The New York Sophist

When a veteran rhetorical scholar chooses to make a case you’d expect it to be very difficult to critique, or at least very well constructed, using all of the arts that they study in such a way to make the criticism of it difficult or tricky. But in this case perhaps the mechanisms of gatekeeping are so well embedded in the field that merely pointing at them as obvious goods is enough for those who believe in them.

The recent editorial by Martin Medhurst who edits Rhetoric & Public Affairs (for now) wrote an editorial that I won’t reprint here. It’s been pasted all over rhetoric social media. I can do no better than this critique of Medhurst’s comments by Mohan J. Dutta, so I’m not going to try. If you want to read Medhurst’s post it’s here, and Dutta does an excellent job of indicating the problems with the essay. Suffice it to say that it’s embarrassing that a rhetorician would use such obvious equivocations to make an argument that is purportedly so vital to them. You would think that the argument would be so much better assembled by someone in such a distinguished position.

Two things I will add to the growing critique. First is that it’s no straw person that people believe that strong individual will is all one needs to achieve excellence. Here a scholar with a great record and the power of editing one of the top journals in rhetoric clearly believes that individual accomplishments are the only way to measure excellence, are clearly discernible and measurable, and only those who have these accomplishments enumerated are in a position to determine who else has them. This is disturbing enough. To add to it, it is the graduate committees of what he calls “diverse” scholars who are in the best positions to evaluate their merit and accomplishments. Such certainty is quite good for maintaining systems of power, and absolutely terrible for those interested in advancing communities based on inquiry. Looking back to determine what innovations count is not advisable or healthy. It’s a system that relies on replication in order to determine value. That’s not good for scholarship.

We must recognize the structural and community debts toward and about knowledge and scholarship if we hope to keep advancing thought, which I was under the impression we were supposed to be doing. I believe we need to always be at the ready with argumentative resources about the value of communities that are focused on engaging questions and being critical over the value of the individual genius slaving away in his study (deliberate pronoun choice here, in case you were wondering). This editorial, however narrow-minded it is in its capacity, does do us the valuable service of starkly showing how little critical thinking is employed in determining the slipperiness of terms. “Distinguished” could never be a neutrally arbitrated designation, nor could a place of pure judgement be recovered for such a designation. These things are determined contextually. A rhetorician should know better. We should know better. If we have such designations, they should fully reflect what our ideas teach us. Advancement of thought and scholarship seems to me to be opposed to maintenance of a system of doing scholarship. Diversity of method, diversity of object of study, diversity of scholar, diversity of evaluation – all seem to be givens if one’s aspiration is to advance thinking.

My second thought about this editorial is that it is important to keep the uncertainty about what it means to be distinguished alive and in play. The decision of NCA to open up the process is a good one. This is the right direction, as now we get to ask this question, argue about it, decide what counts and what doesn’t, and most importantly it stays open. An open and direct encounter with the meaning of the term is one of the better ways to prevent the word from being used to curtail the involvement of those who do not have access for historical reasons to the massive resources that most distinguished scholars have had. We, the practitioners of rhetoric, should be engaged on what it means to produce excellent work. It should never be a given – the category itself is value-laden. I think we have ample resources in the field to see how ideology gets us all and how much we need to question and reconsider our judgements and especially our reconsiderations. I do not understand how a flexible and ever-present, ever-rearticulated model of being “distinguished” in scholarship harms the quality of the designation. The consistency comes by the only way rhetoric has remained consistent over time, by adapting itself to the people and places that need and use it to work out meaning. It makes little sense to hold to a hard and fast designation of permanence across time in a field that rightly identifies such beliefs as contingent and historical.

This editorial is nothing short of a gatekeeper pulling off the cover of the machine, showing us the complex and rusty gears, and admonishing us to “be careful with the precious machine! It’s fragile!” Deciding what distinguished means, and who should get that designation, is not a mechanical process and should not be. It should adapt to the ever-changing conditions that we all face in scholarship and in life. This is supposedly the nature of the art we study. Setting up what it means to be distinguished, important, and valuable should be something we all discuss and ask questions about. It goes without saying how weird it is that a rhetorician doesn’t want that discussion.

Spring term was a bit bumpy for me as I took on teaching online public speaking for the first time and took over an argumentation course for a colleague who had to be out for a time for surgery. Both experiences were educational for me. I hope the students learned things too. Most of them did.

I had more failures than ever this term, and I’m not sure why. I think it might be due to students adapting to a slate of teaching practices that are forwarded by people who either don’t care that much about the classroom, see the classroom as a precursor to corporate employment, or think they are doing the right thing by cutting low-performing students a break. The pattern I noticed was low to no class attendance, performance of minimal requirements based on what they imagined I wanted them to do, and upon failure or just not turning in anything at all, claiming anxiety/mental illness as the problem (e.g. “I’ve had a really hard semester, feeling depressed and anxious, I’m struggling,” etc.)

I think that mental illness, anxiety, and fear of failure, et. al. are serious concerns, but more serious is our social phobia/inability to speak about these issues as if they were real. In my syllabus I make a point about illness – I get sick easily so the last thing I want is someone with the flu or some horrible illness coming to class infecting everyone. I say if you are sick stay home. There are plenty of ways to catch up with the course later on. I write about it on the courseware, I record it on audio files, so there’s no reason to be there unless you want to participate directly. My goal now is to try to figure out how to word the syllabus to account for this trend and to handle it in a way that makes sense.

The trouble is I don’t want to make students feel they have to disclose a very stigmatizing and personal issue to me to get assistance. I need to think about wording it in a way that shows I’m happy to alter the conditions of assignments/work/due dates to accomodate for such issues. But I don’t want to make a bad thing worse.

The goal with such wording should be emphasis that although the illness is important and requires due attention, the work is not trivial in the light of anything. The assignments, readings, writing still must be done. I think that treating mental illness, anxiety, depression, whatever it is as a reason to do sub-par work or to not do work at all is very insulting to those who suffer from it.

Like any illness, we can adapt the curriculum to handle it. The question is how to word it to not make matters worse. And how to word it to indicate to students that they won’t be made fun of, insulted, called lazy, stupid, entitled, or any of the things I hear faculty describe students as with frightening regularity on my campus.

I’m happy to work with students to meet their needs as I feel the work of the class is important enough to justify such accommodation. The students benefit from the course; it really matters. The things they read and are asked to do matter. These practices are vital and should be treated as vital. They should not be treated as something either too hard, or too insignificant to matter in the light of a student admission that they are suffering from anxiety. We need students to feel comfortable coming forward and asking for help. If we don’t communicate this as necessary and appropriate, and find a way to do it well, we are communicating that our courses are not important at all.

I still regularly hear that people continue to say that I am against competitive debate. I am not. All debate is competitive, by definition. A debater is trying to sway an audience to their side, or at least, away from the side of the opponent (Yes, everywhere else but intercollegiate tournament debating, “critique without alternative” is a fallacy).

I am against tournament debating for many reasons. The tournament over determines what debate and good arguments look like. It encourages a flattened view of rhetoric as eristics instead of a complex view of rhetoric as meaning-making. Worst of all, it makes students believe that the best part of debating is rendering your opposition into silence, because it means you’ve won. Silence, as we all know, means we should probably go research a bit more and have the debate again before we determine what’s best or good – but then, tournament norms are not interested in the best or good. Too sloppy. Better to have clean arguments for clean decisions, otherwise we won’t know who the champion is.

I could email and personally correct these people, but I would be losing an excellent source of evidence that tournament debate teaches poor critical thought. Such a first-class equivocation proudly stated by a 4+ year tournament debater indicates both dangers of the tournament: Thin thought where complexity is eschewed because it doesn’t help you win, and equivocation as content (as opposed to device for inventio, which is the better use of the fallacies). I think a good sign of a poorly taught rhetor is use of the fallacy to silence the opponent or the fallacy as a reason to win, i.e. “They committed a fallacy, we win.” Instead I am just going to provide examples of my critique to provide more relief to it.

This week the parents of a 14 year old kid are suing his school for slander over how his debate team and coach treated him after a recent loss.

The lawsuit provides a narrative of events where the coach and team turned on a student for (and I need to italicize this I think) talking to students from other schools about ideas.

Think about that for a second. The role of debate is, ostensibly, to improve thinking, improve the quality of ideas, and hopefully for us to arrive at solutions, better plans, or at the least, better framings of the questions we face in our world.

But this coach (clearly not a teacher) and the students thought it was appalling that a student would share thoughts and ideas, talk about the debate topic, and compare quality of evidence with a student from an opposing school. They berated him for engaging in appropriate and valuable intellectual activity.

Any teacher would be thrilled to know that a student was engaged in conversation with someone who was not in the student’s class about what was being taught there. But we must remember that tournament-oriented debate directors are not teachers. They are coaches. They see their role as creating wins. They want to help create arguments and people that win debates. This is in serious conflict with the role of debate to improve the quality of thought in the world, to test evidence, and to engage in thoughtful conversation.

This reminds me of the nonsense pedagogy I experienced last summer at the New York Urban Debate league summer workshop where my attempts to encourage young students to read, engage with the topic, and examine varying perspectives on the arguments in law and society on an international treaty were dismissed in favor of playing games and throwing candy to students who were able to quickly answer or quickly give a speech about a trivial matter. Responses that conform to the rules of the tournament are the curriculum. Engagement with the complexities of an international treaty on the level of law, culture, and ideology are not going to help the students “win debates.”

This attitude grotesquely cuts out the most valuable aspect of debating which is uncertainty. A difficult feeling to be sure, but a quick look at politics these days should confirm to any thinking person that we need some doubt. Certainty, and the witty response – the “clap-back” – are killing space for reconsideration and thought in our most pressing problems.

What could replace the tournament? Here’s an idea.

On Monday, the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris caught fire and burned for hours. It was nearly totally destroyed. The French government has now started to debate how to rebuild the cathedral, starting with a competition about the spire. This is competitive debate in its full form: We have a problem – we are unsure how to address it – everyone has some ideas – let’s test them.

What’s central here is the approach to a community good, or a cultural good, instead of the idea that the people who will argue against you have nothing to contribute to the topic as a whole. Instead of trying to win with my idea about rebuilding, let me tell you why I think it is the best way to recover the building. Let me argue why this approach is best for us.

And conversations between people with differing ideas might happen outside of any formal legislative debate or contest submission. Why? Because the focus is on addressing the question well. If the focus is not on creating discourse worthy of the question, we all lose. What we get is a very narrow idea of what a few people think is best. Debate’s power, when freed from the norms and conveniences of the tournament, is to create solutions that no one person, nor group of people, could come up with on their own. The process of debating introduces what I call “debate’s desire” into the conversation, forcing people to yield, to concede, and to focus on different points during the process in order to better represent their claims.

In the Notre Dame example, there are no prizes except to solve the issue or address what was lost in a fitting way. This could easily be done with debate programs that focus on the school or community, or on what the students feel should be addressed. The reward for debating well should not be an artificial feeling of superiority in individualist thought, but the pleasure of community and the benefits of speaking well in response to a difficult question along side others who care. There is great pleasure and great learning in realizing that one spoke very well to the question, as did others, but the question was wrong. Or it was underdeveloped. Or it comes from a shallow ideology. Or any other result that would jam up a contest that is always oriented toward the question “Who won?” This topic would be rejected because there’s no easy way to determine the winning idea. The best ideas will come out of debating it, which will be the ones chosen. But the debate will be structured in a way not to exclude others from the inventional process, but to highlight the communal effort. Oddly, most debate topics are topics that require a multiplicity of voices, and attention on something other than the speaker, but these elements are trimmed away for the convenience of the tournament.

Imagine a competition that didn’t focus on creating silence but creating conversation. Creating the sharing of ideas not to get one over on someone, but to rise to the quality of the question. The only silence here would be that of the teacher’s surprise to find that their students are in conversation with students from other schools about controversies that vex most adults. Debate teaches confidence and questioning like nothing else. These things should inspire those who practice it to want to create and share, and to see thought and intellectual work as rife with uncertainty and full of community.

The joke of academia is that there is no such thing as a monograph. It’s full of voices and conversations of others. It exists because others speak, not because someone shut them up with a killer argument. Tournament debate has it so backwards. And the most dangerous part of this is how those who were shaped by its ideology use it as a stand in for all competition, ensuring nothing can rise to threaten the tournament, which also shapes their idea of good argumentation across society.

Exploring competitive debate should not involve an automatic integration of a “break” and a quarterfinal bracket. It should consider the role of competition in society and why we have debates in the first place. The quality of reason is always contextual and to think that reasoning could be taught in a vacuum through a series of weekend competitions is a very impoverished view indeed. Even worse, it creates a lot of very confident, very well-spoken people who automatically assume that arguments phrased in unfamiliar ways – that don’t follow “rules” – are evidence of poor minds not worth engaging. What we are left with is a parody of philosophy indeed: The speaker of truth addressing an empty room, seeing the absence of listeners as the best evidence that they are not only smart, but right.

Competitive debate is harder than tournament debate as the evaluation is much less clear. It’s contingent. There’s no checklist of right moves. There’s no consistency from debate to debate. There’s very little connecting the wins at one competition to the next. This frustrates most of those involved in tournament debate today, so they continue to create rules and policies to make debate even thinner, even more shallow. Uniform depth is what attracts these people to a massive body of inquiry. The lack of curiosity is frightening. The tournament is comfortable and provides that certainty that your argument is good. Historically we can compare the tournament debaters with the Peripatetics (as I have done with Prof. Eckstein) who crafted the 5 part canon of rhetoric as a pedagogical device. As philosophers, it’s good to have a checklist. And their students did well, going on to live very successful lives in a society whose laws and institutions were crafted and governed by the students of Isocrates, who taught no such certainty only questioning by the stasis, in contexts that were as dynamic as the day required. Who won?

http://fav.me/dczaw2

After reading this piece on “erisology” in The Atlantic my thoughts instantly went to one of my favorite pieces of writing when I think about the impossibility of civil political argument. “Homer’s Contest” by Friedrich Nietzche.

In this piece, Nietzsche spells out the relationship the ancient Greeks had with competition and how a competitive edge kept their society going. Competition lifted everyone up through a conception of “jealousy” – I want to outperform my neighbors, in public, in various arts and athletic abilities. This sort of competition kept society organized and stable because one wants to excel, to work to be the best at something, and to prove it through performance in front of others.

Nietzsche calls this practice “eris” after the ancient Greek goddess of jealousy and envy. But he says our conception of jealousy is vastly different than that of the ancient Greeks.

This isn’t a jealous about things or about limited resources. That’s the bad eris. The bad eris considers people a problem, and that they should be eliminated so you can have what is rightfully yours.

This dark eris is responsible for collapse of civilization as people no longer work toward a collective end nor do they see the point in investing in public services or things. Everything is a threat, because everyone wants your stuff.

The good eris is responsible for community because you need a group of evaluators, judges, and critics to say who did the better job. Instead of worrying about what public places might take from you, you worry about what you can perform or share there. Instead of worrying about someone taking your stuff, you worry about someone outperforming you.

I think the concept of Erisology is perhaps too scientific to be useful in its current form, but if we start to think more about eris and the role of envy and competition in political controversy we’ll be on a better track. It starts with some simple givens: In order to be right about a political view, you need an audience. Being right by yourself is just getting closer to your own opinion, isn’t it? There has to be some verification, otherwise people wouldn’t post their thoughts online.

The funniest thing about the essay is how angry so many rhetoric scholars got about it. Imagine, people we’ve never heard of talking about OUR field and not mentioning US! Yes, there’s plenty of bad Eris floating around the university. This should surprise no one. Where’s the good Eris, where’s the professional or academic rhetorician desire to compete, to show that we get it better than the Erisologists? That we have better, more useful perspectives? Where’s the desire to add to their performance something they are missing? All I see on Twitter are professors making fun of someone who is asking pretty good questions. Not a great moment for the field, but a common one whenever anyone dares to mention things we consider in our territory.

Since the contemporary field of rhetoric is much more interested in talking about oratory and persuasion than teaching people how to do it, it makes sense that other people would rush in to fill the gap. More attention is obviously needed on the question of how to teach people how to argue, persuade, discuss, and advocate, and if the professional rhetoricians in rhetoric departments aren’t going to do it, other people will fill that space because it’s important.

Good envy or bad envy. Envy-ologists might focus on what makes someone want to share their view. It’s odd isn’t it? If you are right about something, and if all the evidence supports your view, why do you get so upset with other people when they don’t agree? Let’s see who has the best answer to that.

This is a video I made for my online public speaking class addressing some of the things that after two formal presentations they still need to work on.

The biggest problem in teaching speech and debating is the problem of performing to teacher expectations which expect students to exceed teacher expectations. This is the problem identified by Buddhists as “Pointing at the Moon.” There are some good koans about this problem. I talk about it in this video a bit. Much more to say about it in an upcoming post.

What I like about this video is the way it was shot, which is something we don’t teach in public speaking even though the types of public speaking our students will be doing will be highly web mediated. I want to point this out in my instruction, which is happening all online. This seems like a good way to do it.

Teaching online means that we need to study video techniques, techniques of lighting and storyboarding, but also the process of post-production: sound editing, color grading, and so on. It’s a terrifying new world for the professor who loves the chalk and talk.