The New York Sophist

I’m not having any fun teaching public speaking this semester – first time that’s happened in many years.

The reason is that the students are incapable of interacting at the level that makes the class work. They do not see the value, or how-to, or why they should do anything but passively listen to me ramble on about the readings.

This is pretty clearly an effect of Zoom High – I often feel like the class is an in-person pantomime of a Zoom class, everyone with their cameras off, doing their own thing during the class time.

In my upper-level class I’ve turned it just into a writing workshop, and that is enjoyable. Talking through and about the process of writing. Makes me feel that I should have been a rhetoric composition person. But debate had other plans and ideas for me, as it always does.

As I re-imagine public speaking to serve these students better (rigor, regular assessment, lots of activities weekly – all as a way into approaching hermeneutic practice, i.e. “What does this text say?”) I am reminded of the many times I’ve thought to myself that public speaking and debate are properly considered composition.

The history of American composition is the soil of all the great crops of the modern university: public speaking, debate, oral interpretation of literature (read: IE or interp), literary criticism, and literature studies. Looking back on how things were taught, these branched off as ways to help students understand that they too can write and should write, and before that – they too should and can speak, perhaps are obligated to speak as part of being an educated person.

There are race and gender restrictions on this of course when you look back far enough. However the principle of it I think can be wrenched from that disciplinary, oppressive, exclusionary history as it has for composition and writing programs. There’s a lot of great writing about it out there that is ignored by the literature folks, who pretend that literary studies fell from the sky, pure and ahistorical (could just be an effect I have from working at Smooth Brain U). Composition is obviously the beginning and the end of most every discipline, in my mind, i.e. “putting things together in a way that makes sense.” Disciplinary battles are about shifts in style, which have been tracked by Michel Foucault (most notably) as the arbitrary shifts in epistemology that make up our intellectual history.

How would public speaking become composition? I Think that I should teach some sort of writing of speeches, some compositional method first, then the speeches should be branched out from that – in other words, they don’t really know what to say and traditional composition will help them generate a text to speak about. The creation of the text will be the ordering of perspective needed to help them have a base from which to speak to others, and then that speech can be critiqued in relation to the text, audience, situation, context, etc.

Argumentation is already structured this way, and the debate class has built in firewalls for this kind of thing with the policy debate tradition of “carded evidence,” one of the many attractive reasons to use that competitive format as the basis for teaching any debate course at the university level (and of course high school, if you are in that world and found this post). This is also related to an old argument I’ve rehearsed many times: Public speaking should be taught like a debate class. This is another way of reposting that old concern. My current public speaking course is sort-of this way now but not working because the element of composition is missing.

This is a wildly different approach for me but it might work – more importantly I think it’s a good way to patch up the cracks in the foundation left behind by Zoom schooling during the pandemic. The other frightening thing here is the idea that each class coming in will have different foundational issues since they experienced Zoom schooling at different ages, the gaps of which are uncertain. For example, is the gap between 13 and 15 years old wider, deeper, more significant than the gap between 10 and 12? Looks like I am going to find out, barring the implosion of higher education on the whole.

Not many people think about there being a relationship between these synonyms, but that’s exactly the point – they are not synonyms and have a wide variance of possible relations we can put them in. It is our binary-oriented society that is high on the supposed power of empiricism and statistics that conflates the two into one. For if you are debating with someone you are arguing; to argue with someone is to engage them in debate. There is no discernable difference to most of us today because the only operation here is to hit them with the same fact bar or truth bar in different places until they relent.

Consider this meme that has been making the rounds on my social media, it’s a good place to start.

Whoever Sarah Maddox is, she’s doing something we all have done – wish to be in a different discursive environment than the one we find ourselves in currently. This is a pretty clear rejection of debate based on a very sound understanding of what debate is. The definition here we get through what is being rejected: A form of discourse that cares little to nothing about the people involved in the exchange of reason and cares a ton about the resolution of that exchange.

In short, debate is best defined as a discourse where you have ultimate fidelity to your position, and you attempt to make your position as strong as possible on standards that have very little to do with the person engaging you. In debate, you either imagine those standards (Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca’s Universal Audience perhaps) or you have third parties who clarify the standards or have presented them to you. You don’t really mind hurting the opponent because they have nothing to do with the evaluation of the strength of your position.

Debate is distasteful because we think of it exactly in these terms – “They will say anything to advance their point of view,” “they are unmovable!” etc. This is the earmark of good debate discourse. It’s not a flaw, it’s a feature because this kind of discourse is used to test the firmness of the case around one’s beliefs. In the debate you would never relent your position, that’s not the discourse here. Instead, what you might do is reflect on the weakness of part of that position and try to shore it up for next time. The result of all this is that you gain insight into how reasons interact with the claim and can better see – perhaps from an outside point of view – what it is you are advocating here.

Contrasted with this is argumentation, which is much more fluid and cares nothing for fidelity to the position. Instead, fidelity is to your opponent. In argument we are almost always trying to convince our opponent(s) to change in some way. This connects argumentation to rhetoric in the same sort of relationship that has been posited between rhetoric and dialectic (antistrophos). I would say it’s not exactly right, because argumentation and debate both care about reasons, but reasons for different purposes. In argumentation we cannot lose the connection to our interlocutor because then we’d stop talking. In debate, we want to place our opponent in a position where they cannot come up with something to say – it means we have defended our position and accomplished our goal.

Argumentation’s goal involves the alteration of people, the malleability of the opponent. Much like the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, argumentation has the other as “first philosophy.” Debate has no such ethics. Debate’s ethics circulate around giving your position due diligence no matter what – making the best possible defense you can. For those who find such an ethic distasteful, please consider that the American justice system – and many across the world – have this ethic in their laws about the right to trial, representation, and a fair hearing. When we want to be certain about a matter, we can turn to debate.

When we want to change perceptions and change relationships between others, ourselves, and reason, we rely on argumentation which pretty clearly captures what Maddox would like out of what she is assuming is better debate. Argumentation means that you have nothing but respect for the person, meaning although you are trying to influence them you will only do it on the terms that keep the conversation, connection, and relationship alive and thriving. That is, you adapt what you are saying and how you are saying it to the other. If they turn away, or disconnect, you’ve failed in your goal – and you have failed the position, attitude, or perspective you think matter so much.

Douglas Ehninger, in his essay “Argument as Method” (Speech Monographs, June 1970) takes the definition of argument to the highest level in this vein, arguing in his work that the invocation of argumentation with another is one of the most direct attributions of human rights we can make. We are in effect saying that the only way I can get you to agree, change, or alter your view is to rely on your human mind – your ability to reason – which is enough like mine that I know I can reach that goal with these familiar and convincing reasons:

Because argument is “person risking” it is “person making.” By accepting the risk implicit in an attitude of restrained partisanship the arguer both bestows “personhood” on his opponent and gains “personhood” for himself. For to enter upon argument with a full understanding of the commitments which as a method it entails is to experience that alchemic moment of transformation in which the ego-centric gives way to the alter-centric; that moment when, in the language of Buber the Ich-Es is replaced by the Ich-Du; when the “other” no longer regarded as an “object” to be manipulated, is endowed with those qualities of “freedom” and “responsibility” that change the “individual” as thing into the “person” and “not-thing.”

The association of argument with alchemy is not to transform the worthless into the valuable, but is the constitution of the valuable, the concrete articulation of humanity and human-rights:

[Argument is] a way of achieving “personhood” for oneself by bestowing “personhood” upon another. . . it paves the way toward “personhood” for the disputants, and through them and millions like them opens the way to a society in which the values and commitments requisite to “personhood” may some day replace the exploitation and strife which now separate man from man and nation from nation.

Ehninger’s definition of argumentation is an advocacy to treat it like mathematics or literature, a process of study and engagement that can create knowledge and actionable truths about people in the world. This is because argument requires at the very opening of it the assumption that one is engaging with a person, a human being, someone who also is capable of argument. Why argue if the opponent/audience is incapable of understanding reasonable discourse?

Argumentation is required when we want to change people; debate is required when we want to test our own convictions and understandings of a position. Both share the necessity of human minds in the equation as essential to the rubric, but only one puts the other person, as a thinking, caring human being, as first principle.

The film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the perfect film to explain why there are so many different American debate formats. It’s because we cannot erase our past relationships to what we love; we can only build upon/around/between that love. We can only articulate what we love about the target of our affections. We love them because of everything about them.

In my numerous semi-public lectures and articulations of my anti-tournament view, people get really upset with me and often want to angrily talk to me about what debate did for them. They are pretty clearly engaged in some self-persuasion, most of it, again around the perimeter of debating: Meeting great friends, having a good time, seeing interesting places, etc. Everything pleasurable comes from circulation around the desired thing, not the traversal of the desired thing. It’s not holding it that is pleasurable, but the orbit around it. We see this as the conclusion of the film: The certain dissolution of the relationship is not a convincing reason to not pursue it. In other words, the joy of the relationship is there due to the explicitly finite nature of it.

Not to submerse you in Lacan again, but his analysis of Plato’s Symposium and the desire that Alcibiades has for what he sees in Socrates – the jewels of his personality, wisdom, thinking – all inside him – makes Lacan conclude that any relationship is governed by the desire to mutilate the other into a shape or the shape that will expose and make accessible these “jewels” within. So this is one read of the film, that love for someone always ends when the mutilation goes too far, and the couple is now engaged in something too far whittled down, cut, or changed to withstand more alteration or the articulation of the about which we all endlessly desire to say – “What is it about them (i.e. circulating) that makes you love them so?”

This final scene of the movie I call “American debating finds its perfect format.” The acceptance that we cannot stay together, we know the format is going to fail, we know that the debates will become increasingly less valuable/productive/educational, we know that at some point we will have nothing left to whittle or carve, and we will end our relationship with that format and all flee to another one is “ok.” When we do flee to another one, we will have tried to wipe our minds of the previous problems, that the new start will fix them all, but those things just cannot be wiped away.

Public Forum is a great example of this. Ted Turner wanted to sponsor a high school national debate format where anyone could watch it and determine a winner. This orientation meant that public forum would have accessible, commonplace topics and arguments, speeches aimed at a public audience, and decorum to match it. Turner quickly abandoned his quest as the debates quickly became “debates” – recognizable as the familiar past relationship happening again, but this time somehow “different.” As time has gone on, Public Forum has sped up, chosen topics that appeal to the debater versus the public, and included theoretical assumptions about moves one can make in a debate and what the defenses are, sort of like chess but called “theory.”

One wonders what sort of public audience would find this debate compelling or interesting without the framework around it that it is a high school competition and so it has rules that you can’t understand or things that you have to do in order to win. This constraint means that these formats already are headed down the road – just like any format – to the point of abandonment just so we can forget them, and start over (with them).

The differences here in delivery, style, and proof are telling. As the years go on, these debates become more and more like the familiar high school policy debate round, sounding “persuasive” and sounding “argumentative” always heads back that way – it’s comfortable, reasonable, and it’s what debate “should be like.” Any attempt to make a format will gravitate back to what it should look like, but under the camouflage of “good debating.” As Kenneth Burke has pointed out, banning something often makes us realize elements of the thing banned that are really powerful and necessary – and we want them back. So we smuggle them back in under another name. In tournament debating, we usually just call it “pedagogy” or “good argumentation.” We forget why we wound up miserable when we pursued that relationship the previous time.

In the attempt to carve out the perfect debating format, we always wind up repeating the same mistakes because “that’s who we are.” Just like in the film, we must go through this process again and again until, like the characters in the film, we accept the truth that a debating format will never be satisfying in the way we want it to be – and that’s ok. We will return to our habits and our demands which force us to mutilate it. We will carve away until we find that the entire operation was insufficient. At some point, we are going to be ok with that because for a short period of time, the format reveals something – perhaps only because we know it will fail, that the jewels will not appear and that the space between the inside and the about cannot be traversed. In the end, a debate format is a poor attempt to simulate the universe of disagreement, and the only insight it can really provide is just how difficult it is to express one’s self to another. Can we have debates without the termination or break-up with a format? We can, but we might not want to.

A multipart series

In the last two parts, I discussed some of the troubles debate has had and the vision that I think debate should take on as it looks forward. I’m framing this discussion around the concept of discourse, which has a lot of definitions and approaches. I’m relying on Lacan’s understanding of discourse, the places we find and relationships we craft through language that allow us to fit ourselves, through speech, into various roles. Sometimes we take the position of the shaper, sometimes we are the shape that results.

The Lacanian discourses are sometimes incorrectly seen in a hierarchy of best to worst. I think that it’s better to think of the discourses as contextual. There are times and places for each one. So for now, I believe we need the Analyst’s discourse – also what I believe to be the writing center model – to get the kind of debate we need right now to serve the university and serve our world.

This doesn’t mean that other discourses are not generative. Let’s consider debating structured around the discourse that probably gets the most negativity, the Master’s discourse:

Whenever I encounter the Master’s discourse, I want something else. It doesn’t matter what I want – I recognize a desire; I recognize that there is something missing. This is typically seen as a sign of bad teaching, but it could be read as the necessary distinction between professors and students: Students are always more liberal than their ‘conservative’ professors.

In this discourse, the appearance of the Master, the authorized order-er of information constitutes and creates knowledge. This is a political act as epistemology always is – a selection and deflection of reality based on choices (Burke). What is inaccessible is the human being behind the mastery. You never really can know your teachers as human subjects, can you? I often think about this relationship through my experiences of being a high school teacher in Texas, encountering a student and their parents at the grocery store, and noticing their eyes always fixated on my cart, as if this was some access to a secret level of information about “the master.” Of course, such prodding is never the revelation of the split subject, but it is indicative of the desire for more that is created by the clarity and directness of the knower and the known. Information and knowledge are split; accept it! Here’s the examination/paper/quiz that will prove you’ve accepted it.

This could be seen as producing the necessary conditions of revolution, but there’s no interaction between desire and mastery, only that mastery produces it. Contrasting that to the revolutionary discourse of the analyst, where mastery is the outcome of the discourse, we are hell and gone from that here. Desire is eliminated from the interaction between the agent and the other (speaker and audience; teacher and student) and only appears after knowledge has been constituted. This could be seen as the gap you feel when you take a great class but you can’t really explain why it was so good or even explain what you can do now – you want . . . what exactly? Maybe another great class from that professor.

In debate this is echoed through calls for “better debating” in our societies – better forums and more support for debates are needed. The Master’s discourse, in the wrong venue, appears ridiculous: “Debate will change our institutions for the better so let’s change our institutions for the better.” Everyone agrees we want better debating in public life. We nod. We repeat as more desire is created as the signs of mastery roll on constituting the known world.

In the right contexts, the discourse of the Master provides not only a set of known facts and theories – approaches and history of a field – but also fires up the student to “do something.” The lack of a target for desire is irrelevant within Lacanian theory – desire’s object is agnostic. What’s important is that there is something for desire to orbit, to circulate around. This could be anything. What’s important is what it cannot be – understandings of the Master as arbitrary ($), mastery itself, or even an understanding that knowledge is produced by systems (although you can argue that it’s pretty openly understood in this discourse that knowledge is ideological; it’s all on the numerator side of the equation).

This sort of “classroom debate” is well known and well chronicled, particularly in the famous book Argument Culture by Deborah Tannen, where she gives us a glimpse of a classroom debate where the power dynamics of society are on full display, being replicated, being shown as the natural way to debate:

The picture was easier to put in than typing the quote. This is the Discourse of the Master on full display. The teacher’s display of the master signifier, debate causes the “jump” of the students into what debate must be. There’s no nuance or discussion as the relationship is direct and clear between the sign and the response. The teacher knows what a debate is, the students know what they must do, and the result is dissatisfaction; a desire for something else. Instead of the debate being a place where one could expose one’s uncertainty ($), it remains hidden, and the students who are troubled with their performance (either aggressively or remaining silent) must live with thinking through desire (“what’s wrong with me?” “Did I do that right?” “why don’t I like this?”, etc).

Reading this year after year when I teach debating has revealed another way the Master’s Discourse rises in the university classroom: the white men feel they can ask questions at any time, and spend as much time as they want to formulate what they want to say. Class time is their property. Conversely, non-white students and women are succinct, quick, and never interject without careful consideration of the moment to raise their hand. When I call on them, they give the shortest answers possible. I see this as the effect of recognition of who classroom space and time is for – it’s private property. This isn’t a town square; this is a mall food court. Appropriate modes of engagement only extend to those who appear in line with the master signifiers. It seems odd to me that the Master’s discourse is still so blatantly a way of teaching in higher education – I don’t mean lecture, I mean the demand to reproduce the unquestioned, certain relationship between the signifier and what it organizes. This is not learning, but duty.

In policy debate, the Master’s Discourse exists mostly in the topic committee meetings. The question of whether a motion can be debated is the question of whether we “know” that it can generate the right connections for good debating. Many good topics are rejected I imagine based on the fact they do not have clear pathways to knowing what can be said. Any uncertainty must be rejected, but it’s ok to be dissatisfied, or desire more because at least a debate can happen. This “at least” we have “clear ground” position that comes up in topic discussions quite often is the Master’s Discourse at work. What’s important about this discourse is that there can be no expression of uncertainty, no expression of wondering if this is the right position.

For a contrast, let’s take a look at a very attractive model of teaching policy debate, the Discourse of the Hysteric:

In this, the best overall teaching discourse according to Bruce Fink, the agent presents themselves as wildly uncertain. They go over various options on what to think or do and the other reads this as a desire for mastery. They offer the Master Signifier, “Well it has to be this.” “I’m not sure,” says the agent, however we know that they do know what they want, as desire is in the position of truth, the hidden position in the discourse. By feigning uncertainty they produce a ton of reasons, explanations, articulations, narratives, ad nauseum as the product as the other attempts to explain the “right answer” to the unpersuadable agent. This generates a lot of text, a lot of knowledge, all of it meant to explain the correct way to answer the question. We see this as an intermediate teaching discourse in policy debate that is oriented toward the tournament (must it be? This will be addressed in a future post, a bit of an error on my part has become revealed!) where the intermediate student pushes on the novice student in some kind of response drill to a theory position (“why? What’s another reason? Why that reason? how does that happen?”) something like “PICs good” or “conditionality bad.” At a higher level the instructor would (hopefully) take the position of serious doubter to the rationale of the author of the book (vs. the author of the card)and the thesis of the position being advocated. This is a good thing to see but quickly depressing when you realize it is constrained by the limits of the persuasiveness of the tournament.

The teaching discourse advances familiarity with knowledge but has no hand in the creation of knowledge itself. You could argue that the teaching discourse is radical in the sense that it creates “knowledge about knowledge,” increasing access to what’s out there, what can be said that “makes sense” on a question. That sense-making is always determined by relationships that are out of the hands of the student. The increase of knowledge generated via debate participation is one that cannot be altered, only proselyted. Everyone should do this to learn so much more about the world and the ways it is organized. This might explain why so many tournament debaters wind up in law school despite their best efforts to try to engage the world on “their own terms.” It’s simply not possible. As Audre Lorde famously says, this is a set of the master’s tools. The siren song of the understanding of how knowledge is organized and mastered is a lot more comfortable than any attempt to create or craft alternative knowledge(s). No matter how radical the building methods, one winds up in a familiar floorplan. And kind of likes it because they know everything there is to know about the relationship of knowledge to why it has that status.

The discourse of the master is unsettling to students; the format of the debate doesn’t allow them to speak about the issues they are learning about when preparing for the debates because they are not in the realm of knowledge that can win a debate. You have to shift the discourse to one of the other operations to get the realm of infinite possible arguments without restriction, which is the university discourse. This is satisfying to many because you can argue anything you want as long as it is a “good argument,” i.e. conforms to the demands of the hidden organizing principle of the master signifier. This is where a lot of debate formats tend to settle down.

The discourse of the hysteric is the optimal pedagogical debate, used to teach the knowledge of a field by “pretending” there is no correct answer – think about the traditional law school pedagogy of Socratic Method. This works by forcing the students to articulate and rearticulate the reasons that can only apply if their articulation of the master signifier is accepted as the answer to the question. This is great law pedagogy because lawyers are not being trained to upend, circumvent, or even alter the law – they are there to know what the law wants, so to speak, and convince the uncertain that the law is on their side.

Now that all four discourses have been examined, can we say which one policy debate is? I think I can articulate where policy debate is now and where it has been – perhaps it has been all four given particular space-time coordinates.

I don’t agree with that assessment, but I will say in the next post how and why I think policy debate is the format for my debate class next semester in the next post. There will be references back to these discourses, so keep this post bookmarked or handy. I do think that if I were to teach debate using another format, I will fall into some holes and not even realize it. The stakes are too high when we are teaching debate which, for reasons that will appear in the next post, we should start calling democratic literacy.

In Plato’s Gorgias the fear of the rhetoric student is that they will use their power to manipulate, to trick, to “stand in” for the one who knows. They will be a powerful opponent to the one who “really knows” the law, who “really knows” medicine, and will give harmful advice and be a danger to the civic order, to people’s health, and an affront to those who do know what’s right but cannot express it well.

I’m ok with teaching students with this risk in mind. The art of rhetoric is one that holds in it the risk of these sorts of things. Being able to convince an audience as to what is best to do, good to do, requires one to realize that the standards of the ethical, the good, evidence, proof, and reason must be reconstituted persuasively in every moment of advocacy. This is why advocacy and argument are so hard – one has to do the job of Atlas, holding up the world with one’s strength. The dangers of rhetoric set out by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue assume a static world where things are simply good and bad, existent or non-existent, can be known through questioning, and we merely turn to those who know in order to be told what’s what.

Trump attorney Jenna Ellis is the kind of university result that I’ve always been horrified in having a hand in creating. Here is someone who follows “the ones who know” – if we are to believe her statement in court when pleading guilty to election interference yesterday. Obviously, this is a deeply flawed person, but it might be useful to speculate as to why she bothers me so much.

This seems like the kind of person who believes that knowledge is a set of things one acquires. If one is a more experienced lawyer, one knows the law better. There’s no sense from her statements either then or now that there’s an understanding of the law as something that must be crafted each and every time it is used. There is a responsibility one has to articulating the law – making it – whenever one speaks.

The too-simple read is that Ellis is a selfish manipulator who did all this for her benefit and understood that she was altering the truth in a severe and dangerous way. I am not so sure. I think perhaps she could see the benefit of working for the President, and absolutely loved being on such a “big case,” but this wasn’t motivated by an understanding of articulation crafting the reality of the law. Instead, she was happy to follow those who know, and work with and for them in order to do what can be done in the law, what should be done in the law.

Anyone who teaches debate has taught a fair number if not an excessive number of future lawyers. There is a kind of student who loves the rules and believes that there are things that are fixed, extant, unmovable, and known that they can lean heavily upon when practicing the art. There is another kind of student who understands that all the rules are crafted, all the rules are made of paper, and therefore they have to be rewritten once in a while, rearticulated, their reasons for being must be spoken, and also that they require defending – they don’t exist without their defenses. There is a kind of debate student who loves the rules and just like the bad D&D player, the love of the rules disrupts the amazing possibilities that one can gain from participating in the game.

The danger of expert discourse is that people are willing to do things for it without realizing that “expert discourse” is always constituted and offered each and every time. I hope I do not teach people to follow what the expert information or the experts say. I hope alternatively I teach people that with the right words they can craft any sort of persuasive message. The reason is that every single message from an expert, a seasoned lawyer, anyone telling you what evidence is, has been made. It’s to the benefit of those who made it to make it look timeless, eternal, and without human fingerprints all over it. But the rhetorician knows better. And hopefully I’m getting this idea across to all my students so that I have no part in crafting the thought and approach of a figure like Jenna Ellis.