The New York Sophist

Argumentation pedagogy is, unfortunately, homogenous across nearly the entire speech communication discipline. A textbook based on the Toulmin model – but not even the whole model, just data, warrant, and claim – and no discussion of field dependency is at the heart of it. A paper about a controversy and then the fabled “Letter to the Editor” completes the course.

I remember talking a lot with Dr. Barbara Warnick in my last year at the University of Pittsburgh (where I received my Ph.D.) about Stephen Toulmin. She was teaching an advanced undergraduate course on argumentation and had decided to use Uses of Argument as the only text in the course. Brilliant, I thought, as I was unsure how many argumentation scholars out there had read the whole book. She came up with the phrase “the basic T” to describe the poverty of the pedagogy of Toulmin that was being distributed as argumentation instruction (meaning data, warrant, and claim, and that’s it). I like to think that Toulmin would have a laugh at how rhetoricians have taken his theory and turned it into the object of argumentation theory he was attempting to deconstruct – something absolutely there, measurable, and universally meaningful.

Due to an unexpected illness I am now covering an undergraduate argumentation course, and my first thought was, “I have about a month to make sure they get everything!” My second thought was the petitio: what is everything?

I started to write some notes about what makes argumentation important. Against the model of criticizing controversy from on high with a dash of historical re-enactment of a world with engaged newspapers, I see argumentation as a course in invention and production – something that many professors might scoff at given their attitude toward student ability (“They can’t use a comma correctly!”). Producing good argument requires familiarity with theory as a guidepost, not as argumentation itself. Theory with iteration and then reiterated is the proper model for a course in argumentation that is based on rhetorical assumptions.

So, given a month, what’s most important? What theories do you teach? This is the question, and I reduced it to three essential theories for argument instruction that students should be familiar with at the end of a 15 week course (but I only have about 5, give or take what the previous instructor covered).

The Universal Audience

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory that argument’s proper aim is audience, not accuracy or truth, can catch some criticism. In defending their theory they show that historically it has always been the case that the ethics and truth of argumentation has been based on the assumption that whoever encounters the argument will find the means to be persuaded. There is no objective measure of the quality of an argument, save that constructed by what the speaker knows about the specific audience and audiences like it at her location in culture, space, time, etc. The best argumentation is that which the universal audience would be able to agree with, hence, pandering is not possible to the local audience as the universal audience – coming from another place or area – wouldn’t get it.

The Enthymeme

The enthymeme is less an argument theory and more an argument modality (Conley is really sharp on this point). Instead of teaching it as a theory of understanding and critiquing argument, return to Aristotle and teach it as a chosen way to frame and deliver persuasive claims about the past (forensic) matters to audiences. It’s a powerful way to encourage people to find creative ways to share ideas with audiences and recognize that nobody constructs arguments out of the air; all argumentation is co-authored with the audience through little winks and statements of open assumption. Taught as an incomplete syllogism, the enthymeme is clearly based on invention-happening-elsewhere (the syllogism) so to talk about it as if it were a way to generate argumentation isn’t what Aristotle had in mind.

Toulmin, but not what you think

Toulmin’s biggest contribution to argumentation is field-dependency, which comes first – well before the “basic T” or any of the other structural ideas. The reason is simple: How could you reconstruct a warrant if you didn’t know the field in which the argument is taking place? Even in Uses of Argument his examples of the three understandings of “can not” indicate the intense dependence that meaning has on context. This is why when I google argumentation syllabi I’m pretty sure that very, very few teachers of argumentation have read Toulmin outside of presentation in a textbook. Field dependency encourages student creativity in both research and production as the audience becomes as important as getting the “right” information (whatever that might be). Who are you talking to and what do they believe is out there in the world? This question is the start of the field dependency discussion for the production of argumentation.

What am I missing? We’ll find out on Thursday when I meet with them the first time.

Spring break ended too soon but I did get one final draft out and have another one underway. We’ll see if I can make the NCA deadline.

I get a lot out of NCA but it comes out of the cracks. It’s not a direct path to the value of it. I always have a few moments that stick with me and that I use to help me in my thinking.

But for the most part, NCA is run by and loved by dilettantes who see themselves as people who would be NPR journalists if they did not think they were smarter than NPR journalists. There’s a lot of chat about what’s going on on this or that series, latest episodes of Frontline or whatever the journalism show de jour is, discussion about podcasts and Rachel Maddow – stuff like that. It’s a huge cocktail party – over 4,000 people – so some dilluding of the content is expected.

The only papers worth hearing I feel are those from the top paper panels. These are people who have put in the time and are trying to make a contribution beyond NCA, beyond scholars, and perhaps shift the field a few millimeters ahead. Unfortunately NCA schedules most of these to happen at the same time, so you have to pick. This shouldn’t happen, but it shows how far removed the idea of attending panels to learn something is from the planners’ minds. It’s also not nefarious; it is most likely that NCA is way too big, and people are too forgiving in letting in ideas rather than fully thought out papers.

NCA is good for graduate students, I always assumed, but there was a lot of strange stressful discourse from grad students I spoke with last year in Utah. Maybe faculty put too much pressure on NCA these days because the percentage of valuable content at NCA is getting smaller and smaller. It could also be that since people no longer read hyper specialized journals casually (why would you?) the face-to-face at a bar or after a panel is much more important for making connections in your career. Not sure why this is but if you are an advisor, stop stressing out your students about NCA – it’s a place to learn and grow, not to nail a virtuoso performance.

So I’m not sure I should invest so much time into writing for the NCA conference unless I have a really good idea. The past few years I have had some great ideas, and my current one – about Myles Horton’s pedagogy and the distinction between deliberation, dialogue, and debate – isn’t one of my better ideas. I’ve just decided to write it and see how it goes and if it doesn’t hit the NCA conference deadline, that’s fine. I’m not too worried about it.

There’s also our journals, which are not widely read at all – barely read within the communication field – making them poor organs for the distribution of ideas or larger persuasive goals about normative aspects of rhetoric and pedagogy. They are very good organs if your goal is to have a conversation with the 10 or so other scholars who engage in the work you do. That’s how they are designed.

I have nothing against this design except for the fact that nearly 100% of all publication effort in rhetoric is aimed at these 5 journals with a readership that is in the hundreds. If we design our journals this way we should couple that with the discussion, or the obligation, to publish for broader outlets about our ideas.

I like blogging, but this week has me thinking that my new model for writing should be this blog coupled with publication elsewhere. I like the model of a Patreon, where people subscribe to your work for a small fee and then can request or put in ideas for future writing or podcast-type publication. This might be a good way to put a premium on non-academic style work and reach an interested public who self-selects given their interest. I might give this a try.

The only thing I didn’t really do well at this spring break was outline my short book idea. I should just start writing it and get a rough draft out to a publisher in a month. This might be pretty good timing for the upcoming political debates. It’s an untested method, but I think the thesis of the book is going to be to flip the Presidential debates (or any political debates) from refined final product to raw material, a set of commonplaces, or topoi, for us to use to craft a refined set of political principles to defend.

The biggest success story about spring break was how much fun I had playing Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online. I really do think that if things went haywire in the academic world I could stream video games all day for 5 to 6 days a week and have a blast. Of course, any engaging, fun, and exciting creative work can turn into a “job” – one that you despise and resent – very quickly. Just look to how that leaks out in the negativity many professors present toward their students!

Spring break is here and the only thing I’ve done so far is play about 5 hours of Fallout 76 before getting ready to go out to eat at one of my favorite spots before hitting a bar to wish a friend happy birthday.

There is a productive hope for spring break including:

• Finishing my NCA paper for this year on Myles Horton’s pedagogy and the artificial wall between discussion, dialogue and debate.

• Taking my 1694-ish rhetoric textbook to the bookbinder for much needed repair.

• FInishing reading all the books I’ve checked out from the library on Roman education

• Grading all of the podcasts and videos from my online public speaking course

• Getting a jump start on two big essays due in April/May.

So that’s a full week I think but without any other demands on my time such as getting decent, walking to the campus, sitting in the office, and such it can really free up a lot of time. This is why I hope very soon to be teaching mostly online if not entirely online.

I’ve been looking forward to spring break ever since I fell behind on my semester plan about a week and a half ago. Things happen and it’s okay. I am just glad that I have some time to catch up a bit.

The other big thing that has happened is my mega-computer, the one I built and rebuilt a couple of times, has just started giving me blue screens all the time now. I shut it off and put it aside, but that meant I had to rearrange my home workspace. Now I’m typing this on an Asus Chromebit, and my second monitor I brought up to the university to plug into my old desktop computer I had up there for debate. Since I don’t do debate anymore, I no longer needed that computer for that project so I just moved it into my office to use it for work. So far so good, but on compressing audio (WAV to MP3) it is very, very slow compared to the mega computer. Not very happy about that, but maybe if I decrease the quality of the recordings I’ll have better results. I’ll work on fixing the big computer in May/June, once the term is over.

So we’ll see how the week ends as next Sunday I’ll most likely post “The End of Spring Break!”

Next Tuesday (March 5) I am appearing in a performance about speeches by actual speechwriters and writers of that hardest form of rhetoric, comedy. They told me I can speak about anything I want related to rhetoric, so I think I’ll speak about the upcoming season of political debates, Presidential and otherwise. It’s always a good idea to follow Cicero and “prepare the minds of the audience for what they are about to hear.”

It looks like it will be a good time. I have 7 minutes (the fingerprints of debate practice are everywhere) and I’m not sure what the venue will be like. I have a lot of ethos questions too. As the professor in the bunch, will it be necessary to read from a paper? Will it lose credibility if I just speak about it without notes? I’m definitely wearing a coat and tie, so if I feel that is an integral part of the ethos, why do I have questions about reading notes? A professor would do that – at least that’s what the audience might think.

I’m very happy I get to be a part of this mostly because of my recent obsession about reaching publics frequently with rhetorical insight, and Roman educational perspectives, where listening to, evaluating, and giving speeches were all a part of learning how to be a citizen and function politically in the day-to-day life of the Roman Empire. We seem to have lost that in the U.S. (among other places I’m sure too) and I’m very interested in exploring how to recover that. My hunch is that the loss of the town hall, the church meeting, or whatever was the forum for handling local problems goes hand-in-hand with the loss of our rhetorical abilities to deeply investigate our views and work to reject simple binaries on complex issues.

Part of this project is to raise questions about who controls the agenda for public discourse, and there’s no better place to start than with those who control most of our public imaginary about what debate looks like and should be used for – the Commission on Presidential Debates. We have a lot of scholarship on how bad the debates are, but not a lot of scholarship on how to make them better, or how to make what we have a positive thing. Perhaps we should approach the Debates like the TV show Chopped? “Open your basket, you have to use these awful ingredients.” Maybe there’s something nice that could be made from the random assortment of statements a Presidential debate provides.

I should get my comments together this weekend and practice a few times before Tuesday night. As someone who is old and grumpy, 9PM is quite late to be doing anything, let alone starting something! But I’ll just down a few coffees before I go and things should be good. They said they might video it as well so if that turns out to be the case I’ll post a link to the video in a follow-up.

More strange than academics engaging the public is the idea that academics engaging the public is strange. In the field of rhetoric, we’ve nearly totally pulled away from this idea. Debate teams exist at the margins of rhetoric and communication departments, structured like sport teams. Faculty push to publish in journals were 7 to 10 people will read and possibly use their work. Rhetoric and communication courses are taught with total fidelity toward theories and principles from the academic literature, not with an eye toward helping students improve their ability to capture audience attention and persuade. Courses at the higher levels draw on and celebrate ideas and writing that have little to do with the rhetor’s art of crafting meaning and working to carefully untie the knots that moor audience belief. The field is almost totally inward looking.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and how to engage in rhetorical work that’s valuable while reaching a broader audience. I don’t think rhetoric exists without audience; you could have all the other elements there to it and not have rhetoric. The audience is the thing that is necessary for the rhetorical.

It doesn’t have to be a real audience, but material. There should be the presence of a material manifest audience of some kind. So when I’m typing this blog entry I think about the report I see as to how many people clicked on the last one and what the monthly traffic is like to this site. When putting something on YouTube I think about the numbers of views and sustained minutes. These aren’t real as much as they are material. They are guideposts for what works, as long as you can honestly imagine what the audience might want.

I’m pretty disappointed we don’t have a journal dedicated to this sort of thing. Contemporary Argumentation and Debate always has promise, but is really trapped in a bad situation. As a debate journal, it has the twin prongs of 1)pressure to be something “better” than debate, the inferiority complex of debate as not a real thing passed down from the scholars-on-high who forget how their critical acumen owes a debt to intercollegiate debate for sparking it and 2) the event horizon of intercollegiate debate itself. When you are in the event horizon, the rest of the universe looks askew and becomes a problem. As you try to move away from the singularity, you rely on distorted information – in this case light – to navigate. You could easily be headed right into the singularity as you start to move. Even basic information is distorted in the area of the singularity. So even well-meaning people can still be pushing a monastic, non-public model of debate and scholarship while claiming they are getting out of it. As an example think about the following attempts to break the event horizon: Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Ted Turner (now Public Forum), CEDA Non-Policy Division Debate, and finally British Parliamentary debate. All these forms are now nearly inaccessible to audiences without a lot of training about how to stop doing what they would normally do when listening to arguments, and instead “follow the rules.”

I do hope that some debaters take seriously the pieces/interviews that Shanara Reid-Brinkley gave a few years ago about how debaters are scholars. This can be true, although I don’t believe it’s automatically true. A well researched position in a debate is aimed at winning a tournament, so it suffers from that. But what’s the difference between that and the conference paper or journal article written by an academic in hopes to fatten a tenure file or lead to a promotion? The utilitarian element of a paper or a debate case need not be totally deterministic of the quality of the work. What’s missing is a venue, or a way out of the event horizon of the tournament. Similarly, the event horizon of the academic department, or bureaucracy is equally devastating. I wonder what publication possibilities there are out there.

Currently working with many others on the reboot of Timely Interventions and perhaps this journal could be a place where debate arguments could transform themselves into interesting pieces for a broader audience. Debate podcasting that is not about debate would help, but about the work, insights, and understandings that debate has brought to people. In The Bin was my podcast for a long time and some of the episodes seemed to bend that way, but the stronger forces were always toward talking about the tournament. Without legitimate competition to the tournament, debate will never provide all the possibilities for transformative education that it could. What is needed is for a few debaters and their teachers to imagine and implement serious alternatives to the tournament schedule, competitions that do not rely on tournament structure, and give debate back its rhetorical aspects – the big audience – in order for us to benefit from its power. I like the idea of debater/scholars very much, but I’m uncertain we can get there given the obsession over breaking, octafinals, and speaker awards. These don’t belong in scholarship. Yet, professional scholars run a similar conflicting system for tenure and promotion that strips away the possibilities of thought and research in the same manner.