The New York Sophist

We need local community platforming for rhetors, speech, debates, and argument. We have to lead it and we need it locally. We cannot rely on privately owned corporate communication platforms to curate, cultivate, and teach people how to engage in public deliberation and argument.

In the past the Town Hall was the way of doing this. People would attend and listen for a while before engaging. If they engaged too early, the collective body would push back on that speech making it conform to the recognizable, the actionable. Rhetoric’s discipline is meant to make something palatable, in the way that taste disciplines the cook’s imagination and provides limits that don’t stifle, but engage creativity.

Most of our educational efforts toward critical thinking – perhaps over 90% I would guess – are about reception. We think we can solve problems of shallow thinking and poor inference by addressing reception alone. We tend to fall into a trap of thinking that production of text, either writing or speaking, is a part of the problem. We don’t think of a critical thinking exercise as creative.

This is often apparent in bad assignment design where students are asked to replicate and repeat good, valid sources that are determined by the instructor. They are not encouraged to think about what they would like to contribute to the conversation outside of how they are going to quote and cite the sources that they found. Professors often establish a hierarchy of quality sources without the necessary discussion about why one source might be better than another. For many students, it doesn’t make a lot of sense why academic journals would be superior to their own eyes and ears. This has to be explained in a way that they can understand. But too often this is set out as dogma, and people who reject research are laughed at. This doesn’t make them respect professors or peer reviewed work whatsoever.

Professors are very scared to grade quality. They would rather grade via a rubric that establishes points per source cited, APA format citations, and the like. This teaches students that these requirements are mere arbitrary, bureaucratic demands to a functionary. They are not invited to see themselves as potential scholars or as people who belong in the conversation. They are more like file clerks, and as such, are eager to see the rubric so they know where they can cut corners – not where they can excel. Professors have somehow come to the determination they are there to police students, to discipline them, to show them when they can’t follow rules or instructions, without the necessary compliment of helping them improve the quality of what they are crafting and making. Following rules is the secret major that all college students are forced to take. What about inquiry? What about trying something new based on the readings? Why all this reporting on other things said by others? What about the development of the future ortators, future producers of smart texts?

Quality is a whole different issue and it is often a source of anxiety for professors who have become very comfortable in pointing to point totals and math to justify grades to worried students. It’s as if they too depend on the rubric to find meaning in the assignments they give. They cannot just talk about how a paper or a speech was not great, and give advice for how to make it better. They also don’t realize they could just have the student do it over – why not? What is the point to having university classes? It’s certainly not to follow rubrics as if they were laws.

The value of the rubric is in helping your blindness as a person when you are grading. There are tons of biases that instructors could have toward student work. Keeping names off of assignments is one way to address this, but that harms the ability of the instructor to grade on a continuum – to recognize micro-improvements as they happen for each student. The second way is a rubric that you use as a professor and perhaps don’t share with the students. This ensures you give equal time to all aspects of the assignment rather than just to one or two things that bother you about it. The things that bother you often are cultural or issues of privilege; what you think is appropriate and good. A rubric can help you snap out of these biases and look toward improving that student’s production where it is and how it is manifest.

Platforming speeches seems like a good rubric-oriented move as it lets students do the one thing that they never get out of public speaking and the like – an audience. The audience is the most vital element of speech instruction that you can have. But we teach our courses like swimming without a pool, like basketball with no court to practice on, and like chemistry with no laboratory experience. These would be considered incomplete experiences at best, and perhaps not the courses in another sense.

This can be achieved with community involvement of some kind, or perhaps community partnerships with the university. This requires a lot of work and a lot of investment. There might not be a good way to attract audiences to have a look at student speeches. The other way might be web videos, but these would have to be made for a web audience, not just a lateral of the classroom speech with broken podium and dusty chalkboard. Maybe streaming is a good way to do it? This is a nascent thing, but there are many programs out there in forensics who do a show night of their top speeches for the community as a fundraiser. I wonder if this could be expanded to the entire curriculum of public speaking (as well as related courses) as a starting place to see how these speeches play with the presence of a manifest audience.

It then must expand to club status beyond the university to give people space to practice oral engagement with others on ideas. Local interaction and normalization of this is very important. Part of the practice is the normalization, locally, of rhetorical styles. The idea that one attends a debate or a display of good speeches as a normal part of community should come back. This could be funded by the university, but it could also be a civic project as well. This interaction – serving only as consumers of persuasive speech rather than the creators of arguments – is responsible for a lot of our failing in political conversation today. And it’s a failing of those who should be promoting it – the rhetoricians.

I just read Steven Salaita’s new blog where he writes a very nice, very long piece about his new job as a school bus driver in the Washington D.C. area. It’s really good, really well written. But it’s not good rhetoric.

Salaita describes being a school bus driver in very noble terms, anchoring his description on the terrible alternative, being a university professor, and having to compromise one’s views. He describes not being able to hold his position at the American University in Beirut because he refused to compromise with the provost on a matter of campus dissent about his loss of his position. It seems, from the way Salaita tells it, that he could have held onto a position there if he had worked to quiet the student unrest. He refused to do it.

At the same time, he is very flexible and fluid and generous about finding the values in being a school bus driver. I’m sure it’s a fine job for those who need to do it. But Salaita could have done so much more if he was a bit more flexible in the way he presents his viewpoints.

Consider the idea that he could have helped those protesting students find more productive, and more acceptable ways to vent their frustration, anger, and concern about his loss of appointment. He might have been able to stay at AUB and teach and write. He would have been able to reach a great many students there, expressing to them his principles, the backing for them, and reasons why they should oppose colonization. But as a school bus driver he no longer has that opportunity.

It seems to go without saying that Salaita’s downfall is his lack of understanding when it comes to rhetoric. For him, rhetoric is always fake, always a gut-wrenching compromise, always opposed to the truth in service of the bad. Here’s a quote from him describing the oldest rhetorical form, that of speaking:

I was rarely nervous speaking in public, even when infamy provided large audiences.  During that period I was fighting for a cause, one indivisible from my career, and so I welcomed opportunities to lecture.  Self-assurance gave way to nervousness after speaking became an occupation.  Like any prestige economy, speechmaking is fraught with ego and betrayal.  It requires self-promotion and networking and assertiveness and all kinds of other things I do poorly.  People in the circuit are cognizant of the approaches and opinions that would limit their desirability and the size of their audiences.  They also understand which demographics to ridicule and which to promote.  Public discourse doesn’t exist in a free market. 

Salaita’s lack of fear of public speaking is truly disturbing. Such lack of concern means a lack of interest in the audience’s role in the crafting of meaning. Salaita is there to merely tell, to impose upon the audience his view. They are to receive it. Since it’s a right view, they will get it, or they won’t, and that will be that. His admission that he does networking poorly is meant to be a dismissal of networking as not something “honest people with conviction” are able to do, but what I get is someone who has little interest in the dynamics of communication, language, and speech. Speechmaking and public discourse don’t fit his model of what it should look like, so they don’t exist. Salaita is a certain person. Certain about a great many things, and it informs this very thin, very strange model of giving talks.

Consider an alternative, where one’s fidelity to one’s political positions encourages one to find ways of reaching audiences that, through legitimate means very much like your own, have arrived at certain conclusions. Imagine these people’s conclusions being the product of reading, thinking, living, and talking. This is how you arrived at yours. Now imagine that this machine, the human mind, could be driven on another road of such materials, and it could arrive at different conclusions. Imagine that the certainty that language offers is merely one iteration of language’s power, and that doubt and questioning are the other side of that descriptive and dominating function of language.

Sometimes it is very valuable to soften one’s virtues, one’s principles in order to allow access to why they are so good to those who you deem most unlikely to agree. A rigid expression of principled view is often the best way to eliminate any conversation or conversion, and also a good way to make sure that any and all of your attempts at persuasion are shut down (the so-called “blacklist” he mentions in the post). There has to be some flexibility in how one proposes and presents ideas to audiences. If that flexibility is not there, then we should seriously doubt the authenticity of the claim of the person that they really do want to convince people of their view. Most of the time, such as in this case, we see that the correct view is merely correct, and exposure to it should render people eager to change minds.

The idea of “honest work” is a good one, but who gets to determine that? From this post, it seems that the “honest work” of driving the school bus is that because it is extremely removed from being a professor or scholar. The distance between absolutes is not honest, but constructed. To talk about the constructed nature of scholarship, professor labor, the academy, and the blue-collar world is very interesting and could open up a great discussion. But here we have simple contrast bordering on contradiction. “this is honest because it is the opposite of that.” I think from his blog we will get a nice clinic in the importance and difficulty of the art of rhetoric.

It’s not easy to try to approach others with ideas; it is exceedingly difficult to get someone to see things from your perspective; it is nearly impossible to get agreement on a contentious issue with others. But the art of rhetoric, being flexible with the presentation of firm commitment, opening or even unlocking the door to how that commitment was formed, is essential even in its difficulty. For at the end, our presentation out loud of our commitments for the ears and mind of others turns us into an other for our own ideas, and gives us much needed refinement of those thoughts for the furthering of the argument, idea, or belief. We might not be able to convince others of our viewpoints in a frame of total agreement. But we might all end up with something new to consider, to think about, and to evaluate that comes from the no-one, from the act of rhetorical engagement itself. This is what is missing from the discourse of Salaita, and all those who fear adjusting the presentation of their ideas is total betrayal of those ideas. Good rhetoric requires it.

Surfing around this morning and discovered that the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Measure of a Man” has it’s 30th anniversary today! I feel pretty old.

Here’s a great article talking about the history of the episode and its production.

In this episode, Starfleet has a hearing to determine if Data has rights. He’s about to be considered the property of Starfleet so a robotics expert can disassemble him and build more Datas to serve on the entire fleet.

Data decides to resign from Starfleet to avoid being disassembled as he doesn’t feel the robotics expert will be competent enough to reassemble him.

This sparks a hearing where an admiral appoints Riker to advocate for Starfleet against Data. Picard advocates for Data. I guess Starfleet doesn’t have JAGS? Or maybe everyone has a legal education in Starfleet?

Anyway, this episode I used for years upon years in argumentation courses. Watching the way the arguments are made, the way evidence is presented, and how the two characters try to persuade the judge is burned into my memory. It was a fun time. I even used it here at St. John’s for a few years, but haven’t done so in a long time.

The episode is good to show to students as it’s very disconnected from the familiar. Many of them haven’t seen much of Star Trek of any kind, and the topic – whether an artificial intelligence has rights – is one that seems somewhat fantastical, which is good for pushing creativity among students (they don’t get much of a chance for it at any point in schooling).

It might be time to show this episode again in class as this is the generation that will have to face this question for real: Does an artificial intelligence enjoy the same rights to self-determination and choice as a human being would?

I’m wary of using entertainment media to teach these concepts, but this premise is one where we can really mine out some “equipment for living” in Burke’s phrasing. The question is still an open one even given the entire argument of both sides. Students can use it to generate their own arguments about the issue and bring up conceptions of the case that did not appear in the episode.

Maybe I should return to this in the classroom and see what happens.

P.S. I rewatched this episode a couple of days after i posted this, and the reason there are no JAGs is the starbase is new, and nobody has been assigned to the office yet there. This is the reason why the officers of the Enterprise must serve as the advocates.

I used to use Microsoft OneNote a ton to take notes and save clips of things, but since I now am using my new Pixelbook more and more (it’s what I’m typing on now) for everyday tasks, Google Keep is my go to for saving stuff I want to write about or think about later on.

It’s so strange. Google Keep is far too simple. It’s a web based clipper of URLS, images, and lists. It doesn’t have nearly the features of OneNote, but it’s so quick and easy to use I just keep clicking on it to save stuff. Plus on a chromebook you are imbedded in the web anyway, so I think that makes me perceive that things are going faster.

Also I just take notes now in Google Docs and it’s helping me remember stuff a lot better, and create a lot more. I think that I’ve reached a point where direct and simple are more important than a bunch of features that I might use someday. OneNote is still amazing, but for some reason I just don’t really go back to it and poke around. When I feel like I want to do some writing that’s not connected to a project that I’m already into, I just open keep and poke around.

Of course I have many notebooks – drawers and drawers of them – which is my preferred way to write when in transit. Now the pixelbook’s big advantage is that it fits perfectly and comfortably on the tray of an airplane seat. It’s quite literally the best airplane computer I’ve ever seen, even better than an iPad with a keyboard case. I’ve tried everything, and this one is super great. It doesn’t feel like you are going to break the tray either. It just works perfectly and feels comfortable.

But if you don’t want to have the tray out, the notebook does fine. I always have a Muji pen or a uniball pen as those are cheap, but they move fast, they seem to not mush up your thoughts or reactions as you go, like slower pens will do. The best way to test out what you’d like to write with or on is to subscribe to ScribeDelivery which is a blind-box for notebooks and pens. I’ve learned a lot about my analog writing desires and process from them. And here in New York, being on a bus or a subway always gets me thinking about writing, so I want to have something to jot things down on.

I don’t like tiny notebooks; I really don’t have a lot of hates, but I really do hate the smallest Moleskine notebooks. They are just so rigid and bulky and the pages never sit right when you try to use them on the go. This is my current notebook that I bought in Japan at a museum gift shop. It’s perfect, plus it has that great Japanese paper, not sure what it’s called, but it has a great feeling and the ink doesn’t bleed off of it. I got another one after I opened the one I bought and tried it out so I wouldn’t run out. It’s doing pretty well so far, mostly because Google Keep is slowly encroaching on my paper notebook habits.

Keep is great for taking pictures of books and book reviews so I know what to read next. I’ve found myself slipping into the habit of taking pictures of paragraphs – something I’ve seen students do on social media – instead of writing the quote out or typing it out. I wonder how this experience with note taking changes the relationship we’d have with the note. Is it better to write it out? I have notebooks full of paragraphs I wrote out in the library because I didn’t have a laptop, or my laptop’s battery was so bad that it would not be possible to sit there with it for hours pouring over books. But the pixelbook regularly will go 8 to 10 hours without the charger. I’m just typing after all, nothing very battery intensive. But these devices seem to have the technology to where we could type out quotes and notes fairly easily. I wonder why I take photos more often then? Keep is becoming my go-to place for keeping lists of books to buy is part of it too. Easier than the old notebooks.

Yet still this semester I stopped using Google Calendar so much and have a Moleskine planner, which I love filling up with tasks. Perhaps this is all a big, slowly moving circle or something where things trade off with one another based on what I’m thinking and feeling. Or maybe there’s a process underneath that determines it based on what I’m writing about or working on.

The movie Bird Box got a ton of attention over December and I happened to watch it as well. I thought about it for a while after I saw it and decided to try to write a paper about its connection to the contemporary political situation and how we think about rhetoric.

I gave this paper as a talk during our brown bag series that the rhetoric & communication department do every semester. I think it went pretty well.

After the failure of the GoPro 7 to record less than 15 minutes in any one go, I decided to use the old handycam again. So this was shot on a now 12 year old Handycam with a wide angle lens and a zoom mic. It turned out pretty good I think considering the age of everything involved.

I usually use Wondershare Filmora to edit my videos, but it kept crashing, so I used Cyberlink Power Director 14 instead, which was great. It crashed a lot too, so I had to use my laptop to render it but it was super fast once I got all the video transferred over. The Handycam uses this weird compression format called AVCHD which takes some special effort on the part of the editing software to decode.Glad I got it figured out as this is a nice camera (and my only option really) for recording my more long-form stuff I do.