The New York Sophist

Kenneth Burke has this great tool, or method or heuristic device – I’m not sure what to call it. He calls it “perspective by incongruity” and what it does it help you see something in a disturbingly new way. You use the wrong sort of heuristic or perspective in order to understand, or convey understanding about something that if you just did it the normal way you wouldn’t get your idea across.

When you put two perspectives or two terms together that do not match up or do not come from the same narrative, you get at the same time a lot of fog, but you also get a lot of movement – of trying to see through, around, and past it. This movement and the fog (metaphorical of course) gives you the chance to see things a bit differently than you would have normally.

When I teach public speaking I often teach this as a way of providing statistics so they won’t bore the audience. “Tell the audience how many Yankee stadiums on opening day that is,” I’ll say, “Or how many Manhattans.” These are images everyone has in mind and can easily scale and scope the harm or benefit of the idea being conveyed in the speech.

But the other day I had this happen to me in a way that surprised me, it was totally unintentional and it really opened up my thinking about teaching.

I had a student come to office hours to work on a speech. We were trading ideas back and forth and building arguments. It was a great meeting. I happened to notice his laptop was really cool looking, really light, and had a great screen. I asked him about it and he said it was a Macbook Air.

“yea it’s great,” he said, “My sister gave me this to use in college.”

After he said that, I saw him totally differently. He wasn’t a student working on a speech, he was someone’s brother, someone’s son, a friend, a cousin – someone his family was so proud of for attending college. Someone who was very close with his family, who wanted the best for him. The gift of the laptop opened up this new perspective that I was sitting with someone who really meant a lot to other people.

This small moment of contact -where I was forced into imagining my student as someone who was deeply cared about, and a source of pride for a family I’ll never meet – seems like something that can hedge against the common, cynical tales of students that ooze about the halls of academia.

I hate that students are talked about, then become, something in the way of our work, something lazy that we have to deal with, headaches who keep coming back, who won’t listen. Here’s a young person who is just doing his best. He’s trying, and people have invested in him. The gift of a laptop on top of the cynical student discourse is incongruous enough to let in the chance for some new identifications.

I wish there were easier, or even constructed ways to plan to humanize students for their professors. I think even the most caring of us grow a bit calloused after a few semesters on autopilot. But caring, really deep caring, is essential for excellent teaching. I’ve been convinced of that for a while. Caring about more than rules and policies or material and weeks left in the term. These students, who have made their families proud, who have been given special things to carry with them to help them on their journey, deserve an experience in higher education, an experience that will confront who they are and point to who they could choose to be.

The revolutionary educational experience will not come from cynicism, from re-enforcing the norms of the corporate world, from worrying about your students not being able to hold down a job. It will come from the recognition that they are here to get better. Whatever that means, it is not compatible with the idea that they are here to cheat and trick you out of points.

How do we encourage this perspective by incongruity? How do we increase the chances of this sort of encounter?

Here’s an attempt at a weekly vlog I’m going to try to put out on Fridays to complement what I post here.

I hope it’s a complement and not something that replaces what I’m writing here, but the temptation is very real.

As someone who studies rhetoric and argumentation from the speech communication tradition, it’s much easier for me to just talk into a camera instead of writing.

I do love writing though. Love doing it, never had a problem with it, and really like the idea of keeping a blog. The trouble is finding a regular time to engage in the practice.

The best fusion of worlds might be in a new podcast I’m about to start producing. More on that to come as it will have it’s own website and all sorts of ways to interact. I’m trying a different platform from the way I did In the Bin.

Let me know what you think of the vlogging experiment! And yes, I need to color correct my footage before posting it. Just realized that.

The headline shouldn’t surprise anyone after checking out what our so-called government thinks is the best way to proceed in making appointment decisions. We elect people who believe that seeing into a person, seeing who they are deep inside, is going to be helpful in determining if they will be able to fulfil a role.

The Kavanaugh hearings exposed that we haven’t moved forward since ancient times in the belief that one’s actions and attitude communicate what’s really in the soul. Spending a few days answering questions in a really fancy room might not be the way to determine if someone is a good person. The process is a parody, a very insulting parody, of dialectic. Kavanaugh is a terrible person for a lot of reasons. So this post isn’t really about him, but it could be as you’ll see near the end.

Kavanaugh is pretty clearly an unfit person to hold any position, but this sort of “unfit” is a perfect fit for the American ruling class. His behaviors throughout his life indicate that he understands what’s on the table and what’s off the table as far as conduct that will be perceived as appropriate, or behavior that matters. Remember, it’s only been recently that we, as a society, have determined that sexual assault is not something that women have to tolerate in order to be successful.

The Kavanaugh hearings opened up for me an opportunity to think about how to re-arrange our hearings and confirmation processes around a rhetorical first principle instead of this incredibly bad 15th party version of some Socratic version of truth. It’s nonsense in the political to believe that soul-truths would be the best way to govern. What you need is flexibility, situational awareness, and command of the power to rewrite reality with well-chosen articulations. This is a Supreme Court ability set, if you think we need one.

So what would the hearings look like? I would suggest instead of investigating “Character” – which nobody we elected seems to understand what that might mean given the questions – we should ask questions around the most important issue for a justice: What is your conception of the Universal Audience?

The Universal Audience is the creation of Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca in their book The New Rhetoric. They argue that when we are arguing we are imagining our audience. That audience is not the actual audience we will engage with, but it is the audience we feel is worth engaging. That’s a huge difference, and can cause some problems. For example, what if you imagine the only audience worth engaging is people who “get it” in the terms of class, political view, race, et cetera – all the accidental characteristics people can have? This then excludes large parts of the audience that are legitimate. This is why BP debate internationally is nonsense – speakers exclude anyone who hasn’t practiced BP from their conception of what is persuasive, rendering their approach to argumentation unethical, at least. It is pandering, and it’s something to be avoided in ethical argumentation.

According to the Universal Audience theory, there is an ethical way to do this which is to double check yourself and determine if you are committing the fallacy of substituting a vanguard audience – a specialist audience, but not just specialized in an academic subject, but perhaps even class or race or other exclusionary characteristics – for the universal audience which includes people who are not factually present, but due to the content and the scope of the material deserve to be present in the discourse. This is how I interpret Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca when they write, “The Universal Audience is not a matter of fact, but of right.” Who has a right to be included in your argumentation? Who has the right to be assumed when you are speaking?

By now you can see that Kavanaugh’s universal audience fails on a couple of fronts, mostly due to his argumentative responses to the accusations of Dr. Ford and others. His rhetorical performance fails to include appropriate stakeholders and we can see that via performance. His argumentation is structured, as all of our arguments are, toward who we imagine counts. He does not imagine that these women, and these sorts of claims that are made by women, matter.

How can we make this critique rhetorically, or at least, consistently with the theory I’ve discussed? Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca offer the idea of the undefined universal audience, which is the ethical check on the easy slide between a vanguard and a universal. The undefined universal audience is the conception of how that audience was formed by the speaker, given his or her conditions, and whether the criterion or locus of the generation of that audience was done ethically. The Undefined universal audience is a good way to evaluate whether a speaker has invoked inappropriate bias in the framing of why their position is acceptable, and why we should believe it. This comes from structure as well as content (“I got into Yale” is a good example of both).

The undefined universal audience is a criticism that picks up on both what the speaker did to frame that audience, and whether or not the members of that universal audience are indicated in enough of the grounded, actual audiences that intersect all the time. This isn’t an appeal to intersectionality per se, but it could easily function along side it since it’s easy to assume any audience member is a composite of multiple identities both asserted and ascribed, and persuasive rhetoric is always pulling one forward and pushing others back (an audience view of how Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca’s concept of “presence” and “amplification” might work).

So Kavanaugh’s universal audience of “Americans” is unethical since it does not consider the legitimacy of those who are women, nor those who did not attend elite schooling. Supreme Court judges must imagine universal audiences when making decisions. Can Kavanaugh form an undefined universal audience in these situations? Or would he mistake “Americans” or “citizens” for a vanguard audience?

This is the sort of questioning that would be quite meta, and quite valuable to listen to for us as we consider the evergreen question of who counts as American. Framing a universal audience, as in how to persuade people is always automatically answering the question “Who deserves to be persuaded?” And that understanding is a way to ethically check our arguments to make sure we aren’t using the idea of reason to erase large swaths of legitimate members of our society.

For the sixth time (maybe?) I travelled up to Montana to do a workshop and run a small BP tournament for those amazing people from the snowy west in Montana. I really like going out there, although this time I had some reservations about it.

I always have reservations about it though. The first reservation is that they really don’t need me. How many years does it really take to be able to teach debate? Well, like chess, not a lot. The rules are really simple. And if you’ve seen a few debates, you sort of get what it is to look for (it’s not as complicated as the CA vanguard would have you believe; you are just looking for what’s persuasive to a general audience. Why we don’t have audiences is a mystery though). Anyway, they always argue that it’s diversity of viewpoint and opinion and the attraction of an outside person teaching and all that. I feel bad going because it most likely costs a lot and I don’t want to waste people’s money. What do I know about debate anyway? I just read old books, get excited about them, and talk to people about them.

Here’s what I said in Montana. It might very well be one of my last formal debate appearances, so I thought i’d film it at the weirdest angle I could think of. Actually it’s just an accident as we had to move rooms – I can’t really teach without a screen or some whiteboard action.

I still try to incorporate the ideas of Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca into debating as I feel that these are the most instructional theories. But my summer research was about Roman teaching methods and Roman rhetoric pedagogy, so that seems exciting too. I prepared a couple of hours of material but only had about 45 minutes. So maybe this is something I should record as a YouTube channel video, me just talking to the camera. Very weird, but I could do it I guess. The best would be to set it up in a university classroom, but with the status of our facilities you’d think I was talking from a condemned building. It’s not nearly as nice as the 1,000 student college this lecture was filmed in.

So should I continue to do this work? I like teaching, I like teaching lots of people all over the place. I don’t like debate anymore and I have removed myself as much as I can from the world of debating. But I feel like debate is a good pathway toward the study of rhetoric, which matters quite a bit more. Rhetoric is the antidote to debate, which is colonized by incredibly poor and shallow standards of proof from science and journalism. Rhetoric is the true discourse of science and journalism, because it includes the status of facts in the mix of the persuasive. Journalists and scientists believe facts to be outside of discourse. This is why these discourses never help us understand our world; they are always unsatisfying because we so very rarely have a hand in their creation.

BP debate is doing well in Montana for a few reasons. First, they do not travel the international circuit, which better mimics community norms for persuasion and argumentation. Local and regional debate is always of a better quality than a large international or national competition circuit because the norms are much more murky and flexible. If you are having a huge international competition or tournament, you have to make rigid the rules and the nature of judgement so people do not feel their money is wasted. I feel that it’s wasted money if you are interested in teaching or learning about the complexities of rhetoric, but most of the people who go there are just trophy-hunters, less interested in the art or the experience than they are the prize. It really is a sport, without any of the elements that make sports worth watching.

Local BP and regional BP is great as well because local audiences can be included. Smaller field, more time between debates, more of a chance to schedule debates when audiences can actually attend. This changes things in a huge way. Appeals angle toward the audience not toward the rules of fairness or what the CAs want the tournament to look like. Adaptation toward an audience is more instructional about how argumentation works than any appeal to a rule or a set of practices developed to make tournaments run smoothly.

I don’t know if I’ll go back, this might be the last one, but September is a long way off. A lot can change in 12 months. All options open is the best way to roll. Except I’m not going to run a debate program again. You can count on that one.

The new semester is here and it’s time to

They have renamed all the donuts in the on-campus Dunkin’ Donuts and I cannot deal with it. The names are just too much and I keep taking pictures of them.

Now that we are jelly-brating, some news you may have heard already: I am no longer directly or indirectly responsible for or teaching a debate program. I handed it back over to the university to see what else I can do with my time. Of course, the real reasons are not that selfish, and they are also not public. Maybe one day I’ll post them here, but for now just know that things are better than I could have imagined. I feel like I have a new job, and there are all sorts of new perspectives I’ve taken on due to that. Most of them have to do with how and why we teach public speaking at the university, but there are a few other ones too.

I have to get back to writing and course prep for now – I have a big paper coming due that I did not budget enough time to complete. Now the heat is on. And the blog must suffer.