The New York Sophist

When our department was first formed here back in 2008, the first order of business of the newly assembled faculty was to choose a department name. After the great I.A. Richards, I suggested “The Department of Miscommunication.” Richards had suggested in his work that nobody really studies communication. When it works, he argued, it’s uninteresting. Nobody pays attention to communication when everything is going great. It is when people misunderstand and judge in weird ways that we wonder how it happened. Often times I think this is the root of rage and anger when people don’t “get the obvious.” So I thought it was a good name for us to go with. I was quickly ignored after people realized I wasn’t joking.

Now on my campus nursing is all the rage. Aside from the obvious irony of building a giant nursing facility on a university campus (home care for the aged? Is this symbolic hospice?) everyone is thinking of ways, or trying to think of ways, to wedge what they do into the new program and new flashy facilities and budget. This only makes sense. And apparently my subconcious is as well. The other day I saw something that referenced the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and misread it to say “Department of Unsuitable Sciences.” I thought, what a cool and appropriate place for a rhetoric professor! For isn’t rhetoric an unsuitable science?

Arguments from Lacan and Lundberg’s great case for thinking of rhetoric as a science, it’s really not a suitable one is it? For rhetoric eschews commitments of all kinds. Scientists will interrupt here and proclaim, “O how wrong you are about science! For a scientist is the first to throw off commitments in the light of new information!” However that is merely trading a set of commitments for another. What the rhetorician does is point out that this is wordplay. One calls a serious commitment “truth” or “data” as a scientist, and something removed from that a “commitment.” The rhetorician is always moving the goalposts and the field, sometimes in opposite directions to explore what happens if we have a goalpost and no field, and vice versa.

The Department of Unsuitable Sciences would preserve this sort of fluidity of moving around the ‘givens.’ Yes, we are practicing science; yes these sciences are unsuitable, perhaps as sciences but we open up the research into a number of different ways to determine unsuitability. We simultaneously hold up the idea that these are sciences and that they are unsuitable as such or for other reasons to be discovered through our work, which only takes place by way of propping this title up. Without it, there’s not a lot of reason to inquire after it, is there?

Unsuitability moves under its own force. Sometimes we feel the sharpness of it when we tell a joke and nobody takes it as funny, or when we make a comment that in one venue would have gotten a laugh, but in this one only creates furrows on frowning faces. This alone is worth study, and thankfully some rhetoricians define the art of rhetoric as one of the study of appropriateness. What is appropriate in one venue is not in another; we have a sense about this, but it’s hard to articulate and makes us very uncomfortable when there is the demand to articulate the reasons why something cannot be said in a particular location in space-time, around particular people.

Perhaps the Gen Z term would be “Department of Cringe Studies.” I think that this might be what we are after in serious rhetoric – the avoidance and appearance of the Cringe. For that is a serious, embodied reaction, hard to articulate that is often brought about by the appearance of combinations of words. Symbols misunderstood and misused are at the heart of cringe as well. The Department of Unsuitable Sciences is open to any and all research into cringe content.

Perhaps the Department of Unsuitable Sciences is a good podcast title? I have been thinking about a new solo venture in this medium, so why not? If it’s unsuitable for podcasting then it would be a perfect fit.

Initial Thoughts about A Social Justice Debate Course

Current Listening Trends

This time of year reminds me how far removed I am from tournament debating. My social media feeds are filled with horrifyingly saccharine posts about how success was found even though teams didn’t win “the big rounds” (shocking!), all credit is due to individual hard work, heart, dedication, or a number of other values that perhaps self-styled leftist debate “coaches” shouldn’t trade in. In the end nothing is said about precisely what was learned, or how to measure it, or even what insights were garnered about argumentation, rhetoric, discourse, evidence, or the like. All it comes down to is a few platitudes that wouldn’t differ that much from the writing of a little league or high school football coach.

My experiences in debate went on way too long, but this spring I’m a bit grateful about my debating experience, and trying to plumb it for insight into how to run a debate course – very different than the coaching world where winning isn’t interrogated but losing sure is, and there are no measures of the success and learning we all know is happening but cannot articulate.

I feel like I am always of two-to-three-minds about debate – that there’s something powerfully educationally radical there but the domination of debate activities by 1) formal educational institutions and 2) people who see no problem organizing debates around the same principles you’d find in child’s baseball or soccer games ruins or deflects interpretations of debate at its full ability. Abilities outside the tournament structure cannot be imagined easily due to the colonization of thought about debate by pro-tournament instructors. Most debate coaches are teaching debate tournament practice, not debating.

Add to this the obsession of scholars (such as myself and my colleagues) who mistakenly think that theorizing argumentation will, by default, theorize debating. These terms are used somewhat interchangeably by the public; isn’t that an indicator that scholars should look a bit deeper? An argument is not a debate. Can it be? Under what conditions? What’s the relationship between these terms? This is woefully undertheorized. What’s the most recent scholarly book on debating? Would that be 1964’s Decision by Debate?

Policy debate is a strange format among strange formats out there in the world. It’s primarily practiced in the United States and Japan. Both countries have different approaches to it. I’ve been noticing this as I transfer my videotaped recordings (!!) from when I was in Japan in 2009 to something digital to post on YouTube for the upcoming celebration of the debate exchange between these countries this November.

I’ve also been notified that my debate course has been selected as part of the Social Justice courses being offered as a part of the diversity initiative of my university. Years ago I insisted that we offer an argumentation course and a debate course. Most universities (and most debate people) see no problem with offering a course called “Argumentation & Debate.” I liken it to offering a course called “Zoology and Botany” since they are both pretty much about living things. We also wouldn’t offer a course called “Short Stories and Essays” – unless we were really doing a theory course and not a composition course.

All of this has me thinking about a question: Is policy debate a natural fit for questions of social justice? Does policy debate lean left as per the form of the debate, the rules and the discursive norms that are reinforced by those competition rules? I’m thinking about teaching this format as a way to investigate the question of social justice in various policy and legal contexts.

My initial answer is that policy debate imagines debate as dissolution. That is, debate breaks everything down from mixtures and alloys into components and then attempts to show how the flaws in the composition – from language choice to bias in research to the by-products of completion, etc mean that the approach to a question is a bad one. Policy debate treats argumentation as a chemical agent of breakdown into component parts. It could also be seen as the winner of a policy debate is whoever presents the most universal solvent, conjuring images of Thales (everything is water, judge) as well as some deep lore in the language of debate (solvenTcy?). The judge tastes the brew, or observes the process of dissolving of texts and rates the debate based on the quality of the substances chosen and the method of how they were dissolved; how many solids were left?

Dissolution when done poorly or improperly has less of the forensics lab, trying to catch the criminal and more of the Vegas magic show, where the white tiger appears in the cage after a flashy display of a purple, shiny cape. Often when we teach debate to young people or beginners we lean toward the Vegas show teaching – I can do this trick for you; now I can show you the awesome trick! As people reach the limits of potential participation in tournament debate they are more like a pre-Socratic, seeing everything dissolve into everything else and trying to account for it in some meaningful way.

This isn’t necessarily leftist. Methods like dialectical analysis (Marxist or not) are not about dissolution at all but about combinations that assume a relationship. You take two elements of society and place them together to explore the topos of similarity. Likewise, Burkean identification/division is more addition than subtraction. But then, does a debate method used to investigate social justice need to be leftist, inherently leftist?

I wonder what you think of all this. There are merits in the leaning of policy debate toward dissolution. Other debate formats might have another principle involved in them. A quick and broad-brush list might be to associate Lincoln-Douglas with contraries; World Schools with contrast; World Universities with combination; and American Parliamentary with contradiction. I need to think this out a bit more as this seems like a series of posts now not just one.

Is policy debate a good format for leftist analysis? Or is that an illusion brought about through competitive norms that reward dissolution? There’s nothing particularly politically engaging about dissolving discourse into another discourse to prove that it is ineffectual, although it’s challenging and fun. There’s certainly not a clear path to intervention past the tournament if you walk away thinking all things dissolve into water.

Thinking about teaching after the pandemic

My recent listening habits

As the term is progressing, I am already seeing my hypothesis coming back in an altered form. Here’s what I initially came up with at the start of the term:

1. Visual Stimulation is Required

2. Students expect completion equals quality

3. Interaction in class is unnecessary

4. Class is a solo experience

This is part four and the final part – class as a solo experience.

I remember my first time teaching classes in Japan. I did my typical pedagogical style of making a couple of statements, then pitching them to someone in the class for a response. Usually this gets things going, but in Japan it was a total non starter. I had to scramble a bit and take on the uncomfortable teaching style of direct instruction – aka bad lecturing (in my opinion) – to make the class work.

Of course this kind of instruction is only bad from my point of view. The worst thing a teacher can do is mistake their preferences for universal principles of teaching. We all learn and gain interest through different vectors – that’s the study of rhetoric really – and we should be open to being profoundly uncomfortable in front of our students. However, this experience really did stick with me throughout my Japanese lecture tour.

It was only near the end when I met a Japanese high school teacher named Tony, an Australian who had been living in Japan for many years that I understood that this was a cultural force. According to Tony, the best way to think about the students is that the teacher is the source of knowledge – there’s little one can learn from one’s peers. If you don’t understand something, that’s on you, and you should go off by yourself in order to fix it. Learning is a solo experience, done in larger classes because that’s efficient was my conclusion.

Maybe we should celebrate this epistemology as it seems to be the stake in the heart of group projects, something everyone shudders at. Reflecting on this now it seems that many students see class as a solo experience in this way, a reflection of being a head in a box (or a turned-off camera in a box) for a long period of their education during the lockdown.

What is the value, other than economic efficiency, for putting 30 people in a box, in rigid plastic chairs, all facing the same way, for 40 to 90 minutes? I don’t know if there’s much value aside from those “life moments” of catching the eye of a classmate you are attracted to, watching someone perform a mysterious and strange habit across the room from you, or relishing the schadenfreude of someone who asks an incredibly dumb question or answers the teacher incorrectly. No wonder people keep their head down and don’t engage in the traditional classroom.

This is compounded by the lockdown as all you really had when class was over was yourself and a computer screen. Perhaps there is a positive value of the physical classroom – the conversation before and after class between pseudo-strangers. In a class, students are all having an experience that they often confirm with one another in those moments just to make sure they are not crazy: “Is this professor for real?” “Can you believe that exam?” “What project is he/she talking about?”

Taking those accidental community moments and moving them to the center of the classroom might be a good goal. How does one make side conversation the curriculum? In rhetoric, this is easy – for me as a sophist I take as a goal the claim of Gorgias not just to be able to answer any question, but show you how to answer any question in a way that provokes good vibes, confidence, and a feeling of “movement” – what I’ve been recently calling in my head “the persuasive force.” This is the feeling of gravity you get from an argument that you know probably won’t change your mind but you can still feel its energy (dunamis) as an aspect of the shade of rhetoric known as “recognizing all available arguments.”

Students feel that there’s little to gain from class interaction anyway, further pushed on by COVID and the lockdown’s many flaws of bad technology use, grade inflation, and the horrors of death and illness all around. Students got more comfortable being alone and believing that they, in a bubble, can learn and gain knowledge without the assistance or interaction with peers. Badly designed group projects reinforce that idea. How could it be that everyone we meet was the “only person” in the group who did any of the work?

This assumption is broken down, for me, by turning the class into a space of civic practice – how to make and substantiate a claim, and also looking at claims to see what operates within. Assignments and direct instruction can be pushed to the realm of homework – the so-called “flipped classroom” which always makes me think of a bad HGTV show starring twin real estate agents who indulge liberally in tan-in-a-can. Moving the speeches out of the class has been very productive in allowing students to see that the comments made by peers are very instructive, but maybe not in a direct acquisition of information way, but a way to see the resonances and harmonies in our speech that can be used, abused, or misused to try to get another person to, in the words of Wayne Booth, have some sort of effect on another human being.

Daily Doxa vlogcast is live on YouTube

On youtube I’ve started to record 7 minute videos pretty much every day talking about whatever I am thinking about in relation to rhetoric, argumentation, debate, and everything adjacent to all that.

I’m calling these Daily Doxa videos, or Daily Doxa Vlog – but I am wondering if it is more of a podcast? What’s the distinction between these terms? What do we gain and lose from using one over another?

I think of podcasting as audio only, or audio focused. Any video would just be a bonus or behind the scenes style feature where it’s neat to see everyone talking at the microphones. A vlog is more about visual composition and seeing the person’s life as they move around in it, through it, and whatnot.

I feel like my videos are very low production quality in both ways, but I like the casual chat while walking around. I like how the backgrounds change as I am going wherever I am going in them. It’s honestly very helpful for me to help me think about my own thinking and review what I have been thinking about during the past day before hitting record on the camera.

I feel like posting these is like letting people leaf through my pocket notebook or planner and see all the things I’m jotting down during the day. I kind of like that because the threat, or possibility of publication here – saying all my thoughts out to an audience – requires me to think through my own ideas and throughs as if I were seeing them as another person. To say them I have to make sure I say them in a way that makes sense to whoever might come across them.

This means I get to hear them in a new way as well, which makes me think about them again and differently. Then the cycle has a chance to repeat.

This looks like publication/delivery but this is invention isn’t it?

Thinking about teaching after the Pandemic

My recent listening habits

As the term is progressing, I am already seeing my hypothesis coming back in an altered form. Here’s what I initially came up with at the start of the term:

1. Visual Stimulation is Required

2. Students expect completion equals quality

3. Interaction in class is unnecessary

4. Class is a solo experience

This essay is about the third one, the idea that interaction in class is unnecessary.

If you have a society that valorizes individual accomplishment over the collective advancement of people, you have a classroom that is seen as a site of efficiency rather than necessity. We have classes just because it makes economic sense to educate 30 or 40 people in the same class before the same professor. There’s no other reason.

Of course all of us who value teaching and ponder it often know that the bouncing of an idea around the room, the asking of a question that causes two or three shy students to say “I wanted to ask that,” or someone challenging what another student said are parts of the curriculum.

All of that was lost in the poor transition from the classroom to Zoom University as it was called in the United States. This interactivity showed that the physical presence of students together in a room was essential, even to those professors who don’t think too hard or critically about teaching. The complaints from all sides show the necessity of the classroom.

However it might be the case that students do not think of the classroom as important or vital to an education that is for individual gain. Many students take courses because they have to, or because they are required, not because of any curiosity or interest. They see classes as part of a pathway toward a job or a career of some kind.

The need to participate in class or consider class as a group effort is thwarted by the COVID lockdown experience, the idea that university exists to provide job training and job training only, and a society that values the individual achievement, never telling the story of the people who supported the individual and made their success possible (it’s never the strong individual or genius by the way).

I made this assumption and hypothesis long before the semester started. I’ve found that only in my hybrid course section do I find trouble. But this is probably because the “meet in person once a week and do the rest online” model is a terrible one, motivated by University pragmatics and marketing instead of pedagogy or principles of ethics (Give the customer options!). Many students in there did not choose the hybrid modality but were placed in it. But in my other courses, interaction is good.

I wonder if the interaction is motivated by hearing what one another say rather than impressing the professor or leaving a rhetorical impression. It is still a challenge to indicate to students that the interaction with peers is not accidental but necessary.

The classroom is also one of the few places where we can chip away at this dangerous narrative that we are all singular individuals without connection to a larger society: We are responsible for ourselves and our success alone; anyone who is suffering or struggling is doing so because of their individual choices. To challenge this we need instruction that shows how when someone advances everyone does by hearing that advancement or being privy to that person’s success. This is echoed in David Bohm’s theory of dialogue where he argues that persuasion by one over a group might sway opinions but will not have a value anywhere close to the value of the group suspending this kind of argumentation in favor of an argumentation that encourages everyone to take up an assumption and think about what makes it work.