The New York Sophist

Not everything is meant to be accessible to the public. The definition of “public intellectual” these days seems to be someone associated with a university who is a professional explainer. Someone who can reduce what research they are doing into terms that are immediately and unquestionably valuable to the general public.

This recent post about a podcast pairing comedians and academics shows the danger of limiting this definition of public intellectual. Here we have an interesting idea of smashing up two different ways of talking (and therefore knowing) about the world – comedians and scholars – in order to provide a result of understanding the scholar’s world to the audience. This heteroglossic experiment unfortunately has saddled itself with the burden of a filter – the host decides ahead of time what research is accessible to the audience, and it primarily seems to be hard science. The host is not meeting his or her own obligation of letting the dialogue craft the accessibility. It’s a trick, designed to get the sort of accessibility that he or she wants, even before the languages are allowed to combine, clash and blend.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea that one speaks in a language that is permeated with other meanings from the contexts in which is it crafted – polysemy – led him to believe that novels were an amazing environment where you could pit different languages – that is, ways of speaking against one another. This would reveal how different we speak to one another for sure, but more importantly, it would result in some verbal mash-ups that might create new ways of speaking about, and therefore knowing, the social world of human beings. Humans speak differently to different people from different classes and different roles in society. This is what he means when he uses the term heteroglossia. The novel is where we become aware of these different discourses, and we become aware of our ignorance about how language works us over.

Why filter the podcast? Seems like the combination of a scholar and some comedians would work itself out, if Bakhtin is right (he has a few books that you can read if you want him to really prove his case). However, there’s a much more dangerous aspect to this podcast and the way it is set up – the podcast, under the guise of explanation, is an agent of the continuous flattening of explanation and knowledge that we face in our era: The reduction of everything to hard data.

If hard data is most accessible to people, it’s because they are comfortable with the idea of hard data, not necessarily the data. This comfort might not be warranted – any scientist will tell you that data needs a good heuristic in order to be meaningful. A bad heuristic can lead to some bad conclusions – and the heuristic is only as good as one’s knowledge about how the data was collected and in what capacity it is being measured.

The audience needs a dose of discomfort, if ethics mean anything here. That discomfort should come in the form of hearing a humanistic discourse about a contemporary problem, and watching the comedians attempt to address it using their own, inappropriate, language. The result could be a new way of understanding understanding, showing the audience that science and social science is but one way of addressing our problems. There are many ways to confront the questions we face, and some of the best lead to a deep sense of uncertainty. What better way to carefully introduce audiences comfortable with the pleasure of hard-data than through a comedic mash up with scholarly humanistic theories?

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca offer a check on the speaker, the rhetor, to ensure he or she is being ethical. They call it the Universal Audience. What it is is your imagination crafting the audience you wish to speak to, not the actual audience. You use this created audience as a check against anything you might say in order to avoid pandering to the actual audience – giving them what they want more than what they might need. The Universal Audience has the added side-effect of boosting the quality of actual audiences, providing them not only engaging material presented well, but a bit of a boost in quality, giving them something a bit more complex than they expected. We could think about this as a small puzzle, or a moment of confusion about something they might believe. This, over time, raises the quality of the audience. It also ensures that the person, or people addressing the audience hold themselves accountable for the meanings they are permeating through their rhetoric.

In this case, there’s no universal audience at play. We have pandering to the audience. And as anyone who speaks for a living – such as teachers – can tell you, what you expect your audience to be capable of is often what you get. You get it because you create it. And in this case, we are not going to get public intellectuals. We are going to get audiences comfortable that they know all about things that are probably best left uncertain, or out of reach.

This week I will be travelling to Montana for my now apparently annual debating workshop that I present there. This started a couple of years ago after meeting people in Mexico after the IDEA youth forum. At the forum, it became clear to me that it is important to create an environment of solid argumentation pedagogy if one expects to teach debating, rhetoric and argument. Without the environment, and a good large environment, there’s very little that can be done to teach rhetoric well. At least that’s how I see it. They were very happy to invite me to big sky country and I was happy to go. I am still quite excited about this, it still contains newness and the sense of frontier. Perhaps that’s my own association with this state and my ever constant fantasy that I will live and teach debate there one day.

The first workshop was in Billings, as is this one. Last year it was in Helena, where Brent Northup called it a debate “masterclass” – something I’d never heard associated with debating at all. I’d always thought of masterclasses as something associated with artistic endeavor, and debate as associated with – well – not that.

Considering debate as a performance is rare. A workshop is for crafting and building, making something practical perhaps or at least producing something – like a writing workshop. A masterclass is for putting yourself in touch with artistry. Acting workshops are for the production of better acting perhaps, but a masterclass would be for the refinement of the connection with the art. Something a bit more self-focused rather than product focused, perhaps. Usually reserved for advanced students, the masterclass – at least somewhat – suggests that there’s other learning that must come first. Something more programmatic. Something more practical. Something “not advanced.”

There are other ways to go with this word as well – thinking about music, a field that is where masterclass is used most often in reference to something performed, or performance. This is what I think masterclass in debating means – seeing debate less as something to be made and more as a performance.

A performance is about the moment and the experience of performing in that moment, with that context. The principles of this are much more focused on relationships, between the self and the audience. There is also a lot of focus on creation and generation, as well as reaction.

Thinking of debate as a product – something to be made in a workshop – this is about standards. This is about fitting expectations that exist in the world of the workshop. This isn’t necessarily about an audience or a moment, but about making something that is high quality and built well. It is about meeting the expectations of the craftspeople with whatever your relationship to the work might be.

Debate workshops forge the tools that one uses in order to create tournament victories. Debate masterclasses allow one to work out the connections between oneself and one’s debate performance. Seeing debate as a tool is not necessarily contrary to seeing debate as a performance if one sees a violin as a tool as well. Some people do.

The lack of anything other than debate workshops indicates where our thinking about debate lies. Against my better judgement I’ve watched a number of recent debate workshop lecture videos online. And the emphasis is on workshop.

Nothing but the bare bones. Direct delivery in a manner that most contemporary teaching theory would indicate doesn’t work. No introduction or orientation at all – “Today my lecture is on. .  .” No questions for the audience to bat around. No, this is instructional in how to handle and make tools that have specifications to do certain jobs. That’s it. There’s no education happening in these videos. There is a better word for it – and it’s often heard at debate workshops these days – “training.” These lectures are clearly built on the assumption that debate is a skill in tool use, and those tools must then be surveyed, detailed, and students need practice in using them to make arguments.

Training for what? It seems as if it is a training that goes little beyond tournament utility. Then what? What use is it after the tournaments have come and gone?

Debate masterclass, in contrast, brings up the thing that most debaters don’t want to discuss or confront – the uncertainty and lack of control of it all. Masterclasses highlight this lack of formulaic tools, and instead opt for exploring what is available to aid the performance – something that is always fleeting, especially in its most desirable form. Without a tournament, what will debate do for you? What relationship will you have with it? Imagine what pedagogy would look like with this mentality. For one, it would not look like shop class day one instruction, or on-the job factory training – a bland delivery mechanism of truths in the operation of machinery.

Debate workshops train people on how to build a road – how to level the ground, how to pour the asphalt, and most importantly, how to mark it with colored lines for use and limits. A masterclass is a walk in the woods, those same woods you went to last week, but are still unfamiliar. Very few markings exist. What you think are markings in an instructive pattern are created by your mind. Ephemeral, the walk does you good, but takes you nowhere. Roads are good for getting places, but the wilderness is good for figuring out where you are, and where you might want to spend your time. Debate as performance – that ancient and deeply rhetorical sensibility, has been blotted out nearly completely by the tournament-dominant theory of debate-as-skill.

Many debaters spend some portion of the summer at a summer debate institute, or “debate camp” as we call them colloquially. Here are a few questions to evaluate the quality of your summer institute experience. Think about them next spring when you are making summer institute plans.

I ask these questions because I believe most debate institutes would not pass basic university quality control standards, regardless of the accrediting institution. I also believe most instruction given by debate coaches at summer institutes is a model of teaching that has been rejected across the university and supposedly opposed by most debate educators – the banking model, identified by Paulo Friere. Furthermore, I think most of the teaching practices and the information given to the students in these sessions would be grounds for dismissal if university faculty were to teach this way.

Here’s the list. Think about the implications for pedagogy, and for your ability to take the summer institute experience and use it to advance your education, not just your win-loss percentage.

How many times were you involved in direct instruction (i.e. lectures, a model of instruction where someone talks to you in a group and you listen more than you speak)?

How many times were you involved in sessions where you talk with your fellow students more than an instructor talks to you?

How much time was reserved each day for reading articles and books?

How many times were you asked to present summaries of your research to your peers?

How many times were you taught an issue of politics, economics, history or another subject by someone whose only credentials were that they were a debate coach or a “winning” debater?

How often were you given instruction by someone who is an expert in something other than the format of debating or winning competitive debates?

How often were you asked by an instructor to give your point of view on a question of strategy or preparation?

After a practice debate, how much time was given to you to reflect about the round with your teammates and opponents?

After a practice debate, did the critic give you suggestions on what to do with your upcoming instructional or research time as a part of the critique?

How often did your instructor suggest or provide short readings from scholarly materials about the topic you were working on?

How often did your instructor suggest strategic tricks for tournament success instead of potential avenues for access of information from scholarly sources?

If your institute was on a university campus, were you given significant amounts of time to use the research library on campus?

How often were students asked to instruct or provide instruction to their peers?

How often were you consulted on curriculum (i.e. what should we be teaching to you guys?)

How often were you told what to do by an instructor without space to debate, challenge, or question that demand? (i.e. Organization of a speech can only be this particular way)

Did you participate in any speaking or debate activities at your institute that had nothing to do with the rules and restrictions of tournament debating?

How often did your instructors access and instruct you about rhetorical or communication theory, making it applicable to the challenges you were facing in rounds? (Most “debate coach” types do have at least a Masters degree in this field)

What sources did instructors offer to you as the basis for their content lectures? Did they internally cite experts or expert sources?

Did instructors cite their research on powerpoint or through a bibliography distributed to you during or after the lecture?

Did your instructors approach the topic with an enthusiasm and energy to get you engaged in the material, or did they approach you with a cynical rhetoric, almost bored with their material?

How often did instructors connect the debate material they were teaching you to other formats of debating or arguing that we find in the “real world” (i.e. institutions of democratic governance, etc)

How many times did instructors debate against students, then critique the same debate they were in, identifying winning arguments?

How many times did instructors participate in debates where a student from the class or institute offered the critique?

How often did you debate your peers and were also judged by your peers?

What percentage of the research you were given at the institute was a product of you or one of your peers versus a product of an instructor?