The New York Sophist

One of the moments that sticks in my memory from graduate school is putting the SETI @ Home screen saver on a bunch of computers that weren’t mine.

The small room at the end of the hallway in the speech communication (now Rhetorical Studies) department in Sims Hall at Syracuse University had a few old computers in it for the use of graduate students. At the time I was obsessed with the SETI @ Home program, and wanted to crunch even more data than my little Mac laptop could handle. After about an hour, I saw all the screens in there lighting up with the distinctive red and yellow bars of potential alien signals.

Alien communication. Seemed like a pretty reasonable thing to have the computers research while nobody else was using them. I spent a long time looking at the screen as it did it’s work. On nearly every page the source of the potential alien chatter was listed: Arecibo Radio Observatory.

The loss of Arecibo Radio Observatory is nothing short of acute ear trauma for the human race. We have been listening carefully to deep space for decades. Now, the ability to listen has been destroyed. We are now alone again, surrounded by potential noise but unable to know it.

The communication breakdown is a symbolic marker of the global communication breakdown we’ve all experienced over these past few years as we all decided to ignore our capacity to hear, and instead try to broadcast our signals over the signals of others. Sabotage, not accident, has been the watchword when it comes to political communication, everyone forgetting that at some point they did not believe what they think now; someone had to persuade them that their view is right.

Arecibo was a powerful symbol for those of us who believe communication to be the most vital part of the human experience. Our ability to craft meaning for one another, and do it with a particular purpose in mind, makes us part of a large family of creatures on Earth. What separates our ability to do this is we can craft symbols that are unrelated to any material thing or extant property around us: We can send signals that only refer to other signals, those signals sent so long ago we don’t remember making them.

The symbolic power of the observatory was simple: We are listening. We want to hear you. We want to get what you are saying. The intensity of our concentrated listening to the heavens produced so much data that SETI created the screensaver software to take advantage of the resting CPU power that sat idle across the planet. We had listened so intensely that the information collected would take the best computers on Earth a generation to carefully consider what we had heard. Space that around a bunch of PCs and laptops idling away across the world, and you exponentially cut that time.

SETI @ Home and Arecibo combined in a way to symbolically present us at our best to ourselves. We are eager to hear whatever you might be saying out there. We are trying our best to hear you, and we are trying to understand it as best we can. We’re even questioning the silences as meaning something. It doesn’t get more generous than this in terms of communicative responsibility.

And yet, millions of us are capable of spending the time and money on such a project, and equally capable of mourning the loss of such a project. At the same time though, we are incredibly incapable of listening – really listening – to the variety of viewpoints that fellow human beings may hold.

The contradiction would be staggering if we weren’t familiar with human beings. Even when we are certain we learned a ton from listening carefully, we find it to be impossible to do with one another. Even more ironic: We all think we are doing it extremely well when what we are most likely doing is tuning one another out.

The collapse of Arecibo is a tragedy and horrible loss for human scientific knowledge, but perhaps we can take a moment to reflect on the symbolic collapse of our ability to listen to the most foreign, most alien creatures. They are, after all, moments to practice this all around us.

Following in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan, I have used Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Maelstrom” as a way to describe rhetorical strategy, kairos, and how argument really works away from all the too-firm theories that are floating around out there.

Now I’m thinking that the Maelstrom is a useful metaphor for universities and university instructors to plan for the rough times ahead. Just like in the story, universities cross a dangerous stretch of water every year, hoping that they will be able to make it out and back before the storm arrives. To be caught in the storm certainly means that you are going to be pulled directly to the bottom.

Fritz Eichenberg, U-M Library Digital Collections

The narrator of the story is caught in a maelstrom and there doesn’t appear to be a way out. For a moment, the character can see the wall of water around him, and notices that things he thought would sink are moving up the column, and things that he believed would float are heading to the bottom. He decides to lash himself to a heavy object in hopes that this will be pushed to the top of the whirlpool.

For rhetoric, the meaning is pretty obvious, at least to me. It’s much more valuable to look around and make use of the way things are floating around you in your situation and encounter with topic and audience than it is to stay committed to the things that you brought with you. Things you prepare alone are always going to be persuasive for you. But the audience has their own assumptions and feelings, and those might work in ways that make little sense to you, but still work. The goal isn’t to be right; the goal is to persuade, or at least to bring the audience closer to your point of view (which is often what persuasion ends up being, realistically).

For online teaching, what instructors have been doing is panicked grasping to things that they think will keep their class afloat in this mess. Quizzes, daily discussion, handing in various reading reactions, etc on a near daily or weekly basis is much more frequent than would be assigned in an in-person course. The panic of not being able to see the students makes instructors think that they have no idea if the students are engaged, learning, or “paying attention” – whatever that means. Often this last one is just “looking at me while I’m talking.” Not the best measure of student engagement quite honestly.

These measures are all comfortable and familiar and we believe they tell us something. We believe they have the power to keep the objectives of the class floating. But in this unusual situation, frequent daily or weekly stress of doing a bunch of work that isn’t clearly connected to a larger goal in the course is just going to continue to pull the course to the bottom.

The panic that there are not comfortable ways or familiar ways to take stock of a class and see if people are engaged is very real, but we can’t just replicate the in person online and think that it will provide the same value or information. Honestly, the in-person metrics are more comfortable than valuable; I wonder if they actually float in any circumstances.

Looking around to what engages and works in the online space is what’s needed, even if it’s not familiar or comfortable. What we are looking for are things that communicate value to students. Things that make them feel that they are part of something educational, meaningful, and valuable.

For me what has gotten the biggest response are short podcasts just checking in with everyone that I post to our class chat about once a week. These are just audio recordings where I address questions I’ve received 2 or 3 times, mention a comment that someone left that I think is good, or general guidelines or thoughts I have about upcoming readings and assignments. The students really like these because they give them the sense they have something to hold onto that helps them stay afloat. Notice this doesn’t require them to do anything – it doesn’t add to an already stressful and over-assigned term.

One of the things I’m most frustrated by is how much of my ability to adapt is connected to professors who do not think – never think – that they need to adapt to the students. They think the students should be grateful to be able to hear the professor speak. They think they are transmitting the best information to the students. They also think they are defenders of “real” knowledge, and are noble for looking out for cheaters and those who trick the professor into giving out precious undeserved “points.” Nobody feels engaged or helped by seeing a bad laptop camera professor telling them that they need to read the syllabus.

I’m just hoping that by associating myself with the things that feel like they would sink I might get a chance to rise to the edge of the storm and be picked up by someone else. I think that the scramble for the things that appear to work, because they fit a shallow and undeveloped model of what it means to know or teach, is to ensure that your entire crew will be consumed by the maelstrom.

It’s Friday night and normally I’m pretty energetic and excited. Tonight I’m worn out, and I think it’s because I spent most of the week working on an essay that I should have done last month. With all the changes and the almost-taking-a-buyout business I can forgive myself the slip this time. After all it’s better than my typical writing excuses such as “video game” or “too much pizza.”

I’m frustrated because I am not sure why I’m so tired after working on that piece and getting it finalized. I really shouldn’t be. It wasn’t epic, didn’t require a ton of research, and was pretty easy to write and edit. I think it makes sense and will be helpful for the intended audience. So I shouldn’t be tired. Instead, I’m mad and tired.

My mind goes back to the start of the week and a Monday video call with a friend and colleague where we were discussing metaphors for kinds of writing. He was talking about the kind of writing one does on comprehensive exams: The kind meant to prove that you that you can move heavy ideas around properly and get them in position. I talked about how annoying that rhetoric is because it doesn’t soar, and it’s not particularly “cool.” He called it positioning and then I responded with, “It’s like being one of those guys with the orange lights who are moving the plane out of the gate and onto the tarmac.” Bingo.

Photo by Zamir Yusof on Unsplash

Tarmac Rhetoric – the kind of rhetoric that moves extremely bulky powerful ideas into place so that someone else can soar with them. Someone else can see the 30,000 foot view, someone else can feel the rush of the ground moving away rapidly. But you get to move this majestic machinery – which cannot soar or be elegant on the ground – out of a tiny space and into a less tiny area so it can move to a narrow but long area so that it can take off.

Tarmac rhetoric isn’t heavy. Planes aren’t heavy really. They have a weight, but it has to consider fuel, luggage and passengers. Planes are pretty light. They are designed to stay aloft. But they are very bad at moving themselves around and into position to lift everyone on board into the sky and sail them toward a destination somewhere quick.

I’m pretty sure this piece I finished drafting today was tarmac rhetoric and a pretty good case of it too. It sets up the ability of others to take off and go in a lot of directions quickly, lightly, and impressively. But in order for them to do that, I have to wave the little orange lights, stand in the heat, and make sure it gets into position on the tarmac.

Do we teach tarmac rhetoric? Do we teach positioning the “Wings that give our weighted words flight,” to quote Kenneth Burke kind of? What does that teaching look like? Who are we in the relationship to lifting, transforming, transportive rhetoric when we are the ones who help move the awkward beast out of the space it doesn’t belong and into the place where it can sit for a bit before it launches up and away, shining?