Procrasti Nation

Ok so poking around and procrastinating, I learned that the person placed in charge of publishing the Constitutional Convention of 1787 debate transcripts was John Quincy Adams. Mr. Rhetoric himself from the 19th century was ordered to edit and publish them in 1818. This guy really loved words. I wonder if I could teach a class just on him and all the stuff he wrote, plus his pretty clever (and incredible) speeches about abolition on the floor of the House. I bet I could design that course and teach it.

These days, I’m thinking a lot more about preparing and teaching courses as online packages. There are so many essays out there about passive income and ways to develop helpful courses for people on different topics and charge them some amount of money to take the course. It’s not for credit; I don’t think any of them really offer any sort of accreditation for completing the course. It’s more like self-help or self-improvement kind of stuff.

I am pretty sure I could put together a decent public speaking course, but I think it would be lost in the noise. I think I’ll put together something like “transformational oratory” or something instead to capture people who don’t just want to speak in corporate boardrooms, but maybe want to influence people in many different situations. Most public speaking stuff assumes a work environment, which is pretty pathetic.

Oratory has been lost in this exchange. Maybe Adams’s return isn’t just an accidental find. Maybe it’s time to bring him to the foreground again and really think about what public speaking and oratory can be.

Is There Anything to say about Yesterday’s Speeches?

A return to the standard formulation of political speech at the highest levels of government seems to be the message I got from yesterday’s event.

Was this a victory speech? It didn’t feel like it. It felt more like a return to the familiar and comfortable structure and cadence of professional political speech.

From my point of view, there’s nothing really exemplary or exciting about either of these speeches. They were showcases of the traditional tropes and forms you’d expect to hear from the new President and VP elect. It was a “greatest hits” of these tropes and figures, reminding me of so many previous addresses by so many other candidates.

This doesn’t mean the speeches were “bad” – they were just expected. And I’m really feeling the lag from four years of the irony that Trump provided: Every Presidential-level address you’d expect to be totally crazy, unhinged, and well – all over the place.

Novelty is a dangerous thing in speech as it can train the audience to always be looking for that novel move or content instead of what you might want them to do, and also it creates a short memory for your addresses. For Trump this works out great as he has very little in terms of policy development to offer. For Biden, novelty would be a huge threat to his policy initiatives. Harris too.

Returning to the comfort of bland political speech probably felt comfortable to most who watched and heard the speeches. It felt like there were again guideposts or guardrails in national politics. These speeches could be classified as a “return to normalcy” which might be something critics would say is totally called for. It’s also on brand for speeches that are supposedly victory speeches (although these did not feel like victory speeches for a lot of reasons in the context).

Here are the things that the speeches did that I thought were valuable:

  1. Provided a sense of comfort in the articulation of a return to “normalcy” in the way they were structured, delivered, and the combination of delicious flavors we haven’t had in a while (imagine returning to grandma’s after a long absence).
  2. Marked the exigency of the ballot counting being over and that the result was official and legitimate (necessary given the floating arguments about corruption without anchor point).
  3. Marked the historic moment of a non-white woman about to occupy the office of Vice President. What does this mean? What will it mean? This is in order in terms of “victory” speeches (perhaps the most victory moment there) in terms of epideictic rhetoric, the only irony in the speech is that this radical historical moment was handled with very traditional, Aristotelian gloves even in terms of public address! Again not a flaw, but something to notice.

Here are the concerns I have about the speeches:

  1. Reliance on the trope that we need to come together as a nation is dangerous; it was aimed at a very different America. This argument needs to alter to consider: Social media, obsession with facts as the only/ultimate arbiter of political discourse, 24 hour for-profit cable news that is partisan, and the coronavirus. Why was this not a theme of examination for both speeches? Dangerous as it address nobody except the blind Biden faithful (who will read it as “yes we won, you have to accept it” – coming together for them is nothing short of agreement). When old tropes come back around they need to be introduced or at least not show up in their 90s haircut like last night.
  2. No suggestions on how to rhetorically navigate the upcoming litigation. Perhaps ignorance is not just bliss, but a good strategy – if these cases are illegitimate, should it appear in a speech? This is a great question. In my mind, ignoring the upcoming challenges might not have been smart. What would have been great here would have been a reference to “situations” where “devisive” forces might try to discredit the “accomplishment” that we “all share tonight.” Something like that would have been all that was needed, but ignoring the speculative utterances of the Trump campaign in totality just legitimizes the claim of theft from people who are sympathetic to the idea.
  3. Related to this is that there’s a looming run-off election in Georgia that the upcoming Biden administration has a lot riding on. I wonder why there were not attempts to connect yesterday’s speeches about the future direction of the nation, the transformative spirit of the future, and the lofty goals and dreams of Americans in the same terms that the Georgia race for Senate was couched. They are obviously capable of this: Recall the many specific references to fracking in both the VP debate and Presidential debates. That’s too specific for my tastes for this need, but still, why not angle it a bit more? Contextualize this win in the terms of the changes we all feel that are happening to us (and also, because of us, but at the same time are inevitable no matter what we do – it’s a nice twist!).

I guess now that I’ve typed it all out, it seems to me that the speeches yesterday were a rhetorical success? I really don’t feel that way. I think the most important thing that will have to be overcome is the lack of Trumps dynamic style and clipped mode of public address, which people have come to associate with a President who is active and involved, and most importantly not a professional politician. It’s a significant challenge, and I’m pretty sure Biden and Harris will have several good ways of addressing this. But for the faithful and the haters, there’s little that could be done to change either opinion on them. That might be the biggest challenge yet: How to recover the value of changing up one’s mind.

An Idea for Using Everyday Photos in Teaching Speech

It’s always usually at the 1/3 of the semester mark that I start to think about the class I’d rather be teaching, rather than the one that I am actually teaching. I keep a notebook of all these ideas for future ways to organize and orient the class, but these ideas never look very good when doing course planning.

I took this great picture today that I sent to my sister as it represents the combination of something she loves with something she despises.

For her this represents an uholy combination of much loved Harry Potter with the all-consuming horror of Legos which never fail to appear in her visual or physical presence anytime she is at home.

Assigning students to find images out there in their daily lives that represent something frustrating, impossible to accept, or other sorts of “aporia-istic” combinations might be a fun assignment. It also encourages them to look around in their daily lives in a new and different way. And this might be the purpose/function of education.

This isn’t the only thing you could do with this assignment, of course. You could assign a number of different kinds of photos and then the speech becomes “how do you account for this photo being representative of/an example of/or an instance of that concept or idea?”

This could be a number of words but it could also be quotes, aphorisms, and other things that, when placed by a photo, require some articulation. It is a good exercise in reason-giving, and a great exercise in what counts as evidence. These concepts are considered to be obvious to most students, i.e. “we’ll you know, it’s just an example of it.” or “it’s a fact.” In order to avoid these space-fillers and work on the development of reason-giving discourse assignments that are a bit off from the everyday kinds of topics might be required.

Again, public speaking is composition, which should be obvious by now. But what might be more challenging to accept is that evidence and reasons are composition. We compose evidence; we compose reasons and reason giving. This is particularly hard to accept in our current political climate.

The Fallacy of the Banned Public Speaking Class Topic

Just finished assessing the first round of student speeches for the term and the average grades were around an 88 to 90, high B to low A. This is atypical for me; most first speeches are closer to a C and slowly move up to this point over a course of four to five speeches.

Speech quality increases the less restrictions you give students on topics and the more instruction you give them in terms of how to develop a topic. Public speaking instructors suffer from the idea that in order to increase the quality of speeches they must police the nature of the topic, banning a number of topics that they associate with poor quality orations.

Photo by Jouwen Wang on Unsplash

This is the most common fallacy of the public speaking professor, the fallacy of causation between particular topics and bad speeches. It isn’t the topic choice that causes the poor speech, nor is it the nature of the topic. There are a few causes of this – namely three problems with topic approach that the instructor should address through teaching rhetoric instead of teaching orientation toward the “right position” on an issue or “a better topic” or even “good sources.” These things won’t address the core of the problem.

First, most of the topics that are associated with bad speeches – abortion, drug legalization, gun restrictions – are huge topics that cannot be taken on just as they are. They require a walk through the stasis in order to discover what the best point of contention is. They require examination through the general and specific topics of Aristotle and Cicero. They require acknowledgement that a young person is speaking on the topic, someone with little to no credibility. All these things are usually ignored by the instructor in favor of “get good sources.” But speech should be a lot more than a way to measure someone’s ability to evaluate research sources.

Another issue with these topics is that instructors might consider them “too real” and inappropriate for the classroom. this defense makes little sense to me. It’s one thing to criticise the university for not teaching “real world” skills or having applicability outside the gates. It’s another for instructors to deliberately restrict the content of a course to be removed from the things that people are speaking about and attempting to persuade one another about most often. Even moreso, consider that the course is meant to help people become better at such speech, and the instructor saying “There is no point in discussing these issues since persuasion is impossible.” This seems like a reason to reconsider the necessity of a speech course in totality, not an adaptation to make the course better.

Audiences are audiences. A university student audience brings with them into the classroom the assumptions, ideology, and values they have. A speech on a controversy is a wonderful way to gain class attention and connect the principles of good oratory into something they are experiencing directly and can connect to their life experiences. Of course, nobody should feel compelled to change their mind on an issue, but that’s an important consideration for oratory as well. These principles of democratic engagement are really not taught anymore. We teach young people that they are fools if they do not dissolve their opinions in the light of the facts. Instead, why not discuss how difficult it is to understand the fact, understand ideology, and negotiate the feelings and thoughts that surround any controversy they might face. Giving students a plan for future encounters with oratory might be more important than practice in making the same old designs on safe topics.

Speaking of safe, this word is probably the centerpiece of the most serious objection to particular topics, and that is the concept of the “safe space.” The trouble with safe spaces has been argued to death all over the internet, and I won’t rehearse those arguments here. The only thing I can add to this conversation is the danger of assuming there is a place that is free of persuasion and argument. Although safe-space considerations are well meaning and aimed at helping students feel comfortable and get in the mental space to engage learning, the idea that they would be immune or free from convincing speech is extremely dangerous. We are always vulnerable to it. And people who are not well-meaning at all will take advantage of those who feel that there’s a space that is persuasion or argument free.

When people want a safe space, what they want is a space that is free of aggressive, hostile, and bad argumentation or speech. This has been conflated with all persuasion and all oratory because in contemporary America, we are horrible at this. We have been taught, and continue to teach that facts are facts, they are easy to obtain, easy to understand, and that in their presence we should just change our mind without hesitation. This anti-human, monstrous position is responsible for people’s negative feelings about political conversation, their aversion to argument, and their desire to be away from oratory. The solution is to provide oratory as the fine art that it is. If speech teachers and public speaking courses are not going to do this, we have little hope to find it in other places.

Public speaking is oratory, and oratory is an art that connects humans and allows human beings to see themselves connected to one another in new ways. “Consubstantiality” is what Kenneth Burke called the art of rhetoric. This has been forgotten, or is just unknown to contemporary teachers. We tend to automatically think that speech and oratory are a violent interruption of our lives, separating us from what we know and believe, challenging us to accept new and different beliefs. This can be the case. But this other relation is where oratory is at its most artistic, creating moments where we see new connection and take on shared identity, seeing a place for future possibility.

I have a lot more to think about in terms of creating digital speech. The internet has become an art gallery of oratory, with preserved speech hanging there, waiting for us to stop for a bit as we walk or surf by. More on that later as I think about these wonderful orations that the students are producing this term.