The New York Sophist

The title of this post is a note I often get. I thought I’d make my common response public.

Don’t hire a debate coach to run your debate program. Don’t hire someone who has a record of tournament success.

Instead, hire someone who is a radical teacher, someone who is a critical pedagogue. You want someone who recognizes that the classroom, and the “outside the classroom” exist in a yin-yang relationship. Hire someone who is frustrated by the college classroom not because they have to be in there teaching public speaking, but because they are frustrated by the innate design flaws of such a system of teaching.

The outstanding debate program is one that supercharges your existing communication curriculum by providing engagement with populations, communities, and people in the world through rhetoric, oratory, and speech. The students who opt in for debate programs take what they get excited about in the communication curriculum out to these communities, they roll it around, and bring it back covered in insight from the audiences (and sometimes opponents) they encounter there.

In short, a debate coach is someone who is committed to creating students successful at navigating and mastering the norms of the debate tournament – an extant group of people who want to fold others into their norms of thought and speech. These norms unfortunately serve the norms of what makes tournaments work well, not what makes rhetoric work well, and certainly not open to the idea that we are being operated by these norms, put “through the motions” of speech and argument, spun like a top by the ideological commitment to tournament debating.

What you want is someone who is committed to teaching in a way that they find the classroom incomplete – it’s too antiseptic to be meaningful for teaching. They are someone familiar with student-centered, active and creative engagement, and have a healthy respect for assessment and rubric design over grading.

The model for a good debate program is the writing center. Over the past 40 or so years, the academic conversation among writing centers and writing instructors has moved to a place of student-focused creation of texts and their interaction with communities and ideology. Debate, as it’s practiced now, is more like 1950s or 1960s composition, where modality is taught, and the correspondence to a set of rules for modality is the sign of good writing. Debate though only has one modality to teach, and that’s what the tournament calls a “good argument.” At all BP or World’s competitions, for example, the notion of fairness of a motion is always held above any other conception of the motion.

If your university is considering a debate hire, or a debate program, hire a teacher who wants to create additional opportunities for students to engage other communities with the rhetorical and communication concepts that are taught in your classes. Have them return and share with these classes what they experienced. This model keeps argument, rhetoric, speech, oratory, and communication theory alive. It’s praxis, one of the best governing principles we have for determining if our pedagogy is sound.

I wave off most people from trying to hire a tournament-forged debate coach type. It’s better to hire a generalist in research who loves to teach, and the department can empower that person with a budget and some faculty-determined goals for the debate program. The rest should come as most of the best pedagogy does, action and reflection on that action to create theory that governs another action. This will provide the entirety of the students in the department with the benefits of an engaged learning program based on external partnerships. Perhaps the writing center mixed with an ecology program? A day trip to the forest, the wetlands, or the shore seems like a good metaphor for what I’m suggesting.

The last thing political discourse needs right now is a program that encourages people to believe that they have found the “right way” to argue, “real” debate, or any other such nonsense. What is needed are experiences to remind ourselves, and our students, how incredibly difficult it is to stand before an audience and offer them reasons to alter their attitudes about something. This moment never gets old, never is easy, and most importantly, is never the same. Debate education based on rules of fairness will never prepare people for this moment, it will only serve to encourage them to dismiss it in favor of other rules-based argumentation environments, such as the law. This fetishism doesn’t help create practice in the messy and frustrating necessity of debating in a democracy, which could be conceived of as a continuous “adaptation of adapting,” or the moments where you feel that pressure that you have to account for your position on something with mere words alone, nothing else.

It’s 202o, so of course PBS is airing the San Francisco Symphony and Metallica’s second live concert together. Such a strange combination might just be evidence of getting older, nothing else. Probably not going to get over that this is on PBS. But PBS is where I discovered Doctor Who, so perhaps this is on brand for them.

When S&M first appeared, it was a very strange but delightful combination for me. At the time I was thinking a lot about rock operas such as Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar and so the idea of symphonic heavy metal was quite nice. I thought it worked pretty well and still really enjoy that album.

Now watching the second go round, it appears they aren’t really changing up much of the set. It feels like a “lets do that again!” Or it could be the anniversary of the original S&M concert, somewhere around 1999 or 2000 I’m guessing. Could be an anniversary, or a marking of the moment.

What it isn’t is anything like the first one, even if they play the exact same set list in the level of mastery you’d expect from that many career professional musicians. The first collaboration is an example of kairos.

This ancient Greek term is poorly defined in many places as “opportunity” or “the opportune.” This makes kairos seem like a natural force, and those who can use it incredibly lucky. Or perceptive. Or a bit of both. Kairos has little to do with luck, and a lot to do with one of the most important practices that the discipline of rhetoric teaches: Recognition.

I think the best way to teach kairos is to couch it in layers of recognition: First being that we must recognize that any rhetorical intervention is temporary. That’s how it has meaning at all. It’s contingent, of the moment, and will have to be rearticulated, or created anew, at some point in the future. It also is the recognition of the complexities of the moment, situation, reason for the articulation, and the audience. It’s also the recognition that our words are always incomplete and that the audience isn’t there to receive them but to work with them.

One of my favorite definitions of kairos doesn’t come from professional rhetoric scholars, but from Paul Tillich, a theologian, who defined it as moments where “the eternal breaks into the temporal,” moments where one moment becomes hyperweighted, a moment of decision or realization, one where one is compelled to respond by the sheer weight of the realization of the moment and it’s relation to what has happened and what shall be coming.

There are a lot of great definitions that might be better. I’m a big fan of:

Roger Thomson, writing about the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, defines kairos as, “A moment of spiritual insight and propriety.” Also: “Invocation of the eternal during a specific moment in history to enact change.”

James Kinneavy: “Right timing and due measure” (seems almost like opposites?)

Augusto Rostagini explains Gorgias’s understanding as three fold: 1) Knowledge of the different forms speech can take, 2)adapt it to the situation before you and 3) harmonize it with the speech around you.

Eric Charles White defines it as the recognition that, “there can never be more than a contingent and provisional management of the present opportunity.”

Also: “understanding willing to begin again” and “A unique opportunity to confer meaning upon the world.”

John Poulakos says that kairos, “expands the frontiers of language and invites audiences to settle them.”

These are all present to some degree in S&M, but maybe not so much in S&M 2. Right timing and due measure seem obvious for musicians, so that one is present. But is the concert timed right? It seems like it’s the twentieth anniversary of the first S&M, so maybe that’s something. But that seems more like appropriateness. Perhaps there’s a kairos that is just for epidictic moments? This is more a celebration of the initial collaboration as not much changed. Reiteration can’t be kairotic, can it?

Perhaps it’s like White – this is the understanding of the initial combination of heavy metal and symphonic sounds articulating and understanding itself again. Maybe this is another “opportunity” to appreciate how weird, natural, or unique this music is.

Gorgias, through Rostagini, is the musician’s method here: Harmony. They know what they are supposed to do with their instrument and how to play it. But what applies to this new and contingent situation? How can I bring the form I know into concert with the situation that is unfamiliar? That’s the practice of kairos, or maybe rhetoric as a whole – not sure.

Poulakos is the most obvious really. Let’s push the envelope because we can, and let’s see the audience push back. The audience is a contributor at this point, and as we see many times in the concert, an additional musician.

There’s another definition I wish I had written down that I heard several years ago at the Rhetoric Society of America conference. It was a super weird Sunday morning panel, the last day of the conference. It had a woman working a loom in the corner, a speaker handed out porcupine quills to us, and another professor talked about how making lines on rocks 15,000 years ago was indeed rhetoric. I enjoyed the hell out of it. One of the speakers talked about kairos as being a term from weaving, which was related to being able to deftly move the thread up and down, between the perpendicular threads in a way that was efficient and good. Weaving is something we naturally associate with rhetoric (Weaving words, spinning a yarn, creating an argument out of whole cloth) but this really solidifies the connection, perhaps ironically.

Kairos might not be a big PBS aired concert like this, but playing the music together, hitting the notes at just the right moment together, would be. It is kairos to take a look at the music of a metal band and say, “I wonder how I can weave this into a symphony performance?” Kairos is not the memory of the concert, or even being able to go, but the recognition of a weighty moment that draws into contrast the expected, and compares the past to the future. I liked watching it, but it was nothing like the 1999 concert, more of a tribute to it. However there were still those moments of play in the concert that brought to bear the beauty and intensity of the symphony and Metallica’s music in ways that both heightened and dissolved those distinctions into meaning.

Two days ago, someone asked me what my favorite American historical text was. It wasn’t that weird of a question: This is the time of year where I start to plan out my next semester’s courses and figure out the themes I want to teach.

Something that has been on my mind since the Amy Comey Barrett hearings has been the position of Constitutional Originalism. Although made fun of endlessly by the left – mostly revealing the shallow nature of political conversation these days – I am much more intrigued by the nature of this position as a hermeneutic. How do you read this ancient document? Surely you can’t just read it like you are this post? Can you read it like an older book, “Oh that was a good view for back then, but now . . .” – How are you determining that it was a good view? I have so many endless questions about this hermeneutic, and I have to resist the urge to buy a bunch of books on it and just lose myself in figuring it out.

I assume it’s a hermeneutic, but it’s more likely a practice. Joseph Ellis in his recent book American Dialogue: The Founders and Us shows that there is no such thing as being able to read these ancient documents without the practice of engaging the archive and positioning one’s read among the documents that exist there. Although we can never know the minds of the founders, we have many of their expressions of belief, feeling, and attitude about things, and we can assign convincing motives to them that will then apply to other matters. His book is masterful in how to use archival documents to create contemporary arguments.

Originalism, if it makes any sense at all, would be a practice in continuous re-reading of the archive. I doubt that’s what most originalist justices do. Re-reading is a notoriously unstable and threatening practice that people whose credibility rest on them being THE interpreters of something would not be willing to accept. Credibility of the Supreme Court is based on them being the last word, not one word among many (perhaps one of the best reasons we shouldn’t have a Supreme Court under democratic governance, which, is many things but most commonly ‘some words among other words’).

One of the themes I thought about teaching my debate class under would be the Constitution. Read the Federalist Papers (not all of them), Ellis’s book, and perhaps some of the originalist stuff (conservative and progressive texts on originalism [yes, there are progressive originalists]). Traditionally I have just taught the course based on examining the Presidential Debates, Malcolm X’s debate at Oxford Union, James Baldwin’s debate with Wiliam F. Buckley, Jr. at Cambridge Union, and John Quincy Adams’s many debates in the House on the question of abolition. Could still do this course, but would cut the Presidential Debate part out I think. Maybe wishful thinking that the Commission on Presidential Debates will be irrelevant after this election.

So I have been thinking about this list, here it is in no particular order:

The Federalist Papers

Who wouldn’t love a collection of arguments aimed at the public about why the Constitution is a really good idea and not a trick to enforce tyranny and absolute rule on everyone? These were all published in New York newspapers, and well, like we see today, the Federalists had the upper hand because their opponents didn’t own as many great newspapers as the Federalists did. All of them are great, but there are a few standouts, notably 10 and 51, but I’m sure you’ll put your favorites in the comments. A great way to teach this is to have students read the Constitution without the Bill of Rights, since those were not a part of the document being debated – they came along after ratification, and mostly due to the work of James Madison.

Notes on the State of Virginia

The only reason I like this collection of really, really weird observations about Virginia is that they reveal what a messed up person Thomas Jefferson was. Imagine being smart enough to understand the deep connections to scientifically gathered data to agriculture and national/global politics, but also being able to predict the hazards and benefits of a globalized economy. Now imagine you can see all that, but you can’t accept for one second that your slaves are human beings. What a mind?

Common Sense

Thomas Paine was a madman. Not only did he write this document knowing full well that if the revolution didn’t happen or was lost he’d be executed, that wasn’t enough for him. Later on he wrote Age of Reason, an argument against Christian thought in governance while waiting to be executed for being a foreigner involved in the French Revolution. I think I’d be a bit distracted. Anyway, Common Sense is fantastic, making a direct, public argument for why the colonies have a unique duty to resist British rule as they are one of the last safeguards of the concept of liberty (not just liberty, but the concept of it, which is a pretty cool argument).

Civil Disobedience

Henry Thoreau, according to all scholars, was an edgelord, but even edgelords sometimes have a really good point. This is pretty far removed from the earlier documents (which really don’t have that clean of a temporal relationship) but probably wouldn’t exist without the historical sediment of all the rhetoric of the earlier documents. Thoreau writes masterfully here on the duty we have to not obey or follow unjust laws, and that resistance can be many things. Would be nice to assign students to re-write the argument in the contemporary context of police violence and America’s role internationally in making many people’s lives miserable so we can have cheap sneakers.

That’s the list I came up with but I am sure there are many others that I could add here if I thought more about it, but that was my initial reaction. Some other ones that really matter would be Leaves of Grass and of course Adams’s Lectures on Rhetoric which might make fragmentary appearances in any course.

I think an examination of America as a country that was founded on really intense, high-stakes debates would be a nice contrast to all the calls for civility, logic, and empathy that we are seeing from people who really should know better. People don’t have long public debates about things that they aren’t passionate about, and our feelings have just as much right to expression as the cleanest logical formulation. Argumentation and debate are human activities after all.

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.

For some reason I have been reflecting on my career and work a lot lately, probably because I’m starting to feel strange about how the days are not broken up by wandering from room to room at the university. Those walks are so essential for clearing the head as you are preparing to teach, or wondering what that book you are going to get from an Interlibrary loan will contain, or going to meet a colleague to talk about a writing idea. These are important spaces where intellectual work goes on that remain unappreciated and unexplored (at least to my knowledge).

My career was very aptly summed up accidentally in a recent conversation I had where the phrase “big lift for small impact” was used – that’s been everything I’ve done here at my university.

Obviously this applies to the work I did for the debate program here – no need to post about that again – but also for nearly anything else that I write or post or create. It’s a lot of time and effort. But there is one aspect of it where this might not make sense, and that’s teaching.

The common view of teaching at the university is “Professors teach as part of their job.” Using a traditional rhetorical means of invention, I inverted that to see what could be said: “Teachers profess as a part of their job.” This didn’t seem accurate.

Teaching is professing, it is in the heart of rhetoric, because not only are you saying “this is important, you must learn these things,” you are simultaneously creating that reality for the students: “This is important, here’s how you know it is important, because of these feelings and thoughts.”

This is lost on most professors who believe that their external markers of expertise are enough to generate this desire to know and desire to learn among students. At the high school level, bad teachers use authoritarian power moves to communicate importance as well as mind-numbing activities that produce discipline rather than interest. 

What is the rhetorical mode of professing? The verb means to declare or avow something. This seems like the mode of making a case, a persuasive address that proves that the subject is vital, important, or significant. Since it’s rhetorical that should be to the audience you are addressing, which nearly all professors miss. The attitude of the professor is “they are the ones who need to work hard to get it, they are the students.” This is often couched in terms of responsibility, which is always lacking among students. A quick survey of the history of rhetoric would indicate that this is a common trait of most assembled audiences too. 

When teaching, you are professing, you are making a case for your declaration or your passionate avowing of the importance of a concept, some information, or whatever you are teaching that class. And since all classes are different audiences, each one needs adaptation. 

Is there a case-based, rhetorical theory of teaching out there? The closest I’ve found is in Buddhism, particularly in Tibetan debates, but there’s a debate pedagogy tradition in the early U.S. as well. 

What about Rome? It is known that from time to time the rhetoric teachers would take on the unpopular opinion on a declamation case to show the students how it’s done, but did any take on the position of how to craft oratory in a particular way?

I guess what I’m looking for is models of how to speak when you are pushing the value of a central text to students, and you cannot do this without your take being involved. You can’t assume they are there because they are interested. So how do you convert them from people who have to attend, and hope it won’t be miserable, to people who feel lucky to be there, and who look forward to the next one?