The New York Sophist

Here’s a video I made as a first attempt at teaching the rubric I’ve designed for evaluating and making Presidential (or national party leader) debates tolerable and perhaps useful.

The goal of these debates, and the Commission on Presidential Debates, is to create a forum to inform voters on the issues. What they leave out is that the issues will be determined by two parties and the national TV news media.

This is a very limited crew to determine what issues matter in a national election. There’s little to no diversity of approach or thought here. Add to it that the Commission says nothing about the role of debate, what it should look like, and cites no study or explanation of why debate is so important and valuable. There’s no model here.

My approach is to take what we have and try to make something good out of it. I propose using the debates as a way of creating more nuanced political positions for yourself by evaluating how close or far from the candidate you are on certain metrics such as the nature of the world, principles, plans, and the role of past action on future success.

Have a look at the video and see what you think. It might be useful to try to use this for the next debate to gain something interesting to post on social media after it’s over and everyone is ready to fight.

I’ve been talking a lot about writing process with a friend, from the start of composition and generation of ideas to the way that a thesis gets mapped out, or at least how I do it.

So through these conversations about something totally unrelated to this post, I’ve been thinking that most ideas for an essay or for a video or whatever I’m trying to make are best thought of in terms of 3 movements that move through the idea through different perspectives.

Rhetoric, debate, argumentation are all perspectives that when looked through at an idea reveal something we were unable to see before (or even something we create through looking differently).

I’ve talked and written about the importance of the presence of uncertainty in life and how rhetorically it’s a powerful resource for invention. There are other things to explore here, like uncertainty in relation to the audience (Universal Audience theory could benefit from this), delivery, and discussions about proof/evidence.

As a starting point, through this three movement process I’m playing with I’ve come up with the following way to approach the subject of how to teach uncertainty:

1. Strategies to avoid seeing uncertainty as a problem to address via total elimination (perhaps the only way to deal with it that we are taught?).
2. How to use uncertainty as a site for rhetorical invention and generation of ideas without the requirement that uncertainty efface itself in order to achieve this.
3. How to create uncertainty out of rhetorical situations where the controversy or audiences feel there are very clear reasons and positions out there – making uncertainty out of the tools and materials that indicate certainty (not just for fun but for important rhetorical epistemic impact).

I think these are movements of the same argument – that uncertainty is important, teachable, not to be eliminated, and an important part of life. This allows a sort of managed way to write about it (which is also a way to think about it and think through it).

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.

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?

Why do I feel that coming to an event like this, ostensibly only about debating, do I find more people interested in my research and interested in my writing than I found among the professors in my field that I studied with in graduate school?

Why is it that “the choice” – that you have to either become a debate coach OR a scholar, seem so incredibly silly when I am at these events? 


Perhaps it’s because that NCA or field of rhetoric “old guard” who assume debate is for immature thinkers to gain maturity, or for students to be introduced to rhetorical or communication theory, but after that it really is for those malformed thinkers that could have been scholars, but failed/chose not too/couldn’t cut it, are not present, and would never be present at an event that centers around teenage students, high school students, or beginning undergraduates. If this is true, how do you persuade these reviewers that debate, as a practice, as a living thing, is just as valuable as the discourse of Mitt Romney for the study of rhetoric? Does pointing at how English Composition departments are ahead of us in this respect help?


Why is it so clear that there is a field-wide bias against debate in the scholarship of the field of rhetoric, mostly perpetuated by senior scholars who either practiced debate as an undergraduate, or perhaps couldn’t “cut it” as debaters, like the negativity I experienced toward debating as an undergraduate from particular scholars in my rhetoric department at that time?

Flipping the classroom is a popular idea in teaching right now. Could debate serve as a place which we can innovate, as it traditionally has in the field of rhetoric, by flipping the scholarship of the field in an analogous way? Imagine journals containing the narratives of experiential learning from debaters that are explored in the 50 minutes of your University class for connections or disruptions to theories that often take on no more reality for students than that of a spectral powerpoint slide?

How do you persuade scholars of argument that they have the best living laboratory in which to workshop ideas, test theories, and explore the limits of propositional argumentation as an idea every weekend at a campus near them?