I have one more thing to say about the kind of critique I tried to fashion [in Possible Lives]. Academic training is agonistic; graduate study instills in us the penchant for critique, and the disciplinary tools to do it. More generally, Western intellectual life is energized by attack and counterattack — just read the letters section of a magazine like The Nation. It is less common — and perhaps more difficult — to find shared concerns or seek collaborative resolution. (303)

Rose, Mike. An Open Language: Selected Writing on Literacy, Learning, and Opportunity. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006.

found via: Lindquist, Julie. “Review: Looking Back at the Road Ahead.” College English 70.1 (Sept. 2007): 70-78.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

In recent years, renegade rhetoricians from Cal State Fullerton and other underdog schools have clobbered debate kingpins from Harvard and UC Berkeley with a hodgepodge of unorthodox methods known as “performance debating.”

Instead of relying on scholarly research to foil opponents, the teams employ guerrilla tactics such as reading from Dr. Seuss, impersonating pirates or ballroom dancing with a chair.

“People call us the terrorists of debate,” says Fullerton student Brenda Montes.

The goal of performance debate is threefold: Knock rivals off stride, impress judges with creative forms of argument and open the heavily white-male field to new voices.

The methods have sparked an uproar. Purists say the gimmicks are wrecking a noble tradition. But supporters insist the techniques are returning the art of persuasion to its roots.

[...]

“Traditional debaters say the only evidence that matters is library research,” he said. “We say personal experience is equally important.” Bruschke points out that Aristotle ranked emotion equal to logic as a tool in seeking truth.

[...]

Performance teams “have pretty much started to ruin traditional debate and what it offers students educationally,” said Ken Sherwood, director of forensics at Los Angeles City College.

In the past, debaters had to research both sides of an issue. “It taught students there’s always another side and it forced them to understand the opposition,” Sherwood said. “If you do that, you’re better able to defend your own perspective.”

In contrast, performance squads focus on personal stories and theatrics that often have little to do with the topic, he said.

Defenders of alternative tactics say they’re simply trying to “level the playing field” against students who have been honing debate skills since high school, often at elite private campuses.

But Sherwood disputes the idea that underprivileged students need gimmickry to compete. “My program has brought more people from disadvantaged backgrounds into debate than Louisville, Fullerton and Long Beach combined,” he said.

Harvard’s Perkins said it’s true that performance debating can shortchange students on research skills, but he still admires the movement. “It has strengthened the game and made it more demanding,” Perkins said.

At a recent Malibu contest, Brett Beeler of Cal State Fullerton stopped mid-sentence in a debate and asked teammate Caitlin Gray for a document.

As she rummaged around, Beeler impatiently left the podium and whispered heatedly at her. The tiff escalated, and suddenly he slapped her.

The judge of the debate came unglued. “You need to leave right now!” he shouted at Beeler.

But the slap was an act — a way to breathe life into the otherwise dry debate topic, a court case involving domestic violence.

“I really did believe it was an incident of domestic abuse,” said the judge, Orion Steele, a professor at the University of Redlands. “It took me a good half-hour to cool down.” Then he awarded the victory to Fullerton.

Each of Fullerton’s two-person debate squads uses a strategy tailored to individual members’ backgrounds.

Puja Chopra and Parija Patel, both of Indian descent, sit down and meditate in debates to symbolize that arguing over legislation is pointless because true change must come from within.

Another duo cranks up a stereo and delivers arguments with homespun rap lyrics. When opponents complained that rap wasn’t an acceptable way to debate, Fullerton countered with a swipe at speed-talking. “The way you talk is understood by fewer than 2,000 people in America,” debater Dale Morrison said. Rap has a better chance of influencing listeners, he said.

Some schools get so swept up challenging Fullerton’s tactics that they forget to rebut the team’s arguments, Bruschke said. He estimates 10% of college squads use performance tactics.

When performance teams face each other, things can get pretty weird. Long Beach State once faced two women from Concordia College in Minnesota who stripped down to G-strings and talked about reclaiming their bodies from objectification by men.

The all-male California team couldn’t get past the distraction. “Their brains left them,” said Neesen, their coach.

Another contest pitted a Fort Hays student dancing with a chair against a Northwestern team reading the script of “Dr. Strangelove.” The topic was federal control of Native American land.

“It was a wild debate,” Shanahan said. “Strangelove” prevailed.

Part of a performance squad’s success depends on the element of surprise. “It’s classic guerrilla warfare,” Bruschke said. “Your tactics have to constantly change or you lose your advantage to superior force.”

Shanahan once judged a match in which a team used nine minutes of silence to signify that African Americans had no voice on a policy matter.

“It was powerful,” Shanahan said. But when other schools began copying the ploy, it wore thin. “After you hear it 15 or 20 times, it becomes passe,” he said. “The bar gets raised.”

Ultimately, the endless quest for novelty could doom the new form.

“It’s getting to the point where it’s hard to do something that really challenges the boundaries, because the boundaries have been all but eliminated,” Shanahan said. “It’s hard to say where things will go next.”

I lean towards calling this a “good thing” because it’s opening up the debate style that usually favors masculinist argumentation (which privileges those from middle class white upbringing and favors men over women because of socialization). While I think it might be problematic that some of these performances don’t address the issue, I think it’s great that young rhetoricians are realizing that there are different ways to communicate than through a logical 3 reasons with support style method. The fact that narrative is being used is amazing, and that bodies are being incorporated into argument is really cool. As Iris Marion Young has pointed out, our traditional beliefs in a democratic deliberative democracy privileges certain people whose education and background have helped them adopt the norms of debate. If we’re to truly open up the public sphere to be inclusive of many different voices, we have to change what we value (and what we desire) in argumentation/discourse. That’s why I read this and think it’s exciting and a “good thing.”

In this chapter, Graff discusses Deborah Tannen’s book The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue, a book in which Tannen argues that we debate too much and instead need a culture based more on listening and dialogue. Graff brings up the very valid point that “Tannen herself falls into a needless polarization of ‘debate’ versus ‘dialogue,’ as in her book’s original subtitle. The mistake here lies in setting up debate and dialogue as polar opposites, when they are better seen as complementary moments in the process of social exchange, which constantly alternates between the adversarial and the consensual” (87-88).

Graff also points out that Tannen’s book does just what it seems to deplore because it has a confrontational quality (89). Graff also points out that Tannen’s book does validate conflict and accepts that it’s necessary, but Tannen seems to forget that when she attacks polemics.

This particularly struck me as interesting, in regards to classrooms:

Far from the excess of contentiousness that Tannen sees in today’s classrooms, then, I find much too little. Classroom disagreement rarely moves beyond the traditional trading of opinions and observations–Pythonesque “mere contradiction”–to enable the differences to be worked through. Even the angry recent confrontations over differences of race, ethnicity, and gender have taken place mostly outside classrooms, where these differences are usually expressed in a noncontroversial airing of “alternative perspectives” and in the choice of assigned authors. The compositionist Joseph Harris rightly describes this evasive celebration of differences as “a kind of multicultural bazaar, where [students] are not so much brought into conflict with opposing views as placed in a kind of harmless connection with a series of exotic others. (92)

This same sort of engagement, but even more conflict-free, is what occurs in high school classes as well, according to Graff.

Polemics and Irenics in Argument – it’s a start?

In her essay “The Womanization of Rhetoric,“ Sally Miller Gearhart writes that she believes “that any intent to persuade is an act of violence“ because the persuader has an intention of changing someone (53), and proposes that instead we should “forsake all this and think of ourselves not as bearers of great messages but as vessels out of whose variety messages will emerge“ (60). I think this is an interesting position, and the reason I bring it up isn’t because I completely agree with her. In fact, I strong believe that everything is an argument, as is often argued, which makes Gearhart’s position problematic (isn’t everything violent if these two ideas merge?). (However, if the dominant metaphor, “Argument is war,“ is a subtext to our lives [Lakoff and Johnson, right?], then perhaps this idea of everything being violent is something to pursue?) I am interested in this because I feel it gets at a very important question about arguments, and that is how aggressive or violent should they be? Perhaps another way to look at this might be how much is the arguer collaborating with the audience and those with different opinions, and how much is the arguer working against the audience and those who disagree.

In Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness, Walter J. Ong writes:

Contest is a part of human life everywhere that human life is found. In war and in games, in work and in play, physically, intellectually, and morally, human beings match themselves with or against one another. Struggle appears inseparable from human life, and contest is a particular focus or mode of interpersonal struggle, an opposition that can be hostile but need not be, for certain kinds of contest may serve to sublimate and dissolve hostilities and to build friendship and cooperation. (15)

Johan Huizinga adds, “All knowledge…is polemical by nature“ (qtd. in Ong 45). At this time, I am inclined to agree, that all of our knowledge is created out of struggle and conflict. However, to what degree can this struggle be too aggressive or violent? I know this feels vague at this time, and I’m looking for some sort of guidance (both from myself by writing this out, and from you).

Another valid concern is how we might become too irenic. Ong believes that we have become “unabashed irenicists“ (24). Here I am inclined to agree. Americans tend to fear conflict, viewing it as something that must cause separation. While we often value differences (or is this merely lip service), we don’t really value differences in ideas. This is true from the introspective (how many people struggle to dispel conflicts within themselves?) to the large scale (you’re either with us or against us – a minimization of choices, of differences). In groups, we try to dispel conflict through means such as voting, consensus, and compromise, all of which I believe just serve to mask conflict (voting hides the needs/wants of the minority who has lost; consensus is more a contest of who can last the longest; compromise masks the fact that neither party actually got what they wanted).

Which brings me to polyphony (multivocality) and collage in texts, including hypertexts and multigenre essays. I like these texts because they don’t mask conflict – in fact, it is usually right there, in multiple voices and from multiple pints of view. In fact, an author can be upfront about his/her/hir own conflict within the self; the author doesn’t have to take a singular view on an issue, but can rather express all the voices in his/her/hir head. Additionally, I like these texts because of their potential to be, in my own made up phrase, “texts that listen.“ By creating this term, I am drawing on my belief that we often do not listen to texts or to people, but rather wait impatiently to “counter-argue.“ If a text has multiple viewpoints, perhaps it can quell this urge to “read“ with an eye for what you can attack in a counterargument.

Some ideas that I would like to intersect as I research and write include gender, aggression, verbal and psychological violence, polyphony, polemics, irenicism, collage/montage/bricolage (sp?), hypertext, texts that “listen,“ and the metaphor “argument is war“ (Lakoff and Johnson). Questions I have at this time include:
1. Does this make sense at this time?
2. I know this is a huge topic – does anyone have suggestions for ways to focus?
3. What suggestions do people have for sources? I am considering Barthes and Bakhtin, but would love more ideas.

Works Cited

Gearhart, Sally Miller. “The Womanization of Rhetoric.“ Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Gesa E. Kirsch, Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

Ong, Walter J. Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.

Huizingo states, “All knowledge—and this includes philosophy—is polemical by nature.“ (45)

I wonder if this last fact is true. I agree that all knowledge is socially constructed, but is it, according to dictionary.com, “Of or relating to a controversy, argument, or refutation“? That’s an interesting question. I suppose it’s true, isn’t it? Isn’t all knowledge growing out of some conflict, some contest? I suppose then, that the real question should become what kind of contest should this be? Should it be an aggressive one? Can there be contests that are not aggressive?

I must remember to put this idea into my paper.

What if the critics are right, Kysha wonders beside you, her tone easing into something you have never heard from her before, something suddenly taut and authentic, and the self-esteem movement is not only goofy but hazardous?

How so? you ask, watching the plane gaining speed.

What if inflated self-esteem – the kind that comes not from actual achievement but from teachers and parents drumming into kids how great they are – triggers narcissism instead of self-worth?

What if the result of the self-esteem movement isn’t a child who applauds him or herself healthfully, but one who stews with hostility and aggression against the world for lying to him or her repeatedly?

Of course, this connection is only tangential. What is the point here? I think it’s that we’ve become too concerned with irenicism (?), that we focus too much on dispelling conflict. Is there conflict within us? Dismiss it, tell our children it’s alright and that there shouldn’t be inner turmoil; instead we should be happy. Is there conflict between us? Ignore it, smooth it over, do something so that it doesn’t exist.

Does the argument sound too harsh because it has the word “argue” in it? Cry out that an argument is wrong, that instead we should be putting out ideas for others to listen to (which is, I believe, a noble attempt), but still forgetting that why should it be wrong to argue?

I guess, it boils down to the question: Is it wrong/violent/aggressive to want to persuade someone, in effect, to want to change them?

Sara also lent me Clueless in Academe by Gerald Graff, which has a chapter titled “Two Cheers for the Argument Culture.” Sara led me to understand that he critiques Tannen for critiquing agonistic argument while simultaneously engaging in it; therefore, perhaps argument is inescapable in our society?

How should argument be made so that it is not agonistic, so that it promotes listening and dialogue, not conquering and obliteration? How can we make argument dialogic, (polyphonic?), so that it’s not aggressive? I agree with Lunsford that “Everything is an argument,” which is both an obvious statement and a profound one. It’s also troubling, because if, in our culture, everything is an argument, then everything is war; we have built up aggression and agonism. Conflict is fine, aggression onto others, I view as bad.

Well, or is it? Ong makes the argument that aggression can be good. For instance, the young child aggresses (?) him/her/hirself onto the mother when frightened, invading her private space. This can certainly be viewed as aggression. But I wonder how much of this is aggression and how much of it is regression (the child becoming once again one with the mother). Perhaps it is aggression, in which case we must assess, what aggression is good and what aggression is bad? And are good and bad the right words for this kind of debate?

Reynolds writes:

Delivery, however, is the more readily revived of rhetoric’s two “problem canons,” both theoretically and practically. In composition studies, especially with the advent of word processing and desktop publishing technologies, it has become increasingly popular for both scholars and students to rethink and reemploy delivery issues in rhetorical performance and rhetorical criticism. Current thinking about rhetorical delivery recognizes equivalencies among oral, written, and electronic pronuntiatio and actio–analogies between voice/gesture and layout/typography, for example. Composition studies focused on technical and computer-assisted writing seem especially to promote a reconsideration of delivery issues in these terms (see Connors, Panetta, and Reynolds for representative treatments).

Check out the following:

Connors, Robert J. “Actio: A Rhetoric of Manuscripts.” Rhetoric Review 2 (1983): 64-73.
Panetta, Clayann Gilliam. “Teaching Rhetorical Delivery in Freshman Composition.” Thesis. Old Dominion U, 1992.
Reynolds, John Frederick. “Classical Rhetoric and Computer-Assisted Composition: Extra-Textual Features as ‘Delivery.’” Computer-Assisted Composition Journal 3 (1989): 101-7.

“The biological side of our nature is nothing to be ashamed of.” (10)

“Contest is a part of human life everywhere that human life is found. In war and in games, in work and in play, physically, intellectually, and morally, human beings match themselves with or against one another. Struggle appears inseparable from human lfie, and contest is a particular focus or mode of interpersonal struggle, an opposition that can be hostile but need not be, for certain kinds of contest may serve to sublimate and dissolve hositilites and to build friendship and cooperation.” (15)

At first, I didn’t understand what Ong meant by contests that can be helpful to society or to interpersonal relationships, but he gave examples later that made sense. For example, we define ourselves against our parents; this contest is part of our development, and without it, we wouldn’t become individuals.

Charles Sanders Peirce says, “A thing without oppositions ipso facto does not exist.” (17)

G.E.R. Lloyd in Polarity and Analogy (1966) shows that adversativeness in Greek thought was essential. (20)

“Alvin W. Gouldner has shown that the ancient Greek way of life was marked by (1) the quest for fame…through (2) personal action in (3) a contest system of operation setting person against person.” (21)

“[T]he Greeks seem to have made more careful use of adversativeness than did other cultures, both as an analytic tool and as an operational intellectual procedure.” (21)

Greek fame “grew out of reflection on disputation, on verbal and intellectual contest, on the question, ‘How is it that what you say demolishes what I say?’” (21-22).

This is highly agonistic, in my opinion, and very aggressive (which Ong will discuss later). This definitely eliminates the feminine, the cooperative, from public discourse and seeking fame. Wow.

“With logic, ancient Greece formalized adversativeness as no other culture had done.” (22)

“Rhetoric, out of which formal logic grew, proceeds also by opposition, but by contrast with formal logic, rhetoric deals typically with soft oppositions. Rhetorical oppositions are negotiable.” (22)

Modern academics have become “unabashed irenicists” (24). This is very interesting to me, because do we try to mask conflict now too much? Is it to be avoided at all costs? I feel that we too often mask conflict with consensus, voting, and compromise, which usually don’t actually remove conflict, but mask its existence. Something to ponder.

Ancient Greece: “…the totally male population of academia, the vigorous and often brutal disciplining of pupils, the dominantly agonistic teaching procedures, the constant recycling of knowledge, even that acquired by reading, through the agora of public oral disputation, the programmatically combative oral testing of knowledge…” (25)

On page 36 Ong takes a moment to note that agonistic is not our only structure. Indeed, there are other structures that are very common. In fact, we all first learn language from our mothers, thus the term “Mother tongue,” a nearly ubiquitous term across cultures, and this is not agonistic. (36)

“Contest” has most recently been linked to “aggression” (38).

John Dollard writes “Aggression is always a consequence of frustration” (39).
“With or without this hypothesis, aggression does appear always to involve volunteer impingement on another’s person or possessions, intrusional initiative, physical or psychological.” Aggression is an action, into someone else’s territory. (39)

Aggression can be a sign of weakness and insecurity. (41)

Greek word agonia is akin to “contest.” agon is an assembly or arena. (43) “In the litigious Greek world…an assembly, getting together to discourse, was rather essentially a mobilization for contest.” (43-44)

Huizingo states, “All knowledge—and this includes philosophy—is polemical by nature.” (45)

I wonder if this last fact is true. I agree that all knowledge is socially constructed, but is it, according to dictionary.com, “Of or relating to a controversy, argument, or refutation”? That’s an interesting question. I suppose it’s true, isn’t it? Isn’t all knowledge growing out of some conflict, some contest? I suppose then, that the real question should become what kind of contest should this be? Should it be an aggressive one? Can there be contests that are not aggressive? I have so much to ponder on this, and so little time. I’m gonna walk home and read Ong’s next chapter, and then, I swear, I’ll write my paper.