Public Address, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy in Existential Times
In posting this essay, I realize it is not going to be up to the task I have in mind for it, but I’m posting it anyway for reasons that appear about halfway through the writing of it. As Peter Elbow instructs, “the words will show you where to go.” True for this piece and also true for the way that I have been thinking about, worrying about, and attending to the horrific invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
In 2009 I taught at a debate workshop in Slovenia. At that workshop were students from all over Europe, mostly Eastern Europe. I met some Ukrainian students there, and we hit it off. They were great.
In 2010 they invited me to come teach at their university for a couple of weeks. The university funded the whole thing, and it was really fantastic. This is one of the trips of a great many I’ve taken to teach debate and rhetoric that I think about more often than any other.
During that class there were so many things going on that I was really uncertain whether I was teaching anything or not. I felt there were few handholds and fewer signs that students were “getting it.” Since that time I’ve come to realize this feeling is the feeling of “going beyond” – a phrase I borrow from Buddhism – where the binaries are not erased, ignored, or banned, but transcended through a discourse where the binary just no longer makes any sense. In short, I learned a lot and felt like the students did too. So where was the teacher? It was a great moment and one I reflect on pretty often. I try to reconstitute this, but it’s been tough, mostly because of my attitude.
Since that time, I have let my doubt grow like an algae on the side of the fishtank about words, debate, argument, and their ilk. The layers I wonder about now, on this blog and elsewhere, about the efficacy of teaching debate in a world where Plato’s Thrasymachus and Callicles are not just right but perhaps the only game in town. What’s the point? You can teach people to offer incredible words, explain things extremely well, and engage others with intensity and care in a way that hopefully will move them. But can good words elevate to the level of a predator drone? A MiG? A missile? These material objects are coated in recalcitrance to our expressed desires. It seems that the material world around us is firm and real, and we just speak in the cracks. We don’t constitute much, if any of it.
This attitude is sadly common among the teachers of speech that I encounter, that speech and argument, debate, and their relations are really only good enough to be considered a business skill – something you can use occasionally to perhaps enrich yourself a little more than your neighbor. So much for the grand narrative of democracy, of the great experiment in liberty and freedom that often is the way American democracy is described. Perhaps that’s just marketing. But I like to think that somewhere, at some level, there’s an incredible and overlooked ability in words. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has been aptly demonstrating this, and it’s worth a bit of a closer look not just at him but at his rhetorical attitude and aptitude. I believe it to be a rare moment that should be more commonplace.
It feels weird to try to talk about political speech as something very meaningful. In American public address, it has a taste of real cynicism. I was trying to think of American speeches to compare to Zelenskyy’s, but it doesn’t feel quite right. Of course, it’s naive to think there was a time when United States public address was free of corporate slime. It’s always there, always growing on the porous surface of speech no matter how hard you scrub. But that sort of cynicism might encourage us to think that the power of speaking up and out has no muscle. That it is not symbolic but purely symbolic – or only symbolic. Or that human speech in the form of public address is a reflex, something that has to happen. It is time to address the country. What else can we do? I think the twin forces of cynicism of speech as a thin veneer, combined with a haughty, misplaced confidence in the “right” of free speech have worked well together to convince most Americans that speech isn’t that powerful or great, but it’s important that we think it is.
But in an existential situation, a situation where total loss is the outcome, all things even public address rise to the occasion. This is where Ukraine is now. This isn’t a familiar conflict. This isn’t some sort of insurrection or police action. This is an attempt to end a people, to end a country. This level of threat is being countered by Ukrainians in an incredible show of passion, force, zeal, and strength.
The problem arises when we associate rhetoric, public address, argument, or words with the true and the factual as some sort of wedge meant to wrench people out of a position and into a new one. Rhetoric is not mechanical nor is it a skill. It is a creative art, an art of getting people to see themselves as others. They can see themselves in the words of the speaker, or the speaker in them, or the words of the speaker as already part of them – a relation between them, the speaker, and the speaker’s words. Rhetoric’s art is the art of creation, of making, of constituting words out of the air, a message out of parts, and an audience out of people. The rhetor does it all at once. At the best, you don’t understand or even agree with the words, you are carried along by them, you feel your place among them immediately. In teaching debate, I often offer this aporia to the students: You can recognize an argument as excellent, true, and perfect yet could not predict that argument before you heard it. How does that work?
President Zelenskyy demonstrated this art beautifully, and continues to do so. His speech on the eve of invasion was a masterclass in public address’s ability to reconstitute the field – any field – thought, or action. I was thinking of a retired Pentagon General on CNN explaining that the Russian military’s launching of missiles across the border was “preparation of the battlefield.” Zelenskyy was doing the same thing rhetorically. If a missile sends a message or wipes a slate clean, it has a much shorter range of arguments that are doing the same thing.
Here we see President Zelenskyy do everything you want in a speech. He constitutes the audience in a double: The Russian people, and us, the eavesdroppers on a personal plea. We are hearing something we “are not meant to hear.” But we are meant to hear it. We are able to judge Zelenskyy’s character by how he speaks to the people who are poised to invade his country and wipe out his government.
He turns the entire field of his speech not into his reasons, but consideration of their reasons. What’s really behind these ideas, these statements that you are hearing? What do these things mean? Zelenskyy positions himself as a critic alongside the Russian people, not opposed to what he assumes they believe. Instead, he assumes they think like he does; that they too are not sure what is behind what the Russian government is saying.
He does not address the Russian government – he asks if Russia itself really wants this. He “rebifurcates” the obvious binary we came to the speech holding. He is not interested in what the Russian government wants. His entire speech is a counterpoint to his opening: If the Russian government will respond to his attempt at communication with silence, he will render them into silence in his address. They don’t just stay silent; they do not take place. This is between two peoples, and people who he is about to constitute as “people.”
He locates his position in the stuff of everyday life. Football matches. Families. Friends and walks. Love. This is placed in parallel to the supposed “stark” use of a fact: A large, shared border. We leave that border to learn that’s not all that is shared. The border seems massive at the start of the speech. By the end, the shared border is just one of many shared things, and not even close to the most vital. This contrast is really something. The scope and size of the shared border should be one of the biggest facts at play in the argument. Yelenskyy reduces it to a stage, something incidental.
He can only suspect what Russians want: Even though he speaks in Russian, some of the personal examples, he admits, might not be that meaningful to his audience. But there are deeply shared things that go beyond language and culture here. Values that nobody would deny, which are also Ukrainian values: To live their lives, decide their own fate. This is beyond a “shared value,” this is escalated in Zelenskyy’s delivery. He speaks of the sovereign right of all human beings. Both Ukrainians and Russians can understand this. And by omission, the Russian Government does not. He never says the Russian government is wrong. We simply have to accept it, from our constituted shared position as human beings. They don’t get to disagree; they just aren’t in a conversation about this.
His delivery is personal. He lets us know he is speaking as a citizen. He asks questions. He hesitates. The delivery is confident, personal, assured, and caring. It will be understood by rhetorical scholars as one of the very best uses of pathos in the history of public address. But it’s not just pathos. Zelenskyy can only speak as the President of Ukraine. He can’t avoid that identity. But he can, like a gestalt, bring forward other images out of his role as President. In such a position, one has the faith and confidence of the people – perhaps a more legitimate source of power than an oath, or a constitution could ever provide. He can speak as the people, as one of the people – a synecdoche of Ukraine. President or citizen, these parts understand the value of the whole, the importance of what can be lost. This is ethos, and in its traditional formulation as something much more complex and powerful than “expertise,” which is how most American public speaking texts and teachers treat it. Here’s someone who can be President and citizen at once. Perhaps he can be a citizen because he’s President; perhaps he’s President because he can speak this way. It’s nicely blurred; it has to be blurred.
I’ll be updating this later with some other posts as I get more English translations of Zelenskyy’s speeches. Someone who is well-trained in rhetoric can present themselves however they wish; the rhetorical master does the same but without the notion of presenting. They just are that. The words are not an appeal, they are the right words. It’s vital to realize that rhetoric is still present, it is operating, but it is at such a fine level that it cannot be distinguished from actuality. “This is a good speech” is a world away from “that’s right,” particularly when the exigence doesn’t get any more severe than this.
It is shameful to think that this sort of threat does not loom larger in peacetime as the reason to encourage more faith in words, in argument, in debate. I feel ashamed at my doubt. I feel somewhat silly and powerless too writing about something like a speech in this moment. But doubt itself can be a resource for understanding, faith, and the creation of meaningful human relations. The way people think is in words, it is influenced deeply by words. Once heard or read, they are a part of that process. This is something that the machinery of war can never have. Is this propaganda? Is this reality? The best sort of rhetoric defies and defines both; it’s the dissolution of binaries – it’s just good.
Instead of thinking of words as part and parcel of the democratic educational experience, the existence of the existential threat – the looming of the total loss – should be more apparent when we think about public address. There’s nothing that can stop it’s force from equating that of the materiel in war, by whatever means. Teaching in Ukraine raised a lot of these questions for me that I thought I had settled. Standing with Ukraine today facing a terrifying darkness has them up and about again, but with a better understanding of the importance, and power, of speaking to others – providing the means necessary for others to change, to transform, to move differently through the world, to reconstitute a world to move through; the heart of education; the heart of rhetoric. We are with you because we are you, you are us, we share words and through that we have it all.