Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 63: Rhetoric and Pedagogy — with Dan Adleman
Speakers: Fiorella Pinillos, Am Johal, Dan Adleman
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Fiorella Pinillos 0:06
Hola oyentes. Mi nombre es Fiorella Pinillos, y esa es Below the Radar a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement, and is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
Fiorella Pinillos 0:22
On this episode of Below the Radar, we are joined by Dan Adleman, an assistant professor of rhetoric at the University of Toronto. Dan received his PhD from UBC in 2016 and has previously taught at the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia Institute of Technology and Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Alongside our host Am Johal. He's the co-founder of the Vancouver Institute for Social Research, a nonprofit graduate level Critical Theory free school, ran out of the art gallery since 2013.
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Am Johal 1:00
Delighted that you could join us this morning, Dan Adleman, our guest on Below the Radar. Welcome, Dan.
Dan Adleman 1:06
Thank you for having me Am.
Am Johal 1:08
Dan, why don't we begin by just, why don't you introduce yourself in terms of the work that you're doing at the University of Toronto?
Dan Adleman 1:15
Okay, well, I did my PhD in English Language and Literature at UBC. I finished that in 2016. And I was teaching at Emily Carr University here in Vancouver, and decided that I should apply for another job. So I put together the most exquisite package that I could and applied for this job at the University of Toronto teaching rhetoric, and then forgot all about it because I thought I didn't have a chance in hell of getting the job and went travelling. And I know three months later, I started getting all these phone calls from a Toronto phone number. I was in Winnipeg at the time. And I didn't pick up the phone calls because I thought it was a telemarketer or something like that. Finally picked up on the 10th call kind of angrily. And said oh University of Toronto and Innis College, would like to do a Skype interview. So I borrowed a suit jacket and did a Skype interview. Three weeks later, I was moving to Toronto, and a big part of the premise of my application for this Writing and Rhetoric job was that we have to develop ways to think about new media studies, ecology, and rhetoric or symbolic environments together. New ways of intertwining them. And that's work that was inaugurated by figures like Marshall McLuhan, who is most famous for developing this Toronto School of Media Studies. But not a lot of people know that he was a classically trained rhetorician.
Am Johal 2:44
Now, you've been working there for a few years now. And maybe if you could share with us some of the courses that you've been teaching, and you've been developing new courses with undergrad students and others so.
Dan Adleman 2:55
Sure, yeah, it's been a huge project of mine to roll out this new curriculum. And fortunately, the program at Innis College has been very permissive with me, and has facilitated everything that I've wanted to roll out so far. The core curriculum revolves around this course called A Brief History of Persuasion, which is about the genesis and evolution of the rhetorical tradition, starting with Gorgias, Plato and Aristotle. And this argument that emerged around whether or not rhetoric was a discipline. And if it was a discipline, what kind of discipline is it?
Dan Adleman 3:34
Plato, slash Socrates espoused that rhetoric wasn't an actual discipline, it was just a kind of knack, that persuasion just happens when a charismatic orator like Gorgias, the sophist, when he gets up on a soapbox, and persuades people of a certain course of action, like we should go to war with this nation state, or we should lower taxes or raise taxes, or that somebody should be found guilty of a certain offense. And there was a certain amount of justification for that view, on the part of Socrates because Gorgias was a kind of charismatic charlatan. And he was famous for taking money to take on any kind of soap box position. So if you gave him a nickel to make a case, to go to war with Sparta, then he would take on that position. And if you paid him a nickel to take the opposite position, he would do so just as readily. And Socrates believed that rhetoric, the art of persuasion, was antithetical to the pursuit of truth, which was the task of proper philosophizing.
Dan Adleman 4:39
But his students well, Plato's student, Aristotle, believed that rhetoric, the art of finding the best available means of persuasion for a given task was a proper discipline and taught it side by side with philosophy. So I tracked those conversations over the millennia through the Romans, all the Europeans and the Americans and the birth of the new rhetoric in the 20th century with Kenneth Burke. And for Burke, whose work is really just as seminal as McLuhan's, and emerges at around the same time, we have to think about rhetorical environments or scenes, as these dynamic symbolic ecosystems of persuasion, of influence of identification of ideology, and so on. So we track those conversations in that course. And that's really the keystone of my curriculum.
Am Johal 5:33
Interestingly, when we think about the word persuasion, how it relates to communications, the sort of subfields outside the academy that use those terms, quite regularly in politics, the backroom of politics, it's sort of the rhetoric of persuasion is very much used in terms of voter identification. It's used in the field of advertising around whether it's Lippmann in the early 20th century, those types of rhetics were definitely employed in the field of public relations. And so they do kind of coincide with political power, but also a kind of economic zone selling products and all of these kinds of things. And these have shaped very much the 20th century but previous times as well. So how do you relate rhetoric to these fields of political communications and advertising communication?
Dan Adleman 6:25
Well, something that Kenneth Burke's work has in common with McLuhan's, is that they both of her, that we should take the stuff of advertising and popular culture seriously as objects of inquiry. And rather than merely disparaging them as mere rhetoric, as an epithet, we should scrutinize how they do the work of persuasion, of influence, of reorientation, configuration of the field of influence.
Am Johal 6:57
Now, you've done some work related to media theory, and ecology. And when we think of the relationship between the human animal and nature itself, there's lots of people in philosophy that have ventured into those areas in the 20th century from Heidegger on the question concerning technology to many others. But your approach to thinking through this question around rhetoric, media and ecology, what has your approach been?
Dan Adleman 7:34
Well, a lot of it unfolds around initial homologies, between rhetorical optics and one hand, thinking about symbolic environments, how they, they tug and pull at us in different ways. Ecological environments, loosely speaking, nature, ecosystems, and the kinds of operations that happen through them, how they impact us how we impact them, and technological environments, media environments, and obviously the rhetorician Marshall McLuhan was seminal and refashioning how we think about media, not so much as inconsequential vehicles of our communications, as full spectrum envelopes that completely reconfigured the field of human interaction, and reshape us at almost the molecular level, which now been integrated into common sense. But when he first started to espouse these ideas in the 50s, and 60s, he was written off as a charlatan, people thought it was nonsense.
Am Johal 8:34
And in terms of bringing McLuhan back into the classroom today, how do you view the relevance of McLuhan now?
Dan Adleman 8:43
Well, his legacy persists through a lot of different avenues. I mean, I teach this course called digital rhetoric. Where we think about the legacy of figures like Marshall McLuhan, Herald Innis all the way to the present day, and not just in terms of blandly applying these ideas developed in the 50s in the 60s and 70s, to the contemporary scene, but thinking about how these ideas have and continue to metamorphosis in relation to our ever evolving media environment. We were reading the Medium is the Massage in my digital rhetoric class, a seminal graphic novel written with Quentin Fiore, wherein McLuhan really prognosticates the contemporary moment in all kinds of ways. And a student of mine who's about 18/19 years old, a very bright student, actually asked me about halfway through the lecture, so was there, wasn't there internet in McLuhan's day?
Dan Adleman 9:44
And she was incredulous, you know, having been born around the time of 911 being born with a social media account pretty much. She was incredulous that in McLuhan's time the world that he was talking about really hadn't come to pass yet, because he was able to evoke in such vivid terms the world that we now inhabit, the global village.
Am Johal 10:05
In terms of other things you're looking at in terms of media theory that you're bringing into these questions around rhetoric, media and ecology. Are you looking at people like Paul Virilio, or others who else from the area that you're reading through that you're bringing into the classroom when thinking through these questions?
Dan Adleman 10:21
Yeah,
Am Johal 10:22
Slaughter-Dike?
Dan Adleman 10:23
Oh, very much. So. Whereas in the brief history of persuasion class, we focus on the unfolding of conversations around persuasion and disciplinarity. In the media class, we look at the unfolding of conversations around media, and the global village. So after looking at McLuhan's work, we look at the work of Friedrich Kittler, who's a more extremist hyperbolic version of McLuhan in a lot of ways who integrates the post structuralist work of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paul Virilio, is much more apprised of the bellicose, militaristic dimensions of media technology. And then we move on to the focus on attention or faculty of attention. And its metamorphosis. And its diminishment over time, because for the longest time, people thought that attention was just this received faculty that was relatively universal amongst people. But now, it's obviously been assimilated into everyday common sense that our capacity for attention for deep attention that kind of stuff that we cultivated through, you know, our investment in print culture, is susceptible to diminishment in relation to our transfection, media technology, our addiction to media technology. So we look at the work of Kate Hails and Bernard Stiegler and their different takes on attention. Hails believes that hyper attention she calls it, what most of us refer to as multitasking is an aptitude. Stiegler is much more pessimistic about what's been happening to human attention span over the last couple of decades.
Am Johal 12:08
Do you look at people like Isabel Stangers or Donna Haraway, or the artist Pedro sterile who writes about Rhetoric in Media as well,
Dan Adleman 12:16
We do look at Donna Haraway's work. And in fact, we have this visiting faculty member next year, Megan Bowler, who's a student of Donna Haraway. And we benefit immensely from her insights Haraway's one of these, in many ways, eco medial thinkers. And she's really our first foray into eco medial thinking. And that is if for people like McLuhan, and Innis media constitutes not just a vehicle or a substrate of communication, but a full spectrum environment, an envelope, that eco medial thinking is about the extent to which our natural environment constitutes a kind of media. And so there's this kayasmatic relationship between media as environment and environment as medium. And that's something that we explore through the work of Donna Haraway, among others.
Am Johal 13:12
Do you at all relate to the work of Quentin Meillassoux?
Dan Adleman 13:17
It's an undergrad class. So I'm still coming to terms with Meillassoux's work myself.
Am Johal 13:21
Yeah. And so besides the teaching and the working on curriculum that you're doing, you've been also doing some writing work as well. I'm wondering if you have any current writing projects that you're working on right now?
Dan Adleman 13:33
Yeah, a lot. You know, one of them is, that's going to be coming out as a book chapter with Routledge sometime in the next half year or so is a broader vision of this interlacing of rhetoric, ecology and media. And then another piece that'll be coming out soon looks at these vectors through the work of a local Vancouver scholar, Ian Angus. And then I'm also doing some work on genres, in particular genres of television, and cinema. So I'm editing a special edition of the Canadian review of American studies around what some scholars refer to as new television, and new rhetorical ways of looking at television series like The Wire, Sopranos, Deadwood, and so on.
Am Johal 14:35
And now, in terms of your analysis and reading of rhetorics, historically and in the contemporary, are there ways that you're reading the present political moment in terms of the relationships to populism and authoritarianism that are functioning in various ways or reading that culturally?
Dan Adleman 14:53
Yeah. Well, there's so many avenues for this to occur. Yeah. Kenneth Burke was especially interested in these kinds of political movements. And he has a lot to say. And for him, a lot of these forms of so called populism revolve around the complex interplay of identification and dis identification, which he adopts and adapts from Freud, but uses more generally, for him, the basis of identification, the bases are myriad, you know, we we identify with others, on the basis of everything from you know, race and gender to, you know, class and forms of conspicuous consumption, literary and cinematic enthusiasms, fashion and so on. And this is something that goes on, it's always already happening, and it's tugging at us from 1000 different directions. And whether it's looking at, you know, Hitler's mind calm, or more contemporary movements, you know, you can see the complex operation of identification with some on certain alleged grounds and dis identification with others. You know, I'm especially fascinated in Vancouver's political scene along those lines. I mean, for example, to my mind, this is just me, I thought that Vision Vancouver as a political party was cynically and sinisterly brilliant at the operation of identification as a political gesture as a political strategy, actually.
Am Johal 16:28
In terms of how you read Toronto politics for Ontario politics today with Doug Ford, coming into power that has a particular kind of effect on the post secondary environment in particular. So how are you feeling that in terms of the political rhetoric that we're employed from a campaign point of view, but in terms of how it actually lands down on the ground in various social sectors in public health and other areas?
Dan Adleman 16:53
Well, there's a massive rift, I'm not as savvy a reader of the political scene in Toronto as Vancouver because I've only been there for a few years, nonetheless, you know, obviously, the provincial government seems to be employing a version of populism or a recapitulation of a form of populism that's been sweeping the world over the last few years, perhaps beginning with Trump. And in many ways, the provincial government in Ontario is actually a much more measured and controlled and savvy version of that form of populism, you know, I don't know whether it's the handlers or whether it's just the premier himself. But you know, they're very strategic in what they disclose to the general public and what goes on behind closed doors and stuff. You don't get a lot of three in the morning, bathroom tweets or anything like that with the provincial government. Nonetheless, the way they've managed to appeal to and mobilize working people, suburbanites, rural Ontario is an extremely formidable and they've managed to Ford's a very powerful coalition, the likes of which I don't think is gonna go away anytime soon.
Am Johal 18:06
And interestingly, it kind of coincides timing wise with the election of Jason Kenney, where there's been a mobilization of government resources around a kind of energy war room, which, I mean, it is almost Orwellian in a certain sense of the use of the language around the creation of these pieces, which is really a kind of propaganda arm of government to mobilize against civil society organizations, those people who might have differences with the government, which were part of the sort of practice of democracy in government in a free society, that we have a mobilization of government, and I suppose it happens all the time, but perhaps not so explicitly or in such a deeply partisan way as this particular issue.
Dan Adleman 18:49
Yeah, well, we see the operation, a very complex operation of identification and this identification at play, and, for example, pipeline politics, you know, whether it's Harper's equation of anti pipeline activism as foreign influence, and there's the pejorative use of influence and foreign. Well, I mean, what are these petroleum companies then? Or whether it's Trudeau's complex forms of signaling that he's a friend of Indigenous peoples, while railroading pipelines through. These seem to be, you know, very deliberate strategies for getting certain demographics on board while alienating others that you can afford to alienate politically speaking.
Am Johal 19:35
Now Dan, you and I collaborated on a project for many years here in Vancouver when you were here, the Vancouver Institute for Social Research, Critical Theory free school that we kind of ran off the side of our desks out of the org gallery and wonderful little community that formed around it. I'm wondering if you're still thinking about doing something in Toronto similar?
Dan Adleman 19:55
Yeah, I have been because that was obviously a huge part of my life for what was, I don’t know, five years so that we did that. And I'm constantly sitting in on classes at the University of Toronto. It's kind of a treasure trove of what ends up being free education for me. I usually just walk into classes and sit down, eavesdrop on them all the time.
Am Johal 20:17
You're a weird dude.
Dan Adleman 20:18
Very much so. And our former facilitator, our host, Jonathan Middleton, for example, he's out in Toronto too. And I've chatted with him about the possibility of starting up a free school project. In the meantime, I've been hosting public education events at Innis College, where it's been really important to us that we hold these para academic as you'd like to call them, education events, free to the public, free of charge, and of the sort that would appeal to this appetite for cutting edge theory. So we just, about a week ago, hosted the political philosopher, Jody Dean at Innis college, and that was on December 5, I think it was a Thursday or a Friday night, snowy nights in Toronto. 200 people showed up. It was incredible. That really emboldened me, both at Innis college and maybe in some kind of free school project to continue. And not just along the lines of what we did in Vancouver, but maybe, you know, continuing to develop that model of para academic free school and continue to think through what that might look like. I think every different iteration of a free school is going to be a little bit different from the others. And that's how it should be.
Am Johal 21:30
Great. Anything else you'd like to add, Dan?
Dan Adleman 21:33
Oh, that's plenty. You know, if I've said anything incriminating, I hope you'll edit it out of the interview.
Am Johal 21:39
Yeah, you're a professor of rhetoric, so you can say whatever you like.
Dan Adleman 21:42
Much appreciated.
Am Johal 21:44
Thank you for joining us on Below the Radar.
Dan Adleman 21:46
Thanks for having me.
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Fiorella Pinillos 21:50
Thanks again to Dan Adleman for joining us and Below the Radar. Stay in the loop with Below the Radar by following us on Twitter and Facebook. Be sure to subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. As always, thank you to the team that puts this podcast together including myself Fiorella Pinillos. Jackie Obunga, Paige Smith, and Kathy Feng. David Steele is the composer of our theme music and thank you for listening. Tune in next time for a brand new episode of Below the Radar.
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