Absurdity as a Rhetorical Resource or a Defense of Fast, Easy Judgements for Terrible Ideas
By: Dan Faltesek
Tags: Philosophy, Judgement, Fake News, Rhetoric

When I was an undergraduate I took a course called “Coaching and Officiating Basketball.” It was really rigorous. The professor, a former D3 national championship coach, taught everything from the meta-analysis of league-level rules through player drills. This was his chance to tell future gym teachers everything he knew. Flex-based offenses were the main theoretical approach, especially symmetrical and mirror patterns that would repeat forever, as some of the leagues these future teachers would coach in had no shot-clocks. A new coach at a small-town high-school could then install this sequence, functionally a single play, then focus on player development, defense, and situational basketball.

At the end of the day, almost every concept the basketball prof taught, was a process model. Good basketball was repeatable basketball. If an offensive process took ten seconds, you could run it three times during a normal college shot-clock. The team would wait for the process to run through, waiting for an obvious error, which is when the team would strike. Error recognition was the heart of the paradigm.

A lovely absurd abstract by Steve Johnson

Forced Errors in Practical Argument

In day to day argument, wining is hard. Policy debaters are often chided for their high rate of delivery. What is important to know is that this often abates in college, the debaters slow down. The critique of debater speed misses the empirics: from Karl Rove through Donald Trump, the strategy of the American right has been to rapidly shift positions, to flood-the-zone. Although these folks don’t speak quickly, they run the high school debate spread offense, many independent arguments that each are dangerous. The use of wider scale argumentative strategies, controlled word-economy, and just good old line-by-line are key skills.

There are three ways to win an argument: your evidence is better, their argument doesn’t respond, they didn’t answer. Just like high school JV debate, a lot of public life is about “dropped” arguments, the points that get missed to poor decision making or just simply not being good enough at arguing. One reason why so many debates on the lower levels are decided on drops is their ease for the judge. Deciding the actual application or non-application of a point is hard, reading a bunch of evidence is easier, but tends to miss the point.

When one is arguing with someone practically, submitting a stack of evidence really isn’t on the agenda and your judges are not taking copious notes. You need arguments that get to the stasis point easily. One of the most handy practical arguments is reduction to the absurd, if your argument is right then this other thing must be true, and it obviously isn’t true.

This does two important things:

A. it saves energy — if we all accept the absurd/obvious

B. it calls for rejection of a claim, not necessarily the embrace of one, meaning it has relatively low stakes

But shouldn’t we want to do things the hard way?

First, to be really clear, people are tired, it is sort of our main thing. Without getting into Herb Simon on attention, you actually can’t use your top-end strategies for every point, there neither time nor energy. This is also why debaters pick-and-choose, winning a handful of dispositive arguments is much more efficient.

Second, it is not stylish to dispute every point. It also may be aesthetically horrid to dispute every point at the highest level. Let’s say we are debating space policy and one of the affirmative points is that “the sun is a mass of incandescent gas.” Clearly, this is wrong, the sun is made of plasma. Does it matter for deciding how to finance orbital debris clearing? No, absolutely not. Other than for comedic value, you really don’t need to spend any time on this point. Disputing it would waste your time, energy, and credibility. I can hear it now: how does it hurt me to beat them on some point where I am right? Because you are supposed to as an arguer, have a sense of the larger strategic coordinates of the debate and the possible stasis (or decision) points ahead.

Third, you may want to avoid debating the ground level of a point because it should be obvious or beyond debate.

Yes, you want easy sorting arguments, they are very useful. Rejecting the absurd is an efficient, beautiful way to manage practical arguments. Does it do all the work of making public discourse function, no. What it does is filter out noise in the channel to the point where we can have our better debates about things that really matter. This is where folks get speed in policy debate exactly backwards — folks get spread out all the time in public arguments, speed dynamics allow you to develop strategies to compensate for that. And you see at the highest levels of college debate folks slow down again, the arms race ends when folks reach the level where they can easily and quickly dismiss or even invert terrible arguments.

Nope, that won’t hold a charge…

We need the obvious and the absurd

Initially, absurdity functions as a noise filter. When the gorilla suit dancer comes in folks ignore the obvious attention seeking (for the record in high school I danced back at the gorilla). Ignoring obvious distractors makes good sense and in a world with the risk of intermedia agenda setting (where another media channel might follow you), you don’t want to be he point where noise was loaded into the channel. The moment were it was clear that Trump lost the 2016 election was on Wednesday, when the family attempted to claim victory (as part of the stop-clock strategy) and the story was not covered as a form of quotation journalism. Once the intermedia leader-follower relationship breaks down, the great power of Trumpism will fade. Reactionaries depend on keeping you in a consistent state of activation, they need to keep you reacting to whatever they are doing. This is not to say that you can simply ignore them, there are times when you will need to react, but that the key to strategy here is picking your spot. And how do you effectively pick your spot — by simply saying something is absurd.

Argumentative aesthetics are real and useful. Among my favorite niche topics in rhetoric is the aesthetics of mathematics — the idea that mathematicians perceptions of the beautiful influence how the formal science of mathematics develops. Having aesthetic preferences does not invalidate math, aesthetics, like affect, are inevitable (all complete methodologies have an ontology, epistemology, axiology, and a rhetoric — aesthetics live in the rhetoric but all of these are co-productive). Some arguments are beautiful, others down right ugly. Although I am a hack for Boltanksi and Thevenot’s justifications model of argument, let’s stick to Toulimin for now. For the most part the most pleasing arguments have a reasonable number of assumptions, with concise/qualified claims, appropriate backing, and good delivery.

Ned Stabeler really got the argumentative aesthetics right, in his critique of the asinine request to only hold the certification of the votes of people of color. The moralizing tone of the second minute is fun, but it is built on the foundation of the first minute in rock solid argumentative aesthetics. Stabeler uses the technique advocated in policy debate where the other side’s claim is quickly summarized, tagged with “your argument” or “you say” followed by a concise counter claim and the relevant backing points. His word economy is excellent, the points are delivered with excellent diction and voicing. Most of all his use of backing. By accepting the measures used by the other side, then arguing that those measures support his claims, it would then flip the burden for the first side to deliver evidence that would defeat their own backing logic. The cycle repeats several times, allowing Stabeler to build ethos as he quickly dispatches their arguments before he turns to his own offensive argument. If you accept the logic against certification, then jurisdictions with higher variance should be rejected, of course the white suburb of Livonia had worse stats than Detroit, so you should reject that, but you won’t because either 2+2=5 OR the canvas board members are racists. Notice that Stabeler did not focus on the first half of the argument, the trap is waiting for the other side where they would be forced to argue for the absurd conclusion.

The power of reduction to the absurd is the ability to backstop arguments clearly and clear noise from the system. At stake is more than just a useful approach, but a shift in warranting in general.

Toulmin’s model supposes that an argument has a claim that is supported by data. There really are only a few kinds of warrants, a few of particular consequence: generalization, sign, causality, principal, analogy, and authority. Reduction to the absurd plays well with all of these. A generalization that can’t be generalized or a sign that didn’t open up your eyes. What matters is that there is enough agreement about backing that clear judgements about the absurd and the obvious can be reached.

At this point some folks might push back on this essay, arguing that the absurd and the obvious are figments of my imagination, and that what I am really talking about is episteme — the condition where the effects of power are functionally invisible. For the most part I am bored by this argument. First and foremost, in any discourse there will be aesthetics and a sense of agreed upon backing. There is no outside. Strategically reversing power relations (meaning that we see what power is and we use it to make a better world) is what communication research is all about.

Needling folks with constant skepticism is the same strategy employed against reduction to the absurd and all sorts of other argumentative strategies, even that lovely speculative strategy, big if true. This doesn’t lead to a world without power, it leads to a world where the horizon of warrants becomes the personal opinion and authority. Political psychologists have fairly well established at this point that there is a sizable block of folks who have a strong preference for authoritarianism. If the domain of argument from principle falls away the power of authority would grow unchecked. Authority warrants are anti-fragile: they gain power during disorder.

Why does any of this matter?

Reduction to the absurd, and rejection of the absurd are efficient and effective strategies for arriving at truth, or at least moving away from untruth. The absence of absurdity complicates or even shuts down various dialectical and rhetorical processes.

The last fifty plus lawsuits filed by the larger Trump organization are absurd. In my broader reading of these filings every one includes multiple absurd claims, from the merely lazy (that no one haw son the election without Florida +Ohio or that a poll watcher going to the wrong address is proof of fraud) to the brazen (the secret affidavit of “Spyder”). To this point the great force for our protection from the ridiculous has been the court system. In absurd discourses the ostensibly political Supreme Court would be waiting in the wings to overturn the outcome of the election. Deep inside the story of a stolen election is the idea that truth is fundamentally partisan, that if you just got the right judge, the facts wouldn’t matter. It is a troubling turn for public discourse that professional arbiters of truth, dialectical judges, are the key. If the public sphere is functioning at any reasonable level, reduction to the absurd should not be reserved fro the dialectical level of the system, but available rhetorically.

My final argument is that in a world where the absurd is not available as a category it may best be restored by earnest absurdity. The answer that there was no meaningful fraud in Michigan, Florida, and Pennsylvania is one thing. Defensive arguments are nice, but they depend on offense. What would be a strong offensive play here? Argue that Ohio and Florida were stolen from Biden. It isn’t too hard to dream up a few reasonable stats for this perspective or even just sit on the argument that the polls were right and provide the dispositive evidence that something was up. The point of an argument like this isn’t destroy the public sphere but to put down a marker, to force the other side to make an argument. I would bet, if you layout a 20 second case for a stolen Ohio through extreme voter suppression, the idea of the absurd will come flooding back. The absurd counter does two things: A. it is a test — is the person actually making new meanings or are they in psychotic in the Lacanian sense (meaning they are locked into a single version of reality where no new meanings are possible) in which case persuasion is impossible, B. if they pass the test, the absurd claim will get them to engage your claim, likely asserting that it is absurd — then the game is on…