Talk:Landmark Worldwide/Archives/2009/Feb

Controversial?

Landmark has a history of controversy in the press and the view of outsiders. Why is this not reflected in the lede? Micahmedia (talk) 02:25, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Let's see. Sarah Palin attended a church where some of the ministers believe in the existence of witches. She has been prayed over to protect her from witches. Is that mentioned in her biography on Wikipedia? Nope, but it was in the news. It just isn't encyclopaedic. O.K. Werner Erhard was once a member of a notorious cult called "The Church of $cientology." Some members of that church have been convicted of various crimes committed in furtherance of the "religion." Does that make Erhard guilty of such crimes? Of course not. Despite the criminal charges and lawsuits against the church, some customers, particularly those who engage in the practice of "Dianetics" have received benefits recognized by mental health practitioners. It isn't all bad. That's just guilt by association, and that's unencyclopaedic as well. Wowest (talk) 04:55, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Let's see: "controversy" must mean "something having something to do with the Church of Scientology". But wait a moment: the esteemed Church of Scientology does not have a monopoly on controversy, does it? Did not the idea of "controversy" exist before L. Ron Hubbard dreamed up his own little controversy? Might not the theory and practice of controversy even outlast Scientology? Can we discuss Landmark Education's controversial sides without reducing them all to one (admittedly large) crime of association? -- Pedant17 (talk) 04:10, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Why is relationship between Landmark's business model and pyramid schemes not discussed in this article? Micahmedia (talk) 02:40, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

What relationship? Rlendog (talk) 03:10, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Let's see. In a Pyramid scheme, people who bring in new people get a percentage of what they pay for products. They also get a percentage of what people those people recruit spend. In Landmark education, people tell their friends about the product and nobody gets any percentage of what new customers pay. So, the relationship is that there isn't any relationship. Wowest (talk) 04:55, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Let's see: we can point out that one aspect of one characteristic of pyramid schemes differs from one aspect of one characteristic of Landmark Education's practices. So we conclude that no relationship exists? Or do we compare more fruitful points of comparison: recruitment patterns, hierarchical organization, the whipping up of enthusiasm, the blanket coverage of the gossip-sphere, the parallel competing channels ...? -- Pedant17 (talk) 04:10, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

In a pyramid scheme, there is an exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, often without any product or service being delivered. I am not aware that there is any exchange of money for enrolling people in Landmark. If there is, please provide reliable sources. If not, then there is no relationship between Landmwark's business model and a pyramid scheme. Rlendog (talk) 15:22, 26 January 2009 (UTC).

Well done. Another point of (questionable) detail demolished, and therefore "there is no relationship between Landmwark [Education]'s business model and a pyramid scheme" -- except for all the other possible points of comparison and contrast. -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia may not regard Sarah Palin as controversial on the basis of the views and actions of some people she once met. But that doesn't mean that Wikipedia has to shy away from anything controversial in the public career of Sarah Palin. The same rules apply to Landmark Education: where controversy exists, Wikipedia needs to note that it exists.-- Pedant17 (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

O.K. Let's look at your "stuff."

• recruitment patterns Relies exclusively on word of mouth advertising? So? Lots of organizations do.
• hierarchical organization In a pyramid scheme, people you recruit are under you in the hierarchy. With Landmark, they're all on the same level.
• the whipping up of enthusiasm Well, again, so what?
• the blanket coverage of the gossip-sphere What on earth does that mean?
• the parallel competing channels I don't have a clue what THAT means. What are you talking about?

Wowest (talk) 11:33, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

The suggestion that Landmark Education relies exclusively on word-of-mouth advertising, though not entirely true, does indeed provide a point of comparison with pyramid schemes -- regardless of what other organizations may do. Thus we have a point for discussion in the article under the rubric of the relationship between Landmark Education's business model and pyramid schemes, as requested. We could add that to the rest of the potential discussion on recruitment within the analysis of overall recruitment patterns. -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

The suggestion that recruitment has some connection with "hierarchical organization" intrigues me -- I look forward to contributions on this subject to the discussion within the article of the context of the relationship between Landmark Education's business model and pyramid schemes. -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

We appear to have agreement that the whipping up of enthusiasm provides yet another point of comparison in examining the relationship between Landmark Education's business model and pyramid schemes. -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Evidently the concept of "the blanket coverage of the gossip-sphere" will require some explanation and/or exemplification in adding to the article's treament of the relationship between Landmark Education's business model and pyramid schemes.I made up that phrase (ah, the power of language!) -- but Mr Google appears familiar with such usage. Think of the back-channels out of the purview of the official lexicographers and social analysts ... -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

The saturation of the market by parallel competing channels (downlines and intersecting circles of aquaintance) appears as a theoretical feature of both Landmark Education evangelization and geometric MLM/pyramid-scheme growth. Once again, an interesting and rich theme for our article -- especially in the examination of why the theory falters. -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

The "joke" of the Landmark Forum is you get 'nothing' for your $400. Yet, many if not most graduates enthusiastically recommend the experience to their friends. Even so, the Criticism section of the article deserves a hearing, but the current content intermixes these indiscriminately and could use some editing. The criticisms are several:

- Sales techniques
- Cult accusations
- Effectiveness challenges

Genuinelycurious (talk) 10:00, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

I don't believe that's accurate. Getting nothing was like the punchline of the old est training, sometimes. It depended on the trainer. The Landmark Forum calls itself an inquiry. That doesn't necessarily mean it's supposed to lead to "something." Wowest (talk) 19:35, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Bingo, this is what I'm talking about. And users Wowest and Pedant17, PLEASE keep it civil. I'm starting a discussion here, as this is the DISCUSSION page, where the merits of constructing the article this way or that can be be discussed in a calm and collected manner. Wowest, your Sarah Palin comparison is off base.

There is controversy surrounding both EST and Landmark, as you'll see from the history of this article. The article still does not reflect that controversy, but only because there has been much in-fighting among the editors going back well over a year. I'd like to restart the discussion in a methodical way. The criticism section needs some tlc. It's a mess.

Sales techniques is a good place to start, since this is where I keep finding comparisons to a pyramid scheme or multilevel marketing. At one point this article contained a description of the Forum's format and business model. Why is that gone? Micahmedia (talk) 21:39, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

O.K. Let's say you go to an Herballife meeting. There may be some deception involved, as an ad promising a job in a new nutritional supplement store. Been there. You find yourself one of the fat people in the room. The thin people are all in the business. They all seem to be happy. They explain how wide your personal pyramid can be how many levels down you get paid for at what percent. You see that there is a certain level where you would put put people you recruit to make the most money. You can also get supplements at a discount and use them for you own personal use so you can become happy thin people. So either you sign up or you don't. If you sign up, the person who brought you gets a percentage of the sales you generate forever and ever. They label this as ... I think it's residual income, or something of the sort. When you have enough people under you, you can retire rich. O.K. That's the deal. Maybe you can become richer, healthier and/or more attractive if you devote yourself to the business. Some people try, some don't.

O.K. Your friend does the Landmark Forum. (S)he is encouraged to bring guests to the final evening session. You come. You see a bunch of chairs set up in a certain way with a sound system and, maybe, 200 people in the room. People talk about some personal insights they just gained from the three daylong sessions. Most of the people in the room seem happy, with a few exceptions, if you're looking for such a thing. The Forum leader writes something on the board and asks people to read it back. Someone stands up and reads it back. It sounds right to you, and the Forum leader says that it's incorrect. The person standing up argues with him. Eventually some of the newcomers catch on that he isn't reading it back correctly. Finally, the Forum leader asks the reader to come forward and touch each word as he reads it. He does so, and sees that he is reading it back incorrectly at the same time as everyone else in the room. The Forum leader explains that this is an example of "concept-determined experience," which is one of the "distinctions" of the Forum. That makes sense to you. Then, the guests go off to separate rooms where someone called a "guest seminar leader," and who is often, also, a "seminar leader," talks about the Forum. You are asked whether you would like to take the Forum several times during the evening. You don't notice it, but if you are already registered your name is underlined on your nametag, and nobody else talks to you. This can be lonely unless someone comes up and talks to you as a human being instead of a statistic. If someone asks you whether you'd like to take the Forum and you say yes, they move on to sign you up. If you say no, they go away, but other people will ask you the same question. But, they won't take "yes, but" for an answer. If you say "yes, but I'm a Libra," then you will wind up talking about being a Libra.

The problem is that anyone who does anything in the organization wants to become like someone else. This happens in hospitals too. The LVN's all want to be RN's. The RN's want to be doctors. The doctors all want to become the chief of staff. Here, it's about statistics. Some people want to become seminar leaders. To do this, they must first be guest seminar leaders. To this, they must go through a training program and attempt to lead guest seminars. When leading such seminars, a certain percentage of potential customers will enroll with you. To become a guest seminar leader, there will be a certain percentage which is the cutoff point for qualification. Most people don't get there and drop out. To become a seminar leader, you must first be a guest seminar leader, have a certain percentage effectiveness, go through another training program and maintain your various statistics.

At the level of enrollment statistics, the biggest variable seems to be who is leading the guest seminar. Some people, with relatively high levels of accomplishment in real world activities, will consistently have high statistics. With some, sixty percent or more of guests who show up will enroll. Thinking about specific people, a very poised, healthy and very attractive married woman who also had a reputation as a swinger was in that category. Another guy who was a millionaire on paper and who ran three miles this morning with a five pound weight in each had was also in that category. Another guy who used to be an accountant, but now had a real estate investing business, making millions of dollars a year AND who works four hours a day and goes to the gym every day is also in that category. I knew this guy before and after he started that business. Before, he was a nerdy but strangely enthusiastic accountant. Afterward, well, he was awesome. You would expect him to have been a major or a colonel in the military and to be a current business executive from his new personality. This tells us something about the potential customers. They want to be healthier, they want to be more attractive and they want to make more money. We had the same kinds of potential customers a couple of paragraphs up and the Herballife meeting. I think everyone is that way. Some people in each organization have become more successful in those areas of life, and when that's obvious, potential customers are more likely to become customers.

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On the negative side of Forum marketing, some of the potential guest seminar leaders try things that don't work, which people do in life anyway. Some are naturally pushy people who try to dominate or force people to enroll, and two things happen. First, their statistics are abysmal, and second, the turned-off potential customers blame the organization for the "high pressure."

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One consequence of that is that some people who have gotten some personal benefit from the Forum go out of their way NOT to bring guests to guest events, but to sign them up in some other way, just to avoid the desperate wannabes in the guest room.

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I don't see that as being any different from any other human activity. If you meet someone who is warm, nourishing, healthy, friendly, generous, prestigious and financially successful, you want to hang out with them and be more like them. Sometimes people who strike you as having all of those qualities are total monsters who do horrible things on the side and enroll people into groups like the Ku Klux Klan, but I'm straying afield, here, so I'll stop. 76.95.83.118 (talk) 08:50, 29 January 2009 (UTC) Oops. I wasn't signed in! :Wowest (talk) 09:02, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Long speech above. Is Landmark a pyramid scheme? Elle magazine said it was, so we do have a source. But customers don't get money out; it doesn't work like a Ponzi scheme. Compare Amway, which is more like a pyramid scheme. So it's probably not a pyramid scheme. The "cult" issue is tougher. There are people who say it's a cult. It has some aspects of one. est met the classic definition at cult#Sociological_definitions_of_religion, including a "charismatic leader", Werner Erhard. Landmark is the corporate successor to "est", but doesn't have a charismatic leader; it's more corporate. It meets the other four criteria for a cult, though. --John Nagle (talk) 15:58, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

You are kidding right? First what four criteria are you talking about I read link you cited "Under this definition, a cult refers to a group with a high degree of tension with the surrounding society combined with novel religious beliefs" how does this apply and there aren't even four critera here? Second, I went back and read the Elle Magazine article. Even if I considered Elle a reliable source for something other than fashion and style the what the article actually says is "...On the other hand, the sort of overzealous efforts Landmark's volunteers tend to display on the corporation's behalf are precisely what disturbs skeptics, many of whom feel that the Forum is a mass-marketing pyramid scheme..." That is pure hearsay not a single verifiable fact in the quote, and there is no evidence to even suggest that Landmark is a pyramid scheme.--Mvemkr (talk) 17:03, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

No one here is qualified to determine whether (or not) LE satisfies someone's definition of a cult, or pyramid scheme, etc. But we may, where appropriate (following Wikipedia's rules), record the fact that such claims appear in reliable sources. Mvemkr, I submit you are misusing the term hearsay; it is applicable in a legal setting and would have limited purchase here (if any at all). Nomoskedasticity (talk) 17:12, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

I completely agree. I have been following this discussion for quite a while and so far no one has put forth a reliable source for the claims that Landmark is either a pyramid scheme or a cult. Do skeptics feel it is one or both, yes. Are the feelings of skeptics notable and worth inclusion? I think that may be the question that needs to be resolved.--Mvemkr (talk) 17:31, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Given that skeptics in this instance represent a major segment of humanity, we should indeed grant their views (properly sourced) a mention. -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

You're getting silly now. The vast majority of humanity have never heard of a "pyramid scheme" or a "cult," as the term is used in America. There will be a few who have heard of "Multi Level Marketing" because Amway is active in how many countries? Way fewer than that have heard of either est' or The Landmark Forum. It isn't in the news, but people are dying all over the place from hunger, disease, aggressive Muslims, aggressive Israelis, aggressive Tamils, aggressive Chinese communists, drugs, street crime and all that. If I walk out onto the street, I could score some crack or some Vicodin pretty easily, if I were so inclined. Nobody out there (on my street) has heard of any of this stuff. They think that money is something that you even have or don't have, and that if you don't have it, you get it by stealing it or having someone get steal it for you. Wowest (talk) 00:36, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

I stand by my claim: "a major segment of humanity" (not as as in a different interpretation "the vast majority of humanity") will react with skepticism to the sales-pitch of Landmark Education and its ilk when exposed to it. Whether they know of pyramid schemes or cults and whether or not they associate those concepts with Landmark Education, native skepticism gives people a chance to resist the blandishments proffered. -- Some skeptics even go so far as to publicly question Landmark Education's nature and actions. We can mention and reference such skeptics. -- Pedant17 (talk) 23:40, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

And what do you base that on that "skeptics in this instance represent a major segment of humanity"?--Mvemkr (talk) 00:26, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Primarily, I base the contention that "skeptics in this instance represent a major segment of humanity" on the failure of Landmark Education to show significant growth in numbers of participants -- despite its keen recruiters. -- Pedant17 (talk) 11:12, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

What is your source for these statements? And, even if they are true, why would you presume that they support a contention that "skeptics in this instance represent a major segment of humanity"? There are many other possible causes for those statements to be true (if they are). For example, Landmark Eductation's "keen recruiters" may not be effective recruiters. Or, many people are just not interested in the services Landmark provides, even if they are not skeptical. Or, they can't afford that service. Rlendog (talk) 16:30, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

The single statement on the "failure of Landmark Education to show significant growth in numbers of participants" rests on Landmark Education's published statistics showing that growth stagnated in the early 21st-century. Figures, several of which the owner of the http://www.landmarkeducation.com site website subsequently rendered unavailable at some time between 4 March 2007 and7 April 2007 per http://www.landmarkeducation.com/robots.txt suggest the following growth-pattern in approximate numbers of people attending the Landmark Forum since 1991:

• 2001: 600,000 (see Landmark Education's web-site as of 2002-11-28)
• 2002: 600,000 (see Landmark Education's web-site as of 2003-07-29)
• 2003: 600,000 (see Landmark Education's web-site as of 2004-06-10)
• 2004: 758,000 (from Landmark Education's web-site as of 2006-02-07, as once available via http://web.archive.org)

If anyone has better figures, please provide them.

I agree that causes other than public skepticism may have influenced the figures. But any speculation on "[in]effective recruiters" would have to account for Landmark Education growth in other periods. Speculation as to affordability needs to take into account the targeting by recruiters and recruiters' willingness to bankroll their recruits. Would we regard the world economy from 2001 to 2004 as a factor? -- Given that varying degrees of skepticism exist, those not interested in Landmark Education "services" can also count as skeptics: they show skepticism as to the relevance of Landmark Education's offerings. If we believe Landmark Education's figures, generic public skepticism seems a likely candidate for lack of significant growth over the period 2001 to 2004. On the other hand, commentators seeing Landmark Education as (say) a pyramid scheme might find evidence of market saturation. As yet another alternative, one could postulate (very simplistically) that Landmark Education has provided inaccurate statistics (and subsequently tried to cover up inconsistencies). But in the light of Landmark Education's well-known interest in statistics, that seems unlikely. -- Pedant17 (talk) 23:40, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Landmark's growth may well have slowed. But, assuming your statistics are correct, that does not show that "skeptics in this instance represent a major segment of humanity". There are many other potential and even more plausible causes for growth to stall. Market saturation, as you state, is one, but for some strange reason you try to link that to a "pyramid scheme", which makes no sense to me. Most products and services eventually reach market saturation, but that does not make them pyramid schemes. You also for some reason state that specualation on ineffective recruiters would "have to account for Landmark Education growth in other periods." But stong growth in other periods would contradict your thesis of skeptics representing a "major segment of humanity", so I am not sure what that argument is about. As to your statement that "If we believe Landmark Education's figures, generic public skepticism seems a likely candidate for lack of significant growth over the period 2001 to 2004", why? As I stated above, there are many other possible candidates. You even added a couple yourself (market saturation, inaccurate statistics). And there are others, such as general inertia people tend to exhibit in making a change or a purchase. So, again, how does slowing growth for three years prove "general public skepticism", which itself seems a weaker statement than the original "skeptics in this instance represent a major segment of humanity", and even if we twist the word "skepticism" to incluse "lack of enough interest to be willing to invest significant time and money"? And even your statistics do somehow prove your thesis, how is that not OR? Rlendog (talk) 05:50, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

1. the contention that "Landmark's growth may well have slowed" assumes growth. The statistics provided do not indicate any growth for a period, but rather suggest stagnation. -- 2. The labeling of the statistics as "your statistics" might mislead. The figures as sourced come from Landmark Education. -- 3. Other reasons apart from skeptical opposition do exist for growth to stall, but some of those reasons interact with the presence of skeptics, rather than provide separate and exclusive explanations. For example, even pyramid schemes which achieve a measure of temporary success may, by their nature, reach a point of saturation when they run out of non-skeptics to recruit. I mention pyramid schemes as a current topic in the discussions on this talk-page. -- 4. I agree that some products and services (and memes) eventually saturate their potential markets. And pyramid schemes provide a good example of this that may or may not prove instructive and relevant. -- 5. The mention of "Landmark Education growth [not "strong" growth -- just growth] in other periods" does not contradict the idea that skeptics represent "a major segment of humanity". It merely exemplifies what we may already suspect: some people class as less skeptical than others. Such people could form a pool of potential non-recruits. -- 6. The suggestion that the "general inertia people tend to exhibit in making a change or a purchase" may explain lack of significant growth runs up against problems similar to those encountered by the idea that Landmark Education recruiters do not do an effective job. Namely, it does not explain in and of itself why Landmark Education participation figures sometimes stagnate and sometimes do not. In that respect, postulating a core of skepticism may prove more satisfactory. -- 7. Strictures on original research relate primarily to the content of articles. I don't propose inserting speculation about lack of growth into the Landmark Education article -- rather I have tried to explain here on the talk-page that the published views of the skeptical have significance and should go into our article as reliable sources. Some of the counter-arguments on majority/minority opinions, which tend to claim that lots of people "do" Landmark Education and that some surveys of deeply involved sub-sets of the populace found high customer satisfaction rates, appear even more unreliably and unjustifiably OR-ish. -- Pedant17 (talk) 12:06, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

We might agree that Elle magazine acts as some sort of authority on "fashion and style". When the Elle societal-barometer, the Elle' reporter and the Elle editors carefully take the trouble to record that "many" skeptics "feel that the Forum is a mass-marketing pyramid scheme" we can sit up and take notice of this generalized opinion -- and record it as an attributed opinion. We cannot dismiss a widespread view as mere 'pure hearsay". -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

We can juxtapose that with the dictionary definition of pyramid scheme. "Elle magazine reports that many skeptics "feel that the Forum is a mass-marketing pyramid scheme," but the Forum does not meet the legal definition of "pyramid scheme," and doesn't engage in any mass-marketing.

Main Entry: pyramid scheme Function: noun Date: 1975 - a usually illegal operation in which participants pay to join and profit mainly from payments made by subsequent participants Wowest (talk) 02:26, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Sure -- we can juxtapose quotable sources with dictionary definitions -- so long as quoting dictionaries doesn't constitute original research. We could castigate Elle for not using a particular "legal" definition, as opposed to some other more readily-accepted definition. We'd have to examine any unsupported contention that "the Forum" (which I presume means "Landmark Education") does not engage in marketing to the masses. -- Pedant17 (talk) 11:12, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

What does marketing to the masses have to do with pyramid schemes? Many business market to the masses. That does not make them pyramid schemes. Rlendog (talk) 16:26, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

You night have to ask Elle magazine why specifically they detected a feeling that equated the Landmark Forum to "a mass-marketing pyramid scheme". I merely responded to the unproven assertion that "the Forum" (Landmark Education) "doesn't engage in any mass-marketing" with a suggestion that we would need to examine such a claim before accepting it uncritically, OK? -- Even if one doubts that Landmark Education engages in mass-marketing, the fact remains that Elle magazine recorded this perception. Given that Elle has a mass-circulation audience interested in trends and fads, the recording of the perception contributes to our discussion of controversies involving or implicating Landmark Education. Pedant17 (talk) 23:40, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

The narrative of a Landmark Forum Guest evening simply shows that you get exploitative types and lots of gullible people -- and even occasionally some ambitious people. Especially around Landmark Education. We may want to mention the obvious in our article. But we cannot make unsupported sweeping statements about human nature based on this interpretation. -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Question: how does an apparently first-hand account of a Landmark Forum Guest Evening, replete with gossipy and titillating "shares" about "reputation as a swinger" and "a millionaire on paper" contribute to our mandate of discussing "improvements to the Landmark Education article"? -- Pedant17 (talk) 11:12, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm just comparing that with the previous paragraph, with a first hand account of a pyramid type (MLM) of meeting. They just aren't the same. That was someone else allegation. And those don't qualify as "shares." They're just descriptions and analysis.

There is such a thing as honesty, whether or not there are reliable sources for it. For example, someone wrote a bunch of articles about Landmark, early on, for several magazines. They talked about the Los Angeles Landmark office being located in the old est office. That's clever, but completely untrue. The old est office has been for sale forever, and Landmark was never located there. Werner Erhard's second wife has a financial interest in the old est office, so it will probably not be sold during her lifetime. LOL! That's something you could be appropriately cynical about. Wowest (talk) 00:50, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Strangely, the account of a Landmark Education event contained much more emotional rhetoric and personalized detail than the account of the MLM meeting -- so "just comparing" doesn't quite cut the mustard. -- The contention that the two gatherings "just aren't the same" seems self-evident. Nobody expects identical behavior -- the issue here relates to "relationship" -- similarities and contrasts and possible genetic borrowings. -- The slippage into the first-person in the narrative apparently goes beyond "descriptions and analysis". Hence my confusion with the concept of the "share". -- Thank you for the "story" of the Los Angeles Landmark Education office -- I hadn't heard that one. If we can track down the articles (and any articles refuting them) we could add this anecdote to a section sorely needed and unaccountably absent in the article -- the section on the actual and fabled interrelationships between Erhard Seminars Training and Landmark Education. -- In the meantime I repeat my question: how does an apparently first-hand account of a Landmark Forum Guest Evening, replete with gossipy and titillating "shares" about "reputation as a swinger" and "a millionaire on paper" contribute to our mandate of discussing "improvements to the Landmark Education article"? -- Pedant17 (talk) 23:40, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

We could put the "Criticism" section out of its misery by eliminating it as a section and distributing all its content to the appropriate place(s) in the article. That way we keep topics together under a clearer overall structure and avoid some of the edit-wars over where material "should" go. -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

I think it's fine the way it is. It could probably use some expansion, though. Some people think/thought est was a cult. People objected to the gutter language used on occasion. People thought it was too fascistic. People thought it was too much like Scientology. O.K. They came up with the Forum. Gutter language eliminated. Less structure. Conceptual framework swiped from Martin Heidegger instead of Scientology. That's all worth mentioning. So, perhaps, is the fact that Heidegger admired Adolf Hitler. That would make a titillating tidbit, if you could find a R/S for it.

Wowest (talk) 00:50, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Unless we get good reasons for keeping the "Criticism" sub-section in existence, I propose redistributing its contents. -- I doubt that Heidegger's (readily sourceable) tendencies towards Hitler and Nazism have any direct relevance to an article about Landmark Education. But we could certainly improve our article by examining in detail Landmark Education's debt to Heidegger -- without pre-judging the issue for readers by hiding such details in any "Criticism" section. -- Pedant17 (talk) 23:40, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

More "Controversial"

This is getting too long to edit. .

O.K. First of all, "cult." It's a religious term. Various religious groups label each other "cults." It means that someone else worships God the wrong way. So from that viewpoint, it isn't an appropriate label. Wikipedia isn't a religion, so the term just isn't appropriate. I'm in a peculiar situation, personally, because I'm definitely part of the "anti-cult" movement. I'm also someone who did the old est training and took the Forum a long time ago. I haven't had anything to do with Landmark in over fifteen years now. Someone else brought up the term LGAT -- "Large Group Awareness Training." It seems to fit that definition.

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Now, "pyramid scheme." It isn't that, either. Someone told me that the old "Mind Dynamics" course was a pyramid scheme, or MLM (Multi Level Marketing) program. It was also an LGAT, but it people made money promoting it, all the way down the pyramid. Mind Dynamics was put out of business by a lawsuit, but was reincarnated as "Lifespring." I do not know whether it was still an MLM, though, but I suspect that it was not. I don't know whether they're still around, either.

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Why would we wish to report that a "reliable source" repeats something that just isn't true? It is true that there are people who wonder what the deal is. The way you're labeling them seems incorrect, though. They really aren't skeptics. They're more like cynics. "Must be a pyramid scheme?" That's just someone's wholly uninformed opinion, and we all know the common wisdom about opinions, but we're supposedly an encyclopedia, not a gossip factory.

. Wowest (talk) 19:23, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

The suggestion that the word "cult" functions only as a religious term appears overly simplistic, especially in Wikipedia. But we can certainly analyze Landmark Education in terms of its religious characteristics -- as well as discussing biz-cults, psycho-cults, mind cults and personal-development cults as exemplars of Landmark Education. -- If someone can produce a Wikipedia-worthy reliable source that clearly states that Landmark Education does not fit the definition of a pyramid scheme, then we can concentrate of quoting the characteristics of Landmark Education that suggest that it may fall into the multi-level marketing category. -- 'Why would we wish to report that a "reliable source" repeats something that just isn't true?' -- Because lots of people harbor false beliefs. And because we cannot always identify false beliefs. And because we sometimes disagree as to what constitutes a false belief. Look at an encyclopedia -- even a top-quality encyclopedia -- from a couple of centuries ago. Many of its "facts" have ended up as delusions or errors -- thanks to the work of skeptics. Wikipedia has to report opinions -- we just use the Wikipedia neutrality policies to present the opinions (and counter-opinions) as such. -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

That makes no sense. Landmark Education is a US registered LLC, people pay money to do their courses which are accredited through www.iacet.org, the employees get paid, the business pays overhead and then reinvests or distributes the profits to its employees. This is all cited in the first part of the article which has now been stable and undisputed for at least a year. Pedant17 or someone else please explain to me how a "cult" offers CEU's (Continuing Education Units) and or produce a Wikipedia-worthy reliable source to the contrary, meaning that Landmark Education is in fact a cult, MLM or Pyramid Scheme WP:Proveit. Without those sources this whole discussion is moot. Furthermore analyzing Landmark Education in terms of its religious characteristics...is certainly WP:OR --Mvemkr (talk) 10:35, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

The claim that my paragraph "makes no sense" cannot stand without addressing the relevance of each of (at least) the following concepts (mentioned therein) to Landmark Education: cult, religious, biz-cult, psycho-cult, mind cult, personal development cult, pyramid scheme, multi-level marketing, false beliefs, encyclopedia, fact, delusion, error, skeptic, opinion, counter-opinion. -- The registration of Landmark Education LLC as a commercial entity in a specific legal jurisdiction does not require or preclude it operating or functioning as a "business" and/or as a cult and/or as an entity with religious views and impacts and/or as a biz-cult and/or as a psycho-cult and/or as a mind cult and/or as a personal development cult and/or as a pyramid scheme and/or as a multi-level marketeer. Just as various people can regard the Peoples Temple as both a church and a cult, or just as Scientology gets classified as a religion and/or a business and/or a cult. -- The contention that (for example) www.iacet.org appears in the article does not stand up to scrutiny. -- A glance at the article history log and the archived discussions contradicts the idea that the first part of the article has remained undisputed for the last 12 months. -- I assert that any cult-like organization may offer CEUs and that any provider or CEUs may potentially have cultic traits. If one could demonstrate that the likes of IACET thoroughly vet all providers for cult-hood according to an acceptable definition of "cult", then that would provide a piece of evidence about labeling -- one more evaluation to add to the others. -- The demand to prove that "Landmark Education is in fact a cult" has no relevance to proposals to cover controversy more thoroughly in the Landmark Education article. To cover controversies more thoroughly (which we must do to achieve a neutral point-of-view), we need reliable sources that note differing views of Landmark Education and its operations -- whether or not such views have provable merit. -- I quite agree that "analyzing Landmark Education in terms of its religious characteristics" per se would violate WP:OR. Once again we need reliable sources that have initiated such analysis. See the archive discussions on this very field. -- Pedant17 (talk) 11:12, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

I think what is accurate is something like while Landmark Education is in fact an accredited educational company some people have theorized that it is cultish or cultlike. Which to me is similar to the fact that the earth is round and some people in history thought it was flat. In my opinion where we disagree in our approach is that I am starting from the earth is round, prove it is flat or at least be clear that saying it is flat is not accurate. It seems to me that you are saying prove that it is not flat which is backwards for a fact based encyclopedia. Also, please notice in the earth article the weight placed on the "earth is flat theory" that is a great guideline for how any cult/mlm or other fringe theories should be included. Said another way I think it is backward to prove a positve by disproving a false negative. Instead we should concentrate our efforts on substantiating the facts about the company and its producsts and framing any theories consistent with WP:CSECTION and WP:UNDUE.

Furthermore I disagree that the IACET does not stand up to scrutiny. They are an independent national accreditation organization. There is no reason for an accreditation organization to vet providers for cult-hood. Their standards are outlined here IACET Standards and certainly no cult or cult like organization could pass all of these standards. Which included a site visit.

There is certainly plenty of evidence that Landmark Education is in fact an accredited educational company, with a unique methodology and offers courses to the public and that these courses have value for Landmark's customers. Which customers have used Landmark Education's programs to produce results in their business and personal lives and certainly for the most part have a strong brand loyalty. And there are plenty of relaible sources for that statement Independent Research I realize that link is to Landmark's website, and certainly has their corporate spin, but it was easier than providing links to the originals, some of which are not available on line. I definitely think the material in these studies warrants inclusion in the article and bears out the statement above. I also know from your past posts that you feel some of these studies are corporate and not "independent". I disagree except in the case of the DYG study.--Mvemkr (talk) 23:09, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

1. One can accurately state that Landmark Education has achieved accreditation as an organization offering certain courses. That does not preclude other facts and views: for example that Landmark Education has registration as a limited-liability company, or that Landmark Education encorages certain attitudes and behaviors. Some people see the company-status as paramount -- tax authorities, for instance. Many more people would associate Landmark Education with its ideas and methods. Other people see it primarily as a Large Group Awareness Training -- indeed, the authorities on LGATs often mention it as a archetypal representative of the breed. And other people again associate Landmark Education with one or more of a variety of different cults. Still other people see echoes of a pyramid scheme or other multi-level marketing scam in Landmark Education's activities. All these people can justify their viewpoint. We have no consensus on classifying any of them as wrong or even as an insignificant minority just because of some preference for one of the other labels. The labels do not mutually exclude each other. -- 2. The comparison with the flatness/roundness of the earth does not help matters. The "hard" science of geophysics offers a widely-accepted explanation of the shape of the Earth. Landmark Education, as a body of people, must rely on the "soft" sciences of sociology and psychology and educational theory and religion to account for its various aspects in the human world of multiple opinions and judgments. Once again, no one view can trump those of others. -- 3. The conclusion that we should concentrate on the facts and products relating to Landmark Education as a commercial company narrows the scope of our article unreasonably. That would preclude us pointing out the gulfs between Landmark Education's educational practices and those of mainstream educational theory, for example. (Why do so few educational theorists endorse Landmark Education on the www.landmarkeducation.com website, for example?) What can business scholars tell us about Landmark Education's ideas on ontology that a philosopher could not counter or expand? (Why do so few (if any) ontologists or metaphysicians endorse Landmark Education on the www.landmarkeducation.com website, for example?) -- I somehow doubt that the earnest fans and enthused acolytes of Landmark Education promote it BECAUSE of its business credentials -- maybe their sense of social togetherness and/or psychological excitement has more to do with their behavior. We can make more of these factors in our article -- but not by stressing the coincidental side-issue that Landmark Eduaction happens to function externally in its relations with certain authorities as a "company". -- 4. Nobody has suggested that IACET does not stand up to scrutiny. (The contention that mention of www.iacet.org appears in the article does not stand up to scrutiny.) If no reason exists for an accreditation organization to vet for culthood (and nobody here has suggested that they should -- only surmised that they do not) then we have no basis for assuming that a cult cannot gain accrediation. -- We can test the accreditation process results. IACET has accredited Hubbard College of Administration International -- see http://www.hubbardcollege.org/about/accreditlicense/index.html which displays the IACET logo and reveals that "Hubbard College of Administration has been reviewed and approved as an Authorized Provider of continuing education and training programs by the International Association for Continuing Education and Training. Authorized Provider #201733." And yet Hubbard College makes no secret of its association with Scientology, which, whatever one's personal opinions on the matter, certain people regard as a cult. -- Accordingly, we might treat with some degree of skepticism the claim that "certainly no cult or cult like organization could pass all of these [IACET] standards". -- 5. It certaily appears that Landmark Education can offers CEUs per IACET in 7 ( http://www.landmarkeducation.com/menu.jsp?mid=735&top=22 ) of its many courses (28 distinct offerings at last count-- see http://www.landmarkeducation.com/register_landmark_forum_landmark_grad_programs.jsp ). Does that make it an "educational company"? Not necessarily. Does it respond to advances in educational methods and practices? Does it incorporate new research in psychology and ontology on an ongoing basis? Does it participate in exchange of ideas and faculty with providers in its fields of personal growth and effectiveness? Or does it rather resemble a religious gathering dedicated solely to the preservation and dissemination of its own distinctive take on the world and on living? -- 6. Reference to the Landmark Education website for evidence of third-party opinions does not cut it. If one cannot find originals (notably for the Harvard study), one might well wonder why (answer: Harvard has forbidden the general dissemination of the study in question). -- We can and should reference truly independent studies. We must attach little weight to corporate propaganda. -- Pedant17 (talk) 12:06, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Format and business model

"At one point this article contained a description of the Forum's format and business model. Why is that gone? Micahmedia (talk) " .

O.K. MM -- let's get back to your project. I don't know why a "business model" is an appropriate subtopic here. Can you say something more?

.

As far as "format" goes, there is a syllabus online, now, I just noticed, at:

http://www.landmarkeducation.com/landmark_forum_course_syllabus.jsp .

We might want to summarize that and link to it. Wowest (talk) 19:42, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Speaking only for myself (and utterly shunning any suggestion of a "project"), I would note that some people do apparently see Landmark Education as a business. In that respect it might well posess or utilize a business model. Such a model might even differ in intersting and instructive ways from the business models of (say) Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery or even Royal Dutch Shell. So let's add a section into the article -- even a stub-section -- called "Business Model". If it doesn't get fleshed out, perhaps we'll get encouragement to revisit the opinion that sees Landmark Education as a "business". -- As for the suggestion of summarizing the Landmark Forum syllabus, would that necessarily tell readers much at all about the "format"? We might gain more insights by building on material from a more objective perspective such as that given in Drew Kopp's study of the details and functioning of the Landmark Forum presentation-"space". -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Who is Drew Kopp? Any relationship to John Galt? Wowest (talk) 08:30, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps Drew could/would answer your question, but it has no relevance to our discussion. Suffice it to say not that he "is" anything, but that he has made and published a study of the format and environment of the Landmark Forum. -- Pedant17 (talk) 11:12, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

O.K. so where and what is this study? Wowest (talk) 23:30, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Here you have it: "Invisible Bodies, the Disinherited, and the Production of Space in the Landmark Forum" -- Pedant17 (talk) 23:40, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Drew Kopp ENGL 597R Dr. Roxanne Mountford 14 May, 2003

Invisible Bodies, the Disinherited, and the Production of Space in the Landmark Forum

There is always a world already interpreted, already organized in its basic

relations, into which experience steps as something new, upsetting what has led

our expectations and undergoing reorganization itself in the upheaval.

–Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics

When I see an empty spot, I park my car there; when someone points the way for me, I walk in that direction; when someone opens the door for me, I enter the room; when someone ushers me, I seat myself; when someone stands in front of a room and speaks, I sit quietly and listen. In his statement above, Gadamer first asks us to consider that we are always already inscribed into the basic relations of our everyday world. An important implication that follows asks us to examine what happens when the material space we inhabit simultaneously calls forth bodily responses (Gadamer’s “experience”) that defy our always already cultural expectations of those material spaces. Even if I fail to acknowledge something conceptually, say for instance, ultraviolet sunlight, it still affects me physically. How might this apply in material spaces that creative minds design with intentional rhetorical aims not available to immediate conceptual scrutiny, or that in fact take advantage of the always already interpreted world evoked by the material space to effect persuasion? I’m not simply talking about advertisements, but social events that require significant time commitments from attendees to occupy arranged material space. I’m taking for granted that social events of any kind call for some manipulation of

� Kopp 2

material space to enhance the effectiveness of the rhetor’s purposes in holding an event. It is because of this that these arranged spaces call for rhetorical analysis. In her article, “On Gender and Rhetorical Space,” Roxanne Mountford calls the geography of these social, communicative events, rhetorical space, which, “like all landscapes, may include both the cultural and material arrangement, whether intended or fortuitous, of space” (42). The cultural, what Gadamer refers to as the always already interpreted world, gives us the code for the range of appropriate responses to a given arrangement of material space, and as Mountford also contends, it is “the nexus from which creative minds manipulate material space” (42). Landmark Education (LE), an educational company, has developed educational courses as communicative events that take full advantage of this principle. I will study one course in particular, the Landmark Forum (LF), because of its creative and intentional manipulation of space to effect its rhetorical aim of producing social spaces new to its participants.

Writing about material space as rhetorical necessitates sharp distinctions between different ways of conceiving of space. For clarity’s sake, I will use the term space in three senses in relation to the study of the rhetorical employment of space in the Landmark Forum. One is the material, purely physical space that requires arrangement or manipulation; the second is the conceptual, culturally determined, always already interpreted way we read material spaces; and the third is social space, which emerges at those sites where the material and conceptual spaces converge, calling forth resistance and transformation.

The production of social space occurs there where “experience steps as something new, upsetting what has led our expectations and undergoing reorganization itself in the upheaval” (Gadamer 15), allowing someone to speak and act in ways not previously available. The term “production” here refers only to the generation of the social space that emerges in the experience

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of a subject when material space disrupts that subject’s cultural expectations triggered by that material space. I will speak of the work and effort needed to move and arrange physical objects that together compose a space as arrangement or manipulation, rather than production. Throughout this paper I will continue to develop and distinguish this concept of the production of space, as Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja employ the term, but first, a few words must be devoted to the rhetorical event under scrutiny and how I came to know about it.

What is it? Or, how is it an is?

The Landmark Forum has added new dimensions of leadership and contribution to my work. As an academic, I have always drawn great satisfaction from teaching. In completing this program, I was able to find a national and even global expression for my deepest concerns. Today, I face the challenge of leading a team of scientists, engineers, and public policy experts in finding ways to be responsible stewards of our environment. The Landmark Forum has equipped me to contribute on a large scale, and to think and act effectively, even in complex and difficult situations. --Dennis Mileti. Chair, Sociology Department at the University of Colorado. Boulder, Colorado.

Including numerous, culturally diverse and high-profile testimonials such as Dennis Mileti’s, Landmark Education’s website also provides many other pages of information designed to create a favorable public image of the company. First and foremost are descriptions of the course and the results promised; the Landmark Forum is a weekend long seminar that promises breakthroughs in the quality of everyday life for its participants. Many facts argue for the effectiveness of the course, which include a study performed by noted social scientist Daniel Yankolovich. It touts that “More than 90% of participants report practical and enduring value for

� Kopp 4

their life – well worth the time and cost,” though the date of the survey is inconspicuously absent.1 Another interesting fact is that “610,000 people have taken The Landmark Forum since Landmark Education was founded in 1991.” This averages out to approximately 50,800 new participants a year. The website also explains “how” their methodology works: “The Landmark method is more like coaching than teaching; more like conversation than lecture. While conventional education methods focus on content (adding facts, rules, or skills to our knowledge), the Landmark method deals with context – the framework(s) in which content can exist.” Despite the informative nature of the website and the favorable image it portrays, it does not account for the numbers of new participants a year quoted above. Rather, Landmark relies primarily on graduates of the LF and other courses to generate new business. The course leads graduates to produce a social space that compels them to “share the LF” with relatives and friends, with the aim of having them attend a guest event and ultimately attend the LF. Part of my intention is to illustrate the role of material space in producing this space and to examine how it remains hidden from the conceptual scope of participants in the course.

This hidden-ness actually leads enthusiastic graduates to spend enormous amounts of time selling the course to friends and relatives through professing the results they achieved, i.e., the newly produced social spaces, in the course. They may have asked their boss for a raise and got it, or perhaps they have taken part in a project that has helped fulfill their desires to contribute to their communities, or perhaps they expressed their love for family and friends in ways that have deepened their relationships to new levels of intimacy, sometimes breaking past years of silence to do so. Graduates desire the same new social space for their friends and relatives. Yet, when the friend or relative asks a graduate to explain how this “context shift” led to saying and doing things outside the graduate’s character, the answer the graduate gives often

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continues to bewilder the investigator: “It’s a conversation. During the course, you sit in a hotel ballroom for three days and an evening with a hundred other people and you listen and talk, listen and talk, until you see whole new ways to deal with your life.” The focus then turns to what was said during these conversations. Then the graduate struggles to explain the “technology” of the course, i.e., the ideas and the language (the “distinctions”) the facilitators use. Landmark terms their use of language its “technology.” I use the term in quotations to mean the same thing, but I will use the term without quotations to mean the combination of how the material space of the course disposes participants to “get” the unfamiliar “technology” of the discourse. Technology, then, is the intentional working together of the material and conceptual spaces to produce social space. The Course Leader (CL), the most visible facilitator in a Landmark course actually warns graduates against trying to relate the ideas of the course to potential guests. Rather, she will coach graduates to simply share what “opened up for them” (i.e., the newly produced social spaces they now have access to). The trust a potential guest has in the graduate is all that is needed for her to attend a guest event in order to see for herself what it’s all about. Only rarely does merely talking about the LF, or reading information on the website, lead to someone registering to attend the course.

However, it is interesting that a graduate will likely not consider what role the material space of the course has in the production of social space, as it works to defy one’s cultural expectations. Part of what makes this interesting is the minute degree to which the material aspects of the course, space and time, receive exposition on the company’s website:

The Landmark Forum is held in a workshop setting, such as a hotel conference

room or one of our meeting facilities in major metropolitan areas. […] The

[course] takes place over three consecutive days and an evening session (Friday,

� Kopp 6

Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday evening.) Each full day begins at 9:00 a.m. and usually ends between 10:00 p.m. and midnight. Breaks are approximately every 23 hours, with a 90-minute dinner break. The [Tuesday] evening session generally runs from 7:00 p.m. to 10:15 p.m.

Compare this to the language used to describe the results LE promises: The Landmark Forum is specifically designed to bring about positive and permanent shifts in the quality of your life. These shifts are the direct cause for a new and unique kind of freedom and power. The freedom to be absolutely at ease no matter where you are, who you’re with, or what the circumstance – the power to be in action effectively in those areas that are important to you.

Whether from a graduate or the website, potential guests are led to believe it is the information delivered in the course that does the work, which is due in part to the fact that the results— produced social spaces—are the most visible and attractive feature for participants. Most who attend the LF keep their eye on getting those results and consequently do not pay much attention to the material space they must occupy along the way.

Regardless, I contend that it is the “where” and “when” of the arranged material space that plays the essential though largely undisclosed rhetorical role in effecting the results LE promises. Therefore, I will illustrate how “these shifts” result from the accumulation of innumerable points of interaction where participants’ cultural expectations crash against the physical space of the course, incurring resistance that the spoken discourse of the course then challenges and silences. The experience of resistance in participants is not only expected, they are crucial in allowing the facilitator to apply the “technology” of the course to effect “transformation,” i.e., the production of social space. Without the rhetorical effectiveness of the

� Kopp 7

arranged material space, LE’s “technology” would occur as a perplexing set of ideas at most, indecipherable claptrap at worst.

Methodology: My Horizon of Experience or Erfahrung

It is important to address how I acquired my knowledge of Landmark Education’s practices and methods of delivering their programs. I first attended the Landmark Forum in February of 1992, experiencing first hand several transformations, including positive impacts in my life, from personal relationships to professional development. The principal “shift” for me was that I got myself into the film business, which was no small feat. However, I doubt that the extensive changes I made in my life would have been possible had I not continued participating in the organization. In fact, for a total of seven years (1992-1999), I participated in the company’s various “educational” programs, including LE’s Curriculum for Living, which I completed within a year after attending the Landmark Forum, and experienced the continuous production of social spaces I desired to occupy. This “Curriculum” has four parts, the first of which is of course the Landmark Forum. The Advanced Course, which takes place over four days and an evening, follows this along with a seminar series called the Landmark Forum in Action, which has ten evening sessions spread out over twelve weeks. Lastly, after having completed these three courses, as with many others who follow this track, I took the Self- Expression and Leadership Program, which combines three Saturday workdays and ten evening- sessions, all spread out over a three-month period. Landmark promises those who complete the Curriculum “a life that you love or your money back,” which at the time would have been $1145.00 total.2 However, since I was successful in the several projects I used my participation to forward, I happily declared myself a happy customer.

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By the end of 1993, I also began to volunteer with the organization in various roles, from taking part in the actual legwork of producing LE’s courses, to registering people to attend them. LE’s volunteer program, called the “Assisting Program,” is an elaborate and powerful mechanism that not only trains people to deliver Landmark’s programs, but also promises further transformations in the quality of life for participants who volunteer their time and effort in such a manner. Landmark could not operate without its veritable army of highly skilled and committed volunteers. Landmark’s website presents the program in the following way:

Participants in The Landmark Assisting Program assist at all levels in producing and generating results in Landmark's programs. As in all Landmark programs, Landmark Education’s commitment to participants in this program is that each person receives more value from the program than the time, energy, and expense he or she puts into it. The Landmark Assisting Program is designed so the activities in which you participate become the medium for your training, development, and empowerment.

Consequently, the more “training, development and empowerment” I received, the more qualified I became to take on larger and more demanding roles within the organization, and doing so also continued to expand my professional development.

Through an intensive six-month volunteer training program, I became qualified to lead “Introductions to the LF” from 1993-1995. In addition to leading numerous small guest events intended to “enroll” guests into attending the Landmark Forum, I also volunteered to coach and train others to perform this same rhetorical activity for the company. This in turn prepared me to take on a two-year (1995-1997) long “Assisting Agreement” as a Course Supervisor, a volunteer position that requires one to manage every physical detail of a course’s arrangement, while in

� Kopp 9

direct partnership with the Course Leader, the principal speaker at a course. During these two years I supervised the material arrangement (Landmark terms this “production”) of eight Landmark Forums, and four Landmark Advanced Courses. During this same two-year period, I enlisted and trained dozens of LF graduates to volunteer in the Assisting Program, specifically to carry out the arrangement of the material space of the particular courses I supervised. Following this I participated sporadically with the company, ceasing to do so altogether in 1999, after I reviewed the LF in December of that year. Today, I remain in contact with only a few people who continue to participate in Landmark’s programs. In this study I will rely primarily on my experience as a Course Supervisor, which brought me into intimate and intensive contact with all aspects of Landmark’s technology, both the material, spatial practices, as well as their spoken discourses, as it was my aim to acquire them. I will use my life-experience, what Gadamer calls Erfahrung, to illustrate what rhetorical role the manipulation of the material space of the LF has in the production of social space. It is the horizon from which I will work to ultimately analyze the very values that have shaped this horizon itself.

Material and Conceptual Space and the Production of Social Space

How is it that graduates fail to acknowledge the role of the arrangement of space as the primary rhetorical force that effects the production of social space? To begin to answer this question, I need to distinguish what I mean by social space, already used in ways distinct from material and conceptual space. Edward Soja terms social space “thirdspace,” which he in turn has reshaped from Lefebvre’s “spaces of representation.” It is distinct from material and conceptual spaces, but yet encompasses them. Social space is a “thirding,” the lived space where the nearsightedness of subjectivity (the conceptual) and the farsightedness of objectivity (the material) no longer cancel each other out; yet neither is primary. This thirdspace perspective

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allows us to study that approximated space where subject and object meet as a newly inscribed space. This approximated space is no longer material space alone, nor is it the cultural, always already understood conception of material space, but a space including both and moving beyond them. In other words, when we encounter material space, we cannot help but see it through a culturally supplied conceptual lens, which determines our possible responses to what we see conceptually. Because any concept is an abstracted approximation taken from an originary experience of material space, conceptions ultimately cannot contain the entirety of material space. Thus, material space always defies our conceptions of it, despite any attempt to subordinate material space to our conceptions of it. However, while our minds may be deceived, our bodies are not; the material relationships we enter by virtue of our physical presence continuously demand approximated re-conceptualizations or revisions. Our bodies, when arranged together with material spaces intended to defy our always already conceptions of the material, prompt these re-conceptualizations. If our bodies must contend with continuous affronts, the multitudes of re-conceptualizations build to form a different sort of space unfamiliar to the inhabitant. This continuous re-conceptualization is the production of social space, or thirdspace. However, since the role of material space in effecting rhetorical intentions often remains hidden, our attention remains on the conceptual space, and thus, we attribute to it the lion’s share of the production of social space. When locked in seeing only conceptual residues of social space, valuing only words and the concepts they signify, we keep the “actual social and spatial practices, the immediate material world of experience and realization” at a distance, “unseen and untouched” (Soja, Thirdspace 63). Therefore, because Landmark Education arranges the material space of their courses in such a way that its role in persuasion remains hidden to the participants, they only attend to who speaks and the things said in the Landmark

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Forum. Thus, that is all that graduates of the LF have to explain how they achieved their breakthroughs: words and concepts. Their transformation remains a mystery to them, unexplainable, which fact presents its own rhetorical appeal to a perplexed friend or relative, ultimately resolvable only if she physically attends the Landmark Forum

How can we access and reveal what works to remain invisible in the production of social space? Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, helps delineate further the context for my analysis of Landmark Education’s rhetoric when he points toward an answer to the question, “…what exactly is the mode of existence of social relationships?”

[S]ocial relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have

a spatial existence; they project themselves into space, becoming inscribed there,

and in the process producing that space itself. Failing this, these relations would

remain in the realm of ‘pure’ abstraction – that is to say, in the realm of

representations and hence of ideology: the realm of verbalism, verbiage and

empty words. (129) Rather than the language and concepts Landmark proffers in its courses, I will explore the arrangement of material space, what Lefebvre and Soja call “spatial practices,” as the rhetorical element without which, “the genesis of a new realm of possibility,” the explicit aim of the LF, would not be possible. Thus, the key to this inquiry lies in the multitudinous sites where cultural expectations meet the material space the volunteers provide, forcing re-conceptualizations to occur in the manner that Landmark Education intends. Invisible Bodies, Arranged Space, and Cultural Expectations

Roxanne Mountford, in her exploration of the pulpit’s gendered location, writes that “material spaces can trigger the social imaginary because of the historical and cultural freight

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attached to the space” (49). Thus, creative minds can take advantage of the cultural freight attached to the material arrangement of space in order to cause us “to form relationships with each other and the space through its structures” (49). Landmark Education rhetorically uses commonplace cultural expectations about educational spaces to effect transformation in a participant without the participant having conceptual knowledge of the mechanism itself. For instance, the company utilizes an arrangement of the material spaces of their courses similar to communicative events common to everyday educational experience. They set chairs in theatre- style facing a podium with chalkboards, a music stand and a tall director’s chair, which arrangement intersects with educational, business, and even theatrical sets of expectations. Also working within these expectations, participants, volunteers and the facilitator all wear nametags as at most business or educational gatherings, obviating those uncomfortable moments of having to ask more than once for someone’s name. As an educational expectation, everything looks like a situation where a facilitator will merely impart knowledge to the participants, who in turn will consume this knowledge just as they have in all the educational situations of the past. Participants expect that the facilitator will provide understandable concepts and getting their money’s worth depends on getting something from the course. In actuality, the material space of the course as the Course Leader and her team of volunteers enforce it, defies this expectation at every turn.

And this leads me to address what lies beyond the edges of the above, rather simplified picture. In order to appreciate how the manipulation of space works to draw participants into relationships with a space, continually defying their cultural expectations, I must lay out who arranges this space and how. An elaborate power structure exists behind the scenes of a Landmark Forum, working at all times to remain unseen. It is composed of volunteers

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responsible for the arrangement of the material space, though not without accountability to paid employees, both on-site and off.3 The key volunteer in charge of a course’s arrangement is the Course Supervisor, which I discussed in the above section entitled methodology. Under her are one or two apprentices training for the same key position.4 Below this role in the chain of command is a Production Supervisor, who assembles the team of Production Assistants and manages them throughout the course to perform the tasks of physical arrangement. The Course Supervisor manages another crucial volunteer, Course Leader Support, who provides the Course Leader’s meals and various personal needs (including having clothes washed or dry cleaned) throughout the course. Under the direction of the Course Supervisor, who is accountable to the Course Leader, this power structure works to ensure the continuous management of the physical space of the course in such a way that the Course Leader and the participants engage in the conversations of the course without distraction. The participants cannot but mind the spoken discourse of the course at all times.

In revealing the power structure responsible for arranging the space of a Landmark Forum, I hope to make clear the extraordinary degree to which the company works to manipulate the material space, and that such care would not be taken unless it played a crucial rhetorical role. During every moment of the course, the volunteers provide a precise theatrical level of intentional management to how the space appears to participants. They show up long before participants do and stay long after participants have left in order to arrange the course room to a state of impeccable brilliance, far above and beyond the standards a normal hotel staff would consider acceptable, and also maintain it, if not improve it. No matter what may occur to disturb the physical space, the Course Supervisor leads the volunteers in their extraordinary efforts to remove, even well in advance, any possible distraction that might threaten to take participants

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out the conversation at hand. As a consequence, participants have no choice but to engage unknowingly in material relationships, while at the same time ostensibly working to understand the concepts of the course. Thus, as Lefebvre suggests, the process of inscribing produces its own space, but this happens below the “radar” of the conceptual understanding of the participants because most of the rhetoric occurs materially, by virtue of unseen bodies, the volunteers.

Having had some transformation of their own social space out of doing the LF, volunteers genuinely feel they are part of making the same experience possible for participants. Additionally, what compels them is their own quest to expand their ownership of the means of producing new social space by virtue of giving their time and effort, carrying out the various and menial duties of arrangement of the space, while simultaneously receiving training and development. In order to make the scope of my argument manageable, I must exclude many sites of material interactions. Please keep in mind that as I present the ones that follow, they are a sampling meant to evoke and illuminate moments of inscription that participants and even volunteers may be largely unaware of. Donning the White Nametag and the First Points of Contact

Wearing yellow nametags in clear plastic shields and dressed in casual, professional attire, volunteers greet participants with smiles at the hotel doors and at strategic points along the way to the ballroom. The volunteers’ appearance effects the initial steps of material identification and relationship. What is considered casual and professional dress is determined socially: volunteers at a LF in New York City will likely dress more business/professional than volunteers at a LF in Atlanta, Georgia, or in Tucson, Arizona. Yet, unless in Dharamsala, India, the Hopi Indian reservation in New Mexico, or perhaps Japan, no volunteer wears robes and

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sandals, headbands, shorts, or sneakers. Instead, volunteers in North America, Europe, and Australia wear dress slacks and shoes, dresses and blouses, and genuine smiles: all that would identify and inscribe Landmark as familiar, respectable and inviting. The cultural expectations triggered in newly arriving participants begin when they see that volunteers, dressed in such a manner, are ordinary people who have obviously “been through it.” They are recognizable in an everyday sense, except for the yellow nametag, or perhaps the ubiquitous smile, which sometimes give people an impression of forced awkwardness. The volunteers provide the very first points of contact, and if the participants can relate to them and respect them, the invitation succeeds. Thus, as the participant accepts this invitation to move along to the next material space, she identifies herself as belonging in the space provided; she re-conceptualizes it as familiar; she steps into the role of a customer being served.

Outside the doors to the course room, which open precisely at 8:30 a.m., two volunteers wait behind two six-foot skirted tables, ready to greet approaching participants. One table contains all the participant nametags in two separate groups, arranged neatly into rows, columns, and alphabetically according to last name. If the participant can locate her nametag in the first group, she simply dons it and walks in the doors. If the participant cannot locate her nametag, the volunteer will ask for her name and locate the nametag. If the tag is not among the first group on the table, the volunteer will direct that participant to the second table to complete unfinished details in her paperwork, usually a signature on a faxed information form. The volunteers restore order to the rows of nametags during free moments after participants step away. Indicative of each following material interaction, these moments provide opportunities for volunteers to guide participants, what Landmark calls “flow.” According to the degree these moments of material

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interaction are familiar, participants either adopt or resist adopting subject positions volunteers provide for them to inhabit. The nametag is key in establishing these initial positions.

Rather than yellow, like the volunteers’ nametags, participant nametags are on white paper slipped into clear plastic shields, with first names computer printed in large bold script, and the last name printed below the first in small letters. The social situation of wearing a nametag brings along a range of cultural freight, depending on a participant’s familiarity with the practice. Unless one is accustomed to attending conferences where nametags are commonplace, awkwardness in putting them on is likely in some degree. Embarrassment may result due to having to subject oneself to the rules of the material space: a participant cannot be in the room without wearing their nametag. If someone attempts to enter the room without having first gotten her nametag, the volunteer at the door will redirect her to the nametag table. The fact remains that putting it on requires a re-conceptualization: making an adjustment to a new situation one has paid to experience. Furthermore, once the course begins, the Course Leader will ask participants to wear their nametags visibly, so that when called upon, the CL can know their name. A participant does not have the luxury of not wearing the nametag. In fact, this is one of many agreements the CL will ask participants to keep in order to be in the course. I will explain the purpose of these agreements in a later section.

Thus, the volunteer’s friendliness and helpfulness at the nametag table helps each participant to re-conceptualize herself as belonging to the material space. When giving the nametag to a participant, the volunteer may offer a small rolled piece of masking tape to affix the tag, if the participant wishes to avoid sticking a pin in their shirt or blouse. Many participants follow the suggestion to affix the nametags on the upper left or right of their chest, while others, feeling awkward about having to wear a nametag, resist the advice and stick it on their waist,

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inside their jacket, or merely hold it. The Course Supervisor instructs volunteers to not bother participants if they avoid wearing it.

However, the resistance to this form of subjugation usually only occurs on Friday morning of a Landmark Forum. At around 6:00 p.m., when the Course Supervisor announces the beginning of the single, hour-and-half meal-break (all other breaks are thirty minutes), volunteers collect nametags from participants as they exit the course room. During the break, volunteers count the nametags to make sure all were collected, and then place them in neat alphabetical rows and columns while the entire room is cleaned and reset. The doors open precisely twenty minutes before the end of the meal-break, and as they open, the nametag-table comes out with two volunteers. Most all participants, by this time, without a second thought, take their nametag and place it on their chest as they enter the room for the next session. This event repeats each morning and evening of the course, and by Sunday, any awkwardness in donning the nametag has effectively vanished in most all participants, freeing them to attend to the spoken content of the course. Moving Toward the Destination

Driving to the course site,5 walking into the building, following volunteers’ directions, accepting a nametag and putting it on—all these actions and more are subsumed in the material event of registering to attend a Landmark Forum, and thus, participants perform these actions inside the requirements of the cultural expectations that ensue with attending an educational event in the role of a customer being served. A participant has already paid $375 and has arranged her schedule to attend all sessions of the LF as a destination that promises to produce new social spaces for her. I use the term “destination” in a manner similar to Carole Blair in her essay, “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s Materiality.” Blair

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distinguishes a destination as a material event that demands “physical labor of a would-be audience member. Some kind of motion is required to go to the sites, and most require mobility to negotiate their spatial dimensions” (46). I would add that movement toward a destination, even the most minute material interactions, entails transformation, because material interaction leads to experiences that inevitably defy one’s conceptual expectations, necessitating re- conceptualization, thereby producing social space distinct from the participants’ conceptual, always already understood relationships to space. The symbolic and conceptual significance of this movement remains negligible because the arrangement of space compels the participant to move and to engage in small, incremental material shifts that inscribe the participant into a space new to the participant. These incremental steps add up over three days and an evening, sometimes leading to surprising transformations where participants say and do things not considered within their everyday character. These shifts appear to occur suddenly, without detectable cause, and are hence “miracles” of one order or another.

Thus, a participant’s continuous movement toward this series of destinations is a key element of the production of space in the course. While it is accurate to say that volunteers enact the frontline of the creation of space, the course could not happen without the participants’ money and time. As a customer who is likely to continue this relationship with Landmark if the results of the course meet or exceed expectation, the participant will pay to attend (move in relation to) more destinations: a predictable outcome of being inscribed into the social space participation in the course produces. Entering the Room

Stepping into the course room,6 a participant will see chairs arranged theatre-style into four sections with three aisles separating the sections. The chairs not only complement the

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podium at the head of the room, on which rest two large chalkboards, but they also accentuate the wide-open space of the ballroom, well lighted with a combination of florescent lights and incandescent chandeliers. A volunteer at the door directs participants to one of three other volunteers. Stationed strategically at the openings of the three aisles, these volunteers usher participants to the front and centermost seats. Volunteers, wearing yellow nametags, delineate the space participants, wearing white nametags, can inhabit.

On the Friday morning of the course, participants often greet these requests with various forms of resistance. Though some follow the volunteers’ prompt, most ignore it, finding seats in one of the wings of chairs. By the third day of the course, however, as the continuous arrangement of space works to harness resistance only to silence it in the re-conceptualizations of the production of social space, this ratio reverses. Therefore, by Sunday morning participants not only happily affix their nametags, but they also eagerly fill in the front centermost seats well before the course begins at 9 a.m., a situation quite different from the previous Friday morning. Here, some participants may wander around the room before the course begins: they may get a drink of water at a water station, perhaps examine the podium, or even nosily survey the tables at the back of the room where one or two volunteers engage quietly in anticipatory paper work. Although the cultural expectation is to subjugate oneself to the demands of the arranged material space, participants at first resist fitting themselves in such a space, but as they do so, no matter how incremental the step, former resistances fade.

Below are two diagrams that illustrate the layout of the space with volunteer positions. The first shows the layout before the morning session of each day and before the beginning of the evening session after the meal break. Volunteers wait with nametag tables outside the open doors to the course room before 9 a.m., and before the end of the meal break. As discussed

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earlier, at each of these times, participants must claim their nametags, since the volunteers had collected them when the participants left to eat or left for the night. Also in this set-up, volunteers stand in key positions to usher participants to their seats.

The second diagram gives a course in progress. Volunteers sit behind tables or remain stationed at the door to the room, which remains closed unless someone exits or enters. Throughout the course, the Course Supervisor (indicated by the black square) sits in a tall director’s chair at the end of the main aisle facing the podium. She also has a music stand used to place a manual that lists all the procedures and timelines for the course. Both the Course Leader and the Course Supervisor each have a tall director’s chair and music stand. They each have the same style name tag, distinct from either the volunteer or participant nametags: either white lettering embossed on thick black-colored plastic, or black lettering on thick gray-colored plastic. With these material trappings affixed to both the Course Leader and the Course Supervisor, participants identify the latter as the person to speak to privately about particular issues that may arise during the course, including specific complaints having to do with the physical space of the room. The Course Leader also relies on the Course Supervisor to have conversations with participants who have difficulties with the course, when those participants are not comfortable with voicing their issues publicly.

� Kopp 21 Landmark Forum room layouts: before morning and after-dinner sessions, and during course:

Sound Speaker WaterStation Water Station Volunteer Chalkboard or Whiteboard Music Stand 6’ Skirted Table Sound Microphone Sound Speaker WaterStation Water Station Sound Speaker Sound Course Leader Course Supervisor Sound Speaker � Kopp 22

The Chairs

The arrangement, appearance and comfort level of the chairs play a crucial role in producing social space, primarily through limiting and confining participants to inhabit a particular material position and to engage in certain spatial practices. Whether in their own facility or in a rented hotel ballroom, Landmark expects all chairs to be in excellent condition, identical in color and form, cushioned and upholstered in cloth or vinyl, with chrome or black metal backing. An observant participant may notice that, upon entering the room and walking toward a seat, from most all angles, the chairs appear set in perfect, even rows; rows are set in even numbers of chairs unless the LF has an odd number of participants, then only one row will remain odd. On the Thursday night before a LF, from 6:00 p.m. to sometimes after midnight, volunteers prepare the room, spending hours to set the chairs in this uniform manner, no matter how well the hotel staff may have arranged the chairs prior. After removing any defective or old chairs, replacing them with newer, more pristine ones if available, volunteers use rulers to make exactly two-inch spaces between each chair, four-foot wing aisles between the side wings and middle sections and a five-foot center aisle. To make the rows and columns appear in perfect lines, volunteers true up the edges of the chairs using a taught string held from end to end of a row. In order to make re-sets quicker during the short thirty minute breaks every three hours of so, volunteers mark key chair positions, usually the corner chairs of each section, with small-cut pieces of tape that the outer back leg of the chair covers.

In a hundred-person LF, the center sections would likely have six chairs to a row, and with five columns, each wing would require twenty chairs: the first row set with two, then four, six, and eight for the outermost row. For the beginning of the course and of each session, volunteers will pull two to four chairs from the last row of the wing closest to the entrance. This

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forces participants to fill all available chairs, including the dreaded front and center seats. For participants who arrive closer to the beginning time or after, volunteers usher them to an odd empty seat, sometimes in the middle of a row mostly filled with participants, rather than put down a new chair. Participants in such cases must undergo the social discomfort of having others make room for them to pass in order to seat themselves, making the row fill up to its requisite even number. Once every chair is filled, volunteers place down, one at a time as each of the last participants arrive, the two to four chairs originally set aside. Several reasons explain this manipulation of the seating arrangement, one of which is that an empty chair in the middle of a section distracts the Course Leader, not to mention the participants sitting around the empty chair who are left to wonder who is not present and why.

Another reason for this seating arrangement is that once all participants are present, both the Course Supervisor and the Course Leader can acknowledge at a glance how many participants are present in the room at any given moment. In other words, LE treats participants as aspects of the material space as much as it does the chairs they sit in, handling them delicately but precisely toward very specific rhetorical ends. Both the Course Leader and the Course Supervisor work to learn each participant’s name, matching them to their face and even speech acts, and usually do so by the middle of the first day of the course, if not sooner. In fact, during each break, these two work together to recreate each and every participant that spoke during the last session, as well as those who appeared to be “unengaged.” Then, at the beginning of a session, with no empty seats anywhere in the chair arrangement, but with one or two chairs left in standing reserve, the Course Leader can lead the present conversation. The Course Supervisor inductively determines who exactly is missing—if there is someone missing, more often than not it was one of the “unengaged” participants—and then reports the fact to the Course Leader in due

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time. These communications between the Course Leader and Course Supervisor usually take place during “paired shares,” when the Course Leader directs participants to examine some aspect of their lives in light of the “distinction” currently under discussion.

This provides another important reason for the particular chair arrangement; it is a form of spatial control that elicits resistance in participants, but leads to re-conceptualizations of social space. The even numbered rows, with no odd and empty seat, insures that each participant has a partner for the multiple occasions for “paired sharing.” This frequent and crucial practice happens throughout the course, and the Course Leader guides and directs these shares with the assistance of the limited space of arranged chairs. In a LF with an odd number of participants, where an odd row is necessary, a volunteer will sit in during each paired share. Thus, it is quite possible for someone to avoid standing at a microphone for the whole course, never engaging in a dialogue with the course leader and becoming a speaking body for the group to listen to, but impossible to avoid directed dialogues with participants sitting next to one. The chair arrangement, replicated and reinforced numerous times throughout the course, forces participants to face each other during these paired shares and apply the “distinction” currently under discussion to specific areas of their lives. Some participants might wish to avoid the awkwardness of speaking with strangers about their personal life. The economic equation, getting one’s money’s worth, compels some degree of participation, but coupled with the material arrangement of two people having to say something to each other at specific and multiple times, familiarity with the situation emerges with each participant’s re- conceptualizations of the material space. Resistance fades as the values of participation— willingness to experiment with the concepts of the course and share generously from one’s life—

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become the demonstrated norm with both the direct and public conversations with the Course Leader and in the private paired shares.

In order to speak to each other, or perhaps to increase comfort, participants often work against the space provided for them through shifting, leaning and scooting their chairs. By the end of each two and a half to three hour session, the participants have disturbed the chairs’ perfect order, have left empty water glasses and trash on the floor, and have left behind pillows and clothing. Upon returning from the first thirty-minute break and every break thereafter, participants may notice the chairs arranged again in pristine symmetry, the water stations restocked with fresh glasses, iced-water, and dry table clothes. Any writing on a chalkboard the Course Leader added during the previous session will reappear rewritten with impeccable precision, in perfect rows, each block letter inscribed with the same thickness. If participants left items behind, such as a pillow, sweater, or water bottle, those items will appear neatly arranged where the participant left them, folded and straightened, or perhaps they will appear in an area designated for personal belongings. Again, the Course Supervisor directs volunteers to pull two to four chairs from the section closest to the doors, forcing participants to fill all chairs, leaving the last to the latest arrivals back from the break.

If they do take conceptual notice of these events of material manipulation, participants hardly have any means of reacting to these events except to acknowledge them. But this is rare; most participants actually do not have much concern for the alterations concerning the space, because of its monotonous order, but are much rather concerned with the subject matter of the course. Yet, someone produced these spatial alterations, and these alterations cause participants to engage in multiple and minute material relationships that force the most incremental re- conceptualizations, happening just beneath the surface of consciousness. The theme of these re

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conceptualizations, fitting the participant to meet each material requirement of the course, could be stated facetiously as “resistance is futile.” In other words, “try as you might to distract yourself from the aims of this course, you will fail: pay attention to the speaking body.” The volunteers continue to relentlessly replicate this arrangement throughout the course. They do so no matter what material resistance participants may effect: leaving trash on the floor, keeping pens left under the chairs to fill out forms, pulling up tape covering microphone wire, spilling water at the water station, any chaotic situation that may occur.7 Volunteers even appropriate spaces well beyond the course room. After each new session begins, with all the participants back in the room, the volunteers clean and restock all restrooms in the vicinity of the course room, empty all ashtrays and remove all cigarette butts from the smoking areas. Both the Course Leader and the hidden volunteers continuously assert and reassert power over the participants through these means of controlling the material space, all the more so because the volunteers manage participants as material bodies within the domain of the course room, and even beyond.

In asserting control over the means of arranging the material space, Landmark Education, in the form of its direct representatives, the Course Leader with her team of volunteers, seeks to lead people who occupy their space to become attuned to the intentions that continuously forge the physical space. Because the space is designed to bring out resistance only to silence it, the transformative rhetoric of LE works in a way impossible under different, i.e., everyday, material conditions. If the conditions cannot be re-shaped and managed by the company, the rhetoric becomes impaired. Harnessing Resistance

Only when we occupy a space that we hold to be familiar is it possible to engage in attending to a new and unfamiliar experience. Our initial encounter with material space triggers

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cultural expectations of space familiar to us; we find ways to understand what is laid out for us in familiar terms. However, we hardly notice that our choice to be in such a space has already inscribed us into the rhetorical aims those who manipulated the space intended. In the case of Landmark Education, this intention includes confronting participants with an experience that defies familiar explanations. When we encounter an unfamiliar experience, regardless of our initial familiarity with the material space, we always meet the unfamiliar with some form of resistance; we resist acts of domination that threaten subjugation through submission; not knowing or understanding something places us in a position of weakness and dependence. This happens through all the spatial practices Landmark engages participants in already discussed: finding the course room, donning the nametag, finding a seat, speaking at a microphone or with a participant sitting next to one. Each replication of a spatial practice forces a participant to re- conceptualize and incorporate something unfamiliar, “upsetting what has led our expectations and undergoing reorganization itself in the upheaval” (Gadamer 15). We only unwillingly surrender our everyday interpretation of material space, I assert, because our identities are tied up with our cultural expectations, the always already interpreted world. As Gadamer proposes, following his statement quoted above, “Only the support of familiar and common understanding makes possible the venture into the alien, the lifting up of something out of the alien, and thus the broadening and enrichment of our own experience of the world” (15). The ultimate implication is that with each incremental re-conceptualization that approximates a new relationship to the unfamiliar material space, a participant’s identity, composed from prior conceptualizations and invoked anew as always already cultural expectations, undergoes a transformation, which Lefebvre calls the production of social space. The material space of the Landmark Forum draws out the participants’ cultural expectations only to challenge them with

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the course’s unfamiliar material space coupled with its discourse. This ultimately compels participants to speak in the course’s terms, which themselves are handy and workable conceptual models that aid these re-conceptualizations.

The spoken rhetoric of the Landmark Forum uses the participants’ resistance to the material space of the course to dispose them to listen to the course’s discourse in a particular manner; the course harnesses resistance in participants to lead them to re-shape their identities into transformed social spaces. Composed of a number of concepts termed “distinctions,” the discourse of the Landmark Forum purposefully defies everyday ways of speaking and understanding. This is due in part to Landmark’s appropriation of many of their concepts from Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of language and Being, infamous for its unfamiliar and difficult- to-understand neologisms.8 Some of Landmark’s concepts include “the already always ways of being human,” “being-in-the-world,” “creating a clearing,” and tautological phrases such as “the possibility of possibility.” These and other constructions may sound slightly familiar to an everyday understanding, but they ultimately require a certain degree of “dwelling in the language” to “get the distinctions” as Landmark intends, which has nothing to do with conceptual understanding. Here lies the most confrontational aspect of the course that defies the central cultural expectation triggered by the educational and business setting. Understanding the “technology” of the course is completely superfluous, in Landmark’s view, and despite the fact that many participants actually get upset with the difficulty of the concepts, the Course Leader will simply coach them to “dwell in the conversation, don’t try to understand it.” Participants must contend with the confusion and discomfort that come along with not understanding a discourse they pay money to consume in ways the cultural freight triggered by the material space prescribes them to do.

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The Podium

Unmanaged and chaotic material space distracts participants from giving attention to the speaking bodies in the course, including most importantly the Course Leader, who nominates herself for the attention of the participants while inhabiting the space of the podium. Carole Blair explains the simplicity of this principle, pointing to the material demand for attention:

The most obvious demands rhetoric makes on the body are the very physical ones

required for one to pay attention. Rhetoric, regardless of its medium, is introduced

into a space that would be different in its absence. By being introduced, it

nominates itself for the attention of potential listeners, readers, or viewers […] To

attend to a speech is to sit or stand still, usually facing the speaker, and be quiet in

order to hear. (46) Several other elements aid this directing of attention of the participants toward the podium. At all times, sitting in the back of the room, a volunteer monitors the sound system, controlling the volume for each of the microphones, including the wireless microphone the Course Leader uses. Throughout the course, during breaks, the volunteers test the sound system, replacing batteries frequently in the Course Leader’s wireless microphone to insure no interruption or irregularity in the presentation of clear audible expression for those authorized to speak. The back of the room also has a few skirted tables with volunteers sitting behind them, quietly busy with paper work, or attentive to the current conversation. Table surfaces remain mostly clear and neat—mess, despite being unsightly, is interesting. Controlling what the participants give their attention to is crucial to the rhetorical aims of the course. Whenever anything occurs that defies the uniformity of the material space, it immediately attracts the attention of one or more participants, and they devote their attention to these distractions rather than to the person speaking.

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Both noise and motion are thus distractions to be avoided. Therefore, throughout the course, volunteers remain quiet and hidden, only moving when necessary to accomplish the various tasks of arrangement. Landmark trains volunteers in effective whispering techniques and in how to walk without drawing attention to oneself—quick, brisk movements are distracting for the Course Leader, as she has a panoptic view of the entire room. Additionally, two volunteers stand ready at the door to the room, opening and closing it silently for participants and volunteers as they approach and after they pass through the opening. During set-up, volunteers tape up the door clasp with masking tape to obviate any clicking sounds, and even oil the hinges of the door to silence any squeaks.

As a consequence, the design of the space leads participants to attend to the podium at all times, to either displayed writing of some sort or more importantly, whoever is speaking: the Course Leader, or a participant standing at a microphone in conversation with the Course Leader. The cultural expectation, again in the educational vein, affixes supreme importance to this physical site. The podium presents a marvel of simple symmetry. It is 8 feet deep, 24 feet long, and 18 inches high, with a step resting directly in the center-front that leads to the 5 foot wide aisle separating the center sections of chairs. Two large chalkboards, positioned equidistant from each other on either end of the podium, flank a tall director’s chair and music stand at the center of the podium. A chalk eraser and two pieces of chalk, white and yellow, rest on each chalkboard tray. Behind the chair at the back of the podium is a skirted table at the center of which is a tasteful floral arrangement. A few other items sit along the edge of the table, though participants will likely not take notice of them, such as a glass of water, a metal thermos, a small dish with lozenges, and a small notepad with a black pen and sharpened pencil. Parallel to the chalkboards, but not on the podium, are two large white boards that display information referred

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to throughout the course (see diagrams above). The white board to the right contains the purpose of the course (“The genesis of a new realm of possibility…”); the white board on the left displays Landmark’s “Curriculum for Living,” of which the LF is the first course of four. Beyond the white boards, in either corner of the room are sound speakers, though only if the facility does not have its own sound system. Each of the three aisles has a microphone stand.

The chalkboards on the left and right side of the podium are both filled from top to bottom with impeccable, thick white chalk writing. Besides working to set chairs before and after each session, volunteers also spend much time making board-work impeccable: rows block letters are always two inches wide with one inch spaces between, measured with strips of masking tape. Once written, volunteers spell the writing out loud and backwards from the source document, to insure accuracy in the transcription. This passes unheeded in the participants’ scope of the material space.

The writing on the board to the left, clearly visible for all participants, states unequivocally how the LF produces the results it promises, in essence, setting the tone for an arranged material space that defies triggered cultural expectations. I paraphrase it as follows:

You have a right to expect the results promised only if you are present in the course room during all sessions, including the Tuesday evening session. You can leave the room at any time during the course, but keep in mind that if you do, you will likely experience the result, but you will forfeit the right to expect the result. It may seem to you that leaving the room for just a few moments should not matter, but in our experience, we have found that it does. (Emphasis mine)

The writing on the other board to the right directs participants to speak to the Course Supervisor at the back of the room if they have special requirements such as a leg-chair, or perhaps

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medication schedules, or hearing or seeing difficulties that require special seating arrangements. Knowing of all possible irregularities at the beginning of the course allows the Course Supervisor, as the agent of the Course Leader, to remain in control of arranging the space. Again, the demands on attention, as stated explicitly on a chalkboard as one of the first spatial practices of the course, utilizes the cultural expectation that if one is get one’s money’s worth, participants must engage in physical, spatial practices that will continue to enforce the production of social space. However, the value of being present in the room occurs for most participants as catching everything said, not missing any of the presented information. But this is an appendix to the rhetorical role of the arrangement of the material space.

Invisible Bodies Revisited

As mentioned earlier, the Course Supervisor and her team of volunteers are responsible for the constant visibility of speaking persons throughout the course. The volunteers’ job is to continuously manipulate the space, while remaining invisible to the participants. Of course, this is ideal and there are always impediments to accomplishing this stream of tasks successfully. The Course Leader, with her unique, panoptic point of view of the entire space of the room, provides the standard for the Course Supervisor to manage the arrangement of space. Except for the podium and its accessories (including the sound speakers), everything in the room faces the podium. All eyes look to the front, both those of the participants and of the volunteers. If anything in the space is “off,” such as the temperature of the room, a failure in the sound system, a sleeping participant, a participant without a nametag, an empty chair, a depleted water station, the CL will see it. If the disturbance is intrusive, the CL will include it in the conversation at large, perhaps requesting the Course Supervisor to raise or lower the temperature in the room, or raise or lower the volume for the sound system. Thus, control is exerted over the means of

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arrangement, even when there is an apparent lack of control. Here is the frontline power relationship that provides the ground for the continuous manipulation of space. A competent Course Supervisor, however, will always be looking out for irregularities that could disturb the Course Leader’s presentation. She will identify and obviate them before they come into the material space of the room and distract participants from attending to authorized speakers, and from attending to any visual displays on and next to the podium.

The Course Leader

While the volunteers continuously produce the material of the course in conjunction with the participants, the Course Leader provides the standards that measure the effectiveness of the team’s efforts, but only to the degree that she herself experiences no distractions from applying all her attention and energy to the participants. During most Landmark Forums, the only paid employee present is the Course Leader, making that person accountable for the results of the course. At this point, I think it is important to give a sense of what a Course Leader is as a material presence for the participants. LE’s website describes this 53 member body concisely, while offering pictures and names of each of them: “The men and women who lead The Landmark Forum are extensively trained senior program directors of Landmark Education. The training program includes 3-7 years of full-time, rigorous, specialized study, preparation, and practice.”9 What does this rhetorical training produce? Perhaps Cicero’s ideal rhetor. William Bartley, who wrote a biography of Werner Erhard, the founder of est and the Forum, describes Erhard’s performance during an est training in 1972. As Erhard is the archetypal Course Leader, I offer this description (as it matches my experience of the many Course Leaders I have worked with) as applicable to each Course Leader’s presence, regardless of their gender or nationality:

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[Erhard] seemed to move among the two hundred and fifty people seated in that hotel ballroom with a repertoire of emotions, arguments, and responses that fitted no pattern yet was always on target. He exuded power yet had an unerring sensitivity to everyone in his vicinity. With every person who presented him-or herself to him, he dealt differently. […] He stood in front of us—this tall, slender, immaculately dressed blue-eyed man—in full view, for sixteen hours each day […] He had virtually total recall of anything said to him by a trainee [a participant in est] and refer [sic] back to things said earlier with minute accuracy. […] At midnight he seemed as clean and well pressed, and as fresh, as he had been at eight o’clock that morning. (xvi-xviii)

Thus, a Course Leader reflects in her well pressed presence the same unflagging uniformity the rest of the material space of the course presents to the participants. Except she is the primary object of attention, including speech acts of resistance. She directs the conversation and regulates the time each session begins and ends. She designates and enforces the rules for speaking (e.g., a participant must raise her hand, wait to be called on, and then proceed to a microphone). Participants step onto the podium only when the CL invites them up to demonstrate something pertinent to the course. Yet, as demonstrated above, it is the arranged material space that constantly grants the Course Leader this attention that spans 13-15 hours a day for three days (hours were much longer in the days of est—1972-1985).

At the beginning of the course, with an empty podium drawing attention to itself, the Course Leader’s dramatic entrance begins the action. After going over the writing on the chalk boards, this first session becomes all about questions participants have for the Course Leader, which range from LE’s business practices and how it all started, to the personal history of the

� Kopp 35

Course Leader herself. The Course Leader also directs the completion of a few logistic activities, which are carried out with the aid of the volunteers, who pass out forms to the different sections and collect them again once completed (another very important role of the volunteers). At this point, participants must make and keep a series of promises in order to demonstrate their choice to participate in the course. These include wearing nametags in visible locations; raising one’s hand, waiting to be called on, and going to a microphone to speak; attending each and every session while being on time; avoiding the consumption of alcohol or non-prescription drugs throughout the course; clapping after any participant has finished speaking at a microphone. These are required promises. However, if participants promise the recommended promises, the Course Leader promises extraordinary results, usually referred to as the “thousand-dollar Landmark Forum.” The key recommended promise is to participate fully, “as if your life depended on it,” carrying out whatever exercises the Course Leader gives the participants to perform. These exercises almost always have to due with some variation of “sharing what’s opening up in the LF” with someone in the participant’s life. Often during these activities, a participant may complain in frustration, asking when the actual course (i.e., the presentation of the words) will get started. The CL invariably answers, “It already has.” The arrangement of space persuades participants to form material relationships regardless of any conceptual knowledge or cultural expectation they may have of the incremental material movements they enact within the space of the course. Participants thus have no recourse but to inscribe themselves into a relationship with the Course Leader, the preeminent speaking body materially representing Landmark Education, who appears to be the single most dominating force working to subjugate participants into “trying on” the presented discourse. Again, her power is the product of the arrangement of the material space. Seeking to gain back on their

� Kopp 36

investment, participants stay in the course room throughout each and every session, and often do so despite engaging in fierce resistance to the material and language of the course. In fact, it is those that present the fiercest resistance to the Course Leader who, as visible speakers, provide the most dramatic spectacles of breakthroughs. The Course Leader’s interactions with these participants make available in the social space of the course the tracks for each of the other participants to follow in their own way.

The Produced Social Space

The impact of the multitudes of incremental moments of the manipulation of space, the harnessing of resistance only to effect its dissipation, delivers the result: attunement to the values LE professes. These values include: “being extraordinary,” “saying yes to life,” “being powerful and effective in the face of any circumstance,” “being courageously willing to take risks,” “openly expressing love and appreciation,” “generously giving up resentments and urges to dominate or manipulate others,” etc. By the Sunday night of the LF, the production of these spaces culminates in a social space quite unlike the everyday world participants had left behind the previous Friday morning. Ebullience pours forth, encomiums abound, intimacy reigns. The Course Leader warns the participants of the imminent discrepancies that will confront them when they step back out into the ordinary world. The social space created in the LF is highly transient; it requires continuous reshaping to stay in existence, grow and develop.

In the light of this newly created social space, participants’ everyday social conditions suffer a devaluation of sorts. Taking advantage of the obvious disparity between these two worlds, one in which one lacks power, the other in which one has it, the Course Leader casts this situation as an exigence for participants to institute practices that will lead to the transformation of the conditions of everyday life. The key to this is first and foremost to continue participating

� Kopp 37

with Landmark Education in some form: taking courses that cost money, and/or volunteering in the Assisting Program. For instance, a ten-session seminar, included in the tuition (thus, already paid for) of the LF begins in the ensuing weeks after the course (at least 95% of participants register for this seminar by the Saturday of the LF). The Course Leader also presents the “Advanced Course,” a four-day and an evening course,10 as an additional crucial step, the purpose of which is to design a personal vision (30%-40% of participants enroll in this course by the end of the Tuesday Evening Session). Enrolling other people to occupy the space produced in the LF becomes an exigent situation for graduates, for doing so will assist in the production of this “transformed” space (for a hundred-person Forum, LE would consider “effective” 40 guests on the Tuesday evening session with 25% registering).

Then, the last event on Sunday evening, before everyone goes home, the Course Leader calls all the volunteers up to the front of the room, having them stand together on the podium. She gives them a moving acknowledgment, revealing to the participants the previously unacknowledged source of the manipulation of space in the course; she informs everyone that she could not have done her job without the work of the volunteers. The Course Leader selects a participant to stand at a microphone and thank the volunteers. Clapping and cheering ensue (roughly 10%-15% of the participants of a LF later volunteer in some capacity; perhaps 10% of this latter number end up taking on significant volunteer leadership roles in the company). Conclusion: a Faustian Bargain

In revealing these formerly invisible bodies, the volunteers, as the source of the arrangement of space in the Landmark Forum, the Course Leader confirms that the material conditions and the means to manipulate those conditions are the primary constituents to the production of social space in each participant’s life. The enthymemic message is clear: LE

� Kopp 38

possesses the means, it provides the techniques and the technology to manipulate and master the material conditions, and thus the social spaces of life. Participants become aware of the gap that exists between their conceptual intentions and the actual results they produce in life; controlling the material space is equivalent to owning the means of the production of social space. The LF, in its material space, demonstrates this to most participants, especially those who have experienced for themselves the sometimes exhilarating production of social space, breakthrough results, thanks to the LF. Thus, the company has made itself indispensable as a tool or set of tools that asserts itself in any given situation as providing the means to effect intentional changes to everyday life (i.e. the available means of persuasion-the techne).

This begs a further question concerning the values (e.g., “being extraordinary,” etc.) the material arrangement of space attunes participants to by the end of the course. The core to each of these values is power and owning the means of production is a clear material expression of ownership of power. Landmark banks on the fact that all people lack power in some area of their lives and thus, desire to possess power. The majority of Landmark’s customers, I claim, are the disinherited—those somehow separated from ownership of the means of the production of social space; their conceptual intentions do not match the social spaces they desire to inhabit. People take the LF for a handful of reasons, almost all having to do with rhetoric, effecting transformation intentionally through communication in relationships, communities, institutions, the workplace, the home, transformations that would lead one to inhabit desired social spaces. By themselves, the disinherited cannot effect these transformations, or so Landmark would have them believe, since they apparently lack the available means. But to own Landmark’s technology, one must practice the manipulation of the spaces required for the “technology” to effect transformation. A Faustian bargain results: continue to participate, and you will continue

� Kopp 39

to be the master of your fate. An enthymeme lies hiding behind this commitment to participate: the technology is indispensable; it becomes more important than the freedom and power in life it promises to grant its possessor. I would contend that this is a fundamental inauthenticity of Landmark Education, to use its own term to describe this dynamic and Landmark’s lack of transparency of its operation. Landmark Education, in the form of any and all of its representatives, pretends to their customers, that participants can acquire this technology, its consequent powers, and then drop the tools that granted these powers at any given time in the future. For instance, the Course Leader, at the very end of the LF, will say, “I take it all back,” claiming that everything said in the course possesses absolutely nothing to believe in. Yet, this is said against a background of materially enforced re-conceptualizations that have inscribed participants into a social space the existence of which is completely tied up with continuing to participate with Landmark Education. Thus, Landmark’s technology compels participants to inscribe themselves further into more extensive and elaborate social spaces the organization offers participants to inhabit. This is the Faustian relationship with Mephistopheles, wherein desires are granted, but only if the means used are promoted endlessly, ultimately gaining importance over the participant’s original aims. Long live the institution.

Endnotes

1 I believe that DYG, Inc. performed their study during the year 1992.

2 The prices for the courses were as follows: the Landmark Forum, $295.00; the Landmark Advanced Course, $700.00; the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, $150.00. The seminar series the Landmark Forum in Action is included in the tuition of the LF.

3 The Course Leader is the on-site employee. Off-site employees include staff-members who manage the local LE Center. Titles include the Production, Finance, registration, participation, and Enrollment Managers who are all accountable to the Center Manager. Phoenix houses the LE Center for Arizona. Staff from Phoenix may be present for logistics purposes on the Friday morning of a LF in Tucson, but will not stay throughout the course.

� Kopp 40

4 The number of apprentices depends on the number of participants attending a LF. After receiving sufficient training as an apprentice (successful performance in 3-4 courses), a Course Supervisor can assume a lead role, in turn training other new apprentices. At the end of a course, the Course Leader assigns a score to the Course Supervisor. The score, out of 100 points, measures the effectiveness the Course Supervisor demonstrates in the management of the physical space during the entire course. Running averages of these scores determine a Course Supervisor’s eligibility for lead positions in future courses.

5 Most LE Centers have facilities large enough to hold courses at their offices. However, many cities that have LF’s do not have LE Centers and so courses are held at tasteful hotel ballrooms. Phoenix, which houses LE’s offices for Arizona, have LF’s more frequently, with higher numbers in attendance than in Tucson. The cost of renting hotel space can run between 3 and 5 thousand dollars per course. It becomes cost effective to set up office space large enough to hold courses only when sufficient demand calls for frequent courses (more than one every four months). $375 a person for a hundred-person course would generate $37,500. I cannot recreate the precise overhead costs for running a Center, but it includes office space rental, office and course supplies, printing runs, travel, lodging and expenses for Course Leaders and other staff, and salaries for 4 to 6 staff members that run the office. Headquartered in San Francisco, Landmark offers courses in 110 cities via 60 major offices worldwide, manned by a total of 400 some employees (this number includes 53 Course Leaders—see endnote vi). Landmark states that it is an employee owned company with no employee owning more than 3% of the shares. In 2001, the corporation’s revenues reached $58 million. Landmark also claims that they are “organized and operated to invest its surpluses into making its programs, initiatives, and services more available” (Landmark Education Website).

6 Areas like Tucson usually have an average of 100 participants in a Forum. The square footage calculation for the hotel ballroom size is 20 square feet per participant, thus 2000 square feet for a 100 person course.

7 At a LF I supervised in Orlando in 1996, the hotel’s air conditioner malfunctioned. As a result, water accumulated in a ceiling tile right above a few participants in a back row. Just before breaking for dinner, the tile collapsed onto the floor, but not before I moved the participants quietly out of the way. After breaking for dinner, we moved the entire course to another ballroom in the same hotel (one with working air conditioning) all within an hour and a half, in time for the next session.

8 Please see Bruce Hyde’s Saying the Clearing: A Heideggerian Analysis of the Ontological Rhetoric of Werner Erhard. Diss. 2 vols. University of Southern California, 1991. Werner Erhard is the creator of the technology of Landmark Education, though he has remained in a consulting role since he sold his company to his employees in 1991. Hyde writes that Werner Erhard’s work “is both a manifestation of the metaphysical/technological tradition and a new appropriation of that tradition. Therefore it is, on the Heideggerian view, an appropriate venue for a thinking which would reach beyond the current technological paradigm by reaching through that paradigm. The Forum is putting-into-use putting itself to use in order to turn and see itself face-to-face. It is calculative thinking calculating its own deconstruction, reflexion radicalized for the appropriation of its own essential nature. And as a dialogical rhetorical project, it extends the communicative possibilities of Heidegger’s thinking, and makes the event of appropriation, and the freeing release which it occasions, available to an audience which Heidegger’s work is likely never to reach.”

9 I offer a brief national (ethnic) and gender breakdown of the “Course Leader Body.” Of the 53 Course Leaders, 37 are US citizens (9 women), 2 Japanese, 3 Indians, 1 Dutch (woman), 1 Mexican, 2 Australian (one woman), 1 French, 1 Swiss (woman), 1 (Indian born) Canadian, 1 New Zealander (woman), 2 British, and 1 Italian. Thus 13 of the 53 are women. Of the 37 US citizens, there is one black male, and three born in India, one of which is a woman.

10 The cost of the Advanced Course is $700, though a $100 discount is available if a participant registers during the LF.

Works Cited

� Kopp 41

Blair, Carole. “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s Materiality.” Rhetorical Bodies. Eds. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley, eds. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1999.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. David E. Linge. Berkeley, California, 1977.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991.

Landmark Education. 13 April 2003. http://www.landmark-education.com/

Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.

�

O.K. For the benefit of those who find the above impossible to read, you can click on "history" and compare Pendant's last version with the previous version. This gives you shorter lines with a lot of extra white space, since the lines are still a little longer than the window you're reading them in. It will take a while to read this, even if you do understand it. Wowest (talk) 20:08, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Maybe I am mistaken but the above reads much more like an academic personal account rather than a study. By the way where did you find this piece? Is there a link to the original? Oh and it is even easier to read if you hit "edit" rather than history.--Mvemkr (talk) 21:39, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

If you look at the top of Pedant17's long post, the first four lines after "blockquote" lead me to conclude that this is some sort of term paper written by Drew Kopp (?) for ENGL 597R taught by Dr. Roxanne Mountford, who currently teaches at the University of Kentucky (but was at Arizona in 2003 when this was written). I believe this is the first time I've seen someone try to use a student's paper to develop Wikipedia (usually it's the other way around). Nomoskedasticity (talk) 22:31, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

What is even more interesting is that when I Googled the title of the paper, the very first hit was an item purporting to be authored by Drew Kopp himself stating that he removed the paper from his website because "it no longer represents [his] thinking about Landmark Education." [1] Rlendog (talk) 05:57, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Our particular proposed use of this published material relates not to anyone's "thinking about Landmark Education" but to the facts of the format of the "Landmark Forum". -- Pedant17 (talk) 12:06, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

In the hierarchy of reliable sources a 500-level university paper ranks somewhat higher in detachment and credibility than corporate spin (re)produced on a company web-site. If we have better material on this specific topic, let's see it. Failing that, we can use Kopp's work with appropriate caveats. -- Pedant17 (talk) 12:06, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Academic personal accounts have the advantage of appealing to those attracted to the biographical as well as providing the academic apparatus of footnotes and bibliography and referencing the theoretical basis. Fortunately I retrieved this material as published on the author's section of the University of Arizona on February 8, 2008. -- Pedant17 (talk) 12:06, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

"Format" and "business model" continued

This is, again, getting too long to edit. Wowest (talk) 14:34, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

In the hierarchy of reliable sources a 500-level university paper ranks somewhat higher in
detachment and credibility than corporate spin (re)produced on a company web-site. If we have   
better material on this specific topic, let's see it. Failing that, we can use Kopp's work with 
appropriate caveats. -- Pedant17 (talk) 12:06, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Not really. We're dealing with a semi-self-published "term paper" from a lower-level (Master's degree level) course in English from a third-rate graduate school. That doesn't qualify as a "reliable source." We know that the paper was taken down by the author because he states or implies things he no longer agrees with, although we do not know what those things were.

The paper is not that well-written. The author deals with minutiae of the Forum with scrupulous detail. We might, well, call that "being anally-retentive about anal-retentiveness."

The paper deals with the rather interesting notion that a physical environment constitutes a form of rhetoric. We can see that, on a daily basis, on television newscasts, with sets which serve to suggest the competency or professionalism of the news-readers.

There are a few unjustifiable assumptions. Certainly, Landmark Education did not invent nametags. They are most famously seen at science fiction conventions, where some fans lay out good money to have a personal nametag decorated by a famous fan artist. The Forum leader and course supervisor go out of their way to remember which participant is which. I remember an algebra teacher doing that in eighth grade. He got the previous year's yearbook and studied the pictures before class started. On the first day of school, he knew everyone's name. That certainly helped maintain order in the class.

The jump from concern about tidiness to some sort of manipulation of various kinds of "space," all undefined, and then the rhetorical jump to some sort of Faustian contract aren't exactly justified, but one must remember that this is a paper for a class in English, not in sociology, and that the writer has apparently earned a bachelor's degree in a related field. That paper isn't particularly relevant to anything or interesting to anyone who hasn't completed some sort of LGAT program. Wowest (talk) 14:55, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

We would naturally prefer that a beautiful blonde 27-year-old woman from a little Yakutian village with a PhD in nanophysics from Moscow State (Lomonosov) University had analyzed this topic. Failing that, we make the best available use of the best materials to hand. Bear in mind that in this immediate discussion we do not propose Kopp as a source on "the meaning of Landmark Education" nor on "how it works" nor on "who invented nametags" (nobody has claimed that "distinction" for Landmark Education) nor on prescribing what Wikipedia readers might possibly find "particularly relevant ... or interesting". On the contrary, we put Kopp forward in the context of seeking out the most appropriate basis for presenting the "scrupulous detail" of the "minutiae" of the Landmark Forum's format. And let us reflect that studies in English -- even at a Public Ivy university -- can provide an excellent broad basis for the appreciation of rhetoric and for much else in sociology. -- Pedant17 (talk) 23:46, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

How is this term paper any more useful than a personal account from any other person who might have attended the Landmark Forum, including (I'm sure) many Wikipedia editors? How is this, or any other personal account, even a remotely reliable source for purposes of an encyclopedia article? Rlendog (talk) 02:15, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Useful for what? -- The rules of reliable sourcing care not a whit for usefulness. Kopp's study makes the effort to transcend the mere personal account and provides academic apparatus and comes from a university web-site. Even as a (in part) personal account, it transcends the book-published personal account of (say) Martin Lell in that Kopp abstracts his details of the running of the Landmark Forum from multiple occasions. And it provides a good deal more factual detail than the unpublished personal testimonials of Raymond Fowler. -- I've repeatedly appealed for better material. None has appeared thus far. Pro tem, perhaps we should run with Kopp. -- Pedant17 (talk) 00:45, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I mean useful as a reliable source to attribute anything in a Wikipedia article. It's not. As such, it is useless for purposes of informing this article. If you cannot find "better material" than this to support your assertions, perhaps there is limited validity to those assertions. Rlendog (talk) 02:50, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your explanation of usefulness. As for supporting "assertions" -- I hadn't noticed that I had made in this particular thread any assertions that needed supporting. Let's recall the actual topic of discussion here. On January 27, 2009 User:Micahmedia raised the issue of the absence of any description of the format of the Landmark Forum in the current version of our article. Since then we have discussed whether Kopp's detail would give a better and more reliable source for writing on that format than (say) Landmark Education's published syllabus. I've also suggested comparisons with the contributions of Martin Lell and Raymond Fowler. Do you suggest that a published piece of work with footnotes and bibliography does not perform so well in the reliable source stakes as contributions which lack these features? -- Alternatively, do you want to argue that because we have difficulties in agreeing on suitable sources, therefore we should assert that the Landmark Forum does not have a format? -- Or do you propose some other solution to the perceived lack of material in our article? -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:22, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

You're welcome. If we cannot find a reliable source than we should not include the information in our article, even if someone perceives a lack of material. I would suggest, however, that Landmark's own syllabus is probably an appropriate source for describing the format of the Landmark Forum. After all, there is not a lot of corporate spin in a format. In any case, Landmark's syllabus is superior to someone's term paper as a source for desccribing the format. So if a description of the format is needed, and the only source besides Landmark's published syllabus is someone's term paper, we ought to base the description of the format on the syllabus. Rlendog (talk) 03:14, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

The contention that "[i]f we cannot find a reliable source than we should not include the information in our article" may overstate the case. The Wikipedia reliable sources guideline does indeed state that "if an article topic has no reliable sources, Wikipedia should not have an article on it" -- but this refers to articles, not the subsections of articles, and the same WP:RS guideline implies that we cannot always meet the ideal sourcing parameters -- hence its discussion of not-so-reliable sources and their use in certain circumstances. But since we do have a reliable source in Kopp's article, the problem does not arise over-directly. -- The suggestion that Landmark Education's syllabus could provide an "appropriate source" (rather than a reliable source) encounters a series of difficulties: -- 1. The syllabus presents a structure for content topics -- it does not address the actual format of presentation (as Kopp does). -- 2. The syllabus on the Landmark Education website constitutes a primary document rather than a secondary source. It may well represent the desired intentions of Landmark Education, but it does not measure up to the secondary sourcing which Wikipedia specifically prefers. Any use of the one needs supplementing and contrasting with the use of the other. -- 3. Given Landmark Education's use of language and jargon, the syllabus may not provide an informative or reliable reflection of any sort of format. -- The claim that "there is not a lot of corporate spin in a format" does not hold. Any text put out by any organization has a bearing on the image and reputation of that organization: hence the budgets devoted to corporate image and to slick web-sites; and hence Wikipedia's strictures and warnings on the use of primary sources. Quite apart from that generic statement, Kopp has suggested that even the details of room layout in a Landmark Forum contribute to attitudes towards the organization and its idea-set. -- The bald claim that "Landmark [Education]'s syllabus is superior to someone's term paper as a source for desccribing the format" has no justification, and contradicts by mere assertion the discussion of the sources we have conducted so far. But to summarize: a careful, unbiased and thorough secondary source prepared and published in an academic environment approaches much further towards the ideal of a a truly reliable source than any document constructed by a commercial entity for the purposes of enhancing corporate gain. -- Any discussion of the format of the Landmark Forum -- content and presentation -- should address Wikipedian ideals of neutrality and balance. If we lack any single good definitive reliable source that could give us that neutrality and balance directly, we may have to spread out net more widely rather than more narrowly. We can use Kopp, the syllabus, and the host of accounts of personal experiences. As the Wikipedia:Reliable source examples essay suggests, in the case of "... popular culture ... [it] may not be discussed in the same academic contexts as science, law, philosophy and so on ... When a substantial body of material is available the best material available is acceptable, especially when comments on its reliability are included." -- Pedant17 (talk) 23:52, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

What could you even find useful here, Pedant? "The Forum is conducted in a highly-stylized environment with scrupulous care taken to avoid the most minute distractions?" I think that just about summarizes whatever Kopp has to say, and then, how are you going to cite it? It isn't a book or publication. It isn't on line anymore. Is the specific environment actually necessary to communicate the notions that Forum presents? I hardly think so, but I'm sure it helps. Wowest (talk) 05:10, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

Useful for what? The summary-sentence provided misses Kopp's rhetorical contentions and omits the examples of detail. -- We can cite Kopp exactly according to its origins -- as a web-page document available as at a given time and no longer publicly available except through personal application. -- I doubt that the "specific environment" must lead necessarily to "communicate the notions that [Landmark] Forum presents". But recall our immediate task here: not to "communicate the notions that [Landmark] Forum presents", but to satisfy expressed curiosity about the "format and business model" of the Landmark Forum. (The notions presented by the Landmark Forum might deserve their own separate Wikipedia article.) -- Pedant17 (talk) 00:45, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Now you're getting silly again. You're talking about your own "expressed curiosity," and you already have the answer you want. I suggest that nobody else is interested in the "format and business model" of the Landmark Forum."

Consider the would-be participant. I'm going to forget the Forum for a bit and go back to the old est training, with which I'm more familiar. Someone is told that (s)he should take the training (1) because it's the right thing to do, or (2) to get high without drugs or (3) to become enlightened. I think those were the three most common reasons at the time. I suggest that the participants were only interested in what they could get out of the program for themselves, with a very few suggestions. One was a guy who wanted to start his own seminars. He stole a copy of the manual for the est training. I understand that he went to jail later.

Anyway, I read the article you supplied very carefully. It doesn't appear to add anything of relevance to the article. It's much too detailed and theoretical. It jumps from minute observation of trivia to more and more speculative allegations with no transitions, and without displaying any connections between the observations and the conclusions.

You appear to have an unstated emotional interest in this topic, and you appear to be grasping at straws in an effort to meet your own emotional needs here. Despite your argumentation, you don't really have a reliable source, here, and your source really isn't saying anything important enough to include in the article. All he seems to present is a vaguely critical attitude toward the Forum, and, as someone else pointed out, he now disagrees with his own paper. You might consider trying to contact him to see what he currently does and does not believe. Wowest (talk) 05:31, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Since we have talk-pages for the discussion of improvements to articles, I propose to take no notice of the personal characterization of myself as "silly" or of the claim that I "appear to have an unstated emotional interest in this topic" or of the speculation that I "appear to be grasping at straws in an effort to meet [my] own emotional needs". -- The suggestion that "nobody else" shows any interest 'in the "format and business model" of the Landmark Forum' does not accord with the data in this talk-page and in the history of the article: On January 27, 2009 User:Micahmedia raised the issue of the absence of any description of the format of the Landmark Forum in the current version of our article. User:Micahmedia pointed out that the article once included some material on this topic. I deduce that other people have an interest in the matter, and that we cannot conclude that my mention of "expressed curiosity" relates only to myself. -- The suggestion that we consider potential participants in Landmark Education offerings when writing our article has some merit. But this segment of Wikipedia's readership seems small: we equally need to write for the curious, the student of LGATs, the satisfied customers, the intriged bystanders, the haters, the browsers of random articles, and everyone else. -- I fail to see what an analysis of a vague memory of "the three most common reasons at the time" of est has directly to do with crafting article text on the format of the Landmark Forum post 1991. If you have reliable sources on why potential participants "took" est, I suggest editing the Erhard Seminars Training article. -- I fail to understand what a rumor about a jailing in possible connection with alleged stealing of an est manual has to do with crafting article text on the format of the Landmark Forum post 1991. Perhaps this anecdote belongs in a trivia-section in the article on Urban myth. -- The characterization of Kopp's article on "Invisible Bodies, the Disinherited, and the Production of Space in the Landmark Forum" as "much too detailed and theoretical" intrigues me. I find it alarming that a potential source can give too much detail: we might have to expunge all reference to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or to Proust's In Search of Lost Time from Wikipedia were we to follow this "rule". And the articles on Isaac Newton or Ludwig von Mises and their influence would suffer seriously from rejecting potential sources which appear too theoretical. -- We haven't suggested including Kopp's so-called "speculative allegations" in the article at the moment -- but we could readily do so at some point, with the onus on Wikipedians as a group to counter any doubtful claims with well-researched counter-claims in reliable sources. For the moment, we can take advantage of the so-called "minute observations of trivia" to make summaries in our current topic: the format of the Landmark Forum. -- We have already discussed the contention that we "don't really have a reliable source, here". I'll abandon any suggestion of citing Kopp if someone can provide a better source that covers the same points of interest. Until then, we can make use of this material to fill an identified lacuna in our article. -- The contention that "[a]ll [Kopp] seems to present is a vaguely critical attitude toward the Forum" does not hold water. Kopp may have expressed such an attitude -- opinions differ on how to interpret his views. But he certainly does other things apart from presenting a critical attitude -- and the facts and details he provides in his 41 pages may have greater long-term impact than any mere personal attitude (though that published attitude may have equal relevance elsewhere in our article). -- The claim that Kopp "now disagrees with his own paper" appears over-simplified. Kopp states that the paper "no longer represents my thinking about Landmark Education" -- he does not withdraw any factual statements -- indeed he intends to revise his work. But even if Kopp's views undergo a 180-degree shift, his published account remains as an expression of its time -- assessable on its own merits. We can look forward to more material in the future while using what we have in the interim. -- The suggestion that we "might consider trying to contact [Kopp] to see what he currently does and does not believe" has minimal relevance to assessing the value of Kopp's already published material. We do not assess reliable sources on the basis of statements of belief -- rather we judge them primarily on their own internalities.If Kopp were to write a personal email denying that the setup of Landmark Forum rooms included a sharpened pencil, we would take little notice of his email as an unreliable source. If Kopp were to publish a denial that the setup of Landmark Forum rooms included a sharpened pencil, we could note that and either present two contrasting views on the sharpened pencil issue, or avoid mentioning sharpened pencils. Right now, we cannot per se interpret a suggestion about belief or lack of belief as invalidating the precise details Kopp provides about our topic: the format of the Landmark Forum. -- Pedant17 (talk) 02:22, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I looked it up. The graduate program in English at the University of Arizona is in a six way tie for 46th place, scoring 3.1 on a 5 point scale. We don't seem to have a Harvard, Yale, Stanford or U.C. Berkeley quality of student here. Rankings are here: http://www.english.ucsb.edu/undergrad/aftermajor/gradrankings.asp .......... 76.95.83.118 (talk) 01:01, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

46th equal out of 80 odd tertiary institutions offering PhDs in English -- let alone the places offering Masterates and the universities outside the United States. Not bad going in the inter-course stakes. But at this level we might want to look at the internal evidence of the individual work as well as the ranking of an institution at a point in time. Wikipedia does not confine itself to contributions or sources emanating only from "Harvard, Yale, Stanford or U.C. Berkeley". And in the past the Wikipedia Landmark Education article has favored citing work from the sociology department at the Univesrity of Colorado and rejected psychology studies associated with the University of Connecticut. The phrase "horses for courses" comes to mind. -- Pedant17 (talk) 00:45, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

"Format" and "business model" Part III

The Pedant doth protest too much, methinks.

You're placing an undue emphasis on a non-reliable source, according to Wiki standards. . You rather need to separate your two topics. The "business model" seems to by very much like the business model of any other educational organization. Let's do that now. Wowest (talk) 02:47, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

In the absence of bullet-proofedly reliable sources, I merely point out the merits of the best available source known to me. If a better source becomes available, we can incorporate that too. -- I fully endorse separating out out (not "my") two topics of "business model" and "format". But the suggestion that Landmark Education's business model "very much" resembles "the business model of any other educational organization" ignores several salient facts: the elements of multi-level marketing, the attitudes towards competitors, the sourcing of the raw material (erhardism), the demand for integration of belief, the intolerance of alternative approaches. Compare the Church of Scientology and consider whether a religious "business model" might fit better than comparisons with institutions of adult education. -- Pedant17 (talk) 23:52, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Business Model

Compare it to a state university. You have registration. Frequently, members of various honor societies provide volunteers to make it work. You have classes that meet in certain places at certain times. You pay your tuition and take your class. Then, you list it on one or more versions of your resume, if you think it's relevant. The biggest difference with the Forum is that they offer you your money back, assuming they still do that. It's been about fifteen years since I was around there, as I said. What is it you want to say? Wowest (talk) 02:47, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

OK: compare Landmark Education to a state university. Where do the ideas come from? Where do the teaching staff come from? What qualifications do the staff have? What prerequisite educational standards do the students have? Who changes the curriculum? and why? and how? What catchment area does the institution serve? What expectations exist of open research and serious publication? What age characteristics does the student body have? What percentage drops out of the courses? What percentage of annual income comes from fees? What international recognition does the institution have? What systems operate to ensure the quality of the education of the students who finish the course? What accrediting system has examined the academic and teaching standards? How many employers flock to employ those who finish the courses? What official and unofficial extra-curricular activities deepen and broaden the education on offer? How many books and periodicals does the institutional library possess? What ratio exists between lectures and tutorials and laboratories? Who ensures that the institution caters for different learning-styles? How does the institution encourage student collaboration in the classroom? What mechanisms police and control student behavior outside the classrooms? -- and so forth. -- Pedant17 (talk) 23:52, 21 February 2009 (UTC)