The film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the perfect film to explain why there are so many different American debate formats. It’s because we cannot erase our past relationships to what we love; we can only build upon/around/between that love. We can only articulate what we love about the target of our affections. We love them because of everything about them.

In my numerous semi-public lectures and articulations of my anti-tournament view, people get really upset with me and often want to angrily talk to me about what debate did for them. They are pretty clearly engaged in some self-persuasion, most of it, again around the perimeter of debating: Meeting great friends, having a good time, seeing interesting places, etc. Everything pleasurable comes from circulation around the desired thing, not the traversal of the desired thing. It’s not holding it that is pleasurable, but the orbit around it. We see this as the conclusion of the film: The certain dissolution of the relationship is not a convincing reason to not pursue it. In other words, the joy of the relationship is there due to the explicitly finite nature of it.

Not to submerse you in Lacan again, but his analysis of Plato’s Symposium and the desire that Alcibiades has for what he sees in Socrates – the jewels of his personality, wisdom, thinking – all inside him – makes Lacan conclude that any relationship is governed by the desire to mutilate the other into a shape or the shape that will expose and make accessible these “jewels” within. So this is one read of the film, that love for someone always ends when the mutilation goes too far, and the couple is now engaged in something too far whittled down, cut, or changed to withstand more alteration or the articulation of the about which we all endlessly desire to say – “What is it about them (i.e. circulating) that makes you love them so?”

This final scene of the movie I call “American debating finds its perfect format.” The acceptance that we cannot stay together, we know the format is going to fail, we know that the debates will become increasingly less valuable/productive/educational, we know that at some point we will have nothing left to whittle or carve, and we will end our relationship with that format and all flee to another one is “ok.” When we do flee to another one, we will have tried to wipe our minds of the previous problems, that the new start will fix them all, but those things just cannot be wiped away.

Public Forum is a great example of this. Ted Turner wanted to sponsor a high school national debate format where anyone could watch it and determine a winner. This orientation meant that public forum would have accessible, commonplace topics and arguments, speeches aimed at a public audience, and decorum to match it. Turner quickly abandoned his quest as the debates quickly became “debates” – recognizable as the familiar past relationship happening again, but this time somehow “different.” As time has gone on, Public Forum has sped up, chosen topics that appeal to the debater versus the public, and included theoretical assumptions about moves one can make in a debate and what the defenses are, sort of like chess but called “theory.”

One wonders what sort of public audience would find this debate compelling or interesting without the framework around it that it is a high school competition and so it has rules that you can’t understand or things that you have to do in order to win. This constraint means that these formats already are headed down the road – just like any format – to the point of abandonment just so we can forget them, and start over (with them).

The differences here in delivery, style, and proof are telling. As the years go on, these debates become more and more like the familiar high school policy debate round, sounding “persuasive” and sounding “argumentative” always heads back that way – it’s comfortable, reasonable, and it’s what debate “should be like.” Any attempt to make a format will gravitate back to what it should look like, but under the camouflage of “good debating.” As Kenneth Burke has pointed out, banning something often makes us realize elements of the thing banned that are really powerful and necessary – and we want them back. So we smuggle them back in under another name. In tournament debating, we usually just call it “pedagogy” or “good argumentation.” We forget why we wound up miserable when we pursued that relationship the previous time.

In the attempt to carve out the perfect debating format, we always wind up repeating the same mistakes because “that’s who we are.” Just like in the film, we must go through this process again and again until, like the characters in the film, we accept the truth that a debating format will never be satisfying in the way we want it to be – and that’s ok. We will return to our habits and our demands which force us to mutilate it. We will carve away until we find that the entire operation was insufficient. At some point, we are going to be ok with that because for a short period of time, the format reveals something – perhaps only because we know it will fail, that the jewels will not appear and that the space between the inside and the about cannot be traversed. In the end, a debate format is a poor attempt to simulate the universe of disagreement, and the only insight it can really provide is just how difficult it is to express one’s self to another. Can we have debates without the termination or break-up with a format? We can, but we might not want to.