The never-ending series
This is the discourse of contemporary policy debate. How do we take contemporary policy debate, mired in tournaments, and make it “for everyone?”
Right now policy debate is for those who are desired by it. They want to contort themselves in order to be objects desired to be a part of this headless knowledge. The result is uncertainty, or a portion of our thought is kept from us.
I believe that so-called debate coaches really do believe that policy debate is “for everyone.” I think they believe that if everyone had this education most of our political problems would dissolve. However their actions tell a different story: “public” debates (a funny name since debate implies publicity, audience, the public sphere, etc) are held at random, rarely, on campus for small audiences of students (many of them enticed by extra credit or mandated by the points regime to attend). They are thought of as a discounted, diluted debate form since the public is incapable of understanding serious debate (read: “undesirable”).
Debate meetings are held at night, in a remote room somewhere, and hardly advertised. There’s no attempt to recruit those who need education in debating most; instead, people who are thought to be “good debaters” might be recruited based on the perception of those already on the team or the coach’s interactions with a student in a class.
This isn’t universal of course, this is broad-brush. It used to be that Emory University had a campus engagement project that distinguished debate from policy debate in a way to where both were equal, but different. It seems at the time of this writing that this project has just become “policy debate by other means.” The shortest description on the website is the campus engagement program. It seems to engage in debate education one must engage with policy debate, become interpreted/interpolated by that knowledge.
It’s hard to find a debate program that doesn’t immediately fall into the university discourse creating subjects that “aren’t sure” why one argument is better than another. “It’s a good argument because it’s true,” “It won because they had nothing to say,” “There’s no answer to this implication,” – Ok, but why? – “Well, that’s how debate works.” Public debates are propaganda in this way, making the audience feel they cannot take part in something so sophisticated and intense, happy to defer to the experts who can tell them which side won and why (“they didn’t respond correctly”). Most tournament policy debate persuasion is based on a technique which dances on the edge of being fallacious. However, this makes sense: As Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca remind us, the group that believes itself to speak in universal terms is often a vanguard, effacing the connection to the universal audience by claiming universality in their discourse under a titular term such as “should.” The should/would fallacy is the operating principle of tournament policy debate.
This is a big slog, a big marsh to walk through if I want to make policy debate accessible to everyone in a way that encourages pedagogy about and around debate (rather than encouraging a specific kind of subservience to debate). But what to encourage? Lacan tells us we can rotate a discourse one-half turn from the discourse we find ourselves immersed in. The result we want might not be the result we get through our efforts to overturn the power of the current discourse. Given this, we can either flip clockwise to the master’s discourse, or counter-clockwise to the analyst’s discourse. In the traditional syllogistic arrangement, the hysteric’s discourse is a contrary to the university discourse.
The discourse of the hysteric is the “teaching discourse” as Bruce Fink has called it, since the result is the abundance of the production of knowledge. Note that this knowledge is not “the student’s” knowledge or the knowledge of the other, but the official ordering of things that comes into being when the master is invoked. The teacher knows this, but cannot upset the power balance for then the gig would be up. The teacher is there to teach not what to think, but how to think. What to think is the domain of the Discourse of the University. How to think is the domain of the Discourse of the Hysteric. The reason for this is that the students have to internalize the logic of the master/knowledge relation to participate in the discourse, to get the proper result.
The model I think of in debate pedagogy when I think about this is the debate squad room, shooting out ideas about the new resolution. The “coach” sort of knows what arguments will have weight (tabling how odd it is to know this already given the topic and audience being new/undetermined) and questions the debaters on every idea to see not if their ideas have rhetorical valence but if those ideas fit into the expectations of the master’s knowledge. Do these ideas fit into the limits of what is permissibly knowable at a tournament? For the tournament and the rules derived from having good tournaments (eg: smooth, easy to run, clear breaks) are the true master of policy debating these days, or any sort of formal, competitive debating out there. This post is about policy debate but might not be limited to it.
Particular to policy debate and the way I’m trying to see if it can be made pluralistic and democratic in my own sense of things, I’m curious how much hysteria is productive pedagogically. What I mean by that is, there’s a certain comfort in being able to discuss any issue within the bounds of the predictable and knowable confines of order that comes from “out there.” When we push students in lecture to explain why something is true, or why that theory matters, they then attempt to please the Master by showing mastery of a language that is not their own; it is a language that has as its grammar the master’s authority.
Perhaps in the incessant “Whys” of the hysteric’s discourse one hears some of the overworked machinery of the master in there – and it might inspire the students to take on the questioning role toward their own work and their own answers. Why does this argument work so well? What is truly holding it together? Although many of us claim that debate radicalized us, it seems spurious at best to look to the discourse of the hysteric as the reason why – there’s nothing here that would innately make us think radically. It’s a far cry from dialectics and farther from the politics and ethics that many who have been taught in debate cannot imagine their lives without. It has to come from somewhere other than this discourse, although as a response or a next step from the university discourse, the hysteric’s discourse is obviously empowering.
After writing this (Which took some time) I have to say I’m thinking that two debates may not be enough to capture the pressure one needs from the hysteric’s questioning to break through to a truly revolutionary understanding of knowledge and rhetoric. More to come on this question in the next, and final post about policy debating in the classroom.
I have hopes that basing a debate class around the strictures of policy debate as we know it (university discourse) and pushing the students to align with the Master (hysteric’s discourse) there will be times an elements where dissatisfaction, or even the Lacanian “gap” between expected pleasure and the drive may be enough for there to be an unravelling that allows rhetoric a powerful place in policy debate to allow students to really play with a lot of the controversies in the world that have seemed a distant stage-show in an unfamiliar language and they are part of an unwilling audience with bad seats.