The mass tournament’s impact on debate’s potential

Tournament debating: Massive tournaments or debate education that is oriented toward speeches, time limits, and decision making that is within tournament forms must conceal the fact that it is a selection and deflection of particular notions of argument. Mastery of the tournament hopes to be mastery of argumentation overall, which, from a rhetorical understanding of arguing or debating, is impossible. How do so-called debate coaches and tournament champions maintain this idea that the debate tournament’s thin and limited presentation of argumentation is what debate ought to look like?

This has been discussed in the first half of the 20th century after the invention and immediate viral spread of the debate tournament, first held at Southwestern College by Dr. J. Thompson Baker in the 1920s. In the 1940s, educators like Dr. Elton Abernathy and others worked with NCA to ban debate tournaments as they seemed to provide instructions on how to paint a veneer rather than carpentry. Pearl Harbor cut these conversations short, and when the dust cleared, the tournament was the only game in town, save for those historical re-enactors who liked to annually keep a Triangular Debate circuit alive. But serious debate was now tournament debate. Dr. Douglas Ehninger criticized the debate tournaments ubiquity, arguing that what supports the idea these events are valuable is the “Fallacy of Bigness.” That is, if there are a lot of people entered into a debate event, it must be doing something good/productive/educational. He argued that debate educators are sewing the seeds of their own destruction without stronger rubrics and assessment models, and low and behold he was right.

One of the best ways to understand how the tournament is the worst form of debating is the concepts of the judging paradigm and what is called mutually preferred judging. The Master (S1) can dictate what knowledge is and what is to-be-known (S2) if it conceals the incompleteness of their identity ($). They don’t have all the answers and are just like us when it comes to the influence of argument. But this cannot be revealed if one hopes to control what argument should be.

The judge paradigm is the master’s identity. The paradigm is a listing of what the judge believes to be good argument, what they will support or “buy” in a debate, what sorts of argumentation they prefer. This is written in a style that absolves the argumentation forms, techniques, and standard “moves” from any defense whatsoever; the master indicates where they “lean” in on particular forms and lean away from other ones. As Marcuse identified in “Repressive Tolerance,” such indicators – no matter their revolutionary quality – always are in support of the totality of the system, making it seem even more legitimate by showing others how one positions oneself individually between options.

The important thing to note here is that a judging paradigm that said, “Speak to me like you would anyone,” would not be a judging paradigm. It would be seen as either exotic, strange, or just a waste of an opportunity to “tell us what we need to know.” This sort of demand from others from the master are never as satisfying as you would want them to be though, even when clearly stated. This would be seen as nonsense rather than a “bad paradigm” because it doesn’t tell you what you should know, be, or do.

This is frustrating, but it’s frustration of frustration. It stops the frustration that makes tournaments pleasurable – complaining about the judge. This is what Lacan indicates by saying the product of this discourse is “desire” or the “object cause of desire,” the objet petit a. The debater gets pleasure from having desire for a different outcome, or at least more correspondence between the master’s demand and what they know about the master (“they say they are cool with performance cases but they don’t really know what they are”).

Furthermore, contemporary Worlds debating exponentially amplifies this, making everyone the servant of some esoteric Master who might not even exist. I have written a lot about the judge guidelines for WUDC and their problems. This makes the tournament format itself the master, codifying rules for the debates as if they were something immutable, part of the rules of “good argument.” In this way, every debate becomes generative of desire for something, as the rules themselves are unsure, based on an equivocation that there is an understanding of what a “good argument” is that wouldn’t rely on context, situation, topic, or people listening ($).

The important thing here is that the worst form of debate is when the format takes over from the possibilities that discourse can create. If the result is a desire for “something else,” why not do something else? But pleasure, if you know where it is, is hard to turn away from. This might explain the ridiculousness of intercollegiate debate in the pandemic. Even though it was held on powerful platforms such as Discord and the like, the tournament kept the form of a weekend event. There was no attempt to innovate or provide something else to see where debate would go, what debate would make. It seems the leadership of the intercollegiate debate world is happy with the tournament because they have figured out the alchemy of making frustration pleasurable. They call this “pedagogy.” It seems like a lot of work not to try things out when faced with contingency. What happened to the spirit of the Shirley Debates?

The only cognate to the tournament format is the Presidential debates. Not the company that university-funded programs really want to be in. Or do they? Universities regularly pony up millions of dollars to host a Presidential debate. Providing a forum for the master’s incoherent demands is big business. But shouldn’t those who claim to teach debate, critical thought, rhetoric, and argument want more than the satisfaction of knowing everything is horrible?