I cannot answer this question, but I can provide the conditions by which a debate model could be judged in relation to this question. In short, I know what I want the students to be able to do after participating in a debate program. In my own program efforts, I think I have accomplished this somewhat, but more work would need to be done to get it exactly where I would want it. The method is, if you aren’t getting students to be able to hit certain benchmarks outside of debate practice itself you are not teaching anything but the test, and you should adjust what you are doing with your students to get them where you imagine they should be after debate experiences.

In educational theory the idea of revolutionary transformation is thrown around quite a bit as the ideal outcome of education. There should be a significant change in thinking, ability, skill, or action in the student to indicate that true learning has happened. Often in educational terminology this is called “mastery.”

In my department we regularly have meetings about our objectives, which are peppered with the term – students will develop, display, indicate, communicate “mastery” of particular educational objectives we set out for them. We often look to the production of knowledge (S2 if you remember from previous posts) to indicate mastery. But wouldn’t mastery be the presentation of the sign of mastery?

Mastery for Lacan is quite different, it is the ability to arrange knowledge “on your own terms.” That is, you present the sign around which the knowable, the worth-knowing, and the valuable are arranged. You take control of your life and the meaning of the things you do, say, and practice in it.

Such a goal would be the desired outcome of a debate curriculum or a debate program of my design. I have thought about this quite a bit, and I’m still quite unsure what debate curriculum would approach the discourse of the analyst.

I’m not saying that good debate is therapy or even therapeutic. The association is one more with the terms of the discourse than the actual practice. Debate should allow one the capacity to arrange and rearrange knowledge around the sign of mastery. But as you can see from the diagram, this is harder than it appears – knowledge is forbidden in this arrangement. It’s hidden under the appearance of desire. So what should debate produce? What sort of mastery is this?

I would say this is the rhetorical model of persuasion, the ability to indicate what is right, good, true, evident, without access to an extant knowledge per se. This places debate in the realm of the epideictic – the rhetoric that considers the just, the valuable, and the praiseworthy. It might seem odd to separate debate from reason, but that is something that is also praiseworthy – reason is in the realm of the epidictic itself as a practice and a term worth praise. The epidictic is also the source of argumentative claims according to The New Rhetoric. This is where we go to figure out why we care about what we care about.

Good debate instruction provides mastery, provides one with the sign of the master. This can be read in many ways. But before we get to that result, the presence of the speaker must be looked at in detail first.

What is being represented on the left hand side? Typically this is the position of the speaker, the agent, the one who addresses. Underneath is what is hidden or made inaccessible through the stance taken by the subject. On the right hand side, that fraction indicates the other, the audience, the one who is addressed or indicated in the discourse. The bottom figure is the result of the interaction. The result here is “mastery.” How do we get there?

The explanation of how this idealistic model of debate works is through positing itself as desire (a) – this is something you want to be. This basic rhetorical gesture indicates that there’s knowledge here (S2), but you never get access to it. It remains in the position of inaccessibility underneath the presentation of desire. Students, or potential debate students, are in the position of the other – asking endless questions about their desire in hopes of getting some knowledge ($). It is this intense questioning process that leads to mastery (S1). “I can explain to you what it means to know,” rather than “here’s what you are supposed to know.” This is the distinction, in this case, between S1 and S2.

So many debate instructors take a subservient view of debate much like the traditional subservient view of rhetoric – it is about presenting information and knowledge gleaned through means located elsewhere. Debate will help students conform to the world and understand what is true or false; they will become part of the knowledge that exists already – a set of knowledge that is stable, timeless, objective, and understandable if you commit to it. This model, which I will write about in another post, is the bad model of debate that keeps getting taught and for which we have no good convincing alternative.

The power of debate, structured as endless inquiry against a never-ending desire produces something we could call confidence, humility, inquiry, intellectual curiosity, discipline, creativity – the list is endless as what can be called “mastery” here. But it is clear that this is not organizing oneself to fit someone else’s notion of what we should value. This model of debate empowers those who take it on to take ownership of the world and confidently argue to others what is worth knowing, on their own terms, not under the thumb of others.

A model here would not have any absolute or universal characteristics. But let me throw some ideas out there that I like that might come up for serious consideration in discussions about modeling debate competitions (aka “format” conversations).

First, this idea of the judge. I like policy (NDT/CEDA) debate’s early 2000s trend of calling the judge the “critic.” Much like removing the phrase “debate coach” from our utterances, removing “judge” removes a particular sense of what the observer of the debate (as opposed to audience; audience is anathema in policy debate) thinks and feels about the performances involved. In short, the critic helps the debaters see if they were able to own their argumentation, a very important perspective that the critic can only provide. This isn’t acceptance, but some sort of friction against the discourse of the students. I remember in 2002 a student telling me “How dare you indict my poetry” when I said it really didn’t help me identify or vibe with the point she was trying to make. This is an interesting take on the critic, someone who can’t say very much at all but just praises the attempt at art. The poetry was bad, but by what standard? And how can we use that to gain mastery of our speech?

Secondly, what counts as evidence? Immediately upon writing that question, I’m struck with the sense that this is repetitive. But evidence should not have any firm external foundation in such a model; the evidence should be defended convincingly by the participants in the face of the questioning of it; the sorting of information into categories such as evidence, information, and noise seems like essential practice for mastery. I know what sorts information and discourse and I can speak about it and present it in ways that, even if you are not in the same position as I am, you can definitely see and even take on such a sorting as relevant and necessary in this case.

Finally I think a word on delivery – there is a norm to debate delivery that betrays lack of mastery and intense insecurity about one’s words. Where are the variations in delivery? Where are the variations in style, as in word choice and vocabulary mustered to speak about various issues? The delivery of a debater is unmistakable – clipped, quick, and shrill, intense without exigence, no gaps and no silences. It’s amazing how that delivery has become the norm for debate formats globally. A format with mastery would have guidance on how to develop delivery that works for the moment and works for the way one would like to present one’s case. It should not be a prefab. Mastery would involve choices in how to say and how to deliver one’s position. Here we have “debate delivery” on full display all marked with indicators of belonging to one particular sphere of discourse – and not the one that produces mastery. Here we have the signs of conformity to mastery that emanates from somewhere else, but certainly not from the speakers. They are marking their discourse with the signs of the familiar (as opposed to the signs of being right, true, understandable, caring, etc). Discourse of mastery would have a delivery that crafts that mastery situationally, not conforms to what it is supposed to sound like.

Those thoughts are quite loose and premature, but the base theory is not. If we want the discourse of debate to produce mastery, this mode of discourse will do so. We have to figure out how to make the first utterance one that is desirable and imminently questionable – a firm reversal from how most so-called “debate coaches” present debating to new students.