Part 2 of an undefined series
If policy debate’s technical aspects are what we need not to clarify debating or make debating better, but perhaps as a springboard or even a foil – “These rules are in the way!” Then the intercollegiate debating team is absolutely something we are going to have to dispense with.
I’m ready for your hate-mail, always ready for the bad interpreters of my work that I “hate debate” from people simply confirming they are barely literate, so here’s a qualification: The contemporary policy debate team is in an SAT analogy relationship with the future of American intercollegiate or collegiate debating.
Literary Society: The Writing Center
Intercollegiate Debate Team: “The Future”
If you know the history of the top relationship – really know the history of how composition departments were formed, how literature departments and literary criticism came out of that within the trajectory of American education, you’ll notice that intercollegiate debate – policy debate – does not have that same direction. So what goes in that second slot – what’s the future?
Whatever it is, massive changes are needed to what counts as debate today: A small group of students meeting in a private room somewhere on campus, after hours, honing a very narrow set of practices or skills that can be applied at tournaments to win tournaments is no longer of any value. Instead, this operation should be stretched to cover and consider the entire university in which it is housed.
The shift from Literary Society to Writing Center is a massive shift in discourse, that arrangement of symbols that constitutes the location of meaning, subjectivity, and agency. We have moved from clubs that are selective of their membership to a place where anyone from the campus community can go for assistance on their writing (or as I would call them, rhetoric centers, but branding is very important if you expect to be funded).
The Literary Society was little more than a school club, ignored by faculty and considered extra-curricular. The Writing Center has convinced nearly all faculty that they are teachers of writing, and all faculty that writing is a measure (if not the measure) of successful education. This is not subject-verb agreement or grammar, or genetive case constructions of words that end in ‘s’ (something I still can’t get right). It is confidence, interest, and concern for the act and the result of writing. In short, the writing center attitude is one of constituting desire to and for writing.
We can understand the ideal of the writing center discourse by taking a look at Lacan’s Discourse of the Analyst:
In this discourse, the other is approached to encourage desire to access hidden, deep knowledge, but it never arrives. The other is hystericized rhetorically, presenting uncertainty to the agent in hopes they will reveal the knowledge they clearly have. This knowledge never arrives. All that appears is more interest, more desire in questioning the agent. The result of this is the generation of master signifiers, the terms that order our world and constitute things like values, meanings, and knowlege. They are the terms that allow for epistemology – perhaps ontic terms – but that might be a bit of a stretch.
Nevertheless, the result is a good one – “mastery itself” – one can organize phenomena on “one’s own terms” quite literally, crafting and creating terms for one’s own process. This is the dream of the Writing Center, and why writing center pedagogy and peer consultants are encouraged not to correct grammar or awkward constructions, but instead ask what the writer means by constructing ideas in this way. This hystericizes the writer, they want to know what they should do to “get it right.” This is a submissive desire, a desire to be interpolated and understood through the extant epistemic systems. The consultant, the writing teacher, stays silent, or asks them about their voice, their feelings – something percieved as “irrelevant” to the central question – is this good writing?
The campus debate team is not this, is nowhere near this. The intercollegiate debate team is understood and understands itself through the ultra-conservative operation of subjugation to extant arrangements of knowledge. There is nothing revolutionary here. What we do get though in more pedagogically-centered debate ‘programs’ (the word is so telling) is something that helps us discover the order of knowledge and participate in it without the power or desire to reconstitute it.
The contemporary college debate team can be understood through Lacan’s Discourse of the University:
The relationship of knowledge is vastly different in this discourse. Knowledge is open and available, and it’s a self-organizing system that wants you to take part in it. “Anyone can be a debater” is an equivalent to “Everyone should be a debater.” We want all students to master critical thinking (but note where the master is in this relationship). There is no master; there is only knowledge that wants you to partake in it. The other is in the position of desire, this knowledge clearly is for you, and wants you as a part of it.
The master is hidden. This knowledge is not self-organizing; this knowledge is not neutral. There is an organizing “master” – an ideology, a set of master terms that are not the creation or even owned by the debaters. These terms cannot be revealed for they are locked away under the narrative that the knowledge of debate is self-organizing, a set of neutral principles to be revealed through study and experience.
A great example of this discourse in debate is Bo Seo’s 2022 book Good Arguments. In this memoir that occasionally offers some history of rhetoric, political debate analysis, and advice for daily arguments, debate remains a constant that reveals the truth about argumentation. The sense one gets from this book is that debate is the knowledge of how to argue properly. That is, debate reveals the truth about argument, how it works, it’s principles, in a relevatory way through thinking about one’s debate experiences when one is confronted with argumentative situations. The book is an interesting read no doubt, but what is set up is the desire for the reader to “become a debater” i.e. fold themselves into the self-organizing knowledge of debating to become a part of it.
The result of this discourse is the “split subject” or in this case we could say the person who thinks twice before they speak. Perhaps a good result. The initial result of the University Discourse could be seen as the uncertain subject. That is, someone who has desires and drives, but isn’t completely sure what to do or how to govern these feelings. This might be partially related to the idea that university education creates semi-furbished replacement parts for society; finding a place to fit in might be the result of such a process. In the case of Seo’s book, the result is someone who can recognize and understand when someone arguing or debating is a “bad actor,” violating the “rules” of debating. But then what?
There is no ownership and no understanding of the organizing forces behind the knowledge presented to us in this discourse form. It makes the student, the curious figure in the position of the other its target to fold into “correct” understanding – an understanding that has no illicit motive at all. It is simply pure knowledge. But where goes agency, where goes our ability to shape the symbolic order in this discourse? The point of it is not to create anew, but to maintain.
In the next post I’ll discuss the other two Lacanian discourses and their relationship to debate as I try to figure out who policy debate is for. It seems that what I want is a practice for a revolutionary experience for students, one where they take ownership of what they know and resort it when needed. The Writing Center (perhaps the idealized Writing Center) is my model for this for now.