A multipart series

In the last two parts, I discussed some of the troubles debate has had and the vision that I think debate should take on as it looks forward. I’m framing this discussion around the concept of discourse, which has a lot of definitions and approaches. I’m relying on Lacan’s understanding of discourse, the places we find and relationships we craft through language that allow us to fit ourselves, through speech, into various roles. Sometimes we take the position of the shaper, sometimes we are the shape that results.

The Lacanian discourses are sometimes incorrectly seen in a hierarchy of best to worst. I think that it’s better to think of the discourses as contextual. There are times and places for each one. So for now, I believe we need the Analyst’s discourse – also what I believe to be the writing center model – to get the kind of debate we need right now to serve the university and serve our world.

This doesn’t mean that other discourses are not generative. Let’s consider debating structured around the discourse that probably gets the most negativity, the Master’s discourse:

Whenever I encounter the Master’s discourse, I want something else. It doesn’t matter what I want – I recognize a desire; I recognize that there is something missing. This is typically seen as a sign of bad teaching, but it could be read as the necessary distinction between professors and students: Students are always more liberal than their ‘conservative’ professors.

In this discourse, the appearance of the Master, the authorized order-er of information constitutes and creates knowledge. This is a political act as epistemology always is – a selection and deflection of reality based on choices (Burke). What is inaccessible is the human being behind the mastery. You never really can know your teachers as human subjects, can you? I often think about this relationship through my experiences of being a high school teacher in Texas, encountering a student and their parents at the grocery store, and noticing their eyes always fixated on my cart, as if this was some access to a secret level of information about “the master.” Of course, such prodding is never the revelation of the split subject, but it is indicative of the desire for more that is created by the clarity and directness of the knower and the known. Information and knowledge are split; accept it! Here’s the examination/paper/quiz that will prove you’ve accepted it.

This could be seen as producing the necessary conditions of revolution, but there’s no interaction between desire and mastery, only that mastery produces it. Contrasting that to the revolutionary discourse of the analyst, where mastery is the outcome of the discourse, we are hell and gone from that here. Desire is eliminated from the interaction between the agent and the other (speaker and audience; teacher and student) and only appears after knowledge has been constituted. This could be seen as the gap you feel when you take a great class but you can’t really explain why it was so good or even explain what you can do now – you want . . . what exactly? Maybe another great class from that professor.

In debate this is echoed through calls for “better debating” in our societies – better forums and more support for debates are needed. The Master’s discourse, in the wrong venue, appears ridiculous: “Debate will change our institutions for the better so let’s change our institutions for the better.” Everyone agrees we want better debating in public life. We nod. We repeat as more desire is created as the signs of mastery roll on constituting the known world.

In the right contexts, the discourse of the Master provides not only a set of known facts and theories – approaches and history of a field – but also fires up the student to “do something.” The lack of a target for desire is irrelevant within Lacanian theory – desire’s object is agnostic. What’s important is that there is something for desire to orbit, to circulate around. This could be anything. What’s important is what it cannot be – understandings of the Master as arbitrary ($), mastery itself, or even an understanding that knowledge is produced by systems (although you can argue that it’s pretty openly understood in this discourse that knowledge is ideological; it’s all on the numerator side of the equation).

This sort of “classroom debate” is well known and well chronicled, particularly in the famous book Argument Culture by Deborah Tannen, where she gives us a glimpse of a classroom debate where the power dynamics of society are on full display, being replicated, being shown as the natural way to debate:

The picture was easier to put in than typing the quote. This is the Discourse of the Master on full display. The teacher’s display of the master signifier, debate causes the “jump” of the students into what debate must be. There’s no nuance or discussion as the relationship is direct and clear between the sign and the response. The teacher knows what a debate is, the students know what they must do, and the result is dissatisfaction; a desire for something else. Instead of the debate being a place where one could expose one’s uncertainty ($), it remains hidden, and the students who are troubled with their performance (either aggressively or remaining silent) must live with thinking through desire (“what’s wrong with me?” “Did I do that right?” “why don’t I like this?”, etc).

Reading this year after year when I teach debating has revealed another way the Master’s Discourse rises in the university classroom: the white men feel they can ask questions at any time, and spend as much time as they want to formulate what they want to say. Class time is their property. Conversely, non-white students and women are succinct, quick, and never interject without careful consideration of the moment to raise their hand. When I call on them, they give the shortest answers possible. I see this as the effect of recognition of who classroom space and time is for – it’s private property. This isn’t a town square; this is a mall food court. Appropriate modes of engagement only extend to those who appear in line with the master signifiers. It seems odd to me that the Master’s discourse is still so blatantly a way of teaching in higher education – I don’t mean lecture, I mean the demand to reproduce the unquestioned, certain relationship between the signifier and what it organizes. This is not learning, but duty.

In policy debate, the Master’s Discourse exists mostly in the topic committee meetings. The question of whether a motion can be debated is the question of whether we “know” that it can generate the right connections for good debating. Many good topics are rejected I imagine based on the fact they do not have clear pathways to knowing what can be said. Any uncertainty must be rejected, but it’s ok to be dissatisfied, or desire more because at least a debate can happen. This “at least” we have “clear ground” position that comes up in topic discussions quite often is the Master’s Discourse at work. What’s important about this discourse is that there can be no expression of uncertainty, no expression of wondering if this is the right position.

For a contrast, let’s take a look at a very attractive model of teaching policy debate, the Discourse of the Hysteric:

In this, the best overall teaching discourse according to Bruce Fink, the agent presents themselves as wildly uncertain. They go over various options on what to think or do and the other reads this as a desire for mastery. They offer the Master Signifier, “Well it has to be this.” “I’m not sure,” says the agent, however we know that they do know what they want, as desire is in the position of truth, the hidden position in the discourse. By feigning uncertainty they produce a ton of reasons, explanations, articulations, narratives, ad nauseum as the product as the other attempts to explain the “right answer” to the unpersuadable agent. This generates a lot of text, a lot of knowledge, all of it meant to explain the correct way to answer the question. We see this as an intermediate teaching discourse in policy debate that is oriented toward the tournament (must it be? This will be addressed in a future post, a bit of an error on my part has become revealed!) where the intermediate student pushes on the novice student in some kind of response drill to a theory position (“why? What’s another reason? Why that reason? how does that happen?”) something like “PICs good” or “conditionality bad.” At a higher level the instructor would (hopefully) take the position of serious doubter to the rationale of the author of the book (vs. the author of the card)and the thesis of the position being advocated. This is a good thing to see but quickly depressing when you realize it is constrained by the limits of the persuasiveness of the tournament.

The teaching discourse advances familiarity with knowledge but has no hand in the creation of knowledge itself. You could argue that the teaching discourse is radical in the sense that it creates “knowledge about knowledge,” increasing access to what’s out there, what can be said that “makes sense” on a question. That sense-making is always determined by relationships that are out of the hands of the student. The increase of knowledge generated via debate participation is one that cannot be altered, only proselyted. Everyone should do this to learn so much more about the world and the ways it is organized. This might explain why so many tournament debaters wind up in law school despite their best efforts to try to engage the world on “their own terms.” It’s simply not possible. As Audre Lorde famously says, this is a set of the master’s tools. The siren song of the understanding of how knowledge is organized and mastered is a lot more comfortable than any attempt to create or craft alternative knowledge(s). No matter how radical the building methods, one winds up in a familiar floorplan. And kind of likes it because they know everything there is to know about the relationship of knowledge to why it has that status.

The discourse of the master is unsettling to students; the format of the debate doesn’t allow them to speak about the issues they are learning about when preparing for the debates because they are not in the realm of knowledge that can win a debate. You have to shift the discourse to one of the other operations to get the realm of infinite possible arguments without restriction, which is the university discourse. This is satisfying to many because you can argue anything you want as long as it is a “good argument,” i.e. conforms to the demands of the hidden organizing principle of the master signifier. This is where a lot of debate formats tend to settle down.

The discourse of the hysteric is the optimal pedagogical debate, used to teach the knowledge of a field by “pretending” there is no correct answer – think about the traditional law school pedagogy of Socratic Method. This works by forcing the students to articulate and rearticulate the reasons that can only apply if their articulation of the master signifier is accepted as the answer to the question. This is great law pedagogy because lawyers are not being trained to upend, circumvent, or even alter the law – they are there to know what the law wants, so to speak, and convince the uncertain that the law is on their side.

Now that all four discourses have been examined, can we say which one policy debate is? I think I can articulate where policy debate is now and where it has been – perhaps it has been all four given particular space-time coordinates.

I don’t agree with that assessment, but I will say in the next post how and why I think policy debate is the format for my debate class next semester in the next post. There will be references back to these discourses, so keep this post bookmarked or handy. I do think that if I were to teach debate using another format, I will fall into some holes and not even realize it. The stakes are too high when we are teaching debate which, for reasons that will appear in the next post, we should start calling democratic literacy.