The New York Sophist

At the USU national tournament held two weeks ago in Atlanta, BP debaters found themselves confronted with two motions that I believe were the first moments where debaters could have turned debate on itself as a topic. This is something that regularly and easily happens in contemporary policy debate. It cannot yet happen, and may never happen, in BP debate because of the way each format manages the stress of embodying a position.

Embodiment is a source of discomfort, delight, awkwardness, uncertainty, politics and ethics. Being in the world with a body comes with it responsibilities and rights. When we articulate words into the air in a debate, we are sending out something from our body to make contact with the bodies of others. Speech is incredibly personal; the airwaves that make sound are made by the body, and contact the bodies of the listeners. When debating, we often give our bodies over to making arguments, we put our bodies into the arguments we make, we have to – the arguments are spoken, they are a part of us. It is rare that the articulation of an idea that is not our own, or opposed to our idea of self comes along in debate in a way where we feel we have to make it or we are not participating as a recognizable body in debating. However, two such interesting moments happened recently.

These moments come along rarely. At the past USU national tournament there were two such moments where debaters could have brought such critical questioning of being into the debates by invitation of the motion itself:

1.  THR the decline of apparent technical skill as a key criterion in evaluating art.

2.  THBT violence by Palestinians against Israeli civilian targets is justified.
 

Both of these motions (the second being at the heart of controversy at the competition all on its own without any help from me) offer debaters the opportunity to critique the norms of BP debating itself, and offer for the judges the opportunity to stand opposed or in favor of particular models of debating. But in order to get to that interpretation, in order to allow for rhetorical invention to take place, one must be able to see this as a possibility, both strategically and essentially. In order to arrive at that point, one must drum up, engage with, or be aware of a profound sense of discomfort with the body of debating itself. Formats serve the purpose of embodiment, not only policing what comes in or out of it as bodies do, but also constituting a root of identity, ethical engagement, and discomfort about things (as minimal as touching and as profound as diet or sex). Given acceptance of a general state of discomfort with debate as embodied, debaters can argue the following possibilities:

1. Debate should not be judged on technical merits whatsoever, but on how we affectively move and feel toward a speaker’s performance. Affect is all we have, and is the root of logic, reason, and law.

Debate’s lack of technical judgement harms those who want to debate in order to make a difference in the world, participating more in showy protest marches complete with selfies rather than getting trained in how to work within the bureaucratic bowels of the beast, as real change will be led by the bureaucratic order.

We should not be constrained by technical rules in debate, we should use those limitations to be generative of argumentation rather than limiting of argumentation.

Technical rules in the evaluation of rhetoric have always had a central place in the production of political messages, we should keep them central in our debate art.
 

2. We should reject any motion that calls upon us to defend the deaths of innocents under any conditions, and we should leave this room, travel to other rooms at the tournament, and try to convince them to stop debating this motion as well.

This motion places us in the difficult position of evaluating options for action when the political has either dried up or excluded participation of those who are being exploited. Such motions are at the heart of debate education – making the difficult call out of several bad decisions is what policymakers do.

This motion is a call to question violence in debate in general. How often are we called upon to endorse the deaths of thousands through foreign policy, war, strategic strikes, etc. Recognizable bodies are inappropriate for debating, yet Other, foreign bodies are okay. What does that say about what we reinforce in debate? What should we be reifying? (Whatever the team chooses here is their position in the debate).

We recuse ourselves from endorsing the nature of this motion and will not discuss it. We believe this time should be spent discussing the nature of appropriate motions, what they should be like, who should be writing them, and what it means when we give a voice to ideas that threaten our own identities.

Who are we to stand here, in our spare time, and speak about just violence between those we do not know? Can we instead speak about this question? Who are we? What is our relationship to violence? Can we even justify the violence that debating does to us, here, at a university, in a classroom, today?

Such resources are not available to most BP debaters precisely because BP has no critical distance between its rules and policies and its performance. That distance is held there by fragile rules of competition, and has no theoretical backing whatsoever. BP as a form though owes its entire existence to a lack of theorization, to nearly pure pragmatics, and a smug dislike and disinterest in rooting its practice in any text outside of itself. All we need are the words of the winners, and things shall work out. But this eliminates any inventional space for questioning the body. This is important given that all practices in BP (and in most debate formats in general) come from what judges vote on. If you want to change a rule in debating, make it a persuasive part of your practice that judges vote for. Everyone will be doing it in a matter of months.

Compare this to policy debate which has gone totally the other way. Now, discomfort is the heart of the performance, it is required, in fact, you don’t even have to mention it. Everyone assembles out of a profound sense of discomfort with the body of debate. But this discomfort has become so given as to be a comfortable place of departure. Denigrating the body of debate, fragmenting it, questioning it, and calling it out for being a limited space from which to argue or interrogate at all is a universal starting point.

Policy debate has atomized the body of practices of debate by refusing to stop at the point of discomfort and using that as invention. As this became the norm, more interrogation began, but this time at the level of the body constituted by the rhetoric of discomfort. This was another productive level of expressible discomfort and difficulty about the embodiment, quickly replaced with more interrogation on this discourse of discomfort. The space between locating the site of invention of argument (discomfort with the embodiment required by the form) and the critique of those arguments as site for invention of argument (discomfort with the embodiment required by the discourse of discomfort with the embodiment required by the form) rapidly began to accelerate, until today where you have critique temporally prior to the argument that may or may not exist, but has the potential to exist – in other words, one can root argumentation in sites of potential invention to come. This has atomized policy debate; it no longer has identifiable limits. Some celebrate this lack of coherent formation, others believe it to ruin the ability to practice argumentation. At the minimum, policy debate under this description serves a valuable function of questioning when, or even if, an argumentation based on reason and evidence is possible. Policy debate is moving quickly away from 2oth and early 21st century argumentation theory toward a more performance studies/art rubric, where the constitution of the uncomfortable body questions the arbitrary limits of the performance space, the canvas, the museum, etc.

The advantage BP has over policy is indicated here – BP can be presented to audiences without serious adaptation, aside from rate of speed and argument selection. But policy presented to audiences is incredibly difficult, since the starting place is not controversial issues, but the state of controversy given acceptance of the horrors of being constituted as a body. As BP debate becomes more uncomfortable with its body, the more comfortable it becomes with expressing that discomfort through its embodiment. Right now, conversations about the limits, rules, and norms of BP are all that is possible, and they cannot happen within the confines of embodied advocacy, aka “the round.” The question for BP, as debaters start to locate their discomfort in embodiment as a site of argumentative invention will be: How much of the body must be preserved in order to form a coherent critique? Coherency, of course, must remain pinned to a third party, a decision maker. Policy debate did not hold to this limitation and remains coherent only to its own practitioners and critics of the art: “There is no point in making our discomfort with our embodiment understandable to those outside of it.”  BP is insured a bit in this way, as the entire process of embodying arguments relies on those outside of it, since “reasonable people” exist who are not connected to debate – in fact, more reasonable people are in the world who haven’t participated in competitive debate than those who have. Serious adherence to the principle of a reasonable person in the world will be needed to keep the coming articulations of discomfort in the body of BP argumentation from unraveling the body, and the space to constitute a body, in the future.

At the USU national tournament held two weeks ago in Atlanta, BP debaters found themselves confronted with two motions that I believe were the first moments where debaters could have turned debate on itself as a topic. This is something that regularly and easily happens in contemporary policy debate. It cannot yet happen, and may never happen, in BP debate because of the way each format manages the stress of embodying a position.

Embodiment is a source of discomfort, delight, awkwardness, uncertainty, politics and ethics. Being in the world with a body comes with it responsibilities and rights. When we articulate words into the air in a debate, we are sending out something from our body to make contact with the bodies of others. Speech is incredibly personal; the airwaves that make sound are made by the body, and contact the bodies of the listeners. When debating, we often give our bodies over to making arguments, we put our bodies into the arguments we make, we have to – the arguments are spoken, they are a part of us. It is rare that the articulation of an idea that is not our own, or opposed to our idea of self comes along in debate in a way where we feel we have to make it or we are not participating as a recognizable body in debating. However, two such interesting moments happened recently.

These moments come along rarely. At the past USU national tournament there were two such moments where debaters could have brought such critical questioning of being into the debates by invitation of the motion itself:

1.  THR the decline of apparent technical skill as a key criterion in evaluating art.

2.  THBT violence by Palestinians against Israeli civilian targets is justified.
 

Both of these motions (the second being at the heart of controversy at the competition all on its own without any help from me) offer debaters the opportunity to critique the norms of BP debating itself, and offer for the judges the opportunity to stand opposed or in favor of particular models of debating. But in order to get to that interpretation, in order to allow for rhetorical invention to take place, one must be able to see this as a possibility, both strategically and essentially. In order to arrive at that point, one must drum up, engage with, or be aware of a profound sense of discomfort with the body of debating itself. Formats serve the purpose of embodiment, not only policing what comes in or out of it as bodies do, but also constituting a root of identity, ethical engagement, and discomfort about things (as minimal as touching and as profound as diet or sex). Given acceptance of a general state of discomfort with debate as embodied, debaters can argue the following possibilities:

1. Debate should not be judged on technical merits whatsoever, but on how we affectively move and feel toward a speaker’s performance. Affect is all we have, and is the root of logic, reason, and law.

Debate’s lack of technical judgement harms those who want to debate in order to make a difference in the world, participating more in showy protest marches complete with selfies rather than getting trained in how to work within the bureaucratic bowels of the beast, as real change will be led by the bureaucratic order.

We should not be constrained by technical rules in debate, we should use those limitations to be generative of argumentation rather than limiting of argumentation.

Technical rules in the evaluation of rhetoric have always had a central place in the production of political messages, we should keep them central in our debate art.
 

2. We should reject any motion that calls upon us to defend the deaths of innocents under any conditions, and we should leave this room, travel to other rooms at the tournament, and try to convince them to stop debating this motion as well.

This motion places us in the difficult position of evaluating options for action when the political has either dried up or excluded participation of those who are being exploited. Such motions are at the heart of debate education – making the difficult call out of several bad decisions is what policymakers do.

This motion is a call to question violence in debate in general. How often are we called upon to endorse the deaths of thousands through foreign policy, war, strategic strikes, etc. Recognizable bodies are inappropriate for debating, yet Other, foreign bodies are okay. What does that say about what we reinforce in debate? What should we be reifying? (Whatever the team chooses here is their position in the debate).

We recuse ourselves from endorsing the nature of this motion and will not discuss it. We believe this time should be spent discussing the nature of appropriate motions, what they should be like, who should be writing them, and what it means when we give a voice to ideas that threaten our own identities.

Who are we to stand here, in our spare time, and speak about just violence between those we do not know? Can we instead speak about this question? Who are we? What is our relationship to violence? Can we even justify the violence that debating does to us, here, at a university, in a classroom, today?

Such resources are not available to most BP debaters precisely because BP has no critical distance between its rules and policies and its performance. That distance is held there by fragile rules of competition, and has no theoretical backing whatsoever. BP as a form though owes its entire existence to a lack of theorization, to nearly pure pragmatics, and a smug dislike and disinterest in rooting its practice in any text outside of itself. All we need are the words of the winners, and things shall work out. But this eliminates any inventional space for questioning the body. This is important given that all practices in BP (and in most debate formats in general) come from what judges vote on. If you want to change a rule in debating, make it a persuasive part of your practice that judges vote for. Everyone will be doing it in a matter of months.

Compare this to policy debate which has gone totally the other way. Now, discomfort is the heart of the performance, it is required, in fact, you don’t even have to mention it. Everyone assembles out of a profound sense of discomfort with the body of debate. But this discomfort has become so given as to be a comfortable place of departure. Denigrating the body of debate, fragmenting it, questioning it, and calling it out for being a limited space from which to argue or interrogate at all is a universal starting point.

Policy debate has atomized the body of practices of debate by refusing to stop at the point of discomfort and using that as invention. As this became the norm, more interrogation began, but this time at the level of the body constituted by the rhetoric of discomfort. This was another productive level of expressible discomfort and difficulty about the embodiment, quickly replaced with more interrogation on this discourse of discomfort. The space between locating the site of invention of argument (discomfort with the embodiment required by the form) and the critique of those arguments as site for invention of argument (discomfort with the embodiment required by the discourse of discomfort with the embodiment required by the form) rapidly began to accelerate, until today where you have critique temporally prior to the argument that may or may not exist, but has the potential to exist – in other words, one can root argumentation in sites of potential invention to come. This has atomized policy debate; it no longer has identifiable limits. Some celebrate this lack of coherent formation, others believe it to ruin the ability to practice argumentation. At the minimum, policy debate under this description serves a valuable function of questioning when, or even if, an argumentation based on reason and evidence is possible. Policy debate is moving quickly away from 2oth and early 21st century argumentation theory toward a more performance studies/art rubric, where the constitution of the uncomfortable body questions the arbitrary limits of the performance space, the canvas, the museum, etc.

The advantage BP has over policy is indicated here – BP can be presented to audiences without serious adaptation, aside from rate of speed and argument selection. But policy presented to audiences is incredibly difficult, since the starting place is not controversial issues, but the state of controversy given acceptance of the horrors of being constituted as a body. As BP debate becomes more uncomfortable with its body, the more comfortable it becomes with expressing that discomfort through its embodiment. Right now, conversations about the limits, rules, and norms of BP are all that is possible, and they cannot happen within the confines of embodied advocacy, aka “the round.” The question for BP, as debaters start to locate their discomfort in embodiment as a site of argumentative invention will be: How much of the body must be preserved in order to form a coherent critique? Coherency, of course, must remain pinned to a third party, a decision maker. Policy debate did not hold to this limitation and remains coherent only to its own practitioners and critics of the art: “There is no point in making our discomfort with our embodiment understandable to those outside of it.”  BP is insured a bit in this way, as the entire process of embodying arguments relies on those outside of it, since “reasonable people” exist who are not connected to debate – in fact, more reasonable people are in the world who haven’t participated in competitive debate than those who have. Serious adherence to the principle of a reasonable person in the world will be needed to keep the coming articulations of discomfort in the body of BP argumentation from unraveling the body, and the space to constitute a body, in the future.

No shortage of thoughts about USU floating around the internet. For me, it was one of the best tournaments I’ve been to in a long while. No I’m not some weirdo – I too was bothered by the delays, the cut round, the wording of that motion. Even in spite of all these things it was a debate tournament that made me feel like I did about debate years ago – that debate was a powerful force and that in spite of itself, or in spite of those who want it to be this way or that, it will provide quite a bit for the intellectual mill.  Here are my thoughts, in no particular order:

What is Debate? It’s Old School

Gorgias called the study of rhetoric a “powerful lord” and a “pharmakon” meaning a drug/medicine/poison – which is what debate is. This metaphor is too perfect for debating, as we find USU members interested in debate as a medicine for their lives. With drugs, too much of something that cures can kill, and often a toxin can heal. In debate, we have a group of skilled pharmacists – herbal healers ready to apply treatment, or an opium den full of addicts who care nothing for the outside world, just provide that next high. We consider our role as “drug dealers,” and how we can get the largest number of people to try our drug of choice – much better than what they are taking from the corporate media in terms of debating – and demand it in their lives, from multiple sources. The external view of USU is along way off though, as the internal disputes must be handled first. We need a clear grasp of what we are about, what we are doing at a USU tournament before we can move out into the community in a coherent manner.  A page from the Sophists: They created a market for debate and debate studies themselves out of a careful read of Athenian society and what was not there. We could do the same as an organization for college campuses.  But first, we need to figure out what’s behind all that anger that comes out when, due to time constraints, a round has to be cut. Surely we aren’t just upset about that?

Who Am I?

It was extremely weird how many teams that I judged wanted to call me by my first name, or use me as an example in a debate – “Steve Llano would say” – “Steve Llano believes” – I didn’t ask around to others to see if this is a normal practice around the tournament, swapping “Chair” or “Speaker” for the individual in the address of the speeches. I always liked the address of the “Chair” or to the “House” or “Speaker” as a device to remind us that we are not addressing our opponents nor are we addressing individuals and their myriad preferences, but we are addressing the “House” – the community of those decision makers who, upon hearing our arguments, would find handholds in order to start a climb toward our ideas. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca term this the “Universal Audience” and explain that this is the audience to which your arguments are addressed should you be speaking to a group of people that you can’t quite fully see or know. Any debate audience is this way, so you would want to make arguments that could not be rejected as such by those people because the recognition of those arguments is a prerequisite to being thinking members of the audience. Addressing the “Speaker” means one is making arguments based on a cultural and rhetorical construction of “reason” (very different from Enlightenment or so-called philosophical reason) and one would assume one would be able to assent if one heard that argument, whether they disagree or not. Swapping to the individual, or the person, shifts debate into the realm of persuading the vanguard – those who are the model performers by which all others in the community align their decision making (eg: The US Court System and the Supreme Court might serve here).  By appealing to the person, one is going to appeal to their tastes and standards, and that erodes an art of appeal toward the Universal Audience. This is not bad; this is vastly different than what BP was like even 2 years ago. Are we willing to make such a shift? For with it comes a lot of discussion about what this or that judge likes or will accept, and we are more a court-system model of argumentation and not a parliamentary-system model of argumentation. The difference: The first appeals to individuals to judge the value of a discourse by a certain meter stick, a dead set of rubrics and standards that must be followed in order to preserve the legitimacy of the form, the second by the persuasive possibility of the discourse of a speaker, considering how reasonable average people would find ways to agree with it. I prefer the latter, but it seems many speakers might find easier paths to winning by appealing to who is sitting in the chair rather than the abstract “Chair.”

Vocabulary Builder

I found so many teams using weird constructions of words to sound like “cool debaters” rather than just choosing to explain arguments to the panel in a way that is accessible and easy to meet them halfway. This is of course related to the increasing speed of delivery we see across the board in debate, but that aside, many speakers are grasping for terms they have heard about but don’t really get – this is what Miyamoto Musashi says when talking about young samurai, obsessed with technique rather than just victory: “The flower has become more than the nut. Immature strategy is the cause of much grief.”

I’m all about people investigating argument theory for insights into how to debate better. The texts are difficult, and there are no guides (yet) to this rich literature. Things like modality, performative speech-acts, and other theories are ripe for the taking to those who brave the wilderness of academic writing. However, what I experienced was people going for a short cut to sound smart. The most obvious example is the use of the term “counterfactual” to describe any argument that paints a picture of a world, effect, or result of an argument. This is very strange – a counterfactual argument is only when one is arguing in contrary to established fact, and it’s a type of argument that one makes to persuade others by saying “Had you not done that behavior, X and Y would now be in your life” or “X and Y could have been avoided.” People were using “counterfactual” as a synonym for “rebuttal” or even in one instance, as a synonym for “an argument that describes a situation.” This merely makes debate look like a petty game played by those who are dilettantes, not good for University support. Instead, let’s impress one another with how passionately and persuasively we can communicate complex ideas so that anyone in the University community could understand them. 

The second term of concern is “FIAT Power” – which I saw debated in 3 of the debates I judged out of 8 total. This convenience term from policy debate has no place in a format that purports to be persuading reasonable people, since they would be uninterested in adjudicating the limits of a theoretical construction one would use to say “wrong forum,” or like a legal appeal to dismiss or strike evidence or testimony, and would rather hear the comparison of advantages no matter what the limits of the passed policy are. I would encourage debaters to come up with other ways of making these “move to strike” arguments for audiences, the easiest one being from daily life – most of the time people do not argue about how something will be done, or whether we will do it, but whether the move to do it will accrue benefits or harms – in short, most people’s daily lived experience of argumentation is one where they use FIAT automatically. It doesn’t need to be part of a decision on persuasion in a debate.  “Let’s assume,” one might say, “We go to the all-you-can-eat Burrito Bar for lunch. What happens? We will fall asleep in that meeting, or spend the afternoon feeling ill from eating all that wonderful cheese.” Such an argument requires FIAT, but the speaker did not make the case for it or make an argument establishing the bounds of FIAT. The speaker just did it. It’s a device from natural argumentation that people use all the time. Why can’t we?

What Makes a Good Motion?

Herbal healers will mix medicine differently than Addicts will. They are both interested in the pharmakon for different reasons. And if you try to correct the addict, or take away her drugs, you get a very violent result. The herbal healer doesn’t like being told they are practicing “alternative medicine” or “isn’t a real doctor” either. This is the split on this last point, the split between these two attitudes.

Balance was cited to me as the only metric that makes a good motion several times after the Palestinian motion was set. While I agree that Balance is essential (for a representative argument of this position, click here), it is only part of a larger method that must be used when drafting motions. Fairness/balance is essential or people are going to quit debating really quickly. Luck of the draw getting the right position on a motion can’t be the only factor, which is why I subordinate controversial and recent (so-called “above the fold” motion setting) to balance. But there’s something very important left out of the consideration on motion wording, and that is access.

Motions have to be accessible to the group of debaters that are assembled to debate. Most of the time, principles like interest and novelty trump accessibility because motion setting teams are thinking of what interests them, what their experiences are like, etc. Although this is perfectly legitimate, there should be a voice in these conversations reminding everyone that the normal debate participant has not debated 10 debates on gun control, nor have they had the Israel/Palestine debate “a hundred times.” This was the first time my students debated a Palestine motion (they loved it; they found it a great confirmation that they had been reading the right material and their practice had paid off) and it was the first time a number of people had debated it. Access means that novel wording might throw someone off their game, or make the debate inaccessible because the wording feels exclusive, or really disturbing in some way. 

To have a fair and balanced debate one must be able to access the motion emotionally and intellectually. Novel wordings, or wordings made to excite those who have been in debate a long time can thwart the principle of access. Care must be taken to give handholds, or ways in for those who are directly connected to the topics, ensuring they can see a place to stand for them. This would be the case with any motion – in debate our tools are the stuff of daily life; we play soccer not with a soccer ball (reserved only for such contests) but with the lives, hearts, and minds of those involved in serious conflict, controversy, and danger. Nobody wants to be told, “To win you have to kick your cousin’s heart through that goalpost.” This is how that motion was read by some people. Careful wording can access the novel debate, but novelty should not be the principle of wording (it can be a principle of motion generation however). I would like to see an order of operations for motion writing that looks like this:

1. Controversy

2. Balance

3. Accessibility

4. Novelty

This not only allows space for those who are in the 5 to 10% of debaters who make it their whole life and debate each weekend, but also helps those who maybe attend 3 to 4 tournaments a semester (the much larger percentage somewhere in between these two numbers). The controversy over the Palestinian motion was valuable in the sense that it showed us that our agreement on what a good motion looks like has a bit of equivocation in it, and it might be beneficial for the community to have a discussion about the norms of motion writing, what we value, and what we are about. What is this debating thing good for anyway? What do we stand for?

Doing In the Bin from the bar was amazing. Thanks for all who came out. I had a great time at this tournament and will be thinking about it for a while. An old blog post I had a look at before writing this conveys my excitement and awe that 125 teams attended USU. After this year’s near 200 team tournament, I am eager to see how the USU tournament will make me wonder, think, and ponder next.

No shortage of thoughts about USU floating around the internet. For me, it was one of the best tournaments I’ve been to in a long while. No I’m not some weirdo – I too was bothered by the delays, the cut round, the wording of that motion. Even in spite of all these things it was a debate tournament that made me feel like I did about debate years ago – that debate was a powerful force and that in spite of itself, or in spite of those who want it to be this way or that, it will provide quite a bit for the intellectual mill.  Here are my thoughts, in no particular order:

What is Debate? It’s Old School

Gorgias called the study of rhetoric a “powerful lord” and a “pharmakon” meaning a drug/medicine/poison – which is what debate is. This metaphor is too perfect for debating, as we find USU members interested in debate as a medicine for their lives. With drugs, too much of something that cures can kill, and often a toxin can heal. In debate, we have a group of skilled pharmacists – herbal healers ready to apply treatment, or an opium den full of addicts who care nothing for the outside world, just provide that next high. We consider our role as “drug dealers,” and how we can get the largest number of people to try our drug of choice – much better than what they are taking from the corporate media in terms of debating – and demand it in their lives, from multiple sources. The external view of USU is along way off though, as the internal disputes must be handled first. We need a clear grasp of what we are about, what we are doing at a USU tournament before we can move out into the community in a coherent manner.  A page from the Sophists: They created a market for debate and debate studies themselves out of a careful read of Athenian society and what was not there. We could do the same as an organization for college campuses.  But first, we need to figure out what’s behind all that anger that comes out when, due to time constraints, a round has to be cut. Surely we aren’t just upset about that?

Who Am I?

It was extremely weird how many teams that I judged wanted to call me by my first name, or use me as an example in a debate – “Steve Llano would say” – “Steve Llano believes” – I didn’t ask around to others to see if this is a normal practice around the tournament, swapping “Chair” or “Speaker” for the individual in the address of the speeches. I always liked the address of the “Chair” or to the “House” or “Speaker” as a device to remind us that we are not addressing our opponents nor are we addressing individuals and their myriad preferences, but we are addressing the “House” – the community of those decision makers who, upon hearing our arguments, would find handholds in order to start a climb toward our ideas. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca term this the “Universal Audience” and explain that this is the audience to which your arguments are addressed should you be speaking to a group of people that you can’t quite fully see or know. Any debate audience is this way, so you would want to make arguments that could not be rejected as such by those people because the recognition of those arguments is a prerequisite to being thinking members of the audience. Addressing the “Speaker” means one is making arguments based on a cultural and rhetorical construction of “reason” (very different from Enlightenment or so-called philosophical reason) and one would assume one would be able to assent if one heard that argument, whether they disagree or not. Swapping to the individual, or the person, shifts debate into the realm of persuading the vanguard – those who are the model performers by which all others in the community align their decision making (eg: The US Court System and the Supreme Court might serve here).  By appealing to the person, one is going to appeal to their tastes and standards, and that erodes an art of appeal toward the Universal Audience. This is not bad; this is vastly different than what BP was like even 2 years ago. Are we willing to make such a shift? For with it comes a lot of discussion about what this or that judge likes or will accept, and we are more a court-system model of argumentation and not a parliamentary-system model of argumentation. The difference: The first appeals to individuals to judge the value of a discourse by a certain meter stick, a dead set of rubrics and standards that must be followed in order to preserve the legitimacy of the form, the second by the persuasive possibility of the discourse of a speaker, considering how reasonable average people would find ways to agree with it. I prefer the latter, but it seems many speakers might find easier paths to winning by appealing to who is sitting in the chair rather than the abstract “Chair.”

Vocabulary Builder

I found so many teams using weird constructions of words to sound like “cool debaters” rather than just choosing to explain arguments to the panel in a way that is accessible and easy to meet them halfway. This is of course related to the increasing speed of delivery we see across the board in debate, but that aside, many speakers are grasping for terms they have heard about but don’t really get – this is what Miyamoto Musashi says when talking about young samurai, obsessed with technique rather than just victory: “The flower has become more than the nut. Immature strategy is the cause of much grief.”

I’m all about people investigating argument theory for insights into how to debate better. The texts are difficult, and there are no guides (yet) to this rich literature. Things like modality, performative speech-acts, and other theories are ripe for the taking to those who brave the wilderness of academic writing. However, what I experienced was people going for a short cut to sound smart. The most obvious example is the use of the term “counterfactual” to describe any argument that paints a picture of a world, effect, or result of an argument. This is very strange – a counterfactual argument is only when one is arguing in contrary to established fact, and it’s a type of argument that one makes to persuade others by saying “Had you not done that behavior, X and Y would now be in your life” or “X and Y could have been avoided.” People were using “counterfactual” as a synonym for “rebuttal” or even in one instance, as a synonym for “an argument that describes a situation.” This merely makes debate look like a petty game played by those who are dilettantes, not good for University support. Instead, let’s impress one another with how passionately and persuasively we can communicate complex ideas so that anyone in the University community could understand them. 

The second term of concern is “FIAT Power” – which I saw debated in 3 of the debates I judged out of 8 total. This convenience term from policy debate has no place in a format that purports to be persuading reasonable people, since they would be uninterested in adjudicating the limits of a theoretical construction one would use to say “wrong forum,” or like a legal appeal to dismiss or strike evidence or testimony, and would rather hear the comparison of advantages no matter what the limits of the passed policy are. I would encourage debaters to come up with other ways of making these “move to strike” arguments for audiences, the easiest one being from daily life – most of the time people do not argue about how something will be done, or whether we will do it, but whether the move to do it will accrue benefits or harms – in short, most people’s daily lived experience of argumentation is one where they use FIAT automatically. It doesn’t need to be part of a decision on persuasion in a debate.  “Let’s assume,” one might say, “We go to the all-you-can-eat Burrito Bar for lunch. What happens? We will fall asleep in that meeting, or spend the afternoon feeling ill from eating all that wonderful cheese.” Such an argument requires FIAT, but the speaker did not make the case for it or make an argument establishing the bounds of FIAT. The speaker just did it. It’s a device from natural argumentation that people use all the time. Why can’t we?

What Makes a Good Motion?

Herbal healers will mix medicine differently than Addicts will. They are both interested in the pharmakon for different reasons. And if you try to correct the addict, or take away her drugs, you get a very violent result. The herbal healer doesn’t like being told they are practicing “alternative medicine” or “isn’t a real doctor” either. This is the split on this last point, the split between these two attitudes.

Balance was cited to me as the only metric that makes a good motion several times after the Palestinian motion was set. While I agree that Balance is essential (for a representative argument of this position, click here), it is only part of a larger method that must be used when drafting motions. Fairness/balance is essential or people are going to quit debating really quickly. Luck of the draw getting the right position on a motion can’t be the only factor, which is why I subordinate controversial and recent (so-called “above the fold” motion setting) to balance. But there’s something very important left out of the consideration on motion wording, and that is access.

Motions have to be accessible to the group of debaters that are assembled to debate. Most of the time, principles like interest and novelty trump accessibility because motion setting teams are thinking of what interests them, what their experiences are like, etc. Although this is perfectly legitimate, there should be a voice in these conversations reminding everyone that the normal debate participant has not debated 10 debates on gun control, nor have they had the Israel/Palestine debate “a hundred times.” This was the first time my students debated a Palestine motion (they loved it; they found it a great confirmation that they had been reading the right material and their practice had paid off) and it was the first time a number of people had debated it. Access means that novel wording might throw someone off their game, or make the debate inaccessible because the wording feels exclusive, or really disturbing in some way. 

To have a fair and balanced debate one must be able to access the motion emotionally and intellectually. Novel wordings, or wordings made to excite those who have been in debate a long time can thwart the principle of access. Care must be taken to give handholds, or ways in for those who are directly connected to the topics, ensuring they can see a place to stand for them. This would be the case with any motion – in debate our tools are the stuff of daily life; we play soccer not with a soccer ball (reserved only for such contests) but with the lives, hearts, and minds of those involved in serious conflict, controversy, and danger. Nobody wants to be told, “To win you have to kick your cousin’s heart through that goalpost.” This is how that motion was read by some people. Careful wording can access the novel debate, but novelty should not be the principle of wording (it can be a principle of motion generation however). I would like to see an order of operations for motion writing that looks like this:

1. Controversy

2. Balance

3. Accessibility

4. Novelty

This not only allows space for those who are in the 5 to 10% of debaters who make it their whole life and debate each weekend, but also helps those who maybe attend 3 to 4 tournaments a semester (the much larger percentage somewhere in between these two numbers). The controversy over the Palestinian motion was valuable in the sense that it showed us that our agreement on what a good motion looks like has a bit of equivocation in it, and it might be beneficial for the community to have a discussion about the norms of motion writing, what we value, and what we are about. What is this debating thing good for anyway? What do we stand for?

Doing In the Bin from the bar was amazing. Thanks for all who came out. I had a great time at this tournament and will be thinking about it for a while. An old blog post I had a look at before writing this conveys my excitement and awe that 125 teams attended USU. After this year’s near 200 team tournament, I am eager to see how the USU tournament will make me wonder, think, and ponder next.

Debate Stream on YouTube is streaming CEDA Nationals live. CEDA, anachronistically stands for Cross Examination Debate Association, but the debate style is that of American policy debate with all the speed, crazy citations, and wild combination of post-structuralist theory with contemporary political discourse you could want. It’s shaping up to be a good weekend.

What isn’t surprising is that it’s being streamed – American policy debate has always been much further along in the dissemination of their product via internet video (with some disastrous results) yet still the personal risk of having a viewer substitute identity for in-round advocacy seems like a non-starter for the policy debate community. And they have had the worst imaginable impacts come from internet video! 

What is surprising is that there is an on-screen, internet based flowing software that is being demonstrated on this stream. Dialectica is in an early stage in development, but it appears to be even more radical in its implications for debate than streaming video. The site allows for the user to flow a debate in a way that can be read by others and followed long after the debate is over. 

American policy debate is highly technical in the way arguments are advanced and refuted. It is also highly technical in the delivery mechanism as well. Perhaps these two practices which are at the heart of American policy debate insulate participants from the fear that any outside observer will confuse presence with belief-in-advocacy. This software allows for there to be transcription – like one would do for a musical score – of a round in order to share it with those who can “read music” but can’t attend the concert. 

I for one am excited about using this program in my courses and for debate teaching. But its presence has be thinking a few generations down the line. What could this technology be used for? Clearly, the intent is teaching – providing high-quality transcriptions in technical, strategic discourse for the teaching of how to win debates from various positions. In short, there’s nothing that different between this and chess notation – it’s good that policy debate is moving toward a standardization of this sort. But what are the larger implications in a community that cannot give up the drive to turn everything into a strategy for winning tournament debates?

The implications of this technology are far more critical to debating than the implications of internet video or audio. Could a multi-tournament record of an argument being defeated by a particular card be held up as evidence in a debate that the judge is either a part of the “debating community” or not based on whether she votes on this card? Could a team go to a tab room with 2 years worth of decisions upholding “conditionality bad” in order to get a judge struck from judging them in the future? Could a team implicate an entire school or program as being mired in racism, colonialism, essentialism, etc. by bringing up the argument strategies of those long graduated, claiming that debating in the name of that program means that you implicitly endorse the ideology of these debaters? 

What about consistency? Advocating for a particular “project” of some kind for 2 or 3 seasons, then changing tracks might be used as evidence that claims to in-round transformative advocacy are insincere. Attempts to win the ballot, stacked up over numerous 2NR and 2AR performances recorded last season seem to indicate a debater’s performance in this round is inconsistent with such claims. 

The concern here is of course that debate of any kind – American policy or BP – does not need any excuse, much less an attractive, easy to access technology, to become more inward looking. This program is amazing for what it can do for debate pedagogy and the teaching of things like “line by line argumentation” and the importance of “cross application” of evidence. But if past is prologue, the community will have to take a strong stand as to the limits of such an innovation. It doesn’t take much for debate communities to take their own practices as grist for the competitive, modernist-toned, tournament mill.