Hey there audience, hope you are gearing up for a Merry Christmas or happy holiday whatever it is you are into celebrating.
I’m deep in reflection on teaching as I often am this time of year so haven’t been publishing much here. But I hope to have some starting points soon. The biggest issue on my mind is how to adapt to people who experienced the transition to higher education and its demands during the lockdown.
This isn’t a temporary thing, nor is it going to go away in four or five years. The pandemic has given pedagogy “long COVID” and this means lifestyle changes to how we approach teaching and learning.
The end of 2022 is the end of caring what happens to intercollegiate debate for me. After attending the NCA Convention and hosting the Civic Debate Conference in the summer here on campus, I’m finally convinced the future there is self-serving, and completely devoid from what it should be about – how to teach people to make cases for what they think is best (aka: rhetoric; the rhetorical tradition).
In 2023 the plan is to try to bring what I love about writing studies and composition into what I love about debate as a practice and what I think is most valuable about the rhetorical tradition. These three things do not fit too well together for a lot of reasons, most of which are fake.
As for now I’m just going to read and enjoy the cold weather as we move through the rest of December
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?
Reflecting on attending the National Conference in New Orleans
I wrote a long post about this earlier today but for some reason Substack didn’t save it. I know there was some trouble with images earlier as well so maybe the whole server was having trouble. Either way, I’ll write a different one as I am not sure my laptop up in the office has this saved either. I’m hoping it is, and if so I’ll post that one too. But here are some reflections from the National Communication Convention that was in New Orleans just before Thanksgiving.
For those of you unfamiliar, the National Communication Association is the professional organization for all those who study, teach, research, and practice the broad term “communication.” I’ve been going for years, and before this convention I felt a little odd about going. I thought maybe my time with NCA was coming to an end. Perhaps there were other or better things to do – or maybe just different; time for a change. Regardless, my feelings about going were lukewarm at best. Now that I’m back home, I’m feeling pretty good about going. Here are some reasons.
1. Being a Teacher
The NCA convention should be seen by those who teach and mentor as publication, review, and continued engagement in the work of pedagogy. We should see the convention as a site of “publication” – read in that traditional sense – where one can see one’s work in mentoring and teaching happening around them and with the former students one interacts with.
I’m thinking about this as a solution to something that bugged me that I wrote about a while ago. My old friend Tuna Snider who was a long-time debate coach, often dismissed the NCA convention as something “other than” work. I argued in this paper, presented on a panel remembering him after his death, that we should see his coda – his dedication to hosting global debating workshops anywhere in the world that would be receptive to him – as his “body of work.” He wasn’t much of a writer or publisher in the traditional sense, but the living collection of people who worked together on debating and attended these workshops could be seen that way.
After returning from New Orleans, I think that NCA can be a place like that for me where I can check up on the circulation of ideas and people, unperturbed by Socrates’s concern that an idea can wander away from you unable to explain itself. In this realm of publication, ideas and people are alive together and more ideas and more people join in on the questions and the work.
2. Begone Debate!
Many a person has accused me of “hating debate,” if anything I pay too much attention to it according to some people. I wonder what else there is to attend to? I feel like debate taught me well, very accidentally, but I had a very unique experience in my interactions with the intercollegiate competitive debate world. My lack of deep involvement as an undergraduate might explain why my ideas are seen as odd by those who were deeply invested and continue to be so as administrators and coaches in programs. Regardless, I find working on something that is pedagogical and educational, with its untapped potential of slicing across the university faster and better than a vice provost can say “interdisciplinary” to not be a waste of time, but something that invigorates my classroom teaching.
I do not think I will ever return to intercollegiate debate. Of course that comes with the large caveat that one’s relationship with debate is never “over,” per se.
I always try to attend a few debate panels, but this year these were incredibly stale. They spoke about debate across the curriculum as if it were a new, vibrant, idea. Trouble is, it’s still just an idea – as it was in 1999. They still talk about public debates as some malformation of “debate proper” and wonder why nobody comes to their events. One could argue people are not engaged by such 19th century forms of engagement anymore but I would gesture toward TED talks, Intelligence Squared, and YouTube – with a massive amount of videos in the hundreds of hours of debates between people on myriad subjects.
I thought many times of Kenneth Burke’s theory of correctives, and wondered if I was working on the poetic corrective to a religious/scientific paradigm that contemporary intercollegiate debate is stuck in. Burke’s imagery of the religious corrective as a large lumbering hippopotamus sitting in the water nearby seems apropos of where intercollegiate debate is. I think I’m done with trying to engage with it on that level, and might not attend these panels in the conferences to come. It’s a wonder I didn’t realize this when during the pandemic debate coaches used powerful technological tools like YouTube, Discord, and the like to merely replicate weekend tournaments. There’s no interest in innovation there.
I am interested in innovation using debate formats in other forums at the university, away from the hippo of the tournament. It’s time for a major corrective, but these weighted words are not going to get wings from going to another panel about how to save a debate team from a budget cut. I can also talk about better models of debate, something that nobody seems interested in because the parasitic infection of the tournament has almost completely compromised the host, debate. They cannot or will not imagine debate without tournaments. I can!
3. Plan Your Own Convention
I was positively floored at the impact, fun, and joy I had at the Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca panel I put together, particularly because it was scheduled at 8AM on a Saturday. It went better than my wildest hopes!
At first I thought the division hated the idea because of the scheduling but no – I think they put it at that time because they knew it would draw a crowd, and it did! The diversity of points of view in the audience was really something else. I pulled out my Mikme recorder and turned it on, and this is a full recording of the panel.
I think the energy of the panel comes through on the audio recording. There are some brilliant ideas here and the panelists are so well versed in the book that there’s little to compare this session to out there. I hope you like it.
What I learned from this is that I should just design things I would want to see and attend. Put people on the panels I think could contribute greatly to the conversation, and let’s see what happens.
Just like I mentor people whose work I want to read one day, I now think I should just create events I want to attend and see how they go. I think I’ll be very surprised!
There are more reflections to come, but that’s good for tonight. Nursing myself away from a cold that I immediately got once home and the energy of New Orleans faded. But much more to say – and more to say about New Orleans!
Now that I’ve written a bit about the ideal model of debate that should be taught and practiced, I thought I might criticize contemporary debate teaching and practice from the same perspective, that of the Lacanian discourses. Contemporary debate practices are the university discourse, or what Lacan would later call the discourse of fake science.
The model here has the subject present itself as knowledge (S2) and address the other as its desire (a). This could be thought of in a number of ways, most commonly presented by debate teams and so-called “debate coaches” as “You really need to know how to argue properly.” Another variation: “Debate is an intellectual activity.” A further one: “Debate is for intelligent and smart students.” There are of course a ton of ways to say it, but the general gist here is that debate is a system of knowledge that wants you to be a part of it. It can also be seen as creating a desire in the other for it, as it presents itself as a pure form of knowing.
This is related to a lot of fantasies about what it means to know and be intelligent such as: responding quickly to questions, being witty immediately after someone says something wrong, never looking up any information, so-called ‘thinking on your feet,’ and other such strange models of “being smart” that exist. Not all of these are bad, but it’s bad to think these are the signs of intelligence, not practices that situationally may or may not be what you want to invoke for a particular kind of engagement from your audience or interlocutor.
At a recent debate conference a friend told me that they “loved” teaching a particular format of debate. What a strange thing to say – except for it’s dead on for the university discourse. Format appears to be the mode by which the self-regulating set of knowledge of debate is distributed. If I am teaching rules for a format, I am teaching the knowledge of debate. There’s no ideology or judgement here; this is just how debating works. Any format presents itself exactly this way, hiding very well that there is a choice being made about who to serve. The ideology (S1) is concealed by the presentation of the extremely attractive knowledge about how to argue and win against anyone – a pure system of engagement that has no stake in the outcome would be the best way to show everyone that you are right and smart (not necessarily in that order).
The result of participation in the appearance of self-ordering rules for debate that promise the result of always producing a winner in any engagement is a subject wracked with uncertainty outside of this clear rule set. It could be said that instead of thinking of debate (S2) as concealing an ideology that does not follow the rules of debate; a master order, a politics, a deeper feeling of the true (S1), what debate really does is cover over that strict rules of human speech and discourse, aka reason or logic are really political moves and investments in the messiness of human communication, and that’s what is being hidden from the debate practitioner.
Of course they will never figure this out – it’s in the position of inaccessibility. They will always have a sort of cynical and uncertain view of public argument, wondering why people cannot “follow science,” or “accept the facts” as our contemporary discourse puts it. Worse yet, one is hesitant about expressing one’s views on things without a clear rule set, or agreement that a particular set of argumentative rules will be followed as they “should be” in debating. Debate represents an ideal of perfect self-organizing knowledge about what arguments are better than other arguments.
What is a bad argument? Debate can tell you, but it cannot convince you. Why is that? It is because the value of good or bad in argumentation is determined ideologically. This is not permitted to be discussed in current tournament debating pedagogy as it ruins the game. Adaptation to audience is not what debate is about. It is adaptation to an audience that believes with monastic devotion in the pure project of reason, that is, argument without human failings. Arguments should be good and accepted no matter who says them, when they say them, or how they say them.
The result of all this debate team, debate coaching, and tournament pedagogy is the production of people who understand what makes an argument good, but are unable to confidently enter the fray if the situation is not rule-based. They are uncertain, or “split” subjects, people who understand how the world should be and live in a different world. The narrative of justification of piecemeal action is the great benefit – they can justify the system of reasons to anyone, which is very different from persuading people to change their belief. Recognition is not feeling; there is intellectual adherence, then there is passion.
This is a similar problem we face in argumentation pedagogy in general with the fallacies where they can be recognized, yet have no purchase on rejecting arguments that “feel right.” People can pass a fallacy quiz with an A+, and then leave class to go happily vote for a fascist who offers nothing but ad hominems and post hocs, seasoned with begged questions. The reason? Because they are right. Ideology is behind any organization of argumentation and to teach it this way, keeping that in the position of inaccessibility only fuels job security for debate coaches – “look around, we need logical debate now more than ever!”
The solution is of course in my previous post, but there are two other discourses to consider from Seminar 23. I’ll post about those as potential solutions for debate pedagogy in the weeks to come.
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.
