Debate’s structure makes structural demands on speakers. When entering a debate, one enters carrying the immense ideological weight of what you think a debate should look like. All the debates you’ve seen, all that you have thought debate is and should be, every debate you’ve hated and enjoyed – we all walk into the debate carrying these bags like a Sherpa of discourse.
This isn’t necessarily bad. In debates with friends and family, in the bar, or at work about political issues, this makes and marks the speech as a particular type. That marking of speech – your tone, speed, and intensity – communicates to interlocutors what the appropriate responses can consist of. This is why we change our tone, speed, and non-verbals when we are losing the debate or getting too frustrated and want the discourse to change. Sometimes we want to stop the conversation and indicate that through discourse.
These markers for what works and what doesn’t work are handed down to us through social practice, mired with power and the history of who, or what types of subjects, have been authorized to speak in certain ways and at certain places throughout that culture/society’s history. For example, I always ask my students what the difference is between them speaking in the front of the classroom and me speaking in the front of the classroom. We have trouble moving beyond “authorization via degree and employment” most of the time.
This is the root of the problem with the debate tournament, or as many debaters and coaches hilariously call it – “debate.” I’ve wondered how to mark my work when I’m writing and speaking about debate. Writing might be easier: I can always say there’s debate and Debate, the difference being clear. Verbally I often say debate and contest debate to show that what most debate coaches and participants/addicts mean when they talk about debate is the very narrow, very limited, very privileged, very private, and very exclusive world of the tournament debate where the public isn’t invited or even made aware it’s happening.
The demands of a tournament competition of any kind shave off practices and habits from anything that you might want to put into a tournament form. Based on how the tournament is evaluated, the strategies will change and alter toward winning. The debate tournament is the practice of eristics, or in this case the shaving off of appropriate debate moves or practices in order to win. Most judges recognize this shaving off of what would “count” in a debate outside the tournament through some metric – often a paradigm in the American tradition – and call this recognition the practice of adaptation. This is not adaptation to the audience but adaptation to the tournament, and is rewarded as such.
Debate tournaments are fine if they aren’t the only debate education available, but often they are. The only exception I can think of is Stoneman Douglas High School where all the students received their instruction through an imbedded debate curriculum. After the mass shooting it became clear that these students were well prepared to engage the public in argumentation.
I don’t think debate teaches much except how to skirt rules and policies, how to mirror an appropriate discourse when everyone is in on the game, how to sound like you care about something other than winning (eristic style), and perhaps the answer to Herbert Marcuse’s Great Refusal: I’m happy to play a game when I’ve seen the dice loaded because I have practice in dice loading.
Excellent debating and winning tournament rounds reifies the importance and certainty of the tournament. It doesn’t question the tournament’s existence or bring attention to what’s outside of the tournament round. Something that did that would lose every time, as it would undercut the root of the pleasure those who administrate and judge tournaments feel. It would call out their symptom. And as Lacan tells us, we will kill to preserve our symptom.
