The New York Sophist

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Part 2 of an undefined series

If policy debate’s technical aspects are what we need not to clarify debating or make debating better, but perhaps as a springboard or even a foil – “These rules are in the way!” Then the intercollegiate debating team is absolutely something we are going to have to dispense with.

I’m ready for your hate-mail, always ready for the bad interpreters of my work that I “hate debate” from people simply confirming they are barely literate, so here’s a qualification: The contemporary policy debate team is in an SAT analogy relationship with the future of American intercollegiate or collegiate debating.

Literary Society: The Writing Center

Intercollegiate Debate Team: “The Future”

If you know the history of the top relationship – really know the history of how composition departments were formed, how literature departments and literary criticism came out of that within the trajectory of American education, you’ll notice that intercollegiate debate – policy debate – does not have that same direction. So what goes in that second slot – what’s the future?

Whatever it is, massive changes are needed to what counts as debate today: A small group of students meeting in a private room somewhere on campus, after hours, honing a very narrow set of practices or skills that can be applied at tournaments to win tournaments is no longer of any value. Instead, this operation should be stretched to cover and consider the entire university in which it is housed.

The shift from Literary Society to Writing Center is a massive shift in discourse, that arrangement of symbols that constitutes the location of meaning, subjectivity, and agency. We have moved from clubs that are selective of their membership to a place where anyone from the campus community can go for assistance on their writing (or as I would call them, rhetoric centers, but branding is very important if you expect to be funded).

The Literary Society was little more than a school club, ignored by faculty and considered extra-curricular. The Writing Center has convinced nearly all faculty that they are teachers of writing, and all faculty that writing is a measure (if not the measure) of successful education. This is not subject-verb agreement or grammar, or genetive case constructions of words that end in ‘s’ (something I still can’t get right). It is confidence, interest, and concern for the act and the result of writing. In short, the writing center attitude is one of constituting desire to and for writing.

We can understand the ideal of the writing center discourse by taking a look at Lacan’s Discourse of the Analyst:

In this discourse, the other is approached to encourage desire to access hidden, deep knowledge, but it never arrives. The other is hystericized rhetorically, presenting uncertainty to the agent in hopes they will reveal the knowledge they clearly have. This knowledge never arrives. All that appears is more interest, more desire in questioning the agent. The result of this is the generation of master signifiers, the terms that order our world and constitute things like values, meanings, and knowlege. They are the terms that allow for epistemology – perhaps ontic terms – but that might be a bit of a stretch.

Nevertheless, the result is a good one – “mastery itself” – one can organize phenomena on “one’s own terms” quite literally, crafting and creating terms for one’s own process. This is the dream of the Writing Center, and why writing center pedagogy and peer consultants are encouraged not to correct grammar or awkward constructions, but instead ask what the writer means by constructing ideas in this way. This hystericizes the writer, they want to know what they should do to “get it right.” This is a submissive desire, a desire to be interpolated and understood through the extant epistemic systems. The consultant, the writing teacher, stays silent, or asks them about their voice, their feelings – something percieved as “irrelevant” to the central question – is this good writing?

The campus debate team is not this, is nowhere near this. The intercollegiate debate team is understood and understands itself through the ultra-conservative operation of subjugation to extant arrangements of knowledge. There is nothing revolutionary here. What we do get though in more pedagogically-centered debate ‘programs’ (the word is so telling) is something that helps us discover the order of knowledge and participate in it without the power or desire to reconstitute it.

The contemporary college debate team can be understood through Lacan’s Discourse of the University:

The relationship of knowledge is vastly different in this discourse. Knowledge is open and available, and it’s a self-organizing system that wants you to take part in it. “Anyone can be a debater” is an equivalent to “Everyone should be a debater.” We want all students to master critical thinking (but note where the master is in this relationship). There is no master; there is only knowledge that wants you to partake in it. The other is in the position of desire, this knowledge clearly is for you, and wants you as a part of it.

The master is hidden. This knowledge is not self-organizing; this knowledge is not neutral. There is an organizing “master” – an ideology, a set of master terms that are not the creation or even owned by the debaters. These terms cannot be revealed for they are locked away under the narrative that the knowledge of debate is self-organizing, a set of neutral principles to be revealed through study and experience.

A great example of this discourse in debate is Bo Seo’s 2022 book Good Arguments. In this memoir that occasionally offers some history of rhetoric, political debate analysis, and advice for daily arguments, debate remains a constant that reveals the truth about argumentation. The sense one gets from this book is that debate is the knowledge of how to argue properly. That is, debate reveals the truth about argument, how it works, it’s principles, in a relevatory way through thinking about one’s debate experiences when one is confronted with argumentative situations. The book is an interesting read no doubt, but what is set up is the desire for the reader to “become a debater” i.e. fold themselves into the self-organizing knowledge of debating to become a part of it.

The result of this discourse is the “split subject” or in this case we could say the person who thinks twice before they speak. Perhaps a good result. The initial result of the University Discourse could be seen as the uncertain subject. That is, someone who has desires and drives, but isn’t completely sure what to do or how to govern these feelings. This might be partially related to the idea that university education creates semi-furbished replacement parts for society; finding a place to fit in might be the result of such a process. In the case of Seo’s book, the result is someone who can recognize and understand when someone arguing or debating is a “bad actor,” violating the “rules” of debating. But then what?

There is no ownership and no understanding of the organizing forces behind the knowledge presented to us in this discourse form. It makes the student, the curious figure in the position of the other its target to fold into “correct” understanding – an understanding that has no illicit motive at all. It is simply pure knowledge. But where goes agency, where goes our ability to shape the symbolic order in this discourse? The point of it is not to create anew, but to maintain.

In the next post I’ll discuss the other two Lacanian discourses and their relationship to debate as I try to figure out who policy debate is for. It seems that what I want is a practice for a revolutionary experience for students, one where they take ownership of what they know and resort it when needed. The Writing Center (perhaps the idealized Writing Center) is my model for this for now.

Possibly a Multi-Part Series?

I’ve picked up a moonlighting gig (probably shouldn’t announce that but too late) teaching a course titled “Argumentation and Debate.” Perhaps the formal title is really “Argumentation & Debate” like “PB & Jelly” as most people believe these words have much less distinction than those two substances, often using them interchangeably even though they are scholars.

I’ve been thinking about this gig, and I would like to teach the class using policy debate, that weird, esoteric, tiny American mode of debate that not so strangely hasn’t really caught on anywhere in the world with the exception of Japan. I remember attending the Debate and Education (sorry I don’t remember the exact name) conference at Penn State and having a great time there – in particular hearing a paper from someone extolling the virtues of teaching policy debate in an undergraduate Argumentation N Debate class (maybe that variant will catch on if I keep using it).

This led me to ask the question, is policy debate really for the general education classroom? Or even a class on argumentation-N-debate? I wasn’t sure because I was immediately blitzed by the begged question, who is policy debate for? Then: who is intercollegiate debate for?

The patriotic, immediate answer that swells from the deepest roots of my being is EVERYONE! It’s for everyone! But that answer is propaganda; I was trained and conditioned well by my experiences. Once we take a look at policy debate practices: Who is doing it, where, and with what sorts of conditions and attitudes we get a lot of evidence that perhaps policy debate is not for “everyone,” the appearance of scare quotes meaning that many times people think they are addressing everyone but they are addressing an elite, a vanguard, that stands in for everyone pretty seamlessly – “I speak to everyone that matters to me.”

I am very curious how to protect/defend/make relevant the undergraduate four year college experience. It’s becoming less and less relevant by the month it seems with the mounting costs, little help from any sector, and the lack of any other relevant rhetoric about the experience other than “What job do you want to do for the next 30 years, O 18 year old?”

Without any other articulation, the experience of diversity and intellectual composting offered by the “core curriculum” will be axed pretty quickly. We see it in West Virgina, and now SUNY Schools are following, cutting the departments that have no clear connection to answering this question, as if it were the only question in the world worth asking. The trouble with college administrators is that it’s never the people smart enough to run the college who take those jobs – they are too busy doing the things smart intellectual people want to do: Teach and Learn (maybe Teach/Learn?), read, and write. Nobody wants to play on Excel all day and go to meetings about strategic plans and reports unless you hate reading or are a bad teacher – or you don’t like teaching. That’s who winds up in the administration. They don’t have the perspective to be able to make such decisions.

This is relevant because there might be a way to save that four-year experience if we stpo thinking about it in terms of credit hours and basic or required courses and start thinking of the university as an experience worthy of the name. You’ll get to take your courses for your major and all that, and you’ll get some sort of document that proves you can do the thing you believe you want to do, but at the same time you will engage in a practice that is foreign – nearly alien, difficult, fun, fast, and wild that uses the resources of the entire campus to sustain it. Perhaps the “core curriculum” should become the “hardcore curriculum” in this way – inquiry as competition, the agon, the struggle to determine what questions are worth fighting for, what questions should be supported and by whom, and what sorts of questions can stand up to the tests of legitimacy, believability, persuasive power, etc?

I feel like policy debate is for first year college students, particularly those who have been told or forced to go to college by well-meaning, short-sighted parents. They will return home with an ability to question, read, and analyze that will feel so cold and unfamiliar coming from their child during fall break, Thanksgiving, Easter, pick the holiday. Restructuring departments around contributing to this first-year experience will be an adjustment, but will also allow faculty in departments that are under the knife, like classics, philosophy, art history, anthropology and the like to become purveyors of the kinds of information, research, and topics that will fuel young people meeting one another and intensely interacting using and being between words and utterances.

This model is very lose but this is where the begged question is taking me tonight as I write this and think about what to do in my course in January. There’s not a lot of time – either for me and my future students or for you and all other future university students – reimagining the university experience rather quickly and rather radically seems like the only way to slow down people who only seem to know where to make the cuts because the university is arranged in a block pattern suitable for easy slices. Blending it all together into an evaluated experience of debating in a very technical and measurable way might be just the solution (or stop gap) we need now. At the minimum the question, “Why do we need to know this?” becomes begged and therefore generative, opening up the possibility for rhetorical invention as the answers can be proven, challenged, questioned, and amended.

A post late in coming. What is a keynote address? What should it be?

Recent experiences at a conference make me think that this practice isn’t one at all. It’s just “give a long time to someone whose work everyone is familiar with or should be.” It’s no different than a conference paper presentation except the person giving it is famous in the field.

Perhaps a keynote should be totally different from a conference paper or panel. Here are some thoughts about what a keynote needs to be in order to be a keynote – that is, something plenary, that opens or anchors a conference, that everyone expects to attend.

1. A Sense of Purpose

   A good keynote address should consistently be arguing for the purpose of the field, organization, or the topic of the conference. We are gathered here to share our ideas because we share a sense of purpose. This need not be the thesis or an established point in the address, but should flow throughout. It should be the undercurrent of the entire presentation. Reinforced and reminding through the talk, it makes sure to invigorate and give some connection to the other things the participants will say, hear, and do throughout the rest of the conference.

2. Double Vision

   A good keynote shows the audience simultaneously where we’ve been and what’s next. This could be thought of either as a more spiritual metaphor – the idea of visions; a harbinger of some kind on the horizon, or the more boring metaphor of the GPS – cold and efficient, telling us what’s ahead and what we need to do as an organization to get there. The point is that there must be a display of the past, present, and the desirable future at once. The speaker who is good at this will be someone who can take easily recognizable moments in organization/field history and connect them with a vision for and of the future where they seem in concert. What appears blurry at the start of the keynote becomes a perfect palimpsest where the letters on the older text below become necessary to the words of the document on top, the one still being written now by the members and participants in the conference.

3. Acknowledgement

   A good keynote will be humble and risk-averse. It will not call attention to the speaker and the speaker’s work, unless that work is established in the keynote as a tipping of the hat to the greats. The opportunity here to give praise to the major work in the field, the big moments of accomplishment and advancement to the field. Of course, one can share one’s insights and work (we’ll get to that) but it’s much more important that this work be seen as a continuation of the accomplishments of the great ones or the great organization – those things everyone can identify. The keynote weaves them together to provide a sense of living history – we are all a part of these accomplishments, but they require maintenance and we cannot stop here. We are appreciative for the basis for future and current work. This is sort of like inheriting a garden.

4. The arc of interesting work

   This is where the speaker can discuss their current or future work, but it should not be presented in a state of completeness. To use a baking metaphor the ingredients, the rising, the oven should be the focus. There should be recognition and discussion of recent work – hopefully from younger members – that is the right way to go and of great interest. There can also be discussion of a perplexing issue – maybe one a few people have tried to study but nothing definite yet, or a giant topic that we should study, that we are obligated to study, but nobody can seem to find the way in (or haven’t noticed it yet). This is less the presentation of research and more the presentation of inquiry, or that excited moment when one recognizes something that can really open up and become interesting in scholarship. This is the part of the keynote that is the rudder and puts the boat on the course the speaker wishes. This can also be done very creatively, making the entire thesis of the keynote this point – a big issue to investigate; a huge controversy; something going on all around us that begs for scholarly attention; and then the speaker can do the rest of the elements as they go through and discuss the various elements at play in the issue.

There are no doubt more things that a good keynote should do, and I’d be interested in seeing what readers think. I would say the ones I’ve listed here are essential – meaning whatever else you do, don’t fail to do these things. If you miss one the keynote evaporates, becoming just another dry conference paper. You can’t have a conference of just presentations – there must be someone, something to remind everyone how valuable and important the work that brings us all together ultimately is. This is never given, it must be created, sustained, and most importantly, communicated to others and must be convincing.

All of my old teachers are dead. This is something that pops into my head once in a while although it isn’t completely, literally true.

Many of my teachers are old or were old when they taught me and are still alive, and there are some I’m sure who have passed. But do old teachers die?

They do and they do not. In order for you to “have been taught,” the teacher must be dead. They have either been killed by the student, or by the teaching, or by some relationship between the three to where the student steps over the body in order to move along.

The teachers who most influence you are stuck in your head as feelings or voices that erupt at moments when you need some kind of inspiration or injunction. I think this is because the moment you face is conceived of in your conscious mind as a problem to solve, yet your unconscious mind – your spirit – recognizes that moment as a moment of instruction; that moment that you thought was a problem is actually your teacher.

I travel in circles where students are often talked about and thought about as a frustrating cluster of problems. I don’t know why you would become a teacher or a professor if you did not want to encounter surprising statements or beliefs from students. They are not there for you. They are not there to reinforce your views on your subject or your approach to the topic of the course. They are there to learn, and presumably they are to learn from you.

This relationship, among these kind of people (who can mostly be found on Reddit in r/professors, a kaleidoscope of horrendous and pathetic discourse) is one of direct relationship. I tell the students what to do, they re-present it back to me, I grade it, they complain about my grading, and the whole time I’m surveilling them because they are all cheaters, stupid, or both. The focus on behavior and discipline – coded in the term respect – is not the role of the teacher or the professor. It comes directly from this narrative, that the professor/teacher is providing something to “lower” people who either don’t deserve it or can’t understand it – and therefore should be grateful to the instructor for the opportunity. I hear this all the time in the discourse of my in-person colleagues but after finding this sub-Reddit I am certain it’s everywhere.

Alternatively, the teacher can be influenced by the not-dead-but-dead teachers in their head crying out to reframe the classroom not as an economic problem or a relationship problem but as an opportunity to learn. They could accept what they feel their students cannot, that this moment is a special privilege and if one is open to the moment and responsive, one can really learn something valuable.

Instead of the classroom as a transactional space, or an exchange of capitalist value (your labor for my intellectual “wealth”) our imagination of that space could be anything that helps us create and craft rather than a stripped-down ritual of obedience and fiat value. Good liberal professors use “contract grading” as a way to be fair, but this is simply palliative care. The point is not to have a peaceful death, or to mitigate the pain of death, but to cut through – to kill the moment, slice through it, and come out of it without needing the teacher.

One of my older metaphors might be a good starting place for those of you who really want to cut through the nonsense and die for your students – the National Park Ranger in the United States. These people are the stewards of the national parks, a source of orientation and information about the park space, and they help visitors find their way around. But when the building, the mountain, the park itself is available they step to the side. They do not interject themselves, demand respect for pointing toward it, or insist that you discuss the moment/event/experience in a particular way. They are there to assist, guide, and help the visitor have a profound, powerful, moving, and learning experience. Just recently I had the chance to hear a Park Ranger discuss The Stonewall Inn and it provided layers of appreciation to what I already knew about the moment and the place. Current popular modes of university teaching would be stretched to assume the students bring in any knowledge with them to the class, most of them seek to avoid knowledge. It’s a very stark contrast in attitude.

Old teachers are dead, and we have moved on from them – however they are not dead, not literally (sometimes they do this) but they are dead to us as teachers and have transformed into someone or something else. But they leave us with a sense we carry forward in our lives, a sense that we could always be in a classroom, we can always be and most often are a student. Getting ready for the semester is preparing your own death as a professor, preparing a situation where the students can gather up the strength and desire to kill you and thereby keep you and them alive in the way that is demanded of pedagogy.