Your model of debate is not radical but rather feeds the conservative model of debate you criticize

[Stephen M. Llano, Associate Professor in Communications at St. John’s University, 7-3-2022, "Three discourses of American debate (with a glimpse toward a fourth)," Argumentation and Advocacy, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10511431.2022.2136756?scroll=top&needAccess=true,]//owen *gender language modified with strikethrough

In American policy debate the reification of university discourse debating is seen through the disclosure of judging paradigms, which position the judge in relation to the knowledge of arguments. Instead of the debaters appealing to the judge’s convictions, attitudes, or cultural positionality, the debaters appeal to how the judge articulates knowledge on a variety of set argument types that can be offered in the debate. The judge writes up their relation to debate knowledge along the axis of performative argument, speed, procedural argument, evidence, and the like. This helps the debaters fold their speech into ways that can be seen as being appropriate. Since mastery is off the table, neither the judge nor the students participating in the debate can address whether or not this is the right way to know arguments or evaluate them; they are working hard to ensure that what they say fits into the organization of knowledge about debate. The discourse of the hysteric: debate as demand The hysteric’s discourse is one where the agent interrogates the master, asking what it is exactly and precisely they know. “The hysteric goes at the master and demands that he or she[they] show his or her [their] stuff, prove his or her[their] mettle by producing something serious by way of knowledge” (Fink 1997, 133). It is the production of knowledge here that is different than the conformity or relation to knowledge that the discourse of the university creates. Instead, the master, or the master signifier, is squeezed to produce articulation after articulation as to why it should be in charge or in control in the first place. The position of agent is occupied by the barred subject, who addresses the other as the master signifier, asking it for answers. The result of this confrontation is the production of knowledge – both old and new articulations of knowledge that justify the master’s position. What’s in the inaccessible position is desire. The agent gets pleasure from the production of knowledge, however it is impossible for this knowledge to ever satisfy the agent. Bruce Fink writes, “the best teaching discourse is the hysteric’s discourse, which Lacan associates with the best scientific activity. It is not always an easy discourse to sustain for those who do not adopt it spontaneously, nor for those in the publish or perish world of American academia” (Fink 1997, 149). This understanding of the hysteric’s discourse helps understand it as only aimed at the production of articulations of knowledge from mastery. One thinks of the Socratic method, or the teacher asking students to explain why they think a certain way after they have presented the textbook answer to a question in class. The teacher wants more and wants the student to be able to produce more, so keeps asking after them. This mode of debating has been identified by Bartanen and Littlefield as “forensics as play,” a phrase that means several things for them including social benefits and the entertainment that debate became for participants as it became more technical (Bartanen and Littlefield 2014, 211). Turning from society to a self-organizing expertise, this discourse of debate turns away again to the pleasure of the participants. This debate is characterized by intensive pressure on the rules and necessity of debate itself, where the conditions of winning are predicated on the ability of the participants not just to defend their overt position in relation to the debate topic, or their use of logic or reason, but to justify the rules and existence of debate itself. The hysteric’s discourse has crafted a model of debate that can be characterized as autophagic, a special kind of incompatibility “between one rule and the consequences resulting from the very fact that it has been affirmed” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 203). Most contemporary debate practices stem from questioning the use of master signifiers, a use that without the deployment there might not be the ability to debate at all. Autophagy works by “showing the incompatibilities which are brought out by reflection on conditions or consequences of its affirmation” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 205). This tradition of debating is highly localized, bringing the act of debate into question in order to ask why things have to be a particular way. A debate team reads evidence from a social scientific journal, prompting the opposing team to ask them why they favor that form of knowledge – that of published research – to another. The author recalls a debate where one team asked another why they bring so many files in boxes with them into the room if they really do believe their opening claim that they want to “learn and engage in dialogue” instead of try to beat the other team in a contest. In American policy debate during the 1990s to the early 2000s debaters raised such questions only to see if they could find the articulation of these concerns that would become subject to the master signifier of debating (two sides, turn taking, carded evidence, and a winner-take-all decision). In short, the boom of critique arguments in policy debate did not undermine or unseat the norms of policy debating but reinforced them. All “new” forms of knowledge produced by questioning the master signifiers, the ideology, and the organizing principles of debate led to the practices of rapidly reading “cards” – paragraphs copied from published material – about the effectiveness of humor or irony compared to ‘mere’ argument. Debate was made more comfortable for those participants but maintained it’s same organizing principle of authority. In short, all the radical attempts at autophagy are based on the pleasure of the game of trying to see if the other team can produce recognizable signs of mastery – not a new ordering. Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca support this view as well writing that “the argument is quasi-logical, because, in order to make the incompatibility evident, an interpretation must be made of the act by which the opponent opposes a rule” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 204). This means that any autophagic claim depends on interpretation. That is, one must be convincing through establishing a perspective and attitude toward the claim in order to claim it is this kind of incompatibility. This kind of pedagogy can only be conservative in the end. Students learn that no matter how many variations of the articulation of why they can produce, the master is always the end point. Where the creativity in competitive debate lies is finding the articulation of knowledge that is novel in the way that it falls in line with the master signifiers at play. That shocking moment that debaters have where they “learn” is when they reinforce the dominant signs of mastery that organize human and non-human life on earth without much question or critique. As Fink reminds us, “The discourse of the Hysteric remains in thrall to master signifiers (S1) and a system of knowledge/belief (S2) that it has not itself embodied and produced” (Fink 1997, 123). The pleasure from engaging in this kind of debate for playful or social reasons is the generation of varieties of knowledge organized and produced by a master signifier that is never challenged in position, but in justification. That is, the challenge of “why debate?” is offered in order to produce responses that can then be used to continue the debate. Perhaps the entire hysterical model of debating could be seen as autophagic.