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Introduction
Conversations about debate praxis are slowly moving from realm of the ideal to the realm of the material. While certainly valuable, these conversations generally do not include criticism of the influence of sociological structures on argumentative structures. Instead, critics focus on the discursive, rather than the structural, components of exclusion and oppression. Feminist approaches to argumentation, for example, critically analyze patriarchal reasoning, and its resultant discursive norms. When applied to competitive debate, these critiques similarly focus on issues of argument choice and the resultant marginalization of participants in the activity.
Rhetorical approaches to feminist argumentation accept the notion that rhetorical theory is primarily concerned with the public influence of argument and discourse.
However, materialist rhetorical theorists disagree with the foundational assumption that discourse and texts are the primary sites of social struggle. As Celeste Condit Railsback writes,
there are conditions of human material existence which exert semi-universal forces upon human experience, and which therefore exert objective force upon human language structures. For example, the physiological process of starvation, because of the physiological consequence it entails, exerts an objective force upon human language structures which make "food" (or its variants) a positive term, even though both the experience of the reality of starvation and "food" are mediated by the language structure.
Materialist rhetorical critics seek to describe the way the speech act, emanating from a contextualized human body, structures and is structured by larger material institutions. These critics believe that rhetorical materialism is a superior alternative to the discursive determinism, or idealism, of rhetorical scholarship that suggests that arguments and ideas are the main forces of oppression and resistance in society. Such critics are inspired by the apparent structuralism of Lloyd Bitzer's concept of the rhetorical situation, a confluence of history, materiality and text that contextualizes rhetoric.
In encouraging greater attention to the structural and collective components of rhetoric, materialist scholars are allied with Marxist cultural critics such as Terry Eagleton, believing that, however interesting individual acts of heroism (like great speeches) might be, human collectivity is more interesting still. Materialism contains a kind of denial of individual autonomy that one may find disconcerting. Arguments and utterances are seen as institutionally constructed; rhetoric often seems to be nothing more than the reproduction of institutional structures. Criticism, however, seeks to restore some level of autonomy to the speaker(s) by building an awareness of those structural reproductions.
Marxist criticism sees human subjects and discursive practices as occurring in a context of unequally produced and possessed materiality. A Marxist critic therefore examines how discursive strategies reproduce "the imperturbable logic of the commodity" and seeks to achieve "the analytic and critical understanding of relations of dependence, exploitation, and humiliation" by some groups over others. Marxist criticism is concerned with the "extension of the capitalist principle to all spheres of existence."
Similarly, Foucauldian criticism explores how the human subject is shaped by its own semi-conscious complicity in discursive fields of power relations. For Foucault, discourses are a kind of action. Language normalizes particular normative views of the world. "Discourses justify themselves in terms of their rapport with 'true' discourses, while at the same time they conceal their relations to desire and power." Together, Marxist and Foucauldian criticisms examine how individuals are shaped by material institutions through various discursive rituals. Only by realizing how these processes work can some level of autonomy be located; liberation, insofar as it is possible, occurs through praxis, the conscious application of critical theory and concomitant material resistance.
This paper seeks to apply materialist criticism to the pedagogy of academic debate. Although debate enjoys a certain pragmatic autonomy from argumentation theory, many unspoken assumptions are found in debate practice which find their bases in traditional theories of argument fields. I argue that the argumentation theory that serves as a basis for debate praxis is currently a reflection of the capitalist-administrative rhetoric of privilege.
In the first section, I lament the conceptual separation between theories of argument fields as institutions and criticism of the materiality of those institutions. In the second section, I explain how the rhetorical patterns that emerge from the ruling-class institution of policy making are reproduced in contemporary policy debate. The final section concludes the paper with a sketch of the parallel ordering of state and debate, material antecedent and discursive consequent.
Materiality, Power, and Argument Fields
Stephen Toulmin's introduction of argument fields contributed to argumentation theory by suggesting that various institutional collectives use different standards to evaluate claims. Because they have different purposes and values, these collectives have different criteria for truth and desirability. Neither Toulmin, nor other scholars, however, described the material component of fields. Although subsequent scholarship on fields acknowledged that powerful institutions enjoy greater argumentative success than less powerful groups, this scholarship has tended to understate the extent of power inequalities in public argument.
In his frequently cited description of fields, Toulmin constructed a kind of subject-object dichotomy, wherein the subject could move freely from field-object to field-object, from group to group, tooling and re-tooling arguments to render them appropriate to these varying groups.
The trains of reasoning that it is appropriate to use vary from situation to situation. As we move from the lunch counter to the executive conference table, from the science laboratory to the law courts, the "forum" of discussion changes profoundly. The kind of involvement that the participants have with the outcome of the reasoning is entirely different in the different situations and so also will be the ways in which possible outcomes of the argument are tested and judged.
Field variance as an indicator of systems of logic has gone largely uncriticized. The ideal arguer moves quite freely from field to field, locating different kinds of appeals to make to different discursive groups. As Bill Hill and Richard Leeman interpret it, audiences actually apply different criteria of judgment in different fields:
In a general sense, the field is the perspective from which the object of focus is being judged. Thus, Toulmin holds that we will judge a legal argument using standards appropriate to the "field" of law, medical arguments using standards appropriate to the "field" of medicine, diplomatic arguments using standards appropriate to the "field" of diplomacy, and so on.
Similarly, Robert Rowland believes it "seems obvious that arguments vary by field." In these descriptions, institutions are discursive, ideal entities. Their identities are drawn from their vastly differing sets of foundational and functional logics.
The student of argument is therefore instructed to adapt her persuasion to those different audiences and institutions. Thomas Hollihan and Kevin Baaske retain this identity-based construction of fields in their description of field variance. Instead of assuming that one argues from a particular construct, the arguer is idealized as arguing from a perch above all fields, onto various members of different fields.
People belong to a variety of groups, and these memberships may give you some insight into their attitudes and values. Obviously, you can learn something about people if you learn what political party they belong to, if they are religious or not, what church they might attend, what groups they belong to, etc.
The difficulty in establishing field-invariant arguments may contribute to the discouragement of establishing a critical space from which to examine all fields.
In their essay on fields as arenas of discursive struggle, Theodore Prosise, Jordan Mills and Greg Miller question Toulmin's assumption that fields are primarily logical types based on subject matter analogous to academia. Theories inspired by the Toulmin model account for the "internal logic of argumentative utterances" but not the "external organization constraining those utterances." While some scholars have addressed fields as institutionally "organized systems of discourse," there has been little investigation of the material dynamic of those fields. The success of arguments largely depends
on the objective positions agents occupy in a field. The relative status of advocates in a social field determines the probability of an argument becoming accepted. …Authority figures generally have a great deal of symbolic capital recognized in the field as legitimate. Their arguments will carry more social weight.
Likewise, "(l)egitimate discursive practices serve to marginalize those whose symbolic capital does not fit with the linguistic market or field."
While I endorse Prosise, Mills and Miller's conclusion that "(a)rgument is most fundamentally an exercise of social power," I believe critics can and should sketch more direct relationships between material structures and argumentative power. Governments, movements, institutions, and agents succeed not merely by appearing rhetorically powerful, but by using their extradiscursive resources to rhetorically reproduce their power and ideology.
The repetition of particular discursive rituals reinforces normative assumptions behind those rituals and, in turn, strengthens the institutions upon which they are modeled. For Foucault, these normative assumptions are reinscribed upon consciousness through their rhetorical performance. As Ronald Greene states, "(t)he ability of rhetoric to generate a 'publicity effect' implicates the materiality of rhetoric in a process of surveillance." The "surveillance" is a metaphor for the enforcing norms of discourse. Enforcement occurs through the subject's assumption of responsibility for the reproduction of discourse and its concomitant ideology. Foucault writes that the speaker
who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he (sic) makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation which he simultaneously plays both roles: he becomes the principle of his own subjection.
Thus, as Greene puts it, the rhetoric of reasoning is a kind of human technology, critical to the organization of governing institutions and their norms.
As a field, which draws its norms from a more materially powerful field, the debate community generates an argumentation aligned with competing dominant discourses. Dominant classes, over-represented in the state apparatus, utilize media and scholarship to define the terms of social problems, which they then (discursively) proceed to solve. In policy debate, teams rhetorically draw upon dominant class media and scholarship to define problems which, hypothesizing the use of legal and political tools, they then purport to solve.
The similarity between the two is, of course, skewed by the competitive and "utopian" nature of debate. Frequently, debaters propose plans and speculate on outcomes that go against conventional wisdom. Robert Rowland's important prioritization of debatability over "realism" chronicles the cognitive separation of policy debate and conservative conceptions of "the community." But Rowland does not address this as a political separation. Neither he, nor other debate scholars, asks why the "real world" is limited in the way it is. Instead, he is concerned with making debate slightly less bound by realism than the dominant discourse of the policy field upon which it draws. Although "it is important that the debate process have application to the real world," lest it "become a modern version of the second sophistic," Rowland concludes that realism "is logically subordinate to debatability." But the primary purpose of this subordination is pragmatism, not criticism. Rowland writes that
in argumentation it is primarily the pragmatic goals that matter . . . (it) is the means to the end of problem-solving; it has no intrinsic nature aside from fulfilling this pragmatic purpose.
What Rowland, perhaps unconsciously, guards against is the idea that debate can
be critical of the blind spots of policy making. To guard against this, he invokes the very pragmatism that characterizes dominant discourse. Without a more radical notion of the "real world," debate remains uncritical: the aspects of the Second Sophistic Rowland's own analogy warns against.
In policy debate theoretical assumptions guide hundreds upon hundreds of rhetorical and logical gestures in a manner similar to the very specialized, often ritualistic, guiding assumptions of legal practice. Law legitimizes class rule when it successfully mediates political conflicts. It adopts and refines an internal logic whose utilization hides law's external ties to privileged classes. Legal and political discourse provides a mystifying mass of problems and principles, constantly moving "within, and moved by, [law's] relation to the problems posed for it by the social structure." Its chief rhetorical device, however, is also its device of materialization, policy making. "The history of law is the history of this relation as it is mediated by the legal profession, the legislature and the law enforcement agencies."
Marxist legal critic Nicos Pulantzas offers an institutional critique that synthesizes the rhetoric and the materiality of law. Law as declaration organizes consent. Its representative rhetors offer it as the only desirable, material reality available to the oppressed, thereby reproducing this ideology in the consciousness of all actors, administrators and the administrated.
...although law places an important (positive and negative) role in organizing repression, its efficacy is just as great in the devices of creating consent. It materializes the dominant ideology that enters into these devices, even though it does not exhaust the reasons for consent. Through its discursiveness and characteristic texture, law-regulation obscures the politico-economic realities, tolerating structural lacunae and transposing these realities to the political arena by means of a particular mechanism of concealment-inversion...The dominated classes encounter law not only as an occlusive barrier, but also as the reality which assigns the place they must occupy. This place, which is the point of their insertion into the politico-social system, carries with it certain rights as well as duties-obligations, and its investment by the imagination has a real impact on social agents.
Policy debate is certainly an "investment by the imagination" in the field of policy making. The consent to the inevitability of institutional directives serves to socialize the debater into the norms of a class-divided society.
The argumentation skills learned in competitive debate are often touted as tools for eventual critical advocacy in students' post-debate lives. Gordon Mitchell, however, has argued that theories of such empowerment are lacking. Similarly, the advent of the "kritik" or critical analysis in policy debate has been offered as an alternative to pragmatic policy advocacy. However, the very novelty and strength of the "kritik" stems from the accepted normalcy of policy making as the ruling paradigm for evidence-based debate. Both critical analysis and advocacy outside of debate remain at the margins of the activity, a reproduction of the marginalizations of such analysis and advocacy in the larger society.
Critics might blame debate's inability to empower students on its ontological commitment to objective truth, binary oppositions, and rationalism. Again, these are ideas rather than structural realities. The misappropriation of rationality and truth by disproportionately powerful institutions makes the ideas of rationality and truth more convenient targets than are their material antecedents. It is easier for critics to attack the notion of truth itself than to attack the distortion of truth-seeking methods by ruling institutions. Deference to these institutions and their appointed experts is still a central feature of traditional argumentation and debate.
Moreover, reliance on mass media sources, the journals of elitist think tanks, and public relations-manufactured press services all serve to construct a particular possibility of argument in policy debates. The advent of electronic research databases has exacerbated this conservatizing tendency since most of these databases are mainstream in content.
To summarize, I am suggesting that discursive inequalities and marginalized identities are not the only objects of criticism in policy debate. These problems are symptoms of the reproduction of the policy field, a field which, in its institutionalized materiality, produces and contains both inequality and marginalization. The field of policy debate is a ritualized and enhanced reproduction of this larger material institution. Debaters are taught, through pedagogy and reward, drawing from policy literature and traditional (uncritical) notions of governing, to imitate the ruling class. Inequality and marginalization are part of the structure governing such imitation.
Policy, Class and the State
We might view policy debate as a ritualized imitation of ruling-class political discourse with occasional "holes." Critical spaces open up when participants realize that the argumentative field they model is often irrational and unjust. The holes of critical discourse, which can question the field as field, have not yet grown big enough to transform it. Rather than attributing the incompleteness of critical policy discourse to a lack of rhetorical innovation on the part of the participants, it is more accurate to attribute it to the material antecedents of policy debate: a society steeped in technological rationality, replete with inequalities of power, led by a class whose interests include convincing "the people" that self-management is futile or undesirable.
There is, therefore, a parallel ordering: the material ordering of society, wherein the privileged pretend to be removed from the dirty problems of their subjects; and the rhetorical ordering of policy argumentation, where argument fields are treated merely as texts and where competitors cite ruling class discourse while arguing about how to manage the problems below them. Friedrich Engels described the state as a contingent product, which must hide its status as such:
The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it "the reality of the ethical idea," "the image and reality of reason," as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is the product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power seemingly standing above society became necessary for the purpose of moderating the conflict, of keeping it within the bounds of "order"; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it, and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.
I am arguing that the constant referent of the "state" invites the debater to look on the world from "above," from a rhetorical vantage point whose material antecedents are inequality and conflict, and whose desirability is absolutely necessary for its perpetuation.