![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
In response to Kathleen Hall Jamieson's proposed agenda for future Presidential debate research, we recall the troubled relation between debate and conviction, which has fueled disciplinary and public controversy throughout the last century. Following a brief genealogy of three such controversies, we describe four models of debate as a cultural technology for managing the economy of moral conviction: debate as critical deliberation, debate as civic virtue, debate as social justice, and debate as game. We claim that reading Jamieson's proposal in light of these technologies reveals a potentially disturbing fault line: if we fail to distance the aims and methods of Presidential debate research from the game-like status of contemporary electoral politics, her research proposal will be subsumed by the professionalized communication apparatus of managed democracy.
Darrin Hicks would like to thank Jayson Harsin and Josh Hanan for their helpful comments on this essay; Ronald Walter Greene would like to thank his debate coaches, especially Nancy Warwick (Bayside Jr. High) and Paul Spivey Singletary Jr. (Irmo High School).
Darrin Hicks would like to thank Jayson Harsin and Josh Hanan for their helpful comments on this essay; Ronald Walter Greene would like to thank his debate coaches, especially Nancy Warwick (Bayside Jr. High) and Paul Spivey Singletary Jr. (Irmo High School).
Notes
1 Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “The Discipline's Debate Contributions: Then, Now, and Next,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 85–97.
2 Ronald Walter Greene and Darrin Hicks, “Lost Convictions: Debating Both Sides and the Ethical Self-Fashioning of Liberal Subjects” Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2005): 100–126.
3 Theodore Roosevelt, “Chapters of a Possible Autobiography: Boyhood and Youth,” Outlook (February 22, 1913), 407.
4 Roosevelt, “Boyhood and Youth,” 407.
5 Roosevelt, “Boyhood and Youth,” 407.
6 The New Republic, “Editorial Notes” (April 3, 1915), 219.
7 The New Republic, “Editorial Notes,” 219.
8 James M. O'Neill, “A Disconcerted Editor and Others,” Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking 1, no. 1 (1915): 81.
9 O'Neill, “Disconcerted,” 80.
10 O'Neill, “Disconcerted,” 82.
11 Douglas Ehninger, “The Debate about Debating,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 44, no. 2 (1958): 128–36.
12 Ehninger, “Debate about Debating,” 134.
13 Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and The Public Good (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997).
14 Greene and Hicks, “Lost Convictions,” 102–07.
15 “Fearful Colleges Ban Debate on Recognition of Red China,” Harvard Crimson, June 17 1955, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1955/6/17/fearful-colleges-ban-debate-on-recognition/
16 Eric English, Steven Llano, Gordon R. Mitchell, Catherine E. Morrison, John Rief, and Carly Woods, “Debate as a Weapon of Mass Destruction,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 4, no. 2 (2007): 222.
17 James McGregor Burns, “Debates over College Debate,” New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1955, 12.
18 Harvard Crimson, “Fearful Colleges.”
19 Richard Murphy, “The Ethics of Debating Both Sides,” Speech Teacher 6, no. 1 (1957): 1–9.
20 See Greene and Hicks, “Lost Convictions,” 102–107.
21 C. A. Baird, “The College Debater and the Red China Issue,” Central States Speech Journal 6, no. 1 (1955): 5.
22 Dennis Day, “The Ethics of Democratic Debate,” Central States Speech Journal 17, no. 1 (1966): 5–14.
23 Eric Hoffer, True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1951).
24 E. Patrick Johnson advances the concept of “quare” to foreground “the ways in which lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transgendered people of color come to sexual and racialized knowledge” in “‘Quare Studies,’ or (Almost) Everything I learned about Queer Studies I learned from my Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 2. CEDA and NDT form the nexus of “policy” debate in the United States.
25 Jarod Atchison and Edward Panetta, “Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication: Historical Developments and Issues for the Future.” In The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Andrea A. Lunsford (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 328.
26 Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley “Harsh Realities of Acting Black: How African American Policy Debaters Negotiate Representation Through Racial Performance and Style” (Doctoral dissertation, University of Georgia, 2008), 69.
27 A key essay setting the terms of the critique of performance is Ede Warner, Jr, “Go Homers, Makeovers or Takeovers?: A Privilege Analysis of Debate as a Gaming Simulation,” Contemporary Argumentation and Debate 24, no. 1 (2003): 65–80. While not a tremendously active blog, also see http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/ and for a more active community centric blog that takes debate as an object for community activism, see Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle at lbsbaltimore.com.
28 To summarize this debate as a “framework debate” or a debate about debate is a necessary shorthand. The arguments were very nuanced and deserve closer study, but a central element of the debate was whether or not the performative and argumentative assumptions of policy debate require the displacement/erasure of quare bodies. From another angle, the debate was one about which model of debate was more inclusive of the other model of debate. One can access the debate at NDT 2013 Finals—Emporia SW v Northwestern LV, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZrWfDIediU, retrieved August 14, 2014. Emporia State SW defeated Northwestern LV on a 3–2.
29 The Scrapbook, “Decline of Debate,” the Weekly Standard, April 22, 2013, http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/decline-debate_716270.html
30 The Scrapbook, “Decline of Debate.”
31 The Scrapbook, “Decline of Debate.”
32 Jessica Carew Kraft, “Hacking Traditional College Debate's White-Privilege Problem,” The Atlantic, April 16, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/traditional-college-debate-white-privilege/360746/
33 Kraft, “Hacking.”
34 The full passage from the Kraft essay: Critics of the new approach allege that students don't necessarily have to develop high-level research skills or marshal evidence from published scholarship. They also might not need to have the intellectual acuity required for arguing both sides of a resolution. These skills—together with a non-confrontational presentation style—are considered crucial for success in fields like law and business.
35 Adam J. Jackson, “Do Articles about Alternative Debate Reinforce White Supremacy?” Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, http://lbsbaltimore.com/do-articles-about-alternative-debate-reinforce-white-supremacy/
36 Ede Warner, Jr highlights how the critics confuse the role of rules and procedures with the gaming solution. Rules are expected to be invariant in the round, but procedures, of which Warner distinguishes between procedures of substance (topicality) and procedures of style that include “rate of delivery, note taking techniques, what qualifies as evidence, and other technical presentation issues,” are debatable in the round. “Go Homers,” 66.
37 Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, “Ghetto Kids Gone Good: Race, Representation, and Authority in the Scripting of Inner City Youths in the Urban Debate League,” Argumentation and Advocacy 49, no. 1 (2012): 77
38 Reid-Brinkley, “Ghetto Kids Gone Good,” 78.
39 Dayvon Love, “White power and Black Voices: Why We Can't Rely on ‘Good White People,’” Leaders of the Beautiful Struggle, July 22, 2014, http://lbsbaltimore.com/white-power-and-black-voices-why-we-cant-rely-on-good-white-people/
40 Jamieson, “Discipline's Debate Contributions,” 87.
41 Craig R. Hullett, Allan D. Louden, and Ananda Mitra, “Emotion and Political Cognition: A Test of Bipolar, Two-Dimensional, and Discrete Models of Emotion in Predicting Involvement and Learning,” Communication Monographs 70, no. 3 (2003): 250–63.
42 Jamieson, “Discipline's Debate Contributions,” 89.
43 For a discussion of these strategies of capture and control see Jayson Harsin, “Public Argument in the New Media Ecology: Implications of Temporality, Spatiality, and Cognition,” Journal of Argumentation in Context 3, no. 1 (2014): 7–34
44 Jacques Ranciere, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory & Event 5, no. 3 (2001), http://0-muse.jhu.edu.bianca.penlib.du.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3ranciere.html
45 For a discussion of the U.S. State Department's recent investments in exporting debate as a means for secularizing the hermeneutic practices of “Islamic fundamentalists,” see Darrin Hicks and Ronald Walter Greene, “Conscientious Objections: Debating Both Sides and the Cultures of Democracy,” The Function of Argument in Social Contexts, ed. Dennis Gouran (Washington, D.C.: National Communication Association, 2010), 172–79.
46 Jamieson, “Discipline's Debate Contributions,” 92.
47 Jamieson, “Discipline's Debate Contributions,” 92.
48 Jamieson, “Discipline's Debate Contributions,” 92.
49 Roosevelt, “Boyhood and Youth,” 407.
50 Byron Tau, “Obama: I Am Not the President of Black America,” Politico 44: A Living Diary of the Obama Presidency, August 7, 2012, http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/08/obama-im-not-the-president-of-black-america-131351.html
51 Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Barack Obama, the Tea Party, and the Threat of Race: On Racial Neoliberalism and Born Again Racism,” Communication, Culture & Critique 4, no. 1 (2011): 28
52 Jamieson, “Discipline's Debate Contributions,” 92.
53 Mary E. Stuckey, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Presidency and Presidential Rhetoric,” The Review of Communication 10, no. 1 (2010): 39.
54 Josh Isreal, “Two-Party Debates: A Corporate-Funded, Party-Created Commission Decides Who Debates—and Who Stays Home,” The Center for Public Integrity, September 18, 2008, http://www.publicintegrity.org/2008/09/18/3057/two-party-debates
55 Lisa Disch, The Tyranny of the Two-Party System (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002).
56 Greene and Hicks, “Lost Convictions,” 117–19.
57 On communicative democracy, see Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 120–36. It should be noted that Young would not likely support the game conditions of competitive debate. She is critical of argument as a style that displaces other styles of communication.
58 Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010): 49.