Lost convictions

Abstract

This paper takes as its point of departure the ethical problematization of debating both sides – having students argue both affirmative and negative on a debate resolution – in order to highlight the role of communication as a cultural technology of liberalism. It argues that debating both sides contributed to the cultural governance of cold war liberalism by separating speech from conviction to cultivate the value of debate as a method of democratic decision-making. The valorization of free and full expression as a pre-requisite for ‘decision by debate’ prepared the ground for dis-articulating debate from cold war liberalism and re-articulating it as a game of freedom that contributes to the moral education of liberal citizens. In so doing, debate becomes a global technology of liberalism creating exceptional subjects by circulating the communicative norms of deliberative democracy.

Keywords:

• conviction
• free speech
• cold war
• debate
• American exceptionalism
• deliberative democracy

Acknowledgments

Portions of this paper were presented at: the Eleventh Speech Communication Association/American Forensic Association Conference on Argumentation, Alta, UT, August 1999; The Conjunctures Cultural Studies Workshop, Tampa, FL, March 2001; The Fifth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, Amsterdam Netherlands, June 2002; and the International Debate Education Association Conference/03, Dubrovnik, Croatia, October 2003. The authors wish to thank the participants who commented on the paper and the anonymous reviewers associated with this journal for their feedback.

Notes

Reference to ethical self-fashioning as an aesthetic dimension of debate education gestures toward our Foucauldian commitment to a ‘the aesthetics of existence’ see Foucault (1984), Greenblatt (1980) and Battaglia (1995).

For a more detailed justification for emphasizing the technical dimension of culture as opposed to its linguistic dimensions, see Bennett (2004).

Much of the work on the relationship between governance and communication takes as its point of departure the interrogation of textualist protocols and/or an investigation into communication industries and media (Hunter 1988, Bennett 1990, Miller 1993, Miller 1998, Greene 1998, Packer 2002). In this paper, we are more interested in how the inter-actional and embodied elements of communication are transformed into a cultural technology.

See Hicks and Langsdorf (1999) for an assessment of how deliberative theories of democracy elide the technical interventions necessary for governing citizens discursively.

According to Nichols (1926) the very existence of speech departments in the US was due to the desire to hire coaches to run debate and oratory contests. As the travel schedule grew, the competition between colleges intensified and administrators began equating academic excellence with success in debate, and public speaking teachers were hired to run debate and oratory contests. The birth and growing influence of the national forensics organizations Delta Sigma Rho in 1906 and Pi Kappa Delta in 1908, along with the ensuing centralization of debate topics and formats, constituted a second major transformation concomitant with the rise of tournament debating. Intercollegiate debate became a burgeoning business marked by a flood of argumentation and debate manuals and professionally run camps and festivals. A third and closely related change in debate practice was the loss of the large and partisan audiences that had attended debates for the previous 130 years. With the advent of its professionalization, the debate tournament became a relatively isolated event as the lone expert judge replaced the public audience. Hence, the standards of judging debates shifted from the ability to persuade an audience to the rightness of one's beliefs to the ability to present an effective case, a case that demonstrated a sound knowledge of argumentation and could withstand attacks on the assigned proposition.

It is difficult for us to provide a demographic profile of a ‘typical’ debater at the West Point tournament. The 1954–1955 tournament was won by a team from the University of Alabama (a large co-educational state supported school that excluded black folks in the 1950s). They defeated a team from Wilkes College, a small co-educational private school in Pennsylvania (Windes & Kruger 2004). Debate teams of the period, as they do today, tend to have more men than women. A more comprehensive history of the period would include the role of debate at historically black colleges in the US and a discussion of the status of historically black colleges in relation to the regional distribution of invitations to the National Debate Tournament. This essay is primarily concerned with ‘tournament debating’ as an extra-curricular activity. Further research is needed on debate as a course of study, as an extra-curricular activity, and as a classroom activity in all types of educational venues. For a recent example of work discussing the value of contemporary US high school debate within the context of adolescent culture, see Fine (2001).

For a discussion of the role of argument in light of the modern domains of truth, see Habermas (1984, 1979a).

This sentence draws on the original insight of Louis Althusser (1971) concerning the ritual dimension of ideology and the materiality of interpellation. Recently, Judith Butler (1997) has commented on the interaction between Althusser's appropriation of Pascal and the embodied relation between performance and belief (p. 25, p. 155). Our point is that, for Day, debating both sides becomes a ritual that instantiates a belief in the authority of debate by ‘citing’ the norm of free and full expression in and through a live action spoken performance.

On the idea of abstraction, a process by which speech is separated from the particularities of the body that speaks, see Warner's Letters of the Republic (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990).

See also Hovland et al. (1949).

Schlesinger (1949). For a brief discussion of the masculinist and heteronormative tone of Schlesinger's defence of cold war liberalism, see Alpers (2003, pp. 279–80).

See Burns (1954) and Baird (1955).

For a review of the problems and possibilities of deliberative democracy and discursive theories of citizenship, see Hicks (2002).

For the explicit link between the moral theory associated with Kohlberg and his critics and deliberative democracy, see Habermas (1979b) and Benhabib (1992). For a more recent explication of how argumentation theory and pedagogy might contribute to building a deliberative democracy, see William Rehg (2002). It is worth noting that Rehg worries that ‘the competitive ethos of debate … could work against the co-operation required for democratic deliberation’ (2002, p. 24).