Ross K. Smith

2003 - Mental Health Policies: Escape from Bedlam?

(Words interspersed with minutes of silent writhing gesticulation). "Moan. Tear Hair. White Rabbit. Bre'er? Go ask Alice. Is there malice? Mal? Malady? Melody to some, dissonance to me. Oh my. Meeow."

Well? What do you ask in cross-ex? What do you say in the 1NC? Here you are confronted with the "performance" affirmative.

This only somewhat (if at all) exaggerated situation is a "hot topic" (for those of you who prefer your dissent commodified) in contemporary debate theory. To understand how to deal with it, it will help to understand a little of the history that brought us to this juncture.

The nutshell version of the history is that kritiks include language kritiks. Language kritiks focus on how an argument is presented. The crudest example would be if someone used a racial slur to try to make their point. The language kritik would argue that even if the point being made was valid, expressing it in those terms is so objectionable a to warrant rejecting either the argument or the team. (Most people go all the way to the latter - why not try for the "voting issue?"

As kritiks gained popularity the distinction between language kritiks and other kinds of kritiks (of assumptions made by a team/argument) became blurred. The argument was frequently heard that "language shapes reality" or "form is substance." This kind of claim was then coupled with the argument that "you cannot sever" so as to make the indictment of form or language the one "prior" issue. So, a run of the mill kritik like the "myth of mental illness" that seems to simply say that one of the affirmative harm claim is incorrect, became transformed into an argument that their "performance" should be rejected because it is flawed or, worse, repugnant. Teams on either side, affirmative or negative, sometimes lost because their opponent won this line of argument.

Well, if you can win because the opponent's performance is flawed, why not take the next step and argue you should win because your performance is good? Further, why not say you should win as long as your performance is better, even if the opponent's performance is not bad? After all if the form/substance distinction is false and the team that does "the better debating" should win, then why shouldn't we start out with a question of form?

The answer, I suggest, is that debate has a subject matter and a form of its own that distinguishes it from other activities. Part of the form (format) is the resolution. Another part is the notion of clash. A third is the fact that the judge is asked to answer a yes/no question. The absence of ties, double losses or double wins is a feature of the competitive activity that forces choice. I will argue that, taken together, these features of our activity make it difficult to justify merely rewarding better performance.

Before we get to that conclusion, however. Two things need to be clarified. First, what is performance? Good question. Performance is frequently a self-serving concept emplyed by the team advocating a performative perspective. I suppose that anything you do is part of your performance. Speaking, gesturing, singing, dancing, and taking prep are all part of performance, as is clothing. The better question might be, "Which aspects of performance are most important?"

And that leads us to the second clarification. I am not arguing, and do not know how anyone could, that performance is not an important part of debate. If you can prove your point by singing, dancing or miming then more power to you. Defenders of performance argue we should not exclude creative and alternative means of expression. I agree. We could hardly require monotonic speaking. Performance cannot be excised from debate. The question simply is, what is its role?

The problem arises when performance is said to be the focus of the debate. We are familiar with plan focus. Plan focus means that the judge is trying to answer the yes/no question of whether the plan is desirable vis a vis competing policy options. We are familiar with resolution focus. Resolution focus means that the judge is trying to answer the yes/no question of whether the resolution is a true statement. Even traditional topicality asks a simple yes/no question: does the plan take action of the kind described by the resolution?

These yes/no questions are reflected in the names we give to the teams: affirmative (yes) and negative (no). There is two-sided clash over these questions. They fit our format and our understanding of what debate is. And we have criteria for deciding these questions. Net benefits tells us how to decide plan desirability (which, when the resolution is a policy resolution is also the case for resolution focus). We can argue over competing interpretations on topicality.

But the first, and still unresolved, major problem with performance focus is that there do not seem to be criteria for deciding how performances compete with one another. They certainly do not compete in the same sense plans and counterplans do. Even if you can say one performance is better than another, why reject either if both are to some extent good?

Permutations take care of this problem for counterplans, but there is no simple analogue for performances. Any attempt to analogize is, in fact, a nightmare. Teams try to "PIC" the other team's performance, saying we support every bit of your performance except for this one part. Is the one part a word? A gesture? What criteria are there for a fair performance PIC?

Beyond competitiveness, there is a basic lack of criteria for even deciding what aspect of performance is best. How much weight do you give to the part of a performance that showed the plan is good? Do you use a point scale? Ten points for gestures, five for reasoning, six for vocabulary?

Performance advocates will say that these questions should be decided in the debate according to arguments made by the debaters. Well, first, that is a cop out in a theory discussion. My question is what kinds of arguments might be made on the subject? To date, there is not a satisfactory answer. Second, this approach pushes the debate onto a ground that is far removed from the topic. While we are spending half of our time talking about how to judge a pair of original oratories and the rest of our time delivering them, when are we debating about mental health care?

To this question the performers will say, "Oh, but the performance must be germane to the resolution." Germane, relevant, or some other substitute for topical. Which brings us to the second damning indictment of the performative affirmative: they are unpredictable. As the negative, you should be prepared to say that the federal government should not increase public health services for mental health care. But to be expected to oppose any performance that is in any way related to the resolution is a far greater task. First, there do not appear to be any real limits to things "germane" to the resolution. It includes the word, "should." So anything normative is fair game? Government. Mental. Care. There is not a novel, a song, nor a poem written that is not somehow germane. Second, there is no stable thing to oppose. It is ludicrous to say you can oppose one of the words your opponent chose. But what does it mean to oppose "the whole" of their performance? Do not all of the speeches count? If so, then there is not a stable focus of the debate and the last speaker wins. If not, then which parts and speeches count for what?

The third, and final, indictment I will mention here is somewhat more esoteric but is most important. And that is that debate is a unique activity. Debate is the one activity we have in our educational system that teaches argumentative clash. Argumentative clash requires advocates to separate the wheat from the chaff of all that is said on a subject. Debate accomplishes this by having a question that is answered in the affirmative by the affirmative. Arguments that do not address that question are dismissed. Advocates are required to explain how their arguments support or refute the question. Saying "my performance was good" does not come close. There are individual events. There is music. Drama. Sculpture. All of these are activities where people perform. These activities have educated critics who can judge efforts of the performers. In debate we have debate judges who are very good at educating about one kind of performance: debate.

Debate cannot be all things to all people any more than sculpture can. Some say we should not "silence voices" of those who want to do things differently, but surely they do not mean that we should reward people no matter what they say or do. And if not, then we're right back where we started. Again, I am not saying one should not be allowed to say or do anything in particular as long as it makes an argument that speaks to the focus (plan or resolution) of the debate. Nor am I arguing we should only have policy resolutions. But as long as we do have policy resolutions, then the question of the debate is a policy question. The question is interesting, controversial, and challenging. Those who do not engage it should lose to those who do.