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Cites

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	1	+Difference is not negative, outlining the boundaries of striated space. Instead, it is anarchic, permeating every aspect of life and death to create meaning. Only this explains the creation of the new. Your logic traps us in the logic of being, we gesture towards becoming.
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	3	+Colebrook 02. Claire. Understanding Deleuze. Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen and Unwin, 2002. Print. AKB
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	5	+The key challenge of Deleuze’s thought lies in its acceptance of the problem of both genesis and structure. On the one hand, against Hegel, We have to recognise the positivity of difference. There is no origin (such as consciousness) that must negate the world in order to think the world, for consciousness itself must already be differentiated. Difference is therefore not grounded on anything other than itself. It is only through difference that we can think of any origin, including consciousness. On the other hand, Deleuze will not accept that there just ‘is’ a structure of differences. He insists on thinking the genesis or emergence of difference: how is it that we have a system of differentiated signs, such as a language? How did we come to think of ourselves as differentiated from the world, as subjects? Deleuze insists that we have to confront this problem by thinking difference positively. Only positive difference can explain the emergence of any differentiated thing, whether that be the system of differences of a language or the differentiated human individual. Thinking difference positively is no easy task, However, for it is the very nature of thought, as common sense, says to accept a world of already given identities and to subordinate difference to the relations among those identities. Positive difference must therefore destroy the pacifying and stabilising intellect of common sense; it must allow thought to move beyond a logic of fixed terms. For Deleuze, positive difference is not so much a theory or proposition as it is an eternal challenge. We tend to perceive the world as already differentiated; we do not, for example, perceive the differential genetic powers that produce organisms. At any time that we try to think of the difference that produces distinct terms, we tend to label it, identify it and subordinate it once again to common sense and representation.
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	7	+THE SOCIAL CONTRACT WAS NEVER SIGNED. Instead, the state operates by capture, defining legality and then putting itself before the law, always already removed from culpability. That creates the fundamental tautology in which the state guarantees its own existence and operation, becoming the judge, jury, and executioner, but also the bible upon which we pledge our beliefs. The 1AC’s acceptance and affirmation of the law sustains this domination.
	8	+
	9	+Toscano 05. Alberto. “Capture”. The Deleuze Dictionary. P43-45. 2005. AKB.
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	11	+The concept of capture is used by Deleuze and Guattari to deal with two problems of relationality: (1) how to conceive of the connection betweenthe state, the war machine and capitalism within a universal history of political life; (2) how to formulate a non-representational account of the interaction between different beings and their territories adequate to a thinking of becoming. In the first instance, Capture defines the operation whereby the state (or Urstaat) binds or ‘encasts’ the war machine, thereby turning it into an object that can be made to work for the state, bolstering it and expanding its sovereignty. Apparatuses of capture constitute the machinic processes specific to state societies. They can be conceived as primarily a matter of signs. Whence the figure of The One-Eyed emperor who binds and fixes signs, complemented by a One-Armed priest or jurist who codifies these signs in treaties, contracts and laws. Capture constitutes a control of signs, accompanying the other paradigmatic dimension of the state, the control of tools. The principal ontological and methodological issue related to this conception of capture has to do with the type of relation between capture and the captured (namely in the case of the war machine as the privileged correlate of the apparatus). Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of universal history evades any explanation in terms of strict causality or chronological sequence. It turns instead to notions drawn from catastrophe theory and the sciences of complexity to revive The Hegelian intuition that the state has always been there – not as an idea or a concept, but as a threshold endowed with a kind of virtual efficacy, even when the state as a complex of institutions and as a system of control is not yet actual.¶ The logic of capture is such that What is captured is both presupposed and generated by the act of capture, at once appropriated and produced. Deleuze and Guattari return to many of the key notions in the Marxian critique of political economy to affirm the thesis of a constructive character of capture, arguing, for instance, that surplus labour can be understood to engender labour proper (though it can also be understood as the attempt to block or manipulate a constitutive flight from labour). Capture is thus an introjection and determination of an outside as well as the engendering of the outside qua outside of the apparatus. It is in this regard that capture is made to correspond to the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation, interpreted as a kind of originary violence imposed by the state to prepare for the functioning of capital. Deleuze and Guattari are very sensitive here to the juridical aspects of the question, such that State capture defines a domain of ‘legitimate’ violence, inasmuch as it always involves the affirmation of a right to capture. In its intimate link with the notion of machinic enslavement, the apparatus of capture belongs both to the initial imperial figure of the state and to full-blown global or axiomatic capitalism, rather than to the intermediary stage represented by the bourgeois nation-state and its forms of disciplinary subjectivation.¶ The notion of capture can also be accorded a different inflection, associated with the privileging of ethological models of intelligibility within a philosophy of immanence. Here the emphasis is no longer on the expropriation and appropriation of an outside by an instance of control, but on the process of convergence and assemblage between heterogeneous series, on the emergence of blocs of becoming, as in the case of the wasp and the orchid. What we have here is properly speaking a double capture or intercapture, an encounter that transforms the disparate entities that enter into a joint becoming. In Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka, such a process is related to a renewal of the theory of relation, and specifically to a recon- sideration of the status of mimesis, now reframed as a type of symbiosis.¶ Under the heading of capture we thus encounter two opposite but entangled actions, both of which can be regarded as schemata alternative to a dominant hylemorphic mode of explaining relation: the first, under- stood as the political control of signs, translates a coexistence of becomings (as manifested by the war machine) into a historical succession, making the state pass from an attractor which virtually impinges upon non-state actors to an institutional and temporal reality; the second defines a coexist- ence and articulation of becomings in terms of the assemblage of heteroge- neous entities and the formation of territories. What is paramount in both instances is the affirmation of the event-bound and transformative charac- ter of relationality (or interaction), such that capture, whether understood as control or assemblage, is always an ontologically constructive operation and can never be reduced to models of unilateral causation.
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	13	+The 1AC’s over-determination of valid activism as legal – the constitution, the USFG, public colleges, legal discussion, etc – erases the state from the frame of criticism and protest ineffective. Sit and discuss, never challenge.
	14	+
	15	+Svirsky 10. Marcelo G. “Introduction: beyond the royal science of politics”. Deleuze Studies Volume 4: 2010 supplement 1-6. AKB 3’s Michigan.
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	17	+Anxieties over democracy in the post-war era, reinvigorated by philosophical Nostalgia for the modern icons of civic engagement – including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and James Madison – resulted in a flourishing industry of academic writing on political participation, especially in the English-speaking world and particularly in the field of political science. Almond and Verba’s legendary The Civic Culture (1963) and Carole Pateman’s Participation and Democratic Theory (1970), together with Robert Dahl’s and Seymor Martin Lipset’s works on democratic theory, are just a few of the most prominent names and different works that have become the pillars of a very influential clergy, which has helped circumscribed contemporary understandings of politics. The paradigm introduced by such thinkers (and supported more effervescently by republicans than by liberals) did not seek to replace or challenge the privileged political form that is ‘representative democracy’; rather, it assumed that ‘mass participation is the lifeblood of representative democracy’ (Norris 2002: 5), and identified elitism as that which impedes the reinvigoration of democratic regimes (see Schumpeter 1950). As a sequel to this colossal effort, researchers on political activism have has anchored the concept firmly within official politics through the invention of a statistical science of voting fluctuations, participation in party politics and other formal indicators; only lately has this school of thought devoted any critical attention to the evident limits and barriers of formal political participation (see Norris 2002). Other trends in political theory have derided the efficacy of activism by forcing the concept into a reductive alignment with merely habitual social habits, thereby making the future of political life dependent on banalities such as ‘bowling together’ (cf. Putnam 2000). By default, Such developments in political theory tend to categorise the informal protests of the citizenry as the most radical of activist practices. Ultimately, the tides and modes of civic engagement (or disengagement) are seen as symptomatic of either the flourishing or the declining state of an existent ‘democratic spirit’, which is invariably celebrated per se, leaving no room for significant criticism of the nature of the ‘democracy’ supposedly animating that ‘spirit’. As Deleuze and Guattari have explained, this characteristic ‘royal’ science of politics ‘continually appropriates the contents of vague or nomad science’ – those forms of political investigation looking ‘to understand both the repression it encounters and the interaction ‘ “containing” it’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367–8). One major task of new activist war machines is, then, to escape entrapment within the black hole of the majoritarian discourse on civil society, captured and defined by pervasive notions of ‘representative participation’. Although the ‘NGOisation’ of the public sphere since the 1980s (see Yacobi 2007), together with other forms of political proliferation, have broadened the visible political field, The potential of non-institutional forms of action has been weakened ideologically by a whole state apparatus comprised of research centres and budgets, instrumental teaching, and a parliamentary politics that has incorporated the discourse of civil society – all of which have effected a sectorisation of society and political life. The epistemological aspirations of the three ‘ideal circles’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367) of the state, economy and civil society are commonly used to categorise political eruptions as forms of participation in the official, representative state politics. It is in This light that we must interpret the failure of academia to come to terms with the division of labour lately being imposed by the transversal relations between intellectual investigation and political situatedness embodied in militant research. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, ‘we know of the problems States have always had with journey-men’s associations or compagnonnages, the nomadic or itinerant bodies . . . ’ (368). It is clear that a Jamesonian ‘strategy of containment’ is at work in the narrative tradition of royal political science. It is in the notion of ‘representative participation’ that a function of formal unity or a strategy of containment has been founded, which, as Jameson puts it, ‘allows what can be thought to seem internally coherent in its own terms, while repressing the unthinkable . . . which lies beyond its boundaries’ (Jameson 1981: 38). By tying official politics together with every form of political participation it can ensnare, what royal political science does is ‘radically impoverishes . . . the data of one narrative line’ – namely, that of the new activisms – ‘by their rewriting according to the paradigm of another narrative . . . ’ – namely, that of representative participatory politics (Jameson 1981: 22). The subversive power of political potentia is thus contained by this reductive strategy; civil society becomes the main territory of this imprisonment, assisted by a false equation of official participation with challenging politics. Rather than problematising The political, This royal understanding of activism uses its ‘metric power’ to axiomatise politics, while simultaneously repressing activist experiences that refuse simply to align with ‘the given’ of formal politics. An example of this can be seen in the hostility of western states towards Organisations such as ‘Wikileaks’ or the ‘Animal rights movement’, each of which are immersed in creative acts of citizenship that actualise ruptures. Such new scenes and acts are constantly at risk of being appropriated by this royal science of politics, which imposes upon them a model that channels civic participation according to established rules and concepts. Activisms that seek only to guarantee the workings of representative democracy are essentially Slave activisms; they dwell in safety and their impact and potential is expected to be absorbed without drawing the system into new structures of resonance. The assumption that ‘mass participation is the lifeblood of representative democracy’ not only imposes a particular model of the political, it also reinforces a pejorative way to conceive activism. By Positing representative democracy (or any other regime) as the reified model of political process, theory necessarily idealises certain forms of involvement over others. For example, classical participatory theory is often blind to the creative significance of the activist energies being unfolded in such events as critical teaching in schools, revolutionary philosophical writing, the deconstructive effect of a critical assemblage that confronts patriarchal power, or of civic homosexuality which disrupts heterosexism. In fact, the assumptions underlying ‘representative’ participation are troublesome for at least two reasons. Firstly, Participation in the formal political process of ‘representative democracy’ does not in itself necessarily implicate a critical attitude or action, seeking a less repressive and more creative life. To evidence this, it is enough to keep in mind some fearful recent examples of mass political support for ‘representative’ state violence, as occurred last May when thousands of Israelis marched in Tel Aviv and the streets of Jerusalem to back the killing by the Israeli Defence Forces of nine activists from the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and 4 Marcelo Svirsky Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, as they boarded the Mavi Marmara ship sailing to Gaza as part of a humanitarian flotilla. Similarly, We might remain mindful of other, no less electrifying, cases of popular support for wars and genocides in South America, Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa, or of events such as the Holocaust. In these instances, mass Participation more accurately falls within the Reichian analysis of a popular ‘desire for fascism’ – which lies worlds away from a participatory liberalism that idealises the commitment of the public to activist citizenship (see Isin 2009) and to the tolerant ‘good life’ that western democracy claims to represent. Secondly, passivity is not necessarily a sign of political anaemia, but may be a cultural expression that requires local explanation. Here, Research at times confuses the visible with the political: absence of visible mass participation might be a sign of unconscious and pre-conscious compliance with ongoing forms of oppression, and can impact more energetically on the perpetuation of a regime than can tangible acts of the body – these modes of active abandonment produce the reign of daily microfascisms.
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	19	+ This model of royal politics – both in the state and activism – renders all subjects passive and generalized under the thumb of the law, classifiable within the grid of the constitution and the cell of the jail. We might change these categories, but their logic remains the same.
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	21	+Lefebvre 05. Alexandre. A New Image of Law: Deleuze and Jurisprudence. 2005. AKB.
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	23	+II. Critique of the Dogmatic Image of Law¶ I term the “Dogmatic image of law” a collection of four interrelated characteristics – false repetition, distributive difference, state-centered, and abstract – that together form a figure that prevents the appearance of authentic difference and repetition. It is, therefore, not inconsiderable that Difference and Repetition opens with, and is organized by, a critique of law, and that this critique is systematically extended in A Thousand Plateaus. In what follows I present four critiques of the dogmatic image of law and its replacement by extra-legal terms that put true difference and true repetition to rights.¶ 1. Singular ‡ Particular (critique of false repetition).¶ A law is a set of constant relations, its most basic operation consists in determining a resemblance of the subjects it rules vis-à-vis terms it designates.10 The formulation of a law requires the extraction of constants, or what amounts to the same thing, a determination of variables belonging to another law. Fundamental for Deleuze is that Law compels singularities to change: they pass from being singularities to particulars. Instead of possessing their own singular differences in combination with other singularities, law transforms the singular into a particular exemplification of a general law in relation to other particulars that also exemplify laws. This conversion to particularity precludes true differential repetition of singularities: “As an empty form of difference, an invariable form of variation, a law compels its subjects to illustrate it only at the cost of their own change.”11¶ This concept of law prevents consideration of the singular and its difference. It is dogmatic for two reasons. First, singularities are made to resemble one another as particulars subsumed by an identical law. Second, laws themselves stand in fixed relation to other laws, rendering change as calculable repetition. The singularity is arraigned by a law which changes it in kind; it discovers that its intimate legal subjectivity is in fact an expression of a law and its powerlessness is simply its objective legal form: “a subject of law experiences its own powerlessness to repeat and discovers that this powerlessness is already contained in the object, reflected in the permanent object wherein it sees itself condemned.”12 The legal form imprisons the singularity in constituting it as a regular legal particular; in so doing, law separates the singular from what it can do. creative and strictly unforeseeable powers are substituted for the legal form of generality/particularity.¶ For these reasons, authentic repetition denounces the relationship of the law to its particular in favor of the differential repetition of the singular. Repetition is extra-legality itself, everywhere it puts law into question: “Repetition is against the law: against the similar form and the equivalent content of law. If repetition can be found, even in nature, it is in the name of a power which affirms itself against the law, which works underneath laws, perhaps superior to laws.”13 Moreover, as Deleuze will later argue in Difference and Repetition, genetic positive repetition of singularities gives rise to the legal order, an order which then obfuscates the true genesis of singularities by representing these as legal particularities. My point is not to comprehensively sketch authentic repetition for Deleuze, but simply note that it is conveyed in adamantly anti-legal formulations.¶ 2. Distributive Difference (critique of judgment)¶ The critique of distributive difference in Difference and Repetition is a critique of Aristotelian specific and generic difference. The most perfect type of difference for Aristotle is “specific” difference, found between species sharing a genus. Within the genus, difference is univocal: the many different species are said in one and the same sense as their genus. Genera are able to bear differences while remaining substantially the same, “they remain the same in themselves while becoming other in the differences which divide them.”14 This is not the case with generic difference. Here, differences between genera are equivocal; their differences are too large to enter into relations of specific contrariety and cannot be gathered into a covering identity.15¶ For Deleuze, this schema of specific/generic is a timid conception that forfeits the true nature of difference. At once, true universality is lost in equivocity and true singularity vanishes in favor of resemblances between specific differences.16 This concept of difference has significant consequences for judgment. Generic difference is equivocal and as such is not collective but distributive. A list of categories (broadest divisions) comes to represent being and establishes a “sedentary distribution, which divides or shares out that which is distributed in order to give ‘each’ their fixed share.”17 Here, Judgment divides and proportions the concept into the terms of which it is affirmed; it distributes Being into categorical differences and proceeds to subsume specific differences under these categories. This activity preserves identity within judgment, it “allows the identity of the concept to subsist.”18 Categorical judgment allocates to each being a space in Being, it divides up a territory into particular domains ordered by divisions of generic and specific differences.¶ Judgment thus prevents any apparition of internal difference, or differences between things of the same kind (either between existents or within the existent itself). Judgment is a twofold operation based upon commonsense (the equivocal partition of the various categories and their coordination) and good sense (accurate empirical distribution into categories); these two values “constitute the measure la juste mesure or ‘justice’ as a value of judgment.” 19 Underlying judgment is the presupposition of existing categories that can adequately portion difference; it is precisely this presupposition that assures that judgment “can neither apprehend what is new in an existent being, nor even sense the creation of a mode of existence.”20 If judgment apprehends a discrete “new” being, the schema will be redrawn with finer distinctions, but the form of judgment and distributive difference remains obviously intact. Echoing Artaud, Deleuze therefore recommends “to have done with judg- ment,” to abandon distributive difference in favor of a nomadic nomos.21 Such a smooth space occurs when differences distribute themselves (and not according to an ordering plan) into an open space that overturns the totality of judgment. Here, beings go to the limit and threshold of their power and in so doing transform and differentiate themselves. Laws of good sense and common sense are overturned in the rejection of judgment occasioned by the nomadic nomos.
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	25	+Instead, we affirm the queer suicide bomber, an explosion of the self/other dialect to create new potential for meaning. We affirm a reading of the unreadable, a playing with the taboo, becoming before, through, and after the law.
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	27	+Puar 7. Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. 2007.
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	29	+The fact that we approach suicide bombing with such trepidation, in contrast to how we approach the violence of colonial domination, indicates the symbolic violence that shapes our understanding of what constitutes ethically and politically illegitimate violence. - Ghassan Hage, "'Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm'" Ghassan Hage wonders "why it is that Suicide bombing cannot be talked about without being condemned first," noting that without an unequivocal condemnation, one is a "morally suspicious person" because "only un- qualified condemnation will do." He asserts. "There is a clear political risk in trying to explain suicide bombings."33 With such risks in mind, my desire here is to momentarily suspend this dilemma by combining an analysis of these representational stakes with a reading of the forces of affect, of the body, of matter. In pondering the modalities of this kind of terrorist, one notes a pastiche of oddities: a body machined together through metal and flesh, an assemblage of the organic and the inorganic; a death not of the Self nor of the Other, but both simultaneously, and, perhaps more accurately, a death scene that obliterates the Hegelian self/other dialectic altogether. Self-annihilation is the ultimate form of resistance, and ironically, it acts as self-preservation, the preservation of symbolic self enabled through the "highest cultural capital" of martyrdom, a giving of life to the future of political struggles-not at all a sign of "disinterest in living a meaningful life." As Hage notes, in this limited but nonetheless trenchant economy of meaning, Suicide bombers are "a sign of life" emanating from the violent conditions of life's impossibility, the "impossibility of making a life. "" This body forces a reconciliation of opposites through their inevitable collapse- a perverse habitation of contradiction. Achille Mbembe's and brilliant meditation on necropolitics notes that the historical basis of sovereignty that is reliant upon a notion of (western) political rationality begs for a more accurate framing: that of life and death, the subjugation of life to the power of death. Mbembe attends not only to the representational but also to the informational productivity of the (Palestinian) suicide bomber. Pointing to the becomings of a suicide bomber, a corporeal experiential of "ballistics," he asks, "What place is given to life, death, and the human body (especially the wounded or slain body)?" Assemblage here points to the inability to clearly delineate a temporal, spatial, energetic, or molecular distinction between a discrete biological body and technology; the entities, particles, and elements come together, flow, break apart, interface, skim off each other, are never stable, but are defined through their continual interface, not as objects meeting but as multiplicities emerging from interactions. The dynamite strapped onto the body of a suicide bomber is not merely an appendage or prosthetic; the intimacy of weapon with body reorients the assumed spatial integrity (coherence and concreteness) and individuality of the body that is the mandate of intersectional identities: instead we have the body-weapon. The ontology of the body renders it a newly becoming body: The candidate for martyrdom transforms his or her body into a mask that hides the soon-to-be-detonated weapon. Unlike the tank or the missile that is clearly visible, the weapon carried in the shape of the body is invisible. Thus concealed, it forms part of the body. It is so intimately part of the body that at the time of its detonation it annihilates the body of its bearer, who carries with it the bodies of others when it does not reduce them to pieces. The body does not simply conceal a weapon. The body is transformed into a weapon, not in a metaphorical sense but in a truly ballistic sense.,1 Temporal narratives of progression are upturned as death and becoming fuse into one: as one's body dies, one's body becomes the mask, the weapon, the suicide bomber. Not only does the ballistic body come into being without the aid of visual cues marking its transformation, it also "carries with it the bodies of others." Its own penetrative energy sends shards of metal and torn flesh spinning off into the ether. The body-weapon does not play as metaphor, nor in the realm of meaning and epistemology, but forces us ontologically anew to ask: What kinds of information does the ballistic body impart? These bodies, being in the midst of becoming, blur the insides and the outsides, infecting transformation through sensation, echoing knowledge via reverberation and vibration. The echo is a queer temporality-in the relay of affective information between and amid beings, the sequence of reflection, repetition, resound, and return (but with a difference, as in mimicry)-and brings forth waves of the future breaking into the present. Gayatri Spivak, prescient in drawing our attention to the multivalent tex- tuality of suicide in "Can the Subaltern Speak," reminds us in her latest ruminations that suicide terrorism is a modality of expression and communication for the subaltern (there is the radiation of heat, the stench of burning flesh, the impact of metal upon structures and the ground, the splattering of blood, body parts, skin): Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning, for both self and other. For you die with me for the same cause, no matter which side you are on. Because no matter who you are, there are no designated killees in suicide bombing. No matter what side you are on, because I cannot talk to you, you won't respond to me, with the implication that there is no dishonor in such shared and innocent death. 36 We have the proposal that there are no sides, and that the sides are forever shifting, crumpling, and multiplying, disappearing and reappearing, unable to satisfactorily delineate between here and there. The spatial collapse of sides is due to the queer temporal interruption of the suicide bomber, projectiles spewing every which way. As a queer assemblage- distinct from the queering of an entity or identity-race and sexuality are denaturalized through the impermanence, the transience of the suicide bomber, the fleeting identity replayed backward through its dissolution. This dissolution of self into others and other into self not only effaces the absolute mark of self and others in the war on terror, but produces a systemic challenge to the entire order of Manichaean rationality that organizes the rubric of good versus evil. Delivering "a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through," suicide bombers do not transcend or claim the rational nor accept the demarcation of the irrational. Rather, they foreground the flawed temporal, spatial, and ontological pre- sumptions upon which such distinctions flourish. Organic and inorganic, flesh and machine, these wind up as important as (and perhaps as threatening) if not more so than the symbolism of the bomber and his or her defense or condemnation. Figure 24 is the November/December 2004 cover of a magazine called Jest: Humor for the Irreverent, distributed for free in Brooklyn (see also jest .com) and published by a group of counterculture artists and writers. Here we have the full force of the mistaken identity conundrum: the distinctive silhouette, indeed the profile, harking to the visible by literally blacking it out, of the turbaned Amritdhari Sikh male (Le., turban and unshorn beard that signals baptized Sikhs), rendered (mistakenly?) as a (Muslim) suicide bomber, replete with dynamite through the vibrant pulsations of an iPod ad. Fully modern, animated through technologies of sound and explosives, this body does not operate solely or even primarily on the level of metaphor. Once again, to borrow from Mbembe, it is truly a ballistic body. Contagion, infection, and transmission reign, not meaning.
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	31	+Framing (?)
	32	+The role of the judge is to be a polyvocal educator, endorsing methodologies that affirm the multiplicity of voices within the debate space and our pedagogical exploration. That’s key to accessing or even understanding the kinds of questions and values we can get from the activity.
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	34	+Koh and Niemi 15. Ben, Rebar. How Do I Reach These Kids?: An Affirmation of Polyvocal Debate. NSDUpdate. September 15, 2015. AKB.
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	36	+For as long as there has been debate, there has been the debate about what debate is. We are not against a discussion of what constitutes debate. In fact we are absolutely for it. We argue that this is a crucial debate within debates. The question should not be “what is debate?” The proper question is “what can debate do?” The constitutive feature of debate that we are most abstractly interested in is the precise one that is so often banished by debate pundits – the possibilities of what it can do. We do not yet know what debate can do. All are welcome to accept the challenge of forcing debate into a linear and instrumental framework, but be warned it will certainly fail. Debate is a process and a field, not a mechanism. This is the case for polyvocal debate. Our current definition (which is open to redefinition) is that debate should be thought of as a complex assemblage of voices (the debaters, the judge, audiences, coaches, the authors quoted, and so on), and that it is wrong to limit the possible voices or the possible enunciations of those voices. Debate is always about multiple voices – multiple ways of sensing/expressing. Even non-sense and non-expression have their own voices. This is not a paradigm. It is a hypothesis about the system of relations that co-creates debate. The power and potential of polyvocal debate is not located in some far-off future. It is right here right now, and it is also capable of contact with the outsides of one perspective on time and space. To paraphrase June Tyson – Don’t you know? It’s after the end of the world. Within the system of relations composed by polyvocal debate, we always have the ability to ask “should we believe in something in the first place?” as well as “if we believe it, what are its normative implications?” These questions, in whatever form they take, are some of the most primal elements of debate. Restricting the scope of debate to only some of these questions is a serious loss. More absurd is the justification for restriction based on the value of being able to ask and engage with these questions in the first place. It is wrong to assume that chaos and doubt are bad. It is even worse to argue for a progressive fallacy that chaos and doubt can be removed from debate without debate ceasing to be debate at all. Debate is not soccer, or chess, or playing the trumpet. Perhaps it can do similar things to those activities, but if so it is because it does not feature the limits that define soccer or chess or playing the trumpet. It is apparently very easy to make assumptions about what education is. Most often this is accomplished without citing a single theorist on the subject of education OR a robust understanding of what education could be outside of “commonsensical” assumptions (which are less common and relatable that they initially seem). As we often like to tell our students – read the literature. We call the kind of education that is often assumed “banking-style education” after Paulo Friere. This is the notion that education is about accumulating knowledge. 100 facts are better than 99 facts. People devalue education because they think of it only in these calculated terms. To the banking conception, the end game of education would not be an increase in self-respect, a commitment to social justice, or a development of communication and empathetic powers. It would be the resume statement of “things I’ve learned.” We must not buy into this conception of education. In debate, the Collaborative way voices intertwine and builds a world of speech and frames it. No debate performance can be perfectly reproduced. The judge’s interpretation and voice are then added. The desire for absolutely objective or procedurally exact judging is a desire for an impossibility. We should not be afraid of the judge’s voice. We recognize it as one among many. Some judges speak loudly and have particular desires. We do not begrudge them this. What is important is that they acknowledge that theirs is only one voice among the many and one way of sensing among all sense and nonsense. It is not a question of excluding the chaos or even controlling it, but understanding the value in hearing the clash of multiple voices. For Nowhere else in school are we given the vibrant opportunity to be as real in the academic space as is in debate; where we are able to read multiple arguments from multiple views from multiple bases. We must encourage debate to be an outlet for the chaotic and doubtful elements of our beliefs for it’s an opportunity to bridge debate’s separation from the real world into our own world. Our lives aren’t always smooth unwavering stories. They are often a chaos that is hard to grasp outside the lens of community. Polyvocal debate is inclusive and encouraging of this chaos, of the hard questions and life changing moments of realization. A form of debate that acts as if it can omit doubt is not a true form of debate at all. This isn’t just an argument for “unique educational value” in the banking-sense. Debate should not be thought of as an esoteric extracurricular designed to spice up the resume. Paradigms of debate that stop at the moment of rational justification treat the issue of what world we create for ourselves as an unnecessary step, but this conversation is what must happen in our lives and further what must happen in debate. Polyvocal debate allows for this discussion. We should not just ask “is deontology true” but further “is it good for me to believe in deontology” or util or contractarianism, etc. Rationality cannot be trusted to judge itself, but abandoning logic altogether isn’t necessary just yet. It is too easy to take up one side or the other (only truth matters or only the good matters). Debate is harder. The tenets of logic and justification can create questionable conclusions, and a truly valuable form of debate must allow us to criticize and reevaluate these conclusions to live our lives to the fullest. We must be able to ask if beliefs empower or disempower our lives. We always have the power to ask should we believe it or is it correct, and exercising this capacity is the practice of debate. There are two ways in which we can understand and consider what we ought to believe – what is rationally justifiable, and what is good for us to believe for ourselves. In our lives we cannot just ask “what do I think is true.” We must always end up asking “is it good for me to believe in what I believe?” This is how we must act in our own lives outside of just the debate space. When we are faced with a difficult situation be it in our personal lives, work, etc., we are inevitably going to be confronted with moments of seemingly undeniable hopelessness; where despite our best efforts and our thinking, we cannot justify or rationally see a way to be happy or push ourselves through to the other side. Is it good for me to believe that no matter what I will do, that I will get a bad grade in this class? Is it good for me to believe that I will fail in my work? Is it good for me to believe in hopelessness? Our answer is no. Our answer is that Debate helps you learn new questions as well as new answers. Again and again we’ve heard the articles and arguments that collapse everything to the Old questions: education versus fairness, the rules versus innovation and expansion, correct ways of being versus incorrect ones. Bizarrely there are some who like to play with the same questions forever, perpetually flipping bits between one and zero, never writing new code. We are tired of these questions. Perhaps they would be enlivened by new voices. Polyvocality is the necessary and explosive generation of new questions. The practice of debate is an educational activity because it is generative and interrogative of voices. Use it for what it’s used for. Education can be praxis – where the abstraction of theory becomes lived abstractness inside the fabric of everyday experience. Where a radical new way of thinking-feeling the world become possible. Where you don’t just learn about quantum physics, but cry at how beautiful the expression of quantum interactions can be and feel blessed to be a part of them, and then teach them to your friends and family. But this is only part of what education is. Education is a becoming that is necessarily political. Often times it is anti-reactionary or anti-conservative, not because it includes some biased political position, but because it is impossible to actually experience learning without it changing you – what you think is right and wrong, what you want to do, and who you think of yourself as. On our view, this makes education necessarily anti-fascist (where fascism is defined as the tendency to over-represent and prefer certain ways of being to others based on normative, intuitive, or ontological claims). No matter your petty political affiliations, too many people in our world must attempt escape everyday, live as targets, suffer, and experience domination. If education is not a force to help us address this, it is not a properly empathetic education. Even if the educational space of debate allows for slightly more opportunities to escape the everyday and find new connections and places to dwell, this is a greater benefit to everyone than any obedience to respectability politics, norms of conduct, or “correct ways of being” could ever achieve. This is how the world works. We should not abandon the cause of empathy just because we can have that elsewhere. It’s not as if we should not care about others at certain times because we do so in others Debate is foundationally about empathy. Arguments are only persuasive in the ability for their to be foster a shared experience of understanding. Judges vote for arguments that have a particular effect on them – the effect of “being convincing.” Arguments that win send the judge on a path of becoming-convinced. In order for this to happen, the debater must actually get through to the judge on some level, whether intuitively, emotively, via rhetoric, the flow, or explanation. The best debating promotes empathy. Not empathy defined by biased terms – empathy defined by actual contact with actual others, perspectives, and ways of expressing oneself. It is not that young people are in need of moral training or must be told what is right and wrong or that debate should erase and conquer disagreement. Rather, it is that we should strive to learn to live with disagreement. For it is too simple and brute to believe in a monovocal system of thought – that your language is the only Rosetta Stone to translate the world through. Debate must be a place to see how to live with ourselves and live among others. If being the better debater means being the worse person, we should NOT endorse this conception of better debating. There is no value to improving a debate related skillset that is not bracketed by being caring and affirming of the world. The argument against education, methodology, and performance debates is that these will somehow sacrifice an essential part of what makes debate debate. This perspective is entirely wrongheaded. What a polyvocal understanding of debate underscores is that what makes debate is multiple voices. Our belief is that it is possible to promote incredible skill, learning, and growth in students and be better debaters while at the same time being better people. Debate is a field where participants of all kinds create real experiences and real change. Students have the ability to speak their individual truths and have real academic and personal conversation about what creates, sustains, and restricts their worlds – and If the current “rules of debate” do not allow for that, we advocate breaking those rules.

EntryDate

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	1	+2017-02-04 15:53:27.722

Judge

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	1	+Dinooooo

Opponent

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	1	+Marcus ST

ParentRound

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	1	+53

Round

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	1	+4

Team

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	1	+North Crowley Reed Neg

Title

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	1	+Deluze Vol 1

Tournament

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	1	+Collyville