Perfomative Contradictions in policy debate: the limit(lessness) of negative conditionality.

PART 1

Nicholas Fiori – March 2011

I feel comfortable in speculating that the most popular Kritik on the military presence topic has been some iteration of the Security K. Something along the lines of, the drive to securitize/stabilize/control various predicted threat scenarios is a mode of biopolitical control/technological thought/enlightenment rationality that should be rejected in favor of a multifaceted epistemology of the international system, or interrogation of our ontology etc. These type of Kritiks almost invariably argue that the drive to war, or political violence, is driven by the ontology/methodology of security and securitization and that these scenarios of risk, their discursive utterance, produces regimes of truth that make the playing out of those scenarios highly likely. These arguments, presented in the 1NC, often times have alternative texts that advocate the absolute, or at least in the instance of the 1AC rejection of the criticized, logic/discourse. Moreover, this kritik cannot argue that it is the plan action that it disagrees with since most authors writing critically of American foreign policy would advocate a reduction in overseas military presence. Rather, teams that read the security K must argue that it is the representations/methodology/ontology of the affirmative that should be rejected.

Yet, despite this vehement rejection of securitization, on the next flow I often find myself jotting down the outline of some form of the deterrence disadvantage. The disad will argue that only the preservation of the US military deterrent force in the region can prevent some hostile threats to national security from mustering the will to start and all-out war. So in one breath, the negative argues that all forms of securitization should be rejected and then engages in first-rate securitization of their own. The negative is committing the same rhetorical sins of the affirmative and they know it. This is the problem of the performative contradiction, an argument not new to debate by any stretch of the imagination, but one, I think, conditionality theory debate will know that allowing the negative to argue contradictory positions puts the affirmative in the position of making answers to one argument that are links to the other, contradictory, position. When the negative decides that they no longer want to advocate the terrible six party talks counterplan, they can use all the arguments about why international dialogue fails and only changes in military positioning can solve North Korean conflict as realism links to the security K. Moreover, the negative gets the block, which means while the 2ac may have only been able to allocate 2-3 minutes to answer the K, the negative gets 13 minutes to respond.

And certainly there exists a pre-disposition against performative contradictions in debate; only by mistake do negatives read a hegemony good disad and a hegemony bad disad in the same 1NC. But this type of contradiction is less problematic because any reasonably experienced 2AC could exploit the contradiction to their advantage by conceding some arguments and turning others. But with advocacies, by this I mean arguments that would produce a change over the status quo (counterplans, alternatives), it’s more tricky, and when those advocacies exists on conceptually different levels like a counterplan and Kritik, the contradiction seems to take on actual and not just debate practice problems. If it is true, as the negative’s had argued, that it wasn’t the effects of the plan that were the problem, but the rhetoric of the 1AC, then why is it that the negative is allowed to make such utterances but the affirmative cannot? I speak only from my personal experience, but it seems to me that there is a general default among debate judges that this position is perfectly defensible. Why is it so incredibly rare for the aff to be able to win on the argument that the negative links to their own Kritik when, on face, it seems largely unfair?

I don’t think there is any certain way for us to determine exactly where this pre-disposition arose from, but I think that it probably has to do with the general acceptance of negative conditionality (by this I mean having more than one counterplan in the 1NC and advocating just one in the 2NR) that has become predominant over the last decade or so. You can disagree with my timeline for when multiple conditional advocacies gained prominence, and certainly they had their heyday in the 80s as well, but it is hard to deny that the latest resurgence in conditionality combined with the mainstreaming of the Kritik has produced the curious situation of permitting contradictions. Of course, debate did away with the idea of aff conditionality (multiple plans, plan amendments, etc) long ago, largely, even if not explicitly, as a way to counter perceived affirmative side bias. Negative conditionality was another attempt at such balancing, as was the advent of list topics in college and the military presence topic in high school. On a side note, this topic has become highly (at least perceptually) negative biased; I rarely see teams flip affirmative in elimination rounds anymore. And interestingly, what before the season seemed to be a huge topic, has been so narrowed down, that there are hardly more than 6 affirmatives that a nationally competitive team as to prepare for (absent critical affs). This is, of course, the tangible result of how we as a community usually votes in topicality debates throughout the season. From this historical perspective, the acceptability of performative contradictions could be explained as a way of correcting for affirmative side bias, a drive evidenced in a number of contemporary debate norms.

It is possible to argue that performative contradictions are unfair and are a reason to vote affirmative. It is not entirely obvious that the sides need to be more balanced. I think it is relatively easy to make the case that allowing contradictions gives the negative too much ground. And considering the move toward the negative on other practices I mentioned, sides maybe need to be re-balanced back toward the affirmative. More importantly, the theoretical considerations of these contradictions seem to defy the most basic tenant of the kritik: that what is said and how it is said matters as much or more than the tangible outcome of a policy. If it is true that the utterance of the reality of security threats produces them as real in our conscious, shouldn’t the negative also have produced some security truths as well? Particularly when the kritik argues for a representations as opposed to ontological or methodological framework, it is fairly persuasive argue that the contradiction is unfair. I think this stems from a pre-deposition as a critic to see the effect of each side’s utterances as equally reasons to reject. The reality, however, is that this argument is hard to win, except for with some particular critics. This is an unfortunate fact I feel, considering the ‘truth’ of the problem with this contradiction at the philosophical level the affirmative should be able to win more of these debates. The first step to changing this norm is to go for this argument more often and spend more time thinking of arguments you want to make.

I will continue this discussion of negative conditionality with advice on how to both go for performative contradictions bad and how to answer this argument soon.