The Sailors meet the Avant Garde

I thought it might be a good idea to notch up the level of discourse at last night’s meeting, so I put together a short take on Critical Theory. Curiously enough, after an hour and a half of rather serious discussion, we never actually got as far as CT. Interesting.

The VCA knows my feelings about all of this. I’m a little dubious about the real value of debating this complicated material, as it doesn’t necessarily lend itself to any meaningful conclusions even though its inherent goal is action. To me, it’s just that a debate round is never really a conduit to action. Using a debate round to attain political results is roughly the same as using a meat loaf to tune a piano. It’s just the wrong tool for the job.

Still, the material has its fascination. I wouldn’t have written Caveman if that weren’t the case. The initial material we teach debaters is the ethical constructs of the 18th century, and how they’ve played out since. They are easy concepts to understand, at least at their base level, if you happen to be a young high school student. Consequentialism vs. deontology, utilitarian calculus (from Mill to Singer), justice, the dialectic—solid bones to build a framework for understanding the practical aspects of philosophy. The modernist concepts, however, are not so easy to understand. If we’re looking to discover, say, racism in a text, the idea that we look to the text for what it doesn’t say requires, first, an innate understanding of text qua text, and then asks that we make a satori-like jump into the non-visible subtext. This requires that we first cover a lot of background, other than just saying that it’s so, if someone is really going to understand it.

We never got to any of this, but we’ll go back and continue next week. We got seriously hung up on issues of racism and sexism in their own lives, without even getting into serious issues of racism and sexism. Meh expressed well the disempowerment that girls feel, however subconsciously, of attending debate tournaments that are 60/40 male female. That is such a good starting point for understanding power as an idea, which is absolutely required if you want to understand empowerment and Foucault and, eventually, biopower (the particular subject that I wanted to teach that got me started down this path in the first place). (Speaking of which, I went online and found a bunch of so-called biopower evidence, and it was the biggest pile of unintelligible nonsense I’ve ever seen. As I say, debating this stuff in rounds is, at best, superficial.)

This is, of course, the fun part of the job. If I can get them to do some of this reading and thinking during the off-season, I’ll have been successful.