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IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DEBATE ROUND
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IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DEBATE ROUNDThere is a dangerous tendency for Lincoln Douglas and Policy debaters who seek to use the works of Derrida in the debate round. That tendency is to reduce Derrida's philosophies into radical subjectivist nihilism. These debaters may argue that because Derrida demonstrates that the meanings of words are dependent on contexts that all words have no meanings whatsoever. They may argue that all meaning depends on one's subjective viewpoint, and is hence indecipherable. They may claim that because there is no such thing as the "Truth," the judge cannot affirm the resolution. The problem with this sort of argument is that, of course, if there is no truth or meaning, the judge can neither affirm nor deny the resolution, hence, the debate cannot be decided. This sort of application of "deconstruction" to the debate round also relies on a poor reading of Derrida's texts. Deconstruction is not nihilistic, rather, it is precisely attuned to meanings. Recognizing that texts do not have one true meaning and interpretation does not abolish the concepts of meaning and interpretation altogether. Deconstruction carefully traces the meanings of a text, including the what the text literally says, as well as how the text goes about saying it, what it conspicuously leaves out, and what possible unintended meanings can emerge when we stop worrying about what the author, or framer of the resolution intended and examine also plays of language and context. Deconstruction also deconstructs itself. A deconstructive reading is double: it is aware of what it itself brings to a text. Debaters should be aware of what they bring to the debate. When I say text here, I do not mean to confine Derrida's analyses to the written word. Rather, consider a text to be a broad term that can imply institutions, laws, cultures, and practices. Deconstruction authorizes alternative readings of dominant institutions and practices of power. As such, it is potentially politically subversive. Deconstruction can give license to such practices as critical race theory, critical legal studies, and feminist analysis; practices that analyze "how" a text, a law, or a practice may marginalize racial, gendered, and sexual others, even though (or because) it doesn't mention them. Deconstruction can also be a way to re-examine the idea of what counts as “evidence.” Can performance, play, poetry, and paradox constitute ways to affirm and negate resolutions just as values and criteria? Do these playful forms count as well as the doctrines of philosophers and quotes and evidence from experts? Deconstruction may be an original and compelling way for debaters to affirm or negate a resolution. For example, take the resolution "The right of the individual to immigrate out be valued above the nation's right to limit immigration." A traditional affirmation of this resolution would probably lead one towards the value of "justice" and the criteria of political philosophers, like John Rawls, for example, whose "Difference Principle" provides the moral grounding upon which to argue that everyone, regardless of their social status, ought be guaranteed the same opportunities, including choice in immigration. A traditional negation might utilize the criteria of libertarians who argue that the same value, "justice," is best guaranteed by protecting the freedom of individuals to earn money without competition from immigrants. Instead, how might a deconstructive negation of this resolution proceed? This negation could be based on questioning the dichotomies that the language of the resolution is premised on, for example, the question of "immigration" itself is based on the initial divisions between individual/nation, citizen/alien, and inside/outside. Derrida's deconstruction provides tools for questioning the naturalness of such divisions. In Dissemination, Derrida explores the nature of divisions and exclusions and the philosophical/interpretive tradition of privileging what is present as opposed to what is absent, suspended, or displaced. Immigrants are an excellent example of this practice manifested in political discourse. Derrida argues that the hegemonic role of logic is to "keep the outside out." However, the problem arises that "this elimination, being therapeutic in nature, must call upon the very thing it is expelling, the very surplus it is putting out. The pharmaceutical operation must therefore exclude itself from itself." 66. Exclusions must call upon the thing that they exclude. In excluding the other, on whom they rely for self-constitution, they remove their own possibility. For there to be such a thing as a "citizen," there must also be "non-citizens," immigrants, aliens, and others, or the word "citizen" would have no meaning at all, it wouldn't make sense. Derrida's philosophy invites us to ask, how is the citizen constituted by the immigrant, and vice versa? How is the nation constituted by the individual, and vice versa? Derrida examines the Greek word "pharmakos" which means both "evil" and "outside."67 The pharmakos was a scapegoat in rituals to rid the city or the body of "what is the vilest in itself."68 The pharmakoi were also men put to death in an annual Athenian ritual of sexual purification. The ritual was necessary as the way the "city's body proper reconstitutes its unity, closes around the security of its inner courts, gives back to itself the word that links it with itself within the confines of the agora, by violently excluding from its territory the representative of an external threat or aggression."69 These external threats are also internal. They have broken into the sanctity of the city. The scapegoats were most often "degraded and useless beings" of Athens. Not only was it necessary for Athens to cleanse the city of these threats for the city to reconstitute itself in security. It is also necessary for humanity to "keep the outside out." Derrida explains, "By this double and complementary rejection it delimits itself in relation to what is not yet known and what transcends the known: it takes the proper measure of the human in opposition on one side to the divine and heroic, on the other to the bestial and monstrous."70 Deconstructive readings of contemporary discourse on the "immigrant" will find references to these people as "dirty," "bestial," "lazy," poor workers who must be kept out in order to keep the "nation" and economy clean and free. The sacrifice of the pharmakos is a type of tracing "played out on the boundary line between inside and outside." It is a way for the nation to "trace and retrace" the line between inside and outside. The nation's self constitution depends on the exclusion of these inside outsiders. These pharmakos are beneficial in the role they serve in cleansing the city, but also harmful as evil outsiders. Derrida writes that these contradictions undo themselves in the "passage to decision or crisis."71 In a footnote Derrida quotes Frye, who says that the pharmakos, like immigrants, are "neither innocent nor guilty."72 Must the human community always retrace its lines by excluding others? If deconstruction's project is break through and examine the sorts of oppositions (inside/outside) that require the sacrifice of scapegoats, what political possibilities are opened up? Derrida's project is "in going beyond the bounds of that lexicon." A lexicon is the way we understand our language. Derrida wants to go beyond the ways we traditionally understand language, as including and excluding. In doing this "we are less interested in breaking through certain limits, with or without cause, than in putting in doubt the right to posit such limits in the first place."73 If we put in doubt the rights of the affirmative to posit the difference between the citizen and the immigrant, we have negated the resolution in an exciting and untraditional way. We have called into question the right of the affirmative to make these distinctions, and we have located the source of oppression and inequality not in the "nation's right to limit immigration" as the affirmative would have it, but rather, in the very terms of the resolution itself. This may be why Derrida says that "Deconstruction is justice" and it is one of many possibilities that deconstruction has to offer Lincoln-Douglas debate.74 Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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