Post- Modern Critiques as Stratagems in the Policy Debate Discourse

David J. Glass, M.D. Debate Coach, Edgemont HS Perhaps the most dramatic change in academic policy debate over the last decade has been the introduction of a new class of argument called a “critique” (also spelled “kritik” by those seeking to reference the cultural roots of some versions of the argument). Critiques reference in their myriad examples a range of disparate thinkers, but have coalesced into a similar form, with a particular purpose in a round of competitive Policy Debate. A pervasive subset of Critiques invoke a school of academic discourse known as “Post-Modern Criticism.” There are many different strains of PostModernism, and reviewing them all is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is important that the reader be introduced to the work of at least two authors, Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger, in order to understand these archetypal examples of this new debate position. It is ironic that a more complete appreciation of Foucault and Heidegger, and recourse to the analytical methodology they helped evolve, serves to undermine the unique strategic potential of the post-modern critical discourse, rendered as The Critique, as a constructed tool to gain victory in a round of Policy Debate. Foucault was a historian who sought to increase understanding of certain classical systems of knowledge, through the very rejection of descriptive historical analytical norms such as tradition, continuity, and evolution, insisting that a discourse should be evaluated in the “now”. One might be tempted to view Foucault as a social biologist in disposition; his studies of both sexuality and the scientific method betray his respect for the quantifiable, and his meticulous and vast descriptions of phenomena are reminiscent of the zoologist describing a new species, or an anthropologist a novel culture. However, unlike a traditional scientist, Foucault was a relativist, and relentlessly criticized the idea of objective truth, describing instead relative accepted-truths operating as part of a system of cultural norms. His archeology of history rejected the norms of history (such as an ordering of events in a constructed sense of continuity), demonstrating his methodology of stepping “outside the box” of the intellectual project he is analyzing. However, it is imperative to note that Foucault’s descriptions are not determinative. Foucault writes, in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “My aim is not to transfer to the field of history, and more particularly to the history of knowledge, a structuralist method... My aim is to uncover the principles and consequences of a... transformation that is taking place in the field of historical knowledge.... My aim is most decidedly not to use the categories of cultural totalities in order to impose on history, despite itself, the form of structural analysis. The series described, the limits fixed, the comparisons and correlations made are based not on the old philosophies of history, but are intended to question teleologies and totalizations...” (pg 15)