Constructing the Ethical Limits of Play in Policy Debates

Edmund Zagorin

symploke, Volume 17, Numbers 1-2, 2009, pp. 181-196 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

DOI: 10.1353/sym.2009.0017

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Constructing the
Ethical Limits of Play
in Policy Debates

Edmund Zagorin

We are segmented from all around and in every direction. The human
being is a segmentary animal. Segmentarity is inherent to all the strata
composing us. Dwelling, getting around, working, playing: life is
spatially and socially segmented.
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari (1987)

Games are significantly dependent on the rules and conventions which

define the available options to their participants. However, the abilities of
games to become liberating spaces of play which exceed the limitations of
their specified play-options are equally dependent on the ability of participants to negotiate and challenge the rules within the competitive or creative
telos of the particular game. In this essay, I will examine the way in which
two different understandings of norms govern the activity of policy debate,
a competitive speech activity which makes use of philosophical concepts to
continuously re-frame the possibilities of its participants. The first set of rules
will be presented as intrinsic to the play of the game itself, capable of affirmation or negation by the immediate participants whose success at limiting the
space of play is always situated within in the hands (or mouths) of the debaters arguing for their legitimacy. The second set of rules will be presented as
a universal notion of ethical practice, understood as external to the space of
play and outside of the participants agency to negotiate or define.
This essay will seek to elucidate an understanding of rules-governed
play in policy debate which is always able to overcome the immediacy of its
segmentarity by re-establishing the criteria of relevance, in which the assertion of universalized norms serves to put an end to play and sterilize the
game of critical inquiry and experimentation. In attempting to understand
play as a potentially infinite process of experimentation enabled by a limited
space, we may understand the rules not as sterile components of governance which merely regulate or repress certain types of activity, but rather
as always productive of a contoured play. This co-production of participant
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182 Edmund Zagorin

Ethical Limits of Play in Policy Debates

subjectivity and rules-process may tend towards experimentation and variance or alternately uncritical repetition of appropriately authorized behavior.
Insofar as creative production and adaptation is a valuable pedagogical and
desirable trait for game designers to pursue, hopefully this essay may offer
some insight into the characteristics of rule-sets and their framing which
either enable or preclude such critical growth and mutation.

Limits as the Space of Play

We may choose to understand the entirety of social existence as play.
Insofar as we choose to operate such a concept, we have already acknowledged a distinction between play and games, between rules and limits. Play
is a how; game is a what; rules are defined and ephemeral, as the clich goes,
made to be broken; limits inhere within the very space of play that is simultaneously its enabling condition and the insistence of its finitude. Johan Huizinga,
the Dutch historian of play, went to great pains to characterize homo ludens
as not essentially a player, but rather embodying the fluid characteristics of
playfulness in its movements, writing it was not my object to define the
place of play among all other manifestations of culture, but rather to ascertain
how far culture itself bears the character of play (1950, ix). However, while
Huizingas theory and historical analysis of play may have centered primarily on the homo, we speculative humanists concerned for our own animalisms,
our tendencies to vegetate or mineralize, or for any material to spontaneously humanize without warning may attend to play as a contouring process
without the compulsion of adhering to the metaphysical presumption of our
socially defined humanistic identity roles. As Jane Bennet writes
Our habit of parsing the world into passive matter (it) and vibrant
life (us) is what Jacques Rancire (in another context) called a partition of the sensible. In other words, it limits what we are able to
sense; it places below the threshold of note the active powers of
material formations, such as the way landfills are, as we speak,
generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds of methane.... (2009, 95)

We are inescapably in play, knowingly or unknowingly, whether we are the

player or the played or more frequently uncertainly in the space between
either, surrounded and composed of a material world which becomes
towards us playfully, holding our soft necks in its ferocious fanged jaws
only to leave us with the tender gouge of the playful nip. We may thus be
attuned to the trajectories of the ever-shifting coordinates which compose the
space of play without forgetting that the condition for this space of play are
enabled by its finitude. Just as we are encapsulated by a particular intersection of space and time, within the borders of a particular horizon, a particular
habitude, a particular domicile or vehicle, a particular formula of activity, our

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play is segmented by the limits of our very existence. There will always be
such limits, whether you want to refer to gravity or death as the impassable
threshold, or recognize that the same conditions of finite production inhere
with what Deleuze and Guattari name the abstract machines of our reality,
which direct the flows of matter and energy along variable ranges of possibility. This does not mean that outcomes of these particular processes are
singular, necessary, or inevitable according to some pre-ordained ideological
formula, but merely states that their diversity is partially constituted by their
limited possibilities. Mixing flour and water in a metal bowl cannot produce
a full-grown pterodactyl in only seven minutes flat. While the generative
properties of imaginative faculties may conceive of many identities beyond
the limits of their material productions, the empirical vitality intrinsic to the
manifest variance of reality is necessarily a function of these limits, which
specify and individuate empirical phenomena and conceptual apparatuses
away from the sickeningly homogenous everything=everything false
holism of totalitarian transcendence. In fact, Deleuze and Guattaris instructions for philosophical thought, for populating ones conceptual desert via
experimentation, precisely involves this sort of play constituted through
limited variance, as they write,
Although there is no preformed logical order to becomings and
multiplicities, there are criteria, and the important thing is that
they not be used after the fact, that they be applied in the course
of events, that they be sufficient to guide us through the dangers.
If multiplicities are defined and transformed by the borderline
that determines in each instance their number of dimensions, we
can conceive of the possibilities of laying them out on a plane, the
borderlines succeeding one another, forming a broken line. (1987,
251)

The segmentarity of our daily trajectories through waking, transiting, working, dwelling, and playing, as inter-characterized by one another, form
exactly this broken line of successive bordered multiplicities that differentiate without requiring a notion of linear progression. However, just as
we have distinguished the segmentarity of play generally, we may also find
games as internally constituted by such multiplicitiesspaces of play which
are limited in ways far more negotiable. Games can thus be understood as a
mimicry of empirical segmentarity through the mirroring of inherent limits
through rules and conventions, adding another layer of artificial limits falsely
supposed as internally symmetrical to external limits. Rules and conventions should rather be understood as contingent historical constructions for
which a presumed key element is that they be treated as natural and sacred,
necessary and essential to the functioning of the game and the preservation
of the idealized play contained within it. Yet what happens when certain
rules are understood as breakable, indeed, what of rules which are seldom if
ever enforced? The limits certainly dont disappear, yet they adapt along a

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particular trajectory, according to the understanding of what such a violation

means to involved participants. Frequently, the dispute-resolution process
is incorporated into the strategic motivation of the players within the game
as a space of play, as all defined elements are folded into the motivations of
the defined players. One can see this in many sports where fouling or other
forbidden behavior along with the governing dispute resolution process,
referees and so on, become strategic elements in achieving victory which
both participants know will be available to them at the start of the game,
albeit with the attendant risk of incurring disciplinary intervention.1 Insofar
as the rules succeed in maintaining a relationship between the participants
and allow the game to continue, the rules are individually superfluous to the
space of play yet collectively necessary for the social definition of its limits.

Policy Debate as a Space of Play

Policy debate is a fiercely competitive speech activity where two teams of
two participants argue in front of a judge who then adjudicates one team as
the victor, the other the loser, and assigns all four debaters speaker points
based on individual performance. While policy debate is a global phenomenon practiced in many formats and academic contexts, all of which merit
serious scholarly inquiry, I will focus my attention specifically on nationallevel inter-collegiate policy debate in the U.S. This focus encapsulates not
only a single game but a community of participants which overlaps with and
includes many smaller identity communities. These overlapping communities consist of participants, judges, coaches, administrators, tournament
directors, and all of the other minor agents, components, and machinery
which enable undergraduate competitors, grad student assistants, and
judges, professors, and other non-credentialed professional debate folk to
leave their academic institutions for many weekends a year, oftentimes missing classes and important events, to travel long distances to compete against
one another for days at a time. The policy debate season lasts for the bulk
of the academic school year, and most of the participants have known each
other for years while newcomers quickly become socialized into the norms
and conflicts of the community which surrounds and inter-penetrates the
game which it is devoted to. Community-members become tied together in
part through their shared life style which develops with the intensity of the
competition and depth of research and argument-preparation efforts, which,
as Gordon Mitchell has noted, is no small feat:

1
The section of the essay owes an intellectual debt for many inspiring ideas about the
evolution of games through rule-breaking, specifically using the soccer-rugby example, to a
piece by Ian Johnston Theres Nothing Nietzsche Couldnt Teach Ya About the Raising of the
Wrist (Monty Python) A Lecture in Liberal Studies, May 1999 [available online as of January
2010] http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/introser/nietzs.htm

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A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education estimated that the

level and extent of research required of the average college debater
for each topic is equivalent to the amount of research required for
a Masters Thesis. If you multiplied the number of active college
debaters (approximately 1,000) by that many research hours the
mass work effort spent on exploring, comprehending, and formulating positions around relevant public policy issues is obviously
astounding (Goodman 1993). (1998, 12)

However, it is precisely the communal element of the debate game space

which makes the competition inextricably tied to shared social understandings of argumentative merit, which ground inclusion or exclusion. However,
it is precisely this shared orientation of understanding as an on-going process
which provides the intellectual raw material that provides a reservoir of
concepts and memes to enable adaptation. As Steven Savatorre writes in the
context of theatrical games, this research is crucial to game-development in
varying contexts, and should not be limited within the discrete boundaries of
the object of study by itself:
Players must know that the act of game-playing does not relieve
them of the responsibility of preparing for the projectall of the
game players must make every effort to know and research (in all
senses of that word) the text. Appropriate research begins with
a careful reading of the text itself, but could also include reading
textual criticism, gathering information about the culture of the
texts time period, collecting visual material from or about the
period, and so on. (1999, par. 5)

The grounding of change in debate is thus enabled in the competitive nonlinear dynamics which motivate diverse research topics and select their
success through the possibilities of competitive deployment in many debate
rounds over time. This evolutionary process is always in dialogue with
social expectations about argumentative merit. When competitive victory is
determined from the perspective a particular critic or set of critics, it becomes
impossible to separate the nature of that victory from the social and conceptual practices in which the adjudicatory decision is enmeshed. The extent
to which one can objectively win an argument will always be less than
the extent to which someone can score a goal, the latter being significantly
more difficult to dispute, the former itself a product of a game built out of
disputes.
Policy debate is unique among games, as many of its participants will
even tell you, in that it is a game without rules. Strictly speaking, this
is not the case; one team which is affirmative will speak first, the negative
will speak second; speech times do not exceed nine minutes for the first four
speeches of the debate and do not exceed six minutes for the latter four; there
are four periods of cross-examination after each of the first four speeches,
each of which maximally last three minutes; and at the end of the debate,

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Ethical Limits of Play in Policy Debates

the judge is obliged to decide a winner (and by corollary a loser) and assign
speaker points to all four participants. What is meant by the game without
rules is that there is no clearly defined rule-set limiting the type or strategy
of argument that the participants may employ, and that the argument about
what rules should be employed in the debate is itself a subject of contention
by the debaters. The clearest case of this negotiability is the understanding of the resolutiona statement created prior to the season by a committee of respected community-members prior to the season which expresses
a normative statement about a set of policy actions to be taken by the U.S.
federal government. For example; Resolved: The U.S. federal government
should reduce nearly all agricultural subsidies for corn, cotton, rice and/
or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. Debate as conventionally
understood demanded that the affirmative team either defend the resolution,
or an example of it, by reading a plan, such as the United States federal
government should eliminate all subsidies for cotton ruled trade-distorting
by the World Trade Organization. However, teams that choose not to read
a planmay argue that they are approaching the resolution from a different
non-normative perspective (e.g., aesthetic, performative, genealogical, and
so on) which they assert is an equally if not more valuable way to engage
with the topic, or they may argue that pedagogy gained from the resolutional
framing is productive of violent subjectivity, or they may argue against the
very notion of rules in the first place, and so on.
This framework debate or debate about debate, is often a microcosm
for the clash of civilizations culture wars that occurred in the past twenty
years of academia, where the arguments of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida
are used in battle against the staid opposition of Rawls, Habermas, and Rorty.
Policy debate heavily relies on evidence which is read rapid-fire into the flow
of the speeches themselves, so in many cases the words of these very authors
are introduced into the clash of the debate. The framework debate may move
quickly from questions of fairness and burdens of rejoinder to obligations
for enabling civic discourse to critiques of exclusive limits and conceptual
borders, censorship and microfascism, re-framing the debate as an activist
podium or an artspace, contextualizing arguments in terms of the communicative styles which they employ and just as easily severing advocacies and
strategically mutating loci of offense and defensea populous desert to be
sure, rife with conceptual experimentation.
The challenge of rule-breaking is common even when the affirmative
does read a plan, part of an argumentative genre called topicality which
challenges the plans relation to the resolution. For example, in the case of
the previous subsidies resolution, the plan the United States federal government should abolish liposuction would likely be deemed as outside the topic
despite its normative claim, whereas a team that performed a narrative genealogy of African cotton farmers bankrupted by the hypocrisy of American
domestic subsidies and free trade ideology might be considered within the
topic but outside of the resolutional framework. For some critics, reading

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a plan is a necessary prerequisite of affirming the topic; the discussion is

progressive rather than overlapping. For others, any argument is fair game;
the participants are left to justify or de-justify the contentious claims and the
critic will attempt to adjudicate without excessively biased intervention.
In the decades-long history of policy debate, the gaming paradigm is a
relatively new invention. However, it is one which carried significant implications which may have motivated the specialization and research-intensive
nature of the activity away from previous conventions of rhetorical persuasion. As debate scholar Maxwell Schnurer points out,
Previous paradigms had been blatant attempts to keep barbarians
away from the sacred space of debate, or were transparent efforts to
justify competitive inequity. Gaming was revolutionary because it
followed the clear lines of Thomas Kuhnfocusing on theories as
valuable because they explain our world (Snider 1984, 1982). Unlike
policy-making, or hypothesis testing, Gaming didnt advocate for
a position on paradigms; it explained all the other paradigms as
gamers arguing to change rules for competitive advantages. (2003,
47)

In other words, whether or not debate as always been a game, the selfawareness paradigm of debate-as-game has fundamentally changed the way
in which it is carried out by participants and adjudicated by critics, exalting
an incentive system which privileges argumentative innovation, diversity,
and intensive research. Debates are rapid-fire speed-reading events where
debaters spread arguments that many people could otherwise take hours
to carefully develop, all within the constraints of their short speech-times.
Debates which once involved careful deliberation of students role-playing
as Congressional legislators may now move quickly between plans and
counterplans and permutations testing their mutual exclusivity or mutual
non-desirability, advantages and disadvantages framed in particular decision calculuses and around certain values which can be criticized and
counter-criticizedauthorship ranging from Barack Obama to Carl Schmitt
to John Mearsheimer to Gilles Deleuze. Teams exhibit varying degrees of
argumentative flexibility which may encourage or discourage the use of
critical theory arguments. Inflexible teams may strategically invest for skill,
depth, and speech-time in narrowly defining the terms of the debate in order
to preempt the necessity of a substantive response, a strategy which may
complexly affect their opponents decision to engage in a critical negation
depending on their own flexibility, preparedness to engage the other team
on their own terms, and confidence debating framework. Lets say that the
negative team argued that the affirmatives representation of African suffering were an unethical mode of disaster pornography, cannabalizing the pain
of the racial and non-American Other to expediently stage a morality play
designed to expiate guilt over bourgeois complicity in the larger structural
causes of that sufferings production. A typical framing response to a critical
argument might read,

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Ethical Limits of Play in Policy Debates

The negative should defend only either a policy option or the status
quo.
Moots the value of our policy proposalchanges the focus of the
debate, makes all of our offense meaningless.
Destroys Linear Clashby changing the agent from a government
to the judge they prevent us from leveraging our best comparative
arguments.
Predictabilitywe cant predict the myriad of whimsically-worded
alternatives produced by critical theorypolicy options are
restricted by predictable advocates in the literature.
This argument is a voting issue for fairnesswithout shared
ground debate is impossible. (Ehniger 1970, 108)

If two friends differ on whether they will gain greater satisfaction from
dining at Restaurant A or Restaurant B, because the causes are simple and
immediate, the common end at which they aimthat of maximum enjoymentwill exhibit like qualities. When, on the other hand, as in a dispute
concerning political persuasions or social philosophies, the causes are broad
and complex, the end aimed at may be remote or abstract. Always, however,
some agreed upon end or goal must be present to define and delimit the evaluative ground within which the interchange is to proceed. When such round is lacking, argument itself, let alone any hope of resolution or agreement, becomes
impossible. The absence of a commonly accepted aim or value is what lies at
the root of many of the breakdowns that occur, for example, in negotiations
between the communist and Western nations, and what accounts for the well
known futility of most disputes on matters of politics or religion. When disputants hold different values their claims pass without touching, just as they pass when
different subjects are being discussed. What one party says simply is evaluatively
irrelevant to the position of the other.
For those unfamiliar with policy debate, these sorts of arguments might
appear to be very strange. On the one hand, isnt the nature of policy
debate to discuss only what considerations ought inform the pragmatically
normative concerns of producing good policy? On the other hand, isnt it
precisely the ability to shirk responsibility for representational violence that
enables a willful blindness of policy-making bureaucrats to the ways in
which their flawed approaches may uncritically perpetuate harmful practices
and norms? Must we agree on the relevant questions of the debate in order
to have a debate, or are the truly important disputes always partially over
what the framing or important questions should be, and even how these
frames of emphasis and prioritization should be formulated to begin with.
In his seminal text on game theory and psychology Fights, Games and Debates,
Anatol Rapoport distinguishes debates (which are not adjudicated by a third
party) from games in that the question of strategy must be always bracketed
by a willingness to find starting points for common ground. Using the example of arms control negotiations, he points out that if both sides continue

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to win the Prisoners Dilemma by refusing to commit to reductions, that

both sides become caught in a situation of absurd armaments and taxing
militarism which is, strictly speaking, in the immediate interests of neither.
Are debates primarily about the terms in which they are configured, what
arguments should properly count? Policy debates, like all arguments, rely
on legalistic distinctions which often parse concepts into discrete parts and
wholes and distinguish the meaning of words through rigorous definitions.
But is this truly the totality of disagreement? Rapoport replies,
Distinctions are man-made, say the semanticists. There is no
natural level at which distinctions ought to be made. The level
is determined by the needs of the language user and by the resulting social usage. Therefore, arguments about what terms should
be applied to what referents are not settled by determining truth
but only by convention. They are like arguments over rules of the
game. There are still no real rules of the gameonly conventions. Change the conventions and you have changed the game.
(1960, 304)

Thus, what we might perceive as a brute and uncritical enforcement of the

rules, a challenge to the participants integrity, or an affront to their identity,
mode, or style of play becomes a space in which the rules themselves are
made unexceptional, opened up for debate, and challenged by participants as
would any other argument. Rules are not separate from the components of the
game, de-limiting its boundaries and constraining the choices of the debaters,
rather there are a set of undefined limits external to the rules and largely an
expression of the unwritten willingness of the participants to allow play to
continue beyond certain expectations. Debates must conclude in a certain
pre-defined amount of time in order for the hundreds of debates simultaneously occurring in sequence to remain roughly on schedule. The reaction of
other participants to a violent or illegal act is unpredictable, and, therefore,
while theoretically in play is ruled out by pragmatic considerations about
the willingness of other participants to continue the debate round, or the
judge to find such styles or approaches of argument persuasive. However,
debaters have always pushed the envelope, from bringing in oppressed
parties for first-person testimony to hip-hop rap of arguments to re-mixing
or hacking their opponents speeches via performances which playfully
double arguments in a space safe from capitalist cooptation to reproducing
arguments pictorially to performative nudity and excretion. These examples
are certainly at the extreme fringe of envelope-pushing and are not in any
way representative of the debate community or what are understood to be
socially acceptable practices, however they serve as a powerful demonstration for the innovative lengths that competitive pedagogy can foster, each
with a complete theoretical versing in the literature base which defends such
approach to rhetoric and performance.

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Ethical Limits of Play in Policy Debates

This understanding of rules which sediment the boundaries of convention only to be swept away in the interplay of change, or which interpolate
the opposition into conformity with the frame which it establishes, is thus
similar to Deleuze and Guattaris concept of the inter-play between smooth
and striated spaces, the latter which enables metrical progression, the former
which enables a greater degree of experimental becoming. The negotiation of innovation cannot function without the establishment of a prior
conformitya negation insensible without a prior affirmation to ground its
ontologyand thus we see a relationship of necessity between the assertion
or understanding of prior rules and rhizomatically mobile technologies of
challenge, resistance, critique, subsidence, as Deleuze and Guattari write,
...the two are linked and give each other impetus. Nothing is ever
done with: smooth space allows itself to be striated, and striated
space reimparts a smooth space, with potentially very different
values, scope, and signs. Perhaps we must say that all progress is
made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth
space. (1987, 486)

Just as the condition of debate which enables restriction of certain arguments

contingently from frames of consideration, it enables every argument to
potentially be internally mutant within multiple interlocking frameworks.
As Elizabeth Pass writes, Smooth spaces are dynamic, and transformation
is more important than essence (2001, par. 9). Even in the moment of assertion of a particular rule-set, value-set, criteria-set, evaluative framework,
the concern for the essence of these arguments is minimal to non-existent;
gaming makes the employment purely strategic and already folded into
the flow of play. The argument that we need to act to stop violence means
something radically different in a Kantian, utilitarian, and pure ontological
framework. That same argument is internally dependent on value judgments about whether or not violence is good or bad, or whether acting to stop
violence is the appropriate response to observing violence in the world. The
frames change as debaters arguments compete and negotiate within them.
In a framework which is only concerned with representations, the fact that
the plan, if enacted, would save a million children, counts for almost nothing. This conceptual result itself may be a reason to reject the framework,
but nothing is a priori; it can only be weighed against other counter-veiling
considerations for which privileging representations in decision-calculus
is, in and of itself, a meritous proposition. These observations demonstrate
an important proposition about the activity: part of what gives debate its
creative vibrancy is its ability to consistently re-draw the boundaries of
discrete conceptual objects, to leave fluid the criteria of relevance for research
and inquiry while simultaneously intensively pursuing that scholarship. In
debate, the fruits of critical theory and persistent interrogation are not intellectual paralysis or withdrawal from political advocacy, but more often than
not a reciprocal engagement with creative experimentation.

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Ethical Challenges within Policy Debate

and the Social Limits of Gamespace
We have thus established that limits are inevitable but not to be confused
with rules which are not only mutable but strategic, spontaneous, and adaptive. The rules of policy debate against certain arguments represent genres
of arguments themselves, limiting the scope of argumentative implication
and the necessity of response to substantive objections via preclusion from
the scope of relevant consideration. The inevitability of limits does not imply
their essence or stasis; even speech times have changed over the decades.
Merely that social understandings of debate practice within the community
of participants recognize the existence of certain limits and of certain rules
and believe that the former delimit the boundary of play whereas the latter
represent simply another multiplicity forming the internal continuum of
the nonlinear dynamics of the play space. However, the limits which I have
thus far identified appear to be limits of necessity, continuous with the social
mechanics of debate practices, yet at the same time inevitably both contingent
and unavoidable. In other words, even if you change the speech times, you
still recognize the speech times. Even if you abolish the speech times, you
still recognize the necessity that at some point the person must stop talking
in order for the opponent to respond. This raises the question: what are the
possibilities of a socially introduced formation of limits, not established rules or
conventions per se, but boundaries which out of a perceived social necessity
no participant will transgress? This is to ask, can we conceive of a limit to a
space of play which is a limit to the willingness of participants to continue
which has been produced entirely by social understandings of acceptable
behavior, and how does that relate to the playful creativity of the disciplinary
yet liberating debate about debate? In the debate community, these forms
of arguments are known as ethics challenges.
Importantly, the phrasing of the scope of the previous question would
include acts such as threatening the judge with violence, cutting the tongue
out of your opponent, or burning their research prior to the debate. While
these acts would obviously count as far outside the boundaries of socially
introduced formation of limits, they are not theoretically impossible to accommodate in the same way that talking for an infinite period of time would be.
However, these acts are, of a practical and externally legal necessity, impermissible based on the necessity of the social conditions of participation which
enable the activity in the first place. These previously mentioned violations
would also, in the context of a debate round, be intentional, targeted, specific
and therefore represent a smoothing against the inevitable limits of striation which would likely provoke a far greater backlash of striation or abolition against many fora of debate space. Limits against these types of behavior
thus represent a socially necessary component of the debate-space.
Ethical challenges, however, occur in a somewhat different context. They
are not necessary but normative assertions not of the limits of debate, nor a

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Ethical Limits of Play in Policy Debates

framework for evaluating arguments but rather an ethical framework for

debate practice. A debater may make an ethical challenge against an opponent who is believed to have lied, mis-cited evidence, cut evidence out of
context, and a whole host of other behaviors which one team understands
as being socially regarded antithetical to debate, a social understanding
resulting derived from abstract community norms. Debaters, as a rule,
are taught to avoid such challenges unless absolutely necessary. They and
their judges generally are not interested in these highly self-referential
questions of debate-ethics. The norms to which they refer are necessarily
inter-subjective and highly ambiguous. They are not written down or listed
in a defining document or even anywhere (although there are documents of
rules and evidence which are not generally understood as practical guides
for debating), and they are rarely discussed by participants. Perhaps one of
the reasons that these community norms exist in their current rhetorical black
hole is that most people would just as soon assume a rough approximation
of equivalency with their opponents and critic in terms of ethical limits of
practice and get on with the business of debating. In most cases, this laissezfaire approach works fine: all participants have roughly the same idea of
what would constitute unethical behavior; no one crossed any of these lines,
and therefore the question of ethics was a non-issue. However, it is useful
to examine the times when disputes arise in order to see how conflicts over
opposing viewpoints of ethical debating are resolved within or exterior to the
suddenly striated game space of the debate round.
Certainly, there may be those few who are not interested in ethics and are
simply trying to get away with as much as they can get away with. These
individuals might be called shady, liars, card-clippers, or simply
cheaters. My discussion here is not about such individuals, but rather about
cases where both teams believed that they were in the right and defended
their behavior as ethical and in conformity with an assumed ethical system
which they perceived was also being questioned. In such cases, the shared
notion of universal yet unspoken community norms can be productive of
not only a certain type of debater but of a certain method of calling out
which attempts to not only administer a particular rhetorical punishment
for a particular perceived offense (as well as demanding a further material
punishment from the judge in the form of a competitive loss) but attempt
to ground a form of humiliating exclusion from the protection of reciprocal guarantees of ethical behavior in the future that such community norms
are designed to protect. In other words, you broke the ethical rules, thus
you can never expect others to play by them against you in the future. The
debater suddenly has much more at stake than simply winning the debate
round; loss could solidify status degradation to that of a quasi-pariah and
undermine credibility in future debates. The implication of this sanction,
enforced at the level of community awareness of the infraction, disseminated
quickly by judges, participants, and observers, is that membership in the
debate community is conditional on meeting certain standards of acceptable

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behavior, knowledge of which is both falsely assumed as universal yet differs

dramatically between teams, regions, and even individuals.
Perversely, the same instinct towards laissez-faire that is the vitality of
debates about argumentative framework turn personal and poisonous once
an ethical accusation is introduced. All of a sudden, the element of gaming
seems all wrong, and yet the debate continues, and depending on how
participants argue their ethics challenges or counter-argue their innocence,
the judges will have to decide who wins at the end of the round. However,
owing to the extreme irregularity and lack of socialization around such invisible norms, these challenges are adjudicated according to uncertain criteria. Should the judge intervene to vote for the team that they truly believe
have been wronged? Or is winning an ethics challenge necessarily tied up
in meeting the burden of proof that such legal challenge would include?
And if the former is true, should judges vote against unethical behavior even
when no such challenge is presented?
The usual remedy of debaters, coaches, and judges to these sorts of issues
is, let the debaters sort it out. An argument is an argument, whether or not
it is about carbon emissions or the rules of debate itself, and, as uncomfortable and personal as they may be, ethics challenges are not much different
than a dressed up topicality or framework argument, in which the strategic
charge of cheating is occasionally more casually levied. However, from
an evaluative stand-point, this method smoothes over the space for preemptive striation, rhetorically positioning a level playing field which is simultaneously establishes a hierarchical order away from the gamespace which
disenables the accused to exist outside of that already accomplished roleformation. This role of the accused is preemptively tainted with the ethos of
nefarious intentions, and thus hamstrings their persuasive ability to defend
themselves. Here, the open space of play invites a form of closure in the
instance of the accusers challenge, a form of figurative rather that playfully
literal censorship which censors by effectby instantiating a bias within the
critic against one of the participants prior to the reciprocal engagement of play.
Ethics challenges are not made to be argued against; they are made and justified by an intuition that they precede the right of the other team to have their
speech evaluated as arguments, a right which after all, is only afforded to an
ethical members of the community. In a way, they are almost an argument
against the judge, rather than the other team, who is often asked to put away
their reservations and decide, in their heart of hearts2 as it were, whether
or not the transgression actually constitutes an ethics violation. Just as they
falsely appeal to a notion of the (imagined) universal, they appear to force the
judge to occupy the position of either safeguarding or risking the viability of
the very fabric of the debate community itself, and since most peoples intuition is understandably risk-averse, this is a bad spot for any accused to be in,

2
These are both actual quotations from speeches on ethical challenges during the 2009-2010
inter-collegiate policy debate season.

194 Edmund Zagorin

Ethical Limits of Play in Policy Debates

regardless of the validity of the accusation. While criminal judges at least are
asked to interpret a statute in a particular way, in policy debate, there is no
set of written ethical norms. Debate critics are thus asked to intervene against
the milieu of competing claims and counter-claims to irrevocably decide on
based on the amorphous criteria of moral intuition alone. In other words, the
very methods which judges employ to process appeals is stacked in favor
of the accuser, with the hope that wolf will only be cried when the situation
truly merits it. In a highly competitive community of intensely motivated
individuals, such collective trust is a foolishly artificial presumption.
Ethical challenges pose a difficulty for our conception of the mechanisms
of creative production and variance inhering within limits. If everything is
in play, then shouldnt what seems to be just another limit, albeit of a different kind, serve as a provocation for adaptation and creative resistance? We
have already answered the question of how ethical challenges position the
participants in striated space, but how does it fit into the nonlinear dynamics of shaping the praxis of the debate space itself? By bracketing the space of
resistance outside of the debate, always post facto to the accusation of unethical play, the ethics challenge creates a closed mode of debating in which the
ethical questions are always and necessarily prior. This closedness then may
represent a boundary beyond which playful creativity is not comfortably or
easily crossed. While restrictions cannot be understood as merely repressive,
the ethics challenge itself is a closure of the establishment of other contingent limits since it presumes a claim to the essence of the activity, located
in the policy debate community. As Paul Armstrong has argued, following
Wolfgang Isers theory of play,
As a rule-governed but open-ended activity, play provides a model
for deploying power in a nonrepressive manner that makes creativity and innovation possible not in spite of disciplinary constraints
but because of them. Not all power is playful, of course, and some
restrictions are more coercive than enabling. But thinking about the
power of constraints on the model of rules governing play helps to
explain the paradox that restrictions can be productive rather than
merely repressive. Seeing constraints as structures for establishing
a play-space and as guides for practices of exchange within it envisions power not necessarily and always as a force to be resisted in
the interests of freedom; it allows imagining the potential for power
to become a constructive social energy that can animate games of
to-and-fro exchange between participants whose possibilities for
self-discovery and self-expansion are enhanced by the limits shaping their interactions. (2000, 221)

Instead of enabling experimentation by restricting the space of play to focus

on parsing criteria which are always internal to the process of negotiating
contingent values and frames of relevance, ethical challenges which rely on a
universalized, pre-supposed (yet non-existent) ethical rule set act as an end
to creative play, shutting down the very process which allows the continuous

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re-shaping of interactions which they govern. This sterile notion of ethical

boundaries has initiated a panoptic disciplinary function, where most debaters prefer to err on the side of caution and thus adapt their ethical practice
to the most conservative version, rather than risk negotiating their practice
from the preemptively disadvantaged end of the rhetorical hierarchy. In
other words, debaters assume that if something might be unethical, better
to be safe than sorry and avoid it altogether. This panoptic effect shrinks the
perimeter of the space of play via a mechanism which is presumed external
and non-negotiable to practice of debate. The result is a competitive incentive which may motivate ethics challenges in greater numbers and increase
the number of practices which are needlessly understood as deviant.

Conclusion
Policy debate offers an insight into the adaptive nature of contingent rules
of games and the limits which enable such adaptation within a space of play.
In contrasting debates about argumentative frameworks with ethical challenges, I have sought to elucidate the ways in which rules are both productive of creative innovation by participants and potentially dis-empowering
when conceived of as essential, prior and universal. Game theorists should
thus resist the temptation to simplify gaming situations by an understanding
of their defined rules without first asking more probing questions about the
practices in which participants operationalize those rules and examining the
modes of production which such rules encompass, enable, or preclude.
While rules are necessary to any understanding of games which particularize their play or establish the activity of participants within historically
contingent conventions, the more important questions about rules are less
about how they apply to a static snap-shot gaming situation and more about
how the routinized praxes of gaming allow or disallow for their mutation
over time. Games are not produced as stable essences, pre-ordained hierarchies built to last for an eternity but are rather meshworks of smooth and
striated spaces that constrain and enable different options for play within
particular situations by adept participants.
Limiting choices of game-participants is thus less relevant than the
method of that limitation and how it comes to be understood within the
community of participants over time. For a game such as debate which has
always understood many features of its social practice as negotiable and
intrinsically mutant, the accusation of an ethics challenge asserts a problematically insular value-set which establishes a sterile conceptual exteriority to
the space of play. Just as social notions of ethical behavior in larger social
communities change over time and are subject to challenges and counterchallenges, so must the assertion of values within a space of play recognize
their own contingency. The vitality and scope of experimentation and

196 Edmund Zagorin

Ethical Limits of Play in Policy Debates

innovation within and around any gamespace is to some degree dependent

on the willingness of the participants to accept the established rules as immutable givens, or alternately, their abilities to assert conceptual mobility against
the sedimentation of strait-jacketing norms of practice.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

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