1.
If our memories are like books, we are all cooking them. Experience is not the mere recall of sensation, but a tropic transformation of it. Memories may act as screens for others, serving as witty chaperones who distract the suitor. They may combine their elements into a new memory, giving us an experience that is our own only through fiction. They may darken the palette of colors and skulk through the alleys of the psyche’s layered city, unseen in person but its nightly crimes reported in the mind’s press: the symptom. And yet, all this fiction is without an author. Cyril Connolly: “Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.” Or, the Ghost in Hamlet: “Purpose is but the slave to memory.” Our reminiscences are unreliable witnesses to our lives. They are, most of the time, the only evidence available.
In my own book of memory, however edited, my encounter with debate—yes, the ‘extracurricular’ activity, nerd shit—shaped the course of my adult life in no small way. One of the ways I recall this feeling is through nausea: one specific night, after a debate tournament, I walked on the abandoned common of the campus. I felt, for reasons completely obscure to me, like I had been “cored out.” This wasn’t an overreaction to a bad performance. It was that I did not know who I was: who I thought I was, who I heard when I was speaking, was no longer so obvious. Where, really, did my speech come from?
While at the time this experience was distressing, it also committed me to debate. If this was what had placed a question where before I hadn’t even needed an answer, it was through debate I would discover the new answer. Or so I thought. Instead, over the course of many years, I came to recognize that this hollowed-out space was a great gift. It was something like freedom.
I suspect this story will not be completely unfamiliar to others who have participated in debating at some point in their lives, but this is not the story ritually rehearsed about the value of debate. In fact, when intercollegiate debate has been described as a “nauseating machinery”—in 1916, by one William Hawley Davis—this was emphatically not in its favor. The machine view of debate derives all of its value from what it produces: Debaters. In this model of debate practice, participating in debate is not practicing something that anyone can do but an induction into a gnosis, a special club, marked knowledge of its rituals, jargon, forms and ceremonies, the obsessions and aversions of its active membership. Debate produces Debaters as a failure of its promise: when that hollow core is revealed through the practice of debate, one can rush to fill in the site of identity with the activity itself. People become addicted to this new identity and attach themselves to it more fiercely than what must seem to the “outsider” like similar sources of school-days nostalgia: Greek life, athletics, hobbyist clubs, and so on. While any attachment to the bygone good-old-days of student life always feels a bit pathetic to me, the Debater is a tragic figure. It’s like a prisoner who mistakes an escape route for the source of the draft in their cell, and quickly plugs it up to make their confinement more comfortable.
2.
It probably will not be a grant-winning argument to say that debate is valuable because it is hollow at its core. So I have tried to find an analogy that will help to clarify this idea. Debate is a geode. What we find within a debate is not the fullness of truth, but a true place for something to appear. In the crystalline facets of arguments, we don’t admire the rectilinearity of its logic for its own sake, but because of its resplendence. Debate sensitizes us to those proverbial “shades of gray” that accompany all human concern. Through debate, we learn these shades as the source of all true speech: we learn the gray rainbow.
If one were evaluating a geode as a rock, in light of the uses we give to rocks, it would be worse than useless. Rocks can be valuable for building things, but geodes, precisely because they are hollow, are not building material. Rocks might be valuable as weights. But the geode is lighter than rocks of similar dimension, again because of the hollow core.
Yet geodes are among the most sought-after rock formations, precisely because of this hollowness. You can see this in the video below. It’s charming to me to see all of these geode enthusiasts so disappointed by the “solid quartz.” The main attraction at the Geode Festival is the hollow: this is what makes it a “true geode.”
This is also what is at the heart of a “true” debate — a hollow. The hollow of the stone, once split, seems to disappear. Or, from another perspective, it becomes one with the very medium of its own visibility. It is just the air around us. Debate as a practice of persuasion is something like this: not moving knowledge from an inner world and coding it into some form able to be absorbed by the outer world, but a discovery of that point of indistinction between inner and outer, the hollow of meaning in which the speaker is audience, the audience speaker—the proposition is an instrument of splitting the hollow to allow it to be shared.
Students (and not only students) starting out on their first debates mistake this hollow they quickly discover with a problem: usually it is ignorance. They try to fill it up by citing information, displaying their collection of facts, or, when truly desperate, with mere words. There are plenty of people who supposedly teach debate who applaud this anxious exhaustion, even naming it as the purpose of debate. During graduate school, I had many arguments—some friendly, some heated—with others who taught debate. “The students are doing Masters-level research for their Affirmative case!” “They are reading more difficult texts than are assigned in their classes!” “They are in the room late at night with energy drinks looking at fracking reports!” None of this, I’ll admit, seems bad. When compared to apathy, here is a machinery for producing interest: if students in competitive debate learn they can win something by learning, they will be motivated to learn. And so the machinery of debate is set to work: but here what is nauseating is not arising from the student, but from the machine operator. Here they too try to fill up the hollow core of debate with apologetics, whatever works to keep the money rolling in and the prying eyes of others out.
But there’s another, maybe even more important facet of this analogy that helps illustrate for me the value of debate. Geodes are hard and dull. But once split in two, we discover within a crystalline structure that creates a thousand different scintillations. This splitting—the division of a debate into Pro and Con—does not split us into a “good side” and a “bad side.” Rather, we discover there a structure of surfaces—the superficial edge of this particular hollow that creates the surprising and beautiful kaleidoscopic effects. I see the role of the debate educator as something like this. After the debate is over—the geode is split—you can take each hemisphere into your hand and move it around in the light, showing others how they might produce different effects with the debate they just had.
3.
There is a long tradition of thinking about the practice of argumentation as one that produces color. Most famously, the “colors of rhetoric” were codified in the tradition of declamation around specific controversiae—a kind of case-based debate extremely popular during the late Roman Republic and throughout much of the Roman Empire. In Bonner’s work on Roman Declamation, he glosses the term:
The term color had, before Seneca’s day, been applied [in the field of rhetoric] only as a general word for ‘cast’ or ‘tone’ of style…But in Seneca it takes on the quite different meaning of ‘twist of argument,’ ‘plea,’ ‘excuse,’; and it is very interesting to note, in view of the legal associations of the controversiae, that the term ‘color insaniae’ [color of insanity] survives in the Digest [the primary source on Roman Law, compiled under Justinian] meaning a ‘plea of insanity.’ (55)
Color, once taken back into the discourse of the law, becomes a formula for a plea of equity. By the end of the Empire (when the Digest was collected) the practice of arguing controversiae was no longer training for public life—there was no real public life to speak of. But in its heyday, learning how to paint in the colors of rhetoric was the crowning achievement of one’s education:
Making black white and the reverse was the age-old prerogative of the pleader, but the colores of the declaimer were something more subtle; by a slight shift of argument, by an added insinuation, or a guileless plea, they tone down the guilt or represent it in even more glaring colours. The colores are the Persian carpet of the declaimer; look at it from one angle and the colors are bright and clear, the pattern simple, but observe it from another angle, and the shade deepens, the pattern changes, and the whole appears in a different light. (56)
Persian carpet or geode: you may choose between these metaphors. But this I think is where I would locate the value of debate. We come to see, in vibrant detail, that the pattern of our own belief, the very structure of our world, may take on a very different meaning when seen “from another angle.” We should seek to revive a practice of debate that does not produce Debaters, but instead a greater sensitivity to the hollow at the center of all our communicative commitments, a hollow that, when opened up to common sensibility, will not betray them as “substanceless”; instead, it should show the meaning of our sense of reality is a place to begin inquiry, not end it.