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Kritik

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Policy debate
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Policy debate

In Policy Debate, a kritik (derived from German kritik, meaning and pronounced as "critique", and often abbreviated K) is generally a type of argument that challenges a certain mindset, assumption, or discursive element that exists within the advocacy of the opposing team, often from the perspective of critical theory; it is often spelled in the normal English critique or is sometimes called a criticism, and takes the adjective form kritikal (meaning and pronounced as "critical"). A kritik can either be deployed by the negative team to challenge the affirmative advocacy or by the affirmative team to indict the status quo or the negative advocacy. Kritiks (and their German spelling) were developed by teams at The University of Texas, coached by Bill Shanahan, in the late 1980s out of an existing "single-citizen" argumentation paradigm which called for the judge to vote a single citizen's conscience rather than adopting the role of the federal government. The Shanahan kritik is more a decision calculus than the kritiks which emerged on the college circuit in the early 1990s on the nature of language's intrinsic ambiguity. Though kritiks are used generally in policy, their usage is also increasingly found in Lincoln-Douglas debate.

Structure

The structure of the kritik is similar to that of the disadvantage in that it includes a link and an impact or implication. Unlike the disadvantage, however, it excludes uniqueness and includes an alternative. This structure leads to snide comments by debaters favoring "policy" (i.e. debate without critiques) that a kritik is "just a non-unique disad."

A kritikal link, unlike a disadvantage link, need not be unique; that is, the team putting forward the kritik (almost always the negative) need not prove that the impacts claimed by the argument could not be triggered by the status quo—that the affirmative does not uniquely lead to the impact. Instead, the typical kritikal link is one of re-entrenching the philosophy or mindset to be criticized by the argument, be it biopower/biopolitics, racism, militarism, realism in international relations, patriarchy, statism, imperialism/Orientalism, capitalism, gendered language, or anything else.

Impact or Implication

The kritikal impact or implication varies depending on the nature of the kritik. Kritiks of such things as biopower, militarism, and capitalism typically argue that the indicted concept justifies nuclear war, genocide, and totalitarianism. Other kritiks, such as those of language, racism, and those advocating Objectivism typically claim deontological impacts; that is, the positive effects of the affirmative are unimportant compared to the ethical damage it does. However, these are generalities and, for instance, a kritik of biopower may simply argue that, from a deontological perspective, a judge has a moral imperative to reject biopower.

Alternative

The alternative is the core of what separates the kritik from being just a highly philosophical linear disadvantage. The alternative is generally supposed to provide an advocacy other than that which the affirmative has put forward; however, the alternative tends to be "reject the criticized philosophy" or "reject the affirmative." More substantive alternatives exist however; a kritik which takes the position of Ayn Rand's Objectivism might include "adopt the Objectivist program" as the alternative.

Recently, some debate teams have begun integrating kritikal counterplans into their kritiks, employing the counterplan as the kritikal alternative; a typical instance of this would be using a counterplan to ban the military as the alternative to a kritik of militarism.

Examples

If proposed policy action was for the United States to send humanitarian assistance to Africa, a possible critical argument would be a kritik of Statism. The link would be that the affirmative uses the centralized state in their plan, and the implication is that the centralized state is bad for x reasons and should therefore be rejected. The negative might call for the rejection of state action without concretely proposing another social system or they may explain another type of social organization that should be used instead of the contemporary state, often anarchy.

Examples of kritiks may include indicts of racism, militarism, patriarchy, biopower, empire, normativity, terror talk, and genocide trivialization. Some kritiks may be presented in their entirety by a single author while other kritik presentations may use various different authors that cross-reference each other's arguments. Perennially popular kritik authors include Michel Foucault, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Lacan, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Martin Heidegger. Others, such as Edward Said and Thomas Szasz, may be rare or ubiquitous, depending on the topic at hand.

Criticism of kritiks

The validity of kritiks in policy debate is not universally accepted. Some arguments which indict their validity include:

  • De-emphasis on topic related research. In a 1996 Rostrum article G. William Bennett states: "Kritiks discourage research on the topic, decrease the variety of cases and attacks, and substitute in their place an increased emphasis on deconstructing ideas and language."
  • Reduced pedagogical value of debate. Bennett continues: "The constructive and more encompassing nature of policy clash increases the discussion of multiple ideas and is more educationally worthwhile."
  • Unfair burden on judges to decide appropriateness of affirmative policy plan. Kritiks attempt to show flaws in affirmative logic but they don't always provide an alternative, but there is no reason to reject a plan when the alternative is unknown. How can a judge evaluate a plan without knowing what will replace it if the plan is rejected?
  • Kritiks trivialize policy debate's traditional focus. No longer is policy comparison and problem solution the focus.
  • Some find particular kritiks uncomfortable or difficult to visualize because of their radical nature.
  • Some kritik views are thought to constitute a bastardization or trivialization of the philosophies of authors cited. This is not a problem unique to kritiks, in that several political scientists are frequently bastardized in "pure" policy debate, but this is the most commonly articulated complaint about kritiks by supporters of pure policy debate[citation needed].
  • The usage of kritiks in most novice high school policy rounds is highly frowned upon, as most novices are unable to obtain a full grasp of a kritik.

Supporters of kritik argumentation suggest that none of these indictments are unique to kritiks, meaning that they apply to the traditional debate arguments as well, and that a kritik is just another argument which must be researched and prepared for. They also point out the specificity of many kritiks in relation to policy comparison and implementation (such as Foucault's contributions to our understanding of mental health care or Agamben's relevant contributions to civil liberties). Many of those that believe in the validity of kritik argumentation also argue that because many kritiks indict particularly bad assumptions that the other team has made, there is often no need for an explicitly stated alternative to the other team's offending advocacy. For instance, if negative has proven that aff's 1AC is racist, then why does the neg need any alternative beyond 'don't advocate racism,' or 'reject racist assumptions'? (the alternative, racial tolerance, being implied by the nature of the question)

Usage

In general, kritiks have been universally accepted in National Circuit (Tournament of Champions) debate and most inter-collegiate policy debate, and less accepted in particular regions of National Forensic League debate, especially by "lay" judges. However, some believe this may simply be due to poor explanation. Indeed, inherently philosophical issues are relatively complex and often the small amount of time a negative team gets to speak during the duration of a round is not enough time to fully explain the complexities of the argument.

Kritiks are also increasingly popular in the National Parliamentary Debate Association. They have even begun to be used in the lay-judge dominated International Public Debate Association, whose paradigms generally demand a jargonless, easy-to-understand articulation of the basic kritik structure.

The Kritikal Affirmative

The realm of the kritik has extended beyond the negative argument into the region of the affirmative case. The kritikal affirmative seeks advantages which fix (in the jargon of debate, "solve for") impacts and concepts which are attached to the negative argument of the kritik. For instance, a plan to ban Don't Ask, Don't Tell would claim that it "solves for" heteronormativity as per queer theory.

The Kritik affirmative actually had its beginnings on the NDT college circuit at least as early as 1998, and probably earlier. Emory University, for example, during the South East Asia topic ran a plan to recover landmines under the auspices of an existentialism overview. Harvard likewise ran a hate crimes affirmative three years prior to that (1995) that claimed "rhetorical" advantages. These were both well before the oceans topic referred to above. Given the widespread use of philisophical argumentation throughout the 1990s, however, it is difficult to determine with any accuracy when the FIRST kritik affirmative was born, and, therefore, we should caution against attempting to pin such a title to any one debate. (Demetrius L. 2006)

In some instances, the kritikal affirmative does not even have a plan at all and is simply a collection of criticisms.

References

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