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Constructing the Ethical Limits of Play in Policy DebatesEdmund Zagorin

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

Published by University of Nebraska PressDOI: 10.1353/sym.2009.0017

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We are segmented from all around and in every direction. The humanbeing is a segmentary animal. Segmentarity is inherent to all the stratacomposing us. Dwelling, getting around, working, playing: life isspatially and socially segmented.

Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari (1987)

Games are signi cantly dependent on the rules and conventions whichde ne the available options to their participants. However, the abilities ofgames to become liberating spaces of play which exceed the limitations oftheir speci ed play-options are equally dependent on the ability of partici -pants to negotiate and challenge the rules within the competitive or creativetelos of the particular game. In this essay, I will examine the way in whichtwo different understandings of norms govern the activity of policy debate,a competitive speech activity which makes use of philosophical concepts tocontinuously re-frame the possibilities of its participants. The rst set of ruleswill be presented as intrinsic to the play of the game itself, capable of af rma -tion or negation by the immediate participants whose success at limiting thespace of play is always situated within in the hands (or mouths) of the debat-ers arguing for their legitimacy. The second set of rules will be presented asa universal notion of ethical practice, understood as external to the space ofplay and outside of the participants agency to negotiate or de ne.

This essay will seek to elucidate an understanding of rules-governedplay in policy debate which is always able to overcome the immediacy of itssegmentarity by re-establishing the criteria of relevance, in which the asser-tion of universalized norms serves to put an end to play and sterilize thegame of critical inquiry and experimentation. In attempting to understandplay as a potentially in nite process of experimentation enabled by a limitedspace, we may understand the rules not as sterile components of gover-nance which merely regulate or repress certain types of activity, but ratheras always productive of a contoured play. This co-production of participant

symploke Vol. 17, Nos. 1-2 (2009) ISSN 1069-0697, 181-196.


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subjectivity and rules-process may tend towards experimentation and vari-ance or alternately uncritical repetition of appropriately authorized behavior.Insofar as creative production and adaptation is a valuable pedagogical anddesirable trait for game designers to pursue, hopefully this essay may offer

some insight into the characteristics of rule-sets and their framing whicheither 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 acknowl-edged a distinction between play and games, between rules and limits. Playis a how; game is a what; rules are de ned and ephemeral, as the clich goes,made to be broken; limits inhere within the very space of play that is simultane-ously its enabling condition and the insistence of its nitude. Johan Huizinga,the Dutch historian of play, went to great pains to characterize homo ludens as not essentially a player, but rather embodying the uid characteristics ofplayfulness in its movements, writing it was not my object to de ne theplace of play among all other manifestations of culture, but rather to ascertainhow far culture itself bears the character of play (1950, ix). However, whileHuizingas theory and historical analysis of play may have centered primar-ily on the homo, we speculative humanists concerned for our own animalisms,our tendencies to vegetate or mineralize, or for any material to spontane-ously humanize without warning may attend to play as a contouring processwithout the compulsion of adhering to the metaphysical presumption of oursocially de ned humanistic identity roles. As Jane Bennet writes

Our habit of parsing the world into passive matter (it) and vibrantlife (us) is what Jacques Rancire (in another context) called a parti-tion of the sensible. In other words, it limits what we are able to

sense; it places below the threshold of note the active powers ofmaterial formations, such as the way land lls are, as we speak,generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds of meth-ane.... (2009, 95)

We are inescapably in play, knowingly or unknowingly, whether we are theplayer or the played or more frequently uncertainly in the space betweeneither, surrounded and composed of a material world which becomestowards 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 beattuned to the trajectories of the ever-shifting coordinates which compose thespace of play without forgetting that the condition for this space of play areenabled by its nitude. Just as we are encapsulated by a particular intersec -tion of space and time, within the borders of a particular horizon, a particularhabitude, 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 besuch limits, whether you want to refer to gravity or death as the impassablethreshold, or recognize that the same conditions of nite production inherewith what Deleuze and Guattari name the abstract machines of our reality,

which direct the ows of matter and energy along variable ranges of possi -bility. This does not mean that outcomes of these particular processes aresingular, necessary, or inevitable according to some pre-ordained ideologicalformula, but merely states that their diversity is partially constituted by theirlimited possibilities. Mixing our and water in a metal bowl cannot producea full-grown pterodactyl in only seven minutes at. While the generativeproperties of imaginative faculties may conceive of many identities beyondthe limits of their material productions, the empirical vitality intrinsic to themanifest variance of reality is necessarily a function of these limits, which

specify and individuate empirical phenomena and conceptual apparatusesaway from the sickeningly homogenous everything=everything falseholism of totalitarian transcendence. In fact, Deleuze and Guattaris instruc-tions for philosophical thought, for populating ones conceptual desert viaexperimentation, precisely involves this sort of play constituted throughlimited variance, as they write,

Although there is no preformed logical order to becomings andmultiplicities, there are criteria, and the important thing is that

they not be used after the fact, that they be applied in the courseof events, that they be suf cient to guide us through the dangers.If multiplicities are de ned and transformed by the borderlinethat determines in each instance their number of dimensions, wecan conceive of the possibilities of laying them out on a plane, theborderlines succeeding one another, forming a broken line. (1987,251)

The segmentarity of our daily trajectories through waking, transiting, work-ing, dwelling, and playing, as inter-characterized by one another, formexactly this broken line of successive bordered multiplicities that differ-entiate without requiring a notion of linear progression. However, just aswe have distinguished the segmentarity of play generally, we may also ndgames as internally constituted by such multiplicitiesspaces of play whichare limited in ways far more negotiable. Games can thus be understood as amimicry of empirical segmentarity through the mirroring of inherent limitsthrough rules and conventions, adding another layer of arti cial limits falselysupposed as internally symmetrical to external limits. Rules and conven-tions should rather be understood as contingent historical constructions forwhich a presumed key element is that they be treated as natural and sacred,necessary and essential to the functioning of the game and the preservationof the idealized play contained within it. Yet what happens when certainrules are understood as breakable, indeed, what of rules which are seldom ifever 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 violationmeans to involved participants. Frequently, the dispute-resolution processis incorporated into the strategic motivation of the players within the gameas a space of play, as all de ned elements are folded into the motivations of

the de ned players. One can see this in many sports where fouling or otherforbidden behavior along with the governing dispute resolution process,referees and so on, become strategic elements in achieving victory whichboth participants know will be available to them at the start of the game,albeit with the attendant risk of incurring disciplinary intervention. 1 Insofaras the rules succeed in maintaining a relationship between the participantsand allow the game to continue, the rules are individually super uous to thespace of play yet collectively necessary for the social de nition of its limits.

Policy Debate as a Space of Play

Policy debate is a ercely competitive speech activity where two teams oftwo participants argue in front of a judge who then adjudicates one team asthe victor, the other the loser, and assigns all four debaters speaker pointsbased on individual performance. While policy debate is a global phenom-enon practiced in many formats and academic contexts, all of which meritserious scholarly inquiry, I will focus my attention speci cally on national-level inter-collegiate policy debate in the U.S. This focus encapsulates notonly a single game but a community of participants which overlaps with andincludes many smaller identity communities. These overlapping commu-nities consist of participants, judges, coaches, administrators, tournamentdirectors, and all of the other minor agents, components, and machinerywhich enable undergraduate competitors, grad student assistants, and judges, professors, and other non-credentialed professional debate folk toleave their academic institutions for many weekends a year, oftentimes miss-ing classes and important events, to travel long distances to compete againstone another for days at a time. The policy debate season lasts for the bulkof the academic school year, and most of the participants have known eachother for years while newcomers quickly become socialized into the normsand con icts of the community which surrounds and inter-penetrates thegame which it is devoted to. Community-members become tied together inpart through their shared life style which develops with the intensity of thecompetition and depth of research and argument-preparation efforts, which,as Gordon Mitchell has noted, is no small feat:

1The section of the essay owes an intellectual debt for many inspiring ideas about theevolution of games through rule-breaking, speci cally using the soccer-rugby example, to apiece by Ian Johnston Theres Nothing Nietzsche Couldnt Teach Ya About the Raising of theWrist (Monty Python) A Lecture in Liberal Studies, May 1999 [available online as of January2010] http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/introser/nietzs.htm



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A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Educationestimated that thelevel and extent of research required of the average college debaterfor each topic is equivalent to the amount of research required fora Masters Thesis. If you multiplied the number of active collegedebaters (approximately 1,000) by that many research hours themass work effort spent on exploring, comprehending, and formu-lating positions around relevant public policy issues is obviouslyastounding (Goodman 1993). (1998, 12)

However, it is precisely the communal element of the debate game spacewhich makes the competition inextricably tied to shared social understand-ings of argumentative merit, which ground inclusion or exclusion. However,it is precisely this shared orientation of understanding as an on-going processwhich provides the intellectual raw material that provides a reservoir ofconcepts and memes to enable adaptation. As Steven Savatorre writes in thecontext of theatrical games, this research is crucial to game-development invarying contexts, and should not be limited within the discrete boundaries ofthe object of study by itself:

Players must know that the act of game-playing does not relievethem of the responsibility of preparing for the projectall of thegame players must make every effort to know and research (in allsenses of that word) the text. Appropriate research begins with

a careful reading of the text itself, but could also include readingtextual criticism, gathering information about the culture of thetexts time period, collecting visual material from or about theperiod, and so on. (1999, par. 5)

The grounding of change in debate is thus enabled in the competitive non-linear dynamics which motivate diverse research topics and select theirsuccess through the possibilities of competitive deployment in many debaterounds over time. This evolutionary process is always in dialogue with

social expectations about argumentative merit. When competitive victory isdetermined from the perspective a particular critic or set of critics, it becomesimpossible to separate the nature of that victory from the social and concep-tual practices in which the adjudicatory decision is enmeshed. The extentto which one can objectively win an argument will always be less thanthe extent to which someone can score a goal, the latter being signi cantlymore dif cult to dispute, the former itself a product of a game built out ofdisputes.

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, thisis not the case; one team which is af rmative will speak rst, the negativewill speak second; speech times do not exceed nine minutes for the rst fourspeeches of the debate and do not exceed six minutes for the latter four; thereare four periods of cross-examination after each of the rst four speeches,each of which maximally last three minutes; and at the end of the debate,


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the judge is obliged to decide a winner (and by corollary a loser) and assignspeaker points to all four participants. What is meant by the game withoutrules is that there is no clearly de ned rule-set limiting the type or strategyof argument that the participants may employ, and that the argument about

what rules should be employed in the debate is itself a subject of contentionby the debaters. The clearest case of this negotiability is the understand-ing of the resolutiona statement created prior to the season by a commit-tee of respected community-members prior to the season which expressesa normative statement about a set of policy actions to be taken by the U.S.federal government. For example; Resolved: The U.S. federal governmentshould reduce nearly all agricultural subsidies for corn, cotton, rice and/or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. Debate as conventionallyunderstood demanded that the af rmative team either defend the resolution,

or an example of it, by reading a plan, such as the United States federalgovernment should eliminate all subsidies for cotton ruled trade-distortingby the World Trade Organization. However, teams that choose not to reada planmay argue that they are approaching the resolution from a differentnon-normative perspective (e.g., aesthetic, performative, genealogical, andso on) which they assert is an equally if not more valuable way to engagewith the topic, or they may argue that pedagogy gained from the resolutionalframing is productive of violent subjectivity, or they may argue against thevery notion of rules in the rst place, and so on.

This framework debate or debate about debate, is often a microcosmfor the clash of civilizations culture wars that occurred in the past twentyyears of academia, where the arguments of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derridaare used in battle against the staid opposition of Rawls, Habermas, and Rorty.Policy debate heavily relies on evidence which is read rapid- re into the owof the speeches themselves, so in many cases the words of these very authorsare introduced into the clash of the debate. The framework debate may movequickly from questions of fairness and burdens of rejoinder to obligationsfor enabling civic discourse to critiques of exclusive limits and conceptual

borders, censorship and microfascism, re-framing the debate as an activistpodium or an artspace, contextualizing arguments in terms of the communi-cative styles which they employ and just as easily severing advocacies andstrategically mutating loci of offense and defensea populous desert to besure, rife with conceptual experimentation.

The challenge of rule-breaking is common even when the af rmativedoes read a plan, part of an argumentative genre called topicality whichchallenges the plans relation to the resolution. For example, in the case ofthe previous subsidies resolution, the plan the United States federal govern-

ment should abolish liposuction would likely be deemed as outside the topicdespite its normative claim, whereas a team that performed a narrative gene-alogy of African cotton farmers bankrupted by the hypocrisy of Americandomestic subsidies and free trade ideology might be considered within thetopic but outside of the resolutional framework. For some critics, reading



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The negative should defend only either a policy option or the statusquo.

Moots the value of our policy proposalchanges the focus of thedebate, makes all of our offense meaningless.

Destroys Linear Clashby changing the agent from a governmentto the judge they prevent us from leveraging our best comparativearguments.

Predictabilitywe cant predict the myriad of whimsically-wordedalternatives produced by critical theorypolicy options arerestricted by predictable advocates in the literature.

This argument is a voting issue for fairnesswithout sharedground debate is impossible. (Ehniger 1970, 108)

If two friends differ on whether they will gain greater satisfaction fromdining at Restaurant A or Restaurant B, because the causes are simple andimmediate, the common end at which they aimthat of maximum enjoy-mentwill exhibit like qualities. When, on the other hand, as in a dispute concerning political persuasions or social philosophies, the causes are broadand complex, the end aimed at may be remote or abstract. Always, however,some agreed upon end or goal must be present tode ne and delimit the evalua-tive ground within which the interchange is to proceed. When such round is lack-ing, argument itself , let alone any hope of resolution or agreement, becomesimpossible. The absence of a commonly accepted aim or value is what lies atthe root of many of the breakdowns that occur, for example, in negotiationsbetween the communist and Western nations, and what accounts for the wellknown futility of most disputes on matters of politics or religion. When dispu-tants hold different values their claims pass without touching, just as they pass whendifferent subjects are being discussed. What one party says simply is evaluativelyirrelevant to the position of the other.

For those unfamiliar with policy debate, these sorts of arguments mightappear to be very strange. On the one hand, isnt the nature of policydebate to discuss only what considerations ought inform the pragmaticallynormative concerns of producing good policy? On the other hand, isnt itprecisely the ability to shirk responsibility for representational violence thatenables a willful blindness of policy-making bureaucrats to the ways inwhich their awed approaches may uncritically perpetuate harmful practicesand norms? Must we agree on the relevant questions of the debate in orderto have a debate, or are the truly important disputes always partially overwhat the framing or important questions should be, and even how theseframes 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 thirdparty) from games in that the question of strategy must be always bracketedby a willingness to nd starting points for common ground. Using the exam -ple 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, thatboth sides become caught in a situation of absurd armaments and taxingmilitarism which is, strictly speaking, in the immediate interests of neither.Are debates primarily about the terms in which they are con gured, what

arguments should properly count? Policy debates, like all arguments, relyon legalistic distinctions which often parse concepts into discrete parts andwholes and distinguish the meaning of words through rigorous de nitions.But is this truly the totality of disagreement? Rapoport replies,

Distinctions are man-made, say the semanticists. There is nonatural level at which distinctions ought to be made. The levelis determined by the needs of the language user and by the result-ing social usage. Therefore, arguments about what terms shouldbe applied to what referents are not settled by determining truthbut only by convention. They are like arguments over rules of thegame. There are still no real rules of the gameonly conven-tions. Change the conventions and you have changed the game.(1960, 304)

Thus, what we might perceive as a brute and uncritical enforcement of therules, 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 aremade unexceptional, opened up for debate, and challenged by participants aswould any other argument . Rules are not separate from the components of thegame, de-limiting its boundaries and constraining the choices of the debaters,rather there are a set of unde ned limits external to the rules and largely anexpression of the unwritten willingness of the participants to allow play tocontinue beyond certain expectations. Debates must conclude in a certainpre-de ned amount of time in order for the hundreds of debates simultane -ously occurring in sequence to remain roughly on schedule. The reaction ofother participants to a violent or illegal act is unpredictable, and, therefore,while theoretically in play is ruled out by pragmatic considerations aboutthe willingness of other participants to continue the debate round, or the judge to nd such styles or approaches of argument persuasive. However,debaters have always pushed the envelope, from bringing in oppressedparties for rst-person testimony to hip-hop rap of arguments to re-mixingor hacking their opponents speeches via performances which playfullydouble arguments in a space safe from capitalist cooptation to reproducingarguments pictorially to performative nudity and excretion. These examplesare certainly at the extreme fringe of envelope-pushing and are not in anyway representative of the debate community or what are understood to besocially acceptable practices, however they serve as a powerful demonstra-tion for the innovative lengths that competitive pedagogy can foster, eachwith a complete theoretical versing in the literature base which defends suchapproach to rhetoric and performance.


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This understanding of rules which sediment the boundaries of conven-tion only to be swept away in the interplay of change, or which interpolatethe opposition into conformity with the frame which it establishes, is thussimilar to Deleuze and Guattaris concept of the inter-play between smooth

and striated spaces, the latter which enables metrical progression, the formerwhich enables a greater degree of experimental becoming. The nego-tiation of innovation cannot function without the establishment of a priorconformitya negation insensible without a prior af rmation to ground itsontologyand thus we see a relationship of necessity between the assertionor understanding of prior rules and rhizomatically mobile technologies ofchallenge, 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 striatedspace reimparts a smooth space, with potentially very differentvalues, scope, and signs. Perhaps we must say that all progress ismade by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smoothspace. (1987, 486)

Just as the condition of debate which enables restriction of certain argumentscontingently from frames of consideration, it enables every argument topotentially be internally mutant within multiple interlocking frameworks.

As Elizabeth Pass writes, Smooth spaces are dynamic, and transformationis more important than essence (2001, par. 9). Even in the moment of asser-tion 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 intothe ow of play. The argument that we need to act to stop violence meanssomething radically different in a Kantian, utilitarian, and pure ontologicalframework. That same argument is internally dependent on value judg-ments 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. Theframes change as debaters arguments compete and negotiate within them.In a framework which is only concerned with representations, the fact thatthe plan, if enacted, would save a million children, counts for almost noth-ing. 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-veilingconsiderations for which privileging representations in decision-calculusis, in and of itself, a meritous proposition. These observations demonstratean important proposition about the activity: part of what gives debate its

creative vibrancy is its ability to consistently re-draw the boundaries ofdiscrete conceptual objects, to leave uid the criteria of relevance for researchand inquiry while simultaneously intensively pursuing that scholarship. Indebate, the fruits of critical theory and persistent interrogation are not intel-lectual paralysis or withdrawal from political advocacy, but more often thannot a reciprocal engagement with creative experimentation.



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Ethical Challenges within Policy Debateand the Social Limits of Gamespace

We have thus established that limits are inevitable but not to be confusedwith rules which are not only mutable but strategic, spontaneous, and adap-tive. The rules of policy debate against certain arguments represent genresof arguments themselves, limiting the scope of argumentative implicationand the necessity of response to substantive objections via preclusion fromthe scope of relevant consideration. The inevitability of limits does not implytheir essence or stasis; even speech times have changed over the decades.Merely that social understandings of debate practice within the communityof participants recognize the existence of certain limits and of certain rulesand believe that the former delimit the boundary of play whereas the latterrepresent simply another multiplicity forming the internal continuum ofthe nonlinear dynamics of the play space. However, the limits which I havethus far identi ed appear to be limits of necessity, continuous with the socialmechanics of debate practices, yet at the same time inevitably both contingentand unavoidable. In other words, even if you change the speech times, youstill recognize the speech times. Even if you abolish the speech times, youstill recognize the necessity that at some point the person must stop talkingin order for the opponent to respond. This raises the question: what are thepossibilities of a socially introduced formation of limits, not established rules orconventions per se, but boundaries which out of a perceived social necessityno participant will transgress? This is to ask, can we conceive of a limit to aspace of play which is a limit to the willingness of participants to continuewhich has been produced entirely by social understandings of acceptablebehavior, and how does that relate to the playful creativity of the disciplinaryyet liberating debate about debate? In the debate community, these formsof arguments are known as ethics challenges.

Importantly, the phrasing of the scope of the previous question wouldinclude acts such as threatening the judge with violence, cutting the tongueout of your opponent, or burning their research prior to the debate. Whilethese acts would obviously count as far outside the boundaries of sociallyintroduced formation of limits, they are not theoretically impossible to accom-modate in the same way that talking for an in nite period of time would be.However, these acts are, of a practical and externally legal necessity, imper-missible based on the necessity of the social conditions of participation whichenable the activity in the rst place. These previously mentioned violationswould also, in the context of a debate round, be intentional, targeted, speci cand therefore represent a smoothing against the inevitable limits of stria-tion which would likely provoke a far greater backlash of striation or aboli-tion against many fora of debate space. Limits against these types of behaviorthus represent a socially necessary component of the debate-space.

Ethical challenges, however, occur in a somewhat different context. Theyare not necessary but normative assertions not of the limits of debate, nor a


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behavior, knowledge of which is both falsely assumed as universal yet differsdramatically between teams, regions, and even individuals.

Perversely, the same instinct towards laissez-faire that is the vitality ofdebates about argumentative framework turn personal and poisonous once

an ethical accusation is introduced. All of a sudden, the element of gamingseems all wrong, and yet the debate continues, and depending on howparticipants 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 invis-ible norms, these challenges are adjudicated according to uncertain crite-ria. Should the judge intervene to vote for the team that they truly believehave been wronged? Or is winning an ethics challenge necessarily tied upin meeting the burden of proof that such legal challenge would include?

And if the former is true, should judges vote against unethical behavior evenwhen 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 notit is about carbon emissions or the rules of debate itself, and, as uncomfort-able and personal as they may be, ethics challenges are not much differentthan a dressed up topicality or framework argument, in which the strategiccharge of cheating is occasionally more casually levied. However, froman evaluative stand-point, this method smoothes over the space for preemp-

tive striation, rhetorically positioning a level playing eld which is simul -taneously establishes a hierarchical order away from the gamespace whichdisenables the accused to exist outside of that already accomplished role-formation. This role of the accused is preemptively tainted with the ethos ofnefarious intentions, and thus hamstrings their persuasive ability to defendthemselves. Here, the open space of play invites a form of closure in theinstance of the accusers challenge, a form of gurative rather that playfullyliteral censorship which censors by effectby instantiating a bias within thecritic 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 justi-ed by an intuition that they precede the right of the other team to have theirspeech evaluated as arguments, a right which after all, is only afforded to anethical members of the community. In a way, they are almost an argumentagainst the judge, rather than the other team, who is often asked to put awaytheir reservations and decide, in their heart of hearts 2 as it were, whetheror not the transgression actually constitutes an ethics violation. Just as theyfalsely 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 intu-ition is understandably risk-averse, this is a bad spot for any accused to be in,

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


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regardless of the validity of the accusation. While criminal judges at least areasked to interpret a statute in a particular way, in policy debate, there is noset of written ethical norms. Debate critics are thus asked to intervene againstthe milieu of competing claims and counter-claims to irrevocably decide on

based on the amorphous criteria of moral intuition alone. In other words, thevery methods which judges employ to process appeals is stacked in favorof the accuser, with the hope that wolf will only be cried when the situationtruly merits it. In a highly competitive community of intensely motivatedindividuals, such collective trust is a foolishly arti cial presumption.

Ethical challenges pose a dif culty for our conception of the mechanismsof creative production and variance inhering within limits. If everything isin play, then shouldnt what seems to be just another limit, albeit of a differ-ent kind, serve as a provocation for adaptation and creative resistance? We

have already answered the question of how ethical challenges position theparticipants in striated space, but how does it t into the nonlinear dynam -ics of shaping the praxis of the debate space itself ? By bracketing the space ofresistance outside of the debate, always post facto to the accusation of unethi-cal play, the ethics challenge creates a closed mode of debating in which theethical questions are always and necessarily prior . This closedness then mayrepresent a boundary beyond which playful creativity is not comfortably oreasily crossed. While restrictions cannot be understood as merely repressive,the ethics challenge itself is a closure of the establishment of other contin-

gent limits since it presumes a claim to the essence of the activity, locatedin the policy debate community. As Paul Armstrong has argued, followingWolfgang Isers theory of play,

As a rule-governed but open-ended activity, play provides a modelfor deploying power in a nonrepressive manner that makes creativ-ity and innovation possible not in spite of disciplinary constraintsbut because of them. Not all power is playful, of course, and somerestrictions are more coercive than enabling. But thinking about thepower of constraints on the model of rules governing play helps toexplain the paradox that restrictions can be productive rather thanmerely repressive. Seeing constraints as structures for establishinga play-space and as guides for practices of exchange within it envi-sions power not necessarily and always as a force to be resisted inthe interests of freedom; it allows imagining the potential for powerto become a constructive social energy that can animate games ofto-and-fro exchange between participants whose possibilities forself-discovery and self-expansion are enhanced by the limits shap-ing their interactions. (2000, 221)

Instead of enabling experimentation by restricting the space of play to focuson parsing criteria which are always internal to the process of negotiatingcontingent values and frames of relevance, ethical challenges which rely on auniversalized, pre-supposed (yet non-existent) ethical rule set act as an endto 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 ethicalboundaries has initiated a panoptic disciplinary function, where most debat-ers prefer to err on the side of caution and thus adapt their ethical practiceto the most conservative version, rather than risk negotiating their practice

from the preemptively disadvantaged end of the rhetorical hierarchy. Inother words, debaters assume that if something might be unethical, betterto be safe than sorry and avoid it altogether. This panoptic effect shrinks theperimeter of the space of play via a mechanism which is presumed externaland non-negotiable to practice of debate. The result is a competitive incen-tive which may motivate ethics challenges in greater numbers and increasethe number of practices which are needlessly understood as deviant.

Conclusion

Policy debate offers an insight into the adaptive nature of contingent rulesof games and the limits which enable such adaptation within a space of play.In contrasting debates about argumentative frameworks with ethical chal-lenges, I have sought to elucidate the ways in which rules are both produc-tive of creative innovation by participants and potentially dis-empoweringwhen conceived of as essential, prior and universal. Game theorists shouldthus resist the temptation to simplify gaming situations by an understandingof their de ned rules without rst asking more probing questions about thepractices in which participants operationalize those rules and examining themodes of production which such rules encompass, enable, or preclude.

While rules are necessary to any understanding of games which particu-larize their play or establish the activity of participants within historicallycontingent conventions, the more important questions about rules are lessabout how they apply to a static snap-shot gaming situation and more abouthow the routinized praxes of gaming allow or disallow for their mutationover time. Games are not produced as stable essences, pre-ordained hier-archies built to last for an eternity but are rather meshworks of smooth andstriated spaces that constrain and enable different options for play withinparticular situations by adept participants.

Limiting choices of game-participants is thus less relevant than themethod of that limitation and how it comes to be understood within thecommunity of participants over time. For a game such as debate which hasalways understood many features of its social practice as negotiable andintrinsically mutant, the accusation of an ethics challenge asserts a problem-atically insular value-set which establishes a sterile conceptual exteriority tothe space of play. Just as social notions of ethical behavior in larger socialcommunities change over time and are subject to challenges and counter-challenges, so must the assertion of values within a space of play recognizetheir own contingency. The vitality and scope of experimentation and


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innovation within and around any gamespace is to some degree dependenton the willingness of the participants to accept the established rules as immu-table givens, or alternately, their abilities to assert conceptual mobility againstthe sedimentation of strait-jacketing norms of practice.

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

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6.2 (2001). http://english.ttu.edu/Kairos/6.2/coverweb/de/pass/index.htm.Armstrong, Paul. The Politics of Play: The Social Implications of Isers Aesthetic

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Documents

Policy Debate Zagorin