kritik


 * Running the Kritik (Parli Debate Specific, but widely applicable)**

Although Bill Shanahan is widely credited with applying the critique to NDT debate, pre-merger CEDA debates frequently featured critical theory-based objections to resolutions or plans. (Bill Shanahan? Nukespeak for example was run in CEDA in the mid 80s--and Critical Legal Studies (CLS) was ran in NDT in the 70s and critical theory args maybe even earlier.)

There are three foundations to the kritik:

The first is that a paradigm is being critiqued. A paradigm is a fancy word for a specific world view or set of assumptions. Some examples of paradigms might be capitalism, socialism or neo-classicism.

The kritik can/should literally function as a disad in the round. Because the government team won’t be claiming a specific paradigm (unless they do so in a value statement), you will be linking your kritik off of the assumptions behind the claims that the government team makes.

Finally, the kritik functions in the round as a gateway to a discussion of fiat and its implications. Can we really discuss the effects of a policy if we are misrepresenting the very paradigm’s its based on?

That’s the general idea behind the kritik, here’s a basic summary of what we’ve talked about so far:

You operate within paradigm X Paradigm X is bad. Therefore your plan is bad.

Before we get too far, you need to know that this is not the ONLY kind of kritik. Kritiks have been in debate forever, but they haven’t always been defined as a kritik. I like to break down Kritiks into five types:

1.) The speech act kritik: This argument focuses on utterances or arguments made in the debate. Some examples include sexist and racist language but also extend to ‘repugnant’ arguments like genocide good or nuclear war good.

2.) The rule based kritik: The creation of decision rules is an old practice in debate, taken from the old value debate circuit. The general practice in this argument is as a framework for weighing solvency and advantages. A rule is established (like utilitarianism is good) and then the opposition tries to win that the government team has not met the rule in solvency or advantages.

3.) The ethics kritik: These are arguments made every round, like “dropping T in the MO means that the Opposition has an unfair time skew in the debate round.” The team running this argument is contending that their opponents have broken an explicit or implicit rule to debating.

4.) The kritik of implicit assumptions: These arguments function mostly as disadvantages and have already been explained above. For instance, the government endorses capitalism, capitalism is bad, so the government plan is bad.

5.) The resolutional kritik: This is essentially a speech-act kritik, but not of the opposing team, but of the resolutional language.

Framework!

The Kritik is ‘a priori’, which means it is an argument that must be adjudicated first before we can evaluate other issues in the round. Another characterization of this is the term ‘pre-fiat’. This just means that the fiat is a discussion that takes place before we even get to talking about what happens after we pass the plan (post-fiat). Topicality is an example of another ‘a priori’ argument. We have to decide if the plan is even allowed to be discussed within the resolution before we can evaluate it. In this way, ‘a-priori’ arguments provide a ‘gateway’ to the rest of the debate.

The reason for this ‘pre-fiat’ status is because the kritik often is evaluating issues that the entire government plan is based on or relies on. The warrant for the claim “Improving the economy is good” is that capitalism is good. If the kritik is challenging the assumption that capitalism is good, we cannot weigh or discuss whether or not improving the economy would be good until we resolve the debate about capitalism.

Another reason that kritiks are ‘pre-fiat’ is that it is the only ‘real’ thing that happens in a debate round. Think of the PMC as a performance, a rehearsed presentation by an actor given to an audience. This performance is real, it is tangible, it can be recorded, recounted and shared. Now think about what we are talking about in the performance. Does the world change when the plan is passed? Is there a magic word that makes anything we talk about in a debate round become real? If plan texts were wooden boys, they would not become real. That means if a kritik actually talks about what was SAID, not what is hypothesized, then we are discussing a real event. The government team actually endorsed capitalism out loud. This really happened. The government team actually DID use sexist language. Kritiks often target things which are explicitly real world that had an impact in real life. We should talk about what really happened before we talk about what might happen in an imaginary world where some made up plan might get implemented.

Winning the framework debate is the key to ensuring that your kritik will compete with the government’s plan. It is also good to have specific arguments in the framework debate as to why the specific argument you are talking about might be more important than the affirmative’s case. For instance, if you are kritiking sexist or racist language, you might say that because debate is a communicative and public event we have an obligation to the event to ensure debate’s moral and ethical stability. It is crucial to the educational value of debate to make sure that it has a moral and ethical center. In essence, the framework debate is about convincing the judge that she or he should evaluate the kritik first in the debate round before any other question is resolved, and that if the kritik must be compared to the plan, that the kritik will outweigh.

Let’s look at an example of a Kritik of Implicit Assumptions, a Feminist Kritik of International Relations:

Premise: The government team uses foreign policy actions to achieve goals and generate advantages. Foreign policy is inherently patriarchal and exclusive of women and feminist ideals. Patriarchy is the cause of international competition and provides the impetus towards violent conflict. Only when we couch action in feminist rhetoric and support feminist goals can we achieve a productive and sustainable world free of conflict and destruction.

Link: Feminist author, Juliet McCannell wrote about how the rhetoric of cold war foreign policy in the 1950’s subverted women to explicit roles as homemakers. She wrote that cold war rhetoric imprisoned women in the home, shackling them to children and the kitchen and away from places where policy decisions are discussed and made. The government team is engaging in a war-frightened foreign policy discourse that returns us to this cold war mindset we have yet to recover from as a society.

Link: Policies aimed at stopping future conflicts don’t work. The conflicts always happen in some form, regardless of specific policy actions. The government plan engages in this hollow hope of stopping international conflicts.

Impact: Patriarchal foreign policy rhetoric ignores the needs and safety of women, leading to abuse, denial of rights and rape of women. War rhetoric puts civilian women and children at risk as collateral damage in conflicts that is deemed acceptable in the government teams harms/advantage scenario as an unfortunate side effect of conflict.

Impact: Foreign policy rhetoric leads to power dialogue. Specific power dialogues include power ‘over’ rhetoric that creates competition in the international arena. The goal of foreign policy is to subvert and control international bodies, subjecting them to the rule of the dominant actor, in this case the actor in plan. Power ‘over’ discourse leads to oppression and control and the denial of self-determination.

Alternative: We must discuss gender when we talk about foreign policy actions. How will the policy protect women and children? How will the policy include the feminist perspective in the implementation of the policy? The alternative is to endorse a framework where gender becomes central to any discussion of international relations.

Alternative: Reject plans that claim to stop inevitable wars while doing nothing to stop institutionalized violence against women and children. Domestic violence, rape, and discrimination are all violent acts that we can actually solve and make a dent in, especially since our discussions and deconstruction in this room will influence ourselves and the community to focus on these forms of structural violence. Your plan will not stop a war. Nothing will happen after this round. However, written endorsements by the critic will shape the community and provide a written record of why we should stop domestic violence first, before hypothesizing about international events that will continue unabated despite our discussions.

Examples of Kritiks:


 * Marxism/Dialectical Materialism
 * Spanos (a critique of foreign policy based on the work of William Spanos)
 * Borders
 * Feminist International Relations
 * Critical Legal Studies
 * Critical Race Theory
 * Epistemic Complexity
 * Cultural Imperialism
 * Heidegger
 * Nuclearism
 * Normativity
 * Threat Construction
 * Terror Talk (using the rhetoric of "terrorism," "terrorists," etc.)
 * Objectivism (based on the work of Ayn Rand)

Performative contradictions - One common answer to the kritik is that the opposition has engaged in a performative contradiction - they also violate the kritik in their advocacy. There violation is then argued to be worse because they knowingly violated the kritik whereas the Government's violation was inadvertent. Thus, the performative contradiction warrants a ballot for the gov.