The Late William Spanos Critiques Debating

WILLIAM V. SPANOS

William V. Spanos is a highly acclaimed author, World War II Veteran, POW at Dresden, distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton and well known in the competitive world of high school and intercollegiate academic debate. We thank Dr. Spanos so much for speaking with us. It is not often that we have such brilliant minds comment on our insular activity and his work gets at the heart of what we do.

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS:

CS: When we had our discussion in Binghamton, you asked me if teams were ever marginalized or excluded for reading arguments based on your work. Some have argued that this move is most frequently enacted during debates with an argument aptly referred to as "framework" where one team will define and delimit their ideal 'world picture' of a carefully crafted resolution and then explain why the opposing teams argument have violated the parameters of this 'frame.' In earlier comments on debate you had criticized the disinterested nature of the activity and its participants - the detached model of debate where anything goes so long as you "score points" and detach yourself from the real (human) weight of these issues. How might debaters approach debate or relate to our resolutions in a more interested sense?
WVS: The reason I asked you that question is because I've always thought that the debate system is a rigged process, by which I mean, in your terms, it's framed to exclude anything that the frame can't contain and domesticate. To frame also means to "prearrange" so that a particular outcome is assured," which also means the what's outside of the frame doesn't stand a chance: it is "framed" from the beginning. It was, above all, the great neo-Marxist Louis Althusser's analysis of the "problematic" - the perspective or frame of reference fundamental to knowledge production in democratic-capitalist societies -- that enabled me to see what the so called distinterestness of empirical inquiry is blind to or, more accurately willfully represses in its Panglossian pursuit of the truth.
Althusser's analysis of the "problematic" is too complicated to be explained in a few words. (Anyone interested will find his extended explanation in his introduction --"From Capital* to Marx's Philosophy" -- to his and Etienne Balibar's book *Reading Capital*. It will suffice here to say that we in the modern West have been *inscribed* by our culture --"ideological state apparatuses (educational institutions, media, and so on)-- by a system of knowledge production that goes by the name of "disinterested inquiry," but in reality the "truth" at which it arrives is a construct, a fiction, and thus ideological. And this is precisely because, in distancing itself from earthly being --the transience of time --this system of knowledge production privileges the panoptic eye in the pursuit of knowledge. This is what Althusser means by the "problematic": a frame that allows the perceiver to see only what it wants to see. Everything that is outside the frame doesn't exist to the perceiver. He /she is blind to it. It's nothing or, at the site of humanity, it's nobody. Put alternatively, the problematic -- this frame, as the very word itself suggests, *spatializes* or *reifies* time -- reduces what is a living, problematic force and not a thing into a picture or thing so that it can be comprehended (taken hold of, managed), appropriated, administered, and exploited by the disinterested inquirer.
All that I've just said should suggest what I meant when, long ago, in response to someone in the debate world who seemed puzzled by the strong reservations I expressed on being informed that the debate community in the U.S. was appropriating my work on Heidegger, higher education, and American imperialism. I said then -- and I repeat here to you -- that the traditional form of the debate, that is, the hegemonic frame that rigidly determines its protocols-- is unworldly in an ideological way. It willfully separates the debaters from the world as it actually is-- by which I mean as it has been produced by the dominant democratic I capitalist culture --and it displaces them to a free-floating zone, a no place, as it were, where all things, nor matter how different the authority they command in the real world, are equal. But in *this* real world produced by the combination of Protestant Christianity and democratic capitalism things -- and therefore their value --are never equal. They are framed into a system of binaries-Identity/ difference, Civilization/barbarism I Men/woman, Whites/blacks, Sedentary/ nomadic, Occidental/ oriental, Chosen I preterit (passed over), Self-reliance I dependent (communal), Democracy I communism, Protestant Christian I Muslim, and so on -- in which the first term is not only privileged over the second term, but, in thus being privileged, is also empowered to demonize the second. Insofar as the debate world frames argument as if every position has equal authority (the debater can take either side) it obscures and eventually effaces awareness of the degrading imbalance of power in the real world and the terrible injustices it perpetrates. Thus framed, debate gives the false impression that it is a truly democratic institution, whereas in reality it is complicitous with the dehumanized and dehumanizing system of power that produced it. It is no accident, in my mind, that this fraudulent form of debate goes back to the founding of the U.S. as a capitalist republic and that it has produced what I call the "political class" to indicate not only the basic sameness between the Democratic and Republican parties but also its fundamental indifference to the plight of those who don't count in a system where what counts is determined by those who are the heirs of this quantitative system of binaries.


CS: I would love to hear more about what you mean by the word interested. According to earlier work you had mentioned that it came from the Greek term for "in-the-midst." The relay between this "point of view" and your account of the bombing of Dresden in your memoir In The Neighborhood of Zero seems remarkable. What lessons might we take from this?
WVS: Following up on what I've just said, inquiry, whether it takes the form of knowledge production or debate, cannot be disinterested. "Disinterested" inquiry is an orientation towards the truth that has been exposed as a myth by the poststructuralist revolution from Martin Heidegger through Michel Foucault to Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Judith Bulter. Inquiry is necessarily interested precisely in the sense that it takes place in the world. The word "interest" come from the Latin (not Greek) inter esse, which means that we, as human beings, are "beings in-the-midst" (as opposed to beings, such as angels, who look down from a distance on or "observe" phenomena from above). As Heidegger said, following Kierkegaard, we, as human beings, have been "thrown into the world" and thus exist *inter esse*, "in-the-midst-of- being." We are, therefore, interested, that is, we relate to or engage phenomena with care precisely because everything we encounter *inter esse* is transient, uncertain, problematic, a matter of questioning, To understand human being as inter esse is thus to acknowledge that we are radically free. This is not as easy as the word "freedom" implies under the aegis of American democracy. The freedom that comes with being-in-the-midst is a difficult, even agonizing freedom. We can't rely on some higher cause, whether God or a framed system (such as democratic capitalism), to choose for us. We must choose for ourselves, Being in the midst, being interested, means, as Sartre put it long ago, being "condemned to be free." But that is the price one has to pay to become free from the degradation of servitude and for the exquisite joy of being fully human. Dis-interested inquiry separates or, better, alienates the inquirer form this inter esse. As I said earlier, it reduces the mysterious force of being-in-the-midst to an absolutely knowable (quantifiable) thing. Put alternatively, in privileging the observing or panoptic or spatialzing eye-- the eye that, seeing everything in time an space at once, reduces being's dynamics" in a "world picture" -- it privileges the answer over the question. To be interested then means to beware of those who demand answers --or finality -and victory. They invariably turn out to be murderous brutes.
It was precisely this lesson about being-in-the-world that I learned in the midst of the terrorist firebombing --for that's what it was-- of Dresden perpetrated by the the U.S. and Britain against German civilians in World War II, after I was taken prisoner of during the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium. All through the war I, as a young boy, was nagged by the feeling that there was something radically wrong about my being sent by an abstract "higher cause" about which I knew absolutely nothing to fight and die for my country. And the little I did know as a child of immigrant parents did not instill me with patriotic fervor for that higher cause. But I, like Huckleberry Finn in his relation to black freind Jim, suppressed that nagging feeling by blaming myself for daring to have such heretical feelings. After all, who was I to have opinions about higher causes? In Dresden, however, under the unrelenting Allied incendiary bombs that killed over 100,000 innocent civilians in one day and night air raid, I was, as I narrate in my memoir *In the Neighborhood of Zero,* dragged into the truth. In that horrendous zero zone of mass death and mutilation -- in-the-midst with a vengeance -- I bore witness to the terrible end of the logic that privileges a higher cause, a Telos, over everything that's "below," which is to say, over everything that doesn't count to those, above, who do the counting. All this, not incidentally, is encapsulated by the little poem a wrote as the epigraph to my memoir:
"Hovering over // their microsmic map, // no periplum, // They, // in shining brass, // push their prosthetic armada // to its destination, // unleash its murderous load, and, // when the unexpecting city below // goes up in turbulent flame, // cry, "good show, old chaps." // Caught in that rain of terror, // we, down here, // under their abstract gaze, // the living and the dead, // in the midst // of fire and brimstone, // all the boundaries razed, // become // a neighborhood of zero."


CS: You mentioned that your work is primarily influenced (although always by many others) by Heidegger, Foucault, Arendt, Said and now Agamben and Badiou. In focusing on the similarities between these authors and emphasizing what they have in common, how do we remain on guard against the violent processes of assimilation and homogenization?
WVS: This is, admittedly, a controversial constellation, especially because it includes Edward Said, who, according to "Saidians," was very critical of the poststructuralist initiative that Heidegger inaugurated. Said's criticism of this poststructuralist tradition focused primarily on two related aspects of poststructuralist theory: 1) its alleged antihumansim; and 2) its alleged denial of agency to the human subject. As for the first, it is true that the poststructuralists, especially Foucault, following Heidegger, were severely critical of the Western humanist tradition. This was because this humanist tradition privileged the concept of Man (anthropos) understood as a self-present and determining essence. That is, it simply substitued the Word of Man (anthropo-logos) for the Word of God (Theo-logos) as the beginning and end of the truth process. To Heidegger and Foucault, for example, the so called humanist revolution in the Renaissance that displaced God by Man was not radical, because it simply secularized the Theo-logos, naturalized the superanatural. This Humanism, no less than the theology it replaced, remained metaphysical: an interpretation of the being of being meta ta physica: from after or beyond or above the way things actually are, that is, panoptically.
Said --and far moreso many of his followers-- felt that Foucault's privileging of discourse over the worldliness of the a text constituted a radical denial of humanism and human agency: that man makes his/her world. In my view, however, this was not exactly true. In substituting discourse for humanism, Foucault and the poststructuralists were then confronting the problem of language -- its loss of transparency -- posed by Nietzsche's, Freud's, and Heidegger's inaugural interrogations of disinterested (empirical) inquiry, which they showed was metaphysical. They were not denying the human nor human agency as such. They were, in fact, attempting to show that, in privileging the observing" (panoptic) eye, the "disinterested" humanist inquiry of modern democratic capitalist or Enlightenment Western societies was no less ideological-- and deterministic-- than the indoctrinating language of totalitarian societies, indeed, that it was more difficult to achieve human agency under its aegis because, unlike totalitarian indoctrinationism, in which power is overt and manifest (and thus vulnerable), it conceals its determing power beneath the rhetoric of freedom. (knowledge will set you free from power). In other words, Foucault and the poststructuralists overdetermined language (textuality) over the question of human agency in their critique of disinterested inquiry because it was the most pressing concern at a the time when the West was proclaiming, imperially, that its imperial version of the truth was applicable to the world at large. They were not denying the humanity of man nor rejecting human agency. They were-- and this, I think, is what the post-poststructuralists, Agemben, Badiou,Zizek, Butler, are all about-- laying the ground for a new, radically un-centered, nonidentitarian concept of the human and humanism and the human polis. They were, in fact, exactly what Said, in qualifying the humanism he was committed to, called himself at the end of his life: "non-humanist humanists."
We must of course, be vigilant in maintaining distinctions, After all, this is the crucial imperative of the poststructuralist critique of identity (the founding principle of the West: that Identity --Sameness -- is the condition for the possibility of difference and not the other way around. But in doing so, we must also be wary of rigidifying the "others" (temporality, affect, women, workers, blacks, gays, Muslims, Jews, nomads, and so on) decolonized by the critique of identity back into fixed essentialist idententies. In my mind, the revolution in thinking inaugurated by poststructuralist theory in the 1970s was drastically setback, if not annulled, when the "worldly" (politically-orented) theorists of this revolution put themselves into a binary opposition to their textual (ontological/epistemological) affiliates, thus turning a community of nonidentical identiies --what, after Antonio Gramsci, I call a revolutionary "historical bloc" --into one at war with itself.


CS: What does it really mean to "think difference" or "think the second term" positively?
WVS: As I have been saying in one way or another throughout these remarks, the Western tradition, particularly in its latest (Anthropological or Enlightenment) phase, has been structured according to the imperatives of a binary logic (Identity/difference), in which the first term is not only privileged over the second, but is also empowered to demonize the second. It is based on a politics of enmity. Thus, Some (total) thing vs. nothing, Self vs. other, Civilization vs. barbarism, Man vs. woman, Straight vs. .gay, White vs. black, Occident vs. orient, and on and on. According to this Enlightened mode of knowledge production, only entities that are measurable have being; everything else is as nothing. Or to put it alternatively only *things* count; every phenomenon that is not a thing doesn't count. But, as Heidegger says in his essay "What Is Metaphysics?," every statement that the adherents of this mode of knowledge production make about truth is necessarily accompanied by reference to this nothing: "That to which the world refers are beings themselves -- and nothing besides; that from which every attitude takes its guidance are beings themselves -- and nothing further; that with which the scientific confrontation in the interruption occurs are beings themselves-- and beyond that nothing." And he concludes: "What about this nothing? Is it an accident that we talk this way automatically ... ?" The implication here is that this nothing (das Nichts), which the West systematically has repressed has also haunted its truth discourse from the beginning of Western civilization. Poststructuralist theory, then -which, as the etymology makes clear in questioning a mode of knowledge that spatializes or thingifies what are not things (like time), constitutes an effort not only to retrieve the nothing that modern Western thinking will militanly have nothing to do with, but also to think this nothing positively. The question it asks --or should ask-- is what would a world in which the nothing, in all its manifestations, is given its due be like? This question about the coming community is the question that, like Said at the end of his life vis a vis Palestine, Agamben, Badiou, Ranciere, Butler, and Zizek, among others are now asking,


CS: Some of the most contentious arguments in the debate community about your work revolve around questions of identity. You criticize structures of whiteness that serve to maintain the hegemony of metaphysical imperialism, but the alternative you offer of identityless identitiesin multiple places in your work, especially America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire, seems like a privileged position to take. It is certainly easy for the majority of debaters as white, privileged males to adopt a nomadic or fluid identity- but what does the strategy of identityless identities do for those who are facing the brunt of oppression or cultural destruction now? Is this intended to be a strategy for them?
WVS: Of course, identity is crucial in the struggle of oppressed peoples against tyranny. Being a Palestinian, for example, is absolutely necessary to the natives of Palestine who would resist the depredations inflicted on them by the powerful Israeli regime. It enables solidarity and endows strength to the cause of resistance. But what I have been calliing poststructuralist theory has also taught us that identity, as a cultural phenomenon, is a historical construct, not a fact of nature. It is, as I have been suggesting, the consequence of a mode of knowledge production structured in domination, one, that is, that reverses the primal priority of difference (the many) and identity (the one). In prioritizing identity (the One) over difference (the many) this ontological fiction thus devalues and subordinates the latter and renders it colonizable. On the surface, this disclosure, which now posits difference as ontologically prior to identity, would suggest that the relay of minority terms in this binary logic, insofar as it has been denied a natural solidarity, are rendered powerless. But this is not necessarily so, since poststructuralist theory-- Gayatri Spivak comes to mind here-- has also taught us that the (subaltern) identites that have been established historically (by the dominant culture) can be used strategically against its oppressors.
This strategic appropriation of identity in the cause of resistance is too complicated to spell out here, but its efficacy (not least for debaters who would resist the established debate frame) can be suggested briefly by my referring to a well known literary text and a well known (in my mind epochal) modern historical event that have something basic in common: Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener", and the Vietnam War. In both, the focus is on the nobodies --those who are as *nothing*, who don't count, in a binarist system in which what counts is determined by material power, Wall Street and the forwarding American war machine, In both, as well, the weak "nobodies" defeat the powerful Somebodies, not by confronting the latter head on, in the forwarding terms of encounter it assumes, but simply be refusing to be answerableto the "Truth" of the powerful!. It was Bartleby's "I prefer not to" that disintegrated the certainty of his arrogant lawyer boss's Wall Street (democratic/capitalist) ethos. And it was the National Liberation Front's (the Viet Gong's) refusal to fight their war of liberation according to the forwarding dictates of the American imperial regime that resulted in the disintegration of the American military juggernaut. Appropriating the very subordinate terms by which the dominant parties represented them, both Bartleby and the National Liberation Front were enabled to transform them into a weapon that defeated a far more powerful aggressor. It's worth recalling, at this juncture, Edward Said's appeal to the "damaged life" of Theodor Adorno in his effort to envision a mode of resistance in an age when those who don't count don't otherwise stand a chance: "'In an intellectual hierarchy which constantly makes everyone answerable, unanswerabilty alone can call the hierarchy directly by its name."' (Culture and Imperialism).


CS: Many of the most charged criticisms of your comments on debate stem from the charge that you have had very little experience with debate and are not qualified to comment on it. We've taken the position often that our insular activity could use some outside criticism, but others remain skeptical of the view that disinterested, 'switch-side,' debate, where debaters can take any position on an issue, will actually produce more neoconservatives like Cheney and Rumsfeld. They cite policy debaters who practiced this and went on to champion rights for Guantanamo Bay detainees after debate and law school. Surely you don't believe that all debaters will become neocons simply from following this model. But what should we be most on guard against in order to avoid the worst of the imminent global disaster that the neocons are undoubtedly leading us to?
WVS: The danger of being a total insider is that the eye of such a person becomes blind to alternative possibilities. The extreme manifestation of this being at one with the system, of remaining inside the frame, as it were, is, as Hannah Arendt, decisively demonstrated long ago, Adolph Eichmann. That's why she and Said, among many poststructuralists, believed that to be an authentic intellectual --to see what disinterested inquiry can't see-- one has to be an exile (or a pariah) from a homeland-- one who is both apart of and apart from the dominant culture. Unlike Socrates, for example, Hippias, Socrates' interlocutor in the dialogue "Hippias Major" (he is, for Arendt, the model for Eichmann), is at one with himself. When he goes home at night "he remains one." He is, in other words, incapable of thinking. When Socrates, the exilic consciousness, goes home, on the other hand, he is not alone; he is "by himself." He is two-in-one. He has to face this other self. He has tothink. Insofar as its logic is faithfully pursued, the framework of the debate system, to use your quite appropriate initial language, does, indeed, produce horrifically thoughtless Eichmanns, which is to say, a political class whose thinking, whether it's called Republican or Democratic, is thoughtless in that it is totally separated from and indifferent to the existential realities of the world it is representing. It's no accident, in my mind, that those who govern us in America --our alleged representatives, whether Republican, Neo-Con, or Democrat-- constitute such a "political class." This governing class has, in large part, their origins, in a preparatoary relay consisting of the high school and college debate circuit, political science departments, and the law profession. The moral of this story is that the debate world needs more outsiders -- or, rather, inside outsiders -- if its ultimate purpose is to prepare young people to change the world rather than to reproduce it.


CS: Lastly, and this may seem like a silly question, but many in debate charge you as an antihumanist who has no ethical standing and, like Heidegger, would not intervene in the face of genocide -or at least that your philosophy warrants that passivity. Can you speak to this?
WVS: Anyone who has read even a few sentences of my writing, including my book on Heidegger, will realize that I am radically opposed to all forms of totalitarianism. To equate my interest in Heidegger's de-structive thought with Nazism is guilt by association, not encounter with my work. Everything I've taught and written since I began reading Heidegger, has taken its point of departure from his interrogation of the Western metaphysical tradition, a thinking from above things-as-they are that has as its telos the coercion of everything in space and time (existence/ difference) into a larger whole or totality (Essence/Identity). That forcing of differential phenomena into taking their proper place in a larger whole is totalitarian. In reversing the traditional binary between Identity and difference, I commit myself to a radically secular (worldly) perspective. He/or she who subscribes to the metaphysical interpretation of being (in whatever form) is not free. On the contrary his/her vocation (or calling) is always to serve-- to be the servant of-- a "Higher Cause". He or she who rejects the metaphysical interpretation of being, who commits him/herself to *this* world is radically free. What troubles a lot of debaters about my position, however, is not so much the question of my particular politics as the fact that I don't limit totalitarianism to Nazism (or Fascism), but, following the poststructuralists' critique of the so called Enlightenment, extend it to include liberal capitalist democracy. This, I think, is because such an inclusion, subverts one of the basic-- unexamiend -tenets of the debate world's framework: the enabling distinction between totalitarian indoctrination and liberal democratic disinterested inquiry, a distinction that has been called into question by the poststructularists' appropriation of Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony. If Spanos is against democracy, this binarist argument goes, then he must be totalitarian.
As for the question of my relation to humanism, it should be noted, in addition to what I said earlier about the "anti-humanism" of the poststructuralists, that, as far as I recall, I have never referred to myself as an anti-humanist. My book on The End of Education, where I spell out the implications of reversing the binary logic endemic to disintersted inquiry for higher education, is pointedly subtitled "Toward Posthumanism." My quarrel with Humanism has to do with the way the human has been appropriated in and by and *for* the West, particularly in the wake of the so called Renaissance, which, by the way, was not a rebirth of Greek learning-- a learning grounded in the temporal (secular or, more radically, profane world and committed to the question (to possibility), over the answer (the vocational act) -- but Roman: eruditio and institutio in bonas artes (scholarship and training in good conduct). The post-theological phase of the Western tradition simply subsituted the Anthropo-logos (the Word of Man) for Theo-logos (the Word of God). It thus did not radicalize humanity's relation to being; it naturalized (secularized) the supernatural. Man (with the capital letter), instead of God, became the measure of all things. His vocation --his calling -- became *servitude* to the higher cause of Man,and his politics became a political theology. And, it's imporatant to add, the word "Man" in this tradition has meant emphatically *Western* Man. The rest of the world's humanity became the Western humanist's (white man's") burden.
In referring to "posthumanism" in my book on higher education, therefore, I was not suggesting that we abandon the concept of man; I was, rather, pointing to a far more radical and inclusive understanding of humanity's essence than that "secular" version which became hegemonic in the modern West: a profane humanity, as it were. I mean by this, a radically finite humanity, a humanity, to reintroduced the language I used earlier to critique disinterested inquiry, that finds itself thrown in the world: always already in-the-midst (*inter esse*), always already in the time of the now, where one must choose . More specifically, I mean a humanity that is gifted I cursed by a finite consciousness --an animal that is simultaneously and inextricably-- irreparably, Agamben puts it-- outside and inside, apart from and apart of, the world he makes, and where, therefore, the life-enhancing question (the beginning) -- is *always already* ontologically prior to he Answer (the *Telos*) to use the paradoxical term Edward Said adopted in his posthumously published meditation on humanism (*Humanism and Democratic Criticism*), by referring to "posthumanism," I was calling for a "nonhumanist humanism," a humanism that, unlike the essentialist humanism privilege by the West- is grounded in difference and thus constitutes a singular universal, one in which as Said puts it quoting Aime Cesaire, "no race possesses the monopoly of beauty I of intelligence, of force, I and there I is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory." Here, of course, "victory" means victory over (the very idea of) victory. It's the neighborhood of zero.