Saker,+James+(Jamie)

Paradigm (2014 Major Revision) Latest edit: September 23 2014

__Pref Summary (NEW Fall 2014)__


 * __Policy & LD:__** Pref me as a critical judge as that seems to be closest for most teams and schools to recognize. In past years, I've tried to be as accessible and wanted to allow teams to construct the round they wanted, but after almost a decade since I've been back on the circuit, one realizes there's only so much interdisciplinarity that can be hoped for in the frame of a debate round. Worse yet, too many debaters were doxologically invested in in the High Church of "policymaker framework" or "LD circuit theory" and thus interpreted my interdisciplinary orientation as an green light to assume they could run those arguments with absolutely zero engagement on epistemological and pedagogical levels. This was seriously awkward, with all these robed young acolytes assuming the transmutative powers of their camp theory file or framework file would perform its usual in-round magic against the performance, community or critical argument opponents.


 * __For both forms of debate (CX and LD):__** If you know how to think, engage and debate radical left theory, systems, media and social systems theory (Luhmann, Kittler, Sloterdijk, Lyotard, Latour, McLuhan), poststructuralism (e.g. Deleuze, Serres,, Derrida), speculative realism (Land, Brassier, Harman, Negarestani, etc.), constructivism, radical aestheticism (Schilingensief, Brecht), gender theory (Butler), Marxism, post-politics (ala Ranciere, Laclau, Dussel, Zizek, Mouffe), postcolonialism (ala Arrighi, Spivak, Hardt, Negri, Said, etc.), post-Freud (e.g. Lacan, Ettinger, Zizek), or even strongly confrontational views(e.g. Dugin), pref me. Even if you engage prior philosophical bases (e.g. Hegel, Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger) with a contemporary edge, and want a judge to engage that thinking, I'm a good shot. Doing stuff that presumes the contemporary neoliberal progressive enframing of "reality" is "TRUE AND OBJECTIVE"? Naa... find someone else to judge your round and we're both much more happy. Oh and yes, decentralized approaches resonate highly: I'm with my mentor Ranciere in looking for the path that doesn't invariably lead to Plato, but rather empowers and emancipates the proletariat. In my day job, I'm extensively involved in decentralizing and distributing information security and risk controls to "the people" in given enterprises, and nod with profound respect to the political experimentation of the Swiss in localizing political control (while acknowledging some interesting problems inherent in those demos/democratic approaches).


 * __Policy Specific__:** 'Policymaker'* framework isn't accepted as a doxological truth. You must engage and defend it on theoretical grounds, carrying the epistemic baggage that any meaning-production system must sustain. E.g. don't expect to read some blippy point and have me assume it's true. Don't expect me to hack neoliberal progressive. Wiki Fukuyama and postpolitics and you'll have a good idea of how I think.

//* Policy-making: the process of creating, advancing and establishing a policy, particularly in political realms. Isn't it curious how often 'policymaker' purists never debate the making (which in reality includes great social complexities, negotiates through interpretations of ideas and the spaces they deploy, muddles through epistemological differences, encounters the inequities of consideration, input, decision-making, implementation and governance across uneven and heterogeneous bodies, classes and other constructions of identity, singular and collective.)? All of those dynamics are the 99.99% of policy-making, yet how often do we find debaters who want to pretend none of that exists, waiving a magic wand of fiat (another word that doesn't mean what they might think) to make it all go away? And what does it go away for? What does this 'policymaking' become then, since it has nothing to do with the real political processes of making policy?//


 * __LD Specific__:** "The Theory", straight-up Kant, evangelical Rawls, and other theological purist perspectives are best left for other judges. I'm just not capable of reading your stuff and keeping it contained in the pandoric box it needs to be sustained within in order to derive the same meaning you're probably expecting.


 * __K Debaters__:** I'm proudly outing myself this season as a post-political post-[|poststructural]post-colonialist, constructivist intersectionalist who is engaged in arguments within the speculative realism camp (while advocating a cosmotraumatik speculative constructivism). This makes me quite high-theory, but I get wicked cold chills at the sublime capacity of raw aesthetics and process performance, narrative debate, etc. often in that artistic space.

__**Identity Debate**__: The debate round is a radically unique event space where you and I and the other debaters get to share part of our life. Use that space carefully if you want me to connect with you (that's your choice that I recognize). I have no access, nor do you, to the plight of peoples outside our event, though we can develop a sort of trust with each other in our discussion and come to determinations on how we might proceed. We also have the capacity to call bull on each other, disrupting the perceived comfort zones, though this often has to be done when a foundation of trust is established. For some interesting reasons, we seem to be wired to lock in habit, fix "that which kept me safe yesterday is most likely to keep me alive today," and tune out scary events and narratives that don't reconcile. We are convinced that if we just believe the Grand Narrative that we've been raised within hard enough, we will be protected; kept safe; free from tragedy. From this view, racism, class exploitation, gender discrimination, etc. all seem pathetically trivial and equally catastrophic: we exclude the Other not out of some complicated hate for a specific culture, behavior, color, gender, etc., but out of a shameful safety inclination: "If I just believe this Narrative I've been told by my parents/church/party/friends/etc., I will be protected and catastrophe will strike some other poor soul."

That's not good enough for us. Hiding in Ideology (which is really a masked Theology) won't do anything but assure we will be unprepared when things get difficult.

Back to the event/encounter of the debate round: This opportunity becomes increasingly clouded as we throw into the mix things we just cannot know nor inter-subjectively reconcile. For instance, my great grandmother was sold as a "dirty dark Bohemian" at age 8 and shipped from western Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) to Philadelphia to work as an indentured servant until she was 22. She wasn't "white" to her owners, yet now, we construct Poles, Czechs, Romanians, Muslim Yugoslavians as "white". Even more confusing was the fact that it appears much of her Czech family was buried in Jewish cemeteries, but she had a Protestant faith imposed upon her by her masters. Should we implicate her as a "white oppressor" and what would she say as a 14-year-old brown girl, scrubbing floors and being forced to satisfy the master of the house when he commanded? How do we even begin to reconcile our personal stories and the struggles of those who came before us?

If you are involved in an identity debate and have me in the back of the room, this section is pivotal to helping you understand how I am evaluating things: I have no way of evaluating anything about you other than our moment within the event-space. I will probably get profoundly angry if you Universalize things and violently impose Signifiers upon Signifieds with a total disregard for their singularity. These moves are too close to the same moves of those who attempt to eradicate and destroy authentic singularity.

Instead, I want to know how you deal with the singularity and take that material from our event into a construction of something fresh and new: What kind of artist are you, creating new spaces, new ways of constructing thoughts, etc. Neither you nor I can possibly know about our ancestry and the fights our predecessors fought. Let's live in our event and do with it what we can to construct a better place. Note: Don't think for a moment I'm a champion of "get along, go along" neoliberalism mush. Hell no. There are times to set the world ablaze, as are there times to construct meanings that force the otherwise unthinking masses to have to temporarily wake up and reconcile their intolerable ignorance. See this little preview (in German) of artist Christoph Schlingensief and his installation "[|Please Love Austria]" (aka Schlingensief's Container) which shocked and shamed the entire nation of Austria for its hateful, xenophobic anti-immigrant policies. Some times, debates are most successful when they pursue nonlinear paths.

Here's what French poststructural theorist Michel Serres says on language and meaning, which goes to why you probably don't want me as a judge if you're counting on a camp interpretation or expecting me to hack for neoliberal progressivism:
 * __ Resonance __**

"Every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness." - Michel Serres "Biogea"

__ Cheat Sheet (For Those In a Hurry with a Minimal Investment) __**

> > > > > Many neoliberal scholars have acclaimed how the framing epistemologies of the policymaking, analytical reasoning, and objective sciences have proclaimed the logical ascension of the white western Man of European descent over the peoples of the planet, bringing great illumination to the darkness of human origins through the historical singularity otherwise known as the Great Brilliance of Enlightened Reason. "We are here to educate the noble savage," proclaimed this most Reasoned (and Sunburnt) Man, adorned in his India Whites, musket charged and prepared for elephant-sized game. "Reason and certainty will prevail and keep the uncertainties and externalities from troubling us," they championed.
 * __ Speed __ : For 10 years, I've flowed NDT/CEDA speed. What would Paul Virilio say about this? Increasingly, I prefer a round where you call upon me to think, and give me time to think.
 * __ K __ : If you run it, know it. If you don't, don't. I love K's that construct and change the framing of the round - e.g. floating PICs.
 * __ Critical Aff/Performance/Slam Poetry/Art/Aesthetics __ : Certainly! But be prepared to negotiate meta-framework issues of meaning production, aesthetics/epistemological production/language/signification/ethics/politics, to reconcile why this method is preferential in the round respective to advocacy, texts, emancipation, identity construction, etc.
 * __ Policymaker __ : Has presumption to explain why we must sustain the (problematic) status quo. This isn't as hard as it sounds. Ranciere explains the origins of policy / police / politics from the Greek //polis//. I see policymaker as capable of both politics (emancipatory) and police (rigidity), but too often, "policymaker debaters" advance what can only be interpreted as the latter form. Thus it's a police argument: impose our advocacy upon the people because advantage X, Y and Z. Read Ranciere and Badiou for a clue here on what the hell I am meaning. Also, an extensive amount of my day job involves //governance//, meaning I'm functioning as an Aff in round, advocating that there are places we need to fix, stabilize meaning and police that interpretation. An example is the proclivity of cyberthreats that exploit social engineering vectors e.g. Spear Phishing: 90% of our employees are not in a position to engage the theoretical grounds of this problem and thus a policing approach that helps them accept what has been negotiated as a viable responsive strategy is pursued. Of course, this vanguardism highly reeks of Plato, and makes for a rather critical debate! (If only more experts, academics and authorities had such challenges to their ideas, as Lenin and others might attest). Also, debate engagement of the political problems in this realm akin to Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt are very welcomed, as well as more contemporary explorations (e.g. Georgio Agamben).
 * __ Speaks __ : I use tenths to move up and down degrees based on the following model: 28.0 = Central tendency; clean execution and no errors. 29.0 = Exceptional, typically engaging meta-framework, complex ideas negotiated and engaged into meaning production, you’re moving outside the Matrix. 30 = You should be in the finals round. 27.0 = Some problems you need to work on. 26.0 = Lots of problems; technical or in misunderstanding things. 25.0 or below = Ethical problems. This is rare territory for me, and usually is related to conduct I find unacceptable in how we relate to and treat each other. Don't ask me to disclose speaks. I disclose the decision whenever I am permitted to. Also, doing what is expected perfectly well is nice, but not exceptional. '30' is a statement that I found your construction authentic, aesthetic, remarkable and probably got cold chills enjoying it. Lacking that, be happy with 29.0-29.9 for really great work :)
 * __Paradigm Narrative, In 30 Seconds (NEW)__**

Tragically, skeptics of this Grand Ideology persisted, from the French rogues who threw stones at Plato to the German systems theorists who pointed out the nightmare of a pregnant chaos that infected the dreams of a dialectically perfected Humanity (and thus not only urinating in Descartes and Kant's cup, and spilled Hegel's wine glass all over the white tablecloth, but disrupting the otherwise pleasurable naps by the American and British analytics who had embraced the slumber of an analytic certainty). Even the bastards of the Global South, who ought to know their place in silence, dared challenge this White Illumination. Rogues like Enrique Dussel, appropriately observed a corresponding connection between Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" and the latter's Dutch epistemological underpinning "I conquer, therefore reality is." Great trouble had been raised by these most indecent of persons.

Confronted with this most proper of ideologies (spoken in its most British of tongues), the humble debate judge and author of this paradigm found resonance, comfort, solace and mug-slamming solidarity in the witness and attestation of Sir Simon Pegg in his "World's End" performance when he he proclaimed: "**Oh, f* off, you big lamp!"**


 * __ Experience & Background __**


 * // Debate //**
 * Nineth year back judging LD and CX debate after a long nap in Capital.
 * Judge more than 70-80 rounds per year, most national circuit experience in North-Central US (Blake, Caucus, Harvard, Westside, Valley, Dowling). Increasingly more time spent in LD due to team judge obligation requirements
 * Former interim head coach, Westside (Omaha Nebraska, TOC bid tournament school), LD and Critical coach at Westside, head coach at Fremont-Mills. Produced debaters who attained NDT bids in their freshman and sophomore years and won their district qual.
 * Policy and LD Debater, Millard North High School (Nebraska)

//**Professional**//
 * Corporate Information Security Officer for a regional community bank in Iowa and Nebraska
 * Segment expert and senior decisionmaking analyst on decentralized cybersecurity with briefings published to the U.S. executive branch, American Banker's Association, and other industry forums.


 * // Theory //**
 * PhD Student, European Graduate School (Saas-Fee, Switzerland)
 * Theorist and student working with philosopher Jacques Rancière on the application of aspects of his theory into systemic risk. Having spent more than seven years with Rancière’s thought and having a break with structuralists in the music arts that strangely parallels his break and self-exile from the Marxist structuralists (Althusser in particular), much of his my thinking is very influenced by his works and experiences.
 * Student of Bracha Ettinger, assisting her with digital archives. Bracha’s Matrixial theory strikes me as a remarkable study of quantum and topological human spaces, a dramatically different region of thinking from that of the “cosmological” aspect of Rancière, Deleuze and other “large space” thinkers. I’m quite curious if there can be connections established between the very large and small theories. That said, I am **not** a native Lacanian and you should absolutely not expect me to read Lacan in the “proper orthodoxial” manner.
 * Other teachers of influence: Judith Butler, Michael Hardt, Simon Critchley, Paul Virilio, Friedrich Kittler, Leonard Bernstein.
 * Other thinkers of very significant influence: Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Henri Bergson, Ernst Laclau, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Heidegger, Reza Negarestani, Nick Land.


 * __ Conflicts __**

High School Debate: - Omaha Westside/District 66 (Nebraska) - Fremont-Mills (Iowa) - Des Moines Roosevelt (Iowa) CEDA/NDT: - United States Military Academy (West Point / Army Debate)


 * __ Grab Bag (2014 Version) __**

I'm interested in hearing thinkers who are ambitious enough to want to change the world, but have the early humility to understand just how problematically screwed this idea is. From the young Romantics, Sturm und Drang, Hegel, Marx and his conjoined brother Adam Smith, through the early dreamers of German Expressionism who desired the purification of a cleansing Great War and through the late crisis of the grand systemic visionaries of the 20th century, the vision of Thinking Big have been implicated with great troubles. As Zizek says in "In Defense of Lost Causes", the regression of the mean toward the futility of neoliberal progressive mush isn't a neutral position. New ideas need to be championed more than ever, and debate is a wonderful place to bring them forward for exploration. Construct the event; command the moment, and take personal risk to bring forth an aesthetic potentiality worthy of engagement.