profile: noise@thirdparasite.com

Critical debate has 100% solvency. If you don't believe me and believe kritik is "disadvantages without uniqueness," then talk with me. Listen to my team's message. Our advocacy will hopefully redirect you from that myth. This decision, while it affects our common future, is about you and the world you see as possible for all of us.

Policy vs. Kritik

As a policy debate coach on a difficult circuit (50% full-out critical in Nebraska, 50% full-out policy/TOC-style in Iowa... we live on the faultlines), I'm quite the anomaly. My day job is running risk management for the largest global financial processor. As I shared with philsopher Ken Wark (to his probable amusement), I live in the "belly of the Vectoral beast." I live on the faultline between policy and philosophy that challenges us all in the debate world.

Both have their place: policy helps us in situations within the current terrain. It guides us within the day-to-day. I'm a big fan of this realm, having married a wonderful woman who sees the world from this perspective. Without "concrete utilitarians," our world would totally suck. We'd have lofty ideas and empty homes. We'd transcend conceptually and reach new plateaus mentally, and starve with empty bellies. As I suggest, Policy is an instantiation of our current Philosophy, just as our Consciousness is an instantiation of our current Unconsciousness.

That said, Policy gets us only so far. It works within the system, and when we have problems that originate from the limitations of the system, we cannot expect an answer within that very same system to help us. This is the realm of the kritik in policy debate, and it's a tremendously valid one. Those who reject it do great harm to themselves and society. At best, they're relegated to minor fools that embrace the comforting Matrix over the conceptual difficulty of a problematic Alternative. Should you consider yourself an intelligent human being, please don't find yourself in this role.

Relevance

Having left policy debate for two decades, returning upon accident, I found the re-entry of the world to be the most envigorating experience for my professional career as an architect of risk thinking. I felt like a thief, scraping up the ideas of great thinkers like Agamben, Deleuze, Heidegger, and others and applying them to a domain starved for decades of sincere thought. Each argument and case written for my team was an exploration of thought for the world of corporate risk.I was the poster border child, sneaking across into critical land from the world of corporate policy, stealing solutions they could not locate otherwise.

As I delved deeper, I grew bolder, placing the signature upon the thought I returned. My cases written in my "day job" referred to the thought of great thinkers like Agamben. How curious it was that the State of Exception explained the condition and the subsequent risk facing my Vectoral employer far greater than any audit document, external assessment or executive report. Ken Wark's works were shockingly fresh, as were that of Heidegger in his 1931 lecture on Platos's "The Cave" allegory, as represented in The Essence of Truth. I marked my executive risk reports with the DNA of critical thought, attempting to infect the Mind of the Vectoral Beast with the Virus of Change (for its own benefit, and ours).

In spite of this success, identifying over $1 billion in risk to my employer that was previously invisible through all known-risk detection techniques, I grew increasingly perplexed. Over 70 years of great thought were sitting out there for anyone to digest, yet they were being ritually disregarded. Corporate catastrophes were recurring, as if Enron, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, Long Term Capital Management, etc. were insufficient for our consideration. It became apparent that our political instantiation was problematic, as executives embraced tired, misaligned models. They foolishly found comfort in the illusion of safety of a static politic, unaware that such rigid resistance to ebb and flow only assured catastrophe. Hell, I wasn't even evaluating their world through the mind of great masters like Serres, who would have crucified their deontological intent in a moment's notice. Forget deontology, dehumanization and all the other kritical d-words that scare the Matrix-Mind debaters: these people were just plain useless. Their Politic had failed them as their maps referred to a long-lost landscape. They disgraced any meaningful Stakeholder worth evaluation through their method of engagement.

Direction

This advocacy represents a contribution to both communities -- policy debate and corporate risk. Our project answers the question of "is this critical stuff of any meaning in my (closed) world?" If my answer, that the thoughts of Ken Wark, Alex Galloway, Deleuze, Guittari, Serres, help address the problems of the largest global financial processor is insufficient to your interpretation, then nobody can help you. Your world is closed, and will be perpetually so unless some accidental intervention awakens you from the dead, as did yours truly. You've signified the EPIC FAIL. Game over. All your base are belong to us.

Alternately, if such discourse awakens questions within you, those which perhaps have led you to this page, then Becoming indeed has potential, as I realized last year through the encounter with Dana Christensen's "Finnigan's Wake,' as debated by Ian Lee and David Robinson, judging round three at Kearney Nebraska. Discourse reached me, why not you?

Discoursive Solvency

With this said, all the evidence in the world can be run in rounds, presented to senior executives at Fortune 500 firms, and so on. But at the end of the day, it comes down to a ballot and he/she that signs it. You determine that reality. It's in your mind. The mind of those who decide where we should listen.This is where the knife slices reality.

The direction of our philosophy, our academic thought, the practice and politic of our global corporations hinges upon a discussion no different than this one we've just had, between you and me. The perception of a senior executive that this discourse has significance wields as much power as any fiat argument in our world of debate.

I urge you to consider this role of critical thought in that ballot. If you doubt, what is your standard for relevance? Why do you restrain? Why do you exclude? How can it be "bad for debate" and "bad for the business world" when politic has given us the disfunctional status quo and philosophy illuminates a new path? If my experience, applying it in the largest financial corporation globally is not enough for you, is there any world where discourse and new ideas would matter? And why is such an impossibly high standard maintained? What status quo is being defended at such exhaustively imbalanced standards, for what purpose? Can't you see, quite possibly, that it is this very thought of the rejection of the non-politic that perpetuates our problems?

As Heidegger explains, we've fallen into a terrible rut, pretending that truth is all about finding correspondances in statements, living a sort of simple checklist world. Sort of the world of debate flows filled with correspondance to statements on Politics DAs, with great regard for assessing and testing those flows but disregarding any capacity for evaluating the greater resolutional statement truth which needs sought. Indeed, correctness-of-statements truth gives us no such solution. This simplistic definition of truth fails us miserably. Instead, solutions come from the illumination of entities, shocking of perspectives, challenging of paradigms and illustration of contrasts. Differences, Deleuze would remind us. This is the world we face, in every minor decision, illustrated in every boring business memo, every conference call.

This is the world you face as you write that ballot. Think about it, and hear our advocacy with truth contemplation. Ask yourself where change truly originates, whether it's from policy-world committees, training seminars, conference calls and bureaucracies, or in original discourse that calls all of us to beg that origional question of how things are.

Enjoy our project. At a minimum, we've provided you with true discourse, original thought (not from boring camp files) and challenged you and others on our circuit to a sincere debate. As you sit there, determining the outcome of the round, we're hopeful that the very "voters" we speak of resonate within you. May our discourse be meaningful, educational, promote fairness in not only our debate world, but that of that illusory fiat world that resides beyond and is disparaged through disingenous treatment by many teams.

May our judges evaluate us by the integrity of our message, the sincerity of our advocacy, and the capacity of our message to contribute to a meaningful change in our world.

Jamie Saker
August 2009