What is a Kritique?

What is it?

Most policy arguments center around disproving the plan’s desirability or proposing an alternative policy. A Kritik (critique) differs drastically. A Kritik, normally ran on the negative, seeks to problematize either the rhetoric, assumptions, research/scholarship, and/or epistemology of the affirmative’s 1AC.

First, let’s define epistemology. Epistemology, in this sense, is likely the way the affirmative produces/claims to know their knowledge/1AC is true. For example, an advantage that says the plan is key to boost economic growth presupposes a capitalist epistemology, given that the US is a capitalist state. Another argument can be that the affirmative presumes indigenous people are a necessary sacrifice for military action and deterrence, which is settler colonialist.

Ontology is a concept that will be explored in detail in the advanced Kritiks section.

Theory of Power

The theory of power is the Kritik’s argument about how the world/a specific part of the world/academia works. The literal definition is a theorization of how power works, but it is usually not just about power in debate. Additionally, it is usually paired with/is synonymous with the impact to the Kritik.

Here are a few examples:

Although these three theories are drastically different, they all seek to make a structural claim about something integral to society (and usually, the 1AC).

This is a more complex theory of power about racial capitalism, semiotics, and cybernetics by an author called Jonathan Beller.

This is a theory of power about international relations.

This one talks about the current state as it is, and seeks to theorize indigenous violence as integral to the state.

Impacts

The impact portion of a Kritik is the impact to the theory of power itself — not to be confused with the impact of a link. The impact of the Kritik is why the theory of power is bad. For example, the above theory about settler colonialism (the first Indigenous Action Media 21 card) argues that indigenous people are subjected to state-sanctioned genocide and disposession, which would consequently be the impact to the Kritik.

There are Kritiks that only deal with the impact level, and not as much into the theory of power, although rarely. An example of this is the traditional Capitalism K (which is barely even a Kritik, at this point) to the right.

Links

The link for a Kritik is what connects the theory of power and contextualizes it to the affirmative. Links are, depending on the Kritik, one of the most important parts of the Kritik. A link is what proves that your Kritik is not just a FYI: Here’s how the world works, but rather a thesis that problematizes the way the 1AC tells its narrative. Some Examples:

A theory of power about Settler Colonialism can run a link that says the 1AC creates infrastructure that harms nearby indigenous populations via the construction of man camps. This demonstrates that Settler Colonialism as a theory is true in the context of the affirmative and that the 1AC is implicit in assumptions that legitimize Indigenous violence. Here’s the example to the right:

A theory of power about Racial IR (the way we think about international relations is currently racist) can run a link about a 1AC portraying China as a threat to American dominance, and impact that out to how these narratives that portray China as a threat cause anti-Asian violence here and now. This proves that the 1AC’s representation of China spills up to racial violence and may be rooted in racist assumptions.

The way a link is articulated depends on the way you are running a Kritik. For this guide, we will be sticking to the explanation above and doing a lot more work later.

Alternatives

An alternative is relatively self-explanatory on a surface level, but is much more complicated. An alternative is what the judge endorses via voting negative, and is a way to generate uniqueness for the links (i.e. an alternative to a Capitalism critique would be a socialist revolution or endorsement of socialism, and that creates a shift away from Capitalism in either this debate or the post-revolution world). The alternative does not need to resolve every link, contrary to how many teams will believe the alternative works. It merely generates uniqueness as a better endorsement of the world than the affirmative.

Permutation

A permutation is an affirmative argument that says the alternative is compatible with the affirmative, and that we can do both (or a different permutation, albeit do both is usually the relevant one). Given the alternative explanation above, disproving the permutation usually requires good link debating that demonstrates the necessity of the alternative alone. Treating the alternative as a way to generate uniqueness means inclusion of the affirmative triggers a link and reverses uniqueness. The other way to beat the permutation is to run disads to the permutation or reasons why it can’t solve some piece of offense you have.

Framework

Most critiques require a different framework or way to evaluate the debate. Framework arguments argue that a problem-solving plan focused approach is flawed, and that we should evaluate the debate a different way. Some examples of this include evaluating the effects of the 1AC’s scholarship on us as debaters (i.e. what it normalizes and educates us), evaluating the 1AC as an object of research produced by the affirmative that the negative must disprove, and evaluating the 1AC’s assumptions prior to its consequences. These will make more sense as you spend more time with different Kritiks and understand how they attack the affirmative and what they aim to disprove, but each framework argument seeks to change the burden of rejoinder (i.e. what the negative must do to win). You must win that your framework interpretation is better than the affirmative’s in order to successfully win a different way to evaluate the debate, which requires a lot of work on standards and disadvantages to their interpretation, but it makes the Kritik a much more winnable option if you win framework.

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