Brian ​Foley
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  Brian ​Foley

December 16th, 2017

12/16/2017

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When having to interact with the world, a useful piece of knowledge:

Descriptive vs Prescriptive

Language is authoritarian. It is always delivered in the affirmative. This is undeniable. Even the apophatic is an affirmation of. 

This affirmation is always present like air. It is a sickness, not a symptom. 

Awareness of such resides in the substrata of experience, with every action walking upon it. 

It is no wonder so many texts have been misidentified as prescriptive, instead of descriptive. 

Take, for instance, Aristotle's Poetics. 

At first I register chapters of rules, catalogues of structures of knowledge, melodies of logic. 

Inside the text, the how of poetry, tragedy, comedy. Catharsis emerges. History makes it law because language is affirmative. 

But what if we are to take the text generously, accept it as description versus prescription. 

A prescription relies on language's oppression. ​It is closed.

A description on the other hand can be centrifugal, indirect, phenomenological (i.e. singular), poetic.

It exists to provoke prescription, which is at once desired and repulses the human. Yet description also provokes art.

This is what Poetics does. It describes what has been, not what shall always be.

The Poetics history, however, provides an object lesson.

Humans will always first assume a description to be an attack, of which then will then call a law. 






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