Term
Description
used in 66 texts across the archive
“Rather than drawing lines between, say description and prescription, think in terms of increasingly precise and penetrating descriptions being increasing prescriptive, while the more precise your prescription the more detailed a description is entailed. What you see, notice and articulate immediately obligates you to interfere with the world in such a way and to see, notice and articulate more, which becomes a form of data exchange.”
In use
“I think this description is accurate and the social transformation in itself beneficial, but, as it stands, massively forgetful.”
“We can then ask which description is better—people talking to each other as “equal” or people talking to each other as engaged in fine tuning and testing the direction each wants to lead the other.”
“The implication of my description is that language is ordinarily invisible—we don’t notice ourselves speaking, we don’t think of ourselves as adding one word to another as we speak, much less as making sounds that we could “listen” to by bracketing their meanings.”