Today is the publication day for Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape by Acid Horizon, including Will Conway, alumnus of my debate team. Will was a good political science student until he joined debate. On the team, he was eager to run Kritiks, arguments that go outside of the system in order to object to still playing by the rules of the system with proposed solutions, arguments that apply philosophical positions to say that the system itself is flawed and will continue to perpetuate problems without a major paradigm shift. He was hooked. Still, he did an internship in DC. Similar to my experience doing the same, when I saw staffers discussing tips for replicating the signature for their democratically-elected congressional representative on bills, he became further disillusioned by operating within the system in the halls of power, and felt naive about ever being idealistically hopeful about real change within the structure of society. Philosophy became the answer.
Some fields of study debate whether the discipline is merely descriptive or can also be prescriptive. To be constrained to the work of descriptive is to observe, make notes and analyze, and reach some global conclusions to report. To dare to go beyond, to make judgments and recommendations based on those observations, is prescriptive work. We tend to leave prescriptive work to the bold, the revolutionaries, the old pale and stale politicians who pass bills that may or may not reflect the will of the people in a not so timely manner. Sometimes the bold revolutionaries succeed and we grant them honors. Most of the time they fail and society labels them as crazy and perverse. Descriptive work is safe. Prescriptive is a dirty battle, high in risk, mostly hopeless. Acid Horizon and their book describe issues in the way our society is structured and take on the risk of proposing a paradigm shift for change, for untraining habits and accepting deviance as provoking thinking instead of rallying for control in the guise of order, for reconciling ideas concerning respect for individuals with how to live within society. In Will’s words, “To become intolerable to what is absolutely intolerable in our present situation is to manifest a scandal of truth in the form of one’s life.”
Here the poignant ending challenges the assumed role of philosophy:
At this point, it may be expected that we will make the typical gesture of a denunciation of philosophy as a kind of pseudo-activity:
“We philosophers have only interpreted the world-system, but it is up to you, The People, to change it.”
No.
This platitude suggests a distance that philosophy constantly occupies, and which we categorically refuse. As we assert in the beginning, we assert at the end: every text, and therefore every philosophy, is a machine, always involved with the community it establishes with its audience, and the theoretical and political desires that connect the two. Philosophy cannot stand detached from the world, and any claim that it could is a false pretense that only functions to detach it from its own collaboration with the world as it currently is.
Philosophy is the creation of concepts in a manner hostile to the order of things, or it is mere collaboration with it.
You can find the book here.