@belegorm: I may very well have misunderstood Austin's point, because I could hardly make head nor tail of it! Was I any closer in the comment I posted above yours? The idea that "Consensus should be something that just happens to happen, rather than something people deliberatley set out to achieve"? This is my central problem - I don't find writing like that clear! What does a "descriptive" or a "prescriptive" understanding of consensus mean? (If these are technical philosophical notions that would be assumed knowledge to anyone who'd studied whatever branch of philosophy they're from, then my apologies - I assumed they weren't, and I was just to treat the words "descriptive" and "prescriptive" with their usual meanings). I think your talk of tackling the being of the change is showing up the problem here - ontology (as far as I understand it) is the study of categories of being, and of what it means for a thing to exist. But it's not at all clear (to me) what "ontologically" is meant to mean in this context - you've interpereted it (I think?) as understanding the "nature" of the consensus, and how it is brought into being. Presumably that wasn't what Austin meant - why would he advocate not trying to understand the nature of a consensus? I'm assuming he had something else in mind, but I have no idea what it is. This is just the kind of problem I was talking about! @immortal_guy said:

Heya!

So, two things:

First, I apologize if some of my tweets aren't always written with the clarity that my pieces are here. I'm in a strange place on Twitter right now. About a third of my followers are people who steadily grew to read my stuff and watch my streams over the past four years or so. Those folks come from a wide range of places, but there are lots of academics, critics, and other jargon-friendly people. I'm still in the habit of talking to them with tweets like that. (Also, it's a good case of where knowing the jargon helps. Laying out Descriptive, Prescriptive, Strategic, and Ontological would take way way way more tweets!)

Second, so here's what I mean when I say those words in the tweet "consensus is most valuable when it's understood descriptively, not prescriptively, and strategically, not ontologically":

Consensus is most valuable when it's used descriptively, not prescriptively: When we describe a real instance as being one of consensus, that's useful! It's a quick way of saying 'Well, at the very least, most of us are on board with this. Maybe we're wrong, but the real agreement we have counts for something." I'm contrasting this to statements that prescribe consensus as a singularly desirable outcome, like "Well, since we have consensus, we must be right" or worse "Good decisions only come out of consensus." Another example; Descriptive claim: "Upgrading the Quen sign in the Witcher 3 was useful for me, because the shield it gave me let me fuck up in combat without taking a lot of damage." Prescriptive claim: "People who are good at The Wticher upgrade the Quen sign" or "To be good at The Witcher, you need to upgrade Quen."

Consensus is most valuable when used ... strategically, not ontologically: In day to day life, we use a lot of categories and adjectives that aren't quite "right," but are good enough to work with. That's strategic (or, sometimes, 'analytic') use. So, when we think about consensus strategically, it means that we recognize that consensus is rarely full consensus. It means we pay attention to the fact that there are almost always dissenting voices, even if we go ahead with the group's overall desire. In fact, it means that we understand that the "group" we're talking about is probably also fluid, and that we'll re-evaluate what we mean when we talk about said group in the future. It's strategic because, like strategy, the specifics are unclear but the big picture is solid enough to work on (and it's "analytical" because it's a sort of linguistic tool we use to perform an empirical study with, and empirical studies can never reveal true reality, they can only present evidence that we can then use to try to infer something about reality.) Strategic/analytical claims are contrasted with ontological claims, which are (as pointed out in an above post) claims about the True Nature of Things. In the case of consensus, that would be imagining (again) that the consensus perspective on an event is True, and further, that consensus Truly Exists. The reality is usually a lot more complicated than that.

An example that worked well for me when trying to wrap my head around strategic/or analytic categorization was thinking about the civil rights movement in America in the 1960s (Or the LGTBQ+ rights movement today, or the Women's Suffrage movement, or the American Revolution, etc...). In the 1960s, a lot of civil rights leaders spoke about blackness in America or about the "Black Experience." Now: There was no unified black experience, no one set of features that constituted "blackness." As many social researchers would come to argue over the next 50 years, the boundaries of a racialized group are flexible and porous, and the features of a racialized group are many. Which is to say that in the 1960s, if you picked out the names of two different black people from a hat, you might get really different lives: One person could be rural, one urban; One a man, another a woman; One could have served in WW2, another might be living in an artist's commune (and for a third, both of those might be true!). And yet... "blackness" still felt like it referenced a set of experiences and perspectives that many, many, many black people shared. And so we can make a strategic claim: African Americans in the Jim Crow era were oppressed, dismissed, ignored, and abused. And because we're making a strategic claim about this group, and not an ontological claim about the nature of reality, the claim can be true even if there are exceptions to it. (And ideally, once the "strategic" use isn't as urgent, we can come back to those exceptions and interrogate them!)

There is another term that I use a lot (especially on Twitter, but I've used it here too), and that is also in contrast with "ontological." That term is "historical" (Oh, and sometimes "material," too!) I use "historical" for a lot of the same reasons I use "strategic" or "descriptive" above, but also because it helps clarify exactly what sort of claim I'm making. For instance, last year, a cousin and I got into a fight over this claim: "Women do household work." He wanted to make an ontological claim. For him, women just... did that. That was part of what made a woman a woman: They naturally, universally were somehow compelled to do chores. On the other hand, i wanted to make a historical version of that claim: "For a long time, household chores were considered "women's work," and women did the bulk of this labor." That claim is a lot stronger, because it isn't trying to refer to some ontological truth about some (again, for my cousin, ontologically defined) group of people. Instead, it's referencing specific, material actions and understanding them as something that can change in a different time or circumstance. For this reason, you might also see me (or other writers) contrast "historical" claims from "ahistorical" claims. Historical claim: "The geometry used in Picasso's Guernica dizzied viewers in a way that suggested the confusion of the Spanish Civil War." Ahistorical claim: "Guernica is a transcendent work of high art and beauty."

And for the record, I don't think we should never make prescriptive or ontological or ahistorical claims: They're just much, much harder to prove or argue for. Plus, it often seems like shifting the convo into this "higher tier" of argument ends up distracting from the reason we start debating or investigating something to begin with! If I set out to study the safety of manufacturing plants in China, and then someone drags me into an ontological conversation about what "safety" really means anyway, well... That's not going to help that study get done! At the same time, I'm really glad that there are people out there studying what "safety' 'really means,' but that doesn't mean I want them jumping into every convo where someone says "safety" so they can be like "WELL ACTUALLY..."

I hope that clarifies things a bit!

(Oh, and for the record, I stand by Foucauldian, since I was literally referencing the way a (gay) philosopher named Foucault wrote and spoke about the institution of marriage and its relation to queerness.)

-Austin