Category: Theory

• Fragmentary, No. 28

  This reciprocal determination operates elsewhere as well, although by other means and with other aims. It involves a double displacement, which renders a concept plausible or true by pointing to an error and, at the same time, by enforcing belief in something real through a denunciation of the false. The assumption is made that what…

  • R L • powell

  January 11, 2019

  Fragments, Impensive, Theory

  conterfactual, de Certeau, facts, factuality, fiction, flawed logic, Heterologies, history, Michel de Certeau, negative affirmation, the fiction of history, the science of history, theory

• Fragmentary, No. 13

  Of course the pornographic imagination is hardly the only form of consciousness that proposes a total universe. Another is the type of imagination that has generated modern symbolic logic. In the total universe proposed by the logician’s imagination, all statements can be broken down or chewed up to make it possible to rerender them in the form of logical…

  • R L • powell

  January 3, 2017

  Fragments, Image, Theory

  cannibalism, equivalence, imagination, logic, pornography, Sontag, Susan Sontag, symbolic logic

• Fragmentary, No. 10

  ~ About stupidity . . . From a musical game heard each week on FM and which seems “stupid” to him, he realizes this: stupidity is a hard and indivisible kernel, a primitive: no way of decomposing it scientifically (if a scientific analysis of stupidity were possible, TV would entirely collapse). What is it? A spectacle, an aesthetic fiction,…

  • R L • powell

  March 11, 2016

  Fragments, Theory

  academia, fascination, observation, Roland Barthes, stupidity, theory, Trump

• Fragmentary, No. 8

  [T]he four theses of modernity. We cannot not periodize. Modernity is not a concept, philosophical or otherwise, but a narrative category. The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated. No ‘theory’ of modernity makes sense today unless it comes to…

  • R L • powell

  August 24, 2015

  Academia, Fragments, Theory

  historiography, history, maxims, Modernity, periodization, the dash, the modern, the period