Tag: 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. 25

  The moderns confused products with processes. They believed that the production of bureaucratic rationalization presupposed rational bureaucrats; that the production of universal science depended on universalist scientists; that the production of effective technologies led to the effectiveness of engineers; that the production of abstraction was itself abstract; that the production of formalism was itself formal.…

  • R L • powell

  November 21, 2018

  Books, Fragments, Reading

  abstraction, Bruno Latour, essentailism, formalism, history of science, meaning, Modernity, philosophy, philosophy of science, rationality, science, tautology, theory, We Have Never Been Modern

• Fragmentary, No. 15

  Marilyn Strathern . . . taught me that “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with).” Strathern is an ethnographer of thinking practices. She embodies for me the arts of feminist speculative fabulation in the scholarly mode. It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories…

  • R L • powell

  February 9, 2018

  Books, Fragments

  Donna Haraway, interaction, intra-action, metadiscourse, theory, thinking

• 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