ABSTRACT
The inevitability of the encompassment of invention by convention becomes clear as one considers the concepts coined by Roy Wagner. For Wagner, without the fiction of culture—or, more recently, perspective—one loses sight of the contours of differentiation and, thus, of the possibility of determining meaning through contrast. Wagner wishes to attain that which lies beyond language: “the experiential concreteness of its referents.” In Wagner, the attempt to conflate description with the difference one names has a parallel in the idea that fractality replicates the one in the whole and vice versa: Fractals are said to keep their scale by mimicking themselves. Wagner understands that this is what lies behind Heidegger’s Unter-schied and Derrida’s difference, but affirms that “the admission of a cultural difference that could not be bridged by analogy, a cultural dif/ference, would deny the possibility of a theoretical solution”.
