Category: Books

• 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. 24

  “The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. . . . Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.” ✧ F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

  • R L • powell

  November 20, 2018

  Books, Fragments, Reading

  consequence, emptiness, F. Scott Fitzgerald, gatekeepers, gateway, guard, guarding, meaning, nothing, shame, Tender is the Night

• Fragmentary, No. 22

  When anyone was witty about a contemporary event, she would look perplexed and a little dismayed, as if someone had done something that really should not have been done; therefore her attention had been narrowed down to listening for faux pas. She frequently talked about something being the ‘death of her,’ and certainly anything could have…

  • R L • powell

  November 5, 2018

  Books, Fragments, Reading

  books, character, Djuna Barnes, Jenny Petherbridge, Nightwood, profiles, Reading

• Fragmentary, No. 21

  Sex, like being human, is contextual. Attempts to isolate it from its discursive, socially determined milieu are as doomed to failure as the philosophe‘s search for a truly wild child or the modern anthropologist’s efforts to filter out the cultural so as to leave a residue of essential humanity. And I would go further and…

  • R L • powell

  October 24, 2018

  Books, Fragments

  binaries, binary, body, constructivism, gender, sex, sexuality, the body

• Fragmentary, No. 17

  But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of…

  • R L • powell

  May 9, 2018

  Books, Fragments

• 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. 14

  In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method…

  • R L • powell

  January 4, 2017

  Books, Fragments, Impensive, Introductions

  Ballard, Crash, dream, fantasy, hypermodernity, J. G. Ballard, Modernity, reality, supermodernity, urban life, urban sprawl

• Fragmentary, No. 11

  My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back. If I stayed everliving time, I’d still have little luck. —Gerhard Scholem, “Greetings from the Angelus” There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide,…

  • R L • powell

  September 23, 2016

  Academia, Books, Fragments

  Angelus Novus, catastrophe, history, progress, Walter Benjamin

• Fragmentary, No. 9

  The rule that secret files must contain only information already known is essential for the operation of a secret service, and not just in this century. Likewise, if you go to a bookshop specializing in esoteric publications, you will see that every new book (on the Holy Grail, the mystery of Rennes-le-Château, the Knights Templar,…

  • R L • powell

  February 24, 2016

  Books, Fragments, Reading

  conspiracies, familiar information, Knights Templar, learning, new information, research, Rosicrucians, secrets, The Great Mysteries