Weird Studies

By SpectreVision RadioSociety & Culture Arts Philosophy

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Typical duration
80 min
per episode

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Weird Studies episodes

August 15, 2018 Episode 23: On Presence
Phil stops by JF's Canadian homestead for a raucous IRL conversation on the idea of presence. The range of topics includes objects of power, the magic of books, the mystery of the event, modernity's knack for making myths immanent, genius loci, the mad wonder of Blue Velvet, and the iron fist of the virtual.
REFERENCES
Gil Scott-Heron, "The Revolution Will Bot Be Televised"
Louis CK on smart phones at the ballet recital
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution
Gilles Deleuze on the virtual: see Bergsonism, Proust and Signs, The Logic of Sense, Difference and Repetition, Cinema II: The TIme Image
Expanding Mind with Erik Davis, "Being Anarchist"
JF Martel, "Reality is Analog"
Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment (and Gyrus's review)
Gyrus, North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture
Geoffrey O’Brien, Phantom Empire
David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps His Head”
Donald Barthelme
David Lynch, Blue Velvet
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Meraphysics

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1 hr 44 min
August 01, 2018 Episode 22: Divining the World with Joshua Ramey
American philosopher Joshua Ramey, author of The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and the Spiritual Ordeal, and Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency, joins Phil and JF to discuss a philosophical project whose implications go deep and weird. In his books and articles, Joshua proffers the vision of a world where divination -- whether or not it is recognized as such -- isn't just possible, but necessary for advancing knowledge, creating art, and forming communities. And his research has revealed that the wardens of our neoliberal order know this all too well. As he writes in an essay discussed in this episode, the mandate of a weird age ought to be clear: "Occupy, and practice divination."
**REFERENCES
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and the Spiritual Ordeal
Joshua Ramey, Politics of DIvination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency
Joshua Ramey, "Contingency Without Unreason: Speculation After Meillassoux" (abstract)
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, University of British Columbia, at academia.edu
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Difference and Repetition, and The Logic of Sense
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on Contingency
Elie Ayache, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability
Weird Studies, "Does Consciousness Exist?" Parts One and Two
Special Guest: Joshua Ramey.

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1 hr 10 min
July 13, 2018 Episode 21: The Trash Stratum - Part 2
The writings of underground filmmaker Jack Smith serve as a starting point for Phil and JF's second tour of the trash stratum. In their wanderings, they will uncover such moldy jewels as the 1944 film Cobra Woman, the exploitation flick She-Devils on Wheels, and (wonder of wonders) Hitchcock's Vertigo. The emergent focus of the conversation is the dichotomy of passionate commitment and ironic perspective, attitudes that largely determine whether a given object will turn out to appear as a negligible piece of garbage... or the Holy Grail. By the end, our hosts realize that even their own personal trash strata may give off shimmers of the divine.
Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures
Robert Siodmak (director), Cobra Woman (1944)
Jack Smith, "The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez"
Roger Scruton, English philosopher
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (TV series)
Kenneth Burke, American literary theorist
Alfred Hitchcock (director), Vertigo (1958)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Charles Ludlam's Theater of the Ridiculous
Mel Brooks (director), High Anxiety (1977)
"Ironic Porn Purchase Leads to Unironic Ejaculation", The Onion (1999)
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim"
Herschell Gordon Louis (director), She-Devils on Wheels
André Bazin, What is Cinema?
Erik Davis, "The Alchemy of Trash"
David Lynch, Mulholland Drive
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Phil Ford, "Birth of the Weird"

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1 hr 7 min
July 04, 2018 Episode 20: The Trash Stratum - Part 1
Is the Holy Grail a crushed beer can in the gutter? JF and Phil consider the implications of Philip K. Dick's line, "the symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum." Gnosticism, Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot, Thomas Ligotti's "The Order of Illusion," Jack Smith's glorification of moldy glamour, saints' relics that look like beef jerky -- all this and more in the first of a two-part conversation.
REFERENCES
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Phil Ford, "What Good News Do You Bring?"
Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis
Philip K. Dick, VALIS
Stanislav Lem, Microworlds
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Frank Darabont (dir.), The Shawshank Redemption
Weird Studies podcast, On Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' Part 1 and Part 2
Richard Wagner, Parsifal

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1 hr 16 min
June 20, 2018 Episode 19: Intermezzo
After announcing that Weird Studies will be going to a bi-weekly release schedule for the summer, Phil and JF talk about how the podcast has gone so far and what's on the horizon (more guests!). Before long, they're digging deep into what makes each of them tick as weird speculators, locating the points at which their ideas differ and converge. The discussion touches on the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux, the theology of Tertullian, the Beatles, the Coke-Pepsi dichotomy, the art of religion, and more.
SHOUT OUTS
Mandala artist Betty Paz
Infinite Conversations
Michael Garfield, the Future Fossils podcast
Ramsey Dukes (Lionel Snell), “The Charlatan and the Magus”
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and the Spiritual Ordeal and The Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency
REFERENCES
Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on Contingency
GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy
MC Escher, Drawing Hands
The works of Tertullian

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1 hr 10 min
June 13, 2018 Episode 18: Does 'Consciousness' Exist? - Part Two
JF and Phil finally get down to brass tacks with William James's essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" At the heart of this essay is the concept of what James calls "pure experience," the basic stuff of everything, only it isn't a stuff, but an irreducible multiplicity of everything that exists -- thoughts as well as things. We're used to thinking that thoughts and things belong to fundamentally different orders of being, but what if thoughts are things, too? For one thing, psychical phenomena (a great interest of James's) suddenly become a good deal more plausible. And the imaginal realm, where art and magic make their home, becomes a sovereign domain.
REFERENCES
William James, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?"
Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego
William James, Essays in Psychical Research
Weird Studies D&D episode
Proust, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
The Venera 13 probe's photos of the surface of Venus
Wallace Stevens, "A Postcard from the Volcano"

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1 hr 2 min
June 06, 2018 Episode 17: Does 'Consciousness' Exist? - Part One
In this first part of their discussion of William James' classic essay in radical empiricism, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?", Phil and JF talk about the various ways we use the slippery C-word in contemporary culture. The episode touches on the political charge of the concept of consciousness, the unholy marriage of materialism and idealism ("Kant is the ultimate hipster"), the role of consciousness in the workings of the weird -- basically, anything but the essay in question. That will come in part two.
Header image by Miguel Bolacha, Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCES
William James, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?"
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
Daniel Pinchbeck, author and founder of Reality Sandwich
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Matt Cardin - author and editor, creator of The Teeming Brain

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49 min
May 30, 2018 Episode 16: On Dogen Zenji's 'Genjokoan'
JF and Phil tackle Genjokoan, a profound and puzzling work of philosophy by Dogen Zenji. In it, the 13th-century Zen master ponders the question, "If everything is already enlightened, why practice Zen?" As a lapsed Zen practitioner ("a shit buddhist") with many hours of meditation under his belt, Phil draws on personal experience to dig into Dogen's strange and startling answers, while JF speaks from his perspective as a "decadent hedonist." "When one side is illumined," says Dogen, "the other is dark." For proof of this utterance, you could do worse than listen to this episode of Weird Studies.
REFERENCES
Dogen Zenji, Genjokoan
Shohaku Okumura and the Sanshin Zen Community in Bloomington, Indiana
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Weird Studies, Episode 8: "On Graham Harman's 'The Third Table'"
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image
Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours (Against Nature)
Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

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1 hr 12 min
May 23, 2018 Episode 15: On Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' - Part Two
In this second of a two-part conversation on Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker, Phil and JF explore the film's prophetic dimension, relating it to Samuel R. Delany's classic science-fiction novel Dhalgren, the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the affordances of despair, the spookiness of color, the transformation of noise into music, and the Chernobyl disaster. They even come up with a title for a novel Robert Ludlum never wrote but should have written: The Criterion Rendition!
REFERENCES
Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Stalker
Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (foreword by William Gibson)
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space"
John Searle, Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception
Steve Reich, Come Out
Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology"
Stanley Kubrick, The Shining
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

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1 hr 6 min
May 16, 2018 Episode 14: On Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' - Part One
Journey into the Zone to uncover some of the strange artifacts buried in Tarkovsky's cinematic masterpiece, Stalker (1979). In this first of a two-part conversation, Phil and JF discuss a poem by Tarkovsky's dad, compare the film with the sci-fi novel that inspired it, explore the ideological underpinnings of formulaic genre, delve into the meaning and affordances of the concept of zone, and affirm that in a sufficiently weird mindset, even a casual stroll in your hometown can become an excursion into a Zone of your own.
REFERENCES
Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Stalker
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic
The Wachowskis (dir.), The Matrix
James Cameron (dir.), Avatar
Second City Television (SCTV), vintage Canadian comedy show
Alex Garland (dir.), Annihilation (based on the novel by Jeff Vandermeer; here's an article on how Garland's film differs from Vandermeer's arguably weirder text)
SCTV, Monster Chiller Horror Theatre: Whispers of the Wolf

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42 min

About Weird Studies

From the publisher's feed

Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel host a series of conversations on art and philosophy, dwelling on ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call "reality."