Dear JF,
So the APA blog has been kind enough to invite us to say something about our podcast. For the benefit of the blog’s readers, then, I should first introduce us: I’m Phil Ford, a musicology professor at Indiana University, and you’re JF Martel, a filmmaker and writer who lives in Ottawa, and we co-host an arts and philosophy podcast called Weird Studies. I’ll also say, with a self-consciousness probably unavoidable in an open letter, that we’ve been friends since 2015, at which point we started an elephantine philosophical correspondence (of which this blog post forms a part) on topics that my Dad, an old-school logical positivist, wouldn’t have considered philosophical at all — magic, daemonic visitations, hyperchaos, hyperstition, weird fiction, weird films, weird stuff in general. But as the good folks at the APA have invited to write a guest post on Weird Studies, so maybe such things are philosophical after all? It would be nice to think so.
A threshold question: what is the weird? In the course of our correspondence, I came up with my own, twofold answer.
- It is whatever lies on the far side of the line between what we can easily accept from our world and what we cannot (e.g. daemons). And
- it is what emerges in our experience when we allow ourselves to suspend our usual “irritable reaching after fact and reason” — which is how Keats describes “negative capability” — and allow ourselves to entertain eldritch notions.
If there is Gender Studies and Disability Studies and American Studies, etc., then why not a scholarly field of Weird Studies? If asked to define Weird Studies (a field of academic study I invented and that has the great advantage of not existing), I might say that it is a practice for becoming more negatively capable.
In 2015 I started writing a series of blog posts about magic (the pentagrams-and-incense kind of magic, which Aleister Crowley styled “magick”), and one of the things that interested me most about it was the exact kind of resistance the notion provokes in educated moderns. “To know ourselves by our resistances” — this was something the potter and poet M.C. Richards was after, and it seems an admirable method to me. What makes an idea hard to think, and what does our resistance to it say about us, or for that matter the universe? If we proceed from a certain position of epistemic humility it becomes easier to look at something like magic and without immediately dismissing it. Not that I (or you, I think) are interested in accepting it either. Belief is not what we’re after. Perhaps what we are after is a different kind of question, not is it true but what if we try this on for size? What does a weird idea afford? How does the world look with that idea in the picture?
In any event, we eventually hit upon the idea of continuing our conversation in the medium of the podcast, where it had a fighting chance of being heard and maybe even joined by others. So it’s been mostly a series of our conversations with the odd guest sprinkled in: so far we’ve had philosopher Joshua Ramey, futurist Michael Garfield, magical theorist Lionel Snell, and esoteric man-about-town Erik Davis on the show. And as I write this we’re preparing to record an episode with Jeffrey Kripal, the dean of American esoteric studies.
This is all by way of an explanation for the way we’re writing this blog post in a sort of dueling-banjos epistolary style. Conversation is how this project began, and it is both the form and content of the show. So it seems to me, anyway. What about you? How would you characterize the Weird Studies project? I know we don’t see it in exactly the same way. Being an academic, I tend to think of it as an academic project, and, being an artist, you consider it an art project. It would be interesting to consider the difference that distinction makes.
Cheers,
Phil
***
Dear Phil,
In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Luis Borges wrote that the metaphysicians of the planet Tlön are not seeking truth; rather, “they are after a kind of amazement.” That line resonated with both of us when it came up in the recording we did on that story. What better way to qualify the non-existent discipline of Weird Studies than to attribute it to the metaphysicians of a world that never was?
At one point in the planning phase of Weird Studies, you suggested that we open each episode with the line, “For entertainment purposes only.” That was a good idea. In common parlance, to entertain has two very different meanings: (1) to provide people with amusement and (2) to give consideration to unusual, even outlandish possibilities. This double meaning captures what I believe are the implicit goals we set for ourselves when we sit down to record. First, we want to create a conversation that has aesthetic value in itself—i.e., that constitutes a kind of story, or a journey with eldritch vistas along the way. Second, we want to seriously consider the significance of ideas which, though they may not be true in a literal sense, gesture at a kind of truth which tends to get lost in that “irritable reaching” that Keats lamented.
Quentin Meillassoux, one of my favorite living thinkers, describes philosophy as “the invention of strange arguments, necessarily bordering on sophistry—which remains its dark structural double.” One of my favorite non-living thinkers, Gilles Deleuze, would have agreed, though he might have replaced “sophistry” with another term: art. In the preface to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze wrote, “A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction.” Philosophy is equal parts investigation and speculation. The inquiry into “what is” always leads to a strange dreaming of “what might be.” The work begins as an investigation, but the investigation leads one further and further down speculative paths. In this sense, the philosopher is like the protagonist of a film noir, who follows a trail of clues into an increasingly fantastical world.
Plato’s cave of chained troglodytes, Descartes’ demon of deceit, Kierkegaard’s undercover knights, Hume’s topsy-turvy billiard tables, Thomas Nagel’s noble effort to shapeshift into a bat, Spinoza’s unspeakable cosmos where mind and matter form just two of an infinite number of attributes—when you think about it, philosophy has always been a kind of phantasmagoria, and it’s the phantasmagoria that has always fascinated me. It testifies to the visionary core of any philosophical project, its power to confront the weirdness of existence and enact that weirdness in the hope that secrets might be disclosed. One of the things I find most exciting about Weird Studies—and the correspondence that led to it—is the freedom it gives us to do justice to this speculative dimension of philosophical thinking, which to my mind is indistinguishable from a kind of artistic creation.
Maybe speculation is ultimately more concerned with possibility than with truth. Or to put that on more affirmative footing: if all things are possible, then infinite possibility is the axiom on which any speculative project rests. The question of whether a philosophical statement is strictly veridical may be its least knowable, hence least interesting, aspect. The Stoics may have been factually wrong about the nature of the cosmos, but read them as artists, and their work continues to resonate with something like truth, even in 2018. What is this truth we possess without knowing we possess it if not the truth of the weird?
In the podcast, we often use Nietzsche’s term “untimely” to qualify unfashionable ideas that pack a subversive punch. In the interest of our readers, Phil, what are some of the untimely theories or ideas that you’ve found most compelling since we started the podcast last February? Giving some examples might help people understand what we’re getting at when we talk about the weird.
Keep it real,
JF
***
Dear JF,
One way of defining “the untimely” is as “the unfashionable.” The word has another resonance, though, implying that there are certain ideas that are simply not answerable to our usual understanding of time — which is to say, to a historicist understanding of time.
When we launched Weird Studies, I wrote a “hello world” blog post that listed twelve of the largely unspoken, untheorized, and unchallenged ideas that most educated moderns have humming along in the background of their thinking — the basis for a vernacular philosophy of the modern. Here is the first one:
Time moves irreversibly forward. Situations evolve from previous situations, and this evolution goes on continuously. The meaning of each such situation is given by its place in progressive linear time.
Which leads us to no. 2:
Past ideas and events are nothing more than the products of political, economic, and social forces within the cultures that give rise to them. Consequently, there can be no such thing as “timeless wisdom” or a “perennial tradition” of metaphysical truth. Indeed, there are no human universals, only “cultures.” (“Always historicize,” as humanities academics like to say.)
As a scholar, I’m interested in magic and the occult (or, if I’m trying to sound a bit more respectable, “the field of esoteric studies”). The western esoteric tradition is built upon the notions of “timeless wisdom” and “perennial tradition.” You know, the ancient secret wisdom safeguarded by numberless generations of Hidden Masters working tirelessly behind the scenes to usher humanity to Enlightenment and our true place among the stars, etc. etc. — the old Rosicrucian dream. But what if it isn’t just a dream? That would be pretty weird: indeed, it is exactly that weirdness that powers John Crowley’s wonderful Aegypt tetralogy, which asks us to imagine that “there is more than one history of the world.” Now, for the benefit of readers unused to our schtick, I hasten to add that I am not saying that the Rosicrucian idea is true, or that I really believe it. As Lionel Snell wrote, “‘really’ and ‘believe’ are not words that go happily together in magical thought.” I like what you suggest in your last missive — what if we read (say) the Rosicrucians not as thinkers in the business of making veridical statements but as artists? John Crowley seems to be doing just that in his most recent novel, a retelling of the Rosicrucian story The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.
Actually, in Authors of the Impossible Jeff Kripal is asking us to do something very much like this. The old Secret-Wisdom-of-Hidden-Masters story, along with a great many other magical or occult or (to use Kripal’s recent coinage) super natural stories, amount to a super-story, a story of stories, a story we are telling even as it seems to be telling us. And that story is both contingent and historical and perennial and universal — which is to say, untimely. It’s this both/and style of thought that is the open sesame to the weird, it seems to me.
Yer pal,
Phil
***
Dear Phil,
Yes, the both/and style, as opposed to the either/or of conventional rationalism, is definitely the weird’s signature, at least as we seem to understand it. And adopting a both/and orientation is very much what we meant, I think, when we agreed that our podcast was intended “for entertainment purposes.”
I think the reason we ended up not using that motto is that it would have been a bit misleading. It is true that Weird Studies is all about playing with ideas, but it’s playing for keeps. As we were saying in an off-the-air chat just the other day, we could not take this stuff more seriously.
Nietzsche’s utterance that one must write in blood and aphorisms, Camus’s insistence that real philosophy must always remain a question of life and death—these wagers have never ceased to resonate with me. As I see it, our yen for both/and thinking doesn’t imply a rejection of serious thought in favor of a fideistic free-for-all. While the occult deserves respect, Weird Studies isn’t an occult podcast. Our both/and rests on a deeper either/or, which is the question of what the hell is going on in this universe, and how are we to act in it. We don’t pretend to have final answers; in fact, we don’t believe anyone does, or ever will. That’s kind of the point. As a now famous psychologist once told me, “Life poses an unimaginably absurd question. What makes you think the answer isn’t also unimaginably absurd?”
Openness to the weird is openness to the real as it actually manifests. Perhaps no one knew this better than Socrates, who often reminded his disciples that he knew only that he knew nothing. It’s worth nothing that Socrates didn’t come to this profound insight on his own; he came to it thanks to a daimon that haunted him night day and never let him rest. Philosophy was born in fugues of ecstasy and possession. That’s why intellectual historians find it so hard to distinguish its early practitioners from shamans, priests and magicians. Archaeologists say the same about artists. More than anything, I would like to impart on our listeners this realization that thinking and creating are magical processes. They are not purely subjective; there is something cosmic in them. The world isn’t the same after you’ve brought something new into it, even if it’s something as ghostly as an idea.
If our show has a political edge, it may lie in our shared commitment to art and philosophy’s power to reveal the world. This power is inseparable from the notion of the weird, since the mere fact that the human mind has it may be the weirdest thing of all.
As ever,
JF
Phil Ford
Phil Ford (Ph.D. University of Minnesota, 2003) is an associate professor of musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He has also taught at Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin. His work has dealt especially with postwar American culture and music (jazz, pop, film music, the avant-garde), musical performance, sound, philosophies of experience, and the intellectual history of counterculture. He is the author of Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013) and has published essays in Representations, Journal of Musicology, Musical Quarterly, and elsewhere. Since 2006 he has blogged at Dial ‘M’ for Musicology, and in 2018 he and J. F. Martel launched Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast. “Weird Studies” is also a pretty good description of what his current book project is about: it concerns magical styles of thought, feeling, and experience in various contexts, musical and otherwise.
JF Martel
Jean-François Martel (@jfmartel)is a film and TV director, screenwriter and author. In addition to making several dramatic short films, he has worked as writer and director on numerous television documentary programs for Francophone and Anglophone broadcasters in Canada and abroad. Much of his documentary work has focused on culture and the arts. J.F.’s essays have appeared in online journals such as Reality Sandwich, The Finch, and Metapsychosis, as well as in print, in anthologies published by Penguin-Tarcher and North Atlantic Books. He is the author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, published in 2015 by Evolver Editions. Ediciones Atalanta released a Spanish translation of the work in 2017. His long-form essay, “Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things,” is available in e-book format from Untimely Books.
