Weird Studies

On the surface, the phrase "the medium is the message," prophetic as it may have been when Marshall McLuhan coined it, points a now-obvious fact of our wired world, namely that the content of any medium is less important than its form. The advent of email, for instance, has brought about changes in society and culture that are more far-reaching than the content of any particular email. On the other hand, this aphorism of McLuhan's has the ring of an utterance of the Delphic Oracle. As Phil proposes in this episode of Weird Studies, it is an example of what Zen practitioners call a koan, a statement that occludes and illumines in equal measures, a jewel whose shining surface is an invitation to descend into dark depths. Join JF and Phil as they discuss the mystical and cosmic implications of McLuhan's oracular vision.

REFERENCES

McLuhan, Understanding Media
The Playboy interview
McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
Graham Harman, American philosopher
Clement Greenberg, American critic
Dale Pendell, Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft
Brian Eno, British composer
Marshall and Eric McLuhan, The Laws of Media: The New Science _
Jonathan Sterne, _The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (editors), The Essential McLuhan
Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America
David Fincher (director), The Social Network _
Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema I _and _Cinema II
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin
Eric Havelock,_ Preface to Plato_
Walter J. Ong, American theorist
Plato, [Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic(Plato))_

For over two centuries in early modern Italy, boys were selected for their singing talent castrated before the onset of puberty. The goal was to preserve the qualities of their voice even as they grew into manhood. The procedure resulted in other physiological changes which, combined with an unnaturally high voice, made the castrati the most prodigious singers on the continent. As Martha Feldman shows in her book The Castrato, a masterpiece of cultural history, the castrated singer was such a singular figure that he invited comparisons with angels, animals, and kings, attracting adoration and ridicule in equal measures. The castrato was a true liminal being, and as JF and Phil discover in this episode of Weird Studies, an unlikely herald of the present age.

REFERENCES

Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds

Stanley Kubrick, American filmmaker
Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, singing "Ave Maria"
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
X-Men
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"
Thomas Ligotti, "Mrs Ligotti's Angel", read by horror writer Jon Padgett
Weird Studies, Episode 48: Thomas Ligotti's Angel
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Genesis P-Orridge, American musician and occultist

"You don't find reality only in your own backyard, you know," Stanley Kubrick once told an interviewer. "In fact, sometimes that's the last place you'll find it." Oddly, this episode of Weird Studies begins with Phil Ford hatching the idea of putting a replica of the monolith from 2001 in his backyard. As the ensuing discussion suggests, this would amount to putting reality -- or the Real, as we like to call it -- in the place where it may be least apparent. Perhaps that is what Kubrick did when he planted his monolithic film in thousands of movie theatres back in 1968. Moviegoers went in expecting a Kubrickian twist on Buck Rogers; they came out changed by the experience, much like the hominids of great veld in the "Dawn of Man" sequence that opens the film. This is what all great art does, and if you look closely, maybe 2001 can tell you something about how it does it. Because in the end, the film is the monolith, and the monolith is all art.

REFERENCES

Stanley Kubrick (dir.), 2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke, "The Sentinel"
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (novel)
Clement Greenberg, American art critic
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), The Shining
Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory
Weird Studies episode 62: It's Like "The Shining," But With Nuns: On "Black Narcissus"
Ligeti, Atmosphères
Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology
Jay Weidner, Kubrick's Odyssey: Secrets Hidden in the Films of Stanley Kubrick
Rob Ager's analysis of 2001 (Ager was criticized for not citing Loughlin above)
Eric Norton's Playboy interview with Stanley Kubrick
J. F. Martel, "The Kubrick Gaze" in Daniel Pinchbeck & Ken Jordan (eds.), Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age
J. F. Martel, "The Future is Immanent: Speculations on a Possible World"
Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Sid Meier's Civilization V
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), A Clockwork Orange
Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology"
Gilbert Ryle, "Improvisation"

In preparation for an upcoming special episode on living in the early days of the Covid-19 Pandemic, here's Phil Ford reading an essay William James wrote on his experience of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

REFERENCES

William James, "On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake"

This is the first of two conversations that Phil and JF are devoting to C. G. Jung's seminal essay, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," first delivered in a 1922 lecture. It was in this text that Jung most clearly distilled his thoughts on the power and function of art. In this first part, your hosts focus their energies on Jung's puralistic style, opposing it not just to Freud's monism (which Jung critiques in the paper) but also to the monism of those other two "masters of suspicion," Marx and Nietzsche. For Jung, art is not a branch of psychology, economics, philosophy, or science. It constitutes its own sphere, and non-artists who would investigate the nature of art would do well to respect the line that art has drawn in the sand. Weird Studies listenters will know this line as the boundary between the general and the specific, the common and the singular, the mundane and the mystical...

REFERENCES

C. G. Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry"
Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century
Peter Kingsley, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity
Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychologist
Kinka Usher (director), Mystery Men
Theodor Adorno, “Bach Defended Against his Devotees”
Aleister Crowley, English magician
C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus
Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
C. G. Jung, The Portable Jung
Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" in: Untimely Meditations
Weird Studies, episode 49: Nietzsche on History
Weird Studies, episode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio
Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal
Paul Ricoeur, French philosopher
Rudolph Steiner, Austrian esotericist