Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Consciousness”

Episode 115: Transience & Immersion: On Brian Eno's 'Music for Airports'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0500

Soft, soothing, and understated as a rule, ambient music may seem the least weird of all musical genres. Not so, say JF and Phil, who devote this episode to Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports, the 1978 album in whose liner notes the term "ambient music" first appeared. In this conversation, your hosts explore the aesthetic, metaphysical, and political implications of a kind of music designed to interact with the listener -- and the listener's environment -- below the threshold of ordinary, directed awareness. Eno and Peter Schmidt's famous Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards designed to heighten and deepen creativity, lends divinatory support to the endeavor.

Support us on Patreon
Find us on Discord
Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack

REFERENCES

Brian Eno, Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Gabriella Cardazzo, Duncan Ward, and Brian Eno, Imaginary Landscapes
Oblique Strategies Deck
Theodore Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music
Marc Auge, Non-Places
Anahid Kassabian, “Ubiquitous Music”
Sigmund Freud, “On Transience”
Weird Studies, Episode 104 on Sgt. Pepper
Joris Karl Huysmans, A Rebours
Roger Moseley, Keys to Play

Episode 106: The Wanderer: On Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 05:30:00 -0400

In this episode, Weird Studies turns meta, reflecting on the peculiar medium that is podcasting, and how it has shaped the Weird Studies project itself. JF and Phil provide a glimpse into what it feels like to create the show from the inside, where each recording session is like a journey into an unknown Zone. The conversation also occasions sojourns into the flow state, or experience of pure durée, its implications for our conception of free will, and surprising parallels between modern materialists’ adherence to nihilism and ancient religious ascetic practices. Ultimately, JF and Phil explore the archetypal image of the wanderer as representative of Weird Studies’s existence so far, and of the kind of impact and legacy this project can have.

N.B. Weird Studies will be on a haitus for the month of September, and will return on September 29. In the meantime:

Support us on Patreon:
Find us on Discord
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack

References

Robert Sapolsky, Interview with Pau Guinart
Bruno Latour, French philosopher
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith
Nina Simone, “Feeling Good”
Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus
Richard Wagner, Siegfried
Lewis Carol, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
John David Ebert, American cultural critic
Patrick Harpur Daimonic Reality
Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village
Phil Ford, “What was Blogging?”
Weird Studies, Episode 71 on Marshall McLuhan

Episode 18: Does 'Consciousness' Exist? - Part Two

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 10:00:00 -0400

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"

Episode 17: Does 'Consciousness' Exist? - Part One

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 10:00:00 -0400

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