Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Ethics”

Episode 155: Dispatches From the Inside: On Planet Weird's 'The Unbinding'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0400

One of the most surprising aspects of paranormal experience is how often it takes on a storylike form, unfolding exactly as you would expect it to in, say, a Hollywood horror film. Viewers of Karl Pfeiffer's film The Unbinding will get a sense of this in the early sequences of Greg and Dana Newkirk's latest occult adventure. The haunting comes on strong and takes rather familiar forms. But the almost too-good-to-be-true frights -- effective as they are in an almost fairy-tale way -- soon give way to a procedural that invites us to ponder the ethics and methodologies of paranormal investigation in the age of Global Weirding. What do we owe the Others we encounter? What do they owe us? In this episode, JF and Phil discuss some of the questions haunting this brilliant documentary from the creators of Hellier.

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REFERENCES

Planet Weird, The Unbinding
Weird Studies, Episode 67 on “Hellier”
Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO”
Duncan Barford, “Magick Versus Content”
Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty

Episode 147: You Must Change Your Life

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 24 May 2023 10:30:00 -0400

Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" ends on a note that has puzzled and inspired readers for more than a century: "For there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life." In this episode, JF and Phil search for the meaning of this ethico-aesthetic imperative that Rilke heard resounding from a fragment of Greek statuary. This episode is special because the hosts were able to record it in person while on a writing retreat in Western Quebec.

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REFERENCES

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
He Man, superhero
Munich Terrorist Photo
Albert Camus, The Rebel
Franz Kafka, "The Trial" and “In the Penal Colony"
Auguste Rodin, French sculptor

Episode 139: Sex, Money, and Power are YOURS with our SECRET Art-Power Formula!

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 11:30:00 -0500

"YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE!"

Tired of failure and self-loathing? Want to be rich and famous while having a good time all the time? Wondering how to turn your banal opinions into Transcendent Truths? Look no further than this special, exclusive episode of Weird Studies, where we reveal, once and for all, the secrets of ART-POWER!

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SHOW NOTES

Ramsey Dukes, BLAST Your Way to Megabuck$ with My SECRET Sex-Power Formula
James Raggi's statements on artistic freedom in tabletop roleplaying games: Proud to Commit Commercial Suicide 2023 and On Potential Inclusivity/Morality Clauses in RPG Licenses
David Cronenberg, "I Would Like to Make a Case for the Crime of Art"
Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey
Alfred Gell, The Art of Anthropology
Susanne Langer, “On the Cultural Importance of the Arts”
Weird Studies, Episodes 73 and 74 on Carl Jung’s Theory of Art
Kodo Sawaki, Japanese zen teacher
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics
Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence
Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams
John Dewey, Art as Experience
Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
Neil Gaiman, “Make Good Art”
Leon Wieseltier, “Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture”
Eugene Vodolazkin, Laurus

Episode 127: Leaving the Mechanical Dollhouse: On Abeba Birhane's "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity"

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 10:30:00 -0400

Like Caligula declaring war on Neptune and ordering his troops to charge into the Mediterranean Sea, our technological masters are designing neural networks meant to capture the human soul in all its oceanic complexity. According to the cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane, this is a fool's errand that we undertake at our peril. In her paper "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity," she makes the case for the irremediable fluidity, spontaneity, and relationality of people and societies. She argues that ongoing efforts to subsume the human (and the rest of reality) in predictive algorithms is actually narrowing the human experience, as so many of us are excluded from the system while others are compelled to artificially conform to its idea of the human. Far from paving the way to a better world, the tyranny of automation threatens to cut us off from the Real, ensuring an endless perpetuation of the past with all its errors and injustices. Phil and JF discuss Birhane's essay in this episode.

Header image from via www.vpnsrus.com (cropped). Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

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REFERENCES

Abebe Birhane, "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity”
J. F. Martel, “Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things”
Melissa Adler, Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge
Weird Studies, Episode 75 on 2001: A Space Odyssey
Weird Studies, Episode 114 on the Wheel of Fortune
William James, American philosopher
Midjourney, AI art generator
Rhine Research Center, parapsychology lab
George Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives”
Abebe Birhane, “Descartes was Wrong: A Person is a Person Through Other Persons”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German philosopher
J. R. R. Tolkein, “On Fairy-Stories”
Martin Buber, I and Thou

Episode 117: Time is a Child at Play: On the Mystery of Games

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 10:30:00 -0500

The topic of games and play has fascinated JF and Phil since the launch of Weird Studies. Way back in 2018, they recorded back-to-back episodes on tabletop roleplaying games and fighting sports, and more recently, they did a two-parter on Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, a philosophical novel suggesting that all human culture tends toward play. In this episode, your hosts draw on a wealth of texts, memories, and nascent ideas to explore the game concept as such. What is a game? What do games tell us about life? What is the function of play in the formation of reality?

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REFERENCES

Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia
Jobe Bittman, The Book of Antitheses US version, EU version
Weird Studies, Episode 6, Dungeons and Dragons
Weird Studies, Episode 7, Boxing
C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art
Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics
BF Skinner, American psychologist
Heraclitus, Fragments