Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Hyperstition”

Episode 178: Edge of Reality: On John Carpenter's 'In the Mouth of Madness'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Earlier this month, Phil and JF recorded a live episode at Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington following a screening of John Carpenter's film In the Mouth of Madness. Carpenter’s cult classic obliterates the boundary between reality and fiction, madness and revelation—an ideal subject for a Weird Studies conversation. In this episode, recorded before a live audience, the hosts explore the film’s Lovecraftian themes, the porous nature of storytelling, and how art can function as a conduit to unsettling truths.

Special thanks to Dr. Alicia Kozma and the IU Cinema team for hosting and recording the event.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES
John Carpenter, In the Mouth of Madness
John Carpenter, Prince of Darkness*
John Carpenter, The Thing
Joshua Clover, BFI Film Classics: The Matrix
Philip K. Dick, Time Out of Joint
David Cronenberg, Videodrome
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)"
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
Nick Land, English philosopher
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Jonathan Carroll, The Land of Laughs

Episode 36: On Hyperstition

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 10:15:00 -0500

Hyperstition is a key concept in the philosophy of Nick Land. It refers to fictions which, given enough time and libidinal investment, become realities. JF and Phil explore the notion using one of those optometric apparatuses with multiple lenses -- deleuzian, magical, mythological, political, ethical, etc. The goal isn't to understand how fictions participate in reality (that'll have to wait for another episode), but to ponder what this implies for a sapient species. The conversation weaves together such varied topics as Twin Peaks: The Return, Internet meme magic (Trump as tulpa!), Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysics, occult experiments in spirit creation, the Brothers Grimm, and the phantasmic overtones of The Communist Manifesto. In the end we can only say, "What a load of bullsh*t!"

Header Image: Still from the 1920 German Expressionist film The Golem: How He Came in the World, by Paul Wegener.

REFERENCES

JF's notes on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
David Lynch (director), Twin Peaks: The Return
Phil Ford, "Garmonbozia" (work in progress, unpublished)
Delphi Carstens, "Hyperstition"
Delphi Carstens, "Hyperstition: An Introduction" (2009 interview with Nick Land)
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
CCRU Archives
The occult concept of the egregore
William Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford, The Blood of the Saints
A. T. L. Carver, "The Truth About Pepe the Frog and the Cult of Kek"
Paul Spencer, "Trump's Occult Online Supporters Believer 'Meme Magic' Got Him Elected"
Colm A. Kelleher, The Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Sun Ra, Space is the Place

Episode 32: Orbis Tertius: Borges on Magic, Conspiracy and Idealism

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 31 Oct 2018 11:15:00 -0400

Jorge Luis Borges's story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a metaphysical detective story, an armchair conspiracy thriller, and a masterpiece of weird fiction. In this tale penned by a true literary magician, Phil and JF see an opportunity to talk about magic, hyperstition, non-linear time, and the power of metaphysics to reshape the world. When Phil questions his co-host's animus against idealist doctrines, the discussion turns to dreams, cybernetics, and information theory, before reaching common ground with the dumbfound appreciation of radical mystery.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in Ficciones
Weird Studies, Episode 29, "On Lovecraft"
George Berkley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)
John Crowley, the Aegypt tetralogy
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia - Urn Burial
Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
Karl Schroeder, "Degrees of Freedom"
Weird Studies, Episode 26, "Living in a Glass Age"
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Dogen, Genjokoan