Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel. For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to weirdstudies.com. Hi, this is JF.
Our last episode on hyperstition ran a little long, so we agreed to cut out the last 20 minutes or so of the conversation. But that segment had some good stuff in it, stuff we think is important to include if we're to do justice to our theme, so we decided to release it separately as a kind of Christmas bonus. Consider this mini-episode a way for Phil and I to thank you for listening to Weird Studies, which dropped mewling into the world almost a year ago now. We look forward to continuing the conversation with each other, with our guests, and with you in 2019. This is also an opportunity to thank the people who've helped us put this podcast together, Joseph Cook for designing the Weird Studies logo Matt Melanson for his Crow illustration
Pierre-Yves Martel for the wonderful interstitial music Leslie Halfordy, my beautiful wife, for her voice and our families for their undying support and understanding Thank you all and Happy New Year We hope you'll enjoy our conversation The problem is that there is a line of thinking today that holds the entire structure of our civilization to be so profoundly problematic
that to banish a critical idea, let's say it's a Marxist idea, to banish it or to somehow relativize or frame or box in my Marxism away from my politics, my personality, my engagement with society, this is an idea that's built to destroy the entire thing. Like, how can you be a Marxist while banishing your Marxism? Yeah, that's an interesting question. Isn't that exactly what those academics are doing when they rail against patriarchy and capitalism in the classroom and then go and like cash in their checks as tenured professors and pay their mortgage. But this is actually a really important point that you're making. This is something that really bothers me is people who entertain a certain idea,
not because they have any commitment to it, but for sort of careerist reasons. Like I'm not a Marxist, but I'm going to say Marxist type shit because that's what sells in the academic marketplace. In my life, I treat women badly, but I'm going to say feminist type stuff because that's what sells. And you see a lot of that. But I'm trying to think, is that an intellectual failing or is that a human failing? Well, you were saying the intellectual failing was a failing of personality, a failure of personality. Yeah, it's true. I think that the two are inextricable from one another. And addressing problems of the human has to happen on the level of the individual. Right. Oh, yeah. And so in as much as there is a meeting place of the problem of personality and the problem of idea, like we tend to address problems of ideas in globalizing way.
Well, the problem with Marxism is blah. It leads to violence or something. You know, it's the nature of ideas that you are dealing with things in abstract and totalizing ways. Right. But human beings, if you try to deal with human beings in abstract and totalizing ways, you're a human resources department, right? You're not a human being. Or you're a fascist government. Yeah. Or a communist. Yeah, exactly. Totalitarian. So like if you have a colleague who's just like living in hypocrisy and living in false consciousness and so on, what's my approach to such a person? Well, if they're, I mean, this is assuming that I'm not such a person, right? Which is maybe a dicey assumption to make.
let's say I'm that kind of guy which I kind of am I mean you know I talk a good line about magic but I'm not going to pretend that I'm like fucking Aleister Crowley over here I don't think I'm a total tourist but at the same time I do treat these ideas as a scholar to some extent in a distanced and academic way if I didn't then I wouldn't be a scholar right that's what scholarship is the ability to somewhat uncouple from ideas so that you can play with them. I think one problem with like overcommitment to ideas is actually you become so stiff, so sclerotic, you can't think any other shit. It actually makes you stupid. And so you actually become less good as an academic, as a thinker. But let's say this is a characterological problem of mine. Maybe
this intellectual disposition I have in thinking about magic and the occult is part of a character structure where like different bits of me don't talk to one another. Maybe I can talk a good, like I'm a Buddhist. So maybe I talk a good line about compassion. But you know, some guy cuts me off in traffic and I flip him off. Actually, just the other day, I got in a shouting match with some guy in a park because he had his dog off leash and you're not supposed to. And it pisses me off because all these motherfuckers think that their dogs are totally under their control and they're not. And they always come running up on my dog. and sometimes they're unfriendly and I have to deal with that. It pisses me off. And I just said, leash your dog. And this guy's like, fuck you. And I'm like, fuck you. And he's like, fuck you. And then I'm like, fuck you. And this went on for a while, you know.
And then I can turn around and be like, yeah, we need to be compassionate and really listen to one another and blah, blah, blah. I'm full of shit, you know. Like all that has to happen is some guy to say, fuck you. and my reptile brain starts squirting anger hormones and I'm acting like I'm going to do something. Right. I mean, I'm so glad that there was no one else there because I think back on it, I'm like, oh my God, that's the most embarrassing shit ever. Okay, what's the cure for me in that context? Is it that I have to really think about things? Really get my thoughts straight? No, actually, I think I have to work at human shit. It's not a thinking thing.
It's a human thing. You know what I'm saying? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, but in all you've said there, you have affirmed a certain system of belief that some people are calling into question. So you've said that everything happens at the level of the individual. Well, I don't know if I said that, but a lot happens at the level of the individual. Well, you said all these things, all these intellectual problems boil down to problems of personality or problems of the individual. Oh, I don't know if I said all of them. Quite a few of them. Let's say I'm interested— All right, let's say 90% of them. Let's say that I'm interested at the point at which intellectual problems become human problems. Right. That's not to negate intellectual problems that are just intellectual problems. Like if I have a problem with like my math proof, it's not because I yelled at some guy in the dog park.
No, that's not what I meant. What I'm saying is that the discrepancy between ideas and life or let's say your Buddhism and your behavior in the park on this one particular day, basically what you seem to be saying was that all of this intellectual stuff, including ideological systems like Marxism or feminism or whatever, all of these exist within a context, a bigger context that is human life and human beings living together. Well, yes, I'm happy to say that. Well, not everyone agrees with that in the sense that some people believe that this faith we have in the, let's call it the sovereignty of the individual to balance themselves out and to see things in a proper balanced way is itself problematic.
Like Marxist theory at its limit is like even our language has been determined by power relations, even the words we use, everything. And so there is no way of separating the conclusions of Marxism regarding the value of this or that social construct. and the way you live your life. You can't walk out of it. It's like the feminists used to say, the personal is political. There is no outside of the political. I absolutely reject that. Yeah. I absolutely and totally reject that. That's what I'm saying. When people say there is no outside to politics, to me, has the ring of fascism. Right.
At least totalitarianism, whether it's a fascist kind or a kind of like Soviet kind of collectivist kind of communism. Yeah, one or the other. I agree with you, but in saying that, we are affirming something that they, those people who believe that would object to profoundly. We are reasserting certain values that they perceive as innately and intrinsically oppressive. Well, like what? Like the sovereignty of the individual, for example. You're just maintaining a power structure by not being totally total in your criticism of it. Like even if you were to look at things from a kind of purely environmental perspective, well, then each of our individual existences, just the fact of existing is an affront to the planet.
Like there's a lot of that kind of thinking going on, right? So these are ideas that have gotten away with. But I absolutely reject that. This is madness to me. This reminds me of something Chesterton says in Orthodoxy, that the opposite of rationality isn't madness. I forget how he phrases it. He says no one's as rational as a madman, is what he says. Yeah, exactly. There is, and this is a part of my commitment to a kind of philosophical pluralism, every idea leaves a remainder. And the attempt to make it so that your idea, whatever your pet idea is, whether it's environmentalism, whether it's Marxism, whether it's make America great again, fucking hyperstition, accelerationism, whatever.
To try and make that idea total so that there is no remainder, there's no outside, that even to attempt to think outside of it is to betray the environment or to betray America or something. That to me is the great heresy. It's very easy for people to get you wrong and listen to things that you say and say like, oh, so you must be against Marxism, or you must be against Freudianism, or you must be against Donald Trump, or you must be against feminism, or whatever. No. I can be to varying degrees for or against these things because I'm a human being and I have preferences, right? And I don't think that's bad. But the thing that I don't like, that I really hate, the thing that I set my face against, the thing that I dedicate myself to opposing,
is not any one idea. It is that tendency, that heresy to rationalize an idea, to make it so complete, to extend the domain, to extend its grid such that it maps every last item of human existence onto itself. It is that attempt to totalize ideas that is the thing that I oppose and will oppose with my last dying breath. Yeah, that's kind of the one thing I have to say in the end, is that the whole idea of the real, the real is what exceeds all ideation. So it's the same thing as saying, for every idea there's a remainder. There's always more than you think. So, you know, in Steiner, Rudolf Steiner's philosophy,
there are two paths of evil, right? There's the Aramonic and the Luciferian. and from what I understand the Luciferian move is this decision that you can trace back to old stories like Cain and Abel or the fall of the angels of the origins of Satan and all that of the creature who decides that its view is sufficient for judging the whole it's basically that is in itself the fall. And that's Luciferian I believe that's Luciferian, yeah. Well, that kind of makes sense. Lucifer's the one who thinks he's got it all figured out. Exactly. And Cain is the one who thinks he's got it all figured out, right?
In the story of Cain and Abel, you have Abel, everything's going well for him. He's sacrificing animals, his best sheep to God. And Cain sacrifices some of the fruits of his labor to God. And then God favors Abel. And then Cain's like, what's going on? And then God says, watch it, Cain. Stop thinking that the way things have gone give you enough information to judge the whole thing. And that's kind of the Luciferian move. It's when my view from somewhere will become the view from nowhere. Yeah, that's a perfect way of putting it. Gives me license to commit whatever acts I deem appropriate to rectify or to eliminate the injustice of existence. And those acts are always wicked.
They always end up being the most depraved and wicked acts. Yeah. And it all comes from what you're saying. The sin of Cain. Right. The sin of Cain. It's the sin of totalizing. Wow. It's the opposite move from what you were saying about art. Art is always the nevertheless. I accept the situation. Nevertheless. Nevertheless points to that excess that's always present. There's always more to the story than you think. So you never have enough information to draw some kind of firm and final conclusion. So that's what, at least what I'm writing about, the real capital R, I'm talking about that excess, that nevertheless, there's always more. And that's the humbling realization that kills ideology. it's what tells you that no matter what how much i love marx i think marx was a genius but i'm not
a marxist is that i don't think marx was uh he didn't give us a revelation he was a an ingenious thinker who came up with wonderful theories for explaining social relations and economic relations that sort of thing but the point is you're not a you're not a platonist but i know you dig plato i'm going through the complete works now he's he's fantastic yeah but plato is not a platonist it's the old thing I'm glad I'm Jung and not a Jungian you know as Jung said it's like that's an affirmation of the individual at least the the capacity for individuals to embrace the fact of the totality the existence of an all while remaining conscious that that all will never be their possession that we are participants in a drama that exceeds us
we are figures on a stage we're not unimportant but we're not all fucking Hamlet either you know And we have to just accept that we live in this mystery. You know, what you just said just put something in mind. Where we started is talking about Nick Land. Yeah. And his strenuous attempts to get out of himself, to get out of the limited subjectivity of the bourgeois individual. Right. and as heroic as that sounds i mean you and i both have at different times expressed a lot of frustration with the extreme limits of that idea of subjectivity and it's responsible for so many things that we don't like and yet the attempt to eliminate it forever and all to kill it
to destroy it which is what i take nick land to have been up to delivers you back into the very thing that you maybe wanted to get rid of in the first place, which is that ultimate inheritance of the side of Western rationalism that is maybe kind of more problematic, the view from nowhere. I'm going to crawl out of my own head, and then I will be able to truly see things from the view from nowhere. Maybe there's actually nothing wrong with simply accepting the fact that you're an individual, that you're a limited perspective. Like there's worse things than being an individual. Yeah. Now sometimes I think this kind of like revolt against the self turns into, I mean, we've talked about this before in this show,
near relations, false friends, that apathy can be very similar to a Buddhist idea of non-attachment, but they're not the same thing. There's a big difference between true compassion and what Buddhists call idiot compassion. Right. And likewise, there's a big difference between, you know, questioning the self and hating the self. Yeah. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with being okay with who you are. In fact, I can't help but see a lot of the pathologies of academia really come down to people who just hate themselves and are taking elaborate revenge on themselves. Look at Michel Foucault's biography. His entire career was an attempt to desubjectivate himself. And not only in his intellectual work, but in his personal life. Well, I'll just leave it there and let people who are interested read his biography.
But I wanted to say something about the individual. Yeah, the individual we see as this invention of the modern world, this bourgeois innovation that came about around 1600, maybe a little bit before, and is a completely contingent idea. Whereas what's interesting when you read William Rowan Thompson's analysis of Rapunzel is that he tracks the birth of individuality back to the rise of eukaryotic cells billions of years ago. It's at that moment that unique entities came into being, entities that were born to love and die, to reproduce with others and necessarily to create other individuals that were mortal. We don't know how deep this idea of the individual goes.
And I think that people who fight against the idea of the individual, like you said, more often than not, there's probably some psychological reason behind it. But also, I think there's a noble fight to wage against any particular iteration of the individual. And that's where there is a critique of the bourgeoisie to be had. Or the Buddhist interrogation of the self. Yes, absolutely. Which I think is very important. Yes, but it's never zero-sum game. It's not like you end up with no individual. It's that the individual is construed as a historical creature. I mean, your individuality is made up of language and matter and all kinds of things that existed before your individuality existed. Nevertheless, your individuality is not reducible to those things. There is something about the individual that is a kind of refrain, a kind of unique signature in the fabric of creation that has intrinsic value.
And I think that until we regain some sense of that collectively, that this polarized, fractured thing that's going on will just perpetuate itself. Yeah, I agree. If you can't believe that each person you meet is an individual, you know, the term namaste in India, I believe, means something like, I recognize the God within you, you know. There's something about recognizing the spark of the vow we've talked about with Martin Buber, the vow that not only each person, but each thing is. Until we have some way of collectively accepting that, I think we have major social problems. The question is, how do we ever get back there? I don't know. Something in this idea of the refrain, that chapter is interesting because Deleuze and Gautari are constantly using musical language to describe what they mean by refrain.
I mean, the very name, refrain, is a kind of a musical term. A refrain is like in a song where you go back to the thing that, let's all sing it together now. Alouette, gentil alouette, or whatever, right? Some of the things they say about music is just sort of like, oh, come on. It just seems like total bullshit to me. Like they're just making stuff up. Although, you know, that's okay because we have a right to bullshit a little bit when we're generating ideas. I feel like a little bullshitting is sometimes necessary to prime the pump of inspiration. So I'll stick up for their bullshitting about music. And I think it does, in fact, end up being an inspired idea. The idea that, as you said in your notes on this chapter, Jaluz and Qatari viewed the universe as being pure expression.
And so these refrains, these little fragile centers that human beings create for themselves in a hostile universe, those are like the songs of birds or the plumage of birds they're beautiful they're expression and they're not just expression because like we're human beings and we think they are you know this is the cultural construction thing again no they are expression right they're expressions of a universe that is always already aesthetic at least that's how i choose to read this the aesthetic is not something we invent and then project on an indifferent universe the universe is in itself aesthetic and we are expressions of that that doesn't make us special birds are like that wolves are like that plants are like that you know bacteria are like that
but then i'm thinking about the refrain as something aesthetic as something like music i think of a line of sunra's there's this crazy movie that he was in called space is the place and there's some wonderful moments where sunra is just kind of meditating aloud in his sort of esoteric philosophy. And one of the things he says is, you're music too. And that surely is something that's worthy of respect, perhaps even love. consider subscribing to weird studies on itunes stitcher or another podcast service