Weirding

Clearly, the world is getting weirder. A bizarre excrescence of celebrity culture becomes president; the world shuts down for a virus; an island is swallowed by rising seas; some formerly unsimulated aspect of reality is taken over by a simulacrum when no-one is looking. Whenever such things happen, we find ourselves thinking, “I never thought we’d be here, but here we are. So now what.” For good reason, the phrase “global weirding” has caught on of late: it suggests that as ecologies and environments undergo cataclysmic change, our lives are increasingly irradiated by strangeness. 

But “weirding” also can have another implication, by analogy with the perceptual strategy of “queering.” To queer a Busby Berkeley musical is to see its glorification of monogamous heterosexuality — “normal love,” in Jack Smith’s words — as an artifact at once alien and intimate. To weird is to do something similar, to see and seek out the shadows cast by things in normal life. Weirding means finding in ordinary things the most outlandish possibilities, the most obscure connections, the most bizarre coincidences. Conversely, it can mean seeking out the strange (mysticism, occult magic, paranormal phenomena, avant-garde art) and finding there questions that commend themselves to the attention of serious thinkers. Weirding is what Phil Ford and J.F. Martel do in the Weird Studies Podcast, and it is what they propose to do in this course.