Episode 134: On Federico Campagna's 'Technic and Magic'

In Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, the philosopher Federico Campagna argues that we moderns have exhausted the reality system we devised at the dawn of our age, a system he calls Technic. Technic has one goal: to reduce all things to language by naming, tagging, measuring, and quantifying them, by turning every parcel of the physical and psychic universe into a "unit" defined by its position in the system. The result has been an erasure of the mere "suchness" of things, the singularity of things simply existing as they are. To replace a worldview that is now revealing its endemic nihilism, Campagna proposes Magic, a way of seeing that reestablishes a balance between the measurable and the ineffable. JF and Phil discuss Campagna's magisterial performance in this episode. Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel 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 SHOW NOTES Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic Bill Hicks, “Bit on Marketing” Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time Plotinus, Neoplatonist philosopher Francis Bacon, Irish artist Samuel Beckett, Irish author William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch Weird Stuides, Episode 87 on Arthur Machen Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism