Erik Davis > Quotes

“In this book, I will argue that, at least under conditions of high weirdness, the causal relationship between cultural codes and “experience itself” gets twisted into a loop whose unstable and resonant dynamics actually drive the mode in question.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“After all, the encounter with supernatural agents brings us back to arguably the most archaic religious idea (or at least the most archaic idea of religious scholars): animism, the belief in, or communication with, otherworldly beings. High weirdness is weirdness animated.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“The first domain is aesthetic. The weird describes a peculiar domain of feelings and images associated with stories, spaces, atmospheres, and moods that relate to the uncanny, the fantastic, the perverse, and the macabre side of the supernatural. The weird here is essentially a genre—not just of cultural production, but of affect and possibility, of the visionary imagination and the experimental body. Books can be weird, but so can subcultural happenings. The second domain marks the weird as a space of deviancy, social or otherwise. Weird things are anomalous—they deviate from the norms of informed expectation and challenge established explanations, sometimes quite radically. In the human world, you are being weird or a weirdo when you refuse or transgress dominant behavioral and conceptual codes. Despite its numinous, supernatural ambience, the weird also hunkers down in the margins of the actual, as a centrifugal turn away from naturalistic or probabilistic or historical norms to which it remains, nonetheless, intimately tied. The third and most substantial sense of the weird is ontological.4 In this view, weirdness is a mode of reality, of the way things are or the way they appear to be (which may be just two sides of the same strange coin). Weirdness here is not simply an artifact of our bent minds but a feature of the art and manner of existence itself—an existence I believe we can still talk about directly, though perhaps always with a forked tongue. More than a genre, more than a psychological mode, the weird inheres in the loopy, twisty, tricksy way whereby things come to be.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“In encounters with high weirdness, culture becomes consciousness. Marginal and esoteric cultural narratives—particularly those wrapped up in conspiracy theories, extraterrestrials, occult forces, strange gods, and fantastic pulp fictions—intrude forcefully, uncannily, and sometimes absurdly into the texture of lived experience.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“But high weirdness is equally a mode of extraordinary experience. At”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“More dramatic than the presence of this remixed cultural material, of course, is the startling appearance of an Other: the reptilian entity who pops out of the phantasmagoric scene and returns the observer's gaze.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“In the court of the mind, skepticism makes a great grand vizier, but a lousy lord, and a worse bard. As readers and interpreters, I believe we must move gingerly when dealing with reports of extraordinary experiences, which can be convulsive to experiencers, but strangely delicate things in the analytic afterglow. While I do want to analyze the experiences ahead, as well as the written accounts, I am far more interested in providing close readings of them than in explaining them away. I want to provide maps of their influences, resonances, and structural dynamics rather than unravel their ultimate meaning or origin or cause. We need to give these enigmas and strange loops room to breathe and to be—to enjoy what Bruno Latour, a philosopher and sociologist who will accompany us throughout our work, calls their own “ontological pasture.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“My theoretical approach here, I want to insist, will be decidedly experimental, more of an attempt—in the classic sense of “essay”—than an analytic framework. In cobbling my network of concepts together, I am driven by my dissatisfaction with the idealism of religious and mystical thinking, on the one hand, and the stinginess of the usual reductionism on the other.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies