Monday August 4, 2025
12 – 1:30pm
Robert Webster 250
In 1908, near the end of his life, Charles Sanders Peirce published an essay that argued for the soundness of a belief in the reality of God. Central to his argument is the practice of daydreaming, an “agreeable occupation of mind” that he names “musement.” In musement, Peirce claims, we have a tendency to speculate on the origins of some wonder or another, a tendency he insists naturally leads to a belief in God. Although Peirce’s argument is full of holes and in fact is not even an argument in the traditional sense of the term, his musings on musement as a method for attending to the spontaneity of thought provides a way to think about daydreaming as a kind of science of guessing. But daydreaming is a type of thinking whose worth is (traditionally) tied up in its not being valuable for what use it can be put. In this regard, it’s better to think of daydreaming as an art than a science and its worth closer to what Jean Baudrillard called “radical thought.” In this talk, then, I muse on Peirce’s musings to consider musement’s hol(e)y tendencies and to propose that musement is an imaginary solution of the type favoured by pataphysicians. As such, I conclude that it is good for the kind of nothing that is, strangely, good for radical thinking.
Eldritch Priest writes on sonic culture, experimental aesthetics, and the philosophy of experience from a ’pataphysical perspective. He is Associate Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Eldritch is also a composer and improviser, as well as a member of the experimental theory group “The Occulture.” He is the author of several essays and books including Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics ofFailure (Bloomsbury 2013) and most recently, Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams, and Other Imaginary Refrains (Duke University Press 2022).
This talk is hosted by the UNSW Media Futures Hub.