​by Mark Fisher

​No-one is quite sure what they are: Nick Land, Stephen Metcalf, Sadie Plant. Part theory, part fiction, nothing human, constructs so smoothly assembled you can't see the joins. They don't write text; they cook up intensities. They don't theorise; they secrete, datableed.

What we used to call cyberpunk is a convergence: a crossover point not only for fiction and theory, but for everything that either doesn't know its place or is in the process of escaping it. Whatever is emerging where authority is getting lost and middle men are being made redundant. Anything interesting was always like that. Metalhead Michel Foucault was never easy to place. They asked him if he had ever wanted to write fiction. He said he'd never done anything else.
​
So more than a fusion of fiction and theory, it's all about cross fertilizing the most intense elements of both in monstrous nuptials against nature. Synthetix.

​"Dozens of different argots are now in common currency; most people speak at least three or four separate languages, and a verbal relativity exists as important as any of time and space. To use the stylistic conventions of the traditional oral novel - the sequential narrative, characters 'in the round', consecutive events, balloons of dialogue attached to 'he said' and 'she said' - is to perpetuate a set of conventions ideally suited to the great tales of adventure in the Conradian mode, or an overformalized Jamesian society, but now valuable for little more than the bedtime story and the fable. To use these conventions to describe events in the present decade is to write a kind of historical novel in reverse...²1964. Writing in the pages of the SF magazine New Worlds , J. G. Ballard celebrates the multipliticous, impure junk languages of William Burroughs. Ballard wheels away the decorous scenery of the literary novel to reveal the atrocity exhibition of the late twentieth century as it emerges in Burroughs' carnivalesque prose: "swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels..."Burroughs has already intravenously pumped pulp fictional vernacular into the hi-cultural zone of Joyce-Eliot experimentalism, fatally contaminating it. Ballard's own condensed novels are in preparation. Cyberpunk fiction lies in wait; assembling itself out of machinic convergence, it is a direct but unanticipated consequence of the intersection of the PC, TV and the telephone. Invading clean white Kalifornia dreams with nightmares from the machinic unconscious, William Gibson and Pat Cadigan populate cyberspace with nonorganic gothic avatars and voodoo entities. The bourgeois novel in flames.

​The near future. (But it's already happening) "Twisted trading systems have turned the net into a jungle, pulsing with digital diseases, malfunctioning defence packages, commercial predators, headhunters, loa and escaped AIs hiding from Asimov security."Dead hippies create cyberspace, but what comes together is the jungle: Cubase materialism smearing white economies with black marketization. Illicit distribution networks, rogue retail, faceless bacterial commerce. Silicon valley in flames.

​The death of the author is an entirely technical matter, not at all a metaphor. The cool, efficient decommissioning of the author-function in music shows the way. Remixes displace (fixed, finalised) texts; DJs, producers and engineers replace authors. What succeeds all this is the version, in the sense Jamaican reggae culture gave to the term. Unofficial, potentially infinite, illegitimate: there's no such thing as an authorised version.

​"The state's pre-arrangement of overlaid bridges, junctions, pathways and trade routes trajectorize the scorching advance as it impacts upon the hapless head of the social. Detonation of nuclear arsenals of the world merely pushes the nomads underground: shedding their skins in reptilian camouflage, vanishing without a forensic trace in ambient recession into the underground...

Things sometimes converge in the most unpropitious locations. Coventry, for example. The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit processes cybernetics and culture together, apprehending culture cybernetically and cybernetics culturally. The impetus is not so much inter- as anti-disciplinary, the concrete problem being the freeing up of thought as synaptic-connectivity from its prison as subject-bound logos. Following flows where they want to go leads not into random noise but out onto what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of consistency . "If we consider the plane of consistency, we notice that the most disparate things and signs move upon it: a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message... There is no 'like' here, we are not saying 'like an electron,' 'like an interaction', etc. The plane of consistency is the abolition of metaphor; all that consists is Real." The CCRU is part-populated by names you don't know yet, but are bound to soon - moving as a massive, with our street-gun samplers, never alone - a k-class swarmachine infecting White Man Face with afro-futurist and cyber-feminist cultural viruses .
​
​"Writing becomes a process of software engineering, making connections, and connecting with the other connectionist systems and their connections too; 'does not totalize', but 'is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself.'" What Pat Cadigan calls synning: synthesizing.

​No more cerebral core-texts, no more closed books. Looking instead to games or the dancefloor for inspiration. Attempting to produce something that will match the ambitions of Lyotard 1974: "To understand, to be intelligent, is not our overriding passion. We hope rather to be set in motion. Consequently, our passion would sooner be the dance, as Nietzsche wanted ... A dance ... not composed and notated but, on the contrary, one in which the body's gesture would be, with the music, its timbre, its pitch, intensity and duration, and with the words (dancers are also singers), at each point in a unique relation, becoming at every moment an emotional event..."(LE 51) Intensity conductors operating at non-human machine speed, writing machines, machinic writing,text at sample velocity.

​Text samples from:

​J. G. Ballard, "Mythmaker of the Twentieth Century", reprinted in RE/search: J. G. Ballard
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (both Athlone Press) 
Luce Irigaray, Speculum: Of the Other Woman (Cornell University Press)
Nick Land, "Meltdown", unpublished
Stephen Metcalf, "Black Capital"in Collapse 2 and IOD 1
Jean Francois-Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (Athlone Press)
Sadie Plant, "The Virtual Complexity of Culture"in Future Natural (Routledge)

​by  J.G. Ballard

​Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. What the writers of modern science fiction invent today, you and I will do tomorrow - or, more exactly, in about 10 years' time, though the gap is narrowing. Science fiction is the most important fiction that has been written for the last 100 years. The compassion, imagination, lucidity and vision of H.G. Wells and his successors, and above all their grasp of the real identity of the 20th century, dwarf the alienated and introverted fantasies of James Joyce, Eliot and the writers of the so-called Modern Movement, a 19th century offshoot of bourgeois rejection. Given its subject matter, its eager acceptance of naiveté, optimism and possibility, the role and importance of science fiction can only increase. I believe that the reading of science fiction should be compulsory. Fortunately, compulsion will not be necessary, as more and more people are reading it voluntarily. Even the worst science fiction is better -- using as the yardstick of merit the mere survival of its readers and their imaginations -- than the best conventional fiction. The future is a better key to the present than the past.

​Above all, science fiction is likely to be the only form of literature which will cross the gap between the dying narrative fiction of the present and the cassette and videotape fictions of the near future. What can Saul Bellow and John Updike do that J. Walter Thompson, the world's largest advertising agency and its greatest producer of fiction, can't do better? At present science fiction is almost the only form of fiction which is thriving, and certainly the only fiction which has any influence on the world around it. The social novel is reaching fewer and fewer readers, for the clear reason that social relationships are no longer as important as the individual’s relationship with the technological landscape of the late 20th century.

​​In essence, science fiction is a response to science and technology as perceived by the inhabitants of the consumer goods society, and recognizes that the role of the writer today has totally changed -- he is now merely one of a huge army of people filling the environment with fictions of every kind. To survive, he must become far more analytic, approaching his subject matter like a scientist or engineer. If he is to produce fiction at all, he must out-imagine everyone else, scream louder, whisper more quietly. For the first time in the history of narrative fiction, it will require more than talent to become a writer. What special skills, proved against those of their fellow members of society, have Muriel Spark or Edna O'Brien, Kingsley Amis or Cyril Connolly? Sliding gradients point the way to their exits.

​It is now some 15 years since the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, a powerful and original writer in his own right, remarked that the science fiction magazines produced in the suburbs of Los Angeles contained far more imagination and meaning than anything he could find in the literary periodicals of the day. Subsequent events have proved Paolozzi's sharp judgment correct in every respect. Fortunately, his own imagination has been able to work primarily within the visual arts, where the main tradition for the last century has been the tradition of the new. Within fiction, unhappily, the main tradition for all too long has been the tradition of the old. Like the inmates of some declining institution, increasingly forgotten and ignored by the people outside, the leading writers and critics count the worn beads of their memories, intoning the names of the dead, dead who were not even the contemporaries of their own grandparents.

Meanwhile, science fiction, as my agent remarked to me recently in a pleasant tone, is spreading across the world like a cancer. A benign and tolerant cancer, like the culture of beaches. The time-lag of its acceptance narrows -- I estimate it at present to be about 10 years. My guess is that the human being is a nervous and fearful creature, and nervous and fearful people detest change. However, as everyone becomes more confident, so they are prepared to accept change, the possibility of a life radically different from their own. Like green stamps given away at the supermarkets of chance and possibility, science fiction becomes the new currency of an ever-expanding future. ​

​The one hazard facing science fiction, the Trojan horse being trundled towards its expanding ghetto -- a high-rent area if there ever was one in fiction -- is that faceless creature, literary criticism. Almost all the criticism of science fiction has been written by benevolent outsiders, who combine zeal with ignorance, like high-minded missionaries viewing the sex rites of a remarkably fertile aboriginal tribe and finding every laudable influence at work except the outstanding length of penis. The depth of penetration of the earnest couple, Lois and Stephen Rose (authors of The Shattered Ring), is that of a pair of practicing Christians who see in science fiction an attempt to place a new perspective on "man, nature, history and ultimate meaning." What they fail to realize is that science fiction is totally atheistic: those critics in the past who have found any mystical strains at work have been blinded by the camouflage. Science fiction is much more concerned with the significance of the gleam on an automobile instrument panel than on the deity's posterior -- if Mother Nature has anything in science fiction, it is VD.

​Most critics of science fiction trip into one of two pitfalls -- either, like Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell, they try to ignore altogether the technological trappings and relate SF to the "mainstream" of social criticism, anti-utopian fantasies and the like (Amis's main prophecy for science fiction in 1957 and proved wholly wrong), or they attempt to apostrophize SF in terms of individual personalities, hopelessly rivaling the far-better financed efforts of American and British Publishers to sell their fading Wares by dressing their minor talents in the great-writer mantle. Science fiction has always been very much a corporate activity, its writers sharing a common pool of ideas, and the yardsticks of individual achievement do not measure the worth of the best Writers, Bradbury, Asimov, Bernard Wolfe Limbo 90) and Frederik Pohl, The anonymity of the majority of 20th-century Writers of science fiction is the anonymity of modern technology; no more "great names" stand out than in the design of consumer durables, or for that matter Rheims Cathedral.

​Who designed the 1971 Cadillac El Dorado, a complex of visual, organic and psychological clues of infinitely more subtlety and relevance, stemming from a vastly older network of crafts and traditions than, say, the writings of Norman Mailer or the latest Weidenfeld or Cape miracle? The subject matter of SF is the subject matter of everyday life: the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife's or husband's thighs passing the newsreel images on a color TV set, the conjunction of musculature and chromium artifact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator -- all in all, close to the world of the Pop painters and sculptors. Paolozzi, Hamilton, Warhol, Wesselmann, Ruscha, among others. The great advantage of SF is that it can add one unique ingredient to this hot mix -- words. Write!

taken from:

Syzygy was the title of a five week ‘art show’ co-produced by Ccru and Orphan Drift.
 
The name means ‘twinning’ or ‘twin-system’, and this theme operated as a multilevelled guiding thread. It was during the production of this event that Ccru made contact with the virtual Continentity of Lemuria, which taught us many secrets that we have since attempted to formulate as ‘Digital Hyperstition’.

​Digital hyperstition is already widespread, hiding within popular numerical cultures (calendars, currency systems, sorcerous numbo-jumbo, etc.). It uses number-systems for transcultural communication and cosmic exploration, exploiting their intrinsic tendency to explode centralized, unified, and logically overcoded ‘master narratives’ and reality models, to generate sorcerous coincidences, and to draw cosmic maps.
 
The Lemurian biomechanical hyperculture propagates itself through decimal notation, whose latent interconnections are demonstrated in the Numogram (see web-site): an occult diagram of time and practical guide to the ethics of unbelief. An initial attempt to clarify this topic has been made in the most recent issue of our journal Abstract Culture.

​According to the tenets of Hyperstition, there is no difference in principle between a universe, a religion, and a hoax. All involve an engineering of manifestation, or practical fiction, that is ultimately unworthy of belief. Nothing is true, because everything is under production. Because the future is a fiction it has a more intense reality than either the present or the past. Ccru uses and is used by hyperstition to colonize the future, traffic with the virtual, and continually re-invent itself.

excerpt from the book: ​Ccru Writings 1997-2003