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by Steven Craig Hickman  HYPERSTITION AND THEORY-FICTIONQ6. Does hyperstition exist outside of time and how is it hidden? This is fascinating, particularly in relation to the apocalypse meme, which is not at all. How do the two terms relate? R6. Time is the working in historical time of that which lies outside (but constructs itself through) historical time. Apocalypse closes the circuit. – from interview with Nick Land by Delphi Carstens Over and over as I read various theory-fictions the name that seems to hover like a bad nightmare, yet circulates through many texts like an invisible presence or corruption, an immanent field of jouissance – a bittersweet degradation is that of Nick Land: Functioning as magical sigils or engineering diagrams hyperstitions are ideas that, once ‘downloaded’ into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Whether couched as religious mystery teaching, or as secular credo, hyperstitions act as catalysts, engendering further (and faster) change and subversion. Describing the effect of very real cultural anxieties about the future, hyperstitions refer to exponentially accelerating social transformations. Or Bataille’s “archontes” – those deadly kellipots of the Lurian Kabbalah: “The acephalous gods who, as we will still need to show, represent matter are precisely the images of dismembered bodies that the substitutions of the series are rushing toward. If the dismembered body represents one of these primal images that sets in motion the chain of images, and if the series is once again inclined toward an approximation of this image, with regard to the movement of the chain, we are dealing with a form of circulation. With the dismembered body, a circle closes itself but only to unroll itself once again.”1 Land will turn the gods into capitalists and retro-viral infestations blitzing the last stop gap of a no future zone: Acephalization = schizophrenia: cutting-up capital by way of bottom-up macrobacterial telecommerce, inducing corporate disintegration. The doomed part of intensively virtualized techonomic apparatuses subverts the fraying residues of anthropomorphic guidance. Control dissolves into the impossible.2 Think of Deleuze’s notion of Aion and Chronos: the force of non-linear time cannibalizing historical time, a narrative between the linear dynamics of the monotheistic or Blakean notion of narrative as Genesis > Apocalypse (History, Chronos > chronological); and the circular and eternal return of Joyce’s “riverun past Eve and Adam’s” of the cyclical times of Shelley’s fossil poetry (Cyclic, Viconian, Nietzsche’s amor fati – love of fate – the eternal return of the Same, Deleuze’s Aion or the eternal return of “difference”, etc.). Symptomatic of a type of cultural illness induced by future shock, the hyperstitional ‘infection’ brings about that which is most feared; a world spiraling out of control. This, manifestly, is the task of the’ hyperstional cyberneticist,’ according to Land – namely, to “close the circuit” of history by detecting the “convergent waves [that] register the influence of the future on its past”. As Land indicates, a hyperstition signals the return of the irrational or the monstrous ‘other’ into the cultural arena. From the perspective of hyperstition, history is presided over by Cthonic ‘polytendriled abominations’ – the “Unuttera” that await us at history’s closure. Lovecraft’s tendrilled gods as immanent Ideas from the future relayed through Quantum engines into unsuspecting humanity, releasing programs and algorithms that bring about the convergence of technology and intelligence: the Singularity. Instead of the Platonic notion of eternal Ideas, the sense of those fallen powers in matter itself as the immanent force of intelligence and productive power: the Red Tower unleashed (Thomas Ligotti story). Or, as Badiou would say, “Generic Intelligence” not “General Intelligence”. For Badiou, this sort of experience inheres within what he calls a “generic procedure.” Since such a procedure “has nothing to do with the limits of the human species, our ‘consciousness,’ our ‘finitude,’ our ‘faculties,’” it has to be thought through the same mathematical formalism as the “glacial world” of Cartesian extension described by Meillassoux. To quote from Logics of Worlds: “If we think such a procedure in terms of its formal determinations alone—in the same way that we think the laws of the material world through mathematical formalism—we find sequences of signs and various relations arranged in a productive or counter-productive manner, without ever needing to pass through human “lived experience.” In fact, a truth is that by which “we,” of the human species, are committed to a trans-specific procedure, a procedure which opens us to the possibility of being Immortals. A truth is thus undoubtedly an experience of the inhuman.” For Badiou, it is the event which interrupts the regime of custom by exposing an absence of necessary connection as a positive metaphysical possibility rather than an epistemological deficit. As an alternative to “habit,” what Badiou calls “fidelity” constitutes the synthetic principle of “inhuman experience” proper to a generic procedure. The subject of a generic procedure is cast along an aleatory trajectory on which every term of experience is encountered as radically new—shorn of the regularities of habit— and is either included or excluded (in a binary fashion) from the construction of a generic truth. For Land a hyperstition is such a generic truth. Exulting in permanent ‘crisis mode,’ hyperstition accelerates the tendencies towards chaos and dissolution by invoking irrational and monstrous forces – the Cthonic Old Ones. As Land explains, these forces move through history, planting the seeds of hyperstition: John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness includes the (approximate) line: “I thought I was making it up, but all the time they were telling me what to write.” ‘They’ are the Old Ones (explicitly), and this line operates at an extraordinary pitch of hyperstitional intensity. From the side of the human subject, ‘beliefs’ hyperstitionally condense into realities, but from the side of the hyperstitional object (the Old Ones), human intelligences are mere incubators through which intrusions are directed against the order of historical time. The archaic hint or suggestion is a germ or catalyst, retro-deposited out of the future along a path that historical consciousness perceives as technological progress. As Land would say in an interview: What is concealed (the Occult) is an alien order of time, which betrays itself through ‘coincidences’, ‘synchronicities’ and similar indications of an intelligent arrangement of fate. An example is the cabbalistic pattern occulted in ordinary languages – a pattern that cannot emerge without eroding itself, since the generalized (human) understanding and deliberated usage of letter-clusters as numerical units would shut down the channel of ‘coincidence’ (alien information). It is only because people use words without numerizing them, that they remain open as conduits for something else. To dissolve the screen that hides such things (and by hiding them, enables them to continue), is to fuse with the source of the signal and liquidate the world. Think of what Kabbalah actually was for those Hebrew scholars: a map of the Mind’s Cosmos… this sense that the Sefirot were the broken vessels of a catastrophic universal system of entropy, and that the gathering of the darkness from those scattered vessels to reweave the body of the universe, etc. As Zizek would say “traversing the fantasy”: in the fantasies of scholars comes the hyperstitional creation of the future, a future that comes as a memory not of the past but of the future itself. Think of Einstein in New Mexico: he had a room built above his studio, a room with 13 steps to reach it, a room with nothing in it but a chair, a room painted solid black and sealed to the point that no light of any kind could seep in. He would sit there in the darkness for hours contemplating his mathematical equations. I remember when I took acid in the sixties and seventies of visualizing in the darkness forms: mathematical figures and entities in hyperreal colors; geometric and number based entities that would move into and out of patterns creating architectural objects as if something were trying to deliver a strange new message in a language barely understood. Think of the genius Srinivasa Ramanujan a mathematical prodigy who dreamed equations. Ramanujan credited his acumen to his family goddess, Mahalakshmi of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work, and claimed to dream of blood drops that symbolised her male consort, Narasimha, after which he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes. He often said, “An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God.” He visualized math even if couched in religious terms. More a savant, he was barely literate and failed other subjects, etc. This notion of lucid dreaming and receiving these complex scrolls of informational content aligns with this Landian sense of the computer vectors from the future, etc. Or, the Gnostic sense of “more than rational” gnosis (knowledge). Couched back in secular terms our brain is computational device that is not bound by chronological time, rather it taps into Aion or other dimensions of timespace for its systems. What we term genius is just accidents of the brain itself: gifted individuals tap into the gaps in the filter that most others are unable too. As Scott would say: the BBT closes us normals off from accessing this computational device, instead it delivers to us only the environmental (local) data we need and keeps the rest. All those ancient traditions of Sorcery and entheogens is pathways to circumvent the blind brain’s filtering mechanism, to short-circuit it and open up gaps in its armor to release informational content otherwise closed off. (I’m sure Scott would (in his scientistic) belief system explain all this away. Or, maybe not!) But why else did humans spend thousands of years developing relations to entheogens and rituals surrounding the use of hallucinogens even in Greece, Rome, and other cultures, India, China, Africa… etc. Most of our monotheistic religions shut all this down just like the reformation closed off the hermetic and magical traditions they feared from Renaissance thinkers, etc. What men fear they demonize and reject, associate with evil… but if Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze, Land etc. are correct then “evil” is the creative in us, or as Black acknowledges “evil is eternal delight” “energy”… etc. Hyperstition is equipoised between fiction and technology, and it is this tension that puts the intensity into both, although the intensity of fiction owes everything to its potential (to catalyse hyperstitional ‘becomings’) rather than its actuality (which can be mere human expressivity). The problem with both modern sciences and philosophy is that it binds itself to tradition, constrains its thoughts and ability to think by ingrown codes and systems of knowledge and power (Foucault) that force academic or para-academic thought into molds of acceptable discourse etc. When certain humans discover techniques or other paths to thought, math, etc. that do not fit into those networks of affiliation they are marked as either “obscurantist” or “genius” as if they must be abnormal or outside the normative parameters of acceptable or polite company. People are afraid to face the unknown and new, they’d rather hide in their received traditions than venture outside the circle or fence into the wilderness. Ask yourself why that is? We know that when the sciences or even philosophy come up with something new it takes if not a generation then at least a very wide consensus of cowards to come to terms with a new “truth”. People fear what they cannot reduce to their surround abode of thought, their habitat of sameness. What’s funny is that the cry of modernism was “Make it new!” Yet, when one reads their work one discovers nothing new, only the cultural malaise of outworn and belated thought rerouted into a stylistics that appears new only in that it hides the same under the affective relations of ethical cowardice. Think of Eliot, Pound and Wyndham Lewis who are the arch-modernists: each harbored fascist dreams of tradition and constraint, of authority and control. Nothing new here. Sadly most thinkers in our day revert to a zero degree of thought caught between older battles of idealism or materialism under the guise of immaterialsm of the updated physics of Quantum theory. Between advanced semioticians of finance, or the vitalistic charade of mythic matter, or the mathematical entities of some generic procedure, or the Subject as self-reflecting nothingness etc. each seeks out of the past rather than the future a path forward into chaos beyond the human. We seem bent on an inhuman vision of escape or exit, one that flattens or corrupts the human into the inhuman or anti-human. It’s as if we were ashamed of being what we are, as if to be this strange animal with consciousness – with a sense of the linguistic “I”, that signifier that hooks and rambles across the screen of the mind like a puppet made of papier-mâché and strings of thought rotating in a void were to be ruined (Foucault) cast out into the outer darkness of non-thought (Laruelle). As if we woke up one day and thought that being human were a mistake, a disease, a degradation on the face of earth… as if suddenly secular philosophy had agreed with the monotheistic religions after all and we were just stains and fallen beings, sinful creatures who had instead of acting against God had acted against the rest of creation. We hear over and over that ours is the Age of Anthropocene: the age of human degradation of the climate, earth, the geosphere, etc. Is this not a new religion of earth come to bite us in the ass. Are we not reinstalling the sacred in a new mode? Whereas we abandoned the monotheistic religions in the Enlightenment, now we are expected to abandon both the liberal order, the seat of Reason, and the Self as Subject for the non-human, inhuman, anti-human (take your pick). Why would I who struggle so hard to free myself of Christianity and become an atheist (without God) want to now enslave myself in a new religion of the non-human couched as it is in a philosophical jargon? No. Something is wrong here. We seem to be abandoning the sciences in the very moment when we need them most. The sciences are based on sense-data, empirical and also mathematical modeling, etc. A balance between Set and Synthetic theoretic in math is the basis of twenty-first sciences. Both the Life (biological) and Physics need to work in balance together to form a more viable path forward. Too many philosophers have denigrated the sciences, when its the powers of government, finance, etc. that enforce, fund, and control the flow and direction of R&D etc. that should gain our Eire, not the sciences as a human tool or heuristics. I guess I’m tired of the Left who is either full of malaise or full of optimism for everything but the human itself… as if now humans must become themselves the sacrificial scapegoat of a new earth religion. Cast out in favor of the non-human other: the inhuman, anti-human, or non-human, etc. As if Gaia had replaced Yahweh as the arbiter and judge of human Sin and degradation. As if our sin was not against heaven but the earth. Time to walk away from either reversion, monotheistic or earth based, obscurantist or philosophical. All these false philosophers who seek to escape the human seem like old school transcendentalists to me. Let’s escape the human condition, become something other… We are what we are, let us act on what immanently is the force of our intelligence in this cosmos, without being blinded by religious forms of transcendence. Otherwise we’re doomed to fatalism concerning the real problems we face ahead. Both posthumanist and transhumanist discourse is replete with this transcendence crapology, seeking to exit the human project for either biogenetic enhancement through pharmaceutical, genetic alteration, etc.; or, by merging with out technologies: robotics or virtual assemblages. Yes, we as a species like every previous species that has already gone extinct may reach that point where we give way to something else, but this is not the time nor the age to abandon hope. Dante was wrong: there is no sign above the human prognosis that say “Abandon hope all ye who become human!” It’s time to accept who and what we are and deal with it. I’m not saying that the sciences might very well in the future provide just such machinic or enhanced lifestyles, rather the point is not to make it into a religion, secular or otherwise. One need only reread the cyberpunks and newer science fiction to realize that such dreams of immortalization may not lead to what our promoters of transhumanism and posthumanism believe. I like David Roden’s “disconnection thesis”: The Disconnection Thesis (DT) states that technically constituted agents become posthuman where they learn to function outside the assemblage of institutions and other artificial systems that that humans have built and upon which we reciprocally depend. There may be many ways in which this might occur, most of which we cannot presently envisage. Of course there are our avatars of posthumanity – Skynet say – but technological prediction has a poor track record. We do not know whether such technically induced vitality is possible, or what form it could take, if any. Let’s leave it open or fictionalize it. Or even use the hyperstitional, memetic, or egregore to bring it about if this is truly the path forward. But let’s do it under the light of Reason, not religious and irrational behavior guided by either pessimistic or optimistic rhetoric. For years the Left has been under the superstition that the Enlightenment is our Number One Enemy. One can read through the entire gamut of Leftist thought and see a critique not of the Enlightenment per se but of its so to speak “instrumental reason”. That it was turning us into machines, etc., forced by mechanistic “invisible hands” of economic servitude, etc.. Yet, now we want to affirm another fatalism? Abandon one secular myth for another? Enter the servitude of metamorphosis into non-humans? A migration out of reason into what? Nietzsche whom people either love or hate wasn’t stupid, and he didn’t live long enough to finish his project. Yet, he had in his brief creative life developed a theory of meaning: nihilism. It was a concept that allowed us to understand the history of human “meaning,” and how culture shapes the symbolic fictions of truth that guide our ethical, religious, and scientific – philosophical frameworks toward either ruin (passive, romantic nihilism of self-destruction and self-ruinous hatred), or toward positive-feedback loops and auto-productive active nihilism full of that creative and energetic abandonment: beyond good and evil, shaped by the amoral, impersonal, and alien force of immanent intelligence from the core of our inhumanity. Cloaked in his mad prose of the end were sparks and sigils, guideposts toward what we’ve become in our time: the fretful denizens of a postmodern age of nihilistic despair, else a culture of death mobilized the evil and creative energetics of a posthuman future. We are those of whom he spoke, the very measure of both passive and active forms of nihilism. And in this generation the balance between these two forms of nihilism are far from equilibrium and bringing about a great civil-war among cultures and peoples of the earth. It remains to be seen whether the reactive and ruinous forces of passive nihilism (tribalism, ethnic and religious violence, etc.) or active nihilism (neuroscientific and transformative, energetic powers and dispotifs toward overcoming present frameworks, scientific and philosophical, posthuman and transhuman) will win the day. We stand on the cusp of this great battle fearful of what it portends. Our cultural measure is the various registers of art, literature, music, film, and other modes of creativity; along with the various sciences as they enable the convergence of NBIC technologies (nanotech, biotech, information and communications). Every intellectual and media pundit knows we’re in a great transitional period, part chaotic, part dynamic non-linear movement that could go either way: toward break through, or break down. No one has the answer to which. One has to decide which side of the world one is on: passive and regressive nihilism, or active and transformative nihilism. The so called post-nihilism is just that Post… like David’s posthumans, we just don’t no what’s beyond the – as my friend Scott Bakker terms it the ‘crash space’ of the Semantic Apocalypse. Here we are. That’s all. Some like Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism thought we should just give things a nudge, accelerate things to the point of collapse or break through. Nick Land followed their trajectory and updated it with hyperstitional notions of fictions that create the thing they envision on the fly. Active revisions, programming reality. Most thinkers like to stay within the boundaries of the known and safe, rather than venture into the wilderness of unbound thought. Not being a philosopher but rather a speculative adventurer in thought I’ve never seen the difference between theory-fiction (as they term it now), and science or speculative fiction. One needs to broaden the path across the borderlands of the known and unknown, skirt the edges of the darkness without being sucked into its labyrinth of chaos and thermospasm (Land). My friend Scott Bakker points out a tendency in thinkers to stay within the fold of their peers, the consensus reality show of acceptable discourse and narratology. I have never felt restricted by any authority whatsoever. Many misconstrue my writings as affirmations of the thinkers I discuss when it’s just a need to understand. One need to be bound by what one reads and critiques, explicates or comments on. I read all sides of a particular thought… Left, Right or otherwise in politics, etc. To bind oneself to only one’s inner circle of thought is to blind one’s self as well. THE MIDDLE WAY: THE IN-BETWEEN OF PHILOSOPHY – INVERTING BUDDHISM AND WESTERN PHILOSOPHY: IMMANENCE RATHER THAN TRANSCENDENCEIn Mahayana Buddhism, the Middle Way refers to the insight into śūnyatā “emptiness” that transcends the extremes of existence and non-existence, the two truths doctrine. Two aspects of the Buddha’s teachings, the philosophical and the practical, which are mutually dependent, are clearly enunciated in two discourses, the Kaccāyanagotta-sutta and the Dhammacakkappavattana-sutta, both of which are held in high esteem by almost all schools of Buddhism in spite of their sectarian rivalries. The Kaccāyanagotta-sutta, quoted by almost all the major schools of Buddhism, deals with the philosophical “middle path”, placed against the backdrop of two absolutistic theories in Indian philosophy, namely, permanent existence (atthitaa) propounded in the early Upanishads and nihilistic non-existence (natthitā) suggested by the Materialists.3 Sometimes I think my early martial arts training, along with investing many years in Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions I developed a sense of siding not with either thought (idealism) or being (materialism). And, most definitely not with reducing the one to the other, but in staying with the middle path between; yet, in contradistinction to the above almost Platonic system of transcendence, I have felt that this cosmos is itself the home we seem forever unable to accept or resolve ourselves to so that the middle path I speak of inverts the notion of transcending the extremes, and rather seeks to enter the strife in oscillation between the extremes like Ulysses striding between Charybdis and Scylla. Scylla and Charybdis were mythical sea monsters noted by Homer; Greek mythology sited them on opposite sides of the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland. Scylla was rationalized as a rock shoal (described as a six-headed sea monster) on the Italian side of the strait and Charybdis was a whirlpool off the coast of Sicily. They were regarded as a sea hazard located close enough to each other that they posed an inescapable threat to passing sailors; avoiding Charybdis meant passing too close to Scylla and vice versa. According to Homer, Odysseus was forced to choose which monster to confront while passing through the strait; he opted to pass by Scylla and lose only a few sailors, rather than risk the loss of his entire ship in the whirlpool. In allegorical fashion to flow in-between Idealism and Materialism is to be like the light wave or particle in quantum physics: to adapt to the screen of existence and flow in-between the barriers that would seek to entrap me in thought or being, reduce me to one or the other side of the equation. Collapsing into the future between two states of being without being forced to cross-the-Rubicon as One or Two, but as the Middle accord in-between – an oscillating and vibrating string of possibility and potential that only effects disclosure in the retroactive participation of future intervention into the past. In some ways we are already in the future playing through the scenarios of our past lives in a game of draughts Heraclitus long ago spoke of in which (fragment 52) “Time is a child playing a game of draughts; the kingship is in the hands of a child”. Nietzsche relates these concepts of eternal, universal law with Heraclitus’s ethics in the following passage, which he begins by quoting Max Heinze (with whose interpretation of Heraclitus Nietzsche disagreed in a previously-cited passage on page 73 of The Pre-Platonic Philosophers): “What should justice punish if the eternal universal law and Logos determine all things?” This is pure error! There exists no clash. To the contrary, insofar as humanity is fiery, it is rational; insofar as he is watery, he is irrational. There is no necessity, qua human being, that he must acknowledge Logos. (PP 74) This passage describes Nietzsche’s conception of the lack of moral necessity in the writings of Heraclitus. According to Nietzsche, Heraclitus’s writings are purely descriptive accounts; their purpose is not to suggest how people ought to live, but rather to describe how people do live. By charging that Heraclitus rejected ethical imperatives, Nietzsche is making a statement about Heraclitus’s worldview: it is not simply that Heraclitus did not make claims about how things ought to be, he could not even make such a claim because there are no imperative “oughts” in his universe. Actions, decisions, and events can still be good and evil in this view, but there is no longer any impetus for the evil to be rejected and the good to be accepted.4 In Bataille evil is energy and creativity, base matter is intelligent and active, a part of that ancient system of immanent archontes or entities that like our quantum flux collapse upon our material universe from the thermospasm (Land). Our skewed reasoning has sought false reasons for life in a supposed inorganic system of dead matter, when it is our framework of thought that is inaccurate and unable to decipher the potential (virtual; Deleuze) from the actual. We assume the actual as all when it is but the tip of a vast iceberg as in modern cosmology of Dark Energy and Dark Matter which account for 95% of the universe according to current mathematical models. Only 5% of baryonic matter, the phenomenal universe we see around us makes up the visible and known universe. Even recently Einstein’s theory of gravitation waves become truth: “These amazing observations are the confirmation of a lot of theoretical work, including Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which predicts gravitational waves,” says physicist Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge, UK. Hawking noted that Einstein himself never believed in black holes. We know so little about ourselves or the universe that all our learning is but the games of a child playing draughts. In the coming centuries if we live long enough as a species, if survive and collaborate to face the many issues of this century: climate change, global civil-war and unrest, poverty, viral catastrophe, etc. will we begin to realize just how ignorant we still are. The universe is an unfinished system that we are barely able to see much less know with out senses or instruments. For us to shape either scientific, religious, philosophical or socio-cultural systems of totality and closure that enclose us in frames of myth or secular reason without an openness to the unknown and the future is not only stupid but suicidal. Yet, that seems to be what is happening in many areas of religious, civil, and global existence. We bicker over Left or Right with closed minded aggression and irrational glee as if we all had some ultimate answer to the question of the meaning of life, when in fact we have no “theory of meaning” that can give us but the scratch on the screen of existence. Time to wake up people. The universe doesn’t give a shit who or what you are, there is no peek-a-boo demon or God beyond the dark veil of the Great Wall. No pecking order in the universal scheme of things. Only the impersonal and indifferent productivity of a universe dancing to its own inhuman music. Why am I an “inhumanist” rather than a humanist? Because we have been unable to accept the universe on its own terms without human meaning being stamped and imposed on it. Nihilism was a start, it brought many to ruin under the torsion of psychological collapse; others, it opened a door onto freedom – the negative or negation of negation. Seeing we are without ethical or socio-cultural support systems (Symbolic Order) external to our mode of being, that shape our human meanings as fate or freedom, as harmony or catastrophe, we have literally in our age been thrown back upon ourselves to defend ourselves against the past Law of religious control as well as the power of governments or dictators. All that is over with. Now we must forge new tools and theories of meaning out of the invisible and visible truth of what is and works… as one old Sanskrit saying has it: Tat Tvam Asi, “Thou art that“. Yet, this is not the closure of thought on being, or being on thought – but, rather of the middle way of knowing and being aware of knowing one is that… the subtle knowledge that there is a difference within the difference in-between thought and being – a “gap or crack” within which a vibration occurs, an oscillation between the two, wave and particle, a quantum fluctuation: a restless strife and unending questioning and questing for the Real.
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