Underground Streams:
A Micro-History of Hyperstition
and Esoteric Resistance
EDMUND BERGER
I.
“…which is the revolutionary path? Is there one? – To withdraw from the world market… or might
it be to go in the opposite direction? To go further still, that is, in the movement of the market, of
decoding and deterritorialization?” – Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 19721
The question is answered only by Lyotard with a resounding “yes” in favor of these destructive power
powers. Following his predecessors' emphasis on a politics of desire, Lyotard transcribed the libidinal joy
the workers found in their deconstruction into this decoding: the proletariat “enjoyed the mad destruction
of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their
personal identity.”2 But he too would drop this line of thought, later castigating his works from this period
as “evil,” something for the philosophical dustbins.
These ruminations are the theoretical basis of “Accelerationism.” A divisive issue, the #Accelerate
Manifesto has gained rapid traction, while its earliest traces, generated in Sadie Plant and Nick Land's
Cybernetics Culture Research Unit (CCRU) continues to trigger vitriolic reactions by its apparent
celebration of capitalism's darkest compulsions. Deleuze and Guattari had observed that underneath
capitalism's 'decoding of flows,' “desire itself becomes the death instinct... that carry the seeds of a new
life.”3 Land collapsed this observation into Lyotard's own that capitalism exists due to the human libidinal
drives; accelerating capitalism would then be a natural process of accelerating humanity's own
compulsion towards death. Land’s aim, most properly, is a technological market-system in runaway,
outstripping its human components.
The “New Accelerationism,” is instead an invocation many aspects of high modernism. The subtle
overtures towards hierarchical organization stands in stark contrast to the highly networked, distributed,
and horizontal ethos found in the postmodern era – be it in the affinity groups and direct democracy found
in various activist movements, or the 'flattened bureaucracy' of many contemporary corporate forms.
Aside from this, we have the allusions to technological self-mastery, evoking perhaps the proto-fascism of
Italian Futurism. Unlike the Futurists, with their prioritization of speed and war as social drivers, the New
Accelerationists cite examples such as Chilean CyberSyn project as the historical precedent to their own
project – arguably part of the last socialist program of modernity prior to the birth of neoliberalism
proper.
New Accelerationism breaks with the Landian variant, scrubbing from its rhetoric the thanatropic
drives its predecessors celebrated, the fiery apocalypticism nowhere to be seen.
Instead, humanism and talk of management takes the place of inhumanism and dark, anarchic impulses.
Land and the CCRU feverishly produced text after text blending cyberpunk and science-fiction,
Lovecraftian horror, electronic dance music and distorted French theory into a systemic irrationality that
appears far more chaotic than earlier philosophical movements. New Acceleration instead envisions a
society organically organized by principles of rationality, mathematical prowess, and a bountiful
cooperation between man and smart machines.
Both strands of Accelerationism can be deemed problematic for their varying degrees of
complicity with neoliberal capitalism. The Landian strand, while presenting itself as anti-capitalist yet promarket, embodies the drive to excess and destruction of the organic that marks neoliberal reality; the New
Accelerationism, on the other hand, appears as the idealized face of neoliberalism due to its positive
valorization of harmonic rational management through the usage of cybernetic and information
technologies. Yet through its removal of Land's own frantic excesses, New Accelerationism loses something
fundamental to the ongoing critique of neoliberalism and along with it a whole host of dissident practices.
This would be the conceptual force of hyperstition, an “Element of effective culture that makes itself real,” 4
- in other words, the ability for the fictional to manifest itself in the physical world.
Hyperstition was indicative of Land's intensification of chaos theory with chaos magick. Just as
hyperstition looked to the ways that unreality could displace the continuity of the real, chaos magick
emphasizes the subjective nature of perception and the ways that the plasticity of ideology can be
manipulated and reconfigured. One example Land gives of this shifting paradigm is William Gibson's usage
of what he dubbed “cyberspace” in novel Neuromancer. In the cyberpunk classic, cyberspace is a digital
'non-space', a “consensual hallucination”5 that users can plug into and drift through the datastreams of an
accelerated, runaway corporatism. For CCRU, Gibson's cyberspace helped call into being the internet as we
know it today, even if it existed mainly in its militarized and state-dominated form when Neuromancer was
written.
Elsewhere, Land describes capitalism as a force “extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where
confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely.”6 This is particularly true of the finance markets, where
early news reports and off-the-cuff interpretations can shape the movements of trade, and with it the
entire monetary system. Speculative finance has made a home in this quasi-fictional web, utilizing these
fluctuations of financial instruments to turn high-risk investments into profit gains. Other speculative
modes of playing with market expectation and confidence has been defined as “positive-feedback trading,”
or the buying of securities when prices are high and the selling when they bottom-out. As described in a
1990 article by Larry Summers, among other economists, this process involves “Investment pools whose
organizers buy stock, spread rumors, and then sell the stock slowly as positive feedback demand picks up
rely on extrapolative expectations over a horizon of a few days.”7 Clearly, positive-feedback trading is
contingent on the fostering of rumors in the context of the real, utilizing the cultural ferment of Wall Street
to transform these abstractions into financial reward – with long term, overarching ramifications for the
rest of the market. This reveals precisely the hyperstitional dimensions of finance markets: “Hyperstition,”
Land states, “is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the
experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies.”8
The talk of positive-feedback, alongside the usage of advanced information technologies on the
trading floors (ranging from the global connectability of the electronic marketplace to the 'black boxes' of
the high-frequency traders) shows the debt that neoliberal capitalism holds to the boom in information
sciences during and following World War 2, or what Philip Mirowski has called the “cyborg sciences” cybernetics, communication theory, game theory, etc.9 An example of this is the famous Black-Scholes
model, the first formula for pricing options that enabled the rise of financial capitalism proper by
importing the Wiener Process (named for the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener) into economic theory.
Here we find hyperstitional attributes in that this borrowing from physics and computer science was
presented as a 'universal law' in economics; what the model did was conjure forth a new paradigm for
capitalism that presented itself as wholly rational and organic. Mirowski quotes Herbert Simon by
describing the movement of these scientific constructs into economics as the “sciences of the artificial,”
noting the increasing inability and perhaps outright collapse of the distinction between the real and the
mathematically-construed simulations of reality.10
We should take heed of Marx when he observed that “even as capital appropriates technology as
the most effective form of the subsumption of labor,” technology itself “is not ‘identical with its existence as
capital… and therefore does not follow that subsumption under the social relation of capital is the most
appropriate and ultimate social relation of production for the application of machinery.’” 11 But Land was
far more influenced by Fernand Braudel than Marx, relying on the former's distinction between markets,
where goods circulate through horizontal networks, and capitalism, where structures like the corporation
(and the state) act as anti-markets. As Marx noted, capital constrained the application of technological
innovation; synthesizing with Braudel, Land's position is that the acceleration of market circulation would
then, presumably, unleash the latent forces within technology itself. From this perspective the binary of
real/simulation matters not, for the feedbacking loops of hyperstition shows the constant movement
between the two; it propels itself from economics and technology to an ontological plateau that is
populated, for Land, by Gothic horrors and occult assemblages. From another angle, it charts the
acceleration of markets and technology as resistance to the totalizing forces of capitalism.
This returns us to the key problem in Land's Accelerationism: to what degree, in the dually
horizontal and vertical system of neoliberalism and hypercirculation of money as digital code, does the
distinction between capitalism and markets offer alternatives? At what point does Accelerationism not
actually oppose neoliberalism, but instead buttress the logic of capitalism by providing a science-fiction
twist on libertarian ideology? Other theorists (Deleuze and Guattari, Tiqqun), have observed the
importance of speed in resistance, while others (Virilio, Bifo, Tiqqun again) have emphasized deceleration;
meanwhile, each of these stands sits uneasily between the false distinction between the alternatives of
rampant neoliberalism and statist liberal social democracy dominates resistant imaginations. Tiziana
Terranova writes that “the notion of a post-capitalist mode of existence must become believable,” 12 a
statement that indicates the becoming-real of imaginative alternatives and looping us again back to the
specter of hyperstition. In the debate over the Accelerationist tendency, hyperstition itself – and its
historical progenitors – may have much to teach us, if for no other reason than its utilization of things that
appear irrational, nonsensical, and anti-scientific as a weapon against the rationality of our neoliberal
globe.
II.
If much of neoliberalism's rationalized logic is derived from the 'cyborg sciences', scrubbed largely from
this picture is the far more nomadic, deterritorialized offerings that move precisely in the opposite
direction. Andrew Pickering's The Cybernetic Brain stakes out a cartography at the intersection of
cybernetic theory with the esoteric, and holds up the artists, revolutionaries, and mystics who dabbled in
this hybridity as a counterpoint to those who took the information sciences into the worlds of the militaryindustrial complex, corporate management, and economics. Central to his story is the neuropsychologist
William Grey Walter, whose 1953 book The Living Brain betrayed a deep fascination with “what one might
call altered states and strange performances: dreams, visions, synesthesia, hallucination, hypnotic trance,
extrasensory perception, the achievement of nirvana and the weird abilities of Eastern yogis and fakirs—
'strange feats'...such as suspending breathing and the heartbeat and tolerating intense pain.” 13 Among the
cyberneticians, Grey Walter was not alone in this regard; Pickering describes these ruminations as the
beginnings of a discourse on the technologies of the “non-modern self,” an ontological paradigm of
performativity that stands outside the traditional linearity of historical development.14
Influenced by Walter's book were the Beat writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin (the two
would attempt to replicate the mystical experiences described in the book with their Dreamachine). 15
Most importantly for our current interests, however, is the fact that Burroughs is intimately linked to
hyperstition by Land and the CCRU: “it was ‘far from accidental’ that Burroughs’s equation of reality and
fiction had been most widely embraced only in its negative aspect – as a variety of ‘postmodern’
ontological skepticism – rather than in its positive sense, as an investigation into the magical powers of
incantation and manifestation: the efficacy of the virtual.”16 This deconstruction of the boundaries
between reality and fiction emerges from the constant creation of contemporary realities radiating from
Control. In Naked Lunch the archetype of Control is found in Dr. Benway, a “manipulator and co-ordinator
of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control.”17 This Control
emerges from within the sciences, be they technological, mathematical or linguistic (we should note that
in neoliberalism each of these have become indivisible from one another and from the market itself). In
later works Control is linked to what Burroughs calls the “language virus,” the concept that words and
languages operate in a viral fashion, moving from host to host infecting each, and in doing so sets the
parameters on how the host views their reality.
Mark Hansen argues that much of this position was derived from information theory, observing
that in The Nova Express the word virus is described in terms of its 'information content', spreading
through the usage of communication technologies.18 Others have noted the relationship between
Burroughs' writings and those of the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, who prefigured hyperstition by
elucidating the complicated relationship between reality and fiction, and the ways in which language itself
was a magickal force capable of transforming our perceptions of the world. For Crowley this paradigm was
the result of a crushing conformity generated by prevalent forms of groupthink (confidence in progress,
war, political and religious ideologies, and competition) and countered it with the anarchic maxim “Do
what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law!” In The Place of Dead Roads, Burroughs depicts an antiControl revolutionary in the form of Hassan i Sabbah, the historic leader of the Persian Hashshashin
(Assassins). Burroughs' Sabbah provides the hero of the novel with the dictum “Nothing is true, everything
is permitted”, drawing on Crowley's law.19 While Burroughs' books display the use of occult rituals based
on those of Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), there is also a curious historical connection: L. Ron
Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, had been initiated into Crowley's OTO by the rocket engineer Jack
Parsons in 1945. Hubbard would not only blend Crowley's focus on the power of words and symbols with
cybernetics and viral imagery,20 but Burroughs himself would join Scientology in 1959 and begin
interjecting these very ideas into his writings.21
Burroughs' revolutionary vision comes imbedded within the cut-up technique, a method of cutting
up texts and splicing them together to reveal new methods and meanings within with the explicit goal of
reorganizing reality. David Wells has argued that Burroughs viewed the cut-ups as a form of Scientology's
practice of auditing – the 'clearing' of internalized sensations resulting from negative repetition of certain
symbols within communication. While this may be true to a degree – fighting the control of communicable
signs over the individual features prominently in both - Burroughs and Gysin were also clear about the
roots of the cut-up within the avant-garde, tracing its origins to Lautreamont, who had extolled the virtues
of plagiarism in his Les Chants de Maldoror, and then to the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, whose 1920 poem “To
Make a Dadaist Poem” included instructions on cutting up newspaper articles, and pulling the words out of
a hat at random.22 Burroughs and Gysin drew further attention to literary history with their own cuttingup of the works of Arthur Rimbaud, who Nick Land would depict as a dark precursor to Accelerationism
by quoting Georges Bataille: “Poetry leads from the known to the unknown.”23
Each of these figures and art movements maintained, alongside their drive to foment aesthetic
revolution, murky ties to the world of the occult. Occult themes circulate through Les Chants de Maldoror
alongside proto-surrealist stream of consciousness and appropriations from scientific texts, while
Rimbaud's poetry is littered with references to alchemy and illuminated states reached through
experimentation with a “derangement of the senses”24(one of Rimbaud's mentors had been Charles
Bretagne, a noted libertine and occultist25). Lautreamont and Rimbaud, in turn, bestowed a heavy bearing
on the chaotic aesthetics of Dada, yet it has remained largely unacknowledged is the way that the Dadaists
incorporated elements of the mystical and the esoteric into their art. Hugo Ball, for example, described
Dada as a “return the innermost alchemy of the word”26 (itself a reference to Rimbad's “Alchemy of the
Word”, where the derangement of the senses is first spoken of), while Marcel Duchamp illustrated this
clearly by bringing elements of the occult science into his works.27 Tzara, meanwhile, was deeply
fascinated by totemism.28
Lautremont, Rimbaud, and Dada: each would be distilled and reworked not only by Burroughs and
Gysin, and also by the Situationist International, another motley consortium that dissolved the lines
between the aesthetic and the political. While there is little need for us here to review the complex history
of the Situationist movement and their nomadic relationship to the Parisian avant-garde and the events of
May '68, it is worthwhile to reflect on the similarities between their own theories of consumerist societies
and Burroughs's understandings of Control. Just as our reality-fiction is predicated on the manipulation of
the word itself, the Situationists pictured everyday life encased within the “Spectacle” – the accumulation
of capital until it becomes image. In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord illustrates the role of language in
evolution of the Spectacle: “The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the ruling production, which
at the same time are the ultimate goal of this production.”29 Elsewhere, the poet Novalis is cited on the
relationship between the word and despotism of contemporary state-form - “Writings are the thoughts of
the State...”30 Just as Burroughs's Control operated through communication technologies, it was along this
same paths that the Situationist's Spectacle also propagated itself: “Spectators are linked only by a oneway relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another.”31 And finally, as
Burroughs's had connected Control to information theory, the Situationists also cast Spectacle in a similar
language:
This society's need to market objects, ideas, and model forms of behavior calls for a decoding
centre where an instinctual profile of the consumer can be constructed to help in product design
and improvement, and in the creation of new needs liable to increase consumption. Market
research, motivation techniques, opinion polls, sociological surveys and structuralism may all be
considered a part of this project... The cyberneticians can certainly supply the missing
coordination and rationalization – if they are given the chance.32
While there exists these striking similarities between the two discourses, the modes of revolution urged
by Burroughs and the Situationists may exist even closer together. Drawing directly on Lautreamont, many
early Situationist writings focused on detournement, the poetic subversion of texts and images,
appropriated and plagiarized from their original sources. The practice is a direct analogue to the cut-up
technique; if the word and the image aid the singular message of the Spectacle, then the dissection of these
arrangements and their reorganization can reveal new meanings. “...the main impact of a détournement is
directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements.” 33
Detournement fully the nonsensical – it is “less effective the more it approaches a rational reply.”
Importantly, the Black Mass is cited as a detournement par excellence, invoking perhaps the Situationist's
own preoccupation with heretical Millenial sects.
Detournement eventually became become the more explicitly political “construction of Situations”
- a temporary and collective space in everyday life where the rules and overcodes of the Spectacle can be
overturned. Situations constituted openings in this world, and with their proliferation and critical mass a
new world could come into being – one of direct democracy instead of liberalism, gift economies instead of
capitalism, and free-form experimentation instead of the Spectacle. It bears several crucial resemblances
to detournement and the cut-up by deploying the 'raw material' of the Spectacle itself to establish itself.
They are non-organic, reflecting not a primordial state, but something that arises only through collective
will. Situations were depicted as existing as a distributed network that would be linked via the same
communication technologies that enabled the Spectacle: “the positive phase of the construction of
situations will require a new application of reproductive technologies. One can envisage, for example,
televised images of certain aspects of one situation being communicated live to people taking part in
another situation somewhere else, thereby producing various modifications and interferences between
the two.”34 The Situation is thus a counter-Spectacle, just as the cut-up was the creation of a counterlanguage.
The Situation is akin to the carnivalesque spoken of by Mikhail Baktin, a festive mode of
subversion that hijacks the content of organizations of power and turns them inside out. Bakhtin
foreshadowed the Situationist's theses by writing that the carnival “is not a spectacle seen by the people;
they live in it, and everybody participates because its very idea embraces all the people.” 35 In one
hyperstitional linkage, Bakhtin's own analysis of the carnival revolves around the monk Rabelais, who
satirized the monastic life with his writings on the mythical Abbey of Thelema’s single code of conduct:
“Do what thou wilt.” This was, of course, Aleister Crowley's own maxim within his philosophical system
“Thelema.”
Given all these cross-pollination of ideas, its unsurprising that there is indeed a linkage between
Burroughs and the Situationists. The connecting thread is Alexander Trocchi, an artist whose career
oscillated between both the American Beats and the French militants. Trocchi conceived of a methodology
of Situations he called sigma - “a process, without beginning or end, without subject or goal... something
experienced in the lived time of everyday life.”36 Sigma resembled greatly the goals of chaos magick,
described by Genesis P. Orridge as a “process of individual and collective experimentation with no finite
answers, dogmas, or unchalleangeable truths” capable of “break[ing] Control at all levels.” 37 Trocchi's
sigma as was to contribute to a “spontaneous university... a vital laboratory for the creation... of conscious
situations.”38 He maintained a close correspondence with Burroughs, inviting him – along with Allen
Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, among others – to participate in the sigma project by serving as “directors” of this
'university.'39 Debord, however, would expel Trocchi from the Situationist International; the sigma project
would never materialize. Burroughs, however, remarked that the Situationists would be “an excellent
outlet for the short pieces I am writing now.”40 These writings included The Electronic Revolution, where
the cut-up technique is extended to the splicing and playback of tape records. Burroughs here speculated
on the fomenting of dissent through sound, perhaps by playing audio recordings of a riot to create a riot 41
– a hyperstitional framework for turning fiction into reality.
III.
[The Autonomists] used the Dadaist techniques of the collage, taking characters from the
newspapers, cutting out pictures, mixing and sticking them to the page and then photographing
and printing it all... Their reading was less tedious than that of their elders. They were reading not
so much Marx and Lenin, but William Burroughs and Roland Barthes.42
It was the Italian Autonomia of the 1970s and their punkish, DIY attitude, who adapted Deleuze and
Guattari's politics of desire to redirect Marxism towards something far more experiental than the Stalinist
politics of their time and place. Alongside these was an aesthetic sensibility that was reached through an
engagement with the history of the avant-garde and post-Situationist theory. Autonomist radio stations
like Radio Alice and underground publications such as A/Traverso, used the cut-up technique as part of a
“Mao-Dada” strategy –only Spectacles and Simulations could undo Spectacles and Simulations.
Foreshadowing hyperstition, A/Traverso produced a text bearing the title “False Information Produces
Real Events”:
Acting like a mirror, Radio Alice is language beyond the mirror. It has built a space in which the
subject does not recognize himself as in a mirror, as restored truth, as fixed reproduction, but as
the practice of an existence in becoming. And language is one of the levels whereby life is
transformed. It is not enough to denounce power’s lies, it is also necessary to denounce and break
power’s truth... False signs.43
Like the Situationists the Autonomia would engage with the tradition of the Carnivalesque
alongside a Marxist political analysis. Bakhtin had described the carnival as “political drama without
footlights,” where the dividing line between “symbol and reality” was extremely vague,44 and the
Autonomia had embodied this approach through their media-oriented tactics of detournement. But under
a regime of emergency laws a great portion of the Autonomia was sent to prison or into exile, leaving its
legacy through an extensive network of radical punk and anarchist squats and social centers.
One such center was the Decoder collective, known for introducing politicized cyberpunk into
Europe and providing translations of the magazine RE/Search.45 Decoder was named for Decoder, a 1984
German film produced by Klaus Maeck. With a cast of underground luminaries, appearances included
Burroughs and Genesis P. Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. P. Orridge
himself was a popular practitioner of chaos magick (Thee Temple's writings invoked shamanism, trance
states, and ceremonial magic as “cosmic boosters” to mutate culture from within),46 and following his
introduction to the cut-up technique by Burroughs himself, incorporated it into music to body
modification. Decoder itself revolved around Burrough's ideas, presenting the cutting-up of tape
recordings as a means of revolt against dystopic corporatism. In one notable sequence these tapes are
utilized to incite riots; the filmakers utilized footage of real riots against President Reagan during his visit
to Germany. As Maeck recounts, their intent was to pass out recordings to the rioters, but they were
already beaten to the punch: “we were more than surprised that our script became true before we even
started... there were actually tapes spread around, distributed around the political circles, with the
instruction to make further copies... and it worked!! At 11.00am you heard helicopters and shooting,
although there were none.”47 He continues:
I wanted to realize Burroughs' ideas and the techniques which he described in the 'Electronic
Revolution', and in The Revised Boy Scout Manual and in The Job... From the 'Forward' of the
Decoder Handbook: 'It's all about subliminal manipulation, through words, pictures and sound. It
is the task of the pirates to understand these techniques and use them in their own intrest. To
spread information is the task of all media. Media is power... And we should learn in time to use
our video and tape recorders as Weapons. The fun will come by itself.'... my conclusion was similar
to that of 'bands' like Throbbing Gristle; by turning around the motivation, by cutting up the
sounds, by distorting them etc. one should be able to provoke different reactions. Make people
puke instead of feeling well, make people disobey instead of following, provoke riots.48
Decoder (both the thinkers behind the film and the collective) soon became intertwined with the avantgarde network dedicated to “neoism,” an eclectic anti-ideology that feverishly sampled cyberpunk,
industrial culture, Dada, Fluxus, Mail Art, Situationism, chaos magick, Discordianism, and anarchism, with
a focus on plagiarism and detournement. Like the Italian Autonomia, Neoism is fixed within the protohyperstition continuum by its adherence to the credo “false information will produce real events” - the
networked culture utilized the tactic of 'open name,' (Monty Cantsin, Karen Eliot, and Luther Blissett, etc.)
which were open to appropriation by artists and revolutionaries across Europe and America to conduct
actions and interventions free from the constraints of individual subjectivities. Luther Blissett was
prominent, particularly in the Italian post-Autonomist circles, and was blended with tactical media
strategies to simultaneously evade and confound Control. These open names were connected to open
groups – non-organizations free from structure and capable of being sent in any direction by those who
deployed its moniker: the Association for Autonomous Astronauts, the London Psychogeographical
Society, and the Workshop for Non-Linear Architecture, for examples.
The political dimensions of these open collectives derives from the work of George Sorel, who in
1907 had noted the role of the myth in mobilizing the masses to revolt against a contemporary order. 49
This hyperstition comes in the guise mythopoesis, and following the integration of the avant-garde into
these political dimensions, it takes the form of mythopoetics. As Brian Holmes has observed, mythopoetics
assumed a new primacy for dissent in the current, post-Fordism world of globalization: “The ideas sound
fantastic, but the stakes are real: imagining a political subject within the virtual class, and therefore, within
the economy of cultural production and intellectual property that had paralyzed the poetics of
resistance.”50 Indeed, the circles utilizing Luther Blissett and the AAA intertwined with the alterglobalization movement that emerged after the Zapatista revolt in Chiapas, Mexico; the Tute Bianche, for
example, were another 'open myth' that integrated themselves into the international circuits of the
Carnivals Against Capitalism (which maintains its own lineage going back to the Situationists and the
Autonomia) and a participant in the famous protests in 2001 against the G8 summit in Genao.
If these segments veered directly into the political, other elements, centered around Stewart Home,
redirected them back into the esoteric. Home, having had a series of festivals dedicated to plagiarism and
attempts for general strikes against art production, established the Neoist Alliance in 1994 as an 'occult
order,' complete with texts that became increasingly hermetic and conspiratorial, weaving a mythic
worldview where dark forces led by Masonry embodied the power of bourgeois power and culture. In a
text titled “Marx, Christ, and Satan United in Struggle,” Dada and Situationism are recast as part of an
occult underground lineage, led by “'secret chiefs'... based in Tibet”51 - a nod to Crowley's writings
alongside Theosophical philosophy. Elsewhere, the Alliance makes the claim that “Futurism, Dada, and
Surrealism emerged at the precise moment Aleister Crowley was... [creating] 'High Magick' as we know it
today”,52 while in another essay, Home states that the term “Neoism” itself came from a text by Crowley,
and that “Like the Situationists, the Neoist Network drew heavily on the mythology of occult and secret
societies.”53 This was clear in the case of the LPA, who linked political and monetary power to the existence
of ley-lines and issued pamphles with titles like “Smash the Occult Establishment”.54
IV.
Today organizations like the London-based Nanopolitics group have continued the tradition of blending
anti-capitalist activism with the mystical. With the goal of creating a 'micropolitics of the body,' the group
dabbles in collective therapy, shamanism and esoteric currents as an antidote to the overcoding of
movement and subjectivity under the neoliberalism. They remain distant from the mythopoetic
continuum, relying on instead on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalytics, while noting that these concepts
trend very closely to neoliberalism's own internal logic – the politics of desire is present within the
functioning of today's order, albeit in a way that maximizes the extraction of surplus-value.55 Even things
like shamanism, animism, and other strands of esoterica reach their commodification in the New Age
industry; Andrew Pickering observes that the early cybernetician's interest in a “non-modern self” laid the
groundwork for this postmodern spirituality.56 In their farcial tone, the Neoist Alliance linked New Ageism,
those “shameless charlatans,” to the fact that “world's top occultist are to be found among the ruling
class”.57
The hyperstitional nature of neoliberalism presents itself under the banner of rationalization, as
indicated by borrowings from information theories and the hard sciences and its endless application of
technological innovation, but it is at the moment that this rationality inserts itself that the irrational dually
emerges: Chronic unemployment, the upward flow of money, environmental degradation, political
corruption and systemic crises reveal this in full. That theories of chaos, complexity, and non-linearity
underscore the functions of electronic markets indicate that the traditional framework of “rationality” is
irrelevant. This question then becomes whether or not the forces of irrationality counter-act neoliberalism
or simply mirror its own operations, much like Accelerationism itself.
The fact is that the seemingly irrational, the occult and the mystical, holds a strong, yet largely
unacknowledged influence upon the current world. This short and cursory outline has touched on the
various significant cultural and political uprisings that overlap with occultism, sometimes directly and
other times at arm's length. We could cite Isaac Newton's interest in sacred geometry and Rosicrucianism,
Robert Boyle's preoccupation with alchemy, and other numerous occassions in the foundations of modern
science as indications that the oppositional relationship between the “rational” and the “irrational” itself is
something in need of being overturned. George Sorel, in his work on myths, went so far as to assault
science itself for its systematic rejection of the “chaos of reality.” While new theories of self-organization
largely overturns this statement, the role of science in reinforcing Control takes place on multiple levels:
on one hand, it lends power a means through which to organize itself, while on the other, designating what
constitutes “knowledge” and the paths to achieve it.
The difference between hyperstition-as-Control and hyperstition-as-Mutation lies in each's own
relationship to formal notions of rationality. The assertion of neoliberalism-as-reality obtains, despites its
requirements of speculation and the immaterial, a legitimacy through its appropriation of reason itself;
mythopoetics, by contrast, evades notions of reason specifically through the acceleration of what at first
glance is unreason, and through perpetuation by opening to any participant or movement, regardless of
geographical location or even historial position. Organizations of Control certainly perpetuate themselves,
yet it is through a specific modulation of the individual through a succession of enclosures that amounts to
the setting of parameters on just what a subjectivity/body can do. Mythopoetics instead allow a process of
subjectification through principles of autonomy. Concentrated enough, it can break into the “real”, utilizing
primarily the key functionary of the Spectacle: the media.
Going further still, hyperstition is configured by CCRU as a forceful presence from the outside that
short-circuits the reason/unreason binary and lays the myth of rationality to waste; any hyperstitional
feedback loop must contain a “call to the Old Ones,” a nod to the unknowable cosmic entities found in the
weird stories of Lovecraft. In our present moment the weirdness of the unknown presents itself in
scientific revelations made possible by cutting-edge information technologies: the vast time-scales,
existing beyond human comprehension, of the movements of geological strata, or the fluctuations on the
cosmological level. This reorganization of our perception of time is matched in the world of capitalism
itself by the black boxes of high-frequency traders, manipulators of the market largely free from human
management, which operate at a much faster rate than their human counterparts on the trading form. The
so-called occult dimensions of hyperstition, then, reveal that the games of the “media” are really an aspect
existing on the side of a more potent force: that of technologically-enhanced communication technology,
launching both time and space into schizoid bifurcations which reveal, ironically, the collapse of
“communication” itself.
We could invoke the musings of Tiqqun on the 'Imaginary Party', “the heterogeneous ensemble of
noises which proliferate beneath the Empire, without however reversing its unstable equilibrium, without
modifying its state...”58 For Tiqqun, Empire is the globalized system of Control, neoliberalism welded to
despotic biopolitical fabrics; the Imaginary Party consists of those “elements which are impossible to
assimilate” into the system.59 Their roster of un-assimilated elements trails closely with the limit
experiences invoked by the avant-garde and the occultists (“Violence, excess, delirium, madness
characterize heterogeneous elements to varying degrees...”60). They render the Imaginary Party as the
noise spoken of by the information theorists – the entropic forces that decay or obstruct the proper
transmission and decoding of a message. In the first wave of cybernetics and communication studies, noise
was presented as the Other, an adversary to be held at bay; for total information awareness of the tactical
environment to be obtained, noise must be kept at a minimum and made manageable. Noise is a negative
force within a controlled system, just as the Imaginary Party is the Empire in negative.
Yet is the functioning of the system not the endless circulation and accumulation of excess, made
possible by the delirium of postmodern communication? Neoliberalism is the image of the rhizome,
without beginning of end, a proliferating web of connections between plateaus of varying intensity. Late
Deleuze seemed to acknowledge this, moving towards breakage and refusal. He stresses need for the need
to create “vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers” as a tactic of anti-political political action. 61 In
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari had described ‘vacuoles’ as the false lack created by the “dominant
class” to power capitalism's engine.62 Late Deleuze pivots and urges lack against capitalism excess, noncommunication against the necessity of communication – in other words, Deleuze was, like Tiqqun,
invoking the concept of noise in the entropic sense.
Noise is not emblematic of destruction; it is a sort of negative genesis, an unlikely moment of
creation. Gregory Bateson argued that “All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not
restraints— is noise, the only possible source of new patterns.”63 Noise is the unpredictable, changing
communication relays and information feedback loop as an intrusion from the outside. Serres too
approaches noise as such: “…order and flat repetition are in the vicinity of death. Noise nourishes a new
order. Organization, life, and intelligent thought live between order and noise, between disorder and
perfect harmony.”64 Noise does not have to literally point towards theses of spontaneous self-organization,
the becoming-orderly of flux; this is a philosophy of systems and difference, where the excluded joins with
the greater whole with the capability of transformation. Serres relates it to the parasite, that creature that
turns over the laws of ownership by creating the means of subsistence into something held in common. It
intrudes into the linearity of the host's existence like noise into the communication channel; it is heard in
one way or another, and by interrupting the linearity it opens up to both the exterior world and to
transformation. This is the hidden turn in Deleuze's vacoules of noncommunication, and in Tiqqun's
Imaginary Party: to break into the circulations of communication, be it through strategic “noncommunication” or through the clamor of those moving beneath the delirious exchanges of Empire. Serres'
noise is the voice of the subalterns, the excluded, and the fringes, and it is through the principles identified
in information that they make their voice heard, enter into – and change – the stable equilibrium of what
they oppose.
With its dualing roots in modernity's avant-gardes and postmodern chaos magick, hyperstition
holds commonalities with revolutionary movements in that both take sight of the world as it is, bound up
in ideology and mystifications, and experiments wildly to establish an imagined reality. We cannot fall
victim, however, to blind mystifications, for mystification and alterity is the promise the current system
offers us. Capitalism, as a game of desire coupled with perpetually shifting technological terrains,
embodies the becoming-real of nonexistent forms; it captures the powers of imagination to power cycles
of consumption and production. What delirium or intoxication can the myth of revolution offer us that
capital is not already willing to provide, at least to those in the so-called developed world? This is a
profound danger in these waters, where the libidinal explosion of being-against becomes an end in itself,
and dissent becomes the simple buying of temporary carnivals. The stakes are high, on social, economic,
ecological, and subjective scales; if hyperstition is to be used, it must be pragmatic, designed with a
horizon in mind and an expression of something beyond simple games. Instead of cataloging, let us read
these things as a search for tools and weapons.
1
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari .Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Penguin Books, 1977, pgs. 239240
2
Jean-Francois Lyotard Libidinal Economy Athlone Press, 2004, pg. 109
3
Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus pg. 223
4
“syzygy” Cybernetic Culture Research Unit website
http://web.archive.org/web/20130829063258/http://ccru.net/syzygy.htm
5
William Gibson Neuromancer Ace Books, 2000 (reprint ed.), pg. 5, 51
6
Delphi Carstens, Nick Land “Hyperstition: An Introduction” Merliquify, 2009, http://merliquify.com/
7
J. Bradford, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann “Positive Feedback Investment
Strategies and Destabilizing Rational Speculation” The Journal of Finance, Vol. XLV, No. 2, June 1990, pg. 383
8
Carsten, Land “Hyperstition”
9
See Philip Mirowski Machine Dreams: How Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science Cambridge University Press,
2002; as well as my own “'The SAGE Speaks of What He Sees': War Games and the New Spirit of Capitalism”
Deterritorial Investigations Unit January 25th, 2014
http://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/the-sage-speaks-of-what-he-sees-war-games-andthe-new-spirit-of-capitalism/
10
Mirowski Machine Dreams, pg. 15
11
Tiziana Terranova “Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, capital, and the automation of the common”
http://quaderni.sanprecario.info/2014/02/red-stack-attack-algorithms-capital-and-the-automation-of-thecommon-di-tiziana-terranova/; citing
12
Ibid
13
Andrew Pickering The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future University of Chicago Press, 2011, pg. 73.
14
Ibid, pgs. 13-28
15
John Geiger Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine Soft
Skull Press, 2003.
16
“Lemurian Time War” Cybernetic Culture Research Unit website,
http://web.archive.org/web/20120418105652/http://www.ccru.net/archive/burroughs.htm
17
William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch Grove Press, 2009 (reprint edition) pg. 19
18
Mark Hansen “Internal Resonance, or Three Steps Towards a Non-Viral Becoming” Culture Machine, Vol. 3,
2001, http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/429/446
19
Ron Roberts “The High Priest and the Great Beast at The Place of Dead Roads” in Davis Schneiderman and
Philip Walsh Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization Pluto Press, 2004, pg. 231
20
Hansen “Internal Resonance”
21
David S. Wills Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the 'Weird Cult' Beatdom Books, 2013
22
William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin The Third Mind Viking Press, 1978
23
Nick Land “Shamanic Nietzsche” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987-2007 Urbanomic, 2012, pg. 222
24
Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, March 15th, 1871, in Wallace Fowlie (trans.) Rimbaud: Complete Works,
Selected Letters University of Chicago Press, 1966, pg. 307
25
Gary Lachman A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004, pg. 134
26
Nadia Choucha Surrealism and the Occult: Shamanism, Magic, Alchemy, and the Birth of an Artistic Movement
Destiny Books, 1992, pg. 40
27
See John F. Moffitt Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp State University of New York
Press, 2003
28
Katherine Conley Surrealist Ghostliness University of Nebraska Press, 2013, pgs. 10-12
29
Guy Debord Society of the Spectacle Chapter 7 http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm
30
Ibid, Chapter 131
31
Ibid, Chapter 29
32
Raoul Vaneigem The Revolution of Everyday Life Rebel Press, 2006, pg. 136
33
Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman “A User's Guide to Detournement” http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm
34
Guy Debord “Report on the Construction of Situations” June, 1957 http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/report.html
35
Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelias and his World Indiana University Press, 1984, pg. 7
McKenzie Wark The Beach Beneath the Streets: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist
International Verso, 2011, pg. 130
37
Peter Webb Exploring Networked Worlds of Popular Music: Milieu Cultures Routledge, 2007, pg. 83
38
Timothy S. Murphy “Exposing the Reality Film: William S. Burroughs Among the Situationists” in Schneiderman
and Walsh Retaking the Universe pg. 44
39
Ibid, pgs. 30-32
40
Ibid, pgs. 33-34
41
William S. Burroughs The Electronic Revolution, Pociao's Book, 1998 pg. 13
42
Franco “Bifo” Berardi Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of Post-Alpha Generation
Autonomedia, 2009, pg. 20
43
Cited in Marco Deseriis “Irony and the Politics of Composition in the Philosophy of Franco 'Bifo' Berardi” Theory
& Event Vol. 15, Issue 4, 2012 http://www.e-flux.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/3.Deseriis_theory_event_REV-1.pdf
44
Cited in Gavin Grindon “Carnival against Capitalism: a comparison of Bakhtin, Vaneigem, and Bey” Anarchist
Studies Vol. 12, Issue, 2, 2004
https://www.academia.edu/234514/Carnival_Against_Capital_A_Comparison_of_Bakhtin_Vaneigem_and_Bey
45
Tatiana Bazzichelli Networking: The Net as Artwork Digital Aesthetics Research Center, 2008, pg. 71.
46
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Thee Psychick Bible:Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee
Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth Feral House, 2010, pgs. 11-12.
47
Jack Sargent “Interview with Klaus Maeck” http://decoder.cultd.net/interview.htm
48
Ibid
49
George Sorel, Letter to Daniel Halevy, in George Sorel Reflections on Violence Dover Publications, 2004, pgs. 2656
50
Brian Holmes Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering Autonomedia, 2008, pg. 5
51
Neoist Alliance “Marx, Christ, and Satan United in Struggle” in Stewart Home (ed.) Mind Invaders:A Reader in
Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage, and Semiotic Terrorism Serpent's Tail, 1997, pg. 114
52
Neosit Alliance “The Grail Unveiled” in Ibid, pg. 67
53
Stewart Home “Introduction to the Polish Edition of The Assault on Culture” in his Neoism, Plagiarism, and
Praxis AK Press, 1995, pg. 198
54
See London Psychogeographical Association “Nazi Occultists Seize Omphalos” and “Smash the Occult
Establishment” in Home Mind Invaders pgs. 29-32, 36-38
55
Nanopolitics Group Nanopolitics Handbook Minor Compositions, 2014, pg. 25
56
Pickering The Cybernetic Brain pgs. 183, 302
57
Neoist Alliance “Marx, Christ, Satan” Mind Invaders, pg. 111
58
Tiqqun “The Cybernetic Hypothesis” http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cybernetic-hypothesis
59
Tiqqun This Is Not A Program Semiotext(e), 2011, pgs. 41-42
60
Ibid, pg. 42
61
Gilles Deleuze interview with Negri
62
Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus pg. 28
63
Gregory Bateson “The Cybernetic Explanation” Steps to an Ecology of the Mind University of Chicago Press,
2000
64
Serres The Parasite John Hopkins University Press, 1982, pg. 127
36