Welcome to lecture 2.3 on Transcendental Exit. Let's take a step back here and return to hyperstition, which is the way in which fictions become fact, or the way in which that which is seemingly unreal, or not real, becomes real. Within their fictional writings, the CCIU utilise their narrative to address the cosmic fatalist position humanity is put in after Kantian critique is understood. That is to say, the early aims and writings of the CCIU are written as a way to understand Kantian philosophy not as a philosophical option, but as the framework of reality, unto which everything is either critiqued, deemed transcendentally ignorant, or destroyed slash deconstructed. Here we can begin to glimpse on a meta-level what the CCRU are attempting to achieve, though arguably a clear endgame with the CCRU isn't something you'll find.
However, back to the meta-level of hyperstition the CCRU are playing on. I'll return to the details of the AOE, or the Architect Tornok, order of the eschaton soon, but what's important regarding these details is that they are developed into the creation of a complete system, a system itself which is tied up with various fictions, realities and theories, so tied up that one can never truly find a beginning or origin. Any great hyperstition then has to be a riser. Let's take this in baby steps and look at what's happening here before our very eyes. We are holding a physical or real or material text entitled CCIU Writings 1997-2003, within which there are writings, articles, pieces and stories attributed to a small group called the CCIU, the history of which is hazy at best. They supposedly
held a certain popularity at Warwick University in the 90s for a short time, a few years in fact before disbanding. These writings contain both fictions in the cases of names, dates, societies, meetings, groups, letters, etc, and yet also contain facts and pre-developed realities, for instance, Lemurian mythology, William Burroughs' theory of language, capitalist economic theorisations, and the Cthulhu universe. Now, all of these are curious in themselves because in relation to the AOE and the OGU, which I've already been talking about, these are fictions. There is an imminent creation of paranoia and neurosis that comes from reading the CCIU writing text itself. They cannot be read as neither fact nor fiction nor theory. The writings themselves are theory fictions which are actually hyperstitional in themselves.
Whilst reading these writings, we are witnessing the creation of a myth, the creation of a religion or a theological religion. What we're witnessing is this process in reverse. That is, our reading of these texts as events which happened bolsters and hardens the fiction as becoming fact. Our reading then emphasises and promotes the hyperstition itself. It's tough to be able to see this in any clear way because hyperstition plays around the edges of phenomena and new mena in such a way that it acts as a means of communication. Understood in this manner, we can see that fiction, as previously stated, resides in the outside, what seemingly cannot be and yet has to be in some form external to man. That is to say, a fiction can only be created from what has already representationally been given, or as a form of imaginative construction.
A construction which takes its building blocks from what it's already empirically sensed and experienced. Altered mental states of man attend to his innocence and his imagination in such a way that new forms come in from the outside, via his thoughts, and enter into the world as fictions to later become realities. Self-driving cars were once fictions, mere thoughts, but they soon became realities via immanentisation into culture. You are part of the fiction. You are partaking in the workings of the CCIU as you're reading the text. Everyone has a human security system. The CCIU writings unlock the knowledge needed to assess that system. I won't go into too much depth regarding the CCIU slash AOE system itself here. That is a journey that a practitioner needs to make on their own.
There's various texts related to the game of decadence and practice scattered around CCIU writings text. These are for people who want to do the practice, not directly related to theorizations on purely the philosophy. For now, I'll continue into the further depths of hyperstition and digital slash cyberculture, which surrounded the CCIU at the time. On page 12 of CCIU writings, it says, Digital hyperstition is already widespread, hiding within popular numerical cultures, calendars, currency systems, sorceress, 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.
Let's delve into this a little deeper, where number, philosophy and occultism meet is where the activation of the CCRU's project really starts to come through. Before I talk about specifics here, relating to number however, we're going to have to turn back to the work of Kant, which is always haunting the work of the CCRU, even once it has been stripped of its academic constraints relating to debates around determinism, free will and morality, which ultimately are not of interest and are actually seen as somewhat ignorant once an implicit understanding of critical temporality is taken as one starting point. That is, as I've previously stated, if you can't have time in time, then there's no such thing as linear time, then free will, which is the future following the present, and determinism, which is the past affecting the present and becoming the future, are both false because they are both structurally reliant with regards to time on linearity.
Let's get back to number. Within the inside-outside framework, which is established as reality, something peculiar happens to number. The ability for numbers to communicate alters into something which at first seems like simple synthesis, but on further exploration turns into something almost mystical and forbidden. This form of communication happens between the inside and the outside. It's one of the few times there is a relatively clear communication between the two realms. On the inside, numeracy is equated with accountability, metrics, quantification, digitalisation, numerology, indexing, etc. On the inside, numbers and numeracy in general are a way of allotting things to certain positions. Mathematics is an epistemologically pure form of knowledge. 2 plus 2 can never equal 5, etc. And as such, mathematics on the inside is one of the clearest places
wherein we can assess whether or not we've achieved a priori synthetic knowledge. That is to say, we can continue mathematic exploration using the same mathematical system we know to be true and therefore draw further conclusions from these equations and from the system and from the continuation of the system which aren't already known and can be said to be synthetic but due to their inherent nature within mathematics are also a priori. On page 161 of the CCIU writings in a piece called Barker Speaks the CCIU state once numbers are no longer overcoded and thus released from their metric function they are freed for other things and tend to become diagrammatic. What the CCIU are alluding to here when they write of overcoding is a term from Deleuze and Quattari's A Thousand Plateaus,
wherein overcoding means, in the words of Deleuze and Quattari, phenomena of centering, unification, totalisation, integration, hierarchisation and finalisation. When numbers are overcoded, they become representational finalities on the inside. They are accountable conclusions. They have become trapped in the amber of phenomena and stopped on their vectors, trajectories or diagrammatic paths. In simple, formal terms, we see or sense these numbers or numeric phenomena only. We see only the accountancy sheets, the finance, the addition, the subtraction, the multiplication. We see everything related to numbers subsumed into linearity due to our inner sense's inherent function as that which stratifies time in a linear manner. our inner sense then traps the diagram of number into a finality. It overcodes it. For us,
number is either a subtraction, a stagnance or an addition. That is to say that actually number on the inside can be mapped topologically onto the false linear temporality of the inner sense, of the past, the present and the future, or more abstractly is the idea of going backwards, remaining still or going forwards. Therefore, once number is phenomena on the inside, it loses its ability to manoeuvre and alter things. It gets trapped, and in its trapped state, it solidifies man's temporal reality as linear. It helps bolster this belief. So when the CCIU state further on on page 161 that sequence is not order, they are writing directly in relation to Kantian or critical temporality. They are stating that the linearity or sequence of events which one's innocence makes mandatory is not order at all. Man has,
due to his human security system's authoritative modes of belief made order synonymous with sequence, causality synonymous with reason, and chaos synonymous with forms of fragmentation. This entire idea, encapsulation, and theory of temporality culminates into something surprisingly practical, yet still rather complex. It culminates into an answer regarding what the CCIU is or was, and leans much heavier on their direct influences, namely Deleuze and Guattari. The CCIU goes on to state, Now, this actually is a relatively tough statement to take apart,
especially if one is encountering can for the first time. However, it can be deciphered within the framework I've already laid out. There are two parts of this sentence which beg further exploration, namely underproduction and traffic with the virtual. These might seem like relatively innocent terms, but they're both Deleuze-Guattarian terminology, as put forth in their two-volume work Capitalism Schizophrenia, which is composed of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, a two-volume work which heavily influenced the CCIU and heavily influences Nick Land. This Deleuze-Guattarian theory is something I go in-depth into in the next lecture. For now, I want to focus on an idea which has been apparent in these first two lectures, but isn't strictly mentioned on the surface level, namely the notion of exit or transcendental exit. As mentioned in the first lecture, once one understands that they are in a cage,
surely their task should be forthwith to develop methods of exiting or escaping the cage. In a practical sense, this is what much of the CCRU's work is about, whether or not one can exit these constraints and allude to ways in which we might be able to. The notion of exit itself is something to be delved into. It's something that can be read cryptically as the antagonist of time binding, which is mentioned in Lemurian Time War. On page 43 of CCIU Writings, it says, Now, it may seem as if I'm repeating myself in some manner, but thus far I've only outlined two of the three rough problems concerning man within critical time and critical time itself. In the first lecture, I outlined the Kantian structure of critical time. I also outlined in both lectures thus far the predicament such a form of temporality puts man into, i.e. a lock-in.
I have yet to talk more on the CCIU methodologies of attempting exit from such shackles. The imminent system that makes exit a potentiality for the CCIU is outlined in the next lecture, utilising Deleuze-Oquartarian philosophy as our basis of occulted exit. However, within this lecture, I have been speaking of number, and number begins to get us nearer to an understanding of how such an exit might be possible. and not how methodically and practically, but systematically how. That, what makes exit possible, is within the realms of mathematics. Let's return to William Burroughs' cut-up technique, which is one of the clearest articulations of a phenomena-numena communication. And yet, Burroughs' technique is part of a long history of noise, moments, events, histories, movements, techniques,
and individuals who rode the diagonal. To continue the earlier mention of Burroughs' cut-up technique, he states, the word lines keep you in time cut the in lines make out lines to space the ccriu comments on this on page 43 stating space has to be understood not as empirical extension still less as a transcendental given but in the most abstract sense as the zone of unbound potentialities lying beyond the purview of the ogus already written what we're talking about then is these forms of linearity modes of chronology in the way in which these forms and modes constrain our thinking within time and space. Plot, free will, destiny, narrative, story arcs, progression, causation, etc. These are significations of the same comfortable illusion that there is either
a distinct ability to create clear sighted rails of sequence, or there already exist such rails. These systems create the idea of linearity. As previously stated, both of these existences are metaphysical errors. We live in a world of transcendental possibility, which includes the potential for an invasion from the outside, but an invasion from the outside seems to take its beginnings within the inside. This is why Broward's cut-up techniques, both in themselves and taken as a metaphor, are so important, because what we're talking about here is, as the CCIU states on page 43, technologies for altering reality. These techniques aren't just phenomenological, they are also transcendental. They are phenomenological in an extremely basic sense, in that the words that are cut and pasted are pasted onto a physical page, and thus the representation of that page
changes. But as the representation of that page changes, what's altered is the numenal ideal, which is and was behind it. That is to say, the assumed linear reality is sliced up, and the presumed forms of reality are altered. These techniques, this mode of communication between the phenomenal and numenal, is taken on by Deleuze and Guattari, and to a certain degree made theoretically possible by their work. As such, this lecture ends here, paving the way for the next, which is strictly on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and the outside, and the possibility and actuality of communication between the inside and the outside. I'll see you then.