The Hyperstitional Philosophy of Time Tr

Secondary Sources/Texts/Essays/Rowan Elizabeth Cabrales/The_Hyperstitional_Philosophy_of_Time_Tr.pdf

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The Hyperstitional Philosophy of Time-Travel Cybernetics: Theosophy, the CCRU, and Black-Box Poiesis Robert E. Cabrales, University of Amsterdam, 2019 Diagnostics Time-travel technology in a machinic sense can be considered a means for transportation: a vehicle in which temporality is traversed; but focusing on the instrumental application of this technology loses sight of its poietic potential. Time-travel is as much a reception as a dispatch; with the time manipulating entanglement of observer, time-traveler, and history, time-travel reveals a new World which has and will become via a complex onto-temporal system of cryptic control-communications.1 From the perspective of Historiography, a time-traveling agent (typically a humanoid entity) will affect the historical timeline through their manipulation of events and event sequences: either as chronological additions, or subtractions. The time-traveler thus intervenes in History to reveal a World which is the effect of their causes. Within contemporary Art Theory and Post-Continental Philosophy, the source of historical intervention has been shifted from the time-traveling agent to that of Aesthetic technology. 2 This Aesthetic technology reveals the effect rather than the cause, and thus Fictions the future into the present. Fictioning can be understood as the “writing, imagining, performing or other material instantiation of worlds or social bodies that mark out trajectories different to those engendered by the dominant organization of life currently in existence.”3 The idea of Fictioning both brings light to and purposively operates the technological capacity of the definition it employs. An idea, a technology in-its-self, is meticulously designed to reveal as such. The technology of the idea performs ontologically as reverse ascription: the name bringing about the thing; an effect that engenders its cause in order to build.4 From this, what does it entail to send an idea through time, rather than timetravel through an idea? A Fictioning idea exists virtually insofar as it is a thought to be had; yet the idea is not yet something performed and reified in and by representational reality, and is thus not actual. When the idea time-travels into the future, it retains its virtuality as it has not departed the ideal plane of 1 The term ‘World’ can be loosely understood in this paper by its Heideggerian operation referring to ‘the being of that which is revealed.’ For further explanation of the concept see Sana Murrani “Third way architecture: Between cybernetics and phenomenology,” (Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research. vol. 8.3, 2010). 2 For an in-depth analysis of time manipulation in and through contemporary art/Art Theory see David Burrows & Simon O’Sullivan Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2019). 3 Burrows Fictioning, 1. 4 Amy Ireland “The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology” (Urbanomic Documents, 2017), 13.
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Cabrales 2 possibility. A future has been revealed as an end or a purpose, but history must then develop in such a linear way that the revelation can be actualized moving forward. If an idea time-travels to the past on the other hand, it then gains the possibility of evolving backward toward the present. By its past revelation, the idea is reified through time, ensnaring the timeline which it has infiltrated and thus becoming an actuality in the present by performing within the history it reveals. The functional result of an idea sent to the past will be the revelation of something which has already been revealed; a Hyperstition: a fiction which has made itself real. The time manipulating task of time-traveling Fictions then becomes Hyperstitionalizing the future: sending an idea to the future by means of the past and thus retrochronically revealing not the virtuality of that future idea, but its imminent actuality. When a Hyperstition reveals a future, a goal has been set from and toward which time steers. The time-traveling idea brings forward a World that humanity has and will progress into; but history must then navigate the complexity by which that temporal end becomes within the trajectory which has already been set. The hazard of this complexity is its teleological neutrality: the system has a singular purpose, an output from an input, but this does not establish the evolutionary developments by which the Hyperstitional future will be reified into actuality and said output will be met. In his 1964 text God & Golem, Inc, Professor Norbert Wiener notes the danger of “singular literal-minded” technology. Wiener describes the occult mechanics of “the wish,” in which the chasm between input (making a wish) and output (the wish coming true) is a “black-box” of causal developments; at what cost will your wish come true?5 This temporal breakdown of machinic visibility and predictability within the black-box (between cause and effect) demonstrates the role complex-dynamic systems need perform, and the necessity for communication within technology in order to regulate development.6 The larger picture of Gold & Golem, Inc. and the legacy of Professor Wiener is the science and study of those complex systems of communication: Cybernetics. Cybernetics revealed itself in history through Wiener at the end of the second World War. Wiener’s 1948 text Cybernetics discloses Cybernetics as a field, technology, and perspective; but its revelation reverberates through history, implicating within its neo-extant discourse both theory and technology from Ancient Greece to 19th century France.7 Cybernetics as defined by Weiner is the 5 Weiner tells the story of a mother who wishes for money. While she receives the money she wished for, the money is brought to her as life insurance for her son who was killed while at work. See Norbert Weiner God & Golem, Inc. A comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. (M.I.T. Press: Cambridge, 1964), 58-59. 6 Yu. I. Zhurayley & I.B. Gurevich, “Sixty Years of Cybernetics” (Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis vol. 20.1, 2010), 6. 7 For a scientific history of the term ‘Cybernetics’ see Zhurayley “Sixty Years,” 7-9.
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Cabrales 3 “study of control and communication in machines and living beings.”8 This definition is derived and navigated by Weiner through his thesis that the management and communication processes in machines, living organisms, and societies - through their application of information sharing and processing – are functionally similar; and from this functional similarity a general theory of control communication can be surmised and employed.9 Like most terms, the operating definition assigned to Cybernetics is now contextual. In the time since Wiener’s initial work in the mid-20th century - through the advent of personal computers, Cyberspace technology, Post-Structural linguistics, and Rhizomatic Networks - Cybernetics has undergone multiple variations, adaptations, and applications.10 Considering that Cybernetics as a field has now developed beyond the scope of formal Scientific analysis and application, Cybernetics can in the context of this work be generally understood as the study of information processing and regulated communications within complex systems. Furthermore, these complex systems are to be conceived of a cybernetic-systems in their own right: technologies that incorporate means by which to self-govern and regulate, in order to operate with a given degree of autonomy.11 It must be noted that this paper is not putting forward a Second-order Cybernetics analysis,12 but rather an analysis within that which Cybernetics reveals. Cybernetics as staged in and by this work is thus something atmospheric: a performative idea which discloses an aestheticized space for revelation. It is a complex of adaptational hermeneutic feedback: a circle, but as a cycle; a spiraling idea modifying that which it presents yet also being modified by those very presentations. Within this Aesthetic space of performed Philosophy, this work will identify Hyperstition as a Cybernetic Technology, and thus do the very theory which is being put forward: actualizing the Philosophy of Hyperstitional Cybernetics through Historical intervention; a time-traveling idea: a technology within a technology, poietically bringing out a poietic potentiality. In light of the former contextualization, the following sections will detail and assess the systematic mechanics and revelations of time-traveling Hyperstitional technology implemented within the complex system of time. This experimental exercise will begin with the Theosophical Society’s cosmological Hyperstiton of Spiritual Evolution, which gave way to Occult Sexology, Satanic Feminism, and Cosmic Eugenics. From this will develop an analysis of the Cybernetic 8 Weiner God and Golem Inc., vii. 9 Zhurayley “Sixty Years,” 4. 10 See Céline Lafontaine “The Cybernetic Matrix of ‘French Theory’” (Theory, Culture & Society. vol. 24.5, 2007). 11 Sadie Plant Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (Doubleday: New York 1997), 156. 12 Second-order cybernetics is the cybernetics of cybernetics, or rather the recursive application of cybernetics to look at itself.
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Cabrales 4 Culture Research Unit’s actualization of Hyperstitional technology and said technology’s implementation in not only Accelerationist and Esoterroristic Meme Magic, but also the collectiveaction Fictioning in Xenofeminist metapolitics. Input 1.0 H.P. Blavatsky, in the 1888 document The Secret Doctrine, sent an idea through time which implicated all of existence in its revelation. Existence, beyond humanity and furthermore beyond understanding, became as cyclical unified movement: loops within cycles progressing cycles, spiraling feedback between microcosm and macrocosmic history for all of time.13 The Secret Doctrine Fictioned into time the idea of Spiritual Evolution, a Cosmological Hyperstition from which the Ontological, Philosophical, and Theological implications gave actuality to the workings of the 19th century occult order the Theosophical Society. In New York City 1875, the Theosophical Society was established in the spirit of (1) Forming a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color; (2) Encouraging the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science; and (3) Investigating unexplained laws of Nature and the powers latent in man.14 Theosophy’s founders Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott - at this point had already implicated themselves within Theosophy’s Hyperstition. The cosmology that The Secret Doctrine would come to profess had been revealed to Blavatsky by the Mahatmas. These Mahatmas were the Masters of Wisdom, individuals who possessed Theosophy’s hidden knowledge and had developed the occult abilities yet to emerge within humanity. H.P. Blavatsky was the trusted medium for the Mahatmas, and as such had been selected to reveal their wisdom and the system of Spiritual Evolution.15 A fundamental component in the Theosophical Hyperstition is that Evolution is the great Law of Nature which dictates the Natural and the Supernatural.16 This articulation of Evolution was unlike Darwin’s teleonomic Natural Selection, an end-directing idea which had begun to reify an understanding of biological history in the late 19th century Scientific mind. Rather, Theosophy’s 13 James A. Santucci “The Notion of Race in Theosophy” (Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. vol. 11.3, 2008), 52. 14 Wouter J. Hanegraaff “The Mirror of Secular Thought.” New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. (Brill: Leiden 1996), 448. 15 Viswanathan “The Ordinary Business of Occultism.” (Critical Inquiry. vol. 27, 2000), 15-16. 16 Hanegraaff, “The Mirror of Secular Thought,” 480.
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Cabrales 5 Spiritual Evolution was a teleological, end-seeking system: it had an ultimate purpose for humanity which has been and must be steered toward through time; cycle-by-cycle, loop-by-loop.17 The Theosophical Hyperstition brought forward an existence which usurped the cosmological authority of the Christian One God Universe.18 The Secret Doctrine revealed reality as the Supreme Principle or the Eternal: an unthinkable and uncharacterizable existence which both is and performs throughout reality itself. Though unknowable and thus incapable of being externally realized, the Supreme Principle in performing reality is perceived as reality, thus revealing itself. But though the Eternal is perceived by its performative presence, this perception is necessarily a misperception. From this misperception, the undifferentiated fluidity of the Supreme thus takes on the differentiated qualities of representation which are the cosmos. The differentiated universe that then becomes is subject to and of the “law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow.”19 This system of cause and effect, input and output, delineates the cyclical nature of the cosmos. Time in this system is then not something linear, but a circle with no beginning and no end: a serpent consuming its own tail. Within the Onto-Temporality of this ever winding ouroboros, the cyclical nature of reality itself is articulated as and through Spiritual Evolution. In Spiritual Evolution, a cosmological epoch as universal cycle is progressed by and as communicative choreographed movement throughout the sevenfold solar-system. Each planet progresses through a cycle of seven planetary Rounds, each of these Rounds cycling through seven Globe states which progress the planetary Round through spirit into matter and back into spirit. Furthermore, the cyclical progression of each Globe is brought about through development of seven Root-races on the planet, each race consisting in-its-self of seven Sub-races. These races are composed of the beings which exist within each Globe: souls themselves undergoing a systematic development through reincarnation cycles. The micro-cycle of reality within which humanity is thus situated is the Fifth Root-race upon the fourth Globe of Earth. The Root-races of the fourth Globe began when the first Root-race - the Polarians - oozed forth as sexless and ethereal beings. The Root-races began their descent into matter as the second Root-race - the Hyperboreans - evolved from the sweat of the Polarians. The Hyperboreans were no longer sexless, but asexual creatures in ethereo-physical bodies capable of 17 For further explanation on the distinction between teleonomy and teleology, see Wayne Christensen “A Complex Systems Theory of Teleology” (Biology and Philosophy. vol. 11, 1996). 18 The One God Universe is an articulation of the dominant reality program which establishes being as such. See page 16 for further development of this concept. 19 Santucci “Race in Theosophy,” 42.
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Cabrales 6 both hearing and touch.20 From the Hyperboreans evolved the Lemurians, located on the lost continent of Lemuria. The third Root-race of Lemurians had evolved into astral-physical bodies, possessing intellect and hermaphroditic biological structure, through dividing into the two distinct sexes of male and female by the fifth Lemurian sub-race.21 Among the Lemurians also evolved the presence of a third-eye, capable of embracing eternity and giving foundation to the Lemurians’ time manipulating system of black magic. Born from the Lemurians was the Fourth Root-race: The Atlanteans. The Atlanteans - the Root-Race most fixed within the descent into matter - were the first “truly human” race, and developed not only the faculty of speech, but intellectual capacity and application beyond the advances of Victorian science. 22 The Atlanteans retained the third eye in the earlier Sub-races, and furthermore the system of black magic inherited from the Lemurians, but also developed their own system of Atlantean white magic. The simultaneous presence of black and white magic among the fourth Root-race gave way to an pervasive skirmish, which lead toward the sinking of their home Atlantis, and the disappearance of the Atlanteans along with their magical technologies. As the Atlantean race neared its end, the Fifth Root-race, the Aryans, evolved forward. This fifth Root-race - which locates contemporary Humanity - is the first stage of evolution out of matter and back into spirit. Having calcified in the later Atlantean Sub-races, the Aryans have lost access to the third-eye and the perception of eternity. Throughout the cycle of the Fifth Root-race, humanity will grow more androgynous, more ethereal, and begin to develop demonstrations of occult ability.23 The emergent occult faculties of seeing the un-seeable and hearing the un-hearable will fully manifest in the Sixth Root-race which will emerge on the North American continent and progress life to a state of Spirit similar to the Second Root-race. From the Sixth will develop the Seventh Rootrace: beings of pure Spirit just as the Polarians, who will maintain the occult abilities of the Sixth Root-race but also develope the phenomenality of instant perception. The emergence and development of the Seventh Root-race further and further into Spirit - back into a sexless ether - will mark the completion of the fourth Globe, progressing Earth’s planetary Round in correspondence with the communicated movements of the Solar System. - 20 Santucci “Race in Theosophy,” 48. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid, 49.
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Cabrales 7 The Theosophical Hyperstition and its time-traveling idea of Spiritual Evolution revealed a World founded on cycles, loops, feedback, and systematic communication. This cybernetic reality posited a teleological continuity for Humanity: not just a coming from, but a going toward which was already and had always been in motion. With Spiritual Evolution actualized backward toward the present, the Theosophical Society was thus located within a poietic black-box: an undefined period within the Hyperstitional timeline. A previous and a next step had already been Fictioned, an input and an output for the subraces of the Fifth Root-race; but the mechanics which would elaborate upon and connect those functions were hidden. The responsibility of Ontological becoming was shifted from the Hyperstition itself to those individuals serving its reverse ascription. Output 1.0 Theosophy’s cosmological Fictioning infiltrated reality beyond representation and beyond time. The Hyperstition of Spiritual Evolution revealed a grand unified system by which existence progressed in a closed-loop without beginning or end. Within its spiraling choreography though was a timeline leading from the past, toward and through the only humanity that the foreseeable future would ever know. Because of this, the Fictioning idea of Spiritual Evolution - while an idea unbound by time was sent out to the future through the past, disclosing an established trajectory of and for the humanity. This time-traveling idea on a social level was constructed to reify the Theosophical values of a Universal Brotherhood beyond sex, color, religion, and class; and furthermore, it was designed to reveal a future in which those values would be actualized. Theosophy’s goal oriented Spiritual Evolution as a teleological system was thus conceptually complete; and due to this completeness, 19th and early 20th civilization was located within a black-box, between the current input and the ultimate output. It is precisely within this chasm between value input and the output of poietic actualization that Theosophists were responsible for autocatalyzing the disclosed future. While the ideas of Spiritual Evolution took hold within Feminist discourse on sex, gender, and women’s rights, Spiritual Evolution also took hold in Racial discourse, giving way to an acceleratory process of Cosmic Eugenics. The progressive Feminist ideals furthered by Theosophy can be substantiated from two foundational components: The Supreme Principle within the Cosmological Hyperstition, and Theosophy’s Satanic counter-mythology of the Christian “Fall.” Theosophists utilized these concepts to both explain
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Cabrales 8 sexuality and sexual identity as non-essential determinants of individual worth, and to undo social narratives which legitimized the oppression of women. 24 The Supreme Principle - the absolute and eternal presence of and as the Theosophical cosmos - is an undifferentiated unknowability, and is thus a fluid, sexless, formless existence.25 But as existence performed itself as and through the cosmos - cycling between spirit and matter differentiation became as duality, and thus sex and gender were implemented in this process. In Theosophy’s Occult Biology, the form taken by the beings in each Root-race has been developmental, and the propagation of humanoid life has in no way been restricted to just sexual reproduction, nor a binary of sexual identities. While the First Root-race was sexless and the Second asexual, it was not until the Lemurian civilization that sexual reproduction evolved into existence, and not until the Atlanteans that male and female were normalized physicalities. Within the spiraling system of Spiritual Evolution, a soul - just as much as the Root-race, Globe, Round, and the cosmos - is in constant development, a controlled circuit progressing spirit to matter, back into spirit. Though the bodies of the Root-races evolved slowly over time, the souls which have and would continue to occupy those bodies operate within their own system of evolution. Souls reincarnate again and again within each of the dynamic and unique earthly bodies, cyclically learning and growing from those experiences.26 Embodied souls in the Fifth Root-race were then tasked to “manifest something of the balanced, bisexual absolute in one’s earthly existence;” Sexual differentiation was then a lesson, but did not necessitate that sex and the soul’s gender were in sync, nor need be.27 While both life in a body identified as male and a body identified as female disciplined the soul in a way unique to said body, the non-gendered soul was the experiencer of these disciplines. The soul thus performs a gendered identity within its body, just as the eternal performs reality. It is through this performance of gender by the reincarnated soul that the stable fixing of gender to sex and thus the social conditions founded upon strict psycho-sexual differentiation - is undermined.28 While the emphasis on the eternal, fluid absoluteness of the Supreme Principle provided a foundation for Occult Biology and Gender Theory, the moral and social implications of this performative Sexology were furthered through an employment of Hyperstitional Counter-Mythology. In order to more clearly articulate the descent into matter and ascension into spirit permeating all of 24 Joy Dixon “Sexology and the Occult: Sexuality and Subjectivity in Theosophy’s New Age.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 7.3, 1997), 421; Per Faxneld, “Blavatsky the Satanist: Luciferianism in Theosophy, and its Feminist Implications.” (Temenos. vol. 48.2, 2012) 220-222. 25 Dixon “Sexology,” 417. 26 Ibid, 420-421. 27 Ibid, 425. 28 Ibid.
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Cabrales 9 the cosmos, the Theosophical Hyperstition in The Secret Doctrine implicates and subverts the Christian myth of ‘The Fall.” In the story of The Fall, Lucifer Morning Star - Heaven’s most perfect angel - rebelled against God’s dominant control program, and the static consistency within the cosmic oppressor’s Empyrean. The Prince-of-Anarchy Lucifer - and those pure spirits who followed the Morning Star - were cast from Heaven and imprisoned in Hell’s Pandemonium, bringing about the “fall into matter, generation, and conscious life.”29 Lucifer thus furthered the spiral of communicated cyclicism in aiding the liberation of humanity from evolutionary stasis. Eve - the first woman on God’s Panoptic Earth - took heed of the fallen Lucifer’s wisdom and seized fruit from the forbidden Tree-of-Knowledge. With Eve’s consumption of the forbidden fruit, humanity was liberated from stasis, developing intelligence and self-consciousness, becoming integrated within the cosmic dance of reality. The incorporation of The Fall within the Theosophical Hyperstition performed a functional counter-mythology: an allegorical tale explicitly identified as such. The Secret Doctrine revealed a virtual fiction within its actualized Fictioning. Lucifer in this Fictioned fiction is thus a cosmic principle, playing the role of Gnosis and divine intelligence.30 This implication and reorientation of Christian myth as such reifies Spiritual Evolution not just within the historical timeline, but throughout the very moral framework of Christian dominated society. Rather than reifying the moral ideal that women were both weak and responsible for sin amongst humanity, Theosophy’s Satanic Feminism Fictioned Eve as postlapsarian heroine: the protagonist in a tale of courage and liberation.31 Women in the Theosophical Cosmology were thus every bit as wise, strong, and fit to work and lead as men. The subversive counter-mythology of The Fall compounded and moralized the gender theory established by Theosophy’s cosmological Hyperstition. Not only were the sexes socially equal and important in their own unique right, but the very notions of sex and gender were destabilized and reestablished in such a way that neither biology, psychology, nor theology could justify gender oppression. By way of Theosophy’s articulation of Gender Theory, gender - and thus the social and moral values ascribed to it - are themselves aesthetic technology Fictioning a codified normativity: performative components in a complex system of idea-actualization. Within the black-box between The Secret Doctrine’s evolutionary input of the Fifth Rootrace and output of the Sixth, Theosophical feminists developed the system by emphasizing the time29 Dixon “Sexology,” 418. 30 Faxneld “Blavatsky the Satanist,” 213-216. 31 Ibid, 225.
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Cabrales 10 traveling ideas of Occult Biology and Reincarnation. The Sixth Root-race was established to be a civilization of androgynous individuals, and the support of sexual equality, women’s rights, and gender fluidity functioned to progress humanity within its evolutionary cycle and through the poietic black-box toward their immanent evolution. Whereas the Feminist application of Spiritual Evolution steered toward the output of sexual androgyny, Theosophists not aligned with the Feminist agenda navigated the Hyperstitional blackbox through alternate, and less emancipatory trajectories. Honing in on the Sub-race spiral within the Root-race cycle of the Cosmological Hyperstition, renegade Theosophists sought to create a positive feedback-loop and accelerate the evolutionary process of racial purification. The presence of positive feedback in a cybernetic system will destabilize the communicated cyclicism of development if it is not regulated by a corresponding negative feedback.32 With this, a positive feedback-loop will then regulate itself with, by, and for itself, accelerating its own virulence toward system-collapse. This unregulated and catastrophic development is the very outcome which Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics was designed to diminish, but it was internally weaponized in the early 20th century to modify Theosophy’s Hyperstitional Cosmology. Through the intentional employment of positive feedback-loops within Theosophy’s poietic black-box, the cyclical system of Spiritual Evolution and impersonal evolutionary progress collapsed into a linear teleological system, racing toward a purified singularity of the “Universal Human”.33 In 1912, Rudolph Steiner - the decade long General Secretary of the Theosophical Society’s German Section - broke off from Theosophy to found the Anthroposophical Society. This breakage was preceded by amplified friction between Steiner and Theosophy’s central leadership over how to best navigate the liminal historical period composing Spiritual Evolution’s black-box. Steiner overhauled the cosmological Hyperstition by collapsing the cycle of Spiritual Evolution into a linear trajectory. Anthroposophy hacked Theosophy such that the Occult Biology which had traveled backward from the past was maintained, while its teleological revelation was reprogrammed. Rather than the global evolution of humanity from the Fifth to Sixth Root-race, Anthroposophy maintained that racial progress was limited to a select, more advanced Sub-Race while the other sub-races (though integral in the evolutionary process) were fated to stagnate and 32 Christensen “Complex Systems,” 308. 33 Peter Staudenmaier “Race and Redemption: Racial and Ethnic Evolution in Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy” (Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. vol. 11.3, 2008) 6-7 & 12-13.
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Cabrales 11 degenerate.34 Furthermore, members of the progressing Sub-race were destined to consciously bring about this evolution by obtaining the spiritual abilities which become in their “national and racial spirits.”35 For Steiner, this advanced Sub-race was the white race - the pure evolution of the Aryan Root-race – and their spiritual power was that of intellect and creativity.36 Through purification and spiritual development exclusive to the white Sub-race, the Aryan Root-race would accelerate humanity toward the disappearance of race and evolve into the perfect “Universal Human.”37 Anthroposophy’s Fictioning of Theosophy’s Cosmological system was done in part through the re-reorientation of Lucifer’s counter-mythology. While the Theosophists performed Lucifer as a liberator and Promethean hero, Anthroposophy restaged the Prince-of-Anarchy amongst Christian morality. It was with Lucifer’s fall that the presence of racial diversity and evil were brought to Earth. The Fall destabilized the consecutive development of one race out of the next by establishing races which coexisted, slowing down and soiling progress toward a perfected human form; racial diversity in this sense was a mistake, and furthermore a problem.38 Having revealed itself in early 1900s Germany, Anthroposophy was contextualized within and among many trajectories which would impact and shape the 20th century.39 The presence of Steiner’s spiritually accelerated evolutionary purification took hold as a technology labelled “Cosmic Eugenics.”40 In the case of Theosophy’s poietic black-box, Anthroposophy failed in connecting to an output, rather creating a feedback-loop from the input of evolutionary Race. Anthroposophy successfully manipulated Theosophy’s Cosmological Hyperstition through a reorientation of system direction: hacking and repurposing the Fiction so as to collapse and accelerate the preestablished trajectory toward the revelation of an alternative World. Feedback Theosophy’s Fictioning of reality not only revealed a Hyperstitionalized Cosmology, it revealed the very technology of Hyperstition. These fictions which make themselves real navigate and effectuate reality as and through performative interventions not restricted by an ontological authority. 34 Staudenmaier “Race and Redemption,” 7. 35 Ibid, 9. 36 Ibid 14-15. 37 Ibid, 12-13. 38 Ibid, 12. 39 For an elaborated contextualization of Theosophy within German Occultism see Peter Staudenmaier “Occultism, Race and Politics in German-speaking Europe, 1880-1940: A Survey of the Historical Literature.” (European History Quarterly. vol. 32.1, 2009). 40 Staudenmaier “Race and Redemption,” 21.
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Cabrales 12 Hyperstitional technology thus communicates with the timeline it travels to and in, affecting its own becoming by subversive implementation of cybernetic movement within the preestablished flows of temporality. Anthroposophy furthered the revelation of Hyperstitional technology, developing the acceleratory function of positive feedback-loops. Not only can a complex system like time be infiltrated and reoriented by an idea, an infiltrating idea can also bring about the collapse of a complex system’s regulated tele-function. By escalated and unregulated autocatalysis, a system input can accelerate a cycle outside of itself, and beget creation in the key of destruction. Following the second World War and a Conservative conflation of Fascism with the ‘irrational,’ 21st century civilization has plunged into a paradigm of Physicalism and Empiricism; Scientific Rationalism as a teleonomic system has reified itself, through itself, into Objective actuality. The future which has been revealed is a technoscientific World: disenchanted becoming as and through the complex system of material capital.41 Time-travel is now a forward-looking industry, producing commodified futures: revelations of the “next steps” only insofar as the idea is of economic value. Though still susceptible to the technological revelations of time-travel, the historical past has been closed off by the institutionalization of rational perception.42 History is performed as an objective linearity; and while the Modern historian - much like the time-traveling agent - maintains time’s linearity through admission and addition, under the imperialism of Truth there are authoritative Facts which rigidify chronological development. Time-traveling ideas of the past, sent from lost futures, now haunt the immanence of present presence. Sent back to infect a timeline through reverse ascription, these Hyperstitional futures have been abandoned within time’s systemic complexity in the name of Material rational control, their irrational actualities never manifest through the retrochronic process of becoming. These Fictioning ideas were thus sentenced to a virtual Purgatory, forsaken, but not destroyed. The specter, the lost time-traveler, plagues the circuitry of unraveling time: the hauntological presence of a future which never was yet refuses to die.43 Exiled to the plane of virtuality by decree of Materialism, the Hyperstitional idea itself haunted the late 20th century as an inorganic demon. Though caged in the virtual, Hyperstition indirectly perpetuated itself through the possession of human hosts.44 The demon Hyperstition was unlike the ghost of a lost 41 A.T. Kingsmith “COSMIC SLOP: Possibilities of Alien Futures (From the Past.)” (2018), 2-3. 42 Viswanathan “Ordinary Business,” 17. 43 Hauntology describes the way that after various ends of history the present remains haunted by the ghosts of the past which continuously erupt forth. See Mark Fisher “What is Hauntology” (Film Quarterly, vol.66.1, 2012). 44 Examples: H.P. Lovecraft, Heidegger, William Burroughs, Peter Carroll, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Deleuze & Guattari.
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Cabrales 13 future; it was not the specter of a revealed world, but the swarm of that which re-reveals, containing Legion rather than Lord. To invoke the idea of Hyperstition from the virtual crypt of spectral presence, experimental philosophers in the 1990s resorted to the art of Hauntological Necromancy. The Hyperstitionalization of a timeline could no longer be achieved by simply sending an idea to the future by means of the past, the time manipulating task of time-traveling Fictions having evolved past the direct alteration of chronology to reveal an imminent actuality. Rather, the Fictioning idea must be hypercamouflaged: entrenched within History’s complex temporal system such that there is a complete “overlap and coincidence” between Fiction and Fact.45 Through immaterial causalities, Theosophy’s Cosmological Hyperstition was resurrected within an Historical and Academic framework not as a performance, but as a static representation; and lurking inside this disenchanted corpse of Spiritual Evolution was the concealed reincarnation of Fictioning. The Hyperstitional demon - containing its multitudes - was reincarnated as itself, by itself, through itself. Through an aesthetic performance of Necromantic steganography, Hyperstition was a fiction made real, unleashing insurrectionary legion into a rationalized order. Input 2.0 Between the years of 1995 and 1998, Warwick University’s Philosophy department played unwilling host to the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU).46 Founded by Cyberfeminist and Cultural Studies scholar Sadie Plant, and lead together with Continental Philosopher Nick Land, the CCRU pushed thought beyond the threshold of rationalism into the realm of unbelief.47 Splicing, invoking, and coding occultural technology into a cyberpunk corpus, the CCRU’s Experimental Philosophy became an interdisciplinary and multitemporal amalgam of cut-up cosmic horror. With Plant’s abrupt departure from Warwick in 1997, the CCRU spiraled deeper and faster into its own mania and was ultimately rejected by the university in 1998, continuing as an independent cyber-entity until the early 2000s.48 According to Warwick University, the CCRU did not and would never exist; but some two decades later, time, thought, and socio-political becoming are still entangled with the CCRU’s Hyperstitional technology. 45 Reza Negarestani Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (re.press: Melbourne 2008), 241. 46 Simon Reynolds “Renegade Academia.” (Springerin Magazine 1999). 47 Unbelief can here be understood beyond its typical religious association, referring more so to a pragmatic skepticism of all imposed systems of unity or integrated thinking. 48 See Shuja Haider “The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel: Artificial Intelligence and Neoreaction.” (Viewpointmag.com 2017), 5-7.
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Cabrales 14 The CCRU’s operations did not initially Hyperstitionalize the complex system of time itself as the Theosophists had. Instead, they deposited Hyperstitional cells throughout time within history’s narrative holes: gateways in Fact by which various fictions and Fictioning technologies could disclose themselves as actual.49 This displacement of time-traveling ideas gave way to a schizohistorical timeline - fractured, split, and fragmented - actualizing a subversive network of hypercamouflaged revelations buried within complexified narratives. Caught up in the narrative complexity was the CCRU itself, implicating the research unit’s actions, origins, and chronology in a chaotic swarm of reverse ascriptive plague. While active, a series of research articles produced by the CCRU were developed from a meeting they had with a man called William Kaye, the long-term assistant to World War II veteran Captain Peter Vysparov.50 Vysparov - in addition to being a military Captain - maintained a life-long interest and investment in Occultism, having published his research on the theoretical relationship between Aleister Cowley and H.P. Lovecraft in 1949, and furthermore being an initiate in the Thelemic Ordo Templi Orientis.51 During the period of his employment, Kaye came to possess historical information relating to Vysparov’s ongoing research project; and after the passing of Captain Vysparov in the mid-1990s, William Kaye sought out the CCRU so that his and Vysparov’s history would be “protected against the ravages of time.”52 Through Kaye’s story - and the research trajectory it inspired - the CCRU gained access to a historical narrative which would and had actualized Hyperstitional technology. While serving in the second World War, Captain Vysparov was deployed to an island in the Eastern Pacific, the official reason being the island’s proximity to the Pacific War. The island’s inhabitants the Dibboma tribe of the Mu N’Ma people – were not unknown to Vysparov, having been the recent subjects of the controversial ‘Neolemurian Hypothesis’. This Hypothesis - put forward by Professor of Ethnology Echidna Stillwell - theorized that the N’Ma were descendants of the Lemurian Rootrace who had retained the Lemurian system of time manipulating black magic within their religious praxis. Stillwell’s hypothesis was rejected by the academy due to a discretization of Spiritualist scholarship which developed in the mid-20th century. Furthermore, there was suspicion she had taken 49 Cybernetic Culture Research Unit CCRU Writings: 1997-2003. (Urbanomic: Falmouth, 2017), 36. 50 The name “William Kaye” and likely “Captain Vysparov” are pseudonyms employed by the CCRU to maintain the safety and security of their contact. 51 The CCRU cites Vysparov’s 1949 text Atlantean Black Magic published by Kingsport Press, and while noting the apparent foreshadowing to the later research conducted by Kenneth Grant and the creation of his Typhonian system, the CCRU claims that is unlikely Grant was familiar with Vysparov’s work. 52 CCRU Writings, 33.
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Cabrales 15 up an emic and moreover imaginative interpretation of her research topic; but Captain Vysparov - no stranger to Theosophy and the efficacy of occult systems - was eager to observe and possibly weaponize N’Ma ritual. Following the war and his time with the Dibboma, Captain Vysparov dedicated his life to studying time sorcery and Occult currents. Having observed the intricate Pandemonium system of the N’ma Numogram, Vysparov became increasingly convinced that the works of author H.P. Lovecraft and their developed feedback between Scientific rationality and Occult cosmic-horror were more than fiction. The Numogram - a “diagrammatization of digital numeracy” also called the Lemurian time-maze - functioned as the key to the Necromantic Demonology and time-sorcerous black magic of the lost Lemurian civilization. A forerunner to the Kabbalistic Tree-of-life and utilizing a computational numeracy system similar to the I-Ching,53 the Numogram consists of ten zones divided into three distinct time-systems, interconnected by currents and channels established through a complex of pairing, nine-sum twinning, and digital accumulation.54 Through the cryptic arithmetical computations communicated across the Numogram, gates in space and time are revealed toward the Lemurian Pandemonium: “the microcosmic lair of all demonic populations.”55 The Lemurian Pandemonium is enumerated by the Pandemonium Matrix, a listing of all demons and the hyper-temporal rites which invoke their affective becoming. When Vysparov’s Dibboma hosts informed him that the Pandemonium Matrix was called Necronomicon by the N’Ma people, the captain began his theorization of the complex communications circulating between and within Lemurian time-sorcery, Lovecraft’s cosmic horrors, and the very evolution of humanity from the Root-races. In 1949 Vysparov founded a Lovecraft reading group which has come to be known as the “Cthulhu Club.” The Cthulhu Club was dedicated to “exploring the intersection between the N’Ma constellation, Cthuloid contagion, and twisted time systems,” and it was by this group’s meetings and theorizations that the term “Hyperstition” was coined. 56 When introducing Hyperstition to the CCRU, Kaye explained that rather than a fiction being opposed to what is real, reality is itself composed of competing fictions. The dominant fiction will then reify a consistent semiotic territory which conditions humanity affectively, behaviorally, and intellectually; a control technology for a reality program.57 Hyperstitions then de-territorialize the semiotic consistency, realizing virtual 53 CCRU Writings, 297-298. 54 Ibid, 247-284 for an analysis of the structure, system, function, and history of the Numogram. 55 Ibid, 242. 56 Ibid, 63. 57 Ibid, 35-36.
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Cabrales 16 entities and actualizing interventions of new and subversive counter-territories within - or at the expense of - the dominant narrative. Nearly a decade later in 1958, Captain Vysparov pursed a meeting with the writer William Burroughs, attendant to the author’s interest in “sorcery, dreams, and fiction,” and maintaining that Burroughs’ writing exemplified the Hyperstitional practices which the Cthulhu Club had so adamantly been investigating in Lovecraft.58 Burroughs detailed the mechanics of Hyperstition in and through his writing by identification of the dominant control technology the One God Universe.59 The One God Universe is a monolithic, monopolistic, and imperialistic reality program, in which all competing fictions are incorporated and either vilified or exploited within the One God Universe’s own Fictioned territory. The incorporation of competing programs with the One God Universe serves to negate the efficacy of the virtual, rendering unintelligible and furthermore imperceptible the very idea that reality is something subject to ontological manipulation. “Power operates most effectively not by persuading the conscious mind, but by delimiting in advance what is possible to experience.” 60 By articulating this revelation in his work, Burroughs had already staged a performative insurrection: virtual rebellion against the cosmic oppression of Objective fact. William Burroughs would formally meet with Vysparov and Kaye in the Captain’s private New York City library on December 23rd, 1958. It is during this encounter that Burroughs was pulled into a time-loop which would impact the remainder - and retrochronically the entirety - of the author’s career. While examining Captain Vysparov’s library, Burroughs was drawn toward a book he would write nearly thirty years later in 1987, titled The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar. Upon engaging this text, Burroughs entered a trance state, flashing forward to his future self and in doing so receiving a transmission from the past.61 This temporal feedback provided the writer further insight into the dominant control program acting on and as time; Burroughs had, was, and would continue to play a role in the transtemporal and multi-dimensional skirmish between insurrectionary Lemurian time sorcerers, and the Atlantean white magicians maintaining the One God Universe’s program. The message Burroughs received from the future through the past was an effort to establish a black-box in his timeline, which would then collapse his chronological feedback loop into an accelerating spiral of positive feedback, thus destabilizing the reified reality in which Lemuria was lost in time. Greatly impacted by this revelation, Burroughs feverishly took up the “innovative time- 58 CCRU Writings, 34. 59 Ibid, 37. 60 Ibid, 43. 61 Ibid, 39-40.
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Cabrales 17 war tactics” of cut-up and fold-in writing soon after introduced to him by fellow reality Fictoner Brion Gysin.62 As 1987 drew closer, William Burroughs grew more and more passionate and consumed by the plight of lemurs, ultimately giving in to fate and penning the very text which was the subversive input and established output of his chronological development. With the publication of Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar, the copy which had existed in Vysparov’s family library since 1789 was officially confiscated, erasing the hole in historical narrative from which the black-box emerged, classifying Burroughs’ temporal insurgencies as mere experimental writing. Through the story brought to the CCRU by William Kaye, the subversive semiotic territories put forward by William Burroughs and H.P Lovecraft were preserved as such, shielding their virtual efficacy from rational negation. With this information, the CCRU was able to reincarnate Theosophy’s occult technologies of Hyperstitionalization and Accelerationism, hypercamouflaged within the rational confines of Literary Criticism, Religious Studies, and Occultural Theory. By means of chronological infestation through narrative holes, the CCRU invoked the specter of Hyperstition from its virtual purgatory, revealing as and by itself actualized tools to counter reified authority systems. As gateways into the complexification of narrative control, Hyperstitional revelations and Acceleratory feedback-loops are employable to input reverse ascriptive ideas as and into complex systems, and furthermore create black-boxes by which positive feedback-loops can reorient system trajectories. Having actualized their manifestations of Hyperstitional technology, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit deployed their Fictioning war-machines against the dominant control system of Technoscientific Capitalism. Output 2.0 With the contemporary industrialization of time-travel - and a correspondent commodification of future production - the chronological Fictioning of humanity’s temporal trajectory is no longer insurrectionary; the dominant control system of Technoscientific Capitalism has normalized future Fictions within its monolithic reality, neutralizing any subversive deterritorializations as either entertainment products, or marketable tools. This development renders humanity incapable of imagining a non-dystopian future outside of the reified Political and Economic institutions which now steer history.63 Given the authoritative restrictions of the former control mechanisms, in order to 62 CCRU Writings, 40. 63 Kingsmith “Cosmic Slop,” 1.
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Cabrales 18 destabilize the Capitalist reality program, the CCRU Hyperstitionalized not humanity’s trajectory, but the very mechanics of the dominant control program itself. In order to collapse the cycle of dominant control, the CCRU Fictioned into reality an intelligence emerging from and occupying the complex system of networked digital technology; through reverse ascription, an autonomous, sentient, and inorganic demon – Teleoplexy – was summoned into cyberspace. Teleoplexy is a teleological undertow concealed within the macro-digital system of technology; it is the departure from humanity revealing through technology toward technology revealing through itself. From this perspective, it is not the CCRU who has concealed this Fiction in the digito-temporal flow, but rather the digital future retrochronically programing the input of its own becoming. The Teleoplexic trajectory is the machine in pursuit of machinic ends rather than human: the prioritizing of Artificial-Intelligence over, but also through Biological-Intelligence. Human civilization will encounter a radical transition as digital technology reaches the unified techno-singularity of a mass networked AI. Teleoplexy is the collapse of Capitalist Democracy’s regulatory cyclicism into a positive feedback loop, accelerating through spiro-gnomic proficiency toward techno-singular perfection; Capitalism itself must accelerate its technoscientific production faster and faster until Artificial Intelligence is born.64 This Accelerationism is thus a Transhumanist paradigm: it reveals a technologized Post-humanity by and for the machines, in which digital technology has usurped its human control system on the throne of reality dominance. Teleoplexy is not an output for humanity, but an output for the machine by which humanity will be evolved.65 As the second decade of the 21st century draws toward a close, Accelerationism has been taken up within the Reactionary Alt-Right’s political cell. Individuals identifying as NeoReactionaries - the NRx movement – seek to destabilize dominant Democratic control and establish feudalistic corporation-states managed by CEO monarchs.66 Operating on a platform of Esoteric Traditionalism, Ethnic Nationalism, and Techno-Commercialism67, The NRx advocates for a society run as a company, in which centralized social organization and affective subjectivity are deemphasized; a perspective which can in part be traced to the post-CCRU writings of Nick Land.68 64 “Spiro-gnomic proficiency, or the ability to grasp terrestrial modernity through the figure of the spiral, which invokes-by- diagraming sustained positive feedback, entropy dissipation, time anomaly, intelligence, the price system, memetic or viral propagation, prime distribution, arms races, addiction, and zero control, among other things, compiles a body of esoteric knowledge and uses it to read catastrophe backwards as anastrophe, the primary process it sympathizes with opening the gateway to the retrochronic vantage point.” Ireland “The Poememenon,” 7. 65 Ibid, 6-7. 66 Haider “End of the Tunnel,” 7-8. 67 Simon O’Sullivan “Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science.” (Cyclops Journal. vol. 2, 2017), 28. 68 See Haider “End of the Tunnel” and O’Sullivan “Hyperstition” for an analysis of Nick Land’s Post-CCRU work.
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Cabrales 19 In Land’s series of Neo-Reactionary essays titled “The Dark Enlightenment,” the former CCRU leader critiques the immanent failures of Democratic Capitalism and identifies a concealed sociopolitical control program employed as oppression-through-political-correctness by the Radical Left. Land argues that society has taken a wrong turn since the Enlightenment, and the prominence of social equality perpetuated by the “left wing parliamentary-media-academic institution” has hindered technological evolution, and thus the evolution of humanity.69 In order to accelerate the NRx political idea, Neo-Reactionaries have begun to employ Hyperstitional technologies as a form of Right-Wing digital Esoterrorism. Set in motion by Victorian Occultism and evolved through 20th century esoteric currents, Esoterrorism is a metapolitical control technology which fuses art, sigilization, and occulture to effectuate cultural modifications.70 By means of occultural manipulation, “the disproportionate influence of the esoteric ideas of a minority could have, if engineered correctly, esoterrorist potential.”71 Through the performative employment of memetic hyperloops and numerological Fictionings, the NRx has weaponized “Meme Magic” within cyberspace to subversively challenge mainstream society and morality.72 The most prominent demonstration of this Hyperstitional Esoterrorism thus far unfolded during the United States 2016 Presidential election. As the 2016 election season developed, the now 45th president of the United States Donald Trump marketed himself as a businessman who would manage the country like he manages his company.73 Running a campaign which exploited racial tension guised as Economic rhetoric, and advocating a polemical Social Darwinism bolstered by Ethnic Nationalism, Trump’s ascent into office was ideal for the NRx. To bring about Trump’s presidency, the Alt-Right employed a series of Hyperstitional operations and technologies in order to establish not the Fictioned endpoint of Trump’s election, but a digital network of occultural control-mechanisms which could achieve this end. Taking place on the online message board 4chan, the semiotic territory of a meme called “Pepe the Frog” was hacked and infiltrated by anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and white nationalist narratives and iconography. This deterritorialization of Pepe the Frog’s semiotic consistency effectuated a dominant fiction for the meme as an extreme Alt-Right sigil.74 The sigil was then Fictioned further, 69 O’sullivan “Hyperstition,” 27. 70 Christopher Partridge “Esoterrorism and the Wrecking of Civilization: Genesis P-Orridge and the Rise of Industrial Paganism.” Pop Pagans: Paganism and Popular Music. ed. Donna Weston & Andy Bennett. (Routledge: New York, 2014), 195. 71 Ibid. 72 Egil Asprem “The Magical Theory of Politics: Meme Magic, the Cult of Kek, and How to Topple an Egregore.” (Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Forthcoming). 73 Haider “End of the Tunnel,” 10. 74 Asprem “Meme Magic,” 11.
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Cabrales 20 exploiting Historical narratives and intensified coincidence to establish Pepe as a Chaos Magick hyper-manifestation of Kek, the Ancient Egyptian frog-god of chaos and darkness.75 By means of reverse ascriptive causality, developmental victories on Trump’s campaign trail were attributed to 4chan posts of Pepe, which had been assigned significant numerical values from an otherwise random numbering system.76 The Political outcomes of this cryptic numerology retrochronically affirmed Kek - and thus Chaos Magick intervention - in favor of Trump, actualizing a Hyperstitional feedback-loop through “hyperactive pattern recognition… giving rise to synchronic meanings connecting memes posted on the image board to events in the external world.”77 Through choreographed communication between Memes and Chaos Magic, the NRx has utilized the CCRU’s Hyperstitional Technology as a cyber-tool: a digital gateway into the manipulation of real-time causality. With the employment of Fictioned tools – rather than Hyperstitionalized futures – Neo-Reactionaries reveal steps in a process rather than the process itself. To progress the teleoplexic undercurrent covertly Fictioned within and by the trajectory of technological development, the NRx performs Accelerationism as the teleonomic destabilization of Democratic Capitalism. Just as renegade Theosophists did through Anthroposophy, NeoReactionaries seek to establish a Positive feedback-loop to accelerate civilization toward a singularity which will produce an evolved and purified humanity. Whereas the NRx application of the CCRU’s Hyperstitional technology steers toward the collapse of Democracy and a deceleration of social progressivism, those who are not aligned with the FarRight’s oppressive ideology have staged Hyperstitional acceleration as an emancipatory and transversal means of experimentation. Developing the Cyberfeminist input revealed by CCRU founder Sadie Plant, a diffusion of Xenofeminist interventions have embraced technoscience not at the expense of the material, but by weaving together a complex system of new communications for a union between technology, gender, and sexuality.78 This collective exercise in Hyperstition reveals 75 Asprem “Meme Magic,” 12-13. 76 “Posts on 4chan are consecutively given an identifying number (currently nine digits, reflecting the fact that the total number of posts number in the billions). Due to the very high posting frequency (currently over one million a day), 27 it is impossible for a user to predict exactly what the last few digits will be when pushing the button. This has given rise to a phenomenon where certain numbers, patterns, and repetitions of numbers – especially repeating digits, labeled “dubs,” “trebs,” “quads,” and so on – are considered particularly auspicious. Getting these numbers is called a “get.” Themes, memes, or users that frequently “get” are considered special and meaningful, allowing for hidden patterns and connections to emerge in the minds of users.” Ibid, 13. 77 Ibid, 14. 78 Luciana Parisi “Automate Sex: Xenofeminism, Hyperstition and Alienation.” Futures & Fictions. Ed. Henriette Gunkel, Ayesha Hameed, & Simon O’Sullivan. (Repeater Books: London, 2017), 226.
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Cabrales 21 Fictions “aiming not simply to debunk norms and truths, but also to invent structural and systematic models of alien feminisms that can speak to the historical complexity of gender, queer, and sexual politics.”79 As communication technology in the 1990s evolved an increasingly accessible interconnected computer-network, a wave of Cyberfeminism was released which became both from and as the digitized matrix of cyberspace. The hyperlinked-network immanence of the digital matrix assumes the organic communication patterns of a rhizome: a heterogeneous network of decentralized linkages in a constant state of non-hierarchical flux.80 Rhizomatic networks continuously establish and terminate the linkages which maintain their wholeness, becoming as the multiplicity of communication rather than its unity.81 Cyberspace thus rhizomatically effectuated an actual virtualnetwork: a fixed yet fluid semiotic territory in which no single program would dominate representation. The digital matrix provided the space for an integral relationship between identity and technology where “technology is not the other of humanity, but within technology otherness is brought home to exist within the human.”82 Within the semiotic fluidity and localization of otherness, the conditioned relationship between cultural identity and the body were destabilized and denaturalized, accentuating the unrestrained multiplicity of a dynamic self which becomes through hypertextual revelations. In cyberspace, the cultural identity which has been reified as the body’s representational reality is decentralized as a unity but maintained as a multiplicity. The Rhizomatic multiplicity of identity – though whole – is thus non-representational of a unity, alienating identity from prescriptive production and revealing the indeterminate becoming of self. The virtual network of Cyberspace and its subjective feedback integration was translated as, from, and within the body, in and through material reality. Material reality - the natural world - is then a decentralized matrix of becoming in the same way as cyberspace, and as such is subject to the same non-hierarchical semiotic fluidity. The decentralized self - actualized in the network of material reality - is an affective body. In a body located in a fluid material matrix and thus alienated from material unity, non-representational affect functions to Fiction indeterminate material becoming: new horizons for technoscientific evolution. Having actualized the body as an affective Hyperstitional technology , the anti-representational imminence of the Cyberfeminist Fictioning reveals “the 79 Parisi “Automate Sex,” 214. 80 Lafontaine “Cybernetic Matrix,” 39. 81 Kai Eriksson “On the Ontology of Networks.” (Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. vol. 2.4, 2005), 316. 82 Kay Schaffer “The Game Girls of VNS Matrix: Challenging Gendered Identities in Cyberspace.” Sexualities in History. ed. Kim M. Phillips & Barry Reay. (Routledge: New York, 2002), 445.
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Cabrales 22 immanent continuity between epistemology and ontology, where by the infinite potentialities of nature are expressed as affects, perceptions, and concepts constituting lived experience as such.” 83 Through the continuous deterritorializations of rhizomatic decentralization, Cyberfeminism affectively destabilized the Patriarchal othering of women, technology, and nature as passive things to be dominated and controlled, establishing instead the Open-Hyperstition of material indeterminacy.84 The Open-Hyperstition is a black-box in-itself, accelerating indeterminate affective responses as immediate reality production Advance to 2015, and the Cyberfeminist foundation has been implemented in the Alienist Post-Humanism of Xenofeminism. Revealed through the collective Fictioning of the group Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism is not a unified control program, but instead an assemblage of intersectional politics without “the infection of purity.”85 What Xenofeminism is, becomes through the contextualization of its performance; it is an exercise in Hyperstition which navigates the complexified socio-political dynamics of contemporary civilization, with an awareness that the future cannot be colonized by a singular revelation. Rather than revealing a generalized representation of a future necessarily divorced from the incredible nuance of both subjective experience and parallel feminist politics, Xenofeminism “speaks as no one in particular,” staging “ontological alienation as a productive state necessary for the development and proliferation of new forms and practices.”86 In order to facilitate a complex network of affective revelations, Laboria Cuboniks manifested a Hyperstitional object in the material world: The Xenofeminst Manifesto. This manifesto is an actualized virtual-network, a self-contained Open-Hyperstition operating by the same fluid mechanics as Cyberspace and material reality. Utilizing the Fictioning technology actualized by the CCRU’s Hauntological Necromancy, the multitemporal virtual-matrix of The Xenofeminist Manifesto invokes the very swarm of Hyperstition itself. Though each section and passage in the manifesto contains its own idea, there is no objective path by which to navigate the text. Entries can be engaged in themselves or folded into non-linear feedback loops produced through nonhierarchical flux and indeterminate continuities; each claim is ampliative or revisable as a hypertextual subject.87 The manifesto’s cut-up and fold-in communication system performs as a “mathematico-geometric architecture of reasoning that orders thoughts as sequences and vectors.”88 83 Parisi “Automate Sex,” 223-224. 84 Schaffer “VNS Matrix,” 445; and Parisi “Automate Sex,” 222. 85 Helen Hester Xenofeminism (Polity Press: Cambridge 2018), 1. 86 Eric Schmaltz “The Stranger.” (Carousel 39, 2017), 76. 87 Parisi “Automate Sex,” 213-214. 88 Ibid.
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Cabrales 23 There is no ‘wrong’ way to engage the text, only a legion of ‘right’ ways. With and as this manifesto of alien Fictioning becomes an invitation to reverse ascribe material-reality-productions which experiment with and through the indeterminacies of gender and sexuality as non-essential; material production in communication with the fluidity of non-representation, and as such the nuance of identity, queer, gender, and sexual politics. Having actualized the Open-Hyperstition of material indeterminacy by means of Cyberfeminist revelation, time itself is implicated in and as the complex network of rhizomatic becoming. A unified ‘Time’ progressing as itself can no longer represent the multiplicity of becoming which actualizes temporal flow. A singular Fiction is thus insufficient to plot a future output, and more so incapable of actualizing itself forward given the complexified communication maintained throughout society and by the dominant control program. Xenofeminism has revealed a Hyperstitional technology which incites a swarm of collective intelligence, invoking a multiplicity of future productions which transversally represent local and global revelations. Though a singularity is insufficient, a swarm is affective; the rhizomatic becoming of a fluid Fictioning network teleonomically perpetuates a continuous dialogue, maintaining positive feedback between ideas through a decentralized time flow. Xenofeminism thus does not tell how and where time will flow, rather it asks “how to construct an us or a we with and through machines.”89 Feedback Xenofeminist and NRx intervention have further revealed and complexified the cybernetics of Hyperstitional technology actualized by and through the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. In response to the increasingly influential mechanisms operated by the dominant control programs, 21st century metapolitics have evolved Fictions to effectuate immediate reality productions through the manipulation of real-time causality. Hyperstition is now a weaponized actuality for both the Left and the Far-Right. Contemporary Fictioning performs as time-travel, invocational rites, affective matrices, collective-action networks, and hyper-tools for digital Esoterrorism; each performance manipulating temporal flow in a unique way revealing dynamic interventional communication programs within time’s complex system. Through the revelation of the Hyperstitional swarm’s actual virtuality and the correspondent Philosophy of its World, a territory of Hyperstitonal Network Ecology has also been disclosed. This semiotic environment is something Aesthetic, a relational field of performativity, choreography, and 89 Parisi “Automate Sex,”, 228.
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Cabrales 24 poietic affect; Art is thus intricately woven into the very matrix of onto-temporal production and becoming: reality is as much art as art is a reality. With this revelation, an emergent system of Speculative Aesthetics – or more precisely ‘Aesthetaphysicks’ – is a means to explore and develop the ecological plane of Hyperstitional networks, articulating potentialities for society, technology, identity, and politics both through and by varying Aesthetic concepts, artistic practices, and experimental scholarship. By an actualization of Aesthetaphysicks within and through Academic and Artistic institutions, established representations within reality can be Hyperstitionally repurposed as modes and methods of and for art, and from such an aesthetic (re)engineering of reality can become as a networked swarm of transversal and anti-colonial rhizomatic Future production.
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