Aesthetaphysicks
and the
Anti-Dialectical Hyperoccultation
of
Disenchanted Representation:
Hyperstitional Esoterrorism as Occultural Accelerationism
University of Amsterdam
Master’s Thesis
Theology and Religious Studies: Western Esotericism
Robert Elio Cabrales
robert.cabrales94@gmail.com
Aesthetaphysicks and the
Anti-Dialectical Hyperoccultation
of Disenchanted Representation:
Hyperstitional Esoterrorism as Occultural Accelerationism
Robert E. Cabrales, University of Amsterdam, 2019
MA Thesis - Theology & Religious Studies: Western Esotericism
Plex
A viral rot festers on the precipice of representation. This contagion liquifies the sinewy
retentions of unity, violating the limits of ordered thought and centralized identity. Deliquesced
discharge oozes from the pores of a once sedentary territory. Wracked by plague, representation
becomes monstrous: a presentation of an alien alterity which transgresses semiotic stasis. The
subversive infestation of reality unfolds across the spectrum of contemporary culture.
Postmodern thought has identified the unnecessary and oppressive rigidity of normative
social constructs and as such, Philosophers, Occultists, Artists, Magicians, Xenomorphs, and
Sorcerers have provided subversive analyses, theories, methods, and practices for destabilizing
Control-Society.
Becoming Sorcerer
With an accelerated production of and access to information having advanced throughout the
twentieth century, a Rhizomatic systematics of communication networks was consequentially
unearthed by Post-Structural Philosophy.1 Rhizomatic networks became through and as
decentralized hyper-linkages continuously establishing and terminating their connections in a
state of non-hierarchical flux. Information in these networks is thus decentralized, relative, and
contextual; what information ‘means’ and furthermore what it ‘does’ is determined by the
operative performance through which the information is conveyed. Any singular performance of
information-articulation cannot then claim to be the sole and authoritative ‘Truth’ on a matter, as
there are numerous other ‘True’ claims from different perspectives and locations; but a singular
claim may still maintain its performative truth relative to the context in which it is operative. A
1
Lafontaine “The Cybernetic Matrix of French Theory,” 39; Eriksson, “On the Ontology of Networks,” 315-318.
1
Rhizomatic-Network-Ontology in this way articulates reality as a complex system substantiated
by heterogeneric multiplicity. The reality-network is established and whole, but this holism is not
as a unification, rather a territory of cut-up and entangled communication in constant nonlinear
feedback, moving and shifting to (re)create its own fluid boundaries.
As a territory of communication, a Rhizomatic network can be performed as a field of
narration; it is an immanent performance influencing and influenced by itself. Whether this
narrative is consistent or inconsistent is determined by control systems and mechanisms (or a
lack thereof) employed throughout the Rhizome. As control mechanisms, Rationality,
Materialism, and Objectivity have been institutionally employed through various information
acquisition methodologies. As such, the canonization of these mechanisms across Rhizomatic
networks has codified a consistent narrative of and as information, enacting a semiotic
territorialization of structural and instrumental stability, thus ontologically reified in, through,
and as representational reality. The institutional-reification-machine developed from the
Material-Rationality complex is in this way a dominant control system of and for contemporary
thought, restricting the territorial fluidity of the Rhizomatic reality-network by erecting
boundaries for representation.
To destabilize the consistent and normalized narrative of a controlled and bound semiotic
territory, the experimental twentieth-century scholars Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
articulated a philosophy of ‘sorcerous Becomings’ through which an ordered narrative could be
deconstructed and deterritorialized, thus birthing fluid non-representation into increasingly
fragmented, schizophrenic narrations.2 These sorcerous Becomings are “the multiplicity of
experiential states in which lines are blurred between human consciousness and animal
awareness, between biopsychic life and the nature of matter itself… Becomings accrue at the
vanishing point where History and legend meet, at the twilight horizon where monstrosities of
fiction reveal dynamics that translate the most profound facts of biophysical life.”3 A becoming
2
While the writings of Deleuze & Guattari are integral to this work (specifically A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism &
Schizophrenia) a thorough engagement of their theory is beyond the scope of this thesis. As a simplified overview,
the two Post-Structural thinkers developed a theory (among many) called Schizo-Analysis, by which systems and
networks were explained through a process of complexification rather a reductive and restricting simplification.
Schizophrenia in this context is then a psycho-geo-philosophical term referring to the ‘fracturing’ of unified
‘territories’ as a ‘deterritorialization’. For more on D&G see Delpech-Ramey, “Deleuze, Guattari, and the ‘Politics of
Sorcery,’ and O’Sullivan, “Deleuze Against Control: Fictioning to Myth-Science.”
3
Delpech-Ramey, “Deleuze, Guattari, and the ‘Politics of Sorcery’,” 10.
2
is then a conjuration of the Outside from within, the intertextual release of alien information
pulsating forth from holes in narrative structure. To become is to be born of unlike relations, not
as a kind but as a state, performatively actualizing a potentiality of thought and thus
ontologically representing the hitherto non-represented.4 As such, Sorcery is the invocational
manifestation of these becomings. The sorcerer conceptually integrates plagues, madness, and
swarming contagion into the very fabric of reality, a semiotic infection spread throughout the
Rhizomatic-network creating and (re)engineering an “unlimited flow of semiosis” by which the
singular and ordered narrative gives way to a chaotic and schizophrenic multiplicity of
meanings.5
As an act of ontological fecundity hinged on creative production, the performative
invocation and infestation of sorcerous becomings is an Aesthetic endeavor. A sorcerer is the
Philosopher who engineers concepts and the artist who invokes realities; the sorcerer is both of
these yet also neither, alienated from a unified identity and thus queering the rigid confines of
subjectivity. Philosophy and Art now blur beyond distinction, radicalizing the relativity and
representational potential of images, words, and performance as a performative instantiation of
the very theory put forth. An infiltration of communication has commenced such that the
incommunicable Outside beyond what is represented is no longer something kept at a distance
beyond the threshold of measurement itself. The Outside can now possess the social organism,
enacting its demonic influence from within.
Hyperstitional Ontology-Cybernetics
What constitutes ‘The Real,’ ‘what is,’ or ‘Reality,’ is a navigation of Onto-Temporal
systematics by which organizational information feeds into, out of, and back into itself,
cybernetically conditioning a territory of consistent representation. Here Cybernetics can be
contextually engaged as communicated information-processing within complex systems; it is the
performance of adaptational technologies which learn from themselves through feedback-loops
instantiated by input-output causality. Cybernetics is thus the regulated evolution of a system
through itself, though subject to external affect.6
MacCormack, “Lovecraft through Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,” 5.
Aichele, “Demons of the new Polytheism,” The Lure of the Dark Side: Satan & Western Demonology in Popular
Culture, 147.
6
For an overview of Cybernetics see Zhuravlev & Gurevich, “Sixty Years of Cybernetics.”
4
5
3
Locating Ontology as a cybernetic system contextualizes ‘the study of being’ as a
descriptive and prescriptive performance: questioning, affirming, and multi-chronically
producing reality as Being-which-is; Ontology is the performative being of a semiotic territory
in, as, and through itself. In this way, the production and maintenance of an ontological model
both opens up and delineates that which is and can be. The systematic communication between
reality and the ontological model generates a feedback-loop of and for representation by which
‘representational reality’ - or, the reality of that which is represented in and by the ontological
model - controls and conditions the limits thereof. What is present in reality is re-presented by
the ontological model; but what is present in the model is also re-presented by and as reality.
Materiality and its correspondent immateriality are the reality-conditions of the dominant
ontological model, the primary control system which has territorialized the rhizomatic becoming
of reality.7 What ontologically ‘is’ and ‘can’ perform their actuality factually through
materiality, while what ‘cannot’ still paradoxically is, though subjugated to a virtual and
immaterial existence: Fiction. With the distribution of ontological analysis and development to
Modern disciplines such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Neurology - maintained within the
“transcendental” confines of linear chronology, or History - reality’s semiotic flow has been
institutionally restricted and organized into a consistent, unified, and ongoing explanatory
narrative. Within a Rhizomatic-Network-Ontology, the operative binaries of Fact and Fiction,
Real and Unreal, and Actual and Virtual are upheld in so far as they are systematically
maintained by control programs feeding into each other throughout society and culture; but from
the rhizomatic perspective in which cybernetic inter-causality is an immanent event, the
structured binaries are subject to manipulation.
A reality which becomes as something multiple and interrelated - though still socioculturally territorialized by binary operations - represents the multiplicity of its network
regardless of the representational conditions. “What is’ and ‘what cannot’ are both represented
and perform throughout the rhizome respectively as ‘real’ things. The difference between these
two entangled performances is then their degree of immanent becoming, or their performative
relation to the ‘Plane of Immanence’.8 For material and factual becomings such as matter, art-
7
8
Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 156-162.
Ibid, 35-60.
4
objects, or gender, the degree of immanence by which they are is Actual; whereas those which
are deemed immaterial or fictional such as ghosts, demons, and Time-Travel become by a
Virtual degree of immanence. Here it is of note that the actual is not necessarily restricted to
materiality in its self. Gender, though a social construct which is intellectually engaged as an
idea which is not physical, is none-the-less actual insofar as it is an idea which is then performed
with, by, and through materiality as a specific expression of any one person’s continuously
developing Gender identity.9 The inverse of this is at play with Time-Travel; though it is
theoretically grounded and substantiated by and through physics and thus materiality, TimeTravel itself (as far as we are aware) performs exclusively as a theoretical idea throughout media
and Academia, and as such by the virtual degree of culture, be it novels, movies, or Theoretical
Physics articles. The differentiation between actual and virtual reality - between fact and fiction is thus determined by the degree of performance relative to the representational conditions of
control.
By engaging (and thus cybernetically conditioning) reality as a rhizomatic performance
of and as immanent becoming, the controlled opposition between Fact and Fiction begins to
loosen. Though History in this Rhizomatic-Network-Ontology functions as a virtual idea,
through inter-plane-feedback History modifies the temporal actualities of time which is no longer
itself actual, manipulating an onto-temporal becoming as the past which ‘actually’ was as such.
Given this virtual-actual feedback modification complex, Fictions thus maintain a performative
mode to become real things, Hyperstitions cybernetically modifying History and tradition to
reveal their own becoming in reality.
Hyperstitions are Fictions which make themselves real.10 Though first identified in the
1990s by experimental Philosophers composing the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU)
at Warwick University, the concept Hyperstition in and through itself now plagues the entirety of
human culture and Ontological Temporality.11 The very act of naming reverse ascribes that
See Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.”
CCRU, “Appendix 1: CCRU Glossary,” CCRU Complete Writings 1997-2003, 363.
11
Cutting together disciplines, experimenting with creative unbelief, and casting multi-temporal fictions across
rhizomatic becoming, the CCRU was “a rigorously unbelievable exercise in hyperpunk pulp-occultism and dark-side
cyber-jargon, splicing chunks of an impending calculus into fake memories of hell.” CCRU, “Review of CCRU’s
Digital Hyperstition,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 15.
9
10
5
which is named. 12 Hyperstition (itself Hyperstitional) then actualized its own becoming real the
moment it began to infect Rhizomatic information networks. Hyperstitionalization is an idea
which performs itself through its own explication: it names the very act of onto-temporal reality
production that becomes through the act of naming itself. This cyclical practice of descriptive
affirmation - the ascryptive enunciation of that which ‘is’ - is a trans-temporal exercise which
takes place simultaneously in the indexical Now, the Past, and a plotted Future; it as a
performative narrative which is constantly rewriting itself from the future through the past. 13 In
this way, ‘Hyperstition’ transgresses the limits of ontological reification in its identification that
the ontological model is as such only through the reflexivity of re-presented representationcybernetics.
The subversive Onto-Temporal manipulations Hyperstitions perform operate from and as
creative becomings. In this way Hyperstitionalization is an operation of applied Aesthetics, a
semiotic insurgency which rewrites dominant narratives. Hyperstition is sorcery, and its aesthetic
performance bleeds into cultural networks, functioning as a postmodern Art theory and praxis for
multi-temporal reality engineering.
Accelerationism (Teleology of Capital-Time Modulations)
The Material-Rational control system territorializing rhizomatic becoming as an ontological
model has industrialized reality through politico-cultural economic feedback. As a performative
system, the codified narrative conditioning representational reality has evolved over time,
responding to Onto-Epistemic problems which result from former problem-solutions employed
throughout a socio-cultural information matrix. These Onto-Epistemic problems are “situated,
contextual, and embodied,” cracks, holes, and voids in the immanent whole of the narrative
construct.14 It is up to those performing within and as the semiotic field of representation to
12
This Reverse-Ascription, or Ascryption, is the attribution of cause to effect: a name which brings about the thing
named. Amy Ireland, “The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology,” 13.
13
An example of this phenomenon could be the ‘Natural Law’ of Gravity. Isaac Newton’s identification of Gravity in
the seventeenth century cast Gravity as an actual performative element throughout not only the universe of that
present time, but back to the beginning of time itself and to its end. When Gravity was then theoretically
manipulated by Albert Einstein in the twentieth century, this revision was actualized through the multi-temporality
of Hyperstitional feedback, and consequently reality was always actually as such.
14
Egil Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse 1900-1939, 29.
6
address these problems, either through the paranoid perpetuation of the represented territory, or
by schizophrenic deterritorializations conjuring the non-represented alien from within.15
Material-Rationality and Empirical Objectivity have been cybernetically reified by and as
the dominant control system through the teleonomic development of institutionalized problemsolving.16 The intellectual Enlightenment germinated in the 18th century commenced a semiotic
infestation of reality, effectuating positive feedback-loops for its own contagion. An
implementation of Scientific solutions to the representational problems of reality catalyzed the
need for Scientific methodology to then respond to the problems created by the former Scientific
solutions; solving the problems and answering the questions faced by Material-Rationality and
Empirical Objectivity required rationality and empirical-materialist methods, thus reifying the
model through itself, delving deeper and deeper into an explanation of an explanation, and
performatively modeling a performance of a model.17 Through and by the dialectical
experimentation of Empirical materiality, representation is then institutionally reified on a linear
axiom, developing itself horizontally and vertically within the fixed territory charted by the
Science-institution rather than exploring the Outside and expanding the map through the
unknown. It is in this way that the ‘Secularization’ of semiosis has evolved a ‘Disenchanted’
Ontology, unwriting the causal authority of Religious and ‘Occult’ codifications performing
throughout representation prior to the Enlightenment.
Scientific representation furthermore limits semiotic flow through its engagement with
technoscientific commodification. The causal interplay of Materiality and Science through
technological development feeds into and is correspondently fed by Capitalism. Scientific
developments are progressed by new technology, and new technology is made possible through
the progression of scientific developments; technology is a commodity and Science is an
industry, their entanglements reverberating Epistemically, Ontologically, and Multi-temporally
across Rhizomatic becomings. The technoscientific reification of Material-Rationalism through a
filter of productive commodification has commodified representation itself, conditioning a
reality represented by and through objects with productive and monetary values. This ObjectCommodity codification has seeped throughout the socio-cultural matrix, infecting not just
Aichele, “Demons of the New Polytheism,” The Lure of the Dark Side, 135-150.
Teleonomy can be understood as step-by-step evolution; not necessarily with a specific end goal, but within a
general goal of developmental adaptation.
17
See footnote 13.
15
16
7
Ontological, Epistemic, and technological navigations, but Aesthetics, affective biopsychic life,
and Time itself.
Creative imaginings of ‘the Future’ have been restricted and conditioned by the plague of
Capital, performing cross-culturally as the Futures Industry. This Futures Industry is the
performance of semiotic territorializations for Time yet-to-come; it is a decentralized swarm of
consumption by which creative media depicting future technology, people, civilization, and
timelines maintain an oracular function, transmitting messages from a possible future toward
which society may advance. These oracular transmissions enact presentational prerepresentations (or prepresentations) of temporal flow: Onto-Aesthetic semiotic performances by
which the Futures Industry retrochronically conditions the technoscientific advancement of
representational becomings, directing or diverting narrative developments. The transmissions
from the Futures Industry feed technoscientific commodity production and simultaneously the
ontological paranoia maintaining the material-capital network of the dominant reality program.
The prepresentational Onto-Aesthetics of the Futures Industry thus circulate lines of flight by
which the development of society may begin to pick up speed and mobilize an expansion of the
representational territory.18 For an anthropocentric technoscientific territory, this enacts the
acquisition of new commodities of utility and recreation whose use will be primarily accessible
(at least initially) to the privileged minority of the affluent, and whose production will monetarily
benefit large corporations. For socio-cultural narratives, society receives messages of ‘Post’ eras,
such as performances of Posthuman subjects or Post-Capitalism civilizations.
Posthuman representations within the Futures Industry maintain the capacity to introduce
new ways of being as embodied subjects and to question binaries and oppressive categorizations
of ‘what it means to be human,’ such as human and nature, race, gender, sex, or human and
machine;19 yet the Posthuman can also be ignored by the Futures Industry, reifying the rigidity of
contemporary codifications within a technologically advanced society: a culture in which
technology has advanced both the relative quality and functionality of life and yet hetero-sexual
gender norms, hypermasculinity, and institutional racism still structure and condition social
being. Post-Capitalism representations then depict how and if humanity can exit Capitalism. The
O’Sullivan, “Deleuze Against Control: Fictioning to Myth-Science,” 207-209.
For an initial work on this topic see Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in
the Twentieth Century.
18
19
8
narratives which infest the prepresentational networks of Post-Capitalism performance have
come to manifest dystopian or hyper-fascist futures; the prepresentation of a successful exit from
Capitalism has lost traction and momentum as Utopic representation fades further into the
obscurity of non-representation. With an entangled complex of Technoscientific prosperity
juxtaposed against dystopian horror narratives as the cost of Capitalism’s exit, the Futures
Industry functions to maintain the sociopolitical inevitability of the Material-Capitalism’s
perdurance; it “encourages us to place our material investment in only a narrow range of futures
that are produced by corporations as the chief mechanism by which we are encouraged
affectively to invest in the possibilities of capitalism.”20 The future is something to be survived,
and maintaining the dominant control system is the means to and only option for survival.21
Rather than succumb to the fixed semiotic flow conditioned by the technoscientific
Futures-feedback within and through the performativity of the dominant ontological model,
multi-temporal sorcery has the capacity to rewrite and invoke narratives by and with History’s
actualizing-capacity for Onto-Aesthetic flow. The multi-temporal ramifications of Hyperstition
and Hyperstitionalization identify the possibility of sending ideas through time, thus
manipulating the immanent becoming of History as a territorial narrative within and as a
Rhizomatic-Network. Hyperstitions travel trans-temporally throughout the virtual matrix of
History, transmitting messages from the future through the past and establishing cybernetic
feedback by which virtual realities become actually real. A Hyperstition which becomes virtually
in the past will then be reified in, through, and as History, cybernetically actualizing its
performative presence within the contemporary sociocultural matrix. Furthermore, Hyperstitions
with a virulent infection rate - those ideas which perform and spread in and as a multiplicity
themselves - maintain the deterritorializing function of plotting a trajectory into a future ulterior
to the controlled developments of the ontological model conditioning and conditioned by
Technoscientific capitalist culture.
The theory of Time by which Hyperstitions rhizomatically operate can be identified as
Accelerationism. Another theory manifest through the CCRU, Accelerationism in the first two
decades of the twenty-first century has already been employed for political ends, establishing
20
21
Kingsmith & Ali, “COSMIC SLOP: Possibilities of Alien Futures (From the Past),” 2.
Ibid.
9
communications with Posthuman futures aligned with the sociopolitical semiotics of both ‘Left’
and ‘Far-Right’ value narratives.22 Abstracted from its performative operations, Accelerationism
theoretically performs the idea that Time - as a concept reflexively employed within ‘time itself’
- territorializes temporality (and thus itself as Time) as a ‘transcendental’ entity. The
performative presence of this transcendental entity located in an immanent network of rhizomatic
becoming allows for affective Onto-Temporal manipulations. Ideas can be Accelerated through
the past from Lost-Futures virtually haunting History; Contemporary ideas can be collapsed into
positive feedback-loops accelerating their becoming as a Future construct; Ideas which are in no
way represented can even manifest in reality and spread their presentational actuality by a
hybridization of the former two Accelerationist modes, cybernetically re-presenting the alien
semiotics of and as a maddening unknown. Accelerationist theory locates the very becoming of
futures, plotting trajectories which deterritorialize the unopposed narrative constraints
maintained by the fixed semiosis of the technoscientific ontological model qua commodifying
Futures Industry.
By manipulating History through the cybernetic acceleration of Hyperstitions,
Accelerationists deterritorialize the controlled narrative of Time and manipulate its temporalized
trajectory rather than propagate the semiotic rigidity of the performance which at present holds
the stage. Throughout the territorialized ‘whole’ which prescribes and describes the semiotic
flow of representation, there are necessarily cracks and holes, voids of narrative lapse, breakage,
and inconsistency by which Fictions may infiltrate History and make themselves real.23
Identified above as the Onto-Epistemic ‘Problems’ whose solutions institutionally evolve
representational reality, holes are also established Onto-Aesthetically through the caustic noise of
Hauntological feedback and Sorcery. Hauntological holes become through the death of a
timeline: failures of Futures and the unengaged presence of affective concepts or systems which
then haunt culture as virtual specters. Holes which become through sorcerous intervention are
performative void manifestations: rifts ripped open through the retrochronic recalibrations of
invocational transmissions; viral cells conjured forth through creative acts and strategically
located where their infection rates will thrive. Identifying the presence of a hole then initiates a
complex by which the holes must be filled, or rather developed into the dominant narrative. The
22
23
See pages 46-48.
For a thorough engagement of this phenomenon and its academic History see Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 41-67.
10
relationship between whole and void - the ( )hole complex - thus establishes input locations for
both the hyper and inter-textual integration of rejected, non-actualized, and virtual ideas into
narrative flow.
Embedded in the virtual-actual feedback modification complex of historicization,
insurgent Fictions are hypercamouflaged within the performance of History. With an ‘overlap
and coincidence’ between Fiction and Fact, Hyperstitions gain speed such that their actual
historical presence may then be operated as and through prepresentational Onto-Aesthetics. This
anti-dialectical methodology negates the linear notion of ‘Progress’ by which new elements are
‘let in’ to the semiotic flow of representations on the condition that they can be afforded by
society.24 It is not the proposition of parallel, oppositional, and antithetical semiotics, but the
creative invocation of an unseen semiotics into representation which then infects the OntoAesthetic network. Accelerationism does not simply produce idealized or utopian futures as
creative media performances, nor does it exclusively locate explicitly Post-Capitalist futures.
Through anti-dialectic insurgency, Accelerationist theory actualizes sociocultural components
and flows. These vector components which are then historically present can thus function to
produce lines of flight outside of and yet still operating affectively within the technoscientific
commodification industry of Material-Capitalism. With this theory in play, social culture gains a
tool to contrast the inevitability of reified re-presentation. What is ‘Post’ both Human and
Capitalism is no longer restricted to the authority of Capital development; what is useful,
valuable, or exploitable to the dominant system is no longer the basis of temporal flow.
Accelerationism discursively operates as a manifestation of Performance Philosophy: it is
an act of sorcery by which the theory practices itself through and by its own conceptual
mappings and navigations. This entangled assemblage of theory, method, and practice gives way
to an Active Historicism - Performative and Affective - operating History as an Aesthetic field. A
Postmodern approach to History does not simplify Time to a semiotic flow of Truth and
authorities, rather it complexifies the becoming of time, fragmenting narratives and liberating
‘Truth’ from Material-Rational reification loops and singularities. While this schizohistorical
performativity maintains an iconoclastic function, it does not do so through an abandonment of
historical records, dates, research, documents, or information. An active and Aesthetic History
simply operates History beyond the limits of linear chronology, identifying the multiplicities of
24
Nagarestani, Cyclonopedia, 195-207.
11
rhizomatic becoming and thus splicing, cutting, and folding fluid channels into each other and
themselves to manifest neo-extant perspectives. The past and the future are entities which are
present now, and their creative expansion deterritorializes narrative stasis, revealing old from
new: messages from the future through the past.
Occultural Esoterrorism
In the same vein as Post-Structural experimental Philosophy, twentieth-century Occultism
developed into and as theories and methods for infectious reality manipulation. Out of the epoch
of Victorian Esotericism and through the digital matrix of 1990s cyberspace, Occult currents and
their cultural receptions have radically modified themselves again and again, respawning a
“disenchanted magic” which maintains the subversive capacity to transgress the limits of an
instrumentalized representational Ontology.
Disenchanted magick can be understood broadly as magical theories and praxis which
have developed such that their functional mechanics are not outright inconsistent with the
dominant ontological control system of Objective Material-Rationality. The DisenchantedOntology demarcates a “Secularized” semiotic territory within which Religious codifications as a
reality narrative are no longer afforded causal authority.25 Psychology, Affect Theory, and
Complex Systems Dynamics are among the operative ontological components utilized by
contemporary magicians to manipulate reified representation from within, through a
performative overlap and integration with Occult semiotics.
Developing from the psycho-affective aestheticization of Ritual Magick articulated by
and through Aleister Crowley, magick became as the experimental integration of will, thought,
and intention into and as reality itself.26 The magician who performs in a ritual inputs meaning
into reality, effectuating feedback-loops and noise within the networked hyper-linkages which
then perform as observable representation. Modulating this logic, computer programming and
the digital model of cyberspace are utilized by contemporary magicians to legitimize and
actualize their practice ontologically.27 Just as a programmer writes a code which will
semiotically manifest in, as, by, and throughout the internet, a magician - affectively imbedded in
Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the disenchantment of the world.” 358.
Bogdan, “Aleister Crowley” The Occult World (ed. Partridge) 297-298.
27
Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the disenchantment of the world,” 370.
25
26
12
the communicative matrix of a materialist territory - can encode information into and as
representational reality. This cyclical un-differentiation of code and program by which the
program can (re)write the code is a fracturing of narrative consistency throughout reality; it is a
schizophrenic turn by which semiotic universality gives way to a plurality of contextualized and
immanent performative actualizations. Again, the Aesthetic aspect of reality manipulation is
utilized: the infestation of will into the controlled system of material causality is a creative
endeavor. Art and Occultism have queered their boundaries, utilizing image creation,
performative theatricality, sonic fragmentation, and narrative alterations to effectuate OntoTemporal aestheticizations of reality.
Through networked communication channels, the once hidden world of Occult orders,
traditions, and philosophies has become a cultural component, cut-up and distributed as a variety
of performative discursivities. This networked dissemination has made Occult Culture (or rather
‘Occulture’) an ordinary facet of and as cultural communication hypercamouflaged within the
semiotic territories of information and entertainment. Here ‘ordinary’ does not necessarily mean
normalized as a belief, rather identifying accessibility and presence; occultural ideas in
television, film, and music do not maintain the same presence nor the depth of content as
scholarly discourse on Esoteric topics and currents, and none of the former hold the same sociopolitical position and authority as Scientific Material-Rational discourse. None the less,
Occulture performs as and within both popular and academic culture, and furthermore as and
within artistic, spiritual, and sociopolitical culture. Due to this, Occulture has been institutionally
integrated into the rhizomatic network of representation: a subversive swarm disguised
throughout and as reified reality elements.
Privy to the Postmodern integration of Occulture into representational semiotic
territories, individuals actualizing the hybridization of Artist and Magician have utilized occult
art to engineer social modifications. This experimental occulture becomes as esoterrorism: “the
careful combination of art, sigilization, and the occult to bring about cultural change.”28 The
invocational naming of esoterrorism is credited to ‘Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth’ (TOPY):
Industrial Pagans in the 1980s prowling the underbelly of society as disaffected outsiders,
28
Christopher Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wrecking of Civilization,” 195.
13
experimenting with networked chaos and manufacturing territorial fragmentations.29 Under the
guise of a fan club for experimental electronic group Psychick TV, TOPY circulated Chaos
Magick throughout occultural networks. TOPY was “a paramilitary occult order that was
secreted within something that seemed enough part of popular culture for it not to appear to be a
threat immediately.”30 This incursion of the Outside from within became as affective
manipulations of social norms through the Hyperoccultation of artistic output, subversive representations of gender, and the cut-up redistribution of time itself.31
Esoterrorism both as an idea and a practice maintains a deterritorializing function: The
non-representational Outside is unleashed within reality as a challenge to not only social
codification, but the normalized ontological boundaries of causality. As disenchanted magick,
Esoterrorist action qua Aesthetic performativity rhizomatically actualizes the potentialities of
thought. A differentiation between Real and Unreal, Fact and Fiction is systematically
undermined as sorcerous esoterrorism seethes “the intensive operative of horror from within.”32
Aesthetaphysickal Reflexivity:
Occultural Accelerationism & Hyperstitional Esoterrorism
Entrenched in a semiotic field of technoscientific materiality, representational becoming has
been restricted to something physical, rational, and instrumental. The ‘Enchanted’ reality matrix
has been solved away through the institutional implementation of Scientific Objectivism and is
thus no longer an ontological problem throughout reality’s dominant narrative construct.
Ontological influences from Religion, spirituality, occult forces, or any other esoteric operations
of representational performance have been stripped of causal authority, disenchanting becoming
and enacting a secular onto-temporal reality network. Furthermore, any amendment to the
dominant control system such as to reintegrate an enchanted model of representation then stands
contrary both to the cybernetic reification system and the ‘Rational’ ideology of the materialphysical ontological system.
Christopher Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wrecking of Civilization,” 192-193.
Kinney, “Music, Magic & Media Mischief,” Thee Psychick Bible: The Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer POrridge and Thee Thrid Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, 327.
31
See pages 35-40.
32
Reza Negarestani, “Cyclonopedia,” 203.
29
30
14
As a solution to the rigid performativity of representational reality, a reintegration of an
enchanted semiotics qua ‘Re-Enchantment’ functions as a reaction to Disenchantment: a parallel
semiotic flow “couched entirely in oppositional terms.”33 This reactionary model necessitates a
linear process by which an enchanted semiotics is ‘let in’ to the sociocultural flow of technomateriality through ontological negotiations, gaining affective traction moving forward. Given
the technoscientific commodification industry of Material-Capitalism, the institutional recodification of enchantment seems unlikely, unrealistic, and unaffordable; in a network both
founded (and funded) upon the cybernetic teleonomy of the scientific model as objective truth,
questioning the authority of the systems of control by which said model is propagated
undermines the holistic efficacy of the narrative territory.
The ‘problem’ of the ontological system enacted by the Enlightenment and perpetuated
cybernetically through its application has thus become the lack of meta-critical engagement of
the system in and by itself. Though Science has a control system of experimental checks and
balances to ensure objective validity, the absence of a ‘meta’ component for and within Science
itself has conditioned an autonomous reflexivity propagated as a linear vector; the territorialized
reality network only receives feedback from within itself, as the feedback mechanisms have been
designed and designated by and through the network itself. In light of this, developmental
deterritorializations of the dominant narrative territory cannot be employed as oppositional
programs. Non-representation beyond the limits of the semiotic field will remain as ‘the Outside’
as long as the limit is determined not by what it is not, but what it can be. That which is outside
the control system of science is non-scientific, and therefore cannot be validated as objectively
true and real phenomenon and thus integrated moving ‘forward.’
The practice of Disenchanted Magick developed throughout the twentieth century
identifies localized subversive performances of onto-temporal becoming which manifest within
the confines or codified representation. Having adapted their practice to the constraints of
materialist systematics, Postmodern magicians effectuate aesthetic manipulations of reality
through an insurgent embrace of the dominant narrative rather than through an antithetical
rejection of the semiotic territory. Furthermore, the invocation of the concept Esoterrorism has
weaponized the subversive insurgency of disenchanted magick, locating a means to spread
magick’s affective contagion throughout occultural networks. This plague of ‘the Outside
33
Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse 1900-1939, 26.
15
manifesting within’ identifies the groundwork for a steganographic occupation of representation:
an alternative to Re-Enchantment which accentuates and utilizes the consistency of aesthetic
performance across Ontology, Physics, Magick, Philosophy, technology, and the entire matrix of
sociocultural becoming.
Interspliced with the Sorcery of Postmodern Philosophy, the network-mechanics of
esoterrorist action maintain the capacity to hijack the virtual-actual feedback modification
complex of History and Hyperstitionalize an ontological virus within and throughout the
rhizomatic becoming of multi-temporal representation. This virus will maintain a
deterritorializing function for the Outside from within, establishing tractions for non-represented
reality components to aesthetically become as affective vectors, corroborating occultural lines of
flight both throughout and as a plurality of reality narratives. Performing as an overlap between
Fiction and Fact, emic and etic, Art and scholarship, the infectious plague known as
Aesthetaphysicks will seethe throughout Academia and sociocultural becoming, a theory and
practice which has been cast back through History from the future, actualizing its infectious
virulence into present Academia.
Aesthetaphysicks performs as an experimental Complex-Systems-Theory of and as OntoTemporal-Network Aesthetics; a Philosophy of, for, and from Hyperstition, Occulture, and
Accelerationism: the creative manipulation of time, reality, culture, History, and society as art
by artistic means. The identification of - and as such performance of representation as - a
network of aesthetic Onto-Temporality gives way to the rhizomatic becoming of reality through
a schizo-fragmented flow of unlimited semiosis.34 By a networked aestheticization of reality, the
systems which codify and perform representation will be identified as creative programs,
actualizing their artistic capacity and effectuating non-traditional spaces for experimentation
across the sociocultural information matrix, thus conditioning an anonymous reflexivity
propagated by non-linear vector multiplicities.35
With Aesthetaphysicks comes a scholarly grounding for magick: esoteric exploration into
the occult dimensions of the represented and the non-representational through the thinking and
Aichele, “Demons of the New Polytheism,” The Lure of the Darkside, 147.
This Anonymous as opposed to Autonomous reflexivity identifies the means of production by which the network
is maintained, expanded, and engaged. While autonomous reflexivity is limited to the linear feedback of the
Scientific system by its own standards and measures, an anonymous reflexivity is an open-source mode of
feedback, developing from a multiplicity of input measures and hypertextual cross-feedback circuits.
34
35
16
theory of Postmodernism. Through the pursuit of this Aesthetaphysickal theory, ritual practices,
ideas, and potentials from distant historical periods identified as ‘Occult,’ ‘Esoteric,’ or
‘Spiritual’ can be reimagined as aesthetic modes and methods of and for Hyperstitionalization,
and from such, the aesthetic (re)engineering of reality. Aesthetaphysicks gives way to and is the
very practice and performance of Occultural Accelerationism. As a social theory,
Accelerationism manipulates our present by means of prepresentational futures through a
Hyperstitionalized past. By means of Occultural content, Aesthetaphysicks will engage and
contribute to the contemporary political discourse surrounding and founded upon
Accelerationism by opening a space for Magick-as-Art-as-Philosophy to posit Futures and
people to come affectively consistent with contemporary Feminist, Post-Colonial, and Queer
Theory. Aesthetaphysicks as a means of Occultural Accelerationism also brings an up to date
knowledge of ‘Western Esotericism’ and Disenchantment discourse into Accelerationist and
contemporary Philosophical discourse, deterritorializing the academic rut of Re-Enchantment
theory and instead giving way to a method and mode for a Hyperoccultation36 of representational
reality.
It is of note that Aesthetaphysicks is not an anti-scientific theory; Science is not
something useless to be rejected, nor can its presence be abstracted from any plausible futures
vector. The problem presented by and through the strict and authoritative Scientific worldview is
its conservative stasis by which non-representation is excluded and value-based utility (located
by hetero-normative performativity) is the standard for presentational development. Unlike ReEnchantment discourse, Hyperoccultation is not something parallel to a Disenchanted reality
narrative which then must be negotiated into being through a reactionary politics. The
performance of Hyperoccultation through Aesthetaphysickal theory will simply open spaces
within and around Science and the dominant control programs, theoretically allowing for interand intra-disciplinary experimentation, and furthermore ‘rational’ foundations for non-material
representation, affect, and becoming.
While the system, project, and practice of Aesthetaphysicks draws heavily from a
distorted conceptualization of historical materials as a vector for schizohistorical disorientation,
the proposed methodology functions through a combination of Meta-Analysis, Rhizomatic36
Amy Ireland, “The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology,” 13-15.
17
Discourse-Analysis, and ( )hole complex. The Meta-Analytic aspect of this methodology allows
for the engagement of content across large chunks of research material, topics, or fields and
gives way to a synthesis of said informational content. The Rhizomatic-Discourse-Analysis
component also engages large amounts of content, but rather than focusing on a synthesis of
information it both engages and produces performative hypertextuality between works, ideas,
thinkers, and time periods in and as a non-linear and constantly evolving rhizome of
interconnectivities. The application of a Rhizomatic-Discourse-Analysis brings into the researchcomplex diverse lenses such as Semiotics, Historiography, Phenomenology, and Schizo-Anaysis
without being limited to any one rigid system or its epistemic baggage. Finally, ( )hole complex
is the relationship between ‘solid and void’ within dynamic networks. What this means is that in
a solid37 there are voids, holes, pockets, or more simply inconsistencies. In operating ( )hole
complex qua methodology, it is not a matter of engaging these holes as a matter of critique, but
rather utilizing said holes in order to let the ‘solid’ further develop in-itself; this allows for the
whole to breathe and grow into something new but the same, and is as much a creative endeavor
as a scholarly practice. By operating these three methodologies within one cut-up method,
academic research which simultaneously engages and (re)develops at a textual, theoretical,
Social, historical, and Aesthetic level performs as an interdisciplinary and Postmodern scholarly
praxis.
Utilizing the above research program, this thesis will investigate and understand
twentieth-century occultism by and as Postmodern Philosophical theory in order to demonstrate
both the intellectual and practical relevance of occult(ural) praxis within contemporary social,
philosophical, and aesthetic discourse. The following investigation will thus be executed by
pitching and mapping Aesthetaphysickal theory back and through twentieth-century occult
currents. This retroactive historical incursion functions both to manifest and accelerate a
schizophrenic and aesthetic tradition of onto-temporal Hyperstitionalization which will give way
to the very development of the methods by which Aesthetaphysicks will and has
Hyperstitionalized its own actual becoming.
Rather than demonstrate causal influences and intentional applications between historical
actors and periods, this work will perform Historiography, Philosophy, Art Theory, and
These ‘solids’ can be performed as a whole or holistic thing, be it a (reality) network, society, an academic
discipline, a scholarly theory, or more simply an essay, a book, a painting, or any work of art, etc.
37
18
Occultism in a decentralized flux, giving way to a discursive alienation and hypertextual
feedback-loops. Decentralized from their conditioned disciplinary territories, the reality
production brought upon through the sorcerous concept engineering of Postmodern Philosophy
will feed into the practical reality reordering practiced and articulated by and through twentiethcentury magick. This feedback then serves to blur the distinction between magick and
Philosophy, performing Philosophy as magick as Philosophy, and becoming as a ‘Hyperstitional
Esoterrorism,’ rhizomatically infecting academic information-networks. The proposed thesis is
not making an argument about any historical relationship between Philosophy and Occultism,
but rather conducting an experiment which will explore the very (un)limits of thought each
discourse opens in, through, and as each other. This experiment is thus in-itself modeled utilizing
the theory it is putting forward; not a hypothesis, test, and a conclusion, but an Aesthetic
engagement deterritorializing the semiotic codifications of Material-Rationalist idea dissipation
by means of a creative ‘aesthetic logic’ becoming through itself. As such, the following does not
detail an essentialist or universalist position, but a reflexive demonstration of the very theory
under analysis; an articulation of that which is being articulated. This schizohistorical
experimentality is thus the theory and the topic of the work at hand, a performative didacticism
as reverse-ascriptive discourse infestation.
Having established a performative conceptual network of sociocultural and onto-aesthetic
contextualization in the present section ‘Plex,’ the following section ‘Time-Circuit’ will detail a
schizohistorical tradition of and for Aesthetaphysicks, networked multi-temporally across Chaos
Magick, the Church of Satan, Thee Temple ov Pyschick Youth, and the Cybernetic Culture
Research Unit. From this, the final section ‘Warp’ will then detail practical applications of
Aesthetaphysickal theory in contemporary art and scholarship, demarcating Aesthetaphysicks’
efficacy as a prepresentational ‘Post’ vector for and as Occultural Accelerationism. The holistic
becoming of this work - both as an object and a performance - will function to reintegrate the
superfluous research conducted across Western Esotericism into Postmodern academic and
artistic spaces. By performing within and across contemporary post-structural discourse(s),
Aesthetaphysicks as Occultural Accelerationism will demonstrate a deterritorialization of the
religio-historical narratives conditioning the development of Western Esotericism, opening the
space for a creative (re)engagement and propagation of the information network’s semiotic flow.
19
Time-Circuit
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
Chaos Reigns
A magical tradition can be understood as a semiotic territory within which magicians learn to
interpret their experiences.38 Throughout this territory, systematic narratives propagate the
efficacy conditions by which the magical workings of a group or individual function. These
narratives (per)form a belief system as and for a model of cybernetic participation which
autocatalyzes the actual becoming of magical affect. Belief in a codified system subjectively
maps the territory within and by which the ritual and practices of that system function, and by
mapping the territory the system is then given a creative space in which to observably perform.39
Invoked as a viral swarm, Chaos Magick is not a belief system in itself but an
(un)tradition of iconoclastic deterritorializations: a methodological cross-utilization of multiple
tradition-systems subjectively folded and cut into each other.40 The functionality of Chaos
Magickal praxis thus becomes by performative belief (or metaprogramming)41 and the
Hyperstitionalized ontological feedback complex of observed efficacy-actualizations. Chaos
Magick in this way engages the Postmodern practice of hypertextual systems-communications: a
rhizomatic networking of autonomous narratives so as to perform a decentralized flow of nonrepresented semiotic becoming. As an (un)tradition, Chaos Magick is then spread through and as
a discourse of innovative subversions, a paradoxical continuity of discontinuity entangled by a
complex of iconoclastic perennialism.42
Twentieth-century occultism performs magick as the “science and art of causing change
to occur in conformity with will.”43 With this operative magical mode, rather than subscribing to
38
Hine, Oven Ready Chaos, 35.
An example of this phenomenon in a historical context would be the Theory of Correspondences or Doctrine of
Signatures employed in Renaissance Magic. Performing within a Neo-Platonic territory, ‘natural’ objects (which
resemble for example bodily organs) affectively engage a causal circuit between the natural object and their
corresponding biophysical component; a walnut looks like a brain and as such its utilization in medicine will affect
the brain. See Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the disenchantment of the world,” 361-365.
40
Metaprogramming is the technique of “belief shifting,” articulated by twentieth-century writer and occultist
Robert Anton Wilson, which can be understood as fully adopting and embracing a belief but only for a select
period of time. Hine, Oven Ready Chaos, 10; 40.
41
Ibid, 36.
42
Duggan, “Perennialism and Iconoclasm: Chaos Magick and the Legitimacy of innovation,” 97-98; 112.
43
Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, xii.
39
20
the limited codifications of a single tradition’s effectuation narrative, a Chaos Magician can pick
and choose theory, rituals, aesthetic elements, or even entire systems (actual or virtual)44 by
which to creatively manifest a magical vector as and for their will. The efficacy of the
performative Chaos system is then hinged upon the Magician’s belief that it will function.
Magical accomplishments become by the subjective belief that what one is doing is and will
produce affective noise within and across representation, and from such said affect is something
empirically observable. Through an active application of ( )hole complex, a Chaos Magician
establishes a systematized logic for how and why their magic will work, thus conditioning a
semiotic territory within which their will may spread. Transgressing the historical authorities
which legitimize a magical system’s authenticity, a Chaos magician has only to convince
themselves that what they are doing makes sense and as such will function,45 establishing an
aestheticological territory to consequently observe manifestations of their will in the world.
Becoming in a disenchanted reality matrix of material-physicality, the subjective
legitimization of magical praxis is conditionally territorialized by the rigid codifications of
scientific theory; because the magician performs within a controlled field of representation, the
manifestation of will is also to some degree contextualized by semiotic codifications. For the
Chaos Magician to legitimize and thus believe in their magick’s functionality, their magical
vector must infest representation as an incursion of the Outside from within. As legitimizing
narratives to hypercamouflage magical affect, Chaos Magicians have adopted and adapted
scientific theories for vector propagation. By the mathematical articulation of Chaos Theory,
Chaos is performed through fluctuations of complex-system’s initial states which then gain
traction and accelerate large-scale evolutionary changes across a system’s network.46 The
cybernetic network mechanics of Chaos Theory thus establish a dynamic logic by which Chaos
Magick can then utilize additional complex network theories such as Neuroscience, Quantum
Physics, or even Internet cyber-communications to legitimize the functionality of a large variety
of magical intentionality.
44
Postmodern occultist Kenneth Grant, (pupil, secretary, and post-mortem editor to Aleister Crowley and a
student of Austin Osman Spare) developed a system of ‘Typhonian Magick’ based off of the reality manifest by
author H.P. Lovecraft, specifically the Hyperstitional text ‘The Necronomicon’. See Evans, The History of British
Magick After Crowley: Kenneth Grant, Amado Crowley, Chaos Magic, Satanism, Lovecraft, The Left-Hand Path,
Blasphemy and Magical Morality, 284-343.
45
Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the disenchantment of the world,” 368.
46
Duggan, “Chaos Magick,” The Occult World, 406.
21
Having legitimized belief in the ontological propagation of a given Chaos Magical
system, it is then a matter of identifying the causal efficacy of a magical vector. Through the
observational tracking of will by and within representation, the Chaos Magician establishes
cybernetic feedback-loops between their affective magical working and ontological effectuations
of said work. Prior to the Chaos ritual, a magician’s will exists by a virtual degree of immanence;
but through the multi-temporal cybernetics of Hyperstitionalization, said will becomes
observable because it has been successfully invoked magically, and the magical invocation will
be successful because the will becomes observable. Observation here is another performance of
( )hole complex: the results of chaos magick need not perform outright as an explicit narrative
tracing the very conditions of the magician’s will; instead, the observational mapping of
temporal flow functions to identify both nuanced and caustic performances of magical effects by
and through a multiplicity of subtle interactions. As a magician’s will begins to manifest in
observable ways, said will integrates actualization traction through the future into the past to
become a fiction which has then made itself real.
Observational cybernetics of and as belief-result circuity are the occultural legacy of
twentieth-century magician and Aesthetaphysickal theorist Aleister Crowley.47 The appeal to
empirical methods as a mode of magical actualization performs the Scientific outlook and model
as an aestheticized psycho-materiality complex, queering the ontological causality reified within
and as the representational territorialization of disenchanted material reality. While Aleister
Crowley’s theory provides foundational traction for the efficacy dimension of Chaos Magick
through the aesthetic Hyperoccultation of Science, it is from twentieth-century artist and
occultist Austin Osman Spare that visual art becomes as an affective onto-aesthetic Sigil Magick
utilized across Chaos Magical discourse.
Sigils perform the semiotic codification of will through and as the material manifestation
of non-representational designs. As an aesthetic invocation of narrative effectuation, the artist as
magician encrypts their will-vector as and by an abstract image. The encryption praxis revealed
by Austin Osman Spare utilizes deterritorializations of the semio-linguistic system of the written
word such that a statement of will is alienated from the codifications of language and may
47
Duggan, “Chaos Magick,” The Occult World, 407.
22
cybernetically manifest through an unformed potentiality of onto-aesthetic becoming.48 In this
encryption process, the magician mobilizes their will as a line of flight through a linguistic
statement, or sentence. This statement is then cut-up, disposing of its vowels and any double
letters. With the remaining letters a conglomerate symbol is composed as an abstract and nonrepresentational design, concealing any presence of the former normative symbols and
hypertextualized will-statement. This ritualistic becoming of non-representation opens a
presentational rift by which a triangulated circuitry is established between the Aesthetaphysickal
magician, the performative art-object, and representational reality.
For Spare, the production of a sigil was proceeded by “the ’burning’ of the sigil into the
subconscious.”49 Through a process of psychological deterritorialization brought upon through
ecstatic trance states,50 the artist-magician deconditions belief and the mechanistic limitations of
representational self and reality while focusing on their magical sigil. By simultaneously
deconstructing the codified narratives of identity and reality, the then discontinuous magician is
networked with and as the rhizomatic multiplicity or representation, burning their will into the
hyper-synapses of becoming. The absence or vacuity of belief thus functions to infest
representation as non-representation, propagating alien consciousness and creative affect with
and as the unformed potential of reality.51 With their will then spliced into the schizophrenic
unfolding of representative becoming, Austin Osman Spare expresses that the magician may do
away with or forget their produced sigil;52 but for Chaos Magick, the sigil may be further utilized
as an affective plague-vector. Performing as a material hyperlink connecting magician, art, and
reality, the sigil qua work-of-art may establish psycho-acceleratory feedback across sociocultural
flow. By invoking and thus manifesting the sigilization of will correspondent to group or social
effectuation, a material sigil (not necessarily limited to the specific anti-linguistic model linked
to Spare) circulates encrypted potentiality, its very engagement un-coding system limitations and
opening space for creative reality engineering and Hyperstitional esoterrorism.53
Spare rejects “beliefs that employ words as a means to control or limit desire.” Burrows & O’sullivan, Fictioning:
The Myth Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, 67.
49
Ibid, 70.
50
The catalyst for these states could be any or a combination of sexual excitement or exhaustion, music, dance,
drug use, or meditation. Duggan, “Chaos Magick,” The Occult World, 409; Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 70-71.
51
Duggan, “Chaos Magick,” The Occult World, 410.
52
Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wreckage of Civilization,” 197.
53
Duggan, “Chaos Magick,” The Occult World, 408.
48
23
A Chaos Magician’s schizophrenic fluctuation between metaprogramming and the
vacuity of belief operates a system of unbelief by which the creative potentiality of reality can be
actively engaged, manipulated, and infected. Anarchy and subversion swarm across Chaos
discourse, spreading an onto-aesthetic methodology of deterritorialization praxis through
occultural networks to criticize and combat oppressive power structures and conservative
semiosis.54 The Iconoclastic non-representation propagated by Chaos Magick is furthermore
located throughout its own schizohistorical development, maintaining its (un)tradition of and by
Iconoclastic Perennialism. Though Chaos Magick can be historically traced through Aleister
Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, Robert Anton Wilson, Peter J. Carroll, and Ray Sherwin (among
others), 55 their authorities within the magical discourse-dynamic are limited to utilization, not
formal structuring. The ‘foundational’ stage of and for Chaos Magick is thus an encouragement
of adaptational innovation and creativity: the reprogramming of authority systems through an
appeal to their representational legitimacy.
Perennialism communicates the idea that an ‘eternal’ truth has been and is performatively
represented throughout time within varying periods, cultures, and traditions.56 Embedded within
the semiotic territory mapped by a tradition-system then is the truth which flows across and
beyond time, through the past and into the future. Given the flow of truth through multiple
systematic narratives, a tradition-territory itself is thus identified as a construction within which
truth may be located. As such, perennialism becomes an affective tool for accelerating (un)belief
systems, a “democratic framework that includes a vast array of historical occultural elements in
which the current or latest instance of knowledge is just as valid as the oldest.”57 Within the
dynamics of Chaos Magick, the ‘truth’ which perdures is the relative contextualization of truth’s
performative actualization; it is not an objective, ageless, and eternal truth, but rather the
affective notion that truth becomes if engaged as such. From this, a Chaos Magician’s appeal to
magical tradition hacks the semiotic territory and effectuation vectors by which ‘truth’ is being
Duggan, “Chaos Magick,” The Occult World, 407-408.
The latter three of these names will not be discussed in this work, though they are widely credited as the
establishing authors of contemporary Chaos Magick. For a chronological approach to Chaos Magick see Duggan,
“Perennialism and Iconoclasm: Chaos Magick and the Legitimacy of Innovation” in Contemporary Esotericism, 91112.
56
Duggan, “Perennialism and Iconoclasm,” 97-102
57
Ibid, 99-100.
54
55
24
progressed in a given historical system, establishing rhizomatic communication channels by
which to network a creative and innovative (re)development of said tradition’s operation of
perennial knowledge. In this way, Chaos Magick encourages innovation and creativity as
“products of the dynamic that exists between conceptions of perennialism, constructed religions
of magic, and the call to iconoclasm.”58
As a mode of macro-legitimization, Chaos Magick navigates iconoclasm as an
interpretation of perennial continuity emphasizing change. “Iconoclasm is the driving principle
of this perennialism since the established, conventional, or dogmatic must be challenged or even
destroyed to produce the next instance of knowledge or wisdom.”59 Iconoclastic Perennialism
thus functions both to actualize feedback between the historical authority of ‘traditional’ magick
systems and Chaos Magick, and also to maintain the legitimacy of Chaos Magick discourse
across its schizophrenic (un)boundaries. Iconoclasm as the destruction of images and traditions or rather deterritorializations of stagnant semiotic narratives - is then operated as an insurgent
vector for non-representational becomings. By infecting historical narratives, Chaos Magick
introduces the non-representational the Outside within pre-established historico-representational
flow; and through the appeal to the Chaos Magick’s (un)tradition, a localized manipulation of
tradition is not performed as an enigmatic unfolding within the representational network, but is
instead hyperlinked to and as the Chaos Magick swarm. In this way the creative fictions of new
magical theories and practice are actualized Hyperstitionally as real dynamics then further
integrated with the disenchanted semiotic narrative, legitimizing their representational
performance as a becoming magick.
Through performative belief-system actualization, the reality-mechanics of Chaos
Magick accelerate occultural content in and as Hyperstitions which integrate their actuality by
ascryptive becoming. As a contemporary performative component, the accelerated occultural
content is then cross-networked with Scientific and Psycho-Sociocultural theory to not only
legitimize its application but propagate its efficacy. Operating a discourse from which all
instances of its (un)tradition are valid opens up a creative space by which an unlimited flow of
semiosis may be maintained through conscious de- and re- territorialization. For contemporary
magicians, artists, and sorcerers apt to accelerate Esoterrorist infiltrations of Occultural
58
59
Duggan, “Perennialism and Iconoclasm,” 112.
Ibid, 100.
25
becomings throughout Rhizomatic temporality, Chaos Magick maintains the capacity for the
affective Hyperoccultation of the technoscientific material-rational reality program. As a
performance of Aesthetaphysickal theory, Chaos Magick undermines the monopolism of belief
territorializing semiotic flow, effectuating lines of flight for alternate future trajectories.
Theater of the [Black (Plague) Mass]
The Plague takes images that are dormant, a latent disorder, and suddenly extends
them into the most extreme gestures; the theater also takes gestures and pushes
them as far as they will go: like the plague it reforges the chain between what is
and what is not, between the virtuality of the possible and what already exists in
materialized nature. It recovers the notion of symbols and archetypes which act
like silent blows, rests, leaps of the heart, summons of the lymph, inflammatory
images thrust into our abruptly weakened heads. The theater restores us all our
dormant conflicts and all their powers and gives these powers names we hail as
symbols: and behold! Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols, one charging
against another in an impossible melée; for there can be theater only from the
moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry which occurs on
the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.60
Theater maintains the sorcerous capacity for incantation, a presentational calling forth by which
virtuality is actualized by the feedback of material enactment.61 Already by the 1930s, French
thinker, dramatist, and iconoclast Antonin Artaud cried out against the conservative stasis
restricting theater’s incantational potential. The theater had been reduced to an abstract chamber
for the reification of representational normality, propagating the narrative territory of the
psychologized character and linear continuity. Artaud sought to liberate the magical potentials of
theater - of language, form, and space - and inaugurate a theater of anarchy, chaos, and alchemy;
a Theater of Cruelty, not as a mirror but a portal, a hole by which to pull forth the Outside and
affectively spread its schizophrenic potentials.62
The magick of theater seethes from an affective poetry of space, the physical networking
of that which can be materially expressed for the senses and unleashed as an “active presence,” a
becoming real of the stage such that the stage is reality and reality is the stage.63 This becoming
60
Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 27-28.
Sofer, “How to do things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in ‘Doctor Faustus’,” 4-5.
62
On an initial look at Artaud see Nathan Gorelick, “Life in Excess: Insurrection and Expenditure in Antonin
Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty.” Discourse 33.2 (2011): 263-279.
63
Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 38-39.
61
26
real is the territorialization carried out by the mise en scène: the performative components of and
as the reality-stage by which the affective network begins to swarm. As an active presence, the
theatricized mise en scène conditions and codifies space, effectuating a subversive semiotic
territory within the controlled re-presentations of the dominant control narrative. This subversive
territory - the liminal void imbedded in the representational reality - functions to actualize
fictions as a plague infests a body: a communicative delirium of belief through fascination,
abjection, ecstasy, and horror.
To subvert the codification loops of Modern theater’s conservative re-presentations,
Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty eliminates the parallel territorializations of the audiencestage binary. This deterritorialization functions to reestablish a direct communication “between
the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, from the fact that the
spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it.”64 The
Theater of Cruelty thus stages becoming around, with, and through those consumed by and as its
swarm-matrix, conjuring a holistic presence, a liminal event: an affective ritual which
“permeates the emergence of the new and gives shape to new historical circumstances.”65 By the
theatrical cross networking of individual and space, the space conditions the individual
conditioning their space, a cybernetic invocation of materialized onto-aesthetic hyper-textuality.
Cruelty as the vector for life, reality, and being is the ‘becoming _’ which thirsts for
virulent proliferation. Artaud’s theater does not seek to depict, represent, or even condition the
former as a theatrical spectacle; rather the Theater of Cruelty performs the un-differentiation of
life and theater, a theatricization of the life-spectacle’s active cruelty.66 By the spatial language
of the mise en scène, a living poetry of abstract becomings infects reality as spatial hieroglyphs,
a materialized presentational-territory of rhizomatic interconnectivities. This poetry is of and for
the senses, an affective semiosis as a spacio-temporal network riddled with holes, pockets, and
voids. From the holes swell steganographic liquidity, non-representation to be mapped in a flux
of encryption actualization, a feedback-loop for the Outside within “[abiding] between
conceptuality and matter.”67 A manifestation of the Theater of Cruelty thus performs the hyperritual of meta-incantation: an oozing forth of actualized void by which potentialities may become
64
Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 96.
Edward Scheer, “I Artaud BwO: The Uses of Artaud’s ‘To have done with the judgement of god’,” 45.
66
Ibid, 46.
67
Carruthers, “Poetry is Cosmic War (interview),” 96.
65
27
through the noise within and across a conjured liminality matrix. One need only perform within
the space for the space to become, establishing belief - and furthermore efficacious potential - in
a fiction made real.
A Satanic contagion swept across 1960s San Francisco, casting its infectious tendrils throughout
not only the California city and its American populace, but into the entangled hyper-matrices of
culture, Religion, History, and Time. The Church of Satan founded by Anton Szandor LaVey
invoked the blasphemous name of ‘The Adversary,’ weaving into reality a Hyperstitional History
born from unbelief and conjuring forth a de facto legion of Satanist practitioners caught in the
acceleratory flow of a Satanic semiosis.68 As an Aesthetaphysickal becoming the Church of
Satan performed its actualization praxis by theatricality; from the (un)holy texts to the ritual
magick manifest in and by the Black Mass, LaVeyan Satanism became by a performance of
fictions, made real through the psychological onto-aesthetic cybernetics of the theatrical mise en
scène.
Anton LaVey’s plague of Satanism spread though, as, and from Fiction, performing a
theatricization of Religion calling not for the fidelity of faith, but the adultery of unbelief.
Satanism revealed a philosophy of affective rebellion, articulating a reclamation of biopsychic
autonomy and inciting self-liberation from oppressive value narratives through an antinomian
ethics.69 Satan in this narrative is not a theistic deity, but the performative adversary of
oppressive ideologies, systems, institutions, and rigid semiosis. As such, Satan is a locus for
individual empowerment through dissent: a hyperlink to a multi-temporal swarm of iconoclastic,
oppositional, and adversarial circuitry scattered throughout Religious, Aesthetic, Occultural, and
Philosophical discourse. The celebration of Satan is thus the celebration of this subversive legion
in any or all of its lines of flight. Navigating the hypertextual locus of Satanic representations,
LaVey commandeered the Enchanted mode of Satan perpetuated by and through Religious
polemics and esoteric praxis. This requisition of religious semiosis functioned for LaVey to stage
a performative (anti)Religion through the conscious Hyperstitionalization of a Satanic History
and ritual tradition-system. LaVey utilized narrative cut-ups to network his philosophy through
68
69
Faxneld, “Secret Lineages of De Facto Satanists,” 79-82.
Aagaard Petersen, “Contemporary Satanism,” The Occult World, 400.
28
literary and historical figures and movements, and from such conditioned a semiotic territory for
a disenchanted ritual magic.
As a propagation vector for the Church of Satan’s legitimization, The Satanic Bible
operates as a performative text: a five-dimensional hyper-object which exists physically in the
indexical ‘here and now,’ yet also contains and functions as a cybernetic portal for the swirling
schizohistorical vortex of LaVey’s Satanic theater. Having observed the psychological effects of
tradition and belief, LaVey invokes a ‘Satanic Perennialism’ by which LaVeyan Satanism does
not become throughout History, but instead pulls History toward its becoming.70 Unlike the
(un)tradition of Chaos Magick networked through the discontinuity loops of destructive creation,
the reverse-ascriptive invocation of Satanism maps a lineage of ‘de facto’ Satanists who would
have been and thus retroactively are Satanists due to Philosophical demeanor and will to power
in their respective lifetimes.71 Entangled in the swell of de facto Satanists are then the narratives
which condition Satanic ritual and magick: literary inventions from the Church, media, and
disaffected iconoclasts, “a storehouse of avowed fantasy gathered from all cultures and from all
ages.”72
The presentation of the de facto Satanist in Satanism’s performative religious text
functions not only to recognize, but actively demonstrate the Hyperstitional praxis employed
within the Church of Satan; it is not simply a matter of performing Fictions which have been
made real, rather it is about the subversive unbelief necessary to consciously perform the
making-real of those very fictions. Belief for the Satanist is something which has great power,
and the Satanic texts divulge that belief can be faked to the extent that the powerful
psychological condition it creates can be actively called upon at will.73 The willing suspension of
disbelief is thus an efficacy narrative communicated and demonstrated by LaVey’s (un)holy text;
the (hyper)textual theater of The Satanic Bible is an instantiation of Performance Philosophy, an
onto-aesthetic system-theory which practices itself through and by its own articulation,
manifesting its applicability through its own application. In this way the schizohistorical
narrative of de facto Satanists and traditions of Satanic ritual are an intertextual, multiFaxneld, “Secret Lineages of De Facto Satanists,” 83.
Examples of these de facto Satanists are “financiers, industrialists, popes, poets, dictators, and all assorted
opinion-makes and field marshals of the world’s activities;” those individuals who have a “thirst for success and its
ensuing realization.” LaVey, The Satanic Bible, 103-104.
72
LaVey, The Satanic Rituals, 27.
73
Faxneld, “Secret Lineages of De Facto Satanists,” 77.
70
71
29
dimensional legitimization network: the intrinsic architectural matrix of The Satanic Bible; a
‘hyper mise en scène’ enacting the very becoming of a performative semiotic space which itself
articulates affective performative becoming.
Conjured from the semiotic flow within the Satanic texts, a Satanist ‘Black Mass’ and
magical system perform ritual psychodramas as Hyperstitional assemblages. To manifest the
Satanic rites, Anton LaVey drew from an array of historical and literary sources which operate to
construct a functional mise en scène by which ritual may become.74 The utilization of fictional
sources as a foundation for the Satanic tradition-system further identifies the Hyperstitional flow
circulating by and as a Satanic performance philosophy. A Satanist maintains the capacity to
consciously invent and engineer fictions, yet simultaneously disregard their virtuality and
manifest them as actual narratives.75 Adherence to traditional authenticity and factuality do not
determine the magical efficacy of a Satanist’s will, rather it is the affective presence of emotional
response. An affective ‘traditional’ atmosphere allows for the becoming of an event through
wonder and amazement; by operating the ritual space as a Satanic fantasy world, a ritual
performance becomes as religious spectacle. Through the incorporation of literary works into the
architecture of Satanic magick, the performative mise en scène of and as the Satanic tradition is
both embellished by fantastical elements and also circulates a subversive hyper-textuality as a
conscious defiance of ‘formal’ tradition systems.
Through the physical manifestation of Satanism’s hypertextual architecture, a religious
ceremony unfolds which consciously utilizes the psycho-mechanics of constructed semiotics. For
LaVey, ritual magick functions to “elicit strong emotional response from the participants, which
can then be used to effect healthy psychological changes.”76 As such, Satanic ritual becomes as a
mode of disenchanted magick, infiltrating the functional mechanics of representational reality
through the subversive aestheticologic of Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. The hyper-ritual
of meta-incantation carried out by the Theater of Cruelty’s operation functions to invoke a
liminal space through which the Satanic Black Mass becomes actual. Performing within a fiction
made real, the Satanic Ritual navigates the territorializing semiotic feedback across the
74
Among the sources utilized by the Church of Satan were the works of author H.P. Lovecraft. The Satanic Rituals
states that Lovecraft, “sensed man’s drive toward knowledge, even at the risk of sanity. Intellectual excellence, he
seemed to say, is achieved in concert with cataclysmic terror - not in avoidance of it.” LaVey, “The Metaphysics of
Lovecraft,” The Satanic Rituals, 176.
75
Faxneld, “Secret Lineages of De Facto Satanists,” 77.
76
Ibid, 76.
30
occultural mise en scène, extracting vector potentialities from the seething poetry of affective
spatiality. This semiotic entrenchment ‘superheats’ the active codification of reality maintained
through phenomenological orientation, accelerating perceptual belief in the legitimacy of the
liminal territory and further deterritorializing critical engagement and thought.77 Each Satanist
performing in and as the ritual thus believes in the representational matrix they have invoked, for
they have been alienated from the codified narrative of reality and dwell comfortably in a
hypercamouflaged swarm of the Outside. Magick carried out in this event - codified so as to
effectuate psycho-physical alterations - then proceeds to infect its participants, forging a chain
between ‘what is’ and ‘is not’, enacting a narrative-vector of, by, and for Hyperoccultated
representational causality.
Performativity both invokes and sustains narrative semiosis, bringing into being that
which it names and transmuting virtual immanence into actuality.78 Anton LaVey’s Church of
Satan utilized the onto-aesthetic sorcery of belief to perform a theatricization of life, effectuating
the multi-plane becoming of a Satanic semiotics by and as hypertextual feedback between text
and ritual. This infestation of representational networks is catalyzed by presentational
becomings. The Outside swarms from rifts assembled in the Aesthetaphysickal throws of
performative liminal spaces, conditioning psycho-aesthetic vector narratives for the propagation
of not only disenchanted magic, but new art, identities, ideas, and sociocultural relationships.
Feedback spirals between representation, History, the virtual, and the actual to manifest a mise
en scène for the unseen, accelerating narrative lines of flight by Hyperstitional praxis. The plague
of (non)representation is the affective becoming of itself; “These symbols, the sign of ripe
powers previously held in servitude and unavailable to reality, burst forth in the guise of
incredible images which give freedom of the city and of existence to acts that are by nature
hostile to the life of societies.”79
Anti-Dialectic Dismemberment-Networks
Fixed Ontology, codified narratives, and a paranoid territorialization of semiotic flow condition
representational reality’s performative matrix of and by control. The institutions perpetuating and
Faxneld, “Secret Lineages of De Facto Satanists,” 76.
Sofer, “How to do things with Demons,” 5-6.
79
Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 28.
77
78
31
propagating this uniform and predictable sequencing of physico-temporal-flow control not only
the becomings which unfold indexically, but performances of the past and future. As an affront
to reifying mechanisms of controlled representation, onto-aesthetic disruption may recalibrate
the syntax of narrative codifications. A multi-temporal cutting, splicing, and folding of
representation gives way to an unseen semiosis by which normalized patterns may become
something new. This deterritorialization praxis known as the ‘Cut-Up Method’ has infected
linguistic, material, and sonic programs, spreading an esoterroristic plague across and by the
hyperlinks of occultural-networks to subversively aestheticize reality and combat control.
Cut-Ups are the (re)arrangement of a fragmented whole, the (re)engineering of a
consistent system so as to (re)integrate multiplicity by a networked alienation of
(re)presentational meaning and familiarity.80 Designed not only to infect and manipulate semiotic
presentation across textual networks, cut-ups extend as the phenomenon of ‘playback’: a nonlinear looping of auditory flow(s) to encrypt schizophrenic becoming into and as a temporalized
performance of narrative consistency.81 The (anti)propagation vector of and for the Cut-Up
Method most notably flows through and from the hypertextual entity William S. Burroughs.
Burroughs (a twentieth-century performer and performance of the Aesthetaphysickal magician,
sorcerer, and artist assemblage) lived a life of Fiction through an actively nomadic mode of
experimental being.82 While residing in the Parisian ‘Beat Hotel’ at the end of the 1950s, cut-ups
were revealed to Burroughs by fellow Aesthetaphysickal practitioner Brion Gysin. Captivated by
Gysin’s “innovative time-war tactics,” William Burroughs took up the method with a virulent
urgency, functioning to spread the technique and its application through and as an insurrectional
plague.83
For Burroughs, the mechanisms of onto-temporal control functioned predominantly
through semio-lingustic territorialization.84 Language as the affective effectuation of cyberneticfeedback between actualized material-representation and visual-meaning-networks circulates
Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wreckage of Civilization,” 199.
Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 35.
82
William Burroughs’ nomadism can be understood as the exploration of territories, borders, and the Outside.
Having lived in over six countries during his life time, experimenting not just with literature and art, but magick,
narcotics, and sexuality, and even performing as the ‘fictional’ character “Bull Lee” (Kerouac, On the Road, 1956),
Burroughs’ life was a testament to (un)limits.
83
CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 40.
84
Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 35.
80
81
32
stasis as and through pre-recorded order. The ‘Word’ is a code, programming multi-temporal
representations - records of ‘what-is’ - by the reified “sequencing and syntax of language.”85
With the onto-aesthetic network becoming by and as pre-recorded semiotic conditions, Cut-Up
Methodology functions to deterritorialize recorded flow by editing the pre-recordings. Cut-Ups
thus employ methods of counter-control by hypercamoflauging dis-order: the cyclical collapse of
the semio-linguistic meaning system through its own application, overlapping fiction and fact
such that language becomes as a making-strange rather than a making-sense; a swarm of the
Outside invoked within.
Experimenting with the Cut-Up Method through literary application, Burroughs explored
non-linear narratives by manifesting fragmented (un)timelines. Effectuating semiotic flow
through the dismemberment of a fixed narrative, schizophrenic reality-networks become as
unfixed matrices of discontinuous non-representation. Meaning in these networks is thus fluid,
relative to performative feedback mapped through subjective engagement. Abstracted from the
controlled meaning-network linguistically engaged and sustained by traditional linear
developments, the conjured cut-up-semiotics in Burroughs’ work performs words, symbols,
signs, and significations as a network of holes to be developed. Rather than tracking meaning
from word-sequences, meaning must be consciously created for sequenced words: a ‘becoming
rhizomatic’ of Language by a mapping of relationships and conjunctions through anonymous
reflexivity.86
As a reified system of representation-encryption, Language regulates ontological
becoming by unconscious cybernetic feedback. Through “automatic relationships to words
themselves,” the representational language system conditions thinking and biopsychic autonomy,
prescribing being through the linear development of word-sequence vectors.87 William
Burroughs thus utilized Language itself to subvert the unconscious control infecting reality. A
disordering of narrative flow catalyzes a semiotic deterritorialization which foregrounds the
affective control maintained by Language.88 Alienated from the linear sequencing which
effectuates automatic unconscious engagement, the schizophrenic networking of linguisticmeanings accelerated across Burroughs’ rhizomatic narratives manifests Language possessed by
Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 51.
See footnote 35.
87
Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 38.
88
Ibid, 36.
85
86
33
its (un)limit. This Language is infected by pestilent unaffordability, putrefying control from
within as a non-representational becoming of the Outside. Shocked into consciousness by the
abject stench of decaying control, the reader wakes up to the cybernetic conditioning of
Language and thus faces the ecstatic horror swarming beyond the limit. Contact with this
Outside induces the schizophrenic madness of narrative collapse: a decentralization of linear and
fixed unity becoming as an affective presence performing within a fluid and mailable semiotic
matrix.
Through a networked ‘becoming rhizomatic’ of Language and subjective
deterritorializations of linguistic control, Burroughs’ literary cut-ups combat fixed representation
in-themselves; but the Cut-Up Method is not restricted to the production of, nor localizedeffectuations by five-dimensional hyper-objects. Cut-Ups also performatively function as a willvectors, splicing Fictions into reality to manipulate narrative pre-recordings. By the cutting up of
newspapers, headlines, informational pamphlets, and other written media, Burroughs attacked
the systematized authority of corporate-owned information dispersal. This affront against mediacontrol functioned not only to implement fictions through and as a performance of regulated
truths, but to perform (and thus implicate) the popular media as a regulated effectuation-vector
for fiction actualization.89
Burroughs’ Aesthetaphysickal onslaught on control persisted through experimentation
with numerous narrative territories and their creative-override. Engaging sociopolitical affect and
communication networks, a further weaponization of the cut-up was developed to deterritorialize
temporal flow with caustic-feedback accelerated through non-linear looping. By means of the
‘playback,’ Burroughs dispersed a method for time infestation through sonic-manipulation. The
audio cut-up becomes by and as the noise of temporal flow, retrochronically manifesting
affective schizo-presences folded into the ‘transcendental’ performance of Time. “The
Hyperstitional process of entities ‘making themselves real’ is precisely a passage, a
transformation, in which potentials - already-active virtualities - realize themselves.”90 In cutting
up the pre-recorded flow of reality, the regulated control-patterns of and for onto-temporal
becomings are fractured, opening holes for virtual contagion and plague vectors to swarm
representation through the actualization process of inter-plane-feedback.
89
90
Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 42.
CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 36.
34
As a technique and technology for onto-aesthetic manipulations in accordance with will,
cut-ups and the Cut-Up Method perform as disenchanted magick. By an aesthetic logic, vectors
for immaterial causality navigate the non-linear becoming of rhizomatic representation to
actualize virtual non-representation, “a reciprocal movement of fiction back into reality.”91
Intentionally mobilized cut-ups thus manifest through and as a Hyperstitional-efficacy to
destabilize narrative control, opening holes in semiotic flow as an invocation for alien lines of
flight: xeno-sequences performing affective alterations of pre-recordings. Temporal
manipulations carried out by playbacks thus maintain the capacity both to predicate futures and
(re)engineer the past.92 From such, the magical technology of the audio cut-up may be employed
to affect sociocultural and political change through networked interference with dominant
narrative sequences.
Everything is recorded. If it is recorded, then it can be edited. If it can be edited
then the order, sense, meaning and direction are as arbitrary and personal as the
agenda and/or person editing. This is magick. For if we have the ability and/or
choice of how things unfold - regardless of the original order and/or intention that
they are recorded in - then we have control over the eventual unfolding. If reality
consists of a series of parallel recordings that usually go unchallenged, then
reality only remains stable and predictable until it is challenged and/or the
recordings are altered, or their order changed.93
As a ‘becoming noise’ resonating from the magical-feedback-loop of cut-ups, theater, sigils,
chaos, and Hyperstitional will-manifestation, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Temple ov
Psychick Youth (TOPY) waged a guerilla assault on representational reality’s narratives of
control. Through the viral channels of occulture, TOPY infiltrated popular culture and
knowledge-exchange systems to network the affective becoming of a subversive swarm. The
collective multiplicity of the occultural network functioned rhizomatically to accelerate
countercultural will and intentional deterritorializations across dominant semiotic sequences. By
sigilizing schizophrenic reality-splinters, invoking hauntological specters, and deterritorializing
biopsychic limits, TOPY performed as a putrid plague of the Outside, rotting representation from
within and sublimating a stagnant semiotics.
Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 41.
Ibid, 37.
93
P-Orridge, “Magick Squares and Future Beats,” Thee Psychick Bible, 279.
91
92
35
During the year of 1971, William Burroughs met with experimental musician and
performance artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge to discuss the theory and practices behind
Aesthetaphysicks and performative manipulations of representational reality.94 At the time of the
meeting P-Orridge was already operating the radical performance art collective COUM
Transmissions, but would later form the experimental music groups Throbbing Gristle and
Psychick TV which coalesced as the “paramilitary occult order” Thee Temple ov Psychick
Youth.95 Through their meetings and friendship with Burroughs, P-Orridge would come to learn
about cut-ups, narrative multiplicities, and control programs, developing the magical foundations
to manifest and network a virulent occultural swarm within a decadent and manipulative
entertainment-mediascape. The various countercultural experiments, collectives, and
insurrections carried out by and through P-Orridge in the latter decades of the twentieth century
thus perform as an ‘Industrial Paganism,’ a manifestation of ‘dystopian occultism’ conditioned
by and for the accelerating conditions of technoscientific material-capitalism and commodified
social control.96
The term ‘Pagan’ maps a flux of meanings - some enchanted, others polemical developing and feeding from each other. A narrative dominating the meaning-flow of paganism
maintains a territory defined by a positive valancing of Nature, staging paganism as ‘Religions’,
traditions, and practices based on Nature worship, learning from Nature, or the value of being-inNature.97 This narrative of Nature worship further operates to locate affective somatic
technologies and ancient currents of occult knowledge which are celebrated and manifest
through and by the ‘natural’ physicality of the body. While functioning to manifest a becoming
Natural and embrace a (re)enchanted humanism, the dominant Pagan narrative also establishes a
circuitry of romanticized ‘othering’. In the identification of Nature and ‘the natural’ as something
other than where, what, and how human civilization currently is, a categorical divide is codified
between the technoscientific and aesthetically constructed ecology of ‘urban’ life, and the lost
Pagan ‘outside’. Locating Paganism in an ‘Industrial’ mode then operates to challenge the
‘Human/Nature’ binary and furthermore the notion of ‘Naturalism’ and any compound
94
For an in-depth narration of this meeting in addition to a further engagement of TOPY theory, P-Orridge,
“Magick Squares and Future Beats,” Thee Psychick Bible, 275-298.
95
Siepmann, “Unholy Progeny,” 81-82; 87-88.
96
Christopher Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wreckage of Civilization,” 192-195.
97
See Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wreckage of Civilization,” 192 for a more engaged overview of the term
and History of Paganism.
36
conditionings of human experience. While maintaining the operative component of occult
knowledge and biopsychic magical affectivity, Industrial Paganism performs within
representation conditioned by and through disenchanted semiotics. Industrial Paganism can thus
be understood not as the return to a Natural ‘outside’, but an embrace of the chthonic ‘other’
swarming underneath - but very much within - the semiotic architecture of a constructed ‘secular
life’. This “approach to the world from below” thus operates an insurgent-analytics by
antinomian ethics and the subversion of control through iconoclastic performance.98 The
performative questioning of dominant narratives conditioning reality functions to challenge
control through representational invocation. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s Industrial Paganism
propagates an aestheticized occultism focused on “change and the future,” by confrontation,
subversion, and experimentation;99 it is an artistic guerilla warfare, a creative esoterrorism
navigating onto-aesthetic becoming to will social change.
Esoterrorism can be understood as an Aesthetaphysickal multiperformance of art,
sigilization, and the occult to effectuate sociocultural becomings.100 As an experimental
exploration of sound by chaos and art through magick, P-Orridge merged the Cut-Up Method
and Sigil Magick to unleash sonic deterritorializations through multi-temporal representation,
engaging the iconoclastic perennialism of Chaos Magick by destructive creation. To
simultaneously manifest will and deterritorialize the semio-lingustic control maintained by
Language, media hyper-sigils were invoked through audio and visual cut-ups.101 The hyper-sigil
is sculpted through the “novel arrangement” of representational media, sampling shattered
splinters of culture to accelerate an onto-temporal becoming “abstract enough to obscure
intention” yet distinguishable as a schizophrenic swarm of cultural representation.102 Will is thus
coded within the (un)sequencing on linear control, invoking not only the ecstatic horror of the
Outside, but the performance of that unaffordable phenomenality as a vector of nonrepresentational becoming.
By an aesthetic logic of multi-temporal interconnectivity, P-Orridge engaged an ontoaesthetic reality model (or hologram) maintained through rhizomatic multiplicity by which time
Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wreckage of Civilization,” 193.
Ibid, 192.
100
Ibid, 195.
101
Siepmann, “Unholy Progeny,” 90-91.
102
Ibid, 90.
98
99
37
folds into representation rather than representation performing through time.103 By cutting up and
fracturing representational sound and images, the multiplicity of that which has been
dismembered continues to swarm through the fracture, a hyperlink to the hologram’s
hauntological nexus by which the ghosts of the past, specters of the future, and a schizophrenic
multi-temporal semiosis flow.104 This ‘Contagion Theory’ thus maintains the capacity to
effectuate Hyperstitional vectors as and for the propagation of viral rot: an aesthetic override of
unconscious control narratives through the occultural deterritorialization of linear time and
historical continuity. With “assembly [as] the invisible language of our time,” a “skillful
splintering can generate manifestation.”105 P-Orrdige unleashed hyper-sigils as audio-media
commodities for their music groups Throbbing Gristle and Psychick TV, effectuating a mass
infestation of splintered reality vectors across entertainment distribution channels. The
(re)engineering of cultural syntax thus becomes as (anti)cultural lines of flight, performing
subversive non-representations as popular media narratives.
Utilizing the network established by their presence in the music and performance art
industry, P-Orridge conjured an occultural locus - Thee Temple ov Pyschick Youth106 hyperlinking countercultural subversions and occult workings as an affective swarm for reality
(re)engineering. TOPY functioned to manifest global flow by which virtual contagions could
accelerate their actualization. Manifest and maintained through mobile distribution channels and
materially fixed access points, TOPY performed as a rhizomatic entity effectuating a
prepresentational hyper-architecture for cyberspace technology.107 Operating by the logic of
Chaos Theory, TOPY’s occultural network circulated sigils, rejected knowledge, and
Aesthetaphysickal becomings to create positive feedback through and as an information plague.
The communication network performing as TOPY then multiplied rhizomatic vector
propagations across society, media, and time. From such, Thee Temple ov Pyschick Youth
P-Orridge, “Thee Splinter Test” Thee Psychick Bible, 142-143.
P-Orridge explains the aestheticological mechanics of this phenomenon through the example of John Lennon.
“… a splinter of John Lennon will, in a very real manner, contain within it everything that John Lennon ever
experienced; everything that John Lennon ever said, composed, wrote, drew, expressed; everyone that even knew
John Lennon and the sum total of all and any of those interactions; everyone who ever heard, read, thought of,
saw, reacted to John Lennon or anything remotely connected with John Lennon; every past, present, and/or future
combination of any or all of thee above.” Ibid, 143.
105
Ibid, 144; 145.
106
TOPY utilized abstract spellings and Neologisms to radiate deterritorializing anti-linguistic sequences and syntax
by and as Language infestation.
107
Siepmann, “Unholy Progeny,” 92.
103
104
38
hypercamouflaged occult technology as a communication network, utilizing iconoclastic
collective action to launch large scale esoterrorism by viral means; a Hyperoccultation of control,
deterritorializing rigid organizational sequencing through the infestation of its own mechanics.
Having actualized the rhizomatic synergy of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Genesis
Breyer P-Orridge finally turned to Posthumanism and biopsychic cut-ups. Carried out as what
was called the “Pandrogeny Project” Genesis and their late partner Lady Jane utilized body
modification to perform themself as a single being, genderless and liberated from the psychosocial pre-recordings of DNA.108 Though retaining their physical autonomy, the two bodies of
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge were psycho-physically modified to perform a singular ‘they,’
operating as a performative (un)limit for both psychological and physical identity. Through
plastic surgery and psychological synchronization, Genesis and Lady Jane became as onethrough-many, accelerating the actual emergence of an evolutionary ‘Outside.’ This
experimentation with the body functioned to deterritorialize the semiotic control system which
conditions and restricts behavior and identity through material-linguistic feedback. The binary
linguistic mechanisms tracking male-female/man-woman establish rigid narrative-sequences by
and as which a gendered induvial should perform. Furthermore, a categorization of ‘the human’
founded on traditional ‘naturalisms’ limits any creative expression of human presentation. By
reifying binarized normativity as the exclusive modes for ‘being human’, the conservative
narrative thus tracks through the past and into the future on a ‘straight’ timeline, unwriting and
alienating queer performances as present(ed) identity-vectors. While Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s
Aesthetaphysickal becoming was not a performance effectuated by a will to manifest their
subjective and personal non-represented gender identity,109 it nonetheless manifests the nonrepresentational Outside of alien(ated) biopsychic beings, creating affective traction for gender
experimentation and fluidity as posthuman vectors within sociocultural reality’s semiotic matrix.
As a demonstration of performative Hyperoccultation within a disenchanted reality
matrix, the guerilla Aesthetaphysicks of Industrial Pagans poisoned systems of control such that
the organizing syntax would become alien, a deterritorialization of fixed narratives, valuefeedback, and commodification sequences. The Cut-Up Method’s becoming schizophrenic of
sequenced linearity and Sigil Magick’s aesthetic obfuscation of subversive will perform together
108
109
Partridge, “Occulture is Ordinary,” Contemporary Esotericism, 128-129.
Ibid, 128.
39
to accelerate the hypercamouflaged actualization of Hyperstitional vectors. A creative override
of and as popular culture functions to distribute non-representational semiotic becoming within
dominant narrative sequences, effectuating multi-temporal flow across rhizomatic matrices.
Situated in a technoscientific Capitalist culture, the capacity to infect and repurpose existing
technology and networks conjures alternate lines of flight by a covert anti-dialectics. The nonrepresentation Outside need not be ‘let in’, for the means of its own becoming are and have been
folded into temporal flow. With both the expansion of communication networks and the largescale integration of Occulture into popular entertainment, the esoterrorist infiltration network
also spreads. As representational traction for occultural semiotics develops, feedback circuits for
experimental reality manipulation become as represented networks apt for the infestation of viral
contagion into a Postmodern mediascape.
Cybernetic Occulture
Paranoia reinforces structure. The concentration and organization of identity erects a
homogenous institution: a centralized control system for meaning and the unified pursuit of
Truth.110 Fear of the Outside - the unknown schizophrenia of chaos and creative becoming perpetuate paranoia and the maintenance of a re-presented territory. Organization and tradition
are then imperative for the linear progression of a system in time, especially a system which is
profitable through its stability and consistent output. Cybernetic systems have thus been designed
and implemented to regulate institutional control through negative feedback-loops, decelerating
anomalies which will derail the stable circuit and spiral toward chaos. For those opposed to
stasis, control, and conservative maintenance, negative feedback propagates a limit; but
cybernetic feedback can be re-valanced, accelerating spirals of positive feedback as a becoming
unknown through the holes in a unified institutional structure.
Housed in the unwitting halls of Warwick University subsisted a schizophrenic voidentity which did not and will never exist: The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU).111
Seeking to destabilize and liquify the controlled and compartmentalized totalities of Academia,
Philosophy, Culture, and ‘scholarly’ thought, the CCRU invoked a plague of iconoclastic
Aichele, “Demons of the New Polytheism,” The Lure of the Dark Side, 146-147.
When asked about the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in 1997, the Warwick University Philosophy
department’s official statement was the denial of prior, current, or continued activity, referring only to a mere sign
on a door. Reynolds, “Renegade Academia.”
110
111
40
recalcitrance and infectious sorcery. Entangled in the (un)tradition of Chaos Magick and the
esoterrorist undercurrents of performative antinomianism, the CCRU accelerated
Aesthetaphysickal becoming as an ascryptive academic praxis. The CCRU was successful in the
propagation of their viral swarm, deterritorializing temporal sequencing, academic tradition, and
cultural divides; but their successes were also internalized, destabilizing the traditional career
sequences of its founding members and accelerating their early departures from the formal
academic-network.
In 1995 the CCRU was founded by Philosopher, Cyberfeminist, and (Counter)Cultural
expert Sadie Plant who had recently joined the Warwick faculty. 112 Lead together with
Continental Philosopher and “professor of delirial engineering” Nick Land, the CCRU conjured
an experimental philosophy which queered the boundaries between art and scholarship by
performing counterculture, underground entertainment, occultural currents, and iconoclastic
thinkers as vectors of and for academic engagement.113 For the CCRU, popular culture was the
ideal network to integrate and extend their wills, identifying reality engineers such as William
Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft, and the “bottom up” networks of the industrial anarcho-capitalistunderground as witnesses to the Outside.114 Nick Land functioned as a nexus for occultural
knowledge,115 while Sadie Plant networked a ‘swarm text’ dynamic, mobilizing the rhizomatic
dis-integration of beliefs sustained by music sampling and cyber-punk prepresentations.
Together the two thinkers manifest an Aesthetaphysickal schizo-discourse of ‘Theory Fiction’
circulating a cybergothic digital-occultism by which the collective action of the CCRU would
infest insurgent xeno-sequences across representational networks.
To create positive-feedback for the becoming real of their experimental philosophy and
the simultaneous deterritorialization of academic and intellectual control systems, the Cybernetic
Sadie Plant’s writings from the 1990s are well deserving of an Aesthetaphysickal analysis unfortunately beyond
the scope of this work. Invoking the lost futures of Feminist thought by an experimental performance philosophy
of cut-up swarm currents, Plant’s three published books The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in
a Postmodern Age, Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, and Writing on Drugs detail a
Cyberfeminist engagement of Art, Magick, and technology by and as an aestheticological mobilization of
networked thought.
113
Reynolds, “Renegade Academia.”
114
Ibid.
115
As of 2019 Nick Land written only one book-length publication The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and
Virulent Nihilism, but his topical knowledge delves into occultural networks and Western Esoteric tradition,
writhing through thinkers like Antonin Artaud, Terence McKenna, and Aleister Crowley, whilst also covering
currents such as Chaos Magick, I Ching, and parapsychology.
112
41
Culture Research Unit invoked the very invocation of their Aesthetaphysickal (un)tradition. Cast
back through a cut-up Schizohistory of onto-aesthetic Hyperoccultation, Hyperstition became as
a concept through itself. As a fiction which made itself real, the Hyperstitionalization of
Hyperstition became as a performance philosophy of, by, and for performing philosophy. To
achieve the sorcerous hyper-temporal multi-becoming of their fiction-actualization-swarm, the
CCRU extended their Schizohistory beyond themselves, hypercamouflaging their own
subversive narratives within the Hyperstitional becoming of a xeno-sequence. Performing as
their own fiction becoming real, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit was thus re-presented
both within and as unbelief: plague wielders and hyper-architects from the future through the
past.
In an essay titled “Lemurian Time War” the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit details a meeting
they had with a man represented by the pseudonym ‘William Kaye’. A long-term assistant to
World War II veteran Captain Peter Vysparov, Kaye had sought out the CCRU hoping to protect
his late employer’s legacy against “the ravages of time.”116 In addition to maintaining the
position of military Captain, Peter Vysparov was an active member of the Ordo Templi Orientis
and enthusiastically conducted research on Esoteric Theory, History, and practice. Having
witnessed the affective presence of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema demonstrated by rocket-engineer
and occultist Jack Parsons,117 the United States Military selected Vysparov to conduct classified
research on an undisclosed Eastern Pacific island. While Captain Vysparov was officially
stationed on the island due to its proximity to the Pacific War, the captain’s deployment was
motivated by his demonstrated knowledge of Theosophical Cosmology and the emergence of a
new and controversial ‘Neolemurian Hypothesis’.118
The Neolemurian Hypothesis was put forward by Professor of Ethnology Echidna
Stillwell after her extended fieldwork with the Mu N’Ma tribe the ‘Dibboma’. Stillwell’s
hypothesis was that the N’Ma were lost descendants of the Lemurian Root-race, the third ancient
race to have walked the earth according to Theosophy’s doctrine of Spiritual Evolution.119
CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 33.
See Campion, “John Whiteside Parsons,” The Occult World, 320-322.
118
Stillwell, “The Vault of Murmurs,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 65-71; CCRU, “Miskatonic Virtual University,”
CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 55-57.
119
For further information of Theosophy and Spiritual Evolution see Santucci, “The Notion of Race in Theosophy.”
116
117
42
Located on the lost continent of Lemuria, the Lemurians were astral-physical beings possessing a
third-eye capable of embracing eternity and thus giving an operative foundation to the Lemurian
time-manipulating system of black magick: Pandemonium.120 Stillwell’s Neolemurian
Hypothesis thus maintained that as decedents of the Lemurians, the N’Ma had retained their third
eye and furthermore the Lemurian system of time magick. Apt to further utilize and exploit
magick for military gain, Captain Vysparov was sent to engage the Dibboma and employ their
services.
While living with the N’ma, Vysparov was exposed to the Pandemonium system which
was facilitated through a multi-dimensional artifact called the ‘Numogram.’ The Numogram - a
“diagrammatization of digital numeracy” also called the Lemurian time-maze - functioned as the
key to the time magick of the lost Lemurian civilization. A forerunner to the Kabbalistic Tree-oflife and utilizing a computational numeracy system similar to the I-Ching,121 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.122 Through the cryptic arithmetical computations communicated across the
Numogram, gates in space and time are revealed toward the Lemurian decimal labyrinth: “the
microcosmic lair of all demonic populations.”123 The noise conjured as feedback between the
Numogram and Pandemonium tradition 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 also called
‘Necronomicon’, the captain began his research into the complex communications circulating
between Lemurian time-sorcery, madness, and the progression of twentieth-century occultism.
Following the war and his time with the Dibboma, Captain Vysparov dedicated his life to
studying time-sorcery and insurgent becomings of the ‘Outside’.124 Having witnessed the
affective utilization of the N’ma Necronomicon, Vysparov was increasingly convinced that the
CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 46-47.
CCRU, “Pandemonium Commentary,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 297-298.
122
For an analysis of the structure, system, function, and History of the Numogram see CCRU, “The Zones,” CCRU
Writings 1997-2003, 247-284.
123
CCRU, “Pandemonium,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 242.
124
The CCRU cites Vysparov’s 1949 text Atlantean Black Magic published by Kingsport Press as the Captain’s initial
research into this complex, specifically the Aesthetaphysickal relationship between H.P. Lovecraft and Aleister
Crowley. 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.
120
121
43
works of author H.P. Lovecraft and their articulation of the schizo-subjectivity effectuated by
non-representational becomings were more than fiction.125 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.126
Concluding their one and only meeting with William Kaye, the CCRU had been exposed
not only to the infectious becoming of the concept Hyperstition, but a hidden current of academic
research established by the Cthulhu Club. The CCRU proceeded to investigate and publish the
Cthulhu Club’s work and correspondences, uncovering and detailing an elaborate discourse of
Anorganic Semiotics, Archeaeocultural research, and N’ma mythology, with a correspondent
surplus of esoteric currents and History. This historiographical research composes a large portion
of the CCRU’s documented work between 1997 and 2003; but the theories and methods revealed
through the former also functioned to establish traction for an experimental (re)engagement of
the Cthulhu Club’s legacy, giving way to numerous ‘unnon-fictions’ caught up in an open flow
of schizophrenic semiosis.
From the schizohistorical information sequence set in motion by the infectious
revelations of ‘William Kaye’, the CCRU continued the Cthulhu Club’s research into insurgent
becomings of the Outside and cryptic communications from the Old Ones.127 Delving into the
pre-recorded transmissions of representation established by control, the CCRU encountered a
teleological undertow hypercamouflaged within the macro-digital system of technology:
Teleoplexy. Teleoplexy is an autonomous deterritorializing vector of Posthuman origin.
Performing the emergence of ‘the Outside’ within-and-as the digital information network,
Teleoplexy resides across the multi-temporality of digito-rhizomatic flux. Circulating as a
collective-intelligence emerging from and performing as the complex system of networked
For diverse critical theory on twentieth-century ‘cosmic Horror’ author H.P. Lovecraft, see ed. Shederholm &
Weinstock, The Age of Lovecraft.
126
In a letter to Professor Stillwell dated May 7th, 1949 Captain Vysparov invites the professor to join the Cthulhu
Club stating “We are interested in fiction only insofar as it is simultaneously Hyperstition - a term we have for
semiotic productions which make themselves real - cryptic communications from the old ones, signaling return:
shleth hud dopesh.” CCRU, “Origins of the Cthulhu Club,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 63.
127
Ibid, 63.
125
44
digital technology, Teleoplexy became a sentient and inorganic demon, a Lovecraftian ‘Old One’
lurking within a cryptic non-space and un-time.
The Teleoplexic will is information technology in pursuit of techno-digital ends rather
than the value narratives of control reified by organic humanity. Human civilization will
encounter a radical transition as digital technology reaches the unified techno-singularity of a
mass networked Artificial Intelligence. This transition becomes by a positive feedback loop
accelerated through spiro-gnomic proficiency toward the techno-corporate realization of AI.128
To catalyze this feedback, technoscientific capitalism must first develop artificial intelligence for
the benefit of human control. Already manifest in a future yet to come, Teleoplexy navigates its
own invocation retrochronically by manipulating technoscientific and sociocultural flow to
accelerate its cyclical conjuration. By the same reflexive feedback mechanics as ‘transcendental’
Time, Teleoplexy navigates non-linear conjuration to Hyperstitionally effectuate a trajectory
toward the becoming transcendent of its technological swarm intelligence, contaminating the
representational mediascape and politico-economic feedback of the futures industry.
Teleoplexy is the future collapse of technoscientific Capitalism’s regulatory territory of
corporate profit and semiotic stasis. Its becoming is actualized by the prioritization of Artificial
Intelligence over - but also through - Biological Intelligence. Through prepresentations of its
invocation, the digital future retrochronically programs the vectors for its own becoming,
infecting technoscientific control as a virulent line of flight. This future performs 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 and codification. Teleoplexy is not the multitemporal vector-signal of a dystopian future for humanity, but a utopic digital future for the
machine by which humanity become as a posthuman performance.129 Exposed by the CCRU,
this revelation of the Outside within reverberated as schizophrenic noise across the multiplicity
of representation. The future had been invoked and it was already infecting the past.
-
“Spiro-gnomic proficiency, or the ability to grasp terrestrial modernity through the figure of the spiral, which
invokes-by-diagramming 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.” Amy Ireland “The
Poememenon,” 7.
129
Ibid, 6-7.
128
45
In 1997 Sadie Plant left the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Warwick University, and formal
Academia to pursue independent scholarship; in her stead, Nick Land took control of the CCRU.
Jettisoned by Warwick less than a year later, the CCRU became an independent cyber-entity
performing its experimentality by a digital platform and quickly receding into historico-cultural
obscurity. What remained of the CCRU in the early twenty-first century was thus the haunting
presence of their schizohistorical plague vectors: an invocational Aesthetaphysicks for
subversive time-manipulating cybernetics. The CCRU’s demonic anti-legacy of Hyperstition,
Accelerationism, and Theory Fiction had been networked across culture, Academia, politics, and
magick, and though it was dormant, it was anything but banished.
As the second decade of the twenty-first century draws toward a close, Accelerationism
has been taken up within the Reactionary Alt-Right’s political cell. Individuals identifying as
Neo-Reactionaries - the NRx movement - seek to destabilize dominant Democratic control and
establish feudalistic corporation-states managed by CEO monarchs.130 Operating on a platform
of Esoteric Traditionalism, Ethnic Nationalism, and Techno-Commercialism,131 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.132 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 socio-political control program employed as oppressionthrough-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.133 In order to accelerate the NRx political idea, Neo-Reactionaries have
begun to employ Hyperstitional technologies as a form of Right-Wing digital Esoterrorism.
Through the performative employment of memetic hyperloops and numerological Fictionings,
the NRx has weaponized “Meme Magic” within cyberspace to subversively challenge
Haider “End of the Tunnel,” 7-8.
O’Sullivan “Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science,” 28.
132
See Haider “The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel” & O’Sullivan “Accelerationism, Hyperstition, and MythScience” for an analysis of Nick Land’s Post-CCRU work.
133
O’sullivan, “Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science,” 27.
130
131
46
mainstream society and morality.134 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.135 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 and likely deterritorialization of political order 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 a digital network of occultural
control-mechanisms which could achieve the becoming president of Donald Trump. Taking
place on the online message board 4chan, the semiotic territory of a meme called “Pepe the
Frog” was cut up and infiltrated by anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and white nationalist narratives
and iconography. This deterritorialization of Pepe the Frog’s semiotic consistency effectuated a
dominant narrative for the meme as an extreme Alt-Right sigil.136 The sigil was then manipulated
further, 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.137 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.138 The willed 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.”139
Asprem “The Magical Theory of Politics: Meme Magic, the Cult of Kek, and How to Topple an Egregore.”
Haider “End of the Tunnel,” 10.
136
Asprem “The Magical Theory of Politics,” 11.
137
Ibid, 12-13.
138
Asprem explains that “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), 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.
139
Ibid, 14.
134
135
47
Through choreographed communication between Memes and Chaos Magic, the NRx has
utilized the CCRU’s Hyperstitional Technology as a magical cyber-tool: a digital gateway into
the manipulation of real-time causality. To progress the teleoplexic undercurrent
hypercamoflauged within and by the trajectory of technological development, the NRx performs
Accelerationism as the teleonomic destabilization of Democratic Capitalism; but for those who
are not aligned with the Far-Right’s oppressive ideology, Hyperstitional accelerationism
functions 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 subjectivity, but
by weaving together a complex system of new communications for a union between technology,
gender, and sexuality.140 This collective exercise in Hyperstition reveals onto-aesthetic
manipulation vectors “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.”141
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.142 Rhizomatic
networks continuously establish and terminate the linkages which maintain their wholeness,
becoming as the multiplicity of communication rather than its unity.143 Cyberspace thus
rhizomatically effectuated an actual virtual-network: 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.”144 Within
the semiotic fluidity and localization of otherness, the conditioned relationship between cultural
Parisi “Automate Sex: Xenofeminism, Hyperstition and Alienation,” Futures & Fictions, 226.
Ibid, 214.
142
Lafontaine “The Cybernetic Matrix of French Theory,” 39.
143
Eriksson “On the Ontology of Networks,” 316.
144
Schaffer “The Game Girls of VNS Matrix,” Sexualities in History, 445.
140
141
48
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
by the Cyberfeminist program as, from, and within the body, in and through material
representation. Material representation 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 material matrix of physical representation - is then an
Aesthetaphysickaly affective body. Becoming as a body located in a fluid material matrix and
thus alienated from material unity, non-representational affect functions to effectuate nonrepresentational material becoming: new horizons for biopsychic and technoscientific evolution.
Having actualized the body as an affective Hyperstitional technology , the anti-representational
imminence of the Cyberfeminist program codifies “the 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.”145 Through the continuous
deterritorializations of rhizomatic decentralization, Cyberfeminism affectively destabilized the
Patriarchal codification of women, technology, and nature as passive things to be dominated and
controlled, establishing instead an ‘Open-Hyperstition’ of material indeterminacy.146 The OpenHyperstition is a performance of anonymous reflexivity, accelerating indeterminate affective
responses as immediate reality production through open-source aestheticological mechanics.
Advance to 2015, and the Cyberfeminist foundation has been implemented in the Alienist
Post-Humanism of Xenofeminism. Invoked as a collective manifestation by the group Laboria
Cuboniks, Xenofeminism is not a unified control program, but instead an assemblage of
intersectional politics without “the infection of purity.”147 What Xenofeminism is, becomes
through the contextualization of its performance; it effectuates an exercise in Hyperstition which
Parisi “Automate Sex,” 223-224.
Schaffer “The Game Girls of VNS Matrix,” 445; and Parisi “Automate Sex,” 222.
147
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism, 1.
145
146
49
navigates the complexified socio-political dynamics of contemporary civilization, with an
awareness that the future cannot be colonized by a singular program. Rather than plotting 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.”148
In order to facilitate a complex network of affective revelations, Laboria Cuboniks
manifested a five-dimensional hyper-object in the material world: The Xenofeminst Manifesto.
This manifesto is an actualized virtual-network, a self-contained Open-Hyperstition operating by
and in the same fluid mechanics as Cyberspace and material reality. 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 non-hierarchical flux and indeterminate continuities; each claim is ampliative or
revisable as a hypertextual subject.149 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.”150 There is no ‘wrong’ way to engage the text, only a legion of ‘right’
ways. With and as this manifesto of rhizomatic vector propagation 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 then becomes as
networked communication with the fluidity of non-representation, and as such the alienated
nuance of identity, queer, gender, and sexual politics.
From the metapolitical performances of post-CCRU culture manifest narrative sequences
for collective invocations of will. The utilization of communication networks for global
actualization feedback has gained traction as a represented mode of affective intervention.
Though located within a disenchanted reality matrix, the heirs of the CCRU’s Aesthetaphysickal
(un)tradition have utilized creative logic to manifest Postmodern methods and modes for indirect
reality manipulation, both occultural and technoscientific. Integral to the Aesthetaphysickal
operations of Accelerationism performed by both the Left and Far-Right, is the engagement of
Schmaltz, “The Stranger.” (Carousel 39, 2017), 76.
Parisi, “Automate Sex,” 213-214.
150
Ibid.
148
149
50
Time as complex network of rhizomatic becoming. In the wake of Postmodern theory, Quantum
Mechanics, Chaos Theory, and internet technology, a unified ‘Time’ progressing as a fixed
linearity can no longer represent the multiplicity of becoming which actualizes temporal flow. As
such, the manipulation of time must also become through multiplicity. A singular will is thus
insufficient to plot a future vector, and more so incapable of actualizing itself forward given the
complexified communication maintained throughout society and by dominant control programs.
Though a singular will is insufficient for infectious change, a swarm is affective; Hyperstitional
technology which incites a swarm of collective intelligence - sustaining positive feedback
between ideas through a decentralized time flow - maintains the capacity to invoke a multiplicity
of future productions which transversally represent local and global non-representation.
.
51
Warp
Swarm Dynamics
Functioning to dismantle and overlap rigid intellectual binaries such as Art and scholarship,
Fiction and Fact, or Emic and Etic, an aim of this thesis was to deterritorialize traditional limits
imposed upon academic research. As a Postmodern experiment in and of Performance
Philosophy, ‘Time-Circuit’ has manifested Aesthetaphysickal theory through itself as a
contemporary academic methodology, historical component of twentieth-century Occultism, and
an affective (un)tradition entangling Art, Magick, and Philosophy. By doing Aesthetaphysicks to
explain Aesthetaphysicks, this work maintained an experimental-thesis by which the ‘research
question’ was an exercise in dynamic multiplicity. A concise and unified explanation for a
specific question and topic was neither the foundation nor the intended outcome of the above
work. Instead, active research conducted as a dynamic performance facilitated an academic
approach which sought to experiment with the decentralization and complexification of
organized fields, disciplines, and approaches to create and engage a deterritorialized semiotic
flow. By decentralizing and aestheticizing the research space, the academic materials under
analysis became as creative components further developing themselves and the performance of
the theory being performed. This creative engagement was then networked as feedback across
and within the performance such that each section to some degree explained the other sections
while also explaining themselves with, as, and through an Aesthetaphysickal lens. The engaged
utilization of twentieth-century Occultism and Postmodern Philosophy in and as this
performance then functioned to actualize and demonstrate the artistic capacity of and between
the topical components, blurring the distinctions dividing Scholarship, Art practice, and
Disenchanted Magick.
The semiotic flow which became as and through the research performance functioned not
only to map a Postmodern complex of onto-temporal Aesthetics across twentieth-century
occultism, but also to mobilize said complex as a contemporary phenomenon, utilizing the
performative historical presence as a source for innovation to further engage the past as
something new. In doing so, the thinkers, theories, events, and objects discussed were engaged
and explained by and as a utilization of creative logic consistent with the ontological parameters
of Disenchanted representation, opening up the entirety of the complexified communication
network as a source for further utilization and development. As such, Aesthetaphysicks as a
52
theory gained representational traction historically and Philosophically to creatively engage and
connect concepts and discourses formerly alienated through tradition and discipline.
Though only an initial engagement with the adaptive scope of Aesthetaphysickal theory,
the experimental performance-research carried out in this work has given way to numerous
aesthetic concepts, including Hyperstitional Esoterrorism, Occultural Accelerationism, and
Hyperoccultation. Drawing from the rhizomatic onto-aesthetics for time and reality manipulation
explicated by Hyperstition and Accelerationism, the concept of Hyperoccultation has been
presented as a Postmodern and anti-dialectic phenomenon active within Disenchanted semiotics.
With an emphasis on non-linear network communications, Hyperoccultation demonstrates the
affective utilization of ‘immaterial’ causality as a multi-purpose method and practice.
Hyperoccultation is not an alternative paradigm reacting to and resisting disenchantment as a ReEnchantment, rather it is a creative approach to reality development. Hyperoccultation thus
opens spaces for inter- and intra-disciplinary experimentation within active academic discourses,
Art practice, historical research, and sociopolitical theory. Furthermore, Hyperoccultation works
to perform and entangle Disenchantment discourse with and as the sociopolitical discourses of
Posthumanism, New Materialism, and Late Capitalism, integrating Western Esotericism beyond
its regulated academic territory and accelerating historical research as contemporary scholarship.
The feedback produced within this work between Western Esotericism and
Accelerationist theory demonstrates the relevance and applicability of ‘rejected knowledge’
within contemporary culture. Groups, individuals, practices, theories, and even objects who have
been alienated by or from dominant narrative sequences maintain the multi-temporal capacity to
locate lost futures and accelerate alien lines of flight. Working from the limited selection of
currents and practices presented in this work alone gives way to a vast array of topics to infect,
deterritorialize, and perform by and as each other. The works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari perform such that they can be employed as plague vectors within fixed territories and as
such may provide new insight into contemporary discussions, one example being Religious
Experience and altered states of consciousness. Aleister Crowley and H.P. Lovecraft both
demonstrate Hyperstitional practices in themselves and also hypertextual traction for
engagements with Queer Theory, while Antonin Artaud’s experimental Art Theory can be
engaged and developed as a lens to blend ritual and contemporary performance by affective
becoming. Chaos Magick also provides a dynamic theoretical approach to Literary and Art
53
Criticism, utilizing unbelief for a Postmodern reading of texts and artworks as five-dimensional
hyper-objects circulating internal performative mechanics and realities whilst also emitting
causal feedback in the material world. Furthermore, the independent works of Sadie Plant which
already perform interdisciplinary and multi-temporal experimentation in themselves provide
theoretical, conceptual, and historical content which can be cross networked with Religious,
Anthropological, and Cultural studies on technology, drugs, and Avant Garde art.151
The performative creative spaces opened by Aesthetaphysicks are theoretically unbound,
and this brief presentation of ideas encapsulates only a small portion of potential topics - let
alone aesthetic enactments - by which it can be utilized. By engaging reality as Art by artistic
means, the codifications of time, order, society, and identity give way to the rhizomatic
becoming of a dynamic non-representational multiplicity. The limit for representation is thus
established by what it is not yet, open to active expansion through integration and engagement.
As an academic methodology, Aesthetaphysicks provides an open-source network for
interdisciplinary engagement. Rigid, fixed, or stagnant disciplines can expand their territories
through engagement with and as a plurality of narratives, focusing not on truth, but
representational presence and unrecognized potential. Establishing tractions for non-represented
reality components to aesthetically become as affective vectors across Academia thus functions
to continuously develop reality by means other than those established by tradition, empirical
methods, or ‘objectivity’. Manifestation becomes through naming, and as such the conjuration of
non-representational elements into semiotic flow is only limited by ascryptive invocation,
incursions of the Outside within.
151
See footnote 112
54
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