Hyperstition & The New Weird I (Session 1)

Okay. All right, so hi everyone. Can everyone hear me? Am I loud enough? Yeah, you're good. I can control your sound too. Okay. So just to start, I want to talk about the four terms, the entities, worlds, genres, and climates. And sort of talk about these and why I think those four terms make up a very basic equation for storytelling, but in a way that I think will be helpful for talking about hyperstition and talking about the new weird.

so generally how I kind of see it is that what hyperstition does and what it takes from the weird and the new weird is that it turns the subject into a character so the one basic fundamental thing is that it makes any appeal to subjectivity one that you have to realize you're just a character and that there's and that means a particular orientation towards the outside that you have to take on. So I think this... So generally, with the sort of introduction of a story, there's a relationship between entities and worlds right off the bat.

Basically, and it's very clear in genre fiction, you have things that populate a particular world, whether it's kinds of people or kinds of creatures or kinds of objects, and you have the world which is supposedly the container and or result of those things and those entities. And so what genre does, is genre is the sort of attempt to figure out what the rules and procedures are for relating the things in the world and the bounds of the world. So entities and world interact dialectically and following this, the emergence of the rules

of the genre and procedures arise alongside the character. And that the character uses these tools to the genre rules in conjunction with what the character does is what gives us the sort of climate or mood or emotional effect of the stories basically. So, and that that, the mood or the climate is the product of the story that's supposed to leave the story that we're supposed to take and that we're supposed to benefit from. And so I think the general consensus is that's where it stops. And hyperstition, which Amy and Tony will talk about more, is partly in the claim that

it doesn't stop there, that it actually feeds back into the world in a way that's more destructive or creative than we tend to admit. So just to flesh this out in a sort of genre example, to take a horror story or a horror film, you have the world that has a monster or a monstrous person in it, then the genre sets in once that's demonstrated. We see things as they normally are, and then the creature is slowly introduced, and the way it has to behave, and how the characters survive or don't survive, and that's supposed

to generate fear or whatever. So why weird fiction I think is interesting is because weird fiction came about before genre divisions in pulp fiction. So basically there's no difference between a ghost story or monster story or fantasy or horror or adventure really they're all kind of mashed together. So the sort of consequence of this is that the notion of world and the notion of entities in the weird is maximal. It's as big as it can be.

And why Lovecraft is considered the father of it, and what makes him particularly interesting for Hyperstition and for the CCRU, is that to him it's an actual, it's a material world. It's not a fantastic world that exists alongside or maybe before or after ours, but it's our world if you treated it as big and expansive as it could be. and all the creatures in his world could exist biologically. They're just as strange and as far-fetched as they could be, but they're not supernatural. They're what Michelle Welbeck and China Mayville talk about in terms of being supernormal. They're unlikely, but they're not supernatural.

And so, Lovecraft defines the weird as this, basically a story where there's outer unknown forces which temporarily suspend the laws of nature. And it's always not clear if he means the laws of nature as we know them or the laws of nature as they actually are. There's always a tension between whether it's our notion of the world or the world as it actually is maximally extended. The new weird is interesting because the new weird tries to return to this notion of the weird, but after everything's been chopped up into genres. The idea is how do you kind of put back, how do you kind of put this maximally extended world that's been split up into types of stories back into one weird world, basically?

And what does that mean to do that? So, and part of the result of this is that the weird and the new weird try to create worlds that are less parasitic upon what we know the world to be, either historically or presently. So whereas fantasy or certain horror fiction might be largely parasitic on our world, like like it's our world plus ghosts, or our world... Or it's like, you know, Game of Thrones is like the medieval times, but with these entities or something like that. The weird world creates its own mythos. It tries to say there's, you know, time and space are so massive

that there's these things we don't even have any previous reference to or can even imagine. The new weird tries to reconstruct that by recombining existing genres and the old weird into this even, like, redoubled maximally strange world. So, in a sense, I think hyperstition is sort of the next step in this process. It basically says that the effect or the mood that results from all of this can actually be a force of creating worlds and entities that is not genre-specific or even relegated to fiction per se.

And the result of this is that the creative subject becomes a character. They're under the whim of outside forces, but this doesn't absolve them of responsibility or creativity. Whereas Lovecraft, you have the easy escape that you go mad and then everything is over. Hyperstition basically says, no, we're actually responsible for creating different kinds of madness because we know that that's a fiction, but we know the potentiality of fiction at the same time. So I think that's kind of... Hopefully that makes sense, sort of a rough outline of how I see the four terms interrelating.

So I think with that, I'll turn it over to Tony. Okay, so thank you, Ben, for giving a great introduction to our seminar. I just want to kind of go over a few kind of structural points on how the format can be. The way that we're organizing it on our end is that we're kind of preparing about 10 to 15 minutes, 20 minutes of material to kind of share with you, but at the same time, we We don't want it to be like fundamentally everybody muted and have this lecture format. So if at any point in time that any of you guys want to interrupt, just feel free. If you guys are muted, unmute yourself, interrupt us. That's completely fine.

And what we'll do is we'll kind of do these prepared talks in the first half of the session and in the second half of the session. I kind of want to invite everybody in to have a discussion and hopefully we can relate it to material that you guys are currently working with or thinking about, and these sorts of things. Before I give, sort of jump into, like, before actually Amy will jump into a quick introduction of CCRU, and we get into hyperstition. Does anybody have any sort of questions for the basic format of the seminar, or the four points that Ben brought up? Okay, you guys can shake your heads if you don't want to say anything.

Yeah, okay, thank you. All right, so, Amy, would you mind, I'll bring Amy Ireland on. She's a PhD student in Australia, and she does some amazing work in xenopoetics, currently writing her PhD. And we've invited her on to talk about CCRU, hyperstition, and join our general discussion. So I'll pass it on to you. Thanks, Tony. Can everyone hear me okay? Yes. I'll take that as a yes. First thing I wanted to say was that being introduced as an expert in CCIU studies, Tony, like you said at the start, is exactly the kind of subject position that any interest in CCIU studies would negate.

So I deny all claims to being an expert in anything called CCIU studies. Yeah, an anti-expert in CCIU non-studies. So just to give some general context, I think, which is what you wanted, Tony, of what the CCIU is and how it's formed and what happened to it and how that led into the development of the concept of hyperstition. Which I think, I mean, looking at you guys, I think most of you already know a little bit of this stuff. But I'll run over it anyway. So the CCIU was set up at Warwick University in 1995 when Sadie Plant came from Birmingham,

where she was in the Cultural Studies Department, and somehow was convinced to come to Warwick and set up this thing called the Cybernetic Culture and Research Union. unit, which was supposed to be an independent centre with its own PhD students, looking at this new kind of area of study in cybernetics. And Plante had kind of come out of a reluctant philosophy background, or maybe an uncomfortable philosophy background. I remember her saying once that she saw a poster at a kind of information day for tertiary study saying, do you wonder about existence?

You should study philosophy. And she thought, oh, that's me. So she signed up to do a philosophy degree and ended up kind of getting into something that she decided later on in her life wasn't exactly the way she wanted to think about the big questions. But she did her PhD in Situationists, in Hegel, and wrote a really great book called The Most Radical Gesture, before she met Nick Land at a Deleuze conference, and the two of them realised they were into all the same kind of stuff. And I think part of that relationship spurred her joining Warwick University, where Land was based at the time, to start the centre. So she brought over her PhD students and they put the centre together.

And it turned out to be pursuing, I suppose, ideas through its interdisciplinary interests that the university became increasingly uncomfortable about, just in terms of considering it rigorous philosophical work. they were looking at, I mean, Deleuze and Gattari were big influences on both of them at the time and their students and they were looking or practicing concept engineering. Land was into, or kind of has always had this interest in sort of outsider theory, occult studies and obviously the kind of reigning new kind of theoretical space at the time

was sort of, I suppose, Californian cybernetics. People like Kevin Kelly, who wrote Out of Control and this kind of way of thinking of the world through systems theory. We were leading them a little bit outside of the typical academic path, and both of them were encouraging it, obviously. So the CCIU stayed together for about a year to two years until 1997. When Plant left, decided she had enough of academia, disappeared, travelled the world, wrote some more books. I think Zeros and Ones came out just after that, sort of as the end product of the work she was doing there, and left her students in the care of Land, who was, I suppose, continuing

this particularly experimental line with his practice, doing a lot of drugs, and I suppose encouraging this dissolution of the line between theory and practice, so that philosophy was being practiced outside of the university. There's some great stories actually about him leading his class out of the lecture theatre as soon as their lecture would start, and just having this completely nomadic philosophy class that would range the campus of Warwick and end up settling in the bar or the lawn or something. So there's always this idea of troubling any of these borders that have been set up in advance.

And so I guess, yeah, so just some of the students that were involved in the CCIU at the time are really important people, I think, in philosophy and literature at the moment. So people like Luciana Parisi, Steve Goodman, Code 9, Hyperdub, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Steven Metcalf, Mark Fisher, Robert Mackay, Susan Livingston, Anna Greenspan, and Code Jo'ishin, who was an associate. And they were working as well with Orphan Drift, who were an art collective made up of Maggie Roberts and Ronnie Mukaji, did a lot of interesting work. I think some of the readings that the guys set today were actually on Maggie Roberts' website. So Delphi Carstens, who wrote the Hypersitian interview with Land and wrote a PhD on Hypersitian

is one of Maggie's students in South Africa. I'll stick up in the sidebar a link to the Offendrift website as well. Just a sec. So they've got, Maggie's got a pretty good archive up there if you want to look at any of the work that they were doing. So the CCRU got kicked out of Warwick after a couple of really successful virtual futures conferences, which were really interesting because they weren't just limited to the academic sphere. There were people from all over the Midlands coming to sort of see what these crazy people had to say. Stella was there, the Australian performance artist with a big robotic exoskeleton arm

freaking out the locals. And it was really quite a kind of vanguard event. But I suppose because the research that was being produced, stuff like the Lemurian hyperstition and the numogram, which you might be familiar with and which Lendl will probably get into a little bit next week, were being heavily workshopped at the time. and it's interesting that the academy sort of expelled this work as not being relevant. So it kind of moved off campus, became a rogue institution, a prototype for what's cheesily known as para-academia. But these guys were kind of doing it before it was a thing.

And there's that great paragraph at the end of Meltdown that targets the university and educational institutions as this depository of despotic power. And we can go into that a bit later if you guys want. So there are a couple of things that the CCIU did while they were a bit of a rogue operation. The syzygy event at Beaconsfield was a big one, which was where the pneumogram and the Lemurian hyperstition was born. Some info about that on the site I just posted. And we can definitely talk about that later. And then Land had a little bit of a breakdown, I think, to have some time off. And from what I know, went to Canada to recuperate

with Mark Fisher and Anna Greenspan. And they came up with the term hyperstition in the plane over the Atlantic and decided to start workshopping this idea. So the CCIE did a couple of bits and pieces in the early 2000s. They released Abstract Dynamics, which is a series of zines that were released in swarms of five, comprising monographs by people like Ian Hamilton Grant, Lanz, lots of people. And I suppose activity kind of subsided for a while there. the CCIU really quietened down, didn't have a locust anymore, and everyone was kind of going their own ways until Rezina Ghirastani got connected to Lan's work.

Somehow I'm not too sure, I'm not exactly sure what the story is there. Found it in a library or something like that and chased or contacted these guys online, which led to the setting off of the Hypersdition blog. And they workshopped the idea intensely there for several years, which led to basically Nagaristani's novel, Cyclinopedia. So, oh yeah, and then I suppose to continue the trajectory, Lands and Greenspan moved to China, where they're currently now based. Lands works as a journalist and has an interesting near reactionary blog at xenosystems.net with

a weird... he kind of blogs schizophrenically there, and at Urban Futures, which is its sort of reflected double. And Sadie Plant kind of just took some time out of academic life, does some writing, translating. And that's the story of the CCIU. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. Otherwise, I'll hand it back over to you, Tony. All right, well... Sorry. I missed the last bit right after CityPlan. I lost my connection.

I apologize for that. Thank you, Amy. So is this, I mean, we're kind of giving, for the majority of people, as Amy said, the majority of people that are here, we're kind of giving like a lot of background and a lot of stuff that you probably are aware of. Should we skip through to discussions specifically about the readings, or do you want to continue? I have prepared just a general overview of the Hypersision as it's seen on the blog. I can continue. But I don't want to bore you guys with it. That's one. OK, so as we mentioned, we have the Abstract Dynamics Hypersision blog. And so we have the regular contributors, many of which Amy has already mentioned, or all of them.

There's Nick Land, Reza Negresani, Mark Fisher, Anna Greenspan, Susan Livingston, Steve Goodman, Linda Trent. And these are the people who are continuously posting and contributing, even though they have many trolls and many arguments and discussions in the comments sections after each post. But I kind of wanted to just outline the major characteristics of hyperstition and the method of hyperstition. And then the chat is, yes. Thank you, Amy. The original CCRU website is on the right. So the four distinct characteristics of hyperstition that they sort of start on, right? These are the obvious ones that most of us know.

But I'll repeat them. For the first one, we have element of effective culture that makes itself real. Fictional entities make themselves real. And two, fictional quantity functional as a time traveling device. This one's very interesting, because their conception of time is distinct from Deleuze, but sort of follows. It's very interesting. Third one is coincidence intensifier. Hypercision operates as a coincidence intensifier. And this is, in effect, for the fourth, it will call to the old ones, a sort of more occult version. And so the definition that you can basically synthesize these four characteristics into a general definition.

And I kind of want to pull each one apart just a little bit. So the concept of hyperstition, obviously, is opposing or problematizing superstition. And in here, hype is very important. We have in 2004, we have a post with Anna Greenspan, and she says that hyperstition is an attack on the superstitional transcendence, and then goes on to relate it to the market, and she says, quote, Hype acts concretely as an element of effective culture that makes itself real, where reality is precisely measured in the dollar sign. Also, Linda Tran also backs this, of course, by saying hype actually makes things happen

and uses belief as a positive power. Just because it's not real now doesn't mean it won't be real at some point in the future. And once it's real, in a sense, it's always been. So here we get also a lot of this idea of recursive time, and so if it's real, in a in the sense of it's always been. So this is connecting hyperstition directly to the plane of unbelief, and unbelief is sort of adjacent to belief and disbelief. So with unbelief, you don't need to specifically believe in the idea of it. And Anna will say that all is required

is that the ability to cash in or out at the right point of the hype cycle. It's no longer a matter of what is believed, but of what can be treated as real. And so this is very, this is entirely different from Superficient. And obviously there's a lot of resonance in relation between what Ben was originally introduced into us and with the societies of climates. So as we read the weird fiction that Ben and I have outlined, this is one of the obvious things that we want to be always thinking about, is how they're sort of setting themselves up in relation to the real.

to, it's so unbelief, it basically is the practice of recognizing a fiction's effectiveness, using it and still not believing it. So with this concept we kind of understand how we can kind of play with carriers that that we might not agree with, but still sort of get in, see how these realize and produce effects and transmit their signals and messages across. So this is two of the four characteristics of hyperstition. And so we have left to talk about the last two. The last two being the old ones and as a coincidence intensifier.

So we can see hyperstition in one or two ways, and this is how Delphi also sees it in his work. You have one, you have a hyperreal entity or myth-made flesh, which is very similar to what we've been already discussing. But then you also have this inevitable annihilation of things. And when Delphi actually In the interview with Nick Langley Delphi asks Nick about this idea of annihilation We can kind of see how Number plays a part And we see a little bit Into Nick's conception of time And I just want to quote here What he says is

What is concealed in the occult What is concealed or the occult Is an alien order Which betrays itself through coincidences Synchronicities and similar indications of an intelligent arrangement of fate. An example is a Kabbalistic pattern occulted in ordinary language, a pattern that cannot emerge without eroding itself, since the generalized human understanding of deliberate usage of letter clusters as numerical units would shut down the channel of coincidence or alien information. It is only because people use words without numerizing them that they remain open as conduits for something else. So operating as a coincidence intensifier, hyperstition, it has the ability to affect

the cultural arena. And we can see how they play out and how they become perceived truths and thus into the outcome of the entire discipline. We can see how these fictional things play into being time-traveling devices but also affecting themselves to make themselves real. And this is all through the operation of the coincidence intensifier. So finally the call to the old ones. This one's a little more different and almost esoteric, and so I have to sort of play around

this one a little bit more. What hyperstition can be seen here in this one is that it's like an accelerator tending towards chaos by invoking sort of irrational forces. This is why we can see them as being posted, or this is why we can see the one version that Delphi mentions as for annihilation. And one example that I think is very illuminating that they give is John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness. And in that they quote this line that says, I thought I was making it all up, but all the time they were telling me what to write. So for this, this is an exemplary example of the old ones. They being, in this case, old ones. And it's John Carpenter operating, quote,

pitch of hyperstitional intensity. So thus, I think, exploring these four characteristics, we can sort of now look into it. On the politics page, they kind of describe hyperstitional entities in three different circuits, and these circuits make up the hyperstitional vertical circuit. So for the three we have one, the pneumogram, two, mythos, and three, unbelief. Pneumogram, we had, for the pneumogram we had invited Lando, but unfortunately Lando was Lindo Barcelos. Barcelos, I can't actually pronounce the Portuguese way of saying it. But he'll be here the next session,

so I think a lot of the stuff on the numerogram will be elucidated there. And also, if we can get Amy to talk a little bit about syzygy, I think we can eliminate those. But mythos, obviously, is the hyperstitional propagation through carriers, and I did recommend us to read hyperstitional carriers from the blog, and I won't go into it too much, and I think we can talk about it more into the discussion. But basically, carriers tag collected production. They're sort of these hyperstitional puppets. They would call them that populate thoughts. In a weird terminology, they said that it sort of simulates

personalities in order to consolidate a node of cognitive consistency, so like persons are masks. And carriers, they're vehicles which will be the hyperstitional exploration, but they're also vehicles that are singularized and promoted. So the basic thesis of a carrier is that thought only happens if the carrier itself conducts it. That means that the intentional creator, none of these ideas of intent, none of these things matter unless the hyperstitional character is able to think outside what the human can.

This relates to the very inhuman sort of tendencies that mark the method. So carriers are, as Nick would describe it, carriers are units of artificial intelligence production. They're dedicated to consistent pursuit of a cognitive trajectory that would be unstable under the social biological constraints of human psychic existence. So carriers are sort of, in my, the way that I see them is the carriers are these entities in the new fiction in which they can sort of, they sort of, I don't know, in a way that

the Ben said it is when the subjectivity becomes a character, here we have entities and carriers. and carriers are very similar. So I think inside of this discussion there's a lot of questions that get brought up that never narrowed down and I think they would be interesting in relation to the next three sessions. And these are asked by Tachi, who's a common poster on abstract dynamics. And he asks, what does fabricating a carrier involve, and what are the typical steps in production and development of a carrier? I think this question we can theoretically pose towards entities in the new weird, and

this could be an interesting question to sort of take towards when we're reading the fiction. Similarly, can one person instigate the production and development of a carrier? I think this can be answered that it has to be, that hyperstition is a collectivity. It cannot be one single author. This is why Ressa and the rest of the group sort of reject Tolkien as being a hyperstitional author. Whereas Lovecraft's work cannot be distributed to a single author because it's been taken and changed and been written about so much that it has sort of this collective element to it.

And so the final question would be, what does it practically involve the moral questions? So that I think this is very interesting because we can start talking about sort of the difficulties in carriers and choosing carriers. but this also allows us to sort of the hyperstition is the hyperstitional carriers are a way to sort of sidestep this and absolve this so finally I would just conclude this overview of hyperstition with two posts that they did trying to describe the hyperstitional method

And you have two underlying, I guess, you have two underlying assumptions in the hyperstitial method. One is that when we discuss political ideology, they say that hyperstitial is methodologically inextricable from a polytics. This is P-O-L-Y. and it's a removal of politics in its normal sense. However, this question is always remained open. Second is that it upholds an anti-humanism.

So hyperstition is, they say, a pragmatics of depersonalization and artificialization. And it might be sort of natural to identify with this polemical anti-humanism. So what we get from the method is we get three separate definitions or circuits or ways of doing hyperstition. You have the hyperstitional doctrine, and this is obviously a limited. So they want to look at, they ask questions, can anything that can be treated as axiomatic be deducted from the set of central hyperstitional tools or principles? and this is during the hyperstitional doctrine. This is when they're approaching a series of methodological questions or appendices

that can potentially function but inessential to the elements. So it's basically trying to eliminate any hyperstitional entities or things that could relate or are in the vein of hyperstition and sort of also building its alliances. So they have the Lemurian hyperstition, which is based on the preeminence of the numagram and decoding. And this one belongs to us. So the hyperstitional doctrine is to sort of find the ones that belong, the ones that end, and eliminating the rest. So the questions that we ask when we're thinking about method is, what is hyperstition, how does it work, what are essential procedures?

The second function of the method is the hyperstitional analysis, and this is probably what you see mostly on hyperstition.abstractdynamics. This is when they will sort of play out in magic, capitalism, science fiction. These are the ones that they've mostly been sticking to. I think we're going to add to this weird fiction. I know it plays with the sci-fi genre in a way. And looking at, sorry, even if programmatic hyperstition had no engineering ambitions whatsoever, the existence of hyperstition as an analytic apparatus would still be legitimated by the efficacy of potentials.

So, again, we're saying that they're not looking to socially construct. With hyperstition there's no ideal agenda. However, the analytic aspects of these sort of programmatic elements are very interesting. So there's a way to analyze hyperstition. And then the third is the hyperstitional production. And here they have the language of bringing in the hyperstitional puppets. We play them out in theaters. We construct characters or carriers. and we invented, so then we're, with these sort of, within production, we're able to then analyze and then build our methods. So I guess this is like the major formulations, if there is any formulations of hyperstition,

they try to always kind of break it down every time we get closer and closer to a definition, but I think over time this is sort of, I think good points that we can kind of jump off of, jump off of and work with. To bring it back to these, so if we're inside of these, if we're looking at weird fiction and we're looking at how weird fiction, what weird fiction can do, then we're looking at basically two and three. We're looking at how we can analyze weird fiction in these ways as hyperstitional carriers, but we're also looking at how weird fiction is produced, so we're looking at hyperstitional production. And I think with that, I want to pass it back to Ben before I open it up to discussion to see if he has anything to add.

Maybe not. Ben, nope, thanks. I don't know if I have anything to add. Yeah, I mean, partially I feel like we should discuss maybe because everyone's being suspiciously quiet. I know. I hope that we'll be able to get acquainted with each other now and be more able to speak with each other. It is a little quiet, so if anybody has any sort of questions, we also have a lot of the readings that we haven't touched on. And I know we've all prepared sort of things to say about them.

So Arana, instead of spending the rest of the time dictating to you, I would like you guys to sort of tell me how you guys felt about some of the readings or any questions or anything. And when the first time you speak, if you can sort of just introduce yourself to the group, that would be nice. Thank you. Very good. Rebecca, do you have anything? I don't know. I mean, you can take it in any direction. I know you have questions, so.

Did anybody particularly enjoy any of the readings? We did two of the Nick Land readings. Are there any other readings that you would recommend? Getting stuff in the chat. I can say something if... You don't have to say anything? I just... Like, awkward silence for now. But thank you. Yeah. I can go. I can jump in. Hi, I'm Eleanor Gold. Is there anything else I should say besides my name?

No, you can say just... Okay, excellent. Hi, I'm Eleanor. I was really taken with the CCRU, the Lemurian Time War piece that kept coming up and was continuously referenced. And I'm not, I mean, I'm very much like, while I'm reading all of these things, I'm very interested in New Weird, very interested in what seems to be kind of the core concept of fictions that are creating themselves or realizing themselves. but other than that I was very very had no idea about anything that was going on so all of this was very useful

these overviews were very useful for me but this was very much jumping in feet first without really knowing what was going on underneath but I was especially taken by this piece on the Librarian Time War and I was just if someone has something to say to follow up or anything, jump in, please interrupt me. But I was kind of wondering what's going on with this. It was a great piece, but also really bizarre. Am I hearing, are people hearing me now? Yes. Okay, yeah, I dug that one a lot too,

and I think it kind of gets to a lot of what's going on with hyperstition. It kept pulling in burrows, particularly, and then the construction of this mythos. I think it's about challenging ideas of epistemology and what's worth knowing, what is identity. We just kind of, you know, even though, you know, we supposedly examine these things in, you know, philosophy, we really kind of take certain things in practice as givens rather than, you know, examining, you know, what an actual shift in our perception of self

and perceptions of knowledge might, like, mean. Yeah, when you then extrapolate that into, say, a piece like Lemurian Time War. Does that make any sense? Yeah, I would like to. Say more about the epistemological elements. Well, I think... Well, I guess, what exactly about it? I could... So in relation to what you're saying is that the challenge of sort of the human-centered, anthropocentric sort of viewpoints, is that your relation to epistemology?

And just even, you know, kind of when we get to thinking about, you know, actually at one point in the overview, you mentioned irrational. I wonder if maybe it's irrational would be a better characterization where just kind of we think these ideas are rational. What's like logic 103 or whatever. It's a valid argument starts from a true premise and then is rationally sound throughout.

So, but what are ways of thinking that might hold truth that aren't actually rational? So, like, thinking maybe more in terms of, like, the, you know, emotional content of our brains or the, you know, non-linguistic portions of our brains. Okay, I can follow that. Anybody have anything about this specific piece, this Lemurian Time War? So we got that. It was very libidinally driven. It was a nice piece to read. There's a lot of things going on. There's the obvious attack against human-centered thinking.

Sort of. And I think it also ties into the apocalypse, even apocalypse outside of hyperstition stuff. I think, you know, like apocalyptic thinking often does challenge, you know, like truth and, you know, what we hold is like big T truths. I see that, like, well, I think what, like, I want to go back to your first point and kind of say, like, directly, I mean, to talk about the text is what Limerick and Timor

really brings out is that they really are showing that sort of these abstract relations, they can be considered diagrams or maps or they're sort of, they're just as real in a fiction. We encounter them in a fiction in the same way that we encounter them in raw, real life, right? So there's this ability to be able to subject them to different sort of trajectories and multiple embeddings. And this allows us to sort of, I don't know, it's almost like revealing something behind the mask.

It's a decoding of the ideologies, if we can sort of propagate these fictions in this way. So you can see that they're trying to flatten, obviously, the transcendental screens between a fiction and reality, and between itself and the world, or subject-object, these sorts of things. And it sort of exists in itself, I mean this text in itself is a container as well, it's a fictional container for these real interventions into the world. You sort of read these and you can see how it sort of frames and conceals the elements

and then sort of fragments it and breaks it. change, this will allow, when you do this, this will allow for the potential of having any sort of change in reality or the dominant reality that we experience. I mean, for me this is a very powerful element of this text. I don't know if anybody else has anything to push forth. We can, Ben maybe, or Amy? I can contribute just a quote that I was looking up in relation to what you were saying, Beckett, about irrationality as opposed to irrationality and what happens when you're attempting to create truth.

It just sprung into my mind because I read it recently. It's a paragraph from the end of Nicoland's essay, Art is Insurrection, in Venumina. Numenau. If any of you guys have got it, it's on page 174. But he writes, philosophy, in its longing to rationalize, formalize, define, delimit, to terminate enigma and uncertainty, to cooperate wholeheartedly with the police, is nihilistic in the ultimate sense that it strives for the immobile perfection of death. But creativity cannot be brought to an end that is compatible with power. For unless life is extinguished, control must inevitably break down. We possess art, lest we perish of the truth." Which is a Nietzsche paraphrase.

And then he refuses to conclude the essay. But I think that feeds into this idea of that there is a particular element of creation that breaks down pre-received notions of true and untrue. Can anyone actually hear me? Hello? Yes, go ahead. Can you hear me? Yes. Yeah. That's a yeah. Mm-hmm. OK, OK. OK, so I'm going to put in there with just something risking to become a kind of caricature to talk about Nicola Mashindara. So just in relation to the question,

like what is hyperstition, how does it work, and what are its procedures? And then to relate it back to what Amy just said about sort of realising the truth or whatever. There's an essay from 2011 by Nicola in the Journal of Cultural Research on metal studies In Metal Studies and the Scission of the Word, A Personal Archaeology of Head-Banging Exegesis, where he sort of goes over how black metal theory came to happen. And he says on page 249 of that essay, he says, Now the weird personal fact I must somehow account for is that my intellectual commitment to commentary

is actually causally related to my love of metal, according to the following timeline of events. and he begins 1986 to 1987 I develop a habit of doing calculus homework while listening to tapes tapes of KCMU's most deathly and trash metal show, Brain Pain, convinced that improves my thinking. In 1998, during a unique dust to dawn squid cleaning shift, I am deeply impressed by my co-workers' subtle interpretations of paranoid. In 2000, after commenting philosophically on some metal lyrics, I joked with a fellow medievalist graduate student about writing a metal gloss. And in 2006, I started organizing a collaborative image and text metal commentary project that never gets off the ground.

In 2007-2008, I write a running commentary on the first heavy metal song. And in 2008, I present on Dixus at the heavy fundamentalism conference in Salzburg in Sweden. In 2008, I started the journal Glossator, Practice and Theory of the Commentary, and in 2009, I co-organized with Reza Negaristani the spring 2012 volume of Glossator on Black Metal. In 2009, I organized the Black Metal Theory Symposium on Hideous Gnosis. So basically, yeah, just this to me is totally wired realism. Like if you kind of take it back to the text, like obviously the title of this course is new weird realism but in 2009

in the text that kind of consolidated black metal theory for Nicola was basically when he was all by himself and he decided to write by himself without any sort of you know conversation with anyone else, it was before the heavy metals conference in Salzburg in Sweden which consolidated black metal theory as a discourse, he decided by himself to write running commentary on heavy metals originally song so that was in 2008 2009 in the list of events that he's just gonna call days in this article from 2011 and in that article from 2009 which he wrote by himself but I's you know no man or knowing Scott are knowing anyone else and he talks about the aesthetics of inevitability

in black metal as a genre I talked about it kinda musically deictically and vocally, the sort of deets that goes on in, you know, the kind of riffs that lead up to this. It's a real, you know, if you think about black metal, it is a sort of aesthetics of inevitability, especially on this one particular song that he's doing a commentary on, which is Black Sabbath's Black Sabbath. So there in that commentary on that song from 2008, 2009, before he'd met Ben and everyone else or talked to them about black metal theories and discourse, he says, sorry, I'm just trying to grab, he's commenting on the lines, what is this that stands for me, sorry, just give me one second,

Oh, crap, anyway. I think I've lost it. Sorry, I have the wrong paper in front of me here. But, yeah, so it's basically in this he talks about wiredness, so it's the original kind of concept of, the original etymological understanding of the word weird, which means that basically in weirdness there's an uncanniness, like as in, oh my god, that's weird, it happened before, so it was kind of fated to happen, so it takes it back to the medieval understanding of weirdness as wiredness, I'm just going to call it wiredness, because it's W-I-R-D, and this idea that something was fated to happen, which sort of, obviously, you know, is hyperstitional,

You know, it's like it sort of perpetuates itself in this, well, I suppose for what, bring it back to what you were talking about, Tony, for Nicola it would always be like love that drives that, or somebody else was talking about that. you know as opposed to sort of a rational or reasonable understanding it's not driven by reason it's more driven by love which maybe ties it into what Amy was talking about with Lambs there you know that so it brings it back to a medieval notion of thinking as contemplation and contemplation therefore tied to sort of love you know a love of knowledge that maybe we've lost or whatever, I'm going to jump out there.

But anyway, feel free to jump in, anyone. That's it, that's me. It's sort of interesting how he's building his own narrative and how it's sort of making these connections and seeing himself sort of in relation, if you could sort of see him as a carrier of this and how sort of making it real, making it real is interesting. And with this weird aspect also, it's a very good connection. The thing probably that they are dealing with and that they're fighting with a lot is that they also then we have to consider the... also what about considering the Oedipal myth,

being sort of this in this area of faith. And this is, if you read from them, a lot of times they're getting bashed with, they're getting argument, or like arguing against that, what are you describing differently than just this sort of Oedipal myth. So there's like this sort of, there is a difference and there should be a separation between the two. But with what you're saying, to me it's quite, It's actually really interesting, the relationship between, I don't know, the way that he's sort of creating his own narrative, but also kind of connecting these great elements. I think this is something we could maybe... But the weird thing, like the thing about Nicola is that he doesn't even know this.

He doesn't make, he hasn't made, he wrote that text, and I only picked this up because you guys, this was hyperstitional in itself. the fact that you guys sort of created the course at the same time that I was revisiting a text from his from 2008-2009 where he had picked up on this word WIRED. You know, he hasn't used it since, and it's just weird. He hasn't used it since, so he's like not even included in what I'm saying here, but he does in his original sort of commentary on Black Sabbath's Black Sabbath, like he in the last two or three segments on the commentary of Black Sabbath's song, he talks

about Black Sabbath's, about heavy metal's aesthetics of inevitability, and he specifically uses the word wired two or three times, and about how it makes things happen. And then he writes this text in 2011, and he's completely oblivious to the fact that he's even said this. He doesn't flag it or anything in the 2011 text, he doesn't flag what he said in the 2009 text, but he does recount then these instances where he made, where he, you know, hyperstitionally made black metal theory happen. It's just, to me, really fascinating. And then, you know, you carry it on like I am doing his work, you know, it comes back to is more, you know, relating to what Amy was saying, and also the other guy,

but, you know, there have been different sort of driving reasons for reason, or driving, I don't know. I'm not sure what I'm going to say. I think what you picked up on there, Eddie, are about the idea of the weird as fate, or some kind of register of time that stands over and above or outside of linear time is really pertinent to the idea of hyperstition. And I know that on the hyperstition site, it's referred to as a time-traveling technology as well. Hyperstition is a time-traveling technology or a time-traveling device. And so this idea that his...

Nicola's later text, in a way, pre-existed his earlier ones as a kind of possibility in the future that he thought hadn't happened yet, but really it was there waiting to be manifested. I think it talks to exactly the kind of stuff that is going on here. I mean, even the idea of the Sphinx as the Terminator, which Land sort of brings up in meat, is connected to this idea. and the idea of the time loop and the bootstrap paradox, which is, you know, a really sort of dominant trope of, if not weird fiction at least, 20th century science fiction. Sorry, I'm getting attacked by my cat.

So I don't know if this is like a bit of a complex concept to like launch into right now, but it's worth keeping in mind this idea that there is a time rift at work in the notion of hyperstition, which feeds perfectly well into these kind of, like, Gnostic ideas of a difference between reality as it's experienced and whatever forces are outside, like these Lovecraftian forces of the old ones. And there was a bit in the Burroughs reading you guys said. I hadn't actually read this section before, where Burroughs kind of basically re-says this in his own way

on hang on, I've got a different version to you guys but I'll read it out so he's talking about this act of or this method of coincidence intensification and recording everything and playing it back and trying to understand the control structure behind the language that everyone is embedded in specifically the language of the media which is why he interrogates newspapers and uses this recording technology radio so much. But he writes, I think quite early on in the section, You will begin to see sharp and clear. There was a grey veil between you and what you saw, or more often did not see. The grey veil was the pre-recorded words of a control machine.

Once that veil is removed, you will see clearer and sharper than those who are behind the veil, whatever you do, you'll do it better than those behind the veil. This is the invisible generation. It is the efficient generation. So there's this kind of dual reality idea. There's the veil, what's in front of the veil and what's behind. Or this kind of Gnostic understanding of time, which I'm sure is influenced by Philip K. Dick in a lot of this writing as well, Philand in the CCIU. and that I suppose explains as well what's happening in the Lemurian hyperstition which I haven't actually read in in ages otherwise I'd be able to comment on it more the Lemurian time war but there's definitely some and maybe

you guys want to take over and kind of pick up on this but there's there's something about burrows going back in time or something like that forget I I'll just say actually one more thing because I forgot to add. Can you guys hear me still? Mm-hmm. Okay, yeah, there's just, so basically then, that was the other thing I wanted to say, so then basically in Black Metal Beyond the Darkness, which is the text that came out in 2012, 2013, he picks this up again, like again in a kind of unknowing way, and he says he just makes a sort of small contribution to the volume. Sorry, that's my chariot. Ruby stuff. So he lists out sort of a sequence of events that are kind of bizarre. He says, Three days before the Hideous Gnosis event, there was a spiral anomaly in the Norwegian sky.

Two days before the Hideous Gnosis event, the glory of Christchurch in the Bronx was looted and torched by a Satan-loving arsonist. Two weeks before the Hideous Gnosis event, I suffered a one-time seizure in Union Square. For a few minutes, life and the world were peeled away and replaced like a superficial veneer over something much more solid. Abdominal and back muscles took over a month to recover. One week later, I presented a lecture on beheading and the impossible for the medieval club of New York. One week after that, at the symposium, I talked about anti-cosmic black metal and the dissolution of the universe. The title of the symposium was taken from the title of Osama Kena, which ends with the words, no one's there anymore. Anyway, it's just weirdly, just weirdly. It's just like always there in his work.

Anyway, that's it. Somebody else check it out. What are you reading from? Could you put in the sidebar the reference? Yeah, Black Metal Beyond the Darkness. I'll put it in. How do I do this? There should be like a chat, a blue chat box on the left. I'll find it and put it up. Okay, yeah. If you move your mouse, you'll see it. It's at the top left. It's at the top left. Does anybody else have a... Yeah, back in. If I could chime in just on, like, the original meaning of weird and kind of, like, how that ties into the

intensification of coincidence, both of those kind of then tie back to like notions of like synchronicity which is kind of key to you know magical thinking which is then if you know we're looking back at the hyperstitional roots in you know medieval philosophy as mentioned in the sidebar or you know the occult you know the you know hailing of like Crowley and that pulls us back to the black metal. I think that's kind of like an important tie together. It's a lot of different words being used for the same thing.

And also, I think a lot of Robert Anton Wilson stuff seems to be hyperstitional, if we could talk about that. But that, I think, ties directly into this point of weird in its original sense, the intensification of coincidence, magical thinking, while not, and taking it through a lens of unbelief, which I think is, you know, key to like Wilson or Terrence McKenna type shaman stuff. I don't know. Anyone? Yeah, no, definitely. I sent Amy a text. Actually, we should just hear that. Did you read the whole thing Amy, the languages, the unknown language thing?

I haven't had a chance to yet, but it looks completely relevant actually to this whole idea of language coming from outside. Yeah, it's like just even the, you know, John Dee, all those kind of guys are discussed, but yeah, it's completely, you know, incantatory, you know, the idea of, I mean, the hyperstition, if you take it right down to the level of linguistics, and that's basically what that text is kind of dealing with. I'll share it with everyone now, but it's really, really relevant. Like even, I know Tony during the week was talking to me about Grant Morrison and the idea of incantation and stuff like that. It's just a lot of... Yeah, and then you have the hyper sigil and...

Exactly. There are like a hundred different ways that we can definitely take up to two and a half hours just on hyperstitional coincidences right now by throwing out what we can come up with. I think that's a really positive and interesting thing about this seminar. And I think when we start reading, when we start actually reading and discussing the text, we're going to have a lot of intergroup interpreting. I want to ask Ben if he has anything that he wants to add. Or no. I mean, one thing I thought of was, in terms of the weird, and we were talking about time loops,

and bringing up Oedipus, and the sort of, you know, Tony was saying about, isn't this just Oedipus all over again? and sort of the notion of fate there. It's interesting that several people, China Mediaville, and I think Mark Fisher have talked about weird, in terms of weird fiction, not in the original sense, but weird fiction, tries to distance strangeness from being a repetition of the past in that it's a repetition that that repetition was disclosed to happen or would be disclosed, that it's a repetition that only happens by the actual thing coming to be. So, on the one hand, it's, it, which again kind of points to this idea that the world

is sort of maximally creative and extended, um, and that, in the fact that, you know, the weird being super normal and not supernatural is that there's no, no, there's no, the rupture is generally inside our thoughts and not necessarily in the world itself. That anything that would appear as a contradiction or conflict is actually just expanding the bounds of the world as we know it. It kind of refers to the way which Land talks about time and time circuits. You know, like traveling back in time, there's never actually a rupture where you ruin the future.

in this kind of sense, like the idea of time travel and fiction as a time travel device is that by returning to the past you're actually adding to the future by seeing more of the past you didn't know about that disclosure doesn't actually rupture the timeline because the act was already possible because of how extensive the world was so again it's there's no division the fictional is of a different world than of the world itself. So it's this weird kind of looping that actually expands the arrow of time being a symmetrical being certain things being unvoidable. But how we come back to the middle

of them is where the weird try to really try to tweak that. Does that make sense? With that, I mean, how does everybody sort of understand this sort of time-traveling device or this hyperstition's idea of time? Does anybody have any other comments or questions that we can discuss, or is there any problems with it? I mean, I know I have my questions that I'm still working out, but I just wanted to know. for anybody.

I can say something about it, but I don't want to take up too much talking time, so if someone else has something to say, please say it. Do you want me to try and give you my understanding of how the time travelling works for, as far as land conceives of it? Yeah, sure. I think the new book, Templexity, works it out pretty well. But yes, please talk about it. Yeah, exactly. Templexity is a really good resource for this. Lan just published this as an e-book on e-pamphlet on Amazon. It's not very long. It costs a couple of bucks if you guys are interested. But I think the thing that we need to flag here

is that hyperstition works through positive feedback. It works through sustained long-range positive feedback specifically. And all this stuff is happening within the context of post-World War cybernetics. And an interesting text, I think, maybe to read alongside all this, if you want to talk about politics, is also Deleuze's Postscript for a Control Society. So the Landian idea of positive feedback pits it against the human security system, the organism, social structures, the state, Oedipus, all of these homeostatic negative feedback constructions.

And he describes two different positive feedback oppositional circuitries to this. One is a short-range loop that just sort of amplifies and amplifies until it explodes, and then everything returns to equilibrium. Not particularly useful for long-range change. And then there's the long-range positive feedback circuitry, which is, as well as an amplification, it's an intensification. So it changes quality, just as well as quantity, which is a really important thing for understanding all of Land's philosophy and feeds into the idea of time as intensity

set up against this idea of metric linear time. But he understands the idea of time travel as far as I can see, especially from his recent works like this Dimplexity pamphlet where he lays it out more clearly than he ever has before is through the idea of entropy and negentropy, or entropy dissipation. So the thesis, to put it really, really simply, is long-range positive feedback, which is also hyperstition. And it diagrams a lot of tropes in Land's work. One of them is intelligence assembly, which is sort of a big theme in Meltdown specifically,

which he sees capitalism as the phase that assembles this technical intelligence that operates beyond human capacity and that actually uses the human to gestate it in a way but I think he says something like the means of production are going for the revolution on their own so the machines are kind of developing a technical intelligence technology technological innovation and commercialism back into each other to constantly improve machinic complexity. So this is a form of entropy dissipation, which moves against the entropic currents of normal existence

in the massive closed system of the universe, which is heading towards heat death or meltdown. So the way that Land sees it is that... Actually, I've got a little bit I can read, which will explain it probably more clearly. I'll look it up. Basically, entropy is the arrow of time. Here we go. This is from a post on his ZenoSystems blog. If entropy defines the direction of time with increasing disorder, determining the difference of the future from the past, then doesn't local extrophy, through which all complex cybernetic beings such as life forms exist, describe a negative temporality or time reversal?

Is it not in fact more likely, given the inevitable embeddedness of intelligence in inverted time, that it is the cosmological or general conception of time that is reversed from any possible naturally constructed perspective? so in a framework posed by the cosmological application of the second law of thermodynamics negentropy or entropy dissipation or extropy registers as a time anomaly and because it's discharging entropy it sort of operates in this space outside of the linearization of time outside of metrics outside of sort of asymmetrical past to present which is why you always see this trope of the future coming back to get us in Land's writing.

So, yeah, that's, I suppose, an entry into this discussion on time and how Land figures it in terms of this whole overarching paradigm of cybernetics. Very good. I mean, sorry, go ahead, Beckett. Actually, I wonder if we could maybe even view heat death as far as, like, one of the great old ones as far as characteristics of hyperstitional, because it's, I mean, really, heat death is far beyond any kind of actual human experience. experience. There's no reasonable expectation that anything resembling a human being would

exist at the point heat death occurs. So heat death, as a physical concept, is just as far outside of human existence as, you know, Cthulhu or Shabdegarath, you know? Does that... or is that bullshit? No, that's totally it. It's this kind of temporality that's accessing us from the outside in a way that, like Love Cross, Old Ones, or even in like The Shadow Out of Time, for example, the aliens are kind of like kidnapping human minds and accessing different points

in history from this space outside of time. I think that maps on directly. And it's a trope that's used all the time in CCIU stuff too. one thing that I found particularly fascinating that keeps coming up in terms of not just the future coming back into the present but also this idea and I'm probably just horribly paraphrasing I don't know Ben this might have been you the Spengler Tyler's might have been Amy the idea that coming out of hype, that something's not real now but it's real in the future and then will have always been real also is very interesting

to me because it seems then that this external force that is I don't know like what you were the call to the old ones heat death is also something that is generated from culture as well? I mean, is that just really obvious, or am I totally off the pace? I think it's sort of directed towards me and Ben. I don't know if Ben wants to pick it up, or I can pick it up. It's you. Do you want to talk about hype, maybe? Do you think that was yours? And I can jump in. So yeah, in relation I think a lot of the things where we can say that they're fictional

and then they become real or something, so heat death being linguistically, I guess, in our realm of thinking about it, sort of, of course, is a conceptualization that we come up with. But I think one of the interesting potentials that the hyperstition takes serious is that We're sort of able to analyze real possibilities that are happening or that will happen. It is sort of, there is that potential of sort of re-engineering the future and I think this is what Amy was talking about in Mind's concept of time and how when we go back and we, or maybe it was Ben, actually now I'm getting confused. But when we go back, we actually, into the past, it's sort of an expansion of this has

It was an expansion of our world, and so we sort of, I guess, we changed the trajectory of the future. Am I wrong on this, Ben? No, that's what I said, I think. Yeah, so in relation to heat death, I guess a lot of it is how, I mean, is the question And then it's like how, since we've conceptualized it, how do we sort of orient ourselves towards the future, act upon the future, or things like that. These are the questions that I want to think of. Possibly it's outside the realm. It's of course attributing an agenda to it.

I've got a question for Amy. You there Amy? Yep. You there? Yes. Yes? Yeah, no, just because you're a mess in modernism studies, just in relation to that idea of going back into the past to change the direction of the future. It sort of was pitched by the curator Nicholas Borio a few years ago under the heading, Alter Modern. Are you aware of that? What are your feelings on that? alter is in a l t a r yeah it's in other modern other or it can be yeah alter like so it can be other modern or it can be other than modern but his whole other kind of no i'm not yeah alter

modern so he he ran a finale or whatever in the tape modern in 2009 called alter modernity and it wasn't like massively well thought out or anything but that was his basic core kind of concept and yeah he's running the tape being an ally at the moment actually that was what I was doing my PhD on was alter modernity these different ways of thinking it there was a bunch of different people thinking about it at the same time and yeah I just wondered because I know you're invested in the question of modernity but that was his thing so it's kind of like the Benjamin Button syndrome the idea of going back into the past to change the future. Anyway, yeah, just throw that out.

Can you write his name up on the sidebar for me? Yeah, I'll do it. Yeah, there are a lot of stories. I think that... Sorry. I'll just say this one thing really quick, then I'll give the mic back to you. I think that the idea of anastrophe and catastrophe that Land and Plant put forth is my version of thinking about that. You can think modernity linearly, heading towards catastrophe, or you can think it intensively as something from a point of view outside of it, or an alien kind of position, as anastrophe, as the future coming together. so in a way if you think modernity

as anastrophe or anastrophically you're thinking it from a point in the future that's reconstructing the past and I think Yates' The Second Coming is a really good version of this Yates' The Second Coming? okay yeah the rough beasts slouching towards Bethlehem to be born which is I think Yates is a hyperstitial practitioner as well but we can talk about that later I was just going to say you brought the Benjamin Button sort of cliche but there's a ton of other

films that you can consider like Land deals with particularly Looper that's also handling this idea I don't know if anybody has seen Looper. And there's sort of Primer. All of these are sort of dealing with these in slightly different ways, which I think would be interesting to sort of interrogate the concepts of time travel or the devices that they're using perhaps out of this context of this class. Trying to read the sidebar here, because we have Tristan posting a lot on the right, just making sure he's not asking.

So Tristan asks an interesting question here. Does the hyperstition... Does the hyperstitious weird event occur from within the system of conceptual linguistic representations? Or is an external eruption... Or is an external eruption a new quality super-added to the system of representation? An eruption of the new that opens up new possibilities. Are you available to speak or could you just...

Tristan? Oh, okay. Sorry. Babysleeping. Understandable. Does anybody want to address this question that Tristan has here? Is it strictly within a conceptual linguistic event or is it a super added event? I think it's a coincidental relationship between semiotic systems which is not particularly conceptual representation, or it can be, and I'm getting a lot of... Sorry, I apologize.

A lot of things happening on my screen. Does anybody have any comments on this? Does cyberstitionist weird events occur within the system of linguistic representations, or is it somewhat outside of it? Well I would just add that if it's on a bio-evolution semiotic reading, it would have to happen within semiotics, right? I would think the analysis happens within semiotics, but the production, perhaps this is where the outside comes in. So basically, Ben, I bow to you here, I'm just going to say one thing before you start.

If the basis of bioevolutionary semiotics is that everything takes place on the basis of an essential questionality, which is essentially a weirdness, right, so it's a not knowing, and now I give the floor to Ben. So that's all I know. So basically with bioevolutionary semiotics, they say that the evolution of life happens on the basis of an essential questionality, which is an essential weirdness. Basically, it's a not knowing. So, Ben, the floor. Well, I mean, the one thing that jumps to mind is, you know, Lovecraft, he's writing a letter

to a friend he talks about how peculiar his own style of writing is because he says he constantly says the thing was undescribable and he goes on for like six pages to describe it and he kind of says it's weird because on the one hand I'm a radical materialist he just kind of says that what's happening at the level of creation we struggle to understand or define, but at the same time, he says, you know, what language does, language gives us a way of taking a bunch of approximations of a thing. That's why he describes something as, you know, all these weird shapes and, you know, parts that don't really go together and saying this is what

it looks like. So I think there's kind of, the tension is sort of there in that, you know, something happens that we then try to describe linguistically or semiotically and so we can because of the way representation functions we're not going to reproduce it one for one but we can piecemeal construct it or abductively approach it in a way that's good enough for us to at least point to it Yeah, I think that works really well, I think, with the two distinct conceptualizations

that come out in, and I'm probably repeating myself, but in the hyperstitional method, in that there's the distinction between getting close enough for the analysis and then actually the production of it, which is something that we don't control. outside of them. So can it ever be a breathing system again, just so you can keep in with us. Can it ever be good enough, or should we ethically live with anxiety? I don't know. Yeah, so there is, where is the, there's one part that, there's a hyperstition post

in which they get, in which they bring up, where they get accused of being sartrean existentialism, so I want to actually answer that. Well, was it accusatory or was it trying to make common ground? I saw the comment is like trying to say, well, you guys, you know, it wouldn't Sartre be hyperstitional? And then they were like, no way! That's the way I read it. Okay. Yeah. So they were trying to make a relation and then they eliminated it. Do you remember what their response was actually? Well, because of the humanism. And I think the anti-humanism of hyperstition may have part of the answer to ethically living,

in that that's a term without actual meaning in their kind of construct. Okay. This might be a question to put to Lendl when you talk to him next week, because he has recently written a whole lot on anethics. Looking at xenopoietics, hyperstitional practice, this kind of stuff as something he calls anethics, which I don't know enough about to explain in his place, but it might be worth putting a sort of question mark over that for the moment and directing it at him later on. I mean, to do with Bonoza and this idea of ethics as Connaces and stuff.

But, yeah, could be worth asking Wendell. He pluralizes Connaces, right? I remember I actually saw him speak on it recently. We will bring it up. And Amy mentioned that also the section in Psychonopedia did... Just until the next session we can bring this question back up because we will be debating or we'll be talking about a good meal as one of the texts. And we'll have them both. Does anybody else have any other questions or comments or coincidences with their work

they want to bring forth? One thing I would really like to use this sort of seminar format at, and of course this is something you don't have to participate in, it's something that I will attempt to continue to attempt to do is that we bring in our sort of own research questions and we sort of play them out. I think Idea is doing a great job with her interest in black metal and making these sort of relations and it sort of will pluralize our conversations for future sessions. I know it's quite awkward to speak to the screen, especially when people

very quiet. So I understand. Do you have something, Catherine, or no? Yeah, kind of. Can people hear me? Yes. Okay, great. It's not, I guess, strictly related to anything that's come up yet. I I guess my question is, in terms of the collectivization that's necessary to create a hyperstitional character, is there any particular reason why that collectivization has to occur at the beginning, if you know what I mean?

could could an entity in word fiction for example be made into a carrier by later being collectivized if you understand, by later being written about someone other than the original author or something like that so when they're talking about they try to make the when they're talking about this in text, it's in how I think it's fiction has become real. Perhaps they're talking about two developments of how this would work. And when they're defining collectivization of the fictional system, they say that in order to qualify as a fictional system at all,

it is necessary that the fiction must be opened up to participation. I think this is when they're sort of building their ideas of collectivization. opening up the collaborators I'm not sure if it has to be done and I don't think it doesn't have to be done in the beginning or the start or anything in this case but it's a phenomenon of this sort of thing but also collectivity is not only collectivity is not only sort of the only thing for Hyperstition to be for a fictional system to sort of make itself here. Not completely necessary.

I could you want to say something? I mean, I think because of Cthulhu's presence as kind of this towering figure over Hyperstition, And the collectivity doesn't need to be there at its conception. But maybe just as coincidence, the possibility for it to become collectivized needs to be there. But it doesn't need to be there. Maybe that's... I don't know. I would agree. I don't think it needs to be there in its utter conception. However, it's

sort of something that happens in its production. Yeah, I was going to say, I think it's partly because part of the weird is creating your own mythos, since it's not mythos that's necessarily parasitic upon particular mythologies, that But if one person creates their own mythos, then the creation of that, however they contextualize it, the origin of it is not lost. Since the origin of it is arbitrarily created by one person, then someone else can then redefine or expand the boundaries of that particular form of creation. But I think it's the fact that an entity can be hyperstitional or sort of, you know, a good meal for hyperstition.

You know, if it's the creation of a particular person, you know, it's use, you know, but because it has the auspices of being a myth. so it's at the same time kind of arbitrary but at the same time admittedly you know admittedly huge and unbound so it's like one person making up a religion and then they die anyone can come along and collectivize it and redefine it and stretch it because it's sort of trying to be you know because it has a mythological scope even though it's constructed by one and it sort of asks to be collectivized in that sense, I think, maybe.

Actually, Ben, can I just jump in there pretty quickly? Yeah, of course. No, I'm done. No, in relation to, was it Tristan that asked about language or semiosis? Was that Tristan? Yes. It was, yeah. Okay, yeah, no, because in the book that I shared with Amy during the week, which she hasn't read, but basically they say that, so glossopoeia, which is, or glossopoeesis, which is the creation of a new language. So it's essentially similar to xenopoetics, but it's more you're more in kind of control. So your xenopoieses would be related to, say, for example, speaking in tongues in the Bible, whereas glossopoieses would be where you actually kind of map down the terms.

So you create a summary or a glossary. so you're kind of creatively mapping out so it's hyperstitional basically and it's linked directly to mythopoiesis which is what Ben was just talking about there so I think that directly answers Tristan's question so the creation of a myth one person creating their own mythos which is what Ben just said which is hyperstitional is directly linked to the creation of a language which is instead of mythos of poesis, it's a gloss of poesis. So, I don't know. I would say that. Okay. I'm just saying, Kristen is loving what you just said.

Just in case you're not reading. Oh, good, okay. I saw that. Is the Bible hypersitial? I would say so, yeah, absolutely. Paul, unspeakable, what is it? Corinthians 12.4. There you go. So I want to go back to this question that Catherine brought in on when she was talking about permission, having permission for, can you say a little bit more about what you're going for? Because you said it was a little bit tangential, but I just wanted to do contextualize a little bit. You're trying to figure out why permission is also required for collectivity.

Yeah, sorry, I had muted myself when I was talking. I guess it goes back to the Tolkien Lovecraft example, is that it seemed to me, and I could be misrepresenting this, that why Tolkien was excluded from being a high-precision character character within Carrier and Lovecraft was not was because Lovecraft invited collaboration in his works and that was where the openness came in was in him inviting other authors to collaborate with him and then that's how his mid-boss was stretched out.

And I guess, and Amy's right, it is to do with fanfiction obviously what I'm asking about, because it's definitely not the case that other people haven't written using Tolkien's mythos, but it's obviously not official, and he detested it. So I guess my question is why, is that important? Like, does it matter that he detested it? Anyway, lost myself, quickly. Of course. I think intention is something that always gets brought up when they're discussing this, and whether or not—I mean, and I think some—perhaps it's a little bit off base, but a lot of interesting things were happening after Reza's book came out, and they were

doing this symposium, sort of medium, and they did also this—Iberonomic did this symposium book called The Medium of Contingency, and it's sort of relating to this. Does the author have complete ownership over their work when it gets released? Sort of you have all different ways of taking it up and picking it up, and there's sort of like this complicity when there's all these contingencies based on it. However, I think like what, I mean, and And I don't think they say this directly, their problem with Tolkien is that his collectivities are racial, they're racist, so it's very closed off and it's a limited thing of him

based on, I think, political agendas and things. Because a lot of times, yes, I think Tolkien does, I think this argument is interesting, I don't know if anybody... I think, I mean, talking with Beckett earlier, he had some things to say, but, like, why do they eliminate Tolkien's universe? Go ahead. And, well, I'll say even more interestingly that they don't answer the question of Michael Moorcock's stuff. You know... Which, yeah, I think, like, which I think, you know, maybe makes a better case for hyperstition.

especially not only just the Eternal Warrior, Elric stuff, but then also he had a novel that he wrote about Hawkwind in a post-apocalyptic London. So it seems like that mixture of fiction and the real was within his work and then the chaos magic and such that kind of grew out of a lot of Moorcock stuff, I think, but they just kind of dropped it in that blog post. They didn't respond to that, only the Tolkien.

So I wonder, is it a question of actual, well, I don't like this stuff, so I don't care about it, or is it actually a difference of theory? I'm not sure I got the last bit. Am I on? Yes, John. You didn't hear the last bit? Do you want him to rephrase the last bit? Becca, could you just rephrase that last part? Can I just rephrase the last bit? Oh, so because it's not answered in the blog post questioning, is Tolkien hyperstitional? Is Michael Moorcock hyperstitional?

You know, they reject Tolkien, but they don't mention anything about Moorcock. I'm wondering, is H.P. Lovecraft hyperstitional because the authors of the blog like his stuff, and Moorcock they don't care about, so it's ignored? Or is it actually a theoretical thing? I mean, especially in traditional cultural studies, you see this set of fictions is great and revolutionary because I like to watch this all weekend long, and so we'll have a panel at a conference on it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Okay, I'm going to bring this back to the question of language again, just because in

the book that I keep talking about that I will share, it's about unknown languages or constructed languages and the same thing, the author flags the same thing about Tolkien, that he's ignored theoretically and she says that he's ignored theoretically because he's not tormented enough, because his constructed languages, for example, you know, The Lord of the Rings or whatever, aren't tormented enough. So you can trace this back to medieval notion of mystics who are sort of, it's traced through, for example, women who are deemed insane, you know, they're sort of speaking in tongues, but they're deemed insane, you know, they're sort of suffering from the wandering room or whatever. So I'll just read a quote from this. She talks about the online inventors of constructed languages are decidedly invested in Deleuze's

logic of sense and uninterested in keeping their signifiers secret. They are nonetheless overshadowed by Tolkien and the eyes of the public, no matter how much more ingenious or inventive their work they are to the general critic as Carl's Jabberwocky was to the poet Artaud. And Artaud says, I never liked this poem. I do not like poems or languages of the surface which smell of happy letters and of intellectual success. One may invent one's language and make pure language speak with an extra grammatical or agrammatical meaning, but this meaning must have value in itself, that is, it must issue from torment. In short, insane inventions are interesting because they are tormented and or secret, and sane inventions are not."

Yeah, so it's just kind of interesting, like, because Tolkien goes on, obviously, to defend the art of language invention in his own work in a sort of sane construct. So it's not tormented enough, I think, for theoretical work, which is kind of what you were asking, you know? So there's this idea of theory, maybe, in the context of Lovecraft being aligned with torment. It's kind of interesting. And, you know, for Tolkien, or, you know, this idea of... If it's... If it's by-prestitional and it's sane, it's not maybe if it's planned it's not then therefore it's not hyperstitional you know I mean I don't know it's not making any sense but if

it's willed maybe maybe it's not hyperstitional it has to be unwilled which would make sense in relation to the wiredness of fatedness rather than and constructiveness. I don't know, somebody else comes in there. Makes sense? Yes, it does. I'm trying to also think when they're talking about Moorcock, because they do answer to it once in that blog post, but it doesn't say much about it. I mean, it's Linda Trunch. She responds that it is an interesting case, because there is collective authorship. And the... So I think actually Moorcock is more...

is taken as a... hyperstitionally, in the fact that she says that it... it's by the implexing of the real-world figures and situations into a fictional world, and conversely, the incursion of the fictional world into the world of the actual. So it sort of has this inflating... of the boundaries. It's like you said with Hawkwind and London and the Apocalypse. So I think in that case they do sort of accept it but don't say much about it. And Amy, you want to just chime in?

Or I can read Joyce. All I was going to say was what I just typed up there That in that post where Reza defends Lovecraft I think there's something to what you're saying by the way Beckett That there is a preference for Lovecraft And therefore he's defended over other things And I don't know Moorcock myself But it is interesting that they just don't address that at all But Reza's argument as far as I understand Is to do with this concept of politics and that there is, like in the way that the lay of the land is structured in Middle Earth or in Tolkien's whole mythos, it's based along sort of like racial species lines, warring factions, etc.

And then there's a kind of like ideology of British imperialism that stands behind the Sherlock Holmes stories. But Lovecraft, for all of his despicable racism, is constantly paranoid about this threat of infection by these outside forces, and that there is this kind of germinal death, I think is what he calls it, this perversion in the Freudian sense that is constantly crisscrossing any of the identities that persist in Lovecraft's universe, and that this is always at the bottom about breaking down the self, the writing self and the selves that are being written about. I just want to also chime in with another thing that was mentioned on the

side chat is that, and thanks for bringing this up, is that lovecraft's fictions are, as Ben said in the beginning of our introduction, that they're weird for us, that they're situated in our world, while in tokens it's fantasy. And this is a huge distinction for them. The fantasy element is something that's not hyper-intrusional. I think that would be fair to say, right? All right, so Eleanor kind of attributes to Eleanor says, yes, like the dissolution of

species racial borders, however terrifying in HBL craft versus the borders that are very clear and pleasant and tilting. And I think when Reza actually talks about this form of collectivity in trying to find this part, and he's talking and he says in HPL works, the collectivity may look racial but it's absolutely contagious. Populations and races agitate class, a quote, Holocaust of freedom, unquote. And this makes the race travelers particles, the old ones, infected vegetables, humans, etc. These are particles, rather than assemblages of entities.

And this is talking about the sort of assemblage of entities. So this is how Ressa sort of makes his political move, instilling in this debate between them. Would Lovecraft's themes render him hyperstitional without his collaborative writing? I think if there was—I don't know. So Catherine asks, so would Lovecraft's themes render him hyperstitional even without his collaborative writing? A lot going on this side. I think that—I'm not sure how to answer that. I think his sort

of creation of worlds in writing itself was sort of a production of this collectivization, so it's hard to say that. I think without his collaborative writing, he would have no other carriers, that have no other hyperstitional characters, there would be no production, it would just die. So, therefore, perhaps without the collaborative writing, there could be an alternate feature that Lovecraft is not the exemplary hyperstitional. On their website, they cite L. Ron Hubbard as a, you know,

a superstition practitioner in regards to Eleanor's most recent comment. Sorry, there might be some feedback from thunder outside. side. Yeah, the second part of the question, I'm actually not that surprised to hear what you were saying, Beckett. But the second one, I wonder too about something like that. I don't know if anybody's seen, that's a really old news piece, but from 1997 and the sort of eruption of Bloody Mary myths amongst homeless children or children in a foster care system

across the United States and what she calls, or what folklorists call, I guess, polygenesis, and the same myth appearing amongst all of these different households with children and this belief in Bloody Mary, like the thing you say in the mirror three times at sleepover parties if you're a teenage girl, that is simultaneously part of this sort of bizarre and violent Jesus myth. But then this idea of something, because it seems that hyperstition here has to be something that is mutable or that can be collectivized and thus changed,

but is something like that that is a change on something already existing, but it's a change in the same way, is that hyperstitional or does that have the, without everybody immediately reading that piece, obviously, would that have the potential to be hyperstitional? So I think one thing that we perhaps should go back to is in the early posts on hyperstition, we have to consider that hyperstition is a procedure of unbelief, so it's something outside of belief or disbelief.

And so I'm just trying to sort of also relate to these things like Scientology and the Bloody Mary myth and stuff. These things, a lot of these things are related to sort of like religious or mystical senses of belief, and this is something that they're trying to separate from hyperstition. Although people who study or believe in the Bible can practice in hyperstition, this is why they're building this method as a way of practicing. So if hyperstition is connected directly on the plane of unbelief, then there is no need to believe in the thing that's happening.

It's...so, like, I think this is where we can start separating, like, what is hypostritional and what is not, in some cases, like this. When we're thinking of production of unbelief, we're thinking of things outside of truth and false, what is true and what is false, whether we believe it or we disbelieve it. And we problematize this concept of belief. And also that belief has, when we think of religious belief, or these senses of beliefs, these sort of have a passive quality to them. And they're trying to think of hype, with the modern phenomenon of hype,

as having this sort of active or productive potential. And he posted a nice quote from Mark Fisher. Oh, another reason why I'll read it. Mark Fisher on Hyperstition blog. Another reason why superstition falls short of hyperstition, even when they come true, is that they fail to decode the relationship between belief and reality in the way that hyperstition always does. A crucial dimension of hyperstition is an appreciation of the hyperstitional process itself. The superstitious attribute their successes or failures to the fidelity to the talisman or a ritual. Freud was surely right that there is a strong relationship between the behaviors of obsessional

neurotics and those of religious or superstitious believers, observing a ritual. The superstitious person is effectively appropriating a god. Very good quote actually, sort of, elucidate this separation that we perhaps should make, whatever they're trying to make. So with a bloody Mary, that's... So can we add that, like, that hyperstition is atheological then? Does anyone want to talk about that? Do you want to say more?

Or you just... No, well, I think Amy can follow this up here, but this is... The Mark Fisher quote is essentially a Italian reading of theology. So... Amy? I think Eddie is right. It absolutely is atheological. I mean, it's probably coming out of Bataille, considering that Nick is a Bataille scholar. I mean, the cybernetic stuff, the whole idea of hyperstition as positive feedback, comes out of this idea. I remember one of Lance's quotes where he says, God is dead, everything happens from the bottom up, which is the idea of this construction of reality through feedback.

So there is no outside truth. truth. It's all constructed. Everything is fair game to be constructed. And so any kind of potential hyperstition that reports back ultimately to a god or reinforces some kind of transcendent identity outside of itself is instantly non-hyperstitional and relates more to superstition. So absolutely what Eddie has said, etiological. And also, there was I mean, with belief, you cannot separate things easily, but with hyperstition, it's based on its fundamental first characteristic.

I mean, we're recognizing fiction's effectiveness and sort of bringing it through a process, analyzing it, trying to sort of propagate it. But still, in the same sense, there's this weird essence of not believing it, of knowing that sort of construct, not believing it in the sense of truth and false. I think that's an integral part. The people who are complicit in the hyperstition have to not believe in it. They have to know that it's not real, but treat it as if it is. Right. And... ...we're going to... ...

...the only other position on the awareness, acknowledgement of it. Yes. Yes. Hence, complicity with anonymous materials, in a way, I think is speaking about this. Complicity with inauthenticity. Okay, yeah. Which you guys, I guess, are gonna get to. Next session, yes. Superstition, hyperstition dichotomy requires a very specific theological position, the univocality of being via Donsbrotis and Descartes. I wish you could be on the microphone because a lot of...

Yeah, univocality, correct. Okay, let me answer this. Oh, I don't know, that's kind of troubled. So, yeah, that's fascinating. Okay, so I'm not really sure. Can Tristan hear me? Yeah, he can hear you. He just says it's our... Okay, this has been made by...

I'm just going to wait one minute to see what he goes. I mean, I think, in a sense, this idea of university is very important to Deleuze's work, and this work, and a lot of the members of the composition are very interested in those inverseries work. I think in some sense there is this imminent potential.

I'm not quite sure about how it comes through in Descartes, so maybe if you have something, somebody else could comment on this. Well, not universally, but I mean it comes back maybe a little bit to those in, to language in relation to the logic of sense, of nonsense. I'm not really sure how he's tying it to SCOTUS. I mean, SCOTUS would be a problem of individuation. It's more in Alderstein. I mean, I don't know how hyperstition would relate to individuation.

That's an interesting question, though. I would say, Tristan, if you could, there's the Google Classroom. If you could post this as a thread on there, we can continue this. Because I would like to know. That way you can really express the question on it, and you can respond to it. Because it is interesting. And of course, what we were talking about, And the duration is also important. I just can't comment on it now. We're coming sort of to a close. We have about 15 minutes. So yeah, of course. I just wanted to know if anybody else has any sort of comments.

I guess what I would like to open up is for all of you, since now I guess we're a little bit more comfortable talking to each other is if you can sort of express a little bit about what you hope to get out of these sessions and sort of like what ideas you're looking at in relation to either the New Weird, Hyperstition or Reza's work or any sort of other work that comes into contact. That would be very nice. For me, I'm interested in a study, I'm doing a lot of research in relation to the image and how the image is sort of expressed as a contagion throughout contemporary culture, and I'm interested in these relations.

But if not, we can just sort of, I guess, get them throughout the conversations. I just wanted to open it up for everybody. Where's Cueva? Cueva, you have to say something. Cueva? Who are you? Cueva. I'm there. Cueva there? You there? Yeah, I'm here, but my laptop is running really slow, so... It's really jumpy. Say something. I don't know. I guess I'm just kind of mostly interested in the new weird, and like me and Catherine basically do most of our writing together,

so at the moment we're writing a sort of weird fiction thing for Helvet, the new issue. So just hoping I guess it will feed into that a little bit. OK, cool. And what types of weird fiction are you working with? Are you studying? Sort of like reading, interested in? I don't know. It's a difficult question. I don't know. I've written a little bit about sort of Alan Moore, which I think most of his work is weird fiction. I think. I'm not sure. OK. Thank you for joining the class.

The next few sessions will be integrating the readings in a lot more, and at any point in time we sort of set out a few books. Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, Michael Sisco's Member, we have Edge City, and City in the City by the river. So have you got any of these? Have these already been read? No.

OK. I'm trying to catch up with, oh, Amy has more good quotes that I think will pass. I'll put on the classroom for us to discuss further. But thank you. Tony, do the comments stay? Can we watch? Do these stay once the class is over? Like, how do we actually? Yeah, I will be. I'll be, after every class, if we keep up with the comments and we keep up continuously with them, I will copy them and put them into the classroom each time so we can then go back and review them. And hopefully, like, this, we can spark more threads and comments asynchronously. and we can discuss these things that we maybe didn't pick up, or we want to pick up later,

or they kind of coincidentally come back when we're talking about things that don't have any relevance. Yeah, I definitely didn't pick up on half of those. Yeah, so if anybody makes, like, references, another good thing to practice for Forma would be to put it in the chat box so then the references are then saved for us. And I hope we can get into more of like this discussion based sort of dialogue. What we'll do is we'll post like a few for the next session we'll post a few general questions that we're bringing up in relation to the reading to sort of prepare you guys more. Right now in our functions it's difficult to sort of get a hold of everybody and organize

until after the first session. So we'll start now with kind of like having more preparation with the reading materials and being able to get you guys more prepared and more able to be comfortable speaking. The second session will be on Reza Negostani, his work, mostly on Cyclone Media. We'll be looking at theory fiction and sort of fiction as an extension of Hyperstition, how Reza's work in the Hyperstition blog, a lot of it was written on the Hyperstition blog. And sort of, we'll extend, we'll talk more about the hemogram because we'll have a guest who's very interested in this

and has been working a lot with it, Linda Barcelos. And I guess then, I just want to ask Ben if he has anything to say about the second session. He'll be heading up the session. I don't think so. I think you've covered it. Yeah. I think everything else will be in the readings. OK. Yeah, so let's try to have a lively discussion throughout the week, if possible, on the classroom. There's a lot of threads that we can post. And thank you, Amy Ireland, for making this very smooth and good talk, and I very much appreciate you coming on. She's going to be actually co-hosting her own session

on techno-feminism, and that's going to be starting on Friday. That's going to be really good. Thank you all for coming. I guess if anybody wants to leave, some comments for the floor before we leave, I can allow one more silent moment. Thanks, guys, for hosting. It's been really good. No problem. Thank you. Thank you. So that's the end of the first session. If anybody has any questions about how to get to the

classroom, what to do, how to participate, if you're missing a reading or you need a reading, just feel free to post on there or email one, either Ben or I. And thank you. I'm going to go off the podcast now.