Mythotechnesis

Definition

Mythotechnesis is Simon O'Sullivan's extension of myth-science from the production of alternative fictions into the deliberate engineering of affect and form. It remains a fictioning of reality, but its specific object is the construction of patheme-matheme assemblages: synthetic combinations of libidinal intensity, conceptual structure and technical procedure capable of producing forms of life not exhausted by an already constituted human subject (Secondary Sources/Texts/Essays/Simon O'Sullivan/Simon O' Sullivan - Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis.pdf, p. 1).

The concept is formulated against two reductions. The first treats art as a merely illustrative supplement to philosophical reason. The second treats technological development as sufficient to produce a post-capitalist or posthuman subject. O'Sullivan accepts the accelerationist interest in conceptual navigation, experimental heuristics and Promethean construction, but argues that none of these by itself reaches capitalism's production of anxiety, resentment, depression, desire and fantasy at the molecular level (Secondary Sources/Texts/Essays/Simon O'Sullivan/Simon O' Sullivan - Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis.pdf, pp. 15–17).

Navigation, protocols and fictioning

O'Sullivan reads Reza Negarestani's labour of the inhuman as a navigational project: commitments are unfolded into consequences, routes are tested, incompatible commitments are rejected, and each path becomes a hypothesis opening or blocking further paths. He links this to art's manipulable and non-monotonic procedures, in which making and inference alter one another without the result being fully dictated by the starting premises (Secondary Sources/Texts/Essays/Simon O'Sullivan/Simon O' Sullivan - Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis.pdf, pp. 5–8).

Rules in mythotechnesis are consequently protocols for experimentation rather than laws that subsume heterogeneous material under a fixed order. A practice changes its conduct as matter, thought and imagination reorganize one another; fictions can nest inside fictions until they acquire enough density to constitute a provisional world. This makes fictioning an operation, not a genre designation (Secondary Sources/Texts/Essays/Simon O'Sullivan/Simon O' Sullivan - Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis.pdf, pp. 13–14).

Patheme and matheme

The matheme names the formal, transmissible and potentially inhuman organization associated here with reason, science and technological Prometheanism. The patheme names affective, creaturely and libidinal processes that displace the subject from itself. O'Sullivan's point is not to restore warm experience against cold abstraction: affects are themselves abstract and nonhuman, while formal constructions enter bodies and desires. Mythotechnesis runs diagonally between them (Secondary Sources/Texts/Essays/Simon O'Sullivan/Simon O' Sullivan - Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis.pdf, pp. 17–21).

CONTRADICTION On PDF p. 19, one sentence says the former term in patheme-matheme names the formal and the latter the vital-affective. The discussion immediately following assigns the matheme to formal reason and the patheme to affect, and the conclusion repeats that allocation. The first sentence appears internally inverted, but this remains unverified rather than silently corrected (Secondary Sources/Texts/Essays/Simon O'Sullivan/Simon O' Sullivan - Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis.pdf, pp. 19–21).

Relation to CCRU

Mythotechnesis is a post-CCRU concept, not a rediscovered item of CCRU vocabulary. Its relation to CCRU lies in what O'Sullivan sees as the pathic charge of the Warwick milieu and Land's writing: a libidinal component diminished when later accelerationism moved toward rational subjectivation and formal navigation. Mythotechnesis attempts to retain that charge while refusing to let an impersonal technocapitalist process dictate the only available future (Secondary Sources/Texts/Essays/Simon O'Sullivan/Simon O' Sullivan - Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis.pdf, pp. 19–22).

The resulting practice makes images, sounds, performances, diagrams and fictions into prototypes for collective desire. Its criterion is transformative traction: whether a synthetic form can reorganize how bodies feel, think and act, not merely whether it correctly represents a political program. This is why mythotechnesis belongs beside hyperstition but cannot be collapsed into it; the former specifies a constructive libidinal practice, while the latter names a broader reality-producing circuit (Secondary Sources/Texts/Essays/Simon O'Sullivan/Simon O' Sullivan - Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis.pdf, pp. 21–22).