Simon O'Sullivan

Simon O'Sullivan appears in this archive as an artist-theorist and later reader of Ccru, not as a member of the collective. Three distinct texts support an intellectual trajectory. “The Missing Subject of Accelerationism” (2014) diagnoses the absence of affective and collective subject-production from contemporary accelerationism. “Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science” turns that diagnosis into a political account of art, myth and the people-to-come. “Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis” then tests the proposal against the rational constructivism of Reza Negarestani and Ray Brassier. The result is neither a rejection of reason and technology nor an aesthetic supplement to them, but a recurring attempt to connect formal construction with affect, fiction and collective desire.

The missing subject

O'Sullivan begins by separating several accelerationist subjects. The Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics implies a communist subject assembled from different proletarian identities; Negarestani and Brassier pursue rational self-revision and philosophical Prometheanism; Nick Land treats the inherited human subject as an obstacle to an autonomous “techonomic” process. Despite their differences, O'Sullivan argues that these positions give too little account of how a subject is affectively produced (“The Missing Subject of Accelerationism”, pp. 2–5, 8–9).

The objection is not a defense of an untouched human interior against machines. Capitalism is both a large-scale abstract system and something that organizes anxiety, resentment, depression, desire and bodily habit. Conversely, affect is not private feeling possessed by a stable individual: molecular encounters among biological, chemical, technological and digital processes can interrupt the familiar human model and generate new compounds of thought. An adequate post-capitalist subject therefore has to be made at rational, technical and affective levels at once (ibid., pp. 9–10).

Félix Guattari supplies O'Sullivan with a practical alternative. Schizoanalysis experiments with nonhuman encounters and nonstandard models of subjectivity; Guattari's aesthetic paradigm treats expression, group life and practice as means of opening new “universes of reference.” This also changes the argument about political scale. O'Sullivan does not simply choose the local and horizontal over accelerationist abstraction. He calls for a diagonal between vertical systems and horizontal or molecular life, including a strategic alternation between acceleration and deceleration. Withdrawal can be a temporary technique for confronting capital's operation within subjectivity, while abstraction remains necessary for understanding its larger systems (ibid., pp. 10–11).

Ccru as scene, style and affective charge

O'Sullivan's retrospective account of Warwick is useful precisely because it does not reduce Ccru to a philosophical position. He remembers a transdisciplinary scene in which theory met jungle, rave, drugs, science fiction, visual media, fanzines and live performance. The 1990s texts carried an affective charge and a writing with their materials, not just an argument about them. He describes Virtual Futures as an encounter among philosophers, artists, writers and DJs, and stresses that musicians, artists and fiction writers were often more strongly affected by this milieu than professional philosophers (ibid., pp. 7–8).

This is a selective recollection, not a collective history. Its role in O'Sullivan's argument is to identify what later accelerationism lost when it privileged rational programs: libidinal intensity, performative form and fiction's power to organize desire. He reads Ccru's hyperstition as one name for that operative fiction, then asks how its transformative traction might be retained without accepting Land's later politics (ibid., pp. 8, 11–12).

Art as navigation and subject-production

Art is O'Sullivan's proposed site for joining these registers. It does not merely illustrate a political program or await supersession by technology. Expanded and performative practices can combine bodies, digital sound and image, biology, code, algorithms and residual cultural forms. Their images and fictions address something not yet organized as a recognizable identity; their political capacity lies in making alternatives perceptible and desirable (ibid., pp. 11–12).

In the later mythotechnesis essay, O'Sullivan develops this claim through Negarestani rather than simply opposing him. He compares artistic practice with abductive inference: both use provisional hypotheses, manipulation, heuristic navigation and experimental response where outcomes cannot be deduced from starting premises. “Fictioning” names a lived modeling of realities through imagining, imaging, performance, making and conceptual thought. Under neoliberal conditions that narrow the field of possible action, producing a different reality can itself be politically charged (“Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis”, pp. 4–6).

This engagement changes the familiar image of the artist as either autonomous transgressor or external critic. Negarestani's engineering loops suggest an artist who works within dynamic systems and revises practice as materials, concepts and consequences feed back on one another. O'Sullivan extends the model beyond reason: the relevant loops can also map forces, affects and a molecular unconscious. The artist-engineer constructs artifacts and experimental forms of life without assuming that technology alone determines their direction (ibid., pp. 7–9).

From myth-science to a politics of myth

O'Sullivan explicitly derives myth-science from Sun Ra and Mike Kelley, not from Ccru. Its initial task is to name artistic practices that make alternative fictions and call forth subjectivities able to inhabit them. Ccru matters because hyperstition supplies temporal feedback, artificial agencies and fictions that help produce their own reality, but O'Sullivan restores the “mythos” that rationalist versions of accelerationism tend to discard (“Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science”, pp. 1–5, 12–13). The concept's mechanics are treated separately at myth-science.

The expanded essay makes myth a political problem rather than an automatically emancipatory resource. O'Sullivan distinguishes exclusionary myths of purity, origin and hierarchy from minor or open myths through which hybrid and unfinished collectivities might form. Land's neoreactionary mythos demonstrates why the terrain cannot be dismissed as decorative: myth can mobilize libidinal investment as effectively as rational argument. The task is therefore not to oppose enlightened reason to irrational story, but to examine the components, historical conditions and forms of belonging through which a myth-system operates (ibid., pp. 20–23).

O'Sullivan's alternative is immanent rather than transcendent. It does not install a hidden deep structure or promise exit into a purified elsewhere. It recombines residual and emergent materials in the present to create narratives and image-worlds for people who do not recognize themselves in the dominant ones. Art, philosophy and science can interfere with one another to summon a “people-to-come,” but there is no guarantee of political purity: minor invention can slip into major or fascistic myth, so the work requires continuing diagnosis (ibid., pp. 24–30).

Mythotechnesis: construction after the critique

Mythotechnesis marks a constructive second step. O'Sullivan adopts what is productive in Negarestani's rational navigation and Brassier's Promethean refusal of fixed human limits, while asking what they omit. In art, rules become changing protocols for experimentation rather than a fixed system for subsuming heterogeneous materials. Practices can nest fictions inside fictions until they constitute provisional worlds; science fiction can supply prototypes in which reason, desire and unfamiliar forms of life are already joined (“Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis”, pp. 13–15).

The term's core diagram is the patheme-matheme assemblage. Across O'Sullivan's surrounding explanation, the matheme names formal and rational construction; the patheme names the equally abstract but affective, creaturely and libidinal register. Mythotechnesis is the diagonal between them: artifice that does not leave desire to capital, and vitalism that does not reject conceptual or technological work. Its artifacts, performances, diagrams and fictions are holding patterns for experimental modes of being rather than representations of an already constituted subject (ibid., pp. 19–22).

The trajectory is therefore additive. The missing-subject critique establishes that capitalism has to be contested in affect and desire as well as infrastructure and reason. Myth-science confronts the political force and danger of the stories through which collective desire is organized. Mythotechnesis converts both insights into a practice of construction. Across the three texts, O'Sullivan keeps the tension open: reason without affect cannot transform lived subjectivity, but affect without formal and collective construction cannot by itself navigate complex systems.

Archive boundary

The archive supports this focused trajectory in O'Sullivan's writing on accelerationism, art and fictioning. It does not support a general biography or a complete account of his collaborative art practice. O'Sullivan is a post-Ccru interpreter who uses the Warwick scene as one historical and aesthetic resource among others; nothing in these sources establishes Ccru membership. His distinctive contribution here is the diagonal method: joining scales and speeds, concept and affect, engineering and myth while preserving the political risks of each.