Philip of It's All In Your Mind blog asks me via e-mail to elucidate the difference between hyperstition and superstition. This provides an excellent opportunity to explore some of the basics of hyperstition.
One difference is that superstitions don't necesarily involve a becoming-real. It's true that superstitional beliefs can have some impact upon the real. We can all easily produce numerous examples of this, no doubt: the sportswoman who performs better when she wears her lucky charm, the student who excels himself in an exam because it falls on a date he believes is his lucky day. Yet this is not always the case with superstitions. There are plenty of superstitional beliefs to which their adherents stubbornly adhere in spite of all manner of countervailing evidence.
Another reason why superstitions fall 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 their fidelity to a talisman or a ritual (Freud was surely right that there is a strong relationship between the behaviours of obsessional neurotics and those of the religious, or superstitious, believer; in observing a ritual, the superstitious person is effectively propiating a god).
One way of illustrating this difference is by thinking about economics. Bush was wrong to consider 'voodoo economics' a particular abberational type of economics. Rather, economics is essentially voodoo: i.e. a sorcerous practice for producing changes in the real. The whole of Baudrillardian postmodernity falls under the aegis of hyperstition. A cursory survey of the capitalist economy reveals that beliefs, fears, hopes, anticipations and potentials are immediately effective. Gibson's term, 'consensual hallucination', is as appropriate for capital as it was for the cyberspace for which he coined it. Similarly, Deleuze-Guattari's multiply evocative term 'fictional quantities' gives us some valuable hints about the essentially hyperstitional character of capital.
Posted by mark k-p at July 6, 2004 09:37 PMAnd superstitions don't necessarily involve 'fictional quantities' of any kind (Hyperstition always does). When superstitions reveal a numeric/quantitative aspect they betray themselves (to the hyperstitional engineer) as 'degenerated hyperstitional structures'.
Superstitions are typically 'folk BELIEFS which can be contested epistemologically - but try 'refusing to believe' in the Numogram.
In thinking about this wonder if it might also be worthwhile to try to elaborate the similarities between hyperstition and superstition (interesting that when you google hyperstition a message comes up saying 'do you mean superstition?')
Really don't know where to start with this - feel like I have a much better grasp on the 'hype' than the 'stition'
Posted by: anna at July 7, 2004 04:04 AMWhen I google 'hyperstition' I get do you mean 'hyperstation'!
Nick: Unbelief = that which you can't refuse to believe in? I think there's something there...(What was it PKD said: reality is what is there whether you believe it or not?)
Can we say a little more abt hyperstition's essential relationship to 'fictional quantities' I wonder? I'm tremendously sympathetic, but I need a little persuading....
Posted by: mark at July 7, 2004 09:29 AM[Know i'm betraying numbo-jumbo obsession here -but 'what the hell'].
The numeric-quantitative dimension is that of DECODING, 'sealing' the relation between hyperstition and the inhuman - the Outside.
A 'fictional quantity' is never merely a fiction -decoding glues it to an abstract existence beyond truth and falsity (perhaps of the PKD-type mentioned above).
Seems to me this is what crucially differentiates hyperstition from superstition in the 'making itself real' stakes. Because hyperstition is always connected to a hypercosmic 'means of production' beyond anthropomorphic mentality
it doesn't fall prey to the pomo-relativist black-holes of arbitrary subjectivism, idealism, or self-confirming dogmatism. (Of course, it falls prey to any number of other - abominable - things).
The numeric-quantitative dimension is that of DECODING, 'sealing' the relation between hyperstition and the inhuman - the Outside.
A 'fictional quantity' is never merely a fiction -decoding glues it to an abstract existence beyond truth and falsity (perhaps of the PKD-type mentioned above).
This seems absolutely right, but can we decompress it a bit?
Numbers are obviously major for unbelief because there's no question of either believing or disbelieving them. Do you believe in prime numbers is an absurd question, obv.
Big question, but maybe we start to approach it: how do numbers connect with decoding then?
Interesting how numbers cut through the old philosophical binary of relations of ideas/ logic and matters of fact. What is the connection if any between hyperstition and synthetic a priori? I know hyperstition consumes transcendental philosophy, but how it does it in this instance might be worth thinking abt...
Posted by: mark at July 7, 2004 04:39 PMDo you believe in prime numbers is an absurd question, obv.
Inasmuch as they have demonstrable properties when compared to other numbers, I believe in them.
I have huge problems with this whole unbelief thing: Does an agnostic have unbelief in God?
When you go 'belief, unbelief, disbelief', I keep thinking of Plato's 'knowledge, opinion, ignorance'.
Posted by: johneffay at July 7, 2004 11:41 PMMark:
Numbers exceed the synthetic a priori, because - as Goedel demonstrates - all logical systems are quasi-arbitrary subsections of arithmetical pattern (evident through an immanent critique of 'logicism' or rigorous philosophical-discursive overcoding). The natural number line cannot be consistently overcoded by any logical (discursive) doctrines or principles whatsoever.
(You don't need to 'believe' in Goedel to accept this, it's just that you can't believe in logicism or any other definitive - uniquely authoritative - transcendental doctrine without accepting the autodissolution of such doctrines, when consistently extended - into Goedelian 'hypertranscendental arithmetic'.)
[Of course, much more to come on your q.s here]
Johneffay:
>> Inasmuch as they have demonstrable properties when compared to other numbers, I believe in them.
What does 'believing in them' add, compared to just using them?
>> Does an agnostic have unbelief in God?
This is actually quite a complicated question, since once installed within the Numogram 'God' (monotheism) has definite numerico-diagrammatic consequences. 'One' can disbelieve in anthropomorphic divinity (= negative atheism), but the power of unity (Burroughs' OGU) is not dispelled so easily. I'm sure there'll be much more on this.
>> I keep thinking of Plato's 'knowledge, opinion, ignorance'
Unbelief isn't opinion (which still relates itself to the ideal of belief, i.e. as an unconfirmed, tentative or hypothetical belief). Unbelief is a limit concept, beyond - because more robust than - belief. It's the (annihilated) cognitive complement of a fully operational cultural function independent of belief (a Kantian 'regulative idea' comes closer).
Unbelief aims neither at belief (which it has already surpassed) or disbelief (which it has already withstood).
It is a type of impersonal 'knowledge' achieved by the complete - and intrinsically evident (immanent) - subtraction of indoctrination, where all possibility of subjective commitment has been eradicated so nothing but anonymous technocultural functionality remains. Sheer 'thinking'?
Atheism in the sense of a positively manifested hypercosmic desolation (rather than a mere epistemological negation) supports intelligent agencies in a 'state' of ecstatic unbelief (or so Hackhammer's frothing fanatics assert - but you can't count on them).
Posted by: Nick at July 8, 2004 03:42 AM