Sherlock may not be hyperstitional (although I have doubts, see below), but for an interestingly semi-hyperstitional use of Holmes, see ‘The Seven-Per-Cent Solution’, ‘Being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H.Watson, as edited by Nicholas Meyer’ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975). Here we find several proto-hyperstitional devices:

i.Mimicking epistemological hierarchies in order to upset/smear them. In reading the book we come across the subversive use of footnotes as secret catalysers (cf. Spinoza): masquerading as sub- or metatheses transcendental-prophylactically disabled from real engagement with (making a difference to) the ‘master’ text, in fact they react directly upon this presupposed hierarchy.

In this case the footnotes are (Nicholas Meyer’s (annotations to (a discovered text by (Watson about (an adventure of (Sherlock Holmes’)))))). Note that already the reality-quotient index of the hierarchy is interestingly mottled rather than being a simple real-unreal continuum)

(nb. Of course SH already has this supposedly meta-authorial voice in place with Dr. Watson – this gives SH a specific machinic affinity with hyperfiction which Linda has perhaps dismissed too quickly? Also on this point we need to point out the thoroughly hyperstitional relationship between Holmes and London. A number of tourists turn up in London every year to be disabused of their wholesale belief in the reality of Holmes. Also recommend a visit to his rooms, beautifully preserved as a museum, in Baker Street.)

In reading these footnotes, you’re compelled (a)to remind yourself that ‘this is not an episode in the real history of Sherlock Holmes’, a memo which of course has the perverse effect of reinforcing the reality of the ‘real sherlock holmes’; and (b)to remind yourself that the footnoter, although ‘real’ and ‘outside’ the story, is nonetheless ‘within’ the conceit of the novel (is the 'real' author's fiction of himself).

The author, then, constantly combats our tendency to ‘outwit’ him by inducing stable hierarchies, precisely by creating further hierarchies thus activating a fallack position of relying upon things known and familiar, which in this case are fictional. A gap appears between that which has real-potency and that which is part of the ‘real world’ per se.

ii.Introducing causal derangements (time-mockery)
Whilst in a delirious state at Freud’s house Holmes ‘babbled of oysters overrunning the world and similar nonsense’; Meyer, in a footnote, suggests that Holmes used this actual delirious episode as a model for ‘shamming delirium’ in a later (real?) Holmes adventure, ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’, ( ‘it would be interesting to learn the origin of the phobia’ (cf, of course, the appearance of Professor Challenger, also a Conan Doyle creation, together with lobsters, in GOM)). Hyperstitions seem to always be placed within linear time, like ATP dates. This is for what The Upsetter calls ‘comedy value’(noting the importance of the unseen cause in provoking laughter). Again this device employs the compulsion to favour causal links, the temptation of priority, in order to to infiltrate a series of real events.

One realises the potency of the ‘real fictional’ Sherlock Holmes as against the new information one is being asked to process; i.e. one is faced with the intrinsically arbitrary nature of ‘belief’ (or, better, that reality-potency is not a function of belief but only of consistency). Having taken this on board, however, then one has to contend, as Watson and Holmes end up in Vienna, with Freud entering the scene! Real confusion here between the ‘fictional real fictional’ Holmes and the ‘fictionalised real’ Freud. What to make of the reader’s question ‘would Freud really have said that to Holmes’?

At this point, the damage, such as it is, is done - the reader need not ‘believe in’ Meyer’s Watson, or Meyer’s Watson’s Holmes, to feel the effects. In this case rather trivial, and to be sure these tricks are the stock-in-trade of the pomo novelist; in Castaneda’s case rather more wide-reaching since he manages to upset, extremely slowly and carefully, an entire edifice of reality.

Unfortunately, and this is the crux, ‘monkey-flake’ is wont to ‘digest’ this upset post-facto by making it once again into an epistemological formality – ah, he’s demonstrated to me something rather profound about fiction (the self-satisfied faux-aporia where pomostition always leaves things). So to these upsetting techniques we must necessarily add a discipline of consistency-engineering - which is undoubtedly the most difficult, least-discussed, least-successful element of the process, for which all the foregoing is mere preparation – and know where in the cycle to start this engine.

From this point of view, isn’t the difference between Farmerian hyperfiction and hyperstition only one of subtlety, or slowness? Farmer’s Syndrome is the attempt to build an alternative universe in a day, something which is bound to backfire and fall back into the fiction/reality double-articulation given the huge investment everyone has in maintaining a reality? (In fact, is this difference in speed not in some way constitutive of the diff. between reality-potency and belief? Belief being belief in a whole, intensity being 'partial' in every sense)

Thus, an insinuating, slowly ratcheting process, essentially indistinguishable from a programme of intoxication (or detoxification, depending on your point of view). After all, it has millions of years of organic programming to deal with. Farmer’s hubris, on the other hand, is comparable to naïve statements such as ‘everything they tell you at school is just a lie’; which equates to a mere oppositional-realism rather than the more circumspect constructivist-unrealism of hyperstition, which has more respect for the white-powers-that-be: As Nietzsche might say, in order to destroy your enemy, it is necessary first to admire him.

This all begs the question whether hyperstition as a deliberate tactic is too ponderous to be effective, whether it shadows too closely the production of reality (ie contemporary hyperstitions can only be a mere barnacle on the great whale of bourgeois reality-production); or if not, how to locate the shortcuts, or the locations where small fictions can gain leverage against huge lies?

footnote: fallack = fallback

A fascinating, informative post, which takes us right to the heart of hyperstition - or, more importantly, to its limits (where does hyperfiction end and hyperstition begin)?

But I respectfully suggest that the features lur-cur enumerates are precisely qualities of hyperfiction rather than hyperstition. Naturally there are areas of crossover (hyperstition uses hyperfictional techniques), but I remain unconvinced that Holmes, even when hyperfictionalized by the likes of Meyer, ever becomes hyperstitional.

The meta-authorial voice of Watson is all of a piece with many techniques in nineteenth centrury fiction, cf the implex of narrators in Wuthering Heights, the epistolary form of Frankenstein, the journal/ simulated recording form of Dracula (as analysed by Kittler).

(As lur-cur identifies, postmodernist fiction often pursues these simulation techniques to the point of hyperbolic excess. )

I maintain that the difference between Farmer and Castenada is one of kind, not of degree. Farmer seeks to establish that Tarzan, Holmes et al can be treated as (if) real, without really challenging what being 'real' entails. (This is why the fact that many tourists 'believe' in Sherlock Holmes is not evidence that the character has become hyperstitional.) One important aspect of Castaneda's project is the delegitimating of official reality. He doesn't try to persuade us that Don Juan is as real as, say, Richard Nixon. On the contrary, in many ways.

Also, I would re-emphasise that the role of practice in Castaneda is crucial.

One important aspect of Castenada's project is the delegitimating of official reality. He doesn't try to persuade us that Don Juan is as real as, say, Richard Nixon.

So what exactly is he doing in the Introduction to The Teachings of Don Juan, when he describes his initial meeting with this person? I would respectfully suggest that you are engaging in a revisionist reading of this material prompted by Castenada being 'found out', as it were. There is no evidence in the initial texts that Castenada is trying to do anything than persuade us that Don Juan is as real, if not realler than, Richard Nixon. Castaneda might not believe it, but that's hardly the point.

Linda's surely right though John. It is necessary in the initial (or initiating) stages for us to 'believe' in Don Juan and for Castaneda to appear to solicit such belief; by the time we're Yaqui sorcerers such belief is not abandoned but is made irrelevant. We've been taken on a journey. Things have happened. It doesn't matter whether our guide is an actually existing biographical individual or not. He is certainly an Individual. This is unbelief.

Castaneda being 'found out' = his being opened up for/ by hyperstition. The fact that the early texts were capable of eliciting belief (and therefore exposing the mechanics of belief-production) is as crucial as the fact that they were ultimately 'exposed'.

But that's my point! He does try to persuade us that Don Juan is as real as Richard Nixon. We will never be Yaqui [sic] sorcerers by following Casteneda because, Casteneda knows fuck-all about Yaqui sorcerers.

Perhaps the fact that the New Testament was originally capable of eliciting belief, but is now being doubted in wider and wider circles crucially opens it up for hyperstition as well.

We've been taken on a journey. Things have happened. It doesn't matter whether our guide is an actually existing biographical individual or not. He is certainly an Individual.

I feel the same way about most works of literature.

I hope all this doesn't make me sound too huffy: These are genuine problems that I have with what you are doing, rather than some attempt to get involved in a flame war over approaches or personalities.

I have to confess that from my current vantage point, which is admittedly not far past the starting blocks, I tend to side with John here.
I hope this wont be taken the wrong way, as the suggestion is made purely out of well-meaning curiousity; but my first instinct upon reading this site and some of the Ccru writing is that the whole thing is a Hyperstition - a fictitious critical position that has made itself 'real'.

Philip:

my first instinct upon reading this site and some of the Ccru writing is that the whole thing is a Hyperstition - a fictitious critical position that has made itself 'real'.

Well, precisely, good!

John

Perhaps the fact that the New Testament was originally capable of eliciting belief, but is now being doubted in wider and wider circles crucially opens it up for hyperstition as well.

But surely you can see the difference? It really matters whether the NT is true or not, whether there really Jesus was resurrected in the flesh or not. It doesn't matter one jot whether Castaneda really met someone called Don Juan.

Castaneda's sorcery (and he might not 'know anything about Yaqui sorcery' in some trivial academic sense, but he's certainly a sorcerer) works most intensely precisely when you have doubted the existence of DJ (and so much else besides, as D/G say). Christianity falls apart (or degenerates into some enfeebled postmodern shell) once the literal truth of Christ's life and resurrection is put into quesiton.

Of course, Xianity, like all religions, exhibits hyperstitional dynamics. What stops religions being themselves hyperstitional is, precisely, that they must perforce deny the hyperstitional mechanics of their own emergence.

As regards literature, if literature genuinely takes you on an intensive journey, outside the dominant operating system and its scanning patterns (rather than doing a survey of the interior of the reality studio), then it's almost certainly acheived hyperstitional status.

It doesn't matter one jot whether Castenada really met someone called Don Juan.

Not to you, perhaps but I know several practitioners of the 'the Yaqui way of knowledge' for whom the reality of Don Juan is a crucially important component of their belief system. Conversely, a quick Net search will yield up loads of groups for whom the New Testament is some kind of allegory rather than a literal truth. This might well be a degeneration into some enfeebled pomo shell, but my 'Yaqui' chums would say exactly the same thing about your position regarding Castaneda.

My basic point, which might well be getting lost here, is that, given that Castaneda deliberately elicits belief, I cannot see him as a model practitioner of hyperstition, when compared to Sherlock Holmes, for all the reasons that lurCur raised. Linda might well be right about Farmer's treatment (which I haven't read, but will do as it sounds hilarious), but that doesn't invalidate the fact that Homes has bled out into the real world.

Sorry about all the commas! It's getting late...

I have to say, the word 'hyperstition' is being used in a way absolutely contrary to my understanding of it if Sherlock Holmes is being held up as exemplary of it as opposed to Castenada. Lur-cur establishes very well that Sherlock is hyperfictional, sure, but really, there isn't that much difference between Doyle and Walter Scott (who interpolated his fictional characters into real historical events and vice versa). Most of the features Lur-Cur enumerates were well-established techniques in 19C fiction.

The fact that there are authoritarian dupes who want to turn Castaneda's hyperstition into a religion is all-too predictable but this shouldn't distract from the fundamental difference between Castaneda's strategy and that of Christianity.

I'm not suggesting that the DJ books are an allegory. That would be as bad as saying that they really happened. They are intensive cartographies, sorcerous kits.

If Christians admitted that the NT was an intensive cartography, then we'd be getting somewhere.

Do read Farmer's treatment, it's everything Linda says, and also, yeh, fucking hilarious...

Let me put a question to John and Lur: do they think there is any difference at all between hyperfiction and hyperstition? If so, what is it?

I assume that Hyperfiction would be merely linked to interpolating fictional characters into the 'real world' (whatever Farmer is up to). It may also have the result of causing belief in the reality of fictional characters, but this isn't important to you.

Hyperstition, on the other hand, would have the added element of some kind of strategic take-up above and beyond that (people wandering around applying Holmes' methodology). This would also be linked to your concept of unbelief, where belief doesn't matter so long affects are generated. I base this upon your holding up Lovecraft as an archetypal practioner of hyperstition.

If the above is even vaguely accurate, I simply cannot see why Casteneda is held held up as exemplary as, I say again, he deliberately elicits belief. This is evident in the interviews which Mark linked to above. How can he be hyperstitional if he does this? I agree that there might be hyperstitional uses for this material, but that would be in spite of, rather than because of, anything that Castaneda is up to.

As I said previously, the Sherlock Holmes stories have caused large numbers of readers to employ the methodology of a 'science of deduction' which, unknown to them, is in fact based upon induction. This seems eminently hyperstitional to me.

Of course the concept belongs to you guys, so I might well be completely wrong. I just have the sneking suspicion that the reason we're disagreeing is that you find sorcerers sexier than detectives...

Well, the concept doesn't 'belong' to anyone, but it does have its own consistency which we're beginning to map, and your questions are incredibly useful in that process. They're really helping me articulate aspects of the concept that are implicitly assumed by us but which really need to be spelled out.

It occured to me last night - and this partly comes out of the literature/ hyperstition distinction - that the crucial hyperstitional dimension that Lovecraft and Castaneda share which Doyle lacks is 'the passage to the Outside'. Holmes is firmly on the side of the empirical, the ecumenal, the phenomenal (hence his induction). In this respect, 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' is exemplary, with its refutation of the supernatural and its resolution into the Todorov-'uncanny'. By contrast, tere is a genuinely transcendental dimension to Castaneda and Lovecraft, who always describe - and seek to open up - thresholds to the Outside. Their books are such thresholds.

I think the Castaneda situation is much more complex than you're suggesting. For one thing, Castaneda's intentions are neither here nor there (surely if post-structuralism did one thing, it was to put the notion of intentions to bed). But, more importantly, of course it's important for Castaneda to maintain, in interviews, that Don Juan was genuine. Of course he has to elicit belief in the first stages of the process. The game would be up if he said, 'It's a fair cop, I made DJ up.' As soon as he said that, he would no longer be engaging in hyperstition. The issue of belief has to be initially undecidable, or else how will people ever come to question the mechanics of belief itself (which is absolutely crucial to the hyperstitional process)?

On detectives and sorcerers: well, both have a Gothic lineage, with Poe inventing the Holmes template with Dupin. It's no accident, though, that detectives have a relationship to the police and that they tend to be engaged in extirpating the Outside rather than opening it up.

Mark; what you're arguing above seems to me to have a rather troublesome gap in it; namely that you treat 'the Outside' as if it were unequivocally 'real', something I can't go along with. This notion of an 'Outside' is fictional (it may even be hyperstitional, I'm not sure), in which case the notion of defining hyperstitional 'reality' using a fictional device means the whole program must fall foul of Godel.
So far all I have seen is that hyperstitions are fictions which are successful at making themselves SEEM real, which strikes me as several orders of magnitude less controversial.
Feel free though to tell me if I'm missing the point; as I said, I'm just following this debate as it develops here.

Well, Philip, if I may so, I think you are missing the point, but your question raises lots of interesting issues. Many of these connect to Kant! :-)

First of all, what is the difference between 'seeming real' and 'being real'? The whole postmodern discussion of 'simulation', while apparently hackneyed, actually has real bite . Ultimately, this has its origins in the postwar development of cybernetic technologies which could function as if real. If (a la the Turing test), for instance, something can function as a human, it _is_ a human.

Another example. Take money. Does that just 'seem' real or is it real?

Secondly , if there is a difference between something seeming real and being real, it is exactly the difference between Holmes (who is believed to be real, is thought of as real) and Castaneda's Don Juan (who functions as real). This is partly to do with practices: you can follow what DJ says, whatever his ontological status.

This leads on to the third, and most important, point: the reality of the Outside. There are lots of ways into this, but let's start with Kant.

Apologies if you're familiar with Kant (and apologies to many of the other readers who know Kant better than me and will no doubt see this pathetically inadequate attempt to summarise for what it is).

Kant established the difference between the phenomenal (i.e. how the world appears to us) and the noumenal (how the world really is). There are in other words two levels of reality. The phenomenal is all we can experience as human beings. Kant's view was that, in order to perceive or experience anything we had to impose a perceptual and conceptual grid on the world (much like the way in which in order to read a disc, a computer has to format it). This grid first of all involves space and time.

Now Kant's point was that space and time, whilst presupposed in all our experiences of the world, may not actually be there in the Real. The very fact that we have to presuppose them means it is impossible to say.

All of this is by way of saying that, from a Kantian point of view, the Outside is, as it were, more real.

This is precisely the intuition that Lovecraft's fiction vigorously pursues. If there was a single (philosophical?) point to HPL's stories, it was to critique the anthropomorphic equation of reality with the limits of human experience. Hence all of his major stories involve disruptions at the most basic level of the human operating system, with time and space distortions a recurring preoccupation.

Castaneda, too, insists on the reality of the Outside. It is, in the title of one of the DJ books, a separate reality. Getting to the Outside is, Castaneda urges, a matter of moving beyond the human screens to make Contact with the world.

The techniques for getting there may be fictional, but the Outside is most definitely real.

I can see where your response is coming from Mark, but my problem with Kantian reality has always been its irrefutability. As you point out, the fact that we are anchored in this compromised reality means that we can never discount the existence of an 'outside' reality, shorn of the indignity of individual perception; even if we can't experience it. Ultimately though, if something exists, but I have no idea what it looks like, what it feels like, or how it interacts with me, does it even exist? Look at it as the reverse of your claim about something 'seeming' real, 'being' real. If something 'seems' like it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist.

But this is where Castaneda and Lovecraft differ from Kant: they say that the Outside can and does get in. And we can get to It. Even if, as it were, we are no longer us when we get there.

Again, it is not a question of 'seeming' but of 'doing'. The issue is not an epistemological but a practical one. Or rather, it reveals the extent to which all epistemologies, all beliefs, are contingent upon practices.

But if both the practice and the destination are ultimately fictitious, I still believe it falls prey to Godel; it requires too many nods and winks on the part of the reader/critic/sorcerer/detective to believe/unbelieve this. To put it in rather crass terms; I just don't feel it at the moment. I can see how nicely the brickwork fits together, but I still think there's a huge space where the foundations ought to be.

If both the practice and the destination are ultimately fictitious

But they're not. What's a fictitious practice any how?

Hyperstition shows that this reality, ecumenon, is a 'fiction'...

there's a huge space where the foundations ought to be.

Welcome to abgrund. Radical immanence.
Can you explain your Godel point to me?

On the most banal level: think about drugs (psychotropics). Don't they demonstrate that the Dominant Operating System (= consensual reality) is just one scanning system?

Or VR.

It seems to me that there is a simple and deep question here, partly touched upon by mark in terms of epistemology and practise.
It would be foolhardy to believe in Castaneda's surface level assesrtions.
the real test comes in terms of one's criteria for selection.
philosophies all seek to answer something (or ask better questions... yadda yadda, i know this could go on), what they suggest are endless abstracted possibilities in constructing models of the world (cosmos) and its forces.
But how many of those are actually written as delineations of intensive dynamics (affect)? as diagrams or models bearing incontestable relevance to the human conditions of enslavement to fixated reality construction (subjectification), power, clarity, the fade out to death etc.

whether they be hyperstitional or not, whether you believe them or not, the fact that they stand as possibilities (already bleeding through different virtual / actual configurations of the concrete i,.e, was it real? where does DJ exist? on paper? as an intensity? what do you expect? what do you think spaces within spaces are?) on the map of maps through which you may choose to be advised on your movements means that you have a choice... to render some of the practise (be it drugs (often explicitly advised as unnecessary), be it recapitualtion, be it finding every possible angle for disrupting your ingrained habits etc.) then it is by your 'verification by flight' (Miller) that you will know whether it was worth maintaining an account based on CC or not... or whether some other 'utterly believable' cod faced cretin will have done it for you...
if this be hyperstition, then fine...
(but the whole thing of arguing over categories really does make my face puke)

If I'm understanding Mark's point about the Outside it seems a real step forward - accept Sherlock Holmes onto the 'plane of reality' and everything is exactly as Oecumenic rationality has always said, only more so. Do the same with Lovecraft (or Casteneda, or Vallee, or Streiber ...) and the familiar 'glosses' (superb vocab. addition this) disintegrate into pestilential slime.

Hyperstition proposes that its patently deranged 'fictions' are no less real than things whose reality you are entirely confident about.

Sorry I’m posting this comment via a third party ... I’m out of town and have no internet connection at the moment; so this is not a proper answer:

Yes, Nick, this also returns to our first discussion on the Hyperstition blog following Linda’s post (How do fictions become hyperstitions?). One of the problems about Sherlock Holmes, his forerunners and descendants is that they merely reprogram their functioning ‘ground’ wherever they go, the process of reprogramming merely changes according to 'affordance-based' or ‘economical' openness to the outside; their transmission to the outside is always accompanied by their grund of functioning, interactions and politics so actually there is no interlocking with the Outside but merely transporting the grund that means colonizing new territories, conquering and forging new grounds, expanding their empire. Every anomaly that occurs on this ground or through its transportation and its lines of pseudo-flux creatively irrigates the ground, makes it more fertile, seals its political development.

In the case of Lovecraft, Ibn Maymun and Castaneda things are different when something “leaks out” (Sutter Cane): epidemic tempests unfold and leave nothing untainted or immaculate. A Meltdown between the Outside and everything else emerges “from within and without” (Don’t mistake it for pro-survivalist post-apocalyptic scenarios [Terminator 3] in which survival is reprogrammed, promoted and intensified). And as Nick previously suggested in another post, the meltdown spontaneously develops its own contagious interchanging lines of Virtual and Actual, all running as hyperstition vortices; they are irreversibly ungrounded and terribly malevolent to any subject which tries to keep its last possessions (Possession?). Now, every appropriation, consolidating process or repression (ex. Sutter Cane: “I am a God now”) that sparkles in this meltdown and its Virtual / Actual spirals or contagious Unground is a camouflaged operative (a ready-to-swallow Hyperstitional Vortex) which enriches the mess, feeding it to vomit more Mess (it is messing with the mess).

On Philp’s discussion about the Outside: if you tell this to Drujies or cult-less followers of Druj (ancient Zoroastrian renegades) they have a ready and practical answer: Try to be secured and closed as far as you can on all sides, leave no hole unfilled, no wall un-erected and no door open. Then watch and see (of course, if you can) how the Outside really is, how it eats your (it’s not to you but all of us) economical openness and its subjective environment, giving a new dimension to openness: openness as radical butchery. The Outside fuses with the Insider and the hunt begins.

Unfortunately, I can’t answer any follow-up to this comment until next week.

Nick, yeh: I think the role of the Outside has always been implicit in our understanding of hyperstition (what is sorcery if not an opening to the Outside), but it's been forced into the open by Lur, John and Philip's excellent observations and questions, a process which amply demonstrates how productive this blog is at the moment.

Linda's post and her response to R.. er Lur have made me think much more rigorously about the relationship between hyperstition and hyperfiction. I hadn't exactly elided them before, but I wasn't sufficiently clear and what the differences between them were.

Perhaps we've overly stressed the 'becoming real' of hyperstitions; or rather, we've not recognized the extent to which a hyperstition's 'realisation' must perforce involve a 'de-realization' (pending a better term) of the Dominant Operating System. Cf Mouth of Madness, the model as always. Isn't the constant threat of insanity in Lovecraft to do with this?

Mark, my point about Godel is that at the moment, I can only see hyperstition, the 'outside' and sorcery as emanations of an admittedly potent fiction...
As I picture the relationship (bear with me while I attempt what might be a slightly clumsy visualisation) all these possibilities are still contained with the membrane of 'fiction' - i.e that which can be held to be real and not real at the same time (have there been discussions about fiction not as becoming reality, but to borrow from Heisenberg, having the quality of both real and not real at the same time?)... Anyway, this is all terribly expressed, but in short, I resorted to Godel's incompleteness theorem, as it struck me that a 'fiction' of the outside was being used to assert that another 'fiction' - hyperstition - was 'real'.
One of the things I find most interesting about all this is the apparent refusal of hyperstition to accredit 'realness' to everything. Initially I imagined uncharitably that it might just be a reflex pomo statement that 'everything imaginable is real', but the fact that it isn't is if anything even more troubling to decode.
Apologies for the incomprehensibility of the above. I do have mitigating circustmances, but it always sounds pathetic to list them, so I'll endeavour to explain further if any clarification is required.

Philip,

Your comments are very valuable and are appreciated by me and I am sure other readers too.

I must, however, reinforce what Mark is saying: the Outside is not fictional. At least, not in the sense of being 'unreal'.

The distinction between hypersition and postmodernity is an important one, but while there is a certain amount of crossover between hyperfiction and PoMo, it wouldn't be too extreme to say that hyperstition and PoMo are diametrically opposed. I am preparing some material on this, but in the meantime I suggest you read Ccru's essay on Burroughs, if you haven't already. This eloquently identifies that, while postmodernity emphasises the dimunition of the 'real', hyperstition insists, very much to the contrary, that, in a sense, everything is real. But there are different degrees of realization.

You won't 'get' hypersition until you accept that the Outside is more real than you (and me). It's so real you don't need to believe in it. It's so real you can't disbelieve it.

Linda, an 'outside' so real I am incapable of disbelieving in it, sounds uncomfortably like an article of faith. Especially as I am not convinced of the grafting of Lovecraftian 'leaking' onto the rather more sedate Kantian 'Outside', which we must reconcile ourselves to never actually 'seeing'.

Philip, yes this is the nub really: Kant versus Lovecraft/ Castaneda/ Burroughs. Lovecraft's is transcendental horror: the paradoxical encounter with what is beyond the limits of possible experience. Thing is: who or what is doing the encountering?

Transcendental Events are very far from being articles of faith, though.

Nick, Linda, isn't it time we brought Templeton into this?

nb.For the benefit of m…er, linda , and others who may be disadvantaged by an investment in designatory protocols centering on male-germline property transmission: LurCur is not a fore-sur-name co-ordinate, but an atomic entity-designating token (nummoid). Hope that’s clear now.

Although I'd echo JohnEffay’s assurances that there is no concerted attempt here to demolish hyperstition, if we’re to solidify the exciting-but-vague nature of the concept we need to critique it mercilessly. Because it's necessary to resist a purely content-driven definition (Hyperstition only includes the stuff that a cadre of initiates happens to think are cool) just as much as a purely abstract theoretically-driven definition (hyperstition as a theory ‘about reality’ or something equally (un)hideous).

Whilst the former would render HS at best a ‘style’, the latter would make it actually a delibidinizing, metamonitoring apparatus. There is some slippage at the moment between content-driven satanic noumenal scenarios, philosophical analytics, and the idea of there being pragmatic, hyperstitional ‘practices’, and I’ve an idea that we need to understand the relation between the first two things to get to the third.

How to arrive at a specific machinic definition of what it is that Hyperstition designates? I’ve put together a few , very tentative propositions below. Hope it is of some help ;)

But firstly, the question of belief should be dropped altogether. Belief is just to do with what someone says when you ask them about what they believe – ie it is an post-facto device to explain in terms of selfhood and linear causation, why they exhibit certain behaviours, rather than an actual determining factor in those behaviours. Isn’t a ‘belief ‘ just a reassuring way of designating a complex of response-triggers that are not amenable to the interference of conscious intention, ie an excuse for automatism or possession?

Proposition I: The reality of an entity is a matter of consistency.

Already established, really. To the extent that a number of people consistently act in such a way as to suggest an unseen entity, then we are forced to accept the reality of that entity. It makes no difference whether they tell us they believe in it.

Now, we need to break outside of literature and think instead about marketing/hype = investing a commodity with the signs of certain circuits of desire in order that the commodity actually enter those circuits. Creating ‘empty’ signs that are intense enough to occlude their lack of referent, so as to create that referent. One literally hopes, by saying something is desirable, to make it so. In one sense this is closer to sorcery than fiction is, because fiction has lost the aspiration to this direct realisation: Fiction may try to realise a certain world views or certain desires _by way of-_ a story (allegory, subtext), and hyperfiction builds on these efforts by using hooks into the external world. But it’s basically a degraded form of magic; the use of aspirational stories in advertising is far closer to the hyperstitional source (this is a separate point from any judgment on the banal use to which the techniques are put).

Proposition II : Hyperstition is characterised by an identity of, confusion between, or looping of product and producer

V.important. The signs designating a real entity ‘call’ that entity, which then turns out to be the ‘cause’ or referent of the signs (ie veves and dances in vodou), Reality amplification.

It’s arguable that although a Sherlock Holmes book brings something real (a communal holmes-belief-complex-entity, if you like) into existence, it does not literally make holmes or holmesian deduction immediately effectual in a way that would explain why Doyle wrote the book, or at least only in an extremely weak and indirect sense.

Proposition III: persons, characters (and their authors) in hyperstition are always ciphers, gates, callsigns, carriers.

If we take as the ‘subject’ of Castaneda’s books, not Don Juan, but a series of forces and practices, it literally makes them real, makes them effectual; and eventually it is evident that these forces/concepts not only envelope the author and the reader, but are the cause of the writing itself. We can say the book is entirely ‘true’ without making any appeal to historical verisimilitude, ie it is its own justification.

It’s obvious that we need to distinguish here between something ‘making itself real’ and something merely having some effect in reality, as all fictions, no matter how weak, must do (or else we wouldn’t even perceive their existence!). The phrase ‘X makes itself real’ designates a specific procedure and says something more significant about X than that it has persistent real effects.

Streiber, or rather alien abductees collectively, are interesting examples, because of the issue of consistency (geographically and over time). No matter what conceptual apparatus you use to ‘explain’ their experiences, there is a residuum, an irreducible strange, disturbing force is at work whether you choose to locate it in the collective unconscious or in outer space (indeed, many pseudo psychoanalytical ‘explanations’ only help in making the whole thing more terrifying!). Jim Schnabel’s book ‘Dark White’ is excellent on this.

Proposition IV : Hyperstitional entities are indifferent to, modalities of explanation.

This then leads on to the key point of degrees of realization, which enables us to sort out the apparent contradiction between the ‘different levels’ and ‘different type’ conundrum about hyperfiction and hyperstition.

>it is exactly the difference between Holmes (who is believed to be
>real, is thought of as real) and Castaneda's Don Juan (who functions
>as real).

I still find this too vague to be workable –in what way is holmes not also ‘functional’ - however trivial a function it may be (that is to say, any disdain for him/his effects on ‘reality’ is irrelevant here, unless we’re to fall into a content-driven definition). I think that arguments about whether things ‘work’ in this vague sense may in fact be arguments about things being more or less _real_ than each other.

Fiction is something which, whilst operating in the same sphere as hyperstition, is self-limiting as to its potential degree of realisation. By labelling itself as fiction and using as its major devices more-or-less ‘real life’ persons and situations, it limits their realisation to a ghostly existence (as recognisable, collectively-understood images, but with little power or force).

Isn’t this the reason behind Castaneda’s adoption of factoid ‘anthropology’? (I was 15 at the time but I certainly had the experience of sliding from total conviction in the reality of Don Juan to a very compelling state of ‘unreality’).

And Lovecraft, doesn’t he write fiction? Well, Lovecraft redeems himself by the fact that his stories too are not about people but about abstract forces; forces of darkness, forces of fear and disintegration, forces of doubt, forces of the outside. These forces, being already virtual and abstract, have far more potential for jumping the gap than fictional characters. After reading ‘The Rats in the Walls’, one is unlikely to believe in Brown Jenkin, but is haunted by the possibilities of the fourth dimension and what lurks there. And isn’t this, with both Castaneda and Lovecraft, how the outside comes in – via doubt, fear, anxiety, feelings of ungroundedness? The sudden realisation of the transcendental, ie noumena-terror, fear of the outside.

Proposition V : Hyperstition acts as a reality(intensity)- amplifier ; triggers deposited inside fictions that activate demonic-becomings on contact.

In Lovecraft’s historical survey of weird fiction, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ (Dover, 1973) he specifically seeks to distance his work from mere ‘horror’ or ‘fantasy’ fiction by insisting on the importance of these cosmic forces (‘the spectrally macabre’, ‘the literature of cosmic fear’); it’s worth quoting extensively since it also clearly demonstrates the importance of the ‘outside’:
‘There is here involved psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species’…’there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative ever were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.’…’Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.’…’there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain – a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space’ (this last sentence could almost have come from Kant in one of his moods when he enthusiastically tells you about all the nasty things that could happen if not for... – have planned for some time a study of Kant & Lovecraft, it should be done!)

…‘The one test of the really weird is simply this – whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the know universe’s utmost rim’[ continues ;) ]

Here we are right at the heart of the matter : Lovecraft clearly demonstrates the radical immanence of signs and the real (linda rightly points out simulation as a key concept here).

Proposition VI : These ‘triggers’ (see Prop.V) are signs and groups of signs that directly effectuate physiological (archaeopsychic) excitations.

This is a controversial proposition, but if it seems we are in danger of sinking back into a content-driven definition here, let’s point out that Lovecraftian horror shares this feature with the less-gothic spheres of propaganda, pornography and advertising (commercials use certain sign-techniques to tell a story ‘about’ a state of mind that if successful invokes that very state of mind). Lovecraft’s test for the quality of a ‘weird tale’ could equally be imagined coming from the mouth of an adman or porn director: ‘The final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a sensation’.

In other words, hyperstition doesn’t seek out these archaeopsychic sources because they seem sorta cool, but because as material bases of the transcendental unconscious they are _the_ sources of energy. Advertising and pornography, of course, leech off these energies into capital, whereas hyperstition seeks only to accelerate them until they overwhelm their labyrinthine imprisonment in the closed circuits of ‘personhood’. These material bases, of course, are indeed ‘the noumenal’, the outside.

Note how acute is Lovecraft’s understanding of this: he immediately stresses the direct connection between ‘fiction’, biological heritage, and physiology. Note also how even the most supposedly detached, discursive (ie non-fictional) examination of Lovecraft’s writing leaks into an invocation of the very same forces that his fiction describes (this is partly a function of his style, of course; never use one adjective when seventeen will do!). Also how he cites these forces as the drive _behind_ the fiction, rather than as creations _of_ the fiction (‘….It has always existed, and always will exist, and no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales..’) These forces are something that passes through the writer _and_ his creation, use him as a tool for amplification.

Proposition VII : A certain confusion between effects and causes is proper to Hyperstition.

Here we’re really beginning to succeed in paring it off from fiction; whereas with Holmes, the impulse to write, the subject of the writing, and the realities which it produces, have a fairly arbitrary, determinate relationship, with Lovecraft these three things are part of a circuit of excitation, desire and production (desiring-production) (interestingly one can say the same, in a fairly precise sense, about Kant).

Again, Hyperstition is only ever apparently concerned with authors, plots, characters, and stories; it parasitically uses the fiction form to transmit something else – or better, Hyperstition designates the use of the fiction form to promulgate noumenal excitations.

But perhaps hyperstition should not be limited to textual forms; could we think of abstract, sample-based music as voodoo/hyperstition in its purest form; abstract sonic phenomena as the writings/signs of an impossibly dismembered reality which, triggering intensified physiological responses, immediately make themselves real?

>> an 'outside' so real I am incapable of disbelieving in it, sounds uncomfortably like an article of faith - Philip
Surely the exact opposite, when disbelief is impossible faith is comprehensively dispelled.

LurCur's post is obviously excellent.

I think things are really tightening up here.

Just two points I'd like to pick up on for the moment:

1. the question of belief should be dropped altogether. Belief is just to do with what someone says when you ask them about what they believe – ie it is an post-facto device to explain in terms of selfhood and linear causation, why they exhibit certain behaviours, rather than an actual determining factor in those behaviours. Isn’t a ‘belief ‘ just a reassuring way of designating a complex of response-triggers that are not amenable to the interference of conscious intention, ie an excuse for automatism or possession?

I think this is moving too fast. What LurCur says about belief is IMHO 100% accurate - but is already as it were a hyperstitional take on belief, something that has to be 'attained' by passing through the hyperstitional initiation. As LurCur's own example of Castaneda and anthropology shows: it is not as if Castenada was just performing a fraud. As both Linda and I have tried to insist to Johneffay, it is crucial that, in the first instance, DJ be 'believable.'

What's interesting about this is the contrast with Lovecraft, who starts from a position of initial 'unbelievability' but ends up in unbelief.

2. it is exactly the difference between Holmes (who is believed to be
real, is thought of as real) and Castaneda's Don Juan (who functions
as real).
I still find this too vague to be workable

Maybe as stated this is too vague, but I think the point was simply the one that LurCur was making, i.e. Holmes' reality (or not) is solely a question of epistemology or belief, whereas DJ's reality is a question of something that happens to you/ the reader in spite of your conscious beliefs.

On Kant and Lovecraft: I started my Horror course at Middlesex with a quote from Kant and a quote from HPL and asked the students to guess which was the one from a 19C philosopher and which from the 20C pulp novelist.

Good point on voodoo, but isn't voodoo itself dependent on verbal triggers and systematicity? Sample-based music is just too lacking in this systematicity to be effectively hyperstitional isn't it?

btw: I wish someone had told Orphan Drift sorcerers were 'sexy'; they thought they were the naffest things ever!

Apologies for the somewhat confused nature of the previous post, but it seems things are becoming clearer...

>it is crucial that, in the first instance, DJ
>be 'believable.'

still, isn't that just to say that DJ/his actions must be consistent and effectual? Don't we need to stop interpreting 'belief' as a significantly-decisive operation distinct from the smooth running of a consistent circuitry? For instance, it's not crucial for a teenager to believe - even initially - in Sonic-the-Hedgehog-as-'person' to get locked into playing the game, in fact the operative circuits are so strong that after a short period all need for narrative superstructure is forgotten (this why intricately-plotted narrative videogames are utterly awful and uncompelling). Stories and characters are just disguises (that in a literary context, they persist for longer after doing their job is merely a technological factor). I find 'compelling' and compulsion a more apt register than 'believable' and belief.

However it may be that part of the hyperstitional process is to play certain tricks that make all of this explicitly evident to the 'reader'...I'm not yet sure whether this metalevel of transcendental-epistemological realisation is necessary or constitutive of HS, or whether it's just part of a metahyperstitional discourse.

>What's interesting about this is the contrast
>with Lovecraft, who starts from a position of
>initial 'unbelievability' but ends up in
>unbelief.

I agree that examining these two 'opposed' approaches is key - Isn't there something about exactly this point somewhere in the archives, perhaps you can cut and paste here?

>i.e. Holmes' reality (or not) is solely a
>question of epistemology or belief, whereas DJ's
>reality is a question of something that happens
>to you/ the reader in spite of your conscious
>beliefs.

Isn't it that DJ is a carrier for forces and practices which cannot not be believed in, because they are effectual - DJ as a 'person' is no more or less real than Holmes except insofar as he 'embodies' these forces, which make the fiction of his existence more potent. Holmes, on the other hand, is clearly a 'pretend person' in a far less interesting sense.

>Good point on voodoo, but isn't voodoo itself >dependent on verbal triggers and systematicity? >Sample-based music is just too lacking in this >systematicity to be effectively hyperstitional >isn't it?

This is far too rich a point to forget about altogether, but maybe too much of an autonomouse issue to pursue here. What I would say is that where such 'musics' are immediately effective, I would assume that this is due to some level of systematicity (ie a robust interlock between sonic sign-systems and physiology ie rhythm); a productive way to think about it is that there are sonic fictions (ie blur's 'ParkLife') which need to be distinguished from sonic hyperstitions (ie any truly dread D&B track) in the same way as Lovecraft from Holmes, ie something to do with this reality-amplification and product/producer identity.

Nick, faith would only be dispelled if disbelief had been comprehensively eradicated. In this context I don't see that it has; accepting the existence of the 'Outside' still looks to me like a leap of faith, rather than an empirical article.

Lur, I didn't think yr last post was confused. It was a model of clarity (though not in the bad, Castaneda sense of clarity, natch!). I think it reallly helped bring things into focus.

The belief question seems to me worth holding onto. It's so integral to the Mouth of Madness, where Trent starts off 'disbelieving' in Hobbs End then tries to believe in it ('It's not reality' 'It's reality') before short-circuting out into unbelief.

I agree that examining these two 'opposed' approaches is key - Isn't there something about exactly this point somewhere in the archives, perhaps you can cut and paste here?

Not sure where that is; perhaps N and A could help if you're a bit more spectific. I've lost all my archives, remember!

As you say, the music point is a massive one. Systematicity is definitely something to hold onto, though.

Philip, I think much of what Lur-Cur says answers your points. Take the Sonic the Hedgehog thing: you don't believe in it, but 'disbelief' is 'eradicated' by playing it. Similarly, I think yr looking at the Outside from too epistemological/ philosophical/ contemplational a POV. Only a practical contact with the Outside will dispel this. Obv this is not 'an empirical article' because the empirical belongs to the Inside, to what is experiencable by a subject.

Hyperstition only includes the stuff that a cadre of initiates happens to think are cool

Good to know you are a veteran!

V.important. The signs designating a real entity 'call' that entity, which then turns out to be the 'cause' or referent of the signs (ie veves and dances in vodou), Reality amplification.

and

Lovecraft clearly demonstrates the radical immanence of signs and the real (linda rightly points out simulation as a key concept here).

or

These ‘triggers’ (see Prop.V) are signs and groups of signs that directly effectuate physiological (archaeopsychic) excitations.

Why Signs? How do you easily envelop the whole discussion in signs and their associated excitations? There should be a long story behind it.

Don’t you think you have fallen into a postmodern psycho-semiotic trap, which led you to solid formulization of hyperstition, before posing these questions?

Lots of interesting stuff which, unfortunately, I don't currently have the time to respond to in detail. Just two points:

1. Mark's post on the Outside cleared up several issues for me. I had assumed that the opening to the Outside was an adjunct rather than central to hyperstition, which I had pictured simply as an affect producing series of machinic processes. Given this, I'm happy to concede that Casteneda is more hyperstitional than Conan Doyle. However, I wonder if this stress on the Outside doesn't lead to teleology and whether or not this is a problem for you. Should sorcerers have a goal?

2. I agree with LurCur about belief; I just don't see it doing anything useful.
As both Linda and I have tried to insist to Johneffay, it is crucial that, in the first instance, DJ be 'believable.'
Only if you want to set up the Church of Carlos Casteneda or whatever. I would suggest that Crowley (prior to all the Aiwas nonsense)would be a better model, in that you do the rituals and act as if you believe them in order to see what happens. At no point do you make the error of true belief.

Woodsie:

The signs thing is obviously important, but part of the ccru project from way back (following on from D/G) is to do a materialist semiotics. Why should signs be PoMo? The problem with PoMo (or one of the many problems with it) is that it collapses everything into (dematerialized) signs. The D/G/ccru approach makes a distinction between signs and (the rest of) reality. Signs = materially effective triggers, components in a circuitry.

John
yes well your questions were enormously helpful in making explicit what had previously been implicit.

Still think you're moving too quickly on belief. You're already assuming a hyperstitional take on the question, when that is something that needs to be attained. I think belief is something that has to be 'gone through' as it were.

Could you elaborate on Crowley a little?

on the teleology thing - not especially worried by teleology in this context but I shd have thought that the relationship between sorcerers and the outside was tautological rather than teleological, i.e. a woodcutter is she who cuts wood, a sorcerer is she who makes contact with the Outside.

The signs thing is obviously important, but part of the ccru project from way back (following on from D/G) is to do a materialist semiotics. Why should signs be PoMo? The problem with PoMo (or one of the many problems with it) is that it collapses everything into (dematerialized) signs. The D/G/ccru approach makes a distinction between signs and (the rest of) reality. Signs = materially effective triggers, components in a circuitry.

Still doubtful, pomo semiotics also claims so. What LurCur applied to his propositions looks closer to dematerialized semiotics. sorry but adding the phrase ‘materially effective triggers’ doesn’t convince me that he is not really posing his questions on a pomo semiotic kingdom constructed upon fatally seismologic signifying signs which reduce the stratification to productions of significations and trigger expressions rather than inspiring the potentials to emerge spontaneously. Once you enter the realm of signs it’s hard to discriminate dematerialized signs from signs as materially effective triggers. Pomo semiotics has understood it well despite all its silliness and that’s probably what gives postmodernity a great but negatively absurd maneuverability.

You are insisting on ‘triggers’. Could you clarify what do you mean by triggers? Trigger as an activation code for something potential or what? How do triggers function? Where do they function?

>you do the rituals and act as if you believe them in order to see
>what happens. At no point do you make the error of true
>belief.
'As If'...this is a massively important point, which firms up the issue of simulation; Kant's regulative ideas work like this - one must act 'as if' certain things were true in order to remain sane. Any nietzschean (that is to say, rigorous) application of critique must in turn question this motive, opening the way to the possibility that by acting 'as if' other things are true, another set of possibilities for experience may be constituted (unlikely, perhaps, but not impossible).

It's important to consider that any 'system of reality' has a certain amount of inconsistency (yes, it's Godel again); the regulative principles plug that gap. Hyperstition's job is both to open it up again, and to experimentally institute different regimes of simulation or 'as if'.

The 'signs' then are the propositions of the 'as if', the invitation to participate in simulatory practices. This is demonstrably the case with the 'signs' that constitute Castaneda or Lovecraft's writing (and the 'as if' factor shows why belief is not an issue, rather this is to do with playing games which may or may not prove compelling - belief isn't needed, indeed one might start play grudgingly).

The 'material effectuation' happens when the simulatory practices/games/trafficking systems (cf the semantic complex current, currency, counter etc.) are consistent enough, and resonate with archaopsychic/physiological/nervous systems in such a way as to effect an actual change in the transcendental points of reference, a change in the structure of experience.

The signs, characters, plots, concepts, invite us to play at something. If the game is compelling enough, it becomes clear that the invitation came from the game itself. Things happen before they make sense. Reverse causality is the only way to understand it if we try to lever it back into a pseudo-Kantian schema - becuase causality is our attempt to order events in terms of the procedural unfolding of implicated sense, or from greater levels of realisation to lesser. In the case of reality-amplification, or positive feedback this unfolding is demonstrably inverted (why? precisely because one is not behaving 'as if' it couldn't be so). The late undercurrent's work on Francis Bacon gives a specific example of this process.

An additional thought on 'glosses' - this agrees with some neuro/psychologists who believe that 'the few items which catch our attention in a scene are directly sensed while everything else consists of nothing but the knowledge that it is there'.
If this is true then the terms of the Kantian equation are reversed; the strictures of reality are in fact very few 'well-founded' rules surrounded by a huge hole that is filled with 'as if'.

To take visual experience, we know that we take things in in jumps (saccades) which are afterwards retrospectively stitched together (and again, I think CCRU have brought up this example somewhere before). From this angle, it's even more obvious that the self 'itself' is a hyperstitional entity, just a fairly sedentary one.

And it demonstrates how important is the concept of suggestion; to go back to these 'signs' (and I agree a better word is needed to combat too-easy pomo interpretation), they are not representations of something that may or may not exist, but partial objects that suggest a larger virtual-consistency yet to be actually constituted, but nonetheless (un)real. But nb this doesn't at all necessitate mysticism (Bacon again, for example).

Could you elaborate on Crowley a little?

When he wasn't busy initiating the Aeon of Horus by means of the Book of the Law, Crowley's approach was more in the spirit of scientific enquiry than anything else. You can see this in quite a lot of writings in The Equinox and various passages in The Confessions. So, for example, when he was doing the Abra Melin workings, he was basically following a cookbook rather than engaging in a belief system. Somewhere (but I do not have the reference) he discusses how the Abra Melin demons manifest as such simply because of the rituals he's using. In other words, the rituals constitute a faculty which shape his contact with the Outside.

This approach is clearly stated in the 'Preliminary Remarks' to Magick, where he sets out a position grounded in Cartesian radical doubt and ends with:

'We assert a secret source of energy which explains the phenomenon of Genius. We do not belive in any supernatural explanations, but insist that this source may be reached by the following out of definite rules, the degree of success depending upon the capacity of the seeker, and not upon the favour of any Divine Being. We assert that the critical phenomenon which determines success is an occurence in the brain characterized essentially by the uniting of subject and object'.

Incidentally, given all this, there is an argument to be made that Crowley wasn't serious about the claims he made with regard to Aiwass. I don't buy that myself. He was clearly capable of extreme self-delusion: Just look at what he says about his execrable poetry...

>Crowley's approach was more in the spirit of scientific enquiry
again I think you've pinpointed something important there ie acceptance of (kantian, regulative-principled) reality is actually far less rational than a provisional openness to multiple realities (indeed it's positively (in many interesting senses) mendacious).

>He was clearly capable of extreme self-delusion
is that said in blame or praise ;)

once you enter the realm of signs it’s hard to discriminate dematerialized signs from signs as materially effective triggers.

It doesn't really matter though, provided that there is something else apart from signs in the picture. If Pomo is saying that signs can be triggers, I've got no problem with it. Seems to me that the problem is when it says that all that is happening is signs having effect on other signs.

I'm not willing to surrender signs to PoMo; there was an analysis of signs (Pierce esp) which preceded PoMo.

Crowley's being capable of extreme self-delusion makes me think of him as a similar case to Hubbard: both megolomaniacs who became taken in by their own fictions?

Lur, before I forget btw, it's important to hold onto yr crucial distinction between advertising/ hype/ machineries of capital and hyperstition, though this probably merits a thread ot its own.

Exactly opposite, when you bring simulation as an element to hyperstition you can’t easily say ‘it doesn’t matter’. The first task of simulation is ignoring the autonomous system of things, presupposing that things have no autonomous system, consequently it simulates (by self-referential signs) instead of pulling up the potentials. When you bring simulation to the discussion, you should expect that signs begin to effect on other signs unless you want to formulate and reduce simulation to modeling or avoid seeing what happens.

Philip: "accepting the existence of the 'Outside' still looks to me like a leap of faith"
This formulation puts agency on the side of epistemological subject - but isn't it more a matter of a multiplicitous agentic outside intruding itself upon 'the subject' (with the participation of the Lovecraftian sorceror)?
Of course, pragmatic involvement with efficient forces of 'outsideness' can be (quite arbitrarily) epistemologically re-formatted as a kind of belief, but this is strictly irrelevant since hyperstition does not inhere in the (authoritative) philosophical voice - on the contrary, it casts all its 'workers' into the mode of radical implausibility - their beliefs are absurd ('mad'), their conceptual systems deranged, their ambitions alien and revolting. Their effectiveness (for instance, in feeding the human race to shoggothic suck-vortices from beyond the spheres) does not rely on a power to convince but rather on the coincidence of their (densely semiotized) practices with the cosmic reservoir of xenopotencies - activated through triggers, operational codes, true names, decryptions, calls, keys, machinic influences and suggestions ... (to repeat what has been said by many others)
The Lovecraftian sorceror never asked anyone to believe in a shoggoth, and - just in case they are construed as 'believing' such things themselves - Lovecraft assures us not only that they are fantastic fictions, but also that they are, without exception, extravagantly insane (lost and deluded within a labyrinth of lies).
When a shoggoth cores out your mind from the other side having 'faith' in its existence is the last thing that matters, while belief in 'your own mind' is the first thing to perish.
You don't believe in this nonsense? EXACTLY!! Welcome to hyperstition.

"it's important to hold onto yr crucial distinction between advertising/ hype/ machineries of capital and hyperstition"

Holy shit, here we go again (please, please, noooooo)

Woodsie:
The first task of simulation is ignoring the autonomous system of things, presupposing that things have no autonomous system, consequently it simulates (by self-referential signs) instead of pulling up the potentials.

According to PoMo, yes, but we shouldn't necessarily accept its account of simulation. For example: an AI simulates the function of a human being: what's that got to do with self-referential signs? The Thing in Carpenter's film simulates different life forms. Simulation, like signs, can't be given up to the PoMonauts.

Philip:

Isn't your view that the Outside involves a leap of faith an article of faith?

Mark: "Simulation, like signs, can't be given up to the PoMonauts."
For sure, in fact even 'self-referential signs' shouldn't be given up to the PoMonauts - software (for instance) has all kinds of entirely effective semiotic loops without anything to do with 'the signifier' or its PoMo-mutant descendants.

Thanks for the explanation but still i have problems with let’s say the word simulation and its derivatives.

The Thing in Carpenter's film simulates different life forms. Simulation, like signs, can't be given up to the PoMonauts.

Here again, The Thing doesn’t simulate even if you formulate simulation as imitation. Examining the Thing as a simulating predator was the folly of those scientists who tried to find some easy explanation for giving themselves the last relief. Simulation maintains the delusion of security for humans when the Thing joins the party. The Thing calls forth all bioplanes (and perhaps other things) sunken into the organic structure of human race from a deep past and plays them on a fastforward sequence. this is obviously more frightening than what the Thing becomes or when the Thing lurks as a transient entity. Once the Thing becomes X it doesn’t imitate or simulate X but pulls up X from Mr. Y. it is not simulation, it is reengineering and fusing with the autonomous system of the prey to activate it on another region and lead it to discover its terrible maneuverability free of its phylumic limitations. The simulating Thing can’t escape the pseudo-becoming that Catharine Malabou discusses in her essay.

things are getting more acceptable when you talk about software and simulation. yes, that's right. but still i insist that The Thing is deeper than a simulating monster even a complex one.

Woodsie

Simulation is a cybernetic matter before it was a PoMo concern (PoMo = degraded cybernetics)

Simulation doesn't necessarily involve imitation at all. An AI that simulates human function doesn't have to resemble a human in any way.

Good point Nick about self-referential signs.

>dematerialized signs
no-one suggested signs are dematerialized, why is this being assumed
>software (for instance)
is a good example - its signs are not at all dematerialized - see Kittler 'there is no software' for this - it's a dematerialist 'reading' of software and the digital that's the problem. A sign is just an assemblage of matter that reacts with other matter(s) on the level of code (and that's precisely why they constitute triggers). Code allows the concentration of potency in arbitrary selections of matter, which we call signs. It would be ridiculous for the sorceror to ignore this ready-made affective arsenal.

>"it's important to hold onto yr crucial
>distinction between advertising/ hype/
>machineries of capital and hyperstition"
>(please, please, noooooo)
hold on to your marxist-leninist-miserabilist dreams, baby ;)
Isn't it enough to just say (and self-evident, to me anyway) that the use of hyperstition to bolster negative-feedback commodity-loops is a 'botched' hyperstitional process, but in a different way to that in which the production of 'loques d'hopital' is the result of a botched schizophrenic process. Lovecraft's characters are always being literally 'turned to pulp' because their encounters with the noumenal are too fast, too soon. On the other hand, there is something exciting about advertising, but it's not enough, not soon enough: a sorceror would soon become insane with frustration working at an ad agency because their 'regulative ideals' are those of reproducing commercial process, their job isn't to be hyperstitional (this is, rather, their 'given') but to control and brake the process at the right point and to turn the excess reality production back into capital (accumulation is the problem.) There could be exceptions, but they would be at the limit of the assemblage of 'advertising', ie the ad agency would immediately become a terrorist cell or something else.

Bibliographical note : Brown Jenkin, the human-faced pointy-toothed rat appears in 'The Dreams in the Witch-House', not 'The Rats in the Walls' as previously suggested, sorry.

Mark, as i said i accepted a part of what you suggest about simulation, but not about the Thing.

Fair play. But don't you think The Thing involves elements of simulation (even if it ultimately exceeds it)?

I don't know the Catharine Malabou essay; can you say a bit more abt it/ give a reference?

"(accumulation is the problem.)"
But of course accumulation occurs only at the level of code (just ask the greenies - they know that at the thermodynamic level capital production is pure expenditure) - so it's no more than another quaint belief.
As if 'Amerikkka' saves anything!

Just sneaking in to an Internet Café in Tehran: The blog is getting so hot ... thanks everyone.

Mark, wonderful job for attracting so much new energies.

Woodsie, a brilliant discussion about the Thing. But maybe you should bring simulation in to the fold. Have you played Thing 2? The story begins where the movie stopped. Through the game, you slowly realize that The Thing itself is a double insurgency. do you remember when the scientists suggested that the Thing machincally tries to Survive at all costs? In Thing 2, you will notice that this survival is not the survival of the living but the endurance of (un)Life itself which is intolerable for the entities fueled by it. The Thing is more a saboteur rather than a predator; as an Outsider, The Thing, first should simulate (enter) a bio-plane to initiate its awakening project, the process obviously confounds the linearity of contamination, converging The Thing’s bio-insurgency over two lines: [1] awakening the forgotten biopolytics [2] constantly refreshing its becomings. Simulation here is an opening to reach this double insurgency.

LurCur

>>>Isn't it enough to just say (and self-evident, to me anyway) that the use of hyperstition to bolster negative-feedback commodity-loops is a 'botched' hyperstitional process [...]a sorceror would soon become insane with frustration working at an ad agency because their 'regulative ideals' are those of reproducing commercial process, their job isn't to be hyperstitional [...]their job isn't to be hyperstitional (this is, rather, their 'given') but to control and brake the process at the right point and to turn the excess reality production back into capital

Ironically, with this hurried rant or perhaps oversimplified judgment you clearly portrayed who the marxist-leninist-miserabilist guy REALLY is ;)

yes reza, it was a joke against certain parties interpretations of both myself and others...let's not get into it...
>accumulation occurs only at the
>level of code (just ask the greenies - they know
>that at the thermodynamic level capital
>production is pure expenditure) - so it's no
>more than another quaint belief.

After all the foregoing discussion on material semiotics, to now say 'it's _only_ code' and to equate code with belief seems bizarre. If we're talking general economy, of course everything is expenditure and every 'real' differentiation is 'only' code, but at that level there's no need for any 'practices' or for the practices themselves; in fact if we pretend to be able to comprehend general economy without a parallel principle of actual contingent situatedness within a field of differentiated forces we're precisely in pomo-relativist wonderland.

However, that capital/accumulation itself is hyperstitional would be an argument with more force, and one that needs to be addressed here.

>As if 'Amerikkka' saves anything!
I understand Rumsfeld has a healthy savings account...

(should read 'for discussion of 'practices' or for the practices themselves')

Reza:

Mark, wonderful job for attracting so much new energies.

Can't claim credit for that -- they've found their own way here. But I do echo yr thanks to all participants.

Ironically, with this hurried rant or perhaps oversimplified judgment you clearly portrayed who the marxist-leninist-miserabilist guy REALLY is ;)

I think this is extraordinarily uncharitable. But for fear of this blog going the way of other fora where this issue has been raised, can we lower the heat on this topic? However, I do think a Capitalism/Schizophrenia Hype/Hypersition thread shd be strarted at some point.

If people can promise to behave themselves...

I include myself in that stricture obv!

:-)

>>> I think this is extraordinarily uncharitable.

Well, i don't think so. but yes, let's lower the heat; however seems my snide hint didn't work so there is no problem after all :)

Think the issue is to say WHY it's hasty etc rather than go meta, if you know what I mean.

Probably need to hyperstitionalize positions a bit to avoid it getting messy (in an unproductive sense of messy obv), i.e. what wd a Shogothic capitalism look like (or are we already in it)? why do some maintain that capitalism must inhibit sorcery? etc etc

>If people can promise to behave themselves...

u started it mark, I had already provisionally filed advertising as hyperstition as a sop to the 'ardnut K-brigade ;) (but is Reza really arguing that a sorceror _wouldn't_ get bored working at an ad agency?!). However, having been told explicitly that it was a snide hint, I'll lurk off for now.

>>>Think the issue is to say WHY it's hasty etc rather than go meta, if you know what I mean.

Mark, let me return home ... i can hardly post anything here ... i email my comments to my friend and he posts them on the blog ... am paranoid to leave any significant trace on public computers esp. in the Capital. think i have already answered your question on the cold-me forum about some key problems (Vauung nicely cleared some issues at that time) ... but let's not resurrect them at the moment ... maybe later, when the metrological agitations subside.

>>>Probably need to hyperstitionalize positions a bit to avoid it getting messy

I’m getting what you mean but also your suggestion rings in my ear as an unhyperstitional plan when I examine it from another aspect. Regardless of our intention, Hyperstition sprays and discharges mess as it eats con-solidating processes (all modes of pseudo-flux, metronic processes, faces, etc.). As the hyperstition engineers the corpse of solidus, it becomes inseparable from Mess ... hyperstition is not so clean. Real Mess is never productive ... but a heap of compost is.

Looking into the past (not a long time ago, of course), I’m sure LurCur is the one who should be very familiar with the harmless nature of snide comments ... however, I’m always ready to apologize (esp. for a weak snide which failed to work.) so my apologies for the offense.

By way of luring things a little to one side, the following demonstrates a pomo but real approach to surplus value of adverts: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1266219,00.html

...the Advert Channel will change all that. "Forget the programmes - let's just watch the ads!" says its founder, Chelsey Baker. The free channel, to be launched on Sky in September, will run new ads, classic ads, and shows about ads, round the clock, seven days a week, all year round...funded by advertising...

Odysseus hearer of the Sirens, precursor of all those later concert-goers who would sense only irony if told they would not leave alive ('is the orchestra really that bad'), icons falling back from stimulants of religious ecstasy into objects of aesthetic seeing, so aestheticized adverts - the compulsion of their repetition, desire to watch or to not watch, to buy and despise the buyer, cut off by their separation from reference to available-now products. No longer relays in loops of self-destroying desire.
The origin of subject and object: Fatty Odysseus chained to the mast as Ronald McDonald sings "Let me Supersize you, baby".and yet what's that? - across the water Morgan Spurlock dives in http://www.supersizeme.com/ , eating McDonalds 24-7, we salute you - but hey what's your problem?

OK, let's see if we can avoid the whole ideological question collapsing into snarky insolence. There's obviously important issues here, and a starting point would be to accept neither pole is going to be bludgeoned into productive re-thinking by snide remarks.

"I understand Rumsfeld has a healthy savings account..."
But of course this is code - bank savings are numbers in data-bases, socially serving as promisory signs for future consumption.
Consumption has not been in fact suspended (we're precisely not talking about grain silos or oil stocks - capital has no more tendency to stock this way than any other organized society - almost certainly less). Instead, personal consumption has been economized through the capital nexus, allowing increasing regenerative expenditure on 'capital goods' which function to intensify the k-positive dynamics of the overall system, basing it on a secular trend to expanded production ('production for production' - or k-positive economy - for the first and only time in history).
Capital production is the only social arrangement - recorded or rigorously envisaged - to base itself radically upon k-positive dynamics. It's feedback is overwhelmingly regenerative which is why the description of "the use of hyperstition to bolster negative-feedback commodity-loops" is IMHO quite bizarre. To repeat: where else has history ever seen 'runaway' economic dynamics before? Surely to accuse capital of an adherence to homeostatic mechanisms is an inversion of the real situation: capital only employs homeostatic sub-programs to guide its primary regenerative loops.
Of course "only code" was quick, but the matter goes in the opposite direction to the one you indicate - the machinic immanence of monetary code accentuates overall machinic expenditure by detaching accumulation ('bank accounts') from stocking, and attaching it instead to the incremental expansion of future production (see Boehm Bawerk's rigorous analysis).
OK, enough for now.

this sounds v clear and immediately convincing but needs some more processing (obviously, it will serve only to shift the apparent focus of 'my' problem elsewhere but that's positive). Thanks for taking the time to say something rather than professing seething hatred for all discursive practice (and I don't mean that as 'a snide' ;)
Perhaps someone could start a new thread from this (maybe another to carry on the original HS thing) since reloads here are getting a bit download-intensive.

Nick, a big step forward for the initial phase ... thanks ... agreed with LurCur: if you could start another thread ...

ref. Catherine Malabou: "Who's Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?" in Deleuze (ed) paul patton