Unfortunately, I don’t know any such a person existing in the last 2-3 decades ... the potential cases are mostly bound to heavy Academic or nationalistic disciplines (West scored their names out one by one) ... if we could use time anomalies (as in the case of Sutter Cane: hyperstition contaminates the Time itself) then the best candidate would be the one I mentioned in my comment to Anna’s post:
Abdallah Ibn Maymun, the Iranian occultist who had so much influence on ISMAILIS (like Hasan-i-Sabah but in another direction and away from his harsh politico-militaristic procedures) [for investigating how WAR generates hyperstitional processes contributing to irreversible dissolution of the State, and perceiving hyperstition as an autonomous war(w/f)are] ...
During the reign of Sunni Caliphs, Ibn Maymun selected Tunisia as his zone of initial trainings in Afro-guerilla warfare and forming a laboratory for merging his vast Farsi/Arabic/Gabrie (a derogatory term for Zoroastrianism used after Islam)/Mesopotamian magico-ABJAD intelligence with Afro-occult contagions ... five reasons for his deployment in Tunisia:
1. Being partly away from Caliphs’ domain of power
2. Aiding and promoting (co-founding) Fatimids (aka Fatemion) who held a radical hostility toward caliphs in Egypt (later they became the most notable enemy of Caliphs and their Sunni politics)
3. Feeding on an abundant Egyptian resource of occult viruses (if India was the favored hyperstitional cavern for Zahak from where he imported Zero as the schizocyte of the Z-crowd, Egypt was a freshly exhumed necropolis for Ibn Maymun)
4. Playing as a communicative and connective channel among occultural minorities, Islamic sects, arcane brotherhoods and secret societies (they finally seized the control of Egypt)
5. Becoming skilled at working with the hybrids of ‘hyperstition / occult’ and ‘nomadic / barbaric’ warmachines. As soon as he settled in Tunisia, he allied himself with warlike nomads.
Later his Ahl-i-Batin (The crowd of Batin: the inside, the covered space or what cannot be seen by eyes) was condensed as a cutting-edge revolting machine (intermittently producing coup, Terror and regional insurgencies) by Ismailis (esp. Hasan-i-Sabah). If Sabah has already cut his way into the Western pseudo-guerilla / pseudo-hyperstitional datastream, it is mainly because of the exotic apparition of his strike force, ghost-assassins and Alamut fortress ... the credit of war-hyperstition composites actually returns to Ibn Maymun.
Inspired by k punk - a first stab at a hyperstition best of list (just in alphabetical order for now)
(actually hyperstition doesn't lend itself to this because it is depersonalizing and always taken up by complex lineages, but never mind... )
Madame Blavatsky (for showing the zone of perfect coincidence between hoaxes and religions - table-tapping faker, 'inventor' of the Secret Doctrine, the Tibetan masters and Theosophy)
William Burroughs (for fiction as magical war, time-travel implexion and Lemur-obsession)
Carlos Castaneda (for inventing artificial anthropology and dis/belief in Don Juan)
John Carpenter (for Sutter Cane -'I thought I was making it up but all the time they were telling me what to write' and 'The Thing', which has to exist, even though it's a fiction)
Aleister Crowley (for 'rediscovering' the history of magick, 'reinventing' the tarot and the very idea of the Book of Lies)
Deleuze and Guattari (for reanimating Professor Challenger as schizogeologist, blind doubles, numbering numbers and being 'aided, assisted and multiplied')
Drexicya (for 'marine mutation in the Black Atlantic' and 'fictionalizing frequencies')
L Ron Hubbard (for the preposterous incredibility of a science fiction writer happening to receive a B-movie sci-fi religious revelation)
William Gibson (for 'making up' cyberspace)
HP Lovecraft (for the Cthulhu mythos and the Necronomican)
Ronald Reagan (or is it Bush 41? for voodoo economics)
Jacques Vallee (for applying unbelief to the UFO/alien mythos)
Edward Yardeni (for making Y2K hysteria mainstream)
Honorable mentions
Walter Cannon (for Voodoo Death)
Kenneth Grant (for taking Lovecraft seriously)
Alan Greenspan (for irrational exuberance and the new economy)
Philip L Sclater (for giving Lemuria its name)
Whitley Streiber (for the templex relation between writing pulp horror and being abducted aliens)
Or why Bin Laden, Mao and Stalin are not practitioners of hyperstition.
Hyperstition seems to share something with ideologies, propaganda and religious dogma in that all concern the effectiveness (or concrete impact) of narratives/ideas.
Yet, at least one important difference is that political propaganda and/or religious faith demands belief. At its most extreme this demand is imposed by violence. To disbelieve tyrants/terrorists is automatically to oppose them (for Bin Laden disbelievers are the infidels are the enemy)
From Bin Laden's Letter to America
"Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory" [Quran 22:39]
"Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the cause of Taghut (anything worshipped other than Allah e.g. Satan). "[Quran 4:76]
Hyperstition's plane of unbelief, on the other hand, requires neither belief nor disbelief. It's strength is to have the ability to sidestep the issue while not ignoring it.
Hyperstitional practice involves recognizing a fiction's effectiveness, using it and still not believing it. You don't have to 'believe' in Prof. Challenger for example, to realize that he has the ability to produce affects, create concepts and transmit signal. Yet his power to do these things makes it impossible to disbelieve in him.
Is there really something wrong with the calendar archive or my machine works strange as usual? it merely brings one post per day !!!
Hyperstition aims to flatten the transcendence of superstition. Nowhere is this immanence more obvious than in the role hype plays in the market. Here hype acts concretely as an 'element of effective culture that makes itself real', where reality is precisely measured in $.
This connects hyperstition directly to the plane of unbelief. There is no need to believe in cyberhype, Chinahype etc... to make a fortune. All that is required is the ability (or luck) to cash in and out at the right point of the hype cycle. As 'trade guru' Jack Schwarz says, 'it is no longer a matter of what is believed, but of what can be treated as real.' (http://wwww.ccru.net/archive/cyberhype1.htm)
This seems to be entirely different from superstition which also has the potential 'to make itself real'. Yet, as Walter Cannon shows, the potential of superstition rests entirely on degrees of belief (Voodoo death).
Is hyperstition, then, integrally linked to the market economy? (as opposed to what the Chinese communists call 'feudal superstition' ??).
State driven economies have also attempted to rely on hype (i.e. China during the Great Leap Forward, the Soviet Union during the Cold War). It is unclear whether this is hyperstition or just despotic lies.
Count from 1 - 10 and you get this.
Count from 0 - 9 and you most definitely don't.
Ten is the summit of theistic qabbalism, returning numerical proliferation to a superior unity.
Nine implicates a reiterated triadic dispersion or proliferating abomination.
No prizes for guessing the side Lemurians take.
n -1. You know it makes senselessness.
This was a short response to an interesting question about the numerical trend of the Numogram - why it avoids not only irrationals but even fractured rationals - it's posted here as a test
The Numogram avoids fuzziness. It consists of 'crisp' numbers (naturals and sub-naturals).
'Sub-naturals' consist of numbers of a more elemntary order even than the naturals, in particular:
(1) Primes and hyperprimes (primes whose ordinates are themselves prime - i.e. 31, the 11th prime, where 11 is the 5th prime, etc. in this case (5 is the 3rd prime)).
(2) Qabbalistic numbers, used 'alphabetically' for marking by type and ordinal sequencing - at the limit numerical or numerizable constellations simplified by successive digital reduction to the decimal numerals 1-9 (0 digitally reduces to 0, but no other number does so).
The numerical simplicity of the Numogram is functionally necessitated by its replication as the 'viral' propagation unit of Lemurian hyperstition - its extremely modest coding requirements directly correspond to its virulence. It demands nothing but elementary arithmetic and the globalized decimal signs.
Ultimately, the Numogram is nothing more than the disgrammatic implex of decimal numeracy - capable of spontaneous emergence out of any decimal-numeric culture. It is the virtual content of decimalism, spread by the unprecedented and unparalleled cultural virulence of the 'Hindu numbers' (although Stillwell traces things back much further).
Numogrammatic simplicity attunes it to:
(1) Qabbalism: The pre-eminence of the numerals and the operation of digital reduction, collapsing 'higher' numbers into naturals and naturals into numerals. The Numogram demonstrates its consistency with the numerical cultures instantiated in the I Ching, that of the Dogon, and in fact of every species of aboriginal numbo-jumbo to haunt the earth.
Although, when conceived rigorously from the Lemurian perspective, the Hebrew 'Tree of Life' is a Hyperstitionally Degenerated Structure, the Numogram does not critique its digital crispness (qabbalistic functionality)
(2) The Numbering-numeracy of the War Machine (Deleuze and Guattari). The War Machine counts itself in simple compositional numbers. The function of this numeracy is immanent to the assemblage, indexical and nominal, having no reference to measurement (the representation of transcendent magnitude - lying beyond the communicative plane of the machine itself). It thus has no need for 'higher numbers' (rationals, reals, complex numbers etc.) requiring only naturals - in fact simple naturals (typically mere numerals) for its semiotic.
To be crude, there is a 3rd Army, not a 3.14th Army or a Pi Army etc. - a fact holding for every compositional level of the war machine in question. Making culture operate as a war machine requires the disintegration of all semiotics into numbers and a complementary numerical simplification. (Both aspects essential to 'numerization').
The currencies - or concrete semiotics - of commercial war machines, share these characteristics of digital 'granularity' and pre-eminence of modularity (typically on a decimal base) or the compositional aspect of number.
(3) Cryptographic Number Theory: Based on Primes and Hyper-primes
(or hyprimes), a species of arithmetical sub-naturals whose ordinates are themselves primes.
The initial and most compressed hyprimes sequence runs:
(0, 1,) 2, 3, 5, 11, 31, 127 ... where each primes is the ordinate of the next
This is the dimension of efficient numerical keys within the technocommercial plane of contemporary cyberspace - digital crispness is intrinsic to the exact lockings/unlockings involved in this dimension - a system of precise keys and call-signs
However:
The Numogram 'Zones' are merely the base level of the implicit 'Pandemonium System'. It is in the systemic unfolding of this implex, rather than in a base-level 'fuzzification' of the diagram, that demands for more elaborate numerical constellations are likely to be met. The regions of numerical complexity supported by the Numogrammatic system are first of all those of the 'binomic entities', Demons or Lemurs, denizens of the interzones or the 'between' ... this is separate issue to be discussed elsewhere.
In a nuts hell, the simplicity of numogrammatic numeracy supports a series of functions, including those essential to propagation within, and inhabitation of, all decimal-numeric cultures. It codes crisply in order to hide, spread and fold (implex).
Has anyone read this?
M. Houellebecq, of course, is the writer who called Islam 'stupid':
"I had a kind of revelation in the Sinai desert, where Moses received the Ten Commandments. Suddenly, I experienced a total rejection of monotheism.
"In this very rocky, inspiring land, I said to myself that the idea of believing in only one God was cretinous. I could not think of another word. And the stupidest religion of all is Islam."
This once again reinforces the intrinsic antagonism of hyperstition to monotheism.
The Lovecraft book - which has been described 'as a novel with a single personage (the same H.P.Lovecraft) and in which all the reported facts and the cited witnesses are authentic' - sounds deeply hyperstitional.
Interesting, in the light of the discussion on racism in the comments on Linda's post below, that Houellebecq, rather than shying away from Lovecraft's racism, apparently considers it the motor of his fiction.
Following on from Linda's post: a further demonstration of Lovecraft's virulence as an agent of hyperstition here and here, wherein it is argued that the 'ancient astronaut' hypothesis popularized - or should that be pulpularized - by Velikovsky, Von Daniken, Temple and later adherents such as Graham Hancock, derived from HPL. This pulp archaeocosmology maintains that the destiny of humanity was altered by the intervention of aliens (who were thought of as 'gods') during humanity's pre-history.
Temple is the most interesting of these thinkers, if only because his The Sirius Mystery was, for a time, given serious shelf-space in academia. The hyperstional tangle in which Temple, the Dogons and Griaule are implicated is one that I hope we can explore here at more length in future.
Hubbard, another propagator of the 'ancient astronaut' theory, is of course one more writer who is fascinating from the point of view of hyperstition; though, as Burroughs shows in 'Naked Scientology' 'bare-faced messiah' Hubbard diluted the hyperstitional potential of Scientology by demanding belief, locking down any polyvalences or ontological disturbances his mythos threatened to provoke by insisting on a single, Authorized interpretation.
Further to Reza's post: Lovecraft is also deeply implicated in videogame hyperstitional fictional systems. Lovecraft has been repeatedly referenced and (unconsciously and consciously) appropriated since the inception of the PC Horror game genre, but it was only last year that Headfirst returned to the ur-source and released a Cthulhu game.
One of the weakest (or technically the most vulnerable) elements of current first person shooter videogames is that you either must win or lose. Narrating the plot via population diversity in RTS or TS (Real Time Strategy / Turn-based Strategy) games or what is generally called Race-based campaigns has slightly diverged this despotic element through a consistent continuity between campaigns effacing the harsh narrative impact of ‘victory/defeat’ (V-D) terminus. V-D principle has pushed the entire shooter genre to a blind survival bulimia. The player cannot refuse to survive if he wishes to play the game. Whilst in a secret twist, the recent PC game Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne coils this survivalist apparatus into a vermiculate parasitic epic spreading over the videogame’s survival mechanism itself: Max Payne, a fugitive undercover cop finds his wife murdered in a mysterious attack by junkies and consequently dives into the hadean dimension of New York City to find those responsible (mainly a representative of the AOE known as Inner Circle). Cruising streets infested by a drug named Valkyrie -- which provokes occultural excitations and sizzling the meat away -- he is slowly overran by particles of an artificial ancientness bleeding into music, Television, phone sex, drugs, military equipments and the air he inhales. He actually encounters the copies of Necronomicon, the spellbook of Kharun (the Etruscanian demon), a club named Ragna Rock (Ragnarok?), people summoning Lylith, Asmodeus or ‘tasted the flesh of fallen angels’.
Max Payne astonishingly survives over the apocalyptic carnage of the game ... his germinally enduring survival turns his initial negation to a hyperstitional combustion in which he, himself, becomes a hyperstitional entity. In the final chapter, he runs into the last Boss of the game. Continued to exist after nonstop massacres, wounds and lethal traumas, he survives the last encounter to beat the game. The Boss anxiously shouts: “What’s the hell with you? Why don’t you die? What are you?” ... in one line gives a direful reportage to expose the survival economy mechanized in the game as a bacterial endurance (some sort of sporulation), uncovering survival agencies as parasitic germs enduring on a hyperstitional schizocyte named videogame, diagramming the mutation of Max Payne from a liveware to a deeply meshed hyperstitional entity, a Fallen Angel or an undead (Gamer as a Zombie plague hyperstitionally engineered through the ludicosm [Nick Land] of videogame). The camouflage is unwrapped: the omega-degree of survival arrives as a Feeding Project to receive the glutto-signals of the inside and outside. If mere survival reinforces the Feeding Project with pre-parasitic developments toward predation then the Omega-degree of survival is an effective participation in the festivities (of voracity).
We would like to thank our generous friends Abe and Boris for putting this blog together.
How do fictions become hypersitions?
The projection of a consistent world is one prerequisite, but, whilst this is assuredly a necessary condition of hypersition, it is far from being a sufficient one. We only have to compare Lovecraft with the likes of Tolkien to establish this.
If Lovecraft remains the archetype of a hyperstitional practitioner, it is because his fictions have long since escaped their putative author. A work has crossed over into hyperstition when it has become impossible to treat it as the product of a single author’s imagination. The author can no longer be considered the final authority upon the work attributed to him. Thus the question, posed in all seriousness by a devotee: Why does Lovecfraft persist in the pretence that he invented the Necronomicon?
Provisionally, we can say that two developments make this possible.
1) The collectivization of the fictional system. In order to qualify as a fictional system at all, it is necessary that the fictions must be opened up to participation. Lovecraft’s own opening up of his fictional system to collaborators such as Derleth and Ashton Smith was followed after his death by the contributions to the Cthulhu mythos by Lumley, Campbell and others. Multiple authorship presages a wider participation, in which the distinction between fans and authors becomes increasingly unstable.
(Stephen King forms a clear contrast. Consider the way King allegorizes his anxieties about the appropriation of his fictions by his readership in both The Dark Half and Misery.)
2) The practical deployment of the fictional system. Thelemic occultist Kenneth Grant’s utilization of Lovecraft’s system in magical rites is exemplary of this feature. (Grant’s insistence on treating Lovecraft’s universe as real has produced exasperation in at least one orthodox Crowleyan.)
Abstract Dynamics
Aeiou: le blog de flu [French]
a Gauche
Alone in Tartaros
American Stranger
Christopher Hyatt
Corpus Mmothra
Corridor of Madness
Dehiscence
Dialogic
Dread, Walking (Undercurrent) *
Dreamseekah
Fantastic planet
Fastacting
Fictionsuit
Fodder Units - Every last one of us
FoolishPeople
Francula: Payam Yazdanjoo [Farsi, English]
fUSION Anomalog
I Feel Love
Infinite Thought
Invisible College
Key 23
KID SHIRT
Klintron's Brain
K-punk *
Kode9 *
L'Immaginauta [Italian]
Loveecstasycrime
LVX23
Maetl: information apocalypse
Mahzood: Esmail Yazdanpour [Farsi, English]
Million Poems
Mohammad Vahidi (با وجود اين) [Farsi]
Mewsing
Mutato Nomine
Mewsing
Nerdshit.com
New World Disorder
Nexus23
Northanger's Journal
Pas au-delà
pli selon pli
Procrastinocracy
Pseudepigrapha
S a u c e r u n e y
S a u c e r u n e y
Sagittipotent
Samsara Days
Shlonkom Bakazay?
Sleeping on the Floor
Smalltown [Spanish]
Socialfiction
Spurious
squareONE explorations
Surveillance is Inside
Sweet Effay
Technoccult
The Boulder A(nti)pathy Cluster
The Digital Falcon
The Measures Taken
True Names
tsotso
Whatever its specific variants, the practice of hyperstition necessarily involves three irreducible ingredients, interlocked in a productive circuit of simultaneous, mutually stimulating tasks.
1. N u m o g r a m
Rigorous systematic unfolding of the Decimal Labyrinth and all its implexes (Zones, Currents, Gates, Lemurs, Pandemonium Matrix, Book of Paths …) and echoes (Atlantean Cross, Decadology …).
The methodical excavation of the occult abstract cartography intrinsic to decimal numeracy (and thus globally ‘oecumenic’) constitutes the first great task of hyperstition.
2. M y t h o s
Comprehensive attribution of all signal (discoveries, theories, problems and approaches) to artificial agencies, allegiances, cultures and continentities.
The proliferation of ‘carriers’ (“Who says this?”) - multiplying perspectives and narrative fragments - produces a coherent but inherently disintegrated hyperstitional mythos while effecting a positive destruction of identity, authority and credibility.
3. U n b e l i e f
Pragmatic skepticism or constructive escape from integrated thinking and all its forms of imposed unity (religious dogma, political ideology, scientific law, common sense …).
Each vortical sub-cycle of hyperstitional production announces itself through a communion with ‘the Thing’ coinciding with a “mystical consummation of uncertainty” or “attainment of positive unbelief.”
Hyperstition through CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit):
1. Element of effective culture that makes itself real.
2. Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device.
3. Coincidence intensifier.
4. Call to the Old Ones.
http://www.ccru.net/syzygy.htm
Trent uses the term "hyperstition" for "cybernetic" belief systems such as these. "It’s not a simple matter of true or false with hyperstitious systems. Belief here doesn’t have a simply passive quality. The situation is closer to the modern phenomenon of hype than to religious belief as we’d ordinarily think about it. Hype actually makes things happen, and uses belief as a positive power. Just because it’s not ‘real’ now, doesn’t mean it won’t be real at some point in the future. And once it’s real, in a sense, it’s always been."
... "Perhaps it’s all make-believe," Trent smiles enigmatically. "But don’t underestimate the power of belief to make things happen…"
Maria De'Rozario, 'Apocalypse Been In Effect'.
http://www.ccru.net/occultures/cclub.htm
Vysparov: We are interested in fiction only insofar as it is simultaneously hyperstition - a term we have coined for semiotic productions that make themselves real – cryptic communications from the Old Ones, signaling return: shleth hud dopesh. This is the ambivalence - or loop – of Cthulhu-fiction: who writes, and who is written? It seems to us that the fabled Necronomicon - sorcerous counter-text to the Book of Life - is of this kind, and furthermore, that your recovery of the Lemurodigital Pandemonium Matrix accesses it at its hypersource. ...
Stillwell: Hyperstition strikes me as a most intriguing coinage. We thought we were making it up, but all the time the Nma were telling us what to write – and through them...
Correspondence between Peter Vysparov and Echidna Stillwell.
http://www.ccru.net/occultures/cclub.htm
Diagrams, maps, sets of abstract relations, tactical gambits, are as real in a fiction about a fiction about a fiction as they are encountered raw, but subjecting such semiotic contraband to multiple embeddings allows a traffic in materials for decoding dominant reality that would otherwise be proscribed. Rather than acting as transcendental screens, blocking out contact between itself and the world, the fiction acts as a Chinese box a container for sorcerous interventions in the world. The frame is both used (for concealment) and broken (the fictions potentiate changes in reality).'
CCRU, 'Lemurian Time War',