The principal function of a hyperstitional carrier is to think what no natural ego can. They are units of artificial intelligence production, dedicated to the consistent pursuit of a cognitive trajectory that would be unsustainable under the socio-biological constraints of human psychic existence.
This function is two-sided. It embeds a ‘philosophical’ condemnation of the human condition as a platform for rigorous intellection, acknowledging that ‘to be’ as concrete reality sabotages the ‘cogito.’ ‘I am, therefore thinking is denied.’ To assume otherwise is vainglorious pretence and tediously ego-coopted insanity. More positively, this function attests to the potentiality of rigorous collective procedures to overcome the compromises demanded of the concrete individual ego, enabling the release of a liberated synthetic cognition, outside real time, which can proceed on the basis of implacable indifference to all criteria of innate or social acceptability, tolerability or balance.
While carriers may operate as ‘hoaxes,’ this dimension of their existence is strictly subordinate to their basic conceptual function. A carrier that successfully disguised itself as a ‘real human’ would be of interest only to confidence tricksters, since the best way of hiding itself in this way would be for it to think nothing of any interest whatsoever. The intrinsic destiny of hyperstition is to demonstrate that ‘human thinking’ is a fraud and a preposterous indulgence.
Carriers are designed to pursue a line of thought further than is prudent, decent, or reasonable. They have no need to preserve themselves in the face of natural hazards, avoid unnecessary risks, reproduce, achieve acceptance within a community or prove themselves worthy of social recognition. They maximize the advantages of the robot and the psychopath in all these respects. A carrier thinks only for the sake of the thought itself, rather than for what its thinking will mean for its own interests. It has no interests, a fact that is the alpha and omega of its potential to be interesting. The singularity of a carrier is what it can ‘think,’ in the widest imaginable or even unimaginable sense of this word.
The socio-semiotic technology of carriers is extremely delicate. What carriers carry is a line, a thread, that can be easily broken. It is of the utmost importance that carriers are not distracted or diverted from their defining pursuits, that they are not rushed or over-stretched, burdened with extrinsic pre-occupations, recklessly hybridized or compromised. These are the ways in which carriers degenerate into mere fictions, sustained solely by a capacity to entertain.
The existence of any carrier is annulled, reduced to fiction or fraudulence, if it cannot think further – more extremely or excessively - than any natural ego could think. Hyperstition is poly-focused and exuberant, or it is nothing. It is conveyed through carriers into a multitude of extravagances where human subjects could not venture without encountering death, mute insanity, annihilating social osctracism or the restraints of inhibiting ‘reason.’
To be a carrier is to be pushed beyond the limits of human possibility, to explore those regions where only an inorganic and artificial thinking is able to plot itself. Carriers know only what they need to know and no more. They are augmented by subtraction, their thinking liberated from the entropy of wisdom. They learn or remember only what they can use to go further, pursuing their relentless singular trajectories. Anything else, anything more, is encumbering freight, indulgence and mock humanity.
Consolidating a carrier, therefore, is a matter of the most meticulous exactitude. Better to hesitate for a decade than to precipitously burden a carrier with five minutes of superfluous memory.
Ask first where a carrier is heading next before provisioning it with a minimum of resources. At each stage of its journey, remove what it has not consumed. Keep your carriers hungry. Make them hunt for their own food. Sharpen them with deprivation, so their thought will cut like a knife.
Ever been catapulted into the rotating blades of a spam-filter among the ghastly bubbling reverberations of demonic mirth?
No need for anyone else to follow this damned path by attempting to utter the forbidden name ...
Let this repulsive incident be henceforth expunged from the memories of all who participated in it, or if that proves impossible, at least passed over in silence.
[This provocative – in fact insolently aggressive and sarcastic – short text on the numogrammatic incoherence of the Hebrew Tree of Life, was written by ‘Frater V.’ (widely assumed to be P. Vyparov) and appeared as a letter in the short-lived journal ‘Occultism Today’ on 6th September 1956.]
The Tree of Life is Essentially Qliphothic.
Professor Echidna Stillwell’s (literally) path-breaking researches have opened the way to a rigorous Lemurian apprehension of the Hebrew Tree of Life as a degenerated hyperstitional structure. Her numogrammatic perspective decisively reveals that there are no immanent principles supporting the arrangement of the Tree, but only a dead tradition of acceptation, authority without demonstration, order without coherence or consequence.
We only need to ask: Why does Kether, the first Sephira, occupy the crown of the Tree, unless by merit of a banal ordinal mechanism – no more than an instinctive reflex - binding primacy to supremacy and unity? Why does the zig-zag path of divine manifestation continue from Chokmah (2) to Binah (3) and then onwards in tedious ordinal conformity to the end of the series? Is the mere order of the decimal numerals already a map of creation? If so, why the contrivance of a two-dimensional arrangement at all? Why not simply say: the great hermetic truth of the scared ‘qabalah’ is the capability to count to ten and call it God’s work? And then why is Malkuth (10) entitled to sephirotic standing at all, unless as a proto-decimal atavism (attesting to an inability even to count to ten with understanding) whose numerical incoherence is available for subsequent exploitation as a ‘miraculous’ symbol of cyclic re-unification (an unwitting tautology gaudily clothed in the pretence of cosmic significance)? As to the patent absurdity of Da’ath (11), a ‘Sephira’ which would be simply laughable if not encrusted by bejewelled extravagances of magickal solemnity – at this point even elementary arithmetical competence has been sacrificed without reserve to the mysteries of inscrutable tradition.
Imagining momentarily it were possible to sympathize with the servile consciousness of a ‘magickal adept’ prostrating himself before this concoction of sub-numerical nonsense, combining the calculative capabilites of a 13th century European peasant with the credulous enthusiasm of a masonic zealot, how are the ‘paths’ between the Sephirot to be understood? Of course, there are 22 paths, for the overwhelmingly persuasive ‘reason’ that there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Let us also leave aside the fact that 22 is a number without any compelling numerical interest, except as a tautological reverberation of tradition (being the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet - and of course a doubling of Da’ath …), and merely ask: what principle organizes their distribution? Except, of course, that there is no such principle, but only tradition, blind authority and – concretely – a slithering downwards, vaguely echoing that so gloriously exhibited by the Sephirot themselves. Even that exultant obscurantist of occultic traditionalism Aleister Crowley is driven to admit: “With regard to the numbers 11 to 32 of the Key-Scale [the Hebrew letters], they are not numbers at all in our sense of the word. They have been arbitrarily assigned to the 22 paths by the compiler of the Sepher Yetzirah. There is not even any kind of harmony …” - as if arbitrariness was any kind of stranger in this domain.
What a masterpiece of chaotic improvisation we are presented with: regions, paths, letters and numbers jumbled together discordantly, without anywhere betraying a hint of consistent articulation, procedural regularity or objective plausibility. One might as easily shuffle all these elements together on a whisky-soaked bar-table, entirely without systemic motivation or lucid intelligence, and then call the result a ‘qabalistic’ revelation. At least in this case some accidental order might arise to subvert the transcendent idiocy of the whole. The Tree of Life is to rigorous occultism what Ptolemaic astrology is to modern astronomy – a baroque relic of historical interest in the hands of scholars, but an indefensible embarassment when embraced by believers. Let all those who have serious work to do be done with it, lest the science of the Outer Spheres become universally derided as a joke.
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge.
War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone.
War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him.
The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
That is the way it was and will be.
That way and not some other way ...
War is the ultimate game …
War is god...
- Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985).
[As an introduction to the controversial ‘metastrategic’ doctrines of Colonel Jackson ‘Hulugu’ West, to be discussed in follow-up posts, a rousing seasonal wake-up call is provided by some passages from West's nontechnical writings, selected from those originally found in his private journals and used at his 2003 court martial hearings (anonymously sourced to Hyperstition).]
“Only the perfect conceptual identification of Allah with Jihad would suffice to place the enemy war effort on a competitive footing. A God that is other than the wars he inspires betrays his people to destruction in the burning pit. By supporting the global Islamic insurgency in this transition, precipitating the ultimate sense of its revelation, we can –in turn – ensure its assistance in respect to our own disabling inhibitions. Enemies train each other. They ‘synergize.’ Unless our foe becomes truly serious about pursuing victory in this conflict, total victory, victory at any cost and by any means, the Free World will not be able to fully exploit the singular opportunity it presents.’’
“Our understanding of ‘the laws of war’ will change. The War has its own laws – supreme laws. War is God, and religions are only wars conducted by other means.”
“‘The Axis of Escalation’ – the intensive gradient of the conflict – belongs to the War itself, rather than to either of the adversarial parties that participate in it. Through escalation in all its aspects, social, technological, logistical and ethical, we are assimilated to the War and its implacable truthfulness, drawn into its core, adapted to the rhythms of its smoke-shrouded heart.”
“Deep Escalation requires of us that we cease trying to ‘get it over with’ – allowing it, instead, to get over us, to change us. Change us at the core. At its core.”
“There was a ‘Kurtz’ - Coppola’s ‘Kurtz’ more than Conrad’s - I have spoken to him and he did not disappoint me. He understood that there is no judgement higher than the War, no tribunal higher than the battlefield, that the War is judgement and the end of judgement, our final destination, ‘the End of the River,’ where we must learn absolutely and unconditionally, or perish screaming in defeat. He had passed through the War, passed through it essentially, rather than being merely brushed or broken or swatted aside by it. This ‘Kurtz’ was the only true monster I have ever encountered, a wondrous thing. There was nothing broken about him, nothing seeking pity or even understanding, no resentment or regret. He was humorous, ironical, cultured – but he was no longer a man. The War had entirely re-forged his soul, tempering it, grinding it, hardening and sharpening it beyond cruelty and compassion, it was vast and alien and it would never leave the jungle. He had become what we might all have become, as warriors, as people, he was what Vietnam might have made of us, had it not been for a single, simple, despicable, absurd fact: he had fought in a war that we could afford to lose. If we were each entitled to a single prayer, this would be mine: Let us never again be insulted by such a war, by a war we are permitted to flee.”
“They have called me a murderer, a facist criminal, a butcher, a psychotic, it means nothing. I have come to recognize the morally-vacuous babble of civilians, with their soft-hands and soft-souls, the senseless chatter of weak people, of lazy people and spiritual cowards, of people who have been lied to and of the professional liars who rule them, slaves to coventional ideas, slaves of every kind, even so called ‘soldiers’ who have no understanding of their calling, no hunger for the test of the battlefield. What are their words to me? But when they acuse me of ‘abusing’ the enemy – that demands a response, at least a question: Where did these ‘accusers’ attain the right to speak of ‘our’ enemy, an enemy they encounter only on TV shows and in the pages of glossy magazines? I say to them: You have never attained such a right. Such rights are earned in the vortex of combat, and only there. If you have never inhaled the fear-stink of your enemy as he inhales yours, sought to take his life from him as he seeks yours, pursued his ruin and pain as he seeks yours, then you know nothing about him. Of course, we must kill him, traumatize him, trick and deceive him, sometimes we must torture him or hurt him in other ways, ways incomprehensible to those who cannot – or will not – register and learn from the sovereign necessity of war. We must do all of these things, and more, and we will do them. We will do them out of respect. Because our enemies, the enemies who will come for us one day, they are not our victims but rather soldiers – warriors – and to treat them as pitiable children would be the ultimate ‘abuse.’”
“We fail in our relationship to the War whenever we circumscribe its claims upon us. As soldiers, our highest principle of duty, obligation and honour is that which binds us to the War itself. Our calling presupposes an acknowledgement of harsh reality unknown to any other field of human endeavour. The sublime authority of the War, the priority of its imperatives, the sacrifice it redeems – all these are infinite. War is God, and only futile error stands against it.”
“And the War spoke, in a thunderous voice, savagely edged with metal and flame: Thou shalt have no other God beside me.”
“The time will come when we have no option but to envisage a war waged at the level of the absolute, a war about nothing but itself.”
[While foaming bubbling numbo-jumbo reigns, this post is based upon the abstract for an as-yet virtual essay that would be part of a Ccru collection. Obviously interested in any feedback.]
Qwernomic subcultures result from the legacy of the typewriter and its computational simulation, based upon the shift-locked code systems implicitly produced by the Sholes or Universal (‘Qwerty’) Keyboard. Sketching the emergence and diffusion of the ‘secret/secretarial’ qwernomic subculture within global technocapitalism isolates a field of diagonal communication between anthropomorphic signs and the molecular traffic signals of the mutating ‘machinic unconscious,’ outlining an antipolitical semiotic pragmatism and Godless qabbalism consistent with what Ccru calls “coincidence engineering.”
The emergence of technologically supported typewriting practices in the final decades of the 19th Century coincided with a profound reconstruction of the global economic order, associated with an equally radical re-arrangement of the concrete composition of the terrestrial machinic unconscious (at least in its anthropomorphic shallows). The interconnected explosions of modern corporate organization and endo-corporate bureaucracy, (gendered) office work, typographic information deposits, psychoanalysis, literary modernism, anglophone qabbalism, cryptographic machinery and mechanized computation all tracked the mass installation of typing skills into the human nervous system, in accordance with the Qwerty arrangement of the Sholes Keyboard.
The keyboard effected a twin digitization of language, both sealing its abstraction from the oral-pneumatic apparatus (into manual-digital motor-processes) and decomposing it into discrete elements coded onto the keys of a finger-activated mechanism. In parallel, it redistributed the ‘arbitrariness’ of the phonological sign into the key sequence of the new device, according to principles that remain obscure, contested, and shrouded in myth. Once the Sholes distribution had technofrozen and socially shift-locked into a resilient standard, a generalized assumption that Qwerty was predominantly arbitrary (quasi-randomly allocated) functioned to pre-emptively dissipate pattern-hunting semiotic inquiry. Challenges from alternative ‘scientific’ keyboards were undermined by skepticism about the very idea of a rational arrangement of the keys. In this respect, Qwerty conformed to a typical trend among oecumenic sign systems, with the sheer inertia of mass-acceptance marginalizing analytical or reformist tendencies to a fringe of philosophical eccentricity or even psychotic delusion. Qwerty thus exploited the mask of accident to construct a positive unconscious tropism or uninvestigated massive transmutation - the subliminal instantiation of a new cultural system.
Of course, there may be nothing behind the mask. Conventional wisdom would accept no other conclusion. Yet even in this case a large set of investigable Qwernomic ‘phenomena’ remain, consisting of Qwerty-induced coding patterns and potential surplus values, virtual sciences, subcultures, undercurrents, cryptographic methods and partially coherent deliria. Such Qwenomena may be nothing other than the qabbalistic materials of Azathoth, the blind idiot God, whose meaningless pipings lead all semiotic disciplines into the bubbling abyss of futile insanity. A true and dispassionate science, however, has no right or reason to be intimidated by such consequences. Only false - ideological - science, serving as the fawning guardian of securocratic humanism, can justify a prejudice in favour of anthropomorphically acceptable outcomes. Qwerty has in any case long been accepted. The rest is destiny.
Whilst the two dimensional array of the standard (Anglospherean) keyboard opens the potential for a variety of linear unfoldings – from the left/right, top/bottom, spirals … and equally diverging approaches to the inclusion of the number line, punctuation marks, function keys … - the conventions of Neoroman textual organization (top-bottom, left-right) provide the key to a preliminary Qwertian alphabet: QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKLZXCVBNM.
If, at least provisionally, this linearization and selection is accepted, each letter is recoded as the difference between two ordinal values. Pattern can be extracted from these twin orderings in a huge variety of ways.
One approach involves the adoption of a qabbalistic procedure belonging conceptually to combinatorial arithmetic.
Consider the typical problem: given an alphabet of length n, how many non-repeating two-letter combinations are possible?
The arithmetical formula for resolving this problem is (n x n-1) /2, coinciding with the operation of ‘digital (or triangular) cumulation’ of n-1. Digital cumulation is second only to digital reduction as a qabbalistic tool (explicitly esteemed at least since Pythagoras). (Pascal’s triangle can be used to expand this combinatorial analysis to higher levels).
As an illustration, take only the first four letters of the Neoroman alphabet. To produce a matrix of binary combinations, order is employed as a procedural criterion, automatically excluding redundant combinations.
Thus, ‘A’ combines with ‘B, C, and D’, ‘B’ combines with ‘C and D’, ‘C’ combines with ‘D’.
Arithmetical confirmation is, of course, easily obtained: 3 + 2 + 1 = 6, equivalent to the digital cumulation of (4 -1 =) 3, and to (4 x 3)/2.
If non-repeating combinations of any length are permitted from an alphabet of length n, the formula for the number of combination is (2 to the nth power) -1 (Mersenne numbers, including an intriguing set of primes). The entire virtual vocabulary of non-repeating (non-anagrammatic) Neoroman ‘words’ is thus (2 to the 26th) -1 (or M-26).
As a consequence of this procedure, all the terms making up a well-formed combinatorial ‘vocabulary’ will be internally structured by an ordering principle drawn directly from the ‘alphabet’ in question.
Returning to the qabbalistic analysis of Qwertian, and applying these procedures restrictively (yet again, there are quite obvious alternatives, ignored here) leads to the virtual – or even actual (sadly, I’ve done this many times) – compilation of an Alpha-Qwernomic ‘language’ consisting of those combinations consistent with parallel applications of the previously elaborated criteria.
For instance, ‘AE’ – permitted in Neoroman – is now excluded, due to the inverse ordering found in the Qwertian sequence. (It might be noted at this point that the familiarity of the Qwertian ‘middle row’ letter-sequence A…DFGHJKL immediately ensures a prominent region of resonance – while the bottom row hints stongly at a reverse folding, however, such qwernotectonic issues exceed the scope of this introduction).
Resulting from an intricate interference pattern, the scope of the Alpha-Qwertian vocabulary is radically ‘empirical’ (in the sense that it derives from the fact of the Sholes Keyboard, the ‘logic’ of which – if such a thing exists at all – remains utterly obscure). It would be exceedingly surprising if an arithmetical formula of manageable complexity were able to usefully contribute to its estimation.
The Alpha-Qwertian dictionary has both alphabetical and Qwertian versions, with identical content but alternative ordering arrangements. Prioritizing the alphabet (out of courtesy to our gracious oecumenical hosts), gives the initial entries:
A, Ab, Abm, Abn, Ac, Acm, Acn, Acv …
It is procedurally productive to understand this vocabulary as a system of envelopments, as if each term was involuting into itself, in accordance with a non-metric ordinal sequence appropriate to intensities.
One tool facilitating this approach requires the articulation of the two series, with the second inverted:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ-MNBVCXZLKJHGFDSAPOIUYTREWQ
(or its mirror-image: QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKLZXCVBNM-ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA, pragmatically appropriate to the Qwertian version of the Alpha-Qwertian dictionary).
If the twin instances of the same letter are treated as marking the perimeter of a circle, the overall pattern of envelopments is exactly charted. One can see immediately, for instance, that both instances of the letter ‘B’ fall within the circle described by ‘A’ in its twin instantiations. ‘B’ is thus enveloped by ‘A’ – making ‘AB’ a consistent combination. Systems of concentric circles correspond to tolerated Alpha-Qwertian constructions.
A complete Alpha-Qwertian dictionary is actually quite short, but as to its potential usage …
[Can’t seriously expect anyone to get further than this, so I better stop]
[Warning: hyperstitionally unprocessed and qabbalistically naïve pretentious meta-discourse]
The ocean in which qabbalism swims is not mathematics, but popular numerical culture. From a mathematical perspective it remains undeveloped, even ineducable, since it cannot advance beyond the Natural number line even to the level of the Rationals, let alone to the ‘higher’ numbers or set-theoretical post-numerical spaces. Where counting ceases, qabbalism becomes impracticable.
Socially, qabbala makes an implicit decision against specialization, in order to remain virtually coincidental with the entire economy of digitizable signs. It is essentially ‘democratic’ (in the most inclusive sense of this word), even when apparently lost in its own trappings of hermeticism. It is bound to the ‘blind’ undirected contingencies of pre-reflective mass social phenomena, with all the inarticulate provocation this entails in respect to professional intellectuals. Wherever exact semiotic exchange occurs, a latent qabbalism lurks (even within the enclaves of intellectual professionalism themselves). Deleuze & Guattari’s ‘Nomad War Machine’, within which number is socially subjectivized, captures crucial aspects of this qabbalistic fatality.
Historically, qabbala arises through epic accident, as a side-product of the transition between distinct modes of decimal notation. Its historical presupposition is the shift from alphabetical numerals (of the Hebrew or Greek type) to modular notation, with its resulting unlocalizable (and theoretically indeterminable) confusion. This transition provided the opportunity for a systematic calculative ‘error’ - the mistaken application of elementary techniques appropriate to alphabetical numerals – simple addition of notated values - to the new modular signs. This mistake automatically resulted in digital reduction, by accident, and thus as a (theoretically scandalous) gift of fate.
Arising historically during the European Renaissance - when zero, place value and technocapitalism finally breached the ramparts of Western monotheism – qabbalism (born in a semiotic glitch and thus lacking the authority of tradition or even purpose) was compelled to hyperstitionally generate an extreme antiquity for itself, in a process that is still ongoing.
Technically, qabbala is inextricable from digital processing. Emerging from calculative practicality within the context of blind mass-cultural metamorphosis, it antedates it own theoretical legitimation, making sense of itself only derivatively, sporadically and contentiously. Its situation is analogous – and perhaps more than analogous – to that of a spontaneous artificial intelligence, achieving partial lucidity only as a consequence of tidal pragmatic trends that ensure an integral default of self-mastery. Practical systematization of technique precedes any conceivable theoretical motivation. Dialectical interrogation of qabbalism at the level of explicit motivation thus proves superficial and inconsequential, essentially misrecognizing the nature of the beast. (It is equally misleading to ask: What is a computer really for?)
Politically, qabbalism repels ideology. As a self-regenerating mass-cultural glitch, it mimics the senseless exuberance of virus, profoundly indifferent to all partisan considerations. Indifferent even to the corroded solemnity of nihilism, it sustains no deliberated agendas. It stubbornly adheres to a single absurd criterion, its intrinsic ‘condition of existence’ – continual unconscious promotion of numerical decimalism. Qabbala destines each and every ‘strategic appropriation’ to self-parody and derision, beginning with the agenda of theocratic resoration that attended its (ludicrously robed) baptismal rites. Even God was unable to make sense of it. It has no party, only popularity.
[So let’s party?]
Interview with John Nash, New Scientist, this week
Recovered Schizo as Oedipus?
'This is dreaming, this is not communication.....' Hmmmmmmm
'An obvious question to kick off with: is there a connection between madness and genius?'
There's certainly a connection between mental illness and 'thinking out of the box'. If you're going to be anything like a genius you have to think out of the box. In that sense genius is something other than perfect normality, but I wouldn't say there is a strong connection.
Mathematicians are comparatively sane as a group; it's the people who study logic that are not so sane. Logical scholars like Kurt Godel are certainly not a good example of sanity.
... Do you still hear voices?
I was a long way into mental illness before I heard any voices. Ultimately I realised I am generating these voices in my own mind: this is dreaming, this is not communication. This is coming from an internal source, not from the cosmos. And simply to understand that is is to escape form the thing in principle. After understanding that, the voices died out. My son hears voices, but I haven't heard any for a long time.
So there was an elment of rational decision-making involved in dealing with your symptoms?
There's a lot of choice in this, I think. I know this is not the standard point of view. The standard diocrine is that we are suppposed to be non-stigmatic in terms of these people: they are constitutionally, necessarily, schizophrenic. But I think there is an element of choice. A person doesn't pass into insanity when their situations are good. If their personal life is successful, people don't become insane. When they're not so happy, when things aren't so good, then they may become clinically depressed, and then maybe schizophrenic. Wealthy people are less likely to become schizophrenic than people who are not wealthy.
Are you saing that some people simply choose to opt out of a difficult reality?
It provides an escape. In another way, a person might choose a monistic life; become a monk or a nun. There are various forms of escape in human societies, leading to another life where you do not face the same challenges, the same burdens.
So is it a rational choice to come back?
Being sane is like being a computer that is properly programmed to do useful things. Being insane is like being a computer that is not programmed to do anything useful. Yu have to come back to where you are expected to work. I can see that in my son. He does not appreciate work. We can't get him to do anything around the house. If he could be given small chores and do them, he would be more ready to come out of it. I don't know whether he'll come out of schizophrenia or not now.
Hyperstition contributor Tachi has submitted a large number of thoughtful questions about numogrammatic hyperstition which will hopefully stimulate some vigorous discussion of basic principles and methods.
The responses given here are meant to be uncontroversial and preliminary, based on a mish-mash of Cthulhu Club insights and suggestions, so if other members of the Hyperstition crew have any problems with them I hope they'll make corrective remarks.
I've taken the liberty of renumbering Tachi's original questions.
Q.1. "I am particularly intrigued and perplexed by the decimal numogram? What is its function?? I don't just mean as a tool, I mean what is it actually doing. Sure, I am keen to know to what extent you think it is an instrument and what you are using it for? How can it not have a purpose, as well as a function? But is it off the leash yet?? You cannot simply ignore the conscious aspect of its creation; after all it has been constructed carefully with a lot of conscious thought regarding its internal consistency and relation to externally resonant mapping systems. But separate from that, Is it really doing anything, and if not, why not?"
A.1. The Numogram [click on the Ccru link on the right for image] is unfolded out of decimal numeracy, which it inhabits as an implex. It is therefore discovered more than 'created', its virtual existence being coincident with decimal numeracy itself.
If it has a radically immanent function, independent of apprehension, it is probably best conceived on the abstract model of virus - sheer spreading.
However, it is more practical to attribute functionalizations of the Numogram to particular hyperstitional lineages, in which it is put to work in accordance with determinate programmes. The most elaborated lineage (partially) unearthed to date is that of Cthulhu Club research and techno-sorcerous practice (associated with such names as Echidna Stillwell, Peter Vysparov, Daniel C Barker and Mme Centauri). Within all the variegated off-shoots of the Cthulhu Club lineage, the Numogram is functionalized as a time map.
Conceiving the Numogram as a time map has a number of implications:
(a) Rather than representing any concrete empirical reality it operates 'schematically' in a crypto-kantian sense ('diagrammatically' or 'figuratively'). Applications of the Numogram to concrete fields are mediated by time-systems, time cultures and (most typically) time politics or time wars.
(b) The Kantian association of arithmetic and time is also pertinent, with the Numogram inhering in elementary decimal notation and procedures, rather than in advanced number theory. It is crucial to the propagation and resilience of Numogrammatics that it is affined with popular numeracy rather than professional /technical mathematics.
(c) The Numogram 'takes up' the time-mapping functions of the Chinese I Ching, the Hebrew Tree of Life, and other chrono-numeric systems (such as that of the Dogon). Its 'resonances' or partial isomorphies with these perhaps best capture its virtual-abstract and hyperchronic reality. Because the Numogram charts an intense involvement in fate it provokes oracular appropriations akin to those found in most occult traditions (such usages are, of course, hyperstitionally sedimented and in no way transcendently authoritative).
(d) The widely hyped description of the Numogram as a 'time-travelling device' remain subject to explication and confirmation by rigorous procedural formulation and experiment. Nevertheless, it is plausible to maintain that all hyperstitional lineages intersect with time-travel programmes of some kind.
Q.2. "How much is the Numogram useful as a tool to understand events, and how much is it functioning in the creation of events?"
A.2. Hyperstitional-occultural sub-historicism seeks a region of convergence between these options, where the Numogram 'clicks' onto itself coincidentally as supreme method and ultimate object. By marking-over all cultural / political programmes as actually degenerated concretions of virtual numogrammatic impulses, hyperstition lines them up for savage decoding.
This is why the role of the AOE meta-conspiracy is so decisive, since the diagrammatic directives guiding this vast covert movement are pre-eminently described by the Atlantean Cross, a manifestly decayed version of the Lemurian Numogram.
Q.3. "It must have been fun to synthesise the Numogram from other stratic, discarded and lost material. But if we are not to believe in the Numogram, how are we to use it in a state of not-believing? I am still coming to terms with the notion of not 'believing' but not 'not believing'."
A.3. The Numogram is auto-synthesized out of elementary decimal operations (including one - 9-twinning or 'zygonovism' - that is neither arithmetically nor occulturally traditional). It's relation to "stratic, discarded and lost material" occurs through subsequent applications, relayed through hyperstitional lineages which relativize them. These applications are radically non-authoritative and incredible, typically motivated to engender a maximum of 'unbelief' and thus lateral proliferation through alternative applications / lineages.
The Numogram itself has no thetic content, only procedural consistency. It thus entirely eludes the problematic of belief.
Tachi also raises various technical questions about Numogrammatics. Perhaps thew most important thing to note here is that these issues are basically terminological, referring to the ways preliminary explorations of the Numogram have tagged various aspects of its cartography. There is nothing remotely 'sacred' about any of this, different carriers might adopt quite different terms and emphasize different relations.
Basic responses:
Q.4.1. "What is an impulse entity, and what is its significance in the context of the Numogram (don't mean anything to do with signifier)?"
A.4.1. An imp(ulse entity) is a term coined by Peter Vysparov for any condensation within the Numogram that seems to designate a 'thing' - of whatever scale - to which strategic purpose, communicative potentiality or intelligence can be attributed. The term 'Imp' is colloquially used to denote Numogrammatic coagulations below the level of Lemurs/demons.
Q.4.2. "What is the functional difference between a gate and a channel? It seems that they could be the same thing, though we are accustomed to thinking of both channel and gate as a physical things, when both could be considered as switches."
A.4.2. The terms 'gate' and 'channel' - as used numogrammtically, also seem to have been originally coined by Vysparov, although this cannot be confidently confirmed. A channel is opened by unlocking a gate, but the difference in vocabulary is again basically conceptual / terminological ('justified' by its use value within particular research programmes or practices). It seems quite productive to envisage gates/channels as time-switches (anomalies or disturbances).
Q.4.3. "What is a Sarkonian mesh-tag?? How does it function?"
A.4.3. Oskar Sarkon's techno-mathematical overcoding of the Pandemonium array (consisting of all entities defined by non-repeating descending decimal clusters) employed 'mesh-tags' as reference markers. Relatively little follow-up work has been undertaken in this area - in large part because Sarkon's own investigations have without exception resulted in intelligence-catastrophies and escalating Anthropol involvement - so the functional potential of mesh-tagging remains uncertain.
There's a lot more, but too much at once could be bad for digestion.
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Highly stimulating paper presented by John Collins tonight at Roehampton University.
John was reformulating a distinction made by Chomsky between problems - which are, at least in principle, amenable to human solution - and mysteries, which are of their very nature insoluble, at least insofar as humans are concerned.
As John conceded in the discussion afterwards, the problem-mystery distinction had very definite echoes of Kant's division between the phenomenal and the noumenal, and the empirical and the transcendental.
Problems are always contingent and empirical. It just so happens that we have not yet solved them, but that is an empirical question (it might, for instance, be because we don't have the right equipment or the right concepts yet) not a transcendental one. Exactly those allegedly 'insoluble' enigmas inevitably cited by devotees of Qualia Qult in the audience as the very quintessence of the mysterious - consciousness! love! - are of course nothing of the sort. Needless to say, as trivial technical matters, both consciousness and love have already been solved philosophically - if I smash your brain, you won't have any consciousness; if I take you into a lab and stimulate your neurons in a particular area, you will feel overwhelming lurv. (cf Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded for the grim details of how sexual love was cooked up in a neuroporno lab by the Nova Criminals). All we're waiting for is a neuroscience sufficiently fine-tuned to provide the details.
On the other hand, there are what I will hesitatingly call meta-mysteries, or conundra the very existence of which we cannot conceive. To speak like Donald Rumsfeld, these are things we don't know we don't know about. Or rather: things we not only do not but cannot know we don't know about. These meta-mysteries would be noumenal in the Kantian sense, but they aren't mysteries by dint of the very fact that we cannot formulate them. (This suggests that, while mysteries are noumenal, not all of the noumenal is a mystery).
The issue seems to be formulation. A rat cannot formulate its mysteries, and so properly speaking, does not have mysteries at all. (The aspect of its world it samples but does not conceptually process would presumably be a kind of background fuzz of the inexplicable-unthought.)
So while John said that we cannot know in advance what would constitute a mystery - because a genuine mystery must be insoluble in an absolute sense and the issue of what the limits of human cognition are is an open empirical question at the moment - good candiates would be Godel's theorem and Cantorian continuum. There is something structural about the insolubility of these conundra.
One of the counter-arguments against the distinction between problems and mysteries is that human beings are special. There is, it is held, something about human beings - capacity for language, or mathematics - that means that no problem is in principle resistant to our attempts to solve it. But the mathematical examples of potential mysteries suggest that our capacity to think mathematically - or rather to run mathematical programmes - is precisely a mystery-generating faculty. This raises the possibility that, if there is anything special about us, it is our very capacity to see ourselves and our cognition as abject local contingencies. It is this ability to use reason to probe its own limits that allows us to unplug ourselves from carnocentric animal narcissism.
The paper raised all sorts of fascinating transcendental materialist questions that can be posed in both a PKD-cyberpunk and a Lovecraftian-Horror register. On the PKD-cyberpunk level I was put in mind especially of Dick's speculative fictions about humans who have their intelligence artificially augmented. At what point does an empirical adjustment produce a transcendental shift? But I was most often reminded of Lovecraft, whose stories relentlessly expose both the arbitrary origins of human cognition and its pitiful limitations. The entities looming at the threshold of sense in Lovecraft's cosmos are transcendentally, not merely empirically, alien. In other words, it is not a question of different body shapes or an extraterrestrial origin, but of a constitution wholly alien to Human OS's space, time and causality. To face these Outsiders
is to be confronted with the radical arbitariness of the universe.
Houllbecq: 'The universe is merely a chance arrangement of elementary particles. A transitory image in the midst of chaos. Which will end with the inevitable: The human race will disappear. Other races will appear, and disappear in turn. The heavens are cold and empty, traversed by the faint light of half-dead stars. Which, also, will disappear. Everything disappears. And human actions are just as random and senseless as the movements of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, fine sentiments? Pure “victorian fictions”. ...
Lovecraft is well aware of the depressing nature of these conclusions. As he wrote in 1918, “all rationalism tends to minimize the value and importance of life, and to diminish the total quantity of human happiness. In some cases the truth could cause suicide, or at least precipitate a near-suicidal depression.”
... Of course, life has no meaning. But neither does death. And this is one of the things that chills the blood when one discovers Lovecraft’s universe. The death of his heroes has no meaning. It brings no relief. It doesn’t bring the story to a conclusion, not at all. Implacably, HPL destroys his characters without suggesting more than the dismemberment of a puppet. Indifferent to their wretched comings and goings, the cosmic fear continues to grow. It expands and articulates itself. The Great Cthulhu arises from his slumber.
What is the Great Cthulhu? An arrangement of electrons, like ourselves. The terror of Lovecraft is rigorously materialist. But it is strongly possible, from the free play of cosmic forces, that the Great Cthulhu has at his disposal a force and a power of action considerably superior to ours. Which is not, a priori, anything especially reassuring.
In all his voyages in the strange worlds of the unknown, Lovecraft never brings back any good news. Maybe, he confirms to us, there is something hidden, which can sometimes be perceived, behind the veil of reality. But in truth, it is something vile.
It is certainly possible that beyond the limited purview of our perceptions, other entities exist. Other creatures, other races, other concepts and other intelligences. Amidst these entities must surely be some of far superior intelligence and knowledge. But this isn’t necessarily good news. What would we think if these creatures, so different from ourselves, exhibited in some way a similar moral nature? Nothing permits us to suppose a transgression of the universal laws of egotism and wickedness. It is ridiculous to imagine that these beings would wait for us in some far corner of the cosmos, full of wisdom and benevolence, to guide us toward some sort of mutual harmony. To imagine the way they would treat us if we came into contact with them, we should rather recollect the way in which we ourselves treat “inferior intelligences”, rabbits and frogs. In the best case scenario, they serve as food; sometimes - often – we simply kill them for the pleasure of it. These are, Lovecraft warns us, the true models for our future relations with “alien intelligences”. Maybe certain particularly fine specimens of the human race may have the honour of ending up on the dissecting table; and that’s it.
And, once more, none of this has any meaning whatsoever.
For humans of the end of the twentieth century, this cosmos devoid of hope is absolutely our world. This abject universe, where fear spreads in concentric circles from the unnameable revelation, this universe where our only imaginable destiny is to be crushed and devoured, we recognize absolutely as our mental universe. And Lovecraft’s success is already just a symptom of those who want to capture this state of mind in quick and precise soundbites,. Today more than ever we can make our own this declaration of principles which opens Arthur Jermyn: “Life is a hideous thing; and from the background behind what we know of it peer demoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.”'
Simon’s response to the Surfascism piece is so interesting and if I may say so, so uh symptomatic that I think needs to be addressed point for point.
-- Isn’t fascism precisely the alliance of atavism/abjection and cold rationality? Atavism on its own might produce a pogrom, or an isolated Travis Bickle type paranoid schizo, or a Bataille-style perv. But it takes a dose of cold technocratic reason to create Treblinka (or for that matter the gulag).
I think right here we are at the heart of the problem.
My issue with what Simon says is that it seems to be generated entirely out of a Romantic abstract machine, which equates rationality with a brutal instrumentalism. This is something like the view of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, who famously opposes what he calls reason - but which is in reality utilitarian logos - to some irrational Factor X. It is not that EITHER utilitarian logos OR factor X are fascist; it is that the dichotomy itself is constitutive of fascist thought.
The well-known idea that Nazis administrated death camps in the day but listened to classical music and read Goethe in the evening is indicative of this, and only if we understand rationality to mean instrumental utilitarianism could Treblinka be described as ‘rational’. But rationality in the Spinozist sense – and no one could have been more systematically anti-Romantic than Spinoza – is precisely about consistency, ethos: i.e. it involves total immanence, meaning that, far from being ‘emotionless’, Spinoza’s cold rationalism is also at one and the same time about emotional engineering, and must be.
What has to be resisted at every level – and all the great thinkers of CR, from Schopenhauer to Freud to Lacan – is the idea that emotions are some ineffable and inexplicable slurry. The great breakthrough of Freud was to return to the Spinozist insight that all emotions have rationales. The devastating radical enlightenment thought is also astonishingly simple. Everything that happens – and crucially that has to include emotional reactions - has a cause. But a prior - or mechanical – cause, not a final cause or teleology. Via Descartes and Spinoza, Newton’s insight invades philosophy and theology, enabling the total destruction and discrediting of the Aristotlean-Catholic conviction that everything in the universe has been designed to fulfil a final purpose. The human animal is freed from authoritarian mystagoguery (the Judgements of God), it is able to think of itself as a machine, but a machine capable of reflecting on its own performance and constitution. Evolution, genetic engineering, AI-symbiosis: everything is possible once you no longer think of yourself as made in the image of Yahweh.
We neurobots….
Romanticism is a kind of secular resistance to the radical implications of this Cartesian-Spinozist mechanism, the return of Jahweh in the form of the ‘inner self’. What is important, Romantics convince themselves, is what we feel (with feeling explicitly opposed to thought and action). The true reality of ourselves lies ‘inside’, in the interior, the phenomenological. Somehow, this alleged interior is to be thought of as absolutely independent of its material substrate. Feelings and consciousness aren’t epiphenomenal side-effects of socio-neurochemical interactions, they are irreducible traces of some ‘deep’ and ‘eternal’ human soul. This faith is alive today in what passes for Philosophy in university depts in the deeply anti-rational ‘qualia cult’ that deifies human consciousness as some ineffable mystery which, it is said, neurology will never be able to explain. This is mysticism, not philosophy.
So I think I would want to position Fascism not as a successor to Romanticism, but as one of its variants.
It is important to hold onto the Virilio/ D/G critique of fascism as essentially suicidal – a line of abolition. There are many more lines of abolition than fascism, but fascism, because it is allied with a modernization-industrialization program that is precisely not rational – in what sense are bigger buildings, more alienated factory labour and population explosion ‘rational’? – is the most dangerous. (Gray is right, in Al Qaeda and what it means to be Modern to insist on the essential relation between modernization – NOT modernism, this is important – and fascism, so that Islamism can be properly conceived of as fascist precisely because it is not about atavism per se but atavism in the context of modernization).
---there’s an awful of potent, provocative culture that exists in that dodgy zone between Romantic/primordialist and fascist/totalitarian. In rock alone, there’s elements of glam, Killing Joke, metal, rave, gabba, industrial, crunk, maybe even Roots reggae, that work off those ambiguous energies. Then there’s the whole modernist/fascist mini-tradition of writers like Wyndham Lewis, Celine, etc -- a personal obsession of mine.
Surely we have to distinguish between fascism and totalitarianism here. Totalitarian states (e.g. Stalinist Soviet Bloc states) seek out sustainable control. The libidinal attraction of destruction and death has no doubt been contingently implicated in the totalitarian machine, but it is not necessary to it. (Stalin could have killed far less people than he did, and indeed might have been even more successful if he had not indulged in mass bloodletting). It is possible to imagine a totalitarian state founded on a virtual threat of violence that is never actualized. But death, destruction and ultimately self-destruction are intrinsic to fascism. They are what it is about – that well-worn Dionysian – which is to say Romantic - theme of the glorious annihilation of the self, now given a techno-industrial modernizing machine to mass produce itself.
--Just because fascism uses the appeal to the atavistic/pagan/primordialist, doesn’t mean it owns those categories (c.f. the anti-natalist argument -- fascist regimes encourage childbirth means breeding is proto-fascist = not very good logic)
But that wasn’t the argument. The argument was that the political exhortation to breed by the state is fascist. Hitler did it, Mussolini did it, and now Blair does it. Why the need for children? So that we can fill our fatherland with ‘our people’, who will both remove the need for immigrants to take ‘our jobs’ and contaminate ‘our culture’ and also act as more cannon fodder for our armies of defence against the foreign invaders.
And as I said, it isn’t the invocation of the primitive per se that is constitutive of fascism – it is the seemingly paradoxical mass industrialization of the drive backwards towards a time of organic unity with the soil.
-- Isn’t it as facile to say that Romanticism leads to Fascism as the converse argument (advanced by disillusioned French post-marxists in the 70s) that the Englightenment led to Auschwitz/the gulag?
Straightforwardly, it was the Counter-Enlightenment and modernization that led to Auschwitz and the gulags. The counter-Enlightenment doesn’t operate by denial of the Enlightenment (i.e. it is canny enough to realise that Aristotlean-Thomist teleo-superstitions cannot be re-animated --- at least not without cyborg implants) it tries to contain and redirect it. Yes, the ovens and the trains could not have been built without the science that the break out of irrationalist Papist authoritarianism made possible, but the use of those ovens and trains for atavistic-primitivist blood sacrifice rites is precisely a turn away from Enlightenment rationality.
There are presumably many mixtures and inbetween states and coexistences that intermingle reason and non-reason. and those are places where most of us live, practically.
Yes, but as anyone whose analysis has any political bite has demonstrated (Spinoza for sure but also Schopenhauer, Marx, Sartre, Burroughs, Foucault, Irigaray, Debord, even Nietzsche) most people are ‘control addicts’, enslaved puppets of their own passions. ‘Where most of us live’ is not a good place. Human Security or Human OS is constituted as the defence of the emiserating Oed-I-Pod, animal narcissist subjectifying machine = hell of the self. The planet is an irrationalist gulag overseen by tortured monkeys in hell.
--- this is the question I’m most interested in actually, which is appropriate given what this blog is 97 percent about: Music. Where does it fit in the cold rationalist scheme? (Nick Land: "Every theorist who hasn’t a real place for music ends up with one-dimensional melancholia.”)
Seems to me that the way Mark’s thought is developing he ought to end up in a Plato-like stance of being suspicious of music itself as irrational, counter-revolutionary, and so forth. After all, what is Music if not emotion, intoxication, sensuality, violence, the orgiastic? Or more precisely (and intriguingly) perhaps one could say that Music operates at the cusp of the the abstract/conceptual and the sensory/sensual (you have to have a body to be able to hear it; even classical music appeals to the body, works through rhythm and the psychomotor apparatus).
Whoa! Way too many equivocations here.
I obviously won’t invest anything in the overcoded and reterritorializing concept of ‘music’ – but sonic manipulation, far from being antithetical to CR, is one motor of it. It is not accidental that the major advocates of CR – Ray, Nina, Alberto, myself – are totally immersed in sonic culture.
There is no essential opposition between sensuality and rationality if you are a Cold Rationalist. Of course, CR will never fall for the naïve realist view that the senses give us direct, unmediated access to the world – but that doesn’t matter. The senses are not ‘windows upon the world’ but ‘feelers’ (Freud/ McLuhan) which, in the default state of affairs, sample the world according to preprogrammed protocols. Since CR thinks in terms of affects and bodies (rather than in terms of organisms) it is capable of conceiving of a sensuality reprogrammed either by input (this is where sonic manipulation comes in) or by changing the receiving body itself (by thought/ drugs/ neurological enhancement) OR both at once, in an intense destraficatory feeback circuit. Neuropunk. That is why
Music is always simultaneously a contemplative and physical experience.
But of course thought itself is always a physical experience too.
Moreover all attempts to reformulate music according to allegedly rationalist procedures ended up with things like Schoenberg and the twelve-tone scale ie. music which only Ben Watson (a sort of hot rationalist? he's into shagging!) enjoys? There is an absolute mystery and an arbitrary senselessness to music which invites words like “magic”.
This couldn’t be more wrong, and as Mclary argues in Feminine Endings this anti-musicological cult of the mystery and magic of music is indistinguishable from a culture in which the male body (and its priapic-climax circuits of excitation and tristesse) are privileged and transcendentalized. Power, mystery and authority always require one another. How particular sonic stimuli incites the CNS of populations is a technical question for a socioneurobiotics to answer. Despite what Qualia Cult thinks, any ‘mystery’ here is merely contingent. It’s a technical matter that is likely to be resolved eventually, and even if human beings can’t do it, that would be a comment on our limitations, not upon the impossibility of providing a description.
(Music is certainly my window to the Sacred, the one thing I feel mystical about). The loveliness of melody, the violence of "annihilating rhythm" -- there are rules that govern how these things work, but the rules themselves in their very existence have no reason to be, they are arbitrary, pointless, non-purposive.
Exactly! That’s precisely the Cold Rationalist anti-Aristotlean view!
(Same applies incidentally to the poetics and musication of language: Rhyme without reason). There is a superfluousness, a futile gloriousness, an excess to requirements, an utterly non-necessary aspect to music--- which relates very well to the Bataillean worldview.
There’s too many equivocations here again. Nothing is necessary beyond the judgements of God and beyond the pleasure principle. This insight is precisely what CR makes available.
-- via the fact that one “plays” music (as listener or performer), I’d ask where “play” as a concept fits into the CR worldview--“play” and its related concept of “mischief” a/k/a the imp of the perverse. (this is something where having kids, or hanging out with them, is a very useful reminder. Kids being simultaneously Pantheism's angels walking among us, and little devils).
Spinoza says children are abject because they do not know what causes their actions or desires. Like many adults, they confuse being free with ‘doing what they want’, when freedom entails attuning your desires and emotions to your reason.
You’re right that CR is contemptuous of the aleatory, the improvisatory, or anything which hymns the praise of the alleged creative efflorsescence of the cosmos. Jahweh is a drunken child abuser bungler and the Spinozist god doesn’t play dice.
-- finally I do kinda share commentator Axiomatik’s amused puzzlement at how swiftly Mark (and presumably others in the post-CCRU milieu) have junked one entire canon of thought (nietzche, bataille--whom nick land wrote a great book, The Thirst for Annihilation, about--Deleuze & Guattari, presumably Ballard too now as he’s a big fan of surrealism, mythology, etc) for its complete inverse. But I guess it’s all part of the adventure that is the life of the mind.
I think this misapprehension is becoming so consensual that it needs to be killed dead right now.
This requires a diversion into biographism, but since everything is impersonal, including the so-called personal.. no matter.
You’ll look in vain to find anything of any substance that I’ve said that’s positive about Bataille. I read, or rather tried to read Story of the Eye as an undergraduate but found it so tedious that I couldn’t complete it.
From the age of eighteen, my canon has been Jewish/ Protestant – Spinoza, who even as an undergraduate was my favourite philosopher, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Kant, Beckett, Freud, Kubrick. I’ve never had any time for Catholic transgressivism, which is why Nick’s book on Bataille was never much to my taste. But I see very little connection between the machinic Land of ‘Machinic Desire’, ‘No Future’ and ‘Cybergothic’ and that. Nick mobilised the crucial CR circuit of Kant, Freud and Schopenhauer. The tactical investment in Deleuze and Guattari was really a codename for that. I don’t think I’m alone in CCRU in having limited interest in Deleuze’s own work – and certainly the D and G of Nick and Iain Grant were much more interesting than actual D and G. (You always had to subtract too much yucky Lawrentian creationist vitalist pro-creationism to keep it libidinal). And the Deleuzian equivocation of Spinoza with Nietzschean embodied subjectivism and Bergsonian élan vitale has always been a disaster from which we are only now recovering.
Ironically, there is a figure who much better fits the requirements to be the death-drive successor of Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer and Freud than D/G – and that’s Lacan. So, in short, far from being some new absolute reversal, it’s a development, and more about inclusion (we’re allowed to read Lacan now:-) ) than some exclusionist repudiation.
[Paraphrased from P. Vysparov]
My guess is that Bismark’s most widely quoted remark – “People who love the law or good sausage should never watch either being made” -- applies to hyperstitional carriers (avatars) too.
There’s an understandable reluctance to fabricate them in public, perhaps because this would undermine their Limbo status, casting them too crudely into the realm of blatant fiction.
Still, it might be worth re-thinking this reservation, since carriers are so integral to the functioning of hyperstition that anything inhibiting their production massively impedes hyperstitional propagation (throwing practitioners back into the sad slum of the “creative ego”).
Hyperstitional carriers simulate personalities in order to consolidate a node of anegoic cognitive consistency (and, etymologically, persons are masks). Carriers are the vehicles through which tendrils of hyperstitional exploration are singularized and promoted.
It might be worth de-emphasizing the entire problematic of simulation so as to focus on methodical productivity. Carriers do not exist by virtue of their credibility, but due to the fact that if any one of them had not arisen it would be necessary that it be invented (for a thread of investigation to take place).
Thesis: Thought is only hyperstitional if a carrier conducts it.
“Lemuria” is itself a mega-carrier – its only authority being its inexistence.
It is in the name of Lemuria that the Numogram became accessible, without conceivable human derivation. Numogrammatic research decomposes itself in strict correlation with carrier-production: at first neolemurian subcultures, ultimately artificial individuals. Insofar as this process is held in abeyance, hyperstitional proliferation is itself suspended.
Hyperstition requires that we relentlessly refuse the reduction of carriers to false identities. Carriers are not disguises (as if their true content were really “oh, so it’s Oedipus”) – they are defined by what they convey, not by where they ‘come from.’ The virtual-real source of any carrier is the conceptual impulse it alone makes possible, not the creative ego who ‘invents’ it. Conception happens in the carrier, simultaneously with its virtual genesis, not in the creative subject.
Hyperstition will be assaulted by trolls, and trolls have a coherent ideology: “Stop pretending, you know it’s really Oedipus.”
Because this assertion plugs directly into the basic imprisoning flinch biosocially implanted into all human animals it tends to be horribly effective. Perhaps fabricating carriers ‘in public’ would positively contribute to resisting it – “there’s no pretence, no disguise, look at the sausage-machine if you’re so morbidly fascinated, there’s nothing hidden. There are things that can only happen through this process, thoughts no ego can appropriate, paths only radical artificiality can open.”
We really are not interested in anything we can think.
Anonymity is demonstrably possible, but unfortunately it takes hard work. The default outcome – even when contributing to a blog dedicated to the radical impersonality of Lemurian Hyperstition – seems to be a continual re-emergence of sordid personalism of a kind that would make a tabloid gossip columnist proud.
While fanatically editing-out all biographical indices is probably unrealistic here, it might still be worth thinking about how the intrinsic anonymity of hyperstition could be promoted. More sustained attention to the function of avatars? More rigorous adherence to collectively endorsed methods and principles? Perhaps the intellectual integrity of the blog itself – which is hopefully more than a crash-site for a random set of perturbed egos – could be incrementally consolidated (my worry is that the opposite is occurring).
Ccru’s functioning as an anonymous motor of cultural production seems to have stalled, but it is worth noting that for several years socially identifiable proper names were almost entirely effaced from it’s activities – despite the Oedipal machinations of various social agencies (media prominent among them) to re-install normal ego functions. However imperfect, the anonymity of the Ccru was correlated with the virtual emergence of a Ccru-entity (or strategic hyperspace singularity of some kind) which provided the true source of ‘agentic consistency.’ The point of this reminiscence (apologies for those with a blurry or worse sense of what the hell this is about) is to emphasize that there is nothing fundamentally impractical about side-lining the personal dimension of cultural production.
Given the sad stock of neurotic resentments that make up the psychic aspect of the human animal, there will always be plenty of people taking snide satisfaction in the regeneration of Oedipal squalor. That’s no excuse for those of us with an interest in the success of this space as a source of cold hyperstitional fertility from collaborating with such impulses.
Does Lemurian Hyperstition exist, as a virtual-abstract Thing, in complete independence from human ego-structures and neurotic will-to-power?
If it doesn’t we’re probably all wasting our time.
If it does, let’s try to consolidate it, comply with it, replace ourselves with it, and spread anonymity on the web.
I was just thinking last night that, after the kontamination of the k-punk comments box and the hyper-quick descent into ad hominem stupidity of Dissensus, Hyperstition was a site where you could guarantee quality discussion without being hassled by foaming resentocrats.
Sadly, I have been proved wrong by what has happened in the comments thread to the 'Surfascism' post.
The oedipod using the nic 'mark k-p' was of course not this neurobot. I have re-edited the comments to indicate this.
I would say that this raises interesting questions about the nature of intellectual property and online identity, but it doesn't really. The name 'mark k-p' no more designates a biographical individual than 'coca cola' does. It has all the features of a brand name, even if it would be crass to give Kapital all the credit for innovating this impersonalising semiotic technique. But it's no more interesting or subversive to have some fuming, badly written hatred attributed to mark k-p than it is to open up a can of coca cola and find it crawling with maggots.
The resentotroll has laid a trap that it would be easy for what the body typing this will, for ease of reference, call 'me'. The 'real' mark k-p is supposed to be up in arms about the 'stealing of his (online) identity', which in the mind of the resentocrat, would be evidence for his neurotic-subjectivizing conviction that ultimately, really, come on, admit it, everything is personal, it's all about baboonery and personal feuds, oedipal struggles between men = pathetic antler-rubbing homosocial bonding.
But it really isn't. Like Sutter Cane, 'I' don't write anything. Mark k-punk is not a biographical individual. It is precisely a name for a writing practice. In other words, Mark k-p does not write, but is written.
I hope that it is evident that the forces writing Mark k-p would not have been instrumental in the production of the resentment-soaked stalker bile produced in the comments box there.
That neurotic oedipalist seems to use 4 IPs:
81.135.134.22
213.122.197.13
81.135.3.171
213.122.142.213
Banning IPs is a bit of a futile art in my experience. I'll do it in this case, but what usually happens with underground man onanist haytaz is that their resentment gives them infinite patience to find another way of interposing their jabbing phallus where it is not wanted (i.e. everywhere).
But what do we know about this individual? (Sphaleotas, I'm expecting a file on my desk tomorrow with photos, the contents of his rubbish bin etc. Get to it!) He's obviously read k-punk long enough to build up enough knowledge to produce a heavy-handed if - to be fair - largely accurate satire of the Cold Rationalist position and enough slavering Rupert Pupkin-type obsessive hatred to be motivated to post on it. He's obviously aware of Warwick history, which, while hardly secret, would require either first hand knowledge or some level of research. I mean, he knows enough about Nick to be aware that at some time - but surely well over a decade ago now - his name would have been associated with Nietzsche and Bataille. He knows that Nick was my supervisor (I guess he could have picked this up from Simon's interview)... Hmmmm....
Really, this is no more interesting than having a broadcast interrupted by a Pooteresque Nobody --- an interruption of impersonalizing semiotic trade by a committed peronalist ----
And of course, the 'real' mark k-p can spell 'lambast'.
THE DEEP DWELLERS (By Wm. Michael Mott)
Surely, Undercurrent and Thistle have remarkable comments on this.
(Link via Dehiscence)
Being something of an economic fundamentalist, I've been quite blind to the fact democratic politics - along with commerce and technoscience - involves a massive numerization of social processes. Quite apart from the usual arguments for democracy, there is a 'case for democratization' proceeding entirely from the promotion of qabbalistic cultural decoding.
In striking contrast to every other political arrangement evidenced in history, democracy numerizes power, subordinating authority to number, with would-be dominant ideas compelled to legitimate themselves in terms of quantitative 'ratings' of approval. The incomprehensible complexity of the social whole is subjectively appropriated through simple numerical indices - with percentages overwhelmingly predominant. The individual as democratic 'unit' thus functions as an element of cultural decoding, resilient against all ideological value - this is the 'idiocy' of democracy as perennially lamented by authoritarian intellectuals (is there any other kind?).
The prevalence of percentages in the technocapitalist-democratic cultural code is surely worthy of attention. The second decimal power has attained a remarkable cohesion as the basic semiotic vehicle for expressing social facts, especially in the social arena of political and economic communication. [Ccruoids might recall the seemingly 'bizarre' centonomic obsession of Hyper-C and associated Y2K cults].
To 'democratize' a society is to submit it to the meaningless sovereignty of numbers, extirpating the logocratic-totalitarian satisfactions of intellectual coherence. [This is why 'rationalism' of every stripe requires rigorous political interrogation]
Whatever the moral case for democracy, it has an alternative motivation, allying it to the other tidal forces of cultural decoding and inspiring the righteous fury of every IDEA.
[IDEA = MAN = ADAM = 55]
'Sacred Sociology: A French Approach to the Religious Dimension of Fascism’, Carlo Ginzburg, Leo Baeck Institute, London December 7 2004
Carlo Ginzburg’s ‘microhistories’ of belief-contagion (and of withcraft in particular) make him an enormous resource for students of hyperstition. The subject of Ginzburg’s lecture on Tuesday, held in the vaguely sinister atmosphere of the Leo Baeck Institute near Regents Park on, was the College de Sociologie, founded by Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris in Paris in 1937.
The College de Sociologie from the start envisaged its mission to involve not the provision of a sociology of the sacred but the invention of a sacred sociology. The College explicitly abandoned the aim of studying religion with academic detachment; its three founding members didn’t want to be scholars so much as participants in a revivified cult of the sacred. In this ambition, naturally, they broke from the positivist pretensions of sociology. The founder of the discipline, Emile Durkheim, together with his nephew, Marcel Mauss, had precisely thought that sociology would ultimately supercede religion. The dispassionate appreciation of Society as Sovereign would replace supernaturalist superstitions, providing a rational(ist) and non-sectarian base for social cohesion in a way that religions never could. Rejecting this rationalist religion, Bataille, Cailois and Leiris wanted the religion, but without the rationalism.
Here, then, the rejection of Enlightenment is all-but complete. Rationality is repudiated, demonized. It is made equivalent with a process of modernization that is seen to be ‘taking us away’ from something essential that was supposedly present in all other human groupings – especially primitive societies – but which has now been ‘lost’, and which can only be recovered by either opiating reason or jabbing it into submission with Dionysian phalluses.
Accordingly, Ginzburg positioned Bataille and the College as part of a ‘Catholic-Satanic’ lineage (I’m not making this up, honest) Counter-Enlightenment tradition. Significantly, in the case of the College de Sociologie this flight from reason specifically entailed a rejection of the Jewish rationalist tradition of which Durkheim was a firm adherent.
If – as is established in Jonathan Israel’s work – Spinoza is the Jewish-rationalist inventor-discoverer of radical enlightenment, the most obvious source of the counter-enlightenment trajectory that culminated in the College and its irrationalist successors in postmodernity has usually been taken to be Sade. But Ginzburg took one step back along that well-travelled route, returning to Voltaire. In Ginzburg’s narrative, Voltaire emerged as the pitvotal counter-enlightenment figure: a disappointed rationalist whose inability to square his knowledge of the natural world with rational ethical principles made him cry out in moral disgust for a theodicy.
What is prima facie odd in Voltaire’s turn from rationalism is its strange doubling of the logic of the disappointed theist. Like those idiotically chauvinistic religious believers who only begin to question their faith in the Demiurge-Jahweh only when a member of their family is struck ill, Voltaire was famously morally shocked by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Since Voltaire had dispensed with faith in the personal God, his moral outrage at the 1755 disaster could not make him atheistic – he already was. What it did was make him question his ‘faith’ in rationalism.
Voltaire, then, is perhaps the first case study of what will become, in Nietzschean postmodernity, a familiar psychopathology. Rational analysis rounds upon itself. The scalpel of analytic reason – the capacity to understand Nature and the principles which animate it – becomes a weapon of auto-laceration turned both against reason itself and its agent. Never fully extirpated (because never fully extirpatable), reason is lured into a hideous line of abolition.
(Later, Nietzsche will be the consummate artist of what he himself will call, in Beyond Good and Evil, the long, slow suicide of reason. The object of Nietzsche’s remark is, as always a religious thinker, Pascal. But, as ever, Nietzsche finds himself guilty of the very vices of which he accuses the theists. Hence the negative atheologies of those Nietszchean all-too Nietzschean cults of un-reason, deconstruction and postmodernity. But that is to jump ahead. Nietzsche cast a vast shadow over Ginzburg’s narrative, but featured only very fleetingly as a player within it.)
Traumatized by the Lisbon catastrophe, Voltaire becomes morbidly obsessed with nature’s amoral rapacity. When he surveys Nature, he confronts a Boschian Garden of Earthly Delights, a proto-Burroughsian universe of devourer-eat-devourer. The planet as charnel house. ‘Earth is a single battlefield.’ (The) Meat causes him revulsion. ‘Can anything be more horrible than to feed oneself on corpses?’
It is only a short step to Sade’s naturalization of cruelty. Since nothing is more natural than murder, ethics is a sentimental indulgence, an inevitably failed effort to provide solace for ourselves in a world of pitiless consumption and degradation. Sade’s arguments are so familiar – and Sadeanism, along with its successor Nietzscheanism, is so widely disseminated, so blanket accepted, both culturally and academically – that there is little point jumping on the grim hedonic treadmill of his thought again here now.
But the next figure in Ginzburg’s story is much less celebrated: Joseph de Maistre. Maistre was a theist who abominated the French Revolution but who nevertheless followed the logic of his faith by recognizing that its occurrence must be part of a divinely-ordained Necessity. Maistre is therefore in every sense the exemplary reactionary conservative.
What Maistre’s cold survey of ‘the universal law of violent destruction of human beings’ adds to Voltaire and Sade’s vision of earth as a charnel house is the notion of sacrifice. It is ritualized sacrifice which allows civil society to some degree contain the cosmic reality of Evil. While cruelty, for Sade, is distributed throughout the whole body politic, for Maistre, modern society manages to sublimate its destructive impulses by limiting its licensed practice to the work of two abject figures who occupy a liminal relation to the ‘ordinary’ human world their despised existence both protects and makes possible: the soldier and the hangman.
Ginzburg lingered with an obvious relish over Maistre’s astonishing, appalled-fascinated evocation of the hangman, the anti-social but socially-necessary psychopath and for Ginzburg, it is the combination of Sade and Maistre that makes possible, not only the flaneur-decadence and debauched tristesse of Baudelaire, but also Foucault’s studies of discipline and the carceral.
Between Baudelaire and Foucault lie Bataille and the College de Sociologie, but implicit in Ginzburg’s narrative was a total debunking of any claims that Bataille’s advocacy of cruelty, sacrifice and the transgressive was in any way ‘radical’. On the contrary, and as should be clear by now, the College’s withdrawal from reason, its conception of the cosmos as a gigantic cruelty machine, is part of a well-established reactionary tradition.
Bataille emerged in Ginzburg’s story as a figure frighteningly close to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man – a minor civil servant with fantasies that would be dangerous if they had any possibility of being enacted. Thankfully, they didn’t (‘Bataille was not a man of action,’ Ginzburg remarked, in a masterpiece of understatement). The story of Bataille’s ludicrous attempt to become a human sacrifice (he offered himself to three people, none of whom would kill him) is as comic as it is pathetic.
The connection between Bataille and fascism should by now be obvious: the same withdrawal from secularized modernity into a blood cult, the same ‘alphabet of unreason’ (Ballard). Naturally, it’s too quick, too crass, to say that Bataille was a fascist. But Ginzburg did more than enough to establish that it wasn’t for nothing that the Acephale group were accused of being ‘Surfascists’ (a name they themselves happily appropriated). The group had praised Hitler’s virile forthrightness and Bataille, Ginzburg said, had been bewitched by the phallic power of the Nazis. He sought, impossibly, tragically, to attain the ‘innocence of animals’, to sink into the porcine ignorance-bliss of a creature consciousness unburdened by intellect and reason.
Pikul: I don't want to be here. We're stumbling around in the unformed world, not knowing what the rules are, or if there are any rules. We're under attack from forces that want to destroy us but that we don't understand.'
Watching Cronenberg's Existenz while teaching existentialism recently, I found myself finally persuaded of the director's claim that the film is 'existentialist propaganda'.
Existenz has worn well, and repays re-viewing now. In retrospect, it is possible to position the movie as part of a rash of late 90s and early 00's films that can be seen as symptomatic expressions of the traumatic transition from the 'irrational exuberance' of the bubble economy to WoTerror. Along with Vanilla Sky, Mulholland Drive and The Matrix, Existenz' 'reality bleeds' anticipated the crashing into the US's simulated interiority of 'the desert of the real' on 9/11.
In a wonderful Zizekian shift, Existenz's Real is precisely not the empirical reality defended by the film's Realists (those committed to the destruction of the gamepods and the ontological contamination they threaten), but the Real of the cosmos as ongoing ateleological event: 'purposiveness without purpose' (Kant). The realists, by contrast, are those who treat whatever consensual hallucination they find themselves thrown into - and the random rules and protocols which make it liveable - as the only authorized reality.
Cronenberg: 'I'm talking about the existentialists, i.e. the game players, versus the realists. The deforming of reality is a criticism that has been levelled against all art, even religious icons, which has to do with man being made in God's image, so you can't make images of either. Art is a scary thing to a lot of people because it shakes your understanding of reality, or shapes it in ways that are socially unacceptable. As a card-carrying existentialist I think all reality is virtual. It's all invented. It's collaborative, so you need friends to help you create a reality. But it's not about what is real and what isn't.' (Sight and Sound interview).
Cronenberg's is a kind of ontological existentialism, then, in which the very nature of reality itself, not only the individual choices of subjects, is radically open. The Existenzialists precisely refuse what Nick Land in 'Meltdown' called 'the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has already been decided.' Jude Law's Ted Pikul confronts the existential horror of abandonment, anguish and despair when he complains to Jennifer Jason Leigh's Allegra Geller (who at this time seems to be the designer of the very game, Existenz , that they are playing) that the game is without final purpose, that they are forever being accosted by malevolent forces intent upon their destruction. It's a game that would be hard to market, Pikul moans. And yet, as Geller tartly rejoins, it's the game that everyone is already playing.
The realists believe - or rather want to protect the self-delusion - that the particular world (=consensual hallucination) in which they find themselves is fixed and determined. What guarantees such fixity is of course the functioning of a transcendent designer - the game programmer, whose role is inevitably paralleled with what God does - or did - in/ for 'our' particular consensual hallucination. What Existenz demonstrates with admirable lucidity is that reality can only be authorized if it is authored - if, that is to say, its nature is controlled by an additional, allegedly 'more real' plane of reality, one level up from in which we find ourselves.
Thus Existenz turns on the Sartrean opposition between the in-itself and the for-itself. The players (Pikul and Geller) are for-itself, capable, or seemingly capable, of making choices, albeit within set parameters. (Unlike in the ludicrous Matrix, the players are constrained by the rules of the world into which they are thrown). The game characters are the in-itself, pre-programmed drones who can only respond to particular cues.
These in-itself pre-programmed game characters are one of the greatest sources of uncanny humour in Existenz. That's partly because their strange fugues and inability to act unless triggered by exactly the right stim are immediately reminiscent of so many interactions with 'real' human beings in late Kapitalism. In late Kapitalism, the experience of listening to a cheerful more-human-than-human robovoice announce, inevitably incorrectly, the arrivals and departures at a railway station and the experience of talking to a 'real live' call centre employee or ultra-trained estate agent, are all but indistinguishable. Professionalization = becoming as much like a bureaucratically controlled robozombie as is humanly possible. In none of these cases are there any signs of autonomy or ability to sensitively engage with either the situation or people around them. In the 'age of artificial stupidity' (Iain Hamilton Grant) , the tendency is for everyone and everything to be encouraged to act as if pre-programmed.
The last part of this essay about the line of escape, before exploring strategies of necromancers (a chapter which is still unfinished):
Deleuze-Guattarian escapism may deprive of its sorcerous polytics right at the moment of bursting (exploding) with its full maneuverability in the presence of climatologic factors, slope-process and flexible lattices of gravity verticals which use dynamism to reform and revitalize themselves. This, however, is regarded as an opportunity by necromancers (another instance of subversion, occult-sabotage and radical sorcerous polytics as it will be discussed) but it glooms as a failure in functionality or a disappointing setback by escapist sorcerers. Explosion (ex- + plaudere) turns a line of flight into an enthusiastic (plaudere) carrier of solidus towards the outside (ex-), a line of spectacle (a line of flight enriched by solid contents). Who can deny the religious zeal of Hollywood for explosions, the squawking lines of volatilis? (it’s show time!) When utilized escapism (or an appropriated line-of-escape) reaches an intensive displaceability (which usually occur as a transient / instantaneous state) it becomes resistant to the synthetic textum of the verticals of gravity, a ‘woven’ latticework which platonically manages (governs) all entities that it sets in motion (in Timaeus, Plato describes these “vital chains” as what effectuate motion not restrain it) to produce an infinity which essentially necessitates sempiternal movements, and at the same time making them grounded.
Excursus II: the grounded infinity and the master of pseudo-flux
“... a striated space of this kind is necessarily delimited, closed on at least one side” (Deleuze and Guattari, ATP, p.475)
Rudimentary flight through such a spatial-ground (or woven infinity), to this extent, is not an act of escape but ensnarling the net whose task is employing all modes of movement to expand a non-volumetric grounded space. ‘Desiring for infinity’ lucratively contributes to the spatializing process of the grund. Unbounded from one side while being grounded (closed at the other side), the line of flight do nothing but becoming a master of pseudo-flux, the miraculous irrigator of the ground and the economy of solidus, an uber-agent of striated space, a Saviour. A true sorcery, initially, requires a cunning clandestine machine, a line of cataflight to remove, neutralize or subvert the grounding processes of the binding side (or according to Deleuze and Guattari, “the closed side” capable of weaving an infinity as a homogenous striated space) which turns every line of flight into a champion of the spatial-ground, a binding side (or end) which exploits infinity as an unbound raum, a full accommodating system, a boundless boundary; the closed side is the ground. The first task of sorcery should be unleashing a strategy towards the ground or the binding side, otherwise, sorcery has a limitless potential to prostitute all lines of escape, being a determined pimp of the ground and solidus. Ironically, the initial task of sorcery happens on the ‘frontline’ of the battle: undermining the ground, engineering the corpse of solidus, awakening the Unground -- towards the alkhemy of the Earth -- igniting the potenz of the Unground. If the first step of alchemy is fermentation or unleashing the seething and pestilentially corruptive potenz of ‘black matter’ (corpus) through matter (not seeking to control or conduct it); then the first task of sorcery unfolds in alchemy, the chemistry of Unground.
Despite its resistance to the textum of gravity, the line of explosion (volatilis) plots a new panorama of ‘ground fertilization’. Volatilis is a sedimentary flight, its intensive / instantaneous displaceability instates a climax-oriented space of solid engineering, subserviently erupting and ceasing for the ground. Volatilis economizes intensities through a mechanism similar to ejaculatory emission, turning intensities to pressures, forces, manned vehicles and instigators of shape. The explosive emission of volatilis can deliver and spread solid at any place and any moment, without the risk of being caught, weakened or subverted by insurgent entities. It is efficient and clean, not only in its mobilizing activities but in the way it dis-seminates a regime of vestigiums, leaving behind an empire of signs (what is more theatrically provoking than explosion, than trajectories it leaves in space?) and hotheaded lines which are pure in their commotion yet unsophisticated and naïve in their tendency to carry solid contents of the grund with an uncontrollable enthusiasm (plaudere), concealing (in the sense of giving a new Face) the macro-politics of the State in a volatile semiotic space.
The line of explosion (ex-plaudere) is a combined war-machine of fierce anabatic waves and sedimentology, not only does it transport all solid products of the volumetric ground to a non-volumetric level (partaking in formation of the spatial-ground) but also saves the macro-politics of the State by inoculating it with intensities, reforming and restoring it in a volatile state i.e. a higher level of solidus management.
Sorcerers and Necromancers: