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October 21, 2020

Hyperstitional Theory-Fiction

by Macon Holt

The following is from the latest issue of the Full Stop Quarterly. You can purchase the issue here or subscribe
at our Patreon page.

Academic niches are rarely of interest to those whose career success

does not depend on repeated declarations that the niche in question
is of extreme importance. But every once in a while, something that
originates in the rarefied, hyper-specialized environment of
academia is so compelling and so seductive that it seeps into other
spaces—infesting networks and scenes through an unexpected
virality. Yet despite their origin in academia, the very nature of such
ideas—and of the practices related to them—dictates that the work
required to develop them cannot take place within the academy,
bound up, as it is, with the projects of the state and the short-term
goals of the education and research marketplaces. In the para-
academic realm—a space with some freedom from the influence of
the (admittedly evanescent) material rewards promised for playing
institutions’ games—things can get really weird. This is the proper
way to understand the intellectual history—and ongoing practices—
of a group known as the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit
(CCRU).

But before we consider the work of the CCRU, first we must

understand a term they invented: hyperstitional theory-fiction. The
term combines two neologisms developed by CCRU; when joined,
they capture both the group’s main interest and its methodology.
Hyperstition, a compound of hyper- and superstition, describes
ideas that bring themselves into actuality in the future through the
forces unleashed via their expression in the past or present. An
example of hyperstition is the way that the term “cyberspace”—
which originated in William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer—
became, by the mid-1990s, the primary conceptual dispositif
through which we understood the emerging technologies of the
Diagram of the CCRU “spine” internet. What had been a fairly cloistered technology, used
primarily for the communication of numerical data and text between
specialists, suddenly took on a spatial dimension that evoked a
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sense of the world to come. Just as these technologies were becoming more integrated into the reproduction
of social life—and as capital investment began to accelerate—this abstruse tool became a frontier. (The effect
of this crass application of a term from science fiction to a still-poorly-understood communication technology
persists today; what, other than a contemporary version of gold fever, explains the astronomical overvaluing
of a real estate rental company like WeWork, which differentiated itself simply by branding itself as a tech
company?) The intense romance and excitement conjured up by Gibson’s concept have (unintentionally)
shaped the future that became our present as an idea virus.

Hyperstition refers to the way ideas circulate and manifest themselves under the conditions of techno-
capitalism; theory-fiction refers to the condition of knowledge within techno-capitalism. When deployed self-
consciously, theory-fiction can even provide an analysis of what is going on—which can itself serve to shape
the process of hyperstition. If, as hyperstition would have it, culture, politics, economics, identity, and
technology are all part of some kind of cybernetic system—i.e., an interconnected system whose functioning
is regulated by, ruptured by, and respondent to complex mechanisms of feedback—then how could one
theorize about any of these entangled phenomena without also producing operative fictions that feed back
into the system? Theory, then, becomes a response to feedback, and its articulation becomes synonymous
with the invention of new fictions, which in turn become part of the network’s process of feedback.

For CCRU, this proposition calls for a new paradigm of knowledge. All attempts to describe the world
theoretically, in order to function as some kind of cultural force (e.g., to become a source for policy
documents or to establish scientific facts), necessarily involve reduction and intensification. As a result, they
bear an uncanny resemblance to fiction. Theoretical descriptions, the CCRU proposed, are not confined to the
real (and perhaps never have been), and such descriptions inevitably produce virtual or fictive new pieces of
reality. Likewise, pieces of fiction—derived as they are from this cybernetic network of feedback loops—
inevitably offer theoretically-legible explanations emerging from their situation. For the CCRU, this
entanglement of theory and fiction wasn’t something to lament, but rather an opportunity full of creative and
destructive potential. Thus, they sought to produce theory-fictions—and indeed, to become one themselves.

The CCRU was founded in the 1990s out of the philosophy department
of the University of Warwick. The group had no offical affiliation with
the university, the position of which was, according to a Warwick
professor quoted in a 2011 article in Dazed, that the “CCRU does not,
has not and will never exist.” The group was comprised of an
assortment of academic “renegades,” as Simon Reynolds described
them in a 1999 article. In this article, he quotes one of the peculiar
emails he received from the group with their description of their
origins: “Ccru retrochronically triggers itself from October 1995, where
it uses Sadie Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary
habitat. . . . Ccru feeds on graduate students + malfunctioning academic
(Nick Land) + independent researchers + . . .”

Plant and Land—then junior academics—were the central figures of the

group. Plant was a key figure in the development of cyberfeminism. As
Bognor M. Korinor puts it in an article for _AH Journal, the argument
of Plant’s seminal work, Zeros and Ones, is that

patriarchy unwittingly fell into the trap of new technologies,

which will have eventually overturned the delusion that the world
[Urbanomic; 2017] was doing anything but accelerating into an ever more-rounded
feminisation. Patriarchy uses women as its “media, means of
communication, reproduction and exchange” but as the media
multiply, women multiply, “becoming increasingly interlinked”—both networked technologies
and femininity, which are for Plant equivalent, need “no centralized organization and evade
structures of command and control.”

Plant’s work rejected the naturalism that had dogged certain strands of feminist theory throughout the
twentieth century. Taking up Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that “[o]ne is not born, but rather, becomes a
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Woman” and technologizing it through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “becoming-woman” and
Donna Haraway’s affirmation of the cyborg, Plant developed a feminist theory committed to the liberatory
potential of technology, critically understood. The influence of this work has stretched far beyond the CCRU
and proliferated in new theory-fictions across the world.

Land was a philosopher who, as his former student (and fellow member of CCRU) Robin Mackay put it in an
article for Divus,

was perhaps not the greatest teacher from the point of view of obtaining a sober and solid
grounding in one’s subject—but more importantly, his lectures had about them a genuine air of
excitement [. . .] Not only was the course he taught pointedly entitled ‘Current French
Philosophy’—a currency otherwise alien to our curriculum—more importantly, Land’s teaching
was also a sharing of his own research-in-progress. This was unheard-of: philosophy actually
being done, rather than being interpreted at second-hand?! He would sweep his audience into a
speculative vortex of philosophy, economics, literature, biology, technology, and disciplines as-
yet unnamed.

Land’s project, as Mackay describes it, was to re-tool the conceptual framework of absolute contingency he
found in Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia to disassemble the “human security system”
that he believed held back the potential of intelligence as such. This project, in combination with the
deterritorializing cyber culture of the mid-to-late-1990s, gave CCRU it’s accelerationist direction—but in
recent years, it has also taken Land himself into squalid places as a neo-reactionary associated with the “Dark
Enlightenment.”

Around these figures, graduate students, writers, artists and musicians gathered to become the CCRU.
Members included the philosophers and theorists Luciana Parisi, Mark Fisher, and Kodwo Eshun; the
novelist Hari Kunzru; the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman; and the artist group 0rphan Drift. In the strange
ideological desert of the nineties, this collective entity sought to use theory-fiction as a part of a hyperstitional
project to accelerate the dissolution already taking place under globalized techno-capital. Their goal was not
personal enrichment based in neoliberalism; rather, it was to liberate the individual from the confines of
identity, geography, history—and from individuality itself, as then conceived. The CCRU’s aim was not to
direct the flows of power, resources, and capital toward themselves, but to bring about a future in which
humans would be fully enmeshed with these flows.

As members of the CCRU write in their delirious quasi-manifesto,

Swarmachines:

There is no doubt anywhere that matters: simply facts. Debate

is idiot distraction, humanity is fucked, real machines never
closed-up inside an architecture. Schizo-capital fission
consists of vectors dividing between two noncommunicating
phyla of nonpersonal multiplicity. First pyramid structures
control structures: white-clown pixel face, concentrational
social segments, EU-2 Integrated history horizon. Second,
Jungle-war machines: darkening touch densities, cultural
distribution thresholds, intensive now-variation flattened out
into ungeometrized periphery.

No community. No dialectics. No plan for an alternative state.

This paragraph nearly perfectly encapsulates their project; it lacks

only the deep lore of sci-fi and cosmic horror that permeated the
blogs through which CCRU developed their ideas. Everything else
is there: the celebration of destructive intensity; the lack of
sentimentality about the prospect of the end of “human” life as we
know it; the Blade Runner pyramid structures; and the drum and [Audio version; 1996]
bass subgenre, Jungle, as Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine
coursing through the long night of the end of history. One the one
hand, this was an intellectual counterculture in action; on the other
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hand, their point was precisely that they weren’t countercultural at all—they were only amplifying messages
from the bleeding edge. In their view, what then passed for radical philosophical critique seemed content to
incessantly point out the obvious inconsistencies and contradictions of the “third way.” The CCRU, by
contrast, was interested in investigating those forces that had brought about the apparent impasse of the end
of history from the inside—and, if possible, in directing its course to somewhere more exciting.

One such exciting course this took was the development of sonic fiction. In
1999, the critic, artist, and CCRU associate Kodwo Eshun published More
Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. Part theoretical treatise,
part fictional narration, part journalistic hype-machine, the book was an
experiment in amplifying the latent afrofuturist potential in what is, it argues,
problematically termed “black music”:

To use the phrase Black Music is to presume a consensus that has

never existed, to assume a readily audible pre-synthetic essence which
machines have externalized, manufactured and globalized. No longer
sheltering within an essence that never was, today’s Futurist
understands the mythillogic of the soundmachine.

For Eshun, certain musical practices—often attributed to musicians with

certain racially coded bodies—had a destabilizing potential in their capacity
to re-engineer historical narratives, and along with them, the concept and
possibilities of humanity itself. But the argument was not that there was
something essentially different about music produced by the African
diaspora. Rather, the difference and potential of this music emerged from the
[Verso; 2020 reprint] ongoing iterations of the cybernetic feedback process of a world built on
colonial exploitation and capitalist extraction. Thus, black musicians occupy
an interesting position in a world built on such a foundation with regard to
categories like subjectivity, humanity, and being—a position, Eshun
suggests, that may in fact contain a particular liberatory, albeit problematic, potential, which he understands
as a cyborg potential. In a way that recalls the dynamic explored in Plant’s work on feminism, Eshun refuses
the naturalism of previous attempts at articulating emancipatory projects via the soulfulness of “black
culture.” Instead, he explores what happens when those whose instrumentalization (non-)being historically
positioned them as a tool for another create music—or sonic fictions—in a world that has become an
immense collection of technologies. This contingency of history has produced what Eshun calls the “post-
soul” that can be heard in the music of Sun Ra, George Clinton, Alice Coltrane, Tricky and Drexciya. In
More Brilliant than the Sun, Eshun hoped to amplify this feedback loop and to accelerate this Afrofuturist
tendency.

Some time around 2003, the CCRU ceased operation. Plant and Land had both left academia. The graduate
students involved with the CCRU had for the most part graduated, and were navigating the academic and
culture industry job markets. The deterritorializing flows of capitalist life forced those involved in the group
in different directions, resulting in the dissolution of an entity that had been formed to describe and accelerate
that very process. But hyperstition is all about setting things in motion that take place over time—an
intervention in the present that, as it becomes the past, transforms the future. In the decades that followed, the
CCRU’s influence made itself known.

In 2008, the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani published his book

Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials—at once a work
of fringe Islamic theology, speculative philosophy, modern history, and
horror fiction—that explores the geotrauma of fossil fuels. Through a
theory-fictional method, Negarestani posited that the Middle East was
itself a kind of agential force that, through collaboration with the United
States’ military-industrial complex, was conspiring to bring about the
end of human life on the planet via the irresistibility of oil. While the
evidence for these claims would not sway most political scientists, the

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notion this book articulates—that, in a way that seems almost fated, we

are caught in process of entropic acceleration caused by the incessant
performance of actions at odds with what our best thinking says we
should be doing, suggesting that we might question our anthropocentric
notion of agency—is an incredibly useful prism through which to view
contemporary petropolitics and the collapse of environmental systems.
Cyclonopedia was a remarkable development in the theory-fiction genre:
it both expanded what could be done with the form and also brought the
concept to a new audience (Artforum featured the book on its list of the
best books of the year).

In 2013, political theorists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams picked up

the accelerationist themes found in the work of the CCRU, and tried to
re-tool them for an explicitly leftist political project in #ACCELERATE
MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics. Their intention was to show
that technological development need not be synonymous with the
machination of capital and that, through a commitment to technology, a
new political potential was possible.

In the manifesto, Srnicek and Williams write: [re.press; 2008]

The left must develop socio-technical hegemony: both in the
sphere of ideas, and in the sphere of material platforms. Platforms
are the infrastructure of global society. They establish the basic parameters of what is possible,
both behaviourally and ideologically. In this sense, they embody the material transcendental of
society: they are what make possible particular sets of actions, relationships, and powers. While
much of the current global platform is biased towards capitalist social relations, this is not an
inevitable necessity. These material platforms of production, finance, logistics, and consumption
can and will be reprogrammed and reformatted towards post-capitalist ends.

In 2014, Urbanomic—the publishing house run by former CCRU member

Robin Mackay—released Accelerationist Reader, a collection of texts
including works by Karl Marx, Shulamith Firestone, Deleuze and
Guattari, Patricia Reed, and Mark Fisher. The book was an attempt to
produce a canon—i.e., it was a theory-fictional retelling of intellectual
history to emphasize the thread that had developed into accelerationism. It
was an opportunity to see some earlier hyperstitions coming to pass.

That same year, at a summer school in Berlin that would be immortalized

in the odd 2015 documentary Hyperstition, a group of thinkers came
together to form the xenofeminist collective Laboria Cuboniks. In their
exciting and controversial 2015 manifesto, Xenofeminism: A Politics for
Alienation, Cuboniks argued—echoing Plant—that feminism should reject
the centering of nature as its principle of justification and instead embrace
technologies of abstraction and rationality. Put another way, it was an
argument for the utilization of what they saw as a space of potential
opened up by alienation from the immediacy of experience. Taking this a
step further, they closed the manifesto with this maxum: “In the name of
feminism, ‘Nature’ shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for
any political justification whatsoever! If nature is unjust, change nature!”
[Urbanomic; 2014]
Philosopher Luciana Parisi—another former member of the CCRU—
argues that the manifesto should be understood not as a political program,
but as an attempt to exercise force in the world by cybernetic means. In the essay “Automate Sex:
Xenofeminism, Hyperstition and Alienation,” she writes:

The manifesto shouldn’t be read as a declaration of intent, but must be addressed as an exercise
in hyperstition: a thought experiment or an enabler of the future. Here the inexistent can be made

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explicit by and through the practical and theoretical enforcing or naming of truths in the face of
indeterminacy, of engineering politics in the face of the relativism of positions.

Parisi’s analysis points to exactly what is so powerful about theory-fiction. Unlike the approach of critique—
which has some unspoken ideal simmering under the surface and hemming in its theoretical invention—and
unlike the affirmative approaches of thinkers like Deleuze and Foucault—which can become little more than
descriptions of the world of post-colonial, patriarchal techno-capital, so vivid that scholars of those
approaches are sought after by business schools the world over—hyperstitional theory-fiction allows for
objectified interventions that can clearly articulate an ideal in the full recognition of its contingency. It
positions its own project as already embedded in and shaped by the culture in which it is situated. And rather
than succumbing to defeatism, it relishes the problematics that this inflicts upon the agencies of its
practitioners. It is a practice of living and thinking through a paradox that has no uses for such surface level
reading of its position. After all, what is more fictional than doxa?

But here we also find something frightening about this approach: its terrifying ambivalence. An approach that
understands human agency as an illusory interpretation of the exertion of force—a bi-product of mediated
feedback amongst the flows of material processes—is definitionally unmoored from conventionally
understood ethical or political commitments. We see this in what lead Srnicek and Williams to ultimately
abandon the conceptual frame of left accelerationism. Critics of their projects, including Land, claimed that
they had misunderstood where the engine of technological acceleration was located. From a traditional
accelerationist point of view, it is not, as they claimed, possible to separate the progress, spread, and
development of current technological tendencies from capital, because they are constituted by capital. The
theory-fiction on which accelerationism was based cannot undergo a political convention because it is a story
about capital as an ambivalent force. This is why Land’s current work has led him to produce theory-fictional
narrations of world history to hyperstitionally engage in the making of a world of neoreactionary CEO kings
and hyper-racism. Which is to say: he has followed the tendencies of capital in all its violence. Thus, to
advance a progressive political project, Srnicek and William have reframed their ideas in more
conventionally-grounded terms, exemplified in their 2016 book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and
World Without Work.

The most recent significant contribution to the practice of

hyperstitonal theory-fiction was the edited volume of sonic fiction,
Unsound: Undead, released last year by the collective AUDINT.
The group’s founders include Steve Goodman—a former member
of the CCRU, the founder of the record label Hyperdub, and one of
most skillful articulators and propagators of the concept of
unsound. In his 2009 book Sonic Warfare, which some would
regard as a sonic fiction, Goodman delves further into the
cybernetic structures that gave hyperstition form and argues, after
Baruch Spinoza, that—in an ontological sense—matter could be
said to exist in and affect the world to the extent that it interacts
with vibrational force. Unsound is his term for those vibrations that
affect us, the world, and the cosmos that are outside the narrow
band of human hearing. Unsound: Undead further develops this
concept by means of vignettes by both prominent and up-and-
coming thinkers in music, sound, media, critical theory, and
philosophy. In a fragmented and indirect way, these texts chart the
relationship between recorded, stored, and mediated sound, and
death. Or, put another way, they consider the eerie world in which
such recordings have made it so that nothing is ever really dead,
and the presence of dead things amongst the living continues to [Urbanomic; 2019]
enact and force up the present-becoming-future.

Hyperstitional theory-fiction was the invention

of an entity that exists now as a similarly
mediated undead digital specter. The CCRU
was a fascinating parasite on the institution in
which it was founded. By drawing on the
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resources of this academic enclosure—the

magnetism it held for searching minds, the
libraries, the disillusionment of becoming-
institutionalized—it was able to give form to
intuitions of things to come otherwise
overlooked by those building careers in the
relative safety of the academy, and which are
now all but impossible to ignore. Beyond this, it
produced a generation of highly original
thinkers whose commitment to their work was
not limited to the fickle favors of the research
and education sector and who, for good and ill,
have inspired thousands more. It’s worth noting,
once again, that the very forces that the CCRU
hoped to articulate through hyperstitional
theory-fiction are ultimately what led to the
unit’s demise. For many schools of thought,
such a turn of events would be ruinous, as it would seem to invalidate their tenets and assertions. But for the
ideas of the CCRU, the circumstance of their demise only served as further proof of their claim that we are—
and perhaps always have been—in an age in which very little can be said to be under human control.

Macon Holt completed his PhD at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, in
2017. He is a contributing editor at the music magazine Passive/Aggressive, and his writing has appeared in
Atlas Magasin, Blacklisted Copenhagen, and The Ark Review. His first book, Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A
Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019.

 
 

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Cover

Full Stop Quarterly: Winter 2020

The pieces in our latest quarterly issue assemble novel histories of transitional periods, both past and present,
when unique circumstances converged to create monstrous conditions. Click here to read the introduction.

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