Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science

ASCA Workshop 2019, 2019

The terms hyperstition-a compound of hyper-and superstition that describes ideas that bring themselves into actuality in the future through their expression in the present-and Theory-fiction -a mode of reading and writing that seeks to blur the problematic distinction between fictional creations and theoretical descriptions-have been floating around the periphery of cultural analysis and cyberspace for the last quarter century.

The Future of the New, 2018

My argument is simple: that accelerationism is an aesthetics. Accelerationism is the strategy that demands we engage with forms of technology and abstraction to chart a post-capitalist future. While discussion has focused on how this strategy might be translated into artistic practice, my claim is that it is already an aesthetics. To substantiate this claim I explore the two dominant forms of contemporary accelerationism – ‘right’ (or reactionary) accelerationism and ‘left’ accelerationism. I argue that their visions of acceleration and the future are fundamentally aesthetic, drawing particularly on electronic dance music and sci-fi imagery. In particular a common use of hyperstitional devices, fictions which produce an effect in reality, leaves both left and right accelerationism as an aestheticized politics of will and so fundamentally irrationalist. In contrast, to develop political and cultural strategies to imagine the future requires, I argue, an emphasis on necessity and already-existing struggles. https://www.valiz.nl/en/publications/the-future-of-the-new.html

In 2010, critical theorist Benjamin Noys coined the term accelerationism to denote the argument that the only way to overcome capitalism is to intensify exploitation and expansion to the point of collapse. Since Noys’ coinage of the term, several thinkers have attempted to present more positive and celebratory cases for accelerationism. In their “#ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams define accelerationism as the basic belief that existing technological tendencies “should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by a capitalist society.” They expand on this basic premise in their 2015 book Inventing the Future, in which they reframe accelerationism as the demand for the establishment of a post-work, post-scarcity, postcapitalist society. Before Inventing the Future was published, literary theorist Steven Shaviro asserted in his book No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism that accelerationism must be an aesthetic program before it can become a political one. Shaviro defines accelerationist aesthetics as the representation of a post-apocalyptic, accelerated form of capitalism. In this thesis, I propose four alternative characteristics for an aesthetics of accelerationism that accounts for the developments and changes in Srnicek and Williams’ political program: melting, mutation, hyperstition, modernity. I then apply these characteristics to the works of three contemporary artists and artist collectives—British installation and video artist Benedict Drew; Japanese artist collective Chim↑Pom, and the British filmmakers known as the Otolith Group. These characteristics present the transition from capitalism into postcapitalism in an aesthetic form, rendering the arguments and ambiguities of accelerationism more recognizable and understandable.

Plutonics: A Journal of Non-Standard Theory, 2021

Performing within and as a Cybernetic flow of information development, this interdisciplinary and experimental work identifies the manipulations of Time executed through both the 19th century occult-organization the Theosophical Society and 1990s experimental Philosophy group the CCRU. The identification of time manipulation by and through these two groups will detail and assess the systematic mechanics and revelations of time-traveling ‘Hyperstitional’ technology implemented within the complex system of time. This assessment locates the Aesthetic practice of Fictioning progressive futures and the socio-ethical dimensions and implications of the developments which strive toward said futures. Following a brief conceptual introduction to Time-travel, Hyperstition, and Cybernetics, the experimental exercise begins its evolution with an engagement of Theosophy’s cosmological Hyperstiton 'Spiritual Evolution', giving way to Occult Sexology, Satanic Feminism, and Cosmic Eugenics. From this will develop the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’s actualization of Hyperstitional technology through Hauntological Necromancy and said technology’s implementation in not only Accelerationist and Esoterroristic Meme Magic, but also the collective-action Fictioning in Xenofeminist metapolitics.

Aesthetics After Finitude, 2016

In this book artist turned 'aesthetic bootstrapper' Martha Senger writes of an evolutionary 'Event' that arose at a live-work hotel in San Francisco in the 70's when the artist residents of the historic Goodman Building gathered to oppose eviction by the local redevelopment agency and "a new form broke through." Collectively cohering their artistic, social, intellectual and physical labors over a decade in an "integral aesthetic praxis" that expanded to include broad public and media support, although losing the building to a for-profit development Senger proposes they'd achieved the synthesis between art and life once sought by the modernist avant-garde that failed, she argues, due to its broken 'purist' forms. Recognizing the Goodman's de-reconstructive praxis in a double-spiral drawing entitled 'gather, sift, see' she'd created before the Goodman experience, Senger writes she found it theoretically validated in the toroidal geometry of the quantum of action described by mathematician Arthur M. Young in The Reflexive Universe. A 5-dimensional vortex-sphere that supersedes the 4-dimensional spherical geometry of Einstein's deterministic space-time, the toroidal rotation of consciousness as "timing" of the collective imagination creates increasingly complex levels of meaning, reduces entropy and is - Young wrote - "the divine light of recognition" that "returns" to the light. Hoping to further this return with the torus as it architectural metapattern, Senger writes of joining with colleagues to create Goodman2. Based on her conceptual design and described in an essay first published in Architecture California entitled "G2: Chaos Architecture, A Metapattern That Connects," G2's design won an Excellence in Design Award for its architect who commented "G2 is the first visionary architecture that's ever actually been constructed." In subsequent essays Senger connects the torus’ reflexive/recursive geometry with the Marxist-Utopian “dialectical aesthetics” of Frederic Jameson (The Political Unconscious), psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s pre-linguistic semiotics (Revolution in Poetic Language), Jungian analyst Marie Von Franz’s “becoming continuum” (Number and Time), Jungian analyst Katya Walter’s double helix co-patterning of analogue feeling and digital thought (The Tao of Chaos), Douglas Hofstadter’s “strange loopiness” patterning (Godel, Escher, Bach), philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s meta-physics of narrativity (Time and Narrative), Martin Heidegger’s metaphysics of repetition in the temporal synthesis of the imagination (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics), Jacques Derrida’s vortex structure of repetition in which “origin plays and is reactivated as sedimentation is reduced through return inquiry” (Economimesis), Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s “transcendental subjectivity” and “act aqua real” as related to the materialism of Marx and Hegel’s “night of the world”, Jacques Lacan’s goal of analysis as Le Sinthome or the feminine way, and Schelling’s pre-symbolic vortex of desire (The Indivisible Remainder), Senger also associates the vortex with the fractal patterning of chaos dynamics, complexity theory, and subquantum physics theory of ‘dark’ matter. Known to comprise over 96% of matter in the universe, recently discovered to have golden ratio symmetry, and unfolding-enfolding in what physicist David Bohm described (Wholeness and the Implicate Order) as “a potential metamorphosis” through “the primary imagination,” Oxford physicist Roger Penrose’s dodecahedral “twistor” geometry contracts matter into increasingly meaningful, lowest energy configurations via non-computable aesthetic judgement (The Emperor’s New Mind) and physicist Michio Kaku’s “phase transition from a quantitative to a qualitatively compactified, more stable state” he relates to the dialectical resolution of a conflict (Hypersphere), Senger created the G2 Institute and its “Aesthetic Phase Shift” lecture series to further its emergence. Proposing the shift as a determinate negation of capitalism’s objectifying, symbolically-structured order and an integral aesthetic reunion of the spheres of value separated by the Enlightenment, she created a neon sculpture of the star pentagram shown in the book as its “regenerative symbol” and “a revolutionary abstracting praxis” she calls Neo-Vorticism to usher it in. In the book’s Preface Senger further relates its emergence to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s anamnestic “re-writing” of modernity (The Inhuman), art critic/historian Hal Foster’s deferred action (Nachtraglichkeit) as “a continued process of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts” (The Return of the Real), philosopher Michel Foucaultl’s “unveiling of the unconscious (as) the truth of all the sciences of man (The Order of Things), Swiss cultural historian Jean Gebser’s evolution of consciousness (Ever Present Origin), cultural historian William Irwin Thompson’s recuperative “performance of myth” (The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light), anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s proposed “shift to the next level of abstraction” (Mind and Nature), literary critic J. M. Bernstein’s challenge to “think through the separation of the spheres of truth, morality, and beauty brought about by modernity and their entwinement within a stable metaphysical hierarchy” (The Fate of Art), French philosopher Alain Badiou’s “truth event” and proposal for “a new beginning” of history and art (Inaesthetics), chaos theorist Ralph Abraham’s proposed mythic recuperation of the archaic golden mean structured unconscious (Chaos, Gaia, Eros), Martin Heidegger’s “new beginning” of history and art (The Origin of the Work of Art), G.W.F. Hegel’s Aufhebung of Art as expressed in Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics: “The science of art is a much more significant need than in times when art, simply as art…was enough to furnish a full satisfaction. What we have to study is how the principles (of artistic beauty) pass into actual existence…the universal types which constitute the self-unfolding Idea of Beauty” and Alfred North Whitehead’s prediction (Religion in the Making): “The teleology of the universe is directed to the production of beauty.” CHAPTER TITLES Cohering Chaos: Restructuring From Below in the Inner City Goodman Engage: Aesthetic Bootstrapping in the Wake of Art or Reviving the Epic in an Era of Irony & How This All Relates to the New Sciences of Chaos & Reconstructing the Real G2: Chaos Architecture: A Metapattern That Connects Neo-Vorticism: The Tao of Form/Distilling the Real, Resituating Art, Rewinding the Formative Springs of Life" An Urban Space Probe Aesthetic Phase Shift: Fusing Art, Life & the Cosmos POEMS Goodman Engage: A Quantum Performance of the Real Neo-Vorticists Unite! Angel Out On the Aufhebung of Art & Rebirth of the Real at the Opening of the New Millennium Shockfront Death & Transfiguration Singularity (or 2012: the poem) A Compressionist Manifesto Poetry Door New Year's Revolution Elegy to the Queen of Sheba After a Hearing of the State Housing Loan Committee in Sacramento Artefact

2019

The three centuries since the European Enlightenment have manifest rapid developments for both Science and technology. These developments have been accelerated by and proliferated across the socioeconomic structure of Capitalism. Evolving through and as the expanse of technoscientific industrialization is then an increasingly organized scientific model by which to determine what reality can and cannot do. The world, and furthermore a greater extent of the universe, may now be understood from the perspective of scientific rationality, as a ‘disenchanted’, ordered, and logically consistent mechanistic structure free from divine interventions or supernatural forces. Entangled in the complexity of technoscientific commerce and consumer culture, these limits imposed by Science thus dictate and control development within and for society moving forward: what reality can and cannot be. Presented here as critiques of the structured, hierarchical, and objective outlook on reality maintained through the interplay of Scientism and Socioeconomics, both Post-Structural theory and Magick provide theories and praxis for the artistic manipulation of time, causality, representation, and control as means for Postmodern ‘reality engineering’. Magick - performed across twentieth-century Occultism as both the science and art of causing change in accordance with will - does not go against the disenchanted presentation of reality, but rather works within it. So too does Post-Structural theory go to work within institutions and power structures, laboring to deconstruct the rigid organizational methods and reductions of ‘Objective’ systematization and thus expand the possibilities of thought and being into an open network of fluid possibility. Composed as Performance Philosophy, this work both details and demonstrates the intersection and overlap maintained between twentieth-century Occultism and Post-Structural Philosophy. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of Chaos Magick, Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, LaVeyan Satanism, William Burroughs’ Cut-Up Method, the Esoterrorist tactics of experimental-music-organization Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), and the Hyperstitional Theory-Fictions of 1990s Experimental-Philosophy group the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), this thesis will provide a Postmodern theory for the subversive integration of non-represented elements into culture, society, and reality-models by their own means. As a work of Performance Philosophy, this theory will be utilized as the very methodology by and through which the research presented in this paper is articulated; the theory will be both explained and argued not in abstraction, but through and within its own application. By an experimental aestheticization of information communication, this work provides a dynamic approach to questions, problems, and discourses across the Humanities through a utilization of Postmodern Aesthetics, Network Theory, and Post-Continental Philosophy of Time, functioning to deconstruct rigid historical narratives, research practices, and other dominant methods of control.

2019

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine Abstract Analog and digital technologies are an immanent part of postmodern lifeworld's around the globe, and they are a fundament or – in some cases – driving force for mass media, telecommunication, art, and design. This omnipresence and ordinariness of technology make it very difficult to take sides: the defender determines a specific value of technology for creative processes and the opponent proclaims a general worthlessness of technology for artistic creation. This essay focusses not on different judgements, but it will analyze some important aspects of the structural dynamic of technology in the context of a creative mediatization. This means, that a work of art, a design concept or a communication medium has to be understand as a specific aesthetic artefact that enables a perceptual relation or interaction of a technological repertoire, a specific mode of representation and a sensory awareness of the recipient. This interc...

2020

Memories of My Body", a Garin Nugroho's latest film title in 2019, tells about the body's journey, inspired from Rianto's life as a Lengger Lanang dancer. In this film, Rianto is not as a reference, but as a model to describe simulates feminine and masculine concepts in one body on film as a simulacrum; to produce an image that is completely unrelated to reality. The purpose of this study is to show the form of hyperreality in the film "Memories of My Body". This study used a philosophical hermeneutic approach for interpreting how hyperreality forms in the film. This study found the simulations of feminine and masculine concepts in the film. So, the result of this research is a new horizon about the concept of hyperreality. The study can be concluded that hyperreality is not only found in a film that has science fiction or virtual reality, but also, in drama films with a local culture representing a form of hyperreality.

The literature review attempts to critique on the ideas of “Absolute fake art, fake nature, fake cities” by Umberto Eco and “Hyper-reality” by Jean Baudrillard with the cinematic genre of “Science Fiction.” It will show that how has Science Fiction been a contribution to hyper-reality and the characteristics that makes Science Fiction settle in the state of hyper-reality.