Thread by @deontologistics

Someone on FB asked for a definition of Hyperstition, and this is what I came up with: a narrative schema that allows us to aesthetically capture the ways in which our collective anticipations of the future have causal force in the present.

I’m no expert on hauntology, but I think it’s got very similar structure: it’s a narrative schema that allows us to aesthetically unpack the implications of unrealised futures contained in our collective nostalgia for the past.

If hyperstition concerns temporally weird forms of (futural) necessity operating in the present, then hauntology concerns temporally weird forms of (latent) possibility operating in the present. There’s an ecstatic theory of historical consciousness implicit in their juncture.

If you’re really interested in unpacking the (methodo)logic of accelerationism as something neutral, which can be a appropriated for different purposes, then this aesthetics of time is where to look. It’s surprisingly Heideggerian, if thoroughly cybernetic in a way he’d hate.

It is in some sense about overcoming our fallenness in the world, unpicking the cognitive scaffolding of the present in which we find ourselves going with the flow. Our temporal aesthetics-technics let’s us zoom out in a controlled way, exploring its constitutive tendencies.

This doesn’t mandate fatalism. It’s about articulating the interface between (impersonal) fate and (personal) destiny. You can refuse destiny in the name of the fate, but you can choose otherwise. I think that’s the most significant pragmatic difference between Fisher and Land.

There are overlaps/divergences in the tendencies they try to aesthetically extract from the complex of the present, different sorts of surgery performed on the horizon of imagination that defines our collective present. Moreover, there are all too obviously different goals.

The figure of ‘the human security system’ indexes a common enemy, a complex techno-bureaucracy controlling the means of production of personal destiny, validating only familiar modes of subjectivity and desire. But their (personal) wars against it diverge drastically.

Land has allied himself with the forces of literal re-territorialisation: the rejection of free flows of personal becoming, be they alien vectors of morphological transformation or simple geographic movement. For the market to be made global, all else must become local.

I think Mark saw things in almost the opposite way. I certainly do. To harness the de-territorialising power of modernity is to enhance our individual freedoms through social connectivity, (globally) enabling (in)human becomings unbound by any (local) systems of constraint.

Land's political thought is marked by a constant vacillation between fatalist theodicy (hyperstition) and economic apologetics (teleoplexy), and we are supposed to believe this is a logical feature, rather than a rhetorical bug. A virtuous circle rather than a vicious cycle.

Fisher's political thought responds with a cultural counter-history (hauntology) that turns echoes of paths untaken into opportunities for counter-cultural strategy (Prometheanism). His evisceration of the eternal now of capitalist realism enables us to contest the future.

This anti-Landian twist is precisely what is missed by Benjamin Noys in his book Malign Velocities (libcom.org/files/[Benjami…). As nice as Ben is, I will pull no punches on this book: it's fucking awful.

He understands the cultural reference points of the 90s era CCRU and can talk about them with some subtlety. Even if I disagree with his original articulation of 'accelerationism' as 'the worse the better' (deontologistics.co/2018/02/18/oft…), it was certainly an interesting intervention.

Malign Velocities is a book rushed to meet the demands of a moment: the sudden and unexpected popularity of 'accelerationism' following Mark's appropriation of the term and @lemonbloodycola and @n_srnck's elaboration of its commitments in their manifesto - criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/acc…

It reaches for a bunch of cultural reference points that are largely irrelevant to explain this, and gets absolutely no purchase even on the literary reference points inspiring this more explicitly Marxist post-CCRU leftist project. It literally says more about shit than the MAP.

I could list these literary reference points, or the wider cultural themes that inspired the convergence that was the original l/acc project, but that's not what this thread is about. The key point is that Noys reads l/acc as the dissolution of selfhood into a singular tendency.

It's worth mentioning that this came out before Inventing the Future, which deliberately avoided any reference to 'accelerationism' for good reason, but even so, the engagement with the MAP is embarrassingly poor, completely ignoring that it is an explicitly *strategic* document.

To drive this point home, @lemonbloodycola's whole project has always been to 'integrate complexity theory with the theorisation and practice of hegemony' (palgrave.com/gp/book/978303…), i.e., to talk about *multiple* dynamic interacting tendencies that might be contested and steered.

Whatever you might want to say about the status of the self in Mark's work, and the extant to which his framing of the personal/impersonal distinction remains tied to the framework articulated by the CCRU, he very clearly didn't advocate teleoplexic dissolution of subjectivity.

Whatever critiques you might want to put forward of his political activism - the aims, tactics, and strategies that he deployed - or that of Srnicek & Williams following the publication of ItV, the one thing you can't say is that they weren't trying to contest the future.

Maybe the l/acc project failed. Maybe it's not finished. Maybe it's an ongoing commitment that others can adopt in ways that fail harder, better, faster, and perhaps even stronger. Maybe we need to push past left-melancholy and reconnect with contemporary cyberculture.

Maybe cybernetic politics can't work without cyberculture, but I'd wager the inverse is equally true. There's no point exploring the inhuman becomings enabled by these complex connected webs of cybernetic self-modulation if they aren't trajectories of autonomous self-legislation.

Mark's great disappointment was seeing the ways the technologies of the (no)self that enthused the CCRU got appropriated, integrated, and spat out by capital in the form of ever more powerful tools of human security: Facebook as an all-too-human vector of re-territorialisation.

If you want to see how this disappointment unfolded, look at the history of the 'boring dystopia' FB group that Mark started, and which quickly degenerated as the curated vibe got fuzzed by distributed apophenia: vice.com/en/article/aek…

In some cases, the medium really is the message, and the message of FB is that we're all unique individuals whose distinctive social graphs are homogeneous data to be chewed up and digested by impersonal forces, rather than harnessed to our own ends, political or otherwise.

But if you think this necessitates fatalism, that the only option left is dissolving into the dataflow, you haven't been paying attention. Sometimes the message reformats the medium, bursting its databanks and tracing transverse channels into uncharted territories.

There are more hauntological opportunities waiting to be reaped, and more hyperstitional tendencies waiting to sewn. Time is no flat circle, but a roiling surface traversed by intersecting trajectories. We can glimpse old options dying and new ones being born in every instant.

We have but to have the wisdom to look, the courage to act, and the fortitude to fail as many times as we're able, as many times as it takes. Solidarity in futurity, my fast moving friends.🖖

CODA: As usual, here are a few further things to look at if you want to explore the above thoughts further.

1. 'Prometheanism and Rationalism' - which explores the choice between messianism, fatalism, and Prometheanism: deontologistics.co/2016/08/20/pro…

2. 'Autonomy and Automation' (the short version) - which lays out a comprehensive story about the present political/cultural/economic conjuncture, and the stakes of cybernetic culture: deontologistics.co/2017/12/22/aut…

3. 'Solidarity in Joy' - which discusses the relationship between the political and the aesthetic:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1356925172742303744?s=20

4. 'Cyberculture TNG' - where I talk a little about my own excessive Twitter use and what it means:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1346847696930430979?s=20

And finally, a little nugget of hyperstitional ideation, the birth of the hypervillain:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1362343909779787776?s=20

🖖