N o t h i n g i s t r u e,

everything is
produced.
 HYPERSTITION AND THE LEFT
 

TIM DIXON

“According to the tenets of Hyperstition, there is no

difference in principal between a universe, a religion or a

hoax.” Ccru

“For years, I thought I was making all this up. But they

were telling me what to write…giving me the power to

make it all real.” Sutter Cane

HYPERSTITION
 

Hyperstition – a term coined in the 1990s by the Cybernetic

Cultures Research Unit (Ccru) – loosely defined, refers to ‘fictions

that make themselves real.’

The term seems to have gained some traction in recent years with

many references being made to it in recent left-leaning political

theory, and many proclaiming their projects to be hyperstitional in

nature. Hyperstition also seems to offer a means to grasp some of

the more unsettling political movements we face in a resurgent

right.

CCRU
 

The Ccru was founded by Nick Land and Sadie Plant in 1995 at

Warwick University, and then disowned by the University in 1997.

In the ensuing years to around 2003 it collectively developed a body

of work that crossed genres and registers to blend science fiction,

occult mysticism, experimental writing and critical theory. Across

this sprawling output, published largely online at the currently

defunct ccru.net and in zines such as Abstract Culture and Collapse,

the concept of hyperstition is performatively developed and
expanded.

The group continued, following Plant’s early departure. It would go

on to count Ray Brassier, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Kodwo Eshun,

Mark Fisher, Matthew Fuller, Steve Goodman (aka Kode9), Anna

Greenspan, Iain Hamilton Grant, Robin Mackay, Reza Negarestani
and Luciana Parisi among its associates.
In their texts fictional personae interact with historical figures in
academic investigations of more or less real events. A mythology

arises that pits trans-temporal beings against one another in a war

across ages. The Numogram – The Decimal Labyrinth – is
‘discovered’ opening the gates to a host of demons. The techno-

u/dys-topian spirit of the ‘90s runs through the work of Ccru and is
visible in its predilection for collectivity, the apparent belief in the
immanent coming of AI and its obsession with Y2K and the

millennium bug.

Reality via Ccru is to be understood as composed of fictions. Ccru

draws on Gilles Deleuze, who draws on Henri Bergson, to think of

these fictions as ‘virtual’ potentialities undergoing ‘degrees of
realization’. ‘Belief’ becomes impossible, and indeed irrelevant.

Everything is produced.
Ccru itself takes on the consistency of a hyperstitional project. Much
fiction and speculation about the Ccru abounds. There seems to be

something of the cultural malaise identified by Fisher in ‘Capitalist

Realism’ (2009, Zero Books) about the romance many people seem
to have with their moment; a feeling of this being  ‘the last time

things were great.’ Rumours and tales of drug-fuelled intensity

surface, but there’s also a longing for a moment where popular
culture, music, technology and theory seemed to gel and converge,

gaining consistency in a productive forward-thrust not seen since.

There is a lot of rumour about who did what, which seems to run
counter to a decentring collective spirit that sought to do away with

egos and Personalities. People were touched by their experiences

with and of Ccru; people who were more or less close and
associated.

When Ccru disbanded in the early 2000s its members went their
different ways. Land for his part has been accused (quite rightly it

seems) of being the intellectual weight behind the Alt-Right. His

concepts of the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ and the ‘Cathedral’ have
become central to a strand of thought known as Neo-Reaction

(NRx) which argues for ethnic monocultures, crafting pseudo-

scientific rationales for the genetically pre-disposed intellectual
superiority of particular racial groups. While defenders argue that

this itself is some kind of hyperstitional project I remain

unconvinced, and in any case question to what destructive ends this
production might be deployed.
 

HYPERSTITION AFTER CCRU

 

With Land’s move to the right in mind an interesting question to ask

might be why certain productions stick and gain momentum, while

others do not?

In a text on Hyperstition which draws heavily on an interview with

Land, artist Delphi Carstens offers the examples of Judeo-Christian

theology and free-market capitalism as examples of effective

hyperstition; fictions that have affected wholesale socio-economic

overhauls of western and indeed, increasingly global, society.

Carsten’s text is posted on the website of Mer Maggie Roberts, a key

collaborator of Ccru as part of collaborative artist, 0rphan Drift.

In ‘The Thing That Knowledge Cannot Eat’ (Published in ‘Fiction as

Method’, eds. Jon K Shaw and Theo Reeves-Evison, 2017, Sternberg

Press) Carstens and Roberts argue for the primacy of the “affective
registers of horror and the supernatural” in generating effective

hyperstitional projects. Science Fiction plays a key role in the

necessary making new and creating wonder intrinsic to a

hyperstitional undertaking. Mer and 0D embrace a world in flux and

undergoing redefinition through the contemporary techno-scientific

reengineering of subject-object relations.

Fisher, by contrast to Land, became a strident voice of the left,
dismayed by the impoverished life served up by late capitalism and

the dismal future that faced the young. Fisher’s spirit ran through

the Ccru enterprise; in an obituary piece publisher Robin MacKay

wrote of Fisher’s “overpowering enthusiasm and determination to

‘produce’ (not just ‘think about’! he would insist) within and across

multiple cultural forms and disciplines.”

Throughout his output as a writer and teacher Fisher repeatedly

returned to the idea that the future has been cancelled; that neo-
liberal late capitalism has created a pervasive and destructive

impression that there was no outside and no alternative (what he

termed ‘Capitalist Realism’). For Fisher the key was to create

positive new political imaginaries and when they appeared he

embraced these with infectious enthusiasm. In ‘Luxury

Communism: A conversation between Mark Fisher and Judy

Thorne’ (Published in Futures and Fictions, Eds Henriette Gunkel,

Ayesha Hameed and Simon O’Sullivan, Repeater, 2017) Thorne

asserts, “We need to invent fictions about the future, in order to

then make them real.”
She enthuses about the ‘libidinal energy’ generated by clashing

together the terms ‘Luxury’ and ‘Communism’ when naming this

vision for the future. This seems to be the perennial task of the left:

the need to create a positive vision that can galvanise support

enough to take on its own life. Might hyperstition offer a tool to do

this successfully?

Fisher elaborates, “Much of capitalism functions through

hyperstitional processes… we need to think about what a communist

hyperstitional practice would look like.” Fisher cites the ‘hype’ of

marketing where the assertion of a product’s success in the

marketplace is deployed in order to render it successful, drawing a

parallel with the example of class consciousness as a ‘a self-fulfilling

circuit’ that “does not passively reflect an already-existing state of

affairs [but] actively intervenes to produce something new.”

We might ask: what renders one marketing campaign successful and

another a failure? Equally, what renders one revolution successful

and another a failure? What renders one hyperstitional project

successful and another not?

Leftist political theorists Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek have also
taken up the hyperstitional mantel. In 2013 Srnicek and Williams

co-authored the ‘#Accelerate Manifesto for an Accelerationist

Politics’ which laid the foundations for Left Accelerationist thought.

The basis of this thought is that dropping out from or resisting

capitalism will not lead to a post-capitalist future, and that only way

out is through.

In ‘Inventing The Future’ (Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, Verso,

2015) the pair attempted to shape a vision of what a post capitalist

left accelerationist future might look like. They advocate for

Universal Basic Income and the repurposing of technology towards

emancipatory ends. They invoke the efficacy of hyperstition to

“[catalyse] dispersed sentiment into a historical force that brings the

future into existence,” asserting that, “[hyperstitions] have the

temporal form of ‘will have been’.”

This gathering together of latent, dispersed ‘sentiments’ seems

essential to a successful hyperstional programme. The future perfect

‘will have been’ grants things an apparent inevitability in retrospect

– let’s not forget that everything is produced and someone or some

group has driven events in a direction they wanted to. The terrifying
thing in our present political climate is that those on the right seem

to be so effective in manipulating this towards their ends.

Land in his early writing constructs a far more apocalyptic vision of

a Right Accelerationist future. For Land, capitalism itself is the

engine and end point – doing away with humanity when it becomes

a ‘drag’, slowing the process down.

‘Xenofeminism: A politics for Alienation’ (The XF Manifesto),

collectively authored by Laboria Cuboniks and published online in

2015 at laboriacuboniks.net, is another recent leftist political project

that makes claims towards its hyperstitional efficacy.

The text reads manifesto-like with force and libidinal charge, railing

against “futureless repetition on the treadmill of capital…

submission to the drudgery of labour, productive and reproductive

alike…[and] reification of the given masked as critique.” Its focus on

alienation has clear nods to Ccru who boasted of [being] ‘Alienated

and loving it.’
Xenofeminism [XF] argues for a politics founded on gender-
abolition (“Let a hundred sexes bloom!”) that embraces

technological progress as a means to move beyond the so-called

‘natural.’ It does not fall into an anti-natal politics like Donna

Harraway’s ‘Staying with the Trouble’ (Duke University Press, 2016)

(“make kin not kids”) but instead points the finger at a

social/political system that makes reproduction so impossible

outside of the traditional nuclear family model: “We see too well

that reinventions of family structure and domestic life are currently

only possible at the cost of either withdrawing from the economic

sphere–the way of the commune–or bearing its burdens manyfold–

the way of the single parent.”

The manifesto attempts to think through recent developments in

philosophical thinking from a feminist point of view, and through

feminism from the point of view of recent philosophical

developments. Building on key canonical feminist text such as

Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and 1990s Cyberfeminism, key strains

of (Left) Accelerationist thinking are evident (“We take politics that

exclusively valorize the local in the guise of subverting currents of

global abstraction, to be insufficient.”)

The manifesto ends with the polemic mantra “If nature is unjust,

change nature!”
The text is intensely future-orientated, while gathering together

many strains of feminist, queer and trans thought. It is hypersitional

in its strident statement of a future position from which it writes.

The collectivity of the Laboria Cuboniks enterprise enables a

broadening of its position and a wide-cast net that draws in a range

of influences and positions.

Luciana Parisi observes in her analysis of the text, ‘Automate Sex:

Xenofeminism, Hyperstition and Alienation’ (published in Futures

and Fictions), “Hyperstition here concerns not the longing for a lost

past, or the wish for an impossible future, but the meticulous

weaving of parts, enveloping the unknown in the present, gnawing

at the futurities of the moment.”

The question we must ask is how might these fictions make

themselves real?

THE ELEMENTS
 

In ‘Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science’ Simon

O’Sullivan examines and the work of Williams and Srnicek via a

look at 2 sets of ‘ingredients’ given for hyperstition:

The first, from Ccru, is a four-part definition of hyperstition:

 1. Element of effective culture that makes itself real.
2. Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device.
3. Coincidence intensifier.
4. Call to the Old Ones.

nd
The 2 , via Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani and somewhat
more esoteric, is expanded on the Hyperstition Blog and is worth

reading in full.

1. Numogram
2. Mythos
3. Unbelief

Point 3 references in essence an aspect alluded to earlier, whereby

the question of belief becomes irrelevant when we understand any

sense of reality of being composed of fictions. Point 1 here refers us

towards another aspect of Ccru mythology which must be expanded

another time, but which from this reader’s perspective reveals and

expands the fundamentally fictive nature of the seemingly given

numerical underpinnings of decimal numbering systems.

nd
On the 2 element via Ccru: ‘Fictional quantity functional as a

time-traveling device.’ O’Sullivan states that Hyperstition “operates

as a future vision thrown back to engineer its own history.” For

Land this was often Artificial Intelligence, lying in wait in the future

to do away with humanity, and to which end capitalism was the

engine.
We find this element at work in the XF Manifesto too, which adopts
the future perfect, ‘this will have been’ referred to by Williams and

Srnicek. This looping between future, present and past is key.

O’Sullivan turns our attention back these elements and looks at the

invocation of hyperstitional practices in the political projects

outlined by Williams and Srincek. What is found lacking is Ccru’s

th nd
4 element, the ‘Call to the Old Ones’ echoed in Negarestani’s 2

aspect, ‘Mythos’.

Both of these reference H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos – a series

th
of horror fictions developed in the early 20 century and since

further developed by numerous writers and filmmakers including

Alan Moore and John Carpenter. Lovecraft’s ‘Weird Fiction’ centres

on the resurfacing of dormant, ancient, destructive, inhuman forces

outside of our time, space and scale, which spill into our world with

delirious effect.

The lack of attention to mythos in left hyperstitional projects

appears to be to its detriment. “Put simply,” O’Sullivan asserts,

“myth is often at the service of a reactionary Right rather than a

progressive Left.”
At a popular level Brexit and its call to the era of British triumph

over the world in its colonial past is an example. We see it too in the

Democrats promise of more of the same post-Obama by contrast to

Trump’s Make America Great Again – a call to past that most

probably never existed but remains compelling. There is also the

failure of the Remain campaign to create a positive future vision

beyond the avoidance of “uncertainty”.

O’Sullivan calls for “constructions of the affective alongside the

conceptual” which chimes with 0D/Roberts identification with the

language of SF and horror fiction, and also Fisher/Thorne’s praise

for the ‘libidinal energy’ of clashing concepts together. O’Sullivan

quite rightly points to the compelling energy found in Land’s anti-

humanist early works. We find this energy too in the XF Manifesto,

which also adopts the affective language of SF favoured by Roberts

and 0D.

John Carpenter’s ‘In The Mouth of Madness’ (1994), perhaps points

us towards some conclusory remarks. The film gets several

references on the Hyperstition Blog.

Carpenter explores the world of horror writer Sutter Cane whose

fictions drive those who read them insane. John Trent (played by

Sam Neil) is brought in to investigate the writer’s disappearance. As

things play out it emerges that Cane’s fictions are creeping into
reality and eventually that something quite akin the Lovecraftian

Old Ones is driving the whole thing forward. “For years,” confesses

Cane, “I thought I was making all this up. But they were telling me

what to write…giving me the power to make it all real.”

Hyperstition in its weaving of parts, attention to mythos and

intensifying of latent elements is a combination of what can be

willed and what wills you. Roberts and Carstens advocate the use of

I Ching as a tool to navigate a world of complexity – enmeshed as

we are between advanced global capitalism, hyperobjects and our

physical selves.

For 0D this becomes a tool allowing a practitioner to embrace

uncertainty and destabilization and to open up to the outside.

Hyperstition becomes about tuning in to what is acting through you

and trying to channel it. To be open to and to understand what acts

through you is perhaps key.

The question then is not what hyperstition can do for you, but what

you can do for hyperstition.

 
Tim Dixon is a curator, writer, researcher and Deputy

Director of Matt’s Gallery, based in London. 

www.timothydixon.co.uk