Tag Archives: hyperstition

19 years before the CCRU and 0[rphan] D[rift>] collaborated for Syzygy and began to formulate (or be informed of) the concept of hyperstition, Deleuze and Guattari wrote the following:

[I]n order to give a positive meaning to the idea of a “presentiment” of what does not yet exist, it is necessary to demonstrate that what does not yet exist is already in action, in a different form than that of its existence. Once it has appeared, the State reacts back on the hunter-gatherers, imposing upon them agriculture, animal raising, an extensive division of labor, etc.; it acts, therefore, in the form of a centrifugal or divergent wave.¹⁾Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]), 431.

Making DeleuzoGuattarian prose more anthropoid-friendly, one can read the above as saying that what is required for a constructive view of “presentiment” — sentiment = “a view of or attitude toward a situation or event,” pre = “previous to” — of the non-existent is a change in what it means to “exist.” As opposed to viewing existence as an immanent characteristic of a thing, we must think of existence as a realm of potentialities; “what does not yet exist is already in action.”

Take Marxian false-consciousness. You see an ad for a product at T₂ that makes you think “I need that even though I didn’t think I did.” The Marx-Occultist account is that at T₁, an “idea” — or more specifically, a recognition of a lack — was implanted in you as a sleeper-agent to, at a later time, trigger the actualization of your desire for a given product.²⁾I recognize that all talk of linear time is to make a transcendental error — to think of time in time –, but until Kantianism is complete, it’s the best we can do. See “Acceleration & Capital with Nick Land.”

Compare Deleuze and Guattari to the CCRU in “Lemurian Time War”:

Loosely defined, the coinage [hyperstition] refers to ‘fictions that make themselves real’.
[…]
In the hyperstitional model Kaye outlined, fiction is not opposed to the real. Rather, reality is understood to be composed of fictions — consistent semiotic terrains that condition perceptual, affective, and behavioral responses.
[…]
The hyperstitional process of entities ‘making themselves real’ is precisely a passage, a transformation, in which potentials — already-active virtualities — realize themselves.³⁾CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” in CCRU: 1997-2003 (Falmouth: Urbanomic: 2017), [[:]][::]-::[:][:].

There’s no need to quote further as the link is clear. For Deleuze and Guattari, thinking “presentiment” — no doubt harkening back to Deleuze’s work on the virtual vs. the actual — requires a more liberal understanding of existence. Further, the State, an elaborate series of fictions,⁴⁾See Deleuze and Guattari on Dumézil’s theses, ATP pg. 424. acts upon “pre-State,” or “primitive,” social structures drawing them into relations of commerce and connection requiring centralization thus forming the basis of unicephalic control.

Thus, not only is the State holographically existent in “pre-State” societies, the potential for its rise always-already existing in dormant forms, but hyperstition as an idea pre-/post-/a-dates the CCRU and is holographically looming over Deleuze and Guattari.⁵⁾I owe the use of “holographic” to Meta-Nomad’s conversation with John Cussans. In fact, were one to excavate the “origins” of hyperstition, one would likely hit a time spiral from which there is no escape.