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Many members of the Ccru had fled cultural studies, disgusted by its authoritarian prejudices, its love of ideology, and pompous desire to ‘represent the other’ or speak on behalf of the oppressed.
Ccru has tried to connect and cross-intensify with peripheral cultural processes (dark-side digital audio, cyberpunk, Neolemurian sorcery, numbo-jumbo, Afro-futurism, Indo-futurism, Sino-futurism …).
everything interesting happens on the periphery, outside the standard modes of ‘developed’ existence.
Ccru engages with peripheral cultures not because they are ‘down-trodden’ or oppressed, but because they include the most intense tendencies to social flatness, swarming, populating the future, and contagious positive innovation, hatching the decisive stimuli for the systematic mutation of global cybernetic culture.
Ccru has a more ‘fundamentalist’ commitment to cybernetics, whose abstract principles of feedback dynamics, nonlinear causality, and machinic involvement are linked to numerous issues concerning digital technology and telecommunications, but in no way restricted to these.
machines are irreducible to technology.
ethics in the spinozistic sense (experimental production of collective bodies).
Digital hyperstition is already widespread, hiding within popular numerical cultures (calendars, currency systems, sorcerous numbo-jumbo, etc.). It uses number-systems for transcultural communication and cosmic exploration, exploiting their intrinsic tendency to explode centralized, unified, and logically overcoded ‘master narratives’ and reality models, to generate sorcerous coincidences, and to draw cosmic maps.
According to the tenets of Hyperstition, there is no difference in principle between a universe, a religion, and a hoax. All involve an engineering of manifestation, or practical fiction, that is ultimately unworthy of belief. Nothing is true, because everything is under production.
The issue here is Cyber-hype, but now that the human race is virtually dead it’s time for a preliminary excursus on the true history of ‘the CCRU’, or for something vaguely like it.
all primitive peoples are fictions, or masks, and that they ritualize this fact for themselves, in advance of any anthropological metafiction.
The so-called ‘new-economy’ – indexed by the nova-bubble mania of the American stock-market – is no different in its diagrammatic abstraction to the hyperstitious practices of the Plateau of Leng, relics of lost Lemuria, from which the Bon sorcerors of ancient Tibet assembled their dread cult.
Whatever or however it is called, Cyber-hype libidinally invests its own semiotic, propagating fictional quantities, tagging artificial agencies, and making itself up as it goes along, whilst dissolving production into cultural synthesis.
When hyper-cybernetics kicks-in the ‘cyber-’ prefix means nothing anymore.
The ten most valuable global brands are all American, which doesn’t mean anything, since America itself functions as a deterritorialized hype-sign or hyper-brand, a planetary icon for libidinized meaninglessness.
waging an endless war against the oppressive forces of normal social existence.
They claimed that ordinary social reality maintained the power of what they called ‘Atlantean White Magic’, a kind of elite conspiracy which they said had secretly controlled the planet for millennia.
It was clear to me from the unspoken undercurrent that human sacrifice had been involved, probably on a massive scale. Their apparent indifference to such suffering fitted in with a general loathing for human existence itself.
They celebrated what they saw as the imminent destruction of humanity by the forces of techno-capitalism.
‘Pandemonium Matrix’.
Unbelief escapes all this by building a plane of potentiality, upon which the annihilation of judgment converges with real cosmic indeterminacy.
Deprogramming simultaneously retro-produced the program, just as witch-trials preceded devil-worship and regressive hypnotherapy preceded false memory syndrome.
How absurd to imagine that Lemurian Pandemonium has One purpose or function, or that it could support the throne of a Monarch. From the perspective of Pandemonium gods and their conspiracies emerge all over the place, in countless numbers. “My name is Legion, for we are many..”
The interest in Lovecraft’s fiction was motivated by its exemplification of the practice of hyperstition, a concept had been elaborated and keenly debated since the inception of the Cthulhu Club. Loosely defined, the coinage refers to ‘fictions that make themselves real’.
Ah Pook is Here: “And what is a virus? Perhaps simply a pictorial series like Egyptian glyphs that makes itself real” (AP 102).
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 behaviorial responses.
Again, "The Gernsback Continuum"?
Burroughs construed writing – and art in general – not aesthetically, but functionally, – that is to say, magically, with magic defined as the use of signs to produce changes in reality.
Compare this to Alan Moore's ideas; Grimoire = Grammar and art as magic by making a change in the real world by first making a change in the mental world.
Burroughs’s equation of reality and fiction had been most widely embraced only in its negative aspect – as a variety of ‘postmodern’ ontological skepticism – rather than in its positive sense, as an investigation into the magical powers of incantation and manifestation: the efficacy of the virtual.
Representative realism severs writing from any active function, surrendering it to the role of reflecting, not intervening in, the world.
Making it a fundamentally anti-magical practice.
For postmodernists, the distinction between real and unreal is not substantive or is held not to matter, whereas for practitioners of hyperstition, differentiating between ‘degrees of realization’ is crucial.
Burroughs treats all conditions of existence as results of cosmic conflicts between competing intelligence agencies.
Where realism merely reproduces the currently dominant reality program from inside, never identifying the existence of the program as such, Burroughs seeks to get outside the control codes in order to dismantle and rearrange them.
Even representative realism participates – albeit unknowingly – in magical war, collaborating with the dominant control system by implicitly endorsing its claim to be the only possible reality.
Compare with RA Wilson's reality tunnels and the work of Terrence McKenna.
Burroughs names the dominant control program One God Universe, or OGU. He wages war against the fiction of OGU, which builds its monopolistic dominion upon the magical power of the Word: upon programming and illusion.
In order to operate effectively, OGU must first of all deny the existence of magical war itself. There is only one reality: its own.
OGU incorporates all competing fictions into its own story (the ultimate metanarrative), reducing alternative reality systems to negatively-marked components of its own mythos: other reality programs become Evil, associated with the powers of deception and delusion. OGU’s power works through fictions that repudiate their own fictional status: antifictions and unnonfictions. ‘And that’, Kaye said, ‘is why fiction can be a weapon in the struggle against Control’.
Does this make experiments with art, magic, lifestyles, etc. Guerrilla Ontology?
The magical function of words and signs is both condemned as evil and declared to be delusory, facilitating a monopoly upon the magical power of language for OGU
Plato's disdain for poets.
But OGU’s confidence that fiction has safely been contained means that anti-OGU agents can use fiction as a covert line of communication and a secret weapon: “he concealed and revealed the knowledge in fictional form” (WV 455).
Diagrams, maps, sets of abstract relations, tactical gambits, are as real in a fiction about a fiction about a fiction as they are encountered raw, but subjecting such semiotic contraband to multiple embeddings allows a traffic in materials for decoding dominant reality that would otherwise be proscribed.
Techniques of escape depend on attaining the unbelief of assassin-magician Hassan i Sabbah: nothing is true, everything is permitted.
Burroughs-Sabbah’s ‘nothing is true’ cannot be equated with postmodernism’s ‘nothing is real’. On the contrary: nothing is true because there is no single, authorized version of reality – instead, there is a superfluity, an excess, of realities. “The Adversary’s game plan is to persuade you that he does not exist” (WL
There is no doubt, however, that shortly after the winter of 1958 Burroughs starts writing cryptically of visions, ‘paranormal phenomena’, encountering his double, and working with cut up techniques8.
Burroughs told Kaye that, during the trance, it felt as though silent communication with a ghostly non-human companion had flashed him forward to his life as an old man, several decades in the future. Oppressed by “a crushing sensation of implacable destiny, as if fragments of a frozen time dimension were cascading into awareness”, he ‘remembered’ writing The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar – “although it wasn’t writing exactly”, and his writing implements were archaic, belonging to someone else entirely, in another place and time.
Compare this to PKD's experience in VALIS.
The cut-ups and fold-ins were “innovative time-war tactics”, the function of which was to subvert the foundations of the prerecorded universe10.
In Burroughs’ mythology, OGU emerges once MU (the Magical Universe) is violently overthrown by the forces of monopoly
The Magical Universe is populated by many gods, eternally in conflict: there is no possibility of unitary Truth, since the nature of reality is constantly contested by heterogeneous entities whose interests are radically incommensurable.
Korzybski
It was a matter of the gravest urgency that his works be classified as fantasies, experimental dada, anything but that they should be recognized as what they are: technologies for altering reality.”
Lemurs became his sleeping and dream companions. He discovered through this dead and dying species that the key to escaping control is taking the initiative – or the pre-initiative – by interlinking with the Old Ones.
He explained that this interpretative stance had been highly developed by the Board, since respecting the reality of non-actualities is essential when waging war in deeply virtualized environments: in spaces that teem with influential abstractions and other ghostly things.
