hyperstition

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 17 Jun 2023 01:49
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    • From Nick Land's Wikipedia entry:
      • One of Land's celebrated concepts is "hyperstition," a portmanteau of "superstition" and "hyper" that describes the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Hyperstitions are ideas that, once "downloaded" into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Nick Land describes hyperstition as "the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies".
    • See living fictions; not quite the same idea but resonant with each other. Both involve something making the transition from the imaginal to the real; of somehow gaining autonomy for themselves.
    • I had previously linked to the Tinkerbell effect but it strikes me that a far more fitting Disney scenario is Pinocchio, the puppet who longs for and achieves "being a real boy".
    • Also High Weirdness is trying to describe something very similar, a sort of twisty, co-creating relationship between fiction and reality. Hyperstition is maybe a bit more tied up with agency; it is not merely "ideas with a life of their own", but "ideas that have somehow called themselves into being".
      • Hm, actually very few references to the term "hyperstition" from Erik Davis, as far as I can tell. Which is weird, because it seems like exactly the kind of thing he'd be up on and talking about.
    • Hyperstitions fascinate us because it is in their nature to do so. They draw humans to them, enlist them in their cause. It may be that they are the real actors in the world and humans their servants.
    • A sense that culture is all hyperstition; that humans are basically apes who evolved to the point where they could act as hosts for these large-scale ideas. The monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey is a representation of this kind of processs; one genius move of Kubrick's was not to show whatever alien agency might have been behind it; so it appears as itself, not a sign of something else.
    • The real masters of hyperstition are not to be found on the Landian fringe but in the boring precincts of ordinary politics. A politician is one who is adept at linking their personal goals with a broad abstract one; this applies just as much to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, and to the more subtle centrists like Obama and Bill Clinton.
    • 'Hyperstition: An Introduction' - 0rphan Drift Archive
      • Abrahamic Monotheism is also highly potent as a hyperstitional engine. By treating Jerusalem as a holy city with a special world-historic destiny, for example, it has ensured the cultural and political investment that makes this assertion into a truth. Hyperstition is thus able, under ‘favorable’ circumstances whose exact nature requires further investigation, to transmute lies into truths.
      • The hyperstitional object is no mere figment of ‘social constuction’, but it is in a very real way ‘conjured’ into being by the approach taken to it.
        • I'd say this does a disservice to social construction. Latourian actants are more than figments, although not sure they bring themselves into the world...
      • From the side of the human subject, ‘beliefs’ hyperstitionally condense into realities, but from the side of the hyperstitional object (the Old Ones), human intelligences are mere incubators through which intrusions are directed against the order of historical time. The archaic hint or suggestion is a germ or catalyst, retro-deposited out of the future along a path that historical consciousness perceives as technological progress.
        • I can't believe I can make sense of that...but actually it's perfectly clear what he's saying. This is putting a particular Lovecraftian spin on hyperstitions; they not only bring themselves into being, in doing so they subvert time itself. Which I guess makes sense, something that brings itself into being is definitionally capable of acting atemporally, retrocausally.
      • Capitalism incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of intensity, turning mundane economic ‘speculation’ into an effective world-historical force.
    • Mark Fisher

      • “Emotions don’t just happen, they emerge out of fields of cause and effect which can be analysed. This means that feelings can be engineered, in a hyperstitional spiral, which has more to do with what Justin Barton calls “lucidity” than with what academic philosophers call Reason. I’m using the term “emotion” rather than “affect” here, very deliberately. Affect as it is now routinely used by academics is pretty much completely opposed to what Spinoza meant by it. The problem begins with Deleuze, and the fatal splicing of Spinoza’s project of emotional engineering with Henri Bergson’s vitalist cult of creativity and unpredictability. It’s hard to think of thinkers more opposed in their fundamental presuppositions and orientations than Spinoza and Henri Bergson — and more or less everything that is wrong with Deleuze, in my view, is tied up with his infatuation with Henri Bergson. It is Henri Bergsonism, rather than Spinozism, which is the true ideology of late capitalism.”
        • Excerpt From: Mark Fisher. “K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016).”