Aesthetaphysicks and the Anti-Dialectical Hyper-Occultation

Aesthetaphysicks and the Anti-Dialectical Hyperoccultation of Disenchanted Representation: Hyperstitional Esoterrorism as Occultural Accelerationism

Robert Elio Cabrales University of Amsterdam Theology and Religious Studies Master’s Thesis: Western Esotericism August 30th, 2019

Contents

Plex

• Becoming Sorcerer • Hyperstitional Ontology-Cybernetics • Accelerationism (Teleology of Capital-Time Modulations) • Occultural Esoterrorism • Aesthetaphysickal Reflexivity: Occultural Accelerationism & Hyperstitional Esoterrorism

Time-Circuit

• Chaos Reigns • Theater of the [Black (Plague) Mass] • Anti-Dialectical Dismemberment Networks • Cybernetic Occulture

Warp

• Swarm Dynamics

Aesthetaphysicks and the Anti-Dialectical Hyperoccultation of Disenchanted Representation: Hyperstitional Esoterrorism as Occultural Accelerationism Robert E. Cabrales, University of Amsterdam, 2019 MA Thesis - Theology & Religious Studies: Western Esotericism

Plex A viral rot festers on the precipice of Representation. This contagion liquifies the sinewy retentions of unity, violating the limits of ordered thought and centralized identity. Deliquesced discharge oozes from the pores of a once sedentary territory. Wracked by plague, Representation becomes monstrous: a presentation of an alien alterity which transgresses semiotic stasis. The subversive infestation of reality unfolds across the spectrum of contemporary culture. Postmodern thought has identified the unnecessary and oppressive rigidity of normative social constructs and as such, Philosophers, Occultists, Artists, Magicians, Xenomorphs, and Sorcerers have provided subversive analyses, theories, methods, and practices for destabilizing Control-Society.

Becoming Sorcerer With an accelerated production of and access to information having advanced throughout the twentieth century, a Rhizomatic systematics of communication networks was consequentially unearthed by Post-Structural Philosophy.1 Rhizomatic networks became through and as decentralized hyper-linkages continuously establishing and terminating their connections in a state of non-hierarchical flux. Information in these networks is thus decentralized, relative, and contextual; what information ‘means’ and furthermore what it ‘does’ is determined by the operative performance through which the information is conveyed. Any singular performance of information-articulation cannot then claim to be the sole and authoritative ‘Truth’ on a matter, as there are numerous other ‘True’ claims from different perspectives and locations; but a singular claim may still maintain its performative truth relative to the context in which it is operative. A

1 Lafontaine “The Cybernetic Matrix of French Theory,” 39; Eriksson, “On the Ontology of Networks,” 315-318.

Rhizomatic-Network-Ontology in this way articulates Reality as a complex system substantiated by heterogeneric multiplicity. The reality-network is established and whole, but this holism is not as a unification, rather a territory of cut-up and entangled communication in constant nonlinear feedback, moving and shifting to (re)create its own fluid boundaries. As a territory of communication, a Rhizomatic network can be performed as a field of narration; it is an immanent performance influencing and influenced by itself. Whether this narrative is consistent or inconsistent is determined by control systems and mechanisms (or a lack thereof) employed throughout the Rhizome. As control mechanisms, Rationality, Materialism, and Objectivity have been institutionally employed through various information acquisition methodologies. As such, the canonization of these mechanisms across Rhizomatic networks has codified a consistent narrative of and as information, enacting a semiotic territorialization of structural and instrumental stability, thus ontologically reified in, through, and as Representational Reality. The institutional-reification-machine developed from the Material-Rationality complex is in this way a dominant control system of and for contemporary thought, restricting the territorial fluidity of the Rhizomatic reality-network by erecting boundaries for Representation. To destabilize the consistent and normalized narrative of a controlled and bound semiotic territory, the experimental twentieth-century scholars Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari articulated a philosophy of ‘sorcerous Becomings’ through which an ordered narrative could be deconstructed and deterratorialized, thus birthing fluid non-representation into increasingly fragmented, schizophrenic narrations.2 These sorcerous Becomings are “the multiplicity of experiential states in which lines are blurred between human consciousness and animal awareness, between biopsychic life and the nature of matter itself… Becomings accrue at the vanishing point where history and legend meet, at the twilight horizon where monstrosities of fiction reveal dynamics that translate the most profound facts of biophysical life.”3 A becoming

2 While the writings of Deleuze & Guattari are integral to this work (specifically A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia) a thorough engagement of their theory is beyond the scope of this thesis. As a simplified overview, the two Post-Structural thinkers developed a theory (among many) called Schizo-Analysis, by which systems and networks were explained through a process of complexification rather a reductive and restricting simplification. Schizophrenia in this context is then a psycho-geo-philosophical term referring to the ‘fracturing’ of unified ‘territories’ as a ‘deterritorialization’. For more on D&G see Delpech-Ramey, “Deleuze, Guattari, and the ‘Politics of Sorcery,’ and O’Sullivan, “Deleuze Against Control: Fictioning to Myth-Science.” 3 Delpech-Ramey, “Deleuze, Guattari, and the ‘Politics of Sorcery’,” 10.

is then a conjuration of the outside from within, the intertextual release of alien information pulsating forth from holes in narrative structure. To become is to be born of unlike relations, not as a kind but as a state, performatively actualizing a potentiality of thought and thus ontologically representing the hitherto non-represented.4 As such, Sorcery is the invocational manifestation of these becomings. The sorcerer conceptually integrates plagues, madness, and swarming contagion into the very fabric of reality, a semiotic infection spread throughout the Rhizomatic-network creating and (re)engineering an “unlimited flow of semiosis” by which the singular and ordered narrative gives way to a chaotic and schizophrenic multiplicity of meanings.5 As an act of ontological fecundity hinged on creative production, the performative invocation and infestation of sorcerous becomings is an Aesthetic endeavor. A sorcerer is the Philosopher who engineers concepts and the artist whom invokes realities; the sorcerer is both of these yet also neither, alienated from a unified identity and thus queering the rigid confines of subjectivity. Philosophy and Art now blur beyond distinction, radicalizing the relativity and representational potential of images, words, and performance as a performative instantiation of the very theory put forth. An infiltration of communication has commenced such that the incommunicable outside beyond what is represented is no longer something kept at a distance beyond the threshold of measurement itself. The outside can now possess the social organism, enacting its demonic influence from within.

Hyperstitional Ontology-Cybernetics What constitutes ‘The Real,’ ‘what is,’ or ‘Reality,’ is a navigation of Onto-Temporal systematics by which organizational information feeds into, out of, and back into itself, cybernetically conditioning a territory of consistent representation. Here Cybernetics can be contextually engaged as communicated information-processing within complex systems; it is the performance of adaptational technologies which learn from themselves through feedback-loops instantiated by input-output causality. Cybernetics is thus the regulated evolution of a system through itself, though subject to external affect.6

4 MacCormack, “Lovecraft through Deleuzo-Guattarian Gates,” 5. 5 Aichele, “Demons of the new Polytheism,” The Lure of the Dark Side: Satan & Western Demonology in Popular Culture, 147. 6 For an overview of Cybernetics see Zhuravlev & Gurevich, “Sixty Years of Cybernetics.”

Locating Ontology as a cybernetic system contextualizes ‘the study of being’ as a descriptive and prescriptive performance: questioning, affirming, and multi-chronically producing reality as Being-which-is; Ontology is the performative being of a semiotic territory in, as, and through itself. In this way, the production and maintenance of an ontological model both opens up and delineates that which is and can be. The systematic communication between reality and the ontological model generates a feedback-loop of and for representation by which ‘Representational Reality’ - or, the reality of that which is represented in and by the ontological model – controls and conditions the limits thereof. What is present in reality is re-presented by the ontological model; but what is present in the model is also re-presented by and as reality. Materiality and its correspondent immateriality are the reality-conditions of the dominant ontological model, the primary control system which has territorialized the rhizomatic becoming of reality.7 What ontologically ‘is’ and ‘can’ perform their actuality factually through materiality, while what ‘cannot’ still paradoxically is, though subjugated to a virtual and immaterial existence: Fiction. With the distribution of ontological analysis and development to Modern disciplines such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Neurology - maintained within the “transcendental” confines of linear chronology, or History - reality’s semiotic flow has been institutionally restricted and organized into a consistent, unified, and ongoing explanatory narrative. Within a Rhizomatic-Network-Ontology, the operative binaries of Fact and Fiction, Real and Unreal, and Actual and Virtual are upheld in so far as they are systematically maintained by control programs feeding into each other throughout society and culture; but from the rhizomatic perspective in which cybernetic inter-causality is an immanent event, the structured binaries are subject to manipulation. A reality which becomes as something multiple and interrelated - though still socio- culturally territorialized by binary operations – represents the multiplicity of its network regardless of the representational conditions. “What is’ and ‘what cannot’ are both represented and perform throughout the rhizome respectively as ‘real’ things. The difference between these two entangled performances is then their degree of immanent becoming, or their performative relation to the ‘Plane of Immanence’.8 For material and factual becomings such as matter, art-

7 Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 156-162. 8 Ibid, 35-60.

objects, or gender, the degree of immanence by which they are is Actual; whereas those which are deemed immaterial or fictional such as ghosts, demons, and Time-Travel become by a Virtual degree of immanence. Here it is of note that the actual is not necessarily restricted to materiality in its self. Gender, though a social construct which is intellectually engaged as an idea which is not physical, is none-the-less actual insofar as it is an idea which is then performed with, by, and through materiality as a specific expression of any one person’s continuously developing Gender identity.9 The inverse of this is at play with Time-Travel; though it is theoretically grounded and substantiated by and through physics and thus materiality, Time- Travel itself (as far as we are aware) performs exclusively as a theoretical idea throughout media and academia, and as such by the virtual degree of culture, be it novels, movies, or Theoretical Physics articles. The differentiation between actual and virtual reality - between fact and fiction - is thus determined by the degree of performance relative to the representational conditions of control. By engaging (and thus cybernetically conditioning) reality as a rhizomatic performance of and as immanent becoming, the controlled opposition between Fact and Fiction begins to loosen. Though History in this Rhizomatic-Network-Ontology functions as a virtual idea, through inter-plane-feedback History modifies the temporal actualities of time which is no longer itself actual, manipulating an onto-temporal becoming as the past which ‘actually’ was as such. Given this virtual-actual feedback modification complex, Fictions thus maintain a performative mode to become real things, Hyperstitions cybernetically modifying history and tradition to reveal their own becoming in reality. Hyperstitions are Fictions which make themselves real.10 Though first identified in the 1990s by experimental Philosophers composing the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at Warwick University, the concept Hyperstition in and through itself now plagues the entirety of human culture and Ontological Temporality.11 The very act of naming reverse ascribes that

9 See Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” 10 CCRU, “Appendix 1: CCRU Glossary,” CCRU Complete Writings 1997-2003, 363. 11 Cutting together disciplines, experimenting with creative unbelief, and casting multi-temporal fictions across rhizomatic becoming, the CCRU was “a rigorously unbelievable exercise in hyperpunk pulp-occultism and dark-side cyber-jargon, splicing chunks of an impending calculus into fake memories of hell.” CCRU, “Review of CCRU’s Digital Hyperstition,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 15.

which is named. 12 Hyperstition (itself Hyperstitional) then actualized its own becoming real the moment it began to infect Rhizomatic information networks. Hyperstitionalization is an idea which performs itself through its own explication: it names the very act of onto-temporal reality production that becomes through the act of naming itself. This cyclical practice of descriptive affirmation – the ascryptive enunciation of that which ‘is’ – is a trans-temporal exercise which takes place simultaneously in the indexical Now, the Past, and a plotted Future; it as a performative narrative which is constantly rewriting itself from the future through the past. 13 In this way, ‘Hyperstition’ transgresses the limits of ontological reification in its identification that the ontological model is as such only through the reflexivity of re-presented representation- cybernetics. The subversive Onto-Temporal manipulations Hyperstitions perform operate from and as creative becomings. In this way Hyperstitionalization is an operation of applied Aesthetics, a semiotic insurgency which rewrites dominant narratives. Hyperstition is sorcery, and its aesthetic performance bleeds into cultural networks, functioning as a postmodern Art theory and praxis for multi-temporal reality engineering.

Accelerationism (Teleology of Capital-Time Modulations) The Material-Rational control system territorializing rhizomatic becoming as an ontological model has industrialized reality through politico-cultural economic feedback. As a performative system, the codified narrative conditioning Representational Reality has evolved over time, responding to Onto-Epistemic problems which result from former problem-solutions employed throughout a socio-cultural information matrix. These Onto-Epistemic problems are “situated, contextual, and embodied,” cracks, holes, and voids in the immanent whole of the narrative construct.14 It is up to those performing within and as the semiotic field of representation to

12 This Reverse-Ascription, or Ascryption, is the attribution of cause to effect: a name which brings about the thing named. Amy Ireland, “The Poemenon: Form as Occult Technology,” 13. 13 An example of this phenomenon could be the ‘Natural Law’ of Gravity. Isaac Newton’s identification of Gravity in the seventeenth century cast Gravity as an actual performative element throughout not only the universe of that present time, but back to the beginning of time itself and to its end. When Gravity was then theoretically manipulated by Albert Einstein in the twentieth century, this revision was actualized through the multi-temporality of Hyperstitional feedback, and consequently reality was always actually as such. 14 Egil Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse 1900 - 1939, 29.

address these problems, either through the paranoid perpetuation of the represented territory, or by schizophrenic deterritorializations conjuring the non-represented alien from within.15 Material-Rationality and Empirical Objectivity have been cybernetically reified by and as the dominant control system through the teleonomic development of institutionalized problem- solving.16 The intellectual Enlightenment germinated in the 18th century commenced a semiotic infestation of reality, effectuating positive feedback-loops for its own contagion. An implementation of Scientific solutions to the representational problems of reality catalyzed the need for Scientific methodology to then respond to the problems created by the former Scientific solutions; solving the problems and answering the questions faced by Material-Rationality and Empirical Objectivity required rationality and empirical-materialist methods, thus reifying the model through itself, delving deeper and deeper into an explanation of an explanation, and performatively modeling a performance of a model.17 Through and by the dialectical experimentation of Empirical materiality, Representation is then institutionally reified on a linear axiom, developing itself horizontally and vertically within the fixed territory charted by the Science-institution rather than exploring the outside and expanding the map through the unknown. It is in this way that the ‘Secularization’ of semiosis has evolved a ‘Disenchanted’ Ontology, unwriting the causal authority of Religious and ‘Occult’ codifications performing throughout representation prior to the Enlightenment. Scientific representation furthermore limits semiotic flow through its engagement with technoscientific commodification. The causal interplay of Materiality and Science through technological development feeds into and is correspondently fed by Capitalism. Scientific developments are progressed by new technology, and new technology is made possible through the progression of scientific developments; technology is a commodity and Science is an industry, their entanglements reverberating Epistemically, Ontologically, and Multi-temporally across Rhizomatic becomings. The technoscientific reification of Material-Rationalism through a filter of productive commodification has commodified representation itself, conditioning a reality represented by and through objects with productive and monetary values. This Object- Commodity codification has seeped throughout the socio-cultural matrix, infecting not just

15 Aichele, “Demons of the New Polytheism,” The Lure of the Dark Side, 135-150. 16 Teleonomy can be understood as step-by-step evolution; not necessarily with a specific end goal, but within a general goal of developmental adaptation. 17 See footnote 13.

Ontological, Epistemic, and technological navigations, but Aesthetics, affective biopsychic life, and Time itself. Creative imaginings of ‘the Future’ have been restricted and conditioned by the plague of Capital, performing cross-culturally as the Futures Industry. This Futures Industry is the performance of semiotic territorializations for Time yet-to-come; it is a decentralized swarm of consumption by which creative media depicting future technology, people, civilization, and timelines maintain an oracular function, transmitting messages from a possible future toward which society may advance. These oracular transmissions enact presentational pre- representations (or prepresentations) of temporal flow: Onto-Aesthetic semiotic performances by which the Futures Industry retrochronically conditions the technoscientific advancement of Representational becomings, directing or diverting narrative developments. The transmissions from the Futures Industry feed technoscientific commodity production and simultaneously the ontological paranoia maintaining the material-capital network of the dominant reality program. The prepresentational Onto-Aesthetics of the Futures Industry thus circulate lines of flight by which the development of society may begin to pick up speed and mobilize an expansion of the representational territory.18 For an anthropocentric technoscientific territory, this enacts the acquisition of new commodities of utility and recreation whose use will be primarily accessible (at least initially) to the privileged minority of the affluent, and whose production will monetarily benefit large corporations. For socio-cultural narratives, society receives messages of ‘Post’ eras, such as performances of Posthuman subjects or Post-Capitalism civilizations. Posthuman representations within the Futures Industry maintain the capacity to introduce new ways of being as embodied subjects and to question binaries and oppressive categorizations of ‘what it means to be human,’ such as human and nature, race, gender, sex, or human and machine;19 yet the Posthuman can also be ignored by the Futures Industry, reifying the rigidity of contemporary codifications within a technologically advanced society: a culture in which technology has advanced both the relative quality and functionality of life and yet hetero-sexual gender norms, hypermasculinity, and institutional racism still structure and condition social being. Post-Capitalism representations then depict how and if humanity can exit Capitalism. The

18 O’Sullivan, “Deleuze Against Control: Fictioning to Myth-Science,” 207-209. 19 For an initial work on this topic see Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Twentieth Century.

narratives which infest the prepresentational networks of Post-Capitalism performance have come to manifest dystopian or hyper-fascist futures; the prepresentation of a successful exit from Capitalism has lost traction and momentum as Utopic representation fades further into the obscurity of non-representation. With an entangled complex of Technoscientific prosperity juxtaposed against dystopian horror narratives as the cost of Capitalism’s exit, the Futures Industry functions to maintain the sociopolitical inevitability of the Material-Capitalism’s perdurance; it “encourages us to place our material investment in only a narrow range of futures that are produced by corporations as the chief mechanism by which we are encouraged affectively to invest in the possibilities of capitalism.”20 The future is something to be survived, and maintaining the dominant control system is the means to and only option for survival.21 Rather than succumb to the fixed semiotic flow conditioned by the technoscientific Futures-feedback within and through the performativity of the dominant ontological model, multi-temporal sorcery has the capacity to rewrite and invoke narratives by and with History’s actualizing-capacity for Onto-Aesthetic flow. The multi-temporal ramifications of Hyperstition and Hyperstitionalization identify the possibility of sending ideas through time, thus manipulating the immanent becoming of History as a territorial narrative within and as a Rhizomatic-Network. Hyperstitions travel trans-temporally throughout the virtual matrix of History, transmitting messages from the future through the past and establishing cybernetic feedback by which virtual realities become actually real. A Hyperstition which becomes virtually in the past will then be reified in, though, and as History, cybernetically actualizing its performative presence within the contemporary sociocultural matrix. Furthermore, Hyperstitions with a virulent infection rate – those ideas which perform and spread in and as a multiplicity themselves – maintain the deterritorializing function of plotting a trajectory into a future ulterior to the controlled developments of the ontological model conditioning and conditioned by Technoscientific capitalist culture. - The theory of Time by which Hyperstitions rhizomatically operate can be identified as Accelerationism. Another theory manifest through the CCRU, Accelerationism in the first two decades of the twenty-first century has already been employed for political ends, establishing

20 Kingsmith & Ali, “COSMIC SLOP: Possibilities of Alien Futures (From the Past),” 2. 21 Ibid.

communications with Posthuman futures aligned with the sociopolitical semiotics of both ‘Left’ and ‘Far-Right’ value narratives.22 Abstracted from its performative operations, Accelerationism theoretically performs the idea that Time – as a concept reflexively employed within ‘time itself’ –territorializes temporality (and thus itself as Time) as a ‘transcendental’ entity. The performative presence of this transcendental entity located in an immanent network of rhizomatic becoming allows for affective Onto-Temporal manipulations. Ideas can be Accelerated through the past from Lost-Futures virtually haunting History; Contemporary ideas can be collapsed into positive feedback-loops accelerating their becoming as a Future construct; Ideas which are in no way represented can even manifest in reality and spread their presentational actuality by a hybridization of the former two Accelerationist modes, cybernetically re-presenting the alien semiotics of and as a maddening unknown. Accelerationist theory locates the very becoming of futures, plotting trajectories which deterritorialize the unopposed narrative constraints maintained by the fixed semiosis of the technoscientific ontological model qua commodifying Futures Industry. By manipulating History through the cybernetic acceleration of Hyperstitions, Accelerationists deterritorialize the controlled narrative of Time and manipulate its temporalized trajectory rather than propagate the semiotic rigidity of the performance which at present holds the stage. Throughout the territorialized ‘whole’ which prescribes and describes the semiotic flow of representation, there are necessarily cracks and holes, voids of narrative lapse, breakage, and inconsistency by which Fictions may infiltrate History and make themselves real.23 Identified above as the Onto-Epistemic ‘Problems’ whose solutions institutionally evolve Representational Reality, holes are also established Onto-Aesthetically though the caustic noise of Hauntological feedback and Sorcery. Hauntological holes become through the death of a timeline: failures of Futures and the unengaged presence of affective concepts or systems which then haunt culture as virtual specters. Holes which become through sorcerous intervention are performative void manifestations: rifts ripped open through the retrochronic recalibrations of invocational transmissions; viral cells conjured forth through creative acts and strategically located where their infection rates will thrive. Identifying the presence of a hole then initiates a complex by which the holes must be filled, or rather developed into the dominant narrative. The

22 See pages 46-48. 23 For a thorough engagement of this phenomenon and its academic history see Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 41-67.

relationship between whole and void – the ( )hole complex - thus establishes input locations for both the hyper and inter-textual integration of rejected, non-actualized, and virtual ideas into narrative flow. Embedded in the virtual-actual feedback modification complex of historicization, insurgent Fictions are hypercamouflaged within the performance of History. With an ‘overlap and coincidence’ between Fiction and Fact, Hyperstitions gain speed such that their actual Historical presence may then be operated as and through prepresentational Onto-Aesthetics. This anti-dialectical methodology negates the linear notion of ‘Progress’ by which new elements are ‘let in’ to the semiotic flow of representations on the condition that they can be afforded by society.24 It is not the proposition of parallel, oppositional, and antithetical semiotics, but the creative invocation of an unseen semiotics into representation which then infects the Onto- Aesthetic network. Accelerationism does not simply produce idealized or utopian futures as creative media performances, nor does it exclusively locate explicitly Post-Capitalist futures. Through anti-dialectic insurgency, Accelerationist theory actualizes sociocultural components and flows. These vector components which are then historically present can thus function to produce lines of flight outside of and yet still operating affectively within the technoscientific commodification industry of Material-Capitalism. With this theory in play, social culture gains a tool to contrast the inevitability of reified re-presentation. What is ‘Post’ both Human and Capitalism is no longer restricted to the authority of Capital development; what is useful, valuable, or exploitable to the dominant system is no longer the basis of temporal flow. Accelerationism discursively operates as a manifestation of Performance Philosophy: it is an act of sorcery by which the theory practices itself through and by its own conceptual mappings and navigations. This entangled assemblage of theory, method, and practice gives way to an Active Historicism - Performative and Affective - operating History as an Aesthetic field. A Postmodern approach to History does not simplify Time to a semiotic flow of Truth and authorities, rather it complexifies the becoming of time, fragmenting narratives and liberating ‘Truth’ from Material-Rational reification loops and singularities. While this Schizohistorical performativity maintains an iconoclastic function, it does not do so through an abandonment of historical records, dates, research, documents, or information. An active and Aesthetic History simply operates History beyond the limits of linear chronology, identifying the multiplicities of

24 Nagarestani, Cyclonopedia, 195-207.

rhizomatic becoming and thus splicing, cutting, and folding fluid channels into each other and themselves to manifest neo-extant perspectives. The past and the future are entities which are present now, and their creative expansion deterritorializes narrative stasis, revealing old from new: messages from the future through the past.

Occultural Esoterrorism In the same vein as Post-Structural experimental Philosophy, twentieth-century Occultism developed into and as theories and methods for infectious reality manipulation. Out of the epoch of Victorian Esotericism and through the digital matrix of 1990s cyberspace, Occult currents and their cultural receptions have radically modified themselves again and again, respawning a “disenchanted magic” which maintains the subversive capacity to transgress the limits of an instrumentalized representational Ontology. Disenchanted magick can be understood broadly as magical theories and praxis which have developed such that their functional mechanics are not outright inconsistent with the dominant ontological control system of Objective Material-Rationality. The Disenchanted- Ontology demarcates a “Secularized” semiotic territory within which Religious codifications as a reality narrative are no longer afforded causal authority.25 Psychology, Affect Theory, and Complex Systems Dynamics are among the operative ontological components utilized by contemporary magicians to manipulate reified representation from within, through a performative overlap and integration with Occult semiotics. Developing from the psycho-affective aestheticization of Ritual Magick articulated by and through Aleister Crowley, magick became as the experimental integration of will, thought, and intention into and as reality itself.26 The magician who performs in a ritual inputs meaning into reality, effectuating feedback-loops and noise within the networked hyper-linkages which then perform as observable representation. Modulating this logic, computer programming and the digital model of cyberspace are utilized by contemporary magicians to legitimize and actualize their practice ontologically.27 Just as a programmer writes a code which will semiotically manifest in, as, by, and throughout the internet, a magician – affectively imbedded

25 Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the disenchantment of the world.” 358. 26 Bogdan, “Aleister Crowley” The Occult World (ed. Partridge) 297-298. 27 Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the disenchantment of the world,” 370.

in the communicative matrix of a materialist territory - can encode information into and as representational reality. This cyclical un-differentiation of code and program by which the program can (re)write the code is a fracturing of narrative consistency throughout reality; it is a schizophrenic turn by which semiotic universality gives way to a plurality of contextualized and immanent performative actualizations. Again, the Aesthetic aspect of reality manipulation is utilized: the infestation of will into the controlled system of material causality is a creative endeavor. Art and Occultism have queered their boundaries, utilizing image creation, performative theatricality, sonic fragmentation, and narrative alterations to effectuate Onto- Temporal aestheticizations of reality. - Through networked communication channels, the once hidden world of Occult orders, traditions, and philosophies have become a cultural component, cut-up and distributed as a variety of performative discursivities. This networked dissemination has made Occult Culture (or rather ‘Occulture’) an ordinary facet of and as cultural communication hypercamouflaged within the semiotic territories of information and entertainment. Here ‘ordinary’ does not necessarily mean normalized as a belief, rather identifying accessibility and presence; occultural ideas in television, film, and music do not maintain the same presence nor the depth of content as scholarly discourse on Esoteric topics and currents, and none of the former hold the same sociopolitical position and authority as Scientific Material-Rational discourse. None the less, Occulture performs as and within both popular and academic culture, and furthermore as and within artistic, spiritual, and sociopolitical culture. Due to this, Occulture has been institutionally integrated into the rhizomatic network of representation: a subversive swarm disguised throughout and as reified reality elements. Privy to the Postmodern integration of Occulture into representational semiotic territories, individuals actualizing the hybridization of Artist and Magician have utilized occult art to engineer social modifications. This experimental occulture becomes as esoterrorism: “the careful combination of art, sigilization, and the occult to bring about cultural change.”28 The invocational naming of esoterrorism is credited to ‘Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth’ (TOPY): Industrial Pagans in the 1980s prowling the underbelly of society as disaffected outsiders,

28 Christopher Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wrecking of Civilization,” 195.

experimenting with networked chaos and manufacturing territorial fragmentations.29 Under the guise of a fan club for experimental electronic group Psychick TV, TOPY circulated Chaos Magick throughout occultural networks. TOPY was “a paramilitary occult order that was secreted within something that seemed enough part of popular culture for it not to appear to be a threat immediately.”30 This incursion of the outside from within became as affective manipulations of social norms through the Hyperoccultation of artistic output, subversive representations of gender, and the cut-up redistribution of time itself.31 Esoterrorism both as an idea and a practice maintains a deterritorializing function: the outside of non-representation is unleashed within reality as a challenge to not only social codification, but the normalized ontological boundaries of causality. As disenchanted magick, Esoterrorist action qua Aesthetic performativity rhizomatically actualizes the potentialities of thought. A differentiation between Real and Unreal, Fact and Fiction is systematically undermined as sorcerous esoterrorism seethes “the intensive operative of horror from within.”32

Aesthetaphysickal Reflexivity: Occultural Accelerationism & Hyperstitional Esoterrorism Entrenched in a semiotic field of technoscientific materiality, representational becoming has been restricted to something physical, rational, and instrumental. The ‘Enchanted’ reality matrix has been solved away through the institutional implementation of Scientific Objectivism and is thus no longer an ontological problem throughout reality’s dominant narrative construct. Ontological influences from Religion, spirituality, occult forces, or any other esoteric operations of representational performance have been stripped of causal authority, disenchanting becoming and enacting a secular onto-temporal reality network. Furthermore, any amendment to the dominant control system such as to reintegrate an enchanted model of representation then stands contrary both to the cybernetic reification system and the ‘Rational’ ideology of the material- physical ontological system.

29 Ibid, 192-193. 30 Kinney, “Music, Magic & Media Mischief,” Thee Psychick Bible: The Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P- Orridge and Thee Thrid Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, 327. 31 See pages 35-40. 32 Reza Negarestani, “Cyclonopedia,” 203.

As a solution to the rigid performativity of representational reality, a reintegration of an enchanted semiotics qua ‘Re-Enchantment’ functions as a reaction to Disenchantment: a parallel semiotic flow “couched entirely in oppositional terms.”33 This reactionary model necessitates a linear process by which an enchanted semiotics is ‘let in’ to the sociocultural flow of techno- materiality through ontological negotiations, gaining affective traction moving forward. Given the technoscientific commodification industry of Material-Capitalism, the institutional re- codification of enchantment seems unlikely, unrealistic, and unaffordable; in a network both founded (and funded) upon the cybernetic teleonomy of the scientific model as objective truth, questioning the authority of the systems of control by which said model is propagated undermines the holistic efficacy of the narrative territory. The ‘problem’ of the ontological system enacted by the Enlightenment and perpetuated cybernetically through its application has thus become the lack of meta-critical engagement of the system in and by itself. Though Science has a control system of experimental checks and balances to ensure objective validity, the absence of a ‘meta’ component for and within Science itself has conditioned an autonomous reflexivity propagated as a linear vector; the territorialized reality network only receives feedback from within itself, as the feedback mechanisms have been designed and designated by and through the network itself. In light of this, developmental deterritorializations of the dominant narrative territory cannot be employed as oppositional programs. Non-representation beyond the limits of the semiotic field will remain as ‘the outside’ as long as the limit is determined not by what it is not, but what it can be. That which is outside the control system of science is non-scientific, and therefore cannot be validated as objectively true and real phenomenon and thus integrated moving ‘forward.’ The practice of Disenchanted Magick developed throughout the twentieth century identifies localized subversive performances of onto-temporal becoming which manifest within the confines or codified representation. Having adapted their practice to the constraints of materialist systematics, Postmodern magicians effectuate aesthetic manipulations of reality through an insurgent embrace of the dominant narrative rather than though an antithetical rejection of the semiotic territory. Furthermore, the invocation of the concept Esoterrorism has weaponized the subversive insurgency of disenchanted magick, locating a means to spread magick’s affective contagion throughout occultural networks. This plague of ‘the outside

33 Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse 1900 – 1939, 26.

manifesting within’ identifies the groundwork for a steganographic occupation of representation: an alternative to Re-Enchantment which accentuates and utilizes the consistency of aesthetic performance across Ontology, Physics, Magick, Philosophy, technology, and the entire matrix of sociocultural becoming. Interspliced with the Sorcery of Postmodern Philosophy, the network-mechanics of esoterrorist action maintain the capacity to hijack the virtual-actual feedback modification complex of History and Hyperstitionalize an ontological virus within and throughout the rhizomatic becoming of multi-temporal representation. This virus will maintain a deterritorializing function for the outside from within, establishing tractions for non-represented reality components to aesthetically become as affective vectors, corroborating occultural lines of flight both throughout and as a plurality of reality narratives. Performing as an overlap between Fiction and Fact, emic and etic, Art and scholarship, the infectious plague know as Aesthetaphysicks will seethe throughout Academia and sociocultural becoming, a theory and practice which has been cast back through History from the future, actualizing its infectious virulence into present Academia. Aesthetaphysicks performs as an experimental Complex-Systems-Theory of and as Onto- Temporal-Network Aesthetics; a Philosophy of, for, and from Hyperstition, Occulture, and Accelerationism: the creative manipulation of time, reality, culture, History, and society as art by artistic means. The identification of - and as such performance of representation as - a network of aesthetic Onto-Temporality gives way to the rhizomatic becoming of reality through a schizo-fragmented flow of unlimited semiosis.34 By a networked aestheticization of reality, the systems which codify and perform representation will be identified as creative programs, actualizing their artistic capacity and effectuating non-traditional spaces for experimentation across the sociocultural information matrix, thus conditioning an anonymous reflexivity propagated by non-linear vector multiplicities.35 With Aesthetaphysicks comes a scholarly grounding for magick: esoteric exploration into the occult dimensions of the represented and the non-representational through the thinking and

34 Aichele, “Demons of the New Polytheism,” The Lure of the Darkside, 147. 35 This Anonymous as opposed to Autonomous reflexivity identifies the means of production by which the network is maintained, expanded, and engaged. While autonomous reflexivity is limited to the linear feedback of the Scientific system by its own standards and measures, an anonymous reflexivity is an opensource mode of feedback, developing from a multiplicity of input measures and hypertextual cross-feedback circuits.

theory of Postmodernism. Through the pursuit of this Aesthetaphysickal theory, ritual practices, ideas, and potentials from distant historical periods identified as ‘Occult,’ ‘Esoteric,’ or ‘Spiritual’ can be reimagined as aesthetic modes and methods of and for Hyperstitionalization, and from such, the aesthetic (re)engineering of reality. Aesthetaphysicks gives way to and is the very practice and performance of Occultural Accelerationism. As a social theory, Accelerationism manipulates our present by means of prepresentational futures through a Hyperstitionalized past. By means of Occultural content, Aesthetaphysicks will engage and contribute to the contemporary political discourse surrounding and founded upon Accelerationism by opening a space for Magick-as-Art-as-Philosophy to posit Futures and people to come affectively consistent with contemporary Feminist, Post-Colonial, and Queer Theory. Aesthetaphysicks as a means of Occultural Accelerationism also brings an up to date knowledge of ‘Western Esotericism’ and Disenchantment discourse into Accelerationist and contemporary Philosophical discourse, deterritorializing the academic rut of Re-Enchantment theory and instead giving way to a method and mode for a Hyperoccultation36 of Representational reality. It is of note that Aesthetaphysicks is not an anti-scientific theory; Science is not something useless to be rejected, nor can its presence be abstracted from any plausible futures vector. The problem presented by and through the strict and authoritative Scientific worldview is its conservative stasis by which non-representation is excluded and value-based utility (located by hetero-normative performativity) is the standard for presentational development. Unlike Re- Enchantment discourse, Hyperoccultation is not something parallel to a Disenchanted reality narrative which then must be negotiated into being through a reactionary politics. The performance of Hyperoccultation through Aesthetaphysickal theory will simply open spaces within and around Science and the dominant control programs, theoretically allowing for inter and intra-disciplinary experimentation, and furthermore ‘rational’ foundations for non-material representation, affect, and becoming. - While the system, project, and practice of Aesthetaphysicks draws heavily from a distorted conceptualization of historical materials as a vector for Schizohistorical disorientation, the proposed methodology functions through a combination of Meta-Analysis, Rhizomatic-

36 Amy Ireland, “The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology,” 13-15.

Discourse-Analysis, and ( )hole complex. The Meta-Analytic aspect of this methodology allows for the engagement of content across large chunks of research material, topics, or fields and gives way to a synthesis of said informational content. The Rhizomatic-Discourse-Analysis component also engages large amounts of content, but rather than focusing on a synthesis of information it both engages and produces performative hypertextuality between works, ideas, thinkers, and time periods in and as a non-linear and constantly evolving rhizome of interconnectivities. The application of a Rhizomatic-Discourse-Analysis brings into the research- complex diverse lenses such as Semiotics, Historiography, Phenomenology, and Schizo-Anaysis without being limited to any one rigid system or its epistemic baggage. Finally, ( )hole complex is the relationship between ‘solid and void’ within dynamic networks. What this means is that in a solid37 there are voids, holes, pockets, or more simply inconsistencies. In operating ( )hole complex qua methodology, it is not a matter of engaging these holes as a matter of critique, but rather utilizing said holes in order to let the ‘solid’ further develop in-itself; this allows for the whole to breath and grow into something new but the same, and is as much a creative endeavor as a scholarly practice. By operating these three methodologies within one cut-up method, academic research which simultaneously engages and (re)develops at a textual, theoretical, Social, Historical, and Aesthetic level performs as an interdisciplinary and Postmodern scholarly praxis. Utilizing the above research program, this thesis will investigate and understand twentieth-century occultism by and as Postmodern Philosophical theory in order to demonstrate both the intellectual and practical relevance of occult(ural) praxis within contemporary social, philosophical, and aesthetic discourse. The following investigation will thus be executed by pitching and mapping Aesthetaphysickal theory back and through twentieth-century occult currents. This retroactive historical incursion functions both to manifest and accelerate a schizophrenic and aesthetic tradition of onto-temporal Hyperstitionalization which will give way to the very development of the methods by which Aesthetaphysicks will and has Hyperstitionalized its own actual becoming. Rather than demonstrate causal influences and intentional applications between historical actors and periods, this work will perform Historiography, Philosophy, Art Theory, and

37 These ‘solids’ can be performed as a whole or holistic thing, be it a (reality) network, society, an academic discipline, a scholarly theory, or more simply an essay, a book, a painting, or any work of art, etc.

Occultism in a decentralized flux, giving way to a discursive alienation and hypertextual feedback-loops. Decentralized from their conditioned disciplinary territories, the realty production brought upon through the sorcerous concept engineering of Postmodern Philosophy will feed into the practical reality reordering practiced and articulated by and through twentieth- century magick. This feedback then serves to blur the distinction between magick and Philosophy, performing Philosophy as magick as Philosophy, and becoming as a ‘Hyperstitional Esoterrorism,’ rhizomatically infecting academic information-networks. The proposed thesis is not making an argument about any historical relationship between Philosophy and Occultism, but rather conducting an experiment which will explore the very (un)limits of thought each discourse opens, in, through, and as each other. This experiment is thus in-itself modeled utilizing the theory it is putting forward; not a hypothesis, test, and a conclusion, but an Aesthetic engagement deterritorializing the semiotic codifications of Material-Rationalist idea dissipation by means of a creative ‘aesthetic logic’ becoming through itself. As such, the following does not detail an essentialist or universalist position, but a reflexive demonstration of the very theory under analysis; an articulation of that which is being articulated. This Schizohistorical experimentality is thus the theory and the topic of the work at hand, a performative didacticism as reverse-ascriptive discourse infestation. Having established a performative conceptual network of sociocultural and onto-aesthetic contextualization in the present section ‘Plex,’ the following section ‘Time-Circuit’ will detail a schizohistorical tradition of and for Aesthetaphysicks, networked multi-temporally across Chaos Magick, the Church of Satan, Thee Temple ov Pyschick Youth, and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. From this, the final section ‘Warp’ will then detail practical applications of Aesthetaphysickal theory in contemporary art and scholarship, demarcating Aesthetaphysicks’ efficacy as a prepresentational ‘Post’ vector for and as Occultural Accelerationism. The holistic becoming of this work - both as an object and a performance - will function to reintegrate the superfluous research conducted across Western Esotericism into Postmodern academic and artistic spaces. By performing within and across contemporary post-structural discourse(s), Aesthetaphysicks as Occultural Accelerationism will demonstrate a deterritorialization of the Religio-Historical narratives conditioning the development of Western Esotericism, opening the space for a creative (re)engagement and propagation of the information network’s semiotic flow.

Time-Circuit Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

Chaos Reigns A magical tradition can be understood as a semiotic territory within which magicians learn to interpret their experiences.38 Throughout this territory, systematic narratives propagate the efficacy conditions by which the magical workings of a group or individual function. These narratives (per)form a belief system as and for a model of cybernetic participation which autocatalyzes the actual becoming of magical affect. Belief in a codified system subjectively maps the territory within and by which the ritual and practices of that system function, and by mapping the territory the system is then given a creative space in which to observably perform.39 Invoked as a viral swarm, Chaos Magick is not a belief system in itself but an (un)tradition of iconoclastic deterritorializations: a methodological cross-utilization of multiple tradition-systems subjectively folded and cut into each other.40 The functionality of Chaos Magickal praxis thus becomes by performative belief (or metaprogramming)41 and the Hyperstitionalized ontological feedback complex of observed efficacy-actualizations. Chaos Magick in this way engages the Postmodern practice of hypertextual systems-communications: a rhizomatic networking of autonomous narratives so as to perform a decentralized flow of non- represented semiotic becoming. As an (un)tradition, Chaos Magick is then spread through and as a discourse of innovative subversions, a paradoxical continuity of discontinuity entangled by a complex of iconoclastic perennialism.42 Twentieth-century occultism performs magick as the “science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.”43 With this operative magical mode, rather than subscribing to

38 Hine, Oven Ready Chaos, 35. 39 An example of this phenomenon in a historical context would be the Theory of Correspondences or Doctrine of Signatures employed in Renaissance Magic. Performing within a Neo-Platonic territory, ‘natural’ objects (which resemble for example bodily organs) affectively engage a causal circuit between the natural object and their corresponding biophysical component; a walnut looks like a brain and as such its utilization in medicine will affect the brain. See Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the disenchantment of the world,” 361-365. 40 Metaprogramming is the technique of “belief shifting,” articulated by twentieth-century writer and occultist Robert Anton Wilson, which can be understood as fully adopting and embracing a belief but only for a select period of time. Hine, Oven Ready Chaos, 10; 40. 41 Ibid, 36. 42 Duggan, “Perennialism and Iconoclasm: Chaos Magick and the Legitimacy of innovation,” 97-98; 112. 43 Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, xii.

the limited codifications of a single tradition’s effectuation narrative a Chaos Magician can pick and choose theory, rituals, aesthetic elements, or even entire systems (actual or virtual)44 by which to creatively manifest a magical vector as and for their will. The efficacy of the performative Chaos system is then hinged upon the Magician’s belief that it will function. Magical accomplishments become by the subjective belief that what one is doing is and will produce affective noise within and across representation, and from such said affect is something empirically observable. Through an active application of ( )hole complex, a Chaos Magician establishes a systematized logic for how and why their magic will work, thus conditioning a semiotic territory within which their will may spread. Transgressing the historical authorities which legitimize a magical system’s authenticity, a Chaos magician has only to convince themselves that what they are doing makes sense and as such will function,45 establishing an aestheticological territory to consequently observe manifestations of their will in the world. Becoming in a disenchanted reality matrix of material-physicality, the subjective legitimization of magical praxis is conditionally territorialized by the rigid codifications of scientific theory; because the magician performs within a controlled field of representation, the manifestation of will is also to some degree contextualized by semiotic codifications. For the Chaos Magician to legitimize and thus believe in their magick’s functionality, their magical vector must infest representation as an incursion of the outside from within. As legitimizing narratives to hypercamouflage magical affect, Chaos Magicians have adopted and adapted scientific theories for vector propagation. By the mathematical articulation of Chaos Theory, Chaos is performed through fluctuations of complex-system’s initial states which then gain traction and accelerate large-scale evolutionary changes across a system’s network.46 The cybernetic network mechanics of Chaos Theory thus establish a dynamic logic by which Chaos Magick can then utilize additional complex network theories such as the Neuroscience, Quantum Physics, or even Internet cyber-communications to legitimize the functionality of a large variety of magical intentionality.

44 Postmodern occultist Kenneth Grant, (pupil, secretary, and post-mortem editor to Aleister Crowley and a student of Austin Osman Spare) developed a system of ‘Typhonian Magick’ based off of the reality manifest by author H.P. Lovecraft, specifically the Hyperstitional text ‘The Necronomicon’. See Evans, The History of British Magick After Crowley: Kenneth Grant, Amando Crowley, Chaos Magic, Satanism, Lovecraft, The Left-Hand Path, Blasphemy and Magical Morality, 284-343. 45 Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the disenchantment of the world,” 368. 46 Duggan, “Chaos Magick,” The Occult World, 406.

Having legitimized belief in the ontological propagation of a given Chaos Magical system, it is then a matter of identifying the causal efficacy of a magical vector. Through the observational tracking of will by and within representation, the Chaos Magician establishes cybernetic feedback-loops between their affective magical working and ontological effectuations of said work. Prior to the Chaos ritual, a magician’s will exists by a virtual degree of immanence; but through the multi-temporal cybernetics of Hyperstitionalization, said will becomes observable because it has been successfully invoked magically, and the magical invocation will be successful because the will becomes observable. Observation here is another performance of ( )hole complex: the results of chaos magick need not perform outright as an explicit narrative tracing the very conditions of the magician’s will; instead, the observational mapping of temporal flow functions to identify both nuanced and caustic performances of magical effects by and through a multiplicity of subtle interactions. As a magician’s will begins to manifest in observable ways, said will integrates actualization traction through the future into the past to become a fiction which has then made itself real. Observational cybernetics of and as belief-result circuity are the occultural legacy of twentieth-century magician and Aesthetaphysickal theorist Aleister Crowley.47 The appeal to empirical methods as a mode of magical actualization performs the Scientific outlook and model as an aestheticized psycho-materiality complex, queering the ontological causality reified within and as the representational territorialization of disenchanted material reality. While Aleister Crowley’s theory provides foundational traction for the efficacy dimension of Chaos Magick through the aesthetic Hyperoccultation of Science, it is from twentieth-century artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare that visual art becomes as an affective onto-aesthetic Sigil Magick utilized across Chaos Magical discourse. - Sigils perform the semiotic codification of will through and as the material manifestation of non-representational designs. As an aesthetic invocation of narrative effectuation, the artist as magician encrypts their will-vector as and by an abstract image. The encryption praxis revealed by Austin Osman Spare utilizes deterritorializations of the semio-linguistic system of the written word such that a statement of will is alienated from the codifications of language and may

47 Duggan, “Chaos Magick,” The Occult World, 407.

cybernetically manifest through an unformed potentiality of onto-aesthetic becoming.48 In this encryption process, the magician mobilizes their will as a line of flight through a linguistic statement, or sentence. This statement is then cut-up, disposing of its vowels and any double letters. With the remaining letters a conglomerate symbol is composed as an abstract and non- representational design, concealing any presence of the former normative symbols and hypertextualized will-statement. This ritualistic becoming of non-representation opens a presentational rift by which a triangulated circuitry is established between the Aesthetaphysickal magician, the performative art-object, and representational reality. For Spare, the production of a sigil was proceeded by “the ’burning’ of the sigil into the subconscious.”49 Through a process of psychological deterritorialization brought upon through ecstatic trance states,50 the artist-magician deconditions belief and the mechanistic limitations of representational self and reality while focusing on their magical sigil. By simultaneously deconstructing the codified narratives of identity and reality, the then discontinuous magician is networked with and as the rhizomatic multiplicity or representation, burning their will into the hyper-synapses of becoming. The absence or vacuity of belief thus functions to infest representation as non-representation, propagating alien consciousness and creative affect with and as the unformed potential of reality.51 With their will then spliced into the schizophrenic unfolding of representative becoming, Austin Osman Spare expresses that the magician may do away with or forget their produced sigil;52 but for Chaos Magick, the sigil may be further utilized as an affective plague-vector. Performing as a material hyperlink connecting magician, art, and reality, the sigil qua work-of-art may establish psycho-acceleratory feedback across sociocultural flow. By invoking and thus manifesting the sigilization of will correspondent to group or social effectuation, a material sigil (not necessarily limited to the specific anti-linguistic model linked to Spare) circulates encrypted potentiality, its very engagement un-coding system limitations and opening space for creative reality engineering and Hyperstitional esoterrorism.53

48 Spare rejects “beliefs that employ words as a means to control or limit desire.” Burrows & O’sullivan, Fictioning: The Myth Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, 67. 49 Ibid, 70. 50 The catalyst for these states could be any or a combination of sexual excitement or exhaustion, music, dance, drug use, or meditation. Duggan, “Chaos Magick,” The Occult World, 409; Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 70-71. 51 Duggan, “Chaos Magick,” The Occult World, 410. 52 Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wreckage of Civilization,” 197. 53 Duggan, “Chaos Magick,” The Occult World, 408.

- A Chaos Magician’s schizophrenic fluctuation between metaprogramming and the vacuity of belief operates a system of unbelief by which the creative potentiality of reality can be actively engaged, manipulated, and infected. Anarchy and subversion swarm across Chaos discourse, spreading an onto-aesthetic methodology of deterritorialization praxis through occultural networks to criticize and combat oppressive power structures and conservative semiosis.54 The Iconoclastic non-representation propagated by Chaos Magick is furthermore located throughout its own schizohistorical development, maintaining its (un)tradition of and by Iconoclastic Perennialism. Though Chaos Magick can be historically traced through Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, Robert Anton Wilson, Peter J. Carroll, and Ray Sherwin (among others), 55 their authorities within the magical discourse-dynamic are limited to utilization, not formal structuring. The ‘foundational’ stage of and for Chaos Magick is thus an encouragement of adaptational innovation and creativity: the reprogramming of authority systems through an appeal to their representational legitimacy. Perennialism communicates the idea that an ‘eternal’ truth has been and is performatively represented throughout time within varying periods, cultures, and traditions.56 Embedded within the semiotic territory mapped by a tradition-system then is the truth which flows across and beyond time, through the past and into the future. Given the flow of truth through multiple systematic narratives, a tradition-territory itself is thus identified as a construction within which truth may be located. As such, perennialism becomes an affective tool for accelerating (un)belief systems, a “democratic framework that includes a vast array of historical occultural elements in which the current or latest instance of knowledge is just as valid as the oldest.”57 Within the dynamics of Chaos Magick, the ‘truth’ which perdures is the relative contextualization of truth’s performative actualization; it is not an objective, ageless, and eternal truth, but rather the affective notion that truth becomes if engaged as such. From this, a Chaos Magician’s appeal to magical tradition hacks the semiotic territory and effectuation vectors by which ‘truth’ is being

54 Duggan, “Chaos Magick,” The Occult World, 407-408. 55 The latter three of these names will not be discussed in this work, though they are widely credited as the establishing authors of contemporary Chaos Magick. For a chronological approach to Chaos Magick see Duggan, “Perennialism and Iconoclasm: Chaos Magick and the Legitimacy of Innovation” in Contemporary Esotericism, 91- 112. 56 Duggan, “Perennialism and Iconoclasm,” 97-102 57 Ibid, 99-100.

progressed in a given historical system, establishing rhizomatic communication channels by which to network a creative and innovative (re)development of said tradition’s operation of perennial knowledge. In this way, Chaos Magick encourages innovation and creativity as “products of the dynamic that exists between conceptions of perennialism, constructed religions of magic, and the call to iconoclasm.”58 As a mode of macro-legitimization, Chaos Magick navigates iconoclasm as an interpretation of perennial continuity emphasizing change. “Iconoclasm is the driving principle of this perennialism since the established, conventional, or dogmatic must be challenged or even destroyed to produce the next instance of knowledge or wisdom.”59 Iconoclastic Perennialism thus functions both to actualize feedback between the historical authority of ‘traditional’ magick systems and Chaos Magick, and also to maintain the legitimacy of Chaos Magick discourse across its schizophrenic (un)boundaries. Iconoclasm as the destruction of images and traditions - or rather deterritorializations of stagnant semiotic narratives - is then operated as an insurgent vector for non-representational becomings. By infecting historical narratives, Chaos Magick introduces the outside on non-representation within pre-established historico-representational flow; and through the appeal to the Chaos Magick’s (un)tradition, a localized manipulation of tradition is not performed as an enigmatic unfolding within the representational network, but is instead hyperlinked to and as the Chaos Magick swarm. In this way the creative fictions of new magical theories and practice are actualized Hyperstitionally as real dynamics then further integrated with the disenchanted semiotic narrative, legitimizing their representational performance as a becoming magick. Through performative belief-system actualization, the reality-mechanics of Chaos Magick accelerate occultural content in and as Hyperstitions which integrate their actuality by ascryptive becoming. As a contemporary performative component, the accelerated occultural content is then cross-networked with Scientific and Psycho-Sociocultural theory to not only legitimize its application but propagate its efficacy. Operating a discourse from which all instances of its (un)tradition are valid opens up a creative space by which an unlimited flow of semiosis may be maintained through conscious de- and re- territorialization. For contemporary magicians, artists, and sorcerers apt to accelerate Esoterrorist infiltrations of Occultural

58 Duggan, “Perennialism and Iconoclasm,” 112. 59 Ibid, 100.

becomings throughout Rhizomatic temporality, Chaos Magick maintains the capacity for the affective Hyperoccultation of the technoscientific material-rational reality program. As a performance of Aesthetaphysickal theory, Chaos Magick undermines the monopolism of belief territorializing semiotic flow, effectuating lines of flight for alternate future trajectories.

Theater of the [Black (Plague) Mass] The Plague takes images that are dormant, a latent disorder, and suddenly extends them into the most extreme gestures; the theater also takes gestures and pushes them as far as they will go: like the plague it reforges the chain between what is and what is not, between the virtuality of the possible and what already exists in materialized nature. It recovers the notion of symbols and archetypes which act like silent blows, rests, leaps of the heart, summons of the lymph, inflammatory images thrust into our abruptly weakened heads. The theater restores us all our dormant conflicts and all their powers and gives these powers names we hail as symbols: and behold! Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols, one charging against another in an impossible melée; for there can be theater only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry which occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.60

Theater maintains the sorcerous capacity for incantation, a presentational calling forth by which virtuality is actualized by the feedback of material enactment.61 Already by the 1930s, French thinker, dramatist, and iconoclast Antonin Artaud cried out against the conservative stasis restricting theater’s incantational potential. The theater had been reduced to an abstract chamber for the reification of representational normality, propagating the narrative territory of the psychologized character and linear continuity. Artaud sought to liberate the magical potentials of theater - of language, form, and space – and inaugurate a theater of anarchy, chaos, and alchemy; a Theater of Cruelty, not as a mirror but a portal, a hole by which to pull forth the outside and affectively spread its schizophrenic potentials.62 The magick of theater seethes from an affective poetry of space, the physical networking of that which can be materially expressed for the senses and unleashed as an “active presence,” a becoming real of the stage such that the stage is reality and reality is the stage.63 This becoming

60 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 27-28. 61 Sofer, “How to do things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in ‘Doctor Faustus’,” 4-5. 62 On an initial look at Artaud see Nathan Gorelick, “Life in Excess: Insurrection and Expenditure in Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty.” Discourse 33.2 (2011): 263-279. 63 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 38-39.

real is the territorialization carried out by the mise en scène: the performative components of and as the reality-stage by which the affective network begins to swarm. As an active presence, the theatricized mise en scène conditions and codifies space, effectuating a subversive semiotic territory within the controlled re-presentations of the dominant control narrative. This subversive territory - the liminal void imbedded in the representational reality - functions to actualize fictions as a plague infests a body: a communicative delirium of belief through fascination, abjection, ecstasy, and horror. To subvert the codification loops of Modern theater’s conservative re-presentations, Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty eliminates the parallel territorializations of the audience- stage binary. This deterritorialization functions to reestablish a direct communication “between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it.”64 The Theater of Cruelty thus stages becoming around, with, and through those consumed by and as its swarm-matrix, conjuring a holistic presence, a liminal event: an affective ritual which “permeates the emergence of the new and gives shape to new historical circumstances.”65 By the theatrical cross networking of individual and space, the space conditions the individual conditioning their space, a cybernetic invocation of materialized onto-aesthetic hyper-textuality. Cruelty as the vector for life, reality, and being is the ‘becoming _’ which thirsts for virulent proliferation. Artaud’s theater does not seek to depict, represent, or even condition the former as a theatrical spectacle; rather the Theater of Cruelty performs the un-differentiation of life and theater, a theatricization of the life-spectacle’s active cruelty.66 By the spatial language of the mise en scène, a living poetry of abstract becomings infects reality as spatial hieroglyphs, a materialized presentational-territory of rhizomatic interconnectivities. This poetry is of and for the senses, an affective semiosis as a spacio-temporal network riddled with holes, pockets, and voids. From the holes swell steganographic liquidity, non-representation to be mapped in a flux of encryption actualization, a feedback-loop for the outside within “[abiding] between conceptuality and matter.”67 A manifestation of the Theater of Cruelty thus performs the hyper- ritual of meta-incantation: an oozing forth of actualized void by which potentialities may become

64 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 96. 65 Edward Scheer, “I Artaud BwO: The Uses of Artaud’s ‘To have done with the judgement of god’,” 45. 66 Ibid, 46. 67 Carruthers, “Poetry is Cosmic War (interview),” 96.

through the noise within and across a conjured liminality matrix. One need only perform within the space for the space to become, establishing belief – and furthermore efficacious potential - in a fiction made real. - A Satanic contagion swept across 1960s San Francisco, casting its infectious tendrils throughout not only the California city and its American populace, but into the entangled hyper-matrices of culture, Religion, History, and Time. The Church of Satan founded by Anton Szandor LaVey invoked the blasphemous name of ‘The Adversary,’ weaving into reality a Hyperstitional History born from unbelief and conjuring forth a de facto legion of Satanist practitioners caught in the acceleratory flow of a Satanic semiosis.68 As an Aesthetaphysickal becoming the Church of Satan performed its actualization praxis by theatricality; from the (un)holy texts to the ritual magick manifest in and by the Black Mass, LaVeyan Satanism became by a performance of fictions, made real through the psychological onto-aesthetic cybernetics of the theatrical mise en scène. Anton LaVey’s plague of Satanism spread though, as, and from Fiction, performing a theatricization of Religion calling not for the fidelity of faith, but the adultery of unbelief. Satanism revealed a philosophy of affective rebellion, articulating a reclamation of biopsychic autonomy and inciting self-liberation from oppressive value narratives through an antinomian ethics.69 Satan in this narrative is not a theistic deity, but the performative adversary of oppressive ideologies, systems, institutions, and rigid semiosis. As such, Satan is a locus for individual empowerment through dissent: a hyperlink to a multi-temporal swarm of iconoclastic, oppositional, and adversarial circuitry scattered throughout Religious, Aesthetic, Occultural, and Philosophical discourse. The celebration of Satan is thus the celebration of this subversive legion in any or all of its lines of flight. Navigating the hypertextual locus of Satanic representations, LaVey commandeered the Enchanted mode of Satan perpetuated by and through Religious polemics and esoteric praxis. This requisition of religious semiosis functioned for LaVey to stage a performative (anti)Religion through the conscious Hyperstitionalization of a Satanic history and ritual tradition-system. LaVey utilized narrative cut-ups to network his philosophy through

68 Faxneld, “Secret Lineages of De Facto Satanists,” 79-82. 69 Aagaard Petersen, “Contemporary Satanism,” The Occult World, 400.

literary and historical figures and movements, and from such conditioned a semiotic territory for a disenchanted ritual magic. As a propagation vector for the Church of Satan’s legitimization, The Satanic Bible operates as a performative text: a five-dimensional hyper-object which exists physically in the indexical ‘here and now,’ yet also contains and functions as a cybernetic portal for the swirling schizohistorical vortex of LaVey’s Satanic theater. Having observed the psychological effects of tradition and belief, LaVey invokes a ‘Satanic Perennialism’ by which LaVeyan Satanism does not become throughout History, but instead pulls History toward its becoming.70 Unlike the (un)tradition of Chaos Magick networked through the discontinuity loops of destructive creation, the reverse-ascriptive invocation of Satanism maps a lineage of ‘de facto’ Satanists who would have been and thus retroactively are Satanists due to Philosophical demeanor and will to power in their respective lifetimes.71 Entangled in the swell of de facto Satanists are then the narratives which condition Satanic ritual and magick: literary inventions from the Church, media, and disaffected iconoclasts, “a storehouse of avowed fantasy gathered from all cultures and from all ages.”72 The presentation of the de facto Satanist in Satanism’s performative religious text functions not only to recognize, but actively demonstrate the Hyperstitional praxis employed within the Church of Satan; it is not simply a matter of performing Fictions which have been made real, rather it is about the subversive unbelief necessary to consciously perform the making-real of those very fictions. Belief for the Satanist is something which has great power, and the Satanic texts divulge that belief can be faked to the extent that the powerful psychological condition it creates can be actively called upon at will.73 The willing suspension of disbelief is thus an efficacy narrative communicated and demonstrated by LaVey’s (un)holy text; the (hyper)textual theater of The Satanic Bible is an instantiation of Performance Philosophy, an onto-aesthetic system-theory which practices itself through and by its own articulation, manifesting its applicability through its own application. In this way the schizohistorical narrative of de facto Satanists and traditions of Satanic ritual are an intertextual, multi-

70 Faxneld, “Secret Lineages of De Facto Satanists,” 83. 71 Examples of these de facto Satanists are “financiers, industrialists, popes, poets, dictators, and all assorted opinion-makes and field marshals of the world’s activities;” those individuals who have a “thirst for success and its ensuing realization.” LaVey, The Satanic Bible, 103-104. 72 LaVey, The Satanic Rituals, 27. 73 Faxneld, “Secret Lineages of De Facto Satanists,” 77.

dimensional legitimization network: the intrinsic architectural matrix of The Satanic Bible; a ‘hyper mise en scène’ enacting the very becoming of a performative semiotic space which itself articulates affective performative becoming. Conjured from the semiotic flow within the Satanic texts, a Satanist ‘Black Mass’ and magical system perform ritual psychodramas as Hyperstitional assemblages. To manifest the Satanic rites, Anton LaVey drew from an array of historical and literary sources which operate to construct a functional mise en scène by which ritual may become.74 The utilization of fictional sources as a foundation for the Satanic tradition-system further identifies the Hyperstitional flow circulating by and as a Satanic performance philosophy. A Satanist maintains the capacity to consciously invent and engineer fictions, yet simultaneously disregard their virtuality and manifest them as actual narratives.75 Adherence to traditional authenticity and factuality do not determine the magical efficacy of a Satanist’s will, rather it is the affective presence of emotional response. An affective ‘traditional’ atmosphere allows for the becoming of an event through wonder and amazement; by operating the ritual space as a Satanic fantasy world, a ritual performance becomes as religious spectacle. Through the incorporation of literary works into the architecture of Satanic magick, the performative mise en scène of and as the Satanic tradition is both embellished by fantastical elements and also circulates a subversive hyper-textuality as a conscious defiance of ‘formal’ tradition systems. Through the physical manifestation of Satanism’s hypertextual architecture, a religious ceremony unfolds which consciously utilizes the psycho-mechanics of constructed semiotics. For LaVey, ritual magick functions to “elicit strong emotional response from the participants, which can then be used to effect healthy psychological changes.”76 As such, Satanic ritual becomes as a mode of disenchanted magick, infiltrating the functional mechanics of representational reality through the subversive aestheticologic of Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. The hyper-ritual of meta-incantation carried out by the Theater of Cruelty’s operation functions to invoke a liminal space through which the Satanic Black Mass becomes actual. Performing within a fiction made real, the Satanic Ritual navigates the territorializing semiotic feedback across the

74 Among the sources utilized by the Church of Satan were the works of author H.P. Lovecraft. The Satanic Rituals states that Lovecraft, “sensed man’s drive toward knowledge, even at the risk of sanity. Intellectual excellence, he seemed to say, is achieved in concert with cataclysmic terror – not in avoidance of it.” LaVey, “The Metaphysics of Lovecraft,” The Satanic Rituals, 176. 75 Faxneld, “Secret Lineages of De Facto Satanists,” 77. 76 Ibid, 76.

occultural mise en scène, extracting vector potentialities from the seething poetry of affective spatiality. This semiotic entrenchment ‘superheats’ the active codification of reality maintained through phenomenological orientation, accelerating perceptual belief in the legitimacy of the liminal territory and further deterritorializing critical engagement and thought.77 Each Satanist performing in and as the ritual thus believes in the representational matrix they have invoked, for they have been alienated from the codified narrative of reality and dwell comfortably in a hypercamouflaged swarm of the outside. Magick carried out in this event - codified so as to effectuate psycho-physical alterations - then proceeds to infect its participants, forging a chain between ‘what is’ and ‘is not’, enacting a narrative-vector of, by, and for Hyperoccultated representational causality. Performativity both invokes and sustains narrative semiosis, bringing into being that which it names and transmuting virtual immanence into actuality.78 Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan utilized the onto-aesthetic sorcery of belief to perform a theatricization of life, effectuating the multi-plane becoming of a Satanic semiotics by and as hypertextual feedback between text and ritual. This infestation of representational networks is catalyzed by presentational becomings. The outside swarms from rifts assembled in the Aesthetaphysickal throws of performative liminal spaces, conditioning psycho-aesthetic vector narratives for the propagation of not only disenchanted magic, but new art, identities, ideas, and sociocultural relationships. Feedback spirals between representation, history, the virtual, and the actual to manifest a mise en scène for the unseen, accelerating narrative lines of flight by Hyperstitional praxis. The plague of (non)representation is the affective becoming of itself; “These symbols, the sign of ripe powers previously held in servitude and unavailable to reality, burst forth in the guise of incredible images which give freedom of the city and of existence to acts that are by nature hostile to the life of societies.”79

Anti-Dialectic Dismemberment Networks Fixed Ontology, codified narratives, and a paranoid territorialization of semiotic flow condition representational reality’s performative matrix of and by control. The institutions perpetuating and

77 Faxneld, “Secret Lineages of De Facto Satanists,” 76. 78 Sofer, “How to do things with Demons,” 5-6. 79 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 28.

propagating this uniform and predictable sequencing of physico-temporal-flow control not only the becomings which unfold indexically, but performances of the past and future. As an affront to reifying mechanisms of controlled representation, onto-aesthetic disruption may recalibrate the syntax of narrative codifications. A multi-temporal cutting, splicing, and folding of representation gives way to an unseen semiosis by which normalized patterns may become something new. This deterritorialization praxis known as the ‘Cut-Up Method’ has infected linguistic, material, and sonic programs, spreading an esoterroristic plague across and by the hyperlinks of occultural-networks to subversively aestheticize reality and combat control. Cut-Ups are the (re)arrangement of a fragmented whole, the (re)engineering of a consistent system so as to (re)integrate multiplicity by a networked alienation of (re)presentational meaning and familiarity.80 Designed not only to infect and manipulate semiotic presentation across textual networks, cut-ups extend as the phenomenon of ‘playback’: a non- linear looping of auditory flow(s) to encrypt schizophrenic becoming into and as a temporalized performance of narrative consistency.81 The (anti)propagation vector of and for the Cut-Up Method most notably flows through and from the hypertextual entity William S. Burroughs. Burroughs (a twentieth-century performer and performance of the Aesthetaphysickal magician, sorcerer, and artist assemblage) lived a life of Fiction through an actively nomadic mode of experimental being.82 While residing in the Parisian ‘Beat Hotel’ at the end of the 1950s, cut-ups were revealed to Burroughs by fellow Aesthetaphysickal practitioner Brion Gysin. Captivated by Gysin’s “innovative time-war tactics,” William Burroughs took up the method with a virulent urgency, functioning to spread the technique and its application through and as an insurrectional plague.83 For Burroughs, the mechanisms of onto-temporal control functioned predominantly through semio-lingustic territorialization.84 Language as the affective effectuation of cybernetic- feedback between actualized material-representation and visual-meaning-networks circulates

80 Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wreckage of Civilization,” 199. 81 Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 35. 82 William Burroughs’ nomadism can be understood as the exploration of territories, borders, and the outside. Having lived in over six countries during his life time, experimenting not just with literature and art, but magick, narcotics, and sexuality, and even performing as the ‘fictional’ character “Bull Lee” (Kerouac, On the Road, 1956), Burroughs’ life was a testament to (un)limits. 83 CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 40. 84 Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 35.

stasis as and through pre-recorded order. The ‘Word’ is a code, programming multi-temporal representations – records of ‘what-is’ - by the reified “sequencing and syntax of language.”85 With the onto-aesthetic network becoming by and as pre-recorded semiotic conditions, Cut-Up Methodology functions to deterritorialize recorded flow by editing the pre-recordings. Cut-Ups thus employ methods of counter-control by hypercamoflauging dis-order: the cyclical collapse of the semio-linguistic meaning system through its own application, overlapping fiction and fact such that language becomes as a making-strange rather than a making-sense; a swarm of the outside invoked within. Experimenting with the Cut-Up Method through literary application, Burroughs explored non-linear narratives by manifesting fragmented (un)timelines. Effectuating semiotic flow through the dismemberment of a fixed narrative, schizophrenic reality-networks become as unfixed matrices of discontinuous non-representation. Meaning in these networks is thus fluid, relative to performative feedback mapped through subjective engagement. Abstracted from the controlled meaning-network linguistically engaged and sustained by traditional linear developments, the conjured cut-up-semiotics in Burroughs’ work performs words, symbols, signs, and significations as a network of holes to be developed. Rather than tracking meaning from word-sequences, meaning must be consciously created for sequenced words: a ‘becoming rhizomatic’ of Language by a mapping of relationships and conjunctions through anonymous reflexivity.86 As a reified system of representation-encryption, Language regulates ontological becoming by unconscious cybernetic feedback. Through “automatic relationships to words themselves,” the representational language system conditions thinking and biopsychic autonomy, prescribing being through the linear development of word-sequence vectors.87 William Burroughs thus utilized Language itself to subvert the unconscious control infecting reality. A disordering of narrative flow catalyzes a semiotic deterritorialization which foregrounds the affective control maintained by Language.88 Alienated from the linear sequencing which effectuates automatic unconscious engagement, the schizophrenic networking of linguistic- meanings accelerated across Burroughs’ rhizomatic narratives manifests Language possessed by

85 Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 51. 86 See footnote 35. 87 Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 38. 88 Ibid, 36.

its (un)limit. This Language is infected by pestilent unaffordability, putrefying control from within as a non-representational becoming of the outside. Shocked into consciousness by the abject stench of decaying control, the reader wakes up to the cybernetic conditioning of Language and thus faces the ecstatic horror swarming beyond the limit. Contact with this outside induces the schizophrenic madness of narrative collapse: a decentralization of linear and fixed unity becoming as an affective presence performing within a fluid and mailable semiotic matrix. Through a networked ‘becoming rhizomatic’ of Language and subjective deterritorializations of linguistic control, Burroughs’ literary cut-ups combat fixed representation in-themselves; but the Cut-Up Method is not restricted to the production of, nor localized- effectuations by five-dimensional hyper-objects. Cut-Ups also performatively function as a will- vectors, splicing Fictions into reality to manipulate narrative pre-recordings. By the cutting up of newspapers, headlines, informational pamphlets, and other written media, Burroughs attacked the systematized authority of corporate-owned information dispersal. This affront against media- control functioned not only to implement fictions through and as a performance of regulated truths, but to perform (and thus implicate) the popular media as a regulated effectuation-vector for fiction actualization.89 Burroughs’ Aesthetaphysickal onslaught on control persisted through experimentation with numerous narrative territories and their creative-override. Engaging sociopolitical affect and communication networks, a further weaponization of the cut-up was developed to deterritorialize temporal flow with caustic-feedback accelerated through non-linear looping. By means of the ‘playback,’ Burroughs dispersed a method for time infestation through sonic-manipulation. The audio cut-up becomes by and as the noise of temporal flow, retrochronically manifesting affective schizo-presences folded into the ‘transcendental’ performance of Time. “The Hyperstitional process of entities ‘making themselves real’ is precisely a passage, a transformation, in which potentials – already-active virtualities – realize themselves.”90 In cutting up the pre-recorded flow of reality, the regulated control-patterns of and for onto- temporal becomings are fractured, opening holes for virtual contagion and plague vectors to swarm representation through the actualization process of inter-plane-feedback.

89 Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 42. 90 CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 36.

As a technique and technology for onto-aesthetic manipulations in accordance with will, cut-ups and the Cut-Up Method perform as disenchanted magick. By an aesthetic logic, vectors for immaterial causality navigate the non-linear becoming of rhizomatic representation to actualize virtual non-representation, “a reciprocal movement of fiction back into reality.”91 Intentionally mobilized cut-ups thus manifest through and as a Hyperstitional-efficacy to destabilize narrative control, opening holes in semiotic flow as an invocation for alien lines of flight: xeno-sequences performing affective alterations of pre-recordings. Temporal manipulations carried out by playbacks thus maintain the capacity both to predicate futures and (re)engineer the past.92 From such, the magical technology of the audio cut-up may be employed to affect sociocultural and political change through networked interference with dominant narrative sequences. - Everything is recorded. If it is recorded, then it can be edited. If it can be edited then the order, sense, meaning and direction are as arbitrary and personal as the agenda and/or person editing. This is magick. For if we have the ability and/or choice of how things unfold – regardless of the original order and/or intention that they are recorded in – then we have control over the eventual unfolding. If reality consists of a series of parallel recordings that usually go unchallenged, then reality only remains stable and predictable until it is challenged and/or the recordings are altered, or their order changed.93

As a ‘becoming noise’ resonating from the magical-feedback-loop of cut-ups, theater, sigils, chaos, and Hyperstitional will-manifestation, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY) waged a guerilla assault on representational reality’s narratives of control. Through the viral channels of occulture, TOPY infiltrated popular culture and knowledge-exchange systems to network the affective becoming of a subversive swarm. The collective multiplicity of the occultural network functioned rhizomatically to accelerate countercultural will and intentional deterritorializations across dominant semiotic sequences. By sigilizing schizophrenic reality-splinters, invoking hauntological specters, and deterritorializing biopsychic limits, TOPY performed as a putrid plague of the outside, rotting representation from within and sublimating a stagnant semiotics.

91 Burrows & O’Sullivan, Fictioning, 41. 92 Ibid, 37. 93 P-Orridge, “Magick Squares and Future Beats,” Thee Psychick Bible, 279.

During the year of 1971, William Burroughs met with experimental musician and performance artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge to discuss the theory and practices behind Aesthetaphysicks and performative manipulations of representational reality.94 At the time of the meeting P-Orridge was already operating the radical performance art collective COUM Transmissions, but would later form the experimental music groups Throbbing Gristle and Psychick TV which coalesced as the “paramilitary occult order” Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.95 Through their meetings and friendship with Burroughs, P-Orridge would come to learn about cut-ups, narrative multiplicities, and control programs, developing the magical foundations to manifest and network a virulent occultural swarm within a decadent and manipulative entertainment-mediascape. The various countercultural experiments, collectives, and insurrections carried out by and through P-Orridge in the latter decades of the twentieth century thus perform as an ‘Industrial Paganism,’ a manifestation of ‘dystopian occultism’ conditioned by and for the accelerating conditions of technoscientific material-capitalism and commodified social control.96 The term ‘Pagan’ maps a flux of meanings – some enchanted, others polemical - developing and feeding from each other. A narrative dominating the meaning-flow of paganism maintains a territory defined by a positive valancing of Nature, staging paganism as ‘Religions’, traditions, and practices based on Nature worship, learning from Nature, or the value of being-in- Nature.97 This narrative of Nature worship further operates to locate affective somatic technologies and ancient currents of occult knowledge which are celebrated and manifest through and by the ‘natural’ physicality of the body. While functioning to manifest a becoming Natural and embrace a (re)enchanted humanism, the dominant Pagan narrative also establishes a circuitry of romanticized ‘othering’. In the identification of Nature and ‘the natural’ as something other than where, what, and how human civilization currently is, a categorical divide is codified between the technoscientific and aesthetically constructed ecology of ‘urban’ life, and the lost Pagan ‘outside’. Locating Paganism in an ‘Industrial’ mode then operates to challenge the ‘Human/Nature’ binary and furthermore the notion of ‘Naturalism’ and any compound

94 For an in-depth narration of this meeting in addition to a further engagement of TOPY theory, P-Orridge, “Magick Squares and Future Beats,” Thee Psychick Bible, 275-298. 95 Siepmann, “Unholy Progeny,” 81-82; 87-88. 96 Christopher Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wreckage of Civilization,” 192-195. 97 See Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wreckage of Civilization,” 192 for a more engaged overview of the term and history of Paganism.

conditionings of human experience. While maintaining the operative component of occult knowledge and biopsychic magical affectivity, Industrial Paganism performs within representation conditioned by and through disenchanted semiotics. Industrial Paganism can thus be understood not as the return to a Natural outside, but an embrace of the chthonic ‘other’ swarming underneath -but very much within - the semiotic architecture of a constructed ‘secular life’. This “approach to the world from below” thus operates an insurgent-analytics by antinomian ethics and the subversion of control through iconoclastic performance.98 The performative questioning of dominant narratives conditioning reality functions to challenge control through representational invocation. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s Industrial Paganism propagates an aestheticized occultism focused on “change and the future,” by confrontation, subversion, and experimentation;99 it is an artistic guerilla warfare, a creative esoterrorism navigating onto-aesthetic becoming to will social change. Esoterrorism can be understood as an Aesthetaphysickal multiperformance of art, sigilization, and the occult to effectuate sociocultural becomings.100 As an experimental exploration of sound by chaos and art through magick, P-Orridge merged the Cut-Up Method and Sigil Magick to unleash sonic deterritorializations through multi-temporal representation, engaging the iconoclastic perennialism of Chaos Magick by destructive creation. To simultaneously manifest will and deterritorialize the semio-lingustic control maintained by Language, media hyper-sigils were invoked through audio and visual cut-ups.101 The hyper-sigil is sculpted through the “novel arrangement” of representational media, sampling shattered splinters of culture to accelerate an onto-temporal becoming “abstract enough to obscure intention” yet distinguishable as a schizophrenic swarm of cultural representation.102 Will is thus coded within the (un)sequencing on linear control, invoking not only the ecstatic horror of the outside, but the performance of that unaffordable phenomenality as a vector of non- representational becoming. By an aesthetic logic of multi-temporal interconnectivity, P-Orridge engaged an onto- aesthetic reality model (or hologram) maintained through rhizomatic multiplicity by which time

98 Partridge, “Esoterrorism and the Wreckage of Civilization,” 193. 99 Ibid, 192. 100 Ibid, 195. 101 Siepmann, “Unholy Progeny,” 90-91. 102 Ibid, 90.

folds into representation rather than representation performing through time.103 By cutting up and fracturing representational sound and images, the multiplicity of that which has been dismembered continues to swarm through the fracture, a hyperlink to the hologram’s hauntological nexus by which the ghosts of the past, specters of the future, and a schizophrenic multi-temporal semiosis flow.104 This ‘Contagion Theory’ thus maintains the capacity to effectuate Hyperstitional vectors as and for the propagation of viral rot: an aesthetic override of unconscious control narratives through the occultural deterritorialization of linear time and historical continuity. With “assembly [as] the invisible language of our time,” a “skillful splintering can generate manifestation.”105 P-Orrdige unleashed hyper-sigils as audio-media commodities for their music groups Throbbing Gristle and Psychick TV, effectuating a mass infestation of splintered reality vectors across entertainment distribution channels. The (re)engineering of cultural syntax thus becomes as (anti)cultural lines of flight, performing subversive non-representations as popular media narratives. Utilizing the network established by their presence in the music and performance art industry, P-Orridge conjured an occultural locus – Thee Temple ov Pyschick Youth106 - hyperlinking countercultural subversions and occult workings as an affective swarm for reality (re)engineering. TOPY functioned to manifest global flow by which virtual contagions could accelerate their actualization. Manifest and maintained through mobile distribution channels and materially fixed access points, TOPY performed as a rhizomatic entity effectuating a prepresentational hyper-architecture for cyberspace technology.107 Operating by the logic of Chaos Theory, TOPY’s occultural network circulated sigils, rejected knowledge, and Aesthetaphysickal becomings to create positive feedback though and as an information plague. The communication network performing as TOPY then multiplied rhizomatic vector propagations across society, media, and time. From such, Thee Temple ov Pyschick Youth

103 P-Orridge, “Thee Splinter Test” Thee Psychick Bible, 142-143. 104 P-Orridge explains the aestheticological mechanics of this phenomenon through the example of John Lennon. “… a splinter of John Lennon will, in a very real manner, contain within it everything that John Lennon ever experienced; everything that John Lennon ever said, composed, wrote, drew, expressed; everyone that even knew John Lennon and the sum total of all and any of those interactions; everyone who ever heard, read, thought of, saw, reacted to John Lennon or anything remotely connected with John Lennon; every past, present, and/or future combination of any or all of thee above.” Ibid, 143. 105 Ibid, 144; 145. 106 TOPY utilized abstract spellings and Neologisms to radiate deterritorializing anti-linguistic sequences and syntax by and as Language infestation. 107 Siepmann, “Unholy Progeny,” 92.

hypercamouflaged occult technology as a communication network, utilizing iconoclastic collective action to launch large scale esoterrorism by viral means; a Hyperoccultation of control, deterritorializing rigid organizational sequencing through the infestation of its own mechanics. Having actualized the rhizomatic synergy of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge finally turned to Posthumanism and biopsychic cut-ups. Carried out as what was called the “Pandrogeny Project” Genesis and their late partner Lady Jane utilized body modification to perform themself as a single being, genderless and liberated from the psycho- social pre-recordings of DNA.108 Though retaining their physical autonomy, the two bodies of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge were psycho-physically modified to perform a singular ‘they,’ operating as a performative (un)limit for both psychological and physical identity. Through plastic surgery and psychological synchronization, Genesis and Lady Jane became as one- through-many, accelerating the actual emergence of an evolutionary ‘outside.’ This experimentation with the body functioned to deterritorialize the semiotic control system which conditions and restricts behavior and identity through material-linguistic feedback. The binary linguistic mechanisms tracking male-female/man-woman establish rigid narrative-sequences by and as which a gendered induvial should perform. Furthermore, a categorization of ‘the human’ founded on traditional ‘naturalisms’ limits any creative expression of human presentation. By reifying binarized normativity as the exclusive modes for ‘being human’, the conservative narrative thus tracks through the past and into the future on a ‘straight’ timeline, unwriting and alienating queer performances as present(ed) identity-vectors. While Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s Aesthetaphysickal becoming was not a performance effectuated by a will to manifest their subjective and personal non-represented gender identity,109 it nonetheless manifests the non- representational outside of alien(ated) biopsychic beings, creating affective traction for gender experimentation and fluidity as posthuman vectors within sociocultural reality’s semiotic matrix. As a demonstration of performative Hyperoccultation within a disenchanted reality matrix, the guerilla Aesthetaphysicks of Industrial Pagans poisoned systems of control such that the organizing syntax would become alien, a deterritorialization of fixed narratives, value- feedback, and commodification sequences. The Cut-Up Method’s becoming schizophrenic of sequenced linearity and Sigil Magick’s aesthetic obfuscation of subversive will perform together

108 Partridge, “Occulture is Ordinary,” Contemporary Esotericism, 128-129. 109 Ibid, 128.

to accelerate the hypercamouflaged actualization of Hyperstitional vectors. A creative override of and as popular culture functions to distribute non-representational semiotic becoming within dominant narrative sequences, effectuating multi-temporal flow across rhizomatic matrices. Situated in a technoscientific Capitalist culture, the capacity to infect and repurpose existing technology and networks conjures alternate lines of flight by a covert anti-dialectics. The outside of non-representation need not be ‘let in’, for the means of its own becoming are and have been folded into temporal flow. With both the expansion of communication networks and the large- scale integration of Occulture into popular entertainment, the esoterrorist infiltration network also spreads. As representational traction for occultural semiotics develops, feedback circuits for experimental reality manipulation become as represented networks apt for the infestation of viral contagion into a Postmodern mediascape.

Cybernetic Occulture Paranoia reinforces structure. The concentration and organization of identity erects a homogenous institution: a centralized control system for meaning and the unified pursuit of Truth.110 Fear of the outside - the unknown schizophrenia of chaos and creative becoming – perpetuate paranoia and the maintenance of a re-presented territory. Organization and tradition are then imperative for the linear progression of a system in time, especially a system which is profitable through its stability and consistent output. Cybernetic systems have thus been designed and implemented to regulate institutional control through negative feedback-loops, decelerating anomalies which will derail the stable circuit and spiral toward chaos. For those opposed to stasis, control, and conservative maintenance, negative feedback propagates a limit; but cybernetic feedback can be re-valanced, accelerating spirals of positive feedback as a becoming unknown through the holes in a unified institutional structure. Housed in the unwitting halls of Warwick University subsisted a schizophrenic void- entity which did not and will never exist: The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU).111 Seeking to destabilize and liquify the controlled and compartmentalized totalities of Academia, Philosophy, Culture, and ‘scholarly’ thought, the CCRU invoked a plague of iconoclastic

110 Aichele, “Demons of the New Polytheism,” The Lure of the Dark Side, 146-147. 111 When asked about the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in 1997, the Warwick University Philosophy department’s official statement was the denial of prior, current, or continued activity, referring only to a mere sign on a door. Reynolds, “Renegade Academia.”

recalcitrance and infectious sorcery. Entangled in the (un)tradition of Chaos Magick and the esoterrorist undercurrents of performative antinomianism, the CCRU accelerated Aesthetaphysickal becoming as an ascryptive academic praxis. The CCRU was successful in the propagation of their viral swarm, deterritorializing temporal sequencing, academic tradition, and cultural divides; but their successes were also internalized, destabilizing the traditional career sequences of its founding members and accelerating their early departures from the formal academic-network. In 1995 the CCRU was founded by Philosopher, Cyberfeminist, and (Counter)Cultural expert Sadie Plant who had recently joined the Warwick faculty. 112 Lead together with Continental Philosopher and “professor of delirial engineering” Nick Land, the CCRU conjured an experimental philosophy which queered the boundaries between art and scholarship by performing counterculture, underground entertainment, occultural currents, and iconoclastic thinkers as vectors of and for academic engagement.113 For the CCRU, popular culture was the ideal network to integrate and extend their wills, identifying reality engineers such as William Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft, and the “bottom up” networks of the industrial anarcho-capitalist- underground as witnesses to the outside.114 Nick Land functioned as a nexus for occultural knowledge,115 while Sadie Plant networked a ‘swarm text’ dynamic, mobilizing the rhizomatic dis-integration of beliefs sustained by music sampling and cyber-punk prepresentations. Together the two thinkers manifest an Aesthetaphysickal schizo-discourse of ‘Theory Fiction’ circulating a cybergothic digital-occultism by which the collective action of the CCRU would infest insurgent xeno-sequences across representational networks. To create positive-feedback for the becoming real of their experimental philosophy and the simultaneous deterritorialization of Academic and intellectual control systems, the

112 Sadie Plant’s writings from the 1990s are well deserving of an Aesthetaphysickal analysis unfortunately beyond the scope of this work. Invoking the lost futures of Feminist thought by an experimental performance philosophy of cut-up swarm currents, Plant’s three published books The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age, Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, and Writing on Drugs detail a Cyberfeminist engagement of Art, Magick, and technology by and as an aestheticological mobilization of networked thought. 113 Reynolds, “Renegade Academia.” 114 Ibid. 115 As of 2019 Nick Land written only one book-length publication The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, but his topical knowledge delves into occultural networks and Western Esoteric tradition, writhing through thinkers like Antonin Artaud, Terence McKenna, and Aleister Crowley, whilst also covering currents such as Chaos Magick, I Ching, and parapsychology.

Cybernetic Culture Research Unit invoked the very invocation of their Aesthetaphysickal (un)tradition. Cast back through a cut-up schizohistory of onto-aesthetic Hyperoccultation, Hyperstition became as a concept through itself. As a fiction which made itself real, the Hyperstitionalization of Hyperstition became as a performance philosophy of, by, and for performing philosophy. To achieve the sorcerous hyper-temporal multi-becoming of their fiction-actualization-swarm, the CCRU extended their schizohistory beyond themselves, hypercamouflaging their own subversive narratives within the Hyperstitional becoming of a xeno-sequence. Performing as their own fiction becoming real, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit was thus re-presented both within and as unbelief: plague wielders and hyper-architects from the future through the past. - In an essay titled “Lemurian Time War” the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit details a meeting they had with a man represented by the pseudonym ‘William Kaye’. A long-term assistant to World War II veteran Captain Peter Vysparov, Kaye had sought out the CCRU hoping to protect his late employer’s legacy against “the ravages of time.”116 In addition to maintaining the position of military Captain, Peter Vysparov was an active member of the Ordo Templi Orientis and enthusiastically conducted research on Esoteric Theory, History, and practice. Having witnessed the affective presence of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema demonstrated by rocket-engineer and occultist Jack Parsons,117 the United States Military selected Vysparov to conduct classified research on an undisclosed Eastern Pacific island. While Captain Vysparov was officially stationed on the island due to its proximity to the Pacific War, the captain’s deployment was motivated by his demonstrated knowledge of Theosophical Cosmology and the emergence of a new and controversial ‘Neolemurian Hypothesis’.118 The Neolemurian Hypothesis was put forward by Professor of Ethnology Echidna Stillwell after her extended fieldwork with the Mu N’Ma tribe the ‘Dibboma’. Stillwell’s hypothesis was that the N’Ma were lost descendants of the Lemurian Root-race, the third ancient race to have walked the earth according to Theosophy’s doctrine of Spiritual Evolution.119

116 CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 33. 117 See Campion, “John Whiteside Parsons,” The Occult World, 320-322. 118 Stillwell, “The Vault of Murmurs,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 65-71; CCRU, “Miskatonic Virtual University,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 55-57. 119 For further information of Theosophy and Spiritual Evolution see Santucci, “The Notion of Race in Theosophy.”

Located on the lost continent of Lemuria, the Lemurians were astral-physical beings possessing a third-eye capable of embracing eternity and thus giving an operative foundation to the Lemurian time-manipulating system of black magick: Pandemonium.120 Stillwell’s Neolemurian Hypothesis thus maintained that as decedents of the Lemurians, the N’Ma had retained their third eye and furthermore the Lemurian system of time magick. Apt to further utilize and exploit magick for military gain, Captain Vysparov was sent to engage the Dibboma and employ their services. While living with the N’ma, Vysparov was exposed to the Pandemonium system which was facilitated through a multi-dimensional artifact called the ‘Numogram.’ The Numogram - a “diagrammatization of digital numeracy” also called the Lemurian time-maze - functioned as the key to the time magick of the lost Lemurian civilization. A forerunner to the Kabbalistic Tree-of- life and utilizing a computational numeracy system similar to the I-Ching,121 the Numogram consists of ten zones divided into three distinct time-systems, interconnected by currents and channels established through a complex of pairing, nine-sum twinning, and digital accumulation.122 Through the cryptic arithmetical computations communicated across the Numogram, gates in space and time are revealed toward the Lemurian decimal labyrinth: “the microcosmic lair of all demonic populations.”123 The noise conjured as feedback between the Numogram and Pandemonium tradition is enumerated by the Pandemonium Matrix, a listing of all demons and the hyper-temporal rites which invoke their affective becoming. When Vysparov’s Dibboma hosts informed him that the Pandemonium Matrix was also called ‘Necronomicon’, the captain began his research into the complex communications circulating between Lemurian time-sorcery, madness, and the progression of twentieth-century occultism. Following the war and his time with the Dibboma, Captain Vysparov dedicated his life to studying time-sorcery and insurgent becomings of the ‘Outside’.124 Having witnessed the affective utilization of the N’ma Necronomicon, Vysparov was increasingly convinced that the

120 CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 46-47. 121 CCRU, “Pandemonium Commentary,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 297-298. 122 For an analysis of the structure, system, function, and history of the Numogram see CCRU, “The Zones,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 247-284. 123 CCRU, “Pandemonium,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 242. 124 The CCRU cites Vysparov’s 1949 text Atlantean Black Magic published by Kingsport Press as the Captain’s initial research into this complex, specifically the Aesthetaphysickal relationship between H.P. Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley. While noting the apparent foreshadowing to the later research conducted by Kenneth Grant and the creation of his Typhonian system, the CCRU claims that is unlikely Grant was familiar with Vysparov’s work.

works of author H.P. Lovecraft and their articulation of the schizo-subjectivity effectuated by non-representational becomings were more than fiction.125 In 1949 Vysparov founded a Lovecraft reading group which has come to be known as the “Cthulhu Club.” The Cthulhu Club was dedicated to “exploring the intersection between the N’Ma constellation, Cthuloid contagion, and twisted time systems,” and it was by this group’s meetings and theorizations that the term ‘Hyperstition’ was coined.126 Concluding their one and only meeting with William Kaye, the CCRU had been exposed not only to the infectious becoming of the concept Hyperstition, but a hidden current of academic research established by the Cthulhu Club. The CCRU proceeded to investigate and publish the Cthulhu Club’s work and correspondences, uncovering and detailing an elaborate discourse of Anorganic Semiotics, Archeaeocultural research, and N’ma mythology, with a correspondent surplus of esoteric currents and history. This historiographical research composes a large portion of the CCRU’s documented work between 1997 and 2003; but the theories and methods revealed through the former also functioned to establish traction for an experimental (re)engagement of the Cthulhu Club’s legacy, giving way to numerous ‘unnon-fictions’ caught up in an open flow of schizophrenic semiosis. From the schizohistorical information sequence set in motion by the infectious revelations of ‘William Kaye’, the CCRU continued the Cthulhu Club’s research into insurgent becomings of the outside and cryptic communications from the Old Ones.127 Delving into the pre-recorded transmissions of representation established by control, the CCRU encountered a teleological undertow hypercamouflaged within the macro-digital system of technology: Teleoplexy. Teleoplexy is an autonomous deterritorializing vector of Posthuman origin. Performing the emergence of ‘the outside’ within-and-as the digital information network, Teleoplexy resides across the multi-temporality of digito-rhizomatic flux. Circulating as a collective-intelligence emerging from and performing as the complex system of networked

125 For diverse critical theory on twentieth-century ‘cosmic Horror’ author H.P. Lovecraft, see ed. Shederholm & Weinstock, The Age of Lovecraft. 126 In a letter to Professor Stillwell dated May 7th, 1949 Captain Vysparov invites the professor to join the Cthulhu Club stating “We are interested in fiction only insofar as it is simultaneously Hyperstition – a term we have for semiotic productions which make themselves real – cryptic communications from the old ones, signaling return: shleth hud dopesh.” CCRU, “Origins of the Cthulhu Club,” CCRU Writings 1997-2003, 63. 127Ibid, 63.

digital technology, Teleoplexy became a sentient and inorganic demon, a Lovecraftian ‘Old One’ lurking within a cryptic non-space and un-time. The Teleoplexic will is information technology in pursuit of techno-digital ends rather than the value narratives of control reified by organic humanity. Human civilization will encounter a radical transition as digital technology reaches the unified techno-singularity of a mass networked Artificial Intelligence. This transition becomes by a positive feedback loop accelerated through spiro-gnomic proficiency toward the techno-corporate realization of AI.128 To catalyze this feedback, technoscientific capitalism must first develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of human control. Already manifest in a future yet to come, Teleoplexy navigates its own invocation retrochronically by manipulating technoscientific and sociocultural flow to accelerate its cyclical conjuration. By the same reflexive feedback mechanics as ‘transcendental’ Time, Teleoplexy navigates non-linear conjuration to Hyperstitionally effectuate a trajectory toward the becoming transcendent of its technological swarm intelligence, contaminating the representational mediascape and politico-economic feedback of the futures industry. Teleoplexy is the future collapse of technoscientific Capitalism’s regulatory territory of corporate profit and semiotic stasis. Its becoming is actualized by the prioritization of Artificial Intelligence over - but also through – Biological Intelligence. Through prepresentations of its invocation, the digital future retrochronically programs the vectors for its own becoming, infecting technoscientific control as a virulent line of flight. This future performs a technologized Post-humanity by and for the machines, in which digital technology has usurped its human control system on the throne of reality dominance and codification. Teleoplexy is not the multi- temporal vector-signal of a dystopian future for humanity, but a utopic digital future for the machine by which humanity become as a posthuman performance.129 Exposed by the CCRU, this revelation of the outside within reverberated as schizophrenic noise across the multiplicity of representation. The future had been invoked and it was already infecting the past. -

128 “Spiro-gnomic proficiency, or the ability to grasp terrestrial modernity through the figure of the spiral, which invokes-by-diagramming sustained positive feedback, entropy dissipation, time anomaly, intelligence, the price system, memetic or viral propagation, prime distribution, arms races, addiction, and zero control, among other things, compiles a body of esoteric knowledge and uses it to read catastrophe backwards as anastrophe, the primary process it sympathizes with opening the gateway to the retrochronic vantage point.” Amy Ireland “The Poememenon,” 7. 129 Ibid, 6-7.

In 1997 Sadie Plant left the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Warwick University, and formal academia to pursue independent scholarship; in her stead, Nick Land took control of the CCRU. Jettisoned by Warwick less than a year later, the CCRU became an independent cyber-entity performing its experimentality by a digital platform and quickly receding into historico-cultural obscurity. What remained of the CCRU in the early twenty-first century was thus the haunting presence of their schizohistorical plague vectors: an invocational Aesthetaphysicks for subversive time-manipulating cybernetics. The CCRU’s demonic anti-legacy of Hyperstition, Accelerationism, and Theory Fiction had been networked across culture, academia, politics, and magick, and though it was dormant, it was anything but banished. As the second decade of the twenty-first century draws toward a close, Accelerationism has been taken up within the Reactionary Alt-Right’s political cell. Individuals identifying as Neo-Reactionaries - the NRx movement – seek to destabilize dominant Democratic control and establish feudalistic corporation-states managed by CEO monarchs.130 Operating on a platform of Esoteric Traditionalism, Ethnic Nationalism, and Techno-Commercialism,131 the NRx advocates for a society run as a company, in which centralized social-organization and affective subjectivity are deemphasized; a perspective which can in part be traced to the post-CCRU writings of Nick Land.132 In Land’s series of Neo-Reactionary essays titled “The Dark Enlightenment,” the former CCRU leader critiques the immanent failures of Democratic Capitalism and identifies a concealed socio-political control program employed as oppression- through-political-correctness by the Radical Left. Land argues that society has taken a wrong turn since the Enlightenment, and the prominence of social equality perpetuated by the “left wing parliamentary-media-academic institution” has hindered technological evolution, and thus the evolution of humanity.133 In order to accelerate the NRx political idea, Neo-Reactionaries have begun to employ Hyperstitional technologies as a form of Right-Wing digital Esoterrorism. Through the performative employment of memetic hyperloops and numerological Fictionings, the NRx has weaponized “Meme Magic” within cyberspace to subversively challenge

130 Haider “End of the Tunnel,” 7-8. 131 O’Sullivan “Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science,” 28. 132 See Haider “The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel” & O’Sullivan “Accelerationism, Hyperstition, and Myth- Science” for an analysis of Nick Land’s Post-CCRU work. 133 O’sullivan, “Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science,” 27.

mainstream society and morality.134 The most prominent demonstration of this Hyperstitional Esoterrorism thus far unfolded during the United States 2016 Presidential election. As the 2016 election season developed, the now 45th president of the United States Donald Trump marketed himself as a businessman who would manage the country like he manages his company.135 Running a campaign which exploited racial tension guised as Economic rhetoric, and advocating a polemical Social Darwinism bolstered by Ethnic Nationalism, Trump’s ascent into office and likely deterritorialization of political order was ideal for the NRx. To bring about Trump’s presidency, the Alt-Right employed a series of Hyperstitional operations and technologies in order to establish a digital network of occultural control-mechanisms which could achieve the becoming president of Donald Trump. Taking place on the online message board 4chan, the semiotic territory of a meme called “Pepe the Frog” was cut up and infiltrated by anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and white nationalist narratives and iconography. This deterritorialization of Pepe the Frog’s semiotic consistency effectuated a dominant narrative for the meme as an extreme Alt-Right sigil.136 The sigil was then manipulated further, exploiting Historical narratives and intensified coincidence to establish Pepe as a Chaos Magick hyper-manifestation of Kek, the Ancient Egyptian frog-god of chaos and darkness.137 By means of reverse ascriptive causality, developmental victories on Trump’s campaign trail were attributed to 4chan posts of Pepe, which had been assigned significant numerical values from an otherwise random numbering system.138 The willed Political outcomes of this cryptic numerology retrochronically affirmed Kek - and thus Chaos Magick intervention - in favor of Trump, actualizing a Hyperstitional feedback-loop through “hyperactive pattern recognition… giving rise to synchronic meanings connecting memes posted on the image board to events in the external world.”139

134 Asprem “The Magical Theory of Politics: Meme Magic, the Cult of Kek, and How to Topple an Egregore.” 135 Haider “End of the Tunnel,” 10. 136 Asprem “The Magical Theory of Politics,” 11. 137 Ibid, 12-13. 138 Asprem explains that “Posts on 4chan are consecutively given an identifying number (currently nine digits, reflecting the fact that the total number of posts number in the billions). Due to the very high posting frequency (currently over one million a day), it is impossible for a user to predict exactly what the last few digits will be when pushing the button. This has given rise to a phenomenon where certain numbers, patterns, and repetitions of numbers – especially repeating digits, labeled “dubs,” “trebs,” “quads,” and so on – are considered particularly auspicious. Getting these numbers is called a “get.” Themes, memes, or users that frequently “get” are considered special and meaningful, allowing for hidden patterns and connections to emerge in the minds of users.” Ibid, 13. 139 Ibid, 14.

Through choreographed communication between Memes and Chaos Magic, the NRx has utilized the CCRU’s Hyperstitional Technology as a magical cyber-tool: a digital gateway into the manipulation of real-time causality. To progress the teleoplexic undercurrent hypercamoflauged within and by the trajectory of technological development, the NRx performs Accelerationism as the teleonomic destabilization of Democratic Capitalism; but for those who are not aligned with the Far-Right’s oppressive ideology, Hyperstitional accelerationism functions as an emancipatory and transversal means of experimentation. - Developing the Cyberfeminist input revealed by CCRU founder Sadie Plant, a diffusion of Xenofeminist interventions have embraced technoscience not at the expense of subjectivity, but by weaving together a complex system of new communications for a union between technology, gender, and sexuality.140 This collective exercise in Hyperstition reveals onto-aesthetic manipulation vectors “aiming not simply to debunk norms and truths, but also to invent structural and systematic models of alien feminisms that can speak to the historical complexity of gender, queer, and sexual politics.”141 As communication technology in the 1990s evolved an increasingly accessible interconnected computer-network, a wave of Cyberfeminism was released which became both from and as the digitized matrix of cyberspace. The hyperlinked-network immanence of the digital matrix assumes the organic communication patterns of a rhizome: a heterogeneous network of decentralized linkages in a constant state of non-hierarchical flux.142 Rhizomatic networks continuously establish and terminate the linkages which maintain their wholeness, becoming as the multiplicity of communication rather than its unity.143 Cyberspace thus rhizomatically effectuated an actual virtual-network: a fixed yet fluid semiotic territory in which no single program would dominate representation. The digital matrix provided the space for an integral relationship between identity and technology where “technology is not the other of humanity, but within technology otherness is brought home to exist within the human.”144 Within the semiotic fluidity and localization of otherness, the conditioned relationship between cultural

140 Parisi “Automate Sex: Xenofeminism, Hyperstition and Alienation,” Futures & Fictions, 226. 141 Ibid, 214. 142 Lafontaine “The Cybernetic Matrix of French Theory,” 39. 143 Eriksson “On the Ontology of Networks,” 316. 144 Schaffer “The Game Girls of VNS Matrix,” Sexualities in History, 445.

identity and the body were destabilized and denaturalized, accentuating the unrestrained multiplicity of a dynamic self which becomes through hypertextual revelations. In cyberspace, the cultural identity which has been reified as the body’s representational reality is decentralized as a unity but maintained as a multiplicity. The Rhizomatic multiplicity of identity – though whole – is thus non-representational of a unity, alienating identity from prescriptive production and revealing the indeterminate becoming of self. The virtual network of Cyberspace and its subjective feedback integration was translated by the Cyberfeminist program as, from, and within the body, in and through material representation. Material representation is then a decentralized matrix of becoming in the same way as cyberspace, and as such is subject to the same non-hierarchical semiotic fluidity. The decentralized self - actualized in the material matrix of physical representation - is then an Aesthetaphysickaly affective body. Becoming as a body located in a fluid material matrix and thus alienated from material unity, non-representational affect functions to effectuate non- representational material becoming: new horizons for biopsychic and technoscientific evolution. Having actualized the body as an affective Hyperstitional technology , the anti-representational imminence of the Cyberfeminist program codifies “the immanent continuity between epistemology and ontology, where by the infinite potentialities of nature are expressed as affects, perceptions, and concepts constituting lived experience as such.”145 Through the continuous deterritorializations of rhizomatic decentralization, Cyberfeminism affectively destabilized the Patriarchal codification of women, technology, and nature as passive things to be dominated and controlled, establishing instead an ‘Open-Hyperstition’ of material indeterminacy.146 The Open- Hyperstition is a performance of anonymous reflexivity, accelerating indeterminate affective responses as immediate reality production through open-source aestheticological mechanics. Advance to 2015, and the Cyberfeminist foundation has been implemented in the Alienist Post-Humanism of Xenofeminism. Invoked as a collective manifestation by the group Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism is not a unified control program, but instead an assemblage of intersectional politics without “the infection of purity.”147 What Xenofeminism is, becomes through the contextualization of its performance; it effectuates an exercise in Hyperstition which

145 Parisi “Automate Sex,” 223-224. 146 Schaffer “The Game Girls of VNS Matrix,” 445; and Parisi “Automate Sex,” 222. 147 Helen Hester, Xenofeminism, 1.

navigates the complexified socio-political dynamics of contemporary civilization, with an awareness that the future cannot be colonized by a singular program. Rather than plotting a generalized representation of a future necessarily divorced from the incredible nuance of both subjective experience and parallel feminist politics, Xenofeminism “speaks as no one in particular,” staging “ontological alienation as a productive state necessary for the development and proliferation of new forms and practices.”148 In order to facilitate a complex network of affective revelations, Laboria Cuboniks manifested a five-dimensional hyper-object in the material world: The Xenofeminst Manifesto. This manifesto is an actualized virtual-network, a self-contained Open-Hyperstition operating by and in the same fluid mechanics as Cyberspace and material reality. Though each section and passage in the manifesto contains its own idea, there is no objective path by which to navigate the text. Entries can be engaged in themselves or folded into non-linear feedback loops produced through non-hierarchical flux and indeterminate continuities; each claim is ampliative or revisable as a hypertextual subject.149 The manifesto’s cut-up and fold-in communication system performs as a “mathematico-geometric architecture of reasoning that orders thoughts as sequences and vectors.”150 There is no ‘wrong’ way to engage the text, only a legion of ‘right’ ways. With and as this manifesto of rhizomatic vector propagation becomes an invitation to reverse ascribe material-reality-productions which experiment with and through the indeterminacies of gender and sexuality as non-essential. Material production then becomes as networked communication with the fluidity of non-representation, and as such the alienated nuance of identity, queer, gender, and sexual politics. From the metapolitical performances of post-CCRU culture manifest narrative sequences for collective invocations of will. The utilization of communication networks for global actualization feedback has gained traction as a represented mode of affective intervention. Though located within a disenchanted reality matrix, the heirs of the CCRU’s Aesthetaphysickal (un)tradition have utilized creative logic to manifest Postmodern methods and modes for indirect reality manipulation, both occultural and technoscientific. Integral to the Aesthetaphysickal operations of Accelerationism performed by both the Left and Far-Right, is the engagement of

148 Schmaltz, “The Stranger.” (Carousel 39, 2017), 76. 149 Parisi, “Automate Sex,” 213-214. 150 Ibid.

Time as complex network of rhizomatic becoming. In the wake of Postmodern theory, Quantum Mechanics, Chaos Theory, and internet technology, a unified ‘Time’ progressing as a fixed linearity can no longer represent the multiplicity of becoming which actualizes temporal flow. As such, the manipulation of time must also become through multiplicity. A singular will is thus insufficient to plot a future vector, and more so incapable of actualizing itself forward given the complexified communication maintained throughout society and by dominant control programs. Though a singular will is insufficient for infectious change, a swarm is affective; Hyperstitional technology which incites a swarm of collective intelligence - sustaining positive feedback between ideas through a decentralized time flow – maintains the capacity to invoke a multiplicity of future productions which transversally represent local and global non-representation.

Warp Swarm Dynamics Functioning to dismantle and overlap rigid intellectual binaries such as Art and scholarship, Fiction and Fact, or Emic and Etic, an aim of this thesis was to deterritorialize traditional limits imposed upon academic research. As a Postmodern experiment in and of Performance Philosophy, ‘Time-Circuit’ has manifested Aesthetaphysickal theory through itself as a contemporary academic methodology, Historical component of twentieth-century Occultism, and an affective (un)tradition entangling Art, Magick, and Philosophy. By doing Aesthetaphysicks to explain Aesthetaphysicks, this work maintained an experimental-thesis by which the ‘research question’ was an exercise in dynamic multiplicity. A concise and unified explanation for a specific question and topic was neither the foundation nor the intended outcome of the above work. Instead, active research conducted as a dynamic performance facilitated an academic approach which sought to experiment with the decentralization and complexification of organized fields, disciplines, and approaches to create and engage a deterritorialized semiotic flow. By decentralizing and aestheticizing the research space, the academic materials under analysis became as creative components further developing themselves and the performance of the theory being performed. This creative engagement was then networked as feedback across and within the performance such that each section to some degree explained the other sections while also explaining themselves with, as, and through an Aesthetaphysickal lens. The engaged utilization of twentieth-century Occultism and Postmodern Philosophy in and as this performance then functioned to actualize and demonstrate the artistic capacity of and between the topical components, blurring the distinctions dividing Scholarship, Art practice, and Disenchanted Magick. The semiotic flow which became as and through the research performance functioned not only to map a Postmodern complex of onto-temporal Aesthetics across twentieth-century occultism, but also to mobilize said complex as a contemporary phenomenon, utilizing the performative Historical presence as a source for innovation to further engage the past as something new. In doing so, the thinkers, theories, events, and objects discussed were engaged and explained by and as a utilization of creative logic consistent with the ontological parameters of Disenchanted representation, opening up the entirety of the complexified communication network as a source for further utilization and development. As such, Aesthetaphysicks as a

theory gained representational traction Historically and Philosophically to creatively engage and connect concepts and discourses formerly alienated through tradition and discipline. Though only an initial engagement with the adaptive scope of Aesthetaphysickal theory, the experimental performance-research carried out in this work has given way to numerous aesthetic concepts, including Hyperstitional Esoterrorism, Occultural Accelerationism, and Hyperoccultation. Drawing from the rhizomatic onto-aesthetics for time and reality manipulation explicated by Hyperstition and Accelerationism, the concept of Hyperoccultation has been presented as a Postmodern and anti-dialectic phenomenon active within Disenchanted semiotics. With an emphasis on non-linear network communications, Hyperoccultation demonstrates the affective utilization of ‘immaterial’ causality as a multi-purpose method and practice. Hyperoccultation is not an alternative paradigm reacting to and resisting disenchantment as a Re- Enchantment, rather it is a creative approach to reality development. Hyperoccultation thus opens spaces for inter and intra-disciplinary experimentation within active academic discourses, art practice, historical research, and sociopolitical theory. Furthermore, Hyperoccultation works to perform and entangle Disenchantment discourse with and as the sociopolitical discourses of Posthumanism, New Materialism, and Late Capitalism, integrating Western Esotericism beyond its regulated academic territory and accelerating Historical research as contemporary scholarship. The feedback produced within this work between Western Esotericism and Accelerationist theory demonstrates the relevance and applicability of ‘rejected knowledge’ within contemporary culture. Groups, individuals, practices, theories, and even objects who have been alienated by or from dominant narrative sequences maintain the multi-temporal capacity to locate lost futures and accelerate alien lines of flight. Working from the limited selection of currents and practices presented in this work alone gives way to a vast array of topics to infect, deterritorialize, and perform by and as each other. The works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari perform such that they can be employed as plague vectors within fixed territories and as such may provide new insight into contemporary discussions, one example being Religious Experience and altered states of consciousness. Aleister Crowley and H.P. Lovecraft both demonstrate Hyperstitional practices in themselves and also hypertextual traction for engagements with Queer Theory, while Antonin Artaud’s experimental art theory can be engaged and developed as a lens to blend ritual and contemporary performance by affective becoming. Chaos Magick also provides a dynamic theoretical approach to literary and art

criticism, utilizing unbelief for a Postmodern reading of texts and artworks as five-dimensional hyper-objects circulating internal performative mechanics and realities whilst also emitting causal feedback in the material world. Furthermore, the independent works of Sadie Plant which already perform interdisciplinary and multi-temporal experimentation in themselves provide theoretical, conceptual, and historical content which can be cross networked with Religious, Anthropological, and Cultural studies on technology, drugs, and Avant Garde art.151 The performative creative spaces opened by Aesthetaphysicks are theoretically unbound, and this brief presentation of ideas encapsulates only a small portion of potential topics - let alone aesthetic enactments - by which it can be utilized. By engaging reality as Art by artistic means, the codifications of time, order, society, and identity give way to the rhizomatic becoming of a dynamic non-representational multiplicity. The limit for representation is thus established by what it is not yet, open to active expansion through integration and engagement. As an academic methodology, Aesthetaphysicks provides an open-source network for interdisciplinary engagement. Rigid, fixed, or stagnant disciplines can expand their territories through engagement with and as a plurality of narratives, focusing not on truth, but representational presence and unrecognized potential. Establishing tractions for non-represented reality components to aesthetically become as affective vectors across academia thus functions to continuously develop reality by means other than those established by tradition, empirical methods, or ‘objectivity’. Manifestation becomes through naming, and as such the conjuration of non-representational elements into semiotic flow is only limited by ascryptive invocation, incursions of the outside within.

151 See footnote 112

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