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. 1 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. 2 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.” 3 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