-
Discussion
-
Hi, I would like to make a small critique of hyperstition. Read to the end for my critique of hypostition, I would argue that hyperstition and hypostition are the same things (because hyperstition doesn’t work, except as a branding exercise).
First of all, I would just point out that this theory might only exist to provide intellectual cover for doing chaos magick sigil work; but what is most interesting about chaos sigils is their resemblance to corporate logos. And this leads me to conclude that “hyperstition” is merely a fancy name for corporate branding propaganda. But, like corporate marketing campaigns, it doesn’t function as advertised.
So the Hegelian bit: hyperstition claims to create a feedback loop between “theory-fictions” and reality. So far, so good. But what the theory misses is the MOVEMENT OF THE CONCEPT, and particularly, the movement from indeterminate abstraction to actual. So for instance, if someone comes up with a catchy slogan to sell shoes, “Just do it!” that slogan actually has no meaning yet. It can’t function as a telos because it has no content. It’s a floating signifier.
Only as it is developed in the concrete marketing campaign, does “Just do it!” come to mean “Just buy our brand of shoes!” But in the process, the MEANING OF “JUST DO IT” also changes, over time it becomes associated with all the specific images and phrases that are developed over the course of the marketing campaign. But what is crucial here is that in the beginning, it doesn’t really mean anything.
Okay, so now for a CCRU example of failed hyperstition: “AFROFUTURISM.” Kodwo Eshun wrote about some interesting music and musicians in “More Brilliant than the Sun.” But rather than engaging in the existing discourse, he tried to do some kind of abstract theory-fiction. It might be fun to read, but if the goal was to create new theoretical tools, this approach was a complete failure.
The reason it is a complete failure is that Eshun didn’t successfully create a new concept; instead, by taking the easy road and writing stuff that simply sounded cool, he left the concept of afrofuturism underdeveloped. In other words, “Afrofuturism” then just became a floating signifier, available in the general discourse of music for anyone who wanted to use it.
As a result, the term has now become completely meaningless. It has absolutely no content.
So to bring it back to hyperstition: What is the TELOS of the concept “Afrofuturism”? Isn’t it the case that rather than generate some new alternative future, the gravitational force of the existing system just pulled the “afrofuturism” concept into orbit, where it became another floating signifier, referring mainly to the industrial production of musical commodities by the black community as such? And that means that hyperstition is good for BRANDING. If Eshun’s goal was to promote specific musical acts as afrofuturist, and to create a desire to experience and consume commodities labeled as afrofuturist, then perhaps his conceptual intervention was a success!
So the moral of the story is, you can come up with theory-fictions, and you can change reality, but reality also changes you, and the way the changes manifest will be dependent on the available phase spaces in the existing system, and the way all the parts interact, which is unpredictable. And in regards to coining new concepts, given the low level of current general education, I have to ask, “how many words do we actually need to describe the same old BS?”
Also, fyi–hypostition IS hyperstition; from a dialectical point of view, the problem with hypostition is the inability to recognize that one’s IDEAL CONCEPTS of social justice have to be ACTUALIZED in reality as concrete social structures, otherwise either the concepts have no content, or they only have negative content, or they do have content, but the content can only be that of the status quo itself. So you get narratives that glorify victims, while offering no path for the victim to achieve genuine liberation and equality with everyone else, or you get progressive capitalist anti-racism and “equity,” which are intended more to ensure that the system operates smoothly, than to bring about any situation of actual justice.
If you adopt the dialectical perspective that concepts have to be actualized through some real historical process, and we only fully understand what the concepts are, as they unfold meaning through the process, then it becomes clear that “prefigurative politics” implies taking over concepts of social justice directly from an unjust capitalist society; this form of politics seems to suggest that we can know and predict the future perfectly, and that we can then perfectly represent that future using current language and current ideas, even though our ideas are completely conditioned by the need to survive and reproduce ourselves within a system dominated by Capital.
Log in to reply.
