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
1
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
2
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.”
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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.
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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-7Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 156-162.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ppre-representations) 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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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 socio-political 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,
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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 re-presentations 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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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,
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
