Text page
Simon O' Sullivan - Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science
A substantial later essay that ties hyperstition to myth-science, temporal feedback, and the aesthetic engineering of futures.
Archive condition
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Core idea
O'Sullivan argues that hyperstition is best understood not as irrational belief but as a pragmatic operation on narrative, myth, and time. Myth-science names a way of fabricating carriers and worlds that can feed back into reality.
The essay works by setting accelerationist discourse beside CCRU procedures such as cartography, mythos, and unbelief. That allows it to recast hyperstitional practice as an experimental aesthetics of navigation rather than a cult of mere speed.
This matters because it gives one of the clearest later accounts of how hyperstition can be politically and artistically retooled. It keeps the concept connected to practice, fiction-engineering, and temporal recursion.
How to read this text
Read the first definitional section and the numbered CCRU procedures with care. They provide the operational core of the essay.
Then follow how myth-science is positioned against simpler stories about acceleration or belief. The key move is from speed to narrative engineering.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 36
Here an explicit Science Fiction narrative accompanies the more theoretical work of re-patterning Deleuze-Guattarian desiring-production - by way of Norbert Wiener - as cybernetics (the laying out of a machinic unconscious).14 Positive feedback loops (another name for hyperstition) are pitched against the stabilization effect of negative ones: the call is for ever more mutation and deviation from the norm.
Definition · paragraph 78
Hyperstition, likewise, has a future orientation, suggesting, as it does, the possibility of positive feedback loops in which what was fiction becomes real (indeed, this is the force (and attraction) of hyperstition). But hyperstition also mobilises a mythos, which, at least in some instantiations, can work against the invention of this people.
Definition · paragraph 31
Certainly the introduction of any fictional or mythic narrative into this strictly rational and pragmatic programme is at odds with its own self-definition. In terms of Brassier’s own Promethean attitude we might make the claim that mythos is precisely contra science and rationality, and, indeed, that it would involve a deployment of something more ‘folk’, the reinforcement of a manifest image as against the scientific image (not least as it privileges belief over proof).
Mechanism · paragraph 6
I want to begin this brief exploration of accelerationism and hyperstition - in relation to what I call (following Sun Ra and Mike Kelly) ‘myth-science’1 - with a quote from the essay ‘Escape Velocities’ by Alex Williams (one of the co-authors of the ‘The Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’ (MAP)) and which itself offers some proposals on what form an accelerationist aesthetics make take:
Mechanism · paragraph 44
12 (2014) http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/missing-subject-accelerationism (accessed January 23, 2015). 23 In terms of these experimental encounters and conjunctions see also my ‘Art Practice as Fictioning (or, Myth-Science)’, diakron, no. 1 (2014). http://www.diakron.dk (accessed January 23, 2015).
Appears in sections
Hyperstition and Fiction-Making Primary section
The archive's central model of fiction as causal force, feedback loop, and world-making process.