This presentation was delivered to the Philosophy Club at my local university on 9/5/24. I didn't present any particularly new or groundbreaking information, all of this can be caught on a podcast with Robin Mackay that I've linked to on this website previously on Jampack Vol. 3. What follows is mostly just a synopsis in the form of lecture notes, as well as a sort-of synopsis of one of the short stories. Not particularly creative work but it got everything I wanted across. The working title of this presentation was Time Wars and Hyperstitional Fiction: An Introduction to the CCRU
but eventually I decided to simplify it since hardly any of the information is my own.
The origins of the CCRU lay in a derelict office at the University of Warwick. The year was 1997. A horrid vortice of hyperstitional dreamworks and theory-fictions were patched together by a ragtag group of punk theorists and pop artisans, their influence remained subterranean for over a decade. The history of the CCRU is ultimately the history of three principal writers and theorists, with an assortment of other artists and PhD students all collaborating together on this creative project. The three in question: Sadie Plant, noted cyberfeminist, Nick Land, the forefather of accelerationism and the Dark Enlightenment, who’s one of the first anglosphere interpreters of the cowritten works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the late Mark Fisher, known for later attempts to develop a left-wing accelerationist line of thought by continuing the work of Marcuse, Deleuze/Guattari, and Lyotard to create leftist political thought centered around a politics of desire, you could call it a kind of Freudo-Marxism, as well as his tragic passing from suicide in 2017. Towards the end of his life he was beginning to outline a line of thought which he would refer to as ambiguously as “Acid Communism.”
Robin Mackay, only there for the beginning of the CCRU, left before the weider stuff started to happen in the later CCRU writings. Mostly there when these ideas were there in embryo. Punked around in Warwick, disappointed by Descartes, fascinated by symbolic logic due to computer programming background. Chose a course on Nietzsche where he met Nick Land, described as very generous with his time and attention and very charismatic. Very positive person despite what he writes about. Would talk to anyone and engage with anyone on any level. Bit of a shifting group around him where they’d meet at the bar and talk with him. Philosophy pokes around black desperation, a tortuous practice, but very exciting. Very much people drinking in a bar at first, with a sense of there being a group. Not particularly organized, not particularly academic. People from different departments in that group. Physisicsts, law students, literature students, business students, all centered around complexity theory and emergence, engaged with the new realm of the internet.
Started working on a fanzine but didn’t even know what a fanzine was at the time. Too punk to know what punk things were. Made from photocopies. Sent out a message on a Cyberculture Mailing List where he gathered people for the first 2 issues of Collapse. (Only made 2 because at the time he said he was kind of lazy.) PhD students started to group around Nick Land, many people seemed to be excited to work with him.
The CCRU was around then invented as a vehicle for Sadie Plant to set up a research center in Warwick, designed to formalize this vague area of study that had been emerging. An attempt to understand these processes of digitazation and how the human could be understood, as well as nascent research on cybernetics. She brought about 5 or 6 of her PhD students from where she was previously, one of which was Mark Fisher. Brought people who weren’t trained in philosophy but have backgrounds in thinking about culture and were disenchanted with the current model of cultural studies. The philosophy department was reportedly not happy with the intrusion of the CCRU and what they thought wasn’t proper philosophy.
He met Mark and the other people who hung around which were essentially a theory gang called Switch, would show up to conferences and stand in a line with a microphone intonating theory-fictional stream of consciousness. Very much attracted to the idea of theory as performance or as a cultural object in its own right, not talking about culture and talking down to culture without itself being culture. Warwick at the time had a pioneering field of study for philosophy and literature, a hotbed of research. One of the few UK universities that did continental philosophy at all. Uneasy cohabitation with the analytic side of the department.
When Sadie set up the CCRU at Warwick there was already a cybernetic culture program at her previous university at the time. The environment became so hostile that the official existence of the cybernetic culture program only lasted about 6 or 9 months, wasn’t there for a long time. The CCRU at first was sort of a support group for these university exiles, ended up merging with the people which were already around Nick Land. Asked nicely and were given a bare office at the end of a corridor where they wrote CCRU on the door. Simply a name on a door in a room that didn’t really exist. An optimism that the disciplinary model was no longer good enough and something new was needed to make sense of culture and complexity. Became this institution inside the academy physically but outside conceptually.
Feedback and feedback loops, a hugely important concept for the CCRU. Negative feedback, a system adjusts itself to any excitations coming from outside to preserve its identity. Think of a thermostat. Thinking how things maintain themselves in a hostile environment, how do they stay the same. Nick and Sadie were trying to foreground positive feedback, foreground instances in which rather than adjusting itself to stay the same, the system would take in energy and escalate and transform and change into something else. The prime example for them being capitalism, rather than being stable, takes in exponential amounts of energy and outputs tremendous amounts of change. Merging of pop layers and punk layers. Culture is a type of production and cybernetics is the best way to understand production, thus we need a cybernetic theory of culture.
Burroughs is one of the links to the occult angle, being a member of a chaos magick collective called the Illuminates of Thanateros. Taking a lot of ideas from Burroughs and slotting them into this new framework. The CCRU was involved in attempts to think of science fiction authors philosophically. “Did you know there’s a guy in the philosophy department who thinks he’s a cyborg who comes from the future?” Nick was already using science fiction tropes in his works and presentation. Trying to point philosophy to the future and we can’t keep working with these ancient models of the human and being, all being dismantled bit by bit by capitalism. The content and form of the thinking is science fiction, the text itself is a cybernetic machine that excites the reader and brings them to this virtual space, using the reader as a channel for positive feedback. 1. Understand how cybernetic machines and age of technology infilitrates culture and 2. Understanding how culture itself is a cybernetic machine. Nick Land used this line of thinking to understand early cyberpunk authors like William Gibson, threw in a bit of Predator and Terminator (as well as Blade Runner), which were essential texts for the CCRU. The Time aspects of Terminator show up quite a bit in CCRU works, as well as the writings on the Lemurian Time War. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, all of these guys show up and are in whom science fiction and philosophical speculation are all entangled and inextricable. The CCRU is an attempt to extend this tradition rather than study it from the outside. Writing with the compelling character of fiction and the theoretical equipment of philosophy.
They all jumped ship and left Warwick at some point and lived above some kind of body shop, the time from which most of these writings date, and when this became quite an intense production. More intense after they left Warwick, coagulating all of this into a consistent framework without any other outlet or official status or reason to do it. Feverishly following this line of thinking. To Mackay, the amazing thing about the CCRU was that a lot of it genuinely just came from nowhere, a dimension that is to this day strange and inexplicable about how this disturbing consistency arose from such a messy situation. Nick, Anna, and Mark all later found out that where they were living in the house where Aleister Crowley was born.
The driving idea of the Numogram is essentially being a subversion of Qabbala and the Tree of Life and therefore a large part of the occult tradition, as well as its connection to numerology. Devised as being an occult instrument that doesn’t require believing in anything, a radially open occult tool. Simply a thing that works based on the numbers that we know that’s based on elementary arithmetic, forms a solid basis for doing this work. Around this is the whole system of demons, which Mackay likens to I-Ching, a way in which to look at the world once you know enough about the Numogram, you enter into its consitency and begin to see the world the way the Numogram sees the world. Around that you have this whole series of stories of how the Numogram was discovered and stories about all of these fictional characters associated with it. A fictional universe that draws you into the system. A whole apparatus designed to bring you into the world through the fiction. Draws you into philosophical thinking about time.
Time and time travel. They essentially ask Mackay at this point, is they serious? Mackay says it’s the wrong question, a temptation to think about belief. The question is one of producing machines, the text is a machine that produces a certain intensity in the reader, the texts themselves are essentially occult workings that help change how you see the world regardless of your belief in it, for him belief is besides the point. Everyone involved in this scene became dazed and confused afterwards, something strange going on there in building this collective way of thinking about reality that was very far removed from the everyday conceptual model. Something fascinating to him about the fact that in 2001 no one knew or cared about what this was, but only in the interconnected online world that we have with social media becomes the best place and time to talk about and explore this kind of material, people are now insane enough to take this seriously. We can now no longer understand the present from concepts of the past, so the only way we can make sense of the present is through projecting ourselves into the future.
Here he goes into Kant and Transcendental Philosophy, where we can only experience appearance. Appearance and noumenon (the something outside apart from the appearance), we’re always trapped in time in space, ties to Burroughs and us being trapped in this reality studio and brought to suspicions about reality and who’s in control of it. Our experience is constructed from space and time and something outside of both space and time. Psychoanalysis itself involved in a form of time travel, a manipulation of time, which from the normal view of time should make impossible. The CCRU brings these philosophical stories about time which ends up heavily influenced by things like Marvel Comics and science fiction, where we get into the AOE whose whole objective is to secure time and make sure no one doubts that things move in a certain sequence and we can’t get out of it, you’re trapped in the timeline and everything’s determined forever. In order for the AOE and time police to be there, there are in fact some leakages and escape routes. Something gets in from outside choronological time, and outside of the present itself. This, then becomes the other side, the Lemurians, who travel outside of the timeline and connect things in this disordered and anamalous way. Creating a vocabulary to talk about reality differently where you create this micro-culture where you all talk about reality differently and reinforce each other and then think and experience reality differently, which inherently needed to be consistent and outside the normal story, the AOE story.
Mark’s specific contribution: goes back to the question of pop and pop culture. When he first arrived at Warwick and he’d talk about stuff from stuff from cultural studies and Robin would talk about Kant and they’d have these weird conversations where they try to meet in the middle. Descibes him as a receptive thinker who loved to grasp things and redeploy them. He said he has to think through pop culture, through movies or music or comics. His signature is “let’s not just have the numogram, let’s not just have this device with numbers on it, or these demons with funny names, but let’s also have this other layer of Marvel comics like storylines with all these characters and serve as a way to bring in a reader who’s not really necessarily conscious of where they’re going with it and end up discovering this thing called the Numogram, and you ask, is this an actual thing? Is the story true? Or is the story made up based on the fact that the diagram is a real thing?” Thinking rigorous philosophy through pop culture could’ve only come from someone who understands that while you’re reading a Marvel comic you’re reading philosophy already, reading about insane powers and forces beyond the human realm, something which is already going on in philosophy itself.
The history of the CCRU is essentially a reassembled history itself. A post-traumatic therapy situation where they try to discuss what the hell happened and try to build some kind of continuous timeline. Neither philosophy, nor fiction, nor theory. Something where you want the ideas to engage with the wider culture, not purely academic. What’s always at stake is the idea of finding some way of thinking of time that enables one to negotiate with contradictory stances towards the linearity of time.
The work of the CCRU would’ve been impossible without the work of Dr. Echidna Stillwell, but unfortunately there’s only scant biographical information. As far as her academic credentials, she had done pioneering ethnographic research on one of the three main N’ma tribes of Indonesia and had later been appointed the head of the Hydro-History Department at Miskatonic Virtual Univeristy. Although later into the 1970’s her work had fallen into disrepute, especially due to her works attracting attention primarily from occultists and poets. The first writing that goes into significant detail of her work and expeditions is found in the second section of the book entitled “The Cthulhu Club.” We’ll return to this later.
This first writing, called “The Vault of Murmurs” describes a young Stillwell in Indonesia in 1925 upon her first contact with the indigenous population that would be the subject of her ethnographic study, but she would also take upon herself the task of jotting down as much information as she could into their religion, elaborate mythologies, and rituals which would later be collected into a larger volume of dubious esteem. At the time the writing takes place, she had been under the spell of the works of Sigmund Freud and was looking for the chance to turn that interest into practical fieldwork, which lead to her wanting to study the reported traditions of dream-sorcery among the Mu N’ma, one of the remaining N’ma tribes. She begins to describe how the N’ma people broadly speaking first came into the public conscience due to the detailed expeditionary works of one Cecil Curtis, as well as the tragedy surrounding his expedition itself. Although the details of Curtis’ journey focused primarily on the Tak N’ma, another one of the three tribes, there was enough evidence of the dream rites of the Mu N’ma to provoke a deep seated interest in the young Stillwell.
One of the first things she mentions about the N’ma tribes is that firstly, it had a tripartite structure, and this structure had been seriously destablized from the 1883 eruption of the volcano Krakatoa. The Tak N’ma tribe that Curtis had perviously discovered had been totally destroyed in this eruption, and the third tribe, the Dib N’ma had been nearly decimated. She remarks “An atmosphere of terrible desperation overhung them, and I could be under no illusion that the Mu N’ma were little more than a shadow of what they had been prior to the cataclysm. These were a haunted people, whose continued survival seemed a dubious blessing at best.”
So, she describes that due to this intense, apocalyptic atmosphere that she found herself in, she took a renewed interest in the expiditionary works of Cecil Curtis and started retracing some of his steps while reading fragments from his journals. She notes that most people would’ve taken his diary entries to be the ravings of a madman half-insane from an exhausted delirium coupled with his witnessing of the rites and rituals of the Tak N’ma, but due to her interest in Freud, she really couldn’t help herself and took to reading over his journal entries trying to piece together whatever hidden threads she could. Here we can get into the first entries she notes:
17th July, 1883. I know now that I will never leave this place. The jungle is rotting me into nothingness. My supplies are exhausted. Clouds of mosquitos torment me and I am plagued by the pounding, crushing, smothering heat.
28th July, 1883. I have broken from everything, in any case participated in something abominable, behind the tattered masks of man and God. Christian civilization is no better than the prancing of savages, how could human fellowship exist after this?
She remarks later that Curtis seemed to confront an awful revelation whose horror couldn’t be reduced to either the malaria or witnessing of violent, ferocious rituals, but rather, that both of these he seemed to imply were part of some senseless pattern in which his whole life was always fated to be engulfed. Here she also begins to detail that she began to have dreams which featured Curtis heavily, and also began to have dreams which seemed to be her seeing the Indonesian jungles through his disease darkened eyes.
Finally, she starts going into a little bit about the Mu N’ma culture itself, although saying that her initial enthusiasm was a bit at odds with the “oppressive subdued” atmosphere that she found herself in. She says that it’s evident that the Mu N’ma culture was indeed based upon a system of dream magic, in which the Nago, or Dream Witch, occupied an exalted position. Describing the role of the Nago, she says they’re responsible for oracles, medicine, the settlement of disputes, advice and counsel. Those who seek her wisdom would make solitary pilgrimages to her temple, bearing appropriate gifts. A simple ritual follows, during which they would offer a sacrifice as well as make requests of the witch. It was said that on the following night they would receive a Nagwi, or dream visit. She also mentions that the Nago themselves never speak in person, but only in dreams. She also mentions that when she had asked to visit the Nago, the Mu elders merely nodded, showing neither enthusiasm nor any kind of hostility and greeted her request with the same sense of fated inevitability with which they seemed to accept all matters.
At this point, I simply got out the book and started reading the rest of the short story itself. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, it was the only one I had time to go into. I would've loved to do Tick Delirium or the short biography of Oscar Sarkon. I was also unable to go into detail about the workings of the Numogram itself, perhaps a Part II can become so.
Another thing I’d like to highlight is the difference between the concept of Hyperstition with that of superstition, whereas superstition is often something inherited and relative to the culture you’re already familiar with and immersed in, like whether or not you believe you’ll die if you leave a fan on overnight, or whether or not you need to knock on word after you say something that could “jinx” someone, Hyperstition on the other hand is a sort of self-aware mutilation of superstition, by making intentionality and sociality a necessary component of its construction, we’re given by the CCRU the tools to make creative use of coincidences, and the Numogram is one of those creative tools we’re given. It’s up to us whether or not to use it. The basic maxim of hyperstition, as given by the Dib N’ma is “Perhaps it can become so.” Hyperstitional fiction and hyperstition itself is in a sense always unsure of itself due to this necessity for social negotiation in the form of “hype.” Hyperstitional fiction, or theory-fiction, or whatever you want to call it, occupies a space of radical ambiguity between the mode of theoretical and scientific expression that is theory, as well as the penchant for character creation and worldbuilding that’s part and parcel of fiction. It tells you, “hey, it’s okay to do both.” Not everyone will like it, and not everyone will think it’s either proper philosophy or proper fiction, but as long as I continue to read and re-read the works of the CCRU, and as long as they continue to exert some kind of hold on me, I think the results speak for themselves if you choose to read them. Ultimately, this work has been so important to me, because I feel like it opens up so many different creative doors and offers a way to get out of the disciplinary silo.