Alien Rhythms

There was only one thing that I didn't like. In the very back of the garage, near the canisters, I could see something silvery. That hadn't been there before. Well, all right, so there was something silvery, we couldn't go back now just because of that! I mean it didn't shine in any special way, just a little bit and in a calm, even a gentle way. I got up, brushed myself off, and looked around. There were the trucks on the lot, just like new. Even newer than they had been the last time I was here. And the gasoline truck, the poor bastard was rusted through and ready to fall apart. I didn't like the looks of that tire. Its shadow wasn't right. The sun was at our backs, yet its shadow was stretching towards us. Well, all right, it was far enough away from us. It seemed OK, we could get on with our work. But what was the silvery thing shining back there? Was it just my imagination? Now, the thing to do would be to light up, sit down quietly and think it through—what’s the silver stuff above the canisters … why is the tire’s shadow like that? The Vulture Burbridge told me something about the shadows, that they were weird but harmless. Something happens here with the shadows. But what about that silver stuff? It looks just like a cobweb. What sort of spider could have left it behind? I had never seen any bugs in the Zone.  

—Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic 

What is the schema of the spider? The schema of the spider is its web, and its web is the way it occupies space and time. … [T]ake the concept of a spider; the concept of a spider will include all of its anatomical parts and even the physiological functions of the spider. Thus one will encounter that funny sort of organ with which the spider makes its web. But can you deduce from it what we can now call the spatio-temporal being, and the correspondence of the web with the concept of a spider, which is to say with the spider as organism. It’s very curious because it varies enormously according to the species of spider. There are cases of very extraordinary spiders that, when you mutilate one of their legs, which is nevertheless not used for fabrication, make abnormal webs in relation to their own species, they make a pathological web. What happened? As if a disturbance in space and time corresponded to the mutilation. 

 —Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Schema and Synthesis’, Lectures on Kant

Alienness — and the alienation that results from a confrontation with alienness — is the genesis of novelty and change. Wherever one encounters the alien, a mutation or a transformation isn’t far behind. And yet, because alienness involves an aspect of unknowability and unpredictability — an erasure of the familiar and the homely — it is also one of the things in the world which makes us most afraid. We fear the different and the strange, yet we require these things in order to evolve. This makes for a paradoxical affective relationship with the notions of otherness and difference that alienness encompasses — a bizarre and complex orientation unifying dread and desire. Already there is a kind of geometrical confusion in this: desire drives you forwards, while dread forces you back. As Mark Fisher writes in The Weird and The Eerie, it’s not a simple case of ‘enjoy[ing] what scares us’. Rather, ‘it has … to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience’, an affect that involves terror and distress, but isn’t wholly described by them.[0] Fisher’s invocation of ‘the outside’ immediately brings into play the prefix ‘xeno-’, a denotation nominating what follows it as foreign or alien — an ‘outsider’, someone or something that arrives from the outside.

Scrap Metal and Fabric: Weaving as Temporal Technology

The city is the force of striation that re-imparts smooth space, puts it back into operation everywhere, on earth and in the other elements, outside but also inside itself. The smooth spaces arising from the city are not only those of worldwide organisation, but also of a counterattack combining the smooth and the holey and turning back against the town: sprawling, temporary, shifting shantytowns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap metal and fabric, patchwork, to which the striations of money, work, or housing are no longer even relevant.

—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Since this is only going to be a short fifteen-minute talk, I'm going to present my argument very simply, and in form of a philosophical conspiracy theory.

It begins, like all good conspiracy theories, with a mysterious prophecy.

Prophecy

In the enigmatic closing line of Zeros + Ones, Sadie Plant refers to Ada Lovelace's quiet development of the world's first working, fully-implementable, computer program — which Lovelace related to the invention of the Jacquard loom insofar as both realised a form of weaving — as 'a code for the numbers to come'. On the surface, the import of this sentence is simple enough. But it is more than just a superficial reference to the history of computation, time and the complex entanglements of both with women.

Ada Lovelace, who has only moments prior, called herself a prophet, cannot recognise the mark of either a woman or a man in her own writing. She has also just evoked in her assessment of her work's relationship to history, a temporality that any reader of Nietzsche would immediately (and not unironically) recognise as the 'untimely'. The 'numbers to come' is a deliberate echo of the Deleuzean 'people to come' which is an intentional remixing of two passages from Nietzsche, the second of which is the most intriguing for us (from Zarathustra):

Wake and listen, you lonely ones! From the future come winds with secretive wingbeats; good tidings are issued to delicate ears. You lonely of today, you withdrawing ones, one day you shall be a people: from you who have chosen yourselves a chosen people shall grow — and from them the overhuman.[0]

The 'code for the numbers to come’ is an enciphered premonition of the overhuman, one coincident with the intrusion of the untimely into linear history behind the mask of Lovelace's algorithm.

The Tomb of Dead Hyperstition

‘As Cage says, it is of the nature of the plan(e) that it fail. Precisely because it is not a plan(e) of organization, development, or formation, but of nonvoluntary transmutation. Or Boulez: “Program the machine so that each time a tape is played on it, it produces different time characteristics.” So the plan(e)—life plan(e), writing plan(e), music plan(e)—must necessarily fail for it is impossible to be faithful to it; but the failures are a part of the plan(e) for the plan(e) expands or shrinks along with the dimensions of that which it deploys in each instance (planitude of n dimensions). A strange machine that is simultaneously a machine of war, music, and contagion-proliferation-involution.’ (ATP)

A nascent hyperstition (provisionally –––⦅ ) becomes a successful hyperstition ( –––< ) under certain specific conditions—carrier proliferation, cybernetic uptake, memetic vigour, insertion into functional circuits of long range positive feedback, mutant suppleness (or - ‘making itself up as it goes along’ [Carver])—all, significantly, beyond the control of the hyperstitional cyberneticist. As Marc Couroux (whose reality is yet to be rigorously confirmed) reminds us by way of NLP: “[t]here is no failure, only feedback” in an immanent system.

With success emphatically decoupled from control ('all planning is theopolitics, and theopolitics is cybernetics in a swamp') and pushed out into the unpredictability of the system itself, what does it mean for a hyperstition to ‘fail’? Do we know of any that have? (Where do they go?) Positive feedback is a basic requirement, but then what?

Truth and falsity fall into irrelevance as reliable measures of failure or success, for it is the effect of hyperstition to destabilize the oppositional relationship between these terms precisely by manufacturing the former out of the latter. Traditional epistemology is among hyperstition’s most prized victims. It is impossible to ‘be faithful to’ the plan(e), just as it is impossible to believe in the Numogram (or, indeed, refuse to believe in it). Such things do not exist (or consist) in a manner that licences ‘faith’, not in the least because the temporality of faith requires that something stable pre-exist its being believed-in—a continual looping back (to the plan). But co-production with unbelief is something different altogether and approaches much more closely the condition of nonvoluntary transmutation that causes the plan(e) to fail. Not having to enter into a relationship of belief with a hyperstition is an indicator of its potential success. On the other hand, a hyperstition that crosses the line by entreating belief is, perhaps, the only other possible capacity in which failure in the appropriate sense could be ascribed here. As soon as a hyperstition becomes believable it inaugurates the supplementary dimension that returns it to the plan and in that moment annuls its particular, programmatic function, crossing into ideology. Could we say, then, that for hyperstition—the failure of failure is failure?

To fail in failing is to stymie flows of contagion-proliferation-involution and allow the system to rigidify (or to attempt to govern the meme in any manner that circumvents its internal logic). Believability is escorted by sclerosis. Things need to be inverted, flipped, and twisted from time to time: diagrams, angels, plots. Circulation must be maintained at all costs...

The tomb of dead hyperstition is Heaven.