Twisted

The inverted Angel of History is a demon. (It has a name but not a face.)

The Temporality of Ascryption

< Part One: 'Initiation'

Alice was just beginning to say 'There's a mistake somewhere—,' when the Queen began screaming, so loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished. 'Oh, oh, oh!' shouted the Queen, shaking her hand about as if she wanted to shake it off. 'My finger's bleeding! Oh, oh, oh, oh!'
'What is the matter?' Alice said, 'Have you pricked your finger?'
'I haven't pricked it yet,' the Queen said, 'but I soon shall—oh, oh, oh!'
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass 

With all such words it is of the utmost importance that they should never be spoken until the supreme moment, and even then they should burst from the Magician almost despite himself—so great should be his reluctance to utter them. In fact, they should be the utterance of the God in him at the first onset of the divine possession. So uttered, they cannot fail of effect, for they have become the effect. — Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA

With Karno absent, and no way to reach her (what would I have said in any case?), I had no choice but to continue my exploration of her practice unaccompanied. The inverted nature of the enterprise continued to mystify me. One night, uselessly intoxicated and unable to push my earlier success at recreating her method any further, I had scrawled 'ASCRYPTION IS REVERSE ASCRIPTION' on a post-it note in some now unrecognisable fluid and stuck it to the wall above my desk. The evocation of the literary act via the attribution of a name had proven successful—too successful if the complete occultation of every surface comprising my admittedly cramped living quarters by loose stacks of unevenly daubed, sometimes completely indecipherable, sheets of paper was to be counted as a reliable measurement of efficacy. I felt I had lost control. Ascryption was, indeed, a matter of utter submission to the will of some outside force. As a writer I had been schooled in the importance of control. This was variously denominated in terms of metre, rhythm, tone, cleverly constructed metaphorics, believable characters, narrative consistency ... and yet I was producing these effects without any recourse to my own personal catalogue of literary tricks and turns of phrase, or even what I had once arrogantly considered my 'unique poetic voice'. Some utterly alien enunciator had infiltrated my output. Or better, enunciators, for they were certainly multiple. Adept across an unbelievable span of deranged aesthetic proclivity. Where the hell was this all coming from? 

I reread Karno's essay again and again, searching for a decipherable answer among her numerous appeals to 'the crypt', 'the rift' and, most curious of all, 'the future'. It was while staring at the post-it note, utterly lost, half-conscious from the criminal quantity of bootleg mezcal I had drunk in anticipation of yet another night's futile probing, that it came to me. Unlike ascription, which one has no choice but to understand as a cause-effect relationship, ascryption—the production of cause from effect—encodes, by virtue of this deranged causal logic, time in reverse. A text attributed to a writer; a writer attributed to a text. What was at stake was more than the automated procurement of a poem, but a theory of time. Karno was madder than even I (who was—demonstrably—prepared to accept a lot) had suspected. And yet it explained so much. The enigmatic subtitle, 'Practices for Writing on Reality' suddenly took on a terrible significance. She meant it literally. What had I gotten myself involved in? Was I evoking something more significant than a roomful of poetry? I took in the chaotic state of my apartment, unsure I recognised the person to whom it had once belonged. The unfinished bottle of mezcal sat in the middle of the floor, staking out Zone 7 in the remnants of the diagram that continued to leer through its pelt of paper refuse. A bloated agave worm, suspended in the few centimetres of liquid that remained at the base of the bottle turned listlessly in response to some imperceptible tremor from far, far below. 

It reminded me of something I'd overheard at the bar—a verminous word: 'Plutonic'.

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.