Man’s pursuit of knowledge leads him back to the shadows

The CCRU didn’t set out to meet god. In fact, quite the opposite. Throughout most of their collected works you’ll find little asides about how we need to do away with oppression of a “totalising logic” or the scourge of the One God Universe. They seem to think of themselves as cyberpunks dedicated to undermining capitalism and racism from the outskirts of the internet. This is why it's interesting that their writing leads us right back to where they’re running from.

The plan is pretty simple. Kant shows the limitations of our perceptions and Deleuze shows us how to break out of said limitations. The CCRU then turns this into a practical doctrine that takes cues from occultism, marxism and William Bourroughs. In their view, using cut-up techniques, Kabbalah and ritual gives us the ability to break out of our imposed conditions of experience and see reality for what it really is .

The most common reading of all this is that it fits into the post-left anarchist tradition alongside such upstanding citizens as Georges Bataille, Foucault and the Invisible Committee. I will show why this is wrong. Although a lot of work recently has gone into reconciling Deleuze and Hegel the same can not be said about the CCRU. In my view, the work of the CRRU is entirely compatible with speculative philosophy and the Traditionalist worldview.

Despite their best attempts to stick to some kind of “fuck the rules anacharism”, the project amounts to an accidental (yet still interesting) affirmation of the traditionalist worldview. To understand my point, we must rebuild their system from scratch with reference to tradition and what we here at the institute, think of as magical reality.

Kant and all his enemies

Everything of substance starts with Kant. The Transcendental Aesthetic is the first thing Kant identifies as a condition of experience. The Kantian frame, specifically the transcendental aesthetic, is the CCRU’s tool to discover the true nature of the universe. Put simply, time and space are a priori conditions of human experience, Man's particularity is important here, time and space must be presupposed in order for there to be a world experience. Time + space (in that order) synthesis is the route of human experience. From this postulate, we get the idea that there is reality outside of human experience (the outside) and a corresponding inside.

Keep in mind when conceptualising the inside - outside dynamic that it is not a clear split. The only Time that is not interior to time is the transcendental form of time itself. By creating the transcendental and the empirical man is split in two: an empirical world derived from sense data and the frame which connects the outside via a temporal functionality of the inner sense.

You need the pure time of the outside for there to be time at all. 'Time relates to itself though itself' - Anna Greenspan (CCRU member). The transcendental subject is the synthesiser of time (humans just happen to be caught in this process). This opens up the idea that we do have contact with the transcendental outside, however, it's only ever through our senses. We interact with pure time and space, it's just filtered through perception.

This is the essential Kantian metaphysical move. This idea that there is a reality out there before perception that we can not have access to is the building block core assertion of critical as opposed to speculative philosophy.

For anyone coming from speculative philosophy, this is where Kant makes a theoretical wrong turn. The meta-conversation we are having right now about reality and the limits of experience can only happen from within the confines of reality and experience. Discussions of metaphysics are still subject to the rules and laws of metaphysics. Kant has created a place outside of reality which we can only gesture or talk around because there is no way to directly access it despite the fact he is literally writing about it.

“Since every attempt to fix the meaning of language must be done in language, there can be no escape from language, no 'outside'.”

Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, 1977, p.311

According to Guénon, according to all spiritual traditions, the heart is "the seat of Intelligence" understood as supra-rational knowledge, the only form of knowledge allowing "Supreme Identity"

Jean-Pierre Laurant : 'Le sens caché dans l'oeuvre de René Guénon', L'âge d'Homme, 1975, p. 45

The CCRU will spend the rest of their work trying to escape this Kantian bind, refuting its existence in the process. Although they never mention the idea directly, once the CCRU set up their open line of communion with the outside, we reopen the possibility of doing speculative philosophy. In relation to the inside outside dynamic, time outside is non linear and non causal. Think of a linear drawing of two points on a piece of paper. If you were to scrunch the paper or tear it apart, points can become closer or further respectively. Linear time constructed on the inside. On the outside, all we are left with is topological possibilities: the distances in time and space can be folded and bent.

Obviously, the idea of conjecture as to what lies outside human experience seems pretty self-defeating, however, try to move beyond this contradiction by only focusing on the inside and outside interactions. the conversion of incomprehensible nothingness from the outside into the computable code of the side. How does this process happen? Why does it look the way it does when we experience it? how does it sit in relation to its own logic? Obviously there is a bit of creative licence when we get here but it's important to remember it is the relations that create the ground floor for the CCRUs work.

Symbols and Hypersition

For the CCRU, symbolism and the ways it affects us is a key way of understanding how the outside can have an imminent effect on us (we can think of this as magic). A symbol is a two sided communication device. For those who understand the symbol, its use reveals the nature of things. on the other side, the symbol acts purely as intended, as material as it seems. The ignorant subsume the symbol back into the rational, allowing their sceptical assumptions to throw the symbol aside. For example, a ‘radioactive warning’ symbol displayed in front of a field reveals the nature of the field to those who understand it, showing what would not be perceived otherwise (invisible radiation). However, if one is unaware of the meaning of the said sign they only experience the visual aspect of the sign, not the meaning it conveys. For the unknowing, the symbol is just experienced ‘as is’ and subsumed into their rational presumptions.

The phenomenal or semantic reality of symbols is transformed from the material reality though our inner sense to be made meaning of. The raw 'meaning' of the sign, although virtual, maybe even spiritual, is still very real in the sense that it acts upon us by acting through our inner sense. Symbols do not affect us but infect us.

At this point the CCRU introduced the concept of hyperstition. The idea at all realities start as fiction and require a will to bring them into the actual. The concept of an idea infecting culture from the outside under the cover of fiction. Hyperstitional ideas are assimilated into culture and they act as if fictional when first encountered. In this way the future can be retroactively traced as if it is a hyperstitional idea. Prophecy, conspiracies, sci-fi and socio-economic predictions all begin their life as fictions emanating from outside invasion and cultural anxieties. There are concepts that emanate from fiction and retroactively place themselves in culture. Think of the shift in consciousness that accompanied the enlightenment being framed as a grand eschatological narrative emanating from god.

For a modern rationalist, a hyperstition becomes a coincidence or self fulfilling prophecy. However, this humanises a hyperstition’s trajectory which is at odds with the CCRU's objectives who wish to interpret the hyperstition outside of human understanding. When one walks into a room and intuitively understands that they should leave or that they should not head down a certain path the CCRU would argue that they are intuiting hyperstitional feedback from the outside. As these hyperstitional events enter reality and more importantly, time, they begin to alter what we understand as the future.

Now think back to the radiation symbol in a field. Let's say you spent a great deal of time in that field before you knew what the sign meant. Years later, you’re taught about radiation and what it can do to you. immediately you begin to worry that you have been exposed to radiation and you are at risk of some kind of cancer. You start thinking about yourself in the future, going through chemotherapy or dying an early death. At this point, you don’t even know if you were actually exposed but it's too late, the idea of radiation poisoning has taken hold of your mind and you’ve begun to change your perspective on the future. This is an example of a hyperstition changing the future, an idea (radiation) from culture infecting our mind and taking control of how we conceptualise our innersense of time. The concept of radiation is the hyperstition here.

As an aside, when a hyperstitional event occurs it represents a break in Nietzsche's Eternal Return. We’re no longer in a circle but a spiral, as we begin to change our perceptions of the linear future based on what affects us from the outside. This is where we get the CCRU concept of ‘Time Spirals’.

Hyperstition as both a transcendental practice and theory has the ability to propagate breaks from linearity time. Hyperstitional mechanisms open channels to the outside and new makes history possible. This also creates issues with transcendental time. If representation in the Kantian (linear-time) frame becomes a false framework then hyperstitions become a revelation rather than the discovery of something new. Linear time is just one understanding of time among many, it is not more or less true than any other system. Leaving this system is difficult. Epistemological hesitation is what can hold back exit from the frame. In this sense, man must engage in a positive unbelief actively pursuing a kind of irrationalism to have any chance of a transcendental exit. We can think of this as some kind of initiation ritual into the CCRU and the entry step for partaking in their esoteric practices.

The Lemurian time war

The CCRU turns time into a battlefield where forces beyond us fight for control. I t is explored by rewriting a short story by William Burroughs called a ghost of chance (yes the postmodern beatnik junkie guy) .

In summary, the protagonist ‘Captain Mission’ creates a free colony called 'Levitatia', a purely libertarian colony in the sense that there are no laws other than a prohibition of killing the scared ghost lemurs who are believed by the local people to be spirits of the dead. Killing the lemurs is punishable by expulsion from the island or death. Quickly black cat lemurs start to appear to the protagonist briefly before disappearing, taking their magical surroundings with them. These Lemurs do not adhere to the rules set by our transcendental structure. Mission lives amongst the Lemurs naming the biggest one ghost. After this point in the story the Lemurs consistently begin to reveal themselves to mission. They are psychic amphibians; they can stay invisible for 60 million years at a time if they please. Time is nothing for these lemurs. Man lives in time, dies in time and carries it wherever he goes. For man, time is a prison. Time as it exists is a human condition, much like causation or linearity as we will find.

The lemurs taking the space that they came with is used as a metaphor for the aforementioned Kantian inside where time and space is held within the beings themselves. This is probably why the CCRU has taken this story as a basis for exploring time, space and hyperstition.

The account of this story given by the CCRU is written as if the author and Captain Mission are involved in a occult time war where the story is a disguised de-anthropomorphised account of kantian critique. The CCRU are using fiction as a way to understand Kantian critique. In ‘Lemurian time war’, the Lemurs are freed from such a framework which gives them the ability to seemingly travel through time and break the laws of reality. They exist outside the confines of imposed linear time, for them, passing through history is just as easy as moving though physical reality. Their time is topological .

The AOE, OGU and the magical universe

“[the] AOE’s Ambitions are to be everywhere forever.”

CCRU Writings 1997-2003, p.79

“Digital hyperstition is already widespread, hiding within popular numerical cultures (calendars, currency systems, sorcerous numbo-jumbo, etc.) It uses number systems for transcultural communication and cosmic exploration, exploiting their intrinsic tendency to explode centralise, unified, and logically overcoded ‘master narratives’ and reality models, to generate sorcerous coincidences, and to draw cosmic maps.”

CCRU Writings 1997-2003, p.12

When the CCRU talks about the One God Universe (OGU) they are not talking about christianity or monotheism per say. As far as we are concerned it's almost the opposite, It's much closer to modern subjectivity itself .

Modern scientific and philosophical thinking imposes a monopolistic dominion on the magical power of the word (think about the CCRU’s understanding of symbolism). The OGU (henceforth) establishes a fiction at the most fatal level of relativity. There is only one reality, it's own. We simply operate within it.

The OGU is a metaphorical device used by the CCRU to bridge the gap between theory fiction and Kantian critique. The OGU is Kantian critique, to be inside the OGU is time inside the transcendental aesthetic. It is not only a mind control system but a reality creation system.

The OGU can be taken as the human control mechanism. Within the OGU, fiction is safely contained in a metaphysical frame prophylactically limiting all contact between fiction and what is outside it. The magical function of words and signs is declared to be evil and illusory facilitating a monopoly on magical power for the OGU. Returning to our discussion on language, language and words set the bounds of meaning, any limit created in language can be immediately transcended through language. Language forms what thought can even be. In order for the control mechanism to work it must remain unsuspected. Serious magic is too big to see, It consists of endless boxes within boxes that are camouflaged under the guises of legal and rational. Magic as the act of changing consciousness in accordance with will (will in general). In ‘Lemurian time war’, the Lemurs are freed from such a framework which gives them the ability to seemingly travel through time and break the laws of reality.

The OGU, of course, denies the existence of its own mythos as its very function is to present itself as a representation of truth. Kantianism as control. By confusing the representation with the real, man creates a binary framework of fact and fiction. Fact, being that which is defined by the OGU as real. While fiction, which only exists within a metaphysical cage. The outside of liberal modernity becomes nothing more than an illusion outside of the rational. However, fiction allows us to commune with the Outside. Anti-OGU agents can use fiction as a covert line of communication.

This is where the first course of escape can be imagined. For William Burroughs, the word has reached a homeostasis with the host. The basis of his theory is that the spoken work is based on the written word, the host no longer associates words with reality. if something can not be explained by words then it can not be understood. The Linearity of words limits thought within time.

The implication here for the CCRU is that Kantian critique becomes the inner sense and in doing so acts as a human security system. Assumed causality, the constraints of linearity and causation are the forms of the Human Security System which keeps us locked out of the world of magic. We can see here a link between the CCRU and writers like Guenon. For Guenon, modernity seeks to monopolise reality and philosophy leaving us individuals subject to the law of the number. Modernity seeks to suppress Tradition and its metaphysics, destroying the power of magic in the process. The CCRU found a way out of liberal modernity using a different set of tools (hyperstition, time spirals, ect.).

What is to be done?

We have to think of the CCRU’s work in context. Despite starting in the confines of modernist sociology and Neo-Kantian metaphysics, they managed to find a path out. Through a preliminary understanding of symbology and the metaphysics of time, the CCRU builds a ladder out of modernity and gives us the opportunity to build a new metaphysics that starts from scratch.

Whether or not you agree with the CCRU and their conclusions, their work draws attention to the often uncontested laws of time. Time is a warzone and he who controls it, controls reality itself. Rather than being caught in the trappings of liberal modernity’s many layers of law and assumed rules based on dubious metaphysical assumptions, the CCRU attacks the conditions of modern subjectivity itself, the first step to any genuine inquiry into the nature of the universe. All of our modern political and ethical debates happen within the bounds of rules decided from the outside.

It is important for us to remember that the CCRU do not have a monopoly on escape. Much like the Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar, we can take our reality with us as long as we are committed to building a metaphysics that does not rely on the assumptions of modernity. The CCRU work in the name of liberation or some kind of shallow pursuit of truth, it is our job to use their work to discover the genuine philosophical system that operates at the core of our being. While their work may not lead us directly to Tradition, the outside and its lack of linearity opens up the possibilities for a genuine reappraisal of the magical world and symbology.