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Avanessian-Hennig - Whos Afraid of Left Hyperstitions draft-with-cover-page-v2
A later critical intervention that asks what becomes of hyperstition once it is claimed for left politics and explicit strategic use.
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Core idea
The essay treats hyperstition as a contested political resource rather than a fixed inheritance from the CCRU. The question is whether the concept can be refunctioned without losing its feedback logic and anti-representational force.
It proceeds by critique and strategic reframing, testing how left-hyperstitional projects negotiate fiction, planning, collectivity, and political efficacy. Hyperstition becomes a battleground over what kinds of future-making are plausible.
This matters because it shows the concept entering open ideological dispute. The afterlife of hyperstition is not only aesthetic or occult; it is also a struggle over organization, temporality, and political imagination.
How to read this text
Start with the framing question and identify which version of hyperstition the essay is arguing with before moving into the political proposals.
Watch how the text balances strategic planning against feedback, fiction, and contingency. That tension is the heart of the argument.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 6
Since hyperstitions locate the origins of our present in the future, and in order to regain a (positive) concept of future, it is absolutely necessary to draw a line between right- and left- wing hyperstitions. Our claim is that hyperstition has to become a conceptual practice in order not to just understand contemporary cultural environments but to also operate differently within a globally networked capitalism.
Mechanism · paragraph 1
Accelerating the world's research. Who's Afraid of (Leǁ) Hyperstitions Anke Hennig, armen avanessian Related papers Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science Simon O'Sullivan Towards a Future Post-Capitalism: Accelerationism and its Aesthetics Charlie Mills Aesthetaphysicks and the Anti-Dialectical Hyperoccultation of Disenchanted Representation: Hypers… Rowan Elizabeth Cabrales Download a PDF Pack of the best related papers
Mechanism · paragraph 34
Hyperstitions are techno-imaginations (Flusser) that take real data from the natural sciences and the real power of technology. Hyperstitions are coming up with a fiction from the future that confronts us with the discovery of an unexpected past that went unnoticed below the radar of our senses and didn’t become recognized through our knowledge. It didn’t become acknowledged by our ways of concept-making and of navigating our world either.
Stakes · paragraph 7
In the face of “future shocks” nihilism imagines itself post mortem; In other words, it runs a full- circle apocalyptic present. On the other hand, progressive hyperstitions facilitate a paleo- futuristic transmutation of the past, thereby liberating the present. To claim hyperstitions as part of a left politics becomes more desirable as humoristic hyperstitions frequently overcome the post-critical miserabilism of political engagement by acting as agents of a crisis vortex.
Method · paragraph 60
When Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams recently identify hyperstitions as “heuristic fictions,”24 it might not have been enough to fully grasp how they actually have a traction on the future (and present). Hyperstitions have and develop an “underlying.” The underlying (theoretical,
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.