Argument of the work
Burroughs publishes a short story, and it drags his entire biography sideways into the Rift of Lemurian Time Wars [w0]. That is the claim CCRU makes on Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar, and it is already a hyperstitional claim in miniature: a fiction about eighteenth-century pirates on Madagascar protecting lemurs from Homo Sap [w1] is read as an operational document, a conduit, something that routes its author into a war being fought across deep time.
The move Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar performs, in CCRU's reading, is to treat a failed pacific settlement and the extinction of a primate lineage as evidence of a nonlinear conflict. Lemurs are the branch that did not win. Their ancestors rafted across the ocean [w3] and evolved free of monkey competition; the anthropoid line that produced Homo Sap routes through tarsidae or adapidae [w4], and the lemur remainder sits on Madagascar as a spectral residue of another primate history. Burroughs's pirate utopia, wrecked by developers, becomes one more extinction event inside that longer war.
This is why the episode works as a route into hyperstition. The archive does not argue that Burroughs wrote allegory. It argues that publishing the story was the operation, the point at which a writer's life is retrograde-engineered by the entities the fiction names. The Lemurian pantheon then absorbs adjacent material without asking permission. Uttunul, glossed by k-punk as 'eternal', 'utter', 'null', and placed at the head of the Lemurs, gets welded to Spinoza's Ethics Part 1 as its most rigorous philosophical description [w7]. The same register picks up Captain Mission's colony and the sacred lemurs of the natives [w8] as if all of it were one continuous dossier.
The rhyme with Fisher's later hauntological work is direct. RECORDING GHOSTS describes screams that start passive and end by catching the living inside a compulsion to repeat [w9]. Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar runs the same circuit a decade earlier, with the dead branch of primate evolution as the agent doing the catching. Fisher's later vocabulary of lost futures inherits this structure: a past that did not happen exerts traction on a present that cannot shake it.
What the reader gets from taking the episode seriously is a working model of how CCRU reads anything. A text is a vector. A species is a casualty list. A pirate colony is a front in a war whose other combatants are numerical entities on the Numogram. Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar is the cleanest demonstration because the source material is small enough to see the operation happen: one Burroughs story, one extinct lineage, one author pulled through the Rift.
How to read this
Treat the podcast as a secondary entry point, not a primary CCRU text. Eduardo and Erika frame the hosts Curitiba-based artists working through the CCRU Writings 1997-2003, starting with hyperstition and Burroughs [c0]. Pair the listen with Burroughs's actual story, reprinted via the Western Lands cycle, which the ccru.net burroughs file credits with propelling Burroughs into the Lemurian Time War [w0], and with Ghost of Chance, the 18th-century Madagascar pirate-settlement fable where the lemurs are exterminated [w1]. Hear the episode as commentary routed through that extinction.
Argument map
Hyperstition in one move
Start here if you want hyperstition in one move: Burroughs's story routes a reader straight into the Lemurian Time War W0 , and the archive's treatment links failed primate lineages W3 to spectral residues haunting CCRU's cosmology.
Story as operational conduit
Burroughs publishes a short story, and it drags his entire biography sideways into the Rift of Lemurian Time Wars W0 . That is the claim CCRU makes on Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar, and it is already a hyperstitional claim in miniature: a fiction about eighteenth-century pirates on Madagascar protecting lemurs from Homo Sap W1 is read as an operational document, a conduit, something that routes its author into a war being fought across deep time.
Lemurs as losing primate branch
The move Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar performs, in CCRU's reading, is to treat a failed pacific settlement and the extinction of a primate lineage as evidence of a nonlinear conflict. Lemurs are the branch that did not win. Their ancestors rafted across the ocean W3 and evolved free of monkey competition; the anthropoid line that produced Homo Sap routes through tarsidae or adapidae W4 , and the lemur remainder sits on Madagascar as a spectral residue of another primate history. Burroughs's pirate utopia, wrecked by developers, becomes one more extinction event inside that longer war.
Publication as retrograde engineering
This is why the episode works as a route into hyperstition. The archive does not argue that Burroughs wrote allegory. It argues that publishing the story was the operation, the point at which a writer's life is retrograde-engineered by the entities the fiction names. The Lemurian pantheon then absorbs adjacent material without asking permission. Uttunul, glossed by k-punk as 'eternal', 'utter', 'null', and placed at the head of the Lemurs, gets welded to Spinoza's Ethics Part 1 as its most rigorous philosophical description W7 . The same register picks up Captain Mission's colony and the sacred lemurs of the natives W8 as if all of it were one continuous dossier.
Rhyme with Fisher's hauntology
The rhyme with Fisher's later hauntological work is direct. RECORDING GHOSTS describes screams that start passive and end by catching the living inside a compulsion to repeat W9 . Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar runs the same circuit a decade earlier, with the dead branch of primate evolution as the agent doing the catching. Fisher's later vocabulary of lost futures inherits this structure: a past that did not happen exerts traction on a present that cannot shake it.
Working model of CCRU reading
What the reader gets from taking the episode seriously is a working model of how CCRU reads anything. A text is a vector. A species is a casualty list. A pirate colony is a front in a war whose other combatants are numerical entities on the Numogram. Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar is the cleanest demonstration because the source material is small enough to see the operation happen: one Burroughs story, one extinct lineage, one author pulled through the Rift.
Podcast as secondary entry point
Treat the podcast as a secondary entry point, not a primary CCRU text. Eduardo and Erika frame the hosts Curitiba-based artists working through the CCRU Writings 1997-2003, starting with hyperstition and Burroughs C0 . Pair the listen with Burroughs's actual story, reprinted via the Western Lands cycle, which the ccru.net burroughs file credits with propelling Burroughs into the Lemurian Time War W0 , and with Ghost of Chance, the 18th-century Madagascar pirate-settlement fable where the lemurs are exterminated W1 . Hear the episode as commentary routed through that extinction.
Burroughs framing on archived page
CCRU frames this item through William S. Burroughs. On the archived Burroughs page, “The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar” is named as the story that propelled “his entire existence into the Rift of Lemurian Time Wars” W0 . Burroughs’s published scenario, set in eighteenth-century Madagascar, turns on pirate law, lemur life, and extinction under “Homo Sap, the Ugly Animal” W1 .
Publication context
CCRU frames this item through William S. Burroughs. On the archived Burroughs page, “The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar” is named as the story that propelled “his entire existence into the Rift of Lemurian Time Wars” [w0]. Burroughs’s published scenario, set in eighteenth-century Madagascar, turns on pirate law, lemur life, and extinction under “Homo Sap, the Ugly Animal” [w1].
How this work reaches the archive
Transcript record copied from the transcripts collection in the local corpus snapshot extracted from land-ccru-archive.tar.gz.
Public page exposes metadata and a short excerpt only. The full transcript remains in the internal canonical corpus.
Key concepts and people
People
Concepts
Best 3 moments
00:00:18
My name is Eduardo and together with Erika I will be hosting the Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar podcast
00:07:30
I'll read it again
00:14:32
00:14:32 — This is from the text on Burroughs, right? The many sequences on Burroughs, right? Yes
This is from the text on Burroughs, right? The many sequences on Burroughs, right? Yes
Timestamp jump list
Sections
- 00:00:18 — Section 1 — My name is Eduardo and together with Erika I will be hosting the Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar podcast
- 00:29:47 — Section 2 — Like, he sees himself as a lemur in one of the passages
- 00:50:16 — Section 3 — Thank you
Key moments
- 00:00:18 — My name is Eduardo and together with Erika I will be hosting the Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar podcast — My name is Eduardo and together with Erika I will be hosting the Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar podcast
- 00:07:30 — I'll read it again — I'll read it again
- 00:14:32 — This is from the text on Burroughs, right? The many sequences on Burroughs, right? Yes — This is from the text on Burroughs, right? The many sequences on Burroughs, right? Yes
- 00:21:24 — There is this, this excerpt on the beginning in which they say that there's no difference between a hoax, a religion and a society — There is this, this excerpt on the beginning in which they say that there's no difference between a hoax, a religion and a society
Timestamped map
These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels.
00:00:18
My name is Eduardo and together with Erika I will be hosting the Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar podcast
My name is Eduardo and together with Erika I will be hosting the Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar podcast. This podcast will focus on collectives and groups that work with political action, with field reproduction and with artistic practice. We will be looking into a series of collectives that works with these things and we…
00:07:30
I'll read it again
I'll read it again. Hyperstition is an element of effective culture that makes itself real, through fictional quantities functioning as time-traveling potentials. Hyperstition operates as a coincidence intensifier effecting a call to old ones. Hyperstition is a suspension of reality and fiction, opening a path for mag…
00:14:32
This is from the text on Burroughs, right? The many sequences on Burroughs, right? Yes
This is from the text on Burroughs, right? The many sequences on Burroughs, right? Yes. We must remember that these texts, they are all stolen from this enigmatic figure that they call William Kaye, right? William Kaye is like this agent, this agent from the board. We're going to see in this text how the board stands…
00:21:24
There is this, this excerpt on the beginning in which they say that there's no difference between a hoax, a religion and a society
There is this, this excerpt on the beginning in which they say that there's no difference between a hoax, a religion and a society. And I think this probably encapsulates this whole idea that you have always a level of fiction in everything. And I don't know, as an artist, looking to this kind of outlook and trying to…
00:29:47
Like, he sees himself as a lemur in one of the passages
Like, he sees himself as a lemur in one of the passages. And, I don't know, for me it's entirely funny, this idea of lemurs as these supernatural creatures. And I really like the idea of the ghost as well. I think this also taps into their will to create something that is not ascribed to temporality. And also, another…
00:35:54
But many non-Christian cosmologies understand this limit in a different way
But many non-Christian cosmologies understand this limit in a different way. When we feel a bit awkward about this connection, we have to remember that we look with the eyes of Western civilization, which splits the rationality and spirituality, making it feel like those things don't belong together. CCRU searches for…
00:43:00
And then they have this event, which they made together with the CCRU
And then they have this event, which they made together with the CCRU. Anyone that searches for it, you can find it on OrphanDriftArchive.com. And there, if you go at... we have a little problem of pronouncing this word, we're sorry because we don't know, but it goes something like zizi, or zizi. Which was this event…
00:50:16
Thank you
Thank you. Thank you for listening until now. Thank you and see you in the next episode.
Key passage
Best entry extract · 00:07:45
Hypersition operates as a coincidence intensifier, effecting a call to old ones. Hypersition is a suspension of reality and fiction, opening a path for magical narratives, turning the fiction real.
Why this matters: Here the episode states its operative definition of hyperstition, the mechanism for making fiction real on which every subsequent reading of Burroughs and the archive depends.
Representative extracts
Mechanism · 00:07:45
Hypersition operates as a coincidence intensifier, effecting a call to old ones. Hypersition is a suspension of reality and fiction, opening a path for magical narratives, turning the fiction real.
Why this matters: Here the episode states its operative definition of hyperstition, the mechanism for making fiction real on which every subsequent reading of Burroughs and the archive depends.
Mechanism · 00:11:03
writing operates not as a passive representation but as an active agent of transformation and a getaway through which entities can emerge. By writing a universe, the writer makes such a universe possible.
Why this matters: The earlier definition gets cashed out at the level of craft: if writing produces the universes it describes, the archive's fictions count as experiments rather than commentary.
Stakes · 00:24:59
the lemurs of madagascar that they mention, and all the time as a sort of gate or some sort of civilization key, that continues to come along even though they don't exist anymore.
Why this matters: The title image does its argumentative work here, turning an extinct evolutionary branch into a gate that keeps pressing on the present after its disappearance.
Style · 00:11:03
this meeting of Boros and Captain Mission leads to another knowledge of time, Non chronological but spiral.
Why this matters: The staged encounter between Burroughs and Captain Mission is made to carry the record's central temporal claim: history moves as a spiral rather than a chronological line.
Afterlife · 00:30:26
There's hardly sometimes a distinction between past, present and future, because they believe that the future is going to be replicated by the past.
Why this matters: Closing the argument, this locates spiral time outside the text: a lived cosmology in which the future replicates the past survives independently of any fiction.