On a Newly Arisen Futurist Tone in Criticism

By Franco Laborde

I. The chosen title anticipates the movement: in 1982, Jacques Derrida delivered a lecture titled On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy, itself inspired by Kant’s 1796 essay On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy.

In that lecture, Derrida picks a fight with the philosophy of his time, attacking the apocalyptic tone of endings and twilights. Inflecting that title here does the same, while preserving the original intention that goes back to Kant: to open a polemic against the whims of recent criticism and attack its futurist tone.

II. Who is criticism? What do we mean by a futurist tone?

The intention is not to present the field of criticism through a definition of its task. Establishing the addressee of this polemic should not oblige us to answer what criticism is — a question that belongs more properly to philosophical discourse.

But even if the question what is criticism has its interest, for our purposes it is preferable to establish the who of criticism by attending to what educated people conceive of as the critic’s trade.

Let us list some of the tasks of this trade, with the complicity of the cultural supplements: reviews of musical, literary, or filmic works; corollaries to the discourse of the reigning ideologues; video games, anime, and documentaries; descriptions of political, social, or technological phenomena; essays as the great literary genre; vindications; slogans; book launches; interviews; eulogies and burials; philosophical popularization; obituaries; opinion pieces. The list could go on — it is rhapsodic because the contemporary critic is a maker of mosaics.

Criticism as it actually exists — those who perform the tasks listed above — is the answer to who has recently adopted a futurist tone.

Its tasks are defined in part by the possibilities of their supports: no one expects the critic to make their way through the ocean of fiber-optic information at the speed of glaciers. But if something of the critical spirit survives in the trade, it shows in this: the critic cannot help returning to the limits of their material possibilities. And it is there, in that return, that the futurist tone appears as premise.

The futurist tone is a comprehensive, rhetorical, and thematic inclination in criticism oriented toward futurology. In practice, it requires criticism to privilege what it understands as the exclusive concerns of futurology: science fiction, technologies, dystopias, posthuman destinies, cyberpunk aesthetics — though this privilege, and here lies its novelty, is assumed as part of a critical program.

This brings us back to the philosophical question we skirted at the outset: the futurist tone understands the function of criticism to be the appropriation, as its definitive task, of imagining future worlds.

III. Perhaps the fundamental trait of the futurist tone is the kind of bond it supposes between fiction and technology. The most elaborated position on this is the concept of hyperstition, a neologism coined by Nick Land and his circle in the context of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) in the late 1990s.

We consider hyperstition to be the strongest premise of recent criticism, and the rest of this essay can be read as a more or less inspired corollary to this polemic.

Let us disambiguate the term: hyperstition is a compound word including the prefix hyper — superiority, beyond, excess — and the word superstition. With this etymology in hand, and bearing in mind the influence that Deleuze and Guattari held over the group, we can define hyperstition as the overcoming of superstition through the acceleration of feedback cycles of content structured as fiction that becomes real.

From this follow the so-called hyperstitional objects. These elements are fictional constructions that can be conjured into reality through escalating in crescendo cycles that may begin either through gradual, infectious acceptance or through an abrupt acceleration produced by an adversity or event — wars, economic crises, technocultural phenomena. Hyperstitional objects act as unleashed forces that in turn detach secondary objects functioning as “auxiliary hypotheses,” elements that facilitate the acceleration of the cycles by gathering under the logic of fiction what would otherwise remain multiple and dispersed.

The case of Slender Man is the clearest: this terrifying, spaghettified humanoid began as a fictional product in the Something Awful forums, was fed by users, extended across networks, embodied in video games, and acquired sufficient reality to be conjured by two girls through an attempted murder in the woods of Wisconsin.

IV. It is to be expected that hyperstition’s territory lies in the cleft between the supralunar realm of fiction and the sublunar realm of reality. But its pretensions are hampered when applied to phenomena more complex than creepypastas.

There are good reasons to think that the idea of hyperstition is nothing more than a worn garment for wandering exposed through the nights of the internet.

The main obstacle for the concept is the absence of a middle term in the clockwork of its assemblage. Hyperstition is assembled temporally and logically as follows:

• There is a semiotic content structured as fiction.

• This content feeds back through escalating in crescendo cycles that allow it — drawing on flows already existing in reality — to accelerate and gather the multiple and dispersed.

• The semiotic content becomes real and effective.

The absence of a middle term makes these three steps of the assemblage fundamentally the same. The problem lies in the metaphorical use of acceleration — scientific metaphors tend to conceal a poisonous fertility; imposture closely follows impertinent usage.

According to the assemblage, we begin with an incorporeal semiotic content structured as fiction which, in the following two steps, accelerates until it becomes effective. The problem — following the physics behind the metaphor — is that fiction could only be accelerated if it already had mass, or if, lacking mass, it changed direction by entering into relation with something that did (vectorial acceleration). In either case, we would already have a content that is real and effective.

The absent middle term is what should explain how we move from a fiction that is neither real nor effective to one that is. Fictions, according to the assemblage, would be postulations at rest, capable of being accelerated at some future instance — and it could not be otherwise, since if fiction were granted acceleration by virtue of its mere status, the last step of the assemblage would be redundant: fiction would already be real and effective from the start.

The passage from a non-real fiction to a real and effective one is the movement the assemblage promises to execute and fails to execute. It takes it for granted without knowing it.

We cannot see how a belief like this could respond to the concerns of a Borgesian reader who hears the supposed hyperstition of Slender Man for the first time.

In what place outside the world did Slender Man reside before “becoming real”?

Where if not in the reality of the real can a fiction exist?

V. Let us attempt a defense of hyperstition.

Throughout the history of the world there are sufficient cases in which literary fictions have anticipated, or become, the social, political, or technological realities of the future.

The limitation of this defense — even setting aside the fact that it is a genetic fallacy — is that it would not demonstrate what it intends to demonstrate. Historical coincidences between literary fictions and future events do not prove that fictions can exceed the legality of the literary field and become — for example — a technological phenomenon. They indicate, rather, that fictions always work with real and moving contents, which is why some of them manage to articulate those contents concomitantly with the courses of the world — most do not achieve this aim, nor do they care to.

Let us return to our Borgesian subject, and imagine their indignation.

What fiction does not work with the horizon of the world’s phenomena.

What fiction is not itself, at once, a phenomenon of the world and a fact in the world.

VI. The absence of a middle term can be seen in hyperstition’s paradigmatic case: William Gibson’s cyberspace.

The American writer coined the term cyberspace in his celebrated 1984 novel Neuromancer — though he had already used it two years earlier in the story Burning Chrome — a literary event that preceded the public emergence of hyperconnected internet. The unprecedented use of the term and the early description of the phenomenon allow the futurist tone to use it as an example of a fiction that colonized the real.

If the assemblage of hyperstition shows us anything, it is that within it, dematerializing fiction is worth as much as defictionalizing materiality. In this case, criticism understands that fiction exists only on the textualist side of the equation — among the chapters of Neuromancer and Gibson’s literary gestures — while technological objects, the engineering materiality that gives substrate to phenomena like the internet, are devoid of any fictionality.

Hyperstition permits no regressus from facts, only the progressus: it ignores the path that leads from objects back to fiction.

In other words, the futurist tone manages to hype criticism to the point where it cannot help exclaiming what everyone has known since Homer: human fiction exists! If the implicit commitments of such an exclamation were to reach an echo chamber, they would sound like this: objects do not imagine fictions; matter is the object — precisely — of our literary worlds; who has seen a transistor dreaming of silicon sheep.

VII. Here is a perspective that may, with some luck, pull us out of the foolishness.

William Gibson arrived late.

It was the objects themselves that imagined a new modulation of space through their fictions. And they did so several years before Neuromancer was published.

VIII. When we speak of a regressus in the steps of hyperstition, we refer to the possibility of overcoming the definition of fiction as an exclusive product of human agency. Admitting the path that leads from objects to fiction means holding that objects can produce fictions.

One might reply that this has long ceased to be the case, since artificial intelligence is capable of reproducing narrative structures of any literary genre. What we mean by the fiction of objects, then, requires some clarification.

The signs produced by current artificial intelligences are designed to correspond to natural language — they return responses in a human tone (the human-like is today the gold standard of chatbots). Noticing this allows us to avoid circular reasoning when calling the results of raw big data processing the fiction of objects: what artificial intelligence returns to us as a response is nothing other than our human inputs on the black and white of screens.

The outputs can, at most, be understood as artificial fiction or the fiction of artificial intelligence, but they are not the fiction of objects in the strong sense.

This clarification may seem discordant with what we have said previously. But as we will attempt to demonstrate, the fiction of objects is nothing other than their virtuality. If in artificial intelligence we find fiction not mediated by the human, it is not located in the results in natural language tokens — our written exchange with Claude or ChatGPT — but in the black boxes of processing.

IX. The distinction between human fiction and the fiction of objects adds another problem to the philosophy of hyperstition: it recognizes no differences in this regard, and in failing to do so, the task of imagining futures loses the spirit of the world.

We have stripped futurology of both the objects of the world and the world of objects.

X. The need to demonstrate that objects also produce fictions is justified by opposing a prejudice of the futurist tone: only we — humans — can imagine fictions. Our opposition is absolute. Even the term fiction — in the case of objects — is not being used metaphorically: we hold that objects imagine worlds and carry them out.

If the spectrum of agents that produce fiction doubles in size by integrating the silenced non-human part, then the very definition of fiction must be revised. The fiction of objects can be defined as the virtuality of objects.

What does this definition by equivalence imply?

Fiction is virtuality because both are composed of genetic parts that withdraw from the actual in germinal form. It is not necessary for fiction to appeal to an instance distinct from itself to explain the becoming of its elements — fiction is and will always be what follows from its materiality.

At first glance this definition might seem to explain the obscure with the more obscure, but any reader who has had the experience of finishing a novel clearly recognizes the existence of germinal parts: the content of the last pages of a fiction is already present, embryonically, in the first.

Let us recall the definition of virtuality that Deleuze gave so many times: real without being actual, ideal without being abstract. The part of fiction that withdraws does not cease to be real by being inactual; nor is it abstract, since it resides in the immanence of fictional material.

XI. The fiction of objects has at least two cases that bear it out.

The first is Gibson’s cyberspace.

Before the description found in the 1984 novel, both the distributed protocols of ARPANET — a computer network formulated in 1963 and subsequently deployed by the US Department of Defense — and the synthesis achieved by the TCP/IP model — a protocol designed in the 1970s that allowed heterogeneous machines to connect to the same network — had already given topological form to a computational space with unprecedented characteristics.

The logical and mathematical support for the modulation of this space was provided by Wiener’s cybernetics and Shannon’s 1948 information theory, both of which enabled — well in advance — the confection of these objects, and then furnished them with a specific language to intensify the fiction they produced.

Nor should we forget the arcade machines, which by the 1970s had already taken on the aesthetic that retropunk has today as its finished form. Particularly notable is the arrival of Pac-Man in 1980, with its proposal of immersion through high-precision joysticks, 4-bit chip music, and illuminated marquees.

During the final decade of the past century, the experience of cyberspace became mass-scale with the phenomenon of the World Wide Web, intensifying experiences like those of MUDs — text-based dungeons that had already gathered dozens of players together in the eighties.

The fiction of objects, at least from 1963 onward, had begun to imagine Gibson’s cyberspace virtually. The material properties of these objects were extended beyond their engineering actuality through languages such as mathematics or logic, capable of amplifying their contained fiction.

The second example is that of artificial intelligence chatbots.

Language models based on neural networks such as Claude or ChatGPT are capable of returning fiction in whatever literary genre we indicate. Our position is that these natural language outputs cannot be considered the fiction of objects, since the latter exists not in the results on screen, but within the black boxes of processing.

The term black boxes — taken from Wiener’s cybernetics — refers to the fact that in neural network AI models it is mathematically complex, to say the least, to trace the path of a datum through billions of processing cells. The opacity would persist even if it were possible to chart the changes undergone by an element during processing, since there is no clear semantics for understanding what happens in any given layer of the network.

We believe there is no more hyperrealist way to show the fiction of objects than to imagine the processing of data in an open-air black box. The fictions of chatbots were never non-human fictions — we are aware that in saying this we oppose the basic hypotheses of what is called posthuman literary studies — because virtuality as immanent imagination resides in the processing and not in the result.

This inversion explores the alternative path that hyperstition cannot: it is the objects of the world that write the future of human fictions, and not human fictions that write the future of objects.

XII. In this sense, we believe the assumptions of the philosophy of hyperstition underlying the futurist tone have been at least put in doubt. But there remains a stylistic feature that could blunt the force of the disagreement — particularly because it escapes argument by confining itself to the playful aspect of the critic’s trade.

Let us attempt a second defense of the futurist tone.

Recent criticism has certainly maintained a taste for futurism, but it does not follow from this that it is committed to futurology. Imagining futures is, in any case, nothing more than a pedagogical and creative task. The defense gains strength if the relevance of the task is also grounded: imagining futures through human fiction has political and strategic importance in facing planetary threats.

We can only agree with this perspective. Returning degrees of freedom to a criticism with this orientation becomes crucial.

A strengthened criticism must be capable of including the fiction of objects as one more part of the raw material it works with. This requires, to some degree, abandoning the anthropocentric assumptions of hyperstition — those that take for granted that only human language, regardless of the support through which it is expressed, is a source of fiction. If we follow this proposal, a genre like science fiction recovers its attenuated power. The co-implication of the terms “science” and “fiction” ceases to be mediated by anthropocentrism.

Ultimately, it is science that has privileged access to the fiction of objects. This should not be understood as a defense of science as a discourse of truth, but as the vindication of a mode of openness to the world different from that of human imagination.

XIII. The Borgesian subject we have invoked more than once in this text deserves a proper send-off. In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the final paragraph reads “The world will be Tlön” — not because fiction will eventually colonize reality, but because in the virtuality of fiction the future is not in the future to come.

Fiction compels us to understand time as an atheist occasionalist would: a continuous creation, the whole world in each instant.

The world will be Tlön because Tlön already belongs to the world.