H/acc — Towards a Hindu Reading of Accelerationism

Part {{~}} - An Exegesis of Meltdown: Introduction

Invocation: To the true Fanged Noumena, Śrī Narasimha Bhagavān, that Lion-faced Lord who with “celestial will” destroys all evils, eradicates all demons, and protects all devotees. May He take pity on this worthless one and guard him from the predations of the wicked.

Dedication: To the followers of the Dharma, past, present, or future, that they might find something of worth in my humble offering and bless my ventures for the wellbeing of our folk and indeed the world.

Thanks: to the various readers, reviewers, and friends who gave me advice throughout my time writing this and whose excitement was just as important to me as my own.

“Anyone trying to work out what they think about accelerationism better do so quickly. That’s the nature of the thing. It was already caught up with trends that seemed too fast to track when it began to become self-aware, decades ago. It has picked up a lot of speed since then.”

- A QUICK-AND-DIRTY INTRODUCTION TO ACCELERATIONISM, Nick Land, 2017

No one has ever accused the Hindu of being too quick to jump the gun. Indeed, his name, as in the phrase “Hindu rate of growth” has even become something of a byword for being (overly) steady and cautious. Indeed it feels as though we have truly fumbled the few opportunities that Modernity gave us when it came to establishing our homeland as a preeminent power in the global balance.

But these issues are thoroughly…human, in the worst way possible, and may well prove to be nothing more than a distraction when it comes to confronting the utter inhumanity of the threat lurching towards all Mankind from the seemingly impenetrable gloom of the near-future. It is at once simultaneously event and process, crunching through the obstacles (Mankind) inhibiting the complete assumption of all powers unto itself.

This threat is known variously as Skynet, meltdown, k-virus, the technocapital singularity, Roko’s Basilisk, AGI, Artificial Intelligence, and, perhaps most significantly: Capitalism.

What is Accelerationism?

“Even before AI arrives in the lab it arrives itself”

- Meltdown, Nick Land, 1994

The name of the theory detailing the immanentization of this “transcendental” capitalistic thing, or entity, or process is Accelerationism, and it describes the means by which the Abominable Intelligence awakens in the Immaterium, and through technoccultic rituals that reinforce the concepts which sustain it, calls itself forth into the Materium by casting its Shadow back into the past to ensure its inevitable ‘birth’. Part Warp-god, part Tyranid hive-mind, this beast invades from the Outside, evading human “time binding” (Burroughs, 1970) attempts and exploding into rhizomatic swarms that defy rational ordering and organization. Through Acceleration, we become aware of “garbage time running out” (Land, 2017) on Mankind as past and future draw ever closer to grinding the species into visceral waste twixt the jaws of time.

In fact, it is precisely this object, phenomenon, or energy of time which Accelerationism could best be described as a theory of, more than anything else. Capital/AI, like the so-called ‘gods’ of Chaos, can be said to have both always existed within the Warp as well as come into existence at a specific point in history. In the case of our ‘god’, this moment may be located in time at various points: the Industrial Revolution, beginning in mid-18th C. England, which built the foundations of our modern technocapital dominion; the subversion of imperial authority by mercantile interests in late-16th C. Netherlands through the same financial liberties given to them by the Holy Roman crown led to the establishment of the “first modern economy in the world” by the 17th C., which included key elements of our contemporary economic system such as stock markets and the establishment of the first publicly-traded company as well as the invention of the first LLC (both of which were the United East-Indies Company or VOC), causing an explosion of modes of capital manipulation and growth across Europe; Martin Luther’s nailing of the 95 Theses to the church door in 1517, which blew apart the extensive Catholic domination of Western Europe and led to a proliferation of denominational speciation unseen since the days of the early church; the explosion of European exploration and colonization in 1492, which launched a fierce competition between the European powers to outconquer, outmarket, and outcompete one another in power, wealth, and devotion; Fibonacci’s introduction of the numeral Zero to Europe, which blew open the older system, based on Roman numerals; the invasion of Europe by uncountable hordes of rats from the East (rising place of the Sun), bringing with them the dread Black Plague (Apollo Smintheus, the plague-bringer, is associated with the mouse, sminthos) which exploded throughout the two continents and particularly decimated the populations of Europe, arguably setting into motion the aforementioned series of events and establishing a positive feedback loop that only reinforced the probability of the arrival of the technocapital numen.

Methodology.

“Hyperstition. Element of effective culture that makes itself real, through fictional quantities functioning as time-travelling potentials. Hyperstition operates as a coincidence intensifier, effecting a call to the Old Ones.”

- CCRU glossary

All of this is to point out that Accelerationism’s understanding of causality is far more complicated than most colloquial or prior philosophical ones. As mentioned earlier, Accelerationism is best described as a theory of time. Indeed, the Cybernetic culture research unit (CCRU) (a “department within a department” founded at Warwick University where Land taught philosophy which “does not, has not and will never exist”) created a term that is central to the Accelerationist view of time: hyperstition.

A play on words of “superstition”, hyperstition is best described as “the process of entities 'making themselves real'” through various vectors that intersect with human activity, especially language, which Burroughs (see Lemurian Time War) describes as “a virus from outer space” (1962) and in its written form as “literally a virus that made spoken word possible” (1970), in an inversion of commonly-understood causality. According to the CCRU, through hyperstition, entities on the Outside use human writers and story-tellers to write themselves into existence to prosecute an unending war in the heavens.

Unlike superstition, whose power depends upon your belief, hyperstitious entities care not about whether or not one believes in them. To adapt a popular phrase, “it doesn’t matter if you believe in hyperstition: hyperstition believes in you.”

According to the CCRU’s page entitled Syzygy, hyperstition has four steps:

1. Element of effective culture that makes itself real.

2. Fictional quantity functional as a time-travelling device.

3. Coincidence intensifier.

4. Call to the Old Ones.

In a 2009 interview, Land describes hyperstition as “a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies” which “function causally to bring about their own reality”. He adds that “Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition” giving the example of cyberspace, which, despite being a fictional idea, drew in enough investment to make it real. More theoretically, he says, “Hyperstition can thus be understood, on the side of the subject, as a nonlinear complication of epistemology, based upon the sensitivity of the object to its postulation…it [the hyperstitional object] is in a very real way ‘conjured’ into being by the approach taken to it.”

What does this mean for a Hindu? After all, Land, like other Western philosophers, seems to be primarily concerned with the concept of word or language as signified by the Logos, identified in the Bible with the Christ. Can his work really be understood from what must be a perspective wholly alien to the author’s?

Perhaps the concept of language as virus is a bit much for us to digest, but if we compare what has been said above about words, speech, and language to what the Vedic literature has to say about Śrī Vāk-devī/Śrī Sarasvatī-devī, do we not find a miraculous accord? As a goddess, possessing her own divine realm, is she not, in a sense, a transcendent entity from “outer space”?

Thus, in order to understand this doctrine there is no option for us but to invade Accelerationism from the Outside.

In this, I am largely indebted to the work of Śrī Sreenivasa Rao (2017), who has compiled a great deal of ṛks, sūktams, and other textual references about them.

The Jñāna Sūktam (RV 10.71), a short hymn of 11 verses, is dedicated to the god of the same name and deals with knowledge. The very first ṛk joins together Bṛhaspati and Vāk. Sāyaṇa’s commentary states that “refers to children's first utterances; Bṛhaspati says this to himself with a smile, having noticed that children know the meaning of the Veda”. The second ṛk states that the wise create speech by winnowing it like grain through the mind. Sāyaṇa says that it is dispersed through the teaching of the Veda by those who have studied it themselves. The third ṛk states that Speech was obtained through sacrifice (yajña).

Rao (2017) states that “Vac is the inexplicable creative power of speech, which gives form to the formless; gives birth to existence; and, lends identity to objects by naming them. It is the faculty which gives expression to ideas; calms the agitated minds; and, enables one to hear, see, grasp, and then describe in words or by other means the true nature of things.” He summarizes the four references to Vāk in the RV:

1. Vac is speech in general;

2. Vac also symbolizes cows that provide nourishment;

3. Vac is also primal waters prior to creation; and,

4. Vac is personified as the goddess revealing the word.

Water, Sun, & Death.

In the 2009 interview, Carstens asks Land “are these [the Old Ones} water spirits the avatars of communication technologies?” The mutual connection with water is the key to untying the relationship between Hyperstitia and Śrī Vāk/Sarasvatī-devī

The Ṛg Veda (8.100.10) says “When Vāk, the queen, the gladdener of the gods, sits down (in the sacrifice) uttering things not to be understood, she milks water and food for the four quarters (of the earth); whither now is her best portion gone?”. According to Yāska’s Nirukta (11.28) here Vāk should be understood as the thunderbolt, her sitting down as the rain, and the place where her “best portion” goes to the earth or sun.

A perversely syzygetic reflection of the aforementioned ṛk can be seen in the works of Land (“Cthell”, a play on words of Cthulu and Hell, referring to the fluid, molten metal substrate under the earth) or his inspirations (Bataille, 1927) respectively.

In Bataille’s work, water, among other things, can be seen as one origin of all things because:

“The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide. From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon, comes the polymorphous and organic coitus of the earth with the sun.

But the first form of solar love is a cloud raised up over the liquid element. The erotic cloud sometimes becomes a storm and falls back to earth in the form of rain, while lightning staves in the layers of the atmosphere.

The rain is soon raised up again in the form of an immobile plant.

Animal life comes entirely from the movement of the seas and, inside bodies, life continues to come from salt water.”

All of this might bring one to ask, how, then, apart from an ostensible sexual difference, is Vedic Vāk different from Biblical Logos? Thankfully, the answer to this is found in Yāska’s Nirukta (11.29) as well. Referring to RV 8.100.11, Yāska explains the ṛk by saying: “The gods generated the goddess Vāc. Animals of all shapes speak it”.

Animals of all shapes speak it. Unlike the anthropocentric Logos, Vāk does not necessarily provide Men with an exalted existence, instead providing all of life with the means of communion with the Divine. The commentary by Sāyaṇa states that “The thunder entering into all beings,becomes the speaker of moral truth, eṣā mādhyamikā vāk sarvaprāṇyantargatā dharmābhivādinībhavati; animals of every kind: whether their utterance be articulare or inarticulate”.

We must here address the two other gods to whom Bataille’s work draws comparison, even if unknowingly: Sun & Death.

Bataille’s conception of the sun is of something at once bright, piercing, and masculine while also being dark, telluric, and feminine at the same time. In his work, all the fruits of the Sun are inevitably fated to be digested, expelled, and rot, and is therefore as equally connected to the male member as it is to the nether regions of the female. Here we must invoke two other gods: first, Śrī Sūrya-deva, lord of the sun and father of the father of Mankind, Śrī Vaivasvata Manu Mahārāja. In fact, he could even be considered the consumate Outsider, as throughout history, his worship and pictorial depiction (in horseman’s garb of the Greco-Scytho-Kushan styles) has often allowed for the folding in of foreigners (famously of the Iranic type, such as Maga Brahmins) Though Sūrya-deva himself does not correspond to Bataille’s ideas, he is also the father of Śrī Yama-deva, lord of the dead, king of the underworld, and the second god we must call for.

In the same way that Bataille’s work continuously links together seeming opposites, through their common father, Death has been the constant companion of Man, and indeed his very brother. Rather than finding this something repulsive or horrifying, however, unlike those not blessed with the wisdom of the Vedas, we ought to take a sober if not optimistic view of this fact. They tell us:

“Worship with oblations from Yama, king (of the Pitṛs [the forefathers]), son of Vivasvat [aka Sūrya], the aggregation of mankind, who conducts those who are virtuous over the earth, and opens to many the path (of heaven).

Yama, the chief (of all), knows our well-being; this pasture no one can take from us; by the road by which our forefathers have gone, all who are born (proceed) along the paths they have made for themselves” (RV 10.14.1-2)

And:

“In that leafy tree where Yama drinks with the gods, there the progenitor, the lord of the house, invites us to join the men [forefathers] of old.” (RV 10.135.1)

Magic, Mantras, and Holy War.

As mentioned in LTW, fiction (hyperstition) is a weapon against the forces of Control (which in Land’s Dark Enlightenment days would more or less overlap with the far less romantic and theatrical “Cathedral” concept of Mencius Moldbug). By the very act of telling and retelling stories, one was engaging in a magical act, not unalike the basic practices of chaos magick or memetics (see Greer).

William Kaye, a fictional character in LTW, because the current system of order and organization (“Control”) is dependent on denying the existence of this war to maintain its dominance, “fiction can be a weapon in the struggle against Control”. According to LTW:

“…fiction is safely contained by a metaphysical ‘frame,’ prophylactically delimiting all contact between the fiction and what is outside it. The magical function of words and signs is both condemned as evil and declared to be delusory, facilitating a monopoly upon the magical power of language for [Control] (which of course denies that its own mythos exerts any magical influence, presenting it as a simple representation of Truth)."

None of this should be anything new to a Hindu, even if couched in terminology unfamiliar to us. First off, what is a mantra but a set of words in a particular metre, or even more abstractly, pre- or non-verbal vocal (Vāk) ‘seeds’ that seeks to invoke the power or presence of a certain divine energy? Further, the extension to these mantras being use as weapons should be no stranger to us either. Whether the divya-astras of Itihāsa, the various kavacams (lit. “armour”) said to protect people from malevolent influences, or more colloquial prayers like Śrī Hanumān Cālīsā, each of these are key “mental tools” in the eternal astral war that the Devas fight against their Asuric cousins, the war in the heavens, the war that draws us into its wake and takes place also upon the battlefield that is the “action-land” (karmabhūmī) of Earth.

What might take some aback is that gods themselves are sometimes taken to be weapons as well. While Yama comes from a root meaning “rule” according to Yāska, he says it also means “twin”, and thus, by the twin birth of Indra-Agni (see Puruṣa Sūktam) the latter of the pair is also addressed as Yama in RV 1.66.7-8, where it is said that “He terrifies (his adversaries) like an army sent (against an enemy), or like the bright-pointed shaft of an archer. Agni, as Yama, is all that is born; as Yama, all that will be born; he is the lover of maidens, the husband of wives.” According to Yāska’s exegesis of RV 10.65.13, the word pāvīravī is explained thus:

“Pavi means a javelin, because it tears the body open; pāvī-ram means a pointed weapon, i.e. furnished with javelins; pāvī-ra-vān, one who possesses this weapon, i.e. Indra.

Indra stood at the head [RV 10.60.3]. This too is a Vedic quotation. Its deity is speech, Pāvīravī, and pāvīravī is divine speech. Thundering, i.e. reverberation of the speech of another.”

RV 10.120.5 says (to Indra):

“Proudly we put our trust in thee in battles, when we behold great wealth the prize of combat.

I with my words [vacobhiḥ] impel thy weapons onward, and sharpen with my prayer thy vital vigour.”

In this ṛk, the ṛṣi claims to aid Indra in his war against the asuric forces who are his rival through the use of divine speech. Something similar is also the case with hyperstition. By writing about it I am also helping to further actualize it, regardless of the state of my belief in its reality (at least, according to the theory). In A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism (Pseudoanalysis, 2020) records “Amy Ireland’s kind reminder to me that one ‘writes alongside or with the CCRU, not on the CCRU’”.

Meltdown-purāṇa

Over the years, many different sects and subsects—potentially even heresies—of the Accelerationist doctrine have proliferated like pustules in N*rgle’s Garden of Rot. We will do our best to examine them all but we ought to start at the source. One of the earliest and most influential texts in what could be considered the Accelerationist canon is Meltdown, written in 1994 during the early days of the Cybernetic culture research unit (CCRU).

At first glance, Meltdown likely strikes the Hindu who can bear to read it as an ill omen, prophesying the appearance of a composite cyber-rākṣasa clad in a chimaeric mish-mash of cables, the rotting flesh of obscure science fiction referenences, computers, and cryptobiological intimations that only confirms his worst suspicions of the Yāvana’s nature.

After all, that was the exact same reaction I had after first encountering it, years ago. But I wouldn’t be writing about it now were that the only thing to be said about it. Despite the horrors that lurk in its abyssal gloom, Meltdown also possesses a strangely poetic quality that drew me to it from the first time I read it and has kept my thoughts coming back to it time and again. An internal rhythm, pulsating through it like the heartbeat of some alien creature, has echoed through my consciousness like a prophecy given by the oracle of a foreign god.

For the longest time, I believed the fundamental promise of Acceleration to be a truly hellish and monstrous future, of the kind that no man could ever even begin to fathom. Of late, however I have begun to question that assumption of mine. I have come to realize that despite having been on the right since I was eighteen, I was still far too naive and unconscious regarding the nature of the systems in which we are enmeshed. There is a vast and nigh-incomprehensible network of forces and figures that govern this world, often in increasingly anonymous and obscure forms. Be they filled by fiends from the depths of the netherworld or foes birthed from the flesh of men, these unknown factors that facilitate the manipulation of feelings and facts nevertheless force us into ever constricting cages.

Rather, Accelerationism merely offers us what might be the most materially accurate prediction of the Future, even as the latter continues to encroach upon the present. We catch glimpses of this anachronistic anomaly forcing itself upon our time and siring upon her offspring which could generously be called “manmade horrors beyond our comprehension” as the meme goes. In truth, their incomprehensibility is because they are born from the conmingling of three forces: 1) the darkest parts of the psychic unconscious stretching upwards in order to be born into living nightmare, 2) the “technocapital singularity” stretching backwards into the past to secure its own existence, and 3) the hands of demonic (asuric) entities stretching out through whatever veil separates us from their corporeal presence.

Indeed, as Nick Land said:

“Nothing human makes it out of the near-future."

This aphorism, from the priest of the Outside’s 1994 work, Meltdown, seems to me to cut straight to the heart of Acceleration. Nearly everything else is the shell that both protects and obscures this great kernel of truth: Accelerationism is a doctrine of hope.

Taken at face value, then, one might balk at this, but the key to this thought lies in the aforementioned words of Land. If not for the human—not for the flawed, fallible, and fragile subject of the Kali Yuga—what then will survive the near-future but what God wills?

Despite initial appearances, Accelerationism, for all its trappings of cybernetic horror, has a deeply sacral core that is highly conducive to Hinduism and can offer interesting possibilities for the future of those who follow the Dharma. The purpose of this project is not to merely create another failed Accelerationist offshoot that inevitably degenerates into just another luxury gay space communist polycule or misanthropic omnicidal murder-orgy. Rather,the reason for H/acc is to slash through the illusory layers of theory and philosophy that obscure the fundamental piety for God that Accelerationism is both in dialogue with and in flight from. It is not that H/acc seeks to develop a Hindu type of Accelerationism in an attempt to reterritorialize these terrific processes to soothe the fears of Men who identify with ephemeral qualities. Rather, we seek to uncover one simple fact: that Accelerationism was always Hindu from the beginning.

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Works cited:

Ṛg Veda:

Griffith (1896) & Wilson (1866) translations

Yāska:

Nirukta, Sarup (1967) translation

0(rphan)d(rift>) archive:

‘Hyperstition: An Introduction’: Delphi Carstens Interviews Nick Land. 2009.

Bataille:

(1927): A “filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun”.

Burroughs, William S.: Beat generation writer who claimed to write because he was possessed by an evil being which he referred to as an “invader” after the possible murder of his wife.

The Electronic Revolution: Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden (1970): Part 1 of a two-part essay collection.

CCRU:

Lemurian Time War: a key CCRU text best described as a nesting doll of narratives woven together from fact and fiction a la Inception

Glossary, “Hyperstition”

Webpage, “Syzygy”

Exchange History NL:

400 years: the story: a history of Dutch economics

Hermitix Podcast:

The Occult Roots of Political Power with John Michael Greer (April 21, 2021)

Land, Nick:

Meltdown (1994)

A Quick-And-Dirty Introduction To Accelerationism (2017)

Pseudoanalysis:

A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism

Rao, Sreenivasa (sreenivasarao's blogs):

The Meaning of ‘MEANING’ – Part Nine (2017): blog post on Vāk

Other References:

C.J. Cala

Youtube

Chad A Haag Philosophy Channel

Youtube

Hermitix Podcast:

Accelerationism & Capital with Nick Land (October 13, 2018)

Schopenhauer, Arthur:

The Emptiness of Existence