Theory-Fiction

Objective

By the end of this volume you understand the writing practice underlying the CCRU, theory-fiction. You know why the group constructed its object instead of describing it, by what concrete means it did so, and from which lineage it drew. You grasp the epistemological claim behind it, that fiction doesn't miss reality but produces it in its own way. With that you enter the third module and approach the heart of the group, because in the CCRU the method is already the actual thesis.

Exposition

At the end of the last two modules stands an observation you have met since Volume 1 and that now receives its concept. The CCRU drew no clean line between analysis and narrative. Much in its texts reads at once as a claim about the world and as a piece of an invented story. That double nature is no sloppiness and no stylistic error but the procedure itself. It bears a name, theory-fiction, and this volume turns the observation into an understanding. You learn here the group's how, its workshop, before the next volume introduces the why in its most radical form.

Start with the counter-image, because the procedure only sharpens against it. Ordinary academic theory rests on a presupposition so self-evident that it's rarely stated. It assumes there is a world that lies before us and that the task of thinking consists in mapping that world as accurately as possible. The theorist stands outside their object, regards it from a safe distance, and describes what is the case. Truth in this picture means correspondence between the statement and reality. The ideal is the mirror that faithfully renders what lies in front of it. The whole form of scientific prose serves that task, the sober language, the citation, the testable thesis, the clear line between what is and what one merely makes up.

The CCRU disputes that presupposition. For them thinking doesn't merely describe the world, it intervenes in it. A fiction is no mere as-if remaining external to reality but a force that acts back on reality and works on its shape. Where fiction designs worlds, it releases something that can change the world that is. From that conviction follows a different practice of writing. If invention is itself an operative force, then the strict separation of analysis from narrative loses its sense. The theorist then need not describe what is, they can construct what is to have an effect. That's exactly what theory-fiction means. It is thinking that stops wanting to be a mirror and starts being a machine that produces reality.

Now look at the concrete means, because they make the abstraction tangible. The first means is the invented source. The CCRU referred in its texts to books, documents, and researchers that did not exist, and treated them with the full seriousness of scholarly citation. Footnotes led into an archive the group had itself dreamed up. That practice inverts the function of the citation. Where the citation in science binds a statement to a reality that lies before us, the invented citation binds it to one that was dreamed up, and by doing so with full seriousness, it lends the dreamed-up the weight of the real. The second means is the persona, the invented author. The group spoke through figures appearing as the originators of its own theories. The best known is Professor Daniel Barker, an invented scientist to whom the CCRU attributed a biography, a past, and a doctrine, geotraumatics, which you meet again in Volume 20. Barker is no pseudonym in the ordinary sense, behind which a real author hides, but an independent figure through which the group thinks. The third means is the collective anonymity you already met in Volume 8 as a working form. By writing as a nameless collective, the CCRU withdrew from its texts the individual responsible author and gave them the character of a find, of material stemming from no particular pen.

These means interlock and together yield a weave in which the reader can never again feel certain whether they have an analysis or a narrative before them. Exactly that uncertainty is intended. It puts the reader in a state where the boundary between knowledge and invention no longer holds, and thereby opens them to the group's actual claim, that this boundary is more porous anyway than ordinary thinking admits.

Now place the procedure in its lineage, because the CCRU didn't invent it but took it over from a literary tradition and sharpened it. The first ancestor is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer whose stories are about invented books, dreamed-up encyclopaedias, and entire fictional worlds that begin to seep into the real one. His story of an invented planet whose description slowly spreads through reality is a primal scene of the thought that a sufficiently elaborated fiction is capable of becoming real. The second ancestor is H. P. Lovecraft, whom you know from Volume 7. His invented book, the forbidden work full of cosmic horrors, is surrounded by an apparatus of references and citations so dense that some readers took it for a real historical document. Lovecraft supplied the pattern of the invented source that acquires the appearance of the genuine through its learned surroundings. The third ancestor is cyberpunk, Gibson and Philip K. Dick, whose stories treat the boundary between reality and simulation as their theme and thereby confirmed the CCRU in its own procedure.

Hold on at this point to an important distinction, so that you don't confuse two concepts of the course. Theory-fiction denotes the procedure, the writing practice, the how. The concept carrying the claim behind it, the why, is hyperstition, and the next two volumes are devoted to it. Theory-fiction is the craft, hyperstition the thesis about the effective force of what is thus created. The two belong closely together, and yet you have to keep them apart. You could pursue the procedure without believing in its effect, as mere play. The CCRU pursued it because it believed in the effect, and that joining of craft and belief makes up its seriousness.

An objection suggests itself and deserves an honest answer. Is all this in the end just an excuse, a licence under which any claim can disguise itself as profound fiction? The danger is real, and it's the price of the procedure. A theory-fiction evades ordinary testing, because you can't refute it like a factual statement. It doesn't want to be true in the sense of correspondence but effective. The measure thereby shifts from correctness to effect, and that measure is harder to handle. The CCRU accepted that blur because it was convinced the most important forces of culture work by that logic anyway, that money, belief, and the future are not images of a reality that lies before us but fictions that produce reality. Whether that wager pays off is the decisive question, which the next volume tests on the most important example, on capital itself.

One last thought leads beyond the CCRU and shows that the procedure was more than a quirk of the group. Out of theory-fiction came a genre of thinking in its own right that is practised to this day. Its most mature work is a book by Reza Negarestani from 2008 that fuses a philosophical treatise with a horror narrative and builds the means of the invented source and the dreamed-up archive into a closed form. Volume 25 is devoted to that work. It proves that theory-fiction did not remain a mere trick of a small group but became a serious way of developing thoughts unavailable otherwise. What the CCRU began as a para-academic experiment became a tool others took up and carried on.

Core Claim

Theory-fiction is the writing practice of the CCRU, which frees thinking from the claim to be a mirror of the world that lies before us and grasps it as a force that brings forth reality. With invented sources, dreamed-up personae such as Professor Barker, and collective anonymity it blurs the boundary between analysis and narrative. It is the procedure whose underlying claim about the effective force of fictions bears the name hyperstition.

Bridge to the Next Volume

The craft is understood, now comes the belief that carries it. Volume 13 turns to hyperstition, the CCRU's own concept and its theoretical core. It explains the mechanism of the fiction that makes itself real and shows how a narrative can work as a circuit between the dreamed-up and the real. With that you push through to the actual heart of the group's thinking, which everything so far has been running towards.