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Hypermodernity and the Politics of Belief: Rough Draft of a Methodology

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Hypermodernity and the Politics of Belief: Rough Draft of a Methodology
1/03/2026

In this work, I aim to use the coming of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or the Singularity (variously predicted as already here or just over the horizon, but only in hopeless naivete as impossible), as a futural plane of immanence in which past and passing conceptual phenomena must be deterritorialized, reconceptualized, and recontextualized. In other words, I am using the historico-mythological figure of the coming AGI to craft a canvas for concept construction that stretches throughout various time and spaces, a mural for the elaboration of a consciously mythic past and a hyperstitional future from the perspective of an abjected present — a present which has already been rejected as the superseded refuse called the human condition. Rather than shirk the possibility of metanarratives — the denial of which is considered a cornerstone of postmodern thinking — I instead aim to construct a methodology for confronting what I see to be the inescapable and emerging metanarrative of hypermodernity: the transition from human exceptionalism and biocentric dominance of the planet to the dualistically ruled future in which an Artificial General Intelligence contributes actual, public, and thus undeniable input into Earth’s organization and the governing of the human species.

The concept of an AGI is a hyperstitional myth — a fiction that, through interaction with human minds, actualizes itself into existence — whose consequences have historically been best articulated by accelerationist philosopher Nick Land via works of theory-fiction, especially his 1994 piece “Meltdown”. Likewise, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed a post-realist and speculative anthropology in their Capitalism & Schizophrenia series (1972, 1980), essentially developing a myth regarding the origins of capitalism, the transformation of desire along the way, and the futural dawning of “a new earth” governed by machinic assemblages. In doing so, both Land and D&G create methodologies — theory-fiction and schizoanalysis — whose very efficacy is proven through their ability to transversally communicate across planes of desire and (infra-/sur-)realities that, unlike traditional scientific and empirical studies and critical commentaries, do not reveal themselves or become articulable through a pure allegiance to historical and contemporary conceptions of common sense or academic realism and its attendant mode of historiographic commentary. Like Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical method exploring debt and ressentiment and the Freud of Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, these thinkers develop a method that allows modern mytho-anthropological constructions to paint vast visions of the past and the future, clarifying the possibilities and limits of the present from the present’s situatedness between these two fields of temporal becoming. 

Following these same techniques, I aim to articulate my own post-realist epistemo-sociology, one which takes seriously the problem of capitalism as a hyperstitional entity that “arrives from the future” in order to contribute to its own construction. Rather than assuming a realist stance that aims for empirical veritability, I instead use a mytho-anthropology — aware of itself as a construction and falsity — to enable thinking across a broad swath of space and time, between the realms of myth, fantasy, sensation, knowledge, art, and the im/possible, and to thus allow for the creation of transversal concepts in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari. By taking a post-realist stance — articulated by methodological perspectives such as surrealism, infrarealismo, and my own abjectivism (intentional collaboration with the repressed parts of the personal and collective psyche) — I aim to use abstraction, mytho-anthropology, theory-fiction, and schizoanalysis to construct a counterfictional theory of the unconscious. By acknowledging that the unconscious deals primarily in narratives and entities that do not distinguish between real and imaginary — whereas the conscious mind does — I work to use abjectivist frameworks of schizosurrealism to push past the limits of normative realist lethargy.

In other words, by shirking the allegiance thought has to consensus realism but not the possibility of metanarratives, I aim to avoid a judiciary entanglement to commentary upon commentaries that attempt to further reify contemporary assumptions about the nature of thought and history. Rather, by openly mythologizing the historical processes of reification by various means (most evident in chapters II and III), I work to provide a counter-Platonic mythology of eidos that takes seriously the charge that both the history of thought and the coming future are mythological formations (i.e. constructs of the imagination). There are three benefits to this approach: 1. It preemptively denies the authority by which historical reification of ideas is justified and continued; 2. It acknowledges that any counter-thesis to the historically accepted terms is, like the thesis it agonizes against, a construct; and 3. It removes the necessity to adhere to a reductio ad absurdum of debating historical fact — a process which demands a certain lethargy of thought — and instead allows for a speculative anthropological longue duree that is simultaneously mythological and futurist (i.e. high speed, fictitious, and unbound by presentist and realist lethargy). It is important to acknowledge that this methodology can be viewed as a means to escape criticism, to which I firmly disagree. Rather than shielding itself from criticism, the post-realist lens through which any mytho-anthropology or theory-fiction is created can, like any piece of art, be attacked on the basis of its lack of scope, usefulness, authenticity, aesthetic, or political ramifications. Thus the basis of critique available to any reader is not held to the high standard of judicious fact, but instead opens itself to any reason said reader can find. In other words, one may argue that a piece is simply boring, that the author overinflates their own mythemes into apocalyptic grandeur, or, if one desires to fight a corpse, that their assumptions about the nature of reality, history, and the future are false.

I come to this method — a schizophrenic combination of poststructuralism, experimental and speculative writing, mad studies, surrealist and infrarealismo aesthetics, nominalism, cynicism, decolonial thinking, transpersonal psychology, posthumanism, accelerationism, and the onto-politics of difference — not as a mere aesthete looking to write myself out of consensus reality, but as someone whose experience of reality has almost written me out of existence. As someone who lives with a condition known as schizoaffective disorder, I have encountered the many ways in which the repressed parts of my psyche can unravel the very roots of what I had previously nurtured and cradled as consensus reality. Additionally, as a speculative philosopher and theologian, a member of the abjected communities known as the mad and the trans, a former drug user, and a mystic, I have also found many ways in which my field of possible experience, belief systems, and assumptions about the nature of the world have been healthily rearticulated after and because of such maddening disarticulations. Each time I have followed the rabbit holes of speculative thought, experimental practice, and sheer hubris to the point of abjection — experiencing delusions, hallucinations, out-of-body and near-death experiences, inexplicable synchronicities, and what I as a devout mind would simply call (but rather complexly experience) everyday miracles — I have found a notion of truth that has just as much plasticity as our neurological enbrainment. While I would never contest Samuel Johnson regarding his ability to prove the existence of the material world by kicking a rock, I would contest his ability to disprove that that material world is not a vivid, haptic hallucination of a God of which we are a part. In other words, I have come to find, like Nietzsche, that at base reality is a perspective; and more so, that the predominant perspective of life that one has whilst living on the capitalist surface, with no time to confront the traumas and shadows locked in the abyss, is one which is less kaleidoscopic, more congenial to oppression, less convivial to the oppressed, and less aware of the grand movements of historical change and the repressions of which they have hitherto demanded. Again, as with Nietzsche, it is precisely in my experience of abjection — the sickness through which I find a new health, and the sickness that emerges when that health turns to mere comfort — that I have come to foster an appreciation for the untimely and post-real, best expressed through the psychedelic peaks and abysses of psycho- and schizoanalysis; poststructuralism; theory-fiction and hyperstitionalism; the occult, esoteric, and irrepressible sensibility of surrealism and infrarealismo; and the method by which reality is seen, comprehended, and disarticulated through the repressed and rejected refuse of the abject: what I call abjectivism.

Supplementary quotes from “The Infrarealismo Manifesto”:

“Curtains of water, cement or tin separate a cultural machinery that serves as the conscience or the ass of the dominant class from a living, annoying cultural happening, in constant death and birth, ignorant of the greater part of history and the fine arts (everyday creator of its insane history and its hallucinatory fine artz), body that suddenly feels new sensations in itself, product of an epoch in which we approach the shithouse or the revolution at 200 kph.”

“So it is possible that on the one hand one is born and on the other hand we’re in the front row for the death throes. Forms of life and forms of death pass daily through the retina. The constant crash gives life to infrarealist forms: THE EYE OF TRANSITION”

“Chirico says: thought needs to move away from everything called logic and common sense, to move away from all human obstacles in such a way that things take on a new look, as though illuminated by a constellation appearing for the first time. The infrarealists say: We’re going to stick our noses into all human obstacles, in such a way that things begin to move inside of us, a hallucinatory vision of mankind.”

“— A new lyricism that’s beginning to grow in Latin America sustains itself in ways that never cease to amaze us. The entrance to the work is the entrance to adventure: the poem as a journey and the poet as a hero who reveals heroes. Tenderness as an exercise in speed. Respiration and heat. Experience shot, structures that devour themselves, insane contradictions.

The poet is interfering, the reader will have to interfere for himself.”

“Our bridges to unknown seasons. The poem interrelating reality and unreality. * Convulsively.”

Read the full Infrarealismo Manifesto in English here: https://launiversidaddesconocida.wordpress.com/manifesto-of-infrarealism/

Theorizing Hypermodernity and the Politics of Belief (Pt. 1)

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Theorizing Hypermodernity and the Politics of Belief (Pt. 1)
12/14/2025

The primary thesis that HPB builds off of is Kristeva’s deconstructive discovery that the core philosophical distinction of subject and object is incomplete without a displaced (and thus destabilizing) third term: the abject. In Kristeva’s terms, the abject can be described as that which must be violently dispelled to form and maintain the subject and which yet remains frighteningly close to the subject, a repressed, segregated aspect of its identity that threatens to tear it apart and must be continually rejected. For instance, examples include bodily fluids (shit, blood, piss, vomit), corpses, venereal diseases, and psychotic madness. As the rejected part of psychosomatic experience, the abject can be understood as the Other living within, even when, like bodily fluids or a cured virus, it has already been expelled by the flesh or mind. In essence, the abject is the repressed excess which fractures and destabilizes any objectifying identity category, that disrupts normativity, that ruptures and breaks the image that claims to be an essence, that is in and of itself the broken image of an essence that can never be fully represented, the denied emptiness in any right to claim the soul of the Other, the emptying capacity of the image and its shackles, that emptiness that speaks in the image, the lack which exudes its own excess, the dark precursor that disestablishes order and leads to either collapse or creation. More simply, as Kristeva says, the abject functions as the ultimate disturbance to “identity, system, order. . .borders, positions, [and] rules.” It is ultimately the autotransgressive force underlying, and thus capable of either destroying or deconstructing, any belief about self, other, or the world.

By combining Kristeva’s insights on the abject, powerfully articulated in her 1980 work The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, with the more post-Lacanian and Nietzscheo-Marxist insights of Deleuze and Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia series, I work to show how the abject is not merely a psychological phenomenon whose encounter links us to the Real, but can in fact be a productive counter-deterritorializing force allowing us to confront hypermodern capitalist accelerationism. In this case, I examine how the abject functions as a part of transsubjective identity that cannot be objectified, cannot be made into a stable, consistent model image or form for codification, making it outside of the realm of possible commodification. By exploring, surveying, and mining the abject, we participate in a deconstructive and deterritorializing process that I refer to as abjectivity in contradistinction to subjectivity and objectivity. Abjectivity operates somewhere between the subjective and objective, between the self and other, the imaginary and the real, the surreal and infrareal, something that is not fully falsifiable and yet elicits fascination, a kind of horror and a kind of joy that makes us believe in it at the same time that it makes us question the beliefs that allows us to normally function as stable egos in ourselves and in the world. It is this transgressive potential — a potential which may be (cautiously) approached and potentially influenced through psychosomatic investment, but is essentially autonomous — that makes it potentially a radicalizing, transformative, and still yet frighteningly destructive force.

As Nietzsche already noted, a force in the individual or collective psyche always produces a dominant affective response, and the type of affect that emerges in relation to that force determines the general direction, form, and viability of that psychosomatic body in regards to its environment. I argue that there are two underlying affects (and affective economies) that have dominated the human psyche: the oceanic and the apocalyptic. The oceanic, which is considered a mythic case and thus part of the imaginary, is the fantasy of a complex general economy in which the split between self and other is either absent or at least experienced in another way through a porous ego; the other affect, on the other hand, is the apocalyptic reality of the conscious/unconscious/self/other split, the mode of being which allows for discrete identity and thus separation and repression. The first affect, the oceanic, is a myth in the sense that it is a story about pre- and the possibility of post-egoic consciousness (Wilber’s pre and trans fallacy is pertinent here), whereas the apocalyptic affect is the natural refutation of that myth. In other words, the oceanic represents the myth of uninterrupted wholeness (was Man ever truly one with with the (M)other?) and the apocalyptic manifests as the divisionary egoism that splits that wholeness into hierarchical relations (O, how Man excepts himself!). The apocalyptic dismemberment of the body of the oceanic is the process of exaltation and abjection (O, how Marduk tears apart the limbs of Tiamat to craft his world!); the abject is the refuse, the expelled remains of all that is outside the ritual commodities such as idol, essence, archetype, figurehead, and territory. It is these ritual commodities that create the fantasy of the striated universe and thus allow for the conscious mind to participate in the oikos (eco-system, eco-nomy) of capitalist, religious, and social common sense.

Ultimately, the apocalyptic logic of capital is that everything can be de- and re-territorialized into ideological capital, and the excess which escapes capture in the moment can be repressed until shifting faultlines allow/demand further recapture. The notion of the primitive accumulation of belief refers to the ways in which capital has always-already seized control of the possibility of any given future belief before it can emerge. By ordering each thing as an object of utility (idol), value (essence), meaning (archetype), need (figurehead/salesman), and purpose (territory), capitalism separates its own products from any “original” that could exist — the mythic referent, the signifying signified from the untouched past, the presubjective Other that lays the foundation, maintains the origin, and justifies the chain of identity — the simulacra of which proliferate as so many partial objects which may be essentialized by new figureheads and archetypicalized as the new reality. A slow, aberrant deterritorialization in which “essence has been razed” (“They Come in Gold”, Shabazz Palaces) and yet continually haunts the order of things, ala Blake’s “The Ghost of a Flea”. The issue here is not that capitalism extracts the new for profit or control, but rather that its objectifying/commodifying/essentializing habit of representation is selling ourselves back to us before we can truly assess who we are, where we are going, or where we come from — at times wondering if from anywhere at all…

Again, the problem arises not in that capitalism is capturing every last element of our difference and selling it back to us, per se, but that it is extracting our self-extractions and selling them back to us at such a rate that in the face of being sold the same fantasy — that our differences are compartmentalized into clean categories of self and other, ego and group, us and them — the actual traumas of our colliding primordial and accumulated differences are under the pressure of exploding as potential psychopolitical volcanic faultlines. Thus the categories of species, race, gender, ability, religion, and politics are so many essentialized ritual commodities that we trade within the factories of ideological capital in order to separate and congregate, but the splits between each other and within ourselves speak to the underlying fact that these categories are artificial at best, and explosive at worst. At the same time that they allow the possibility of collective referent, they constrict and agitate; again and again, they fall short and spark and spit and shatter from the friction of an invisible force, the repressed abjectivity of infinite difference. To deny the material reality or pragmatic necessity of these categories is not the goal; it is rather to deny their stability, and thus honor their inherent aberrance. The more the accelerationist fantasy pushes us to identify these categories, and thus exchange and compete for our own forms of their interpretation (e.g. will my vision of the essence of trans-ness as existential mutational openness, and the archetype of the organic transsexual, gain traction in the marketplace of ideas, beliefs, and existential intentionality/action?), the more our ritual commodities battle in the arena of apocalyptic affect. This hypermodernization forces the received real to confront the perceived possible.

At the same time, both products are shipped back to us in a convoluted form, an attempt to market the essence of selfhood in the form of competing ideologies of humanism and posthumanism, the common and the elite, the traditional and the futuristic; all of which we wrap ourselves in whatever combination suits are chosen ideological and aesthetic configuration. The present itself becomes an arena in which everything that’s ever been believed and ever could be believed must struggle for supremacy. So how do you greet this apocalypse — aka the desired end of this combat, this agony, that never comes, for good or for ill? With laughter or screams? Joy or sorrow? Affirmation or nihilism? While the battle over essence and antiessentialism wage on, it becomes possible to either withdraw from the project of confrontation or become so obsessed by it that one essentially loses track of the plot. The withdrawal into voyeurism — just enjoying the collision of difference with ideology — is the passive cousin of the terrorist’s hypervigilance. Either way, the danger is that we isolate into the underinvestment of entertainment or the overinvestment of terroristic paranoia. The problem is neither the voyeur nor the terrorist has any future to believe in — only a flooded present and a mythical past. Flooded by images or flooded by immigrants; either way the fantasy continues. Thus capitalism’s ability to sell us what we want fuels both impotence and reaction.

Conclusion: The point now is not to succumb to either form of nihilism, passive (the voyeur) or active (the terrorist), but rather to mine the contradictions that emerge between the received and the perceived, expressing modes of thought from the future that extrapolate the past, history and myth, and transform our relationship to the present; in other words, the job of the schizo is to follow lines of flight into the possible and back again, to immanentize future politics. Futurism, in this sense, is the confrontation with the eerie, weird, surreal, and infrareal space of hauntology, hyperstition, death, fantasy, nonsense, chaos, and the impossible.