Hyperstition in the Dressing Room

The liberatory potentiality of becoming as route for exit

One of the most interesting things about Amy Ireland & Maya B. Kronic’s Cute Accelerationism book, to me, is the progression of the CCRU’s hyperstition into the realm of becoming, as a self or an identity. This to me is a logical point of progression (or perhaps acceleration), in the sense of the place we are now (culturally) versus the nascent stages of creation that shaped the early positions of the CCRU. 

For some reason I want to use the word subversion but I feel like this is the wrong word for this instance: while most of cute/acc is centered around ideas of becoming derived from interactions in trans spaces, there is a particular adaptation: the potentiate becoming one does not have to just look at the space of gender, or even the “cuteness” that the essay-cum-manifesto itself circulated around, but rather an adoption of modality presents a thorough understanding of the many forms of becoming. 

I have always been quietly fascinated by what I perceive as a mirroring between the re-rigging capacities of both trans and bodybuilder cultures. The most blatant line of comparison, perhaps, comes via medical intervention by way of “hacking” hormones with pharmaceuticals. There’s an occasionally interesting disjunct, naturally, between those that align with anabolic steroid or SARMs use contra those that are on Testosterone or Estrogen in order to transition. In both instances a pharmaceutical “other” is introducing a change to allow an individual to transform their body into a vessel that is more representative of their own becoming. 

This, to me, feels obvious, and as such isn’t that interesting in itself. A pharmaceutical intervention feels decidedly 20th century while the opportunity of a mediated packaging and re-rigging of the self via social media (or any other modality of broadcast), viewed not as an excessive remnant of capitalism but rather as potentiated becoming itself feels far more impactful. This is the point, upon my second read-through, that the liberatory potentiality of a world that I am categorical at the antipodes of opened up a space where I was able to enter:

‘It is by a process of deliberation that the body begins to uncouple itself from its own and external authority.’ Even the most tentative re-rigging produces novel proprioceptors, new relations between differential elements, reconfiguring the body-plan, piloting new affects, probing latent spaces. You don’t need a mecha suit, a maid outfit will do. [...] But this ‘production is simultaneously consumption and a recording process’--the broadcasting of these new forms of jouissance, their propagation and sharing, irreversibly mixing ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ imagos. If to be cute is to give up a certain mode of self-regard, it also involves viewing, liking, and sharing yourself as an object. The intense semiotic zones of social media potentiate cuteness to an unprecedented degree, accelerating a decades-long history of symbiosis between Cute and consumer culture. (Cute Accelerationism, 30-31)

Again, while becoming cute might be the motivator of the text itself, it is certainly not the only application. Becoming always has (and always must!) involve a level of performativity, and the venues in which we perform socially are constantly shifting and changing. The idea of the self might be a floating signifier until we can latch onto that performance that echoes not inherently what we feel we already are deep inside, but instead what we feel like we have the potentiality to become. I watched a 20 minute YouTube video of a tattooed zoomer talking about how she was able to lose weight & get in shape by both “romanticizing” good eating habits and “performing” her day to day tasks as if she had already made the changes she desired and was now only attempting to maintain them. This is sort of a much more active mode of manifestation: don’t dream it, be it. An infinite number of banalities paint this but why not just fuck around and find out. 

I think all of this is inherently good; the best part about being a human being and having a body is our potential for change, and a conscious decision that can lead us there. Authenticity insists that there is a core self that is ultimately fixed, and anyone who has consciously spent time as a human-being can recognize that while there might always be a “core sense of being” to who we are, that core is never static. 

One of the reasons that I find myself so invested with the garment design of Carol Christian Poell is how much potential they present to me, in a way that no other body of fashion or clothing design has ever cohesively managed to do. This is an inherently subjective perspective, of course. But while I may not be able to “place myself” in many of the garments in my current state of who I am, the unlimited potential that the garments repeatedly open up makes me excited in a way that other clothing rarely does. This is not just on the level of something like “this shit looks dope and when I can afford it I will wear it and look great,” but rather there is a level of almost conflict that the garments themselves inspired me to engage with: the idea that combat can bring about a new presentation of self is a much more active and enigmatic route into becoming, akin to a sort of lower-stake sense of transcendence or overwhelm. Clothing as leathersex relationship. 

…

In the perfect flight of synchronicity, a re-reading of Andrew Rothwell’s translation of Bernard Noël’s La Chute des Temps (put out on Editions VVV Editions, now out of print) introduced a particular linguistic tic that Noël uses repeated throughout the poem. Noël repeatedly uses the expression “le tu, meaning both ‘the unsaid’ (its antonym in this sense being le dit) and ‘the [familiar] you’.” (La Chute Des Tempts/Time-Fall, 42). As Rothwell states after explaining the capacity of translation to almost always certainly miss the mark of full textuality, “this one little word thus encapsulates a whole thematics of relational identity.” (ibid., 42)

The space of meaning in this idiosyncratic semantic construction highlights the space between the self and potentiality of becoming: the self that we know and the self that we are yet to communicate. And it is when we consider the potentiality for communication that we begin to realize our becomings are not mere naval-gazing self-obsessions, they are potentially wounding instances that open us up to the world, whether this opens us up to sovereign experience (as I spoke to last time, a sort of intimacy with the self) or an active engagement with a community of others. The potentiality of becoming is not an inherent push towards homogeneity: rather it presents a dialog, maybe even a combat that makes way towards communion. A sort of sacred placation to the world that we can suddenly find a new sense of ontological prescience, being in itself. For the only way we can escape from the trap that is the self is to forge our way out, repeatedly, forever pushing towards an infinite chain of becoming.