Theory-fiction is a genre of thought in the process of making and becoming. And, as any genre of that kind on such a stage, what it needs for thriving is methodology: not from the side of ‘theory’ — for there are a lot of possible ways of theoretical inquiry present at hand today (which is, perhaps, a tautology, since the Greek methodos already implies this meaning – ‘the way’) — but for its ‘fictional’ counterpart. A set of practices attributed directly to the methodological (together with metaphysical, ontological and epistemological) domain of fiction already has a name — ‘fictioning’, the art of creation and anticipation of new worlds and things to come, standing for new modes of existence, as it is brilliantly put by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan. To contribute to what was started by them in their book Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, and to offer one more designated method of worldmaking, I will make an attempt to elaborate, in a more or less rigorous way, a particular method of fictioning that I have called hypervision.
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Despite coincidentally sounding similar to ‘hyperstition’, the method’s name is actually not related to it. This is a portmanteau-word which owes its name to a work of fiction, the cyberpunk/dystopian manga Gunnm Hyper Future Vision (more commonly known as Battle Angel Alita) by Yukito Kishiro. I believe that this precise term perfectly reflects the essence of a particular mode of fictioning which will be discussed here. At the same time, it should be mentioned that GUNNM itself is not a sole instance of hypervision as a tool for creating worlds (and new existential modalities); actually, it’s not even a paradigmatic one (rather, it serves as its arbitrary token). For a clearer understanding of what hypervision is — since the straightforward general definition is not enough here — I propose a set of properties relevant to a mode of fictioning which at the same time serve as distinctive features inherent in this particular mode of fictioning (and not any other).
(1) Thisworldness: despite attempts at obtaining a view from the outside, the directionality of this outward gaze is always of this world. It doesn’t deal with other worlds as a plot-setting condition, although it can cognize other worlds as part of the narrative and plot itself; yet, hypervision is unthinkable without the inclusion of our world (with or without us as a part of this world). In other words, any hypervision as a vision of the future is always a vision of our world or what will have become of it in the far distant future. At the same time, not just any kind of representation or speculation about the future of our world is a hypervision: examples of science/speculative fiction which cannot be deemed hypervision are Frank Herbert’s Dune or a cluster of works in the subgenre of speculative evolution (surely such works as Nemo Ramjet’s All Tomorrows are definitely hypervisional by their nature, but this is more an exception from the subgenre in general than a customary or observed consistency). Feature (1) is significant and always present for all instances of hypervision, but it is not decisive for this method of fictioning, nor is it the aspect by which the method is well-defined. The other following features are both more imperative and, at the same time, allow classification of a particular speculation or work of fiction as hypervision.
(2) A feature of perhaps greatest importance is the utilization of time-abyss as a foundation of narrative plot (not just as a plotting device or supplementary tool for building up the whole narration, but as an axis, a stem for the entire story to be created). Hypervision is not merely a speculation about the future of this world: the world it builds and proposes as a representation is a far distant future of this world. Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future is a perfect example of the utilization of deep/cosmic time, vast and unthinkable on individual, generational and even species scale time intervals, to set the whole story. The work deals both with what has become of the humans of ‘our’ today, their direct descendants, as well as their further derivations — not merely ‘posthumanity’ but even what comes after it. Another example, demonstrated by GUNNM manga, is a ‘future after the future’: the unabridged story in this case is set after the distant future which came after the (relatively) ‘closer’ future with respect to our own time.
To demonstrate the latter case, think of the following. If we think of our own time as t?, then the events subject to consideration are unfolding between an infinitely remote t? (which appears only in flashbacks as a past to the actual narrative of GUNNM) and t? which is the actual time of the unfolding plot. Anyway, the ‘principle’ of gap and abyss is preserved in one or another sense. Here we deal not with the future but with two discrete futures that are separated from one another and connected only by a sort of secondary means of connection – via a sort of mediation, allowing the subject to surpass the diachronic cut-off by the smuggling of its time-consciousness from one time to another. This is where the two futures become one while at the same time remaining two. Finally, when we observe William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land and The House on the Borderland, both novels deal with infinitely huge amounts of time, billions of billions years from today: the former deals with the timescale of the earth, the latter depicts the accelerated sequence of events in the whole cosmos up to the end times. In all these instances, time is not only a narrative technique but also a tool for the creation of grim and macabre atmospheres of penultimate or ultimate scenes of the cosmos or humanity, by one or another means and set of causes, as well as their real effects.
(3) Incommensurability of existential horizons: hypervision always deals with the world wherein a rupture exists between the conditions of existence of ‘our present’ or ‘the world as it is now’ and those in the future world, its ecology and existential conditions forming the ontological horizon of the futurity as such. From the viewpoint of hypervisional fictioning, the conditions of the future always transform: in terms of relational properties, this occurs in the move from ‘for the worst’ to ‘our world in which we are present’. That is, nothing that exists within the scope of the contemporary ontological horizon can thrive and live unchanged in this asserted or speculated far future world. It would necessarily go extinct without even a possibility to adapt or perform a transition within the realm of the evolutionary continuum ‘species x ? species y’. In Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique we deal with Earth slowly rendering itself unsuitable for living without the possibility of changing the situation, alongside humanity’s transition to another species capable of living in new post-planetary ecologies of a distant and dying future; H.G. Wells’s Time Machine, in its finale, depicts the Earth of millions of years to come, where the Sun is dying (but not dead yet), and where the existence of the human species is rendered impossible (although it is still possible for human individual at least to be physically present in this world), while other more ‘primitive’ species like abominable crustaceans become dominant. Or, not merely dominant, but rather the only ones commensurable with the living conditions set by Wells’s fictioning.
(4) An equally important feature to (2) is that hypervision always deals with the existence after the aftermath. By the aftermath here I mean a transcendental catastrophic event which creates an ontological rupture between one ontological horizon – that is, ‘our own’, lasting until the ‘not-so-far future’ where the contemporary-world paradigms and ecologies or their direct yieldings are still eligible – and the other ontological horizon which is incommensurable with the former because of the event rendering the former incommensurate with the latter. An example of such a catastrophic event in a presupposed sense may be the death of the Sun as it is posited in Jean-François Lyotard’s The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Still, what Lyotard actually wagers is not akin to hypervision itself, but rather a challenge to speculative thinking, of which, in his mind, philosophers are incapable. Hypervision, on the other hand, is exactly the full acceptance of Lyotard’s challenge — by observing the possibility of existence after such a transcendental catastrophe, as it is put in The Inhuman, one can speculate about modes of existence after such an event (or any event which is similar to it).
In particular, this is what happens in Hodgson’s The Night Land, set billions of years after the Sun died, a world where the very fact that something like the Sun had ever existed at all is treated as myth, fairy tale, a story for infants, rather than the fact of cosmological history. (As the author puts it, we reasonably doubt it like we doubt the reality of the stories from the Old Testament.) Existence after the aftermath may take place in a form where other, post-human or non-human beings inherit the contemporary (from our viewpoint) world. Perhaps these other species came to exterminate the human race; or, this occurred due to the natural or artificial (guided and controlled) evolutionary processes of which the derivation is the transition from one species to another; still another potential cause of the effect may be a transcendental catastrophic event, causing both (3) and its corresponding consequences, such as a totally different ecosystem or the destruction of all ecosystems (with the necessity for adaptation to the very absence of any ecosystem continuing to exist).
(5) Narrative techniques of hypervision always come in one or another form of evidentialist discourse: either oneiric (as dreams or phantasmata), prophetic (as one or another type/category of visions), or as future events that are witnessed/experienced by the subject who is not of the time of the events themselves, but from some distant past. The narrative may as well be a combination of any three of these, with fuzzy or merged fringes and continuums, as in Hodgson’s House on the Borderland where the protagonist witnesses the visions: observing the futurity of the cosmos, its destruction and the aftermath of destruction in a form of accelerated visions of things to come (one can compare it to Wells’s Time Machine where the protagonist only witnesses the dying Earth by virtue of time-travelling with his device).
To elaborate further, since any hypervision is always a speculative claim, it is nothing other than a self-exile of the mind to the edge of all things (both the what and the when of them, as Jason Mohaghegh puts it (Mohaghegh 2019: 52). It’s notable that X in Hodgson’s The Night Land gets his personal mode of hypervision at night, as a dreamer, which, with regards to Mohaghegh’s book about the philosophy of the Night, merges together the Prophet’s Night and the Dreamer’s Night. Perhaps it is this fusion of the two nights which enables, if not directly invokes, what may be characterised as ‘temporal-disjunctive synthesis’. By temporal-disjunctive synthesis I refer to a mode of perception of the course of events with regards to specific conditions of the perception of time from more than one perspective, in linear and one-directional, or, potentially, of different directionality and modalities of existence, like in the case of The Night Land in particular.
A synthesis of disjunction here is deployed as the narrator from the XVII-XVIII century (it is not directly specified) sees things which take place billions of years to come, but not merely as an observer: his mind and time-consciousness merge with another observer, or, better said, an agent, the bearer of a time-consciousness of the time he observes from the past while simultaneously, this other ‘self’ of the future observes the events from the past, his own past self, from that future, bridging the temporal and spatial gap between the two agents. The narrator describes it as ‘awakening in the future of this world’ which is paradoxically enough for time-consciousness because he is awake only in dreams, and the dreams (the mode of evidentialist discourse) serve as the only channel of his communication with the far distant future. Comparably to Hodgson’s works, in GUNNM manga the the maine protagonist heroine awakens from 300 years of dreaming in a future of this — and her own — world only to be faced with the consequences and aftermath of her own past actions (performed 300 years ago) which were not merely ‘individualized’, but, in the full sense, crucial for setting up the condition of the very contemporaneous world she awakens to.
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Still, we also have to discuss the nature or characteristic traits of the temporality which is deployed in hypervision (because time is a key component, or, better said, a key dimension in this method of fictioning). As a combination of principles (2) and (4), abyssal time with existence after the aftermath, we may describe it as a secularised variation of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘messianic time’ — the time which subjects of time-consciousness need to ‘make time end’, transitioning themselves into a mode of existence where diachronic cosmic time leaves them. With this in mind, Timothy S. Murphy, a scholar of Hodgson, puts it brilliantly with regards to our subject: “Hodgson’s narratives of abyssal time explore this messianic time that we ourselves are, the time we need to make time end, in order to determine how we might take responsibility for it and achieve it” (Murphy 2020: 67).
More to the point: Agamben’s representation of what he defines as messianic time is as follows, if we would reconsider this representation in a materialist way: A (the beginning of the Universe — by one of the theoretical means maintained by contemporary physical cosmology) ? B (transcendental catastrophic event) – – – ? C (detached post-aftermath existence as an ‘entry to eternity’). Transition from B to C represents ‘time’s end’ in its current (from our viewpoint) modality. What is important here is not only a detachment of C by qualitative parameters (when cosmological time ends and the time-conscious subject remains to exist with the ‘time that is left him’ — with the temporal dimension now manifested only as an interior-without-ulterior component); further, the ‘eternity’ in Hodgson’s works is (a) suspensible (‘as if all eternity halted at once’ (The Night Land); ‘it was as though time had been annihilated’ (The House on the Borderland)) and (b) paradoxically terminable — the Gates of Eternity are a subject of closure, of end. The temporality of hypervision exists between the suspension of chronology, diachronic cosmic time before B (in the representation above), and the existence of all things in a penultimate step before the Gates of Eternity close: that is, the penultimate step of the total perishing of the Universe from the cosmological point of view in one of the possibilities of such a perishing (Big Crunch, Heat Death etc.).
In W.H. Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland the architectonics of hypervision in this sense is pretty straightforward: the plot agent (in our time), having been placed into the extradimensional and extratemporal (aeonic/synchronic) topos sees, at a mad tempo exceeding any time-consciousness, the end of the Universe and its aftermath which takes part in a completely different temporality. As Murphy puts it:
Schematically, we might say that The House on the Borderland presents a fantastically accelerated diachronic overview of deep cosmological time, […], a time-lapse narrative revelation of our world’s terrifyingly non-human foundations that takes us from the (relatively) recent past to the distant end of time, the aftermath of human hopes, fears, plans, and unintended consequences. (Murphy 2020: 68)
The events are still taking place, but they take place after the end of time, in precisely this modality defined by Agamben as a ‘time that is left us’, but in a materialistic version of this time: the messianic event is replaced by the catastrophic, and eschaton is replaced by a penultimate perishing stage.
While being speculatively ‘dead’ those billion years to come, which the protagonist of House on the Borderland observes from his own ‘present’, he eventually re-emerges in this vision of ‘the existence after the end’: he situates himself at the topos defined as the ‘Sea of Sleep’ after the end times, ‘where all the lovers are reunited after their physical death’, including the agent and his spouse who, in this ‘present’ (temporal point in the A — B continuum from which he, in the ‘conventional’ spatiotemporal modality of existence, witnesses the end of all things and beyond), pass away before the whole vision. This is what Hodgson elsewhere calls ‘the promise of the future’, serving as a leitmotif in The Night Land as well, with the latter itself being nothing but “an in-depth synchronic experience of life on the thoroughly altered (and thus doubly alienated) earth as time’s end draws near” (Murphy 2020: 68). But to get to this point of reunification, one must undergo an unfathomable, enormous passage from one’s own non-existence in the spacetime continuum, which is in some cases performed through such means as reincarnation but not limited to it. Materialistic messianic time, as I call it, this notable feature of hypervision temporality, is precisely this promise of a future, a promise of something to be unfolded after the transcendental catastrophe which would mark time’s end in a particular sense.
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Let us briefly summarize what has been discussed above. Hypervision is a mode of fictioning that relies heavily on two components: abyssal time as a narrational basis and technique, and life after the aftermath as both a plot-setting device and a general setting of the conditions of the narrative itself. Hypervision always deals with this world, either in itself (without any contact with otherworldliness), or within the framework of this world as linked to (an)other world(s), which is reflected, surely, in the narrative and plot. Hypervision deals with a setting ontologically incommensurable with our present ontological horizon, plotting the existence of those who inhabit the future by means of brand-new conditions at hand which themselves vary greatly from those in the world of today. Hypervisional discourse is evidentialist: it stems from one’s (the narrator’s or observer’s) view of the world in a ‘prophetic’ mode, and not from any other possible mode of narration and representation. Its temporality may be characterized as a materialist version of messianic time: that is, a time that is left to us, the existence of time-consciousness in a temporal modality of an interior nature precisely deprived of an ulterior mode.
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References
Mohaghegh, J.B. Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark. Zer0 Books, 2019
Murphy, T.S. “It Might Have Been a Million Years Later: Abyssal Time in William Hope Hodgson’s Weird Fiction” Studies in the Fantastic 9, Summer/Fall 2020 (63-100)