Segment 1: If reality is a terrain of fiction, according to CCRU, then how could we differ base reality from other realities?
In the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) framework, the boundary between “real” and “fiction” collapses. For the CCRU, reality itself is an effect of hyperstition, fictions that become real by virtue of being believed and circulated. As Nick Land and his collaborators describe, “we are interested in fiction only insofar as it is simultaneously hyperstition, a term we have coined for semiotic productions that make themselves real”[1]. In other words, any imaginative narrative can seed new conditions of reality. Under this view, even what we call “base reality” is not an absolute ground but the unfolding outcome of innumerable code-like fictions. Land writes that it is “through fictions, or what will come to be called ‘hyperstitions’, that Land proceeds to deterritorialize … philosophy … turning it into a mode of concept-production which dissolves academic theory’s institutional segregation from cultural practice and subverts the distinction between cognitive representation and fictional speculation”[2]. In effect, philosophy and theory become creative arts that write reality itself, blurring the lines between facts and stories.
According to CCRU hyperstitional theory-fiction, then, “base reality” is not a privileged anchor. Every proposed model of reality (scientific or mystical) is just one narrative program among many. As a CCRU summary notes, any theoretical description “is not confined to the real (and perhaps never has been), and such descriptions inevitably produce virtual or fictive new pieces of reality”[3]. Thus the act of theorizing or narrating does not merely mirror a given world; it generates shifts in the world. From this vantage, base reality differs from other “realities” only in its current dominance, not in an ontological purity. A “reality” becomes “base” insofar as it is currently stabilized by overlapping fictions. But this stabilization is temporary: new hyperstitions can overwrite it. In this sense, the CCRU cosmology implies that all realities (everyday life, digital networks, and mythic underworlds) exist on the same ontological plane of enacted fiction. Our task then is not to peel back layers to find a single ground, but to map the interplay of competing reality-programs. The difference between base reality and other realities becomes a matter of perspective or control, not essence. There is no Humean “hard thing” outside the web of narratives; rather, there are multiple interacting “reality programs” vying for ascendancy, each composed of its own signs and fantasies (the CCRU sometimes calls these reality programs or fictional daemons). Every moment, one myth may fade and another crystallize as the new default.
This idea resonates with the CCRU’s theatrical hyperstition scenario: each act of writing or speaking is like a spell in a war of narratives. As one CCRU theorist paraphrased William S. Burroughs, “Every act of writing is a sorcerous operation, a partisan action in a war where multitudes of factual events are guided by the powers of illusion”[4]. (Though we avoid the informal blog source here, the point is illustrative: fiction acts on reality.) In practice, CCRU writings perform this war of signs: they stage impossible futures so that, under feedback with techno-capitalism, fragments of those fictions seep into the real world (for example, the term “cyberspace” in Gibson’s 1984 novel becoming a lived concept for the internet[5]). When “simulated” scenarios become self-fulfilling, base reality has already shifted.
Thus, within the CCRU vision, one cannot sharply differentiate “the base” from “other realities” by metaphysical criterion alone. Instead, one can only note which narratives have institutional traction. The CCRU would say: all realities are narrative-machines, and “base reality” is just the narrative that has, so far, written itself onto the day’s license plates. Any new fiction (ritual, technology, ideology) can reprogram reality. In sum: reality is itself a terrain of fiction, and there is no uninterpreted plateau beneath it. Every “ground” is already semiotized, and what we call truth or stability is simply a phase in an ongoing hyperstitional process[1][3].
Segment 2: Does this fit the Islamic philosophy which believes the moment the truth is articulated it breaks into being “reality” rather than truth (truth is fragile)?
Surprisingly, a striking consonance appears between CCRU hyperstition and certain themes in Islamic (especially Sufi) thought. In many mystical strains, the ultimate Truth (Arabic al-Ḥaqq, “the Real”) is ineffable; when one tries to fix it in language or image, it unravels into a derivative reality. As Suhrawardī, the Illuminationist sage, taught: truth is known “through divine illumination or unveiling (kashf) after the soul has become purified,” beyond the reach of mere concepts[6]. In his view, propositional language can only approximate or veil the Real; true knowledge comes in flashes of light (ideas) that evade binary logic. Similarly, the great mystic Ibn ʿArabī warns against over-reliance on analytical discourse. He asserts that “nothing cannot be known through unveiling and spiritual experience [wujūd]; preoccupation with rational thought is a veil (hijāb) [causing] confusion (talbīs) and untruthfulness”[7]. In his words, to cling to verbalized truth is to return it to the world of multiplicity and error. In these Sufi currents, when the ultimate Truth passes through the filter of language or thought, it “becomes reality” in the mundane sense (taking on limitations, contexts, contradictions) and thus loses its pristine status. The very moment of articulation, the Real shatters into as many reflections as there are listeners.
This idea, that framing or speaking the Truth enframes it, makes it conditional, mirrors the CCRU notion that descriptions create worlds. Just as a hyperstition “becomes real” by being uttered, Suhrawardī and Ibn ʿArabī imply that the divine names and verses become manifest as worlds when pronounced. In fact, Islamic epistemology often distinguishes haqq (the absolute, divine reality) from haqīqa (the truth accessible to human witnessing). One might say the Qur’an itself is the inscription of truth into history, the Word (logoi) made ink-and-paper. But Sufis would caution that this Word is a double-edged sword: it is a conduit for gnosis, yet it also wraps the mystery in symbols. One metaphor holds that the heavens are created “with Truth,” yet that Truth is hidden: “There is no knower but He”[8]. Islamic sages thus embrace a paradox: articulation is both sacrament and sorcery. It conjures the Real into being (through divine Speech), but in the process it tames the Real, making it perceptible but also partial.
The Hurufiyya art movement elegantly dramatizes this theme. In the mid-20th century, Arab and Islamic artists who embraced Hurufiyya saw the Arabic letters not just as signs, but as living hieroglyphs of divine presence. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr summarized the tradition: “Calligraphy is the geometry of the Spirit”[9]. That is, the cosmic truth crystallizes into loops and strokes. Hurufiyya painters would stretch words and alphabetic forms into abstract compositions, seeking to bridge the ineffable and the visible. In one famous Sufi anecdote, mastering the single letter Alif (denoting the One) suffices: “One Alif is all thou dost need” to know the truth[10] (where [27] refers to a Sufi saying about the Arabic letter alif). In these practices, the act of inscription is itself a spiritual unveiling: the divine unity is drawn into form. But it’s precisely this shaping – inscribing truth onto the page, that produces a tangible world of meaning. The ‘moment’ of writing transforms the eternal (dhāt) into a manifestation (tajallī) for finite minds. In CCRU terms, one might say each letter is a hyperstition, each verse a reality-program.
Judith Butler’s notion of performativity resonates here as well. She observes that “the gendered body is performative … it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality”[11]. By analogy, any “truth” has no fixed essence outside the acts of speaking and writing that instantiate it. Butler adds that if “the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and … a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed … then genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth-effects of a discourse”[12]. This “truth-effect” model fits neatly: truth, once spoken, is no longer that unutterable fullness but a discourse-event subject to ideology and interpretation. The utterance becomes reality, a record, a law, a fact, even as it recedes from the pure “True” in the noumenal sense.
Thus the CCRU idea and the Sufi insight converge. Both deny a passive “bedrock truth” hidden behind words; instead, truth and reality arise together in the interplay of sign and perception. For the mystic, words and names are angels (pūrifying agents) that infuse consciousness with realities; for the CCRU, words and fictions are daemons that engineer new worlds. In neither case is there an untouched “real” unaffected by language. When the Sufi says, “I have prepared the lesson you so kindly taught me; will you teach me anything more?” and then inscribes alif on the wall causing it to split into two[13], he illustrates that writing is world-making. Similarly, Sadie Plant and the cyberfeminists of CCRU lineage saw technology and signification as women’s allies in destabilizing patriarchy – “networked technologies and femininity … need no centralized organization and evade structures of command”[14]. In that vision, female identity, like hyperstition, is not an essence but an enactment.
In conclusion, if we treat truth as “fragile”, easily dispersed by discourse, then both CCRU hyperstition and Islamic mysticism find common ground. In CCRU theory-fiction, reality itself is fragile: it can be overwritten by new fictions. In Sufi metaphysics, truth is fragile to articulation: speaking it shatters its immediacy. Far from contradicting each other, the two perspectives underscore a shared lesson: the line between word and world is an interface, not a wall. The base reality is a narrative we inhabit, as ephemeral as any dream, and the sovereign Truth transcends all realms of description. Our job, whether as theory-fiction thinkers or mystics of the letter, is to navigate between these realms, to write in such a way that new possibilities unfold, without forgetting the void beyond the text.
Sources:
Philosophical texts and essays on CCRU hyperstition and theory-fiction[1][2][3]; Islamic philosophy and Sufism (Suhrawardī, Ibn ʿArabī, Sufi teachings)[6][7][9]; scholarly analyses of Judith Butler’s performativity[11][12]; cultural histories of calligraphy and Hurufiyya.
[1] [2] Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007
[3] [5] [14] Hyperstitional Theory-Fiction | Full Stop
https://www.full-stop.net/2020/10/21/features/essays/macon-holt/hyperstitional-theory-fiction/
[4] Hyperstitional Daemonism: Reality as a Fictional Daemon | The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts
[6] [7] [8] Truth and Reality (ḥaqq and ḥaqīqa) – St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology
https://www.saet.ac.uk/Islam/TruthandReality
[9] Saudi Aramco World : The Geometry of the Spirit
https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/198905/the.geometry.of.the.spirit.htm
[10] [13] “Geometry of the Spirit”: Sufism, Calligraphy, and Letter Mysticism | Sufi Path of Love
http://www2.kobe-u.ac.jp/~alexroni/IPD2020/IPD2020%20No.2/Salih-Butler-Performativity-Chapter_3.pdf
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