Hyperstitional communication and the reactosphere : the rhetorical circulation of neoreactionary exit.

This thesis evaluates the communicative means through which neoreactionaries compose a broader alt-right reactosphere. By retrieving the concept of hyperstition from the archives of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit—an experimental poststructuralist collective based at the University of Warwick in the 1990s—I reemphasize the role of mythos in the rhetorical circulation of far-right memes and accelerationist theory. Aspirational nihilism, as the affective nodal point of the reactosphere, coopts structural feelings of disaffection and puts them in service of racial capitalist futures such as transhumanism or the right to exit. Centering research on the mythological foundations of extremist subcultures is key to deflating the collective fervency that sustains neoreaction. I conclude with a call for rhetorical studies to discover its own exits from the dominant social order or else risk ceding a monopoly on future possibility to neoreactionaries.