Becoming-Earth /
Unearthing Becoming
(0) Meta-Introduction
As Becoming Press has its own minor encounter with scale, its new complexity begets structures to support its own weight. New capacities emerge alongside new needs. This is the stratification of the Earth, a process that continues ad infinitum, as it attempts to differentiate itself from Chaos—absolute dedifferentiation.
Becoming-Earth / Unearthing Becoming, is an editorial project that attempts to create new structures that prevent complexity from escalating uncontrollably. For example, the more books we publish, the more convoluted the discourse becomes, as it takes on more caveats and ever finer details. Without direct intervention, even innocently following our own internal editorial line can lead to a situation where the complexity becomes harder to find patterns in; there is not much use to a trail that no one can follow.
For now, Becoming-Earth / Unearthing Becoming is intended to function as a conceptual surface on which to project our project back at itself. It is a virtual plane of equivalence where heterogenous works can be understood in relation to each other without flattening them. Attempting to establish a framework for future activities cannot, however, be introduced by example, and in trying to underwrite this project, a story unfolded, which contained the solution within it. This story could be written down, and so the solution could be conveyed. Yet in order to convey it, in a way that it would make sense, the story still needs contextualising, and another introduction is in order.
(1) Introduction
Trying to write an introduction to Becoming-Earth / Unearthing Becoming, meant putting our ideas into as few words as possible. An introduction needs many things, and has little space to contain them. An introduction is written as if it will be read in relation to what it introduces, but the nature of this project is such that this introduction must exist separately, and it must be able to stand on its own.
In order for our ideas to still make sense at such a small scale, we had to open everything out, as wide as we could, and try put it all back together, in a more organized way. As we tried to make that introduction more self-contained, it became more complex, too many characters. Perhaps it would work fine, to reimagine the introduction as an editor’s letter, but then that letter would need reworking, as a long instagram description is not exactly a letter.
In trying to make the letter better, it turned into an essay—okay, we could post it as an essay, but a long letter is not an essay, and so it would need reworking, to make everything clear. So we wrote an essay, but an essay is not an introduction anymore. As an essay, it could be a part of the project, but it’s too soon, and it would need building up to, it would itself need introducing. In trying to write an instragram description, we had scaled too far, producing an essay that created more problems than it solved.
So we broke the essay down, attempting to precis the essay into key points and the process began again. In trying to capture the key points, we ended up with too many of them, so we had to organize those key points into groups in a sequence. This might work, short texts that are not so demanding, which could be used as a slow-burning introduction to the project, posted day by day. Let’s do that. Naturally, in order for these short texts to be optimised to this format, they needed reworking, so that each anticipated the next, so that people would read one and feel that another is coming tomorrow, perhaps an epistolary chronicle.
In designing a whole diary from the top down, however, we produced something too self-aware, and each entry felt like a chapter. Though, as chapters, they weren’t that strong, because the book produced by the chapters hadn’t been organized as a book. In order to make better chapters, we found ourselves writing a book. The book was good, just good enough that it would be undermined by self-publishing, so in order for people to better access and understand the ideas, it would need framing in a way which allowed people to trust it. We found ourselves writing a book proposal to a major publisher, with a 2-year editorial plan—stop.
This has all gone too far. We just wanted to write an instagram description, about a project that intended to make our own books more accessible, and by just following the logic of making our own editorial line more accessible, through ever more comprehensive strategising, we found ourselves at the door of another publisher. Too much in one direction, becomes too much in the other direction. We had to turn back, and try to remember what we were doing in the first place.
Having written hundreds of thousands of words, we tried one more time, to think how to introduce this project. It was supposed to be auxiliary, and it had become a whole universe of its own. In a growing state of deliriousness, we produced two more texts by subdividing the original title; two elaborations on two dual-signifiers.
(2) Becoming-Earth
To become the Earth, we must first unearth becoming. We must see ourselves as the Earth, to identify with it.
The Earth arises from Chaos. The Earth is the way in which Chaos—which is only besides itself—can move away form itself. There is only Chaos, so it can only move towards itself, and yet, evidenced by the Earth, it appears to move away from itself. From more disorder to less disorder.
Despite Chaos being absolute dedifferentiation, it nevertheless produces internal differences. The Earth is the technique with which Chaos produces this internal equidifference, the ability of unilinear Chaos to get out of itself. Chaos is entropic, it pulls everything back towards maximum complexity, maximum dedifferentiation, where there are no internal relations, no internal differences, no internal patterns. In order to move away from itself, it must produce internal resistance to its own operation, it must produce structures that prevent immediate decline. It is not enough to lift up the sky, but to find ways to hold it there, for as long as possible.
The Earth, as we know it, demonstrates this possibility, but the Earth does not name the planet in and of itself, it names the process of gradual resistance to entropic Chaos. The Earth is the process of differentiation, and the resistance against rededifferentiation.
Thought happens in a body. Thought happens on Earth. Thought, therefore Philosophy, cannot happen without the Earth as its ground. Philosophy, Thought, Language, and Symbolism are Earthly techniques. The Earth, in order to better maintain its resistance to entropy, subdivides and sediments into layers, which internally subdivide further. The Earth brings forth Life to better organise its surface. For the human to better play its role on Earth, it creates Language, and in order to better organise Language, we have the Symbolic, and so on. We produce ideas, which can become protocols, or ways of organising, and these protocols help to better structure our activity so that we can survive better. Yet, our survival is not separated from the survival of the Earth, in order to prevent ourselves from perishing, we recognise that we must structure ourselves so that our own survival doesn’t fundamentally go against the Earth.
While the Earth scales up, ever further from Chaos, it must achieve balance in its activity. If the Earth produces Man to better organise itself, then Man produces Language in order to better organise itself. If Man disidentifies with the Earth, then his own attempt to resist entropy becomes a form of Earthly entropy. Earth produces Man negentropically, to better resist returning to Chaos, but it is possible for the Earth to overshoot. Too much negentropy turns back into entropy. Artificial Intelligence may be produced under the rhetoric of improvement, progress, and survival, but it is a negentropy that runs contrary to the negentropy of Earth because the demand for power and resources has such a detrimental effect on the Earth that our own attempt to survive will erase our means of survival. Negentropy that runs contrary to the Earth, is a condition of disidentification with the Earth. We could imagine that we are here to help the Earth survive, as its survival means our survival, it is not a resource to expend on our own journey. We are a subplot, of a subplot—we’re not even a spin-off. Becoming-Earth is to recognise that you are already the Earth, you’re part of an escalation of resistance to entropy that didn’t begin on Earth, but rather all the way back, at the “beginning” of Chaos.
At some point, Language becomes so necessary for survival, as survival depends upon the protocols that are produced when ideas are fed back into their source. Teaching and developing the protocols becomes necessary for the next (re)generation to survive. We learn to narrativize, to turn every idea into a story, as stories can last for many generations. Literature is the story of all stories, why we tell them, how we approach their production and distribution. Literature becomes the primary means for word to travel, so it becomes the primary means to co-produce a world or a cosmology. The world is made of signs, and those signs are arranged as a world, and this world is held in place by the symbolic order. Yet signs live and die, meanings and words change over time, and the world, as the highest form of less disordered Chaos (which we name Order) wants to drift apart again. It is not enough to create the world, we must hold it down, too.
If the promise of the world is how we convince ourselves to co-operate and work, then we must see publishing as the scaffolding within which we produce the world, the scaffolding we use to maintain the symbolic order, to ever reinforce the load-baring structures that hold up the sky. Even Literature, too, wants to drift off. It is hard to say that anyone is thinking of the Earth—massive scales of reproduction leads to total deforestation. Literature, once a means of negentropy relative to the Earth, becomes a reaction against the very Earth from which it has risen. It is the will of the Earth, that we return everything to it, and it is a part of moving with the Earth, that we invent ethics.
As Becoming Press has grown, we have also become more complex, and we have also had to create new structures that help maintain the old ones—this is the way of the Earth. Yet Becoming-Earth is also to fight back, with every breath, against our own capacity to undermine our own struggles. It is not enough to keep lifting further and further away. What we take from the Earth, must be returned.
(3) Unearthing Becoming
To unearth Becoming, we must first become the Earth. We must see ourselves as the Earth, to identify with it.
To think in terms of ethics, Becoming Press must understand its own intentions, it must excavate its own reasoning. The further into yourself you go, should you not get lost, you arrive back on Earth. There is no you, and no Earth.
Everything we produce, is pulled from the ground beneath our feet. Ideas on how to organise our survival, must be grown within Language, and Language is grown within the Body. Ideas cannot be shared without them first returning to Language. Ideas, as much as they are extracted, must be replanted to survive. We must ground our ideas by committing them to the Earth.
Part of resisting the possibility of negentropy negating itself involves building structures that prevent this tendency to drift. Becoming-Earth / Unearthing Becoming is the framework we are building that attempts to hold everything in relation to the cause. To prevent the inevitable drift.
It can be argued that “our society’s” negentropic strategy—private accumulation—has exceeded itself, and has corroded into a form of entropy, again. This strategy is itself held in place by the symbolic order, and so changing the strategy becomes very hard. Without a symbolic order, we cannot hold up the world, and so the challenge becomes how to re-organize the symbolic. With nowhere else for ideas to come from, we must find them within the possibilities of the Earth.
In other words, for an idea to be unearthed from within Becoming, it must first be put in the ground. We have published 12 books, we have committed a million words to the Earth, but the only way to know exactly what it is we have buried, would be to unearth it all again.
It is not enough to just keep on cutting trees down with which to endlessly print and publish books. Without careful observation, this negentropic strategy can easily toxify into entropy. If the purpose is to re-organize the symbolic order, and the publishing of literary works is an attempt to achieve this by developing and making-visible an alternative arrangement, a minor symbolic, then there is a necessity to feed our output back into the system. As the amount of publications we have grows, the collection of ideas becomes more complex as a whole, and even if all the ideas are great, a need for maps emerges.
It is not fair to expect that any reader can simply order all 12 of our books, or read all 150 of our essays online. At every level of reality, the tendency towards complexity needs mediation. A book is itself a way of downscaling groups of other books, an attempt to contain, within 1 book, what was contained in 100 others. Chaos desires dedifferentiation, a total absence of interaction, and this tendency is resisted through making everything interact with everything else. Though even re-interaction becomes entropic again, if it lacks a strategy, and so this process of interaction must be organised.
New ideas are important, but new ideas alone do not save the day, for example, the transmission of new ideas depends on simultaneous transmission of the context of those ideas. Nothing is intrinsically meaningful, and so retransmitting old ideas is exactly as important as having new ideas. New ideas must contain within them their own negation, their own means of decryption. As meanings change over time, the same sentences produce new meanings, and so preserving an idea means reconstituting it in new Language. Circulating an idea means reconstituting it in accessible Language.
For a new symbolic to be re-organized, or to establish a minor symbolic, producing ideas is only half the battle, people understanding them, on their own terms, is of equal importance.
(4) Conclusion
These texts barely scratch the surface, and there is so much more to say, but this is just the introduction. We do not already know what the conclusion will be, and we could speculate ad infinitum, but until we follow the protocols into which these ideas sediment, we will not know the value of these ideas. If the Earth resists entropy, but its own resistance can overshoot, and invert, the Earth must produce its own negative entropy. Just as the Earth must resist entropy, and create negentropic structures, those negentropic structures need their own negative negentropic structures, that can work back against negentropy when it is about to become entropic.
So to short-circuit what can easily become an endless loop, we anticipate this project will involve producing texts, interviews and video materials that resynthesize previous works, map them out, or consider them in relation to each other. It will likely involve texts that then feed new publications back into this framework. By virtue of being written by Becoming’s lead editor, this text is itself a synthesis, without a doubt, of works we have published, and works we are developing now.
We didn’t want to make a dramatic start, or claim to have come bearing a predetermined syllabus. We want to run this project transparently, and to be as clear as we can from the start. We were tasked with building a foundation for this to happen, and to somehow introduce it.