Literature, as we at Becoming Press understand it, is not just reading and writing. Literature is something cosmotechnical, a word we tend to use interchangeably with worldbuilding. Through literature, the World arises from the Universe. We—whoever that is—have long understood that the world is just an idea, an illusion of language. When we observe a phenomenon which we consider both unique and differentiable, we identify it by naming it. We assign a signifier to what is, in that precise moment, reconstituted as a signified. From this moment on, we interact only with the sign. This depends upon a group of people agreeing with that assignment. So a world is an idea in common, an idea about who and where we are, and what we are doing here. A world only exists in Language.
“主体”（subject）同样只存在于语言中。我们永远无法做到词能达意，而这种沟通的失败——即我们想表达的内容与实际说出口的内容之间的落差——就被识别并命名为主体。主体性，以及它所处的世界，都是在一个群体内流传，或代代相传的理念。古希腊并不是一片单纯由说希腊语的人居住而定义出来的领土，它是一个理念，而这个理念的传播范围，仅限于那些能用希腊语言沟通的人。这个理念就像电磁学一样，在整个回路中循环往复。
A subject, too, exists only in Language. we never mean exactly what we say, and the failure to communicate, this gap between what we intend and what comes out, is identified and named the subject. Both subjectivity, and the world in which it is situated, are ideas that circulate within a group, or are passed down from one generation to the next. Ancient Greece was not a territory defined by the habitation of Greek speakers, it was an idea that was limited, in its circulation, to those who could be communicated to in Greek Language. The idea circulates like electromagnetism, throughout this circuit. “Becoming Press 是一家独立出版社。我们最初在塞浦路斯（维纳斯之岛）的海滩上诞生，此后经过漫长的跋涉来到了柏林——也就是我们现在的根据地。在这里，“独立”意味着我们没有赞助、没有名气、没有分销商，也没有所谓的“邀约背书”。但正因如此，我们才能极其严肃地对待我们的编辑路线。
Literature is the attempt to organize this current, or flow of ideas. In the case of Ancient Greece, the utterance of Hesiod, the story he so famously told, reached far and wide. Theogony, the poem so recounted en repeat, underpinned the religion and identity of the entire region, uniting Athens, Delphi, Cyprus, and Sinope, granting all of these people and places a part in a shared story. Literature is both the process of storywriting, and the management of its distribution. Literature is both the idea of a book, and the ideas the book contains. Literary forms, whether the novel or the essay, are ideas about how ideas should be compiled, arranged and interacted with.
早在 AI 和 脸书出现之前，西方出版界就已经存在一套“算法”了：大型出版商不只是针对流行趋势约稿出书，它们更是在创造趋势起伏的条件。它们发明了主题和体裁，包装出与之匹配的作家，并组织报纸和机构进行虚假背书，读起来就像批量生产的幸运饼干（签语饼）字条。预先安排好的发行网络，既保证了销量，也保证了它们能霸占地球上每家知名书店的货架。企鹅出版社（Penguin）的编辑可以把任何东西变成畅销书，因为企鹅最终决定了谁赢谁输。Bloomsbury 和 MIT 决定了学术界在公开场合能说什么。这些，我们称之为“主要文学”。
We talk, at Becoming of Major and Minor Literature. The little the West knows about China, comes from the literature organized mostly by Anglophonic publishing monopolies, owned by private equity, the British Aristocracy or American Dynastical Industrialists, and so on, and instrumentalized to control how we perceive ourselves, our world, and our other, and the language we use to discuss and develop these ideas. Long before A.I. and Facebook, there was already an algorithm present in the West, as major publishers did not just commission books on popular trends, they created the conditions within which trends would rise and fall. They invented themes and genres, and invented authors to fit them, organized faux endorsements from newspapers and institutions that read like mass production fortune cookies. Preorganized distribution arrangements that both guarantee sales and guarantee that they dominate the shelves of every reputable bookstore on Earth. Editors at Penguin can turn anything into a bestseller, because Penguin ultimately decides what wins and loses. Bloomsbury and MIT decide what academia says publicly. This, we call Major Literature.
Becoming Press affiliates with the Minor. It is the literature of those outside of these arrangements, topics, themes, ideas and authors. It is a way of thinking about other kinds of stories. We can imagine, all we like, Ancient Greece, captured in the Major literary works of the time, and the major literary works about those works. But what was not recorded, what is not represented in the literature, is the sneering, the retortion, and the counterposition—the reaction. Theogony is a beautiful story, but it was a grand synthesis of so much that came before and from around it, a tapestry woven with skill afforded to those so privileged to dedicate their lives to the art, and it was something to which there would have been a lot of response. To the major Theogony of Hesiod, there may have been countless minor Theogonies from countless unrepresented perspectives. For every major symbolic order, or grand narrative, there are countless minor variations to be unearthed and understood on their own terms.