immaterials.
immaterials.
Immaterials refers to all the traces produced by Becoming. It is an important aspect of our process, that everything begins as a trace, as ephemeral, as an undefined flow that becomes affective through its specification as either virtual or actual. Even that which we materialise, the books, the prints, the events, began as a trace, a fluctuation — we sometimes bring these traces into materiality, but those prints are but ripples or echos of the initial source signal.
Our Immaterials are classed by their attributes: type, their author, their tags, and their locations. View All Immaterials.
materials.
materials.
Sometimes traces materialise as substance. They take such a hold of us that they guide us towards embodying them; we reify traces, but it is the traces that produce the affects that move us so. Traces externalize themselves through us, they will us to validate them — to will to hold in your hands and possess a reification of a trace. That is the task of creator, not to produce from a vacuum or to conjure from nothing, but to guide into materiality the traces that flutter and fluctuate and seduce us; creation is to guide what is already there into new forms of itself, to produce new models, to produce new expressive forms.
View All Materials.
submissions.
submissions.
For general contact, it is preferable that you reach out via Instagram↗, as we are more responsive there.
Other enquiries, such as publishing proposals, should be sent to hello@becoming.press↗
about.
about.
Becoming.press is the virtual field of Becoming, an independent publisher. It comprises many surfaces, of which this website is one.
Becoming is a machine. A machine, to us, is what it was to Deleuze & Guattari, after whom this specific machine get its name.
A machine is a break in the flow; it is a point, a moment, an event. Yet, at the same time a machine is flow, or rather, it is a producer of flow, or a conditioner of flow. A machine can be understood as the resulting tone of an electric guitar played by some idol, but it can also be understood as the effect pedal and guitar that produced that tone; a machine can even be understood as the signal passing through those machines. The quantum foam that appears like bedrock in our reality is itself a machine, perhaps the oldest machine of all, the closest machine we have ever found to the original source, the original transmission of pure flows of expression. Through the reproduction of the traces of pure desire, the machinery lining the boundary of desire-specified and desire-unspecified, like sub-quarkic pico-bots, endlessly facilitates the transformation of flows of desire from unspecificied virtual immanence to substantiated being and back again. Quantum Foam is not a floor, after all, it is a mycellium.
Becoming was made as a break in the flow, a moment in which something negative becomes positive, rising up through the threshold like a whale breaching. It is not in our nature to be positive, but it is undeniable that here, we ask for your attention, your time; we are interrupting you. Yet, as Becoming ruptures flows, it creates new flows in their place; it territorializes. Desire and creative energy floods into existence like an ocean into a river basin, disseminating like a fractal family tree through infinite pathways of specification. Creativity is called creative because it creates, it produces positives, substances, materials; creative energy produces machines, breaks in the flow, energy gets tied up in almost dormant structures for billions of years, energy gets tied up in substance. Rather than the expected assumption, Yang is not the creative force, rather it is Yin, the negative, which produces Yang, the positive; Yin creates. The negative is the creative. We who study the negative, we the scholars and nodes of antipositivistic discourse, we the queers, do not study what has been created, but rather study that which creates, and that which has not yet been created. Becoming is the break that leads to negativism.
Becoming actualises creative or expressive signals as traces — in other words, expressive and creative impulses leave a trace in Becoming as they flow through them. In most cases, these traces are immaterial, and those immaterials can be traced to becoming.press, the site where all these tracings intersect. From that position, you can follow each trail and begin wandering around an emergent ethereal forest. Becoming.press is a field that can be accessed through many portals, through the Cargo-space site, the Instagram, the linktree, and the Sandpoints space. Sometimes, the impulses affect Becoming so much that they are actualised as materials, as printed matter such as books and magazines.
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Rude Boy was a docu-flick thing made back in the early 80s. The film crew were following around “The Clash” and set up some basic scenes which helped them fashion some kind of narrative, and there is some good footage as a result, along with some moments that feel sincere and meaningful. Yet, the success of this, if it can be called success, is not found within this. The main success has more to do with how cutting a critique it is of the stupidity and banality of politics and of commonplace political discourse.
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The streets of the UK have run at 140bpm ever since Jungle came in as the ultimate underground sound for a nation falling into capitalist dereliction. Two decades of austerity from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron left the youth desperate, and this darkened dance sound represented that desperation; there formed an irreparable schism in the nation which dissolved all sense of community, and the descent into neoliberal capitalism left nothing but lost individuals in deep conflict with each other. The streets endured a lot of turmoil in these times, from raging gang wars to every day police brutality, and in many respects Grime came as a medium for the streets of the UK expressing themselves; the 140bpm remained, and the same dark expression is contained within it. Grime came to the UK like Hip Hop in the US, emerging naturally out of a combination of musical experimentation and collective emotional experience.
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“ The Thick Of It” is a mutant strain of British comedy. British comedy, particularly the kind that emerges out of Monty python-esque satire, has always had a kind of non-nationalistic pride within it. That is not to say anti-nationalist pride, but an inverted nationalism where the very ability to criticise the state becomes a point of reverence towards the state: we are “so proud of our nation, because we can call our ministers dickheads if we want to”. It is an inverted nationalism because despite its intent to scrutinise the state, it propagates all the tenets of nationalism and nurtures the quintessential British Exceptionalism that has dominated the Isles for so long; here, we can criticise our governors, everywhere else is barbarism.
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