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Becoming-Earth/
Unearthing Becoming
Unearthing Becoming
An editorial framework for Becoming Press, 2026
“What is the relationship of Thought to the Earth”
— Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy? (69)
The Earth is the immanent plane upon which chaos becomes order, forming the ground of philosophy. Philosophy is done on Earth. Chaos becomes order by folding, an “ontological operation”.1 From the position of the subject, as chaos folds, it can appear to come back around, to recur or repeat, introducing a paradoxical element of difference, a sense of before and after, or first and second, a chaos 1 and 2. A veritable ordering of chaoses arises before our eyes, a gift or a deceit emerging from the gap between the temporality of the subject and its object.
Upon the pulsar ground, great polyrhythmic stacks cascade upwards. Even if everything is metastatic, the temporal differences produced by folding and scale are so vast, of such magnitude that time can become meaningless. The Earth formed by survival of the fittest, atoms bond together in molecules, which collide with other molecules, bond with them, and grow. Vast clouds of dust shift around like a desert, sedimenting as particles collide and accumulate, mix with water vapors, coagulating into stones upon which further dust settles. The toughest rocks could eat all the others, and grow immense in size. So immense that the weight of the rock’s surface would collapse the centre into a core of liquid metal, so immense that its surface would gather so much radiation from the Sun that abiogenesis occured, where mutations of such intensity occur that life itself begins. It is better that no one lived to witness the horror of that eroticism. The planets are hulking beasts.
Like Father, like Sun, Chronos and Zeus, the last guy was always somehow... worse. A generational trauma escalating over time, though there was hardly a precedent for Ouranos to follow. So too, must we imagine, that gravity itself, the nuclear forces, and the quantum fields, are yet even greater beasts, who have survived the first cage matches in the prison of the beginning—those who were the first to win, having been born into absolute loss. “You don’t know what it was like, back there”. When filing their taxes, everybody blames the first fish to leave the water—”thanks, Buddy”—but that guy was himself running, desperately trying to escape the horrors of oceanic life, where there is no light, only waiting, instinct and death. Even those creatures who stalk the abyss, have themselves scaled up and armed themselves in an even more desperate drive to escape microscopic life. If hell is the microbiome, then I leave for God to witness on my behalf, what went on between gravity and its brothers.
There is this ever upwards drive, motivated by escape, escaping to higher and higher orders of abstraction. From quantum fields all the way up to dark pools and stochastic, financial operations. Citibank are running from life at the working-class level; nowhere to go but up. Yet, the Earth is the limit, the absolute ground of philosophy, and soon there will be nowhere else to run. Chaos calls everything back to it, with entropy as its brutal enforcer.
The Earth is itself a fugitive, a great system of entrenchment and resistance against entropy. It defends its sedimentary order, upon which its energetic systems depend, upon which weather and tectonics and air composition are dependent.
psilocybin makes me want
to lie down,
to becoming-fungal,
motionless,
in the grass.
Dead.
Becoming-Earth is, in a sense, a surrendering—you surrender to the Earth, it’s demands, its constant restructuring, as tectonic plates shift underneath and everything slides along with them. Or, you could say that you accept these conditions. You go with the flow of upward sedimentation, like nomads moving with the seasons.
We used to say that publishing was how Becoming Press would breathe. Matter is drawn in, and exhaled out. Publishing was not, in that sense, the end goal of this particular machine. There have been so many possible answers as to what this life should do with its time on Earth. As this respiration unfolded, Becoming grew in size, it became more complicated, which demanded more structure and more support to maintain functionality. Scale is weird.
Acceptance is, here, far from passivity. Accepting the drift of entropy is the first step to resisting it, as creating stability requires rigorous structures that must anticipate the inclination.
The heart of Becoming is its editorial spiral, which has passed through many phases. We began, back in 2021, talking about Negativism, which evolved into the set of three terms which you would have seen written on the first version of our website: Queer Cynicism, Quantum Sociology, and Non-Theory. As the project evolves over time, these terms which guide our practices and signal our interests evolve, too. At some point, that star had imploded into non-Materialism. Even this, has now changed. What does it mean to be a materialist or idealist today, when we might be tempted to now say that ideas are materials, or when people speak of a transcendental materialism or an immanent idealism?
Becoming Press has been through a lot of changes in the last year, our little contraption has grown more resilient under pressure, and unexpected accelerations have driven us into territory we are not familiar with. In this moment, as we look out over the coming year like an uncharted valley, our anxious hand reaches out to hold onto something meaningful, to clasp at a sigil in consolation. A period of existential speculation on what exactly it is we are doing here, an annual habit that dates back to the first texts we ever published, lead to a lot of reading and a lot of new ideas about the role publishing and literature has in the reanimation of the future.
We started to see literature as the very ground we stand upon, the ground into which we plant ideas to incubate, sediment into protocols which become the world itself. For all the externalization, there is unimaginable amounts of digging, all the materials used on the surface world are pulled from under our feet, pulled from the residue of history that is compressed into fuel under its own weight.
Publishing, the role Becoming Press attempts to play, is a form of
, and yet, nonetheless, anomalies slip through. Sometimes literature entails translating doctrine, sometimes it entails nailing a letter to a door. As a publisher, we are increasingly interested in playing a role in the uncovering, creation, and preservation of these counter-narratives, these constellations of ideas, and ways of thinking about the world. Great art and literature is raised out of the ground by artists and writers, or set free from the marble, brought forth, so to speak, but then it is down to editors and publishers to return literature to the ground, for to be available to extract again. We live in a continuous cycle of digging things up and committing them back to the Earth; Becoming-Earth / Unearthing Becoming.
We invite you to read the following text, an editorial piece which sets the stage for 2026