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“The first inscription...”
Where the vision of an atheistic, scientific modernity may have once posited that the Universe is objective, and wishy-washy nonsense was limited to the subject, the vision of postmodernity, conversely, turned this dualism on its head. We increasingly find uncertainty and chaos where we might expect to find order or structure; space transformed from an empty vessel into something overflowing. From Quantum physics to non-Philosophy, we enter a period where the mind is the site of structure, and the Universe is once again wishy-washy nonsense of the highest, or lowest, order. The vibe of literature swings away from sci-fi aliens, towards metaphors and imagery which fixates on spirits, ghosts and demons. Postmodernity is a time of hauntings, spooky interactions, and ritual. It is unclear why LLMs have the emergent properties which make them useful, such as the ability to follow instructions, we have just stumbled upon, through trial and error, formations which appear to work. We can memorise the settings, and reproduce them at scale, we can even begin to refine the functionality without philosophically understanding why these conditions bring forth these results—the commercial viability of A.I. does not depend upon that level of understanding. The reiteration of the same magical-formations which exhibit emergent properties at scale is a matter of ritual. The shaman does not need to know what an MAO inhibitor is to know that Banisteriopsis Caapi boiled down with Psychotria Viridis makes a potion that transports the drinker to the shadow realm. The Technique is figured out over vast periods of time, and its transmission over the generations is made possible by the ritual form, which, in the most simple way, involves repeatedly doing something without necessarily wanting to or understanding why, it’s just something we do to keep an idea going, to keep a fire from going out.
In the chaotic Universe, we build structures to create resistance to the, ultimately unsurmountable, death-drive, whether those structures are walls to keep sheep together, identities to keep groups together, or institutions to keep ideas together, we resist the entropic inevitability as much as possible—everything swerves into dissipation, everything spreads out, everything becomes more complex. Due to everything “lifting” we attempt to “drag”. Human culture is a drag, we define ourselves by the things we arbitrarily ritualise. The continuous, performative up-keep of meaning is enacted en-repeat because we implicitly recognise that what we do not maintain on a daily basis, will wander off like an untethered horse. We return to a cosmology which Hesiod or Heraclitus would recognise, where the world is an order which arises from chaos like rhythm arising from the noise. On what we call a quantum level, there is no structure, it is an illusion of the observer, caught in between different temporalities and mistaking something very slow, or very fast, for something structured. The world is an illusion that leaps out of the temporal gap between the Body and the Earth.
The primary walls of our enclosure are not built from brick or stone, but with language. The Ancient Greek world spread as far as there were humans who could understand and speak Greek. Literature is the practice of organising language, not systematically like linguistics, but in terms of distributing identity and meaning through language, so language is the means through which ideas can propagate, and literature is the attempt to co-organize the flow of ideas. Simple examples could involve the distribution of the bible out of a recognition that Christendom travelled as far as there were bibles. Literature is the attempt to plant ideas, that they grow into something. Before there were books, ideas circulated by voice, and the literature which is considered to have underpinned the entire Ancient Greek religion was in the form of an epic poem. Greek was the language, beyond which no ideas could extend, and the attempt to hold people together using language is literature. The political ambiguity here is rooted in the amorality of language and literature, there can be corrupt reasons to hold people in place, to bind a serf to the land, but the origins of these capacities in evolutionary terms are less politically-charged, as we must recognise on a basic level that without a great expenditure of energy, everything drifts apart, and we have evolved to depend upon each other, we outsourced warmth and digestion to fire, and so we continue to develop new Techniques for resisting the entropic drive to separate. We attempt to survive, we encode everything into symbolic meaning, into literary form, so that our knowledge endures the test of time.
Where we perhaps once referred to the site of symbolic association and abstract exchange value as the social, such a notion has itself disappeared. Arguably, with Marx, our understanding of “sociality” begins a long march, where we start by saying that humans are just a product of their conditions, and the conditions, it turns out, are just capitalism, and so we begin to lose sight of the distinction between what we hoped to elaborate on as the social, and the set of conditions we associate with market economies. Social theory moves back towards a philosophy of language, and for us, takes on a materialist tone, in the sense of returning to the Earth. Where there was a social, now there is the symbolic. It comes at a time where some begin to elaborate on language itself a substance, and discourse on the materiality of thought begins to return. Media theorists no longer simply philosophise about the contents of media, but about media as a medium, and the medium of media. It has been proposed that we might understand the physicality of thought through the framing of language as a secretion. How far can you take a metaphor of semiotic materialism? Can signs be articulated in terms of electromagnetism or quantum theory? Is the symbolic erected or inscribed?
When we think of production, our thought often lacks a sense of circularity or ecology. We do not bring forth technology from nothing, we do not erect structures from the ground up, microchips depend upon the structures of silicon being optimal in various ways, we are always recombining things. We pull things out of the ground and stack them upon the surface of the Earth, but we put things back, too. Our bodies, for example. There are entire cities of stone buried under the desert, being digested in the stomach of the Sahara. Every attempt to reach up to the heavens, begins with a burial, of our hands into the soil. There are unfathomable secrets buried underground, they resurface all the time. We commit our bodies to the earth as we commit ideas to literature, we bury meaning, inscribed in language, so that we never forget. For every major symbolic, there are countless minor variations, each containing a trace of another world, a counter-narrative.
Throughout 2026, Becoming Press will turn its attention towards this process of earthing and unearthing. The practice of publishing literature will be framed as an ecology of pulling things out of the ground and putting them back again. To uncover a minor symbolic within Becoming Press is the same process as burying one. We wish to commit ideas to the ground, for safe-keeping, for posterity, for them to take hold and grow; to survive. In order to plant these seeds we have to write words down, we have to externalise and encode the ideas into language—we have to pull them up in order to set them down. For the Earth is beyond Nature and Technology, the dualism sinks into the sands. Where the human, in its own temporality, distinguishes between what we make and from what we make, there is only a singular process, Earth; stratification, recombination, and sedimentation. The Earth eats itself alive.