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Becoming is the laminar, equidifferent flow of the Real.
The dialectical engine of Becoming is entropic negativity;
entropy produces its own negentropic counterflows
which feed volativity and friction into the Real.
The Earth, as such, abstracts itself from the Real,
naming what it leaves behind the Universe.
The negentropy of the Earth
eventually turns back on its course, turning back towards entropy,
by becoming the ground of further Becoming.
Life is this volativity and friction,
a localized negentropic process of abstraction
that sustains itself by digging ever deeper,
withdrawing ever further from the Real.
The Body is an abstraction machine that removes us from the Real.
The Real did not bar us; it is us who foreclosed the Real.
Just as life uses abstraction to simplify, redact, manage and organize,
the Body uses language to manage its own internal tendency to incline back towards entropy.
To manage the internal tendency within language to incline back toward entropy,
language is organized into storytelling, and as soon as the body allowed, into literature and philosophy.
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Where entropy is the moveward towards higher orders of complexity, negentropy is its inverse side — entropy tends towards chaos, negentropy tends towards the production of structures that create resistance. It’s a paradox, death lies at both ends: from chaos, the world arises, and in chaos the world ends. The more structures we build to resist the chaotic movements of the earth’s strata, the heavier the world becomes, until the foundations fold. Life is the attempt to create structures to prevent total chaos (death), and to create chaos to prevent total structuration (death) — life oscillates between the limits of death. Entropy produces its own negentropy, like a wave hitting against a limit and propagating backwards.
It goes without saying that Becoming is conceptually aligned with chaos and entropy—the ultimate emancipatory term for people who feel confined within structures—and the spirit of entropy has been ever present within the practice of publishing books under the name Becoming Press. As our practice becomes gradually more chaotic and more complex, it naturally becomes more difficult to organize or orchestrate. Becoming doesn’t go where you want it to go, it just goes; negentropy is the instinct to build a sail, that the boat may be steered across the ocean. Becoming Press had no plan when it first embarked; everything was—and remains to this day—stochastic, felt, & improvised, but when we look back, we see patterns emerging, ways of working that we didn’t necessarily plan but which, in retrospect, feel very important to us. The great Lucretian swerve, by moving you to B, reveals the existence of A.
The publishing industry is a neurotic fortress of conventions and predetermined pathways — it is cruel to the level of the architecture. Like the Pythian mandate of Diogenes, we always intended to deface the currency and disrespect the custom, to stake a new, psychotic pathway away from the center, into the undivided woods of Diana. That is what we did. We established a way of working outside of the domain of monopoly distributors and state-funding.