Start with paragraph 7.
Why this work matters
That matters because the page gives geotrauma one of its richest formulations of the earth as active, artificial, and hostile to reterritorialization.
Then and now
Why this mattered then
For the CCRU sequence around acceleration, Grant gave Deleuze and Guattari a harder geology. The new earth comes by “absolute deterritorialization”, turns “more and more artificial”, and closes with “teach the machines to die” [c4][c1]. That cut against Kantian self-organization and “republican carbon-government”, relocating becoming to strata, war-machines, and the cybernetic State [c0][c12].
Why it matters now
Now it matters as a route into questions that later readers often meet through What Was the CCRU?, but in a denser and less pre-digested form.
How to read this
For Grant - Demonology of the New Earth, read the opening set-piece closely; it already states the page's main temporal and geological stakes.
For Grant - Demonology of the New Earth, track how the new earth is distinguished from consoling ideas of future world-making. That distinction is decisive.
Argument map
Primary claim
The page argues that the new earth is not a utopian destination but an active, malevolent, and unfinished process. Demonic becoming names an earth that exceeds human planning.
The work's mechanism
Deleuze and Guattari, Professor Challenger, and demonic process are braided together so that schizoanalysis and geology become inseparable.
What this work claims
That matters because the page gives geotrauma one of its richest formulations of the earth as active, artificial, and hostile to reterritorialization.
Style and mode
Essay / text work
Grant - Demonology of the New Earth works best when read as compressed scene-writing: argument, terminology, and style arrive together rather than in separate academic stages.
Publication context
This work is surfaced here through the Geotrauma and the Outside section of the archive. The edition treats it as a text that circulated within a larger scene of lectures, web fragments, and later commentary rather than as a freestanding classic.
The public page keeps the interpretive layer, the supporting text page, and the original file paths distinct, so readers can orient themselves without mistaking the edition for a substitute full-text republication.
How this work reaches the archive
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
The supporting text page draws on texts-extracted/Grant - Demonology of the New Earth.txt while preserving 1 source file path(s) as the archival source of record.
Key concepts and people
Concepts
Best 3 moments
Key moment
Grant turns geology into procedure: drilling machines cut through captured strata and release machines toward “metastratic deterritorialization,” while the earth “flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialized.”
Key moment
The pressure point arrives when war stops looking historical. “The future visits States firstly through war,” and war-machines come “from tomorrow,” carrying demoniacal surplus into the present.
Key moment
The prose tightens around sorceror-writers, pact-signs, and Lovecraft’s line, “the dogs seemed to abhor this oddly disordered machinery.” Writing becomes demon-binding technique, not representation.
Key passage
Best entry extract · paragraph 7
Thus, how much more artificial can becomings become (‘perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough…’ (1984:239)), and what degree of artificiality pertains to the thousand realized plateaus of the new earth?
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 7
Thus, how much more artificial can becomings become (‘perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough…’ (1984:239)), and what degree of artificiality pertains to the thousand realized plateaus of the new earth?
Definition · paragraph 7
Rather than the positive and negative that organize and extensitize the process, selecting territorialities, the demonology of the new earth follows the autopositive voyages in intensity and the total stases (zero intensity) of a ‘properly machinic death drive’ (1973:477) through a molecular ice age freezing the machines in orbit around anorganic abstracts.
Definition · paragraph 5
Splitting the schizogenic atom, some take A Thousand Plateaus’ construction of the new earth to be the realization of the positive task of schizoanalysis announced at the end of the Anti-Oedipus, making it, according to one analysis, ‘less a critique than a positive exercise in the affirmative’,2 thus binding the ‘terrible curettage’, the ‘malevolent activity’ of
Definition · paragraph 6
Iain Hamilton Grant 94 the desiring-machines (1984:381) to negativity, in the manner of judges and Marxists, sentencing them to hard, critical = corrective labour. Was ‘the Anti- Oedipus above all an insurgent counter-psychoanalytic war machine’ (Villiani 1985: 338), whose militarist labours were exhausted in scorching the earth as a propaedeutic to plateau-constructivism (New Earth, Year Zero)?
Stakes · paragraph 2
‘At the Mountains of Madness’ The Demonology of the New Earth and the Politics of Becoming Iain Hamilton Grant