Chemical Earth

The chemical Earth is the planet as an industrially intensified yet cosmically provincial region of chemical synthesis. In the editorial introduction to Collapse VII, modern chemistry augments capacities inherited from biological evolution and reprocesses the nature that produced them. The result is a new Earth on which humans graze without yet understanding the deterritorialisations opened by its manufacture (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, p. 5). It is not simply a polluted or artificial planet. It is a change in the scale and agency of terrestrial composition.

Nitrogen's nested history

The exemplary material is nitrogen. Industrial food production joins wartime chemistry, the Haber–Bosch process, petroleum, intensive agriculture and population growth. Yet this anthropogenic system augments earlier contingencies: cyanobacteria's transformation of the atmosphere, oxygen's catastrophic selection pressure, and the symbiosis that permitted legumes to inhabit nitrogen-poor environments (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 5–7). Human culture becomes locked into a new symbiosis among crops, fixed nitrogen and the petroleum that powers its preparation.

The chain does not terminate in terrestrial biology. Gravity produces regional contractions in an initially more homogeneous spacetime, making possible entropic and chemical differentiation; stellar nucleosynthesis then forges stable nitrogen isotopes. The industrial field is a late, local section of this cosmic preparation (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 7–8). culinary materialism calls such histories culinary because they trace transformations, mixtures and nested valencies rather than because stars literally cook in a human kitchen.

A region without privilege

chemophilosophy removes the Earth from the centre of chemistry. Once compounds can be synthesised across physical, biological and psychological domains, the planet appears as a fuzzy region of the culinary continuum, produced by a local recipe and enjoying no analytical or synthetic privilege over the space beyond it (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 29–30). This is the editorial's Copernican correction to an encrusted geophilosophy: terrestrial truth requires situating Earth inside the universe rather than expanding the human surface into a universal ground.

The political consequence is double. The chemical Earth enables industrial agriculture, military nutrition and weaponised sensory research, but the same syntheses blur interior and exterior and make bounded political entities harder to identify. Rick Dolphijn's terroristsoldier is figured in every individual whose diet is the entire synthetic terrestrial landscape (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 15–16). State power therefore feeds on the chemical Earth while being chemically opened by it—a structure developed further in para tactical engagements.

The concept also passes through the body. Food carries xeno-economical relations into the consumer, leaving alien traces rather than resolving cleanly into nutrient or waste. The subject produced by the new Earth is internally composed by what it tries to assimilate (Reza Negarestani/Texts/Collapse; Philosophical Research and Development Issue #7; Culinary Materialism - Editorial Introduction.pdf, pp. 26–28). xeno economy is thus the chemical Earth's intimate scale.