Deleuze's Concept of Minor

 

Minor

 

In a lengthy diary entry dated 25 December 1911, Kafka delineates the characteristics of small literary communities, such as those of East European Yiddish writers or the Czech authors of his native Prague. Within such minor literatures, Kafka observes a lack of towering figures dominating the landscape, unlike Shakespeare in English or Goethe in German, which can stifle innovation or lead to sycophantic emulation. Discussions within minor literary circles are intense, with political and personal issues interwoven, and the formation of a literary tradition is a direct concern for the people involved. Deleuze and Guattari, in "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature," argue that Kafka's diary entry is less a sociological sketch of particular artistic milieus than a description of the ideal community within which he would like to write. Despite adopting German as his medium, Kafka aspires to create within the major tradition of German letters a minor literature—one that experiments with language, disregards canonical models, fosters collective action, and treats the personal as immediately social and political. Ultimately, Kafka's example reveals an approach to writing that can be extended to literature as a whole.

 

Deleuze and Guattari assert that in minor literature, "language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization," where "everything is political," and "everything takes on a collective value." They contend that the three main characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation. While the connection between the individual and the political is relatively clear, understanding what Deleuze and Guattari mean by the deterritorialization of language and the collective assemblage of enunciation requires clarification.

 

The deterritorialization of language in minor literature must be understood within Deleuze and Guattari's broader theory of language, articulated most clearly in sections four and five of "A Thousand Plateaus." For them, language is a mode of action—a way of doing things with words. Just as a jury transforms the defendant into a felon upon a guilty verdict, language instigates "incorporeal transformations" of bodies, encompassing images, sounds, hallucinations, and the entire spectrum of the non-discursive. Language's primary function isn't merely to communicate neutral information but to enforce a social order by categorizing, organizing, structuring, and coding the world. Every language presupposes two strata of power relations: a discursive "collective assemblage of enunciation" and a non-discursive "machinic assemblage of bodies." These assemblages regulate patterns of social action, shaping words and things, with words intervening in things by producing incorporeal transformations of bodies.

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Traditionally, linguists characterize a language in terms of constants and invariables, treating variations in language use as meaningless phenomena or deviations from a norm. However, Deleuze and Guattari counter this view, arguing that variables are primary in language, with constants, norms, and rules serving as secondary enforcements of power relations. Within language usage, perpetual variation, interaction, negotiation, and contestation occur, with language users shaping and molding words as elements within shifting contexts. When language users subvert standard linguistic practices, they deterritorialize the language, detaching it from its conventional territory of conventions, codes, labels, and markers. Conversely, reinforcing linguistic norms leads to territorialization and reterritorialization of the language.

 

Deleuze and Guattari contend that in a minor literature, "language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization." They argue that every language, regardless of its size or population of users, is open to major or minor usage, with minor writers making a minor usage of their linguistic medium when creating minor literature. In minor literature, there's no strict separation of form and content, nor a marked differentiation between stylistic experimentation and political critique. Language usage as a whole is thoroughly political, as minor writers deterritorialize linguistically enacted power relations, contesting and undoing the immanent power relations within dominant, major usage patterns of a language.

 

Minor literature is literature of "minorities," yet not in the conventional sense of the word. Majorities and minorities are not solely determined by sheer numbers. For instance, the group of Western white male adults may represent a relatively small portion of the world's population, but they function as the majority, while those outside that group are categorized as various minorities. Minorities aren't defined by fixed identities or characteristics; instead, majorities and minorities are mutually constituted through their positions in power relations. Thus, minor literature seeks to challenge dominant power structures, aligning its orientation with the struggles of minorities. However, not all works created by minorities qualify as instances of minor literature since minorities can perpetuate binary power relations if they fail to become other and deterritorialize the codes that establish their status as minorities. Conversely, Western white male adults may produce minor literature, but only if they engage in a becoming-other that undermines their privileged position.

 

The first two characteristics of minor literature are its deterritorialization of language and its connection of the individual to a political immediacy. The third characteristic involves engaging in a collective assemblage of enunciation, thereby opening up new possibilities for political action. The term "collective assemblage of enunciation" refers to the discursive power relations underlying the usage of a given language, emphasizing that language is collectively produced and reproduced through social interaction. While all literature engages a collective assemblage of enunciation, minor literature differs in that it seeks to articulate collective voices, specifically those of minorities defined by asymmetrical power relations. However, minor writers face the challenge of not merely speaking on behalf of a given minority, as such minorities are structured and regulated by the dominant powers they resist. Instead, minor writers strive to articulate the voice of a collectivity that does not yet exist, aiming to invent a "people to come" or promote new possibilities for future collectivity.

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In concrete terms, minor literature: (i) experiments with language; (ii) views the world as a network of power relations; and (iii) opens possibilities for a people to come. For example, Kafka's experimentation with language arises from his situation as a Prague Jew speaking a deracinated, formal German influenced by contact with Czech speakers. His subtle and unsettling use of German reflects his detached yet technically correct approach, making the language uncannily foreign. Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis" illustrates the interpenetration of the personal and the social in minor literature, portraying Gregor's insect transformation as a thoroughly political subject. Despite taking place within the family household, Gregor's transformation reflects broader power relations extending beyond its walls, highlighting socioeconomic and gender-coded forces at play. Similarly, Kafka's novel "The Trial" engages in sociopolitical critique by revealing power relations immanent within his world and modifying them to disclose tendencies toward future configurations. Kafka's work doesn't delineate a utopian social order but instigates movement toward an unknowable future, contributing to the invention of a people to come.

 

In Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari primarily focus their discussion of minor literature on prose fiction, yet Deleuze suggests extending the notion of the minor to theater and cinema as well. In his essay "One Less Manifesto," Deleuze explores the concept of minor theater through an analysis of Carmelo Bene's adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III. Bene's rendition, which features Shakespeare's lines but introduces new actions and contexts, serves as a critique of power relations and opens new possibilities through a process of becoming-other. Notably, minor theater experiments not only with language but also with all dimensions of drama, including voice, gesture, movement, sound, costume, setting, and stage, highlighting the intrinsic relationship between language and action.

 

While Deleuze's cinema studies don't centrally focus on the concept of the minor, in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, he references Kafka, minorities, and the minor usage of language when discussing filmmakers like Pierre Perrault, Jean Rouch, Glauber Rocha, Ousmane Sembene, Lino Brocka, and Youssef Chahine. These directors' works, characterized by formal innovation and collective self-invention, aim to go beyond current identities and create images and voices of a people to come. Like minor literature and theater, minor cinema involves an experimental deterritorialization of power relations inherent in language, extending from speech to ways of seeing.

 

The common thread across minor literature, minor theater, and minor cinema is a minor usage of language, which entails an experimental deterritorialization of power relations within words. In all these forms of artistic experimentation, the formal and the political are inseparable. Deleuze and Guattari challenge the assumption that European modernist works are largely apolitical, emphasizing the political dimension inherent in Kafka's innovations and suggesting that many modernist tendencies carry political implications. Moreover, they suggest that practitioners of minor literature could include non-Western, non-white, colonial, postcolonial, women, and LGBTQ+ writers, as minorities are defined by their subordinate position in power relations.

 

The implications of this proposition are twofold: first, that the political dimension of minority literatures should have an aesthetic dimension as well, involving the deterritorialization of language; and second, that the productive political effect of minority literature arises from becomings that undo identities and open populations to uncertain possibilities. While various studies have applied Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the minor to diverse minority literatures, the concept's promises and challenges are interconnected, and its selective appropriation induces fundamental modifications. Minor literature's blend of the aesthetic and the political, along with its anti-identitarian, open-ended politics of becoming, stems from its presuppositions about language—a minor practice that deterritorializes power relations and generates possibilities for collective self-invention.