by Daniel Smith
4. The “Minorization” of Politics (Speech Acts and Fabulation). It is here that we confront Deleuze's conception of the political destiny of literature. Just as writers do not write with their egos, neither do they write “on behalf of” an already existing people or “address” themselves to a class or nation. When great artists such as Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Klee, Berg, or the Straubs evoke a people, what they find rather is that “the people are missing.”68 For Deleuze, this implies a new conception of the “revolutionary” potential of literature. The two great modern revolutions, the American and the Soviet, shared a belief in the finality of universal history in which “the people are already there,” even if they exist in an oppressed or subjugated state, blind and unconscious, awaiting their actualization, their “becoming-conscious.” America sought to create a revolution whose strength would lie in a universal immigration, a melting pot in which émigrés from all countries would be fused in a unanimist community, just as Russia sought to make a revolution whose strength would lie in a universal proletarization, a communist society of comrades without property or family. Hence the belief that literature, or even the cinema (Eisenstein's October, Griffith's Birth of a Nation), could become an art of the masses, a supremely revolutionary or democratic art. But the failure of the two revolutions, heralded by numerous factors (the Civil War and the fragmentation of the American people; Stalinism and the liquidation of the Soviets, which replaced the unanimity of peoples with the tyrannical unity of a party, and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet empire), would come to compromise this unanimist belief. In the cinema, it was the rise of Hitler that sounded the final death knell. Benjamin, and then Syberberg, showed how, in Nazism, the cinema, as the art of automatic movement, did not coincide with the “masses become subjects” but with the masses subjected and reduced to psychological automatons: politics as “art,” Hitler as filmmaker (Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will). If art was to find a political task, Deleuze argues, it would have to be on a new basis: that is, on the basis of this very fragmentation and breakup—not that of addressing an already existing people, but of contributing to the invention of a people who are missing. Whitman had already noted that, in America, both the people and the writer confront a double problem: a collection of non-communicating fragments or immigrants, and a tissue of shifting relations between them that must constantly be created or acquired. But these conditions were perhaps clearer in the third world, hidden as they were in the West by the mechanisms of power and the systems of majority. For when a colonizer proclaims, “There has never been a people here,” the people necessarily enter into the conditions of a becoming, they must invent themselves in new conditions of struggle, and the task of a political literature is to contribute to the invention of this unborn people who do not yet have a language.69
If the people are missing, says Deleuze, it is precisely because they exist in the condition of a minority. In Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari offer an analysis of the present state of capitalism, not in terms of its contradictions and classes, but rather in terms of its “lines of flight” and its minorities.70 The concept of the “minor” developed by Deleuze and Guattari is a complex one, having references that are musical, literary, and linguistic as well as juridical and political. In the political context, they argue, the difference between a majority and a minority is not a quantitative one. A majority is not defined by its large numbers, but by an ideal constant or standard measure by which it can be evaluated (for instance, white, Western, male, adult, reasonable, heterosexual, residing in cities, speaking a standard language …); any determination that deviates from this axiomatic model, by definition and regardless of number, will be considered minoritarian. “Man” constitutes a majority, for instance, even though men are less numerous than women or children; and minorities are frequently larger in number than the majority.71 For Deleuze and Guattari, the true theoretical opposition is between those elements that enter into the class axiomatic of capitalism and those that elude or free themselves from this axiomatic (as “undecidable propositions” of the axiomatic, or non-denumerable multiplicities). It is true that minorities are “objectively” definable states—definable in terms of language, ethnicity, or sex, with their own territorialities. It is also true that minorities must necessarily struggle to become a majority—to be recognized, to have rights, to achieve an autonomous status, and so on (women's struggle for the vote, for abortion, for jobs; the struggle of the third world; the struggle of oppressed minorities in the East and West). But for Deleuze and Guattari, these struggles are also the index of another coexistent and almost subterranean combat. For the majority is in fact an abstract standard that constitutes the analytic fact of “Nobody”; everyone, under some aspect or another, is caught up in a becoming-minor. Moreover, in a certain manner, one could say that it is the majority that implies a state of domination, and not the reverse, since it entails a subjection to the model; and that it is the process of becoming-minoritarian, as a universal figure, that constitutes what is called “autonomy” (TP 291, 106). A minority by definition has no model; it is itself a becoming or a process, in constant variation, and the power of a minority is not measured by its ability to enter and make itself felt within the majority system. Minorities have the potential of promoting compositions (connections, convergences, divergences) that do not pass by way of the capitalist economy any more than they do the state formation. In their “Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine,” one of the most original and important texts in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari attempt to describe the organizational conditions of social formations constructed along a line of flight, which are by nature variable and nomadic.72 This is what they term the “minorization” of politics, in so far as minorities must be thought of as seeds or crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements within the mean or the majority.
If modern political literature and cinema can play a role in the constitution of minorities, it is because they are no longer undertaken on the basis of a “people” who are already there, awaiting their becoming-conscious and the possibility of revolution. Rather, they are constituted on a set of impossibilities in which the people are missing, in which the only consciousness is the consciousness of violence, fragmentation, the betrayal of every revolution, the shattered state of the emotions and drives: an impasse in every direction. For Deleuze, this is what constitutes the new object of a political literature or cinema: the intolerable—that is, a lived actuality that at the same time testifies to the impossibility of living in such conditions. And minority writers and filmmakers, faced with an illiterate public and rampant deculturation, confront the same set of impasses in their work. On the one hand, they cannot simply appeal to the collective fictions and archaic myths of their people, since, as in Rocha's film Black God and White Devil, it is often these same myths (of prophetism and banditism) that cause the colonized to turn against themselves—and to intensify—the capitalist violence they suffer from without (in this case, out of a need for idolization). Culturally, one could say that minorities are doubly colonized: by the stories, films, television programs, and advertisements that are imposed on them from without, but also by their own myths that have passed into the service of the colonizer from within. Yet on the other hand, neither can writers be content to produce individual utterances as invented stories or fictions, for by appealing to their own privileged experience (“I in my position as … ”), they break with the condition of the colonized and necessarily pass over to the side of the colonizers—even if only aesthetically, through artistic influences. As Jean-Louis Comolli puts it, writers and filmmakers take as their object a double impossibility: “the impossibility of escaping from the group and the impossibility of being satisfied with it” (TI 219).
Between these two impossibilities, however, Deleuze points to a narrow path, one in which the artist takes real (and not fictional) characters and makes use of them as “intercessors,” putting them in conditi
ons in which they are caught in the “flagrant act” of “making up fictions,” of “creating legends” or “story-telling” (Pierre Perrault, Glauber Rocha, Jean Rouch). In the midst of an intolerable and unlivable situation, a becoming passes between the “people” who are missing and the “I” of the author who is now absent, releasing a “pure speech act” that is neither an impersonal myth nor a personal fiction, but a collective utterance—an utterance that expresses the impossibility of living under domination, but thereby constitutes an act of resistance, and functions as the pre-figuration of the people who are missing. The author takes a step toward real characters, but these characters in turn take a step toward the author: a double becoming. Such collective utterances constitute what Pasolini termed free indirect discourse: that is, a newly created speech act that sets itself up as an autonomous form, a pure event that effectuates two acts of subjectivation simultaneously, as if the author could express himself only by becoming another through a real character, and the character in turn could act and speak only if his gestures and words were being reported by a third party.73 When an author produces a statement in this way, it occurs necessarily as a function of a national, political, and social community—even if the objective conditions of this community are not yet given for the moment except in the literary enunciation. In literature, Deleuze frequently appeals to the texts of Kafka (in central Europe) and Melville (in America) that present literature as the collective utterance of a minor people who find their expression in and through the singularity of the writer, who in his very solitude is all the more in a position to express potential forces, and to be a true collective agent, a leaven or catalyst (as Klee says, “We can do no more”).74 Under these conditions, the speech act appears as a true genetic element, a virtuality that is capable of linking up, little by little, with other speech acts so as to constitute the free indirect discourse of a people or a minority, even if they as yet exist only as the potential of “diabolical powers to come or revolutionary forces to be constructed” (K 18).
In a different context, this is what Bergson termed “fabulation,” which he saw as a visionary faculty that consists in creating gods and giants, “semi-personal powers or effective presences”; though it is first exercised in religion, Deleuze suggests that this is a faculty that is freely developed in art and literature, a mythmaking or fabulating function that brings real parties together to produce collective utterances or speech acts as the germ of a people to come. “We ought to take up Bergson's notion of fabulation,” writes Deleuze, “and give it a political meaning.”75 Minority writers may find themselves surrounded by the ideology of a colonizer, the myths of the colonized, the discourse of intellectuals, and the information of the communications media that threatens to subsume them all; this is the material they have to work on. But “fabulation” is a function that extracts from them a pure speech act, a creative storytelling that is, as it were, the obverse side of the dominant myths and fictions, an act of resistance whose political impact is immediate and inescapable, and that creates a line of flight on which a minority discourse and a people can be constituted. “A minority never exists ready-made; it is only formed on lines of flight, which are also its way of advancing or attacking.”76 This fundamental affinity between the work of art and a people who are missing may never be entirely clear. There is no work of art that does not appeal to a people that does not yet exist. But artists, it is true, can only invoke a people; although their need for a people goes to the very heart of what they do, they cannot create a people, and an oppressed people cannot concern itself with art. Yet when a people creates itself, Deleuze suggests, through its own resources and sufferings, it does so in a way that links up with something in art, or rather that links up art with what it was lacking. Fabulation in this sense is a function common to both the people and art.
5. The “Stuttering” of Language (Syntax and Style). Finally, for Deleuze, the process of “becoming-minor” also describes the effect that literature has on language. Proust said that great literature opens up a kind of foreign language within the language in which it is written, as if the writer were writing as a foreigner or minority within his own language.77 This foreign language is not another language, even a marginalized one, but rather the becoming-minor of language itself. Or as Deleuze puts it in his essay “He Stuttered,” the writer introduces into language a stuttering, which is not simply a stuttering in speech, but a stuttering of the language itself (ECC 107–14). In this linguistic context, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the terms major and minor do not qualify two different languages, but rather two different treatments of language, two usages or functions of the same language, and link up in a direct manner with the political question of minorities.
This is not to deny the reality of the distinction between a major language and a minor language, between a language of power and a language of the people. Minorities and immigrants are often bilingual or multilingual, living in a “major” language that they often speak poorly, and with which they have difficult political relations; in some cases, they may no longer even know their own “minor” language or mother tongue. But this distinction requires a genetic account: under what conditions does a language assume power in a country, or even on a worldwide scale? Conversely, by what means can one ward off linguistic power? It is not enough to say that victors impose their language on the vanquished (though this is usually the case), for the mechanisms of linguistic power are more subtle and diffuse, passing through extensible and reversible functions, which are the object of active political struggles and even micro-struggles. Henri Gobard, in his book L'Aliénation linguistique, for which Deleuze wrote a short preface, has attempted to go beyond the simple major–minor duality by distinguishing four different types of language: vernacular (maternal or territorial languages of rural origin), vehicular (languages of commerce and diplomacy, which are primarily urban), referential (national or cultural languages that operate through a recollection or reconstruction of the past), and mythic (languages that refer to a spiritual, magical, or religious domain).78 More precisely, these distinctions refer to different functions that can be assumed (or lost) by diverse languages in concrete situations, or by a single language over the course of time, each with its own mechanisms of power. For instance, Latin, as a language of power, was a vehicular language in Europe before becoming a referential or cultural language, and then a mythic one. When fundamentalists protest against having the Mass said in a vernacular language, they are trying to prevent Latin from being robbed of its mythic or religious functions; similarly, classicists bemoan the fact that Latin has been stripped of its referential or cultural function, since the educational forms of power it once exercised have been replaced by other forms. The present imperialism of American English, as a worldwide linguistic power, is due not only to its status as today's vehicular language, but also to the fact that it has managed to infiltrate various cultural, mythic, and even vernacular functions in other languages (hence the purist's denunciations of “Franglais,” English contaminations of the contemporary French vernacular).
But these various mechanisms of power, by which one language acquires an imperialist power over others, are at the same time accompanied by a very different tendency. For the more a language acquires the characteristics of a major language, the more it tends to be affected by internal variations that transpose it into a “minor” language. English, because of its very hegemony, is constantly being worked on from within by the minorities of the world, who nibble away at that hegemony and create the possibility of new mythic functions, new cultural references, new vernacular languages with their own uses. British English is set in variation by Gaelic and Irish English; American English is set in variation by black English and various “ghetto languages,” which cannot be defined simply as a sum of mistakes or infractions against “standard” English. Minor languages are not simply sublanguages (dialects or idiolects), but express the potential of the major language to enter into a becomi
ng-minoritarian in all its dimensions and elements. Such movements, to be sure, have their own political ambiguities, since they can mix together revolutionary aspirations with reactionary and even fascistic tendencies (archaisms, neoterritorialities, regionalisms). Moreover, from a political viewpoint,
