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Decolonization and the Minor Writer

Paul Delaney

In their critical study Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Flix

Guattari proposed three determinants for minor expression: firstly, that it be written

in and attempt a deterritorialization of its formative major language; secondly,

that it be charged with a sense of praxis and political immediacy; and thirdly, that it

rest upon a practice of collective enunciation and communal expression. 1 As a

corollary, they also suggested that the minor writer should work the established

traditions of the dominant literary canon. Arlene Akiko Teraoka has argued that this

should not be read as a submissive act of critical re-enforcement on behalf of Deleuze

and Guattari, but that it should rather be perceived as a potentially profoundly

oppositional gesture. 2 For in this way Teraoka has suggested that exponents of minor

literature might be able to negotiate a discursive space from which to resist the

cultural assumptions of the dominant group. By re-articulating a deterritorialized or

displaced language which has become major (through trade or conquest, for instance),

and by injecting into it local signifying practices and defamiliarizing strategies, it has

been supposed that the minor writer might be able to intervene in the social cohesion

of the dominant discursive system. The tactic adopted in this respect, then, becomes

less an attempt at linguistic subversion or canonical kowtowing, and more an effect of

cultural innovation, and coincides neatly with Rda Bensmaias suggestion that the

aim of the minor writer is to propose a new way of using pre-existing models of

expression. 3

By placing minor literature in opposition to the established canonical tradition,

Deleuze and Guattari effectively distinguish between it and the literature written by
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minority groups in minor languages. Whereas the latter is thought to be concerned

with an affirmation of identity politics (whether this is defined in relation to gender,

sexuality, ethnicity, or race), for example, the former is shown to be characterized

by an implicit and anxious questioning of the terms of collective identification. That is

to say, minor writers are defined in consequence of a (social, cultural, and psychic)

dislocation and deterritorialization of their surroundings which calls the conditions of

their collective identity into question. 4 It is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari

note that the problem of minor literature is primarily the problem of immigrants,

and especially of their children; it is also for this reason that they suggest that the

challenge of minor literature is to make one become a nomad and an immigrant and

a gypsy in relation to ones own language. 5 For, in effect, the primary concern of

minor writing is the estrangement and displacement of an already displaced discourse,

with further deterritorialization only deemed possible through the disruption of the

traditional structures of expression. 6 Such disruption can be effected in a number of

ways, and can incorporate a transgression of the dominant language structure (through

the abuse of grammar, for example), as well as an exaggeration of its internal tensions

and an amplification of its assumed signifying practices (by taking language beyond

the bounds of the readily representable). 7 Of primary importance, however, is the

reversal of the established vector of content-to-expression, since for minor writers it

is this paradigm which predetermines the potential for literary expression. Within a

colonial context, for instance, imperialist epistemology and the discourse of type

makes certain things near-impossible for the native writer to conceptualize or express.

In Frantz Fanons first phase of anti-colonial writing (the period of unqualified

assimilation), for example, hegemony is shown to be secured by the general belief

that approved [imperial or dominant or major] fictions are to be imitated in life,

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with the internalization of this belief rendering resistance, or alternative expression,

ineffective. 8 As Deleuze and Guattari note, as long as the content-to-expression vector

stays in place, the potential for change must remain undeclared. The task of the minor

writer, therefore, is to intervene in the established vector of what might be called

major literature (where control of content allows for a certain control over reality),

and to reverse its basic structural flow. Such a reversal enables the writers of minor

literature (amongst other subject peoples) to escape from the determinants of majority

discourse. To return to the colonial scene, for example, it provides the colonial subject

with an alternative means of expression which can escape the clichs and biases of

imperialist discourse. Such expression is invested with a potential to break forms

and encourage ruptures and new sproutings, and these ruptures in turn, enable an

uncertain, because inchoate and always processional, re-visioning of the social and

literary canon. 9 As Deleuze and Guattari note (with a nod towards Michel Foucault),

when a form is broken, one must reconstruct the content that will necessarily be part

of a rupture in the order of things. 10 Minor literature, therefore, differs from

imperialist epistemology by prioritizing expression over content. In this way it is

thought to escape the lure of imitation, and rather become an innovative means of

revolutionary expression. 11 For, in effect, what it permits is the conceptualization of

other sites of self-locution.

Deleuze and Guattari insist that such sites are of a necessarily collaborative

design. The reasons they impute for this are several, and include the proposal that

within a minority context the political domain has contaminated every statement, as

well as the suggestion that minor literatures collective worth can be explained by an

inexplicable scarcity of talent. 12 The latter claim, however, remains unsubstantiated

by Deleuze and Guattari, and is not borne out by historical evidence. Instead, as
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Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd have contended, the collective nature of

minority discourse should be attributed to a certain sharing of cultural and political

experience. For, in addition to bearing testimony to an important residual element of

nonliterate cultures (cultures which might prioritize the communal aspects of oral and

mythic art-forms over the individualistic concerns of a written literature, for instance),

minor literature bears witness to the fact that its proponents are always treated and

forced to experience themselves generically within a dominant political system. 13

Collective expression, then, enables the individual to claim a strategic sense of

solidarity within cultural and political debates, whilst conforming (at least in terms of

allegiance) to the generic stereotyping of majority discourse. This allows the minor

writer to delineate an identity which might transform an experience of negative,

generic subject-position[ing] into a positive, collective one. 14 Whilst remaining

mindful of that which differentiates different minority individuals, such formations

permit an understanding of their shared experiences of exploitation and repression.

They also permit an understanding of the ways in which the minor is made to occupy

an inferior subject-position in relation to the established hegemonic order. Individual

experiences, therefore, are encoded within a varied collective consciousness, and it is

the task of minor literature to express the potential of this uncertain collectivity of

persons. As Deleuze and Guattari note:

because collective or national consciousness is often inactive in external life

and always in the process of break-down, literature finds itself positively

charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary,

enunciation. It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of

skepticism; and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or

her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more possibility
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to express another possible community and to forge the means for another

consciousness and another sensibility. 15

Furthermore, it is the role of the minor writer to realize the counter-hegemonic

potential of minority discourse. As JanMohamed and Lloyd have suggested, the

minoritys attempt to negate the prior negation of itself, whereby individuals are

reduced to a generic status of being minor (or to being inferior, underdeveloped, or

childlike), is one of [minor literatures] most fundamental forms of affirmation. 16

Indeed, as Abdul JanMohamed has discerned, this tactic of negating the negation as

a form of self-affirmation takes precedence over Deleuze and Guattaris calls for

deterritorialization, collective enunciation, and political praxis, and is based upon a

prior will to resist hegemonic rule. 17 This is a prerequisite in situations where the

codification of minority status predetermines the potential for becoming minor (by

ascribing the terms of identity and limiting the content of expression), and where

majority discourse rules to abrogate the social and cultural possibilities of other

marginal existences. Such situations serve as a painful reminder that minorities only

exist in actuality from the moment when they are codified and controlled (as claimed

by tienne Balibar), and exemplify JanMohameds claims that the will to resist must

precede the basic indices of the Deleuzoguattarian paradigm. 18 As JanMohamed has

argued, this is because the hegemonic formation of minorities is itself based on an

attempt to negate them to prevent them from realizing their full potential as human

beings. 19 As such, minor writers cannot participate in the deterritorialization of major

discourse until their negation is suitably negated and their presence accordingly

affirmed. The will to resist, is therefore considered indicative of minor existence.

The will to resist is fundamental to most anti-colonial nationalisms which read

the dialectic of exploitation proposed by JanMohamed and Lloyd (between oppressor

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and oppressed, colonizer and colonized) with a certain familiarity. Such oppositional

formations are also familiar with the basic indices of the Deleuzoguattarian paradigm,

and are often developed within a representative context: where an imperial or major

language is deterritorialized by colonialist policy (through trade and education), for

example, and where its authority is undermined by those minority individuals who

adopt a collectivist approach to social and political expression. In such a setting, the

potential for an alternative or minor form of expression is intensified, with Deleuze

and Guattari stating that the breakdown and fall of the empire increases the crisis [in

representation and] accentuates everywhere movements of deterritorialization. 20 The

process of decolonization, therefore, is seen as a contributory factor in the movement

towards deterritorialization. However, Deleuze and Guattari refrain from making the

two processes fully equatable. For although decolonization is shown to promise an

intensified move towards deterritorialization, it is also heard to invite all sorts of

complex reterritorializations archaic, mythic or symbolist. 21 And this, they suggest,

is the implicit danger of all minority struggles, which deterritorialize in order to

reterritorialize, and overthrow major discourses in order to remake power and law. 22

Decolonizing nationalists provide an exemplary instance of this danger; for not only

do they define themselves explicitly in relation to their desire for reterritorialization,

they also aim to repair many of the social and psychological dislocations suffered

under colonial rule. Moreover, and although their desire has a specific materialist

basis (according to Fanon, for example, desire for the land is the most essential

value, because the most concrete instance of decolonization23 ), it is nonetheless often

expressed in terms which propound a transcendent or essentialist sense of belonging.

This desire is often predicated upon the belief in an intrinsic national essence which

must be realized in some tangible territorial form. Within the context of anti-colonial
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insurgency, such expressions are potentially progressive (in so far as they counter

imperialist myths of cultural and intellectual inferiority) and readily reactionary

(oftentimes re-articulating the generic groupings and essentialist clichs of imperialist

discourse). Indeed, such expressions have been considered entirely reactionary

both by virtue of [their] obsession with a deliberately exclusive concept of racial

identity and by virtue of [their] formal identity with imperial ideology. 24 For the

model of the nation which they propose is similarly monocular and monologic, and

strives to occlude that which is not easily assimilable within its descriptive borders.

Deleuze and Guattari explain this desire for reterritorialization by way of

fatigue and a certain lack of invention, suggesting that in such instances, minor

writers become more concerned with the revival of regionalisms than with the

revolutionary potential of alternate expression. 25 That is to say, in such settings, those

who are marginal and minor pass from a politics of innovation to one of imitation

(which is always territorial), and subscribe to pre-existent and archai[c] models of

self-expression. 26 Implicit within this revival is a general forsaking of the potential of

becoming minor, with the minor writer, or emergent nationalist, rather being heard

to mimic the rhetoric of majority desire. For the act of becoming minor is always

necessarily a process (it is always a becoming which is regulated by schizo-law,

according to Deleuze and Guattari27 ), and is therefore at odds with any definitive state

of national being. As JanMohamed and Lloyd have indicated, becoming minor is

not a question of essence (as the stereotypes of minorities in dominant ideology would

want us to believe) but a question of position.28 The lapse into imitation, then,

betrays a literal sense of fatigue, and provides for the revival of certain characteristics

and traits which might be deemed modular for national existence. In effect, it permits

the establishment of official nationalism. 29 As Deleuze has elsewhere suggested:

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what defines the majority is a model you have to conform to . . . A minority,

on the other hand, has no model, its a becoming, a process . . . When a

minority models for itself, its because it wants to become a majority, and

probably has to, to survive or prosper. 30

It is at the point of fatigue, then, that the minor writer can be seen to simultaneously

subvert and reproduce the major contents of imperial governance. 31 For it is then

that the minor writer is empowered with the content to remake power and law in the

pages of a great literature. 32 It is then that the minor becomes major.

Notes
1
See Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), esp. 16-27.
2
Arlene Akiko Teraoka, Gastarbeiterliteratur: The Other Speaks Back, in The Nature and Context of
Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 317
3
Rda Bensmaia, Foreword: The Kafka Effect, trans. Terry Cochran, in Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka,
xvi [original emphasis]. Bensmaia effectively undermines any grandiose attempts at linguistic
subversion by asking how many writers and poets have supposedly subverted language without ever
having caused the slightest ripple.
4
Cf. David Lloyd, Genets Genealogy: European Minorities and the Ends of the Canon, in Minority
Discourse, ed. JanMohamed and Lloyd, esp. 381.
5
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 19
6
According to Deleuze and Guattari, a major language is already displaced by capitalisms unleashing
of flows which were formerly territorialized, with the primitive tribe and modern capitalist society
identified as the two extreme points of this process. If the former is considered territorialized (because
it is governed by rules and regulations of behaviour which are pre-eminently social in character), the
latter is deemed deterritorialized (because it invents the private individual, and dissociates him/her
from his/her surroundings). As a global extension and underlying constituent of Western capitalism, the
colonial project is punctuated by these differing degrees of territoriality. For a concise discussion of
their significance, see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J.M.
Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 176-177.
7
Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 22-23.
8
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1967),178-179; Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London:
Jonathon Cape, 1995), 115
9
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 28. By processional I mean to suggest that expressions of minor
literature must always remain in a fluid and necessarily unfinished state what Deleuze and Guattari
term a state of becoming.
10
Ibid. Cf. the English-language translation title of Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things: An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970)),
and Didier Eribons remark that LOrdre des choses was Foucaults preferred choice. Eribon, Michel
Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 155
11
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 28
12
Ibid., 17
13
Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, Introduction: Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse:
What Is To Be Done?, in Minority Discourse, ed. JanMohamed and Lloyd, 10
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14
Ibid.
15
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 17. The reference is to Franz Kafkas famous Christmas Day diary
entry of 1911, where many of the conditions of minor literature, or the literature of small peoples,
were outlined. See Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 1910-1913, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1948), 191-198.
16
JanMohamed and Lloyd, Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse, 10
17
Cf. Abdul R. JanMohamed, Negating the Negation as a Form of Affirmation in Minority Discourse:
The Construction of Richard Wright as Subject, in Minority Discourse, ed. JanMohamed and Lloyd,
102-123.
18
tienne Balibar, Es Gibt Keinen Staat in Europa: Racism and Politics in Europe Today, New Left
Review 186 (March/April 1991), 15. According to Balibar, the codification of minority status takes
place at all levels throughout the nation-state, and finds expression in governmental and judicial
reports, as well as in various manifestations of popular culture.
19
JanMohamed, Negating the Negation, 103
20
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 24
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid., 86
23
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 34. Fanon explains this importance by stressing how it is the land
which will bring [a decolonizing people] bread and, above all, dignity.
24
David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of
Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1987),
x [original emphasis]
25
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 33, 24
26
Ibid., 14, 24
27
Ibid., 60
28
JanMohamed and Lloyd, Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse, 9
29
I borrow the phrase official nationalism from Benedict Anderson, and use it to denote the historic
moment when an oppositional nationalism becomes dominant. See Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), esp. 145-146.
30
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1995), 173
31
Seamus Deane, Imperialism/Nationalism, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd edn., ed. Frank
Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 356
[original emphasis]
32
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 86