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Eduardo Pellejero

The strategy of involution Becoming-minor in political philosophy

We gave up utopias. Perhaps we will never come of age, as Kant wished.

Philosophy has relinquished, in this sense, the possession of power (by right) and the

(factual) property of knowledge.

But, even if we no longer have any faith in the advent of a new happy world, we

cannot renounce the exercise of a thought of resistance, in the difficult, unpredictable,

dangerous intersection of our powerlessness and our ignorance. Without it, the different

dystopias that may be glimpsed on the horizon would see the space that separates them

from their total or totalitarian fulfilment surmounted.1

What is to be done? The old Leninist question still hangs over us, with an

irresistible weight, even if we are convinced that the question only admits of a creative

answer. ‘Create’, though, is not a satisfactory answer to that question.

The question lies, today as much as it ever did, before and beyond any program of

action: how to embrace such a politics, a politics that proposes struggle, not as revolution,

but just as resistance? How, or why, to embrace it when we are fully aware of the local,

strategic, non-totalizable value of the changes we can aspire to?

Maybe we could find, I won’t say an answer, but a starting point in the work of

Gilles Deleuze. The Deleuze I mean is the one who passes from REVOLUTION as the

end of history, to revolution as a line of transformation. Differently put, the one who passes

to the affirmation of resistance and leaves behind revolution, understood as the radical and

irreversible advent of a society finally totalized, not divided, but reconciled. This Deleuze

that, the advocate of a minor dialectics, substitutes the global, determinist and teleological

logics of advent by a logics of unpredictable, neutral, ephemeral events.

1 I think that the generic threat of totalization is, nowadays, much more worrysome than totalitarian threats. Capitalistic totalization – under the forms of control societies (Deleuze), integrated world capitalism (Guattari), or empire (Negri-Hardt) – implies a vast number of forms that go much further than dictatorial (military or party based) totalitarianisms. Current capitalism, indeed, establishes in our societies a kind of symbolic totalitarianism, a totalization that overdeterminates reality by representation, and reaches zones which have traditionally been far away from power. Clumsy forms of totalitarianism are, from this point of view, just a violent and voluntaristic reaction of States confronted with the failure of operational totalizations by globally legitimated dispositifs of knowledge and power. In this sense, they represent a kind of step backwards in the direction of archaic dispositifs: discipline, sovereignty, etc.

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In an interview with Claire Parnet, Deleuze proposes a minor political philosophy,

one that has as it conceptual core the idea of ‘becoming-revolutionary’, an idea that is

different from thinking ‘about a “future of the revolution”’.2 This is the redefinition of the

key political event, not as an historical horizon, but as ‘a bifurcation, a deviation with

respect to laws, an unstable condition that opens a new field of the possible’, and which

‘can be turned around, repressed, co-opted, betrayed, but there is still something there

which cannot be outdated’.3

It is a question life, one that takes place inside individuals as in the exteriority of

society, creating new relations with the body, time, sexuality, culture, work. It is just a

matter of the changes that take place, changes ‘that do not wait for the revolution, and that

do not prefigure it, although they are revolutionary on their own account: they have in

them a power of resistance which is proper to the poetic life’.4 That is, the displacement of

desire and the reorganization of life render useless the dispositifs of knowledge and power

that used to channel it. In other words, those processes find their value in the fact that, by

the time they take place, they escape from constituted knowledge and dominant powers,

even if they are subsequently inscribed into new dispositifs of knowledge and power.5

Becoming-revolutionary takes the place of what in historicist political philosophy

had been the revolution; more precisely, it extracts, from revolution, the event, leaving aside

(for a moment?) part of the project, the part of its effectuation on history. Becoming-

revolutionary appears, in this sense, as the power of variation and re-arrangement of the

objects and subjects, of the signs and meanings of a state of affairs, the structure of a

language or the experience of a conscience. In this very measure, it is like the function of

the labour of dreaming, even if it is far from being an ‘Oedipal fantasy’; it resembles ‘the

moments of selective rearrangement that mark historical discontinuities (...) that is, the

power to select and reorder the objects and meanings that belong to a previous world’.6

2 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London:

Continuum, 2002) 37.

3 Gilles Deleuze, ‘May ’68 Did Not Take Place’, in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006) 233. 44 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Deleuze Talks Philosophy’, in Desert Island and other Texts : 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004) 145. 5 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia UP, 1995) 176. 6 Gregg Lambert, The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (London: Continuum, 2002) 137-138.

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Certainly, such a shift in the theory, such a change in the conceptual framework,

has immediate consequences at the level of praxis. Suddenly, the object of struggle is no

longer the defence of a state of affairs, nor is it the fulfilment of a possible but essential

divergence. It is, we hope, with Marcos, a multiplication of perspectives, a vision of the

world that can accommodate many worlds.7

Minor political praxis is delineated, in the first place, as a work of de-totalization of

life. Becoming-revolutionary is a process that puts in question, or weakens, any historicist

dialectics pretending to sanction a de iure what rarely if ever imposes a de facto, whether by

the use or abuse of violence.

* * *

In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-revolutionary is a variation on the

concept of becoming-minor. It is a process of de-subjectivation, of in-determination, of in-

volution, one in which the terms involved, passing through a series of transformations, go

beyond what determines them at the level of representation, even if they do not properly

overcome any previous stage in the direction of a higher figure.

Becoming-minor, in this sense, is a short-circuit of the linear, chronological,

historicist order, a movement of unpredictable variations, where we break with the

representations that, from a major point of view, define us. It is a break with the functions

assigned to us as subjects of the historical dispositifs of power and knowledge we are

engaged with: what our society or family expects from us, what we expect from ourselves,

etc.. And, undermining those horizons of expectation, those structures of control or

discipline, becoming-minor opens us up to unexpected fields of possibility.

The break with the historicist order is also a break with any major politics. Major

politics, in effect, confiscates powers of movement and creation, of change and thought, in

exchange for a representation and a place within the status quo. Becoming-minor, in turn,

frees the singularities underneath the patterns of historical or political representations,

deviating them from the line of progress or evolution of a majority, and affirming each

single element as differentials of individuations, subjectivations and assemblages to come.

7 It also will be an ongoing, perennial task, since power learns from its mistakes and knows how to take advantage of its defeats. François Zourabichvili, incidentally, reminds us that, in the German Ideology, Marx and Engels define communism (in opposition to utopian socialism) exactly this way: ‘Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence’ (German Ideology 57).

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From another point of view, for these openings of the possible to be something

other than a vision, for this new sensibility to be asserted, it is necessary to create the

proper assemblages. Ultimately, that creation is the task that gives consistency to this

singular political philosophy. Deleuze says: ‘When a social mutation appears, it is not

enough to draw the consequences or effects according to lines of economic or political

causality. Society must be capable of creating collective agencies of enunciation that match

the new subjectivity, in such a way that it desires the mutation’. And Deleuze concludes:

‘There can only be a creative solution. These are the creative redeployments that would

contribute to the current crisis.’8

Without the transformations of the force relations unchained by the processes of

becoming-minor, traditional politics has no other sense, no other task, than the

reproduction of the given dispositifs of knowledge and power. But, without the invention

and promotion of new figures of subjectivation, there is no political way out. The search

for assemblages in order to extend the movements triggered by the events is the proper,

constructive alternative to the historical cleavages and social segregations of the major

patterns.9

In Guattarian terms, we could say that becoming-minor is just one side of this

minor political philosophy. The other side is the production of ‘existential territories’

(assemblages) from the non-represented part that ‘insists’, to use Deleuze’s word, inside

and outside us, and that are revealed in the trance of becoming-minor. (We may, perhaps,

understand this along the lines of Rancière’s concept of ‘the part of no part’.)

Briefly: becoming-minor is always a relation with the non-historic, with the non-

representative, with the in-human, the outside; in short, with everything that it is beyond

the empirical and transcendental determinations of the subjects at stake. But it is not a leap

into the void or an idle pursuit, nor is it a plain scream of protest, a mere negativity. It is a

radical form of change that, placing us in a zone of indetermination, transforms us without

negating our singularities; a radical change that overflows the representative ground of

major politics with a non-historic surplus value, viz.: the articulation of unexpected

8 Deleuze, ‘May ’68 Did Not Take Place’, in Two Regimes of Madness, 234 & 236, respectively. 9 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Superpositions (Paris: éditions de Minuit, 1979) 124.

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(impossible) relations between us and the others, between us and work, between us and

sex, between us and thought, relations that, of course, have to be consolidated in proper

assemblages.

What I mean is that becoming-minor it is not the keyword for a new form of

negative dialectics. Deleuze and Guattari do more than pursue the banishment of any

constituted—alienated—subjectivity, even if that banishment is also at stake. Becoming-

minor necessarily implies a constructive material counterpart: the invention of sui generis

political spaces, the assemblage of existential territories.

In other words, if you’ll allow the use of a polemical formula, becoming-minor

implies a minor dialectics, one that proposes to undermine historical patterns of

subjectivation. Major modern dialectics, conversely, believes itself capable of overcoming

political contradictions by virtue of the enlightenment of the subjects involved, who are

supposed to be able to exceed the given dispositifs of knowledge and power, and thus lead

history beyond its factual state. The breakthrough or the openness inherent to any process

of becoming-minor, conversely, is not an elevation to the next step of the system, nor an

evolution of the subject, but a rarefaction of the given conditions and an involution of the

subject.

Deleuze’s programmatic statements point precisely in this direction: becoming-

minor implies discovering that everybody has a ‘third’ world, that everybody is constituted

by points of non-culture and un-development, that is, that everybody is crossed by lines

where our representation cracks up, our language leaks, our majority fades out.10

Certainly, to affirm all this as a political power seems to be, at first sight, a sort of

regression. I realize that it is not possible to ignore the regression that becoming-minor

implies viz. à viz. major representation. However, as we have seen, becoming-minor is a

process of creation before it is a regression to any previous state, be it animal, human or

mythical. It is the creation of new forms of individuation from the dissolution of major

representative figures and the liberation of material and expressive singularities covered by

them.

The example of minor literature shows us that the revolutionary roll of Kafka’s

writing, with all its animal, mechanical, and inorganic variations, goes hand in hand with the

10 Cf. Gillez Deleuze and Feliz Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 26.

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impoverishment of the language and the renunciation of its inscription on the history of

German literature. Kafka, according to Deleuze and Guattari, abdicates his place in the line

that, from Goethe onwards, develops the spirit of the German identity. As they see it,

Kafka introduces a way out of writing through points of un-development, of in-humanity,

of involution, of non-culture, points where, for example, an animal connects with writing.

And that is the key for Kafka’s creation of lines of flight confronted with the material ‘dead

ends’ where he, and the missing people of Prague, were locked up. At the same time, those

are the processes that put them outside of (literary or European) history, that is, outside

any line of progress. We should not forget, however, that the place of a Czech Jew author

in the line of progress of that historical moment was no place at all.

At the level of minor politics, I would suggest that the guerrilla warfare model

which Deleuze touches on briefly in his essay on T. E. Lawrence is, from the perspective of

social labour, an illustrative example of the immanent power of becoming-minor. In

conditions that make it impossible to fight on, or for, major fields, guerrilla warfare

abandons the space of recognition (major projects of freedom, equality or consensus), and

wanders into the desert, the jungle or the slums, where it articulates de facto, in conditions

that are unacceptable for the majority, what they demanded de iure as their right.

As an example, we can mention that the struggle for recognition of the Mexico’s

indigenous populations and the revolutionary aspirations of some Marxist groups in Mexico

underwent a ‘minor’, becoming-revolutionary in 1994, in the Lacandona jungle south of

Guaxaca. Strategically, provisionally, renouncing inscription in major Mexican history—

where they had no place, no representation, and no signs of a reliable political will to

change that fact—these groups led the struggle into a rarefied field where the major

dispositifs of power had an attenuated presence. They were thus able to intensify the

movement, and the results included the auto-determination of many communities, the

creation of singular forms of administration, and, perhaps most importantly, the emergence

of a new form of subjectivity, of a new kind of consciousness, one matched to a ‘new’

people: not just this or that ethnic group, or this or that left-wing party, but the Zapatistas

as a collective assemblage of enunciation of the part of no-part. Doing that, all those

people raised their voices and empowered their lives, many for the first time, without the

mediation of recognition; I am thinking here of their use of masks and balaclavas, both of

which deterritorialize the face—anyone could be behind it.

As you can understand, from the major point of view, from the point of view of

the Mexican middle-class, and even from the point of view of the Mexican lower-class,

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which dreams of becoming middle-class, this becoming-minor is unthinkable, not a

possibility, an unreasonable fantasy: it is seen as an involution. And we agree: it was

unthinkable, it was an impossibility, but it was not a fantasy, because, as a creative

involution, it broke through a political dead end (a series of impossibilities) and led all

those people beyond total marginalization, acculturation, and even systematic annihilation.

Going back to our theoretical field, we should remember that Guattari suggests a

less radical example of minor political-becoming, the case of the free radio in the eighties.

Here we have an assemblage where a technological evolution, the miniaturization of

transmitters and the fact that they could be ‘assembled’ by amateurs being key factors,

‘concurred’ with the collective aspiration for new media of expression, on a micro-political

process that, creatively involutioning—that is, leading the radio out of the major horizons

of communication, the communication of the majorities for the majorities—opened new

fields of possibility for expression and subjectivation.

Perhaps classic critical thought could argue that ethnic minorities, as well as

women, the young, the unemployed, etc., are in no condition to renounce their specific

struggles for recognition, for an adequate representation at the level of rights. And that is a

major problem, in the sense that it is a problem about the articulation between minor and

major politics. But if becoming-minor is proposed as an alternative politics, it is precisely to

the extent that those struggles for rights, at the level of major representation, seem to be

predestined to failure, either condemned to being systematically ignored or to betraying

themselves in the name of a given, established representation.11

It is a question of priority. To support the idea of becoming-minor does not mean

relinquishing our political struggles for acknowledgment; it means strategically to delay that

struggle, which embroils us in a non-representative movement of individuation, to look to

build in fact what we demand by right, even if that is only possible in minor spaces or in

minor conditions, conditions that are undesirable, unacceptable, and intolerable for

majorities.

With incommensurable political signs and in completely diverse circumstances, I

think that it was a path (pathos) of this kind that led the few minoritarian groups which have

shown any political vitality in the last fifty years to articulate a territory, to assemble a

11 Cf. Cindy Katz, ‘Towards Minor Theory’, in Enviroment and Planning D: Society and Space 14:4 (1996) : 494-495.

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people, or simply to discipline a body to be powerful enough to force some kind of

negotiation at the level of major politics.

* * *

Obviously, becoming-minor processes, as lines of flight, are not necessarily

revolutionary; a line of migration (sub-Saharan or Cuban) can end in death (at sea) or in

much harder realities (slavery, for example) than those it left behind.

And, obviously, those processes of becoming-minor do not lead automatically to a

social revolution, to a new society, an economy or a culture liberated from capitalism. In

fact, to the extent that they do not change everything, the new assemblages – developed

from the transformations released by the processes of becoming-minor – border on the

major political projects, generally in non-peaceful ways.

Finally, there is no way to compare, according to a progressive set of values, which

regimes are harsher or more bearable. I mean, it is possible to do it retrospectively, but not

at the moment when one is adopting a line of action. The power of resistance or, on the

contrary, the submission to a control, is decided in the course of each attempt. What

matters is that, suddenly, we do not feel condemned in the same old way anymore; and a

problem which nobody could see a way out of, a problem in which everybody was trapped,

suddenly ceases to exist, and we ask ourselves what we it is that were talking about.

Suddenly, we are in another world, as Péguy says, and the same problems do not arise

anymore – though there will be many other problems, of course.

We do not possess, whether de facto or de jure, any reliable means, a fortiori, to free or

preserve the becomings that undermine the dispositifs of knowledge and power we are

involved in: ‘how any group will turn out, how it will fall back into history, presents a

constant “concern”’.12

In fact, becoming-minor, understood as a line of flight or as a war machine, does

not establish the basis for a revolutionary political program.13 Actually, it is developed in

the very opposite direction, that of the organization logics of traditional political

movements. In this sense, Guattari reminds us that ‘the search of a big unification of

12 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, 173. 13 Even if Anti-Oedipus ends with a program for desiring machines, squizoanalysis ‘has strictly no political program to propose’. On the contrary, it raises a series of conceptual contrasts that allow us to analyze social fields or processes, evaluating the assemblages at stake. See also Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (London: Routledge, 2000) 71.

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resistance forces would just make the work of semiotization of capital easier’,14 and

Deleuze says that there is no such a thing as a left-wing government – there are

governments more or less receptive to the claims of the left, but the left has nothing to do

with the form of the State or the logics of government.

What we have, therefore, is a notion of political thought that, without giving in to

the demands of power, but at the same time without aspiring to power, embraces – beyond

government and opposition – the vocation of resistance.15 This is a tragic political thought,

and with it an a-historical sense of struggle.

Be that as it may, this uncertainty does not imply any imperative of demobilization.

Becoming-minor is more than an ethical concept, and minor politics does not abandon the

political field, ‘closing itself on an unassailable but just ethical position’, as Philippe Mengue

suggests.

Passing from major (historicist) politics to minor (un-totalizable, infinite) politics

certainly brings to the forefront a question about the ethics of struggle; as Negri puts it:

‘why go on fighting if revolution is, by definition, predestined to failure?’ But that question

about ethics has a thoroughly political development: it is indiscernible from politics as a

generalized strategy of struggle. The adoption of a militant ethos cannot be thought

disconnected from a related political praxis, that is, a political praxis disconnected from the

collective assemblages that give consistence and efficiency to any ethics of resistance. The

question, then, would be: how does becoming, how do those lines of flight, those processes

of subversion and those forms of resistance function? And what are they worth, not

absolutely, but in each case, in relation to the material conditions of impossibility that

precedes them?

14 Cf. Guattari-Stivale, Discussion with Felix Guattari (19 March 1985), Wayne State University: http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/stivale.html. ‘Well, I don't think so because, once again, the molecular revolution is not something that will constitute a program. It's something that develops precisely in the direction of diversity, of a multiplicity of perspectives, of creating the conditions for the maximum impetus of processes of singularization. It's not a question of creating agreement; on the contrary, the less we agree, the more we create an area, a field of vitality in different branches of this phylum of molecular revolution, and the more we reinforce this area. It's a completely different logic from the organizational, arborescent logic that we know in political or union movements’. 15 Tomás Segovia says: ‘I beg you not to mix up Resistance with political opposition. The opposition does oppose power but a government, and its achieved and complete form is that of a party of opposition: while resistance, by definition (now useful) cannot be a party: it is not made to govern at its time, but to ... resist’. The passage is cited by Subcomandante Marcos in ‘Seven Loose Pieces of the Global Jigsaw Puzzle’ (1997). Please see : http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/ezln/1997/jigsaw.html

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Becoming-minor is neither ethics nor politics. It is, simultaneously, a question that

passes through ethics and politics in their major meanings, inquiring into their historical

distinctions, as private and public, individual and collective; banishing them for a moment,

making place for new distributions of the sensible, for new fields of the possible.

Probably, more than probably, we will never come of age. But minority could be a

valuable political field if we could make our changes consequent, if we could truly carry out

the transvaluation of our ideals of political philosophy.

As we saw, for Deleuze it is not matter of becoming-major, of reaching majority,

but of becoming-minor, as tribe becomes-nomad in the desert, or as a peasant becomes-

guerrilla in the jungle.

Consequently, dialectics changes its sign, and political thought finds a singular role

every time it is confronted with misery, oppression or injustice. Deleuze writes: ‘Artaud

said: to write for the illiterate – to speak for the aphasic, to think for the acephalous. But

what does “for” mean? (…) It is a question of becoming. The thinker is not acephalic,

aphasic, or illiterate, but becomes so. He becomes an Indian, and never stops becoming so

– perhaps “so that” the Indian who is himself an Indian becomes something else and tears

himself away from his own agony’.16

Creative involution could open us up to lines of flight in situations of political

suffocation where, before being inscribed or progressing in a major project, it is necessary

to articulate a new territory or a new sensibility for acting and thinking. In the idea that it is

possible, it is desirable, it is necessary to articulate a specific force or a singular power

before demanding an adequate representation. In the idea that, from a political point of

view, it is imperative to capture de facto what we demand de iure, even in limited spaces or in

conditions that are unacceptable for the majority. To reach Damascus before the British, as

Lawrence wished.

There it is no politics for the end of the world. Becoming-minor is not a utopia, but

a possibility of reaching a line of transformation within historical conditions that seem to

render any hypothesis for changing things impossible. Becoming-minor it is not a universal

political truth; it is simply a singular, non-totalizable strategy. It does not respond to the

moral imperative to integrate all cultures, all forms of subjectivity, and all languages, in a

16 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Gragam Burchell (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 109.

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common line of progress; it just responds to the vital need for allowing a subjectivity to

flourish, for saving a culture from alienation, for freeing a language from silence.

It is not a solution for everything, or for everyone: there lies its weakness. But it

could be the only thing for some people, and there lies its power. It is not the art or

technique of the possible, but the art, the transformation, of the impossible.

The collapse of the very movement itself it is much more frightening that the

failure or the relapse of historical political movements. For thinking, as for action, it is

imperative to go on fighting, winning the streets, getting into the jungle. And prolonging

the movement in order to throw politics and philosophy beyond their historical or

institutional determinations. It is important, as Foucault knew, to keep patient labour that

gives form to our impatience for freedom from degenerating.

Unlike Lenin’s recursive question, the critical interrogation raised by Deleuze and

Guattari is still alive for us. ‘What becomings pass through us today?’17 is a question that

goes on giving an actual meaning to political thought, above and beyond the particular

answers that material conditions, historical circumstances and individual wills make

possible.

17 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 113.