ABSTRACT

This chapter has argued that minor politics poses a direct challenge to political models founded on a delineated identity – whether in the form of a ‘people’ or a self-declared marginal – where a particular people seeks to determine a coherent consciousness, history, and trajectory bolstered against the becoming of the world. Against these molar models, which are premised on the fetishization of an already present identity, minor politics is seen in the processes of creation, composition, and change within and across identities, programmes, and practices. This chapter has sought to describe the minor modes and techniques of this creation. First, politics begins with specific and particular experience and oppression in the ‘cramped spaces’ and ‘impossible’ positions of ‘small peoples’ who lack or refuse coherent identity – those who, constrained by a wealth of determining social relations, exist under, and in a sense affirm, the condition that ‘the people are missing’. But minor politics is not a resigned turn to the local or particular as such. Rather, it is a politics oriented towards social relations and their possibilities for becoming beyond identity. For, in cramped space – without self-secure delineated identity and autonomous concerns – politics ceases to be a self-referential process of selfactualization, and becomes a process of engagement with the social relations which traverse minorities and determine their movements: a necessary move if anything is to be actively lived. Each cramped situation shows a point of departure, a point of deterritorialization. In this sense, politics emerges across the social – there is no privileged site or subject of minor politics. This is not, however, a pluralist process of the affirmation of each minority concern. Minorities only actualize minor politics in so far as they continually open up to social relations and to the lines of deterritorialization of the social. Because of the relay between the particular intrigue and social relations, politics is driven as much by situation and event as by the concerns of the particular minority. Gone, then, is any existential or political security of a ghettoized margin. Deleuze is indeed somewhat contemptible of such states: ‘Marginals have always inspired fear in us, and a slight horror. They are not clandestine enough’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 139).35 Marginals in this sense are those who appreciate the cramping force of major forms, but, rather than choose to engage with these relations, seek instead to carve out an autonomous identity against them, shoring up their own particularity against the world. This is perhaps the greatest threat to the minoritarian becoming of minority groups, who after deterritorializing major identity (as cultural or national minority, worker, heterosexual, and so on) can easily reterritorialize around a particular minority identity (as self-affirming – and outside-excluding – minority nationalist, communist, anarchist, feminist, homosexual, and so on). Rather than a fetishization of marginal identity, in minor politics particular minority situations or disjunctions are intensively engaged with, elaborated, and complicated, to open out the either/or disjunctions of identity into movements and permutations across disjunctions such that an intensive milieu of inclusive

disjunction emerges. The particular thus becomes the site of innovation (not identity) as minorities rework their territory and multiply their borders. At each moment, even as its concerns become collective matters of ‘life and death’, the little intrigues are prevented – through a certain ‘willed poverty’ and a continual engagement with the social – from solidifying into determined modes of practice, such that minor intrigue is always drawn back into a milieu of experimentation. As such, the milieu of such an engagement is never able to settle, or soar into the self-actualizing grandeur of a people, or its representatives, master authors. Instead, it is an ‘incessant bustle’ charged with vitality, with polemic, and with a continuous process of interrogation, intrigue, and invention as minorities engage with these social relations and seek to turn them away from their molar effects, towards, as Deleuze and Guattari (AŒ: 382) enigmatically suggest, a ‘becoming everybody/everything’ in the ever renewed calling forth of a ‘new earth’.