Major/Minor,Consensus/Community

How strange the change! Just catching up with the discussion of major vs. minor literature over at Johannes' blog (find the relevant entries here, here, and here). The first thing I notice about introducing Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka book into this conversation is how it illuminates what a problematic category "minority" is. Hasn't it already become both un-PC and increasingly inaccurate to speak of people of color, queer people, Hispanics, etc. as "minorities"? If "major" and "minor" are stances taken toward a language, doesn't that de-essentialize what we mean by "minor"? And indeed we can find writers of every "minority" group writing "major" English, grafting their experience onto/into the language by the most conventional, lyric-I-centered means available. Johannes quotes D&G as saying, “We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary condition for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature.” How are we to understand "revolution" if "the minor" does not designate a particular group or class, but a mode available to groups and classes willing to occupy the position of the minor? So I think it's the desire for revolution itself, even on the micro scale (literary revolution, local revolution), as opposed to the reformist/liberal impulse to change the power structure from within (accepting a certain co-optation of oneself as the necessary price for this) that must define the minor not as any sort of category but as a tactic, another name for the tactics of ordinary life that Michel de Certeau talks about such as bricolage or la perruque (doing your own work on company time).

That suggests that the "major," as befitting a "center" or "mainstream," has its own divisions: there's a liberal wing that attempts to define the major or "the great" as being under the sign of humanism, and a conservative wing that operates under the sign of tradition. To a minoritarian revolutionary these differences are unimportant, because both wings seek to strategize literature as a territory, with the liberals parceling out tokens to the minorities they are able to recognize and the conservatives besieged and besieging. Minor literature's deterritorializations are supposed to hollow out and destablize the pluralist humanism (with all its accommodations to and imitations of the operations of capital) of the liberals as well as the white supremacist patriarchal tradition of the conservatives. Excellent: that's the kind of critical work postmodern writing is good at, acting as if there were no use in a center. Yet we, or at least I, am haunted by the center, even as a void. Without some notion of the universal, how can real change take place? How can we have anything but a steady devolution into ever-more fragmented minorities? Viva la difference doesn't bring 'em to the barricades.

That brings us to community vs. consensus. I read community—or better, collectivity—as that which aspires to the universal but doesn't make the mistake that liberal and conservative majoritarians do, which is attempt to situate their contingent values in the center so as to conceal and erase their contingency; instead, taking my cues from Zizek and Laclau, they see the universal center as a space that they can only provisionally occupy, for it has no content of its own. Historical actors step into the universal for a moment (the moment of Badiou's "event") and claim their right to it: so for example in the 1960s during the Civil Rights movement blacks and their leaders demanded to be treated not just as human beings, but the human beings or being: we recognized ourselves and our highest aspirations for dignity and freedom in the faces of the marchers, and were shocked into redefining our polity (which is not to say that powerful residual forces don't continue to try and force black people back out of the category of the human). Perhaps the newly empowered immigrant rights movement will prove in hindsight to have been the beginning of a similar moment, in which the "minor" (and a "minor" language, Spanish) became "major" long enough to alter our sense of what it means to be major, and of who shall be admitted to be a fellow subject rather than an object.

A lot of people can't envision community as being other than governed by consensus, which is a fine word for the will to transform the Other into the Same. Some people look at a small town and see intimacy, shared burdens, a participatory identity; others see cramped quarters, gossip, and small-mindedness. Sometimes I think we just have to take the good with the bad. But collectivity tantalizes me with its promise of a mode of action and organization that can ride the tiger between major and minor, neither seeking turf for itself nor struggling futiley against the very concept of turf. Obviously this is beyond the work of any individual writer—but I do think, when I called Dan Beachy-Quick's writing "major," that I was unconsciously expressing my desire for this provisional zone. Dan's work is engaged with the major and the idea of the major, yet I don't think he wants either to be assimilated by or completely deterritorialize his chosen turf (canonical nineteenth-century American literature, in the case of the piece I discussed). He's opening up cracks in the major where new words and desires might sprout, while also assuming that the major/center/universal is something to be valued as a means to the end of expanded subjectivity. This is risky: the major will, Borglike, always try to grab you and make you part of it, or else spit you out with even greater (or at least more obvious) violence. What might save Dan is his fellow adventurers: others' intersecting projects, others' critical attention to his project, and an increasing tendency toward active participation (what I might call pro-jection) that all might help to keep him honest and keep him supplied with imaginative resources. Such, anyway, is how things work in my utopia of poetry, which I swear to you actually exists for long moments, even here, even now.