#becoming minor

[songbirdsolander]

Jean Baudrillard remarks, there is always a desire not to be interpreted, not to be produced and expressed in the terms that an interpretation employs. Typically the interpreter is an agent of a dominant social code; the interpretation reproduces the material it considers as instances of the code. The desire to escape such codification- for codification Deleuze and Guattari employ the word "territorialization"-the desire to de-code or to deterritorialize seems particularly crucial for minorities who want to remain minorities and affirm perspectives that are not those of the culture they inhabit.'

Robert Brinkley

[songbirdsolander]

If Kafka's work is a rhizome, then its expression does not crystalize into a unifying form; instead the expression is a proliferation of different lines of growth. The work resembles crabgrass, a bewildering multiplicity of stems and roots which can cross at any point to form a variety of possible connections. Reading can participate in these connections; a reader makes connections as he reads. He need not interpret and say what the text means; he can discover where passages in the text lead, with what they can be connected. The result is not an interpretation but a map, a tool with which to find a way. The map is the production of an experimental reading, the word experiment being used here as John Cage uses it, "not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is unknown."I The reader becomes a nomad; to borrow a phrase from Lyotard, reading becomes "a nomadic of intensities." As such it does not threaten minor perspectives; instead it entertains them, and minor literature works to produce a reading which will constitute its own affirmation.

Robert Brinkley

[minor-arcana]

"wouldn’t the most radical challenge consist precisely in escaping a majority that is individually and collectively imposed upon us, as an ideal, a nature, a progress or fate — questioning these majoritarian objectives, which always risk appearing (to the eyes of adults) frivolous, irresponsible and irrational, not to mention infantile and unreasonable? Was it not this majoritarian terrorism that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari fought against throughout their work and revealed as the standard of the white-rationalist-urban-European-consumerist-male, that figure who, despite being far from the numerical majority of the planet’s population, imposes itself everywhere as a measure, in philosophy or in the media, in politics or in the clinic, in economics or aesthetics?"