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 wont 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.
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. Becomingrevolutionary 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

Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2002) 37.
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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 involution, 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.
It also will be an ongoing, perennial task, since power learns from its mistakes and knows how to take advantage of its defeats. Franois 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 Deleuzes word, inside and outside us, and that are revealed in the trance of becoming-minor. (We may, perhaps, understand this along the lines of Rancires concept of the part of no part.)

Briefly: becoming-minor is always a relation with the non-historic, with the nonrepresentative, 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
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Deleuze, May 68 Did Not Take Place, in Two Regimes of Madness, 234 & 236, respectively. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Superpositions (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1979) 124.

(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 constitutedalienatedsubjectivity, even if that banishment is also at stake. Becomingminor necessarily implies a constructive material counterpart: the invention of sui generis political spaces, the assemblage of existential territories.

In other words, if youll 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. Deleuzes programmatic statements point precisely in this direction: becomingminor 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. 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 Kafkas writing, with all its animal, mechanical, and inorganic variations, goes hand in hand with the
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 Kafkas 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 Mexicos 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 factthese 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 faceanyone 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 involutioningthat is, leading the radio out of the major horizons of communication, the communication of the majorities for the majoritiesopened 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
Cf. Cindy Katz, Towards Minor Theory, in Enviroment and Planning D: Society and Space 14:4 (1996) : 494495.
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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 Pguy 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
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, 173. 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?

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 Toms 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 becomesguerrilla 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
Gilles Deleuze and Flix 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 Lenins 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.

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Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 113.

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