Deleuze and Guattari 1986

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Content and Expression

"Only the principle of multiple entrances prevents the introduction fo the enemy, the Signifier and those attempts to interpret a work tha tis actually only open to experimentation." (3)

proliferation of photos and portraits

form of content (bent head) vs. form of expression (portrait-photo) form of content -- bentness of the head/content form of expression -- any form by which something is expressed; book, photography, etc.

not a hermeneutic interpretion, not a categorizatnio of images or psychoanalytical interpretation or structural analysis

in answer to the bent head, the head that straightens (4) -- "intrusion of sound often occurs in Kafka in connection with the movement to raise or straighten the head" (4)

"Music always seems caught up in an indivisible becoming-child or becoming-animal, a sonorous block that opposes the visual memory." (5)

straightened head as a form of content, musical sound as a form of expression

bent head/portrait photo == blocked, oppressed, neutralized desiry, memory, teritoriality

straightened head/musical sound == desire that moves fwd, opens to new connections, deterritorialization

not the composed note that interests Kafka, but "a pure sonorous material" (5); "What interests Kafka is a pure and intense sonorous material tha tis always connected to its own abolition -- a deterritorialized musical sound, a cry that escapes signification, composition, song, words -- a sonority that ruptures in order to break away fro ma chain that is still monotone and always nonsignifying" (6); "Sound doesn't show up here as a form of expression, but rather as an unformed material of expression, that will act on the other terms" (6)

"We won't try to find archetypes that would represent Kafka's imaginary, his dynamic, or his bestiary (the archetype works by assimilation, homogenization, and thematics, wehreas our method works only where a rupturing and hetereogenous line appears). morover, we aren't looking ofr any so-called free associations (we are all well aware of the sad fate of these associations that always bring us back to childhood memories or, even worse, to the phantasm, not because they fail to work but because such a fate is part of their actual underlying principle). We aren't even trying to interpret, to say that this means that. And we are looking least of all for a structure with formal oppositions and a fully constructed Signifier; one can always come up with binary oppositions like 'bent head-straightened head' or 'portrait0sonority' and bi-univocal relations like 'bent head-portrait' or 'straightened head-sonority.' But that's stupid as long as one doesn't see where the system is coming from and going to, how it becomes, and what element is oging to play the role of heterogeneity, a saturating body that makes the whole assembly flow away and that breaks the symbolic structure ,no less than it breaks hermeneutic interpretation, the ordinary association of ideas, and the imaginary archetype." (7)

--> "We believe only in a Kafka politics that is neither imaginary nor symbolic. We believe only in one or more Kafka machines that are neither structure nor phantasm. We believe only in a Kafka experimentation that is without interpretation or significance and rests only on tests of experience" (7):

Kafka has: POLITICS MACHINES EXPERIMENTATION

there is no writer, only a "mahine-man, and an experimental man" (7) -->"To enter or leave the machine, to be in the machine, to walk around it, to approach it -- these are all still components of the machine itself: these are states of desire, free of all interpretation." (7) --> not an issue of being free, but of FINDING A WAY OUT, OR A WAY IN

"Desire is not form, but a procedure, a process." (8)

An Exaggerated Oedipus

"The question fothe father isn't how to become free in relation to him (an Oedipal question) but how to find a path there where he didn't find any." (10)

"it's not Oedipus that produces neurosis; it is neurosis -- that is, a desire tha tis alraeyd submissive and searching to communicate its own submission -- that produces Oedipus." (10)

possibilities of escape from family triangle: BECOMING-ANIMAL, BECOMING-BEETLE (12); "To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, or nonsignifying signs. Kafka's animals never refer to a mythology or to archetypes but correspond solely to new levels, zones of liberated intensities where contents free themselves from their forms as wella s from their expressions, from the signifier that formalized them." (13)

also, the becoming-man of the ape in "Report to the Academy" --> "Flight is challenged when it is useless movement in space, a movement of false liberty; but in contrast, flight is affired when it is a stationary flight, a flight of intensity." (13) --> linking up with abstract machiens

"The act of is a capturing, a possession, a plus-value, but never a reproduction or an imitation." (13)

"Thus, we have two effects of the development or comic enlargement of Oedipus: the discovery a contrario of other triangles that operate beneath and, indeed, in the familial triangle, and the a posteriori outlining of paths of escape of the orphaned becoming-animal." (14)

What is a Minor Literature?

doesn't come from a minor language, but a minor people using a major language

CHARACTERISTICS OF MINOR LITERATURES:

1. "in it langauge is affected with a high coefficient of deterrirotiralization" (16) [deterritorialization of language]

"Prague German is a deterritorialized language, appropriate for strange and minor uses. (This can be compared in another context to what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language.)" (17)

2. "everything in them is political" (17) [the connection fo the individual to a political immediacy]

in major lits, social milieu is environment, background; in minor lit, everything connects the individual to politics

3. "in it everything takes on a collective value" (17) [the collective assemblage of enunciation]

not a "literature of masters" (17); "what each author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she says or does is necessarily political, even if others aren't in agreement" (17); "but above all else, bc collective or national consciousness is 'often inactive in external life and always in the process of break-down,' literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation." (17); "the literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reaons but bc the ltierary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people's concern" (18); "there isn't a subjective; there are only colelctive assemblages of enunciation" (18)

• • "We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature." (18)

have to define major literature through minor literature, marginal literature "only in this way can literature really become a collective machine of expression" (18)

one can [1] "attempt at symbolic reterritorialization, based in archetypes" etc (19) or [2] "go always farther in the direction of deterritorialization, to the point of sobriety" (19)

re: [2]: "Sicne the language is arid, make it vibrate with a new intensity. Oppose a purely intesive usage of language to all symbolic or even significant or simply signifying usages of it. Arrive at a perfect and unformed expression, a materially intense expression." (19)

re: [1]: "the former never stops operating by exhilaration and overdetemination and brings about all sorts of worldwide reterritorialization." re: [2]: "the other proceeds by dryness and sobriety, a willed poverty, pushing deterritorialization to such an extreme that nothing remains but intensities." (19)

"How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language? Kafka answers: steal the baby from its crib, walk the tightrope." (19)

EATING VS. SPEAKING mouth and teeth "find their primitive territoriality in food. In giving themselves over to the articulation of sounds, the mouth, tonguel ,and teeth deterritorialize." (19) eating and writing, eating and speaking "Undoubtedly, one can write while eating more easily than one can speak while eating, but writing goes further in transforming words into things capable of competing with food. Disjunction bw content and expression. To expeak, and above all to write, is to fast." (20)

• • (c.f. Fourth Paradox in The Logic of Sense)

"Ordinarily, in fact, language compensates for its deterritorialization by a reterritorialization in sense. Ceasing to be the organ of one of the senses, it becomes an instrument of Sense" (20)

"KSince articulated sound was a deterritorialized noise but one that will be reterritorialized in sense, it is now sound itself that will be deterritorialized irrevocable, absolutly." (21) "Everywhere, organized music is traversed by a line of abolition -- just as a language of sense is traversed by a line of escape -- in order to liberate a living and expressive material that speaks for itself and has no need of being put into a form. This language torn from sense, conquering sense, bringing about an active neutralization of sense, no longer finds its value in anything but an accenting of the word, an inflectino" (21)

thing "no longer forms anythign but a sequence of intensive states, a ladder or a circuit for intensities that one can make race around in one sense or another, from high to low, or from low to high" (21-2)

"Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor. There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense, but only a distribution of stats that is part of the range of the word" (22)

no longer a question of what is what, but "a question of a becoming that includes the maximum of difference as a difference of intensity, the crossing of a barrier, a rising or a falling, a bending or an erecting, an accent on the word" (22) --"AN ASIGNIFYING INTENSIVE UTILIZATION OF LANGUAGE" (22) -- no longer a SUBJECT of the statement/enunciation; "rather, there is a circuit of states that forms a mutual becoming, in the heart of a necessarily multiple or collective assemblage." (22)

INTENSIVES in language

"Language stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits." (23)

Henri Gobard, tetralinguistic model: 1) vernacular/territorial language [here] 2) worldwide lang, lang of businesses [everywhere] 3) language of sense, culture; referential language; cultural reterritorialization [over there] 4) mythic language, horizon of cultures, religious reterritorialization [beyond] (23)

each language has a function for different materialis;

linguistics as science of language; apoliticized; ("even chomsky compensated for his scientific apoliticism only by his courageous struggle against the war in vietnam.") (24)

Kafka and use of Prague German, rel to Yiddish; deterritorializes Prage German "to several degrees, he will always take it farther, to a greater degree of intensity, but in the direction of a new sobriety, a new and unexpected modification, a pitiless rectification, a straightening of the head. Schizo politeness, a drunkenness caused by water. He will make the German langyuage take flight on a line of escape." (26)

"To bring language slowly and progressively to the desert. To use syntax in order to cry, to give a syntax to the cry." (26)

"There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor. To hate all languages of the masters." (26)

"How many styles or genres or lit movements, even very small ones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as sa sort of state language, an official language... Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-minor." (27)