User:Andre Castro/2/annot/minor kafka
What is a Minor Literature?
In the work Kafka by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari the authors delve into a reading of Kafka's work. The chapter What is a Minor Literature is dedicated to the the notion of minor literature in relation to oeuvre of the Czech writer. Deleuze and Guattari describe minor literature not as a construction based on a minor language, instead 'it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization' (p.16).
The reason why Deleuze and Guattari describe Kafka's work as a minor literature is a two-fold. His birth within a German-speaking Jewish family, and a German education, in the context of the mainly Czech-speaking Prague positions him both within a linguistic and an ethnic minority. Although writing and speaking a major language - German - Kafka is part of the 'deterritoralization of the German population'(p.16); Not unlike emigrants in their new country of residence, Kafka's was a foreign in his hometown, Prague. Beside that foreign condition Kafka decides to take distance from "correct" high German in his writings. Instead Kafka brings to his work the peculiarities and deformations of the German spoke in Prague, 'a deterritorialized language appropriate for strange and minor uses'(p.17)
Deleuze and Guattari resource to the tetra-linguistic model proposed by Henri Gobard to explain Kafka's linguistic entanglement. The model encompasses four language typologies: vernacular, vehicular, referential, and mythical. Vernacular refers to a territorial language, spoke mainly by rural communities; vehicular to the language used in everyday practical and transnational exchanges; referential to the language of culture; and mythical to a religious or spiritual language. The authors ask what is the relation Prague Jews, and consequently Kafka, to those four languages. Czech and Yiddish were vernacular languages, disregarded in an urban scenario, yet Kafka, unlike most Jew, was able to understand and write in Czech, which became important in his relation with Milena Jesenská. German filled both the vehicular and referential language, occupying the same role in the Austro-Hungarian Empire as English in today's world. And Hebrew, was the mythical language, associated with the foundation of Zionism and the state of Israel. Whereas 'vernacular language is here, vehicular language is everywhere, referential language is over there, and mythical language is beyond' (p.23).
The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire 'increases the crisis, accentuates everywhere the movements deterritorialization and invites all sorts of complex reterritorializations' (p.24). In this movement Kafka does not opt for a 'reterritorialization through the Czech. Nor towards a hypercultural usage of the German... Nor toward an oral popular Yiddish' (p. 25). Instead he chooses an intermediate route, by bringing Prague's German into his writing, and exploring it beyond its boundaries. '[H]e will tear out of Prague German all the qualities of underdevelopment that it has tried to hide ... He will turn the syntax into a cry that will embrace the rigid syntax of the dried-up German. He will push towards a deterritorialization that will no longer be saved by culture or by myth'(p.26). In other words Kafka places the here of the vernacular language into everywhere of the vehicular language; he casts a language that despite having its roots, encompasses many places, and is not rooted nowhere particularly.
Deleuze and Guattari situate the revolutionary intensity of Kafka's writing in the minor and undefined language Kafka chose to write in. To write in a minor language is a choice, which implies that one is willing to allow his work to have no value, to become nothing. He will be willing, like Kafka was, to write in a language without masters, within which even its creator is a stranger; A language marked by its poverty, with no single define identity. This is the language Kafka explores. It is in it that he 'find[s] points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones by which language can escape' (p.27). A linguistic territory has no single center of power neither clear boundaries toward what can and cannot be said(p.26).
In the beginning of the chapter Deleuze and Guattari describe three features of minor literature as being the deterritorialization of language, the political nature of every element, and the collective enunciation. I belief to be in position to better understand what the authors meant with these three features. In the first place, the already mentioned deterritorilized nature of Prague's German, which Kafka adopts and explores as his written language; While being the language of Prague's Jews, it derives from an international vehicular language, yet it is distant from the Czech territoriality (p.16). Secondly, the authors defend that within a minor literature 'everything takes on a collective value'. The lack of talent and the impossibility of virtuosity that results from writing in a new, uncharted minor language, prevents enunciations from being inscribed within the work of a given "master". Such lack of ancestry allows for a minor literature to gain a collective meaning (p.17). on spam Thirdly, they state that while in a major literature individual intrigues join to form a whole, in minor literature every intrigue stands-out on its own, and is political. In this scenario each 'the individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it'(p.17). As an example the authors refer to the family 'triangle' as being attached to other triangles, such as the commercial, economic, bureaucratic, juridical(p.17).on political
Notes
on spam
Like in spam, the lack of talent and of "masters", gives the texts a collective identity that turn them property of the collective, therefore their heavy appropriation.But doesn't the same appropriation happens to ads? Would then we classify them as collective? Lack of talent doesn't seem to be missing form ads, neither are "masters", but these are only know by those within the advertising industry, to those outside they look like anonymous creation ...
on political dimension of minor
Although the political dimension might sound abstract, I believe it might begin to make more sense if a parallel is establish to the literary expression of musical genre such as reggae, that becomes minor in migrant journey to its new location in U.K. or US. As being minor the faintest sign criticism, or discontentment is interpreted a politic act.
'[A] Harlequin costume in which very different functions of language and distinct centers of power are player out, blurring what can be said; one function will be played off against the other, all the degrees of territoriality and relative deterritorialization will be played out'. (p.26)
Ronald Bogue
Ronald Bogue interprets Deleuze and Guattari's concept of minor literature affirming that every languages impose its own codes and regularities, which are unstable by nature. A major use of language tries to dominate that unsuitability, by limiting, ordering and regulating those unstable linguistic elements, in favor of the ruling social order; inversely, a minor use, such as Kafka's written German, tends to bring to light and explore the unstable, diverse and divergent elements present in the language (168). In essence is the position a language practice adopts towards power that defines it as major or minor.
'Every language, whether dominant or marginalised, is open to a major or a minor usage, and whatever its linguistic medium, minor literature is define by the minor treatment of the variables of language'(Bogue p.168 )
Notes
The Deleuze Dictionary
Minoritarian (p.164-165)
'major' and 'minor' language
the need to destinguish between major and minor languages: > need to destinguish and define the 2
'Resource to minor language puts the major language into flight. Minoritarian authors are those who are foreigners in their won tongue'
'A majority is linked to a state of power and domination'
'A minority is a deviation from the model ... The majoritarian mode is a constant while its minoritarian counterpart is a subsystem.'
'Minortiarian is seen as potential, creative and in becoming'
'A minor language is a major language in the process of becoming minor'
Minoritarian + Literature (p. 167-169)
'Every language imposes relations through its grammatical and syntatic regularities, its lexical and semantic codes, yet those relations are inherently unstable ... A major usage of a language limits, organizes, controls and regulates linguistic materials in support of dominant social order, whereas a minor usage of a language induces disequilibrium in its components, taking advantage of the potential for diverse and divergent discursive practices already present in the language'
'A minor literature, then, is not necessarily one written in the language of an oppressed minority, and its not exclusively the literature of a minority engaged in the deformation of the language of a majority. Every language, whether dominant or marginalised, is open to a major and minor usage ... Nor is minor literatue simply literature written by minorities. What constitutes minorities is not their statistical number ..., but their position within asymmetrical power relationships that are reinforced by and implemented through linguistic codes and binary oppositions'
Minoritarian + Music (pp. 169-172)
genres developed as part of African-America cultures: dub, reggae
Instances of minoritarian cultures, because their development is complex and cannot be located exclusively within minority instances.
Sometimes the creative and transformative potential of these instances gives way to the pressures of capitalism
'In order to develop a minor use of this language, minor cultural formation ... have had to find way of altering nor recombining elements from the dominant language in order to render them sonorous, as a means to foregrounding their transformative potential. That is to say that minor cultural formation have had to deterrialise the English language. This indeeed is the first characteristic of a minor cultural formation.'
spam seems like a minor usage of the language of marketing and advertisement. and as minor usage, induces desiquilibrium, and questions the dominant social order. Social order and equilibrium are essecial for the success of advertisement and brands, we consumers have to trust them, in order to buy them. Spam, as minor and unstable usge, produces desiquilibrium and questioning, which not only brings its legitimacy to question, but also of conventional advertisiment, therefore being considered DANGEROUS and TO BE AVOIDED