Posts Tagged “milieu”

Becoming Minor: Art and the Political

How many people today live in a language that is not their own? […] This is the problem of immigrants […], the problem of minorities, the problem of minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language?

Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

In response to Deleuze and Guattari we can ask how many people today live in a country, in a culture, in a professional or political milieu that is not their own? Is becoming minor a claim for a revolutionary change (as it was for Deleuze and Guattari in the seventies) or is it a universal and necessary condition of our everyday life? Interpreting Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature (which refers to the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation) I would like to focus on the practices of contemporary art in relation to the political.

First, I would like to discuss contemporary art practices along the lines of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation and consider the relationships between art and non-art, as well as art beyond art institutions, site-specific art.

Second, I would like to discuss art practices in their political immediacy (for example, if aesthetic criteria are replaced by ethical and political criteria, can art still be art without raising political questions?).

Third, I would like to refer to the collective forms of artistic enunciation (interactivity, artistic collaboration, and activism as a political or quasi-political art form). Is becoming minor a deliberate act of vanishing or is it the emergence of new forms of collective subjectivity?