The power of particularity, of minority, has its model or universal consciousness in the proletarian.” Deleuze/Guattari
When Marxist positions address the question of heteronomy and the autonomy of struggles, they do so in the context of a process sustained by a universal class, but which must dissolve itself in class struggles through the transformation of its conditions of existence. Here, the idea of a “revolutionary political subject” seems to precede the process of its dissolution, removing the distance between idea and process in a perhaps untenable short-circuit that, moreover, carries the suspicion of using an impossible theoretical form to cover up the emptiness of the subject.
The theory of minority of Deleuze/Guattari is, according to Sibertin-Blanc, to whom we mainly refer here in the text, one of the most interesting testimonies of a critical heritage of Marxism. In the two authors, we find two partially antinomic theses, one of the contextualization of the minority as part of the proletariat as constituted by the capital economy, and the other of the semiotization of the minority in its opposition to the majority.
The first thesis is based on the capture of a fundamental tendency in the post-68 political situation, namely the “becoming minority of all” by taking up new forms of political subjectivation, even not excluding a “becoming revolutionary of the people,” which in turn creates the conditions for a global movement in which minorities in the long run advance political compositions that challenge the capitalist economy and form of the state. This is a formulation that must be read in the context of the problem of a universal class-“universal figure of political consciousness”-inscribing negativity into capitalist practices of power and their welfare-state realization arrangements.
What characterized the economic and political situation of the time for Deleuze/Guattari lay both beyond and on this side of the state. Beyond the nation-state is the development of a world market, the power of transnational corporations, and the process of a weakening of nation-states, but not their dissolution. In this context, William I. Robinson speaks today of the hegemony of a transnational class, and Kurt Röttgers even of the end of states and the dominance of the economic. For Deleuze/Guattari, the outlines of a “planetary” organization and the extension of an integral capitalism to the entire globe, not only through the export of capital, etc., but also through the fact that human rights and democracy circulate like oil throughout the globe (Baudrillard), form a great abstract machine that integrates and superimposes monetary, industrial, and technological flows. But the abstract machine, they argue, is no more infallible than nation-states, which are no longer able to regulate the abstract machine on their own territory and from one territory to another. In this context, Lazzarato speaks of the globalized war machine of capital. The state no longer has the political, institutional, or financial resources that would enable it to neutralize the social and economic effects of capital’s global war machine. It is therefore not at all surprising to Deleuze/Guattari that all kinds of minority problems, be they linguistic, ethnic, regional, gendered, or youth problems appear precisely not only as archaisms but in actual, revolutionary forms that challenge both the global economy of the capital machine and the mergers of imperialist nation-states.
Rather than speculating on the eternal impossibility of revolution and on the fascist return of the war machine, as Deleuze/Guattari put it in anticipation of a problematic currently being elaborated by Lazzarato in his book Capital hates Everyone, it would be better to explore how a new kind of revolution can emerge to trace a level of consistency that undermines the economy of the world capitalist system and of states. Nevertheless, the question of the future of revolution remains a poorly posed question, because there are obviously the masses or the silent majorities that are not revolutionary, and that is precisely why the question is posed, namely to prevent the very question of the revolutionary becoming of the proletarians. For Deleuze/Guattari, it is a matter of distinguishing the history of revolutions from the “revolutionary developments” of proletarians, developments that can produce a collective subjectivity of unpredictable ruptures, always singular in their emergence but sometimes generalizable in their effects, but never reducible to the historical linearities deduced in classical Marxism, which in turn allow them to be inscribed in an unambiguous discourse of power or counter-power. The discrepancy between becoming a revolutionary and history is not only a discursive question, but above all a social and political question, characterized by a relative decentering of social struggles vis-à-vis the state-national axis as the main organizer of historical representation. It is precisely at this point, Sibertin-Blanc argues, that Deleuze/Guattari apply the concept of becoming to the problem of minorities, and the conceptual hybridization of a “becoming-minoritarian” emerges, which seems to invert and redefine the classical revolutionary formula.
However, Deleuze/Guattari also show in their analysis of the axiomatics of “integrated global capitalism” that this decentering is not only the effect of new forms of struggle, but that it must be seen in the context of the rise of new capitalist powers of accumulation that both use and undermine the social and economic intervention mechanisms of states. At this point, one might address the question of the international circulation struggles that find their shape today in the Riots, as vividly described by Joshua Clover. The distinction between revolutionary becoming and the history of revolution has inevitably internalized a split inherent in the very idea of revolution: between revolution as a historical concept and revolution as a practical idea. For Sibertin-Blanc, Deleuze/Guattari’s formulations related to this oscillate between two unstable positions: Either the authors harden the heterogeneity of the two poles, that of minorities and integral capital, at the risk of no longer being able to show how, then, the revolutionary becoming of minorities can arrive at a universal politics, or they dialectize the relationship and make the coming “result” of the becoming the stake of a “micropolitics” that postpones indefinitely the question of thresholds and upheavals in terms of macropolitical efficacy.
These ambivalences are not resolved in the Thousand Plateaus, but they are short-circuited by a second formulation of becoming-minority that no longer projects minorities at the head of a new universal class, but formalizes them within a system of domination based on the distinction between majority and minority, a difference viewed from the perspective of a semiology of identity assignments, i. e. i.e., executes logical and semiotic operations that reveal an unequal inscription of practices and social diversity in minorities, both as regimes of enunciation and as subjective positions in which groups are individualized, articulating their interests and demands.
For Deleuze/Guattari, the majority always presupposes a constant or standard, whether in terms of expression or content. The authors address the constant of a dominant man, white, adult, city dweller, who speaks English. It is obvious that these men are the majority, even if they would be less numerous than children, women, blacks, homosexuals, etc. For they appear twice, once in the constant and once in the variable from which the constant is taken. The minority emerges as the opposite determination, existing as a subsystem or outside the system regardless of the number, and at the same time is said to include the becoming of all, at least a potential becoming to the extent that it deviates from the model of the majority. The majority contains a homogeneous and constant system, while the minorities are subsystems, but they can also generate a potential and creative becoming. The majority has a content that is constructed by its hegemony and corresponds to a certain state of domination, in which content are subjectivized both those who are identical with the majority (and also identify with it) and those who do not belong to the majority but who can nevertheless identify with a positivity of the system that does not actually concern them. At this point, Deleuze/Guattari address a relationship of domination that is expressed in the always tautological character of the criteria of the majority, but which also provides the language in which the dominated can formulate their demands (the national worker, skilled, male, etc.). However, what constitutes the plasticity of this arrangement is at the same time what exposes it to disequilibrium if its logic is carried through to the end.
The transition to the limit is illustrated by Deleuze/Guattari by means of a series: Man-white-adult-salary earner, “reasonable,” city dweller speaking a standard language, European, heterosexual, etc. The list could be continued practically to the point of ensuring that no one can fully agree with it. This raises the problem of the fluctuating instrumentalization of targeted discrimination criteria depending on circumstances and political goals, the overlapping of some of these criteria, and the conflation of different relations of domination. At the most general level, the analysis shows that the majority defines an empty universality, that norms established as majoritarian constants are not so much enacted to be conformed to, but are used to measure those who do not conform to them, and to identify and categorize the gaps between them. Following Foucault, normative enunciations do not simply demand identification or conformity (“normalization”), but allow for a record of different behaviors in relation to supposed interpellation in order to identify the Other rather than make it identical, or, to put it another way, to measure and fix “deviance” in a reproducible space of division of the unequal, and to make rectification a means of producing new attributions of nonconformity, deviance, or “nonconformity.”
In contrast, the idea of becoming a minoritarian as a creative potential means that these arrangements of power can never fully establish themselves. In this regard, the minoritarian processes are not simply defined by deviance, but by the uncoded or unregulated features of the distances they introduce into distributive or differential positions, which necessitate giving a place to the non-categorizable, the non-distributable, the disruptive oppositions. They constitute a crux that prevents the objective representation from closing in on itself or the social system from collapsing with the structure of oppositional relations that make it a system of distinguishable positions. Between the “positions” there are still fully experiential and manipulable transpositional subjective processes. The crucial point lies in the specific efficacy of these transidentificatory and minoritarian processes, which weaken any hegemonic or majoritarian construction within. Linguistic units, for Deleuze/Guattari, are always enforced by operations of power, making possible collective arrangements of enunciation on a system of homogeneous expressions. Minorities, in contrast, work against the empty universality of the hegemonic norm and against the inclusive-exclusive particularization of the minority as a subsystem.
Since this process is neither particularizable nor universalizable, it does not enter into the dialectic between the universality of the community and the distributive particularity of its parts or places, but rather belongs to “heterogeneity” in the sense of Bataille or even more to the “simulacra” of a Klossowski. This heterogeneity is not understood as a remnant or as a simple breakthrough of the horizon of totalization, since it follows a logic of “inclusive disjunction” that provides any binary relation between main subject/minority subjects with an essential disruption. Thus, it does not positively enter into the construction of an antagonistic conflictuality or a counter-hegemonic majority, not because it stands outside of it, but because it uses precisely the way assigned, recognized, majored, or identifications can be affected by an Other that the systems cannot distinguish without including it. The crux of the theory would now be, on the one hand, to make an immanent statement or an immanent description about a system that follows its inner logic, including the integration of the Other, to the end, thus adding nothing to it qua theory and yet completely reversing it, thus showing that it is not possible without this Other or Nothing, but that it itself also makes it impossible. Moreover, it is a matter of becoming an Other in a way that seems to correspond to Ranciere’s “heterology” of political subjectivity, which starts from a de-identification and an impossible identification. This gives rise to the idea that the critical efficacy of this process works simultaneously against the empty universality of the hegemonic norm and against the exclusionary/inclusionary particularization of a minority as a subsystem. This becoming-minoritarian is a process that fundamentally affects the “large” subject, but here not only under the influence of capitalist decodings, the additions and subtractions of welfare state axioms that “regulate” deregulations, but to the extent that minorities themselves are able to enter into a process of becoming-minoritarian that affects their own “variables.” Either one allows oneself to be reterritorialized by the state as a minority, or one is deterritorialized or actively subtracted in a becoming.
What constitutes a minority, then, is not the number, but the relations within the number. A minority can be numerous or even infinite; the same is true of a majority. The difference is that in the case of the majority, the relation within the number is a set that may be finite or infinite but is always countable, whereas the minority is defined as an uncountable set, no matter how many elements it has. What is peculiar to the minority, here as in Badiou, is the assertion of a power of the uncountable, even if this minority consists of a single member. This is the formula for multiplicities.
Sibertin-Blanc now claims that Deleuze/Guattari’s concept of minorities, through a series of repetitions and inversions, takes the place of the Marxist concept of the revolutionary proletariat while internalizing problematic nodes of that concept. Here emerges the difficulty of maintaining the identification of the subject of revolution that Marxism believed it could guarantee, and at the same time the difficulty of thinking in the void created by its retreat. Here, subject theory oscillates between, on the one hand, representations of a dispersed, almost unrealizable subject (Rancière’s “sans-parts”), and, on the other hand, representations of a new universal subject (the multitude introduced by Negri and Hardt). There is also a conceptual distinction to be made between becoming minorities as creative potential and minorities as “states” or as subsystems minoritized by a system of power that constitutes them as such. In this context, Sibertin-Blanc further sees the danger that Deleuze/Guattari’s minoritarian strategy and the notion of minoritarian becoming that condenses their expectations remain both theoretically incomprehensible and politically empty, if not nihilistic, unless they are connected to global capitalist axiomatics.
Thinking along these problematic lines, one can overprove Sibertin-Blanc’s hypothesis, which claims that minoritarian struggles take the place of class struggle in Deleuze/Guattari’s analysis, not in the sense that they displace it, but that they expand it by making its coordinates more complex, by changing its modes of realization, but also by internalizing some of its presuppositions and certain difficulties.
For Sibertin-Blanc, following Deleuze/Guattari, the factors related to the constitution of minorities are not fundamentally different from the factors of proletarianization. When Deleuze/Guattari write that “the power of the minority, of particularity, finds its shape or universal consciousness in the proletariat,” it is precisely because they refuse to consider the proletariat, which exists in part as variable capital within the socioeconomic structures of capital, independently of the contradictory dynamics through which this structure, on the one hand, sustains the proletariat within itself and through which, at least in part, it even sets forms of effectuation, but on the other hand, also sets the conditions for struggles. Therefore, in locating becoming minoritarian, they refer to the systematic dynamics of global integral capitalism.
Starting from the geo-economic and geo-political axes of capital accumulation in the unequal relations of dependence between “center” and “periphery,” Deleuze/Guattari name the following factors that can produce minoritarian becoming: Decodings of food flows that lead to famine, decodings of population flows through the destruction of indigenous habitats and urbanizations, and decodings of matter-energy flows that generate political and monetary instabilities. The development of a precarious proletariat, whose livelihood is secured only by the informal sector, by state transfers and temporary wages that are not legally secured, and the existence of a surplus proletariat, excluded from wage labor altogether, provide the resources even still for “internal third worlds” in the metropolises. This also opens the possibility for a variety of qualitatively new struggles across linguistic, ethnic, regional, sexist, and youth domains, but these struggles are always overdetermined by the systemic inequality of integral global capitalism.
The global capitalist system “minoritizes” as much as it prole-tarizes. Nevertheless, according to Sibertin Blanc, the difference between the two processes needs to be examined more closely. The Marxist concept of the proletariat refers first to its position within capitalist relations of production, characterized by expropriation from the means of production and incorporation into the production process as labor power, but also precisely to the power of becoming, that which constitutes the class in order to abolish the class, or as Balibar says, indicates its transitional value. In operaism, the second aspect is over-accentuated in such a way that the proletariat as such has no positive function for capital, insofar as it is above all a
primarily liberating “productive force,” as if it had nothing to do with the production and extraction of surplus value by capital, the metamorphosis of “living labor” into “capital. Minorities are again “proletarianized” masses, the latter
insofar as they are integrated into the institutional, social, legal, and ideological structures of nation-states (and of transpolitics, which reduces them to statistical quantities, one would have to say with Baudrillard). Detached from a purely economic determination of the working class and a sociological determination of the proletariat, the concept of minority cannot be thought of without processes through which state power, culture, and the media incorporate them into the social and institutional structures of the capitalist formation. Sibertin-Blanc now refers to as “minoritization” the creative distance that arises in the process of proletarianization, that which is deprived by capital of availability over life processes, and that which is reintegrated into liberal state form through social and political rights, legal and symbolic recognitions, organs of representation and delegation.
Consequently, the concept of minority implies an irreducible diversity that cannot be resolved in the sketch of a contradiction between capital and labor, nor in the supposed homogeneity of so-called workers’ conditions. It is always necessary to take into account the variability of states’ positions within the international division of labor and the unequal integration of their domestic market into the world market, the variability of political structures and regimes that oscillate between social-democratic and totalitarian poles. Moreover, the difference between the institutional and legal integration of minorities as a “subsystem” and the exclusion of minorities from the system, who are then at the mercy of repressive state violence; the corresponding variability in the forms and degree of development of minority struggles;the variability in the ways in which minorities are politically manipulated.
Deleuze/ Guattari think, on the one hand, the bipolarity of capitalist systems in the addition/subtraction of axioms and, on the other hand, the bipolarity of majority and minority. Thereby, the minority cannot be analyzed as a “state” that can be described with invariants or indicators of constants. It comes to an exclusive inclusion of the minorities, which is characterized by a spectrum of variations, shifts.
Furthermore, it is necessary to understand the difference between “becoming proletarian” and “becoming minoritarian” as a difference within the proletariat itself. This in turn, Sibertin-Blanc argues, makes it possible to confront Deleuze/Guattari’s minoritarian strategy with recent debates about the “biopolitics of capital” or the surplus population, already demarcated by Marx vis-à-vis the proletariat and its industrial reserve army. The extended reproduction of capital cannot take place without creating and proletarianizing a surplus in relation to the labor power integrated into wage labor. What Marx calls the relative surplus population, which is simultaneously proletarianized and outside the wage relation, is the industrial reserve army, which has not entirely lost contact with the official labor market, while the absolute surplus population comprises the surplus proletariat, which has also still lost that contact.
Deleuze/Guattari say that the struggles of the minorities cannot simply be identified with the struggles of the working class against capital, because the minorities are not in contact with the official labor market.
can be identified, because the minorities are first recruited from the relative and absolute surplus population. Minority formation, then, is not quite synonymous with proletarianization after all, but is related to the internal distinction between the part of the population subsumed to the capital relation and the “surplus” population, which poses specifically new problems of subsumption. Minorities, while always implicated to some degree in the economic and social expropriation process of proletarianization, inseparable from the various combinations of destruction in the cultural and territorial “remnants,” are also subject to further discrimination.
Marx has been criticized for distinguishing primitive accumulation and accumulation proper as two successive historical phases, rather than analyzing their articulation as a permanent condition of the extended reproduction of capital. It is precisely through this that an absolute surplus population, absolutely non-exploitable, is created. The crucial point is that the surplus population and the industrial reserve army becomes an organic component of incorporation into capitalist relations of production. The latter is related to the existence of a labor market that seems to exert only its own endogenous constraints on individuals, replacing external state coercion with the silent pressure of the surplus. Social liberal strategies tend to treat minorities as part of the relative surplus population as integrated into the relations of production and to count them in the appropriate social institutions (constituting minorities as subsystems and giving a part to the “sans-papiers”); neoliberal strategies seek to treat integrated populations as relative surplus populations and to destroy social institutions, in accordance with the delusion that one is only ever dealing with capital, and the implementation of this delusion in the elimination of what is not codable as “human capital.” One is no more cynical than the other, for cynicism is an immanent dimension of the structure itself. If the relation of production sets the condition for its own cycle of extended accumulation, the surplus population is set by that relation itself, by the immanent rhythm and extent of the destruction of non-capitalist social relations. The blurring of relative surplus as the industrial reserve army and absolute surplus as the surplus proletariat acquires its objective meaning as a function of the real generalization of capital, which tends to exclude every other social relation. With the underestimation of the inventiveness of capitalism and the flexibility of the institutional and state framework for the development of capitalist relations of production, the view arises that the relevant theoretical and practical problems of the revolutionary process would be spontaneously solved by the infallible historical development of the mode of production. The multiplication of the functions of capital and the interests that determine them, the complexity of the processes of production, circulation and consumption, the increase of state intervention in capitalist social relations and the modes of distribution of social wealth, and finally the internalization of the state in fractures and class compositions reformulate the crucial problem of an autonomous politics of the revolutionary movement: The invention of original forms of organization, but also of culture, thought and practices, capable of maintaining the asymmetrical character of the conflict and thus creating within the revolutionary process the immanent conditions of a politics that is not oriented to the forms of bourgeois politics or the practices of capitalist state power.