Minority (philosophy)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The concept of "becoming-minor" and Minority was created by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Basically, Deleuze defined majority as a concept based on domination, refusing a numerical conception of majority. He thus argued that the concept of "dominant minority" is a pure oxymoron: to his eyes, a so-called "dominant minority" can only be said to be an effective majority. To be minor is to belong to the socially dominated-groups, as in Arthur Rimbaud's poem, "Bad Blood", in Une Saison en Enfer: "becoming-minor" is an ethical action, one of the many becomings one can expect to be affected by. Deleuze thus argued that the people was always a minority, whatever its numerical power, drawing on Kafka's literature.
Patriarchy gives a good illustration of this concept of "minority": There may be numerically more women than men, but men still constitute the majority whereas women form a minority. Henceforth, it comes as no surprise that Deleuze & Guattari mix "becoming-minor" with "becoming-woman" ("everyone has to "become-woman", even women..."), "becoming-revolutionary", "becoming-animal", "becoming-imperceptible" and "becoming-molecular". Each type of affective becoming marks a new phase of deterritorialization.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980)
