Variations In their short book on Kafka, subtitled 'towards a minor literature', Deleuze and Guattari define a minor literature in a straightforward way. First they inform us that 'a minor literature doesn't come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language' (1986: 16). Kafka is the ideal type of an author writing in a minor literature according to Deleuze and Guattari. He was a Jew writing in German living in Prague. 'The impossibility of writing other than in German is for the Prague Jews the feeling of the irreducible distance from their primitive Czech territoriality' (ibid.: 16). Kafka has to write in a language that is foreign to the city that he inhabits. In short, Prague German is a deterritorialized language as Deleuze and Guattari put it. It is German, but written by a non-German outside of Germany. It reads like German, but it is also different from or a variation of German. 'A second characteristic of minor literatures', Deleuze and Guattari inform us, is that 'everything in them is political' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 17). The statement is significant, but is also misleading. For when Deleuze and Guattari speak of the political, they don't mean political in the conventional sense. The political doesn't necessarily refer to the realm of the state or to the activities of political parties. But neither do they take the political to be an index of disagreement, along the lines suggested by Chantal Mouffe or Jacques Ranciere, for example. Deleuze and Guattari's account of politics seems far too over-generalised; it lacks any account of the specificity of politics at all. Nonetheless, they do define the concept further. In their account, a minor literature is political because of the way in which the particular and the individual are automatically connected to what they term 'the social milieu'; 'the individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensible, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 17, my emphasis). The contributor to a minor literature is likely to work in what they term 'cramped spaces', within which the force and constraint of the social milieu is directly felt. Furthermore, the minor literature is micropolitical because it introduces variations, which may be quite small, but which make a difference. It is a marker of a movement of differentiation, without the nature of this difference being ordained in advance, or understood merely in opposition to what has existed before. Minor geographies Accounts of the discipline of Geography have often started from the assumption that it is or should be what Deleuze and Guattari would call major language. After all, geographers have understood their discipline to be an integrated or holistic science that, in principle, encompasses other disciplines; or alternatively they have lamented the fact that the project of integration or interdisciplinary synthesis has failed, even within the circumscribed space of the region. In this context, the continuing cohabitation of human and physical geographers is largely the product of the path-dependent history of the discipline; it lacks any conceptual rationale. My contention is that one starting point for rethinking the scope of geography would be to acknowledge that geographical thought and practice has elements of what we might call a minor language all along. To formulate my proposition crudely: as Kafka wrote a form of German which was necessarily a variation of German, geographers may to have write in the major languages of the natural and social sciences and humanities, but often do so, and arguably should do so, in a minor register. My aim here is to recognize the value of the minor in geography. Minor composition, as Nicholas Thoburn observes, does not lead towards 'a synthesis, but an amplification of disjunctions' (Thoburn, 2003: 27). Physics and sociology are good examples of disciplines in which major forms of thought are, in principle, highly valued. …
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