For Deleuze, as for Foucault and Lyotard, the activity of political reflection must have as a primary goal the freeing of an individual (be that individual a person, a group, or a practice) for new practices, practices that change, undermine, or abandon the power relationships that keep old practices in place. Foucault addresses the same concern in his description of philosophical “curiosity”:
"...not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself… There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity. But it is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it." (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure)
pataphysician
in reply to pataphysician • •As such, experimentation is a sober and often tentative activity. One experiments by constructing practices that one is prepared to abandon if their effects are intolerable. The recognition of contingency that inhabits networks of practices brings in its wake another recognition: practices that seem liberating may, because of unexpected interactions with or developments of other practices, have consequences very different from those imagined by their initiators. There is no blueprint for practice. The ethical principles that help one to judge practice remain; but one can only experiment in their realization.
One such experimentation, discussed by Deleuze, is that of “becoming minor.” It is a concept best understood as engaging in a practice that, while within the social network of practices and thus not transgressing that network, occupies a place that disrupts dominant practices by showing creative possibilities within t... show more
As such, experimentation is a sober and often tentative activity. One experiments by constructing practices that one is prepared to abandon if their effects are intolerable. The recognition of contingency that inhabits networks of practices brings in its wake another recognition: practices that seem liberating may, because of unexpected interactions with or developments of other practices, have consequences very different from those imagined by their initiators. There is no blueprint for practice. The ethical principles that help one to judge practice remain; but one can only experiment in their realization.
One such experimentation, discussed by Deleuze, is that of “becoming minor.” It is a concept best understood as engaging in a practice that, while within the social network of practices and thus not transgressing that network, occupies a place that disrupts dominant practices by showing creative possibilities within those practices which would escape the political oppressions associated with them. To engage in a becoming-minor is to construct a line of flight within the social network by constructing—or following—one of the stems of the social rhizome that in the same gesture entangles dominant stems and is a positive possibility for practice. Regarding language, Deleuze and Guattari claim that “it is certainly not by using a minor language as a dialect, by regionalizing it or ghettoizing, that one becomes revolutionary; rather, by using a number of minority elements, by connecting, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous becoming.”
pataphysician
in reply to pataphysician • •