If literature and philosophy can both concern living with thought, what difference does it make regarding the inclusion of a personal character in the former? – Which is the most free: the direct statements of philosophy or the words interwoven within a fictional life in a narrative work (as in e.g. Joyce’s Dubliners)? (28/03/13)
On counter-culture. – The mainstream can be brought underground just as the underground can be brought into the mainstream. It is a matter of forgetting, of rediscovery, of context. (16/02/14)
Alain Resnais stated that the phrase “je tourne pour voir comment ça tourne” expressed his reason for making films: he made films to see how films are made.1 Just as we may think to see how thought operates. (04/03/14)
This is the problem with classical philosophy: like majoritarian thought, it holds itself to a single purpose, a purpose it wants to make dominant. – Or can we say that classical philosophy posits a minoritarian purpose in opposition to the majoritarian? Truth, as the philosophers have understood it, a transcendent truth, a truth beyond the world, is minoritarian compared to the majoritarian worldly truth. – But the new city in Plato’s Republic is a representation of the truth of the philosophers having become majoritarian, having become the rule, the norm. (13/04/14)
Is the professionalisation of philosophy a mode of making the minoritarian majoritarian? (13/04/14)
Jack Kerouac: “They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.”2 – Are the underground and depth burdens?3 Is it the lightest souls that skip across the surface? (12/03/15)
In what way do philosophers create concepts in the form of fictional characters? Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic. – Is there a difference between these two examples? Is it that the schizophrenic is purely a concept whereas Zarathustra is also a man? – The character as concept is the meeting point of literature and philosophy.
(06/06/15)
Virginia Woolf’s concept of integrity4 for philosophy. – This is where a work could only have been written by its author. It does not travel along the usual paths but shows the wear and tear of difficult terrain. It is honest, it shows deep faith in itself. (22/06/16)
The difference between Nietzsche and me: the idea of a new aristocracy vs. the idea of a new counter-culture. Why the latter? The former is continually prone to majoritisation, a process that strips it of any genuine creative potential. The latter is minoritarian; it allows itself a creativity free from the consolidation of the past within the present. (16/09/18)
Think of how science was once minoritarian: think of Galileo and his conflict with the Church. (15/06/19)
Difference is just difference; it isn’t necessarily minoritarian. Otherness and the minoritarian overlap, but sometimes one side is more pronounced than the other. (09/07/19)
The realism of the irreal.5 – The clearest way to illustrate this is by imagining a neorealist director. For the first film the director arrives at a town and films the inhabitants living their ordinary, everyday life. This is a realism of the real. For the next film the inhabitants of an asylum, or a bohemian commune, or a travelling circus, etc. are filmed living their extra-ordinary, everyday life. This is a realism of the irreal. In philosophy this is where we approach thought in this sense of realism, but we don’t expect thought to be normal and banal; we expect it to make leaps of the imagination, to speculate, and so on. It is this irreal form that we capture. (15/09/19)
When the majoritarian is in decline, it often happens that the minoritarian flourishes. (04/08/20)
It is of course possible that something from the mainstream can influence the underground. But the tendency is in the opposite direction because the latter has the creative freedom to experiment. (05/10/20)
Is there a difference between how growth appears in the mainstream and how it appears in the underground? The former aims for the growth of larger quantities of the same, the latter for smaller quantities of the new. (18/11/20)
The terms underground and minoritarian are not synonymous; the latter can be applied to many other things than just the former: in politics, in life in general. But the latter is a general quality of the former; if something is underground, it operates in a minoritarian way. (18/11/20)
We can find high and low quality work within the mainstream; we can find high and low quality work within the underground. (28/01/23)
What is my definition of minoritarian thought? It is a thought that is accustomed to travelling alone. – Does this refer to a thought that is in a minority of one? No, in every generation there are other wanderers who we occasionally meet. (30/01/23)
In Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari state that everything in a minor literature is political.6 Perhaps we can say that the underground, which is always in some way minoritarian, is political in the sense that its independence can only ever involve an independence from the dominant economic forces of its time. An underground that, within its own mode of operation, fully embraces capitalism is simply impossible: its innovations must be worthless in the first instance, i.e., they do not already have a buyer; they are not made to order. (31/01/23)
What should we do with any desire to make our view of the minoritarian match the characteristics delineated by Deleuze and Guattari (i.e., its deterritorialisation, its political nature, its collective nature)?7 In some way there are routes open to do this, but we must remain aware of our own lines of escape: we can find our own minoritarian understanding of the minoritarian itself. (31/01/23)
The extreme result of the majoritarian losing connection to the minoritarian is tyranny. The extreme result of the minoritarian losing connection with the majoritarian is erasure. Both sides are needed as co-players in the development of culture: if the majoritarian remains alone, we arrive at a dominating stasis; if the minoritarian remains alone, we arrive at its loss, a vanishing of the minoritarian because it remained silent everywhere other than in the privacy of its hiding place. (04/02/23)
Notes
1 Quoted in Peter Cowie, “The Curious Alain Resnais,” The Criterion Collection, March 2, 2014, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3085-flashback-alain-resnais.
2 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (London: Penguin, 2000), 48.
3 See the concept of depth developed in “The Absent World,” available at https://www.andrewmilward.net/works/the-absent-world/.
4 See Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Section 4.
5 See my Content and Operation, p 3, available at https://www.andrewmilward.net/works/content-and-operation.
6 Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: U of MN P, 1986), 17.
7 Ibid, 18.
Andrew Milward is a London-based writer originally from the North East of England. His work on thought, language, art, and the history of philosophy can be found on andrewmilward.net, including From the Notebooks (1).
minor literature[s] 