Minor Art and The Political : Towards The Production of Ourselves Anew

Karakilic, Emrah Ali (2024) Minor Art and The Political : Towards The Production of Ourselves Anew. In: UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

For Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987), the central project of capitalism consists in ‘the articulation of economic, technological, and social flows with the production of subjectivity in such a way that political economy is identical with subjective economy (Lazzarato, 2014: 8). Indeed, one of the greatest ‘achievements’ of capitalism lies in ‘the capitalisation of subjective power’ (Guattari, 2000: 47): capital manufactures and launches human subjectivity, in the same way it manufactures and launches a new line of cars (Guattari, 1984). The subject figure of late capitalism is increasingly in crisis. The paradigmatic figure of our time, particularly in the capitalist Northern world, is a self-condemning subject, who is simultaneously enslaved to the machinic processes of capitalism as a non-human-like variable (Karakilic, 2020). Today, frustration, resentment, anxiety and fear define the subject’s relation to itself (Fleming, 2017; Lazzarato, 2014, 2015). This is a regressive/negative subject; a subject that is turning in circles and hitting the wall. This reveals itself, for example, in the increasing loss of “meaning” and, in parallel, the astonishing rise of mental health problems (Berardi, 2015). In a world where subjectivity becomes the key merchandise of capital and where our cynicism becomes the most dreadful virus paralysing the praxis even in the face of catastrophic events, the political battleground becomes, firstly, ourselves. In this paper, I offer to think about engagement with minor art as a means of initiating micro-revolution. For this, firstly, I draw on Felix Guattari’s writings on the concept of subjectivity -multivalent, polyphonic and always-in-process- with a particular emphasis on its ongoing crisis in existential terms (a non-life-affirming-existence, à la Spinoza, defines our lives at large). Secondly, I turn to artist-scholar O’Sullivan’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature” and his translation of the latter into art practice: what does a minor art involve, how is it different from a major art, and what are its characteristics (with real examples from the art world)? Thirdly, I speculate on the potential role of minor art in the organisation of the ethico-aesthetic self-creation process, and this is two-fold: opening-up through art and becoming-artist. i) Opening up oneself through engagement with the minor art practices that produce a rupture in the existing vectors of subjectivation; ii) Becoming-artist, where minor art practice becomes an organising principle or a model for the resingularisation process of the subjectivity: an active intervention and reinvention of ourselves as ‘in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette’ (Guattari, 1995: 7).