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Genet's Genealogy: European Minorities and the Ends of the CanonAuthor(s): David

LloydReviewed work(s):Source: Cultural Critique, No. 6, The Nature and Context of


Minority Discourse (Spring, 1987),pp. 161-185Published by: University of Minnesota
PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354260 .Accessed: 03/02/2013

I am suggesting here that a specific phase in the history of western writing has come to an
end in our own time, namely that phase which falls between the emergence of what I
would term "aesthetic culture" and its current confrontation with the loss of the ethical
function that legitimated it. (162)

It is within the discourse of aesthetic culture that the canon intended here is established,
and from that discourse it derives the terms by which texts are distributed into major and
minor categories, or even defined as literature at all. The end of the canon is not the end
of writing, nor is the end of minor writing the same thing as the end of a distinct writing
of or by minorities.

But if, as I would argue, the hegemonic function of aesthetic culture has largely been
superseded, it becomes all the more important to distinguish between a minor and a
minority writing.

Accordingly, the question at stake here is: what is the historical relationship between a
"minor literature" and the literature of "minorities?"

In order to address this question, it is necessary to attend first to two prior conditions of
any relationship that we may assert between these concepts.

1) how are minorities theoretically constituted as political and cultural categories,


and, in addition, is there a relationship between the political and the cultural
judgment?
2) how has that major literature historically been defined, in terms of function as in
terms of properties, against which another writing has been adjudged minor?

The representation of certain groups of whatever kind as minorities requires in the


first place the political constitution of states within which consensus is in theory
reached through the mediation of conflicting interests to the benefit of a majority of
the citizens. States so constituted emerge only in the wake of the bourgeois
revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but have rapidly
imposed themselves globally as the proper model of political organization. To their
virtually simultaneous emergence as nation states we will return (162-63)

Given the claim that these revolutions establish universal equality of rights for all
men, the provision for proper representation of minority interests within the
constitution becomes essential to the theoretical legitimation of bourgeois hegemony.

As John Stuart Mill puts it in his Considerations on Representative Government


In a really equal democracy, any or every section would be represented, not
disproportionately, but proportionately. A majority of the electors would always have

a majority of the representatives; but a minority of the electors would always have a
minority of the representatives. Man for man they would be as fully represented as
the majority. Unless they are, there is not equal government, but a government of
inequality and privilege contrary to all just government, but above all, contrary to
the principle of democracy, which professes equality as its very root and foundation.

Mill provides here a fairly unexceptional account of the assumptions of just


government and of the principles of democracy. Further critical analysis of what is
a classical account of liberal political theory will bring to light a number of
assumptions which are crucial not only to the constitution but also the domination of
minorities.
Firstly, and in itself almost self-evidently, the theory of representative government,
within which alone the existence of minorities makes sense, is applicable only to the
more or less large nation state: it depends, in other words, on the necessity of
representation, since all cannot, in a community exceeding a single small town,
participate personally but in some very minor portions of the public business (RG,
217-18). Self-evident as this condition may be, the consequences which follow from
it are less apparent. For it is not merely that representative govern is a necessary
compromise, consequent (though Mill is nowhere explicit about this) on the
requirement (163) of developing capitalism that local variations of law and customs
be progressively overridden in the interests of rationalizing both the labor and the
commodity markets. Though this condition requires the mediation of an at first

increasingly disparate set of local or partial interests, representative government is


itself, in Mills account, an institution intrinsically opposed to the spirit of locality.
One of the strongest hindrances to improvement, up to a certain advanced stage, is
an inveterate spirit of locality. Portions of mankind, in other respects capable of, and
prepared for, freedom, may be unqualified for amalgamating into even the smallest
nation (RG, 222).
The initial subordination of localities by centralized power, by autocratic monarchies
in other words, is an historical precondition of representative government on which it
continues to draw and which it furthers. The dismantling of local centers of power by
central government implies accordingly the incorporation into the state of a variety of
laterally and vertically differentiated class and/or ethnic groups.
Secondly, and consistent with that first condition, minorities within the large nation
state are defined not merely by their numerical inferiority to the dominant ethnic or
class groups that compose the nation but moreover by the geographical dispersal
which, in time with the eradication of local legal differences, capitalism requires of
them as a condition of individual and collective economic survival. Unable to form a
majority in any constituency, their unrepresented minority status is perpetuated by the
very dislocations in which the modern state finds the conditions of its emergence.
Confusion is virtually inevitable here, given the difference between the commonly
accepted current usage of the term minority and the sense in which Mill employs the
same term. It is essential to Mills argument, and enabling to the direction which it
takes, that the definition of minorities at this juncture be not only purely political
(RG, 264).

It is for this reason that Marx, in On the Jewish Question, ironically envisages all
citizens of the modern state becoming Jewish: The chimerical rationality of the
Jews is the rationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.
That is, Mill's usage of "minority" has reference only to any interest group
whatsoever whose interests may not be those of the majority. There is no reference to
minorities in the ethnic, cultural, or sexual sense. That this is so is crucial to the
normative drive of his argument and to the notions of development which underpin it.
Pointing out that, "though the Parliament of the nation ought to have as little as
possible to do with purely local af-fairs," it will be necessary to have some provision
for the representation of localities, Mill recognizes that in this case: It would be the
minorities chiefly, who being unable to return the local member, would look
elsewhere for a candidate likely to obtain other votes in addition to their own. (RG,
264)
This, however, does not lead Mill to argue for the provision of, say, a number of
Jewish of Irish representatives open to election by their ethnic group regardless of
locality. Rather, he argues for just such a system to privilege the intellectuals or, as he
is obliged to term them, the instructed minority. Having recognized that geographic
dispersal is one of the crucial factors excluding minorities from representation, he is
enabled to argue that the most significant minority in the modern state is the body of
intellectuals whose institutional functions require their dispersal throughout the
nation.
Accordingly, it is essential to provide for special representation of the instructed
minority within the legislative body. The arguments which justify this claim, and what

may seem the even more outrageous claim that the instructed should be granted more
votes than other citizens (RG, 285-90), constitute implicitly the legitimation of western
bourgeois hegemony globally.
Millss contention is that his instructed minority would provide a supplement, or
completing corrective, to the instincts of a democratic majority (RG, 268).
Note 6: Similarly, Coleridge regards the clerisy as the essential disseminating organ of
cultivation in the political constitution of the state (165)
Rests on two explicit assumptions re: intellectuals:
In the first place, they can correct the potential abuses of majority power by a superior
capacity for reflective rather than instinctive decision. In the second place, their interests
will not coincide with that of the majority, or, where they do, their reflective capacities
will allow them the uncommon capacity of laying their own interests in abeyance.

The two arguments are distinct, but linked within the general narrative which underlies
Mill's political theory. The minority status of intellectuals is consequent upon the same
condition which makes them disinterested, namely, their unspoken detachment from any
prior organic community: politically speaking, the intellectual no longer belongs to his
or her class, local community, or other natural interest group. Dislocation is, in fact, the
symptom of their disinterest. Dislocation and disinterest are seen, in fact, as the destiny
of intellectuals, but as a legitimating destiny precisely insofar as it is also the ethical
history of humankind. Within that history, intellectuals represent a kind of perpetual
avant-garde which occupies the furthest point attained in the normative development of
the human race. The history of human development simultaneously described the

evolution of human beings to that stage at which they are capable of participating in
representative government, which is the ideal type of a perfect government (RG, 218).
Most significantly, it provides a model for both individual and cultural development, both
individuals and cultural or societies passing through an ideal series of stages which
prepare them ethically and politically for representative government:
We have recognized in representative government the ideal type of the most perfect
polity, for which, in consequence, any portion of mankind are better adapted in
proportion to their degree of general improvement. As they range lower and lower in
development, that form of government will be, generally speaking, less suitable to them;
though this is not true universally: for the adaptation of a people to representative
government does not depend so much upon the place they occupy in the general scale of
humanity as upon the degree in which they possess certain special requisites; requisites,
however, so closely connected with their general degree of advancement, that any
variation between the two is rather the exception than the rule (RG, 218) (166)

The requisites referred to here are, in the final analysis, ethical, demanding the
reconciliation in the individual, and more generally, in national character, of authonomy
(self-dependence) and self-subordination. Only an ethical disposition is capable of
freely submitting to the general interest, and that disposition is one which is only
developed through intellectual culture. Accordingly, in an argument profoundly
influenced as is virtually all British cultural theory by the spectre of an empowered
working class, Mill remarks that universal teaching must precede universal franchise
(RG, 280). What is held to legitimate working class disenfranchisement within the

framework of representative government is the contrast between the general level of


development of the national character as represented by the intellectuals and the
ethically deleterious effects of working class labor: Their work is a routine; not a labor of
love, but of self-interest in the most elementary form, the satisfaction of daily wants;
neither the thing done, nor the process of doing it, introduces the mind to thoughts or
feelings extending beyond individuals; if instructive books are within their reach, there is
no stimulus to read them; and in most cases the individual has no access to any person of
cultivation much superior to his own (RG, 216).
Under conditions of representative government, public duty, even without franchise,
prepares the way for full participation inasmuch as it provides ethical training in the
unselfish sentiment of identification with the public (RG, 217). The working classes ay
be developed into the capacity for representing themselves. But what is true internally to
the state is equally true of humankind in general, with the proviso that at a lower stage of
development, individual ethical improvement cannot come about by minimal
participation in public duty. The characteristics of the lowest stage of human
development, the savage, are virtually identical with those of the working classes, and
equally disabling, a fact which should serve to remind us of the extent to which a
discourse of class continues to overlap with one of race: a people in a state of savage
independence, in which every one lives for himself, exempt, unless by fits, from any
external control, is practically incapable of making any progress in civilization until it has
learnt to obey (RG, 197) (167)
Though the disqualifying term, self-interest, is the same, the consequence differs, since
the working classes can be incorporated hegemonically through education and restricted

participation in the affairs of the state, savages only be lessons in obedience. In turn this
latter assertion becomes the inevitable legitimation for the disciplinary powers of
dominant colonialism: primitive societies divide between two fundamental and
fundamentally disabling characteristics, savage independence and the slavish obedience
of the barbarian (RG, 197-99).
Within Mills universal narrative of human development, however, these characteristics
are not synchronic. The slavish subjection of the barbarian is the necessary stage by
which the savage mind can be improved, whether to submit to the restraints of a regular
and civilized government (RG, 178) or to accept that continuous labor which is the
price of civilization (RG, 198). Historically speaking, this explains the periods of
despotism in the development of civilization; contemporaneously, it justifies the forceful
subjection of native populations: Under a native despotism, a good despot is a rare and
transitory accident: but when the dominion they are under is that of a more civilized
people, that people ought to be able to supply it constantly. The ruling country ought to
be able to do for its subjects all that could be done by a succession of absolute monarchs,
guaranteed by irresistible force against the precariousness of tenure attendant on
barbarous despotisms, and qualified by their genius to anticipate all that experience has
taught to the more advanced nation. Such is the ideal rule of a free people over a
barbarous or semi-barbarous one (RG, 382)
The basic principle of external colonialism, that improvement cannot come from
themselves, but must be superinduced from without, contains also the model for the
transition from dominant to hegemonic colonialism, the passage from a government of
will to one of law (RG, 199). The judgment is at once historical and ethical in form, or,

more precisely, it depends on an historiography which is already ethical, upon an ethics


which is always historical. Hence one notes the universality of its application as a
legitimation of internal as well as external colonialism, and in terms of class as well as
race relations. The specific constitution of minorities in the sense that concerns us here
can be deduced from Mills remark in his chapter (168)
on Nationality. It has already been noted that the kind of state that Mill has always in
mind is the nation state. But his chapter on the question of nationality comes late in the
text and as if an incidental complication of the larger argument. It is necessary for us,
accordingly, to stress what the concept of nationality implies within the historical schema
that Mill everywhere invokes. Nation-states are artificial entities, the creation in turn of
the autocratic monarchies and Europe and the need for an increasingly rationalized labor
and commodity market under capitalism.

Here is the key-- But what is significant in the latter case is that in the absence of a selflegitimating autocratic power, an internal principle of legitimacy for the state must be
found. This principle is generally racial, constituting the nation on grounds of ethnic
identity. As Mill puts it: This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various
causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of
language, and community of religion, greatly contribute to it Geographical limits are one
of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents; the possession of
a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and
humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past (RG, 360).
Mills argument here assumes ethnic identity within the historical production of identity,

an assumption that becomes necessary from the moment that a large nation state must
appeal for its unity to national identity, despite being composed of an aggregate of
different ethnic groups. But as we have been seeing, history for Mill is the narrative of
the ethical development of the race, defined precisely by ever-widening capacities for
identification. Logically, therefore, his definition of nationality brings with it a valuable
pay-off in relation to internal minorities, and one which can be efficiently transported,
(169) mutatis mutandi, to all modern western nation states. Mill turns to another more
purely moral and social consideration than geographical bases for national boundaries:
Experience proves that it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in
another: and when it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human
race the absorption is greatly to its advantage (RG, 363). He then proceeds to laud the
advantages for the Breton or the Basque of assimilating into that highly civilized and
cultivated people, the French, rather than sulk[ing] on his own rocks, the half-savage
relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or
interest in the general movement of the world (RG, 363-64). The same, of course,
applies to the Celtic populations under English rule. Admixture of nationalities, is, as a
general principle, a benefit to the human race (RG, 364). But the apparent neutrality of
Mills assertion dissolves in the recognition that such admixture is in fact always the
assimilation or incorporation of a less-developed (that is, technologically weaker)
population into a more highly developed one. And given that Mills historical schema not
only to the formal historical relations between different national characters but also, in
the case of the disenfranchisement of the working classes on educational grounds, to
individuals and classes within any nation, the implication of his argument is that when the

sulky Breton is absorbed into France he will not only constitute a minority in the purely
statistical sense, but also a minority with diminished rights to political representation. The
concept of representation invoked revolves crucially around an ethnocentric model of
political and cultural development, and it is this developmental model which allows the
easy transition between a liberal version of political representation and the legitimation of
external and internal colonialism. The geographical center can always be dissembled as
representing a temporal moment of universal history.
2. Ends of an Aesthetic Representation
What becomes clear from the logic of Representative Government is that the extension of
proportional representation to minorities, however (170)
constituted, makes little difference while the concept of representation in play remains
centered upon the cultural models of a European bourgeoisie. If the recognition of this
fact will lead me to suggest the necessity of a critique of the aesthetic foundations of
political representation, I should suggest from the outset that I do not wish to imply in
any way the sufficiency in itself of such a critique as a political intervention. Nonetheless,
it does seem necessary to understand the intimate inter-involvement of aesthetic and
political concepts of representation over the last two hundred years as mutually
supporting aspects of a western discourse on the human, conceived as universally valid
but effectively ethnocentric. For it is insufficient to critique liberal theories of political
representation without grasping their debt to the concept of an ethical subject formed by
aesthetic culture, that in theory sublates otherwise irreconcilable political or economic
interests. This concept is fundamental to Mills whole argument; hence the central
importance for him of the instructed minority, that is, the intellectuals regarded as

ethical subjects. In this ethical subject, the political and the aesthetic spheres intersect.
Whether directed at political or aesthetic modes of representation, any critique will be
deficient that does not address the nexal function of this representative instance.
I have outlined elsewhere certain fundamental relationships between aesthetic and
political concepts of representation and their grounding function in the establishment of
the canon.
The main point that needs recapitulation here is that the domain of aesthetic culture
provides a site of reconciliation which transcends continuing political differences and
accordingly furnishes the domain of human freedom promised in theory by bourgeois
states but belied in all but form by their practices. The aesthetic domain performs this
function by virtue of the fact that, while bourgeois political theory postulates the essential
identity of man, aesthetic works are held to furnish the ()
Really important note: 8. Thus interpretations of modernism which have addressed the
breakdown of representation as an aesthetic concern are generally deficient to the extent
that they ignore the relation of this formal phenomenon to contemporaneous crises in
political representation and the dissolution of the representative role of high culture. The
role of aesthetic culture could be said to have been efficiently taken over by the culture
industry. (171)
representative instances of reconciliation which at once prefigure and produce an
ethical subjectivity restored to identity with this universal human essence. To contemplate
aesthetic works of whatever kind is to be drawn into an ethical identification with this
essence, which is crucially defined in terms of an inherently formative relationship
between the human subject and its objects.

Aesthetic theory provides consequently the formal paradigm for that continuous labor
which both disciplines the subject and dominates the material world as a prerequisite to
civilization. Its notion of formation is accordingly developmental both in relation to the
emergence of the ethical subject which it produces and in relation to the aesthetic
products which are the objective signs of any cultures relative stage of civilization.
The canon which is framed by aesthetic theory can consequently be conceived in two
interconnected aspects. One is historical, and consists of the ordering of an evolution of
genres (Gattungen) in relation to the historical development of the species (Gattung). The
classic instance of this is the sequence: song or ballad, epic, drama, lyric, which
underpins romantic notions of generic evolution.
The other is evaluative and concerns the discrimination between major and minor
writing. A major writing can be broadly characterized as that which most effectively
fulfills the function of aesthetic culture itself. Accordingly, it must be concerned with
representative instances of the human, instances which may of course vary in relation to
historical periods but are nonetheless contained within the historical schema that
underwrites the evaluative principles of the canon. It should assist in the ethical formation
of the subject, both by depicting the development of an identity to the point of
identification with a more general humanity (the narrative of Bildung), and by eliciting
the readers identification with a character of a poetic subject.

Important: The famous disinterest of the aesthetic work is accordingly assured in two
ways: by the claim that its fundamental patters of development are universal in kind and
by the claim that the universality of that (172)

development arises from a common property of humanity which the work


instantiates and evokes. Key terms here are autonomy and authenticity, concepts
which anchor the free ethical development of the individual subject in the continuous
reproduction of an original human essence.
Any definition of minor writing is obliged to take into account its oppositional status
vis--vis canonical or major literature thus described. For this reason, a too hasty
identification of minority with minor literature will inevitably be inaccurate, and
Deleuze and Guattari are thus far correct to remark in their study of Kafka that it is
perfectly possible for a literature of minorities to fulfill a major function. One notable
case in point would be the literature of nationalism which adopts the same aesthetic terms
in order to forge an oppositional national identity. Deleuze and Guattari are equally
correct to seek to differentiate a literature of minorities written in a minority language
from a minor literature which would be that of minorities composed in a major language.
For minor literature is so termed in relation to the major canon, and its characteristics
are defined in opposition to those which define canonical writing. To enumerate them
briefly and all too schematically, the characteristics of a minor literature would involve
the questioning or destruction of the concepts of identity and identification, the rejection
of representations of developing autonomy and authenticity, if not the very concept of
development itself, and accordingly a profound suspicion of narratives of reconciliation
and unification.
D and G subsume these characteristics under the term deterritorialization, a concept
which, though applied with such generality as to obscure the characteristics of particular
historical instances, nonetheless relates quite specifically to the question of minor and

minority literatures. Minority groups are so defined in consequence of a dislocation or


deterritorialization which calls their collective identity in question and leads to their (173)

categorization as instances of underdevelopment: whether a minority group is


defined in terms of gender, ethnicity, or any other typology, its status is never merely
statistically established, but involves the aspersion of minority exactly in the sense of
the common legal usage of the term for those too young to be out of tutelage. The
hegemonic exercise of power replaces violent and exclusive apartheids with the concept
of the minority, defined no longer as bestial or subhuman, but as not yet fully
developed, childlike, and subject to tutelage until assimilation is accomplished. Minority
identity appears ill-formed by virtue of its supposedly arrested development. One
response to such stereotyping, most frequently that of oppositional nationalism,
resembles Mills appropriation of minority status for intellectuals and his subsequent
reterritorialization of that status within the model of developmental history.
Nationalisms reterritorialize dislocated identities historically, and despite their initially
progressive intents, continue thereby to acquiesce in imperial hegemony even after
independence. An alternative response is that represented by what we are terming minor
literature, which refuses to reterritorialize identity, preferring to extend the critique of
those developmental narratives which perpetuate hegemonic culture.

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