A Minor Question of Literature, or The Bachelor Machine (ca. 1975)

In the previous chapters I have covered, more or less, the “objective determinations” of the literary machines we have found to be working at the basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s own collaborative project—that is, basically, the writing machine that they themselves were attempting to construct by borrowing different components from the literary machines of Kafka and Proust. Now, I would like to turn to “the subjective determination” of the agent (agent) that belongs to this assemblage (agencement)—who is often colloquially referred to as the writer. We recall that Kafka’s literary machine (a burrow) was described as the hybrid of a vegetal system with an animal-logos either trapped or hiding inside. What are the subjective determinations of this strange animal-logos who dwells in a system of writing—or as Guattari says, “a machine,” or a “written device”—and who, as in Proust, may not be said to actually exist otherwise?1 This could be likened to the consciousness of the narrator in the Recherche, which Deleuze describes as being rigorously distributed among all the characters, thus producing the conditions of multiplicity, or a “polyvalent” collective assemblage of enunciation. It is on the basis of this discovery that Deleuze and Guattari will deny that there is anything like individual enunciation in Proust, and later in Kafka—perhaps in all literature, for that matter! No individual, no person. The animal we are trying to determine is already a multiplicity, or what they will call a “collective assemblage of enunciation.” Therefore, it is around the subjective determination of the “being who writes,” the animal that they identify as “a bachelor,” and an objective determination of writing as “a collective assemblage of enunciation” (agencement collectif d’énunciation), that we must now turn to the question of what they call “minor literature,” which in some way already presupposes this relationship, even though it has been badly understood.

In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, the argument that Deleuze and Guattari employ for determining this relationship, or this supposed equivalence between a writer and a people, is contained in the following description: “A machine that is all the more social and collective insofar as it is solitary, a bachelor, and that, tracing the line of escape, is equivalent in itself to a community whose conditions haven’t yet been established.”2 In other words, the question “What is a minor literature?” already invokes the presupposed relationship that exists between the “writer” and a specific community, or “people,” either formally or linguistically defined; determined by nationality, class experience, ethnicity or race, gender or sexuality; or with another kind of community (Bund) whose conditions of collectivity have not yet been established according to any of the terms above. Perhaps these conditions have been lost, according to a Marxian or postcolonial understanding (along with unfortunate echoes of a fascist or neonationalist understanding as well); or perhaps these conditions do not exist in the present because they belong, as Deleuze and Guattari often say, “to a people who are missing” (which, as we will see, does not presuppose that these conditions ever existed in the past and later succumbed to collective amnesia, historical loss, or political destruction). The formulas of a “solitary bachelor” and “a people who are missing” will be the subjects that preoccupy me in this chapter: who, or rather what, is a bachelor? Where are these people? Most importantly, how can literature (or writing) help us find these people, if it does not simply come down to a manner of creating them with literature, or through writing? Finally, can literature (alone) produce (or establish) the conditions of a people who can exist?

When posed in this manner, at first these questions might appear somewhat fantastical. Are we speaking about a purely fictional people, like Swift’s invention of the Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, and the Houyhnhnms? Are we speaking of a kind of people as a species of aliens who often appear in the genre science fiction—a purely utopian and enlightened folk who are missing only because humans are too barbarian? Both of these inventions (or “fabulations”) entertain an essential relation to the notion of “a people” that appears in modern criticism. In fact, most criticism begins by presupposing a direct relationship between the “writer” and “a people,” even though this relationship is never actually established as the condition of literary enunciation itself. All criticism is still too theoretical on this question, especially “political interpretation.” But is this any different from the most common language acts? For example, I’m in a “foreign country” (let’s say Korea), and I make the statement “I am an American” (in English, of course). In what way can it be established that the American literary tradition (e.g., Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Crane, Faulkner, Cather, Salinger, Morrison, Pynchon, DeLillo—of course, I am leaving out important writers) has anything to do with the sense of this statement (énoncé)? This is not so easy to establish, but it is difficult to rule out altogether. Even if my Korean interlocutor has not read a word of Melville, for example, there may be an implicit, yet nevertheless indiscernible, connection between the statement “I am an American” and the statement “Call me Ishmael,” or Bartleby’s “I am not particular.” In fact, the contemporary writer does not have to be born into the language and culture to create the possibility of collective enunciation, and not for minorities alone, because many of our best writers today often arrive from elsewhere, which is one of the defining conditions of what Deleuze and Guattari call a “minor literature.” As they ask: “How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly that major language that they are forced to serve?”3

Nevertheless, let us state again (once more!) that the presupposed relationship between the so-called writer and a, more or less, absent or missing people has attained the status of a myth that determines what is called “modern literature,” a myth that, in the contemporary period, has become a pure and empty form of representation. Deleuze and Guattari state from the very beginning that this relationship should not—must not!—be understood in representational terms; a writer does not represent a people according to a dominant modernist representation of the writer as the authentic creator of national consciousness in exile, nor in the quasi-elective and public social function assigned to certain writers who are assumed to represent minority or subaltern experience (even though this experience is almost always addressed to a majority viewpoint). As Deleuze argues concerning the relationship between literature and life, “To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on a lived content.”4 This is because literature (apart from other kinds of written expression) always involves a becoming that surpasses the lived experience of the writer determined as a subject or an individual; therefore, in order to further clarify the often misunderstood refrain, “the vocation of a writer is to create a language for a people who is missing,” Deleuze will return later to add “not in place of” but rather “to the attention of . . .” in the sense of a “carbon copy recipient” (cc:) of an official document or public listserv.5

Following this understanding, I would suggest that there is a closer relationship than might be believed between Deleuze-Guattari’s conception of the writer and Sartre’s earlier response to the question “For Whom Does One Write?” Even though their respective methods of responding to this question are no doubt different, what Deleuze and Guattari call “minor literature,” on the one hand, and what Sartre defined as “a literature of commitment,” on the other, will be shown to bear a certain commonality in determining the conditions of collective enunciation. For example, the tenuous status of the relationship between the individual act of writing and what Deleuze and Guattari call “collective enunciation” can be thought in relation to the problem Sartre invoked in Search for a Method with his famous example of the black airman in World War II: a mechanic who works on fighter planes because he is ineligible to become a pilot (no doubt due to his race), who therefore steals a plane and flies into France, only to end up dying in a plane crash because he does not know how to fly.6 The meaning of this act, of course, has only an indirect relation to the general situation of the colonized as Sartre defines it: “The general revolt on the part of all colored men against colonists is expressed in him by this particular refusal of this prohibition.” However, the means of expressing his revolt is not immediately given in the insane act of stealing an airplane without even knowing how to fly it, in order to die in a nationalist war for the same colonialists he is supposedly rebelling against. As Guattari writes in his 1969 essay “Machine and Structure,” “It is, in fact, impossible to systematize the real discourse of history, the circumstances that cause a particular phase or a particular signifier to be represented by a particular event or social group, by the emergence of an individual or a discovery, or whatever.”7 Consequently, even though no one can deny that this black airman’s “suicidal act” is real, and that it therefore belongs to the “discourse of history,” this act represented, not a general revolt on the part of all the colonized, but only a specific and individual refusal of his status as a subject that informs his “desire to fly” (and in some ways, this choice even seems perfectly Kafkaesque, much like the desire to become “a red Indian” in one of Kafka’s fables). As Sartre writes, “this political position, of which he doubtless has no clear awareness, he lives as a personal obsession: aviation becomes his possibility and clandestine future.”8

As a second point of comparison with Deleuze and Guattari’s choice of Kafka as the author who will provide them with the blueprint for the “becoming-revolutionary” of literature, let us also recall Sartre’s manner of posing the same problem by championing, through what he defined as a “progressive and regressive method,” the most unlikely figure of Flaubert, the petty Bourgeois, who chose as his response a style of “Becoming-Woman” (in the famous example of “I am Madame Bovary”). As Sartre writes concerning Flaubert’s project,

This project has a meaning, it is not the simple negativity of flight; by it a man aims at the production of himself in the world as a certain objective totality. It is not the pure and abstract decision to write which makes up the peculiar quality of Flaubert, but the decision to write in a certain manner in order to manifest himself in the world in a particular way; in a word, it is the particular signification—within the framework of the contemporary ideology—which he gives to literature as the negation of his original condition and as the objective solution to his contradictions.9

In this passage from Sartre, and also in Kafka, the question of “style” emerges as the single criterion for determining the “becoming revolutionary” of the writer; one might even say, in the case of Deleuze and Guattari, style is equated with becoming. It is, as Jameson will say later on, the “idea” (the “image” of the act itself), which later acquires a particular signification in the framework of an Ideology (e.g., modernism). However, the original “idea” (or image of thought) cannot be immediately reduced to an ideological expression, just as the idea of flying an airplane cannot be deduced from the general situation of all colonized. In this regard, Fredric Jameson was absolutely correct in his observation that the cases of Proust and Kafka (as well as other early modernist writers like Joyce and Durrell) are absolutely singular because there was no pre-given model or archetype for connecting the political and social subjectivity to the means of writing as a response to “an impossible situation”:

The first modernists had to operate in a world in which no acknowledged or codified social role existed for them and in which the very form and concept of their own specific “works of art” were lacking. . . . Such imitation was unavailable to the classical modernists, whose works designate their process of production as an analogical level of allegory, in order to make a place for themselves in a world which does not contain their “idea”; this formal auto-referentiality is then utterly different from the poems about poetry and novels about artists in which the late-modernists designate themselves in their content.10

For Jameson, this singularity accounts for the “singularity” of these original writers, as opposed to the late-modernist writers (like Beckett and Nabokov), whom he seems to discount where the vocation of the modernist writer in exile was already a cliché. Singularity, as opposed to particularity, is a word that I will return to discuss later in this chapter.

Of course, today the situation of “becoming a writer” is somewhat different from what it was for Flaubert, because its social meaning is already given in advance as one possible objective solution to one’s contradictions, which in some ways already limits this activity’s significance because it is already too meaningful. In other words, the project of becoming a writer has a meaning even before it is actually a project of writing, or before the question of whether the particular work has merit is even raised. In the case of a younger generation of minority writers, where the vocation of the writer is already invested with a social and political value, this determines the meaning of this particular activity in advance—even to the point of providing a prejudicial response to the question “For whom does one write?” to apply to every particular case of “minority writing.” Where the model is already too determining of the specific activity, the whole meaning of writing is often reduced to becoming a one-dimensional and clichéd matter of representation (allegory), and thus the question of style (what Jameson defines as signification of an “idea” within the contemporary framework of ideology), as well as the question concerning the specific circumstance (what most cultural critics today call either “context” or “history”), is completely lost in a presupposition that never explains the real reason a subject chooses to write as a peculiar means of both taking flight from and, at the same time, specifically engaging his or her particular situation (whether or not this situation is defined in sexual terms, ethnic terms, or in some other manner yet to be identified by criticism as worthy of being called “political” today).

As a criterion by which many works of literature are selected to be brought before an already specialized public and the court of professional and academic opinion, the “political” already names a value that infuses the work with a ready-made signification, even when these significations are yet to be released from the work’s blank volume. These significations are usually released by the critic whose official role in the process is to identify what is worthy of being expressed and valued, worthy enough to be repeated and extrapolated within the critic’s own text. But this process usually obscures the criterion by which the writers first choose to select certain themes (even when the theme is the act of writing itself!), or choose to construct particular characters in a fiction (when we are speaking of fiction and not of poetry), or, as Deleuze and Guattari often describe one of the goals of this process, to produce certain particle signs and expressions that refer to purely intensive states of being—“to make the sequences vibrate, to open the word unto unexpected internal intensities.”11 In short, the original meaning of the idea of style, which is often “to create an a-signifying and intensive utilization of language,” is completely lost in the representation of its signification for the critic. Certainly, not all writers have a style, and it is obvious that most writers do not have any idea what they are doing, which is why relatively few writers manage to achieve this “becoming.”12 (As Deleuze will ask later, is this state of exception any different in any of the other arts, including philosophy, which is “the art of creating concepts”?) In other words, the mere act of writing, or of becoming a writer, is no guarantee that the process will be successful in producing new intensive states and subjective qualities.

In the case of “minority writers,” therefore, we come back to the objective determination of the act of writing, which always precedes the subjective determination itself in every particular case, or the writer’s own “idea” as Jameson defined it in the passage quoted above. If the meaning of this specific activity has become too abstract, it is because the answers to the questions “What is writing?” and “Why write?” and the representational framework in which the literature is read already gives “for whom one writes” in advance, and thus the content has already been abstracted and is immediately criticized for not being specific enough (i.e., the meaning and value of the work are given before the actual work itself). Of course, Sartre is right to point out that it is not the more or less abstract decision to write, but rather the decision to write in a certain manner, that constitutes the primary criterion for discerning the question of style (in Flaubert’s case, the style of “Becoming-Woman,” which is not simply a matter of “writing like women write” or even “writing as a woman”) as one of how the subject of writing constitutes a movement that is both away from and toward the given situation of being a subject in other respects. In their reply to these questions, Deleuze and Guattari will argue that the statements emitted by a literary machine do not refer back to the individual subject; therefore, according to Deleuze and Guattari’s major thesis concerning what they define as a “minor literature,” the more singular the writer’s expression becomes, the more the relationship between the writer and a people (in this case always meaning a virtual people) will become an intensive zone of mutual becoming, particularly in the way that new literary statements are sometimes taken up to express new possibilities of collective enunciation. Moreover, such a becoming is not of the writer and a people as actually existing subjects, but instead of the creative relation between so-called individual enunciation (which does not exist in the first place) and collective enunciation (which is a fabulation)—as in the case, for example, where the writer’s description of his or her own situation (which is intentionally falsified) functions like a “childhood block of memory” or what Sartre called a “clandestine future,” often in a manner that is difficult to predict.

The thesis concerning fabulation put forward in Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature is the following: modern writers must invent their own style, which is sometimes related to the specific situation of a people. Simply put, the manner in which a writer describes his or her own situation can sometimes provide the conditions for collective enunciation, even when the objective determinations of the conditions are lacking (except in the specialized case of literary enunciation). What Jameson refers to as analogical actually refers only to the “idea” that does not belong to the framework of an existing language, or to a given world, and thus the means of expressing the idea must first be invented. For example, a writer who is determined by what today is called a “minority” or “postcolonial” situation must invent the means by a number of creative and purely “artificial” procedures to escape that situation via literature (which I would qualify to refer to a writing process that is not also specified in advance by the given situation of literature itself). The fact that the writing process is not completely specified beforehand—thus, it is not determined by the situation in the same way that the living subject is determined—means that there exists some degree of freedom in the process, even though this relative degree of literary freedom may be quite remote from the real situation experienced by the individual subject.

What would be the literary critic’s role in all this? “Pay attention to the process!”13 “Most importantly, pay attention to how it works!” Deleuze and Guattari give a much more succinct formulation of this axiom, which I addressed in chapter 3: “Only expression gives us the method.”14 Beginning from this axiom, we would need to place the question of expression at the center of our discussion of the literary process again. But what is expression? Of course, this question is not so simple. If the true task of the critic is to describe the writing process, first by understanding how it works, there is always a danger of falling into the trap of reducing the process itself to a purely formalist description of literary terms and procedures (metaphor, metonymy, allegory, narration and récit, etc.). The writing process cannot be understood simply as a set of superficial features or mere “effects,” and this is not what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they say that expression will provide its own unique method, one that we might assume would be particular to every case. If this is true, however, and the writing process also functions by means of a subjective determination that belongs to a particular “writing machine,” then how can we pretend to abstract from this larger determination of expression a “method” that could be applied to other writing processes, to other writers? Again, as Deleuze and Guattari first argue, Kafka presents us with a case perfectly suited to illustrate this critical problem, which is not the same problem for all writers (i.e., Kafka does not present us with a Universal case that can be applied to all other writers, to all literatures past and present, like “the Kafka theory of literature”). The problem that Sartre attempted to solve in the case of Flaubert with his “progressive and regressive method,” and that Jameson later attempted with his theory of “mediation,” is the same problem that Deleuze and Guattari also address with their theory of “minor literature.”

If, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, Kafka’s own process was specific to what they describe as a particular “writing machine,” and later on as “an assemblage” (agencement), then how do we get from this statement to the claim that the case of Kafka is exemplary for the situation of minor literature in general? What seems to be missing is something that Sartre had defined as the object of his own search, a “progressive-regressive method” for moving between the subjective determination of a particular writer (e.g., the style of Flaubert) and the progressive determination of the writer as a “free alterity” who represents a “virtual people” (according to Sartre’s own terms). Another way of understanding this reciprocal relationship, referring back to Sartre’s example, is the relation between the black airman’s “desire to fly” and his situation as a colonized subject. For example, what Deleuze and Guattari will define as Kafka’s “bachelor desire” may indeed be comparable to the desire to fly an airplane, but how would flying specifically apply to other modern writers? As Deleuze and Guattari write, “as long as the form and the deformation or expression are not considered in themselves, there can be no real way out, even at the level of contents.” Here we encounter the same problem that has determined Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature,” when applied to other literatures, especially those written by minorities. And yet we also find here the problem of expression indicated above, one in which the “method” is not given beforehand, as is the case of a “theory” for interpreting different contents. In other words, this reverses the priority of understanding that operates in most theories of interpretation, in which the method (or the theory of interpretation) gives the expression (in this case, the meaning). What Deleuze and Guattari are trying to devise is a critical procedure according to which the method is singularly derived from the expression and only refers back to the expression. In other words, Deleuze and Guattari provide an “interpretation” of Kafka’s literary machine that is so “singular” as to make it inapplicable to another work of literature. Only in this sense, I would argue, can their theoretical project be understood as “anti-interpretation.”

It is for this reason that they are almost exclusively concerned with the question of how Kafka’s literary machine works, in defining its component parts, its connections, its relays, its series and blocks, and finally, with describing the entire process of how it was assembled, beginning with the letters and ending with the novels (which is to say with the posthumous writings that continued to be assembled by others after Kafka’s death). And yet, not only is Deleuze and Guattari’s method determined by the expression, but we find that Kafka’s writing machine is even more specific because it not only includes all the components that constitute his literary works (the diaries, journals, letters, short stories and fables, and novels), but as Deleuze and Guattari insist, must also be understood to include his bureaucratic and legal writings, his juridical papers, and his reports for the Worker’s Accident Insurance Company.15 Only by taking all his writings together as a whole, Deleuze and Guattari argue, negating the generic determination of what previously constitutes the conditions of literary statements, can Kafka’s specific value as a writer be defined as occupying a border position between the literary and the social, or between the new technical machines and the machinery of the State and the political forms of collective desire that are coming into view (including the collective desires that belong to the social formations of fascism and totalitarianism). This unique position provides his writings both with new contents as well as with the occasions for new forms of expression (such as the hyperrealism of the final novels).

In Kafka’s work, it is not a question of formalist or technical machines in themselves or of the juridical statement in itself; rather, the technical machine furnishes the model of a form of content that is applicable to the whole social field, whereas the juridical statement furnishes a form of expression applicable to any statement.16

In my view, here we have one of the most precise descriptions of Kafka’s achievement of infusing the formal elements drawn from juridical language with new subjective qualities, particularly in The Castle. Given the position that Kafka occupied to be able to bring both literary and juridical statements into such close proximity in a work of art, I think it is safe to say that there is no other modernist writer who would be comparable in this regard.

Completely contrary to the first tendency, however, we also find in the concept of a minor literature an opposing current that would even define a universal trait or condition of modern literature, or at least the production of new literary statements in general. However, it is only in the last chapter, “What Is an Assemblage?,” which in many ways replaces the earlier chapter “What Is a Minor Literature?,” that we hear them speak of a general and nonspecific use of the concept. For example, at this point we should note that they often resort to the phrase “so-called minor literature,” as in the following passage: “Let’s return to the problem of the production of new statements and to so-called ‘minor literature,’ since this literature, as we have seen, is in an exemplary situation for producing new statements.”17 It is a pity that most critics, including most readers of Deleuze and Guattari, have never really gotten beyond the third chapter of the book, “What Is a Minor Literature?,” to reach this point where the question of a minor literature is defined again by new terms and according to a new emphasis: as an exemplary situation for producing new (so-called literary) statements. What is the methodological status, at this point, of the theoretical statement, or rather, what they call the “Anti-method”? As I have already argued, the method being employed is simply inductive. According to an inductive method, one begins with a certain hypothesis that is then tested in a process of experimentation, which results in an analysis of the results and concludes with a judgment concerning whether the initial hypothesis was valid, leading to a new set of thetic principles that can be the basis for certain general conclusions, which must themselves be tested in a number of new experiments.

In this case, the initial hypothesis was that Kafka’s work was “a rhizome, a burrow,” and was composed by certain identifiable contents and forms of expression (the bent-heads, the portrait-photos, the musical sounds, the animal-becoming, etc.). The concluding hypothesis concerns what Deleuze and Guattari define as an “assemblage” (agencement), which is the specific object of the novels and seems to confirm the validity of the initial hypothesis. At this point, we arrive at two primary characteristics of a minor literature in general, which they define as “an exemplary situation for producing new statements.” The first characteristic is that of “a clock that runs too fast,” referring back to its prognosticating potential concerning “the diabolical powers knocking at the door” (e.g., fascism or totalitarianism); the second is that the literature produces statements that are intended for a people who are missing.18 Concerning the first characteristic, I refer back to the proximity in Kafka’s works between new juridical and bureaucratic statements and the new literary statements that seem peculiar to Kafka’s style. However, at this point in Deleuze and Guattari’s argument, the second characteristic now assumes the primary role in the identification of a minor literature, which is described in the following manner: “When a statement is produced by a bachelor or an artistic singularity, it occurs necessarily as a function of a national, political, and social community, even if the objective conditions are not given to the moment except in literary enunciation.” This is stated even more directly in the following sentence: “a statement is literary when it is ‘taken up’ by a bachelor who precedes the collective conditions of enunciation.”19

We should immediately note that the object of the definition has changed—no longer being in response to the question “What is a minor literature?” but extending to address the more general question “What are literary statements?”—and now bears on defining the subjective conditions of new literary statements, perhaps even the subjective conditions of all literature as such.

Let us summarize the logical progression thus far:

1. Minor literature is defined as an exemplary situation for the production of new statements.
2. The specific kind of new statements belonging to minor literature are defined as literary statements.
3. The character of literary statements is defined by their novelty (or singularity), but this novelty refers to the subjective conditions of the enunciation, which precede the objective conditions.
4. According to the criteria of the subjective conditions of enunciation, only bachelors produce literary statements (i.e., literature); or in other words:
5. Literature, more generally, can be defined as the set of all new statements produced by bachelors.

According to the final criterion above, what Deleuze and Guattari identify as a bachelor (or what they also call an “artistic singularity”) refers only to the subjective conditions of enunciation, but these subjective conditions do not refer back to the individual subject of the writer. In some ways this progression again recalls Sartre’s search for a manner of determining the relationship of the subjective form of the artwork and its relation to the objective or historical conditions, which he defines as a movement of “free alterity.” This is why the subjective conditions for literary statements that define a minor literature do not necessarily correspond to the subjective conditions of being a minority or a member of a minority group. Why? There are two reasons. First, because this term “minority” actually refers to the objective conditions of the individual or subject who is identified as belonging to social, national, or ethnic identity (even when this objective determination is divided or reflected by the subject of enunciation itself); second, even these objective conditions are already too abstract and function formally as the subject of the statement according to juridical or statutory requirements. In other words, it is already at a position that is in some way twice removed from the subjective conditions of enunciation, especially literary enunciation (even though literary enunciation can and often does take these abstractions and fill them with new contents and forms of expression). On a very technical level, however, this illustrates the second definition of a minor literature as the production of new statements when the objective conditions are not given to the moment except in literary enunciation.

Recalling Sartre’s own observations, even before we consider the particular social identity in question, there is already the objective determination of the writer qua writer, which is to say, the objective and historical conditions of literary enunciation determined by tradition (national, linguistic, popular, ethnic, or cultural), which the writer cannot choose to ignore entirely without losing precisely the objective determination of “a writer.” Even “minority writing” today is such a tradition, and minorities themselves are always having to choose (or not) to write like particular minorities. Native American writers today, for example, must always decide whether or not “to write like Native Americans,” which also presupposes choosing to have certain group memories, common experiences, family relationships, commonplace addictions, and so on. In this sense the subjective conditions of enunciation are, in part, bound up with the formal and linguistic possibilities that define historically the particular tradition that the writer inherits, which is to say that they are not reducible to individual conditions of experience and memory but already appear in an essentially fictionalized and impersonal form of collective enunciation (i.e., a literature).

Of course, the situation just described was no different for Kafka’s own situation, and Deleuze and Guattari are very careful to provide an accurate accounting of the objective determinations of literary enunciation that define the various possibilities that Kafka, the writer and the Jewish minority living in Prague at the end of the Hapsburg monarchy, could choose from. Immediately, there was tradition formed by the members of the Prague School (Leppen, Meyrenk, Kisch, Werfel, Brod, Hasvek, and the younger Rilke), but also the German of Goethe and Kleist; the emergent Czech popular and nationalist literatures; the Yiddish folk literature and the popular Yiddish theatre of Lowy. As in the case of every writer, there is also the presence of other writers (who might serve as models or influences) who do not immediately belong to his context and situation in Prague. For example, he admires Dickens and takes him as a model for his first novel, Amerika; although Deleuze and Guattari will argue that only Kleist can be regarded as a Master who deeply influenced Kafka.

He didn’t want to create a genealogy, even if it is a social one, à la Balzac; he didn’t want to erect an ivory tower, à la Flaubert; he doesn’t want “blocks,” à la Dickens. The only one he will take as his master is Kleist, and Kleist also detested masters; but Kleist is a different matter even in the deep influence he had on Kafka. We have to speak differently about this influence.20

At this point we might return to Jameson’s argument that Kafka’s “exceptionalism” and originality as a classical modernist writer were due to the lack of any previous model, in order to argue that, upon a finer-grain analysis of the literary culture of Prague in Kafka’s own time, this was certainly not the case. (Rather, it only appears to be the case from the perspective of an essentially ahistorical, Universal, or “Singular Modernity.”) In fact, the specific problem that Kafka faced was the existence of too many models, all of which Kafka rejected in favor of constructing what Deleuze and Guattari call “a bachelor machine” (machine célibataire).

I return now to my original question: What or who is a “Bachelor”? In some ways, Deleuze and Guattari’s introduction of the notion of “the Bachelor” (L’Homme Célibataire) in naming “the expression of an artistic singularity” is an unfortunate choice of terms, because it has yielded too many immediate objections by feminist critics for its overtly masculinist and sexist character. What’s worse, understood in this manner, it seems as if the above proposition could be reformulated to mean that Deleuze and Guattari were implying that heretofore all literature has only been produced by men! The linguistic possibility that the French term can also be applied to a solitary woman (La Femme Célibataire) does not assist us much in this controversy, as much as it is simply one more in the litany of problematic, ill-chosen, and “politically incorrect” phrases that belong to Deleuze and Guattari’s works (“schizophrenic” or “schizoid desire,” first of all, but also “Becoming Woman,” “the Nomad,” “The War Machine”). As I have argued elsewhere, we cannot imagine that they were so unconscious in their choices, especially with regard to the social and political ramifications, that the ensuing controversy surrounding the terms themselves was not already foreseen and thus part of their overall intentionality. Just as in the case of the phrase “Becoming-Woman,” the choice of the term “bachelor,” including its potentially exclusionary and “sexist” associations, is intended to underscore the reality of what they define in A Thousand Plateaus as “order words” (mots d’ordre), that is, the power function of certain phrases and statements that are taken up as expressions of concrete social assemblages.21

In Kafka’s case, however, we must admit that there is something very specific and stubbornly truthful about naming the condition of being a bachelor as essentially bound up with the subjective determination of the literary enunciation. As we know from Elias Canetti’s commentary on the letters to Felice Bauer, Kafka’s Other Trial, the desire to remain a bachelor was so intimately bound up with his own specific understanding of the social vocation of the writer that the two desires became almost indistinguishable.22 Eventually the subjective conditions of the desire to be a writer actually refer to the objective conditions of a real social process: that of “becoming-a-bachelor,” an ongoing and unlimited process of extricating himself from every familial and conjugal demand, of politely refusing—always politely!—any expression of proximity or intimacy that does not serve the act of writing. In other words, Kafka established an unapproachable distance that is also a fundamental trait of Kafka’s stories and the letters especially; at the same time, Kafka eschews most “normal social relationships” with women, unless they also serve as his copyists, his translators, or his private literary agents, as if creating a strange bureau of women that served as the bureaucrats and functionaries of his own writing machine. Deleuze and Guattari themselves constantly underline this characteristic in Kafka’s diaries, which they define as the very milieu or environment of the total writing machine, and especially in his letters to Felice, which they define in unambiguously moral terms as vampirism. Hence, Kafka is a Dracula who determines women as both victims and accomplices; first seducing them through writing, then exchanging letters in mutual acts of tenderness and blood-letting, until they are finally drained by the Eros of distance that Kafka maintains throughout the relationship.

Here, we are also reminded that earlier on Deleuze described Proust in similar terms as a spider, the animal-logos who spins his vast and intricate web in order to capture signs and impressions and drink their blood, and Marcel the spider captures Albertine and holds her captive in order to drain her of all of her possible intensities until she is completely desiccated and the narrator has no more use for her. In asking what is the species of the animal-logos that exists at the center of the burrow, or Kafka’s writing machine, we find Kafka is depicted as a Dracula who sends his letters as bats to both seduce Felice with his absence and then suck the blood from each letter she sends back expressing her desire to be with him sexually. As an example, I will quote from the letter that Kafka sends from Berlin, which displays the “typical” seduction by impossible distance:

(17 March, 1913)

Just a few words, dearest. First, my special thanks for your letter; it arrived just in time to bring a person, who was heart and soul in Berlin, a little nearer to his senses again. But secondly, something unpleasant, but typical of me. I don’t know that I shall be able to come. It is still uncertain today, tomorrow it may be definite. I don’t want to discuss the reason until it has been decided. By Wednesday at ten o’clock you shall know for certain. But it is definitely nothing serious; we shall see. But go on loving me despite this dithering.23

In other letters, there are even the characteristic moments of Kafkaesque comedy often found in the stories, as when Kafka sends a letter at 1:30 a.m. explaining the multiple reasons why he cannot meet the next day at the appointed time, probably for a sexual interlude, and then five more letters by the afternoon scolding Felice for being so cruel as to not write him back, refusing her “intimate tenderness.”24 Thus, in the case of Kafka, the desire to remain a bachelor certainly provides the subjective determination of enunciation, especially in the letters, which Deleuze and Guattari define as the very milieu of the writing machine: it is the social desire of the bachelor that is directly linked to the process of writing, even serving as its motor. Here, the writing machine is a bachelor machine. This is not a metaphor, but a literal equivalence in Kafka’s singular case.

Nevertheless, despite this singularity, Deleuze and Guattari also seek to give it a much larger social meaning, one that will not be restricted to Kafka’s “private and individualistic concern,” but will serve to provide an objectively determined and social meaning as well, which both Sartre and Jameson were attempting to postulate for the modernist writer: namely, a unique model. Certainly one of the most general features of the nature of the social desire that informs the concept of the bachelor and of the so-called modern writer is what Deleuze and Guattari call “a creative line of flight,” partly defined as a movement of withdrawal from the world of others, or from the subjective situation of being determined as a subject for others; and by qualities that refer to the conditions of being alone that determine each social identity, even though these conditions are different in each case. Solitude is not a condition, much less a guarantee, of creativity in either sense, only an objective determination of time; moreover, withdrawal to a state of being alone does not necessarily lead to a process of creation in the case of the writer, and creativity does not naturally seem to belong to the condition of being a bachelor. That is, not all bachelors are creative, and not all writers are bachelors. After all, one can simply withdraw out of depression and not choose to write, just as one can find oneself in the state of being alone in the most intimate of relationships. Prior to becoming an abstraction or cliché, such as that of an “essential solitude” (à la Blanchot), the subjective determination of the writer would need to be understood formally as a withdrawal from concrete social determinations of being a subject for others that can be effected only by a process of writing (or perhaps also madness), a withdrawal that is invested with the desire to write in the first place (rather than to do something else, like fly airplanes), and this involves a very particular form of individuation between the living subject who writes and the conditions of subjective enunciation in literary writing. It may be true that writing indicates a movement of withdrawal from the world and also a kind of madness and obsession, but these are only vague motives that no one has any real idea about—only myth and speculation! Moreover, a writer’s withdrawal is a condition that seems more frequently associated with a depressive position of certain modernist writers, especially Kafka, which forms one of the greatest clichés of the subjective determination of the artist in bourgeois society: the writer as foreigner, as stranger, as criminal, as outcast or class-traitor, as sexual deviant or pervert; but also, the writer as shaman, as trickster, as confidence man, as clown. For example, it is almost comical to think that Shakespeare was depressed, or sought to withdraw from the world; whereas, in the cases of Kafka and Proust, this not only becomes plausible but is the condition of their artwork. After all, can one even imagine a Kafka who is not depressed, or a Proust who is not estranged?

These questions again underscore the difference between Sartre’s time and our own with regard to the question of writing or literature in general. The problem today is that both the objective determination of literature and the subjective determination of the writer are already overdetermined, bloated by too much interpretation, exaggerated to an extreme degree, and even Oedipalized in a way that is very different from the problem of the petty bourgeois writer that Sartre was addressing in his own time. It is here we must return to directly connect the concept of the bachelor to the modernist myth of the writer in a very particular way, keeping in mind all the while that Kafka is exemplary because he has been employed historically to establish the myth of the modernist writer in the first place, both as a form of enunciation and as a social form of desire. In other words, as a function of the modernist myth (as a signification within the framework of an ideology), the proper name Kafka belongs to a collective assemblage of enunciation that has produced the objective and subjective conditions of the modern writers that follow. This collective assemblage of enunciation is called, for the lack of a better term, “modern literature.” It is perhaps for this very reason that Deleuze and Guattari select Kafka as the writer they will employ to counter this same myth, even by creating another Kafka, an “anti-Kafka,” the Kafka of a bastard tradition of minor literature. Certainly, Deleuze and Guattari can be accused of participating in the modernist myth of the writer as a stranger or foreigner, and of a people who are missing or still to come, but as they also say, the thoroughly modernist myths of the writer and of a people “must be understood in a completely different way.”25

If any political value is going to be attached to the situation of the writer today, regardless of his or her social identity, we must first do away with many of the major clichés that have obscured the nature of the desire that first responds to the question “Why write?” To echo Sartre, the decision to write must actually be possible as an elective form of freedom, among other freedoms that are socially and politically defined, before the question of its specific value is even raised. Moreover, precisely because there is no external command that causes the activity, there is a peculiar subjective form of demand that is erected in place of objective social desire. After all, no one is forced to write, or to become a writer! The decision to write may very well be in the form of an elected freedom, but the writer is often a being who turns this freedom into a form of bondage, to become chained to one’s own desk like a dog and eschew the desire to go outside for walks and a breath of fresh air (as Kafka often complains of his own particular habits), to smell of stale odors of cigarettes, coffee, or alcohol (not that all writers smoke or are alcoholic, but rather that all writers smell bad); moreover, to forgo the proximity of others (even if for periodic intervals), to build a vast and intricate burrow, to withdraw into the burrow and to live part of one’s life there, alone, or almost alone! In fact, given the miserable and even grotesque state of the writer as an animal living in a burrow, it is quite amazing that society has come to hold writers in such high regard as angels of Humanity. Of course, this praise is possible only on the basis of a foreclosure of their reality, which then functions as a “dirty little secret” to be discovered later by generations of critics and readers. “Look!” they say: “How disgusting! He was really a pervert, a criminal, or a sexist!” “Look! He was secretly a fascist, or a poor little socialist.” “Look,” in the end, they say, “he was really nothing to admire after all.”

Returning to our discussion of the subjective determination of the writing machine, there is a strangely obsessive and impersonal force that binds the subject of writing to his or her daily routines and particular habits, as if the writer is someone who, in the absence of an external law, must invent a law that can be applied only to his or her case. Kafka’s particular obsession was to construct a writing machine that would complement the writing machine that existed in the office, which had its own bureaucrats and bosses who would enforce its laws and its daily routines; in this sense, I would interpret Kafka’s bachelor desire by the measure of its severity and by the sacrifices it demanded in enforcing commitment to writing. In other words, the nature of the desire that informs an artistic singularity must first be understood positively as a “unique idea” that is formed to express a real social desire and not simply as a fantasy or merely as an aesthetic and dreamy escapism. Only when viewed in this way, as a specific desire that also informs a social form of individuation, can the myth of the modernist writer again be justified as describing both the subjective and the objective determinations belonging to a real process, “or as Kleist would say, a life-plan, a discipline, a method, not at all a phantasm.”26 The problem is that most critics of modern literature are not writers, even if they happen to write books and articles, which is why they often get it wrong. They simply do not understand the process.

As a real form of social desire, the writer engages in a process that “produces intensive quantities directly on the social body” and, moreover, “is plugged all the more into a social field with multiple connections.”27 The desire of “becoming a writer” exists alongside or “mixed in” with other social desires; it is collective before becoming an individual form of expression. But this is because there is no such thing as individual desire. All desire qua desire is already collective, which is to say, fundamentally social. Consequently, even the most solitary and solipsistic of desires already belong to a collective assemblage of enunciation of which the desire of the solitary writer is only one possibility; therefore, one does not “become a writer,” any more than one becomes either a masochist or a political activist, by inventing a singular form of desire. Rather, according to Deleuze and Guattari, one enters into a state of becoming that is already subjectively determined by a collective assemblage of enunciation and objectively determined by other “social assemblages of desire.”

In the case of the writing assemblage, the only condition of uniqueness or novelty occurs when a new statement is invented to be inserted into these other collective assemblages of enunciation, designating a new possibility for other kinds of becoming, which are defined as “new intensive quantities.”

Production of intensive quantities in the social body, proliferation and precipitation of series, polyvalent and collective connections brought about by the bachelor agent—there is no other definition possible for a minor literature.28

Therefore, even in its most private or subjective determination, fantasy still remains part of a collective assemblage of enunciation; likewise, “the most individual enunciation is a particular case of collective enunciation.”29 The process of becoming a writer exists only in relation to other kinds of becoming within the social field itself, becoming that the writer often takes up to fill with new contents and new statements. Likewise, the “becoming bachelor” of the writer exists only in relation to other bachelor desires, and to other real social bachelors, and here we might imagine other sexual bachelors, political bachelors, and minority bachelors as well (and even, as Deleuze and Guattari argue later in A Thousand Plateaus, that “Becoming Woman” is the first of all bachelor desires). We could also further extend the notion of the bachelor to occupy a point of collective enunciation that, at its furthest limit, also necessarily addresses the situation of a people. What is “becoming a people,” after all, but a specifically collective expression of “becoming a bachelor”?

Nevertheless, I must immediately qualify this last statement concerning the concept of the bachelor machine, which is still in danger of remaining too abstract, or of falling back into the most commonplace of myths concerning the solitary writer as a purely impersonal and creative being, and writing (or literature) as the only privileged medium for the creation of a people. As Deleuze and Guattari often remark, this would be a science fiction! In fact, these are the two abstractions that we must chase away, just as K. often chases away his Assistants, even if only to have them return back through the window. (And the myths I am referring to are very much like K.’s Assistants, and it is almost impossible to chase them away completely because they are already in our heads.) The first myth I have already addressed is that of the bachelor desire in its modernist formulation: the writer as an aspecific, nonrelational, and too singular form of individuation that includes all other singularities and is immediately capable of expressing them out of its own substance. This would be more approximate to the Joycean formulation—for instance, “Stephen Dedalus forged the consciousness of a people out of the smithy of his own soul.” Here, of course, we need to remember that these are myths first invented by critics and not by writers themselves, except in the case of Joyce, who was not a bachelor.30

The second myth concerns the social position of the writer often defined as “a leading or cutting edge of deterritorialization,” as if the bachelor and the writer are beings who always appear on the edge of any family or group, always at the margins, as if only to exist in “a world without others,” and whose very being is defined as being the very embodiment of an absolute boundary into the social field itself, either approaching from the outside or seeking to become a completely different nature. In the end, a pure being of writing and the specific silence born of a writing that actively silences all other voices in a singular expression of one collective substance. As a result of its most general and mythic signification within the framework of a modernist ideology, this second myth has functioned especially to distort the position of the writer in minority expression and in the postcolonial field of literature (i.e., the writer as stranger, or foreigner, even in relation to his or her own people or race). In many cases, this has led to predetermination of the position of the minority and postcolonial writer—and of any minority expression, for that matter—as having an immanent relation to the politics of the group without any prior determination of its content, a prejudice that sooner or later leads to the discovery of contradictions, either implicit or explicit betrayals, and a entire range of “unfortunate complications.”

Returning to the comments made in the beginning of this chapter, we can certainly say that there are no “literary people,” no people who exist somewhere in literature, hiding somewhere in the text, lurking around the next phrase or passage, ready to leap out and materialize on the next page. Again, I want to emphasize Deleuze and Guattari’s earlier point that this would turn the collective conditions of enunciation in literature into a common vehicle of science fiction:

The most individual enunciation is a particular case of collective enunciation. This is even a definition: a statement is literary when it is “taken up” by a bachelor who precedes the collective conditions of enunciation. This is not to say that this collectivity that is not yet constituted (for better or worse) will become the true subject of enunciation or even that it will become the subject that one speaks about in the statement: in either case, that would fall into a sort of science fiction.31

To avoid falling into this trap, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the actual bachelor and the virtual community are, indeed, effectively real, but both must be understood as expressions of a collective assemblage. Accordingly, although the process of becoming a writer always refers to singular agents (agents), literature is a collective assemblage (agencement) of enunciation. Thus, it is only in relation to a specific collective assemblage (agencement) that a statement is literary when it is taken up or expressed by a bachelor who precedes the collective conditions of enunciation. These conditions, however, must not be understood immediately as expressing the political conditions of a particular group, but refer only to the enunciations that are found to be missing an objective determination. If this process is described in the most technical or formalist terms, at first, it is only from the viewpoint that the most formalist of enunciation also constitutes the future points for “subjectivization proceedings,” as well as assignations of individuality and their shifting distributions within discourse.

Yes, we might say, the writer hallucinates a direct relation to a people, and in some manner this becomes a hallucinated presence in a people in certain minor literatures; however, in perceiving this presence, that is, in feeling the intensity of a desire that provides it with an object or an image, the reader participates in the writer’s hallucination as well. And yet the quasi-hallucinatory status of the perceived object does not deny the reality of both experiences. Deleuze writes later in The Fold, “Every perception is hallucinatory because perception has no object.”32 Here Deleuze is summarizing a proposition of Leibniz concerning the nature of perception in the monads, which he calls microscopic or minuscule; therefore, in the monads, perception (though prehension would be a more precise term) does not resemble the representation of an object of conscious or empirical perception. In fact, conscious perception is made up from all the microscopic perceptions that condition the appearance of an object, but what causes the object to appear in consciousness very much approximates the production of all the microscopic perceptions in the form of a hallucinatory apprehension of something that is present. Deleuze goes on to qualify this statement, however, in the following way: “Leibniz is not stating that the perception resembles an object, but that it evokes a vibration that is gathered by the receptive organ,” thus every perception is hallucinatory, meaning that the object perceived is not the cause, but rather is an “unconscious psychic mechanism that engenders the perceived in consciousness.”33 For example, when I see the color white, it is because the perception of color is “projected” onto a vibratory matter by an unconscious mechanism. Although Deleuze was not referring to the perception of so-called objects in writing at this point, the same principle could be applied. How, after all, is perception produced in reading, except in a manner that closely approximates hallucination? In other words, what I perceive does not resemble an object of conscious perception, but instead results from a partly unconscious psychic mechanism of projection because it first occurs at the level of signs, but then also includes unconscious perceptions and intensive feelings as well.

Finally, because certain deliria and “states closely approximating hallucination” are real and constitute intensive moments of social experience, this is what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they say that writers produce real intensities directly on the social body, intensities that are communicable with other social subjectivities, inasmuch as readers can prehend the intensity in their own experience and in some sense can share the same hallucinatory reality. What is literary experience, after all? In point of fact, many writers do believe that their characters are real, and that writers do not as much invent their characters as the characters themselves dictate their own narratives and statements to the writer, who serves as a pure medium or as intercessor. It is in this last sense that Deleuze and Guattari might have a much better understanding of writers as strange animals who dwell in burrows, because they allow certain expressions of delirium to exist in literature, whereas critics often want to reduce the literary process to a rational form of communication between professionals, in which there is not the least hint of intensity or desire. What is “a people,” after all, but the name of a very special delirium that has obsessed many modern writers, and the nearly hallucinatory presence of a people in many modern contemporary works can even attest to the existence of this kind of delirium. Modern literature may indeed be a delirium, or may include certain kinds of deliria that are shared between the writer and his or her community, but then we must understand that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “all delirium is world historical.”34 In other words, like the positive status of bachelor desire I spoke of earlier, we would need to define the people as a specific form of delirium that thus has a hallucinatory quality of collective enunciation in certain minor literatures. The quasi-hallucinatory quality of perception that is found in both writing and reading is invoked in the introduction to Essays Critical and Clinical, where Deleuze defines literary production by the qualities of hallucination that determine everything that is perceived or heard in writing. By the means of writing, he says, the writer produces visions and auditions, which might be best defined as specific kinds of hallucinations that have lost their pathologically determined character, much like the writers discussed earlier produce a falsification of their particular situation as subject in a manner that cannot be morally or juridically determined as lying. Consequently, “there is no literature without fabulation, but as Bergson also saw, fabulation—the fabulating function—does not consist in imagining or projecting an ego.”35 This is because, finally, “to write is always to engage in a movement to become something other than a writer.”36 The writer does not speak about it, but is always concerned with something else. In other words, it is often from a critical perspective that the following questions are issued: “What is writing?” “Why write?” “For whom does one write?” and finally, “What is literature?” Even in moments of quiet reflection, writers can be heard to pose these questions concerning the process as well. But that is not important. What is important is that in engaging the process of writing, the writer has always sought to become something other than merely a writer. Who is to say, in the end, that becoming a people is also not a secret concern of the so-called minority writer today? But most importantly, who would forbid it?