language of empire and is subject to all the vicissitudes that this involves.
The centrifugal forces that are acting on it will end up dismantling it. In
reality, ‘major ’ and ‘minor ’ refer not so much to two types of language as to
two possible ways of treating the same language, two usages or functions of
the language. This is why the hero of the process of becoming-minoritarian
for Deleuze and Guattari is Kafka, a Jewish author writing in Prague in
German; not a popular writer, but nevertheless ‘of the people’; a political
writer in that his practice of language renders the major language – German –
minoritarian and (according to the concept developed by Deleuze) makes it
stammer. It is thus that literature has a directly political function: not in that
it represents the exactions of rampant capitalism in ‘realist’ novels, but in
that it renders the standard language minoritarian and helps to subvert its
domination. To render the language minoritarian is to have an immediately
collective, deterritorialising, and political conception of it. In this interest in
Kafka’s polyglottism there is not only a return of the nostalgic myth of pre-
World-War-One Mitteleuropa, with its multilingualism and cultural richness,
or even a slightly exaggerated conception of the power attributed to literature.
There are also two concepts which provide for thinking about language in
an original way and weapons for the concrete analysis of conjunctures that
are not only historical but also linguistic.
Since all this is decidedly abstract, I shall end with an example. In June
2003 the walls of the Paris metro were covered with adverts extolling the
virtues of the temping agency ADIA. There were three posters, respectively
representing a young woman, a young man, and a middle-aged man. The
subjects had been chosen because they did not correspond to the typical
fashion model: instead, they represented a slightly comical version of Ms.
and Mr. Average. Each poster carried the beginning of a sentence in block
capitals, readable from a distance – i.e. from the end of the corridor – and
the end of it in lower case, which had to be approached to be deciphered.
Here are the three sentences:
CETTE FEMME EST BONNE...dans son travail [this woman is good...in
her work]
CETTE JEUNE EST UN DROGUÉ...de travail [this young man is
addicted...to his work]
CET HOMME EST UN OBSEDÉ...du travail bien fait [this man is
obsessed...with a job well-done]
136 • Chapter Five