Nuridsany and Pérennou’s Microcosmos: The People of the Grass (1996) as an Invitation to Become-insect

Phronimon ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Konik
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Political Cinema ◽  
The People ◽  
To Come ◽  
A Minor

This article problematises assertions concerning the existence of a minor tradition of French wildlife documentary begun in the 1920s by Jean Painlevé and more recently contributed to through Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s Microcosmos: The People of the Grass (1996). What is advanced, instead, is the importance of regarding these directors’ respective films as constituting two different minor traditions. In this regard, the impasses to which the often-surrealist features of Painlevé’s films were a response, are discussed in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature and Deleuze’s idea of modern political cinema, or minor cinema. Thereafter, focus shifts on to discussion of the different context out of which Microcosmos emerged, along with the relevance of its unique cinematography for current environmental concerns—particularly because of its capacity to precipitate what Deleuze refers to as a spiritual automaton that stands to catalyse a more ecologically-orientated people to come.

The Open Society and the Democracy to Come: Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Baugh
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The State ◽  
Open Society ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The People ◽  
To Come ◽  
Polar Opposite ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Gain Access

In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson's concept of an ‘open society’, which would be a ‘society of creators’ who gain access to the ‘open creative totality’ through acting and creating. Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the actually existing people, but the rule of ‘the people to come,’ for in the actually existing situation, such a people is ‘lacking’. When the people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the future, creativity and the new. Their openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the conformism and ‘herd mentality’ condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality which is the basis of all narrow nationalisms (of ethnicity, race, religion and creed). It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian freedom to obey Reason and the State. This paper uses Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the open society and of a democracy that remains ‘to come’.

Suicidal Behavior in Black South Africans

Crisis ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lourens Schlebusch ◽  
Naseema B.M. Vawda ◽  
Brenda A. Bosch
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Suicidal Behavior ◽  
Health Care Facilities ◽  
South African Society ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Care Facilities ◽  
Black South Africans ◽  
To Come

Summary: In the past suicidal behavior among Black South Africans has been largely underresearched. Earlier studies among the other main ethnic groups in the country showed suicidal behavior in those groups to be a serious problem. This article briefly reviews some of the more recent research on suicidal behavior in Black South Africans. The results indicate an apparent increase in suicidal behavior in this group. Several explanations are offered for the change in suicidal behavior in the reported clinical populations. This includes past difficulties for all South Africans to access health care facilities in the Apartheid (legal racial separation) era, and present difficulties of post-Apartheid transformation the South African society is undergoing, as the people struggle to come to terms with the deleterious effects of the former South African racial policies, related socio-cultural, socio-economic, and other pressures.

Towards a Minor Poetry: Reading Twentieth-Century French Poetry with Deleuze–Guattari and Bakhtin

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-153
Author(s):  
Daisy Sainsbury
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Language ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Language System ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Poetry Reading ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
A Minor

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of minor literature, deterritorialization and agrammaticality, this article explores the possibility of a ‘minor poetry’, considering various interpretations of the term, and interrogating the value of the distinction between minor poetry and minor literature. The article considers Bakhtin's work, which offers several parallels to Deleuze and Guattari's in its consideration of the language system and the place of literature within it, but which also addresses questions of genre. It pursues Christian Prigent's hypothesis, in contrast to Bakhtin's account of poetic discourse, that Deleuze and Guattari's notion of deterritorialization might offer a definition of poetic language. Considering the work of two French-language poets, Ghérasim Luca and Olivier Cadiot, the article argues that the term ‘minor poetry’ gains an additional relevance for experimental twentieth-century poetry which grapples with its own generic identity, deterritorializing established conceptions of poetry, and making ‘minor’ the major poetic discourses on which it is contingent.

Semitic and Latin Elements in the Language and Literature of Malta

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-195
Author(s):  
Oliver Friggieri
Keyword(s):  
Complex Formation ◽  
National Language ◽  
Language And Identity ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The Creation ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Independent Country

The Semitic character of Malta’s language and the Latinity of its culture have both contributed towards the complex formation of a unique country marked by dualities of language and identity. This article seeks to outline the development of Maltese as a medium through which Malta could best express itself and construct its own literature, as Maltese intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to create an alternative to the older Italian and more recent British dominance. The establishment of Maltese as the national language and of a thriving Maltese literature reflects a move away from the use of Maltese Italian as a minor literature to the creation of an “ultraminor” Maltese for an independent country.

Using Old Photographs in Interviews: Some Cautionary Notes About Silences in Fieldwork

1990 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 327-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Bravman
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
The People ◽  
Taita Hills ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Photo Collection ◽  
Image Production ◽  
To Come

In September 1987, early in my research at the Kenya National Archives, I came across a collection of photographs taken by a British missionary during the 1920s and early 1930s. The collection contained nearly 250 photos of the terrain and people of Kenya's Taita Hills, where I would soon be going for my fieldwork. I pored over the photo collection for a long time, and had reproductions made of twenty-five shots. The names of those pictured had been recorded in the photo album's captions. Many of the names were new to me, though a few WaTaita of the day who had figured prominently in the archival records were also captured on film. When I moved on to Taita in early 1988,1 took the photographs with me. Since I would be interviewing men and women old enough either to remember or be contemporaries of the people in the pictures, I planned to show the photos during the interviews. At first I was simply curious about who some of the people pictured were, but my curiosity quickly evolved into a more ambitious plan. I decided to try using the photographs as visual prompts to get people to speak more expansively than they otherwise might about their lives and their experiences.In the event, I learned that using the photographs in interviews involved many more complexities than I had envisaged in my initial enthusiasm. I found that I had to alter the expectations and techniques I took to Taita, and feel out some of the limitations of working with the photographic medium. I had to recognize the power relations embedded in my presence as a researcher in Taita, in my position as bearer of images from peoples' pasts, and in the photos themselves. I found, too, that I needed to come to grips with a number of issues about the politics of image production, and the historical product of those politics: the bounded, selected images that are photographs. Finally, I had to address some of my own cultural assumptions about photography and how people respond to pictures, assumptions that my informants did not necessarily share.

scholarly journals Enactments of a Minor Inquiry

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 306-316
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Mazzei ◽  
Matthew C. Graham ◽  
Laura E. Smithers
Keyword(s):  
Minor Literature ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Collective Thinking ◽  
Minor Inquiry

In this article, we map conditions and enactments for a new plane of inquiry, what Mazzei named a minor inquiry. Informed by our collective thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of a minor literature and its attendant characteristics, deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective assemblage of enunciation, we present the conditions for inquiry on this new plane, provide enactments from our individual projects, and conclude with incitements for escaping the dogma of prescribed method.

Tough Superstition

2019 ◽  
pp. 38-72
Author(s):  
Thomas Waters
Keyword(s):  
Social Activism ◽  
Innocent People ◽  
The People ◽  
To Come

This chapter reveals the difficulties of convincing the people to discard their ‘superstitions’. However, this change was slow to come and was not brought about by reason or enlightenment. Between about the 1830s and 1860s, campaigners against superstition strove to convince their compatriots that witchcraft was risible nonsense. These campaigners failed because ridding people of their occult beliefs is far harder than many non-believers imagine. It was not social activism but the growth of professional policing that stopped mobs from attacking eccentric, vulnerable, and usually innocent people. Alleged witches were somewhat safer, but knowledge of the occult's finer details remained rife.

scholarly journals Music Theory and the White Racial Frame

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip A. Ewell
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
The People ◽  
To Come ◽  
White Racial Frame

For over twenty years, music theory has tried to diversify with respect to race, yet the field today remains remarkably white, not only in terms of the people who practice music theory but also in the race of the composers and theorists whose work music theory privileges. In this paper, a critical-race examination of the field of music theory, I try to come to terms with why this is so. I posit that there exists a “white racial frame” in music theory that is structural and institutionalized, and that only through a deframing and reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music theory.

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