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8 Medbh McGuckian and the politics of minority discourse RICHARD KIRKLAND 147 The difference between minorities and majorities isn’t their size. A minority may be bigger than a majority.What defines the majority is a model you have to conform to: the average European adult male citydweller , for example [. . .] A minority, on the other hand, has no model, it’s a becoming, a process. One might say the majority is nobody. Everybody ’s caught, one way or another, in a minority becoming that would lead them into unknown paths if they opted to follow it through. (Gilles Deleuze)1 The church and the school receded when I was 18 and also the troubles started when I was 18. So there was a very dark period where I had nothing. Well I hadn’t nothing, I sort of had Marxism, a mixture of Marxism and sex I think, but it wasn’t very satisfying and for 10 years I had nothing. (Medbh McGuckian)2 The creation of human subjectivity is a necessarily endless process. Described by Gilles Deleuze as a ‘becoming’, it is a condition that constantly looks towards a final goal, a homecoming, but that destination is always deferred, always held out of reach.To understand and live within this is a difficult art, one that requires a particular sensuousness and a sensitive apprehension of flux.The poetry of Medbh McGuckian is exemplary in its demonstration of these qualities, and it is no coincidence that it is this subject, the inevitability of becoming and the duties that this places upon us, that is the major theme of her work. This is not simply to observe that McGuckian’s poetry describes provisional shifting states of becoming (although this is the case), but also to recognise that it demands a reading practice that is similarly dynamic.As Peggy O’Brien observes of the sometimes unsettling experience of reading a McGuckian poem, ‘to stare too long at a single, still intractable word [...] is to become paralyzed, and whatever accumulated meaning we might have been carrying topples with the jolt of suddenly arrested movement. Motion is critical.’3 Understood in these terms, then, McGuckian is a kind of sorcerer, but only because, as Deleuze and Félix Guattari observe, ‘sorcery always codifies certain transformations of becomings’.4 Which, in turn, is as good a definition of a spell as I can recall. In Deleuze’s work becoming is the defining condition of what he terms minority status, a mode that does not describe a fixed identity but rather indicates a way of living, a continual process. In turn, its opposite, the majority, is not necessarily a verifiable or material entity, but rather exists as a standard, something to be judged against.As a result of this relentless positioning it can be seen that what has been termed the politics of minority discourse are an inevitability as one always finds oneself occupying a space in relationship to an abstract other, and living that relationship in an active, constitutive way. As such, the minority becomes what Deleuze and Guattari describe in A Thousand Plateaus as ‘a potential, creative and created becoming’.5 To put this more bluntly, we have no choice but to take the ‘unknown paths’ that Deleuze speaks of. The implications of this awareness in Deleuze and Guattari’s work are considerable.Although, as they assert, the majority position is abstract, a principle of judgement and power rather than a verifiable state, it is at this chimerical location that the discourses of identity politics lodge themselves. The assumption of rights and aspirations depends upon a stable, achieved, identity position, a status that can be weighed in the balance, and the worth of its claims assessed. Conversely, as they insist,‘there is a universal figure of minoritarian consciousness as the becoming of everybody, and that becoming is creation’.6 Most importantly, this figure takes a specific form as ‘an amplitude that continually oversteps the representative threshold of the majoritarian standard, by excess or default’.7 As such, minorities have to be seen through a number of perspectives: as ‘objectively definable states, states of language, ethnicity, or sex with their own ghetto territorialities’, and concomitantly as ‘seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority’.8 The very absence of identity enables minor creativity, a process that can be understood as an experiment or innovation with life that at no time settles into a stable position...

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