masque teatro
presents

CRISALIDE XVII
Performing arts festival

WINTER YEARS

TALK 9th May 2010
Fabbrica delle candele
16.30 > 19.30

Politics, molecular, processual Art  

Tavola rotonda coordinated by Nicholas Ridout

Laura Cull / Simon Vincenzi / Piersandra Di Matteo / John Mullarkey / Florinda Cambria / Lucia Amara / Michele Di Stefano / Cristina Rizzo

The panel will focus on the key-concept of the festival: the notion of minority

In French the word majorité is used to indicate both the majority in numerical terms and the “legal age”, describing a person who is not underage anymore. Therefore majorité does not outline only majority opposed to minority, but also an adult opposed to a minor. Besides minorité is a likely reference to Kant’s Minderjährigkeit. The only difference is that Kant places “minority” and “majority” at the opposite sides of a landscape: from a state of minority to a state of majority, going through the Enlightenment. For Gilles Deleuze the words minorité and majorité define two methods, two different ways of philosophizing. The contrast between minority and majority is not only qualitative. Majority recalls a standard idea (man-white-western-male-adult-rational-heterosexual-urban-who speaks a standard language), measured using all these benchmarks. The example proposed by Deleuze is typical: the example of the man. Above the single, with a further level of abstraction, we can find the Man species. Due to this double level of abstraction, the species (intended as the universe) tends to propose and impose itself as the main one: it lives and dominates from above. It does not become, it exists. It exists as a an immutable “fact” in opposition to the transitory dust: men.
The majority is then the homogeneous system of universal constants not affected by the change that expresses itself with the direct speech. The minority, instead, is a variety of subsystems or outside systems that express themselves through the indirect speech and acting with outrageous techniques against their (own) linguistic system. Using amputations, continuous variations, subtractions, distortions, they draw a Third Landscape.
We can define the linguistic paradigm as a major or mother language, with the meaning of a homogeneous and unassailable normative system. In this sense the minority represents a siege to the linguistic system recognized by the usage, the tradition (also the literary one), and by any grammar and orthographic rule. In this way it is possible to shift from linguistics to any other way of expression, creation and, of course, representation.

POSSIBLE FIELDS OF REFLECTION BETWEEN SCENE AND THOUGHT:

- Relation between major and minor systems;
- From the adult-male-western-white-man... to the transformation into -woman, -nigger, -Jew...
- From the raising to “majority” (a thought that becomes Doctrine, a way of life that becomes Culture, an event that becomes History) à to the implementation of a minority project in order to generate events against History, lives against Culture, and thoughts against Doctrine;
- Disability and Clinic (vs pathology)
- Offences and amputations caused to the linguistic system;
- Theatre as a place of movement that provokes distortion, alienation, transformation;
- Conception of the scene as a variety of potential evolutions and evolutions of the potential;
- The scene as a development of the indirect speech (that surfaces from a bottom swarming of people)

Concerning the action of becoming minority – intended as a group of potential and creative sub-systems with the ability of affecting, changing and twisting the major language in all the aspects of its power- Deleuze wrote: “In brief, there is a universal figure that owns the consciousness of minority. A consciousness that is synonym of creation. In order to establish the characteristics of a universal consciousness of minority, we have to interact with concepts that are outside Rights and Domains. This should be the aim of philosophy, instead of an abstract claim for majority”.

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