Minoritarian Becomings

Néstor Perlongher

Preface

Cristel M. Jusino Díaz

On a cloudy summer morning this past January, during the Hemispheric Institute’s 8th Encuentro, Chilean activist and artist Víctor Hugo Robles, El Che de los Gays, led a group on a short walk around the Praça República in São Paulo. Dressed like a school marm and carrying a chalkboard that read “Educação Sexual Gratuita”, el Che handed out condoms to passerbys. Pinned to his chest was a black and white photo of Argentine poet, sociologist and activist, Néstor Perlongher. Decades earlier, Perlongher had based his doctoral dissertation (and subsequent book), O negócio do Michê: prostitução viril em São Paulo on research conducted while cruising the Praça República. Robles’s performance was not only a continuation of his work to promote free, comprehensive sexual education in Latin America, it also invoked Perlongher’s research and advocacy for sex workers and sexual minorities in Brazil. Throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s, Néstor Perlongher published a vast body of critical and theoretical texts that anticipated many of the questions and issues that queer theory in the North would not consider until years later. The majority of this work has only been published in Spanish and Portuguese. This is the reason why the editors have decided to translate his 1991 essay, “Minoritarian Becomings” (“Los devenires minoritarios”) into English. This translation of “Minoritarian Becomings” seeks to highlight Perlongher’s contribution to a field that has, on many occasions, overlooked contributions from the Global South.

For Néstor Perlongher, before literature, there was activism. His experiences at the forefront of Argentina’s sexual dissidence movements in the 1970s would set the tone for a deeply political and dissident body of work. Whether writing about male prostitution in São Paulo, the AIDS crisis in Brazil, the descent from the heavens of Evita Perón, the neobarroque and the Caribbean, or the powers of ayahuasca, Perlongher sought to implode the cramped spaces of marginalities in order to imagine new possibilities of being. More importantly, as Cecilia Palmeiro states in Desbunde y felicidad: “The body was always at the center of his work. It wasn’t about just talking about the body but about putting bodies on the line (for politics, for literature, for anthropology). His entire body of work can be seen as poetic and a politics of a body deterritorialized by a desire that could be ‘a passion for abolition...” (Palmeiro 2010, 19). This poetic is exemplified in “Minoritarian Becomings,” written as a reflection on Felix Guattari’s 1981 trip to Brazil and the subsequent 1986 publication of Guattari and Suely Rolnik’s Micropolíticas. Cartografías do desejo. In this text, Perlongher builds upon Guattari’s concept of a “desiring cartography,” based on affect and embodied practice, which would lead to the delineation of “the map of the other Brazil: the Brazil of the minoritarian becomings—becoming-black, becoming-woman, becoming-homosexual, becoming-child, etc.—from processes of marginalization and minoritization...” The minor, the marginal—in Perlongher’s work, mostly represented through queerness—is imbued with a creative potentiality that leads to the imagination and the construction of an alternative society.

The Conditions of a Desiring Cartography

In a story by Borges, the emperor of an imaginary country demands a cartography so exact and mimetic, a full-scale reproduction of the territory, that, when the populace undertakes the project, all social life is paralyzed. That is not the function of a “desiring cartography.”^[1] To begin, it is not about reproducing from a fixed point—the central eye of the despot—but rather drifting: in that drift are captured the flows of life that enliven the territory, in the way a surfer rides the waves of a libidinal sea.

At the same time, the task of the desiring cartographer is not to capture in order to fix, to ossify, to freeze what he explores, rather he attempts to intensify the same flows of life that envelop him, creating territories as he crosses them. The resulting map, far from restricting itself to physical, geographic, or spatial dimensions (even as the relations, at times mythic, refer themselves—like the Maffesolian “sociality”^[2]—to a ground, to a locus, that nourishes them), should be a map of surface effects (depth not being, with Foucault^[3], more than a fold and wrinkle of the surface) or, like that created by Janice Caiafa with the Rio de Janeiro punks, “a cartography of concrete exercises”^[4]. A navigational chart, if you will, an unsteady kayak in the turbulence of the torrent through the vicissitudes of nomadic pilgrimages, the avatars of the impulses of flight, the (short) circuits of disheveled affect. A map that—as Silveira Jr. condenses from anthropology—“would not be a mere copy of a phenomenon but rather the record of its functioning as a practice within its own movement"^[5]. The copy as a form of arborescence, of the “root-tree” schema^[6] proceeding “as transcendent model and trace”; the chart, in turn, a rhizomatic operation, works like an immanent process that turns the model upside down. To reproduce (according to a model) vs. to follow, complicating spirals in their circumvolution, the paths of flight according to the Deleuzian maxim: “in a society everything flees." Likewise, the postulate of immanency informs the positivity of social practices, considered in the positivity of their functioning and not judged negatively according to an external, transcendent law.

The characteristics of this cartography would be, then, multiplicity and simultaneity; its form: that of montage, a kind of engineering that participates in the quality of “molecular conjunction” that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to desire.

Habituated to narrative sequence and the centrality of argumentation, multiplicity is difficult to confront. How to open oneself to all of the flows when the institutional framework of empire teaches us to close ourselves, to centralize ourselves in a despotic ego, to not let ourselves go, to control ourselves? The conditions of that multiplicity, then, do not only pertain to the mode by which texts are organized, but also affect the production of the subject itself. A subject—or better yet, a “point of subjectification”—that would not be measured by the localized control that it exerts over its desires, but rather be valorized by the intensification of conjunctures and encounters of which it is capable. A “subject” without center; “there are no more subjects but dynamic individuations without subjects, which constitute collective assemblages,” says Deleuze^[7]. Compositions of force, non-subjectified affects, instant individuations: that afternoon… the weather… should be characterized less by an interiority full of guilt and complexes and more by an exteriority open to the surfaces of contact, to the margins.

To map is, in short, to draw lines (lines of force of the socius, lines of group affect, lines of fissures or emptiness: “I have seen the best minds of my generation…”).^[8] Not one, but many entangled lines, imbricated, crosscut, superimposed: “We have as many tangled lines as a hand. We are complicated in a different way from a hand. What we call by different names—schizoanalysis, micro-politics, pragmatics, diagrammatism, rhizomatics, cartography—has no other object than the study of these lines, in groups or as individuals.”^[9]

A Cartography of “Minor” Brazil

It is precisely the preoccupation with flight, with margins, with ruptures, that should guide cartographic exploration. To map is to travel. In this case, the cartography of desire derives from a real voyage, made by the philosopher-militant-analyst Félix Guattari and the Brazilian analyst Suely Rolnik through the upheaval of Brazil in 1982. It is worth contextualizing a bit. The dictatorship that began in 1964 (perhaps less bloody, but no less authoritarian than the Argentine one) was in its final—but harsh—throes. The “opening,” begun around 1979, along with amnesty for persecutors and persecuted, was in large part the fruit of a multiplicity of social outbursts that brandished the values of autonomy and the right to difference. The most blatant expressions of these rebellions came through (and, to a lesser extent, still come from) the so-called “minority movements”: feminist, black, homosexual, free-radio movements, etc.—and, more discreet and underground, by way of mutations evident in the realms of habits, daily micropolitics, “neotribal consistencies"^[10]. A certain climate—one could say—of “existential revolution,” as perceptible in the “plane of expression” (the proliferation, for example, of alternative and underground publications)^[11],as in the “order of bodies”: Dionysian gatherings in the lecherous shadows of cities. It was in this context of agitation—pre-electoral as well, given that such agitation also called for the first democratic elections of governors—that Guattari’s resonant tour was taken, during which he met in various cities with all type of dissidences—“alternative,” autonomous, libertarian, and, in the end political since he advocated the integration of those minorities into the bizarre and forceful PT (Workers’ Party).

Delineate, from the montage of these encounters, the map of an other Brazil: the Brazil of minoritarian becomings—becoming black, becoming woman, becoming homosexual, becoming child, etc.; of processes of marginalization and minoritization; of mobilizations of subjects “without guarantee” (what would classically be called “non-integrated”) in attempts at flight that traverse and agitate the social body. The desiring gaze need not be static, but rather will proceed as a kind of “active description,” a discourse on the evolution of those flights that are capable of leading to forms—even if unfortunate—of institutional recapture or to the ruin of death.

If one irrecusable merit of Guattari and Rolnik’s desiring cartography is its capacity to draw the map of an “other” Brazil in the tumultuous ides of ‘82, it is worth asking, years later (the book was just published in 1986), to what degree the Brazil that they captured—abuzz with splinter groups that made of the “molecular revolution” not only an invocation, but rather a possibility for daily practice—has come to sound almost unknown, almost strange to us. What happened, then, to the minority movements—black, homosexual, feminist, among others—that proliferated, microscopically, ao sul do Ecuador?

Becoming and Identity

It is not about a morbid passion for the exotic, nor about some romantic or extreme liberalism, but rather, it is about asking what the interest of those minorities from the point of view of the mutation of collective existence might be. They would be pointing to, inaugurating, and experiencing alternative, dissident modes, “countercultures” of subjectification.^[12] What is interesting about these minorities, would be, then, that they open “points of flight” for the implosion of a certain normative paradigm of social personality. The oft-mentioned “system” is not only sustained by the force of the arms and economic determinants, it demands the production of a certain model of the “normal” subject to uphold it. It’s important, in the meantime, not to confuse “becoming” with “identity.”

These processes of marginalization, of flight, in differing degrees, release becomings (molecular particles) that cast the subject adrift along the margins of the template for conventional behavior. “Becoming,” he says in A Thousand Plateaus, “begins with the forms that one has, of the subject that one is, from the organs that one possesses or from the functions that one plays, to extract particles, from which relationships of movement and repose, of velocity and slowness, settle in, very close to what is ‘being becomed’ and by which one becomes. In this sense, to become is a process of desire."^[13] To become is not to transform oneself into another, but rather to enter into (aberrant) alliance, into contagion, into mixture with what is different. Becoming isn’t moving from one point to another, but rather entering the in-between that is “in between.” Becoming-animal does not mean to turn into an animal, but rather to have the functioning capacities of an animal, “what an animal is capable of” (as in the case of Hans-becoming-horse).^[14]

Becoming is molecular; it mobilizes particles of turbulence, extracting them from the great molar oppositions. Where there were only two great molar sexes (you will be A or B, man or woman), now there are a thousand small molecular sexes, in the empire of sensation, in the intensive. From the woman as a molar identity^[15], captured in the binary opposition of the “total” sexes, emerges a type of “microfeminity”: the idea is to “produce in ourselves the molecular woman, to create the molecular woman” (movement and repose, velocities and slowness). Becoming-woman is not achieved by imitating women as a dual, identity-having entity, nor by transforming oneself into her. Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari warn, “the importance of imitation or of moments of imitation, amongst them certain masculine homosexualities, should not be denied, and even less so the prodigious effort toward real transformation of certain transvestites.” But, more than imitating or taking on the feminine form, what is attempted is to “emit particles that enter into relationship with movement and repose, or in the general neighborhood of microfemininity”.^[16]

Molecular, minoritarian, “all becomings begin and pass through becoming-woman,” the key of all other becomings^[17]. Why? Because women—“sole depositaries authorized to become sexed bodies”^[18]—occupy a minority position in relationship to the paradigm of the majority-man—chauvinist, white, adult, heterosexual, sane, family man, inhabitant of cities... There are, or there may be, masculine becomings, but not a “becoming-man,” since man is the majority par excellence, while all becoming is minoritarian. And majority and minority not understood by quantitative calculations, but rather as “state of domination"; the determination of a norm by which differences are measured. What we have here is a dominant mode of subjectification.

Being part of a minority, in the sociological sense, while creating the conditions for it, does not automatically unfold into becoming. Becoming black from white, but also becoming woman from woman. In the case of homosexuality in spite of all of the personological and oedipal appropriations, Guattari notes that a “more molecular” level is insinuated in which categories aren’t distinguished in the same way, the groupings, the “specialties,” in which stagnant oppositions between the genders would be rejected; in which, to the contrary, the points of passage between homosexuals, transvestites, drug addicts, sadomasochists, prostitutes; between women, men, children, psychotics, artists, revolutionaries would be sought.^[19] The practice of homosexuality, on the intense plane of sexed bodies, would be inseparable from becoming-woman.

A “homosexual becoming,” for example, will take that corporal practice (the marginalization, the segregation, and above all the difference that it brings) as a means of escaping the imperative “should be”; it will reference a certain axiom concerning the connections between bodies. In another sense, one can think that it—its interpenetrations, its mixtures—undermine or perturb the “hierarchical organization of the organism” that assigns determined functions to the organs.^[20]

Something similar could be said of “becoming-woman” or of “becoming-black”: it is unlikely that these would be mere “acquisitions of awareness,” but rather they would also have to subvert the exclusions, repulsions and forms of hierarchy implicit in their relations. These becomings could trigger a certain micropolitics of perceptions and affect given that they would be affecting modes of segregation—interruptions that act directly at the level of bodies and desires. Although minoritarian, these processes affect the totality of the social. The miniscule groupings of feminism, for example, did not impede the discourse from driving a series of mutations at the level of concrete relationships between the sexes, which continue to be produced despite a relative silencing of militant feminism. One could imagine, perhaps, an association with a certain permanence in sectors of the gay Porteño environment, emanating from an almost epic halo encircling the miniscule Frente de Liberación Homosexual (Homosexual Liberation Front), dissolved in 1975.

Before this uncertain flight, two great alternatives present themselves: one, a “point of passage” is configured for the global mutation of order; two, the risk of crystallizing into the mere affirmation of identity is run. In the latter case, what held the early stages of a rupture with order transforms into a demand for knowledge for and within this same order.

The creation and expansion of territories that make existence livable would no longer be sought after, but rather, they would be resigned to occupy a common place in the concert of the tolerated personalities and play the “muse” in the corner. Once “identity”—often times “interior”—is identified, the rebellious tendency seems to become exhausted and enters into very precarious conditions of integration within capitalist circuits (like the industry of perversion in the concentric paradises of the gay ghetto), and becomes—the death of the swan and the siren’s song—an almost irresistible illusion. Guattari warns: “whenever a problem with identity or recognition appears, we find ourselves before the threat of blockage and the paralysis of the process.”

The sadness of this paralysis is not only discernible at this “personal” level (tedium, lack of interest, apathy, isolation…). It is followed by direct operations from the state powers. In Brazil, the progressive emptying of the “organized groups of minorities” after the return of democracy is combined, at the same time, with a dizzying absorption of their prototypes by the mass media, with the official creation of “Councils” (The Council of the Feminine Condition, The Council of the Black Community) that, beyond the immediate urgencies, fruits of the vindications that they tend to and of the complex microscopies that they concoct, seem to basically “retranslate” their demands into rituals of bureaucratic duty. If in the case of the disappeared S.O.S. Mulher^[21] their intention was to try to intersect with the politicization of misogynist violence, the “Women’s Precincts” that were later installed, would have meant, without devaluing their efficacy, the remission of such conflicts to penal overcodification. In a less “recognized” minority—the homosexual one—the call for dignity must be articulated, in the context of the AIDS crisis, in direct alliance with the medical power. In truth, it is not that the battles are over; they seem to be displaced, rather, to the interior of new institutional apparatuses; it is worth, in any case, to confirm this displacement.

The Marginal Personality

It is interesting to confirm that the notion of identity itself is the product of a kind of “ideological contraband” of the social sciences in relation to minority groups. Outlining an archeology of identity—necessary albeit extensive work, without a doubt—would take us too far (maybe to the essence of being itself). One can, nevertheless, suspect that a possible genealogy (in the field of anthropology, for example) would reencounter, at least from afar, some of the terror experienced by colonial administrators when faced with the “unreason” of savage lives.^[22] One of the solutions, extensively applied, consists of simply exterminating whatever is different.

Along with the above-mentioned, an overlapping ethnocentric variant is derived that reinforces “my” identity (of white colonizer associated with the Ministry of the Colonies) and contrastingly attributes an identity to the “other.” Difference is recognized, but at the price of the translation of those singular modes of subjectification to the code of identity (logo-ego-centric). On this side of the translation of the multiple into the one, journeys like Artaud’s among the Tarahumara or Fitzcarraldo by Herzog, show that another modality of connection is possible: the liaison between the marginalized deemed “insane” and the marginalized “primitive”—an expansive intensification of the difference rather than exclusive segregation, the coming together of eccentrics that dilute and empty out the center.

The classic procedure of translation/reduction of identity’s difference is not only valid for “non-Western” societies. It may also be turned against the “internal minorities” of industrial society. It would be a matter of reworking the itinerary travelled by the old “marginal personality” concept of the Chicago School (in the 1920s) through its arrival at the modern notion of “deviant identity”: changes that indicate the passage from a sociology of the norm against the “anomie,” to a model of society as a system of self-administered selves (egos), paying the price of the conscious construction of a coherent identity in exchange for the dubious prize of an illusory recycling through the circuits of the official order. On this torturous journey, there are still the points of flights, destructurations, and rejections that are characteristic of the heteroclitic marginalities.

The fact that the agents encompassed by the vast “ascension of the social” (social workers, social psychologists, sociologists, social anthropologists, etc.) are influencing in one way or another the creation of artificial modes and serializations of subjectivity, makes it so that some of their interventions (apparently neutral and voluntary) are liable to be articulated by the abstract machines of the over-codification “that carry out the disciplining of subjects according to the forms of the modern State.”^[23] Nevertheless, this “active ignorance,” this effort to homogenize and crush singularities, is not able to stop or nullify these molecular, microscopic processes; what it does accomplish, perhaps, is the closure of their channels of expression.

Mute Passion

In other words, I do not believe that the succession of flights and becomings, eloquent in the spring of the “opening,” have been altogether immobilized or nullified after the conservative restoration of the Republic of Sarney. What appears to have taken place is a certain “loss of voice” of various dissidences. In this context, a scenario is established which, if we heed Trevisan and his history of homosexuality in Brazil^[24], exhibits rather classical airs: on one hand, in the sphere of actions and daily passions, a multiplicity of desirous insurrections; on the other, at the level of current discourses, a certain compensatory hardening which tends to sever contact with the mutating experiments and begins to spin on its own axis, in the comfort of official or officious statements. A double phenomenon: the savagery of daily disorder; the sterility of the discursive order. “Maconha e briga,” as Clementina de Jesús would say, against the civic virtues of moderation, conciliation, conformism.

Signals of this discrepancy are glimpsed when dealing with a phenomenon that would preferably not be spoken of, or, just in case, spoken of little, but which has happened countless times during Brazil’s long history: the feared “quebra-quebra.” Guattari comments on the thundering “quebra-quebra” of 1983 (in which the masses ripped the gates off government buildings in Sao Paulo) with another insurrectional guru, the Italian Toni Negri, and both see it as an announcement, for the long-term, of a “new type of autonomous-communist-anarchist movement.” Leaving aside the apocalyptic catastrophism, the truth is that these deterritorializing, “savage” confrontations seem to persist under the guise of a true “social war” that devastates the streets of the tropics, reaping, week after week, its macabre quota of black youth. Little attention is paid, however, to the “impulses towards flight” that animate many of those processes of marginalization; flight from segregation and the normative modeling whose desperation doesn’t prevent its eloquence. Only poets such as Roberto Piva show themselves capable of seeing—in verses like “marvelous adolescents burn down reformatories”^[25]—the desiring substance of these flights.

Some of these attempts have yielded tragic outcomes. See the case of the adolescent Naldinho—who went on a homicidal "raid," screaming “to escape, I’ll kill whoever gets in my way”—where what appears to be triggered is a certain “abolitionist passion” that takes destruction (and self-destruction) as an object. The marginal vicissitudes don’t allow themselves to be reduced exclusively to economic determinants. These massive processes of marginalization should not only be considered in the negativity of their lack (lack of home, work, “social place,” etc.), but rather in the affirmative quality of their errancy, in their slippery renunciation of the discipline of family and work—something like “nomadic sociabilities” that intertwine in the interstices of the social fabric.

It is interesting to underscore that often, dissidence is also exercised at the level of pleasure and corporeal experience itself. Recent research about male prostitution in São Paulo^[26] shows an intimate (in the literal sense) relationship between perverts and petty criminals, confirming the suggestion made by George Bataille^[27], who detected an “erotic exuberance,” evocative of animalism, among the marginalized (the “non-guaranteed”) in relation to the familiarity of the “guaranteed” workers, domesticated by civilization. Equally intimate is the contiguity with other experiments, manifested by toponymy: the “bocas do lixo” also with the “bocas do fumo.”^[28]

It follows that, in the bosom of concrete social relationships, many of the protagonists of processes of marginalization and differentiated minoritizations (the margin is defined by its relationship with the center; a minority group makes its own self-referential codes) find each other. The desiring cartographer’s ability will reside in accounting for those multi-flow connections that proceed in a disruptive sense in relationship with the haughty, facsimiled “fakeness,” to signal points of passage, of articulation, of intensification.

Subjectification in Crisis

The link between cartography and micropolitics can, at this time, turn into something very precise. A minoritarian micropolitics will attempt to, instead of freezing the differences in stagnant identitarian paradigms, interlace them toward the mutation of serialized subjectivity. If the crisis isn’t only political and economic, but rather also a crisis of the modes of subjectification, the shattering of order must break the subjectification of the very subject that supports and guarantees it. Such are the pragmatics of the molecular revolution.

But it is not a problem of a particular political “program.” To put this machine in motion, it has to be fed with efficient statements—not “fixed” but rather “nomadic” concepts—capable of indicating the diversity of desiring becomings. Desire: not something thought of as undifferentiated and in movement, awaiting an overcodification that would “symbolize” it (operating, as Lyotard said, the conversion of “intensive signs” into “intelligent signs”).^[29] Desire, rather, is directly connected here to the social, in relation to production, articulation, assembly. Desire that—as Paul Veyne says—“is the most obvious thing in the world: … it’s the fact that machines/mechanizes work, that agency functions, that virtualities… are made true: 'all negotiation expresses and brings about a desire, constructing the plane that makes it possible' [Deleuze].” ^[30]

How should we interpret the distrustful reticence of the “sociologies of order” in relationship to desire (which could be, it can be argued, the psychoanalysts' problem, who, for their part, will complete the division of tasks, throwing the social field under the bus of the analyst’s chair)? Would it be reasonable, perhaps, to suspect some complementarity between the sterile figure that serves up discourses about the “other” and the growing development of a security industry that transforms the city into a series of bunkers? Entrenching one’s self behind bars and calling the police might be the last response that ideologues and administrators are in a position to give to the process of marginalization that undermines the interstices of order.

Minority politics should not, today, pass through the “ghettoizing” affirmation of identity, accompanied by the ritual invocations of “solidarity” with other minority groups, nor through the reserve of a (generally secondary) role in the theater of political representation, with results such as: sexism is women’s problem, racism is black peoples’ problem, homophobia is gay peoples’ problem.

Without dogmatically refusing the importance of certain conquered juridical and legal spaces, nor denying the experiences lived under the sign of identification, the crisis (or even the dissolution) of these movements, along with indicating the extenuation of identitarian strategy, could possibly favor (the optimism of the social analysis?) a demand for an exit from such self-engulfing microcircuits, an extensive expansion of the differences, not only among the minoritarian subjects themselves, but also opening towards the broader social field. After all, the radicalness of the relational, sensual, nomadic, ecstatic, delirious experiences should not only serve to feed the marmoreal frigidity of the academy.

Rolnik and Guattari’s contribution to the “desiring cartography” is, in a sense, decisive. Their “semiotic efficiency” begins by calling for the coming together of that multiplicity of dissident subjectivities, of those “unconscious protesters,” and directly relates to our singularities and desires. The textual diversity of their speech and becomings is an example of how that explosion of differences, that general mutation of thinking, of loving, of existing, is not only possible, but also virtual. Asking ourselves about the conditions of its use would imply, I bet, “getting into trouble.”

Translated by Samuel Bauer

Néstor Perlongher was an Argentine anthropologist and poet. In Argentina, during the 1970s, he was one of the founders of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (Gay Liberation Front). During the 1980s he moved to São Paulo, Brazil, where he lived and worked until his death from AIDS in November 1992. Some of his more important works are: "Evita Vive", O negócio do miché and Aguas aéreas.

Cristel M. Jusino Díaz is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She holds a Master’s in Spanish and Latin American Literature and Cultures from NYU in Madrid and a B.A. in Latin American Studies from the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Recinto de Río Piedras. She is currently writing a dissertation on cultural networks between the Caribbean and the Río de la Plata from 1959 to the present. She is the Managing Editor of e-misférica.