Forum essay

Environment and Planning D: Society and

Revisiting minor theory Space
2017, Vol. 35(4) 596–599
! The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0263775817718012
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I am honoured to be part of this conversation engaging and rethinking the ideas and politics
associated with minor theory and their connections with micropolitics. I am inspired by the
creativity and range of these pieces, and a bit daunted as to how to make sense of them
collectively. Perhaps fittingly given the focus, their address and temporal registers differ, they
travel varied spaces of betweenness, stage a multitude of conversations, and call out from a
variety of impasses. Inspired by Anna Secor and Jess Linz’s piece (p. 568), I’m going to try to
keep myself in this impossible minor space, and connect to the ‘immanent politics’ created in,
through, and across these pieces. The task feels more difficult than ‘staying in bed. . .’. To ‘dig
my burrow,’ I will retrace my own meanderings toward and with minor theory, and try to
‘bundle’ it with these others to glimpse, feel, hear, and try to keep open new spaces of and for
politics—politics of knowledge and creative action.
I was initially drawn to thinking about the ‘minor’ from an article on ‘minor cinema’
published in Motion Picture by film theorist Tom Gunning (1991), which provided a
backdoor—perhaps a ‘minor’ door—to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Towards a Minor
Literature (1986). I got to Deleuze and Guattari through the visual and left through the
theoretical, in each register feeling a kinship with ways ‘the minor’ reworks and decomposes
‘the major’ from within. I loved its aspiration to revolutionary consciousness through a
disavowal of mastery and embrace of marginality—a marginality that recognizes and
relates to all that it edges and all of its edges. The political is everywhere in minor
literature, especially in what feels most personal. The deep resonances of that
understanding of the inseparability of the personal and the political with feminist theory
and practice struck a chord with me. It was the way I did and continue to do theory, and
these works gave it a name and a new horizon for thinking and doing. Even this sense of the
situation was in keeping with how Deleuze and Guattari explained minor literature.
As Gunning (1991: 5; Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 28) quotes, minor literature ‘begins by
expressing itself and doesn’t conceptualize until afterward’.
Conceptualizing was ammunition for a critique of some academic ‘big boys’, and the start
of what I thought and hoped would be an exchange on the politics of knowledge
(Katz, 1996). My strategy was to write about minor theory in a non-minor way to show
I could talk the talk, but my gambit did not provoke a response, at least not in print.
I received various gratifying responses from others who considered themselves to be
minor theorists of a sort, and mostly jokey ones from colleagues and friends who didn’t.
But one colleague made a point of telling me that ‘Towards Minor Theory’ made more of an
impact than I’d ever know. Had he not conveyed this intriguing message, I would have

Corresponding author:
Cindi Katz, The City University of New York, New York, NY 10016, USA.
Email: ckatz@gc.cuny.edu
Katz 597

assumed the piece was even more of a ‘dead letter’ than it appeared to be. Maybe I just
addressed it wrong. Twenty years later, it has reached a more receptive and enlivening
destination, and seems to have been traveling there all along. This thrills me. As the
papers in this collection make vibrantly clear, thinking in a minor key opens many spaces
of betweenness from which to imagine, act, and live things differently.
Still, as I wrote at the time, we all have investments in how theory is done and how it is
valorized, and I wanted to provoke masculinist Marxist and poststructuralist theorists into
deeper engagement with feminist thought and minor ways of theorizing. So even though
I am confident about working in this register, and know I have much good company and
inspiration in these realms, I still care about who cares. My stake in jarring those whose
theories I aim to ‘decompose’ remains. Minor theory is a project and practice that should
matter to those whose work it engages, not just because of issues of recognition—though
these matter—but because the sorts of spaces, questions, categories, and analyses it opens up
are useful for understanding and engaging uneven social relations of production and
reproduction in a range of registers.
Likewise, micropolitical analysis, which, as Ben Anderson (p. 593) suggests, ‘invites us
to learn how to act in the midst of ongoing, unforeclosed situations and experiment with
the ways of discerning and tending to the ‘‘otherwise’’’ (cf. Povinelli, 2011). In these
‘micropolitical entanglements’, Michele Lancione (p. 574) notes, ethical actions are
‘always contextual. . .arising from the performed field rather than deriving from a
universalising norm’. Ethics, he suggests, should be ‘attuned to a minor form of politics
against the normalising forces that tend to control and reduce the potential of contextual
becoming’. These are compelling political gestures for the current moment when so
much feels foreclosed. As Caroline Faria (p. 584) beautifully demonstrates, minor theory
and practice can unsettle received narratives and material social practices of power, and
cut through the classed, racialized, and gendered sedimentations of violence, dispossession,
displacement, and criminalization to reveal their veins of connection, discontinuity, and
fracture—banal and brutal—to develop means of opposition in new and different registers.
It remains, however, that minor theory did not get much attention among geographers
in the two decades after I first wrote about it. The idea was raised in just a few scattered
articles prior to 2013 (e.g. Anderson, 2000; Barnett, 1998; Bondi, 1999; Kingsbury and
Jones, 2008). But as the exciting work in this collection and elsewhere makes clear, interest
in minor theory and the minor as such has picked up in the last couple of years in
gratifying and compelling ways, and the stretch toward micropolitics is inviting.
Crucially, minor theory and micropolitics were the themes for the 2015 Annual Meeting
of the (then) Association of American Geographers panel upon which this forum is based.
In a parallel universe, the editors of Society and Space had thoughts of organizing a
‘classics revisited’ forum on minor theory. From where I stood, the proposed forum
didn’t so much seem a revisit (or a classic) as just a visit. Incredibly exciting
nonetheless. Elsewhere, ‘minor theory’ was the theme of the 2015 Critical Geography
Mini Conference at University of Kentucky, while a master’s design studio at Yale that
same year was focused on ‘minor architecture’.
These convergences have spurred me to ask, what might underlie this surgence of interest.
What political, social, cultural relations and conditions of the present in geography and in
the worlds we inhabit and engage might be calling forth this sort of analysis? What
possibilities does minor theory offer for thinking and acting differently in the face of
growing economic inequality at all scales, persistent and increasingly exposed violence
against people of colour, intensifying environmental crises, joblessness, and social
relations of production and reproduction that remain exploitive and oppressive in their
598 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35(4)

articulations of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Is it useful to think about and try to
construct alternative subjectivities, spatialities and temporalities under these conditions?
If the minor is ‘charged with political immediacy and possibility’, as the Critical
Geography Conference call put it, what does that mean for practice, including the
production of knowledge? The essays in this collection provide creative and compelling
answers to that question.
The draw for me in thinking about—and doing—minor theory was its intent to use major
forms in an altered and decomposing way, to undo these forms, practices, and theories from
within. It’s a situated politics of refusal but also of producing ruptures and what Deleuze and
Guattari call ‘lines of escape’ so that something else is possible, happens, is glimpsed from
the interstices, nudged fleetingly into place, or shoved lastingly. To do minor theory is to
make conscious use of displacement—of not being at home or of being between homes—so
that new subjectivities, spatialities, and temporalities might be marked and produced in
spaces of betweenness that reveal the limits of the major as it is transformed along with
the minor. Working in a minor theoretical mode is to recognize that those subjectivities,
spatialities, temporalities are embodied, situated, and fluid; their productions of knowledge
inseparable from—if not completely absorbed in—the mess of everyday life.
Minor theory is not a distinct body of theory, but rather a way of doing theory differently,
of working inside out, of fugitive moves and emergent practices interstitial with ‘major’
productions of knowledge. Working this way may exceed the major but does not leave it
behind. Minor theory questions major theory and celebrates its distinctions from it, but its
moves also alter the constitution and constructions of major theory. Indeed, my recognizing
the forms, practices, and politics of minor theory was a way of situating myself, and so many
others, as players in the field, and not in a ‘minor’ league. Paraphrasing Andrew Barry’s
quotation from Deleuze and Guattari (1986), the intent was and remains to recognize and
release a multitude of ‘whole other stories vibrating within’ the claims and arguments of
major theory. The beat goes on. At the 2017 Annual Meeting of the (now) American
Association of Geographers, there were two parallel (competing?) series of sessions:
six threaded sessions on planetary urbanization and five others offering a range of critical
voices from ‘another planet.’ The vibrations of the latter struck responsive chords in
the sessions’ large and diverse audiences. Felt or not in those other sessions a day
apart and doors away, the multiple and varied stories vibrating within planetary
urbanization alter their claims in important ways. For instance, as Cristina Temenos
suggests here, relational urbanism, in its attentiveness to the particularities of power’s
effects in place, might be construed as a form of minor theory that works in, through,
and against the universalizing theoretical assumptions of planetary urbanization. And that
theoretical work alters and is attentive to the terrains of possible practice.
The current crises of racial capitalism, of the Anthropocene, of state and domestic
violence are crises of social reproduction, experienced in and through the body, on the
street, in the home, in schools, prison cells, and detention centers. The insecurities spurred
by these crises and their effects are visceral and sprawling. They are of course structural, but
they are encountered and made sensible in everyday life. The intimate effects of dispossession
are global, and it may be that galvanizing effective responses to them must travel similar
circuits. Major theory may try to explain the political economic and social contours and
effects of racial capitalism or patriarchy and offer analyses of how these relations of
production and reproduction take their tolls in violence, dispossession, accumulation, and
all manner of interconnected uneven developments, but more often than not it is a broad
brushstroke analysis that doesn’t illuminate much about how these social relations work—let
alone how they feel. Indexing the ways these problems are encountered and lived,
Katz 599

refused and reimagined in different forms, places and scales might enable the construction of
assemblages that work the relays among these forms of exploitation, violence, oppression,
and offer new means to respond to them. Minor theory can work these connections, opening
up spaces that do not deny the power of capitalist social relations of production and
reproduction—or the theories that explain them—but which may reveal their limits in
ways that suggest new means to undo them. It really is no longer enough—and never
was—to analyze the production and expropriation of value, the dialectic of accumulation
by dispossession, or the flows of capital and labour. Though such analyses are crucial at
every turn of capitalism’s screw, it is also necessary to understand the concrete nature of
these abstract social relations. Minor theory attends to the differentiated concrete realms in
which gendered racial capitalism is encountered, known, and felt. It gets at the fear and
insecurity that help keep the structures of capitalism in place, the myriad cultural forms and
practices that secure hegemony, and the relays that connect these structures and might
undo them. Just as minor theory undoes the major from within and works to keep ‘active
and creative as part of collective conditions,’ so might its attention to the material social
practices through which hegemony is secured in everyday life help mobilize a lithe
and powerful response able to resist, rework, and undo those social relations and
practices (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 86). Maybe even, inspired by Secor and Linz,
‘create new pluriverses.’

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

References
Anderson K (2000) Thinking ‘‘Postnationally’’: Dialogue across multicultural, indigenous, and settler
spaces. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90(2): 381–391.
Barnett C (1998) The cultural turn: Fashion or progress in human geography? Antipode 30(4): 379–394.
Bondi L (1999) Stages on journeys: Some remarks about human geography and psychotherapeutic
practice. Professional Geography 51(1): 11–24.
Deleuze G and Guattari F (1986) Kafka Toward a Minor Literature. (Polan D Trans.) Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Gunning T (1991) Towards a minor cinema. Motion Picture 4: 2–5.
Katz C (1996) Towards minor theory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14: 487–499.
Kingsbury P and Jones JP (2009) Walter Benjamin’s Dionysian adventures on google earth. Geoforum
40(4): 502–513.
Povinelli EA (2011) Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Cindi Katz teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where she
chairs the Earth and Environmental Science Doctoral Program. She is working on a book
about ‘Childhood as Spectacle’ and a collection of her essays on social reproduction.