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RB: Well, I’m interested in this notion from Massumi and Deleuze and Guattari about the reterritorialisation of such groups and how they become what Massumi calls just another slot in the grid… he says just because they’re in between doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re revolutionary…
HB: Nobody is necessarily revolutionary. That’s the whole problem. And sometimes you don’t know for a while whether something’s going to have a revolutionary impact. Can you imagine 50 years ago if somebody said “do you think any very traditional Muslims would perform an act costing $200,000, with the cost of cleaning up $40 billion, will make such a difference in the city of New York that the whole psyche of the American nation will change? Nobody would be able to say that. Now this may not be revolutionary in a progressive sense, but nobody… so you can never know how these things work out. The assessment of change is a wager with temporality. (aside) This is not for this, this is for you and me. And somehow we always seem to think we know the time within which we will be able to measure a change.
Yeah, my own work I think wants to inhabit these interstitial spaces longer than say Deleuze and Guattari or say, Massumi and to see what its effects are as an intervention.
RB: Okay, so now we’re into my work a little too. I think I’m starting to see on the Internet nascent collectivity formations and intersecting communities that are about inhabiting interstitial spaces.
HB: Yes, you’re right.
RB: Could you comment on that?
HB: Yeah, I would. I can. I think that is precisely one of the things that I have been talking about. That the technology, the form of mediation if you like , that is the Internet, is if you think about it, precisely the kind of interstitial space I’ve tried to describe. It is neither a fully public sphere nor is it a private sphere, it allows for a certain kind of artifice of identity so that it doesn’t ask you authentically to be yourself. It never asks you that question. It assumes that you can present yourself as you want. It does not have a notion that if you participate in the Communist party then you are, you know, every molecule, every germ in your body is somehow that, it allows for a much more fluid and transitional form of identification. The Internet is really not like a nation, you know what I mean, and there has been a way in which productive resistance, even on the left, has always been identified with groups who will constitute themselves like a nation. I was thinking on the plane yesterday that the process of minoritisation which I see very much in terms of the… what’s happening on the Internet is that people are forming minority groups or collectivities not because they want to be majorities, not because they even see that is the way to be — you know there was a whole bit in the paper for tomorrow which I took out because I don’t have time to talk about it, where I trace this back to W.E.B. DuBois.
RB: Oh, could you send me that bit?
HB: I will. Send me an e-mail and I’ll send you that.
Minoritisation is now not to be set up against the majority, it’s a different way of identifying with political change and effecting political change. The desire to be a minority, so this is different from the Hannah Arendt post-1945 position that those are minorities and those that don’t have nations to belong to, that this is a different way of understanding historical change.
RB: It’s deterritorialised, in that it’s not connected to land…
HB: No, it’s not connected to land, although tomorrow I will say something about the reason why first nations peoples and African-American reparation arguments — it’s just a line — are treated as terribly threatening because they are about land now. And so now that’s a new threat.
RB: And indigenous Australians too.
HB: Yes, and I mention that too. And I quote Kim Scott. So I think that there is another issue there. But I think it’s very complex, but I think that the whole question of deterritorialisation theoretically in Deleuze and Guattari, with great respect, needs conceptually, more ballast to it. I very rarely refer to Deleuze and Guattari in my work. That’s not because I’m antithetical, I think that they’re most interesting, but even in the essay on minority literatures, but there’s something that is too easy there in this notion of deterritorialisation. I think that the real agonistic struggles that are involved in moving from nation to post-nation to what I’m calling minoritisation is not adequately faced.