In chapter 4 of "A Thousand Plateaus," Deleuze & Guattari make important distinctions about the concepts of major and minor w/r/t both language and politics:

1> For them, the distinction between majority and minority is not quantitative, but qualitative. To the extent something or someone approaches an official norm, it is treated as a majority. To the extent it deviates from this norm, it is viewed as a minority.

This explains how white men can be viewed as a "majority" even in contexts where this is not quantitatively the case:

"Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it. Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language . . . It is obvious that "man" holds the majority, even if he is less numerous than mosquitoes, children, women, blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc." 105

2> Major and minor represent two different approaches to a fundamental, underlying variability: extracting a normative abstract standard from it (majoritarian), or subjecting any such standards to continuous variation (minoritarian).

3> To the extent people approach abstract norms, they become "Nobody."

A couple of (my) examples: to the extent that various European ethnicities became "white," they became blanched of any particularity or specificity. As an official standard instead of being viewed as a specific ethnicity, whiteness promotes a kind of anonymity, blankness instead of specificity. Similarly, the Western male business suit (or frat boys in white T-shirts and ball caps) have a kind of interchangeability that women's more colorful dresses do not.

4> Consequently, to become-minor is to become more specific and singular: "For the majority, insofar as it is analytically included in the abstract standard, is never anybody, it is always Nobody—Ulysses—whereas the minority is the becoming of everybody, one’s potential becoming to the extent that one deviates from the model." 105

So, we get the majoritarian, minorities, and the minoritarian:

"There is a majoritarian 'fact,' but it is the analytic fact of Nobody, as opposed to the becoming-minoritarian of everybody. That is why we must distinguish between:

[1>] the majoritarian as a constant and homogeneous system;
[2>] minorities as subsystems;
[3>] and the minoritarian as potential, creative and created, becoming." 105-6

I believe that by describing a breakdown of majoritarian standards (for superheroes, for WhAnglo men), Watchmen raises just such minoritarian possibilities.

backward on this thread	forward on this thread

Notes

Take me to the Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Brian Massumi, Trans. Minneapolis: U of Minn P, 1987.