In their influential 1975 extended essay, subtitled Pour une littérature mineure, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari closely read Franz Kafka's practice of literary and extra-literary writing as an example of how "major language" can be deterritorialised by someone using naturalistic language in a way that resists definitive interpretation and so refuses to be reterritorialised. They call this process "becoming minor": a process that proposes 'lines of flight' from within the major territory and that, in doing so, signals the possibility of different forms of collective voice. In aid of their argument, the essay traverses Kafka's work as if it were all one literary body, citing his journals, letters, stories, and novels, jumping back-and-forth in chronology, genre, and audience, quoting lots of little moments of resistance rather than any longer, expository passages.
Head Over Heels and Away was first made for a show at the Dick Smith Gallery in London, 2006. Aggregating quotations from Kafka (in English translation), this montaged text exaggerates those qualities of Kafka's writing that have come to signify 'the kafkaesque', over-stretching Walter Benjamin's 1934 observation that, "There are two ways to miss the point of Kafka's work."
The compiled text was typeset across eight book'ish pages, folded and trimmed as a loose-leaf signature, playing with the impression that it had somehow resisted being bound into the paperback edition of Kafka's complete works – which it mimicked the paper, dimensions, and layout of – or had fallen from its binding. Copies of this first print edition were free-to-take from the gallery and became supplements to an extended installation of the work at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. There, the same text was typeset in vinyl lettering to fill to all six panes of a large bay window. This window, in turn, faced the brick wall of the adjacent building, blocking the panoramic view toward the city and creating a blockage-as-backdrop to the reading experience.
Two further translations of the piece have since been exhibited, one in German with Pamela Rosenkranz in Bern (2006) and a second in Czech with Jaroslav Anděl in Prague (2010).
