For A Pragmatics Of The Useless

What has a use in the future, unforeseeably, is radically useless now. What has an effect now is not necessarily useful if it falls through the gaps. In For a Pragmatics of the Useless Erin Manning examines what falls outside the purview of already-known functions and established standards of value, not for want of potential but for carrying an excess of it. The figures are various: the infrathin, the artful, proprioceptive tactility, neurodiversity, black life. It is around the latter two that a central refrain echoes: "All black life is neurodiverse life." This is not an equation, but an "approximation of proximity." Manning shows how neurotypicality and whiteness combine to form a normative baseline for existence. Blackness and neurodiversity "schizz" around the baseline, uselessly, pragmatically, figuring a more-than of life living. Manning, in dialogue with Félix Guattari and drawing on the black radical tradition's accounts of black life and the aesthetics of black sociality, proposes a "schizoanalysis" of the more-than, charting a panoply of techniques for other ways of living and learning.

In this cutting-edge volume, scholars from around the world connect affect theory to the field of literacy studies and unpack the role and influence of this emerging area of scholarship on literacy education. Offering an introduction to affect theory and scholarship as it relates to literacy studies, contributors discuss the role of humanizing and dehumanizing influences on schooling and examine the emotional and affective dimensions at individual and communal levels. Arguing that an affective turn requires a radical rethinking of the nature of literacy, these chapters address the impact and import of emotion and affect on reading, writing and calling to action. Grounded in trailblazing research, the contributors push the boundaries of academic writing and model how theoretically-driven writing about affect must itself be moving and expressive.

How do we make ourselves a Whiteheadian proposition? This question exposes the multivalent connections between postmodern thought and Whitehead’s philosophy, with particular attention to his understanding of propositions. Edited by Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Andrew M. Davis, Propositions in the Making articulates the newest reaches of Whiteheadian propositions for a postmodern world. It does so by activating interdisciplinary lures of feeling, living, and co-creating the world anew. Rather than a “logical assertion,” Whitehead described a proposition as a “lure for feeling” for a collectivity to come. It cannot be reduced to the verbal content of logical justifications, but rather the feeling content of aesthetic valuations. In creatively expressing these propositions in wide relevance to existential, ethical, educational, theological, aesthetic, technological, and societal concerns, the contributors to this volume enact nothing short of “a Whiteheadian Laboratory.”

In Always More Than One, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work toward the notion of "choreographic thinking." Here, she uses choreographic thinking to explore a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established categories. Manning connects this to the concept of "autistic perception," described by autistics as the awareness of a relational field prior to the so-called neurotypical tendency to "chunk" experience into predetermined subjects and objects. Autistics explain that, rather than immediately distinguishing objects—such as chairs and tables and humans—from one another on entering a given environment, they experience the environment as gradually taking form. Manning maintains that this mode of awareness underlies all perception. What we perceive is never first a subject or an object, but an ecology. From this vantage point, she proposes that we consider an ecological politics where movement and relation take precedence over predefined categories, such as the neurotypical and the neurodiverse, or the human and the nonhuman. What would it mean to embrace an ecological politics of collective individuation?

“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from Thought in the Act Combining philosophy and aesthetics, Thought in the Act is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art. Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. Thought in the Act enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics.

Explores the cosmological and metaphysical thought in the Zhuangzi from the perspective of nothingness. Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness offers a radical rereading of the Daoist classic Zhuangzi by bringing to light the role of nothingness in grounding the cosmological and metaphysical aspects of its thought. Through a careful analysis of the text and its appended commentaries, David Chai reveals not only how nothingness physically enriches the myriad things of the world, but also why the Zhuangzi prefers nothingness over being as a means to expound the authentic way of Dao. Chai weaves together Dao, nothingness, and being in order to reassess the nature and significance of Daoist philosophy, both within its own historical milieu and for modern readers interested in applying the principles of Daoism to their own lived experiences. Chai concludes that nothingness is neither a nihilistic force nor an existential threat; instead, it is a vital component of Dao’s creative power and the life-praxis of the sage. “Chai provides an elaborate philosophical meontological interpretation of the ontology/cosmology found in the Zhuangzi and the implications for existential practice. It’s a close, careful, but in many respects quite original reading of the classic that contributes significantly to the field of philosophical Daoist studies.” — Geir Sigurðsson, author of Confucian Propriety and Ritual Learning: A Philosophical Interpretation

Impact/Impasse argues for the value of everyday life in college classrooms. Quantifiable categories such as high-impact practice, student engagement, and integrative learning have captured the imagination of a generation of higher education researchers, practitioners, administrators, and policymakers. But they miss those mundane moments, or "impasses," that resist capture by metrics while nevertheless shaping student outcomes. Impact/Impasse blends critical theories and ethnographic research—conducted before and during the COVID-19 pandemic—to argue that learning happens in ordinary moments. Indeed, in sharing anecdotes from both in-person and virtual classrooms, the coauthors show how the so-called new normal is little different from the old in its neoliberal attachment to data. Impact/Impasse provides a conceptual and practical foundation for an alternative approach to valuing impacts on their own terms, in excess of quantification.

In 1994, at the age of twenty-five, when the "terrible brokenness that comes with sexual assault" was folded deep within her body and thoughts of suicide were always close by, Erin Manning wrote The Perfect Mango at an almost feverish pitch: nineteen chapters in nineteen days, a sort of self-rescue operation, where writing became a form of making (and feeling) life otherwise. Throughout those nineteen days, and although not able to fully articulate it to herself at the time, Manning wrote her way into a "composition that asks how else life might be lived." And in the rhythms of that composition, which was also a living, Manning was, and is, able to refuse the category and norm and stillness of "victim" (while still understanding the inheritances of violence) in order to follow instead the more-than-I as well as the joy of the "more-than of experience in the making." Twenty-five years later, Manning allows these earlier writings to find their way back into the world, which is also a way of giving "voice to those moments of messy survival" while also asking us, who share in (and help to bear) those moments as readers, to consider "other ways of listening to the urgency that is living." To (re)publish the book now is to give it a place in the world in a way that honors its force as something that is always beyond anyone's claim to it, even Manning's. In this sense, The Perfect Mango invites us, with Manning, to be in excess of ourselves, and also to consider, in Manning's words, "how to create conditions for living beyond humanism's fierce belief that we, the privileged, the neurotypicals, the as-yet-unscathed, the able-bodied, hold the key to all perspectives in the theatre of living." Ultimately, The Perfect Mango and Manning's reflections on its composition ask us to consider living "in the fierce celebration of a world invented by those modes of life which tear at the colonial, white, neurotypical fabric of life as we know it." "The Perfect Mango is a book about the body, about learning to see it as an entity that has no end, something that is never permanently marked by the violence of history, that can swim into a new skin. The sexual trauma that haunts this book is being painted and purged across its pages, and the young woman who refuses to remain caught in the capture of trauma is also learning to feed herself, to become a body-being that will endure in new forms and through new forms of mutual making. I know this girl, for she is many. I love this girl, as I love us all-we misfits whose hurt provokes us to live through other styles and modes of becoming-together." (Julietta Singh, "Afterward," The Perfect Mango) "How to confront victimization, while refusing the role of the victim? How, after trauma and abuse, can one regain a sense of life's possibilities and plunge headlong into their pursuit, without defensively hardening the boundaries of the self? Without immunizing it against the outside, knowing that it is in the great outside of the world's roil and commotion that potential radically resides - tooth-to-jowl with continued danger? How to grapple with the horrors of the past, without paradoxically binding oneself to them in a Sisyphian attempt to exorcize them through feats of memory and analysis (terminable or interminable)? How, not to own the past, but repossess the future of that past? In The Perfect Mango, Erin Manning charts a path of resistance, resilience, and journeying toward health that is starkly different from the currently dominant identity-based strategies. She writes survival, in what can best be described as a fabulatory autobiography that is rooted in real events but opens them up to each other, and out to a different future. The path is signposted with a motto, implicit here, subsequently expressed in the title of one of her works of philosophy: always more than one. If this is me ... what else? If this is life ... once more!" (Brian Massumi)