For a Pragmatics of the Useless

For a Pragmatics of the Useless PDF Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012595
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
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.

For a Pragmatics of the Useless

For a Pragmatics of the Useless PDF Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012595
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Thought in the Act

Thought in the Act PDF Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452942293
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
“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.

Always More Than One

Always More Than One PDF Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822395827
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
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?

The Perfect Mango

The Perfect Mango PDF Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 195019213X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
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)

The Minor Gesture

The Minor Gesture PDF Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374412
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In this wide-ranging and probing book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception." Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's far-reaching analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward.

The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics

The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics PDF Author: Michael Haugh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108957390
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1009

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Book Description
Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study. Bringing together an international team of leading editors and contributors, it provides a comprehensive, cutting-edge overview of the key concepts, topics, settings and methodologies involved in sociopragmatic research. The chapters are organised in a systematic fashion, and span a wide range of theoretical research on how language communicates multiple meanings in context, how it influences our daily interactions and relationships with others, and how it helps construct our social worlds. Providing insight into a fascinating array of phenomena and novel research directions, the Handbook is not only relevant to experts of pragmatics but to any reader with an interest in language and its use in different contexts, including researchers in sociology, anthropology and communication, and students of applied linguistics and related areas, as well as professional practitioners in communication research.

On Understanding Grammar

On Understanding Grammar PDF Author: Talmy Givón
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 1483259935
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
On Understanding Grammar covers the interdependencies among the various aspects of linguistics and the human language. This eight-chapter text considers some pertinent topics in linguistics, such as discourse-pragmatics, diachronic syntax, topology, creology, method, and ontology. Chapter 1 describes the notions of fact, theory, and explanation, particularly about how these notions manifest themselves in actual practice. Chapter 2 redefines syntax in terms of communicative function and discourse-pragmatics, and about the relation between the function of grammatical devices and their formal properties. Chapter 3 deals with discourse-pragmatics and how it transcends the narrow bounds of deductive logic, as well as the function and ontology of negation in language, and how those relate to the fundamental information-theoretic principle of figure versus ground. Chapter 4 explores the two major aspects of case systems, namely, the semantic role and pragmatic function, and how the two interact in determining the typological characteristics of grammars. Chapter 5 examines the relation between discourse and syntax based on diachronic, ontogenetic, phylogenetic viewpoints. Chapter 6 tackles the relation between synchronic grammar and diachronic change, while Chapter 7 describes the relationship between human language and its phylogenetic evolution. Chapter 8 is about language and ontology, as well as the relation between cognition and the universe. This book will prove useful to linguistics and language researchers.

Propositions in the Making

Propositions in the Making PDF Author: Roland Faber
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793612579
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
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.”

Plenum

Plenum PDF Author: Geoffreyjen Edwards
Publisher: Untimely Books
ISBN: 9780971663565
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
A young star gardener embarks on a religious pilgrimage in this debut space opera. (Kirkus Reviews)

Taunting the Useful

Taunting the Useful PDF Author: Loumille Métros
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1685711111
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In an epoch driven by hyper-consumption and marvelously destructive futility, and in the context of a hegemonic utilitarianism where one goes to university to work rather than to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” the concept of the useful is perhaps one most in need of interrogation. Taunting the Useful seeks to unsettle notions of usefulness and uselessness, not merely by deconstructing these terms, but by sidetracking them. It doesn’t reverse things by saying that what is useless is useful. Rather, taunting is teasing, heckling, tickling, scratching the useful. By elaborating a notion of the “virtual useless,” Taunting the Useful seeks to tease the dimensions of wonder, use, and play, through modalities, contingencies, and potentialities of the useless-useful. An experimental book, it (un)does what it tells, and is as much an object taunting and taunted as it is a description of taunting the useful. Includes bonus chapters!