Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374412
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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.
Thought in the Act
Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452942293
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452942293
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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
Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822395827
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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?
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822395827
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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?
Gesture
Author: Adam Kendon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316264939
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 609
Book Description
Gesture, or visible bodily action that is seen as intimately involved in the activity of speaking, has long fascinated scholars and laymen alike. Written by a leading authority on the subject, this 2004 study provides a comprehensive treatment of gesture and its use in interaction, drawing on the analysis of everyday conversations to demonstrate its varied role in the construction of utterances. Adam Kendon accompanies his analyses with an extended discussion of the history of the study of gesture - a topic not dealt with in any previous publication - as well as exploring the relationship between gesture and sign language, and how the use of gesture varies according to cultural and language differences. Set to become the definitive account of the topic, Gesture will be invaluable to all those interested in human communication. Its publication marks a major development, both in semiotics and in the emerging field of gesture studies.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316264939
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 609
Book Description
Gesture, or visible bodily action that is seen as intimately involved in the activity of speaking, has long fascinated scholars and laymen alike. Written by a leading authority on the subject, this 2004 study provides a comprehensive treatment of gesture and its use in interaction, drawing on the analysis of everyday conversations to demonstrate its varied role in the construction of utterances. Adam Kendon accompanies his analyses with an extended discussion of the history of the study of gesture - a topic not dealt with in any previous publication - as well as exploring the relationship between gesture and sign language, and how the use of gesture varies according to cultural and language differences. Set to become the definitive account of the topic, Gesture will be invaluable to all those interested in human communication. Its publication marks a major development, both in semiotics and in the emerging field of gesture studies.
For a Pragmatics of the Useless
Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012595
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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.
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012595
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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.
Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome
Author: Gregory S. Aldrete
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801877315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Life in Rome was relentlessly public, and oratory was at its heart. Orations were dramatic spectacles in which the speaker deployed an arsenal of rhetorical tricks and strategies aimed at arousing the emotions of the audience, and spectators responded vigorously and vocally with massed chants of praise or condemnation. Unfortunately, many aspects of these performances have been lost. In the first in-depth study of oratorical gestures and crowd acclamations as methods of communication at public spectacles, Gregory Aldrete sets out to recreate these vital missing components and to recapture the original context of ancient spectacles as interactive, dramatic, and contentious public performances. At the most basic level, this work is a study of communication—how Roman speakers communicated with their audiences, and how audiences in turn were able to reply and convey their reactions to the speakers. Aldrete begins by investigating how orators employed an extraordinarily sophisticated system of hand and body gestures in order to enhance the persuasive power of their speeches. He then turns to the target of these orations—the audience—and examines how they responded through the mechanism of acclamations, that is, rhythmically shouted comments. Aldrete finds much in these ancient spectacles that is relevant to modern questions of political propaganda, manipulation of public image, crowd behavior, and speechmaking. Readers with an interest in rhetoric, urban culture, or communications in any period will find the book informative, as will those working in art history, archaeology, history, and philology.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801877315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Life in Rome was relentlessly public, and oratory was at its heart. Orations were dramatic spectacles in which the speaker deployed an arsenal of rhetorical tricks and strategies aimed at arousing the emotions of the audience, and spectators responded vigorously and vocally with massed chants of praise or condemnation. Unfortunately, many aspects of these performances have been lost. In the first in-depth study of oratorical gestures and crowd acclamations as methods of communication at public spectacles, Gregory Aldrete sets out to recreate these vital missing components and to recapture the original context of ancient spectacles as interactive, dramatic, and contentious public performances. At the most basic level, this work is a study of communication—how Roman speakers communicated with their audiences, and how audiences in turn were able to reply and convey their reactions to the speakers. Aldrete begins by investigating how orators employed an extraordinarily sophisticated system of hand and body gestures in order to enhance the persuasive power of their speeches. He then turns to the target of these orations—the audience—and examines how they responded through the mechanism of acclamations, that is, rhythmically shouted comments. Aldrete finds much in these ancient spectacles that is relevant to modern questions of political propaganda, manipulation of public image, crowd behavior, and speechmaking. Readers with an interest in rhetoric, urban culture, or communications in any period will find the book informative, as will those working in art history, archaeology, history, and philology.
Relationscapes
Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262518007
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279
Book Description
A new philosophy of movement that explores the active relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media. With Relationscapes, Erin Manning offers a new philosophy of movement challenging the idea that movement is simple displacement in space, knowable only in terms of the actual. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, Manning argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity—the incipiency at the heart of movement—Manning develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates relational intervals out of which displacements take form. Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, Manning describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. She examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren (drawing on Bergson's idea of duration), and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Turning to language, Manning proposes a theory of prearticulation claiming that language's affective force depends on a concept of thought in motion. Relationscapes takes a “Whiteheadian perspective,” recognizing Whitehead's importance and his influence on process philosophers of the late twentieth century—Deleuze and Guattari in particular. It will be of special interest to scholars in new media, philosophy, dance studies, film theory, and art history.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262518007
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279
Book Description
A new philosophy of movement that explores the active relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media. With Relationscapes, Erin Manning offers a new philosophy of movement challenging the idea that movement is simple displacement in space, knowable only in terms of the actual. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, Manning argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity—the incipiency at the heart of movement—Manning develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates relational intervals out of which displacements take form. Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, Manning describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. She examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren (drawing on Bergson's idea of duration), and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Turning to language, Manning proposes a theory of prearticulation claiming that language's affective force depends on a concept of thought in motion. Relationscapes takes a “Whiteheadian perspective,” recognizing Whitehead's importance and his influence on process philosophers of the late twentieth century—Deleuze and Guattari in particular. It will be of special interest to scholars in new media, philosophy, dance studies, film theory, and art history.
The Perfect Mango
Author: Erin Manning
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 195019213X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 158
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)
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 195019213X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 158
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)