Overview

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.

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9780822361213

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Reviews

How can we voice the unsayable, unsettle the categorical, reach for that which lies beyond conceptualization? How can we enter that midstream of movement, becoming and differentiation, which courses between the banks of the given, yet from which all perceiving, doing and thinking wells? In this passionate book, Erin Manning answers: by heeding the wisdom of those whom the majority call 'autistic.' From their experience she derives a vocabulary of attention, inflection, directionality, incipience, sympathy and the undercommons that carries forth the impetus of life in the minor key. This is a book for scholars, for activists, indeed for anyone in love with life. --Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen

I have been enthralled and held by this book! Erin Manning has given us a new theory of bearing, as well as a new elaboration of gesture, going beyond Balzac's theory and Agamben's interpretation of it. She doesn't lament the loss of gesture but celebrates gesture's minoritization. -- Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition How can we voice the unsayable, unsettle the categorical, reach for that which lies beyond conceptualization? How can we enter that midstream of movement, becoming and differentiation, which courses between the banks of the given, yet from which all perceiving, doing and thinking wells? In this passionate book, Erin Manning answers: by heeding the wisdom of those whom the majority call 'autistic.' From their experience she derives a vocabulary-of attention, inflection, directionality, incipience, sympathy and the undercommons-that carries forth the impetus of life in the minor key. This is a book for scholars, for activists, indeed for anyone in love with life. -- Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen

I have been enthralled and held by this book! Erin Manning has given us a new theory of bearing, as well as a new elaboration of gesture, going beyond Balzac s theory and Agamben s interpretation of it. She doesn t lament the loss of gesture but celebrates gesture's minoritization. --Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

Author Information

Erin Manning is University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including Always More Than One: Individuation's Dance, also published by Duke University Press. 

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