@book{manning2016minor,
title={The Minor Gesture},
author={Manning, E.},
isbn={9780822374411},
lccn={2015048953},
series={Thought in the Act},
url={https://books.google.co.cr/books?id=01gqDAAAQBAJ},
year={2016},
publisher={Duke University Press}
}
In openlibrary.
My highlights:
It is easier to identify major shifts than to catalogue the nuanced rhythms of the minor. These rhythms are narrated as secondary, or even negligible.
Indeterminacy, because of its wildness, is often seen as unrigorous, flimsy, its lack of solidity mistaken for a lack of consistency. It is out of time, untimely, rhythmically inventing its own pulse. It isn’t known in advance. Speculative. Invents its own value, ungraspable, and often unrecognizable.
It is urgent to turn away from the notion that it is the human agent, the intentional, volitional subject, who determines what comes to be. It is urgent to turn away from the central tenet of neurotypicality, the wideranging belief that there is an independence of thought and being attributable above all to human, a betterthanness accorded to our neurology (a neurology, it must be said, that reeks of whiteness, and classism).
Neurotypicality, as a central but generally unspoken identity politics, frames our idea of which lives are worth fighting for, which lives are worth educating, which lives are worth living, and which lives are worth saving. Neurotypicality tells us what is in our best interest, and we tend to accept it wholesale. Neurotypicality as foundational identity politics is rarely named as such.
What we mean by independence, by intelligence, by knowledge? We have already been classed as lessthan, as less educable, as less desirable, as less knowledgeable, as less valuable. We have already been situated, aligned in opposition to the dominant ideal of life, to the majoritarian discourse of neurotypicality, and we fall short.
The neurotypical stages the encounter with life in such a way as to exclude what cannot fit within its order, and blackness, or what Moten describes as “ black sociality,” always ultimately exceeds capture.
I don’t think [the policeman] meant to violate the individual personhood of Michael Brown, he was shooting at mobile Black sociality walking down the street in a way that he understood implicitly constituted a threat to the order he represents and that he is sworn to protect. Insurgent Black life is neurodiverse through and through.
To honor complex forms of interdependence and to create modes of encounter for that difference. They not only want to be seen as valuable in their difference, they also want their need for facilitation to be seen as a necessary and honored aspect of social life. The neurodiversity movement celebrates the relational force of facilitation broadly defined.
The neurotypical, as real contributor to society and to humanity in general, is strongly paired with a notion of independence understood according to normative definitions of ability and ablebodiedness. "normopathy” continues to rule, reducing the importance of relation by placing facilitation on the side of lack: those who need facilitation demonstrate a lack of intelligence, lack of will, a lack of agency.
The neurotypical does not need assistance, does not need accommodation, and certainly does not need facilitation. The neurotypical is independent",
To compose with the minor gesture requires the prudence of the experimenter, a prudence awake to the speculative pragmatism. It is a tentativeness in the act that jumps at the chance to discover what else the event can do. The register of the minor gesture is always political, the minor gesture invents new modes of lifeliving.
"Lifeliving in its usage throughout refuses to privilege this life, this human life, at the expense of different forms and forces of life, even as it recognizes the importance of the punctuality of this singular event we call our life. Asking at every juncture what else life could be.
The undercommons is an emergent collectivity that is sited in the encounter. Its speculative presence as an ecology of practices. a tentative holding in place of fragile comingsintorelation, physical and virtual, that create the potential to reorient fields of".
Neurotypicality involves a hierarchization of knowledge, normative forms of instruction and segregates knowledge according to accepted ideas of what serves society best. Most accepted approaches to learning assume neurotypicality, predefining what counts as knowledge. The university thrives on a belief that knowledge can be encapsulated and marketed. Funding for the humanities, social sciences, the theoretical sciences, and studio arts is continuously under threat due to their so-called uselessness in the economic marketplace. In order to get grants, scholars and artists within the university are asked to frame their own work according to perceived usevalue. Often acting against the very openings learning can facilitate.
In the undercommons it is ‘no questions asked’. What if knowledge were not assumed to have a form already? What if we didn’t yet know what needed to be taught, let alone questioned? The undercommons opens the way for the crafting of problems greater than their solutions. Most academic questions are of the solvable, unproblematic sort. To illuminate regions of thought through which problemswithoutsolutions can be intuited. We must be careful, though, in doing so, not to create false problems. False problems and badly stated questions maintain the status quo. Academic critique and debate are too often played out at the level of false problems and badly stated questions.
There is no way “of being intellectual that isn’t social.” It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. There is an explicit disavowal of method as generator of knowledge. Method is what seeks to capture the minor gesture, what seeks to capture study, and silence it. What emerges from study will never be an answer. What emerges will be patient experimentation.
Artful practices honor complex forms of knowing and are collective not because they are operated upon by several people, but because they make apparent, in the way they come to a problem, that knowledge at its core is collective.
Autistic perception is the opening, in perception, to the uncategorized, to the unclassified. Create ecologies before they coalesce into form. No hierarchical differentiation, for instance, between color, sound, light, between human and nonhuman, between what connects to the body and what connects to the world.
Most of us parse experience before having a direct experience of the field in its complexity. Altering rhythms, reducing our alignment to the homogeneity of capitalist speed. This is our habit: to make the work about us. When we do so, we set up conditions that are only generative as regards what we perceive as our own wellbeing. Place the subject, the human, in the position of agency, promoting the act in terms of the volitional thrust of our own intentionality. What if the act did not fully belong to us? Volitional movement understood as movement belonging to the subject and fully directed. We give a mechanical explanation of a fact, and then substitute the explanation for the fact itself.
Time is not a line along which one can pass again” and therefore “freedom must be sought in a certain shade or quality of the action itself and not in the relation of this act to what it is not or to what it might have been”. Freedom, for Bergson, is dynamic, ecological. Freedom is a quality of the act, an ethos in the act’s opening onto experience. Not all events are free, but in every event we find the germs of freedom. These germs must be tended, must be sown in ways that allow the act to create problems that will in turn generate modes of action, of activity, of activism that create new modes of existence. The minor gesture is a force for freedom.
States of consciousness, Bergson writes, “are processes and not things; . . . if we denote them each by a single word, it is for the convenience of language; that they are alive and therefore constantly changing; that, in consequence, it is impossible to cut off a moment from them without making them poorer by the loss of some impression, and thus altering their quality”. Minor gestures operate where language operates “ beneath the words,”. There is no perceptible difference, as Bergson says, “ between foreseeing, seeing and acting,”. The minor gesture can open the way for a different kind of knowing, For freedom is not to be found in the ordering of experience, in its measure, but in the dynamic intensity of the event’s unfolding. This unfolding affects us, moves us, directs us, but it does not belong to us.
Researchcreation, also called “artbased research,” more instrumental than inventive.
How art itself activates and constitutes new forms of knowledge in its own right? Inquire into the very question of how practices produce knowledge. It generates new forms of experience; it tremulously stages an encounter for disparate practices, giving them a conduit for collective expression; it generates forms of knowledge that are extralinguistic; proposes concrete assemblages for rethinking the very question of what is at stake in pedagogy, in practice, and in collective experimentation. It creates an opening for the undercommons. New ways of encountering study— forms and forces of intellectuality that cut across normative accounts of what it means to know. New forms of evaluation. New ways of valuing the work we do. Locating art not at the level of the finished object, but in its trajectory.
What we know is what can be abstracted from experience into a system of understanding that is decipherable precisely because its operations are muted by their having been taken out of their operational context. Radical empiricism begins in the midst, in the mess of relations not yet organized into terms such as “subject” and “object.” In this mess, everything that happens is real, experience is made up of more than what actually takes form. It is an occasion of experience, not the human subject external to that experience, that creates the conditions for subjectivity, a subjectivity that can never be disentangled from how the event came to fruition.
Despite decades of engagement in transdisciplinary thought, disciplines still tend to order knowledge according to specific understandings of what constitute proper methods, policing these methods through longstanding systems of peer and institutional review.
Method’s alignment to reason is about setting into place hierarchies of relevance whose work it is to include that which is seen to advance knowledge. Assuming in advance that we know what constitutes knowledge, Any ordering agenda that organizes from without is still active in the exclusion of processes too unintelligible within current understandings of knowledge to be recognized, let alone studied or valued. Knowledge tends to be relegated to the sphere of “conscious knowledge,” backgrounding the wealth of the relational field of experience in-forming. Method stops potential on its way, cutting into the process before it has had a chance to fully engage with the complex relational fields the process itself calls forth.
An event accounted for outside its own evolution is an event that has already been taken out of its liveness and organized within the bounds of preexisting forms of knowledge. Knowing is incipient to the experience at hand, actively felt but often indecipherable in linguistic terms, alive only in its rhythms, in its hesitations, in its stuttering.
"I” cannot be located in advance of the event, that the “I” is always in the midst, active in the relational field as one of the vectors of the in-act of experience.
A speculative pragmatism takes as its starting point a rigor of experimentation. It is interested in the anarchy at the heart of all process, and is engaged with the techniques that tune the anarchical toward new modes of knowledge and new modes of experience. It is also committed to what escapes the order, and interested in what this excess can do. It implicitly recognizes that knowledge is invented in the escape, in the excess.
The rigor must emerge from within the occasion of experience, from the event’s own stakes in its comingto-be. Technique is necessary. Speculative pragmatism means taking the work’s affirmation, its urge of appetition, at face value, asking what thoughtfeeling does in this instance, and how it does it. It means inquiring into the modes of existence generated by the act of “hypothetical sympathy,” honoring the minor gestures. Technique is necessary to the art of thought— to thought in the act— but it is not art in itself. Innate knowledge— intuition, speculation— is frowned upon within methodological approaches, unless they can somehow be quantified.
By inadvertently acknowledging that nonlinguistic practices are forms of knowledge in their own right, we face the hurdle that’s been with us all along: how do we evaluate process?
A metamodel, for Guattari, is a nonmodel that upsets existing formations of power and knowledge, challenging the tendency of models to “operate largely by exclusion and reduction, tightly circumscribing their applications and contact with heterogeneity”
In the undercommons, where emergent collectivity is the order of the day, appetition trumps nostalgia, inventing metamodels that experiment with how knowledge can and does escape instrumentality, bringing back an aesthetics of experience where it is needed most: in the field of learning. How does one model oneself?” . . . Schizoanalysis. How you get where you are is an operative question. What models model you? What else can be created, sympathetically, in the encounter? What kind of metamodeling is possible, in the event? How do we operate transversally to such capitalist capture? What new processes of valuation can be explored, and what will be the effect, for knowledge, of such experimentations?
At times, in retrospect, the process developed might seem like a method. But repeating it will never bring the process back. For techniques must be reinvented at every turn and thought must always leap.
Art, as a way of learning, acts as a bridge toward new processes, new pathways. Intuition as the art— the manner— in which the very conditions of experience are felt. art: the intuitive potential to activate the future in the specious present, to make the middling of experience felt where futurity and presentness coincide, to invoke the memory not of what was, but of what will be. Art, the memory of the future.
The art of time is not about definitions so much as about sensations, about the affective force of the making of time where “we are no longer beings but vibrations, effects of resonance, ‘tonalities’ of different amplitudes”. Nor is the art of time about economy, about marking the worthiness of a given experience, the usefulness of time spent. Art not as the form an object takes, but as the manner in which time is composed.
Essence for Deleuze speaks of the unquantifiable in experience, of that which exceeds the equivalence between sign and sense. “At the deepest level, the essential is in the signs of art”. What art can do is to bypass the object as such and make felt instead the dissonance, the dephasing, the complementarity of the between. Tuning into the art of time involves crafting techniques that open art to its minor gestures. It requires an attentiveness to the field in its formation. This attention is ecological, collective, in the event. It is a question of moving experience beyond the way it has a habit of taking, of discovering how the edges of lifeliving commingle with the force of that which cannot yet be perceived, but is nonetheless felt.
The individual is emergent, not preconstituted. The individual is how the event expresses itself, never what sets it in motion. When a process is delimited by the belief that there is a preexisting individual creating at its center, the collective becomes an afterthought. The participatory is left to the end, and with this, a decisive stage of the event is muted. Whether we are talking about the making of an artwork or the setting into place, through a process artfully in-act, of activist practices of emergent collectivity, what matters is less how the work defines itself than how it is capable of creating new conduits for expression and experimentation.
Participation is the yield in what Ruyer calls the “aesthetic yield.” It is the yield both in the sense that it gives direction to a process already under way and that it opens that process to the morethan of its form or content.
utistic perception, the direct participation, in the event, of its welling ecologies, is perhaps the most open register for the experience of the artful. For it is only when there is sympathy for the complexity of the welling event that the morethan of an emergent ecology can truly be perceived. When this happens, a shift is felt toward a sense of immanent movement— and the way at the heart of art is felt. It cuts through, merges with, captures, and dances with the human, but it is also and always morethan human, active in an ecology of resonances that are most readily perceived by the neurodiverse. The artful also does its work without human intervention, activating fields of relation that are environmental or ecological in scales of intermixings that may include the human but don’t depend on it.
Artfulness has no usevalue— it does nothing that can be mapped onto a process already under way. It has no end point, no preordained limits, no moral codes.
Every weather pattern includes a minor gesture. The minor gesture is the pulse of a differential that makes experience in its ecology felt.
Despite the ways the grand gesture overshadows the minor, minor gestures nonetheless course through all events. It is therefore less a question of placing one gesture against the other than it is of exploring what kinds of conditions foster the capture of the minor by the major. The focus here is not on how to “make” a minor gesture, or how to resist a grand gesture, but on how to develop techniques that allow the singularity of a gesture that opens the work to its workings to come to the fore, how to invent techniques that resist immediate capture by the major.
Wonder to what extent it is less the object that matters than the ritualized gestures that compose it, hour after hour, year after year? Ritual understood as the more formalized techniques carried through generations that mark rites of passage in a given culture, reorienting not only the individual but the collective as a whole. Rituality is the return, through repetition, to a task that, despite its habitual nature, is nonetheless capable of shifting the field of experience. Despite their adherence to the inheritance of the past, rituals are everchanging, altered by the conditions of futurities in the making. This potential, this force of form, is what is cared for by the community between rituals. A ritual object is always singularmultiple in the sense that even if it is used alone, it carries the force of the differential of all past rituals and all future rituals. What rituality does is activate. It does so outside of systems of value imposed on it from elsewhere: rituality is considered a practice precisely because it is capable of inventing forms of value emergent from the ritual itself.
Works that emerge out of an intuition that seeks to activate the art of time are works that trouble, complicate, nuance, embolden how experience is felt both for the human and beyond the human in the morethan human realm, the realm that connects to and composes with the human but is not limited to it. When the artwork exceeds its status as an object, when the work becomes relational rather than simply interactive, when there really is a sense that what is at stake is morethan the sum of the artwork’s parts, a minor gesture has been generated.
How can technology activate a field effect without making the field effect about the technology itself? A procedure must be crafted with care, must be relevant to the conditions already at hand, must be capable of activating the ecology of which it is part, must have enough longevity to leave a trace. More procedures fail than succeed. But this is part of their necessity, that they put us in the way of experimentation. Habits die hard, including our habits of reconstructing the alreadyknown.
Wellbeing and comfort too often keep us in the same place, a place we return to daily without much thought, a place that doesn’t encourage experimentation.
A procedural architecting must look at habit’s repetitive pathways to see how they subtly diverge from what is perceived as their assigned choreography, finding within repetition the difference that keeps habit inventive. To craft a procedure that is worldconstituting, the finetuning must occur in the event— it must be immanent to the event’s comingintoitself. These incipient directionalities will have the tendency, over time, to morph into habit. Much tweaking is necessary to find the right balance between the static and the chaotic.
We are accustomed to the act of excision, of subtraction. Parsing is what we neurotypicals are best at. Neurotypicals will not tend to be aware of this direct perception of experience except in extreme circumstances— shock, drug use, exhaustion— or perhaps in mindfulness exercises such as meditation.
There is no question that the world we live in is aligned to chunking, and that the quicker we get to perceiving objects and subjects, the easier the everyday is to manage. Neurotypical experience is built on a few key beliefs. First, ablebodiedness is taken for granted as the ideal starting point for existence. Second, independence is put forward based on the idea that selfsufficiency is the goal. A selfsufficient body is regarded as a body that can consciously make decisions based on a strong sense of where the body ends and the world begins. Freedom is defined according to this notion of selfsufficiency. These beliefs frame the prevalent and seemingly unshakable triad intentionalityvolitionagency. Autistic perception gives us a direct account of relation in-forming, an account that challenges the notion that the world comes parsed.
Again and again in young childhood we are given instructions that assist us in differentiating our skin from that of the world. Think, for instance, of the young child’s difficulty in assigning hurt when they fall, and their tendency to point to the ground instead of their knee. These teachings, which also tend to foreground the normatively rational over the emergently creative or intuitive, the individual over the relational, tune our existence toward a very simple notion of what a body can do. This, over time, convinces the child that singling out objects and subjects by categorizing experience is a necessary part of growing up. That this approach backgrounds the animism of their childhood beliefs is simply taken as a necessary rite of passage toward the agency that comes with adulthood… This invariably results in the backgrounding in experience of the lively continuity and co-composition between body and world.
Conscious thought is but the pinnacle of a much more complex thinking, one that aligns to field perception but does not yet single itself out for conscious discrimination. Nonconscious thought is everywhere active in experience. It is not in the body or in the mind, but across the bodying where world and body co-compose in a welling ecology.
The choreography of collective movement is made possible by the interrelation between the intervals the movement creates and the collective capacity to cue and align to them, in the moving. Choreography at its best is not about aligning bodies to precomposed shapes. It is about generating modes of moving that make felt the complex ecology of incipient movement. My proposal is that an approach that begins in the field of relation is precisely political because it does not begin with the agency of a preconceived group or solitary identity. Rather than beginning with subjectbased identity, this approach begins in the ecology of practices where there is still room for new modes of existence to be invented. New modes of existence call forth an articulation of the political that is not reducible to preexisting constituencies, and thus is open to creating and celebrating modes of lifeliving as yet uncharted.
The activist philosophy I am proposing here is neurodiverse. This means that it cannot be contained within the limits of neurotypical experience.
To move as an autistic is to live in paradox. On the one hand, there is nothing but movement, most of it nonvoluntary, which, for neurotypically inflected existence, translates as strange, unpredictable, disturbing— the autistic body simply moves too much. Normative accounts of individual volition suggest that facilitation must mean a lack of authenticity as regards communication. To be considered properly intelligent, autistics must therefore submit to endless tests that control for individual expression: they must show that their words are really their own. What is most important about facilitation is that it evolves in the emergent field of relation not only of autistic and facilitator, but of the wider ecology itself continuously transformed by this collaboration.
We neurotypicals, especially the ones interested in processual activities such as artmaking, or those of us engaged in exploring movement, must learn to develop techniques to chunk less quickly, and must habituate ourselves to the idea that form is not the concrete and finite structure. If instead of beginning with agency we turn to agencement, asking not what the subject did but what the event proposed, another version of the task comes to light.
In a largely neurotypically inflected society, written communication continues to be what most strongly demarcates the “intelligent” from the “nonintelligent. Many autistics therefore find themselves having to fiercely guard their so-called “independence” from facilitation, not because they don’t honor the relation, but because with it they are not perceived to be so-called independent thinkers.
Most people experience the object before the art of it. They whisk over the sensory into the literal and experience themselves not just in the company of glass, wood, metal, paper, plastic derived objects but beyond this to the significant; that these objects are for cooking, decoration, belong to their neighbour, require a good clean etc. This unattending to the field, leads to a very limited exploration of what the field can do.
he sensual splendour of the world, to which classical autistics are so attentive, shows up by analogy in poetry. Patterned syntax and sound, pulsating rhythm, emotional prosody as a function of tone— these things might induce nonliterate autistics to grapple with poetry’s semantic content and, thus, functional language in general.
Neoliberalism has left the body disempowered, our collective nervous system besieged by the forces of a capitalist takeover. Activism is the narcissistic response of the subject to the infinite and invasive power of capital, a response that can only leave the activist frustrated, humiliated and depressed.
What we call depression is nothing if not plural: it expresses itself in an infinity of ways from sadness to hunger, from loss to anguish and anxiety, from a frenetically quiet inner panic to a fullfledged panic attack, from the stillness of a body incapable of moving to an agitated body. Living with depression, and acknowledging the necessity for facilitation in its many relational guises, is an art of participation, and what has emerged through this art of participation is a belief in the world as a mobile site to which alignments are possible.
Neurodiversity is about accepting that there is no normal human brain, that being different is okay, and about working together to discover how we all can participate to the best of our abilities in our lives.
Autistic perception, as I have suggested before, emphasizes a modality of perception shared by all, but felt directly by so-called neurotypicals only under certain conditions. Depression is one of those conditions. Exuberance is another. In these conditions, what is felt is the precarious edge of existence where experience is under transformation, where the field of expression still resonates with its own becoming. Falling in love is an example of an event where the shape of enthusiasm overtakes what is thought of as the boundedness of the subject to foreground the opening the field of relation provokes
The deep silence of depression, where the world seems to be infolding, or the inner anguish of anxiety, where speeds and slownesses seem to be out of sync with the world at large: these are also events where the relational field vibrates and the sense of a preconstituted self falls away.
We know neither where a world begins nor where a body ends. What is real, what we know, are relations. This is speculative pragmatism: relations are real, here and now, but what they can do is unknowable in advance, must continuously be invented. The relation can never be properly called human. It is always morethan human.
Our debts stay bad because we are owed as much as we owe. We are owed a better world. We are owed reparations for the racism, for the sexism, for the horrors of the genocides we have survived, for the sexual abuse we have lived through. We are owed for the judgments we face each day in a world that refuses to accommodate us, a world that excludes us from proper education. And we owe. We owe the environment better conditions for surviving, for thriving. We owe our children more opportunities for movement, for independent exploration. We owe the woman who sleeps on the street. We owe the drug addict who suffers from mental illness. We owe the black man who can’t walk safely at night. We owe the Indigenous women who keep disappearing. None of this is in question. We are owed. And we owe.
Know that what it is that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable.
A shared debt would be a debt forgotten, a debt that forgets itself. It would be what Moten and Harney call bad debt. Debt forgotten is bad because its point of inception can no longer be traced. It exists in the world in a way that does not lead back to the individual. Forget debt does not mean to forgive it. The forgiveness of debt is still in the logic of credit. Credit “is a means of privatization and debt a means of socialization. . . . Debt is mutual. Credit runs only one way. To forget debt is to invent a new kind of justice, a justice that is only possible where debt never obliges, never demands, never equals credit, payment, payback. Justice is possible only where it is never asked, in the refuge of bad debt, in the fugitive public of strangers not communities, of undercommons not neighborhoods, among those who have been there all along from somewhere.
When quality is perceived only from the perspective of what can be measured, quality is limited to the pregiven realm of what can be accounted for in advance. Quality as activated in the affirmation is not yet contained by a preexisting relation. The quality of affirmation is beyond measure. Stereotype tunes quality to a becomingreactive. We know in advance what the black body, the female body, the animal body can do. The place of refuge feels more livable when we remember that no movement, no fugitive public, is held by individuals. It is held by a multiplicity larger than anyone alone, larger than identity.