For a Pragmatics of the Useless: (Thought in the Act)

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 Felix 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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  ix Prelude. Fugitively, Approximately  1 1. For a Pragmatics of the Useless  15 2. Toward a Politics of Immediation  33 Pocket Practice. nestingpatching  55 3. What Things Do When They Shape Each Other  75 Pocket Practice. backgroundigforegrounding  103 4. Experimenting Immediation: Collaboration and the Politics of Fabulation  115 5. Practicing the Shizz  145 Interlude. How Do We Repair?  199 6. Me Lo Dijo un Pajarito: Neurodiversity, Black Life, and the University As We Know It  213 Pocket Practice. livingdoing  235 7. Not at a Distance: On Touch, Synesthesia, and Other Ways of Knowing  245 Pocket Practice. ticcingflapping  271 8. Cephaloped Dreams: Finance at the Limit  289 Coda. schizziganarchiving  309 Notes  317 References  345 Index  359

About the Author :
Erin Manning is Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University and the author of many books, including The Minor Gesture and Always More Than One: Individuation's Dance, both also published by Duke University Press.

Review :
“Taking black studies seriously as the epistemology of operation from which to practice thought, Erin Manning does more than simply apply black studies to conversations about neurotypicality, autism, and language; she grapples with what black studies attempts to do-to shift the epistemological horizon of thought's horizon.” - Ashon T. Crawley, author of (The Lonely Letters) “Given her expertise, philosophical acumen, and passion for questions of neurodiversity, I am excited that Erin Manning is the person to orchestrate the encounter between neurodiversity and blackness. Who else but Manning could bring together explorations into process philosophy, experimental practice, black studies, and neurodiversity? This is a superb and important work.” - Stefano Harney, coauthor of (The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study) "The argument of the book ranges across a wide field of topical concerns: whiteness, Black sociality, neurodiversity and neurotypicality, affect and feeling, and autism, all within the scope of considerations mainly related to aesthetics, agency, freedom, and power relations. The book itself is clearly situated at the crossroads of such fields as philosophy, neuroscience, and Black studies, and will surely be of interest to graduate students and academics who are seeking the cutting-edge territory of critical work that reaches beyond the boundaries of the university as normally configured. Highly recommended. Graduate students and faculty." - M. Uebel (Choice) "Manning’s book might also be described as a field guide for academics who want to discover or rediscover the conditions by which thinking (as theory, poetry, art, or pedagogy) might generate values apart from those prescribed by our capitalist institutions. . . . [T]he book proffers many encounters with artists, art exhibits, and artistic projects that enable us, as readers, to explore the pragmatics that Manning is invoking." - Ada S. Jaarsma (Letters in Canada)