{"title":"Books by Erin Manning","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780816648450","title":"Politics of Touch","description":"\u003cp\u003ePolitical philosophy has long been bound by traditional thinking about the body and the senses. Through an engagement with the state-centered vocabulary of this discipline, \u003ci\u003ePolitics of Touch\u003c\/i\u003e explores the ways in which sensing bodies continually run up against existing political structures. In this groundbreaking work, Erin Manning reconsiders how new politics can arise that challenge the national body politic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003ePolitics of Touch,\u003c\/i\u003e Manning develops a new way to conceive the role of the senses, and of touch in particular. Exploring concepts of violence, gender, sexuality, security, democracy, and identity, she traces the ways in which touch informs and reforms the body. Specifically considering tango-a tactile, rhythmic, and improvisational dance- she foregrounds movement as the sensing body's intervention into the political. With a fresh vision and an original theoretical basis, Manning shows the ontogenetic potential of the body, and in doing so, redefines our understanding of the sense of touch in philosophical and political terms.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eErin Manning is assistant professor of fine arts at Concordia University and the author of Ephemeral Territories (Minnesota, 2003).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294914556277,"sku":"9780816648450","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780816648450_6974b5be-a71d-4c4b-a952-3a69220e8154.jpg?v=1786016262"},{"product_id":"9780816679676","title":"Thought in the Act","description":"\u003cp\u003e“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 \u003ci\u003eThought in the Act\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eCombining philosophy and aesthetics, \u003ci\u003eThought in the Act\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eEmerging 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. \u003ci\u003eThought in the Act\u003c\/i\u003e enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295087767925,"sku":"9780816679676","price":21.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780816679676_63f7e0b1-c7c4-4b24-b5bf-de894de8f62b.jpg?v=1786016306"},{"product_id":"9781478011071","title":"For a Pragmatics of the Useless","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhat 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eFor a Pragmatics of the Useless\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt 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.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eManning 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eManning, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301520028021,"sku":"9781478011071","price":30.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781478011071_f4f63a19-bba6-4a3d-b654-e108bca15bbb.jpg?v=1786020937"},{"product_id":"9781570274053","title":"Out of the Clear","description":"Out of the Clear begins with the question of the clearing: What operations are at work when land is cleared, or thought is cleared, of all that grows wild? Clearing, the settler-colonial act of defining a territory and producing a border, clears the world of the thickets of all that is already at work. Get rid of the muddle. Privilege productivity. This devaluing operation is taken for granted as the necessary operation for all beginnings. Clear the movementtendencies before you start dancing. Clear the thought-wanderings before you start writing. Clearing's best accomplice is method. A clear site is one that can be overseen, that can be managed. The resounding image of the clearing in Out of the Clear is the residential school for the forced internment of first nations peoples, the sites always barren, empty of any tangle. The motif of the clearing weaves through Out of the Clear, a book written in the first year of the 3Ecologies project's landbased site. In the mode of speculative pragmatism, the book explores what modalities of perspective emerge in the uneasy middling of non-dogmatic approaches to the speculative gardens of our affective surrounds. The impersonal leads in this exploration of what kind of minor sociality might emerge at the interstices of more-than human inclinations.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56304559456629,"sku":"9781570274053","price":18.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781570274053_2a01a699-4950-4f4e-9c49-0daa7dd49473.jpg?v=1786034173"},{"product_id":"9781835951446","title":"The Being of Relation","description":"How does whiteness sediment worlds? How does it format individuality in the name of a neurotypicality that polices how one bodies and how one comes to know? And how does a poetics of relation shift the very logic of this sedimentation?Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation are bold in their call to ‘consent not to be a single being’. This transindividual consent, born in the process of worlds crafting themselves in what he would call an ‘aesthetics of the earth’, are felt in Fernand Deligny’s errant lines. These errant lines, traced to move with the complex gestures of autistics over a period of several years in Monoblet, France (1965-1970), offer an alternative to pathology and individual psychological assessment. The Being of Relation brings these two projects into encounter, exploring what else blackness can be at this non-pathological juncture where what is foregrounded is the very being of relation. On the way, trails of whiteness are excavated and interrogated. The aim: to move toward parapedagogies of resistance, in a logic of a poetics of relation, a logic of neurodiversity, minor sociality and the kind of difference without separability that refuses the binary that holds neurotypicality – as whiteness – in place.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307376783733,"sku":"9781835951446","price":24.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781835951446_54e9399e-2b8c-48bd-ba9b-488a7fc2633f.jpg?v=1786028227"},{"product_id":"9781570274404","title":"Unsettled","description":"To belong is never a simple matter. For Erin Manning, ancestry has always been more of an entanglement than a strict lineage: a collection of stories, fabulations, and echoes of the past. Unsettled is a deeply personal and philosophical exploration of ancestry, identity, and belonging, particularly within the context of Quebec's settler-colonial history and its complex relationship with Indigeneity. Here Manning describes her relationship with a close friend, R., who has lived a life shaped by poverty, subsistence farming, and a profound connection with the land. When R.'s mother bequeaths him their family land, he is left to navigate the tensions of inheritance, loss, and belonging. In an attempt to connect to R.'s Indigenous background, Manning offers to trace his genealogy. Soon, questions of what it means to 'bestow' Indigeneity from an ancestral perspective begin to loom. Manning explores and critiques the practice of usurping Indigeneity in Quebec, where claims of Metis ancestry are often leveraged for social or political gain, ultimately reinforcing whiteness and colonial structures rather than dismantling them. Through the lens of personal relationships, historical analysis, and philosophical inquiry, Unsettled challenges conventional notions of ancestry, property, and identity, while advocating for relational belonging over bloodline essentialism.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56369033576821,"sku":"9781570274404","price":17.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"always-more-than-one","title":"Always More Than One","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eAlways More Than One\u003c\/i\u003e, 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?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481418408309,"sku":"9780822353348","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780822353348.jpg?v=1786089678"},{"product_id":"the-minor-gesture","title":"The Minor Gesture","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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481431122293,"sku":"9780822361213","price":21.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780822361213.jpg?v=1786089691"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-erin-manning.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}