The minor gesture PDF
Preview The minor gesture
THE MINOR GESTURE THOUGHT IN THE ACT A series edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi T H E M I N O R G E ST U R E ERIN MANNING DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM AND LONDON 2016 © 2016 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ∞ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Arno and Avenir by Graphic Composition, Inc., Bogart, Georgia Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data Names: Manning, Erin, author. Title: The minor gesture / Erin Manning. Other titles: Thought in the act. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. Series: Thought in the act | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2015046671 (print) | lccn 2015048953 (ebook) isbn 9780822361039 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822361213 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 9780822374411 (e- book) Subjects: lcsh: Perception (Philosophy) | Self (Philosophy) | Cognitive neuroscience—Philosophy. | Autism. | Political psychology. Classification: lcc b828.45 .m366 2016 (print) | lcc b828.45 (ebook) | ddc 128—dc23 lc record available at http:// lccn .loc .gov /2015046671 Cover art: Nathaniel Stern and Erin Manning, Weather Patterns: The Smell of Red. Installation, Glasshouse, New York, 2014. Photo by Leslie Plumb. Courtesy of the artists and Leslie Plumb. FOR BEN JONES (1930–2015) who followed the minor gestures of the kerf in the study of what else living can be always measure the kerf it makes a difference measure the absence— it is the very stuff, the very kerf, of desire. CONTENTS ix PREFACE Introduction: In a Minor Key 1 1. Against Method 26 2. Artfulness: Emergent Collectivities and Processes of Individuation 46 3. Weather Patterns, or How Minor Gestures Entertain the Environment 64 4. Dress Becomes Body: Fashioning the Force of Form 86 5.Choreographing the Political 111 6. Carrying the Feeling 131 7. In the Act: The Shape of Precarity 165 8. What a Body Can Do: A Conversation with Arno Boehler 189 Postscript: Affirmation without Credit 201 233 NOTES 261 REFERENCES 269 INDEX PREFACE There’s something about writing books that is out of time. As though the writing only really knows what it’s after once it has begun to make its way into the world. For me, thinking too has always had this quality: think- ing thickens in its encounter with the futurity that orients it. This futurity in thinking’s presentness is part of what keeps thinking lithe: thinking is always out of sync with itself. The best kind of encounter with thinking’s outside is the kind that deeply listens to what writing is trying to do, almost thinking beyond what the author is capable of thinking, then returning that thinking, almost beyond what the reader can think, to the author. In this gesture of encoun- ter, no one is trying to convince anyone: thought is thinking collectively at its limit. Going through the review process for The Minor Gesture, I had the luck of encountering thinking at the limit. In an affirmative gesture—what I call “affirmation without credit” in the postscript—the reviewers took time to think- with the text in a gesture of writing- with, returning The Minor Ges- ture to me with the richness of an engagement that was capable of opening my thinking beyond where I thought it could go. In this return, I received not a simple account of how writing performs knowledge, but something much more important: an engagement with how thinking does its work, in the writing. What struck me, in reading these reviews (can these still be called re- views?), was how fragile this gesture of writing-w ith made me feel. The fragility, I think, has to do with writing pushed to a limit where it is truly
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