Always More Than One: Individuation's Dance

by Erin Manning

In Always More Than One, 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 those concepts 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?

Erin Manning is University Research Chair in Philosophy and Relational Art and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. She is the author of Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy and Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty and coauthor, with Brian Massumi, of Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (forthcoming). Brian Massumi is the author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, also published by Duke University Press, and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts.

"Erin Manning's book offers a philosophy of neurodiverse perception, encouraging us “not to begin with the pre-chunked.” How ironic, then, that the impulse to categorize and to pathologize is generally seen as evidence of the normate’s proper functioning. In Manning’s splendid book, autism comes to signify not a disorder but a relational “dance of attention,” one that refuses to strand any entity at the margin of our concern."—Ralph James Savarese, coeditor of Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity, a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly

"In Always More Than One, Erin Manning produces a truly original choreographic thinking. I don't just mean that she writes about choreography. She thinks how the body moves, and moves her writing in step with that thinking. She performs an expanded choreography, developed in dialogue with dance, putting dance in dialogue with other practices. A must for dancers who think - and philosophers who wish they could dance."—William Forsythe, Choreographer and Artistic Director of The Forsythe Company

"In this book, Erin Manning takes us on an amazing journey. It is a journey of philosophical thought, to be sure; but it is also a journey of bodies in motion, through landscapes that are enlivened and transformed by their passage. Always More Than One is a book about the vitality of the in-between. It presents a vision of life adding to life, whether in the simplest everyday encounters, or in the densely articulated webs of works of art."—Steven Shaviro, author of Post Cinematic Affect

Genres: Philosophy, Cultural Studies

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the director of the Sense Lab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. In her art practice she works between painting, dance, fabric and sculpture (http://www.erinmovement.com). Her current project entitled Folds to Infinity is an experimental fabric collection composed of cuts that connect in an infinity of ways, folding in to create clothing and out to create environmental architectures. The next phase of this project will explore the resonance between electromagnetic fields and movement through the activation of the existent magnets in Folds to Infinity. Her writing addresses the senses, philosophy and politics, articulating the relation between experience, thought and politics in a transdisciplinary framework moving between dance and new technology, the political and micropolitics of sensation, performance art, and the current convergence of cinema, animation and new media.

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picking up right where Relationscapes left off, Always More Than One continues Erin Manning's attempt to cultivate a manner of thinking which attends to things in-the-making (rather than things 'already-made'); hence not bodies but 'bodying', not 'the world' but worlding, and not ecologies but 'ecologies of practice' are the conceptual protagonists that make up the bulk of this delicately written tome. Far from an abstract piece of high theory though, it's dance, art, film and - movingly - autistic experience which provide the touchstones for Manning's intricately woven project. After all, as she so eloquently emphasises time after time, no one thing stands alone apart from the fields of relations out of which it is composed, and this is as true of the book as it is the subjects she examines.

A note on that eloquence however: while written in a style that is singularly her own, Manning's prose is by turns both breathtaking and maddening. Breathtaking for its ability to employ the affective charge of language in a way uniquely suited to its own ends, and maddening because, well, see for yourself - On the notion of the 'event': "Think event-time as the foregrounding of the co-compositional infra layering of diagrammatic force form in the now of experience. For the event to dance to attention, the event must create a resonant intensity between the preacceleration of the present futuring and the alignment of a future presenting. Topological time squeezed into the improbable now of movement-moving."

Granted, this is a particularly egregious passage, and to be fair to Manning, it's one that comes only after a long and detailed apprenticeship in the poetics she nurtures from the very beginning of the book. But you see my frustration, no? In any case, it's a poetics that's of a piece with exactly what's at stake throughout: nouns turn into verbs, typically dissociated terms are quilted together, and everything once static now put into motion. A fragment of the living cosmos presented within turned literary and philosophic. Still, Manning is at her best when held close to the ground by the detail of her subject matter: her discussions of Fernand Delingy's 'movement maps', Bratcha Ettinger's formless artworks, Ari Folman's animated quasi-documentary 'Waltz With Bashir', and indeed, the challenges of presenting her own art to different audiences in different spaces all make for engaging, if still demanding reading.

Undoubtably though, it's Manning's empathetic and delicate treatment of autism which constitutes the tender, beating heart of this work. Although clearly stewed in the complex ferment of twentieth-century process philosophy - that of Whitehead, James and Deleuze - Always More Than One speaks loudest when simply attending to those among us who "talk without sound, embrace without touching, and dance without bodies." While refusing the all-too-easy gesture of pathologizing autistic experience as a deviation form the norm, Manning finds within the writings of Amanda Baggs, Ralph and DJ Savarese, Tito Mukhopadhyay and others a lesson in the relationality of experience often passed over in the drive to resolve the universe into the 'pre-chunked' and the ready-made. More than yielding a new way of looking (and feeling) the world about us, Always More Than One is a study in ethics from another regard - one more than worth pursuing.

[Fran(c)k · Rating 4 out of 5]

actually not a philosophy of modern dance, but a philosophy out of modern dance.