The Minor Gesture

Thought in the Act

by Erin Manning

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.

 

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Reference, Cultural Studies

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 3, 2016

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

[Tia · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a lot to love about this book, but there is also something left to be desired by it. I learned a great deal about neurodiversity which Manning beautifully navigates as it is enmeshed with philosophical questions about freedom, politics, art, and desire. I don’t think that I will look at bodies, subjectivity, or volition in the same way after reading this visionary text. That being said, it was not always a very clear read, with a lot of new/unfamiliar uses of words being coined or spoken of in broad strokes, and this I found quite difficult, especially without having a very strong background in Deleuze. The openness of these arguments allows them to be deployed in many different possible ways, which is exciting, but also leaves some room for misuse and uncertainty regarding whether one truly understands the text as it was intended to be read/used. Book jacket descriptions are not necessarily giving an entirely accurate picture of its subject matter either, as I thought that there would be more here about gestures themselves, rather than taking the gesture as a much more conceptual idea from which other topics are then foregrounded.

[Geoffreyjen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This extraordinary book carries one on a journey thbrough a landscape involving art, science, activism but especially neurodiverse experiences, whether these be autistic, or in relation to forms of disability or depression. It is both philosophy and yet, what Manning, inspired by Whitehead, calls « speculative philosophy » - a philosophy that speaks to the built-in strangeness of our day to day lives. The book’s weaknesses are in the same areas as its strengths - this alliance between deep thought-in-the-making and the acts that constitute our engagement with the world is alwayys a challenge, and sometimes seems overly complex, while at thhe same time the complexityy is clearly necessary to understang these dyynamics. This is a book to linger over, to allow to mature in-the-reading, to revisit on more than one occasion.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like at least one other reviewer, I loved many of the ideas here, but found a lot of the language to be unnecessarily difficult, a complaint I often have with philosopher-writers. Found this interesting here, where one of the things Manning writes about is the limits of disciplinary thinking and how training within a discipline can narrow our sense of the questions that can be asked. To me, the density of the text here is a limitation. But I’m still an admirer.

[Margaryta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Going to come back to this one in the future, as I only read up to chapter 4 attentively and then after that was more looking at the content. The way Manning talks about art as an event, a process rather than a self-contained object, is an articulation I have been looking for for years but kept not finding. I'm really glad to be able to reference this book going forward in talking about how the way we think about art should be expanded.