The minor gesture

288 Pages·2016·2.524 MB·English

by  Manning, Erin

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