Thought in the Act : Passages in the Ecology of Experience

201 Pages·2014·1.49 MB·English

by  Manning

ThoughT in The AcT

ThoughT in The AcT
PAssAges in The ecology
of exPerience
Erin Manning and Brian Massumi
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
The authors would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Social Sciences
and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Chapter 1 was previously published as “Coming Alive in a World of Texture: For
Neurodiversity,” in Dance, Politics, and Co-I mmunity, ed. Gerald Siegmund and Stefan
Hoelscher (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2013). Chapter 4 was previously published as “No Title
Yet,” in Le cabinet de Bracha: Carnets, Dessins, Peintures, Scanographies 1981–­2011, ed.
Patrick Le Nouëne (Angers: Musée des Beaux-A rts d’Angers, 2011), 37–5 2.
Copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401–2 520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-P ublication Data
Manning, Erin.
Thought in the Act : Passages in the Ecology of Experience / Erin Manning
and Brian Massumi.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-­0-­8166-­7966-­9 (hc : acid-f ree paper)
isbn 978-­0-­8166-­7967-­6 (pb :acid- free paper)
1. Creation (Literary, Artistic, etc.)— Philosophy. 2. Aesthetics. 3. Thought and
thinking— Philosophy. 4. Experience. I. Massumi, Brian. II. Title.
bf408.m2346 2014
153.3’5— dc23 2013038692
Printed in the United States of America on acid-f ree paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-o pportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ContEnts
Preface vii
Part i. Passages
Coming Alive in a World of Texture: For Neurodiversity
3
A Perspective of the Universe:
Alfred North Whitehead Meets Arakawa and Gins
23
Just Like That. William Forsythe:
Between Movement and Language
31
No Title Yet. Bracha Ettinger: Moved by Light
59
Part ii. Propositions
For Thought in the Act
83
Postscript to Generating the Impossible
135
Notes 153
References 169
Index 175

PrEfaCE
Philosophy is [. . .] a practice of concepts [that] must be judged
as a function of other practices with which it interferes. [. . .] It
is at the level of interference of many practices that things hap-
pen, beings, images, concepts, all kinds of events.
—­gilles­deleuze, The Time- Image (translation modified)
This book runs interference. Its goal is to open philosophy to its outside,
to challenge philosophy to compose with concepts already on their way
in another mode, in the mode of artistic practice, in the mode of event-
formation, of activism, of dance, even of everyday perception. It writes
into this difference, composing across the breach between philosophy and
art, philosophy and dance, writing and painting, speaking and moving.
Philosophy’s outside is a generative environment. Philosophy does not
yet know how to speak. Its thinking is active, uneasy because always in the
encounter. Giving words to the encounter is what we have attempted to
do here. Not to solve the riddle of how art and philosophy, activism and
philosophy, move together, but to ask ourselves what writing can do to
make thought-f elt what art can do, with philosophy.
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.
In each of these cases, and the others encountered in this book, the prac-
tice in question will be construed as a mode of thought creatively in the act.
The practice that is philosophy has no exclusive claim to thought or the
composition of concepts. Like every practice, its only claim is to its own
techniques. For us, the techniques of philosophy are writing techniques.
vii
viii
This book runs writing interference. It seeks to compose concepts, of a cer-
tain kind, in writing. And in the composing, it articulates in the breach,
in the fragile difference between modes of thought, in the act.
Our goal: to experiment with the breach. Not to tell art how to think, or
to tell dance how to understand itself. But to bring into relief techniques,
in the painting, in the dancing, in the creation of events, from which a
singular proposition may breach. For it is in the breaching that thought
acts most intensely, in practices co-c omposing.
For us, to write philosophically is not to cast a predefined conceptual
trawlnet into the waters of an outside practice. It is more like dipping into
the same creative pond. A stone dropped into a pond produces a ripple
pattern. Two stones dropped into the same pond produce two ripple pat-
terns. Where the ripples intersect, a new and complex pattern emerges,
reducible to neither one nor the other. This is the kind of conceptual inter-
ference pattern the book’s writing aspires to. Don’t just write about dance.
As William Forsythe says, dance that thought around. Dance that choreo-
graphic thought around in philosophy’s act of writing.
In our own acts of writing together, we have had to learn how to ripple
the difference between two stone-h ard heads. While negotiating our dif-
ferent ways of dropping into the breach of the practices, we have found
ways to encounter together. We have had to learn to compose an uneasy,
two-h eaded thinking in the act, across a multiplicity of practices. Uneasy,
because thought together is not thought controlled. Uneasy, because writ-
ing in the thinking is an intrinsically fragile art, however many heads are
involved. Uneasy, but beautifully intense. Because when skulls bump, the
resulting brain-w ave interference-p atterns can be a revelation to both.
One never writes alone. As Deleuze and Guattari say, one writing alone
is already a crowd. Our words in this book are never without the echoes of
the voices of those whose difference we chose to write with. Not to men-
tion the moves, gestures, colors, architectures, and events of the creative
practices we encountered. A veritable cacophony. Or better: an ecology.
Composing each of the chapters involved reinventing our techniques for
writing together in a way that could distill from the cacophonous ecology
of our experiences together a shared line of thought, one that we hope
has done justice to the thinkings-i n-t he-a ct that we have had the good
fortune to experience firsthand through residencies and interactions with
creative practitioners.
Preface
ix
Our goal was not simply to describe the complexity of a work’s work-
ings, but to activate its modalities of thought, its rhythms, in a new con-
certation. This meant finding our way into artistic practices to reconnect
with philosophy’s outside, to endeavor to make felt how philosophy can
co-c ompose with other creative practices. Too often, writing stands to the
side, outside the action, as though the “real” work happened elsewhere,
as though what writing was equipped to do with “real” practices was merely
to describe them—o r to proscribe for them, in judgment. We took it as the
task of this book to make it felt, in its own rhythms, that writing is as real
and creative a practice as any, and that it lives in an ecology of experience,
with all the doings adrop, and all the makings enacting.
The hope is that this might be seen as a book of techniques—t echniques
for composing with creative practice, for composing emergent collectiv-
ities, for composing thought in the multiplicitous act. Technique, as we
understand it throughout, belongs to the act. Techniques are not descrip-
tive devices—t hey are springboards. They are not framing devices—t hey
activate a practice from within. They set in motion.
Thank you, Bracha Ettinger, for opening your home to us and for shar-
ing the painting process inhabiting there. Thank you, William Forsythe and
the Forsythe Company, for putting up with us for a month of questions
and cacophonous participation in your movements of thought. Thank you,
Arakawa and Gins, for your acute curiosity and your generosity in dialogue
and for providing us with a panoply of thinking-b ody procedures for the
writing. Thank you, DJ Savarese, Amanda Baggs, and Tito Mukhopadhyay,
for the perceptual acuity with which you share your world.
Thank you to all the members of the SenseLab with whom we have
had the privilege of experimenting in the collective organization of
events exploring how art and philosophy can co-c ompose. For both
of us, the SenseLab’s varied activities have been a privileged incubator for
the thinking-i n-t he-a ct this book is all about. Over the past ten years, we
have been lucky to be able to gather around us and circulate among philos-
ophers, artists, activists, and researchers who have been unfailingly enthu-
siastic in the process of developing new techniques for the invention of
modes of thought in an event-b ased ecology of experience. This book is
dedicated to you.
Preface