Documents 

Dans ce livre vaste et pointu, Erin Manning élargit ses recherches concernant la politique du mouvement au concept de geste mineur.

Bien que pouvant passer presqu'inaperçu, le geste mineur transforme le champ des relations. Plus qu'une variation hasardeuse, moins qu'une volition, il implique de repenser nos présupposés communs à propos de l'agentivité humaine et de l'action politique. Accueillir la puissance du geste mineur à modeler les relations, accueillir sa capacité à ouvrir de nouveaux modes d'expérience et de nouvelles modalités d'expression, c'est défier la dévaluation que l'image neurotypique de l'humain inflige aux modes d'être alternatifs, qui sont mus par le monde et qui s'y meuvent - notamment ce qu'Erin Manning appelle « la perception autistique ». En s'appuyant sur la schizo-analyse de Deleuze et Guattari et sur le pragmatisme spéculatif de Whitehead, les analyses profondes de Manning embrassent aussi bien la mode que la dépression, en passant par les écritures d'autistes, affirmant à chaque fois la neurodiversité du mineur et la politique alternative vers laquelle il tend.

La « recherche-création » monte en puissance en France. Erin Manning et Brian Massumi en sont parmi les plus radicaux théoriciens. Ils se demandent dans ce petit ouvrage quelle écologie de l'expérience mettre en place, entre recherche et création, pour nous aider à penser ensemble et à mettre la pensée en acte. En guise de réponses, ils tirent de leurs expériences vingt propositions décoiffantes et enjouées, qui donnent des envies plutôt que des leçons. Ils sèment ainsi des graines d'événements éminemment politiques, dont notre avenir a bien besoin. [résumé de l'éditeur]

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. [Editor's summary]

“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.” —from Thought in the Act

Combining philosophy and aesthetics, Thought in the Act is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art.

Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. Thought in the Act enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics.