For a Pragmatics of the Useless

Drawing on the radical black tradition, process philosophy, and Felix Guattari''s schizoanalysis, Erin Manning explores the links between neurotypicality, whiteness, and black life. What has a use in the future, unforeseeably, is radically useless now. What has an effect now is not necessarily useful if it falls through the gaps. In For a Pragmatics of the Useless Erin Manning examines what falls outside the purview of already-known functions and established standards of value, not for want of potential but for carrying an excess of it. The figures are various: the infrathin, the artful, proprioceptive tactility, neurodiversity, black life. It is around the latter two that a central refrain echoes: "All black life is neurodiverse life." This is not an equation, but an "approximation of proximity." Manning shows how neurotypicality and whiteness combine to form a normative baseline for existence. Blackness and neurodiversity "schizz" around the baseline, uselessly, pragmatically, figuring a more-than of life living. Manning, in dialogue with Félix Guattari and drawing on the black radical tradition''s accounts of black life and the aesthetics of black sociality, proposes a "schizoanalysis" of the more-than, charting a panoply of techniques for other ways of living and learning.

• | Author: Erin Manning
• | Publisher: Duke University Press
• | Publication Date: Nov 23, 2020
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781478011071
• | ISBN-10: 1478011076