Erin Manning

Always More than One: The Collectivity of a Life

This article explores the idea that affect is collective. By emphasizing that affect does not rest in the individual, a theory of affect is foregrounded that is in conversation with Gilbert Simondon’s concept of individuation, and, more specifically, the concept of the preindividual. The preindividual, in Simondon, is aligned with what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘a life’ — the force of living beyond life itself. This force of life, I suggest, is the resonant field of life’s outside, the more-than of human life where the body is but one verging surface on the field of experience, where the body is always more than One. The more-than-Oneness of the body is always already collective, cutting as it does between life-welling and life-living. It is here, at this virtual-actual juncture, that the force of affect resides, activating the body-becoming.

What if it Didn’t All Begin and End with Containment? Toward a Leaky Sense of Self

In Esther Bick’s psychoanalytic theory, the infant’s relation to the world is mediated by the skin’s capacity to serve as a container for experience. As the infant develops, containment increasingly expresses cohesion of self, as fostered by the continued interaction with the caretaker. Through an emphasis on particular forms of interaction — forms that specifically involve skin-to-skin touch — an infant is given the receptacle necessary for eventual interactive self-sufficiency. But what if the skin were not a container? What if the skin were not a limit at which self begins and ends? What if the skin were a porous, topological surfacing of myriad potential strata that field the relation between different milieus, each of them a multiplicity of insides and outsides? This article explores these questions through Daniel Stern’s account of infancy.

Wondering the World Directly – or, How Movement Outruns the Subject

Turning to the moment when phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) meets process philosophy (Alfred North Whitehead), this article turns around three questions: (a) How does movement produce a body? (b) What kind of subject is introduced in the thought of Merleau-Ponty and how does this subject engage with or interfere with the activity here considered as ‘body’? (c) What happens when phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) meets process philosophy (Alfred North Whitehead)? and builds around three propositions (a) There is never a body as such: what we know are edgings and contourings, forces and intensities: a body is its movement (b) Movement is not to be reduced to displacement (c) A philosophy of the body never begins with the body: it bodies.

The Shape of Enthusiasm

‘This is our dance without bodies / Where every touch has meaning, / and no glance is ever wasted. This is the language we speak’. A language beneath the sounding of words, a language in the shaping for ‘we who can float outside time’. A language of intense non-communication that shapes a different kind of coming-together, a different kind of being-heard. This is the language we speak, autispeak. But it is also the language we speak, anyspeak, the language that spreads across the telling and

For a Pragmatics of the Useless, or the Value of the Infrathin

Marcel Duchamp describes the infrathin as “the most minute of intervals, or the slightest of differences.” Working through Duchamp’s proposition, and taking him at his work that the infrathin cannot be defined as such—“One can only give examples of it”—this article explores how the infrathin comes to expression and asks what a politics of the infrathin might look like. Key to the exploration is the question of how else value can be defined and how this rethinking of the concept of value might compose with the concept of a pragmatics of the useless.

DA BIOPOLÍTICA AO BIOGRAMA OU COMO LENI RIENFENSTAHL MOVE-SE MOVE-SE ATRAVÉS DO FASCISMO

Originally published in the book Relationscapes , movement, art, philosophy (MIT University Press, 2009), this article is an abridged version of the chapter in which the author discusses the controversial junctions between aesthetic, art making and political ideologies. In celebration of the twentyth aniversary of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the recent film biography of Hannah Arendt, the junctions resurfaces as a key topic for aesthetics today. Manning discusses the brilliance of Riefenstahl from a careful analysis of Olympia, considering the camera movements become an invention of the body itself, speculating around the ideologies contained in the portrayed gestures by still objects, invented in the film. The arguments deviate from the recurrent charges around the work of Riefenstah, and allow for a meaningfull discussion about the limits of transcendentalism and physical appearances in movies. As a theorical move, the filmmaker is compared to her contemporaries from the Futurist movement.