For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781478011071)

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 F lix 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
ISBN-10: 1478011076
ISBN-13: 9781478011071
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/23/2020
Pages: 384
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.13lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.80d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 08/01/2021