Semblance and Event

Download Semblance and Event PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262297256
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (622 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Semblance and Event by : Brian Massumi

Download or read book Semblance and Event written by Brian Massumi and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of the “occurrent arts” through the concepts of the “semblance” and “lived abstraction.” Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of “semblance” as a way to approach this question. It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: “lived abstraction.” A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented—variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention—which he refers to collectively as the “occurrent arts.” Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance. The artwork's relational engagement, Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension.

What Animals Teach Us about Politics

Download What Animals Teach Us about Politics PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822376059
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis What Animals Teach Us about Politics by : Brian Massumi

Download or read book What Animals Teach Us about Politics written by Brian Massumi and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-03 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Brian Massumi takes up the question of "the animal." By treating the human as animal, he develops a concept of an animal politics. His is not a human politics of the animal, but an integrally animal politics, freed from connotations of the "primitive" state of nature and the accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating modern thought. Massumi integrates notions marginalized by the dominant currents in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and philosophy—notions such as play, sympathy, and creativity—into the concept of nature. As he does so, his inquiry necessarily expands, encompassing not only animal behavior but also animal thought and its distance from, or proximity to, those capacities over which human animals claim a monopoly: language and reflexive consciousness. For Massumi, humans and animals exist on a continuum. Understanding that continuum, while accounting for difference, requires a new logic of "mutual inclusion." Massumi finds the conceptual resources for this logic in the work of thinkers including Gregory Bateson, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Raymond Ruyer. This concise book intervenes in Deleuze studies, posthumanism, and animal studies, as well as areas of study as wide-ranging as affect theory, aesthetics, embodied cognition, political theory, process philosophy, the theory of play, and the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.

Before the Dawn: An AFK Book (RWBY, Book 2)

Download Before the Dawn: An AFK Book (RWBY, Book 2) PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Scholastic Inc.
ISBN 13 : 1338633678
Total Pages : 293 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (386 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Before the Dawn: An AFK Book (RWBY, Book 2) by : E. C. Myers

Download or read book Before the Dawn: An AFK Book (RWBY, Book 2) written by E. C. Myers and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the future-fantasy world of RWBY, Rooster Teeth's hit animated webseries, teens train to become warriors. Join the fight in this epic official, original novel from E.C. Myers and RWBY's head writers! A storm is coming...After their strange mission in the desert, Coco, Fox, Velvet, and Yatsuhashi are back at Shade Academy, doing some "extracurricular" work to track down The Crown, a mysterious force that's snatching up people with powerful semblances. The job should be easier with Team SSSN by their side, but The Crown continues to evade them. Out of options and worried that a bigger plot is in motion, CFVY and SSSN notify Theodore, the Headmaster of Shade Academy, but Theodore has problems of his own.Troubled by the disasters at Beacon and Haven Academies and struggling to support the flood of refugee students, Theodore declares a new initiation-including the formation of new teams to better unite the student body. Amid mounting tension at the school, CFVY and SSSN must contend with unfamiliar teammates and uneasy rivalries, all while The Crown plots their next move. Don't miss this exclusive, original story straight from award-winning author E.C. Myers and RWBY's head writers, Kerry Shawcross and Miles Luna!

Thought in the Act

Download Thought in the Act PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452942293
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Thought in the Act by : Erin Manning

Download or read book Thought in the Act written by Erin Manning and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.

The Neverglades: Volume One

Download The Neverglades: Volume One PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : David Farrow
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4./5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Neverglades: Volume One by : David Farrow

Download or read book The Neverglades: Volume One written by David Farrow and published by David Farrow. This book was released on 2021-05-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Hannigan is a homicide detective in the isolated town of Pacific Glade, located in the dense forest regions of Washington. The town is so shut off from the rest of the world that it has earned the nickname “Neverglades” from its longtime residents. The Neverglades are no stranger to bizarre and inexplicable events, and Hannigan has seen plenty of things on the police force that seem to defy earthly explanation. Enter the Inspector. A mysterious figure always seen with a cigar and fedora, this otherworldly detective knows more about the workings of the Neverglades than any human being rightly should. There’s a rip in reality around Pacific Glade, he says, making it a breeding ground for the strange and supernatural, and the Inspector is just one of many entities who have managed to slip through. In these nine interwoven stories, Hannigan and the Inspector traverse the haunted grounds of the Neverglades, where it's going to take everything they've got to make it out alive. Time paradoxes, pocket universes, giant dream-weaving crabs and star-snuffing leviathans - it's a lot for one measly little human to handle. But with an eldritch abomination by his side, Hannigan just might stand a chance.

99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value

Download 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452958122
Total Pages : 197 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value by : Brian Massumi

Download or read book 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value written by Brian Massumi and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A speculative exploration of value, emphasizing practical experimentation in its future forms How can we begin to envision a postcapitalist economy without first engineering a radically new concept of value? And with a renewed sense of how and what we collectively value, what would the transition to new social forms look like? According to Brian Massumi, it is time to reclaim value from the capitalist market and the neoliberal reduction of life to “human capital.” It is time to occupy surplus-value for a postcapitalist future. 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value is both a theoretical and practical manifesto. Massumi reexamines ideas about money, exchange, and finance, with special attention to how what we value in experience for quality is economically translated into quantity. He proposes new conceptual tools for understanding value in directly qualitative terms, speculating on how this revaluation of value might practically form the basis of an alter-economy. A promising path, he suggests, might involve emerging blockchain technologies beyond bitcoin. But these must be uprooted from their libertarian origins and redesigned to serve not individual choice but collective creativity, not calculations of self-interest but collaborative speculations on the future to be shared. It is necessary to grasp the specificity of our contemporary neoliberal condition and the ultimately destructive forms of power it mobilizes to better resist their claim on the future. 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value is written to galvanize a radical redefinition of value for a livable postcapitalist future.

The Rhythmic Event

Download The Rhythmic Event PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 026202764X
Total Pages : 130 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Rhythmic Event by : Eleni Ikoniadou

Download or read book The Rhythmic Event written by Eleni Ikoniadou and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-07-18 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into the affective modes of perception, temporality, and experience enabled by experimental new media sonic art. The sonic has come to occupy center stage in the arts and humanities. In the age of computational media, sound and its subcultures can offer more dynamic ways of accounting for bodies, movements, and events. In The Rhythmic Event, Eleni Ikoniadou explores traces and potentialities prompted by the sonic but leading to contingent and unknowable forces outside the periphery of sound. She investigates the ways in which recent digital art experiments that mostly engage with the virtual dimensions of sound suggest alternate modes of perception, temporality, and experience. Ikoniadou draws on media theory, digital art, and philosophical and technoscientific ideas to work toward the articulation of a media philosophy that rethinks the media event as abstract and affective. The Rhythmic Event seeks to define the digital media artwork as an assemblage of sensations that outlive the space, time, and bodies that constitute and experience it. Ikoniadou proposes that the notion of rhythm—detached, however, from the idea of counting and regularity—can unlock the imperceptible, aesthetic potential enveloping the artwork. She speculates that addressing the event on the level of rhythm affords us a glimpse into the nonhuman modalities of thought proper to the digital and hidden in the gaps between strict definitions (e.g., human/sonic/digital) and false dichotomies (e.g., virtual/real). Operating at the margins of perception, the rhythmic artwork summons an obscure zone of sonic thought, which considers the event according to its power to become.

Like a Love Story

Download Like a Love Story PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062839381
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (628 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Like a Love Story by : Abdi Nazemian

Download or read book Like a Love Story written by Abdi Nazemian and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stonewall Honor Book * A Time Magazine Best YA Book of All Time "A book for warriors, divas, artists, queens, individuals, activists, trend setters, and anyone searching for the courage to be themselves.”—Mackenzi Lee, New York Times bestselling author of The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue It’s 1989 in New York City, and for three teens, the world is changing. Reza is an Iranian boy who has just moved to the city with his mother to live with his stepfather and stepbrother. He’s terrified that someone will guess the truth he can barely acknowledge about himself. Reza knows he’s gay, but all he knows of gay life are the media’s images of men dying of AIDS. Judy is an aspiring fashion designer who worships her uncle Stephen, a gay man with AIDS who devotes his time to activism as a member of ACT UP. Judy has never imagined finding romance...until she falls for Reza and they start dating. Art is Judy’s best friend, their school’s only out and proud teen. He’ll never be who his conservative parents want him to be, so he rebels by documenting the AIDS crisis through his photographs. As Reza and Art grow closer, Reza struggles to find a way out of his deception that won’t break Judy’s heart—and destroy the most meaningful friendship he’s ever known. This is a bighearted, sprawling epic about friendship and love and the revolutionary act of living life to the fullest in the face of impossible odds.

Detroit 1967

Download Detroit 1967 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 081434304X
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (143 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Detroit 1967 by : Joel Stone

Download or read book Detroit 1967 written by Joel Stone and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers of Detroit history and urban studies will be drawn to and enlightened by these powerful essays.

Semblance

Download Semblance PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Strangecrow Books
ISBN 13 : 9780991772810
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (728 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Semblance by : Logan Patricks

Download or read book Semblance written by Logan Patricks and published by Strangecrow Books. This book was released on 2013-12-23 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whoever said money couldn't buy happiness has never starved a day in their lives. My name is Aria Valencia, a third year classical music student at the university, and I was down to my last dollar. Some nights, I seriously considered working at the rippers just to make ends meet, but the thought of my dad's spirit--God rest his soul--scowling at me while I danced up on some drooling degenerate was enough to turn me off the idea completely. And then one night, chance came knocking on my door under the guise of the Midnight Society, a secret cabal comprised of the most wealthy and influential souls this side of the Universe. Their leader was a man named Shadow, who was equally enigmatic as he was gorgeous and, for some mystifying reason, had his dark brooding eyes focused on me. Seduced by the promises of fame and fortune in exchange for a seemingly innocent request, I soon found myself drawn into a provocative world filled with both vast riches and unending lies and it didn't take long for me to realize what being a part of the Midnight Society actually entailed: shiny things, sensual romance, and dead bodies. Being with Shadow came with a terrible price, one that I wasn't willing to pay. There's a dark side to every love story, and this one was mine.

Hope at Sea

Download Hope at Sea PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Anne Schwartz Books
ISBN 13 : 1984892851
Total Pages : 27 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (848 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Hope at Sea by : Daniel Miyares

Download or read book Hope at Sea written by Daniel Miyares and published by Anne Schwartz Books. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hope doesn’t only want to listen to her father’s stories about his voyages at sea, she wants to be part of those stories. And so, unbeknownst to her parents, she stows away on her father's 19th-century merchant vessel. But look... The wind has picked up and the sky is darkening... Could there be such a thing as an adventure that is too exciting? Join high-spirited Hope on a trip of a lifetime in this exquisitely illustrated picture book that also captures the love between a father and child.

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember

Download Scatter, Adapt, and Remember PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0385535929
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (855 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by : Annalee Newitz

Download or read book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember written by Annalee Newitz and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its 4.5 billion–year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How? As a species, Homo sapiens is at a crossroads. Study of our planet’s turbulent past suggests that we are overdue for a catastrophic disaster, whether caused by nature or by human interference. It’s a frightening prospect, as each of the Earth’s past major disasters—from meteor strikes to bombardment by cosmic radiation—resulted in a mass extinction, where more than 75 percent of the planet’s species died out. But in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Annalee Newitz, science journalist and editor of the science Web site io9.com explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. Life on Earth has come close to annihilation—humans have, more than once, narrowly avoided extinction just during the last million years—but every single time a few creatures survived, evolving to adapt to the harshest of conditions. This brilliantly speculative work of popular science focuses on humanity’s long history of dodging the bullet, as well as on new threats that we may face in years to come. Most important, it explores how scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters tomorrow. From simulating tsunamis to studying central Turkey’s ancient underground cities; from cultivating cyanobacteria for “living cities” to designing space elevators to make space colonies cost-effective; from using math to stop pandemics to studying the remarkable survival strategies of gray whales, scientists and researchers the world over are discovering the keys to long-term resilience and learning how humans can choose life over death. Newitz’s remarkable and fascinating journey through the science of mass extinctions is a powerful argument about human ingenuity and our ability to change. In a world populated by doomsday preppers and media commentators obsessively forecasting our demise, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is a compelling voice of hope. It leads us away from apocalyptic thinking into a future where we live to build a better world—on this planet and perhaps on others. Readers of this book will be equipped scientifically, intellectually, and emotionally to face whatever the future holds.

Being and Event

Download Being and Event PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 082649529X
Total Pages : 561 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (264 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Being and Event by : Alain Badiou

Download or read book Being and Event written by Alain Badiou and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2007-07-15 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A translation of one of the single most important works of recent French philosophy, Badiou's magnum opus, and a must-have for his growing following and anyone interested in contemporary Continental thought.

Theory of the Solitary Sailor

Download Theory of the Solitary Sailor PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 1913029166
Total Pages : 62 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (13 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Theory of the Solitary Sailor by : Gilles Grelet

Download or read book Theory of the Solitary Sailor written by Gilles Grelet and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grelet's solitary sailor is a radical theoretical figure, herald angel of an existential rebellion against the world and against philosophy's world-thought. Over a decade ago, Gilles Grelet left the city to live permanently on the sea, in silence and solitude, with no plans to return to land, rarely leaving his boat Théorème. An act of radical refusal, a process of undoing one by one the ties that attach humans to the world, for Grelet this departure was also inseparable from an ongoing campaign of anti-philosophy. Like François Laruelle's "ordinary man" or Rousseau's "solitary walker," Grelet's solitary sailor is a radical theoretical figure, herald angel of an existential rebellion against the world and against philosophy's world-thought, point zero of an anti-philosophy as rigorous gnosis, and apprentice in the herethics of navigation. More than a set of scattered reflections, less than a system of thought, Theory of the Solitary Sailor is a gnostic device. It answers the supposed necessity of realizing the world-thought that is philosophy (or whatever takes its place) with a steadfast and melancholeric refusal. As indifferently serene and implacably violent as the ocean itself, devastating for the sufficiency of the world and the reign of semblance, this is a lived anti-philosophy, a perpetual assault waged from the waters off the coast of Brittany, amid sea and wind.

Meander, Spiral, Explode

Download Meander, Spiral, Explode PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1948226138
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (482 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Meander, Spiral, Explode by : Jane Alison

Download or read book Meander, Spiral, Explode written by Jane Alison and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How lovely to discover a book on the craft of writing that is also fun to read . . . Alison asserts that the best stories follow patterns in nature, and by defining these new styles she offers writers the freedom to explore but with enough guidance to thrive." ―Maris Kreizman, Vulture A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 | A Poets & Writers Best Books for Writers As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel― one we’re actually told to follow―and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?" W. G. Sebald’s Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc--or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her “museum of specimens” include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison. Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let’s leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.

An Event, Perhaps

Download An Event, Perhaps PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1788732839
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (887 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis An Event, Perhaps by : Peter Salmon

Download or read book An Event, Perhaps written by Peter Salmon and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosopher, film star, father of “post truth”—the real story of Jacques Derrida Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to “little more than an object of ridicule.” For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, politics, and linguistics. In An Event, Perhaps, Peter Salmon presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and urgent thinker for our times. Born in Algiers, the young Jackie was always an outsider. Despite his best efforts, he found it difficult to establish himself among the Paris intellectual milieu of the 1960s. However, in 1967, he changed the whole course of philosophy: outlining the central concepts of deconstruction. Immediately, his reputation as a complex and confounding thinker was established. Feted by some, abhorred by others, Derrida had an exhaustive breadth of interests but, as Salmon shows, was moved by a profound desire to understand how we engage with each other. It is a theme explored through Derrida’s intimate relationships with writers such as Althusser, Genet, Lacan, Foucault, Cixous, and Kristeva. Accessible, provocative and beautifully written, An Event, Perhaps will introduce a new readership to the life and work of a philosopher whose influence over the way we think will continue long into the twenty-first century.

For a Pragmatics of the Useless

Download For a Pragmatics of the Useless PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478012595
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis For a Pragmatics of the Useless by : Erin Manning

Download or read book For a Pragmatics of the Useless written by Erin Manning and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.