For a Pragmatics of the Useless

Erin Manning

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781478011071, 9781478010029
• eBook ISBN: 9781478012597
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude—Fugitively, Approximately
• 1. For a Pragmatics of the Useless
• 2. Toward a Politics of Immediation
• pocket practice—nestingpatching
• 3. What Things Do When They Shape Each Other
• pocket practice—backgroundingforegrounding
• 4. Experimenting Immediation: Collaboration and the Politics of Fabulation
• 5.Practicing the Schizz
• interlude—How Do We Repair?
• 6. Me Lo Dijo un Pajarito: Neurodiversity, Black Life, and the University as We Know It
• pocket practice—livingloving
• 7. Not at a Distance: On Touch, Synesthesia, and Other Ways of Knowing
• pocket practice—ticcingflapping
• 8. Cephalopod Dreams: Finance at the Limit
• coda—schizzinganarchiving
• Notes
• References
• Index