In Always More Than One, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work toward the notion of "choreographic thinking." Here, she uses choreographic thinking to explore a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established categories. Manning connects this to the concept of "autistic perception," described by autistics as the awareness of a relational field prior to the so-called neurotypical tendency to "chunk" experience into predetermined subjects and objects. Autistics explain that, rather than immediately distinguishing objects-such as chairs and tables and humans-from one another on entering a given environment, they experience the environment as gradually taking form. Manning maintains that this mode of awareness underlies all perception. What we perceive is never first a subject or an object, but an ecology. From this vantage point, she proposes that we consider an ecological politics where movement and relation take precedence over predefined categories, such as the neurotypical and the neurodiverse, or the human and the nonhuman. What would it mean to embrace an ecological politics of collective individuation?
Erin Manning is University Research Chair in Philosophy and Relational Art and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. She is the author of Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy and Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty and coauthor, with Brian Massumi, of Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (forthcoming).
Prelude / Brian Massumi ix Acknowledgments xxv 1. Toward a Leaky Sense of Self 1 Interlude. When Movement Dances 13 2. Always More Than One 16 Interlude. Dancing the Virtual 30 3. Waltzing the Limit 41 4. Propositions for the Verge 74 Interlude. What Else? 91 5. Choreography as Mobile Architecture 99 Interlude. Fiery, Luminous, Scary 124 6. The Dance of Attention 133 7. An Ethics of Language in the Making 149 Interlude. Love the Anonymous Elements 172 8. The Shape of Enthusiasm 184 Coda. Another Regard 204 Notes 223 Bibliography 257 Index 267
Explores the concept of the "more-than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience
"Erin Manning's book offers a philosophy of neurodiverse perception, encouraging us 'not to begin with the pre-chunked.' How ironic, then, that the impulse to categorize and to pathologize is generally seen as evidence of the normate's proper functioning. In Manning's splendid book, autism comes to signify not a disorder but a relational' dance of attention,' one that refuses to strand any entity at the margin of our concern." - Ralph James Savarese, coeditor of "Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity," a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly.
