THE MINOR GESTURE THOUGHT IN THE ACT A series edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi THE MINOR GESTURE ERIN MANNING DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM AND LONDON 2016 © 2016 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ∞ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Arno and Avenir by Graphic Composition, Inc., Bogart, Georgia Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data Names: Manning, Erin, author. Title: Te minor gesture / Erin Manning. Other titles: Tought in the act. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. Series: Tought in the act | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: lccn 2015046671 (print) | lccn 2015048953 (ebook) isbn 9780822361039 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822361213 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 9780822374411 (e- book) Subjects: lcsh: Perception (Philosophy) | Self (Philosophy) | Cognitive neuroscience5Philosophy. | Autism. | Political psychology. Classifcation: lcc b828.45 .m366 2016 (print) | lcc b828.45 (ebook) | ddc 1285dc23 lc record available at htp:// lccn .loc .gov /2015046671 Cover art: Nathaniel Stern and Erin Manning, Weather Paterns: Te Smell of Red. Installation, Glasshouse, New York, 2014. Photo by Leslie Plumb. Courtesy of the artists and Leslie Plumb. FOR BEN JONES (1930– 2015) who followed the minor gestures of the kerf in the study of what else living can be always measure the kerf it makes a diference measure the absence$ it is the very stuf, the very kerf, of desire. CONTENTS PREFACE ix Introduction: In a Minor Key 1 1. Against Method 26 2. Artfulness: Emergent Collectivities and Processes of Individuation 46 3. Weather Paterns, or How Minor Gestures Entertain the Environment 64 4. Dress Becomes Body: Fashioning the Force of Form 86 5. Choreographing the Political 111 6. Carrying the Feeling 131 7. In the Act: Te Shape of Precarity 165 8. What a Body Can Do: A Conversation with Arno Boehler 189 Postscript: Afrmation without Credit 201 NOTES 233 REFERENCES 261 INDEX 269 PREFACE Tere’s something about writing books that is out of time. As though the writing only really knows what it’s afer once it has begun to make its way into the world. For me, thinking too has always had this quality: think- ing thickens in its encounter with the futurity that orients it. Tis futurity in thinking’s presentness is part of what keeps thinking lithe: thinking is always out of sync with itself. Te best kind of encounter with thinking’s outside is the kind that deeply listens to what writing is trying to do, almost thinking beyond what the author is capable of thinking, then returning that thinking, almost beyond what the reader can think, to the author. In this gesture of encoun- ter, no one is trying to convince anyone: thought is thinking collectively at its limit. Going through the review process for Te Minor Gesture, I had the luck of encountering thinking at the limit. In an afrmative gesture5what I call “afrmation without credit” in the postscript5the reviewers took time to think- with the text in a gesture of writing- with, returning Te Minor Ges- ture to me with the richness of an engagement that was capable of opening my thinking beyond where I thought it could go. In this return, I received not a simple account of how writing performs knowledge, but something much more important: an engagement with how thinking does its work, in the writing. What struck me, in reading these reviews (can these still be called re- views?), was how fragile this gesture of writing- with made me feel. Te fragility, I think, has to do with writing pushed to a limit where it is truly in contact with the tremulousness of thinking in the act. Bringing thought into contact with its limit this way is a minor gesture. It is a minor gesture in that it activates a tendency already in germ and emboldens it toward an altering of what that tendency can do. A thought less concerned with the certainty of what it knows is more open to the minor in thinking, more open to the force of the as- yet- unformed coursing through it. Tis minor tendency values the force of form, not just the form knowledge takes. Te Minor Gesture engages directly with this tension between knowl- edge and value. What else could be at stake in the encounter if it weren’t organized around the certainty of knowing? What might become thinkable if knowledge weren’t so tied to an account of subject- driven agency? And, what else might value look like if it weren’t framed by judgment? A minor gesture that activates the collectivity at the heart of thought efects change. It afects not only what the text can become: it alters to the core what thinking can do. It gives value to the processual uncertainty of thought as yet unformed, and gives that thought the space to develop col- lectively. For their elegant engagement with collective thinking in the act, I thank these reviewers by name: Greg Seigworth and Fred Moten. Tank you for inviting me to think beyond the limit of what seemed thinkable, and for thinking there with me. I also thank the SenseLab, with whom the thinking never stops, whether we are making or moving or talking or writing. My life is changed, contin- uously, by the thinking that moves us. And, as always: thank you to Brian Massumi. Even when we’re not writ- ing together I hear the speculative force of our collective thinking in my words. You have taught me that we never write alone. x Preface INTRODUCTION In a Minor Key Tis book begins in a minor key and works to create a feld of resonance for the minor. It does so through the concept of the minor gesture. Te minor gesture, allied to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatari’s concept of the minor, is the gestural force that opens experience to its potential variation. It does this from within experience itself, activating a shif in tone, a diference in quality. A minor key is always interlaced with major keys5the minor works the major from within. What must be remembered is this: neither the minor nor the major is fxed in advance. Te major is a structural tendency that organizes itself according to predetermined defnitions of value. Te minor is a force that courses through it, unmooring its structural integrity, prob- lematizing its normative standards. Te unwavering belief in the major as the site where events occur, where events make a diference, is based on ac- cepted accounts of what registers as change as well as existing parameters for gauging the value of that change.1 Yet while the grand gestures of a macro- politics most easily sum up the changes that occurred to alter the feld, it is the minoritarian tendencies that initiate the subtle shifs that created the conditions for this, and any change. Te grand is given the status it has not because it is where the transformative power lies, but because it is easier to identify major shifs than to catalogue the nuanced rhythms of the minor. As a result, these rhythms are narrated as secondary, or even negligible. Te minor is a continual variation on experience. It has a mobility not given to the major: its rhythms are not controlled by a preexisting struc- ture, but open to fux. In variation is in change, indeterminate. But inde- terminacy, because of its wildness, is ofen seen as unrigorous, fimsy, its lack of solidity mistaken for a lack of consistency. Te minor thus gets cast aside, overlooked, or forgoten in the interplay of major chords. Tis is the downside of the minor, but also its strength: that it does not have the full force of a preexisting status, of a given structure, of a predetermined met- ric, to keep it alive. It is out of time, untimely, rhythmically inventing its own pulse. Te minor isn’t known in advance. It never reproduces itself in its own image. Each minor gesture is singularly connected to the event at hand, immanent to the in-act. Tis makes it pragmatic. But the minor gesture also exceeds the bounds of the event, touching on the inefable quality of its more-than. Tis makes it speculative. Te minor gesture works in the mode of speculative pragmatism. From a speculatively pragmatic stance, it invents its own value, a value as ephemeral as it is mobile. Tis permeabil- ity tends to make it ungraspable, and ofen unrecognizable: it is no doubt difcult to value that which has litle perceptible form, that which has not yet quite been invented, let alone defned. And so the minor gesture ofen goes by unperceived, its improvisational threads of variability overlooked, despite their being in our midst. Tere is no question that the minor is precarious. And yet the minor gesture is everywhere, all the time. Despite its pre- carity, it resurfaces punctually, claiming not space as such, but space- of-variation. Te minor invents new forms of existence, and with them, in them, we come to be. Tese temporary forms of life travel across the everyday, making untimely existing political structures, activating new modes of perception, inventing languages that speak in the interstices of major tongues. Te minor gesture’s indeterminacy, and even its failure to thrive, is what interests me here. For there is no question, it seems to me, that we put too much credence in that which persists, in the edifces rebuilt daily by technocrats. Tere must be other ways of living? In its movement, the minor gesture creates sites of dissonance, staging disturbances that open experience to new modes of expression.