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.
- 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
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- D
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- K
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- M
- N
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