For The Wild - ERIN MANNING on the Choreography of Neurodiversity ⧸356

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today we are speaking with

00:00:12.560 Erin Manning. To open, we wanted to offer some context to Erin Manning's work as a scholar,

00:00:19.740 theorist, and artist. Erin's work is grounded in scholarship on neurodiversity, blackness,

00:00:25.580 and ways of being that move outside of and beyond the status quo. In this episode, Erin shares her

00:00:32.260 contemplations on the role of academia, her commitment to pedagogies that make space for

00:00:38.200 creativity, her understanding of autistic perception as a way of seeing life beyond

00:00:44.200 neurotypical systems, and her musings on what life outside of the logic of whiteness could mean.

00:00:51.100 these are all big philosophical ideas yes but just as much as aaron's work is rooted in theory it is

00:00:59.360 also rooted in tangible practice she details her work with the three ecologies project and

00:01:05.420 emphasizes the importance of land-based work to embody revolution if you're interested in learning

00:01:10.780 more about the philosophers thinkers and concepts mentioned in this episode please visit our episode

00:01:16.780 webpage at forthewild.world for more detailed information. We hope you enjoy this fascinating

00:01:22.520 episode. Thanks for listening. We all live with different conditions of access based on economics,

00:01:34.580 based on race, based on ableism. So thinking about relation for me is less thinking about

00:01:43.100 people as inseparable than about all of the conduits of what I think of as the more than.

00:01:50.680 We breathe in oxygen, we're involved in the gravitational field, we're, you know,

00:01:56.040 made up of water and bacteria. So whatever we are is not in any sense separable from the earth.

00:02:07.460 Aaron Manning grounds in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics, and politics.

00:02:14.000 Pedagogical experiments are central to her work, some of which occur at Concordia University in Montreal, where she is a research chair in speculative pragmatism, art, and pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts.

00:02:28.280 She is concerned always about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. She has written the minor gesture, for a pragmatics of the useless, out of the clear, and the being of relation.

00:02:41.760 her artwork is textile based relationally oriented and often participatory her current

00:02:49.140 research is focused on 3e an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies

00:02:55.800 the social the environmental and the conceptual

00:02:58.740 aaron thank you so much for joining us today this interview has felt like a long time coming

00:03:09.060 And I know the whole team at For the Wild has really admired your work for some time now.

00:03:13.720 Thank you.

00:03:14.500 I'm excited to be here.

00:03:16.280 As we open, I'm thinking I want to make some space to hear about the journey of your life

00:03:21.500 and work.

00:03:22.480 And what do you find yourself focusing on now?

00:03:26.480 And how has your past scholarship led you to these sites of inquiry?

00:03:32.800 Wow, a big question.

00:03:34.220 um well I would say that um like perhaps many people I can only make sense of my trajectory

00:03:42.200 um in reverse so I I don't have a trajectory that had a kind of master plan attached to it

00:03:52.140 um I come um to academia sideways in the sense that it never was a goal of mine to be in

00:04:03.780 academia or to pursue academia as a career um it ended up being a propitious environment to some

00:04:13.160 degree uh to prolong some thought processes and engage in pedagogy um so i come i come to these

00:04:22.800 uh environments that i that i populate i would say the the philosophical environment the dance

00:04:30.100 world the art world I come to them across certain chance encounters I was working as an artist

00:04:41.080 before I entered academia I was always surrounded by philosophy so being in contact with philosophical

00:04:49.460 voices was part of my upbringing in the last 20 years I've been very involved in the growing of

00:04:59.520 of a large network called sense lab and in the last three years there's been a shift to the

00:05:07.400 three ecologies project um which i can talk a lot more about but i suppose the thing that i'm

00:05:13.540 thinking about the most right now is the transversality of those three ecologies the

00:05:20.820 social the conceptual and the environmental thinking about how um it's more interesting

00:05:29.280 to me not to create a kind of binary between the philosophical and the environmental for example

00:05:35.580 um to think about how the practices of everyday life are also um philosophical and pedagogical

00:05:45.520 So those are thoughts that I have. I'm orienting myself toward an exhibition next June where I'm thinking a lot about the segregation of a practice toward a gallery space and how that's different from the kind of work I do in the everyday around the three ecologies.

00:06:05.220 And most recently, from the philosophical perspective, I've finished a little book called The Being of Relation, which is pursuing my thinking around neurodiversity and Blackness.

00:06:20.280 Wow. Well, I know it's a big question and that was a big response. So there's a lot to chew on there.

00:06:26.360 And yeah, I guess I'm wondering how dance and movement, especially within the framework

00:06:33.960 of disability studies and subversive expressions fit into your practice and theory.

00:06:41.500 So I was a dancer before I went into the academic environment.

00:06:48.060 And at the time that I did my PhD, there wasn't the opening, at least in the environments

00:06:55.560 that I studied in for what we now call research creation or art-based research so they were quite

00:07:02.820 separate I did my work as a dancer as a professional dancer on one side and I worked

00:07:11.800 philosophically on the other end and was an artist in a third time so these things were quite

00:07:18.320 segregated when I became a when I got my first academic position which is still the one I'm in

00:07:25.520 at Concordia University, a number of people started to work with me who were choreographers

00:07:30.760 and dancers. And now I would say, because I know more now, that these were chiefly neurodiverse

00:07:38.500 folks. At the time, I had no vocabulary for that, nor did I have a vocabulary for dance.

00:07:44.260 But what I did realize pretty quickly was that there was a large historical lineage of dance.

00:07:50.640 You know, there was something we call dance studies, which was available and which was being produced in dance departments.

00:07:59.040 A lot of it quite semiotically oriented.

00:08:02.900 And I'm not saying that that wasn't good work.

00:08:05.860 It's work that definitely has its place, semiotic or historical work.

00:08:10.420 But it wasn't work that was involved in movement, that had a commitment to philosophies of movement.

00:08:17.820 There was one philosopher working closely in that environment, and that was José Gilles, a Portuguese philosopher who continues to do very, very important work in that environment. But that was work that was quite difficult to get access to in English. He's written mostly in French and in Portuguese, though there was one book called Metamorphoses of the Body that had been published in translation at University of Minnesota Press.

00:08:45.540 So what happened very concretely is that I started writing. And in the first period, my writing was simply there to think with the students that I was working with. And it was writing that had been started or generated by the work that I had done in Politics of Touch.

00:09:04.760 but Relationscapes, the book that came out of it, was perhaps the first commitment to movement

00:09:12.240 philosophy from what I now understand would be a neurodiverse perspective. But it took me a while

00:09:18.720 to understand that that's what I was doing. And so, you know, I don't necessarily occupy

00:09:25.700 disciplinary environments. So I don't know that I situate myself in any one place that could be

00:09:33.120 call disability studies or other studies but I do think that there's something extraordinarily

00:09:39.340 important about movement philosophy and how it allows us to rethink presuppositions about what

00:09:45.260 a body is how a body moves how the question of the body has been mobilized in political theory

00:09:52.100 political philosophy thinking around whiteness etc so so that that would be the trajectory more or

00:09:59.220 yes there is something on your website and you write quote to move is to engage the potential

00:10:09.820 inherent in the pre-acceleration that embodies you pre-accelerated because there can be no

00:10:16.600 beginning or end to movement movement is one with the world not body world but body worlding

00:10:23.980 We move not to populate space, not to extend it or to embody it, but to create it, end quote.

00:10:31.960 So beautiful.

00:10:34.040 And movement and other human actions that may seem basic are often those that fuel us the most and that can really drive change.

00:10:46.920 So I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on creating scholarship that honors this type of expression.

00:10:53.980 Mm hmm. I guess I would start in two directions. And again, I don't think I fully understood this when I was starting out thinking about it.

00:11:04.800 I mean, it's really grown over years. The first direction would be the direction I took in Politics of Touch,

00:11:10.800 which is to go back to the history of political theory in the context of European thinkers.

00:11:20.460 So we're thinking here with folks who are colonially oriented in a way that I would now think about through whiteness and neurotypicality.

00:11:33.140 So if we go back to those traditions, we'll find that we have a philosophy of the body that is very circumscribed.

00:11:41.960 And by that, I mean that the body is bounded.

00:11:45.420 It's not moving.

00:11:46.580 Um, if you look at, at, um, descriptions, for example, of the body politic, um, you'll find a, a stationary body, a stable body. Um, and so the question I had for when I was writing Politics of Touch was what, what would happen to the political were we to begin elsewhere?

00:12:08.060 Were we to take movement into account? What would theory of the human or the modern subject look like under those conditions? So that's one direction. And then the other direction would be the question itself of ecology or environment.

00:12:26.920 And here, neurodiverse thinkers have really helped me out that there's a shorthand of the body that we often call the subject or that we would reduce into categories like identity that is useful in delineating subject to object relations.

00:12:48.920 relations, but that is, I think, very dangerous in sort of cementing belief that there's a clear

00:12:57.860 separation between body and world. And the reason I said that autistics and other neurodiverse folks

00:13:04.640 have been very important to me for thinking this is that they were the ones who came to me early on

00:13:10.740 in 2010, 11, 12, folks like DJ Savary's and Tito Mukhopadai and Adam Wolfand and Mel Bags and

00:13:20.200 others to talk about how there was a tendency in neurotypicality toward what they called chunking.

00:13:29.820 What they mean by that is that neurotypical modes of engagement enforce strong separations between

00:13:37.760 bodies and worlds. They seem to feel certain that there is such a separation, whereas

00:13:45.440 neurodiverse forms of perception, or what I've called autistic perception, is involved in the

00:13:51.760 processes of perception where forms haven't fully consolidated, which is a sort of native

00:13:59.600 way of perceiving for autistics. So when I talk about autistic perception, I don't actually mean

00:14:08.560 perception that is limited to autistics, but I think of autistics as living at the core of it

00:14:16.220 and being able to give us vocabulary to better understand those modes of perception. And so

00:14:22.880 you put those two together, what you have is the realization that it's a very useful

00:14:28.020 shorthand to separate bodies and world or to have a sort of stationary body to describe the body

00:14:36.180 politic, because that's a much easier, that's just simply easier to control. And so beginning

00:14:43.240 with a theory of movement, and by that I don't mean a theory of displacement, I really mean

00:14:48.860 what Brian Masumi calls bear activity, so movement, potential, which is what the world is made of,

00:14:56.660 I think it brings us to a different logic and it's that different logic that I'm most interested or

00:15:02.620 have been most interested in. I've noticed that throughout your work, you detail the concept of

00:15:10.780 autistic perception. And yeah, I would just like to talk through that in more detail and specifically

00:15:19.320 maybe explain the ways that honoring neurodiverse experience is vital in dreaming towards better

00:15:26.060 worlds. So if we really take seriously that there is no neurotypical person, so that neurotypicality

00:15:35.140 is a systemic operation that I now think of as aligned in every sense to whiteness, 0.51

00:15:41.460 then I think we also have to say that there is no neurodiverse person, which is not at all to

00:15:47.560 say that there aren't autistics and folks that are in all kinds of neurological difference. That's

00:15:53.640 not what I'm trying to say, but that neurodiversity is a modality that is expressive of other modes

00:16:00.920 of valuation, other ways of encountering the world that tend to be devalued. And this is very

00:16:07.080 pragmatic. It's not speaking of things that are necessarily even backgrounded. So for example,

00:16:14.500 an obvious one would be the injunction to pay attention that we all know so well. We get

00:16:22.940 organized into chairs early on in our lives, those of us who go to school. And in the organization

00:16:30.980 of our bodies into chairs, our whole body gets organized into a certain frontality as we face

00:16:38.020 a teacher. And in that frontality, we're trained to express in a facial expressiveness how we're

00:16:47.420 listening. So we get trained into a choreography very, very early on that we either fit into

00:16:56.880 quite seamlessly, in which case we're practicing neurotypicality well, or we fall out of.

00:17:04.160 And one thing that, you know, in my book for Pragmatics of the Useless, I begin to really

00:17:10.360 think through a statement which is that Black life is neurodiverse life. And I'm trying to

00:17:19.000 think through the ways in which modes of living that are adjacent to whiteness, that are outside

00:17:25.760 its logic, are by nature neurodiverse modes of life. So what I would say quickly to that question

00:17:32.980 is that what neurodiversity brings, first of all, is the recognition of those choreographies. And I

00:17:40.200 just named one really quickly there are there are millions of others that that that organize our

00:17:46.080 bodies and make them docile um that that produce performative learning bodies um that are that that

00:17:54.980 down the road will delineate themselves from other bodies that are considered to be

00:18:01.040 not adequately performative of knowing that's one way but the other the other aspect of

00:18:07.180 neurodiversity that's really important, I think, is that I think of it as a fundamentally other

00:18:12.840 logic of engagement with the world. The perceptual field, if it's open to all of the nuances of its

00:18:20.960 non-separation from the world, in a kind of difference without separability, allows us to

00:18:30.180 grasp

00:18:32.100 a really, or to engage

00:18:34.720 with a really different notion

00:18:36.540 of ecology

00:18:38.440 and to recognize

00:18:40.900 a much more

00:18:42.960 vital relationship

00:18:46.760 between body and world.

00:19:00.180 I wanted to bring up this other large topic

00:19:28.760 that I know you wrestle with in your work, which is moving outside of systems of oppression.

00:19:36.220 And I'm wondering, how do you grapple with the tension that we must move outside of systems

00:19:45.720 of oppression in order to abolish them? But simultaneously, we often solidify their

00:19:52.340 existence through resistance? It's a tough question, isn't it? My tendency is to think that

00:20:00.380 the rhetorical doesn't do the work outside if it's segregated from practices. My own

00:20:10.020 life is completely imbricated in practice. You know, the Three Ecologies project is a project

00:20:18.440 that requires daily work that is quite physical work generating conditions for living in a pretty

00:20:26.600 northern climate that's off-grid so what I tend to think is that when we're doing this work that

00:20:36.420 that tries to think through very complicated issues around racism around yeah neurodiversity

00:20:43.840 around violence and massacres and death we have to at the same time be generating or at least

00:20:52.800 thinking or working to generate other ways of living it it doesn't work otherwise um

00:20:59.820 I don't think because if if we're not doing that work at the very same time we're not

00:21:05.820 creating movements for those other ways so it's a sort of a long way of saying um that

00:21:12.700 for years I thought that it wasn't my place to talk about these things to work on these

00:21:20.100 kinds of subjects because I was white I couldn't talk about indigenous issues or because I was

00:21:25.300 white I couldn't work through vocabularies of blackness in relation to other ways of living 0.50

00:21:33.200 and at a certain point I thought that that was wrong that precisely because I am white I have

00:21:41.080 to think through these questions. I have to be engaged with them, but in a way that carries

00:21:47.200 through all the other things I do in the world, not separate from them. Yeah. Well, thank you for

00:21:56.040 detailing that for us a bit. And I want to move into a topic beyond and in addition to the

00:22:04.920 university as a thought, because I'm interested in how you view institutions through your works

00:22:11.080 specifically. And I think the university is a particularly interesting point of inquiry as

00:22:16.960 a space that can hold so much radical potential and simultaneously can so easily uphold the status

00:22:25.420 quo. So I'd love to hear more about how you work both within, beyond, and outside of the university

00:22:33.380 through your scholarship and practice? The big, hard question. I'm very aware that when we turn

00:22:41.080 our backs on the institution, the academic institution, we run the risk of engaging in

00:22:49.820 a certain naivety around all the other modes of institutionalization that our worlds are made of.

00:22:55.220 So I try to remember that in my frustration with the neoliberalization of the academy

00:23:02.720 so that my response to it is not simply a kind of frontal response,

00:23:12.240 a neurotypical response, you could say.

00:23:14.260 So I think of academia as very, very good at some things.

00:23:19.520 I think of it, for example, as very, very good at attracting interesting people.

00:23:24.380 I think of it as fantastic at fostering encounters through the classroom.

00:23:31.360 Not all of those encounters are fantastic, but there are a lot of people doing really interesting work in those classrooms.

00:23:38.740 But I do think of it as a colonial institution that functions very much in the logic of capital.

00:23:45.200 I mean, we get credits, and those credits buy us diplomas.

00:23:51.540 The credits are organized around existing ideas of what knowledge should look like that are held together through methodologies that are very much within the logic of institutionalization, even when they're called decolonial, in my view.

00:24:09.480 precisely because we maintain, in most cases,

00:24:16.300 a sense of somebody as the adjudicator of those processes.

00:24:21.060 And for those academic processes to be quote-unquote fruitful,

00:24:26.040 i.e. for the possibility of someone being granted a diploma,

00:24:31.800 it is necessary that they be legible.

00:24:35.100 I'll give you an example of that

00:24:38.180 very current example

00:24:39.740 I work with someone who's a refugee

00:24:41.720 from Syria who's

00:24:43.860 Kurdish so this is a person

00:24:45.760 she's an artist who

00:24:47.380 has lived a life

00:24:49.840 of displacement while in Syria

00:24:51.820 and now for 20 some years

00:24:53.980 in Canada, in Montreal

00:24:55.200 and

00:24:56.880 in the doctoral process

00:24:59.580 she's asked to

00:25:01.360 make that process

00:25:03.380 legible

00:25:04.180 um the the the vocabulary she's given to do that is quote-unquote decolonial but but the ways of

00:25:12.460 doing it in language are very colonial right i mean we we expect her to make sense of that

00:25:18.980 experience through practices that have been um valued by and in the university such as

00:25:26.840 the kind of citational practices that we operate with that predispose us to valuing some voices

00:25:36.100 over others, for example. And so the process, quite a long process of working together has

00:25:43.840 taught us both how limited that environment is for those who cannot work under those conditions.

00:25:51.800 And she's somebody who cannot work under those conditions.

00:25:54.400 She can't make legible. 1.00

00:25:56.840 She, language just doesn't work that way for her in large part because she's also neurodiverse. 0.99

00:26:03.960 And so we found a process that works for her. 0.81

00:26:07.900 We'll see if she passes.

00:26:09.340 It's a complicated process that we've come up with that involves preparing a site for

00:26:14.920 engagement where other people will come in and write in the room and on the walls and

00:26:20.340 on the floor and that the dissertation will be the room itself. But just as she's going up for

00:26:26.800 defense, she's received, well, a quite, I mean, the message was meant well, but it was quite

00:26:33.060 condescending message, I thought, about how she needs to sort of get it together to understand

00:26:42.640 the rigor that is required of her through this process. And whenever I see messages like that,

00:26:49.240 I think, oh, okay, here it is. Here's neurotypicality. Here are those colonial

00:26:52.800 gestures coming back saying, you know, be careful because we already know what a PhD is and what

00:26:58.540 you're doing. It doesn't sound or feel or look like a PhD. And we're not going to let this get

00:27:05.140 through because if we let it get through, it would, it would debase our idea of what counts

00:27:10.820 as knowledge. And I think we do that all the time that we're terrified. Those of us who teach in the

00:27:16.880 institution of giving away our privilege of allowing people through the door who don't

00:27:24.660 merit that crossing. And they don't merit it because they haven't jumped through the same

00:27:29.960 kinds of hoops that we have. So my response to that, not just mine, but Sense Labs and my partner

00:27:38.520 Brian Masumi's response to that has been to think para-institutionally. And the Three Ecologies

00:27:44.240 project is the most, I mean, SenseLab was one of the ways in which we did that work for 20 years,

00:27:50.320 and now we're moving more emphatically into what we think of as a parapedagogical practice

00:27:55.360 where living and learning are absolutely co-composing and we're outside the system

00:28:01.920 of accreditation. I say that though carefully, knowing that for some people, and for good reason,

00:28:08.400 the mode of accreditation is necessary. So for example, I'm working now with a quote-unquote

00:28:14.960 non-speaking autistic. I say quotes because Adam Wolfen certainly speaks, but he doesn't speak 0.62

00:28:21.380 with his mouth. He types to communicate so that with the first quote-unquote non-speaking autistic

00:28:28.160 to be in a university in Canada. And it's important that Adam is in the university for 0.65

00:28:33.940 other autistics so that they can see that it is indeed possible. So sometimes the accreditation

00:28:39.620 is necessary, but a lot of the time, I think we could think much more complexly about what

00:28:47.920 learning is, what has always been. Such an important perspective that we don't hear a lot

00:28:56.120 about. And in The Being of Relation, you write, quote, the question is how to create conditions

00:29:02.440 for a blackening of the world, for a re-enlivening of the socialities it can produce

00:29:08.600 for a poetics of relation, blackness as a practice rewilds the cleave, end quote. 0.88

00:29:15.700 Yeah, wow. And so I'm just trying to wrap my mind around how can we understand rewilding not 0.83

00:29:24.500 just, which isn't just about an understanding of nature that separated us from it, but rather

00:29:31.460 as an embodied cultural process.

00:29:36.060 Yeah, so I've been extremely influenced

00:29:39.120 by what is sometimes called

00:29:41.660 para-ontological thought in Black studies. 0.52

00:29:45.060 And the para-ontological comes from

00:29:47.240 named Chandler and gets taken up

00:29:50.040 by Fred Moten and Denise Paredes Silva,

00:29:53.100 amongst others.

00:29:55.220 And so it comes up through Chandler

00:29:57.620 in a really spectacular text on Du Bois

00:30:01.320 where Chandler talks about how Du Bois finds himself in this kind of stranglehold where

00:30:09.060 if he talks about Blackness, he's stuck with the vocabulary of Blackness generated by white

00:30:15.260 thinkers. So there's this kind of problem that I think you were gesturing at earlier, which is that

00:30:22.380 Du Bois is stuck then in a logic that has already devalued the very question of Blackness. 0.53

00:30:29.340 Um, and I mean, I think we can find this in so many thinkers, but what Chandler then does is he shows us how Du Bois works himself out of that process and that problem by situating the Negro as a problem for thought. 0.82

00:30:48.000 So the para-ontological becomes this schism in the very question of ontology, so that if Blackness can't fit into the ontological, if Blackness can't be equal to being, then we require another modality, another way of thinking existence. 0.86

00:31:10.040 And I see that in so many Black thinkers. And I think that in this literature, what I feel over and over and over again is that there is this, well, in the Black radical tradition, also to quote Cedric Robinson, there's a long, long history of having to be extremely creative as thinkers with respect to what else or how else those parameters might be imagined or created. 0.53

00:31:38.100 And so out of that comes this extraordinary concept of blackness, which is definitely in and of black people, but also much broader than black people themselves. So it's a relational concept, more so than an identitarian one. Relational in the sense of what I think of as the more than.

00:31:56.180 So it is an excess of a simple sedimentation of the body as would have been produced through those modes of the body politic that keep the body stationary. It's a very, very vibratory concept. It's full of movement.

00:32:13.660 And so what I'm trying to think in that quote that you foregrounded is how this paraontological concept of Blackness is always already an ecological concept.

00:32:27.800 And here I'm thinking with Édouard Glissant's important work around the aesthetics of the earth. 0.60

00:32:32.660 So it's hard. I know it's hard. And this is really what that piece was about.

00:32:36.500 it's hard to, it's hard not to, there's a struggle about white people doing this work.

00:32:43.840 And I want to recognize that struggle. And I address it directly in the piece. Some people

00:32:48.620 like Frank Wilderson would say that white-skinned people really can't do this work. My view on it

00:32:54.840 is that there has to be, I think, a way of understanding experience that is not reducible,

00:33:03.580 as I was saying in the beginning, to the segregation or into containment of a body

00:33:10.960 and a separation with the world. So if we take the idea of difference without separability really

00:33:16.440 seriously, then we have to understand blackness and whiteness as systemic and in that sense as

00:33:22.900 going beyond those very racialized categories that have been produced by colonialism, not given to

00:33:30.260 the ways in which you know du bois found himself limited in thought by those very categories and

00:33:36.680 so i'm thinking here of blackness as a practice and i'm learning from black studies which i think

00:33:45.840 is right now the most creative environment for thinking ecologies of resistance i'm thinking

00:33:51.900 through black studies to think about what kinds of modes of of life are yeah are possible or

00:33:59.820 generatable under the conditions of the world as we are living it.

00:34:06.760 To go a bit further into this, I'm wondering how your land-based practices and other practices

00:34:13.460 at Three Ecologies embody this. Yeah. Well, when we started the Three Ecologies project,

00:34:20.120 we've been working on it for a long time. We never imagined that we'd have a land project.

00:34:24.980 We actually thought we'd be in the city and we initially considered it much more as an

00:34:31.660 altar university site.

00:34:34.460 Over years, we began to one, you know, sort of the university part started to fall out

00:34:39.180 because it was sort of thinking in the same logic.

00:34:42.240 You know, if you build an altar university, you're still in the logic of the university.

00:34:45.340 And over time, the idea of the power institutional sort of grew in us in ways that allowed us

00:34:52.380 to understand that we would always be imbricated in some ways in the institutional, and we needn't

00:34:57.080 be so afraid of it, because it could foster certain kinds of openings. You just have to

00:35:03.280 be careful not to allow its logic to take over. So those openings that I mentioned before about

00:35:10.520 its capacity to call forth interesting groups of people and so on. So what happened was pragmatic

00:35:20.460 in the end, we got priced out of the market. By the time we had some money to buy, we couldn't

00:35:25.620 afford it anymore. And we fell upon this possibility up north. It's three hours north

00:35:31.480 of Montreal. And we became interested in taking seriously the question of property. It's a

00:35:39.000 question that I thought a lot about when I was reading The Undercommons by Stefano Hardy and

00:35:46.500 Fred Moten. And the question of property, what it is, they have an extraordinary chapter in that

00:35:52.720 book on credit and debt, and where they argue that we really need to owe each other everything.

00:35:59.200 The problem isn't debt. The problem is a kind of logic of credit. And so Brian and I began to think

00:36:06.180 that what we needed to do was to really commit to this idea of we owe each other everything

00:36:12.520 through the question of property and what that means pragmatically is purchasing land and then

00:36:19.380 taking that land out of the real estate market to make it a commons under conditions of three

00:36:31.400 ecological thought and by that we mean you know with a mandate toward generating the best

00:36:39.240 modalities of growth and preservation and fostering life where it is needed including

00:36:46.660 folks being able to live you know without having to purchase property and so you know learning

00:36:53.840 building a culture that reminds us that we can't own property that that actually the land is not

00:37:00.960 ownable the irony of that of course is that we have to buy it in order to do that so it's um

00:37:06.460 It's a complicated project that is the very opposite of an investment.

00:37:11.500 It's a bit scary because it's outside of the logic of capitalism in that way.

00:37:18.020 But SenseLab worked for many years on alter economies.

00:37:22.040 And so I think that work really prepared us to think about other forms of economy.

00:37:31.220 And so how we live this at 3E is that way, certainly thinking about taking land out of the market, out of the market economy, but also about creating conditions for practices, like I said before, that are not limited to environmental practices,

00:37:57.360 including practices of thought and art practices

00:38:01.560 and practices of conviviality and emergent sociality

00:38:07.660 or what I call minor sociality,

00:38:09.540 a kind of sideways, neurodiverse ways of coming into encounter.

00:38:14.360 This isn't a community that we're building.

00:38:17.740 It really is a site turned toward the transversality

00:38:23.800 of the social, the conceptual, and the environmental.

00:38:27.360 Um, and so I suppose, you know, there's no sort of direct way.

00:38:33.980 Um, I think that would be kind of fake, you know, that, that those things I write about

00:38:37.820 are practiced, of course, not, not directly, but I think in the everyday of simply doing

00:38:44.420 the work that it takes to run a large, uh, tract of land with three houses off grid in

00:38:51.480 the North, you know, cutting the wood, according the wood, you know, we need 40 cords of wood

00:38:56.820 every year we spend eight nine months of the year preparing it and then the rest of the months

00:39:03.380 burning it uh you know inviting people to be here there's a cabin that's open and free for people to

00:39:10.220 who want to collaborate and again collaboration is not something really parsed out collaborating is

00:39:17.340 in the relation of the three ecologies so it can absolutely be their work that we then learn from

00:39:23.080 So that's, you know, that's sort of the everyday practicing of it that we're doing. And, you know, its range is quite broad from, you know, gardening to building to firing local clay to learning how to tend hides to et cetera, et cetera.

00:39:53.080 Thank you.

00:40:23.080 I want to talk a bit about this idea of what keeps us stuck. And in the being of relation,

00:40:32.520 you write, quote, to repeat in the sludge of environmental degradation of settler colonial

00:40:37.960 clearings, whiteness, first and foremost, polices, a logic to keep us in place, end quote.

00:40:45.620 And you continue to write, quote, radical capitalism is the orienting force of the

00:40:50.760 commitment to separation, even as capital itself resists any kind of limit. This double

00:40:56.360 articulation keeps capitalism reinventing itself, even as it continues to amplify its gambit of

00:41:01.880 inequality. I just want to talk about what keeps us stuck and how does racial capitalism keep us

00:41:09.700 stuck and cemented in cycles of violence and oppression? Well, I think it goes back to what

00:41:15.860 I was saying in the beginning in the these intuitions that grew with me as I was writing

00:41:20.620 Politics of Touch so when we're trained in a in a belief of the individual as a marking off of

00:41:28.560 existence from the world a separate entity we begin to become committed to that entity and I

00:41:37.800 think that's true no matter you know whether we're talking about race or disability we're

00:41:45.060 we're all susceptible to that thinking that we're an individual that we are separate um and that

00:41:52.900 we're um strong in that separateness we're trained into it so early to become independent to to value

00:42:02.500 that independence we hear it from our closest friends even when they're on the left that they

00:42:08.680 don't want to have to count on others um they don't want to lose their independence we have

00:42:14.060 you know, we just have a lot of training in that modality. But the problem with that modality is

00:42:19.400 that it then also reduces the world to us. I mean, it's very systematic of that modality then to

00:42:26.480 think, how am I going to change things? We reduce the complexity of the world. We bring it onto

00:42:33.920 ourselves. And then, of course, we're struck by the impossibility of it. How in the world am I

00:42:41.240 going to make a difference. It's impossible. I can't. So there's this kind of double bind that

00:42:46.100 we're in. And then I often think about how anxiety really reinforces that. When we're

00:42:56.280 anxious, our bodies feel terrorized by the world. And when you lose the sense of feeling

00:43:09.240 like there's a some kind of grounding um you begin to build an environment that you call safe

00:43:18.040 for that body it's it makes sense that one would do that um i struggle with depression and i know

00:43:25.300 that when the depression hits it's really quick for me to go into a kind of myselfness um usually

00:43:33.000 negatively, you know, and usually critically against myself, but, but nonetheless, completely

00:43:39.120 imbricated in a kind of self sameness, I become small. So I think that it takes practice to get

00:43:46.980 out of that. I mean, and I really mean that literally, I think whenever I say practice,

00:43:51.280 I think about Sadia Hartman's book, Scenes of Subjection, where she talks about

00:43:55.620 But stealing away, she uses that expression of how the folks who were enslaved would steal away in the night to gather in the forest to practice their rituals.

00:44:13.680 And this stealing away into the practice allowed them to not only recall their webs of relation, but to live them.

00:44:23.980 And this living of those webs allows us perhaps to begin to recognize that when we speak of the qualities of sociality as defined by, say, thinkers like Fred Moten, where sociality is an excess of the individual, is more than the individual, we're not talking about two people.

00:44:44.760 We're not talking about the inter-relationship.

00:44:48.640 We're talking about something much, much more complex that doesn't bring two fully enclosed

00:44:55.260 subjects into encounter, but recognizes something outside of that mode of chunking, where sociality

00:45:03.540 is in excess of any reducible idea of individuality.

00:45:08.420 there we're far less endangered in this in paradoxically because we're harder to catch

00:45:16.620 we're harder to capture those modes of sociality are harder to capture i think that's something

00:45:22.880 that so many black writers emphasize that that you can't you can't steal that you can't steal it 0.54

00:45:31.320 You can try to steal it. And certainly we have so many examples of that. But so that's what I'm trying to think about. The stuckness is whiteness. The stuckness is neurotypicality. And it is the habit of valuation that comes with them. 0.99

00:45:50.600 So the habit of reducing the world to that subject leading orientation, and we do it all the time, you know, we talk about agency, we think about a subject moving something rather than about worlds gathering their movement signatures in generating an emergent subjectivity.

00:46:15.960 I am thinking about how as capitalism has continually proven to adapt, whether that be through capitalist solutions to the climate crisis, or gosh, there's like so many examples.

00:46:31.140 I wonder how we keep up with the adaptation of capitalism, whether that be marketing or, you know, because it gets into our conditioning, even unconsciously.

00:46:46.540 Yeah, I mean, that's the horror of it, isn't it?

00:46:49.500 I think capitalism is extremely creative.

00:46:53.040 I think we have to recognize that it's generative.

00:46:57.720 It's generative of new processes continuously.

00:47:02.220 There's a beautiful book that Brian Misumi wrote called 99 Theses for the Revaluation of Value that I think is such an extraordinary look at the capitalism's excesses, what he calls the surplus value of life.

00:47:18.820 So it's very close to what I was talking about just now, those modalities of existence that can't be captured, that are part of the world always.

00:47:26.900 but they tend to fall out from what we understand as having value, joy, for example, or laughter.

00:47:36.760 I mean, there are lots and lots and lots of examples of moments that don't get colonized by capital.

00:47:44.540 But you're absolutely right that capitalism is reigning logical force that reduces everything ultimately to market value.

00:47:54.900 I think about this all the time you know working in an ultra-economic project I'm always aware

00:48:00.820 of how we need to be as supple as possible in working across different economies it's

00:48:11.480 it's sort of what I was saying in the beginning about institutions it's tempting to be anti

00:48:17.500 something, but that's a hardening. And I think in the hardening of it, you could miss out the

00:48:25.480 minor gestures, the leaks, the reorientations, the openings. I say this, you know, having worked

00:48:32.580 many years on an altar economy with other extraordinary thinkers and a group called

00:48:37.680 the Economic Space Agency. And I think that that allowed us to become a lot more astute about

00:48:44.700 where it lives in us

00:48:48.820 I think a lot of the time

00:48:50.300 capital in the everyday

00:48:53.800 is quite opaque to people

00:48:55.520 and it's not a bad thing to understand

00:48:57.800 its modalities

00:49:00.000 how it plays out

00:49:00.980 so that you become more attuned

00:49:03.960 to where you can also be in deviation

00:49:07.000 from it

00:49:09.260 but it's hard

00:49:10.540 it's the hardest thing

00:49:14.700 Yeah, absolutely. It's been something that I find myself questioning all the time. How do I break free of that creativity that capitalism seems to be so good at? And yeah, I just have been really appreciating this conversation.

00:49:35.180 And as we conclude, I'm wondering how we can affirm just how inseparable we are, not just as humans, but as members of a larger ecosystem and even universe.

00:49:48.920 Yeah, inseparable.

00:49:51.580 I love the concept of difference without separability because it begins with difference so that our inseparability doesn't mean our sameness.

00:50:00.600 It doesn't mean our commonality.

00:50:02.180 It is not without disjunction. I think that's really important because we all live with different conditions of access based on economics, based on race, based on ableism and so on.

00:50:21.020 And so thinking about relation for me is less thinking about people as inseparable than about all of the conduits of what I think of as the more than.

00:50:36.260 So if I put it slightly differently from that, I never begin with a fully consolidated idea of a person.

00:50:42.940 I think of that as an abstraction.

00:50:45.080 that's a shorthand that we're very accustomed to because we feel ourselves as limited by skin

00:50:51.640 and bones and organs um but i don't think that uh that that's our pragmatic experience of the world

00:51:01.160 we we breathe in oxygen we are involved in the gravitational field we're we're we're you know

00:51:08.320 made up of water and bacteria. So whatever we are is not in any sense separable from

00:51:15.380 the earth. Um, it's another duration, um, of, of, of existence. And, and when I think

00:51:24.780 in those modalities and the durational and then think about difference with that separability,

00:51:29.740 I think, well, our work is perhaps less to, to, to recognize, and it's important to think

00:51:36.900 relationally and to understand the field of relation but our work may be more complex than

00:51:42.340 that it may have to do with thinking about or at least i for me i think about what what does the

00:51:49.120 access i have facilitate in engaging these questions that we've talked about today so

00:51:55.900 so i can purchase land to take the land out of the market because i have an academic position

00:52:01.000 that allows me to have access to enough capital to convince a bank to lend me money and somebody

00:52:06.580 else might not have that. But that somebody else who doesn't have that maybe has access to

00:52:14.060 knowledge around the forest that I don't have and can teach me about how to keep a forest healthy

00:52:22.080 so that it doesn't degrade over time and maintains its ecological complexity. And that's a modality

00:52:31.080 that isn't strictly economic because it doesn't function

00:52:35.100 through the market, but it is also economic

00:52:37.380 in a kind of ultra-economic way.

00:52:39.620 Well, it allows for a complex environment to persist

00:52:44.820 that can nurture modes of life.

00:52:48.240 And so the difference with that separability of that encounter,

00:52:52.280 I think of as also needing to be recognized

00:52:55.700 within the world of capitalism in which we live.

00:52:58.180 So very pragmatically up here, up north, I'm very aware that because I have access to capital, I should always pay people who come to give me their knowledge, that this is something of great value to me and to the process, to our project.

00:53:18.680 And I've had conversations with them about why it is that when I go work on their land, they don't pay me. And I think that has to do with access. Again, I have access, they don't have access in this case to financial capital. And I don't think it has to be a zero sum game.

00:53:39.720 So it sort of goes back to this idea of emergent sociality.

00:53:43.240 How do we really take seriously what we have access to?

00:53:48.540 And think of it not as benevolent, not as sharing.

00:53:51.280 I think that those are too simplistic.

00:53:52.880 But think of it as moving the potential around.

00:53:59.200 Well, thank you so much, Erin.

00:54:01.120 I have really enjoyed this stretching of my mind today with you.

00:54:07.720 And yeah, I appreciate all the time and care that you put into your work.

00:54:14.320 Thank you so much. Such beautiful questions and really great to be in conversation.

00:54:26.300 Thanks for listening to For the Wild. The music in today's episode is by Johanna Knudsen with

00:54:32.980 special thanks to Patience Records. For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young, Erica Ekrum,

00:54:39.980 Julia Jackson, Jackson Krupf, Jose Alejandro Rivera, and Devin Tenenbaum.

For The Wild - November 15, 2023

ERIN MANNING on the Choreography of Neurodiversity ⧸356

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