For a Pragmatics of the Useless by Erin Manning (review)

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Reviewed by:

• For a Pragmatics of the Useless by Erin Manning
• Pilar Martínez Benedí

Erin Manning. For a Pragmatics of the Useless. Durham: Duke UP, 2020. 384 pp. $29.95.

“All black life is neurodiverse life.” Fred Moten’s words, written in a manuscript review of Erin Manning’s The Minor Gesture (2016), admittedly haunt her latest effort. Moten’s equation is provocative but also strangely uncontroversial. If nothing else, the alignment between its opposites—whiteness and neurotypicality, those tokens of normativity—sounds intuitively graspable. Manning refers to the alignment more or less explicitly throughout her previous book, but her ambition in For a Pragmatics of the Useless goes beyond that elementary affinity.

First, Manning turns the equation into an “approximate proximity” (4), recasting it less in terms of likeness than of a “thinking-with” that facilitates an alliance between neurodiversity and blackness “in a way that would not reduce one to the other but generate a complementarity” (2). For a Pragmatics of the Useless presents itself as an investigation into such complementarity. When Manning likens neurotypicality to “structural racism” (2), the idea is not so much to equate two forms of discrimination but rather to pen the attitudes that define (by contrast) neurodiversity and blackness, joining both together in an “undercommonness of sociality” (6). Both decide what is recognized as human and what is excluded, but Manning links the recognition and the exclusion not to skin color or neurologies only. Neurotypicality— “an articulation of whiteness at work” (1)—anchors all (valuable) experience to individual human agency—the “volition-intentionality-agency triad.” The only valuable mode of being is that conforming to the fiction of superior “executive function”: “To do it alone, to do it individually, to do it at the pace of the volition-intentionality-agency triad, is to be truly human” (3). [End Page 254]

Conversely, neurodiversity resists this devotion to individuality and independence to adhere instead to relationality and facilitation. (The earlier equation between neurotypicality and whiteness implies that this applies to Black life, too.) The glue that bonds both groups together—and this is Manning’s most engaging move—lies in their shared penchant for “fugitivity.” Neurotypicality needs “to plan, to count, to organize, to select out, to evaluate” (6) and therefore perceives only that which fits into its reductive standard of executive function. Every mode of existence that falls outside the box that is ambiguous, uncountable, dependent, “otherwise” social, relational, diagonal—those modes simply do not register. Black life and neurodiverse life, then, are modes of “minor sociality” (6) that insist on “living otherwise” (7). With this premise, the book aims to explore how “black sociality practices a fugitive planning that is in alliance with neurodiverse sociality and to outline how this fugitivity upends the presuppositions executive function [i.e., neurotypicality, whiteness] carries” (4). But, to what extent does the book fulfill the ambitious plan set out in its promising prelude?

For a Pragmatics of the Useless is not an effortless read. Part theoretical treatise and lexicon, part memoir or report on the activities of SenseLab, part initiation into the practice of the “schizz,” the book eludes easy categorization. Its fourteen segments (chapters, interludes, and “pocket-practices”) actualize Manning’s programmatic indication that “the question of how black life is neurodiverse life is asked in practice ” (12). Readers not familiar with her work might be intimidated or frustrated by Manning’s idiosyncratic and dense prose, but going with the flow will prove rewarding. The book teems with multifarious concepts and terminology borrowed (and reworked) from process and Bergsonian continental philosophy, as well as with recent coinages and neologisms, either borrowed (“infrathin,” “distantism”) or her own (“ticcingflapping,” “livingloving”)—all of them directed at illustrating that fugitivity at the heart of both Black and neuro-diverse life. Manning also draws profusely on neurodiversity advocates, writers, and scholars, yet she all but disavows “the neuro in neurodiversity,” in order to “sidestep,” she claims, “neuroreductionism” (2). The wariness seems excessive, especially when we consider how some of those scholars, like Ralph James Savarese, have shown how much complexity neuroscience may bring to social and cultural analysis. Finally, the ubiquity of terms like “undercommons” and “fugitivity” reveals Manning...