Eric Manning’s The Minor Gesture is the latest release in the Thought in the Act book series, published by Duke University Press, which explores how research and creation can be transformed by philosophy. In The Minor Gesture, Manning draws heavily from Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis and Whitehead’s speculative pragmatism to explore what is dubbed ‘the minor gesture’. The minor gesture is a subversive concept that refers to the fringes of perception and thought before its parsing into cultural intelligibility. The minor gesture is a force that challenges received wisdom and common sense (the ‘major’) by offering potentially unlimited experiential variations that suggest alternative forms of being, knowing and doing. In The Minor Gesture, Manning destabilises neurotypical accounts of perception and agency, and in doing so paves the way for a celebration of neurodiverse experience – particularly ‘autistic perception’.
The minor gesture and its allied concepts are first outlined in the Introduction. The discussion is abstract and presupposes that the reader is familiar with post-structuralist vocabulary. Manning passionately describes how neurotypicality acts as an oppressive force, and persuades the reader to continue the journey into abstraction in order to discover new conceptual resources for tackling oppression. Critique of neurotypicality continues in Chapter 1 where Manning takes aim at method and research creation. Standard methodology is defined as neurotypical insofar as it privileges language and reason, whilst failing to hear the voices that ‘lurk beneath words’ (31). Manning argues that research needs to escape traditional subject boundaries and formalised methods if genuinely new forms of knowledge are to emerge.
In Chapters 2, 3 and 4 Manning examines how art and fashion can displace neurotypical perception and give rise to alternative forms of experience. For example, Chapter 2 redefines art not simply as the production of an object, but as the process of becoming artful. Manning asks: ‘What else can artistic practice become when the object is not the goal, but the activator, the conduit toward new modes of existence?’ (46) Becoming artful entails a different sensitivity to time, where sensations jostle together in emerging perception prior to being concretised into subjects and objects. Skilful artists experience perception in its forming. Chapter 3 continues to explore perception and art, and drills down into the meaning of the minor gesture. The minor gesture is defined as the latent potentiality or background pregnant with meaning, hinting at difference and diversity. Chapter 4 explores the ways that fashion designer Kawakubo challenges perception. Kawakubo ‘breaks fashion’ (92) with her Dress Becomes Body range. Rather than seeing clothes as body-envelopes, Kawakubo explores what textiles can do in the context of a movement–body–fabric world. Manning argues that the Dress Becomes Body range makes perception land on morphogenesis rather than fixed bodies and expectations.
Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are the most substantive in their discussion of autism. In these chapters Manning extends the theory developed in the first half of the book to descriptive accounts of perception given by autistic authors and activists, such as Amelia Baggs and Lucy Blackman. In Chapter 5 Manning contrasts autistic perception to neurotypical perception. While neurotypical perception is understood as always-already parsed into subjects and objects, autistic perception is described as a slowing down of perception’s becoming, or sensitivity to the pre-parsed sensation of perception, a privileging of experiential complexity rather than form. It is argued that an alternative view of perception paves the way for an alternative view of action, and this is convincingly developed in Chapter 6 through the concept of ‘agencement’. Agencement, similar to being-in-the-world, refers to the circularity of an embodied subject who brings a world into being in action, whilst also being constrained by the materiality of the world. This is experienced in terms of pulls and phenomenal fields of force which are more pronounced in the pre-/slowly parsed experience of autistic perception. This theme is further elaborated in Chapter 7’s discussion about depression as a modality of perception which alters experiences of time and agency.
Chapter 8 consists of an interview with Manning and Arno Boehler. This is perhaps the most plain-speaking and accessible chapter in the book insofar as it breaks down some of the challenging concepts and explains the terminology that Manning employs. The book concludes with a post-script, which heavily revolves around Friedrich Nietzsche and the affirmative nature of the minor gesture.
The Minor Gesture is a fascinating and intellectually challenging book that successfully problematises common-sense (neurotypical) understandings of perception, action and embodiment. In doing so it politicises mundane everyday experience and calls for sustained critique of normatively framed lifeworlds. Whilst The Minor Gesture challenges neurotypicality and celebrates diverse ways of being-in-the-world, it is clear that Manning is passionate about social justice in its broadest sense. Manning does not simply write about autism but instead takes aim at late-capitalist, neoliberal concepts of personhood and explores how gender, disability, ethnicity and poverty intersect in the experience of injustice. These broad discussions never take centre-stage, but are introduced to create resonance between autistic people and other groups who are similarly oppressed. This places the content of the book squarely in the realm of disability studies, and will appeal to advanced students and academics keen to explore the application of novel theory to these fields.
However, whilst The Minor Gesture may be described as an accomplished theoretical work, the distinct lack of reference to research may undermine the reader’s confidence in some of the assertions made. Manning is effective in her deployment of narratives written by autistic people to enrich the arguments she is making, but only a small number of authors are cited and the reader may be left wondering how representative these experiences are. Furthermore, there is a risk that Manning’s work is too abstract, thus limiting her readership and lessening the potential impact of the work – particularly at the grass-roots level. Having said this, The Minor Gesture is a unique text in the autism field and a recommended read for those with a penchant for high critical theory.
Institute for Education, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK
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© 2018 Ben Simmons
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2017.1414323