Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Technologies of Lived Abstraction)

279 Pages·2009·4.32 MB·English

by  Erin Manning

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Movement, Art, Philosophy
RELATIONSCAPES
Technologies of Lived Abstraction
Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, editors
Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy, Erin Manning, 2009
R E L AT I O N S C A P E S
Movement, Art, Philosophy
Erin Manning
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about special quantity discounts, please email special_sales@mitpress
.mit.edu
This book was set in Syntax and Minion by Graphic Composition, Inc.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Manning, Erin.
Relationscapes : movement, art, philosophy / Erin Manning.
p. cm. — (Technologies of lived abstraction)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-13490-3 (hard cover : alk. paper) 1. Movement (Philosophy)
2. Technology I. Title.
B105.M65M36 2009
128'.6—dc22
2008031040
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Brian
The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.
—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Th ousand Plateaus

Contents
Series Foreword ix
Prelude: What Moves as a Body Returns as a Movement of Thought 1
Introduction: Events of Relation—Concepts in the Making 5
1 Incipient Action: The Dance of the Not-Y et 13
2 The Elasticity of the Almost 29
Interlude: A Mover’s Guide to Standing Still 43
3 Taking the Next Step 49
4 Dancing the Technogenetic Body 61
Interlude: Perceptions in Folding 77
5 Grace Taking Form: Marey’s Movement Machines 83
Interlude: Animation’s Dance 113
6 From Biopolitics to the Biogram, or How Leni Riefenstahl Moves through
Fascism 119
Interlude: Of Force Fields and Rhythm Contours—David Spriggs’s Animate
Sculptures 143
viii Contents
7 Relationscapes: How Contemporary Aboriginal Art Moves beyond the
Map 153
8 Constituting Facts: Dorothy Napangardi Dances the Dreaming 185
Interlude: Cornering a Beginning 207
Conclusion: Propositions for Thought in Motion 213
Notes 229
Bibliography 247
Index 257
Series Foreword
“What moves as a body, returns as the movement of thought.”
Of subjectivity (in its nascent state)
Of the social (in its mutant state)
Of the environment (at the point it can be reinvented)
“A process set up anywhere reverberates everywhere.”
The Technologies of Lived Abstraction book series is dedicated to work of trans-
disciplinary reach inquiring critically but especially creatively into processes of
subjective, social, and e thical-p olitical emergence in the world today. Thought
and body, abstract and concrete, local and global, individual and collective: the
works presented are not content to rest with the habitual divisions. They explore
how these facets come formatively, reverberatively together, if only to form the
movement by which they come again to diff er.
Possible paradigms are many: autonomization, relation; emergence, complexity,
process; individuation, (auto)poiesis; direct perception, embodied perception,
perception- as- action; speculative pragmatism, speculative realism, radical em-
piricism; mediation, virtualization; ecology of practices, media ecology; tech-
nicity; micropolitics, biopolitics, ontopower. Yet there will be a common aim: to
catch new thought and action dawning, at a creative crossing. Technologies of