Transcript: ERIN MANNING on the Choreography of Neurodiversity /356
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Erin Manning.
Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, concerned always about altering pedagogical and alter economic practices. Pedagogical experiments are central to her work, some of which occur at Concordia University in Montreal, where she is the research chair in speculative pragmatics ism art and pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Recent monographs include The Minor Gesture (2016) or A Pragmatics of the Useless (2020), Out of the Clear (2022), Minor Compositions, and The Being of Relation, forthcoming. Her artwork is textile based and relationally oriented. 3e is the main direction. Her current research takes an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual. An iteration of 3e is a land based project north of Montreal where living and learning is experimented. Legacies of SenseLab infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectively is crafted and then more than human encounter with worlds in the making.
Erin Manning We all live with different conditions of access--based on economics, based on race, based on ableism. 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. We breathe in oxygen. We're involved in the gravitational field. We're, you know, made up of water and bacteria. So whatever we are is not in any sense separable from the Earth.
Ayana Young And thank you so much for joining us today. This interview has been a long time coming. And I know the whole team For The Wild has really admired your work for some time now.
Erin Manning Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
Ayana Young Yeah, as we open, I am thinking I want to make some space to hear about the journey of your life and work and what do you find yourself focusing on now? And how has your past scholarship led you to these sites of inquiry?
Erin Manning Wow, a big question. Um, well, I would say that, like, perhaps many people, I can only make sense of my trajectory. In reverse, so I don't have a trajectory that had a kind of master plan attached to it. I come to academia, sideways in the sense that it never was a goal of mine to be in academia or to pursue academia as a career. It ended up being a propitious environment to some degree to prolong some thought processes and engage in pedagogy.
So, I come to these environments that I populate—I would say, the philosophical environment, the dance world, the art world. I come to them across certain chance encounters. I was working as an artist before I entered academia, I was always surrounded by philosophy. So being in contact with philosophical voices was part of my upbringing. In the last 20 years, I've been very involved in the growing of a large network called SenseLab. And in the last three years, there's been a shift to the three ecologies project, which I can talk a lot more about. But I suppose the thing that I'm thinking about the most right now is the transversality of those three ecologies—the social, the conceptual and the environmental—thinking about how it's more interesting to me not to create a kind of binary between the philosophical and the environmental. For example, to think about how the practices of everyday life are also philosophical and pedagogical. 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 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.
Ayana Young I know is a big question. And that was a big response so there's a lot to chew on there. And the…I guess I'm wondering how dance and movement, especially within the framework of disability studies and subversive expressions, fit into your practice and theory.
Erin Manning So I was a dancer before I went into the academic environment and at the time that I did my PhD, there wasn't the opening—at least in the environments that I studied in—for what we now call research creation or art-based research so they were quite separate. I did my work as a dancer as a professional dancer on one side, and I worked philosophically on the other end, and was an artist in a third time. So these things were quite segregated. When I became a...when I got my first academic position, which is still the one I'm in at Concordia University, a number of people started to work with me who were choreographers and dancers. And as...and now I would say, because I know more now that these were chiefly neurodiverse folks. At the time, I had no vocabulary for that, nor did I have a vocabulary for dance.
But what I did realize pretty quickly was that there was a large historical lineage of dance. You know, there was something we call Dance Studies which was available, which was being produced in dance departments, a lot of it quite semiotically-oriented. And I'm not saying that that wasn't good work, it's work that definitely has its place—semiotic or historical work. But it wasn't work that was involved in movement but had a commitment to philosophies of movement.
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. But Relationscapes, the book that came out of it, was perhaps the first commitment to movement philosophy from what I now understand would be a neurodiverse perspective. But it took me a while to understand that that's what I was doing. And so you know, I don't necessarily occupy disciplinary environments so I don't know that I situate myself in any one place that could be called Disability Studies or other studies. But I do think that there's something extraordinarily important about movement philosophy and how it allows us to rethink presuppositions about what a body is, how the body moves, how the question of the body has been mobilized in political theory, political philosophy, thinking around whiteness, etc. So that would be the trajectory more or less.
There was one philosopher working closely in that environment and that was José Gil, 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 Metamorphosis of the Body that had been published in translation at a University of Minnesota Press.
Ayana Young Yes, mmmm. There's something on your website, and you write, quote, "To move is to engage the potential inherent in the pre-acceleration that embodies you. Pre-accelerated because there can be no beginning or end to movement. Movement is one with the world, not body world, but body worlding. We move not to populate space, not to extend it or to embody it, but to create it," end quote. So beautiful. And movement and other human actions that may seem basic, are often those that fuel us the most and that can really drive change. So I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on creating scholarship that honors this type of expression.
Erin Manning 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. I mean, it's really grown over the years. The first direction would be the direction I took in Politics of Touch, which is to go back to the history of political theory in the context of European thinkers. So we're thinking here with folks who are colonially-oriented in a way that I would now think about through whiteness and neurotypicality. And so if we go back to those traditions, we'll find that we have a philosophy of the body that is very circumscribed and by that I mean that the body is bounded. It's not moving. If you look at descriptions, for example, of the body of politic, and you'll find a stationary body, a stable body. 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? Were we to take movement into account? With what you know, 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. 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-object relations. But that is, I think, very dangerous in sort of cementing belief that there's a clear separation between body and world. And the reason I said that, that Autistics and other neurodiverse folks have been very important to me for thinking this is that they were the ones who came to me early on in 2010, '11, '12, folks like DJ Savarece and Tito Mukhopadhyay and Adam Wolfond and Mel Baggs and others to talk about how there was a tendency in neurotypicality toward what they call chunking.
What they mean by that is that neurotypical modes of engagement enforce strong separations between bodies and worlds. They seem to feel certain that there is such a separation, whereas neurodiverse forms of perception, or what I've called austistic perception, is involved in the processes of perception where forms haven't fully consolidated, which is a sort of native way of perceiving for Autistics. So when I talk about autistic perception, I don't actually mean perception that is limited to Autistics, but I think of Autistics as living in at the core of it and being able to give us vocabulary to better understand those modes of perception. And so if you put those two together, what you have is the realization that it's a very useful shorthand to separate bodies and world or to have a sort of stationary body to describe the body politic. Because that's a much easier...that's just simply easier to control. And so beginning with a theory of movement, and by that I don't mean a theory of displacement, I really mean what Brian Massumi calls bare activity, sole movement, a potential which is what the world is made of. I think it brings us to a different logic, and it's that different logic that I'm most interested or have been most interested in.
Ayana Young I want to dive a bit deeper into the autistic perception and in a review of your book, The Minor Gesture, Ben Simmons writes, quote, "The minor gesture is a subversive concept that refers to the fringes of perception and thought before it parses into cultural intelligibility. The minor gesture is a force that challenges received wisdom and common sense that major by offering potential unlimited experiential variations that suggest alternative forms of being, knowing, and doing," end quote. So maybe first if you could just explain some of your scholarship behind the minor gesture, and then we can go from there.
Erin Manning So I would say that each stage in my process opened up a new problem and by problem I mean, something that generates more thinking. So for example, an obvious one would be the injunction to pay attention that we all know so well. You know, where we get organized into chairs early on in our lives—those of us who go to school—and in the organization of our bodies into chairs, our whole body gets organized into a certain frontality as we face a teacher, and in that frontality, we're trained to express facial expressiveness on how we're listening. So we get trained into a choreography very, very early on that we either fit into quite seamlessly, in which case we're practicing neurotypicality well, or we fall out of. And one thing that, you know, in my book For Pragmatics of the Useless, I begin to really think through a statement which is that Black life is neurodiverse life. And I'm trying to think through the ways in which modes of living that are adjacent to Whiteness, that are outside its logic, are by nature neurodiverse modes of life. So what I would say quickly to that question is that what neurodiversity brings, first of all, is the recognition of those choreographies. And I just named one really quickly there. There are millions of others that organize our bodies and make them docile—that produce performative learning bodies that, down the road, will delineate themselves from other bodies that are considered to be not adequately performative of knowing. That's one way.
But the other aspect of neurodiversity that's really important, I think, is that I think of it as a fundamentally other logic of engagement with the world. The perceptual field, if it's open to all of the nuances of of its non separation from the world, in a kind of difference with that separability allows us to grasp a really...or to engage with a really different notion of ecology and to recognize a much more vital relationship between body and world.
Ayana Young Thank you for that. I wanted to bring up this other large topic that I know you wrestle with in your work, which is moving outside of systems of oppression. And I am wondering, how do you grapple with the tension that we must move outside of systems of oppression in order to abolish them, but simultaneously, we often solidify their existence through resistance?
Erin Manning The tough and isn't it? My tendency is to think that the rhetorical doesn't do the work outside if it's segregated from practices. My own life is completely imbricated in practice. You know, the Three Ecologies project is a project that requires daily work that is quite physical work generating conditions for living in a pretty northern climate that's off grid. So what I tend to think is that when we're doing this work that tries to think through very complicated issues around racism, around neurodiversity, around violence, and massacres and death, we have to at the same time be generating or at least thinking or working to generate other ways of living. It doesn't work otherwise. I don't think because if we're not doing that work at the very same time, we're not creating movements for those other ways.
So that's just a sort of a long way of saying that for years, I thought that it wasn't my place to talk about these things, to work on these kinds of subjects. Because I was White, I couldn't talk about Indigenous issues, or because I was White, I couldn't work through vocabularies of Blackness in relation to other ways of living. And at a certain point, I thought that that was wrong. That is precisely because I am why I have to think through these questions, I have to be engaged with them, but in a way that carries through all the other things I do in the world, not separate from them.
Ayana Young Yeah. Well, thank you for detailing that for us a bit. And I want to move into a topic beyond and in addition to the university as a thought, because I'm interested in how you view institutions, through your work specifically. And I think the university is a particularly interesting point of inquiry as a space that can hold so much radical potential, and simultaneously can so easily uphold the status quo. So I'd love to hear more about how you work both within, beyond, and outside of the university through your scholarship and practice.
Erin Manning The big hard question. I'm very aware that when we turn our backs on the institution, the academic institution, we run the risk of a certain of engaging in a certain naivety around all the other modes of institutionalization that our worlds are made of. So I try to remember that in my frustration with the neo liberalization of the academy. So that my response to it is not simply a kind of frontal response, a neurotypical response, you could say. So I think of academia as very, very good at some things. I think of it, for example, is very, very good at attracting interesting people. I think of it as fantastic at fostering encounters through the classroom. Not all of those encounters are fantastic, but there are a lot of people doing really interesting work in those classrooms. But I do think of it as a colonial institution that functions very much in the logic of capital. I mean, we get credits, and those credits buy us diplomas. 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. Precisely because we maintain, in most cases, a sense of somebody as the adjudicator of those processes. And for those academic processes to be, quote-unquote "fruitful," ie for the possibility of someone being granted a diploma, it is necessary that they be legible.
I'll give you an example of that very, very current example. I work with someone who's a refugee from Syria, who's Kurdish. So this is a person, she's an artist who has lived a life of displacement while in Syria, now for 20 some years in Canada, in Montreal. And in the doctoral process, she's asked to make that process legible. And the vocabulary she's given to do that is, quote-unquote "decolonial," but the ways of doing it in language are very colonial, right? I mean, we expect her to make sense of that experience through practices that have been valued by...in the university, such as the kind of citational practices that we operate with that predispose us to valuing some voices over others, for example.
And so the process, a quite a long process of working together, has taught us both how limited that environment is for those who cannot work under those conditions. And she's somebody who cannot work under those conditions. She can't make legible, she....language just doesn't work that way for her in large part because she's also neurodiverse. And so we found a process that works for her. We'll see if she passes. It's a complicated process that we've come up with and involves preparing a site for engagement where other people will come in and write in the room and on the walls and on the floor, and then the dissertation will be the room itself. But just as she's going up for defense, she's received a quite, I mean, the message was meant well, but it was quite condescending message, I thought, about how she needs to sort of get it together to understand the rigor that is required of her through this process. And whenever I see messages like that, I think, Oh, okay, here it is, here's neurotypical reality. Here are those colonial gestures coming back saying, you know, be careful, because we already know what a PhD is. And what you're doing. It doesn't sound or feel or look like a PhD. and we're not going to let this get through because if we let it get through, it would, it would debase our idea of what counts as knowledge.
And I think we do that all the time, that we're terrified, those of us who teach in the institution of giving away our privilege of allowing people through the door who don't merit that crossing, and they don't merit it because they haven't jumped through the same kinds of hoops that we have. So my response to that, not just mine, but you know, SenseLabs, and my partner Brian Massumi's response to that has been to think para institutionally. And the three ecologies project is the most—the SenseLab was one of the ways in which we did that work for 20 years—and now we're moving more emphatically into what we think of as a para pedagogical practice where living and learning are absolutely co-composing and we're outside the system of accreditation.
I say that though carefully knowing that for some people, and for good reason, the mode of accreditation is necessary. So for example, I'm working now with a quote-unquote "non speaking Autistic." I say quotes because Adam Wolfund certainly speaks but he doesn't speak with his mouth. He types to communicate so that with the first quote-unquote "non speaking Autistic" to be in a university in Canada, and it's important that Adam is in the university for other Autistics so that they can see that it is indeed possible. So sometimes the accreditation is necessary, but a lot of the time I think, we could think much more complexly about what learning is—what has always been.
Ayana Young It's such an important perspective that we don't hear a lot about. And in The Being of Relation you write, quote, "The question is how to create conditions for a Blackening of the world, for a re-livening of the socialities it can produce for a poetics of relation, Blackness as a practice rewilds the cleave," end quote. Yeah, wow. And so I'm just trying to wrap my mind around how we understand rewilding, not just, which isn't just about an understanding of nature that separated us from it, but rather as an embodied cultural process.
Erin Manning Mm hmm. Yeah, so I've been extremely influenced by what is sometimes called para-ontological thought in Black Studies. And the para-ontological comes from Nahum Chandler and gets taken up by Fred Moten, [unknown] pero de Silva, amongst others. And so it comes up through Chandler in a really spectacular text on Dubois where Chandler talks about how Dubois finds himself in this kind of stranglehold where if he talks about Blackness, he's stuck with the vocabulary of Blackness generated by Whiteness. So there's, there's, there's this kind of problem that I think you were gesturing at earlier, which is that Dubois is stuck then in a logic that has already devalued the very question of Blackness. And I mean, I think we can find this in so many thinkers.
But what Chandler then does is he shows us how Dubois works himself out of that process and that problem by situating the Negro as a problem for thoughts. 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. 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 as well, in the Black radical tradition, also to quote Cedric Robinson, there's a, 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.
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. So it is, 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.
And so what I'm trying to think in that quote that you foregrounded, is how this para-ontological concept of blackness is always already an ecological concept. And here, I'm thinking with [unknown] important work around the aesthetics of the earth. So it's hard. I know, it's hard and this is really what that piece was about. It's hard to...It's hard not to...there's a struggle about White people doing this work and I want to recognize that struggle. And I address it directly in the piece, you and some people like [unknown] would say that white-skinned people really can't do this work.
My view on it is that there has to be, I think, a way of understanding experience that is not reducible, as I was saying, in the beginning to the segregation--and or...into containment of a body and a separation with the world. So we take the idea of difference without separability really seriously, then we have to understand Blackness and Whiteness as systemic and in that sense, as going beyond those very racialized categories that have been produced by colonialism, not given to the ways in which, you know, Dubois found himself limited in thought by those very categories. And so I'm thinking here of Blackness as a practice and learning from Black Studies, which I think is right now the most creative environment for thinking—ecologies of resistance. I'm thinking through Black studies to think about what kinds of modes of of life are, yeah, are possible or generatable under the conditions of the world as we are living in.
Ayana Young To go a bit further into this. I'm wondering how your land based practices and other practices at three ecologies embody this?
Erin Manning Yeah, well, when we started the three ecologies project, we've been working on it for a long time, we never imagined that we'd have a land project. We actually thought we'd be in the city and we initially considered it much more as an alternative university site. Over the years we began to wo—the sort of the university parts started to fall out because it was sort of thinking in the same logic, you know, if you build an alter university, you're still in the logic of the university. And over time, the idea of the para institutional sort of grew in us in ways that allowed us to understand that we would always be imbricated in some ways—in the institutional—and we needn't be so afraid of it because it could foster certain kinds of openings. You just have to be careful not to allow its logic to take over.
So those openings that I mentioned before about its capacity to call forth interesting groups of people, and so on. And so what happened was pragmatic in the end, we got priced out of the market. By the time we had some money to buy, we couldn't afford it anymore. And we fell upon this possibility up north. It's three hours north of Montreal, and we became interested in taking seriously the question of property. It's a question that I thought a lot about when I was reading The Undercommons, by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, in the question of property, what it is...though, they have an extraordinary chapter in that book on credit and debt and where they argue that we really need to owe each other everything. The problem isn't debt, the problem is a kind of logic of credit. And so, Brian and I began to think that what we needed to do was to really commit to this idea of we owe each other everything through the question of property. And what that means pragmatically is purchasing land and then taking that land out of the real estate market to make it a commons, under conditions of three ecological thought. And by that we mean, you know, with a mandate toward generating the best modalities of growth and preservation, and fostering life where it is needed including folks being able to live, you know, without having to purchase property. And so, you know, learning, building a culture that reminds us that we can't own property—that actually the land is not ownable. The irony of that, of course, is that we have to buy it in order to do that. So it's a complicated project that is the very opposite of an investment. It's a bit scary, because it's outside of the logic of capitalism in that way, but since I've worked for many years on alter economies, and so I think that work really prepared us to think about other forms of economy. 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, including practices of thought and art practices, and, and practices of conviviality, and emergent sociality, or what I call minor sociality, a kind of sideways neurodiverse ways of coming into encounter. This isn't a community that we're building. It really is a site turned toward the transversality of the social, the conceptual, and the environmental.
And so, I suppose, you know, there's no sort of direct way, I think that would be kind of fake. You know, that those things I write about our practice, of course, not not directly, but I think in the everyday of simply doing the work that it takes to run a large tract of land with three houses off grid in the north. You know, cutting the wood, cording the wood…you know, we need 40 cords of wood every year. We spend eight- nine months of the year preparing it and then the rest of the months burning it…you know, inviting people to be here…there's a cabin that's open and free for people who want to collaborate. And again, collaboration is not something really parsed out. Collaborating is in the relation of the three colleges so it can absolutely be their work that we then learn from. So that's, you know, that's sort of the everyday practicing of it that we're doing in it. You know, its range is quite broad from , you know, gardening to building to firing local clay to learning how to tan hides too etc, etc.
Ayana Young That sounds really neat and I definitely understand a bit of the complications with that project. And, yeah, I want to talk a bit about this idea of what keeps us stuck. And in The Being of Relation you write, quote, "To repeat in the sludge of environmental degradation of settler colonial clearings, Whiteness, first and foremost, polices a logic to keep us in place," end quote, and you continue to write, quote, "Radical capitalism is the orienting force of the commitment to separation, even as capital itself resists any kind of limit. This double articulation keeps capitalism reinventing itself, even as it continues to amplify its gambit of inequality," end quote. Yeah, I just want to talk about what keeps us stuck, and how does racial capitalism keep us stuck and cemented in cycles of violence and oppression?
Erin Manning Well, I think it goes back to what I was saying in the beginning and then these intuitions that grew with me as I was writing Politics of Touch. So when we're trained in a belief of the individual as a marking off of existence from the world, as a separate entity, we begin to become committed to that entity. And I think that's true, no matter. You know, whether we're talking about race or disability, we're all susceptible to that thinking that we're an individual, that we are separate, and that we're strong in that separateness. We're trained into it early, to become independent, to value that independence. We hear it from our closest friends, even when they're on the left, that they don't want to have to count on others. They don't want to lose their independence...we have, you know, we just have a lot of training in that modality.
But the problem with that modality is that it then also reduces the world to us. I mean, it's very systematic of that modality then to think how am 'I' going to change things? So we reduce the complexity of the world. We bring it on to ourselves and then, of course, we're struck by the impossibility of it. How in the world am I going to make a difference? It's impossible, I can't. So there's this kind of double bind that we're in.
And then I often think about how anxiety really reinforces that. When we're anxious, our bodies feel terrorized by the world. And when you lose the sense of feeling like there's some kind of grounding, you begin to build an environment that you call safe for that body. It makes sense that one would do that. I struggle with depression. And I know that when the depression hits, it's really quick for me to go into a kind of my selfness, usually negatively, you know, usually critically against myself, but nonetheless, completely imbricated in a kind of self sameness. I become small.
So I think that it takes practice to get out of that. I really mean that literally, I think whenever I say practice, I think about Saidiya Hartman's book Scenes of Subjection where she talks about stealing away. She talks...she uses that expression of how the folks who were in enslaved would steal away in the night to gather in the forest to practice the rituals. And the stealing away into the practice allowed them to not only recall their webs of relation but to live them. And this living of those webs allows us perhaps to begin to recognize that when we speak of the qualities of sociality is defined by say thinkers like Fred Moten and where sociality is an excess of the individual, is more than the individual. We're not talking about two people, we're not talking about the inter relationship. We're talking about something much, much more complex that doesn't bring to fully enclosed subjects into encounter but recognizes something outside of that mode of chunking where sociality is an excess of any reducible idea of individuality. There we are far less endangered in paradoxicality because we're harder to catch or harder to capture and those modes of sociality are harder to capture. I think that's something that so many Black writers emphasize...that you can't, you can't steal that, you can't steal it. You can try to steal it and certainly, we have so many examples of that. But that's what I'm trying to think about—the stuckness is Whiteness, the stuckness is neurotypicality, and it is the habit of evaluation that comes with them. So the habit of reducing the world to that subject bleeding 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.
Ayana Young 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...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.
Erin Manning Yeah, I mean, that's the horror of it, isn't it? I think capitalism is extremely creative. I think we have to recognize that it's generative. It's generative of new processes continuously. There's a beautiful book that Brian Massumi wrote called “99 Theses” or “The Revaluation of Value” that I think is such an extraordinary look at the capitalism's excesses, what he calls a surplus value of life. 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, but they tend to fall out from what we understand as having value, and joy, for example, or laughter. I mean, there, there are lots and lots and lots of examples of moments that don't get colonized by capital. But you're absolutely right, that capitalism as reigning logical force that reduces everything, ultimately to market value. I think about this all the time, you know, working in an alter economic project, I'm always aware of how we need to be as supple as possible in working across different economies. It's sort of what I was saying in the beginning about institutions, it's tempting to be anti something but that's a hardening and I think in the hardening of it, you could miss out the minor gestures, the leaks, the reorientations, the openings. I say this, you know, having worked many years on an alter economy with other extraordinary thinkers and a group called the Economic Space Agency, and I think that that allowed us to become a lot more astute about where it lives in us. I think a lot of the time, capital in the everyday is quite opaque to people and it's not a bad thing to understand—it's modalities, how it plays out, so that you become more attuned to where you can also be in deviation from it. But it's hard. It's hard. It's the hardest thing.
Ayana Young 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. 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.
Erin Manning Yeah, inseparable. I love the concept of difference without separability because it begins with difference. So that our inseparability doesn't mean our sameness. It doesn't mean our commonality, 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—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. So if I put it slightly differently from that, I never begin with a fully consolidated idea of a person. I think of that as an abstraction. That's a shorthand that we're very accustomed to, because we feel ourselves as limited by skin and bones and organs. But I don't think that that's our pragmatic experience of the world. We breathe in oxygen, we are involved in the gravitational field where we're, you know, made up of water and bacteria. So whatever we are no in any sense separable from the earth. It's another duration…of existence. And when I think in those modalities in the duration, and then think about difference with that, separability, I think, well, our work is perhaps less to recognize—and it's important to think relationally and to understand the field of relation—but our work may be more complex than that it may have to do with thinking about, or at least I, for me, I think about what what does the access, I have facilitate in engaging these questions that we've talked about today.
So I can purchase land to take the land out of the market, because I have an academic position that allows me to have access to enough capital to convince a bank to lend me money. And somebody else might not have that. And…but that somebody else who doesn't have that maybe has access to knowledge around the forest that I don't have and can teach me about how to keep a forest healthy, so that it doesn't degrade over time and maintains its ecological complexity. And that's a modality that isn't strictly economic, because it doesn't function through the market, but it is also economic in a kind of alter economic way. Well, it allows for a complex environment to persist that can nurture modes of life. And, and so the difference without separability of that encounter, I think of as also needing to be recognized within the world of capitalism in which we live. So very pragmatically up here up north, I'm very aware that because I have access to capital, I shall 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. 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. So it sort of goes back to this idea of emergent sociality, how do we really take seriously what we have access to and think of it not as benevolent not as sharing? I think that those are too simplistic, but think of it as moving the potential around.
Ayana Young Thank you so much, Erin. I have really enjoyed this stretching of my mind today with you. And yeah, I appreciate all the time and care that you've put into your work.
Erin Manning Thank you so much for such beautiful questions, and really great to be in conversation.
Evan Tenenbaum Thank you for listening to this episode of For The Wild. The music you heard today was by Johanna Knutsson generously provided by Patience Records. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, Jose Alejandro Rivera, and Evan Tenenbaum.