How does whiteness sediment worlds? How does it format individuality in the name of a neurotypicality that polices how one bodies, and how one comes to know? And how does a poetics of relation shift the very logic of this sedimentation?

Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation are bold in their call to “consent not to be a single being.” This transindividual consent, born in the process of worlds crafting themselves in what he would call an “aesthetics of the earth,” are felt in Fernand Deligny’s errant lines. These errant lines, traced to move with the complex gestures of autistics over a period of several years in Monoblet, France (1965-1970), offer an alternative to pathology, and individual psychological assessment.

The Being of Relation brings these two projects into encounter, exploring what else blackness can be at this non-pathological juncture where what is foregrounded is the very being of relation. On the way, trails of whiteness are excavated and interrogated. The aim: to move toward parapedagogies of resistance, in a logic of a poetics of relation, a logic of neurodiversity, minor sociality and the kind of difference without separability that refuses the binary that holds neurotypicality – as whiteness – in place.

‘Erin Manning attunes to our wandering ways to world and thought in this achingly timely offering. How do we, and how might we, choreograph and dance ways with each other beyond the one-two lockstep of recognitive intersubjectivity and the neurotypicality this atrophic sociality is indexed to? The Being of Relation might reject the epithet “landmark” but in its tracings of such non-insistent intimacies, this luminous book is an exceedingly resonant landing site.’

Erin Manning is professor of fine arts and philosophy at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Recent books include For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020), Out of the Clear (2022) and The Being of Relation (forthcoming). She works at the intersection of the three ecologies - the environmental, the conceptual and the social - with an emphasis on the aesthetico-political (3ecologies.org). Her artistic practices explores this transversality - a recent exhibition is entitled 100 Acres (Richard Saltoun Gallery, London).