For a Pragmatics of the Useless

What has a use in the future unforeseeably is radically useless now. What has an effect now is not necessarily useful if it falls through the gaps. In <i>For a Pragmatics of the Useless</i> Erin Manning examines what falls outside the purview of already-known functions and established standards of value not for want of potential but for carrying an excess of it. The figures are various: the infrathin the artful proprioceptive tactility neurodiversity black life. It is around the latter two that a central refrain echoes: All black life is neurodiverse life. This is not an equation but an approximation of proximity. Manning shows how neurotypicality and whiteness combine to form a normative baseline for existence. Blackness and neurodiversity schizz around the baseline uselessly pragmatically figuring a more-than of life living. Manning in dialogue with Félix Guattari and drawing on the black radical tradition's accounts of black life and the aesthetics of black sociality proposes a schizoanalysis of the more-than charting a panoply of techniques for other ways of living and learning.