<nettime> Out of the Clear

[Stevphen Shukaitis <stevphen@autonomedia.org>]

Now available for ordering and/or free download…

Out of the Clear
Erin Manning

Out of the Clear begins with the question of the clearing: What 
operations are at work when land is cleared, or thought is cleared, of 
all that grows wild? Clearing, the settler-colonial act of defining a 
territory and producing a border, clears the world of the thickets of 
all that is already at work. Get rid of the muddle. Privilege 
productivity. This devaluing operation is taken for granted as the 
necessary operation for all beginnings. Clear the movement-tendencies 
before you start dancing. Clear the thought-wanderings before you start 
writing. Clearing’s best accomplice is method. A clear site is one that 
can be overseen, that can be managed. The resounding image of the 
clearing in Out of the Clear is the residential school for the forced 
internment of first nations peoples, the sites always barren, empty of 
any tangle.

The motif of the clearing weaves through Out of the Clear, a book 
written in the first year of the 3Ecologies project’s land-based site. 
In the mode of speculative pragmatism, the book explores what modalities 
of perspective emerge in the uneasy middling of non-dogmatic approaches 
to the speculative gardens of our affective surrounds. The impersonal 
leads in this exploration of what kind of minor sociality might emerge 
at the interstices of more-than human inclinations.

“To write about the clearing – this sprawling field crowded with the 
haunting absences of felled trees, genocide, and bodies flattened by the 
worlding ritual of whiteness – Erin Manning approaches an old growth 
maple forest with an unpretentious shack and cabin. Fittingly this scene 
is the site of many troubles and spillages: black geographies lush with 
noise, loss, and the exquisite potential of new life that exceeds the 
colonial. A sanctuary heralded by the gaping maw of the monster, this 
book is a majestically unruly series of dramaturgical dispatches from 
the cracks. A cartography of loss and surprise. Buttery breadcrumbs on a 
trail of endarkenment. A geophilosophy on the alchemy of the sweet and 
exquisite. A decolonial force majeure. Join these awkward rehearsals at 
the liminal edges of monoculture. But be warned: there is no stage left 
here. We are coming down to earth, and we will not arrive intact.” – 
Báyò Akómoláfé, author of These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My 
Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home

“A capaciously delightful composite of practical and intellectual 
commitments to the proposition that an event is always an encounter with 
already entangled beings striving to find new conditions of livability. 
From wrangling with the effort of moving sap to syrup to moving 
philosophies of abstraction to speculative pragmatics, Manning fosters 
not merely new ways of thinking but inspires alternate ways of being 
together differently.” – Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of 
Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University

“The 3Ecologies project Manning muses on here consists of motley 
practitioners generating transversal philosophical concepts from within 
the collective attempt to live an anticapitalist life on land three 
hours from Montreal. Unlike many previous off-the-grid “returns” to 
“nature,” 3E engages blackness, indigeneity, decolonization, 
neurodiversity, telecommunications, and internationality as intrinsic 
dimensions of its communal work. The Anthropocene might chain us towards 
the bleak assumption mere survival of the century will already be a 
feat. Manning demonstrates there is always more to life than that – 
provided new vocabularies continue to be spun in the midst of what goes 
on.” – Arun Saldanha, author of Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the 
Viscosity of Race

Bio: Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics 
and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and 
alter-economic practices. Recent monographs include The Minor Gesture 
(2016) and For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020). 3e is the direction 
her current artistic 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 collectivity is 
crafted in a more-than human encounter with worlds in the making.

PDF available freely online: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1165
Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions site.

Release to the book trade March 2023
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