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 For a Pragmatics of the Useless 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 Felix 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.