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Than One
Always
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*
erin manning
duke
erin manning Always More Than One * Individuation’s Dance
Erin Manning Always
More
Than One
*
Individuation’s
Dance
It stands for the general idea underlying alike the indefinite article “a” or
“an,” and the definite article “the,” and the demonstratives “this” or “that,”
and the relatives “which or what or how.” It stands for the singularity of an
event. The term “many” presupposes the term “one,” and the term “one”
presupposes the term “many.” (1978, 21)
In Always More Than One, Erin Manning starts from the reciprocal pre-
supposition of the one and the many. This is what she means when she
says, echoing Gilles Deleuze, that she begins in the middle. She does not
pause to worry over contradiction. She takes this reciprocal presupposi-
tion as a launching pad and dives right in. She does this by approaching the
problem from the outset as a question of composition. That what comes as
one comes a many loses any sense of a sterile conundrum when it is taken
in this matter- of-fact way: as a coming-together (com-position). A many
enter in one coming-together. And comings-together come in many varia-
tions on each theme. When it comes to the one and the many, the wonder
should attach more to this immediate implication of serial iteration than to
any supposed contradiction. No sooner do we dive into composition than
composition launches itself into a process of iteration offering a bounty of
variations, thousands and thousands, on any and all behaviors or events.
Add the notion that the iteration of the process can be inflected, and com-
position finds the double connotation it has in everyday language: not just
a coming-together, but a one (-many) bountifully susceptible to technique.
Manning’s diving in, past contradiction straight to composition and
with process to technique, gives the writing in Always More Than One a re-
markable velocity. It speeds past preliminary considerations as to the nature
of the one that many may expect. The most available readymade categories
for the one are the subject, the object, and the totality. They make unpro-
pitious starting points. Given the habitual ways we have of speaking and
thinking about these categories, to start with them would be to begin with
the assumption that the term “one” did in fact stand for the integral num-
ber one, in lonely opposition to what counts as many. For the unity of the
one not to stand alone, it would have to be opened up to reveal a hidden
multiplicity. But the multiplicity, Whitehead insists, isn’t hidden. It comes
immediately and manifestly with every one. There are significant disadvan-
tages to taking the subject or object as the starting point even if it is only in
order to deconstruct or decenter their counting only for one. The disadvan-
tage is that it activates, as an inaugural gesture, the very habits of thought
it is designed to undermine. Once activated, they are difficult, if not impos-
sible, to shake off.
The alternative adopted by Manning is neither to deconstruct nor de-
center, but to defer. The speed with which she launches into process is de-
signed to hold at bay the issue of the status of the subject and the object
until concepts for the reciprocal presupposition of the one and the many
are sufficiently in place for subject and object to be grasped as a function of
process rather than the reverse: process falling under the province of sub-
jects and objects. The concept charged with holding the status of the sub-
ject and object in processual suspense is individuation, adapted from Gilbert
Simondon. Simondon’s premise is simple: individuals, whether subjects or
objects according to the traditional categories, come to be. They are results
of an ontogenetic process: they are products.
x PrEluDE
It would seem obvious that a process is different in principle from its
products, and that this difference calls for concepts tailored specifically to
it. One of the most evident ways a process differs from its products is in
the span of its activity. A process brings together the factors that go into
bringing about a result by drawing on a different, always wider, field of ac-
tivity than the product once arisen will entertain. Processually speaking, a
making is always bigger than the made. The making includes, in germ, the
form of what will come to be, as well as the functions its being, once arisen,
will afford. In addition, it includes the under-formation and the clinching-
into-operation of the functions-to- come. Formation is more inclusive than
form-and-function. The span of a becoming is broader than a being. An
individuation is more encompassing than an individual. To understand indi-
viduation, this more-than of becoming can never be lost from sight. How-
ever obvious it is that a process is different in principle from its products
and deserves accordingly different concepts, this is rarely taken to heart. If
the concepts of subject and object are not deferred, their forms and func-
tions backcast on process, overshadowing the conceptual complexion of
the under-formation. This is what Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari ana-
lyze as the “transcendental error” of “stenciling” (décalquer, trace) the em-
pirical characteristics of constituted being onto the formative process of its
constitution. Manning’s foregrounding of the notion of individuation is a
way of advancing the account of the reciprocal presupposition of the one
and the many in a way that avoids this transcendental error, never losing
sight of the ontogenetic differing of process from its products, of constitu-
tion from the constituted.
The error of understanding the constitutive process of individuation in
the image of its constituted product is actively maintained by the accumu-
lated cultural and philosophical connotations of the term “individual.” Its
avoidance requires follow-up and follow-through. Manning will accord-
ingly supplement the Simondonian concept of individuation with terms
of her own. One is fielding. When an individual comes to stand out as one
from a broader field of activity from which it arises, we can say that it has
been formatively fielded. The error of “stenciling” over this broader field of
activity is called “transcendental” because what it papers over is precisely
that. The formative field is transcendental in the sense that it does not co-
incide with the being whose becoming it harbors. It outspans it, overspills
its limits, extends “beyond” it. It is not beyond in the sense of “outside” and
radically “other,” or alternatively in the sense of a deeper inside (a radically
xii PrEluDE
(which return in a splendor of Whiteheadian colors diffused throughout
this book).
It is the work of the first chapter to initiate the reader to the reorientation
of individuation’s swerve, taking off from Daniel Stern’s rethinking of the
psychological self and psychoanalytic subject. The writing in this chapter is
already at speed, launching into the invention of new concepts specifically
tailored to the reciprocal presupposition of the one and the many in forma-
tive belonging to a shared process of becoming, and plotting the conven-
tional notions with which we are in the habit of thinking into their twisting
vicinity. The velocity of the writing and the sheer number of new concepts
set in motion may prove at times disorienting for the reader, as a result of
swerve fatigue. Received assumptions or previously arrived at conclusions
the reader inevitably brings to the reading, concerning the individual, in-
sides/outsides, and subjects/objects, are sure to return at moments of con-
scious or unconscious need for conceptual repose. These moments are part
of the process. If they are selectively focused on, however, they will place the
reader at a remove from the text, defaulting them, for example, to a posture
of critique. At these moments the movement of the text continues while the
reader holds to position. This can lead to a disconnect. Just as Manning her-
self takes the plunge, so too must the reader be prepared to replunge into
the current of the writing. The concern of the book is the more-than of any
objective or subjective resting place of process that counts as one. It is only
fitting that the writing itself perform a more-than of any one concept upon
which the reader’s attention might arrest. Like the process it follows, the
writing folds into and out of its own iterations. Conceptual variations un-
fold from each other to stand out for themselves, then fold back together to
express their belonging to the same fielding of thought. This gives a rhythm
to the writing as an ongoing process of the individuation of a movement of
thought. There are refrains and motifs designed to slip a reader who falls
out of step back into the rhythm.
The processual nature of the writing as it performs the more-than of
any one concept gives it a beauty approaching poetry. But it is not poetry,
it is philosophy, “nothing but philosophy,” as Deleuze once said of his own
writing, alone and with Guattari. The difference is that in philosophical
writing, concepts, however many there are and however fast they turn over
on each other, however complex the rhythm of their movement, do crest
into an individuation where they are fully determined and rigorously stand
out in their individuality from the field of their emergence. In a sense, this
xiv PrEluDE
Whitehead says that the process-oriented idea of the one is not the inte-
gral number one but a “general idea” that “stands for the singularity of an
event.” A general idea standing for a singularity? Again, Whitehead is not
being contradictory. He is pointing us in new conceptual directions. What
Whitehead means by “general idea” is not what traditionally goes by that
name. A general idea in the normal sense is an empty category that sub-
sumes a set of particulars. It is an abstract schema used as a standard for
judging the identity of particulars and for assigning them membership in
a predefined class. The general idea is a lofty “The” subsuming the ground
level “a” of each particular that fulfills the schema. Whitehead turns this tra-
ditional logic on its head by pointedly putting the “the” and “a” on the same
level. The general idea, he says, “underlies them both alike.” It straddles
the definite and the indefinite articles. Even more, it takes into its fold de-
monstratives like “this” or “that” and the relatives “which” or “what” or
“how.” Whitehead’s general idea stretches all the way from “the” to “how.”
In other words, it is a span of modal variation, a range of kinds or degrees of
definiteness inflected by differences in manner (“how”). Although it is all
about definiteness, it is not about mutual exclusion. Without the hierarchy
of the “the” over the “a,” there is no a priori way of ensuring noncontradic-
tion. This is a logic of mutual inclusion: a logic for the many’s “underlying”
belonging-together. To mark the difference between this kind of “general
idea” and the traditional kind, a change of name would help. Call it, for ex-
ample, the “generic.” In what way is the logic of the generic immediately
a logic of singularity? In what way is the genericness and singularity of an
event so intimately entwined that it does not even occur to Whitehead in
this passage to comment on the transition from one term to the other?
Daniel Stern shares this logic, and a comment of his can help explain
what is at stake. What is at stake for Whitehead is the very nature of philo-
sophical thinking. For Stern, it’s the richness of everyday experience. For
Manning it is both: philosophy, nothing but philosophy, toward the enrich-
ment of life.
“When you suck your finger,” Stern observes, “your finger gets sucked—
and not just generally sucked” (1985, 80). There is no “the” finger-sucking
that isn’t inflected by the “how” of “a” sucking. “Which”? “This” one or
“that.” And that’s the “what” of it. “Not generally sucked”: a thousand-
suckings- of-fingers. No one suck. Where there is one, there are more to
come. A one after another.
The point is a serious one, even for finger-weaned adults. It is that events
xvi PrEluDE
These are some of the signature concepts of Manning’s original take
on process philosophy, as it develops toward Always More Than One from the
closely allied earlier volumes, Politics of Touch (2007) and Relationscapes (2009).
The qualitative difference of the “how” of an event. The continuum of varia-
tion running across iterations of experience. The processual openness of the
“what else.” The question of composition of the manner in which codeter-
mining factors are brought together toward a unique mutual inclusion in
the event defining the newness of a next iteration: the question of creativity.
The impossibility of thinking creativity without factoring in proliferating
series of life-forming events and their corresponding spacetimes of experi-
ence.
Experience: it is significant that Stern underlines that each of the “thou-
sand variations” on a generic life-event carries a different affect, and that
he qualifies the affect as a “vitality” affect. But we must be careful here.
The words “experience” and “affect” can easily lead back to the concep-
tual repose of the subject and interiority. This would be to stencil over the
singular-generic with the traditional categorical logic again. Stern is clear:
none of the thousand-gettings-out-of- chairs of his first example are sub-
sumable under “a specific category of affect” to which an internal state of
a subject would correspond (1985, 56). A vitality affect is not a category of
affect, and it is not personal. It’s a uniquely generic life-feeling of activity.
Each getting- out- of-a- chair and each sucking- of-a-finger comes with “a
burst of determination” (Stern 1985, 56). They are incidents of determina-
tion; determining occurrences. However small and everyday they may be, in
their determination they are still life- defining events. The feeling they come
with defines what life has been like. This feeling of vitality, or vitality affect,
is not in the subject, and is not just personal (unless accidents and popula-
tions can be considered personal). It is in and of the world. It is in and of the
world’s serial ongoing and the contingent surprises met along the way. It is
in the way in which the ongoing and the surprise come punctually together
to determine a burst of life. Process philosophy is how we burst with life,
in and of the world. It’s about our worlding. How the world populates us,
and we the world, in a reciprocal presupposition of oneness and manyness
determining a richness reaching all the way down to the most furtive suck
of the finger and rising all the way back up from there to tinge the most ge-
neric and regularized events with a feeling of singularity.
Manning’s word for the singular-generic burstability of life a-worlding
across the scales is “a” life (a term adopted from Deleuze). “A” life does not
xviii PrEluDE
velops cannot avoid. It is necessarily entailed by the logic it must deploy in
order for its writing to be equal to the thinking of process. The force toward
mutual exclusion exerted by the traditional-logic categories with which we
are accustomed to using is perhaps at its strongest in political thinking.
This can even be the case in political approaches dedicated to fighting ex-
clusion, to the extent that they lend themselves to the exercise of moral
judgment. What form of political judgment does “a” life imply, as a func-
tion of speciation, factoring in the continually varying and contingently
variable “one” (-manyness) of the transcendental field of singular-generic
events whose cresting from that field compose it? What might an ethics of
the singular-generic involve, as against a morality of categorical judgment?
For Manning, answering these questions effectively requires unstenciling
the transcendental field of becoming of politics. It requires following in
that field what outspans, overspills, and extends vitally-affectively beyond
the backcast form of constituted groupings. It requires a thinking of group
individuation, what Simondon (2005, 293–316) calls collective individuation, in
terms specifically tailored to its constitutive movement. In order to accom-
plish this, Manning generates another topological twist. The transcenden-
tal field as earlier described as a middle that wraps around to self-surround
flattens itself into a surface—a metaphysical surface doubling the surface
of the screen upon which Waltz with Bashir, the film being analyzed, is pro-
jected, and from which the vitality affects its movement-images produce
stand out. It is essential to remember that the way in which the problem of
politics is posed by the project of Always More Than One requires a metaphysi-
cal response. Traditional political reasoning, and its habit of stenciling con-
stituted distinctions onto the constitutive movement of their becoming,
must be deferred, long enough for its categories to be refracted when they
do return—as they inevitably will—through the conceptual force-field of a
political metaphysics of becoming.
One thing that Manning argues is not involved from her perspective in
ethical thought on the political level is the human/subjective face-to-face.
She quotes Levinas’s troubled statement following the Sabra and Shatila
massacre to the effect that there are some who are not eligible for the ethics
of the face-to-face because they are simply “wrong.” This statement, so out
of place with the tone of Levinas’s work in general, demonstrates that there
is a limit to the ethics of the human face-to-face. There is a point at which
it turns its back, reorienting toward a posture of moral judgment justify-
ing exclusion. That limit is when the “other” is no longer greeted as other
xx PrEluDE
have to say he was a subspecies. But even this would not be enough to grasp
“what” he is. He is utterly singular-generic: “a” life serially determined by
events. As is the human, Dawn Prince, on the other side of the fence. Prince
in this encounter is not “the” human. She also is “a” singular-generic life.
It would be reductive and insulting to specify her categorically as a “sub-
species” of human: “the” autistic. She is no more “the” autistic than she
is “the” human. She is “this” autistic human, only and exactly “how” she
comes to that encounter: a primatologist-autist whose seriation of “a” life-
making events have given her a unique talent for cofactoring with apes. No
general ideas about humans and animals and interspecies relations are ade-
quate to grasp the richness and inventiveness of the speciation that tran-
spires between them. Two lives come into encounter across the species bar-
rier of the fence in a zoo, bringing into play the thirdness of a joint event
of speciation: “a” life co- composing. Assessing the politics and ethics of
such encounters from a processual perspective respectful of how both par-
ticipants and their coming-together burst with life- determination requires
a retooling of the concepts with which we think the “nonhuman” and the
variation of the human, and these in the same event: a “more than human”
logic of life-making events, immanent to their occurring.
Significant portions of Always More Than One concern autism, following
on from the final chapter of Relationscapes. To understand the role of the
autistic, and the centrality of autism to the philosophy of the book, it is
necessary once again to hold categorical judgment at bay. It must be borne
in mind that in none of the sections in which it is a question of autism
(chapters 1, 7, and 8 and interludes 4 and 5, in addition to the coda) is there
a “the” autist. There is the autistic/writer, the autistic/drawer, the autis-
tic/videographer, the autistic/neurodiversity activist, the autistic/facilitated
communicator. These are not subspecies of “the” autist, any more than the
autistic is a subspecies of “the” human. These are lives living on the “spec-
trum”: on a generic continuum of variation, ranges of which the conven-
tional category carves out as pathological and in need of “curing.” These are
lives determinedly living, each in its singularly variable way, on a generic
continuum, including all of us.
Manning insists on this: we are all on the autistic spectrum, including
“neurotypicals” who do not carry the diagnosis. This is not an empty ges-
ture of lazy solidarity. And it is in no way meant to deny the reality of aut-
ism or to disregard the very real challenges and often extreme conditions
of social, familial, and health care system oppression many diagnosed au-
xxii PrEluDE
because it brings the more than human into experience. The refrain of the
more than human: human plus many-one singular-generic spacetimes of
experience; human plus the eventful improvisation of new and emergent
vitality affects; human plus contingencies belonging to any number of cate-
gories; human plus more than currently human potential.
What could neurotypicals, we on the spectrum who pass unpathologized,
learn from those who field before or more than they chunk? Wouldn’t our
lives be enriched by upping the degree of fielding we consciously perceive?
Can we learn to bring our experiential differences into creative play across
the barriers and run with it? Manning is not interested in judging autism.
She is not interested in curing it. She is not interested in charity toward it
or pitying those who “have” it. She is interested in co- composing with it,
collaboratively, toward the more-than- currently-human-potential that may
arise from the encounter. While the neurodiversity movement fights for
integration, Manning is suggesting that neurotypicals consider the com-
plementary but inverse move of what might be called reverse integration:
living-with, together in creative co- composition. Coming-together in such
a way that the “properties” of “logically” mutually exclusive categories of
being collude, across their differences and because of them, toward the
improvisation of new vitality affects, new burstings with life, toward new
speciations, new “a” life-living the one and the many in reciprocal pre-
supposition.
In each domain through which it passes, Always More Than One dedicates
its writing to the wonder of the ever-varying manyness of all that comes as
one, and always more. Everywhere it is a question of invention: relational
techniques for performing events of co- composition qualifying as specia-
tions. Everywhere, individuation in the fielding of singular-generic. As for
the primacy of movement that it is necessary to posit for thinking indi-
viduation, the reader will be left to discover it on their own. How movement
moves individuation, and in the process makes that ultimate chunk we call
our body an event requiring a verb—bodying—will likewise be deferred.
A final observation will suffice: this is unabashedly a philosophy of life.
Not, of course, as a category mutually exclusive of nonlife. Rather, as a
quality of bursting-with. Life- quality—vitality—affect. The vital affective
refrain, repeated in all of Manning’s books, is from Nietzsche: “If this is
life, then once more!”
Or: if this is life, then more than one already!
xxvi acknowlEDgMEnts
you bring to all tasks; and Troy Rhoades for making the imperceptible per-
ceptible (and for never being too old to play).
Brian Massumi—you are everywhere here, cited and uncited, with my
thinking and across it, between the words, as Amanda Baggs would say. To
think in such a collective moreness is what this book is about. A project I
could never have carried out without you, and without the thinking that be-
comes us.
acknowlEDgMEnts xxvii
onE Toward a Leaky Sense of Self
2 chaPtEr onE
tinued individuation.11 “To think individuation it is necessary to consider
being not as substance, matter or form, but as a tensile oversaturated sys-
tem beyond the level of unity” (Simondon 1995, 23). Self is a modality—
a singularity on the plane of individuation—always on the way toward
new foldings. These foldings bring into appearance not a fully constituted
human, already- contained, but co- constitutive strata of matter, content,
form, substance, and expression. The self is not contained. It is a fold of
immanent expressibility.
Daniel Stern’s account of infancy expresses this in psychological terms.
For Stern, relation is always the first principle of worlding: “How we experi-
ence ourselves in relation to others provides a basic organizing perspective
for all interpersonal events” (1985, 6). Stern’s argument makes relation pri-
mary, constituting the relational as the very core through which any kind
of sense of self is constituted. While Bick’s and later Ogden’s psychoana-
lytic theories make interaction a necessity, their matrix is not relational:
it always presupposes a constituted, bounded self and other (or self and
self ). Stern, on the other hand, treats the relation as the node of creative
interpersonal potential, shifting, I would argue, from a self-self model of
interaction (where the relation is posited as passive between active subjects)
toward a radically empirical notion of immanent relationality where rela-
tion is considered as “real” as the terms in the relation.
Stern begins in the preverbal realm, suggesting that “several senses of
the self do exist long prior to self-awareness and language” (1985, 6). With
the assertion that there are “several senses of self,” Stern emphasizes that
tendencies outlined in early infancy do not build toward a contained view
of self, but rather lead toward the creation of a multiplicity of strata, each
of them differently expressive under variable conditions.12
For Stern, a core sense of self involves a non-self-reflexive awareness
(1985, 6). Preverbal awareness is linked by Stern to direct experience. Direct
experience is of the order of the event. Similar to William James’s concept
of “pure experience,” defined as the virtual (nonconscious) edge to all lived
experience, direct experience is a form of immanent fielding (Stern calls
this organization) through which events become experienced as such.
Direct experience takes place not in the subject or in the object, but in
the relation itself.13 The associated milieu is active with tendencies, tunings,
incipient agitations, each of which are felt before they are known as such,
contributing to a sense of the how of the event in its unfolding. According
to Stern, events in early infancy lead toward the creation of modes of orga-
4 chaPtEr onE
ing of forces that both direct and destabilize the “self ’s” proto-unification
into an “I.” With all apparent cohesiveness there remains the effect of the
ineffable that acts like a shadow on all dreams of containment. For double
articulation reminds us that singular points of identification always remain
mired within the complex forces of their prearticulation, prearticulation
not strictly as the before of articulation, but the withness of the unutter-
able, the ineffable—the quasi-inexpressible share of expressibility—within
language. There is no self that is not also emergent, preverbal, affectively
oriented toward individuation.
Affect is central to Stern’s analysis of how senses of self develop. Seek-
ing to move beyond the limiting realm of the sensory-motor schema, which
proposes direct linkages between organs and objects, Stern develops the
idea of “vitality affects.” More than any other aspect of his work on preverbal
senses of self and emergent individuations, it is the concept of “vitality af-
fect” that undoes the notion of self as containment.
Affect in this context can be understood as the preacceleration of experi-
ence as it acts on the becoming-body. Preacceleration refers to what has not
yet been constituted but has an effect on actualization.14 In the context of a
movement, it is the virtual experience of a welling into movement that pre-
cedes the actual displacement. Affect moves, constituting the event that, in
many cases, becomes-body.
Vitality affects are a range of affect “elicited by changes in motivational
states, appetites, and tensions” (Stern 1985, 54). To understand vitality af-
fects and the role they play in emergent infant processes, Stern’s concept
of amodality is key. In a departure from the idea of sense-presentation—
where a sense is located on the skin, associated directly to touch, for in-
stance—Stern foregrounds the research that shows that newborns operate
by cross-modal transfer. Cross-modal transfer—the feeling of touch that
occurs in the seeing, for example—happens without a discrete learning
curve. “No learning is needed initially, and subsequent learning about rela-
tions across modalities can be built upon this innate base” (Stern 1985, 48).
Cross-modal correspondence, and, even more so, amodality (the idea that
perception does not locate itself in a sense modality but courses between in
rhythms that build correspondences rather than rely on already-occurring
sites for sensation), Stern argues, transcends the sense “channel.” This
causes a shift toward a supra-modal in-betweenness where sense- events
take form that are neither directly associated to an organ nor to an object.
Amodality foregrounds not the sense itself but its relational potential. “It is
6 chaPtEr onE
duce into vitality affects (Stern 1985, 54). These feelings double-articulate
the relation between content and expression. They make palpable that
content and expression are two aspects of the same stratum, “expression
having just as much substance as content and content just as much form as
expression” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 44). Vitality affects express, shad-
ing into and out from content. Experience is, from the beginning, infested
with this double articulation. Vitality affects are infinitely multiplicitous.
They cannot be pinned down or associated with any finality to the content
of an act. Stern speaks of “a thousand smiles, a thousand getting- out-of-
chairs, a thousand variations of performance of any and all behaviors . . .
each one present[ing] a different vitality affect” (1985, 56). Vitality affects
function in the associated milieu of relation: they merge with experience’s
tendings-toward feeling and emerge as the feeling of the event.
Stern writes: “The social world experienced by the infant is primarily one
of vitality affects before it is a world of formal acts” (1985, 57). Vitality af-
fects color immanent events. Not yet experienced as such, immanent events
are the nexus through which experience begins to form. Stern’s core sense
of self is based on how these experiences veer the becoming-self toward
new forms of relation. These new forms of relation in turn feed the pro-
cess through which the infant becomes differentiated. Difference does not
occur through the stratification of self and other or inside and outside. Dif-
ference emboldens processual shiftings between strata that foreground
and background modes of experience, each of them affected by incipient
reachings-toward, a reaching-toward not of the subject, but of experience
itself. Senses of coherence emerge that unfold as feelings of warmth, inten-
sity, texture, anguish. Coherence in the realm of the constitutive event.
The event, fed by vitality affects, prompted by amodal relays, and re-
routed by senses of coherence (affective tonalities dephasing), takes the
form not of discrete “things seen, heard or touched” but of “qualities of
shape, number, intensity level” (Stern 1985, 57). Preconscious experience
is pure and direct in the sense that it fields virtual events at the cusp of their
becoming-actual. In this entwinement with the qualitative, a living of feel-
ing creates a taking-form of expression. This taking-form of expression is
the dynamic of becoming-selves.
For Stern affective attunement is key to interpersonal becoming. Affec-
tive attunement is another mode of immanent relation where the relation
radically precedes the purported unity of the self. Attunement is a merging-
with of vitality affects across experiences toward emergent events. Not a
8 chaPtEr onE
on the other hand, do not lose this quality. In her video In My Language,16
Amanda Baggs (2007) emphasizes this fundamental difference. In this two-
part video Baggs first creates a sounding-sensing environment by moving
through space while activating and being-activated by the welling environ-
mentality of the milieu. She moves slowly and carefully, touching, smelling,
sounding the environment. Then, in part two, she challenges the notion that
by “translating” this experience into spoken language she will make it more
“complex” or more “real.”
Through the juxtaposition of two ways of engaging the environment,
Baggs foregrounds the inadequacy of concepts that apply hierarchical di-
chotomies to experience (like language versus sensation, cognition versus
the preconscious). In My Language does not reject language outright. What
it does is use first movement and sensation and then language to inquire
into our tendency to place language as the determinant of experience. Why
would we assume that language can touch every aspect of experience, and
why are other ways of sensing or expressing the environment sidelined?
Through an intense dance of the environment in its co- composing of a
body, the video shows the emergence of an associated milieu that cannot
solely be addressed in verbal language. The milieu is hyperrelational, every
act calling forth a dephasing, a transduction, a welling of an environmen-
tality that constitutively challenges the oneness of the self separated from
the milieu of interaction, its skin intact. Her hands moving through run-
ning water, Baggs (2007) explains: “It is about being in a conversation with
every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my sur-
roundings.” There is no standard interaction or containment here, no privi-
leging of the word over the activity, no sense of subject and object, body
and milieu, or self and self. It is not, as Baggs (2007) emphasizes, about
symbolizing experience: “In this part of the video the water doesn’t sym-
bolize anything. I am just interacting with the water as the water interacts
with me.” In My Language is about foregrounding the rich field of relation
activated through multiple interweaving strata in a continuous double ar-
ticulation of content and expression.
In much of the literature, autism is associated with a developmental in-
capacity to create meaningful (empathetic) relations.17 In My Language coun-
ters this claim with a strong political statement. Too often, Baggs says, per-
sonhood is directly associated to verbal interaction, which is then posited
as relationality. Proposing a different model entirely, backed by an ethics of
difference, Baggs’s video forecasts a milieu of the most intense relationality,
10 chaPtEr onE
its topological foldings with and through the associated milieu that is the
world’s becoming. Pure experience is a relational, amodal state. It reaches-
toward experience in the making. In this state, worlding is perceived di-
rectly. Qualities are foregrounded, and through the double articulation
of content and expression, individuating senses of self begin to emerge.
Feeling-vectors predominate, not cognitions, actions, or perceptions as
such. These feelings are co- constitutive of being and worlding, invested,
always, in the milieu and its associations, never deliberately linear or causal.
“The elements that make up these emergent organizations are simply differ-
ent subjective units from those of adults who, most of the time, believe that
they subjectively experience units such as thoughts, perceptions, actions,
and so on, because they must translate experience into these terms in order
to encode it verbally” (Stern 1985, 67).
The infant-world relation affectively tunes to the force-field of events in-
forming. Affective attunement is a preconscious tuning-with that sparks a
new set of relations that in turn affect how singular events express them-
selves in the time of the event. Subtle and ongoing, affective attunements
“give much of the impression of the quality of the relationship” (Stern 1985,
141). Affective attunement makes felt the activation contours of experience,
the intensity, as Suzanne Langer would say, of virtual feeling.21 This links
affective attunement to affective tonality rather than either to empathy or
to the matching of behavior. Stern defines this as a matching of feeling. If feel-
ing is not secondary to experience but is the very activity of relation that
makes up experience, affective attunement need not be solely located on a
human scale. If conceived beyond human interaction, affective attunement
might well describe the relational environment co- created by movement
and sound in Amanda Baggs’s video In My Language. Affective attunement:
an open field of differentiation out of which a singularity of feeling emerges
and merges. A tuning not of content but of expression-with.
Singularities such as emergent selves are co- constituted in a field of ex-
perience. They reach-toward in a worlding that becomes them. This world-
ing is intensified by vitality affects that themselves tune to the world, calling
forth landing sites.22 These landing sites are less a specific node of space-
time than the conditions for the propelling of the event’s actualization. In
Baggs’s In My Language, we feel the emergent landing sites every time a con-
tour begins to sound, taking-form in the event of its expressibility. A three-
part scene makes this felt. The scene begins with Baggs facing the window,
her back to us. A tonal sounding accompanies the movement of her hands
12 chaPtEr onE
Notes
1 As Marc Lafrance points out, Bick is critical in this instance of Melanie Klein’s
suggestion that all infants are capable of introjection and projection. In the
psychoanalytic literature, these are considered to be defense mechanisms.
Introjection refers “to an unconscious process of incorporating the attitudes
or attributes of an absent person—such as a father or a mother—into the self.
Through this process of incorporation, the self is able to feel closer to he or she
who is absent and, as a result, its anxiety is arrested. . . . Projection refers to an
unconscious process of expelling the self ’s undesirable thoughts and feelings
into someone else. Through the process of expulsion, the self is able to get rid
of that which it cannot bear about itself and, as a result, its anxiety is allayed”
(Lafrance 2009, 20n5).
A more nuanced reading of psychoanalysis, and especially object relations,
could have been done in this chapter to more clearly differentiate Bick’s posi-
tion from that of Klein and to explore variants that are less dogmatic about the
skin-as-envelope (see, for instance, Ettinger 1999). My point, however, is less to
critique psychoanalysis than to propose a different perspective on the body and
on affective processes.
2 Lafrance writes, “According to Bick, the infant’s sense of being held together by
the skin does not occur automatically. This sense must be achieved, and it can
only be achieved if the infant’s body is stimulated in a way that gives rise to an
enduring experience of epidermal envelopment. If all goes well and the infant is
provided with regular and reliable experiences of skin-to-skin contact with its
caregiver, then it will over time be able to internalize—or, as Kleinians like Bick
put it, introject—the experience of the skin as a container” (2009, 8).
3 Bick describes second skins as formations “through which dependence on the
[containing] object is replaced by a pseudo-independence, by the inappropriate
use of certain mental functions, or perhaps innate talents, for the purpose of
creating a substitute for this skin container function” (1987, 115).
4 Throughout, “feeling” is used in the Whiteheadian sense and is allied to affect
(and affective tonality) more than to emotion. For Whitehead, feeling is never a
secondary experience. The world is made of feeling. This will be discussed more
thoroughly in chapter 2.
5 Lafrance writes: “For Esther Bick, the experience of the skin as a binding and
limiting membrane must be achieved, and that this achievement is vitally en-
abled by contact with the binding and limiting membrane of a caregiver. Once
this experience has been achieved, the infant will gradually begin to make sense
of itself as a being with insides and outsides and, as a result, will gradually begin
to introject and project” (2009, 8). Lafrance further explains that this differ-
entiation between inside and outside “must be learned through embodied en-
gagements with a caregiving other,” providing the psychoanalytic example of
the child’s relation with the nipple: “The concept of a space inside that holds the
parts that make up his “self ” is developed through sensing the mouth, a hole in
the boundary of the skin, being closed with the arrival of the nipple. This space
inside is thus felt as one into which the object can be introjected” (Lafrance qtd.
in Briggs 2002, 10).
6 See James 1996. The concept of relation as used throughout this book is devel-
oped in more detail in Relationscapes (Manning 2009).
7 In Relationscapes, I suggest that the interval is the metastable quality through
which the relation is felt. For a more detailed exploration of the interval in rela-
tion to movement, see “Incipient Action: The Dance of the Not-Yet” in Relation-
scapes (Manning 2009).
8 For a development of the concept of reaching-toward in relation to a politics of
touch, see Politics of Touch (Manning 2007).
9 In Politics of Touch (Manning 2007) I argue that sensing is always imbricated in the
activity of reaching-toward, an activity that is never restrained to a single body
or self, but that takes place in a complex relational field of its own making.
10 The virtual here is not opposed to the real. It is always an integral aspect of the
actual, if inexpressible and inexperiencable as such.
11 Simondon writes: “We would like to show that the principle of individuation is
not an isolated reality turned in on itself, preexisting the individual as an already
individualized germ of the individual. The principle of individuation, in the strict
sense of the term, is the complete system in which the genesis of the individual
takes effect. And that, in addition, this system prolongs itself in the living indi-
vidual, in the form of an associated milieu of the individual, in which individua-
tion continues to evolve; that life is thus a perpetual individuation, a continuing
individuation across time that prolongs a singularity” (1995, 63).
12 Psychoanalytic theory’s desire to limit behavior to distinct phases suggests, as