ebooks The Turn of the Screw: adapted for the stage by Rebecca Lenkiewicz in Arts-Photography

Review

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Dance; Art and Experience in the MakingBy StreetlightReaderPicking up right where Relationscapes left off; Always More Than One continues Erin Mannings attempt to cultivate a manner of thinking which attends to things in-the-making (rather than things already-made); hence not bodies but bodying; not the world but worlding; and not ecologies but ecologies of practice are the conceptual protagonists that make up the bulk of this delicately written tome. Far from an abstract piece of high theory though; its dance; art; film and - movingly - autistic experience which provide the touchstones for Mannings intricately woven project. After all; as she so eloquently emphasises time after time; no one thing stands alone apart from the fields of relations out of which it is composed; and this is as true of the book as it is the subjects she examines.A note on that eloquence however: while written in a style that is singularly her own; Mannings prose is by turns both breathtaking and maddening. Breathtaking for its ability to employ the affective charge of language in a way uniquely suited to its own ends; and maddening because; well; see for yourself - On the notion of the event: "Think event-time as the foregrounding of the co-compositional infra layering of diagrammatic force form in the now of experience. For the event to dance to attention; the event must create a resonant intensity between the preacceleration of the present futuring and the alignment of a future presenting. Topological time squeezed into the improbable now of movement-moving."Granted; this is a particularly egregious passage; and to be fair to Manning; its one that comes only after a long and detailed apprenticeship in the poetics she nurtures from the very beginning of the book. But you see my frustration; no? In any case; its a poetics thats of a piece with exactly whats at stake throughout: nouns turn into verbs; typically dissociated terms are quilted together; and everything once static put into motion. A fragment of the living cosmos presented within turned literary and philosophic. Still; Manning is at her best when held close to the ground by the detail of her subject matter: her discussions of Fernand Delingys movement maps; Bratcha Ettingers formless artworks; Ari Folmans animated quasi-documentary Waltz With Bashir; and indeed; the challenges of presenting her own art to different audiences in different spaces all make for engaging; if still demanding reading.Undoubtably though; its Mannings empathetic and delicate treatment of autism which constitutes the tender; beating heart of this work. Although clearly stewed in the complex ferment of twentieth-century process philosophy - that of Whitehead; James and Deleuze - Always More Than One speaks loudest when simply attending to those among us who "talk without sound; embrace without touching; and dance without bodies." While refusing the all-too-easy gesture of pathologizing autistic experience as a deviation from the norm; Manning finds within the writings of Amanda Baggs; Ralph and DJ Savarese; Tito Mukhopadhyay and others a lesson in the relationality of experience often passed over in the drive to resolve the universe into the pre-chunked and the ready-made. More than yielding a new way of looking (and feeling) the world about us; Always More Than One is a study in ethics from another regard - one more than worth pursuing.