Individuation’s

Than One
Always
More

Dance
*
erin manning

duke
erin manning Always More Than One * Individuation’s Dance
 Erin Manning Always
More
Than One
*

Individuation’s

Dance

Prelude by Brian MassuMi

DukE univErsity PrEss Durham and London 2013

© 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States
of America on acid-free paper ♾
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng
Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-
in-Publication Data appear on the
last printed page of this book.

All images in chapter 8 originally

appeared in Oeuvres by Fernand Deligny,
edited by Sandra Alvarez de Toledo
© 2007 Editions L’Arachnéen.
To DJ Savarese

for leading the way

toward fresh thinking

 Contents

PrEluDE By Brian MassuMi * ix

acknowlEDgMEnts * xxv

1. Toward a Leaky Sense of Self * 1

interlude || When Movement Dances * 13
2. Always More Than One * 16
interlude || Dancing the Virtual * 31
3. Waltzing the Limit * 41
4. Propositions for the Verge * 74
interlude || What Else? * 91
5. Choreography as Mobile Architecture * 99
interlude || Fiery, Luminous, Scary * 124
6. The Dance of Attention * 133
7. An Ethics of Language in the Making * 149
interlude || Love the Anonymous Elements * 172
8. The Shape of Enthusiasm * 184
coda || Another Regard * 204
notEs * 223
BiBliograPhy * 257
inDEx * 267
 Brian MassuMi Prelude

“A thousand smiles, a thousand getting- out- of- chairs, a thousand varia-

tions of performance of any and all behaviours.” With these words, tinged
with wonder at the richness of the everyday, Daniel Stern underscores the
multiplicity of every single act composing our lives (Stern 1985, 56; cited in
chapter 1 below). Always More Than One, as the title conveys, is dedicated to
that wonder: of the ever-varying manyness of all that comes as one.
Any sense of contradiction this wording may be taken to imply is quickly
sidelined by observing with A. N. Whitehead, another key theoretical re-
source for the book, that as an “ultimate notion” for process oriented phi-
losophy “the term ‘one’ does not stand for the ‘integral number one.’”

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

Brian MassuMi  xi

intimate other). Either option would make it “transcendent” as opposed
to transcendental. The difference is that the notion of the transcendent in-
cludes the idea of an a priori totality. Totality was the third figure of the one
in need of deferral. Despite the abstractness of the notion of totality, its
deferral is the one that comes most easily. The fact that process is always
moving on to a further iteration is itself a deferral. Process is process be-
cause it is forever deferring its own completion in the dynamic form of
more becoming. Process is always in the process of exceeding itself in its
own carrying forward. This makes it transcendental not only in relation to
its determinate products, but in relation to itself. It is always moving into
its own beyond. Process is the transcendental in person. Or, more precisely,
in movement. It is what moves across iterations of being, across the subjects
and objects that come to be through its movement (and are left in its wake).
If process “as a whole” can be characterized, it is as a constitutively open
totality: an everything-always-moving- on that wraps itself up into being
each of its iterations as it unrolls itself forward through them. Its openness
cannot be assigned to an inside or an outside, coming as it does as an always
moving-across of becoming. The best word for it is “immanent.” The tran-
scendental field of individuation is immanent not to a subject (Kant, phe-
nomenology) but to its own phasing into and out of being, as becoming.
It is nothing less than the world’s “worlding,” its fullness of oneness and
manyness, as William James would say, in respects that iteratively vary.
Another word Manning uses for the transcendental field is milieu. The
word, often qualified by “associated,” is a favorite of both Simondon and
Deleuze and Guattari for its double entendre in French. In French milieu
means both “middle” and “surroundings.” To put the two meanings
together without falling back into an outside/inside division that calls for
a subject or object to found or regulate it, you have to conceive of a middle
that wraps around, to self-surround, as it phases onward in the direction of
the “more” of its formative openness. In a word, you have to give the pre-
cept of beginning in the middle a topological twist. All of the concepts that
are mobilized to work with individuation, and to work it through, will then
have to similarly twist. In Always More Than One the transcendental field of
individuation is the philosophical planet in the vicinity of which concepts
bend like passing light, creating a refractive pattern that alters the spec-
trum of even the most familiar terms. No term passes unswerved. But once
swerved from their habitual path, any term is free to return, philosophically
reoriented, up to and including the strategically deferred subject and object

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

Brian MassuMi  xiii

is true of all philosophical writing. What distinguishes process- oriented
philosophical writing such as Manning’s from other kinds is that the indi-
viduation of the determinate concepts crests into their precision like a wave
on a sea of thought. They do not plinth themselves into solitary prominence
on a supporting structure of solidly planted first premises. Rather, they rise
from a swell of their formative conceptual field, and fold back. They are
rigorously composed in the flow of liquid writing, to which they return to
recompose, in a continuing tide of conceptual invention. Like poetry, this
takes utmost technique, but to different ends. A poem is fully and finally
composed. It is an expressive end in itself. It asks to be reread, but not to be
rewritten. Processual philosophical writing is also expressive, and also in-
vites rereading. It is fully composed as well, but without the standing claim
to finality, instead with a horizontal openness of process that extends an
invitation to further. It would like nothing more than for its concepts and
their momentum to forward into a different writing process, toward other
individuations of thought beyond itself, in new iterations and variations,
in rewriting upon writing, in waves of thought, each “one” in company
of an iterative “many,” in a kind of processual quilting of thinking-with.
This is philosophy practiced as a concept- creative endeavor that performs
in writing the larger process it concerns. It gives the gift of a movement of
thought, again as Deleuze and Guattari would say, to a “people to come.” It
sets going a concept-creative momentum for a coming thought community.
A reader bent on holding to position, or to standing rigid in critical remove,
will risk missing the boat. Best to read as Bertrand Russell advises:

In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor con-

tempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to
know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival
of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the
state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto
held. (1996, 47)

Always More Than One, as an endeavor in creative philosophy, dedicates

itself to the invention of new concepts. This is just the half of it. What a
reader who enters the text in an attitude of hypothetical sympathy will im-
mediately understand is that in order to dedicate itself to the invention of
new concepts, it must compose new kinds of concepts. This is signalled in
the opening quote from Whitehead on the reciprocal presupposition of the
one and the many.

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

Brian MassuMi  xv

come in populations, and the populating takes the form of a serial iteration.
From the point of view of their populating multiplicity, events are generic.
But each event is utterly singular. “Each one presents a different vitality af-
fect” (Stern 1985, 56). In other words, there is a life-feeling, a quality of life,
upon which each iteration is a unique variation. The uniqueness of the event
is not in spite of its belonging to the generic population. It is at least in part
because of it. A first suck is a revelation. A fifth suck is a comfort. Suck six
is its own satisfying variation on comfort. Depending on exactly how each
event transpires and what else is present that may inflect it (a glance at a care-
giver’s face, the soft brush of a blanket on the cheek), each sucking in the
series will take on its own unique vitality affect. It is this vitality affect that
makes “the” event definitively what it will have been. In other words, the
definition of the event includes as determining factors both its generic popu-
lousness and the irreducible uniqueness that comes with the contingent
“what elses” of its occurrence. The generic populousness is a multiplicity
of belonging not to a class, but to an event-series.
Across the series run any number of variations on the theme. The “what
elses” are accidents of place and time. This means that in this processual
logic the definition of an event mutually, necessarily, includes as codeter-
mining factors what would in the traditional logic be judgmentally sepa-
rated out from each other as essential properties and accidental qualities.
It replaces this dichotomy with a distinction between a continuing varia-
tion (seriation) and its dosing with contingency (accident; the unforesee-
able intervening variable). This is not a dichotomy, it’s a co-implication: the
iterative variation and the variable intervention of contingency are codeter-
mining. Neither could make sense—or make vitality affect—without the
other. Even more radically, time (serial order, but also in this case things
like time of day and time between iterations) and place (the matrix of co-
presence ensuring that any number of “what elses” will have the opportu-
nity to leave their contingent trace) cannot be abstracted away. The singu-
larity of the event is not only logically, but genetically, inseparable from
its genericness. They are “one”: the singular-generic. As a “general idea,”
the singular-generic includes spatial and temporal coordinates, working
together, to bring seriation and contingency together into the unfolding of
the event. “The” event cannot be thought apart from the co-implication of
space and time: spacetime. A philosophy of experience, then, has to do with
singular-generic spacetimes of experience, in relation to which the most
relevant questions are not “what” but “what else” brought together “how.”

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

Brian MassuMi  xvii

exclude the “this” and the “that” and the “which” and the “what” and the
“how.” It doesn’t even exclude the “the.” Emphasizing the “a” is a way of
saying that the “the” is not the categorical “The” but the potential for defi-
niteness that comes of the processual mutual inclusion of the definite with
the indefinite article, the demonstrative, and the relative.
Manning’s word for the variation across iterations of singular events ge-
nerically belonging to the same populating series is speciation. It is as crucial
for an understanding of Always More Than One to avoid stenciling species back
into a categorical concept as it is to avoid committing this transcendental
error with regard to affect. A species is not a set of beings having certain
properties generally defining them as members of the same class. A species
for Manning, as her term (speciation) implies, is a species of event. A specia-
tion occurs when two or more constituted individuals come back together
singular-generically in a way that produces a new vitality affect. The de-
fining trait of the speciation is the uniqueness of the vitality affect arising
from the burst of determination of such a coming-together. This is not a
property of either of the individuals coming together. It comes between
them. It is in the event of their coming-together, at the crossroads where a
line of continual variation meets the unforeseeable variable of a what-else.
In the thousand-sittings-in- chairs, backside and cushion speciate. In the
thousand-suckings-of-a-finger, mouth and finger speciate. The species, in
each case, is the vitality affect (comforting). The speciation is the difference
each one of the thousands brings to the vitality affect.
Speciation rises up in scale to take on broader significance at levels we
would term macropolitical, in the bursts of determination of the kind, for
example, with which Israelis and Palestinians come together to populate
the world with events of their (anything but mutually comforting) between-
ness. Even at this level, the events in question determine speciations of
vitality affect that are not subsumable under any logic of mutual exclusion,
in spite of the conflictual nature of the events. Not: Israeli or Palestinian.
Rather: what passes between. “A” life (not excluding many deaths; mutually
including the “how” they come about and the asymmetries of all kinds that
come with their coming about).
What is the politics of “a” life? Chapter 3 of Always More Than One asks
that question, with full cognizance of the complexity and sensitivity of re-
posing the question of the political in these terms, in connection with the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The risk of reformulating the question of poli-
tics in mutually inclusive terms is one that the philosophy the book de-

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

Brian MassuMi  xix

but looms as inhuman. Manning’s reformulation of the political question
is designed to disable this limit in order to preserve a political ethics of en-
gagement. Her process philosophy in fact recognizes no such limit, for the
simple reason that the betweenness of human being as it conceives it is not
itself human. It is 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 categories; human plus more than currently human potential,
collectively individuating. The more than human of the political and the
ethical is a constant concern throughout Always More Than One. It is here that
Manning’s thought reaches its most far-reaching, original, and potentially
controversial extension.
The coda returns to the political and ethical question as it concerns
speciation in a different connection. The context is one that might pass as
more “natural” as regards the issue of the more than human of the more
than one. The individuals between which the event of speciation passes
are assignable as two different species in the traditional sense of the word
(as categories of being defined by divergent sets of inherent properties).
There is a bonobo and a human, in encounter. The danger of transcenden-
tal error is extreme here, precisely because the traditional logic would seem
so logically called upon for service. Manning’s account of a singular event
passing between a bonobo and a human moves the discussion of the more
than human onto the kind of territory normally staked out by current dis-
courses of the “nonhuman.” The very term “nonhuman,” which cannot but
reverberate with categorical thinking, marks the difference in approach.
Manning’s approach here makes much of the fact that the coming-together
between the individuals in encounter is oddly triangulated by the question
of what constitutes not a human or a bonobo but, surprisingly, a gorilla.
The singular-generic field that enters into the constitution is already inhab-
ited by the manyness of the more than one or two. The vitality affect that
eventuates is not one-or-the-other of the two, but an unexpected thirdness
of both-and bursting with gorilla-like determination. This is because one-
and-the-other are not subsumable under their categorical species without
remainder. The bonobo is not reducible to the figure of “the” bonobo. In
the constitution of his life are factors that from the traditional logic would
be considered mere contingencies: domestication, an apprenticeship with
language. In Kanzi’s oneness is already a unique manyness. He is a varia-
tion on bonoboing. If you wanted to hold to the traditional logic, you would

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-

Brian MassuMi  xxi

tistics struggle with. What Manning attempts is to acknowledge the reality
and the challenges without surrendering any ground to the pathologization
entailed by the conventional category. What if autism were approached not
in terms of pathology but from the angle of speciation? That is to say, from
the mutually inclusive angle of the more than human in us all, in its con-
tinuing variation? From the angle of what cuts eventfully, variably across
the barriers? From the angle of the emergent vitality affects, qualities of
bursting-with-life- determination associated with different degrees on the
spectrum, as well as improvised in encounters-between?
Manning argues that there is a mode of perception that attends to the
more-than of experience (as always in process philosophy, it’s all about
modal distinction, as mentioned earlier). She describes “autistic percep-
tion” as a field perception directly apprehending the complex relational pat-
terning of spacetimes of experience, in their teeming with contingencies,
and in all their uniqueness: a direct perception of the transcendental field of
becoming. The countervailing mode of perception “chunks” experience. It
immediately divides it into subject- and object-oriented affordances ready-
made for the traditional either/or logic and its categorical judgments, pri-
marily in this case of usefulness (form-and-function redux, ready for sten-
ciling duty).
We all chunk. We are all categorizers and users. Life’s conventional ele-
ments demand that of us. But we are all also transcendental-fielders. After
all, a chunk is only a chunk against the contrasting background of the field
as singular-generic spacetime of experience. Chunky ones come in serial it-
eration, against the many-more-than-one of a continuum of variation back-
grounded by traditional logic and conventional use. We all chunk, and we
all field, but to different degrees, in varying ways.
Manning’s assertion is that the direct perception of the singular-generic,
of relational spacetimes of experience, predominates over chunking in those
who are pathologized as autistic, and this comes as a result of the very same
factors that create the challenges and oppressions of their lives. These fac-
tors notably concern neurological variations that express themselves in dif-
ficulty activating movement in ways that are conventionally useful as based
on pre- chunked affordances (basically, an involuntary deferral of stencil-
ing). What Manning calls “autistic perception” is not an inherent property
of a subclass of the human category. It is a mode of perception that is a
necessary factor in all human experience, but is lived in different ways to
different degrees. It is the field perception no one can live without, precisely

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!

Brian MassuMi  xxiii

 Acknowledgments

Thinking-with is a practice difficult to cite. For it happens in the between of

writing, at the thresholds where the work takes on new direction, breathes
into consistency, falters. Where the writing thinks beyond where it has been
able to think before. It is with this practice of collective thinking that a book
begins to take form. Thank you to those who are often invisible in the writ-
ing but everywhere felt in the process.
Andrew Murphie, for the ethos that is at the core of your practice—be it
writing, or thinking, or organizing, or publishing. This project was moved
by the force of thought you embody.
Lone Bertelsen, for your work on wonder, a concept that, though not
foregrounded here, is at the core of what I think life can do. For wonder is
before the subject, beyond the form, in the interstices where life-living is at
its most intensive and its most ineffable.
Bill Connolly, for always bringing Nietzsche back and inviting his
refrain—“Was that life? Well then! Once more!”—to frame the question of
the political.
Tom Lamarre, for your true infradisciplinarity, that insatiable curiosity
that takes you far afield into other peoples’ thinking.
Pia Ednie-Brown, for being of the middling, and for crafting from that
environment of the more-than. Yours is an ethos of research- creation.
Sher Doruff, for your inventive practice of diagrammatic thinking. And,
in the spirit of diagramming, for always keeping the conversation going.
William Forsythe, Elizabeth Waterhouse, and Christopher Roman, for
informing my work on movement, and for showing the world that philoso-
phy and movement dance together.
Catherine de Zegher, for intuitively knowing that curating is a kind of
choreographic thinking. And for knowing that art’s intervention takes form
in the field of relation.
Ralph Savarese, for the writing, the talking, the jumping, the singing, all
in the name of neurodiversity. And for honoring the voices of the poets.
Mireille Painchaud, for a long-standing commitment to experimentation
with relational movement. And for being my best friend.
Steven Shaviro, for always taking the time for philosophy. Yours is truly
a practice of thinking-with.
Isabelle Stengers, for answering my muddled question, years ago, about
Whitehead’s concept of the proposition. I have not stopped thinking about
it since.
The SenseLab—Nasrin Himada for pushing me harder on questions of
violence and politics; Christoph Brunner for insatiably inventing techniques
for research- creation; Leslie Plumb for living and designing the transversal;
Mazi Javidiani for your quietly insistent curiosity, and that laugh; Bianca
Scliar for always knowing how to activate things and keep them moving;
Felix Rebolledo for taking on the task and making something of it; Andreia
Oliveira for making the link between art and philosophy felt; Charlotte Far-
rell for enlivening, and for tending; Andrew Goodman for caring for rela-
tions in the making (and making sure we are fed); Jondi Keane for under-
standing the force of practice for thought in the crafting; Mike Hornblow
for sustained experiments on how movement diagrams; Paul Gazzola for
being a free radical; Jonas Fritsch for thinking between the lines and design-
ing beyond the object; Sean Smith for always knowing how to make a game
out of it; Philipa Rothfield for making movement the philosophical ques-
tion; Derek McCormack for attending to how space moves; Jaime DelVal for
always being willing to take risks; Nathaniel Stern for composing with the
event; Luciana Parisi for being the most speculative thinker I know; Stama-
tia Portanova for taunting me with the idea that there is movement with-
out a body; Anna Munster for not taking for granted that we know what a
network can do; Thomas Jellis for having the intuition that labs are experi-
ments in the making; Iain Kerr and Petia Morosov for the next collective
experiment; Ronald Simon for giving me back my work from a new angle;
Alanna Thain for the care you give to the relation; Toni Pape for the artistry

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

In Esther Bick’s psychoanalytic theory, the infant’s relation to the world is

mediated by the skin’s capacity to serve as a container for experience: “In its
most primitive form, the parts of the personality are felt to have no binding
force amongst themselves and must therefore be held together in a way that
is experienced by them passively, by the skin functioning as a boundary”
(1987, 114). Before there can be introjection or projection,1 Bick argues that
the infant must become “able to hold himself together in his own ‘skin’ in
the absence of the external holding object, without spilling out and falling
to bits” (2002, 209). As the infant develops, containment increasingly ex-
presses cohesion of self, as fostered by the continued interaction with the
caretaker: “if the caregiver is meaningfully present, then the infant’s mind
will likely be experienced as integrated—as bound and held together, while
if the caregiver is meaningfully absent, then the infant’s mind will likely be
experienced as unintegrated—as broken and falling to pieces” (Lafrance
2009, 7). Through an emphasis on particular forms of interaction—forms
that specifically involve skin-to-skin touch2—an infant is given the recep-
tacle necessary for eventual interactive self-sufficiency. With the skin closed
by a sense of self- containment, the infant will not later risk the deterritori-
alization caused by leakage, a deterritorialization that, in true psychoana-
lytic form, will come with myriad symptoms associated with the necessity
of creating “second skins.”3
What if the skin were not a container? What if the skin were not a limit
at which self begins and ends? What if the skin were a porous, topological
surfacing of myriad potential strata that field the relation between differ-
ent milieus, each of them a multiplicity of insides and outsides? Following
psychoanalytic theory such as that posited by Bick, skin- as- container re-
inforces feelings of aliveness and existence,4 whereas the lack of contain-
ment fosters a state of incoherence associated with anxiety and annihila-
tion. Without self-containment, “the infant fears that its self will dissolve
and, ultimately, leak into a limitless space” (Lafrance 2009, 9). To posit
skin-as- container as the starting point for the notion of interactive self-
sufficiency is to begin with the idea that the well- contained human is one
who can actively (and protectively) take part in self-self interactions. Self-
self interactions depend on a strict boundary between inside and outside.5
They occur within the realm of clearly bounded selves, including the clear
boundedness of objects. Interaction is understood here as the encounter be-
tween two self- contained entities (human-to-human or human-to- object).
What if, instead of placing self-self interaction at the center of develop-
ment, we were to posit relation as key to experience? Relation, understood
here in a Jamesian sense,6 is a making apparent of a third space opened up
for experience in the making. This third space (or interval) is active with the
tendencies of interaction but is not limited to them.7 Relation folds experi-
ence into it such that what emerges is always more than the sum of its parts.
Finally, what if neither skin nor self were the starting point for the com-
plex interrelational matrix of being and worlding? Being and worlding de-
pend on the activity of reaching-toward.8 Reaching-toward foregrounds the
relationality inherent in experience, a kind of feeling-with the world.9 This
tending-toward is a sensing-with that does not occur strictly at the level
of the sensory-motor. It happens across strata, both actual and virtual.10
A looking becomes a touching, a feeling becomes a hearing. But not on the
skin or in the body. Across strata, both concrete and abstract, that con-
stitute an assemblage. This assemblage is a sensing body in movement, a
body-world that is always tending, attending to the world.
In equal measure, the world also tends toward the becoming-body. Body-
worlding is much more than containment, much more than envelope. It is a
complex feeling-assemblage that is active between different co-constitutive
milieus. It is individuation before it is self, a fielding of associated milieus
that fold in, on, and through one another. For the associated milieu is never
“between” constituted selves: the associated milieu is the resonant field of
individuation, active always in concert with the becomings it engenders.
Becoming-self is one of the ways in which this folding (body-worlding) ex-
presses itself, but never toward a totalization of self—always toward con-

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-

towarD a lEaky sEnsE of sElf  3

nization. These modes of organization do not preexist experience—they are
immanent to it. Through the fielding of relations (in the associated milieu
of organization), the infant develops. Contrary to psychoanalytic theory,
development for Stern does not come in discrete stages: “development oc-
curs in leaps and bounds; qualitative shifts may be one of its most obvious
features” (1985, 8). Quantum leaps of development occur in a fractal mode
of relation where events build on events, each of them affecting at once the
infant and the environment, altering what Stern calls the “social feel” of the
infant. In a direct critique of a system that would seek to contain experience
and development, Stern writes: “I question the entire notion of phases of
development devoted to specific clinical issues such as orality, attachment,
autonomy, independence, and trust. . . . The quantum shifts in the social
‘presence’ and ‘feel’ of the infant can . . . no longer be attributed to the de-
parture from one specific developmental task-phase and the entrance into
the next” (1985, 10).
New senses of self are key to Stern’s model of development. Unlike the
idea that the self rests in a containment of skin, Stern proposes that selves
build onto and through one another in intimate relation with a changing
environment. These senses of self are defined as the emergent, core, sub-
jective, and verbal selves, none of which is strictly successive.
Stern’s senses of self are less bounded phases than fractal phase-spaces
composed of interweaving strata. “Once formed, each sense of self re-
mains fully functioning and active throughout life. All continue to grow
and coexist” (Stern 1985, 22). No stratum is ever completely disarticulated
from another in the creation of emergent senses of self. Rather, strata veer
through and across one another in the associated milieu’s intensive field-
ing. As the infant ages and becomes verbal, for instance, their sense of
being a coherent, willful, physical entity—foregrounding strata phasing
toward organization—may intermesh with the frustration of not being able
to express the feeling-vector of intensity that remains a key aspect of the
tending toward coherence—foregrounding the strata phasing toward the
virtual or immanence. Every becoming is tinted with this double articula-
tion. There is no stable pre- and postverbal state. There is no stable identity
that emerges once and for all. Becoming-human is expressed singularly and
repeatedly in the multiphasing passage from the feeling of content to the
content of feeling, a shift from the force of divergent flows to a systematic
integration. This is not a containment toward a stable self. It is a momentary
cohesiveness, a sense of self that always remains colored by the interweav-

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

towarD a lEaky sEnsE of sElf  5

not, then, a simple issue of a direct translation across modalities. Rather, it
involves an encoding into a still mysterious amodal representation, which
can then be recognized in any of the sensory modes” (Stern 1985, 51). Amo-
dality makes apparent that the infant functions comfortably in the abstract
concreteness of the radically empirical: the relation.
The infant is not a passive slate (or a proto- container) into or onto
which the world can be written. The infant is itself an emergent experi-
ence (an experiment in emergence), an individuation of interweaving strata
active in the creation of ontogenetic worldings. These worldings are affec-
tive. They meet the infant halfway, transforming, at each level of the co-
constitutive strata of experience, being and worlding as they come together.
This coming-together is not based on cognitive confirmation. It is precon-
scious, situated in a pure experience of proto-awareness. It is an immanent
becoming-present of experience in experience, the feeling of a “déjà-vu” in
a nowness without, as yet, a past or a future. In preconscious pure experi-
ence of ontogenetic worlding, we have not yet succumbed to the promise
of linear time, living instead in the active topology of spacetimes of experi-
ence that many adults spend their lifetimes resisting. At the heart of these
experiential topologies is vitality affect.
Affect can be thought of as supra-modal. It operates across registers: “an
affect experience is not bound to any one modality of perception” (Stern
1985, 53). Preconscious, affects alter the force of the event, shaping it be-
yond its actual constitution. Affects exceed the realm of the modal, tend-
ing toward the edge of experience where amodality takes shape. Think of
vitality affect as a species of affect, an affective tuning that operates as a
kind of virtual event across myriad actualizations, creating dephasings in
experience. If, for Stern’s core sense of self, the organizational stratum is
the dominant mode toward which direct experience unfolds, vitality affect
can be understood as a co- constitutive qualitative infrastratum that pro-
vides a tending-toward immanent feeling in the constitution of the event.
Organization is therefore always also experiential and affective—a fielding
of relations. According to Suzanne Langer, this quality of life-living accom-
panies us through “all the vital processes of life, such as breathing, getting
hungry . . . , eliminating, falling asleep . . . , or feeling the coming and going
of emotions and thoughts” (qtd. in Stern 1985, 54). We are never without
the presence of vitality affects. The associated milieu where the force of life-
living agitates is first of all a fielding of affective incipiencies.
From its birth, the infant is immersed in feelings of vitality that trans-

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

towarD a lEaky sEnsE of sElf  7

feeling- of but a feeling-with. In affective attunement, a relational merg-
ing occurs that creates a dephasing of vitality affects around new affective
contours. This dephasing is as much a shift in process as a shift in level. It
activates what Simondon calls a transduction, a redistribution of processes
in the making. This experience is not reducible to the poles of the event,
mother and child. It happens in their interval and is co- constitutive of a be-
coming that always exceeds their “selves.”
In early infancy, Stern argues, “interpersonal relatedness does not yet
exist as distinct from relatedness to things” (1985, 63). An infant is not
poised to respond to a human more than she is to respond to the quality
and texture of light or to the touch of sound. This does not mean that the in-
fant is necessarily on the autistic continuum, as suggested—pejoratively—
by Ogden.15 In the early period of a child’s life, relational potential is at its
most extreme. This hyperrelationality has not yet found the means to sub-
tract singularities from the virtual web of the associated milieu, a subtrac-
tion that will later allow a foregrounding of discrete events to be separated
out from the complex relational bombardment of their backgrounds. For
the infant, experience is always first a qualitative merging of edge and con-
tour, intensity and affect. “The infant is asocial, but by virtue of being indis-
criminate, not by virtue of being unresponsive, as suggested by psychoana-
lytic formulations of a stimulus barrier that protects the infant for the first
few months of life” (Stern 1985, 63). This asociality is not against the social.
It is a suprasociality, a relationality activated at the very interval of relation
itself, not yet having landed on individualization. This is relationality at its
most intensive, an opening to the complex fielding of multiplicity as yet un-
differentiated. To posit this quality of relationality as “autistic” is both to
radically misrepresent suprasociality (by negating its relational force) and
to simplify autism (by assuming that autism and the asocial are one and the
same).
Understanding how this suprasociality works will allow us to better
understand the relationship between vitality affects, affective tonality, and
affective attunement. This will in turn lead to a better understanding of
autism.
Intensive relationality—a lived experience of affective attunement at its
preconscious limit—gets backgrounded in most adults. This results in a
more limited capacity to feel the force of preacceleration, to hear and en-
gage with the betweenness of prearticulation, with the more-than of ex-
perience in the making. As this book will seek to demonstrate, autistics,

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,

towarD a lEaky sEnsE of sElf  9

one of sound and light, smell and touch, active not simply for the human
but in a withness of body-worlding that challenges the very notion that the
human is at the center of (relational) experience. Baggs moves through the
environment and it moves through her, feeling-with its forms and forces,
expressing it as it expresses her. With and without language,18 Baggs is at
pains to demonstrate that relation is the how of the world’s co- emergence.
There is nothing but relation. It is precisely this intensive relationality, the video
suggests, that often makes it difficult for autistics to interact with others.
For autistics do not as easily subtract containment from the experience of
relation. They do not tend to first and foremost abstract themselves—their
“self ”—from the emergent environment. This is precisely a neurotypical
tendency, as proponents of neurodiversity would say.19
When containment is no longer the endpoint (and the starting point) of
experience, subtraction from the hyperrelation of synesthetic and cross-
modal experience lags behind. The unified verbal self is no longer the first
to emerge. Baggs (2007) explains, citing a social context where she would
be assumed to be “nonrelational”: “I mean that when I am around a group
of people, their voices may turn into the sound of water, their movements
may all sort of blend together, but in their movements I see patterns not
only of individuals but of the people interacting within a group, and the
individual’s place within the group, and their effect on the group and the
group’s effect on them, and on each other. I see this particularly well when
not trying to understand what they’re saying to each other.”20
The complexity of vitality affects and how they create fields of intensity is
apparent in Baggs’s statement about the challenge of facing social environ-
ments. As she makes clear, it is not that she “withdraws” or that she can’t
engage. It is that the feeling of the event—its vitality affect—takes over to
such a degree that she cannot extricate a “contained self ” for interaction
from the event’s dynamic emergence. Amanda Baggs directly experiences
the event’s vitality, the force of its taking-form. This experience shapes
her bodying, calling forth a field of relation through which she emerges
as a multiplicity rather than a static, interactive self. To interact in a self-
contained verbal way would involve parsing this multiple taking-form into
a single activity of form-taking. For Baggs, it would mean parsing one very
minute aspect of actual experience from the wider and richer realm of pure
experience.
Infants bathe in pure experience. This state of quasi- consciousness is
of the edge, not the center. It is only of the skin if the skin is considered in

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

towarD a lEaky sEnsE of sElf  11

fluttering at her sides as she rocks back and forth. We are lulled by the move-
ment, which then shifts quite seamlessly to the movement of a metal im-
plement scraping against a surface. This scraping continues to move with
the rhythm of the tonal singing, adding to it, but on another plane of ex-
perience. Now, we see only the hand, the implement and its shadow on the
wall: a tonal rhythm in scraping movement. Then, another shift, this time
to fingers moving along a computer keyboard, creating a softer, plushier
sound, aligned, still, with the sound of the voice. There is no cut here: the
video continues this way. This three-part transition makes felt how the land-
ing occurs. It’s not that these are discrete sites—they are continuities in the
sounding through which certain qualities of shift of resonance are fore-
grounded. Each contour stands out for itself as a remarkable point pre-
cisely because of the movement carrying-across. These remarkable points
are landings, but landings only in the sense that they activate the force of
transition that is the carrying-across.
Landing sites are force-fields tending toward relational form. Through
the eventness of force taking form, landings site the environment bodying
such that it coalesces into a singularity to which we can attach content. This
becoming-event of worlding or landing is first and foremost a feeling, a way
of relating, a mode of engagement. Subtracted into an actual occasion, the
event folds the infinity of potential landings into a singular iteration, an it-
eration poised, always, to individuate again, under different and new con-
ditions.
Individuation happens at the surface, not of the skin, but through a
surfacing multiplicity, “a smooth, amorphous space . . . constituted by an
accumulation of proximities, . . . each accumulation [defining] a zone of
indiscernability proper to ‘becoming’ (more than a line and less than a sur-
face; less than a volume and more than a surface)” (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 488). When the skin becomes not a container but a multidimensioned
topological surface that folds in, through, and across spacetimes of experi-
ence, what emerges is not a self but the dynamic form of a worlding that
refuses categorization. Beyond the human, beyond the sense of touch or
vision, beyond the object, what emerges is relation.

12 chaPtEr onE
 Notes

One. Toward a Leaky Sense of Self

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

224 notEs to chaPtEr onE

 Stern notes, that processes are not explored ontogenetically (at the level of their
emergence) but ontologically (in their matrix of being or having become). Stern
asks: “what about the process itself—the very experience of making the leaps
and creating relations or consolidating sensorimotor schemas. Can the infant ex-
perience not only the sense of an organization already formed and grasped, but
the coming-into-being of organization?” (1985, 45). Stern’s criticism of psycho-
analytic theory is that it does not tend to explore the processual complexities
of development/emergence as a fractal phase-space that contains interweaving
strata. “The traditional notions of clinical theorists have taken the observer’s
knowledge of infants—that is, relative undifferentiation compared with the dif-
ferentiated view of older children—reified it, and given it back, or attributed it,
to infants as their own dominant subjective sense of things” (1985, 46).
13 Following the philosophical lineage of thinkers such as Alfred North White-
head, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, an actual occasion or event is conceived
throughout as that through which experience coalesces into actuality. I take the
liberty to align event and occasion despite the fact that some readings of White-
head see the occasion rather as a micro-event. In my reading of Whitehead, occa-
sions are not classified according to scale. An occasion is always an event in its
own right. This usage conforms to Whitehead’s own in Science and the Modern World
(1925) and Modes of Thought (1938). See also Deleuze 1992; Massumi 2011b.
14 I define preacceleration as the felt experience of the not-yet in the moving, par-
ticularly noticeable in the beginning of a displacement. For a more detailed read-
ing of the concept, see “Incipient Action: The Dance of the Not-Yet” in Manning
2009.
15 Ogden makes the assumption here that autism is directly associated with a lack
of empathy. This notion that autistics cannot establish relations is allied to the
concept of mindblindness (Baron-Cohen 1995), a view that I believe is com-
pletely unwarranted. I discuss this in detail in chapter 7. Suffice it to say for now
that this view presupposes that autism involves the impossibility of sensing the
acuteness of the world in its activity, human and nonhuman, a view that has been
challenged by many autistics and writers on autism. In discussing his autistic
son, for instance, Ralph Savarese talks of DJ being a “seismograph” who feels
every aspect of his environment so fully that it deeply affects how he interacts in
the world. See Savarese 2007 and Ogden 1989.
16 To view Amanda Baggs’s video, In My Language, visit http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc.
17 See, for instance, Baron-Cohen 1995; Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright 2004;
Charman et al., Simon Baron-Cohen, John Swettenham, Anthony Cox, Gillian
Baird, Auriol Drew “Infants with Autism: An Investigation of Empathy, Pretend
Play, Joint Attention and Imitation” in Developmental Psychology 33, no. 5 (1997):
781–89. For a more complex reading of empathy in relation to autism, see R. J.
Blair, “Responding to the Emotions of Others: Dissociating Forms of Empa-

notEs to chaPtEr onE  225

 thy through the Study of Typical and Psychiatric Populations,” at http://www18
.homepage.villanova.edu/diego.fernandezduque/Teaching/PSY8900_CogNeuro
psych/9_ToM/BlairEmpathy.pdf. In this piece, Blair differentiates between dif-
ferent kinds of empathy, making the point that “motor empathy is likely to be
impaired in autism” (9) and questioning the claim that “there is any evidence of
impairment for emotional empathy” (10). By motor emphathy, Blair is directing
his attention to the fact that many autistics are not capable of using their voices
or bodies in a way that clearly demonstrates what they are feeling. Sue Rubin, for
instance, talks about how her echolalia often gets in the way of what she really
means to say. The example she gives is of a visitor ringing her doorbell and her
greeting the visitor with an emphatic “go away” when she is actually happy to
see them. She speaks of feeling taken over by the echolalia. Within the autistic
spectrum I am calling “classical” here, there also tends to be a lot of difficulty
with activation (making a decision about an action and immediately following
through with it). I have written more extensively about motor activation issues
in the context of a Parkinsons-like condition called Encephalitis Lethargica in a
chapter entitled “Touch as Technique” in Relationscapes (Manning 2009). Motor
activation issues make it difficult to operate on a neurotypical time-line. Antici-
pated sequences of events such as extending the arm to reach for a pencil or a
keyboard to communicate are often severely impeded, which can give the neuro-
typical the impression that the autistic does not want to respond, with the un-
desired effect that he or she will either ignore them or speak for them. “Freezing”
also happens regularly for some autistics, making it difficult for them to reacti-
vate themselves without assistance. All of these issues can also have important
social consequences. Tito Mukhopadhyay (n.d.) explains: “There is the social
pressure of performing those social gestures—like organizing the muscles of
the face and beam out a social smile of acknowledgment to a face that is wait-
ing with expectation, ready to get hurt or disappointed when the smile fails to
happen. It does fail to happen with my face under that pressure. This ‘not being
able to smile socially’ is not a universal fact. For I do not represent the whole
Autism community. I have seen many people with Autism smile impartially at
friends and strangers, happy faces and sad faces. But I don’t because I can’t.”
Activation issues surrounding motor impairment are often the reason classical
autistics are assumed to be unintelligent or “low-functioning.” This is of course
completely false.
18 In a weblog-based dispute with well-known “high-functioning” autistic Temple
Grandin, Amanda Baggs takes umbrage at Grandin’s categorical separation of
so- called low-functioning autistics from high-functioning autistics. Grandin
writes: “I would think in an ideal world, you don’t want to have people who
can’t talk, but on the other hand, you definitely don’t want to get rid of all of the
autism genetics because if you did that, there’d be no scientists. After all, who do
you think made the first stone spear back in the caves? It wasn’t the really social

226 notEs to chaPtEr onE

 people. . . . A little bit of the autism trait provides advantages but too much cre-
ates a low-functioning individual who cannot live independently. The paradox
is that milder forms of autism and Asperger’s are part of human diversity but
severe autism is a great disability. There is no black-and-white dividing line be-
tween an eccentric brilliant scientist and Asperger’s. . . . In an ideal world the sci-
entist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow
the milder forms to survive.” See this interview at http://www.wrongplanet.net/
asperger.html?name=News&file=article&sid=295. Amanda Baggs responds:
“Note that I think the division between low-functioning and high-functioning
is completely artificial. I do not regard myself as either one because I do not
think it is possible to divide up autism that way. I do not think there is a straight
continuum from Asperger’s to ‘full-blown autistic.’ I think that there are too
many aspects of autism, that can be different in each person, for it to be pos-
sible to just draw a neat line as if autism is one trait that varies in ‘severity.’ I say
this because sometimes people get the impression that I consider myself low-
functioning. I don’t. I don’t consider myself high-functioning either” (see the
post “Temple Grandin, displaying near-textbook ‘hfa/as elitism,’” at http://
ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/http://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/?p=27).
Note also Melanie Yergeau’s comment on the category: “If one can speak but
can’t work, can cook but can’t drive, can read existential philosophy but can’t
add single digits, can hug on demand but can’t stop a head-banging binge, can
mimic small-talk but can’t modulate the volume of her voice, can pass in short
bursts but can’t refrain from hand-flapping, is she high-functioning?” (2010).
19 For stimulating and incisive reading on neurodiversity, disability politics, and
writing, see Melanie Yergeau (2009, 2010; Yergeau and Duffy 2011). In her 2010
essay titled “Circle Wars: Reshaping the Typical Autism Essay,” she writes, “Of
course, this is what the typical autism essay leads us to believe: the genre—and
the authors who have painstakingly constructed this genre, a genre that is rife
with painful history—has constructed autism just as neurological difference—
which it is—yet fails to account for the social construction of neurological dif-
ference—which it also is—instead lumping the difference circle with that of de-
viance” (Yergeau 2010).
20 See Amanda Baggs’s post from November 20, 2010, titled “Doing Things Differ-
ently,” http://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/.
21 See Langer 1977.
22 For a more detailed exploration of landing sites, see Arakawa and Gins 2002.

interlude: When Movement Dances

The epigraph for this interlude is from Gil 2001.

notEs to chaPtEr onE  227

Erin Manning is a University Research Chair
in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in
Montreal. She is director of the SenseLab and author
of several books, including Relationscapes (2009) and
Politics of Touch (2007).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Manning, Erin.
Always more than one : individuation’s dance / Erin Manning ;
prelude by Brian Massumi.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isBn 978- 0- 8223-5333-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
isBn 978- 0- 8223-5334- 8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Individuation (Psychology)—Social aspects. 2. Group
identity. 3. Individuality. 4. Movement (Philosophy). I. Title.
Bf175.5.i53M36 2012
128—dc23
2012011643