For a Pragmatics of the Useless

What has a use in the future, unforeseeably, is radically useless now. What has an effect now is not necessarily useful, if it falls through the gaps. In For a Pragmatics of the Useless Erin Manning examines what falls outside the purview of already known functions and established standards of value, not for want of potential but for carrying an excess of it. The figures are various: the infrathin, the artful, proprioceptive tactilty, neurodiversity, black life. It is around the latter two that a central refrain echoes: "all black life is neurodiverse life." This is not an equation, but an "approximation of proximity". Manning shows how neurotypicality and whiteness combine to form a normative baseline for existence. Blackness and neurodiversity "schizz" around the baseline, uselessly, pragmatically, figuring a more-than of life living. Manning, in dialogue with Félix Guattari and drawing on the black radical tradition's accounts of black life and the aesthetics of black sociality, proposes a "schizoanalysis" of the more-than charting a panoply of techniques for other ways of living and learning.