In Conversation With Erin Manning: A Refusal of Neurotypicality Through Attunements to Learning Otherwise

Somebody on Facebook queried our use of the word neuroatypicality rather than neurodiversity. I first learned about neuroatypicality from your writings, can you explain what it means and how it relates to neurodiversity?

First, it’s so heartwarming to know these are questions that are important to some people, as our universities return to status quo. I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the vocabulary of neuroatypicality because of the way it centers typicality. In the environment of neurodiversity, the most common term is neurodivergence, which I also don’t use. My reasons are more philosophical perhaps, than anything else. What I’m concerned about when we speak about neuroatypicality or neurodivergence is that we frame the difference from the angle of typicality (divergence from the norm) and we see this difference as tied to a person, rather than seeing it as a mode. In my work, I have tried to articulate how neurodiversity is a mode that cannot be reduced to something someone “is.” When we reduce the person to something they “are” in contradistinction to a norm, what we are doing is imposing a pathological logic. To do so is to accept the normative baseline. Neurodiversity is a different logic, in every sense, than neurotypicality, which also can’t be reduced to a person. Neurotypicality is a systemic baseline according to which modes of self-presentation and modes of knowing are policed. Now the trouble with saying that is that people can think that what I’m saying is that neurodiversity is just a spectrum of difference, as though there’s no singularity of difference within that spectrum and that’s also not what I’m saying.

Neurodiversity orients differently in singular experience. When I speak of “diversity in diversity,” my aim is not to relativize. Rather, it is to refuse the neurotypical as the counterpoint. If we speak of autistic perception, we are speaking of a singular angle on neurodiverse experience. If we build into our conversation attunements to activation, or the amplification of attention (or its detours), we are moving into new, equally singular territories. These territories might be called “autism” or “ADHD” or “depression.” That they are all within the diversity of diversity is not to make them the same, but to recognize that baselines are implanted norms meant to produce a deficit body. What I am interested in is what techniques of existence are called forth by our singular ways of engaging and being engaged by the world.

So yes, of course, there’s atypicality, but there is only atypicality, in my view. The next thorny question is whether it makes sense to hold onto the “neuro.” For the most part, my tendency is to think not, and yet I continue to use the vocabulary of neurodiversity because it has a history and I want to be in conversation with that history. Felix Guattari’s vocabulary of “normopathy” is an excellent one as regards reminding ourselves that the pathological should always be situated on the side of neurotypicality. But to come back to the “neuro,” it’s a complicated issue because there are neurological differences, but to “locate” them in the brain is to miss the complexity of the refusal at the heart of the movement for neurodiversity and to radically misunderstand the environmentality of experience. If we see neurodiversity as a movement, as a claim on a modality of living that holds onto complexity, that refuses simplistic (neoliberal) claims about independence, that fosters a relational approach that is in every way more than human (where the human is not centered in experience), the brain has little to do with it. In addition, if we understand the brain to in no way be separated out from the world, we can’t locate modes of existence “in” it. Brains are vectors for experience and they are transformed by experience as much as they produce orientations toward it. In the movement for neurodiversity, this can sometimes be forgotten and lead us right back to the pathologization of difference. This comes up, for instance, around executive function—and here I learn a lot from Estee Klar and Adam Wolfond. If instead of foregrounding how executive function fails folks with ADHD or autism, we focused on the richness of the attunement of all that flows between the so-called “steps” of executive function, we’d rapidly have to rethink how and what we value. Our educational systems still value these “executive” tasks above all else. What if instead we valued the spread? The opening of a perception that doesn’t categorize as quickly (or not at all!). What if we were truly interested in the relational field, or what William James called “radical empiricism,” those actively detouring interstices where worlds are made (rather than represented, or framed)?

Thank you, this is very helpful. I also wanted to know now where Mad Studies fits into these notions that you have been referring to. This is because some of the participants on this webinar series locate themselves in Mad Studies. What are you views on this?

You know it’s fascinating to me . . . I’m not so good at categories and I kind of come to things backwards. If I had known there was something like Mad Studies, it would have changed my life 20 years ago, having spent time in psychiatric institutions, but I didn’t know about Mad Studies. So, like so many people who have struggled, I hid. It’s exciting to know that hiding is less necessary, though to what degree is still a question. What I mean by that is that neurotypicality is a strong enforcer and it is the framing through which many (most?) of us have recognized our value (or its deficit). When I started writing about neurodiversity, I never considered my own experience—it just never occurred to me to center myself in the conversation. Many years on, I can see that I was drawn-in, in part because of the continuous threat of normopathy in my own experience, but still the categories don’t much assist me. What I find more helpful is thinking systemically about how value works, and learning with others how to “schizz” those forms of value, how to detour them. That said, if a category is useful to someone, I would never want to withhold it! I think categories are only useful as long as they are generative, you know, so if Mad Studies is exciting now, I’m all for it.

I am wondering what this means for, and how this plays out in higher education . . .

I guess it means everything. You know I entered into this very intuitively. I watched Mel Bagg’s video In my Language and saw thought in the act! ¹ I didn’t think much about their autism at that time—my concern was with how the movement of sensation at the heart of their thinking shifted the whole question of thought and language. At that moment, there was less literature about autism from the angle of neurodiversity, and there were fewer autistics writing. But there were blogs and I devoured them—Mel Baggs’s Ballastexistenz, ² Estee Klar’s The Joy of Autism, ³ Anne Corwin’s Existence is Wonderful, ⁴ Lydia X.Z. Brown’s Autistic Hoya, ⁵ Amy Sequenzia’ s blog, ⁶ the neuroqueer blog, ⁷ just to name a few—blogs where people were exploring the generative dimensions of autism and speaking about facilitated communication. I read them voraciously and felt such life there, such openness to the complexity of worlds, including a fascinating refusal to center the human in experience.

What I learned as I read the works of autistics and eventually met some of them was that theirs was a real contribution to what else knowledge could look (and feel like). Simultaneously, I was in a teaching context where a new category of knowledge was being experimented with: what we in Canada call research-creation. This category has a lot of potential—though it has been quite reduced by the muting of its wildness in the context of the academy and its obsession with methodology and frames more generally. But nonetheless, I think what research-creation was bringing to the table at the time was a renewed conversation about where value is situated, and how else thought makes itself felt.

Our classrooms are full of different kinds of learners, and it might be fair to see this is even more so the case in studio art for the simple reason that it is not unusual for people who are less interested in writing and language to be more broadly streamed to the arts. This “lack of interest,” I have come to think, is actually not that at all. It’s often something much more complicated: an undiagnosed learning “disability.” I put scare quotes around disability not because there is anything wrong with learning disabilities, but to point out how the norm is kept alive in the presupposition that certain forms of learning have more value than others. For instance, a student who might draw really well but not read easily will likely internalize this as a sense of not being smart. And yet there is such brilliance of technique when you get closer: this student, over years of trial and error, will have found many go-arounds to “pass” as a reader.

In my classrooms, a good number of students come to me to discuss these kinds of things. For that reason I make sure all texts are available as audio texts and we always read everything we are discussing together out loud. I also focus on close-reading and foreground the necessity to take time before we are forced to parse our thinking into a written text or an artwork. Now, of course, there is always a moment for the need to “organize” thought in academia, and we also find ourselves having to work through the complexity of that gesture of “making things count” through a product such as an essay. It’s still an open question why value is bestowed above all else on writing, and in most cases it remains the mainstay, even in research-creation environments.

These sorts of questions occupy my pedagogical imagination. How to create an environment that isn’t predicated on deficit? How to open up the concept of rigor such that rigor is allied to the operative force of thought in the act, and not the representation of what is abstractly considered “smart.” And by abstract I mean in the absence of the lived expression of how knowing reshapes a world. I think a classroom is a dramaturgical site of experimentation where we move through a collective process and learn from each other what else thinking can do. I am not very concerned about content—I don’t think we learn content from each other. I think we learn how to stay excited about learning, and that content “acquisition” follows, if that’s an arena we continue to want to value . . .

I do think we fail each other in the environment of learning. And by that I don’t just mean the students. I mean that we do our work in the presupposition of what counts, and though this approach feeds so few, built as it is in the academy’s false narrative of scarcity, we police knowledge over embracing its potential. Of course, there are exceptions and I revel in those, but for the most part I think we are deeply beholden to neurotypical norms when it comes to how we think about the value of our work.

My questions have to do with how we might create conditions that don’t carry that paranoid sense of scarcity (that breeds competition at one end, and detachment at the other). How can we create an environment where knowing as final act is not the aim? Where what is remembered is how we came to thought.

A neurodiverse learning environment begins here, I think. It refuses category and tries to activate the conditions for learning in the act. What I mean by that is that it tries to demystify knowing. The way I do this has nothing to do with “simplifying,” a tendency I find condescending. In my classes we read complex philosophical texts, and we read them very closely. We are also often engaged with other materials—curious always about the transversality of thought and practice. What is foregrounded is not “what things mean” so much as how they activate a tendency that can find purchase through materials or words or rhythms. We are not interested in a “global” approach that would generalize across many viewpoints. Rather, the approach is granular, as it would be if we were sanding wood to make a table. We ask of the philosophy that it take us on its journey and we follow it there. In so doing, we notice its tendencies, its curiosities, and its aporias.

Accommodation is key, but I don’t think of this approach as “creating accommodations.” John Lee Clark—DeafBlind poet and essayist—is fantastic on this question. When we accommodate, we rely on the norm, returning to a deficit model. Ideally, we are creative enough in our approach to learning that we can be nimble and move with things as they come. This takes a sensitivity to the process itself, but I find that comes with the ecology the classroom itself produces. Students teach each other how to learn, especially when the fear of being judged (the fear of not being smart enough) is no longer on the table.

You have described a different way of doing pedagogy, a different way of doing research. Can you say a little bit more about how accommodation works in your classroom?

It’s a dance, isn’t it! I have a recent situation where a student of mine is in a class that is in no way accommodating to his autism. But I think no accommodation would work in that context because the environment is so stridently neurotypical that it would just become another way of singling him out in his difference. In this kind of situation, it’s difficult to figure out how to intervene. What I proposed was that we repeat the readings together so that I might be able to show him what a neurotypical reading practice looks like. This of course feels deeply unintuitive—and honestly, quite nauseating. But he is not sleeping and his self-esteem is terribly low and he has to pass the class. So we are meeting weekly (with a few other autistic students) to learn how to skim texts and foreground what is valued in a university classroom. This could of course be sidestepped were professors to teach less content but this is a habit: to give so much reading that the student is forced to skim. Skimming requires a very particular kind of (in)attention. It relies on us being able to be actively uninterested in the details of an account in order to pull out declarative sentences, and to connect those sentences to what we already know. A classroom is often a site for practicing the sharing of these generalizing views. In our mock classroom, we spend the first hour learning how to read a text in this manner and then we spend the second hour engaging with the problems of this kind of neurotypical engagement. We have much more fun in the second hour! And unfortunately (for my plan), the second hour is what stays with us. The autistics in this mock class just don’t want to learn how to read less, to feel less, and to connect less. So my “accommodation” has been a failure in that regard. But not so in attuning us to value systems and to the manner in which certain ways of reading and writing are prized over others in an academic context. A true accommodation would be a curiosity about other ways of learning, but in this case it’s not an option. The sad thing is that this is a course on methods of decolonization . . .

I’ve never written about this, but I come from a family of really imaginative teachers. My father was an English teacher in high school and he worked in an environment with kids who would be on the farm in the spring—and in the Canadian scholarly year we go from September to June, so that means that kids were often out planting in the spring and out of class. Over years my father realized what happened was that the boys, in particular, would miss school and then they would be set back, and so they would get older, feel uneasy about being with younger students, lose their confidence and, as a result, disrupt the classroom. Soon, they would be thought of as bullies and as students incapable of learning. But what was actually happening is that they were having trouble achieving literacy. They weren’t learning to read and write let alone be excited about learning. My father—himself neurodiverse, though we never discussed it—puzzled over the problem and decided that he needed to bring out the story-tellers in them, for them to be able to connect to literature and eventually learn to read it. This was the late 70s and 80s. His answer was to give them Walkmans and ask them to narrate stories and give him the tapes to listen to, or speak about the stories they read. Before too long, many of these students were writing their own stories—including drawing and comics. He retired early because he couldn’t accept province-wide testing.

I suppose I learned from him that if you have to prove your value you stop learning. This is so clear in the classroom. It’s noticeable, for instance, that students stop really following the course 6 weeks before it’s over because they are getting concerned about their evaluations, so their focus is on “their” work. What a shame! The classroom feels so different when the aim is not to subtract from the environment your own value, and instead stay with your colleagues in the learning! But if we want that, we can’t ask the student to demarcate themselves from the others as the measure of their participation. Similarly, I think we have to be very careful about group work. Group work can create a real anxiety around paces of learning and can result in disabling pressures to perform for and with a peer group.

I rarely repeat a technique I’ve devised for a class and never repeat the content—I am too interested in learning with the students. One technique I have repeated, though, is one of “shadowing process.” During the first class, students pick a name (of a colleague) out of a hat. This creates “threesomes”—the name you’ve picked is the person whose process you are shadowing, and your process is being shadowed by someone else. As we move through the term, the proposition is to give the gift of process to the person whose process you are shadowing and to be available for the person who is shadowing your process. In the meantime, we’re doing the reading together—in the most recent case, around “minor sociality.” The last class is spent sharing the gifts. What I have found both times I’ve used this technique is that there is a deep sense of joy. The “evaluation” is simple: care about following a process. Very little stress is involved—the curiosity for a process can take many forms (https://neuroqueer.blogspot.com) from writing letters to babysitting to washing dishes, to renting a studio to facilitate someone’s work or going for a walk or a picnic to bask in the conviviality of their process. Knowing that you are being shadowed, and learning from your shadower how the shadowing can take place, creates a relational web, and it is not unusual, I’ve noticed, for the three-ness of the process to foreground itself in the final gifts. Nor is it unusual for people to continue collaborating and developing a deep investment in each others’ practices. Somewhat backgrounded are the readings we do together weekly over the 12-week term, and yet they do transversal work in the process of shadowing. This allows students to learn how philosophy is not something you build into work (making work “about” it) but a mode of thought which can texture an encounter with the world. Seen this way, philosophy becomes a vocabulary we generate together in a context of artistic practice that has effects that are much less frontal. A sideways approach to philosophy gives it less weight (thereby not weighing the artistic process down) but more wings (allowing the questions that animate the artistic process to be more varied and complex).

This kind of alongsideness carries the force of a minor sociality. What I mean by that is that it is not premised on “commonality”—on already having things in common with someone. Instead, it is concerned with bringing out the potential of someone else’s process. This means that people come together at the level of process itself, connecting there, instead of in the frontality of the social.

Did they just share with each other, or did they share with you? Were there grades attached to this process? While it’s often easy to do things differently, when it comes to assessment, it’s a little bit more complicated I think . . .

We decided to meet at our apartment and make an improvised meal together based on one ingredient each person brought and then sit together for the sharing of the gifts. There is no assessment in the strong sense—everyone who participates gets a good mark. I do have to grade, unfortunately, but what I have found is that these kinds of processes generate such enthusiasm that the work is simply outstanding, so it’s pretty straightforward in that regard.

I have generally moved as far away from any kind of evaluation as I can. It’s tricky because of course it remains necessary to give people grades. But I find that if I refuse the process in advance by telling people that I am curious to see what kind of ecology we can create together, that people are excited to do work, and that their work is outstanding. This work can take many forms, but what most stands out is that it is “theirs” in the sense that it wasn’t just made for me. I worry about our teaching students to make work for “us.” How does that foster their own process? I have a tendency to believe that if we want to shift the conditions of value, we have to be less sure we know what they are.

Yes, your book For a Pragmatics of the Useless says a lot about that. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the outsider evaluating something, what is a pragmatics of the useless and how does it work, both in terms of research, research-creation, and in terms of pedagogy?

I think of the pragmatics of the useless as this uneasy interstice where value hasn’t yet shaped the event. Valuation is an emergent process for me, it happens all the time, it happens in the minute where you open your mouth and you put a bite food in it and you go Urgh!! . . . that’s valuation! I am interested in this emergent quality of valuation and the way it shapes experience.

Generally, I would say we live and work in a logic I would call the “representation of the useful.” Here, categories are already deployed and we are expected to fit ourselves into them. Neurotypicality lives here, and/as whiteness. That is to say, in the attribution of value as given we are always working with a normative baseline according to which everything that falls outside the norm is (de)valued.

I could give a pedagogical example. I might be teaching and notice somebody’s not paying attention. Another way of putting that is that I am not at the center of that person’s attention—because they are definitely attending, attuning, just not to what is considered of the “utmost” importance at that juncture. The temptation is to want to organize that person’s attention, and even if we don’t actively single students out at the university level in an academic classroom telling them to “pay” attention, the ubiquitous “participation” mark is our mechanism to penalize these drifts. What if instead we began elsewhere? What if we saw whatever we were teaching as a kind of environmental texturing that opens thought to its potential, including to its detours. What if we didn’t assume that our presence, our voice, and our teachings were the most important things going on? It’s tempting, of course, to ask ourselves: “were they on Facebook, the whole time I was teaching?” the subtext being “what? what I have to say is not more important that your social networks????” This knee jerk response tells us more about how value is organized, though, as it does anything else. First, we really don’t know how that person attends. Maybe distributed attention is easier for them, or maybe they are really tired and not processing well. What I have found is that by demystifying value we can have more interesting conversations. For instance, in a class I taught in the fall, a very engaged student suddenly blurted out that she had just purchased a great pair of pants on the internet! We were deep into a close reading. The class erupted in laughter not only because of the startling honesty of the utterance, but also because we had been so serious, so caught up, that her statement flew into the room like a great breath of fresh air. After she had showed us her new pants, we went on with the reading, lighter than before.

The commitment to a pragmatics of the useless is a call for those kinds of openings we might not otherwise be sensitive to. If we assume we know where value resides, we will always recreate ourselves in the image of its representation. What else might matter in the process?

I would imagine that it’s easier to do that in something like research-creation, than it is in a more formal curriculum in the university.

Yeah I think you’re absolutely right, that it isn’t every environment that facilitates these modes of learning, but I think, at the same time, we have to be careful because it’s not because we’re in Fine Arts that there isn’t whiteness or neurotypicality. And it’s not because we’re in Disability Studies that there isn’t ableism. How many times do we see fiercely neurotypical learning practices framed as disability, or decolonization, or posthuman? We have been trained to value from the neurotypical standpoint, and this training runs through all of us, no matter where we come from. Of course, as I tried to show in For a Pragmatics of the Useless we are not all equal in that regard. Black life, as I have tried to argue, is neurodiverse life to the degree that the neurotypical is White in its mobilization of the normative standard. But that doesn’t mean that we haven’t fallen prey to neurotypical techniques, and to normative ideas of what intelligence looks like, or what learning should include.

We have to recognize that neurotypicality is valued above all else in academia, and it is according to its parameters that we stand out as intelligent. It is how we build self-esteem in these environments. To be an A student is to have understood how to meet those requirements. To practice learning otherwise is not to devalue the A student but to shift the focus toward a kind of learning that can surprise even them. Often an A student has a method down to keep them in high standing, but also feels burdened by it. How do we create conditions where the thinking can come alive again? The aim is not to pull the rug from under them—there will be other classrooms to contend with where normative techniques will continue to be necessary . . .

I suppose one can’t also protect people from what’s going on in other classrooms. I’m going to move on to the question about an alternative politico-ethico-onto-epistemology and I know you’ve written a lot about neurodiversity and blackness and you’ve even equated neurotypicality with institutional racism so could say a little about that, and maybe how that intersects with decolonial and postcolonial debates in higher education? Which is interesting for us, specifically in South Africa, but also across the world too . . .

So, what I tried to propose in For a Pragmatics of the Useless was a logic of approximation of proximity. I begin there to caution that the most dangerous way of talking about this might seen as a simple causal scenario, where you might think I’m saying that all Black people are autistic because I’m saying Black life is neurodiverse life. I’m not saying Black people are autistic. I’m saying that neurotypicality as an imposed baseline is systemic, and as such is akin to whiteness. Neurotypicality is exclusive—certain bodies fit its mould. Black life is excluded from it, as is indigenous life, and other forms of disability, including but not limited to cognitive disability. If your body is such that it reveals its diversity, for example through a spasticity, or through not being able to hold your head up, or not being able to keep eye contact, or not being able to use speech, you are treated as stupid. We’ve internalized this idea that a smart body is a body that is held, frontal, directed, and linguistically capable (among other things). I hadn’t made the connection to blackness until I was in conversation with Fred Moten and he said to me that he thought all Black life was neurodiverse life. Now, in this comment, Fred was making a difference between Black people and Black life . . . and this is always something that is important to say, he was insisting, as he does, that there’s a quality of blackness that transverses Black people. And this quality of blackness, which is of them but can’t be reduced to them—this paraontological share is less a being than a quality of existence. If you’ve been excluded from the norm, practices will necessarily emerge that detour existence such that the norm is no longer the baseline. I think Saidiya Hartman’s work also teaches this. A logic of approximation of proximity tries to think paraontologically to consider ways of moving beyond the “is” of black life “is” neurodiverse life (or vice versa), to shift into a different quality or texture of existence, into a logic that isn’t replicating the ontological presuppositions of whiteness/neurotypicality.

Thanks for that, while you were talking I was thinking about what you’ve written about neuroatypicality and queerness, referring to Yergeau’s notion of neuro-queerness as alternative ways of experiencing and relating to the world. Probably, it’s the same for decoloniality and the undercommons that Moten and Harney are talking about. What does neuroatypicality open up for us in higher education? And how could we respond to that?

I love Melanie Yergeau’s concept of the neuroqueer because it reminds us that the queering happens all the way down! It’s not just about gender or sexuality, which in any case many neurodiverse folks just don’t identify with much if at all. The queer as the agendering potential of worlds colliding opens the way for a very complex field of relations, and I am excited about that. Without the question of category at the forefront, leakages and overlaps and unparsed textures lead the way, and that feels truly queer to me.

I suppose I’d want to end by foregrounding the richness of neurodiversity. It brings a very much needed perspective on the world, one that is in movement, as-yet unparsed. This is not to say that this neurodiverse worlding doesn’t find shapes, doesn’t take form, but that the form isn’t presupposed in advance. The challenge is to keep these openings unparsed to the degree that they can let new angles on experience in. In a time of the gridding of identity onto the individual, this becomes more difficult, and there are a lot of ways in which neurodiversity can get captured into a repathologization of existence. Neurodiversity must remain an opening onto difference—the differential of value itself—for it to continue to be able to do the important work of charting new modes of existence. If it becomes a simple counter to neurotypicality—or when it does—what happens is that the logics of neurotypicality (its ontologies) close things down. This is the challenge we continually face around all forms of difference. Identifying difference as a block, making it an identity, uses the very terms of its debasement as the measure of its value. We have to be careful not to use colonial tools to attend to our decolonial dreams . . .

I was thinking about how in bringing neuroatypicality in to augment what you say philosophically, for example, in the case of volition, intentionality, and the pre-constituted subject and it makes so much sense and it becomes more comprehensible.

Philosophy has been given bad rap . . . as though it’s hard, closed, difficult to enter . . . but philosophy is not hard, it’s like a drawing, it’s a world that gets made, and I think that our task together might be to allow ourselves the breadth to invent those worlds with philosophy’s generative questions. When I published Relationscapes, the autistics who contacted me were teenagers. It’s a philosophical book, yet none of them were intimidated, despite most of them having been excluded from any kind of formal education setting and all of them having been taught they were incapable of learning because they were “non-speaking.” I honestly think a lot of the intimidation around philosophy has to do with our being told, over many years of schooling, that thought has to fit into a system, and that our task is to “understand” it. Philosophy is not to be “understood,” in my view. It is to be engaged as a movement of thought. It is its own language, of course, and that can make it challenging, but the engagement with its rhythms can (and should) be slow and convivial. A few pages over a few hours. When philosophy becomes accompanier and not dictator, we fear it less, and we begin to hear the textures it makes possible for thought and practice. But of course if it’s taught as a set of dictums, people will feel they are left out in the cold. So when I teach philosophy, I emphasize that the questions it asks are questions all children ask. Philosophy is a machine for making concepts, for generating worlds. It is a language, or many languages, but that doesn’t mean it has the last word. It is a mode of engagement with worlds in the making. We are all philosophers in that we are all concept-makers. The difference is that some of us don’t need words to move those thoughts. Some of us do it otherwise—in the forest, in clay, parenting. Others of us become passionate about what concepts can do in language, and what language can do in contact with its outsides . . . These are the people who become writers of and with philosophy, but not developing languages for concepts doesn’t in my view make someone less of a philosopher!

Thank you, I’m sure that there are a lot of people here who would like to be in conversation with you, so I’m going to hand over to others in the room.

Erin, I was trying to read your book For a Pragmatics of the Useless where you make a firm statement that the university is in ruins. If we look at things that are in ruins, we can see them as beauties of the past, or we can see them as organizations or objects that can be taken over. At the same time, we see all kinds of capitalist invaders coming in saying, its no problem if it’s in ruins, we will take over. I would like to hear your ideas about what we do with the ruins of the university?

Hmm it’s a beautiful question. And a complicated one. I don’t want to be glib. Universities can play an important role in our lives—for instance when they create pathways for study in the sense Moten and Harney give it. The danger, though, is that we reduce study to the university, acting like it’s only there that thought moves. The other issue, of course, is the takeover of the university by neoliberalism and the administrative class. And the takeover of our imaginations by neurotypical tendencies as regards knowledge and value.

It’s important to recognize that change is a threat to the university. We are afraid not to know what value looks like. But that’s of course just one problem. What do we do with the infringement on all learning by the evangelical right in the United States that is closing down gender studies, critical race studies, and so on? When do we decide that the university isn’t the site for learning we claim it has been or can be? How much of our energy do we spend fighting logics that are and will always be antithetical to study? And, at the same time, how do we recognize the important shift, in a country like Brazil, when openings are made for Black students and the university tips into new directions and processes, leading toward the crafting of new sensibilities?

I think that the danger is that there is too close a connection made between the work we do and the university. The work we do when we do our work, the thinking, the creating conditions to think and make—this is not done with the university—it is done despite it. What I mean by that is that the strictures of value policed in and by the university reduce the breadth of thought. When work thrives there, it is because it has found pockets of air, vestiges of movement. The work thrives when it is freed from the paranoia of academia’s frames (and, by extension, the art market’s prestige frames, in the context of research-creation). Think, for instance, of how citation works today in the humanities and compare it to 50 years ago. I am not saying we should not cite! But so much that is written today is thick with the fear of treading into the “wrong” territory or not properly acknowledging all that has come before. Thought gets stuck here. And then there is the economic question: in most parts of the world, to study is to pay for accreditation. It is to become indebted for it, the thinking-making taking on capitalist parameters of value and all the adjacent valuations that accompany it (including what I would call the representation of the useful). So even when university is “free,”—as it should be—it is still laden with what Saidiya Hartman calls the “burdened individuality of freedom,” the scarcity model that breeds “excellence.”

So yes, the closure of thought by fascicizing tendencies on the right is terrible and deeply violent and dangerous, but we should not lose sight that even on the so-called “left” we also see troubling tendencies. How often are classes “in” decolonization replicas of the colonial modeling they are resisting (in terms, for instance, of the bestowing of value based on very normative conclusions about participation, about “displaying” knowledge). How often do we as professors give in to the fear that we are being “tricked” by students into “giving” them grades they don’t deserve (this has become a big area of concern for some around ChatGPT). What are we giving and taking in these contexts?

The ubiquitous modes of valuation are violent. This is not because students can’t “do” them, not because it’s impossible to write that paper or whatever, but because the separation between what is being graded and what is lived is too vast, on one hand, and too direct, on the other hand. We need time to digest together, to read slowly, to ask meandering questions, and to learn to better deviate from false problems. What is needed is the opposite of “proving we are smart.” What is needed, I think, are encounters of conviviality, of minor sociality, where thinking takes us with it, when its movements create new paths for living. We need to be moved to think beyond any need to prove to someone we are worthy of it.

And it’s of course not just students. We who work in the institutions are also worn down. I don’t want to keep up my CV. I don’t care to value some kinds of living over others. I am forced to, of course, but quantifying my work has really become a burden. And I am someone who by chance tends to meet the requirements of the system—it turns out the things I like to do “count.” So I have advanced “easily”—if not with ease. And yet, when I went on sabbatical a year ago, the first sabbatical in 18 years, I was so burnt out that opening a book caused nausea for 8 months. The feeling of refusal was so strong, and this is for someone who loves to read and write—so yes, it is in ruins, I think, because it’s killing us. It’s killing those of us who teach and it’s killing those of us who are there to study. It’s denuding our worlds of thought and those modes of practice which enliven it.

But no, it’s not clear-cut. That’s why I tend to think in the vocabulary of the parainstitutional, and why our work for the 3Ecologies project (3ecologies.org) is not articulated as an alter-university project. I don’t think we need an alter-university. I think we need emergent sites for engaging with the movement of thought. And these sites can of course be in universities, but we can’t make the university the locus of teaching and learning. Some of us will need to continue to do our work there, and I am one of them, for the moment. And while we are there, we will work, as so many professors do, to create lively interstices in the movement of thought, and to tend to that thinking. But I think we need to be careful about connecting that thought to the institution. Thinking happens in the alongsideness thinking itself generates. And, importantly, we have to be careful not to pretend there is some magic outside of the university. It’s a factory like so many others. Our problem is that we want it to be something else.

Perhaps, I could say a little bit about schizoanalysis in this context. Schizoanalysis, as I understand it, was born in the La Borde clinic, brought into action by Jean Oury, Félix Guattari, and others, and theorized by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus and a few other texts by Guattari. It was conceived as a mode of encountering the therapeutic that didn’t organize itself around transference. In the typical psychoanalytic model, the transference, which is to say the sublimation onto the figure of the analyst of the content of the trauma, is central to the “talking cure.” Guattari wanted transference to be abolished in order that there be a different kind of circulation. Without transference, there is an activation of an environmentality, and in that environmentality, practices of living things out are potentialized. Schizoanalysis asks something very hard but also very mundane: here now, how do we create the conditions and what kinds of intercessors would potentialize new encounters with the world? The question for schizoanalysis is not one of excavation (why?) but one of mobilization (how?). We shouldn’t read this “how” within the context of the representation of the useful, however. This is not like cognitive behavioral theory. It’s not about “doing” something. Rather, it’s about multiplying the potential openings that cross through the trauma in order to locate intercessors that might redirect it. Intercessors are active orientators—Brian Massumi and I have thought of them as “free radicals”—that “turn” the environment, as Bayo Akomolafe might say. One example that I find really helps is from Guattari—he talks about being inside a room with a therapist and a patient, and the patient is looking out the window and the therapist is asking the patient about their father. Guattari follows the patient’s gaze and notices that the patient has left the room, that the window is functioning as an intercessor to other pathways. So he leaves the room with the patient. The aim is not to “get” anywhere. It is to follow the movements as they develop. The moving outside “schizzes” the situation, opening it to a new ecology. In and of itself that’s not enough, of course. More intercessors will have to be found, or responded to. The big difference is this active engagement with movements at work and the trust that the patient is also a leader in the orientations that follow.

Does it also have to do with some form of collectivity rather than an individual orientation—could you say a little about that?

Yes. Guattari talks about the group subject and the subjected group. The group subject shouldn’t be understood as a group of subjects. It is more like the subject of a grouping. It is a relational field that is more than its “individual” subjects, more than the sum of its parts. The group subject is that quality of existence that erupts in excess of any one tendency. When a classroom is going well, a group subject might emerge, and if it does you can feel it. The subjected group refers to a much more individualist orientation. The subjected group appears when the forces of subjection—be they neurotypicality, be they whiteness, ableism—begin to act on the group to make it paranoid. This reindividualizes the group. It’s close to what Deleuze, via Foucault, calls a control society. The subjected group is unfortunately something we know very well. It has the quality of tense bodies, anxious bodies, and “triggered” bodies. In these contexts, the more-than is muted and what stands out is fear, discomfort, and distrust. We move through the world most typically as a subjected group looking out to police each other, to check each other. What schizoanalysis does is try to turn that. It recognizes the tendencies of the subjected groups and works to schizz them, to create practices that detour them. I learn a lot from Black Studies in this regard, particularly around the work of what is sometimes called “black sociality,” that refusal to pare down the conditions of sociality to the pre-existing form the burdened individuality of freedom takes.

I thought of also asking something about the Three Ecologies . . . I am curious about whether it’s been set up as another way of learning, and what do you do there?

The Three Ecologies is a beautiful little book by Guattari written in the late eighties, where Guattari presciently says that if we want to deal with the ecological devastation, we’re going to have to address the transversality of the environmental, the conceptual, and the social ecologies. That we will never be able to do it by separating these things out. This was the inspiration for our 3Ecologies Project, which has been in the works for more than a decade but has found some tentative form these past 2 to 3 years. It’s something I discuss more at length in my book Out of the Clear should people want more than I can outline here. In the beginning we called it a Three Ecologies Institute, but institute just felt wrong (it remains the name of our non-profit). Institute feels like we have a plan, like there is a central form from which we operate. 3E (as we call it) is much more improvisatory, and much less sure of itself! I think of it less as a site or even a project per se than as a proposition. It is an opening toward other ways of gathering, of learning, of attuning. It is an orientation toward the transversality of the three ecologies, a call for modes of existence activated in that interstice.

The site of our experiment with 3E (because we tend to think that 3Ecologies Projects are alive and active all over the world!) is 3 hr north of Montreal on a large tract of land, which is off grid. It has three houses on it, all of which are solar, which is a difficult technology in the Canadian north between the months of November and January when the sun is very low. So we have had to learn a lot about the mechanics of alternative forms of power, including how to start generators in very cold weather (it is not unusual for it to get as cold as −40 at night in January). The land includes a maple bush and sugar shack, and one of the houses (the one right next to the sugar shack, below the old growth maple forest) is always free and open for those interested in the propositions 3E weaves into existence. From an altereconomic perspective—which has been our focus for quite some time—the project is a direct engagement with the question of property. Once we have paid off the debt, the majority of the land and two of the houses will be given to a foundation Brian and I started calling The Understory Foundation, with the expressed aim that the land should never be developed and always be open to practices generated in the transversality of the three ecologies. We are not alone doing this kind of work that seeks to take land out of the real estate and development market. Our hope with this is that we can generate active and sustained conversations about what else living and learning can look like, and that people who cannot afford to participate in the mortgaging of their existences have a place from which they can do this kind of work that is turned toward three ecologies (where the ecological is never “just” land, or where the land is always also conceptual). It’s important to emphasize that we don’t think of 3E as a “back to the land” project—as though the “land” weren’t always already there, or as though the “answers” to environmental devastation are to be found on the land. That it is in the forest quite far from urban centers is only central to the degree that it tugs us toward environmental questions in new and different ways, including toward alternative forms of energy. The work itself is in relay, in the continuous betweening of sites of 3ecological engagement.

Over the first 2 years, a lot has been set in place and we have gathered several times—for events, for residencies, and for building projects. In the beginning, it was a very big learning curve, so it was harder to relax into events but now that we have figured out how to do most things (or how to find someone else to help!) there is much more room for projects. This summer we will begin building a kiln with a beautiful ceramic artist—Linda Swanson—we will dig clay and make our own glazes from minerals in the surround. We will also continue our gardening, collaborating with a local—Remi Roy—who has two greenhouses and will help us this year with our seedlings. It’s a very short growing season so things really have to be prepared in advance, which I found challenging last year (I made a lot of green tomato pickles!). Remi has been a beautiful collaborator, as has another local, Dany Bigras. It’s meant a lot to the project to be able to connect with people up here.

In the future, we dream of building a greenhouse (we have a small makeshift one for the moment). I have a vision of a kind of northern earthship that includes an art studio dedicated, among other things, to printing braille philosophy books. For that we are collaborating with an exquisite small book-making, paper-making, and printing atelier called Ecluse led by Yannick Allen-Vuillet. For that work, we will also collaborate with John Lee Clark. We will of course continue making maple syrup, which is truly an alchemical process, opening it up to side propositions like pop-up food gatherings and some good dance parties! For the moment it’s our only source of revenue, its profits going right back into the project. And we will always be reading philosophy, creating concepts, taking them on walks, making art. Last year, we had a residency with Ifeoma Anyaeji, Khadija Baker, Shaya Ishaq, and Cadu du Mello called Fire!, where the aim was to make a clay oven like the ones Khadija grew up with. Our beautiful clay ovens didn’t survive the winter, but over the long hours spent sifting sand and sculpting clay, they certainly brought other parts of the world to 3E!

3E leads us, I think, more than we lead it. It is very pragmatic to the degree that many things have to be in place for it to be feasible—lots of wood to keep the houses warm, lots of care for the different energy systems, upkeep for the houses. But there is also, coming from the work of SenseLab over 20 years, a lot of experience with letting things find their ways. What we’ve learned over the years is that things just take a certain amount of time and it’s best not to rush them because, when the people arrive, the processes accompany them.

I know I find the courage to continue the work by reminding myself that we are many doing these kinds of projects, and that I don’t have to “get it right.” We will all figure out together how to create processes that don’t self-institutionalize, that remain open to the questions they elicit, that move us into their logics, and that change us. As I mentioned, 3E has been quite challenging, especially at the beginning, and there have definitely been times when we’ve wondered what in the world we were thinking! But we are also very joyful up north, very taken by the potential the project brings and the modes of existence it calls forth.

In the beginning, the biggest challenge for us was pragmatic. There were just so many things to be on top of, and there was really no time for the kind of work we are more accustomed to doing (writing, making art). We think of our work as “speculative pragmatism,” but it felt like the speculative had gone missing! In time we became acquainted with new angles of the speculative, and today we have time to also go back to our own writing, reading, and making practices, which has been nice!

Having thought so much about the pragmatics of the useless, it was quite confronting to recognize that so much of what needs to be done to keep 3E running is “useful.” We need the wood (30–40 cords/year). We need to get fallen trees off the roads (it’s remarkable how many trees fall!). We need to get the snow off the solar panels if we want electricity. We need to keep the generators in good working order and to make sure there is enough propane in the tanks . . . The challenge has been to find ways to build practices that include these necessities without falling into a useful-useless dichotomy. How to find the speculative edge in those practices as well? And how to share with people who come to participate in the urgency of the necessities without creating a feeling that the conceptual is a luxury that is somehow less rich than the pragmatic? Or vice-versa?

I’m speaking as a teacher, as a lecturer of young beginner students, and I think it’s a question that Viv raised earlier and Erin, what you were saying about pushback, because in terms of trying to open up spaces and do things differently in the classroom, from my experience the university isn’t really that flexible, and so then what is our responsibility to students and especially beginner students, where I always have this dilemma of whether by opening it up, then perhaps they might have to kind of close it down as they progress to higher levels of study. That’s the one thing that’s going through my mind, and then the other is as a student myself trying to finish off a doctoral project that’s trying to do things differently, I find myself more and more conforming to the form that is required of me. So perhaps it’s better to go and live in the wild and not have to deal with any of this stuff. So yeah, it’s not a question, or maybe it is a question I don’t know what it is . . . I’m befuddled by this!

I think we are all befuddled by this. Why wouldn’t we decide that at this point in time we need people to explode all the ways of learning so that we can learn together what the new learning looks like? Of course, the kind of experiments you and I are talking about are threats to the university precisely because they explode the question of value and evaluation, and with that the certainty that whiteness/neurotypicality holds the barometer of that value.

The whole school system is in ruins, thank you for acknowledging children as our best philosophers Erin, I could not agree more, and too often witness their willingness to be affected and engage with deeply ethical questions being undercut by school-afying or cute-afying their perspectives. The earlier on young children learn to parrot facts about the known, structured, White neurotypical world, the sooner their status is elevated in society. Can you say more about the consequences of, and or, breaking with internalized modes of evaluation, or the terror of not knowing. I see it show up in some educators I work with and wherein there seems to be a fear by some early childhood educators, to engage in the unknown or philosophical texts and yet, every day we expect children to learn new words new concepts, and so on. I’d love to hear more about pedagogical experimentation and breaking this lifecycle of disciplining minds into neurotypicality. Art-based approaches feel important, so what might you say in response to that comments and questions.

You know, I’m not going to have more answers than anybody else who’s doing this work . . . we really are doing this work together. I’ve learned so much from early childhood educators in Scandinavia. I’ve been lucky to be around some of them a few times. But this particular experience I had in Norway stood out to me—we set up the classroom with some affordances for play, with some fabric and some thread and one of the early childhood educators in the room said “Oh, this is familiar to me, we do this with the children.” It was an amazing moment because we realized how far we can get from play. We set up the affordances but then we tend to see them as operative for children, and not for ourselves. I think the moment when we think that the work is for the children, we’ve stopped doing the work. And I’m not saying this person wasn’t doing the work, I’m just saying that at some level they stopped thinking that they needed the conditions for neurodiversity as much as the children needed the conditions for neurodiversity. Children can’t be . . . they’re not going to be tricked by us, they know when the conditions are there and they know when we take those conditions seriously . . . and they know when we’re imposing them.

Pedagogically, to be in and of the conditions means being well-prepared without having a schema to follow. It means being attuned to the openings of improvisation while tending to the enabling constraints the environment produces. Without constraints, there can be no improvisation. What happens in those conditions is that there are too many potential paths and that provokes the kind of anxiety that tends to return people to their most habitual ways. An enabling constraint leads you into a singular set of orientations. A disabling constraint cuts those orientations off before they can generate new paths. Every pedagogical environment—every environment—is replete with both. I think of my work as a teacher as learning to be as attuned as possible to the environment while conditioning it with constraints that can enable it to go where we can’t yet quite imagine. Of course, there is a lot of failure, but if the environment is collectively emergent—as in Guattari’s group subject—we can manage the failure as a group and learn from it. Internalizing the failure is always a risk, however, and techniques have to be at the ready should that occur because that kind of internalization too often leads to the species of shame which hardens the body. This tends to reorganize the environment around very generalized versions of the status quo. Whiteness mobilizes here, as does neurotypicality. This is the return of the subjected group, and here it’s very hard to enter with a deviation. When this happens in the classroom it’s always very distressing, and I’ve rarely been able to turn it. Once years ago, before I finished my PhD, this set in and the only way I found to shift it was to shift the environment entirely by moving to another room with a very different feel. It was a year-long class so there was time to attend to the way anxiety had captured the space and in time we did manage to shift back toward a group subject, but it was hard. Today, more than 20 years later, I can sense earlier when this is about to happen and have more ways to address it without turning it into a conversation with an individual—without individualizing the surround. But still, it’s very painful when it happens and it’s very difficult not to reindividualize myself, to pull myself out of the mix and set myself apart as the teacher. If I do that, the space becomes striated into teacher-student and there is truly little to be done when that happens. I think the more we consider pedagogy as a collective working through of these tendencies, the more we will learn how to schizz them. But for that to happen, pedagogy has to be directed by the learning, which is to say that we have to become students in the classroom.

Thank you so much, Erin, it’s been such a wide-ranging and enlivening discussion. I’ve loved it and I also have very much liked that people have felt free to jump in. It’s been more of an interesting conversation and a good start to our series.

I want to say thank you from the Belgian side Erin, you have foregrounded and enacted attunement in your supersensitive way of entering a social space and giving respect to people, and I think that is what gentle anarchists are doing and I would love to call you and gentle anarchist Erin, thank you for all the things you have brought this afternoon!

Thank you for the fabulous questions!