The Minor Gesture. (2013) Erin Manning. Series: Thought in the Act https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv111jhg1
This book begins in a minor key and works to create a field of resonance for the minor. It does so through the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, allied to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the minor, is the gestural force that opens experience to its potential variation. It does this from within experience itself, activating a shift in tone, a difference in quality (Manning, 2013:1).
Cite as: Manning, E. (2013). The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv111jhg1
The Minor Gesture Introduction PDF: https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9780822374411_A35629198/preview-9780822374411_A35629198.pdf
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Approaches to What?
Georges Perec
(Perec, G. (1973) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Penguin, pp. 205-7)
“What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motor-cars is to drive into plane trees. Fifty-two weekends a year, fifty-two casualty lists: so many dead and all the better for the news media if the figures keep going up! Behind the event there is a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or social upheavals, social unrest, political scandals.
In our haste to measure the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible. What is scandalous isn’t the pit explosion, it’s working in coalmines. ‘Social problems’ aren’t ‘a matter of concern’ when there’s a strike, they are intolerable twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
Tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, tower blocks that collapse, forest fires, tunnels that cave in, the Drugstore de Champs-Elysées burns down. Awful! Terrible! Monstrous! Scandalous! But where’s the scandal? The true scandal? Has the newspaper told us everything except: not to worry, as you can see life exists, with its ups and downs, things happen, as you can see.
The daily newspapers talk of everything except the daily. The papers annoy me, they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I ask or would like to ask. What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?
To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is not longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?
How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are. What’s needed perhaps is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we’ve been pillaging from others. Not the exotic anymore, but the endotic.
To question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of the astonishment that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an apparatus capable of reproducing and transporting sounds. For the astonishment existed, along with thousands of others, and it’s they which have moulded us.
What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?
Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.
Make an inventory of you pockets, of your bag.
Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.
Question your tea spoons.
What is there under your wallpaper?
How many movements does it take to dial a phone number?
Why don’t you find cigarettes in grocery stores? Why not?
It matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method, at most of a project. It matters a lot to me that they should seem trivial and futile: that’s exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth.”
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Ten Propositions for Research-Creation. (2016) Erin Manning, with images by Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley.
Research-creation generates new forms of experience; it situates what often seem like disparate practices, giving them a conduit for collective expression; it hesitantly acknowledges that normative modes of inquiry and containment often are incapable of assessing its value; it generates forms of knowledge that are extra-linguistic; it creates operative strategies for a mobile positioning that take these new forms of knowledge into account; it proposes concrete assemblages for rethinking the very question of what is at stake in pedagogy, in practice, and in collective experimentation (Manning, 2015:133).
Cite as: Manning, E. (2016). Ten Propositions for Research-Creation. In: Colin, N., Sachsenmaier, S. (eds) Collaboration in Performance Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137462466_7
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The Case for Minor Gestures (2023). Danah Abdulla & Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira DOI: 10.7764/disena.22.Article.6
This paper lays out the groundwork for a concept we define as minor gestures within design education. Moving away from a conversation centered around decolonization—a term, we argue, that has been co-opted to become a placeholder for equality, diversity, and inclusion, and tick-box exercises within academic institutions— we assert that minor gestures create the conditions for meaningful conversations on what it actually means to move towards decolonizing design education. Using examples from our own pedagogical practices, we sketch out and outline a proposition for minor gestures as theory-in-the-making, or an incomplete pathway towards meaningful, structural change (Abdulla & Viera de Oliveira, 2023:2).
License CC BY-SA 4.
Cite as: Abdulla, D., & Vieira de Oliveira, P. J. S. (2023). The Case for Minor Gestures. Diseña, (22), Article.6. https://doi.org/10.7764/disena.22.Article.6
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. (2013). Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf
According to Jack Halberstam in Chapter 0 of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study: “If you want to know what the undercommons wants, what Moten and Harney want, what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people want, what we (the “we” who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this – we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls”
Cite as: Harney, S. & Moten, M. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions
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Qualitative Inquiry in the Making: A Minor Pedagogy (2020) Lisa A. Mazzei & Laura E. Smithers.
These pedagogical events are at once quotidian and more than one. In this spacetime individuation falls away, and the production of qualitative research expertise becomes a function of the entanglement of human and more-than-human pedagogues (Mazzei & Smithers, 2020:1)
Cite as: Mazzei, L. A., & Smithers, L. E. (2020). Qualitative Inquiry in the Making: A Minor Pedagogy. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(1), 99-108. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419869966
Minor pedagogy: Education as continuous variation (2024) Lisa A. Mazzei & Laura E. Smithers.
Given that racialized neoliberal efficiency and accountability movements have perpetuated injustice across generations, the work of educational practice that contests this must be practice that slips from these major grips to produce new, more just, worlds. Minor pedagogy produces educational justice through everyday shifts in the conditions of our collective possibility, shifts that manifest difference in ways that reject re-form in the pursuit of the not yet (Mazzei & Smithers, 2024:1)
Cite as: Smithers, L. E., & Mazzei, L. A. (2024). Minor pedagogy: Education as continuous variation. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 56(10), 978–987. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2024.2336021
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Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (1975 / 1985)
How can we enter into Kafka’s work? This work is a rhizome, a burrow. The castle has multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren’t very well known. The hotel in Amerika has innumerable main doors and side doors that innumerable guards watch over; it even has entrances and exits without doors. Yet it might seem that the burrow in the story of that name has only one entrance; the most the animal can do is dream of a second entrance that would serve only for surveillance. But this is a trap arranged by the animal and by Kafka himself; the whole description of the burrow functions to trick the enemy. We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged even if it seems an impasse, a tight passage, a siphon. We will be trying only to discover what other points our entrance connects to, what crossroads and galleries one passes through to link two points, what the map of the rhizome is and how the map is modifed if one enters by another point. Only the principle of multiple entrances prevents the introduction of the enemy, the Signifier and those attempts to interpret a work that is actually only open to experimentation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1985:3).
Cite as: Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., & Maclean, M. (1985). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: The Components of Expression. New Literary History, 16(3), 591–608. https://doi.org/10.2307/468842
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Post Qualitative Inquiry Elizabeth Adams St.Pierre (2014).
Post qualitative inquiry offers a critique of conventional humanist qualitative methodology and marks a turn toward poststructural and posthuman inquiry. It also takes account of the new empiricisms emerging with the ontological and material turns in the humanities and social sciences. This inquiry is not methods-driven but informed by concepts like Karen Barad’s entanglement and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s assemblage and by conceptual practices those concepts make possible, practices that will be different in different projects. Post qualitative inquiry is an invitation to think and do educational inquiry outside normalized structures of humanist epistemology, ontology, and methodology (St. Pierre, 2014:1).
https://www.aare.edu.au/assets/documents/Elizabeth-Adams-St.-Pierre-ppt-presentationv1.pdf
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Becoming-Learner: Coordinates for Mapping the Space and Subject of Nomadic Pedagogy (2013). Rachel Fendler.
How can the process of “becoming learner” be observed, documented, and shared? What methodology could be used to discuss nomadic qualities of learning mobilities? This article argues in favor of an arts-based research approach, specifically social cartography, as a tool that can encourage young people to reflect on their identity as learners. Attentive to the deterritorializations, transgressions, and disruptions that characterize the learning process, it develops a mobile strategy for following the learner. This argument engages the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to explore a pedagogical framework that expands our social imaginary of learning (Fendler, 2013:1).
Cite as: Fendler, R. (2013). Becoming-Learner: Coordinates for Mapping the Space and Subject of Nomadic Pedagogy. Qualitative Inquiry, 19(10), 786-793. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800413503797
Rachel’s PhD thesis, Navigating the eventful space of learning: Mobilities, nomadism and other tactical maneuvers, can be read here: https://www.tdx.cat/bitstream/handle/10803/318368/FENDLER_RACHEL_PhD_THESIS.pdf?sequence=5.txt
This dissertation addresses a blindness in the field of education that renders some learning practices in visible. By problematizing how learning is both thought and reported on, this study attempts to engage with those pedagogical experiences that fall outside the realm of assessment (Fendler, 2015:i)
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Review of The Minor Gesture (2017) by Eugene W Holland
If in shorthand we can say that the minor is what varies and the major is what is fixed by social norms and standards, Manning is interested in minor gestures for the ways they introduce variation into experience that would otherwise remain fixed or captured by norms (Holland. 2017:1)
Cite as: Holland, E. W. (2017). The minor gesture. Contemporary Political Theory. Springer Nature
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