Thought in the Act

Passages in the Ecology of Experience

Erin Manning author Brian Massumi author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Minnesota Press

Published:1st May '14

Should be back in stock very soon

Thought in the Act cover

“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from Thought in the Act

Combining philosophy and aesthetics, Thought in the Act is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art.

Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. Thought in the Act enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics.

 "Erin Manning and Brian Massumi have written a fascinating and ground-breaking book that deserves wide attention. An exemplar of how to do theory in an exploratory and process-oriented way." —Jane Bennett, author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

"It is at once a poetic encounter with the works of art presented over the course of the book, and a manual for reaching that productive space where research and creation can be said to truly interpenetrate." —The Culture Machine

ISBN: 9780816679676

Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 25mm

Weight: unknown

224 pages