Carrying the feeling

Conférence publique de Prof. Erin Manning (Concordia University, Montreal, CA)

Carrying the Feeling explores autistic Lucy Blackman’s use of "carrying" as an expressive force in her writing. Continuing to delve into what I have called autistic perception - the force of perception that doesn't yet parse out the environment but attends to the emergent qualities of an environmentality in act - in this paper I explore how else we might think concepts such as volition, intentionality and agency. Of particular interest here is the concept of facilitation, and the improvisatory nature of what I call a "facilitation of facilitation." If carrying is a force that already composes with language, perhaps there is a productive way to consider an environmentally propulsive concept of agencement as operator in experience rather than the ubiquitous first-person account of agency? Challenging what I call "neurotypicality as first identity politics," I propose to open up a discussion of where else a conversation of relation might begin.