The Minor Gesture

Erin Manning’s The Minor Gesture is the latest release in the Thought in the Act book series, published by Duke University Press, which explores how research and creation can be transformed by philosophy. In The Minor Gesture, Manning draws heavily from Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis and Whitehead’s speculative pragmatism to explore what is dubbed ‘the minor gesture’. The minor gesture is a subversive concept that refers to the fringes of perception and thought before its parsing into cultural intelligibility. The minor gesture is a force that challenges received wisdom and common sense (the ‘major’) by offering potentially unlimited experiential variations that suggest alternative forms of being, knowing and doing. In The Minor Gesture, Manning destabilises neurotypical accounts of perception and agency, and in doing so paves the way for a celebration of neurodiverse experience – particularly ‘autistic perception’. — Ben Simmons