625877

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PTXXXX10.1177/0090591715625877Political TheoryManning

Article
Political Theory
1­–19
For a Pragmatics of the © 2016 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591715625877
the Infrathin ptx.sagepub.com

Erin Manning1

Abstract
Marcel Duchamp describes the infrathin as “the most minute of intervals, or
the slightest of differences.” Working through Duchamp’s proposition, and
taking him at his work that the infrathin cannot be defined as such—“One
can only give examples of it”—this article explores how the infrathin comes
to expression and asks what a politics of the infrathin might look like. Key
to the exploration is the question of how else value can be defined and how
this rethinking of the concept of value might compose with the concept of a
pragmatics of the useless.

Keywords
infrathin, Marcel Duchamp, Alfred North Whitehead, speculative pragmatics,
value/valuation, art/artfulness, politics/the political, time/duration

A Politics of the Infrathin, in Preamble

Nothing can prepare us for the infrathin. Nothing can frame it, or direct it.
Nothing can give it value in advance. This should be taken at its word: the
infrathin is always a qualifier before it is a noun. “Infrathin: one must never
make it a noun.”1
A pragmatics of the useless begins here, in the abeyance of the substantive.
A politics of the infrathin—the way the work’s work eludes us, escapes us, the

1Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Corresponding Author:
Erin Manning, Concordia University, S-VA 240, 1395 René Lévesque W., Montreal, Quebec,
Canada.
Email: [email protected]

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2 Political Theory 

way it delays the affirmation of its tenuous apparition, the way it touches us, in
the lag—cannot say in advance how it will unfold, or what it will do. A politics
of the infrathin, as Alfred North Whitehead might say, can only ever negatively
prehend the framings that set it in motion. It can only have known in retrospect
what made it come to appearance (or disappearance) just this way.
A few directions in the sand:

- The German “übersehen,” “over-seeing” seems as important as the

unseeing at the heart of the imperceptible called for by the infrathin.
Übersehen does not really mean to over-see. It means to miss, to over-
look. But this rift between seeing and looking is important, and it is
here that the infrathin will reveal its potential as that which is always
more-than. What is not seen within the seeable is more-than appear-
ance. This is what is at stake in a politics of the infrathin.
- It is not a question of finding something hidden, but of making opera-
tive a tendency that includes the minor gestures of the more-than. The
conditions for the making-operative of a politics of the infrathin depend
each time on a new ecology of orientations.
- A politics of the infrathin produces intensities through subtraction. Be
interested in what makes these intensities, barely perceived, operative
in their singularity. More-than is not always more.
- The infrathin is not simply the difference, it is what makes the
difference.

A politics of the infrathin: a quest, in registers more-than-human, for the

most minor of variations. A commitment to the creation of modes of exis-
tence that practice a pragmatics of the useless. A care for ecologies of
practice that value the effects of what can but barely be perceived, if it can
be perceived at all.

The Most Minute of Intervals

Marcel Duchamp describes the infrathin as “the most minute of intervals, or
the slightest of differences.”2 The concept, Duchamp suggests, cannot be
properly defined—“one can only give examples of it.”3 Notes in Duchamp’s
collection offer a few suggestions: “The warmth of a seat (which has just
been left) is infra-thin,”4 “Subway gates—The people / who go through at the
very last moment / Infra thin—,”5 “Velvet trousers–/ their whistling sound (in
walking) by / brushing of the 2 legs is an / infra thin separation signaled /by
sound. (it is not an infra thin sound),”6 “Difference between the contact / of
water and that of/ molten lead for ex /or of cream / with the walls of its / own

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Manning 3

container moved around the liquid. . . . this difference between two contacts
is infra thin.”7
Duchamp’s notes are attempts at touching what remains elusive. A quality
in the between, an interval that cannot quite be articulated. It’s not the seat
that is at stake, or even the warmth in “The warmth of a seat (which has just
been left)” but what is left behind. Not the seat but a quality of left-ness. Not
the velvet trousers or even the leg in “their whistling sound (in walking) by,”
but the way the rubbing creates a quality of a whistling. Not the substances
exactly in “the difference between the contact / of water and that of / molten
lead” but the quality of their interrelation.
The infrathin: the potentiation of a relational field that includes what can-
not quite be articulated, but nonetheless can be felt. Infrathin: the this-ness,
the haecceity of an experience that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts.

The Exemplary
In the absence of a definition, what is foregrounded is the singularity of
experience, and the specificity of the example. The infrathin cannot be gen-
eralized across experience: it is what makes experience singularly what it is,
here, now. Between the event and the account of its retelling, an infrathin
resides that will never quite be captured. “While trying to place 1 plane sur-
face / precisely on another plane surface / you pass through some infra thin
moments.”8 Beyond capture, the infrathin is a grasping at the singularity of
an interval too thin to define as such and yet thick with the texture of lived
relation.

Prehension
Prehension is the grasping-toward through which experience makes itself
felt. The event—or the actual occasion, in Whitehead’s terms—is pulled into
experience, its force of actuation tied to what Whitehead calls the data of the
occasion. These data are not objects or substances, but relational fields in the
parsing.
But what of the share of the grasping that cannot quite be parsed, pulled
into actuality? That continues to field? What of that which cannot quite be
captured, yet makes a difference in the event? What of the share that cannot
quite define itself and yet takes part in how the world is felt? How to articu-
late the prehension of the infrathin of experience in the making?
Whitehead has a concept for that which is not actualized but nonetheless
affects experience. He calls it negative prehension. Negative prehension is
what must be actively excluded in order for the event to have consistency. To

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4 Political Theory 

achieve consistency, there must be elimination. What cannot conform to the

colour of this singular experience must be backgrounded in order that this
experience be fully what it is.
Elimination is still participation, however. Excluded by necessity from
what is foregrounded, negative prehension nonetheless lurks on the edge of
appearance in the way all backgrounds do. It is not actualized as such in the
event, but the event cannot but be infused with it. Every prehension to a
degree encompasses what negative prehension has textured in.
What the infrathin makes palpable is that there is no occasion that does
not, to some degree, pull the background into the foreground. The infrathin
makes felt the tenuous quality of this both-and. The shift from sitting to
standing that leaves something behind, a quality ungraspable yet felt, takes
the background welter and moves it into the interval of lived experience.
Infrathin.
The infrathin actively backgrounds what is perceived in order to fore-
ground what is not quite within the register of the perceptible. The infrathin
foregrounds this ungraspability in the grasping, affirming the withness of
experience in the background-foregrounding. In doing so the infrathin
directly prehends the potential of the more-than.

Subjective Form
In a philosophy of process, what is most important is movement, or change.
In order for change to happen, however, there must be a moment when the
occasion has become absolutely what it is. For without this absoluteness,
there would be no difference between this and that—no “elbow room in the
universe.”9
Subjective form is the signature of this singular occasion. It is what has
now emerged as the subject of the occasion, a subject born of the process. In
and of itself, this subject cannot change. In the context of this singular itera-
tion, it will always have been what it now has become. And yet, as Whitehead
emphasizes throughout, this actuation of the it is is brief, always on the edge
of perishing, where the force and not the form-taking as such will be what
contributes to future parsings. If what a subjective form does is mark this
threshold between force and form, the active schism between what is and
what comes to be, the operative question is to what extent the unactualized
makes a difference in the passage from force to form, and to what degree this
share of the unactualized can alter future comings-to-form.
This is where negative prehension comes in. Despite their not being
included in the actual constellation of an event’s coming to be this or that,
negative prehensions do have subjective form. “A negative prehension

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Manning 5

expresses a bond,” writes Whitehead. This bond “adds to the emotional

complex, though not to the objective data.”10 That negative prehensions
have subjective forms suggests that the unactualized too influences how the
future comes to be felt.

Autistic Perception
Negative prehension is negative only in the sense that it eliminates a certain
field of data in order to enable the foregrounding of consistency in the actu-
alization of what comes to be. As Whitehead makes clear, when this and not
that is felt, “that” has not been completely excised from the experience. Both
play a part: it is the backgrounding of “that” that makes “this” standout.
Both at once, actually experienced as foreground, risks confusion or
chaos. And yet, to a degree, it is always “both at once.” As those with hyper-
sensitivities will attest, foreground–background can be painfully intermeshed.
Autistics, for instance, often speak of the difficulty of parsing one kind of
sensation or force from another, the environment painfully alive to the multi-
plicity of feeling.11 This limit case reminds us that it is a question of degree.
How negative prehension eliminates is a question of practice as much as
anything else. The goal need not be an absolute parsing or elimination, but a
technique for achieving a manageable degree of consistency. This is the force
of the concept of negative prehension: that it gives us the tools to consider a
certain participation in experience of the background welter, a certain lived
resonance of that which is nonetheless, to an always differing degree, elimi-
nated from the occasion as it comes to actualization. The infrathin is one
technique for giving resonance to the unparsed in experience.
If that which is prehended, in the event, includes elimination, it follows
that elimination is affirmed. Negative prehension is more like the negative of
the image than negation as such. It is a contributory aspect of experience that
eludes the actual as such even as it affects how it comes to expression.
The infrathin gestures toward this share of the event, looking for a way to
make felt how that which never takes concrete form nonetheless makes a dif-
ference. This is why the infrathin can only ever be exemplary. To define it
would be to give it the form that eludes it.
The infrathin: that most elusive of states where what is felt, in the briefest
interval, is the lived co-composition of difference. Contrast.
The infrathin: the differential that marks the rhythm that is the oscillation
between what is perceptible and what is imperceptible yet felt, in the event.
The this-ness of this singular relation, as perceived from two directions at
once.
The infrathin: a variation on lived experience, in the event.

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6 Political Theory 

Value
In Whiteheadian philosophy, an occasion of experience is never valued in
advance of its coming to be. There is no inherent value to experience, nor is
there a hierarchy of value. The human and the nonhuman, consciousness and
the nonconscious are equally taken into account in this philosophy that refers
to the body as a society of molecules. The question is not “What has inherent
value?” but “What are the conditions under which a shift in register expresses
itself, and how does this alter lived experience?”
In the lower grade organisms, shifts in register are chiefly physical.
Contrast is limited in these occasions to a narrow array of difference, and
more is eliminated from experience than is folded in. In the more complex
organisms, feeling is more nuanced, as a result of which the occasion’s sub-
jective form is tinted in more complex ways by the negative prehensions it
has positively eliminated.

Eternal Objects
At both ends of the spectrum, it is eternal objects that promote contrast. Eternal
objects are the pure potential of felt relation. They are what give the occasion
its nuance. They are the thisness of the event’s qualitative difference—just this
quality of sound, just this colour tone, just this affective tonality.
The subjective form of an occasion feels the world in just this way. This
feeling, as Whitehead says, “has an origination not wholly traceable to the
mere data. It conforms to the data, in that it feels the data. But the how of
feeling, though it is germane to the data, is not fully determined by the
data.”12 This is because there is always a push and pull, in the feeling,
between givenness and potentiality. Givenness is necessary to the occa-
sion’s capacity to assert itself as this or that, while potentiality ensures that
the more-than remain included, if only marginally in the case of the lower
grade organisms.
The potential of the more-than enters into the occasion through the eternal
object. “The quality of feeling has to be definite in respect to the eternal
objects with which feeling clothes itself in its selfdefinition.”13 What a feel-
ing has felt always includes this share of speculative potential, this uncharted
value.
Even negatively prehended, this uncharted value makes a difference.

Only a selection of eternal objects are “felt” by a given subject, and these
eternal objects are then said to have “ingression” in that subject. But those
eternal objects which are not felt are not therefore negligible. For each negative
prehension has its own subjective form, however trivial and faint.14

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Manning 7

Pure potential can be sidelined—“the actualities have to be felt, while the

pure potentials can be dismissed”15—but the lure remains. The infrathin is
haunted by this lure.

The Speculative Share

To begin with elimination is to foreground what makes a difference in experi-
ence despite its exclusion from actualization. If, as is usually the case, the
actual is the measure of use-value, it would follow that what is not actually
included in the occasion has no value. For this unactualized share is not only
indiscernible as such, it is unmeasurable, even after the fact. Yet it is this very
ineffability at the heart of the occasion that gives experience its value, I would
suggest. The value of this speculative share of experience is in its colouring
of the event, in its making felt how else experience can be ascertained, beyond
definition.
This would be the first proposition for a pragmatics of the useless: when
experience connects to the infrathin, what it is affirming is another way of
thinking value. Beyond use-value, the valuation not of what is given, but the
capacity of transvaluation to perform a shift at the very heart of the process’s
incompletion, of the process’s inherent indeterminacy. In Nietzschean fash-
ion, value here derives from the in-act of the process’s own affirmation of its
difference: “creation takes the place of knowledge itself and affirmation takes
the place of all negations.”16 A pragmatics of the useless celebrates the share
of experience that is affirmed not because of what it is, but because of how it
affects experience in the making.
A pragmatics of the useless is pragmatic in the sense that it is wholly con-
cerned with the how of the event’s coming to be. This instance of the infrathin.
These conditions for activating this interval of experience. The event cannot
be generalized across iterations. It is always exemplary, always speculatively
pragmatic.
A pragmatics of the useless is speculative in the sense that it is open to
transformation by the potentializing force of what courses through the event,
even when it cannot be fully actualized. Potential courses through the “just
like this” nature of the event, making it reverberate. The infrathin is felt in
this reverberation, potentially singularizing.

Potentially Singularizing
All actual occasions carry this quality of the infrathin. While on the one hand
the event is singularly what it is—this plane surface—the event also includes
in the reverbatory movement of this singularity an openness to difference.

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8 Political Theory 

The infrathin’s potentially singularizing force is its very capacity to be

both-and.
To perceive at this interval of the both-and is to feel the bending of time in
the occasion. It is to feel both the event’s absolute time-signature—the prag-
matism of what happens, here, now—and the potentiality of the event’s
capacity to make a difference. The making of a difference is always also a
making of time. What is singularly potentialized by the infrathin is event-
time, time felt in its differential quality, time less measure than fold.
What then of the “intoleran[ce] of any addition” to the occasion?17 What
of Whitehead’s statement that “an extra patch of red does not constitute a
mere addition; it alters the whole balance”?18 What of the occasion’s neces-
sity to eliminate that which does not conform to it?
The infrathin cuts across this necessity, slicing the occasion such that its
perspective on conformity skews. Givenness and potentiality always work
together—“‘givenness’ refers to ‘potentiality,’ and ‘potentiality’ to ‘given-
ness.’”19 A complexity of feeling is revealed at the differential of their over-
lapping. Perhaps this is what art can do.

Transversality
The infrathin is transversal. It cannot be thought as a state. It is the mak-
ing-felt of a momentary skewing of experience in the moving. The infrathin
feels experience in a way that reveals the occasion’s background and
allows it to dance in the foreground. It creates the conditions to emphasize
what the feeling hasn’t felt. It gives uneasy consistency, in the merest of
intervals, to that which barely registers if it registers at all. “Infra thin
separation between / the detonation noise of a gun / (very close) and the
apparition of the bullet / hole in the target. . . .”20 “The infra-thin separation
is working at its maximum when it distinguishes the same from the
same.”21

Double Articulation
Distinguishing the same from the same, in the duration of the infrathin,
what stands out is how all experience is actively engaged in a double artic-
ulation. The actual is always replete with the virtual, individuation with
the preindividual, prehension with what is negatively prehended. What the
infrathin contributes, as a concept, is a way of thinking the both-and of
double articulation. That extra patch of red does make a difference: it cre-
ates a new world. The infrathin makes felt how both worlds might briefly
coexist.

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Manning 9

Duration
This coexistence is beyond definition in large part because of the challenge
of thinking time durationally. Two times thought together in the event is dif-
ficult to parse into a language that unfolds one subject, one noun, one verb at
a time. Art can do this, but only when it resists defining itself solely according
to how it takes form. What art can do is activate the infrathin of a potential-
izing force. It is art’s very force to be able to compose worlds that activate a
kind of geological event-time—a layered, composite time-felt. Elsewhere,
I’ve referred to this as the “art of time,” art’s capacity to make felt, through
the force of intuition, time’s complexity.
When Duchamp writes “just touching. While trying to place 1 plane sur-
face /precisely on another plane surface / you pass through some infra thin
moments—” the sense is that there is a touching on the art of time.22 Something
is felt—“you pass through some infrathin moments”—that cannot quite be
attributed to the perceiver. For it is not “you” who passes through, but the
plane that feels itself in the passing, that feels the relational field of its co-
composition with the adjacent plane, that feels layers of duration that cannot
quite be distinguished either from its composite plane-ness or its adjacency.
Art can move you toward these planes of duration, making them intui-
tively felt such that a quality of existence is momentarily touched upon. This
touching-upon has nothing to do with metaphor: it is a lived experience. This
will fail if approached through mimicry. The infrathin must every time be
activated anew; it cannot be reproduced, once and for all.

A Pragmatics of the Useless

The second proposition for a pragmatics of the useless emerges: value must
also be activated each time anew. Art that truly engages with what has not yet
found its form intuitively steers away from the mimicry of reproduction. To
be artful—actively engaged in the differential of experience in the making—
art must never seek to define in advance its value. It must never claim to
know how the infrathin will make itself felt. The negative prehension that
haunts it must remain a haunting.
Taking form is art’s risk. There is no getting around taking-form. Experience
wouldn’t be known without it. But the taking-form must not fall into the cat-
egory of pre-valuation. It must not know in advance what its taking can do.

The Fourth Dimension

For Duchamp, the infrathin becomes a way of thinking time beyond the sec-
ond dimension toward the third and even the fourth. The art of time, art’s

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10 Political Theory 

capacity to make felt the non-linear time of negative prehension, becomes his
chief concern. “The possible implies becoming—the passage from one to the
other takes place in the infrathin.”23
To make felt the fourth dimension is to take the fold as time’s impossible
measure. Here, in the folding of experience quadrupling onto itself, the infrathin
touches on the limits of perceptibility. What Duchamp’s infrathin makes clear
is that we need a concept for the imperceptible within the perceptible. “2 forms
cast in / the same mold differ / from each other/ by an infra thin separative /
amount— All ‘identicals’ as / identical as they may be, (and / the more identical
they are)/ move toward this / infra thin separative difference”. “Two men are
not / an example of identicality / and to the contrary / move away / from a deter-
minable / infra thin difference—but.”24

The Differential
The imperceptible within the perceptible is experience’s differential. The
infrathin mobilizes the differential, that share of perception on the very edge
of perceptibility where what is barely felt (or not felt at all) makes a differ-
ence. Two forms cast in the same mold carry the force of this difference
despite their appearance of sameness; identicals persist in remaining qualita-
tively more-than identicality. This qualitative difference that often escapes
perceptibility is the more-than of experience in-forming; it is the edging into
itself of a givenness full of potential. “The infra-thin separation is working at
its maximum when it distinguishes the same from the same.”

The Untimely
Henri Focillon describes the edgings of perceptibility in the experience of the
infrathin in terms of untimeliness.25 The untimeliness of the infrathin fore-
grounds what Whitehead calls “the mutual sensitivity of feelings.”26 This
mutual sensitivity includes the contribution of that which has been eliminated
from the actual. It includes the subjective form of the negative prehension.

The negative prehensions have their own subjective forms which they contribute
to the process. A feeling bears on itself the scars of its birth; it recollects as a
subjective emotion its struggle for existence; it retains the impress of what it might
have been, but is not. It is for this reason that what an actual entity has avoided as
a datum for feeling may yet be an important part of its equipment. The actual
cannot be reduced to mere matter of fact in divorce from the potential.27

Feeling, in Whitehead, is the complex of experience: process philosophy is an

account, not of pure reason, but of pure feeling. “The feelings are inseparable

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Manning 11

from the end at which they aim; and this end is the feeler. The feelings aim at
the feeler, as their final cause. The feelings are what they are in order that their
subject may be what it is.”28 An event is its affective tonality. An untimeliness
is lived at this affective interstice where feeling and feeler live their mutual
inclusion in the event. Too often, we separate these out, marking them as
though one came before the other, in a hierarchy of value: the critique of pure
reason prevails as we situate the feeler outside the event to judge the occasion
from without. Process philosophy does not accept this account. There is noth-
ing outside of feeling. How the occasion has been felt is the experience, it is
its reason for becoming what it is.29 The subject of the event—its superject—is
the untimeliness of feeling folding on itself. This folding creates the nuances
of experience that Duchamp gestures toward with his concept of the infrathin.
Mutual sensitivity of feeling highlights the fold between feeling and feeler,
foregrounding the affective tonality of event-time. The infrathin grasps
toward this difference of the same with the same in the untimeliness of the
lived interval of feeling and feeler. The infrathin gives the briefest consis-
tency to this experiential cluster.

Experiential Cluster
The experiential cluster where feeling and felt are one, like all occasions,
“can only be felt once.”30 Its untimeliness is the fact of its singular once-ness
combined with its durational mise-en-abyme. The infrathin in this way makes
felt the uneasiness of time in the making, time in the feeling, where time is at
once the here-now and the not-quite-yet. This is the work art can do, Duchamp
seems to say, to create the conditions through which the time of the event in
all its untimely uneasiness can come to expression. To create the conditions
for a material expression of duration at the limit.
This involves creating techniques for activating the clustering of experi-
ence where time is of the event. Perhaps this is what Robert Smithson means
when he suggests that the artist creates at the interstices where “distant futures
meet distant pasts,” or when Duchamp writes that “in each fraction of dura-
tion are reproduced all fractions future and anterior.”31

A Piece of You
When experience becomes untimely, when event-time takes over experi-
ence, it becomes apparent how the subject cannot reside outside the event,
looking in. Francis Alys writes, “After a while, . . . you start oscillating
yourself. You forget about the mechanics of the piece and you are entering
this kind of lullaby space. You just take a back seat and that is where

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12 Political Theory 

eventually you accede to that different time perception, which is in between

two worlds of space.”32
When it becomes about what the feeler has felt, in the event, “you” have
indeed taken a back seat. The infrathin of experience in the making carries the
you you are becoming. For while the artist may create the conditions for the
infrathin, it is the infrathin that ultimately does the carrying. “The role of artists
is, in a sense, to continually examine what’s going on there,” writes Robert Irwin.

And so value is not neutral; once negotiated, it ultimately becomes a piece of

you. It can reconstruct how you practice, or how you move in the world. In
time, that has the implication of changing the structures around you. But it’s a
long-term project. The real change that comes from feelings and values has to
be seeded, in a sense, and then it begins to act on things—on you, and then on
how you make decisions and judgments, and therefore on how you construct
the world.33

The artist’s work becomes to emergently attune, in the event, to the nuances
activated in the infrathin of experience in the making.

Consciousness
It is common to give value to a conscious process over a nonconscious one.
Whitehead insists: how an event feels its potential does not necessarily have
to do with consciousness. Consciousness is merely one aspect of the occa-
sion’s capacity for eventuation.
The infrathin does not rely on consciousness to come to expression. And
yet it does touch at the edges of an awareness in which the conscious and the
nonconscious are in co-composition. Here, where degrees and scales of feel-
ing are in act, we are in the midst of autistic perception, the active fielding of
experience edging into itself. Elimination is included, the untimeliness of
nonconscious tendings directly felt.
At this lively interstice between degrees of feltness, what is perceived is
felt contrast. The differential is lived, at the verge of experience in-forming.
When Irwin or Alys speak about the feeling of the art moving you, it is from
the perspective of the verge that they frame their experience. What art can do
is create the conditions for another way of perceiving. “Actually I think that
right now we’re wrestling with how to go from a three-dimensional model to
a four-dimensional one. How do you actually do that? How do you deal with
a four-dimensional way of seeing? And what kind of social practice or order
will result?” Irwin asks.34 Other ways of perceiving create other ways of
living.

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Manning 13

Fourth-Person Singular
Might the infrathin propose a fourth-dimensional way of seeing? And if so,
might this call forth Deleuze’s “fourth-person singular”? The fourth person sin-
gular, the impersonal “il pleut” in the French makes doing a kind of impersonal
acting, in the event. Is this not similar to the way the infrathin foregrounds time
in its layered multiplication, a time not of the conscious external subject peer-
ing in, but of the lived differential of feeling and feeler co-composing? The
fourth dimension not as 1+3 but as n+1—“the many become one, and are
increased by one.”35 Time in the folding, perceiving itself.

The Tension between Things

Doug Wheeler writes, “That’s what I started playing with as an artist: not
looking at things but the tension in between things.”36 The tension between
things is the n+1 of the infrathin: the unquantifiable force of difference that
creates an interlude in the time of the event. It is here, in the force of time’s
folding, where use-value has not yet been determined and the pragmatic is at
its most speculative, that what art can do is most palpable.

The Creative Advance

When Whitehead writes of the creative advance as the push of what the event
can do at its most creative edge, there is a sense of the force of the art of time.
Creative advance is not about the creation of an art object, but a way of
speaking of the lure for feeling, of the differential of experience in the mak-
ing. This differential is called contrast in process philosophy. What art can do,
at its most pragmatically useless, is to make felt the differential force of the
time of the event, the share, in the event, that is contrast. When Wheeler
speaks of “the tension between things,” he is speaking not of an empty space
between objects but of the untimely activity of the relational field. This
untimely activity is replete with contrasts in germ that make uneasy the sepa-
ration between feeler and felt.

Contrast
Contrast is always allied, in Whitehead, with conceptual feeling. A qualita-
tive difference, in the event, is a conceptual feeling. Speaking of the event’s
appetite to become, or what Whitehead calls “concrescence,” he writes:

In each concrescence there is a twofold aspect of the creative urge. In one

aspect there is the origination of simple causal feelings; and in the other aspect

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14 Political Theory 

there is the origination of conceptual feelings. These contrasted aspects will be

called the physical and the mental poles of an actual entity. No actual entity is
devoid of either pole; though their relative importance differs in different actual
entities.37

Conceptual feeling makes qualitative difference felt precisely because it is

capable of holding, in the event, what remains actually excluded but is none-
theless immanently included, as contrast.
“The tension between things” is not about what is actually perceived. It is
about foregrounding the very schism of perception. The tension between
things is the relational field that holds difference in the event. “Difference
between the contact / of water and that of / molten lead for ex. / or of cream /
with the walls of its / own container moved around the liquid.” Infrathin is
not a measure, it is a feeling: “I purposefully chose the word thin that is a
human and affective word and not a precise laboratory measure,” writes
Duchamp.38 Negative prehension animates the relational field, agitating the
edges of what it brings together in differential resonance. Conceptual feeling
gives qualitative dissonance to this creative agitation.

Conceptual Feeling
Conceptual feelings are what give value to the event: they “introduce the fac-
tor of ‘valuation,’ that is, ‘valuation up,’ or ‘valuation down.’”39 This valua-
tion, according to Whitehead, opens the even to “creative purpose.”40 The
introduction of creative purpose happens in the untimeliness of the tension’s
creative agitation. “Every actual entity is ‘in time’ so far as its physical pole
is concerned, and is ‘out of time’ so far as its mental pole is concerned. It is
the union of two worlds, namely, the temporal world, and the world of auton-
omous valuation.”41 The conceptual feeling, the event’s mental pole, gives
texture to that which does not properly actualize but is nonetheless felt in the
folding of time.
That conceptual feelings are what give value to the event reminds us, once
again, that it is not what actualizes that determines value. It is precisely that
which cannot be said to fully become determined that moves the event toward
its creative advance. Value cannot be known as such; it can only be experi-
mented from the edges of a process too untimely to measure.

The Non-object
In an essay titled “What Art Is and Where It Belongs,” Paul Chan writes: “Art
uses things to make its presence felt. But art is not itself a thing. In other

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Manning 15

words, art is more and less than a thing. And it is this simultaneous expres-
sion of more-ness and less-ness that makes what is made art.”42 What makes
art art is not its capacity to become-object, but the way art can make felt the
untimeliness of the tensions active in the relational field it calls forth.

What art ends up expressing is the irreconcilable tension that results from
making something, while intentionally allowing the materials and things that
make up that something to change the making in mind . . . , until it becomes
something radically singular, something neither wholly of the mind that made
it, nor fully the matter from which it was made. It is here that art incompletes
itself, and appears.43

Art is not its final taking-form, but the very process of its incompletion. This,
which can only be felt and not defined, is its value.
In activating contrast, what art can do is give the force of form to that
incompletion. This, I have argued elsewhere, is the minor gesture that makes
it artful.44 Ferreira Gullar, in his attempt to articulate this force of form, pro-
posed the concept of the non-object, a concept directly influenced by the
work of Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, amongst others.45
For Gullar, the non-object might be defined as “an almost-body, which is to
say, a being whose reality is not exhausted in the external relationships
between its elements; a being that, while not decomposable into parts through
analysis, only delivers itself up wholly through a direct, phenomenological
approach.”46 A non-object as presentation, he argues, not representation.47
For Gullar, what was at stake was finding a vocabulary for what he per-
ceived as the important shift, mid twentieth century, in artists like Clark and
Oiticica, toward another way of working with materiality. The non-object, he
writes, “bursts from the inside out, from non-meaning toward meaning.”48 It
is “pure appearance,” “pure phenomenon,” “without pre-conceptions of artis-
tic categories, without reflected consciousness, but rather with the senses.”49

The Relational Object

This vocabulary of the non-object does not quite do the work Lygia Clark
seeks, however, and so despite being seen by Gullar as the precursor to the
non-object, she distances herself from the concept and proposes instead the
relational object.50 She writes,

It is no longer the problem of feeling the poetic through a form. The structure
exists there only as a support for the expressive gesture, the cut, and after it is
finished, it has nothing to do with the traditional work of art. It is the state of
“art without art.” . . . By presenting this type of idea, the artist in reality presents

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16 Political Theory 

this “empty-full” in which all potentialities of the option that comes through
the act take place.51

The difference between the relational object and the non-object is one of
emphasis. What the relational object foregrounds is not the phenomenon but
the relation. Despite her strong interest in the phenomenal, sensual world,
what moves Clark’s practice is the lived experience of the tension between,
in the event. Hers is not a phenomenological approach, but a relational one.
It is active in the infrathin of what Whitehead calls nonsensuous perception:
the direct perception of time’s uneasiness, in the event. By activating the
infrathin of experience in the making, the relational object potentializes this
tension where feeler and felt are at their most lively differential. It makes felt
the event’s contrast. In so doing, it creates the conditions for the kinds of
conceptual feelings that allow the event to express its quality of more-than,
its differential force.

The Value of the Infrathin

This differential force is replete with potential. What art can do is make this
potential felt. Chan writes,

Unlike things, art shapes matter—which gives substance to material reality—

without ever dominating it. All matter absorbs the manifold forces that have
influenced how it came to be, and the uses and values it has accrued—and
emanates the presence of this history and its many meanings from within. In a
sense, form is just another word for the sedimented content that smolders in all
matter. Art is made with sensitivity to and awareness of this content. And the
more the making becomes attenuated, the more art binds itself to the way this
content already determines the reality of how matter exists in the world.52

Art’s sensitivity to the takings-form of material tendencies is how it values

experience. This valuation involves a decision-making process immanent to
the event. No relational object is fully operative that cannot create a cut in the
process: an object is relational precisely because of its capacity to activate the
field such that certain qualities stand out more than others. How a contrast
makes itself felt is precisely what makes art artful.
The artful creates fields of relation through which new modes of encoun-
ter are invented. These infrathin modes of encounter propose new ways of
taking time, of making time. This can only happen if what is foregrounded,
as art, is not its use-value, not its thing-ness, and, perhaps most pressingly,
not its exchange-value. Art has no inherent value. It is not something. It can-
not be generalized, in a neutralizing of experience where feeler is excised

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Manning 17

from feeling. Art is exemplary, in the event where feeling and feeler are dif-
ferentially one.
Art is the capacity to mobilize difference in the event, the capacity to make
felt the force of form that undoes art of its hold on the very object that too
often is said to represent it. A pragmatics of the useless takes this as its third
proposition: that what art can do is always in excess of the object it leaves
behind. A pragmatics of the useless: the value does not reside in the form, but
in the infrathin of form’s incompletion.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author declared the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: Author received support from the Social Science and
Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Notes
  1. Duchamp in Thierry Davila, De l’inframince, brève histoire de l’imperceptible
de Marcel Duchamp à nos jours (Paris: Edition du regard, 2010), 29.
  2. Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2002), 101.
  3. Thierry De Duve, The Definitely Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1991), 160.
 4. Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism, 101n4.
  5. Ibid., 101n9, recto.
  6. Ibid., 101n9, verso.
  7. Ibid., 101n14.
  8. Ibid., 101n45.
  9. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967),
195.
10. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 41.
11. I’ve explored this idea of autistic perception through the writings of Tito
Mukhopadhyay, Amanda Baggs, DJ Savarese, Larry Bissonnette and others. For
more on the concept of autistic perception, and for an account of their incisive
writing see “An Ethics of Language in the Making,” in Always More Than One:
Individuation’s Dance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
12. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 85.
13. Ibid., 86.
14. Ibid., 41.
15. Ibid., 239.

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18 Political Theory 

16. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone
Press, 1983), 187.
17. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 45.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism, 101n12, verso.
21. de Duve, The Definitely Unfinished, 160.
22. Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism, 102.
23. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/21/21_duchamp.pdf.
24. In Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism, 101n35, recto.
25. Davila, De l’inframince,13–14.
26. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 221.
27. Ibid., 226.
28. Ibid., 222.
29. I give a more thorough account of reason in Whitehead (following his account
in The Function of Reason) in “Against Method,” in Non-Representational
Methodologies, ed. Phillip Vannini (New York: Routledge, 2015). A shorter
version is translated in Norwegian in Metodefest og øyeblikksrealisme, ed. Ann
Merete Oterstad and Anne B. Reinertsen, translated in Norwegian by Anne B.
Reinertsen (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2015).
30. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 231.
31. Davila, De l’inframince, 14.
32. Francys Alys and Siobhan Davies, “Conversations,” in http://www.siobhanda-
vies.com/conversations/alys/transcript.php (accessed December 23, 2014).
33. In Olafur Eliasson and Robert Irwin, “Take your Time: A Conversation,” in Take
Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, exhibition catalogue, ed. Madeleine Grynsztejn
(San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New York: Thames &
Hudson, 2007), 56.
34. Ibid., 58.
35. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 21.
36. Dough Wheeler and Hugh Dacvies, “Shining a Light on Light and Space Art,”
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/18/entertainment/la-ca-pst-hugh-davies-
and-doug-wheeler-20110918 (accessed December 20, 2014).
37. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 239.
38. h t t p : / / p p e t i o t 2 . f r e e . f r / S A D T _ D u c h a m p _ M a t t a / 0 1 _ We b P a g e s /
SADTDuchampMatta_020c.htm (my translation).
39. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 247.
40. Ibid., 248.
41. Ibid.
42. Paul Chan, “What Art Is And Where It Belongs,” http://www.e-flux.com/journal/
what-art-is-and-where-it-belongs/ (accessed December 20, 2014).
43. Ibid.
44. See, e.g., “Artfulness,” in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 2015) and “Weather Patterns, or How Minor
Gestures Entertain the Environment,” in Complex Ubiquity-Effects: Individuating,

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Manning 19

Situating, Eventualizing, ed. Ulrick Ekman, Jay David Bolter, Lily Diaz, Morten
Sondergaard, and Maria Engberg (New York: Routledge, 2015).
45. Fereira Gullar, “Dialogue on the Non-object,” http://www.jenmazza.com/site/
index.php/archive/dialog-on-the-non-object/3321/ (accessed December 20, 2014).
46. In Monica Amor, “From Work to Frame, in Between, and Beyond: Lygia Clark
and Helio Oiticica,” in Grey Room 38 (Winter 2010): 20–37, 28.
47. Gullar, “Dialogue on the Non-object.”
48. Fereira Gullar, “Theory of the Non-Object,” published in the Sunday Supplement
of the Jornal do Brasil (December 19–20, 1959): 19.
49. Ibid.
50. For more on Lygia Clark and how her concept of the relational object distances
itself from Gullar’s non-object, see See Suely Rolnik, “Molding a Contemporary
Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark,” in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom:
Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica and Mira Schendel, ed.
Rina Carvajal and Alma Ruiz (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art,
1999), 55–108.
51. Undated manuscript, probably from 1963–1964, in the L. Clark archives.
52. Chan, “What Art Is.”

Author Biography
Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in
the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the
director of the SenseLab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersec-
tions between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in
movement. Her current art practice is centred on large-scale participatory installations
that facilitate emergent collectivities. Current art projects are focused around the con-
cept of minor gestures in relation to colour, movement and participation. Publications
include Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke University Press,
2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (MIT Press, 2009) and, with Brian
Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota
University Press, 2014) and The Minor Gesture (Duke University Press, 2016).

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