The Being of Relation

How does whiteness sediment worlds? How does it format individuality in the name of a neurotypicality that polices how one bodies and how one comes to know? And how does a poetics of relation shift the very logic of this sedimentation? Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation are bold in their call to ‘consent not to be a single being’. This transindividual consent, born in the process of worlds crafting themselves in what he would call an ‘aesthetics of the earth’, are felt in Fernand Deligny’s errant lines. These errant lines, traced to move with the complex gestures of autistics over a period of several years in Monoblet, France (1965-1970), offer an alternative to pathology and individual psychological assessment. The Being of Relation brings these two projects into encounter, exploring what else blackness can be at this non-pathological juncture where what is foregrounded is the very being of relation. On the way, trails of whiteness are excavated and interrogated. The aim: to move toward parapedagogies of resistance, in a logic of a poetics of relation, a logic of neurodiversity, minor sociality and the kind of difference without separability that refuses the binary that holds neurotypicality – as whiteness – in place.

Undoing the world whiteness built: excavating the ways whiteness and neurotypicality structure experience and offering a radical vision for moving beyond them. How does whiteness shape the world? How does neurotypicality police how bodies move, think, and relate? And what happens when we shift our focus from individuality to relation itself? The Being of Relation brings together Edouard Glissant's poetics of relation and Fernand Deligny's errant lines to study the structures that hold whiteness and neurotypicality in place. Moving beyond the confines of pathology and psychological assessment, Erin Manning looks into how blackness and neurodiversity emerge at the very site of relation--where identity is not singular but constantly unfolding. This work examines how whiteness operates as a deeply ingrained social structure and introduces what Manning calls parapedagogies of resistance: alternative ways of learning and relating that challenge normative binaries. Drawing from critical race theory, neurodiversity studies, and philosophy, Being of Relation offers a framework for reimagining social connections outside of conventional categories.