Throughout a series of works, philosopher, cultural theorist, and artist Erin Manning develops an interpretation of immediate embodied experience as being enmeshed in the relationscape: the interconnected field of affective intensities and sensory perceptions that exists prior to the differentiation of self and other, subject and object. Resonant with the pre-personal in Merleau-Ponty and the pre-individual in Simondon, the relationscape constitutes the anonymous excess or ‘more than’ within lived experience that gives rise to a process of individuation.  While the intertwining forces and movements of the relational field underpins all embodied experience, its pre-reflective ambiguity often eludes our attempts to grasp, represent or understand it. In a striking interpretation of neurodivergence, Manning suggests that Autistic perception is uniquely attuned toward the relationscape, as it exists prior to its neurotypical ‘chunking’ of subject and object, and thus to the alterity and excess that is intrinsic to human existence.

Organised around Erin Manning’s visit to Australia, the aim of this workshop is to bring together emerging and leading scholars working in the traditions of phenomenology, process philosophy, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, literature and aesthetics to theorise pre-reflective embodied experience as enmeshed in the pre-individual

Confirmed Speakers 

Erin Manning, Claire Colebrook, Chloe Anastasia, Lorna Collins, Mads Dengso, J-P Deranty, Joe Hughes, Linda Luke, Annie Sandrussi, Jason Tuckwell, Marilyn Stendera and Emily Hughes.

Papers and performances will focus on a range of themes:

• The idea of the pre-personal/ pre-individual/ immediate/ pure/ direct experience in the work of key figures such as Spinoza, Bergson, Whitehead, James, Merleau-Ponty, Simondon, Bachelard, Deleuze, Massumi and Manning

• The role of embodied sense-perception in theorising the pre-individual (i.e. hyper-sensitivity/ hypo-sensitivity, hyper-attunement/ hypo-attunement, cross- and inter-modal sensory experience, flow states and monotropism)

• Experiences of the relationscape in Autistic, schizophrenic and psychotic perception

• Liminal phenomena such as the unconscious, dreaming, reverie and the imagination as experiences of the pre-individual and pre-reflective

• Experiences of the relationscape in nature, ecology, deep time etc.

• Creative and aesthetic practices through which the pre-reflective, the pre-individual, the process of individuation and/or the relationscape might be signified or performed

• Implications for philosophical conceptions of the self (i.e. the minimal, narrative, relational, ecological self etc.) and of the psychopathology of self-disorders (i.e. depersonalization and defamiliarization).

• Implications for philosophical conceptions of the other, and the idea that alterity is inherent to subjectivity itself

• The anxiety, terror and joy of being disposed toward pre-reflective embodied experience, the pre-individual, and/or the relationscape

This workshop is organised by Emily Hughes (emily.hughes@mq.edu.au) and Marilyn Stendera (mstendera@uow.edu.au) and is funded in part by Hughes’s ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) project ‘A lone or lonely life: Lived experiences of Loneliness in Autistic Women’ (DE250100368).