Erin Manning: Out of the Clear

Out of the Clear begins with the question of the clearing: What operations are at work when land is cleared, or thought is cleared, of all that grows wild? Clearing, the settler-colonial act of defining a territory and producing a border, clears the world of the thickets of all that is already at work. Get rid of the muddle. Privilege productivity. This devaluing operation is taken for granted as the necessary operation for all beginnings. Clear the movement-tendencies before you start dancing. Clear the thought-wanderings before you start writing. Clearing’s best accomplice is method. A clear site is one that can be overseen, that can be managed. The resounding image of the clearing in Out of the Clear is the residential school for the forced internment of first nations peoples, the sites always barren, empty of any tangle.

The motif of the clearing weaves through Out of the Clear, a book written in the first year of the 3Ecologies project’s land-based site. In the mode of speculative pragmatism, the book explores what modalities of perspective emerge in the uneasy middling of non-dogmatic approaches to the speculative gardens of our affective surrounds. The impersonal leads in this exploration of what kind of minor sociality might emerge at the interstices of more-than human inclinations.