The Minor Gesture in 12 Movements

Artwork by Martha Shaw

1. Definition

The minor gesture: the gestural force that opens experience to its potential variation, moving from within experience itself, activating a shift in tone, a difference in quality.

2. The minor

A minor key is always interlaced with major keys – the minor works the major from within. What must be remembered is this: neither the minor nor the major are fixed in advance. The major is a structural tendency that organizes itself according to predetermined definitions of value. The minor is a force that courses through it, unmooring its structural integrity, problematizing its normative standards.

3. How does it move?

The minor is a continual variation on experience. It has a mobility not given to the major: its rhythms are not controlled by a pre-existing structure, but open to flux. This permeability tends to make it ungraspable, and often unrecognizable: it is no doubt difficult to value that which has little perceptible form, that which has not yet quite been invented, let alone defined. And so the minor gesture often goes by unperceived, its improvisational threads of variability overlooked, despite their being in our midst.

And yet the minor gesture is everywhere, all the time. Despite its precarity, it resurfaces punctually, claiming not space as such, but space-of-variation. The minor invents new forms of existence, and with them, in them, we come to be. These temporary forms of life travel across the everyday, making untimely existing political structures, activating new modes of perception, inventing languages that speak in the interstices of major tongues.

4. A Politics of the minor

In its punctual reorienting of the event, the minor gesture moves through the event, creating a pulse, opening the way for new tendencies to emerge, and in the resonances that are awakened, potential for difference looms. 

A politics of the minor might be defined this way: the movement activated, in the event, by a difference in register that awakens new modes of encounter and creates new forms of life-living. Life-living in its usage here refuses to privilege this life, this human life, at the expense of different forms and forces of life, even as it recognizes the importance of the punctuality of this singular event we call our life. Life-living is a way of thinking life with and beyond the human, thinking life as more-than human. The conjunction between the minor gesture and life-living is a political ecology that operates on the level of the in-act, asking at every junction what else life could be. How this singular life-orientation carries existence, and where its minor gestures may lead, is always, for me, a political question.

5. Autistic perception

Perceiving through the lens of the minor involves feeling into the way worlds edge into existence. Too often, we assume that our perception of the world is the shape of the world, not the shape of our perception of it. Autistics such as Anne Corwin, Adam Wolfond, Tito Mukhopadhyay, Donna Williams speak of the strange habit of “chunking” that is valued in neurotypical perception.  Chunking is defined here as perception coming in a completed chunk:  a chair, a human, a room. Instead of the world coming to them perceptually in chunks, autistics often speak of the direct experience of perception coming into itself: not form as presupposed site of the world, but worlds in-forming. In what I’ve called autistic perception, they directly perceive force of form, the intensive forces of vistas in the making. All perception works this way: perception is by nature a constructive and connective act. Autistic perception is on a continuum with all perception: the difference is one of degree. For most of us, the quality of the world’s in-forming is too backgrounded for us to directly perceive it.

6. Neurodiversity

Neurodiversity always sidles the minor. It feels into worlds in co-composition, attuned to modalities of expression that are sidelined in favour of the well-greased “functional” systems of what is already presupposed to carry value. Goal-oriented, productive, individualist, independent – these are code-words for neurotypicality. 

Neurotypicality is the systemic model we are trained into the minute we are asked to “pay attention,” to “sit still,” to “stop daydreaming.” The systemic operations of neurotypicality foster a commitment to its genre: we learn early that the more we inhabit that model, the more we will succeed. Schooling is its ongoing police often in conjunction with family’s solidifying of normative valuations. The neoliberal subject is made in its image. 

In the environment of neurodiversity there are many ways of encountering experience: all of us world differently. For some the worlding is thick with company (voices, emergent conviviality, “madness”), for others speaking with one’s own voice is difficult (motor disturbances can get in the way of organizing a body, including separating voice from other kinds of movement, “classical autism”), for others the intensity of attachment to a task and the difficulty of modulating that intensity can lead to the seizing of a body, to its overactivation or deactivation (attention is used in many slippery ways to devalue those complex modes of attunement, “ADD, ADHD”). But what is most important is not the pathology, but the ways these complex differences foster another kind of sociality, another encounter with the co-compositions of the everyday. These are not neurodivergences. They are not simple deviations of normopathy as though neurodiversity could be in a dichotomy with neurotypicality. They are a completely different mode of existence. And as such, they are threats to normopathy.

7. Normopathy

Normopathy is treated as the baseline of experience. It is from normopathy that all differences (all neurotypes, but also all notion of what passes as human) are delineated. Nothing more pathological than normopathy, which is to say, neurotypicality, which is to say, whiteness.

8. Approximation of Proximity

Minor sociality is a sideways sociality. It dwells in another mode than the frontal, the self-possessed, the self-entrepreneurial. It bristles at the very idea of “the burdened individuality of freedom” that keeps capitalism afloat (Saidiya Hartman). It moves in the lexicon of the more-than, which is to say, in the recognition that there is no absolute segregation of self and world. 

Approximation of proximity is a logic. It has kinship with what Brian Massumi calls a logic of mutual inclusion. Minor sociality attunes to minor reorientations of existence. It can do so because its engagement is not in causality, and not in exclusion. This is an affirmative sociality, which is to say, a sociality of the in-act, a sociality in attunement to the what else that animates experience.

I have written about how black life, in approximation of proximity, is always neurodiverse. Black life, working from a lexicon in Black Studies that refuses to reduce blackness to the colonial definition of race, is a reminder that blackness is not an object delimited by whiteness: it is not the shape of whiteness’s other, and cannot be limited to the fantasy of that binary. When I say that black life lives in approximation of proximity to neurodiversity, what I mean is this: the systemic baseline of neurotypicality is never given to blackness. Blackness exceeds the count, cannot be “subjectified,” has already been denied the ontologies of those colonial frames that exclude it, and cannot therefore be subsumed to the logic of mutual exclusion. Black life is never neurotypical, though it can aspire to meet its measure, just as it can aspire to whiteness.

9. Paraontological

Nahum Chandler develops the concept of the paraontological in his work on W.E.B du Bois. Race, du Bois writes, is a problem for thought. Blackness forces the movement of thought elsewhere than within the logic (of mutual exclusion) that can only deny it existence. 

A paraontological mode of existence is always minor: it doesn’t register as the norm, does not register the norm.

10. Poetics of Relation

Edouard Glissant’s concept of poetics of relation emphasizes that it is in the relation, in the opacity of what always exceeds the between-two of binary reductions, that worlds are made. In that paraontological ethos what is practiced is difference without separability (Denise Ferreira da Silva). Difference without separability practices in attunement with the more-than, that speculative share of experience that cannot be bounded in advance. A poetics of relation has no centre, has no subjectivity pre-defined. 

This is not to say there are no inheritances. How worlds come into themselves always makes a difference. But the major stories are not what is mobilized by a poetics of relation, those accounts of transparency told in the name of colonial history. What makes a difference are the minor gestures, the ways in which variation seeds itself, shifting the conditions not only for “what is” but for its potential to make a difference.  

11. Beyond value?

The minor has no prescribed use-value – it does nothing that can be mapped onto a process already underway. Its value is its movement. I have called this the pragmatics of the useless to embolden a thought of the shape value takes when it is committed to the how of the pragmatic and the what else of its speculative share. The minor is never a general idea: it cannot be implemented across systems. Each event carries its own minor gestures, and techniques for their amplification must always come from that singular standpoint.

When techniques for the minor gesture’s emergent valuation become a daily practice,“artfulness” is amplified. Artfulness can be thought of as an aesthetic yield that shifts the contours of experience. 

A minor gesture has no pre-ordained limits, no moral codes. It is not, of itself, “good” or “evil.” But it is conditioning.

12. When movement exceeds us

Minor gestures are not ours to execute as though we were somehow outside of experience’s movement. Minor gestures call for an attunement to what is already underway, and to the crafting of techniques for the amplification of its potential. It is what the minor does within the field of experience that makes its gesture felt.