It is 1968 and social psychologist Fernand Deligny has left Félix Guattari’s side at La Borde to work and live with autistics in the Monoblet area of the Cévennes. He describes it as “the network” - le réseau - and underscores that what he is facilitating is only an attempt. In French: tentative. Over the almost two thousand pages of writing Deligny leaves behind, the gesture of tentativeness called forth by this attempt at living otherwise is repeated on almost every page. Be careful, it seems to say. Don’t make this a method. Don’t harden this into a pedagogy. Don’t make it about what you already think you know.

In an ethos of the pragmatics of the useless Erin Manning‘s talk will endeavour to trace some of the inflections of Deligny’s 30-year project in the Cevènes, thinking at the same time about Edouard Glissant’s concept of errancy in the context of the being of relation.

Erin Manning is research chair in Speculative Pragmatism, Art and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. Recent books include The Being of Relation (forthcoming), Out of the Clear (2022) and For a Pragmatics of theUseless (2020) and Out of the Clear (forthcoming). In her art practice, she works at the intersection of the three ecologies - the environmental, the conceptual and the social - with an emphasis on the aesthetico-political.