Artfulness: Emergent Collectivities and Processes of Individuation

Taking art’s medieval definition—the way—as the starting point, chapter 2 explores how art is less a practice of object-making than a direct engagement with duration. Working with Henri Bergson’s concepts of intuition and sympathy, the question becomes to what degree forms of making are always also forms of participation. The artful is here defined as the operative tendency in art and the everyday that makes felt a transformative potential at the heart of matter itself. The chapter ends through a reorienting of the concept of contemplation to the more-than-human realm, where Manning argues the artful is most strongly felt.