Emergence
This week, we are joined with Dr. Erin Manning and Brian Massumi from 3Ecologies, an autonomous learning environment exploring collective techniques for creative thought and practice. Its activities are radically open, guided by an ethos of self-organization and open accessibility. We talk about this idea of “emergent collectivitity” and how it reimagines the conditions for learning and thinking together - not as fixed structures, but as living processes. We talk about how such practices sustain intellectual life outside of traditional university ecosystems, and how they invite scholars within and outside universities to inhabit new modes of shared study and becoming.
About 3Ecologies:
The 3Ecologies Project, an autonomous learning environment exploring collective techniques for creative thought and practice. Its activities are radically open, guided by an ethos of self-organization and open accessibility. It affirms the value of neurodiversity and non-normative modes of thinking, being, and perceiving.
The 3Ecologies Project resists the neoliberal debt economy currently transforming the university into a colony of the job market. An essential part of its mission is to experiment with the invention of new alter-economic platforms that might offer it – and kindred projects for collective autonomy – the long-term possibility of becoming self-sustaining. Its activities and experimental techniques are developed and diffused without the intention of monetary gain for its members. In the immediate term, in order to obtain financial support toward the achievement of its goals, the following means are employed: applying for government grants; receiving and administering gifts, bequests, and other like contributions in cash, securities, or real estate; organizing fundraising campaigns for charitable purposes.
As an alternative or supplement to the university, the 3Ecologies Project does not grant credit or degrees, nor does it offer teaching services. It regards participation in collective thought and practice as rewards in themselves. Its aim is not to transmit already packaged knowledge, but to explore new modes of knowledge production that push the limits of how we know.
The 3Ecologies Project is a non-profit organization officially registered in Québec, Canada. The Montréal group serves as a coordinating node for a self-organizing federation of local groups active in North America, Europe, Australia, and Brazil.
Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. Pedagogical experiments are central to her work, some of which occur at Concordia University in Montreal where she is a research chair in Speculative Pragmatism, Art and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Recent monographs include The Minor Gesture (Duke 2016), For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020) and Out of the Clear (forthcoming, minor compositions). Her artwork is textile-based and relationally-oriented, often participatory. She is interested in the detail of material complexity, in what reveals itself to perception sideways, in the quality of a textural engagement with life. Her work often plays synesthetically with touch, of recent in acknowledgement and experimentation with the ProTactile movement for DeafBlind culture and language. Tactile propositions include large-scale hangings produced with a diversity of tools including tufting, hooking, knotting, weaving. 3e is the main direction her current research takes - an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual. An iteration of 3e is a land-based project north of Montreal where living and learning is experimented. Legacies of SenseLab infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectivity is crafted in a more-than human encounter with worlds in the making.
Brian Massumi is a contemporary political theorist of communication, critical and cultural studies, philosophy, political theory, science, and aesthetics. One of the foremost thinkers of “radical empiricism,” he is responsible for enabling the widespread use of Deleuzean philosophy in communication and inaugurating the so-called “affective turn” in the theoretical humanities. Massumi is a retired Professor of Communication at the Université de Montréal and a collaborator of 3Ecologies, founded by Erin Manning. His most well-known translation is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987), and he is the author of many influential books, including Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), First and Last Emperors (1993), 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value (2018), and most recently, Toward a Theory of Facism for Anti-Fascist Life: A Process Vocabulary (2025).
Time Stamps:
(0:00) Intro
(5:26) What is 3Ecologies?
(10:33) Event-Based Learning: Engaging Beyond Academics: 3E as Emergent and Self-Organizing
(13:05) Land-Based Practices and Emergent Learning
(22:07) Attuning to Emergent Learning: Maple Syrup Sampling
(28:15) Giving the Land Back to Itself: Emergence through Propositional Learning
(31:06) Anarchival Processes: Archiving Trace Events that can Become Seeds of New Events
(43:32) Off-Grid Learning Spaces: Freedom and Challenges
(49:54) Schole: Leisurely Study Beyond Structures. Taking Time to Read Slowly in Reading Groups
(1:01:13) Embracing Differences in Learning
(1:12:05) Influential Thinkers: Neurodiversity and Academia
(1:26:40) Outro
Show Notes and Credits:
In this episode, we reference the following thinkers, organizations, and resources:
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Fred Moten & Stefano Harney
How to Communicate by John Lee Clark
Touch the Future: A Manifesto in Essays by John Lee Clark
Open Book in Ways of Water by Adam Wolfond
Alfred North Whitehead
Nahum Dimitri Chandler
W.E.B. Du Bois
Saidiya Hartman
Tina Campt
Davi Kopenawa Yanomami
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Process Philosophy
Gilles Deleuze (Concept of 3Ecologies came from his collaboration with Félix Guattari)
William James
Charles Sanders Peirce - Semiotics and The Logic of Relatives
Support 3Ecologies:
Learn more and support 3Ecologies here: https://3ecologies.org/
Music:
Huge thank you to Devon Church for making music available from his album All That’s Solid Melts Into Air. Check out more of his music here.
