Erin Manning, 10 Propositions for Research-Creation (2016)
- Concordia
- Process philosopgy
- dance, choreography
- deleuze
Notes
- Create New Forms of Knowledge (Embrace the Non-Linguistic)
Research-creation proposes new forms of knowledge, many of which are not intelligible within current understandings of what knowledge might look like
- Practice Thinking (Don’t Be Afraid of Philosophy)
philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more abstract than its object. Deleuze, G. (1989) Cinema 2: The Time Image, p. 280
opening thought beyond its articulation in language toward ‘the movement of thought,’ engaging it at the immanent limit where it is still fully in the act.
epistemology(knowledge) vs. ontology(be) had a division, but should come back together
- Make Beyond the Object (Work the Work)
Consider that research-creation is less about an object than a mode of activity that is at its most interesting when it is constitutive of new processes.
self-taught, for bringing a new perspective
- Dwell in the Transversal (Keep Moving)
James calls this field of relations ‘pure experience,’ pure understood not in the sense of ‘purity’ but in the sense of immanent to actual relations. Pure experience is on the cusp of the virtual and the actual: in the experiential register of the not-quite-yet. It is of experience in the sense that it affectively contributes to how experience settles into what James calls ‘knower-known’ relations.
This is the force of radical empiricism, that it gives us a technique to work with the in-act at the heart of experience, providing subtle ways of composing with the shifting relations between the knower and the known, keeping in mind, of course, that the knower is not the human subject, but the way relations open themselves toward systems of subjectification
What is knower-known?
- Be Speculatively Pragmatic (Enjoy the Process)
Speculative pragmatism is an approach that is interested in the pragmatic force of the conditions of the here and now, while simultaneously remaining oriented to the as-yet-unknown.
Whitehead’s notion of the ‘superject,’ the subject of the event, is useful here.
Experience, it reminds us, is not constituted first and foremost of human relations.
- Invent Beyond Technique (Activate the More-Than)
Whitehead seeks to go beyond a Kantian definition of reason toward what he calls ‘the function of reason.’
reason has appetite, while method is safe-pie
Consider technique as propositional, where method is positioning.
Think technique as the act-in-repetition that hones the system, bringing rigor to it.
The key is to go to the heart of technique – close reading, engaged exploration of material, repeated daily practice – and then to go further still.
Technicity is the outdoing of technique. It is the modality for creating out of a system of techniques the more-than of system, the experience of the work’s opening itself to its excess, to what cannot be captured by repetition.
- Metamodel (Make It An Event)
asking how a making is a thinking in its own right, asking what that thinking might be able to do.
making
Whitehead inquires into the tendency to place thought outside experience. This, he suggests, is what is wrong with method. How might the fact of this occasion – what it does, how it feels, where it moves - be separated out by its thinking when thought itself ‘is a factor in the fact of experience’
thought as part of experience, rather than above
The transversal activation of the relational fields of thinking and doing is what I am calling research-creation.
Main proposal
If nonlinguistic practices are forms of knowledge in their own right, as research-creation makes apparent, and if knowledge has the habit of being valued according to the standards of language, how might research-creation assert its value, valued not for what it leaves behind but for its appetite to always begin anew.
Guattari’s concept of metamodelling
meta in the sense of mapping abstract formative conjunctions, in continuing variation, across varying deflections.
Metamodelling shouldn’t be thought as that which frames a process. It is radical empiricism in action. It is a technique for activating the lived abstractions in the event, for making felt the thinking at the heart of the doing.
It is radical empiricism in action, making felt the thinking, the lived abstractions
- Render Formative Forces (Create a Platform for Relation)
An event’s relational force cannot be reproduced. It remains, always, a singular movement. It has a velocity, uniquely played out from the initial conditions at hand.
Not predictable, and also no meaning in predicting.
- Create Altereconomies of Value (Value Emergence)
When the capitalist economy subsumes all other economies, it is not just capturing monetary value. It is capturing processes of individuation. It is capturing entire fields of emergent relation. It is capturing powers of becoming. Capitalism endeavors nothing less than the universal capture of forms of life. It subsumes them, sometimes gently, more often brutally, to techniques of relation dedicated to quantitative value-adding and accumulation
- Activate New Forms of Life (Invent at the Interstices)
Although the capitalist process creates the conditions for the singular emergence of forms of life, and feeds off their heterogeneity, it ultimately attributes no value to them as such. It is supremely indifferent to the qualitative richness that animates its field.
But if capitalism is also singularly inventive of new forms of relation, then despite this complicity there are emergent forms of life always on the make which might come to assert greater autonomy. The result can be leakage in the system – lines of flight toward a non-capitalist future.
Very hopeful.
Emergent life, lived less as value-adding than as a value in itself. Research-creation: the value produced is the process itself, is its very qualitative autonomy.
The fact that I’m researching with making, is in itself valuable, and the value lies in keeping the fire passed from myself to others, without extinguishing it. There’s less individual.