6

Ten Propositions for

Research-Creation
Erin Manning

1. Create New Forms of Knowledge (Embrace the

Non-Linguistic)

• Research-creation generates new forms of experience; it situates what

often seem like disparate practices, giving them a conduit for collec-
tive expression; it hesitantly acknowledges that normative modes of
inquiry and containment often are incapable of assessing its value;
it generates forms of knowledge that are extra-linguistic; it creates
operative strategies for a mobile positioning that take these new
forms of knowledge into account; it proposes concrete assemblages
for rethinking the very question of what is at stake in pedagogy, in
practice, and in collective experimentation.
• Research-creation proposes new forms of knowledge, many of which
are not intelligible within current understandings of what knowledge
might look like
• Consider that new processes will likely create new forms of knowl-
edge which may have no means of evaluation within current disci-
plinary models.

2. Practice Thinking (Don’t Be Afraid of Philosophy)

• How might a resituating of research-creation as a practice that thinks

provide us with the vocabulary to take seriously that ‘philosophical
theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more
abstract than its object. It is a practice of concepts, and we must
judge it in light of the other practices with which it interferes’?
(Deleuze, 1989: 280, translation modified).

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N. Colin et al. (eds.), Collaboration in Performance Practice

© The Editor(s) 2016
134 Ten Propositions for Research-Creation

• This will mean 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.
• Consider that making is a thinking in its own right, and conceptual-
ization a practice in its own right.
• Think of philosophy not as that which frames an already completed
process, but as that which has a history of launching its speculative
apparatus in relation to modes of knowing beyond its purview such
as artistic practice.

3. Make Beyond the Object (Work the Work)

• Take art in its medieval definition as ‘the way.’ If ‘art’ is understood as

a ‘way’ it is not yet about an object, about a form, or content.
• 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. To be constitutive of new processes it is necessary that
potential be tapped in advance of the work’s alignments with exist-
ing disciplinary methods and institutional structures (this includes
creative capital).
• Take seriously that generating new forms of knowledge implies
generating new forms of experience for which there are no pre-given
methodologies, for which there is no pre-determined value. What
research-creation can do is propose concrete assemblages for rethink-
ing the very question of what is at stake in pedagogy, in practice, and
in collective experimentation.

4. Dwell in the Transversal (Keep Moving)

• The unquantifiable within experience can only be taken into account

if we begin with a mode of inquiry that refutes initial categorization
• Instead of holding knowledge to what can already be ascertained
(and measured), let us, as William James suggests, find ways to
account not only for the terms of the analysis, but for all that trans-
versally weaves between them.
• Let us be up to the challenge of radical empiricism as that which
begins in the midst, in the mess of relations not yet organized into
terms such as ‘subject’ and ‘object.’ 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
 Erin Manning 135

contributes to how experience settles into what James calls ‘knower-

known’ relations.
• Note that to reorient the real to include that which can be expe-
rienced (rather than known as such) is to profoundly challenge
the notion that knowledge is based on quantification. [Return to
Proposition 1]
• 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.

5. Be Speculatively Pragmatic (Enjoy the Process)

• Speculative pragmatism is key to this process.

• Speculative pragmatism is an approach that is interested in the prag-
matic force of the conditions of the here and now, while simultane-
ously remaining oriented to the as-yet-unknown.
• A speculative pragmatism takes as its starting point a rigour of experi-
mentation. It is interested in the anarchy at the heart of all process,
and is engaged with the techniques that tune the anarchical into
new modes of knowledge. It is also interested in what escapes the
order, and especially in what this excess can do. It implicitly recog-
nizes that knowledge is invented in the escape, in the excess.
• Keep in mind that a speculatively pragmatic approach never begins
with a pre-formed subject.
• A speculatively pragmatic approach takes the event, not the subject,
as its point of departure. Its pragmatism is that it remains interested
and engaged with all that the event can do, which includes how it
positions itself in the field of relation. Whitehead’s notion of the
‘superject,’ the subject of the event, is useful here. The superject
emphasizes that the occasion of experience is itself what proposes
knower-known relations, resulting in a subject that is the subject
of the experience rather than a subject external to the experience.
Experience, it reminds us, is not constituted first and foremost of
human relations.

6. Invent Beyond Technique (Activate the More-Than)

• An account of method is inextricably linked to a belief in reason.

In this account, reason functions as an apparatus of capture – it
136 Ten Propositions for Research-Creation

diagnoses, situates, organizes, and ultimately it surveys, judges and

understands. Though methods are always open to change, their task
is to reasonably safeguard against the ineffable - that which cannot
be categorized cannot be made to account for itself, and so falls by
the wayside. Conscious knowledge is privileged over the prelinguistic
and the preconscious; writing is privileged over speech and certainly
over all other kinds of making. Method, however open it may seem
in a given context, serves to define knowledge to its core, disciplin-
ing the very question of what constitutes knowledge.
• Whitehead seeks to go beyond a Kantian definition of reason toward
what he calls ‘the function of reason.’ Whitehead sees reason not
as a content to be allied to a method, but as a cut that reorients the
field of experience. Reason, he suggests, is the process’s appetition for
difference. It is what pushes occasions of experience to distinguish
themselves from the welter of activity; it is the ‘counteragency which
saves the world’ from mere life. This cut is not an endpoint, not the
capture of a process. Reason here no longer belongs to Kant – it has
appetite. The cut is operative, it activates potential and sets things in
motion. Method, on the other hand, works as a stilling, as an end-
point. ‘The birth of methodology,’ Whitehead writes, ‘is in its essence
the discovery of a dodge to live’ (1929: 18).
• What we need are not methods for curating life-lived, but techniques
for life-living.
• Consider technique as propositional, where method is positioning.
• Define technique as what tunes the field of resonance of a system in
the making. Think technique as the act-in-repetition that hones the
system, bringing rigor to it.
• A technique has to be invented for each process, and as the process
changes, so does the technique. Technique builds repetition and dif-
ference into the act, opening a process to its potential to differentiate
itself as this or that.
• Technique is necessary to the art of thought – to thought in the act –
but it is not art in itself.
• 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.
• Techniques become methods if they are not outdone. 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.
 Erin Manning 137

• Technique and technicity coexist. Where technique engages the

repetitive practices that form a composing body – be it organic or
inorganic – technicity is a set of enabling conditions that exact from
technique the potential for co-composition. Think technicity as the
process that stretches out from technique, creating brief interludes
of the more-than of technique, gathering from the implicit the force
of form.
• This quality of the more-than that is technicity is ineffable – it can be
felt, but is difficult to articulate in language. [Return to Proposition 1]
• What research-creation can do is make technicity palpable across reg-
isters. It can work, as radical empiricism does, in the complex field of
conjunctions opened up by the transitions in experience, transitions
which attune to the more-than. [Return to Proposition 4]

7. Metamodel (Make It An Event)

• What the conjunction between research and creation does is make

apparent how modes of knowledge are always at cross-currents with
one another, actively reorienting themselves in transversal opera-
tions of difference, emphasizing the deflection at the heart of each
conjunction. The conjunction is at work, actively adjusting the
always immanent coupling of research and creation, asking how the
thinking in the act can be articulated, and what kind of analogous
experience it can be coupled with, asking how a making is a think-
ing in its own right, asking what that thinking might be able to do.
[Return to Propositions 1, 2, 4 and 5]
• A reorienting of thought as a practice in its own right is part of the
creation and evaluation (or, better said, valuing) of new forms of
knowledge.
• In the final pages of his account on the function of reason,
Whitehead writes: ‘the quality of an act of experience is largely deter-
mined by the factor of the thinking which it contains’ (1929: 80).
Challenging the habit of situating facts above thinking – ‘the basis
of all authority is the supremacy of fact over thought’ – 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 sepa-
rated out by its thinking when thought itself ‘is a factor in the fact
of experience’ (80).
• Thinking in the event suggests that the machinations of appetition
are at work, and that they have thoroughgoing effects.
138 Ten Propositions for Research-Creation

• The transversal activation of the relational fields of thinking and

doing is what I am calling research-creation.
• Research-creation does not need new methods. What it needs are
techniques that enable modes of valuing the process, techniques that
enable the tuning to technicity of a practice.
• 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 may be a place to start.
• Metamodelling makes felt lines of formation, starting not from one
model in particular, but actively taking into account the plurality
of models vying for fulfillment. Metamodelling is against method,
active in its refutation of pre-existing modes of existence, 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.
• As Guattari writes: ‘metamodeling de-links modeling with both its
representational foundation and its mimetic reproduction. It softens
signification by admitting a-signifying forces into a model’s terri-
tory... What was hitherto inaccessible is given room to manifest
and project itself into new and creative ways and combinations.
Metamodelling is in these respects much more precarious than mod-
eling, less and less attached to homogeneity, standard constraints,
and the blinkers of apprehension’ (2008, n.p).

8. Render Formative Forces (Create a Platform for Relation)

• An event by definition activates the field of relation. An event is how

an ecology comes to be known as such. There is nothing outside the
event.
• 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. It is potentializing, and renders poten-
tial. It follows the arc of a tendency working itself out. [Return to
Proposition 6]
 Erin Manning 139

• Tendencies are as singular as an event’s generative force. They can be

iteratively reactivated, to variable effect. But each event will activate
its own tendency. [Return to Proposition 5]
• If you follow the technicity of singular tendings, you will be event-
fully setting into motion a metamodelling of emergence. [Return to
Proposition 7]
• A tendency, metamodeled, is an incipient assemblage (a platform for
relation).
• Consider that meta-modellings of generative process are deterrito-
rializing. They move tendentially across institutionalizations, and
morph them. An event of metamodelling must be self-expiring. It
must creatively find ways to affirm its generative power in its passing.
• Invent techniques that assist in allowing the event to move toward
and beyond its formative forces. Follow them to see what they can
do. [Return to Proposition 4]

9. Create Altereconomies of Value (Value Emergence)

• We remain held by existing methods because we remain incapable

(or unwilling) to evaluate knowledge on its own incipient terms,
or better, to engage productively with new concepts of valuation.
[Return to Proposition 1 and 7]
• In a formal economy, valuation is quantitative, and is derived using
conventional measures.
• Monetary economy can mean only one thing: the capitalist econ-
omy. The capitalist economy taps into all other formal and infor-
mal economies in a continuously varied attempt to annex them to
itself, which is to say, to its particular forms of formal valuation and
indexing. The capitalist economy is not only a universal process of
subsuming all forms of value to monetary valuation. It also formally
builds into its definition of value an imperative to quantitative value-
adding. Capital is by definition money that grows more money. The
capitalist economy is formally dedicated to quantitative growth, over
and above all other values. Capitalist techniques of relation are with-
out exception mechanisms of accumulation.
• There are also informal economies. These revolve around assessments
of value that are directly qualitative in nature, and therefore vaguer
and less easily indexed. This kind of valuation is often called prestige-
value. A formal economy also generates its own prestige-value as
a spin-off of its quantitive valuations, or it captures prestige-value, a
140 Ten Propositions for Research-Creation

value produced by informal economies the formal economy taps into

and annexes to itself.
• All of this matters for the experimental practice of research-creation
because the universal subsumption of all other economies, formal
and informal, under the capitalist economy amounts to a capture of
every species of event – including their respective fields of emergent
expressibility, the heterogeneity of their co-composing polyrhythms,
their improvisational power to repeat singularly with variation, their
tendential arcs, their cresting expression on social surfaces of record-
ing that constitute evolving genres of co-activity.
• When the capitalist economy subsumes all other economies, it is not
just capturing monetary value. It is capturing processes of individu-
ation. It is capturing entire fields of emergent relation. It is captur-
ing 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.

10. Activate New Forms of Life (Invent at the Interstices)

• It is important not to mistake this capture for a homogenization.

The forms of life captured by the capitalist process produce value by
distinguishing themselves from each other. Capitalism is as singular-
izing as it is subsuming. The issue is that the singularization is subject
to competition in a way that foregrounds quantitative measures of
success over the richness of qualitative diversity. The heterogeneity
of forms of life are important only to the extent that they add capital
value. Although the capitalist process creates the conditions for the
singular emergence of forms of life, and feeds off their heterogene-
ity, it ultimately attributes no value to them as such. It is supremely
indifferent to the qualitative richness that animates its field.
• If capitalism is a universal process of capture, there is no simple way
out. All activities are at some point, in some way, taken up in it. 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.
• An altereconomics of research-creation, understood as a practice of
the event, is informal. It is unquantifiable. Its valuations directly
concern qualities of life. But the affirmation of qualities of experience
 Erin Manning 141

refuses to settle around prestige-value. Its process is autonomous in

the sense that it is self-propagating. What propagates is an evolving
form-of-life that partners thinking and making at the emergent level
where they already come co-causally together. This is a polyrhythmic
economy of germinal forms attuning – of forces of life finding new
collective expression not for what it leaves behind but for its appetite
to always begin anew.1
• 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.

Note
1. Propositions 9 and 10 are taken almost verbatim from ‘Thought in the
Act’ in Erin Manning and Brian Massumi Thought in the Act: Passages in the
Ecology of Experience (Minnesota University Press, 2014).

Bibliography
Deleuze, G. (1989) Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis: Minnesota University
Press).
Guattari, F. in Genosko, Gary and Murphie, Andrew “Metamodels” in Fibreculture
Journal, 12, (2008). www.fibreculture.org
Manning, E. and M., Brian (2014) Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of
Experience (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press).
Whitehead, A.N. (1929) The Function of Reason (New York: Free Press).