AGAINST METHOD

Some of the major disasters of mankind have been produced by the narrowness of men with a good methodology. — Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason

The question of inter- and transdisciplinarity has recently opened up in academic circles to what we in Canada call "research-creation." Research-creation, also called "art-based research," was adopted into academic language through the very question of methodology. Starting out as a funding category that would enable artists teaching in universities who didn't have PhDs to apply for large academic grants, the apparition of research-creation as a category was more instrumental than inventive. For weren't artists already involved in research? Wasn't art practice always engaged in forms of inquiry? Wasn't it a mode of knowledge in its own right? The issue was not, it seems to me, one of simply acknowledging that artists were also researchers, but an institutional tweaking of that already-existent research category into modes of knowledge more easily recognized by the academic institution. To be an artist-researcher would now mean to be able to organize the delineations between art practice and research methodology for the purposes of a grant that would then, inasmuch as grants ordinarily function this way, orient the research toward "academic" aims.

The issue here is complex. It touches not only on the question of how art itself activates and constitutes new forms of knowledge in its own right but, perhaps most importantly, incites us to inquire into the very question of how practices produce knowledge, and whether those forms of knowledge can engagingly be captured within the strictures of methodological ordering. While I believe that this is a question that could be posed to all forms of knowledge (following philosophers like Henri Bergson, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead, who all, in their own ways, inquire into the methodological frameworks of science, psychology, and philosophy), here I will focus strictly on the question of research-creation and its relationship to what Moten and Harney call "study," emphasizing researchcreation's inherent transversality.

Unlike the definition used by Canadian funding agencies and propagated in many of our institutions, which sees the research component as extra to the artistic practice, thereby emphasizing what has come to be known as the theory-practice split, I would like to take seriously that research-creation in its hyphenation of research with creation proposes singular forms of knowledge which may not be intelligible within current understandings of what knowledge might look like. Taking as my inspiration the myriad colleagues and students whose work has moved me to rethink how knowledge is crafted, and taking also my own practice as a starting point, I would like to suggest that research-creation does much more than what the funding agencies had in store for it: it generates new forms of experience; it tremulously stages an encounter for disparate practices, giving them a conduit for collective 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 extralinguistic; 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. And, in so doing, it creates an opening for what Moten and Harney conceptualize as the undercommons: it creates the conditions for new ways of encountering study — forms and forces of intellectuality that cut across normative accounts of what it means to know.

New forms of knowledge require new forms of evaluation, and even more so, new ways of valuing the work we do. In the case of research-creation, which inevitably involves a transversal engagement with different disciplines, this incites a rethinking of how artistic practice reopens the question of what these disciplines — anthropology, philosophy, art history, cinema, communications, biology, physics, engineering — can do. Here, my focus will be on philosophy, which has a history of launching its speculative apparatus in relation to artistic practice. How, I will ask, can the rethinking of how knowledge is created in the context of artistic practice become an opening to thinking philosophy itself as a practice of research-creation? How, following Gilles Deleuze, 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" (1989: 280, translation modified)?

To make this move requires orienting the concept of art toward the transversality of study, thereby tuning making toward a practice of incipient thought. This involves a rethinking of the concept of thought itself. To follow through with this proposition, it will be necessary, as I do in chapter 2, to turn to the medieval definition of art — defined as "the way," "the manner" — locating art not at the level of the finished object, but in its trajectory. As regards thought, it will be necessary to reorient it to the relational field of the occasion, refraining from delimiting it to predominant notions of intellectuality which tend to place thought squarely within the linguistic limits of intelligibility. Staging a critique of neurotypicality as begun in the introduction, it will also be necessary to undo thought of its dependence on the human subject. This will mean opening thought toward the movement of thought, engaging it at the immanent limit, where it is still fully in the act.

Four propositions to begin:

1. If "art" is understood as a "way" it is not yet about an object, about a form, or content.

2. Making is a thinking in its own right, and conceptualization a practice in its own right.

3. Research-creation is not about objects. It is a mode of activity that is at its most interesting when it is constitutive of new processes. This can only happen if its potential is tapped in advance of its alignments with existing disciplinary methods and institutional structures (this includes creative capital).

4. New processes will likely create new forms of knowledge that may have no means of evaluation within current disciplinary models.

IMMANENT CRITIQUE 1 — ON MATTER

In Modes of Thought, Whitehead protests what he calls "the bifurcation of nature" (1938: 30). The tendency to separate out the concept of matter from its perception or to make a constitutive difference between "nature...