Notes from

Erin Manning's Against Method

From Non-Representational Methodologies (2015), edited by Phillip Vannini

Kerem Ozan Bayraktar · February 2026

Rigid research methods can actually prevent the discovery of new knowledge.

When we decide in advance what counts as knowledge (what categories to use, what questions to ask, what forms the answer should take) we can only find what we already expect to find.

Definition

Research-creation combines artistic practice with academic research.

The term emerged in Canada as a funding category to help artists in universities apply for academic grants. But Manning argues it's much more than an administrative label.

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

The creative process itself generates new knowledge, knowledge that often can't be fully captured in words. When a painter mixes colors, when a dancer improvises movement, when a writer finds rhythm in a sentence, thinking is happening in the act itself.

This isn't anti-intellectual. It's recognizing that there are forms of intelligence and understanding that operate beyond conscious, verbal reasoning.

What does method actually do?

• Organizes knowledge into pre-set categories before exploration begins
• Judges work by existing standards of what counts as valid
• Excludes what doesn't fit the system. If it can't be categorized, it "doesn't exist"
• Deadens the force of change that animates a process, leaving analysis with "still-born concepts"

Methods become "the safeguard against the ineffable." If something cannot be categorized, it cannot be made to account for itself, and therefore it does not exist.

Whitehead's Critique

The bifurcation of nature splits experience into two separate realms.

Example: When we see a fire, we experience warmth and redness. But science describes carbon molecules and radiant energy. Traditional method often only counts what can be measured (the molecules) and dismisses the felt quality as merely "subjective."

Both are real. We need approaches that don't separate the felt quality of experience from its material reality.

William James

Radical empiricism starts in the midst of experience.

Instead of beginning with pre-formed categories like "subject" and "object," James proposes starting in the mess of relations not yet organized.

The relationships between things (the "and," "with," "near," "towards") are as real as the things themselves.

Manning proposes technique instead of method.

Technique changes as bodies change, environments shift, and new possibilities emerge. The painter-paint-canvas ecology is always shifting.

Whitehead on Reason

The function of reason is different from a definition of reason.

Traditional view: Reason is "the godlike faculty which surveys, judges and understands" from outside.

Whitehead's view: Reason is what creates self-discipline within "the welter of the process." It's implicated in the process, not outside it.

Whitehead's Concept

Appetition is the drive within a process toward expression.

Think of it as the internal momentum that pushes creative work forward. Not a plan imposed from outside, but an energy emerging from within the process itself.

Whitehead: "This urge is appetition. It is emotional purpose: it is agency."

Processes have their own direction and intelligence. Research should work with this, not against it. The urge is part of the process, and it affects where the analysis can take us.

Thought is not separate from doing. It is embedded in the creative act.

Traditional view: First you have facts, then you think about them. Thought comes after experience and organizes it from outside.

Manning's view: "The quality of an act of experience is largely determined by the factor of the thinking which it contains." Thought is a generative momentum within the process.

Much important thinking happens below conscious awareness, in rhythm, feeling, intuition, and bodily knowledge.

Manning's Four Propositions

Manning proposes speculative pragmatism.

The key question shifts: not "what does this mean?" but "what can this do?"

This means taking the urge of appetition seriously, asking what thought-feeling does in this instance, inquiring into modes of existence generated by the act of engagement, and seeing where these may lead.

Technique: Close Reading

This "hypothetical sympathy" involves turning to what the work does and asking it to open itself to its own field of relations. How are these relations posited? What do they do? Where does thought-feeling escape existing forms of knowledge?

This unfolds before asking "where do I stand?" That question is often the least interesting one, since it stops the process and aligns the work to existing disciplinary methods and institutional power.

The challenge: how do we evaluate work that produces new forms of knowledge?

Research-creation doesn't need new methods. What it needs is a re-accounting of what writing can do in the process of thinking-doing.

At its best, writing is an act, alive with the rhythms of uncertainty and the openings of speculative pragmatism. But universities often require documents that describe, orient, and defend: documents that facilitate evaluation rather than continuing the creative process.

Guattari's Contribution

Metamodeling asks: "What models are already shaping you?"

Instead of imposing a new model, metamodeling examines how existing models operate and experiments with alternatives.

The criterion of truth comes when metamodeling transforms into self-modeling: when you find your own way through rather than following someone else's map.

Techniques must be reinvented at every turn. Thought must always leap.

At times, in retrospect, what developed might seem like a method. But repeating it will never bring it back. Each situation demands its own approach.

This is the leap Bergson describes: "He who throws himself into the water, having known only the resistance of the solid earth, will immediately be drowned if he does not struggle against the fluidity of the new environment." Only by entering the water do we learn to swim.

Discussion Questions

1. Can artistic practice really be a form of "thinking"? What would that mean for how we understand intelligence?
2. What's lost when we require all research to follow established methods? What's gained?
3. How might we evaluate work that produces "new forms of knowledge" that don't fit existing categories?
4. How does this apply to your own creative or research practice? What "models" are shaping you?

Sources

• Manning, E. (2015). Against Method. In P. Vannini (Ed.), Non-Representational Methodologies. Routledge.
• Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The Function of Reason. Beacon Press.
• Whitehead, A. N. (1938). Modes of Thought. Free Press.
• Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and Reality. Free Press.
• James, W. (1996). Essays in Radical Empiricism. Nebraska University Press.
• Guattari, F. (1996). The Guattari Reader. Ed. Gary Genosko. Blackwell.
• Bergson, H. (1998). Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. Dover.
• Nietzsche, F. (2003). Writings from the Late Notebooks. Cambridge University Press.
• Russell, B. (1996). The Spirit of Solitude. Simon and Schuster.