... my use of non-vehicular language is not just meandering prose.

In looking at a survey of scientific literature on mycorrhizal networks — or fungal-root systems — the vocabulary resonates with much of that used by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, not to mention several concepts in my artistic research practice. Using words like physical, physiological, transfer, establishment, survival, growth, community, diversity, stability, spatial, temporal, and complex, Simard et al. explain how mycorrhizal networks are prime examples of ‘complex adaptive systems,’ since they establish passageways for communication ‘that lead to self-organization and emergent properties in ecosystems’ (2012: 39). The nuts and bolts of how mycorrhizal networks literally function in nature are certainly beyond the scope of this exposition, but watching introductory videos from the BBC (2018) and PBS (Rothschild 2017) easily sparks an imaginative and conceptual understanding of the complex interconnections in a metaphorical methodology.

The mycorrhizal network is the breathing that dances with and between the roots of the annuals, perennials, and rhizomes of my life and work. All of these dance themselves, next to each other, and in tandem until their unique voices become apparent in singing. But the singing cannot exist without the dancing and neither can exist without the breathing.

Complexity can often appear messy and, in After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (2004), John Law opens his arguments with a provocative question: ‘How might method deal with mess?’ (2004: 2). It provokes not because of the knee-jerk response to the question — obviously, we employ methods to avoid mess — but because Law implies that avoiding mess is not always what is most appropriate or interesting. While the sciences deal quite well with ‘provisionally stable realities’, Law notes that ‘alongside such phenomena the world is also textured in quite different ways’ and that ‘academic methods of inquiry don’t really catch these’ (2004: 2). With ‘academic method’ still dominating much scholarship, we could mistake ‘after method’ as another concept to include in the ‘post-’ family (alongside structuralism, colonialism, etc.); although these have clearly influenced Law’s thinking, he aims ‘to broaden method, to subvert it, but also to remake it’ (2004: 9). For this reason, I see ‘after method’ more appropriately as a continuation or nuanced version of method. In this way, ‘after method’ may be akin to afterthought, both in its reflective way of working as well as in its relation to thought itself. In Law’s words: ‘The proof of new ways of thinking about method […] lies in their results and their outcomes, rather than in their antecedents’ (2004: 8). 

One of the key rationales for Law’s proposals is that ‘methods, their rules, and even more methods’ practices, not only describe but also help to produce the reality that they understand’ (2004: 5). While standard research methods ‘are often extremely good at what they do, they are badly adapted to the study of the ephemeral, the indefinite and the irregular’ (Law 2004: 4). It is not surprising, then, that artist-researchers have become increasingly wary of them.

The issue here is complex. It not only touches on the question of how art itself activates and constitutes new forms of knowledge in its own right but also, 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. (Manning 2016: 52)

Published more than a decade after Law’s book, Manning’s ‘Against Method’ (2016) takes Law’s argument to a new level of provocation as it specifically relates to the field of artistic research. As suggested earlier, the centrality of practice in artistic research often assumes a preponderance of ‘the ephemeral, the indefinite and the irregular’ (Law 2004: 4), not only in the practices themselves but also in the types of knowledge they engage with and produce. Manning’s use of ‘against’ points to a more radical position by rejecting expectations that artistic research inquiries ‘fit in’ to established approaches, or baseless assumptions that artist-researchers would benefit from these. In fact, I have previously argued it might be the other way around (Skelton 2013) while educator and scholar E. Bryon has minced fewer words in accusing: ‘what Performance Studies has taken from Performance Practice is profound and what it has given back is negligible and difficult’ (2018: 27). Manning highlights the processual nature of artistic practice and research and offers four preliminary propositions of why one might be ‘against method’:

1. If ‘art’ is understood as a ‘way’ it is not yet about an object, a form, or content.
2. Making is a thinking in its own right, and conceptualization a practice in its own right. 
3. Research-creation [artistic research] 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 happen only if its potential is tapped in advance of its alignments with existing disciplinary methods and institutional structures.
4. New processes will likely create new forms of knowledge that may have no means of evaluation within current disciplinary models. (Manning 2016: 53–54)

With such ideas in mind, Manning clarifies not only the desire but also the need in artistic research to begin an inquiry ‘in the midst, in the mess of relations not yet organized into terms such as “subject” and “object”’ and refuting ‘the opposition between real and unreal, suggesting that the quality of experience — its redness and warmth — is as real as its molecular composition’ (2016: 55).

Manning’s ‘Against Method’ begins with the claim … [next page]