The social life of creative methods: Filmmaking, fabulation and recovery

In this article we consider the theoretical and methodological implications of Deleuzian fabulation for research on recovery from drugs and alcohol as an alternative way of making and doing methods in sociology. The article draws on data produced as part of an ongoing interdisciplinary research collaboration, begun in 2019, with the visual artist and filmmaker Melanie Manchot, social scientists Nicole Vitellone and Lena Theodoropoulou, and people in recovery from drugs and alcohol engaged in the production of Manchot's first feature film STEPHEN. This project attends to the methodological practice of filmmaking as a way of thinking with and alongside colleagues from divergent disciplines about the role of methods, concepts and practices for confronting and resisting processes of stigmatisation. Investigating the research participants' engagement with Manchot's filmmaking practices in STEPHEN as a way to tell stories otherwise, our goal is to engage the social life of creative methods and in doing so, propose an alternative narrative of recovery. In this investigation, we use the term fabulation as developed by Deleuze. In Cinema II, Deleuze makes a distinction between the cinema of reality, where storytelling derives from the camera's objective gaze and a given character's subjective actions, and cinema verité where the boundaries between fiction and reality are blurred. In cinema verité, the camera is not an objective observer but an active producer that keeps reminding the viewer that the on-screen characters are neither fully real, nor fictional. Attending to Deleuze's description of fabulation as it emerges through this process of challenging the existence of 'real' identities in cinema, and beyond, we investigate the use of cinematic devices and fabulative processes of filmmaking in the production of STEPHEN. In doing so, the article develops a methodological account of the activity of fabulation as a material and embodied practice that resists processes of stigmatisation. Through this interdisciplinary project, we propose a new arts-based research agenda which points to the ways in which fabulation as a minor mode of recovery concerns an engagement with the creation of a people to come.