Beyond the mirror: on experiential knowing as research mode in creative writing

Inherent in ‘practice-led research’ is the dialectic between practice and research. For some time, this dialectic has been problematised in varying ways and to varying degrees across the creative arts in terms that are reminiscent of Deleuze’s ‘disjunctive synthesis’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 14). Further, creative writing has mostly theorised its practice and research according to models offered by the visual arts, thereby ignoring its own ‘domain specificity’ (Baer 2012). This paper, however, posits that creative writing is a way of apprehending, knowing and being in the world; and more specifically it functions simultaneously as a perspective, an epistemology and an ontology specific to writing. It argues that our conceptual tools need to be made over in order to fit creative practice in writing: rather than being in thrall to the regime of images, these tools should enable us to deal specifically with writing in relation to the experiential and to subjectivity – that is, from the inside out. Reading Kristeva’s central argument in Revolution in poetic language (1974) against the grain, I reassess the relevance of the term ‘practice-led research’ for creative writing, asking how the poetic text can challenge the dominant paradigm and how it can be considered as research. More pointedly, building on Kristeva’s theorisation of the semiotic chora and on Lakoff’s work on metaphor, I ask what the epistemological thrust of creative writing might be, particularly if it is non-mimetic or experimental and hence destabilises polysemy and the syntactic function. I do so by questioning the role of sign, image and metaphor in the process of knowledge production from within an experiential practice which mobilises the unconscious, perception, pre-language and language. In such light, creative writing is a form of research in its own right which triangulates two seemingly mutually exclusive discourses encompassing (tacit) knowing and (explicit) knowledge.