14

insighT and RigouR:

a FReudo-laCanian

appRoaCh

Malcolm Quinn

Introduction

The term ‘creative practitioner’ facilitates a certain kind of research, one that unites the
notion of a level playing field for art and design production, with an analysis of creative
lifeworlds from within. however, the universally applicable notion of the creative
practitioner, which seems so distinct from the elites and coteries of genius, nonetheless
continues to introduce ideas of creative exceptionalism, even at the highest levels of
analysis. in 2007 in the uK, for example, an ahRC Research Review on ‘practice-
led Research in art, design and architecture’ asserted that ‘The argument that
professionals and teachers in ada [art design and architecture] need an approach
to research that does not undermine their identity as creative practitioners is hard to
refute’ (Rust et al. 2007: 48). a crucial argument that i will advance in this chapter, is
that a psychoanalytic orientation shows that this ‘irrefutable’ assertion can indeed be
refuted. The ahRC Research Review shows that a challenge still needs to be offered to
the special or protected status accorded to the self- identity of the creative practitioner
as a ‘given’ of arts- based research, despite the claim of macleod and holdridge in this
volume, that current thinking has moved beyond theory as against practice (Chapter
20). i am however in agreement with macleod and holdridge’s thesis that ‘arts
research relates to the experience of the researcher whose world is drawn into the
research project and within which, the formulation of the research is relative to the
subject positioning of the researcher’. psychoanalysis offers a specific investigative
orientation, in which the act of making an address to unconscious thought as an analyst,
researcher or investigator affects the construction of self- identity. a psychoanalytic
approach emphasizes how the act of becoming an investigator places the researcher in
a particular relationship to knowledge. assuming the mandate of an artist- researcher
within a psychoanalytic aegis would mean that one was inviting the possibility of a new
understanding of the artist and a new conception of the art object. This is why most
‘applied psychoanalysis’ in art and design is not psychoanalysis at all, since it leaves
existing relations of subject, object and practice intact. The position that i advance in