addressing the ‘anCient quarreL’to skhole is what pierre Bourdieu terms the scholastic point of view (Bourdieu 1998:
127): the objectifying and universalizing perspective associated with the academy
that, for Bourdieu, undermines practice because it turns it into an object for scholarly
dissection rather than for creation. We may insist that our options are not only the false
dichotomy of either compliance with the scholastic point of view, or a refusal to play
the game of knowledge, but to take a different position: to make our work in a way that
satisfies both aesthetic and scholarly imperatives. The research paradigm associated
with creative practice is likely to offer this way through, and allow academic creative
practitioners to marry their research and creative practice, or skhole and, say, techne?,
in the interests of producing knowledge in a different but demonstrably valid way. Yet,
for many within the system, and despite the increasing formal recognition of practice-
based research, the fit between arts practice and research output is still uncomfortable;
and, for many, a site of some anxiety. The ancient quarrel continues, then, to inform
and inflect practice in the academy.
the ancient quarrel: origins and genealogyit is of course plato who is usually invoked as the father of the problem of the relationship
between poetic and knowledge discourses. he wrote about this relationship, and more
generally about the role of poetry in society, across a number of his works. For ‘poetry’
here we read ‘creative writing’ more generally – writing committed to the turn of phrase,
the breath and pulse of a line, the imaginative presentation of an idea of actuality: writing
that, in plato’s terms, is designed to enchant the mind and the senses rather than only
delivering clear and reasoned communication.^2 But commentators often paint plato in
too negative a guise: in a number of places he wrote of the pleasures of poetry – and of
art more generally – and of the contributions the arts can make to society. The Phaedrus,
for instance, is not only a literary work in itself, but one that values the extra- rational.
socrates’ Third speech in that work is a paean to ‘madness’ – that is, a higher mode
of thinking informed by desire, the effect on the poet of the divine, which generates a
greater capacity to show and to know in the one so touched.^3 For socrates (channelled by
plato), creative and non- rational practices enable a contribution to knowledge because
the ‘possession and madness from the muses ... adorns ten thousand works of the
ancients and so educates posterity’ (plato 1924: phaedrus 244e–5a).
Thus, though many readers tend to recall only plato’s rejection of poetry as expressed
in the Republic, on the grounds of its capacity to lure citizens away from rational thought,
he clearly maintains a soft spot for creative practices and an awareness that the erotic
drive associated with the extra- rational may allow doors to be opened and knowledges
gained. even in the Republic, where he has socrates explicitly exclude poetry on the
grounds that ‘all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers’
(plato 1924: Republic 595b), he does so with a certain regret, writing:
let us assure our sweet friend and the sister arts of imitation that if she will only
prove her title to exist in a well- ordered state we shall be delighted to receive
her – we are very conscious of her charms; but we may not on that account
betray the truth.
(plato 1924: Republic 607d)