The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

voi Ces

This is not a position held by creative writing researchers alone; as John dewey
wrote over a century ago:

pretty much all students [of philosophy] are convinced that we can reduce

knowledge neither to a set of associated sensations, nor yet to a purely rational

system of relations of thought.

(dewey 1972 [1897]: 4)

But then, showing his platonic inflection, he continues:

Knowledge is judgment, and judgment requires both a material of sense

perception and an ordering, regulating principle, reason; so much seems

certain, but we do not get any further. sensation and thought themselves seem

to stand out more rigidly opposed to each other in their own natures than

ever. Why both are necessary, and how two such opposed forces co- operate

in bringing about the unified result of knowledge, becomes more and more of

a mystery.

(dewey 1972 [1897]: 5)

still, he does not reject the sensate, as plato/socrates did; he merely admits to some
confusion about how the affectual domain that is art can ally with the rational domain
that is science to produce what constitutes knowledge.
We can not only follow dewey’s lead, but also extend his thinking, pointing out that
the insights generated by the sensate domain have their own validity in knowledge
terms, though we may not yet be entirely clear about how the two domains intersect.
musician Brian eno suggests a way forward in this respect, one that affords space for
sensate and rational encounters with both the material and the ephemeral worlds:

as soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren’t clear when

it was just floating around in your head ... in organising a thought in any way

an unsuspected dimension is added to it. it’s exactly the same way with music.

You work on a piece of music, you put in certain ingredients, and suddenly

they react in a way you hadn’t predicted. if you’re alert to that reaction, that’s

what you work from.

(eno and grant 1982)

in this insight, eno comes close to the position held by the poet, Wallace stevens:
that what is needed is close observation in order to achieve:

the imaginative transfiguration of the real through poetic saying, a language

that does not take flight from the real, but which both adheres to the real most

closely and resists it in the supreme fictions that it writes.

(Critchley 2004: 119)

By making work that is based on observation and attention, whether in poetry, prose
or the plastic arts, we are able to examine and ‘imaginatively transfigure the real’, and