Creative research: A radical subjectivity?

Abstract

The struggles around notions of creative research are in some ways engaged with thereturn of the subject in the face of post/structuralist moves that have tried to evacuate ordissolve subjectivity, or reduce it to an element in a structure. What this kind ofsubjectivity is, and how to define it, seems up for grabs. What I suggest is that creativeresearch is trying to stretch beyond its boundaries by advocating for a knowledgeproducingsubjectivity that rejects the methodological positivism of so-called real research (which in many ways is centred upon the presupposition of a transcendental subject), while negotiating the discourses of postmodernity and post/structuralism which are suspicious of, or radically dismiss, subjectivity as a category. I suggest that creative research might be a radical gesture, indeed a radical subjectivity, whose possibilities as critical/creative practices reveal the human content of the seemingly autonomous forms which are the outcome of the fragmentary world of capitalist social relations.