Engaging with creativity in research through Bergson

Abstract or Summary

As teaching creative practice becomes part of education, it is timely to offer a critique of the kind of intellectual frameworks typically used to explain and evaluate creativity, for example the kind of research questions typically asked of a student commencing a creative project at postgraduate level. These questions are typically analytical, say, around the conventions of a genre and how they can be used to produce new work, but they fail in my view to acknowledge creativity as a process, analytical questions being more suitable to assess a finished work, not one that hasn’t even started yet, or is in process. The conventional academic wisdom is that the “new” is a revoicing or recombining of the familiar, but in this formulation, the “new” remains essentially untheorised. I use concepts around creativity as novelty from Henri Bergson, such as duration and movement, to offer a critique of systems theories of creativity (Toynbee, McIntyre and Csikszentmihalyi) that seek to reduce the creative process to a series of “choices” between different pre-­‐existing creative possibilities. In its place I propose a focus on novelty, duration and movement as aspects of creative process.