Dark practices of writing: disuniting intuition from the unknown as “free range possibility”

Intuition occupies a privileged position in the practices of western creative writers that often conceals and perpetuates hegemonic power relations. We argue that these relations are the product of a powerful rhetoric linking intuition to an external and transcendental origin. While the language used to describe intuition is historically and culturally contingent, it is frequently associated with terms like unknown, mysterious, divine and darkness. To set the scene for our focus on the emergence of Practice-Led Research (PLR), we briefly survey earlier theories of intuition. Reviving the connection between intuition and transcendentalism, Graeme Sullivan (2009) proposes that PLR creates new knowledge through writing that moves from the unknown – configured as “an open landscape of free-range possibility” (p. 48) – into the known. Alongside other PLR scholars, Sullivan merges intuition with the project of connecting the creative arts to the knowledge-production imperatives of academia. This article focuses on how the introduction of a largely uninterrogated version of intuition into PLR threatens its social justice value. Countering this, Hélène Cixous’ reading of the writer’s relationship with darkness inspires an alternative approach to intuition, which actively disrupts the hegemonic power relations and associated oppressive discourses sustained by transcendentalism.