Keywords

Creativity and dialogism are broad concepts derived from different areas of knowledge and which have been found in different scientific arenas. These conceptual approaches are due to the richness and resonances of Bakhtin’s philosophical enterprise and his Circle of interlocutors (Volóchinov and Medvedev) in the Human Sciences. The Bakhtin Circle’s dialogical thought emerged from issues originating in literary criticism; reflection on the relationships between author and work; author and audience, as well as the inescapable responsibility to the act of creation; and that, consequently, through the verticality of his historical-materialist reflection, he promoted a philosophy of Being and becoming with others.

The work of these authors is inscribed in the history of Western thought not only for its linguistic legacy, but, in particular, for its dense and rich philosophical contribution that portrays a deep passion for the debate of ideas and for language as a constituent of Being (Faraco, 2017). In addition to the contributions of a philosophical and linguistic nature, Bakhtin’s ideas and the Circle have produced an impact when appropriated by different human and social sciences, often interpreted in a simplistic or even reduced way (Fiorin, 2020). The concept of dialogism, central to the Bakhtinian work, is empowered in current times, in addition to exerting a fertilizing force for new ideas and conceptions about the processes of human constitution through language, impregnating the sciences of education, psychology, sociology and other areas. There is an enormous attraction in Bakhtin’s ideas, which have seduced psychology in a very special way. We already have an emerging dialogical psychology, which begins to find space and interlocution when we discuss human development and its intricate dynamics and processes (Guimarães, 2019; Hermans et al., 1992; Lopes-de-Oliveira et al., 2020; Simão, 2010). The investigation of creative processes has also been feeding from this source.

Dialogism and research on creativity meet when: (1) we identify that Bakhtinian writing is born from the inquiry into the conditions and meaning of authorship in the play of forces of enunciative traditions involved in the most diverse forms of authoritarian stereotypy of social dynamics; and (2) when recognizing creativity as a phenomenon that necessarily implies, in a very particular way, the emergence of novelty and its alteritarian nature (recognition, strangeness, decentering), more or less subversive of sociocultural dispositions. Accordingly, the approach that sustains this book is given not only by ethically chosen epistemological affiliation, but also by the inexorably intersubjective, relational and situated quality of the creative process.

In this chapter, we intend to carry out a difficult task, which is to provoke an interlocution between the philosophical knowledge of dialogism and the scientific field of cultural psychology of creativity (Freitas, 2013). By inviting readers to reflect on the dialogical dynamics that constitute the creative processes, we open a space for communication between knowledge from different parenting. When we appropriate the Bakhtinian concepts as knowledge constituted in the philosophical and linguistic fields, displacing them for the scientific understanding of complex psychological processes, such as creativity, we run several risks, such as reducing principles and concepts or even (re)producing theoretical and methodological inadequacies from the meeting of two distinct paths of knowledge construction. And we dare even more. It is our intention to bring Bakhtin’s notions into a dialogical encounter/confrontation, internalized by psychology and creativity studies, in an attempt to build intra and inter-theory bridges that saturate and fertilize investigations in the field of the emergence of the novel. This discussion will not leave aside the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the study of creativity from a dialogical perspective and its main premises about the place of alterity in the creation processes, not only of cultural artifacts and products, but especially in the construction of more solidary and utopically democratic ways of living.

For Bakhtin, science and philosophy are different fields of knowledge (Bakhtin, 1999; Faraco, 2017). The dialogical philosophies of language and authorship are critical of scientific positivism. In the ethical-responsible Bakhtinian perspective, the dichotomous separation between the world of life and science, between art and life, and even between life and science, are ways of making each of these spheres of culture sterile by subtracting their world of relationship, their tensions, their imbricated dimensions that are at the same time irreducible to each other. The desimplification of the responsibility that each one of these fields has for the other would be a form of epistemopathy, of becoming ill in the ways of knowing and responding for a world that is constituted by the holistic complexity of relationships. The atomizing mechanism of phenomena would be a way of science not having to deal with the concreteness of life and its transformation process. “It is easier to create without responding for life and easier to live without art” (Bakhtin, 2011, p. 32).

His work underlines an option for hermeneutic thought, through interpretive gestures of human phenomena, without any identification with the traditional scientific format of knowledge production. His intellectual work was aligned, much more, with what he called a “Science of the Spirit” (Faraco, 2017), an ontologically different science from the traditional one, with distinct objects and modes of inquiry far from the mathematized and positivist knowledge of science in general. Bakhtin did not live long enough to witness the emergence of idiographic and qualitative sciences occurring in recent decades (Brinkmann et al., 2014), which gave us arguments and tools for the discussion intended in this work.

Idiography is a perspective of science that understands the process of generalization as centered on the continuous and discrete process of changes inherent to the singularity of phenomena (Salvatore & Valsiner, 2010). Seen in these terms, it is understood that the regularities, repetitions and grammars with universalizing potential only exist concretely in the transforming uniqueness of the individual who acts and constitutes a certain form of life. In the same way, a given way of life only gains its historical-dialectical concreteness through the actions of its actors.

With the consolidation of qualitative and idiographic epistemologies, especially in the field of human development sciences, the research scenario and theoretical knowledge became attractive and permeable to new ideas about the processes of constitution of the human being, welcoming plural theoretical and methodological positions. In current times, Bakhtin, perhaps, would not perceive such a distance between the ontological object of his interpretive philosophy and the ontogenetic conceptions of individual of semiotic approaches to human development (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000; Vygotsky, 1978). It is a question for which we will not have a response, but it encourages us to delve into the exercise of extraction and displacement from the original dialogism to the constitutive sociogenetic dimension of the human subject. Considering that our object of discussion, in this text, arises from the need to explain and understand a dialogical view of creativity, we will start from the conception of creativity practiced here and the heritage that we have to take advantage of Bakhtin’s work and his Circle.

What Creativity Are We Talking About?

Creativity is a topic of great interest to humanity. The arts, literature, cinema and other aesthetic and artistic expressions have been working with this human dimension for centuries, exploring it as an actional field of its material and symbolic work. Psychology and other human sciences have been discussing this phenomenon from different epistemic, theoretical and conceptual positions and views (Neves-Pereira, 2018). The conception of creativity that we will adopt in this work emerges from the sociogenetic bases of human development (Glăveanu, 2014, 2015; Glăveanu et al., 2015; Vygotsky, 1978, 2004) that understand this phenomenon as a superior psychological function (see Vygotsky, 2009) and also as a social, subjective, material, culturally mediated, dialogical, situated, contextual, relational and developmental process (Glăveanu et al., 2019). A broad-spectrum concept, such as creativity, makes a punctual, synthetic, summarized or even consensual definition very difficult. The creative process implies an alterity emergence of novelty from the nebulous field of meanings inherent to the interactions between the “I-Other”. In these interactional exchanges situated in creative dynamics, the function of context; the irreversible subjective and chronological temporalities; semiosis, the production of meaning and its innovative uniqueness signalize how the conceptual definition of creativity cannot abandon the holism involved in the multiple instances that (inter)act in it through the human actions in the world. Glăveanu (2021, p. 14) very well translates this diffuse, complex and challenging conceptual scenario:

There is no single, unified definition of creativity and this is certainly for the best. Instead of opting for one understanding or the other, it is better to consider each one as a facet of a complex phenomenon. The product approach helps us identify when creativity takes place and to compare creative products. Cognitive definitions tell us something about the creative person and the intra-psychological processes they engage in. Systemic and sociocultural reformulations help us consider the wider dynamic of creative expression beyond individual minds and point to the role played by the ideas of others and the broader culture.

The notion of creativity, central to any discussion on the topic, has been problematized in different ways. There are discursive elaborations that, in our opinion, bring novelties to this scenario, converging on what is intended to be explored in this text. Gillespie et al. (2015) conduct a collective discussion where the concept of creativity is questioned from a cultural perspective. The authors do not disagree about a vision of creativity that emerges from processes of social interaction, which can only be understood as a process in motion, in development, over an ontogenetic and irreversible time and marked by specificities. Creativity is a process with human actions, which places it as a social act. It only exists when subjectivities interact, reconstructing cultural messages and meanings in the form of new material and symbolic productions that, in some way, are presented to the world in which we live. Creating presupposes that something was created with a brand of novelty, even when this novel is experienced only by those who created it, as if it were a “personal and non-transferable creative experience”, but genuinely original for those who experience it.

Glăveanu (see Gillespie et al., 2015) argues that creativity can be understood as a representation and as a process/action, a possibility that greatly expands our discussion. Given the dialectical, dialogical and dynamic nature of the creative process, the use of the term creativity reduces the complexity of the involved process, turning it into a label often without any scientific meaning or value. Valsiner (see Gillespie et al., 2015) has repeatedly taken this position. For this author, the concept “creativity” is just a name that does not define what happens from the moment one intends to understand the phenomenon. The term “creative process”, on the other hand, signalizes directions, paths, movements and temporality, configuring a conceptual option that better reflects and refracts the phenomenon itself. In this text, we will privilege the concept “creative processes” as the one that best represents our conception of the emergence of the novel. Nonetheless, the term creativity appears throughout the work, but always understood as a procedural system.

Once defined that the focus of analysis on the creative phenomenon will focus on its processes and dynamics, we will work with the sociocultural conception of the act of creating and its specificities. In this chapter, it is not our object to trace a historical line of the development of creativity, although it is relevant to follow the ways of understanding creative processes throughout human history. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize that the conceptions and ideas about the act of creating, which we share today, emerged in the Renaissance, when the Gods and the Divine were displaced from creative action and man assumed his role in this latifundium (Glăveanu, 2021). From that moment on, the act of creating inspired different versions, concepts and definitions, highlighting human actions, initially carried out by brilliant men, who were linked to some type of power in the social contexts they inhabited. This creativity focused on the individual characterized as genius or solitary author of relevant works does not represent the conception that we will defend here (nor does it represent part of the theoretical models in vogue in the psychology of creativity). Our interest is in investigating a social-relational, cultural, material, systemic, distributed, inclusive, non-discriminatory, ethical creativity that values all levels of people’s creative experience throughout their development. Accordingly, it invests in an understanding of creativity that, as it is a human attribute, is inherent to human action.

Creating Is a Psychological, Social and Material Phenomenon

Creativity, understood from a cultural perspective, takes on different nuances from the psychological mainstream, implying the use of non-negotiable assumptions (such as the sociogenetic, symbolic and temporal dimension of the phenomenon), which define the phenomenon in a specific way. Understanding how these processes take place requires an epistemic and theoretical stance, followed by the defense of narratives that will support the emergence, permanence and consolidation of theoretical models that will explain the phenomenon (Neves-Pereira, 2018). Accordingly for cultural psychological bases, creating is a psychological (Vygotsky, 2004), social and material phenomenon (Glăveanu, 2014) generated in the I-Other interactions, managed by individuals immersed in culture and mediated by multiple contexts. It is a multidimensional phenomenon, i.e., it implies bodies interacting and moving throughout the life cycle, collectively sharing a world of materiality (objective and subjective) impregnated with sociocultural senses and meanings (Glăveanu et al., 2019) and creating artifacts, products, ideas and new experiences. These bodies are crossed by lines of sociability, materiality and temporality, being affected by emotions, feelings and values, as they move in different positions throughout the act of creating, building different perspectives on the phenomenon itself. The individual who creates does this with the other, in a relationship of alterity, crossed by what he/she is, by the dominant values, beliefs and emotions, in permanent dialogue with the world, internalizing meanings, transforming them and returning all of this to the world in the form of a plural and diversified creation that assumes different values in the world (Glăveanu & Neves-Pereira, 2020).

Creating takes place, specifically, in the human ontogenetic trajectory. No other species is capable of operating this psychological possibility. It is a phenomenon that demands richness, plurality and creativity of methods to be investigated and understood, even if only in a small part. It includes, in its critical and social investigation, the economic, political, cultural, educational and ethical dimensions, as well as the dimension related to and values, dialoguing in an attempt to situate the phenomenon in light of its complexity. It is a polyphonic event, made up of multiple voices, which can be from the past, the present and those that inhabit the becoming, but are already heard by some.

Creating Is a Collective Act That Only Occurs in Alterity

It seems impossible to understand human development processes without the presence, mediation and interactions and relationships experienced with the other. The same applies to creative processes. How can creativity be thought of without the presence of another, even when the individual creates in the deepest solitude? The premise that alterity is a constitutive part of who we are is assumed in different theoretical fields, beyond psychology (Brait, 2020a; Bussoletti & Molon, 2010). But, after all, who is this other person who inhabits me, but who is also different from me? Why is this other a sine qua non condition for the co-constitution of the individual in the world of culture?

Cultural psychologists (Valsiner, 2014; Vygotsky, 1978) talk about alterity processes based on approximate concepts that reflect the co-constituting dynamics of the individual immersed in social, historical and cultural contexts. It is in the internalization of the sign (which is a cultural element) that the subject and the cultural other come together and collectively transform themselves, dialectically, into individual and unique syntheses. The other is a constituent part of what I am and this construction takes place through semiotic mediation, the sharing of learned, lived and experienced meanings in existence. Between the I and the Other, there is a psychodynamic zone where the encounter of otherness mixes, collides, enters into conflict, in relation, in dialogue, thus promoting developmental transformations (Vygotsky, 1978). It is in this “in-between” I-Other that the subject-culture co-constitutive dance takes place; It is in this space that the dynamic mediation of signs builds hierarchies that will guide the individual in his/her human development routes, throughout his/her life course (Valsiner, 2014).

The emergence of something new, through acts, is only possible socially and collectively. Starting from the premise that no one creates from nothing, the other assumes an essential role so that the process of creating can take place. These interactive dynamics operate in indeterminate, obscure, unconscious, contradictory and profound dimensions, affecting the psyche, the body, the expressions in the world of individuals in acts of creation. When positioning itself before the other in plural ways, each being defines itself as a unique and non-transferable psychological, social and creative authorship. Bakhtin (2011) used to say that the gaze of the other is always different from my gaze, but I need this other gaze to see myself as different from what I am and what I see myself.

Creating Is a Culturally Mediated Act

Subject and culture are co-constituted. Subject has action over culture, and the latter impregnates and saturates experiences, messages, actions and meanings lived by individuals in their life cycles. This cogenesis takes place through mediation processes, where culturally channelled meanings and senses are internalized by the individuals, who transform them into knowledge, beliefs, values, self-view and world view, returning a new synthesis to culture, through of the resignification of shared signs. Cultural psychology (Valsiner, 2019) highlights the centrality of semiotic mediation as a dynamic process of internalization of signs and the axiomatic assumption of irreversible time in the existence of psychological, biological and sociocultural processes as epistemic and theoretical marks of the emergence of the individual. Creative processes also do not escape the psychological dynamics of mediation, internalization and externalization, in order to take place.

Creativity and culture are also inseparable phenomena. Subject agents of creativity interact in different sociocultural contexts, operating with signs and instruments that are internalized, re-signified and returned to culture through creative acts (Glăveanu et al., 2019). In order to create, it is necessary to be in interaction with the other, in relationship with multiple audiences, oriented towards action and towards the future, impregnated with meanings, values and desires and immersed in the world, with its challenges and multiple cultural messages. The concept of culture is underlined by Glăveanu et al. (2019, p. 2):

In the socio-cultural tradition, culture and mind are interdependent and continuously shape each other. Culture is neither external to the person nor static, but constitutive of the mind and of society by offering the symbolic resources required to perceive, think, remember, imagine, and, ultimately, create. The notion of “creative action” tries to encompass, in this context, the psychological, the behavioral, and the cultural.

Creating Is a Situated, Contextualized and Perspective Phenomenon

Creative processes take place at different addresses. When creating, an individual “speaks” from a specific place, with particular psychological, social, cultural, political and economic marks. Even sharing sociocultural contexts, each human being configures a uniqueness, an unrepeatable singularity. The tones, the sounds, the modalities, and the intentions of the creative act will be, therefore, marks of this experience of being unique, inhabiting a plural world, where interactions and social relationships bring the senses, values, beliefs and knowledge of existence, which will be raw material for the emergence of the novel.

Creative acts are expressed as action, inter or intrapersonal experience, activities and products. Its expression is always crossed by the culture, language, values and characteristics of creative agents interacting with others, at a given time. These constitutive aspects of creativity make clear its “situated” condition, which is positioned and viewed from different geographies, histories, languages, societies and cultures. The Bakhtinian concept of dialogue (Brait, 2020b; Faraco, 2017) presupposes subjects situated in different psycho-socio-historical-cultural positions, experiencing tensions, contradictions, conflicts and plural perspectives; beings who are in search of listening, voice and understanding of themselves and the world and, together, are co-constituted in their humanity and historicity. It is from the difference that creation is born, says Glăveanu (2014). The unequal is central in this process, allowing individuals not only to move throughout existence through multiple meanings of life, but mainly through contact with the different, with the other, in relation to alterity, which is perhaps the only path to the construction of processes of human development and creativity committed to an ethical, inclusive, democratic and dignified human agenda.

Creating Is a Dialogical Process

Understanding creative processes as situated, contextualized and perspectivized is to perceive them in a plural world, sociolinguistically varied, culturally differentiated, which demands dialogue between individuals so that signs, representations and meanings can be shared and, perhaps, transformed into something new. It seems obvious that dialogism is the constitutive dynamics of creation, as well as of the subject-other-culture co-constitution. In psychology, when extracting, dislocating and appropriating the Bakhtinian concept of dialogue, we must adopt caution and care, in order not to reduce this conceptual borrowing, which has been practiced so much today, since Bakhtin’s work has permeated the social and human sciences.

Dialogue, dialogism, dialogical are central notions in Bakhtin’s work (which will be further explored later in this text), which originate from his “prime philosophy” (Faraco, 2017). Dialogue is conceived as a fact of life, an ideal to be pursued, as a “highly interesting sociological document, that is, as a space where one can more directly observe the dynamics of the interaction process of social voices” (Faraco, 2017, p. 61). Culturally-based psychologies, by appropriating the concept of dialogue, consider the “multi-layered definitions” of this concept elaborated by Bakhtin, but focus on its sense and meaning within the scope of cultural and sociolinguistic exchanges shared by individuals in interaction and alterity (Glăveanu, 2017; Ness & Dysthe, 2020). Saying that creative processes are dialogical is in line with the sociogenetic conception of the human being, which establishes that it is in the Self-Other encounter, interaction and dialogue (culture) that individuals constitute themselves as humans. Dialogism is not only a constituent part of creative processes, since it can also be understood as a type of dynamics of these processes. The fact of looking at the dialogue, the construction of narratives and the subject’s speech in the world represent rich methodological paths for psychological research, especially for investigations of social creativity. Bakhtin’s work bequeaths conceptions of Being, of the world, of language, and of social interaction that reach psychology as immense possibilities for the understanding and investigation of psychological phenomena, with emphasis on creativity.

Regarding the Bakhtinian Dialogism

A proposal for the integration of theories and concepts demands clarity and organization of thought as an ethical and responsive act in the face of this type of intellectual challenge of the dialogical approach to creativity. Once we have explored the territory of investigation of creative processes, in the field of scientific psychology, it is time to talk about some fundamentals of dialogism, considering its roots in Bakhtin’s work and his Circle.

With a life marked by deprivation, violence, ostracism, exile, among other severe dramas, Bakhtin did not produce an organized, didactic or even chained system of thought in a timeline. His intellectual production has unfinished aspects, heterogeneous marks and complexities that prevent understanding of his ideas and a lot of material that seems to inhabit a becoming that has not materialized (Fiorin, 2020). As every work is in some way autobiographical, Bakhtin’s life has tinted his intellectual output, showing how difficult it was for him to create while experiencing tragedies, hindrances, and rejections.

Mikhail Bakhtin, literary theorist and philosopher of language, was born in Russia, in the city of Oryol, in the year 1895. Son of an important family, but with few financial resources, from an early age, he dealt with tragedies, such as a bone infection diagnosed in his childhood and that, in adult life, cost him a leg (Glăveanu, 2019). His studies made him migrate to different cities, always in search of professional engagement as a teacher, until he reached Nevel (Russia), where the group known as the Bakhtin’s Circle was formed. At this moment, his intellectual production began, which found the conditions for the initial organization of his work in powerful interlocutors of the Circle. Important works emerged during this period, which was soon completed for extreme reasons: his health, which demanded special care and financial resources he did not have, and his imprisonment, followed by exile, for reasons that were not very explicit. (Faraco, 2017). After World War II, Bakhtin sees his doctoral thesis rejected by the Gorki Institute, with his title denied. From this moment on, he struggles to gain space in prestigious academic circles, but with little success. He dies in 1975, after a long illness (Fiorin, 2020). His work is only known in the Western world after the 60s.

Bakhtin and the Circle had two major intellectual projects: (1) the Bakhtinian “Prime Philosophy”, which corresponds to the architecture of the act, presented in his work “Toward a philosophy of the act” (Bakhtin, 1993), published in 1919, and (2) the Circle members’ project on “A Theory of Manifestations of Superstructure”, based on Marxist ideas that understood Superstructure as “constituted in the social, political and spiritual dimension of life and its products, where language assumes a central role in this constitution (Fiorin, 2020, p. 20). Since the beginning of his work, Bakhtin already brought relevant issues that would be discussed throughout his life as a thinker. Among these themes, the following stand out: (a) uniqueness and the eventicity of Being; (b) the alterity relationships, where the Other is the foundation of the Self, and (c) the axiological dimension of Being in the world, in communication, in dialogue.

In his theoretical structure, Bakhtin recognized a duality between two distinct and incommunicable worlds: the world of theory, where life is not experienced but theorized, producing culture and objectification of human acts and the world of life, the historicized experience of man, where unique beings live and produce unique and unrepeatable acts, in a world of uniqueness and unique eventivity. These two worlds are incommunicable, as the first generalizes human acts in search of theories, moving them away from their singularities, and the second is only understandable by its uniqueness, by the eventic (Faraco, 2017). By perceiving itself as unique in existence, Bakhtinian Being also perceives itself occupying a place in the world of life, a place that cannot be occupied by any other person, which impels it to position itself, to respond to life through responsive and ethical acts. The Bakhtinian proposition, “we have no alibi for existence” (Faraco, 2017, p. 21) makes clear the assumption that the individual aware of his/her uniqueness understands that he/she needs to act on everything that is not self, in relation to the other. The alterity dynamics emerges with potency, as a concrete opposition that constitutes the individual, where the Self-Other interactions permeate Bakhtin’s ideas, marking his linguistic interactionism with important psychological aspects, such as the genesis and constitution of the human. It is the dialogical relationship that will make possible the Self-Other interactions. The alterity processes are only constituted in language, in communication, in dialogue.

Bakhtin’s work understands the creative act as a co-author dynamics and, simultaneously, woven by an individual marked by an inescapable uniqueness. In this perspective, the singularity acting in the actional and transforming field of reality only exists in the tense relationship with everything that is Other, therefore non-self. For Bakhtin, even self-observation in front of the mirror can never be thought of as a solitary experience. Otherness acts in the exercise of self-contemplation as an absolute aesthetic necessity (Bakhtin, 2011). This metaphor signalizes the founding dimension of alterity. The other would be the only dimension capable of unifying an “Self” that is not even identical with itself over time. “It would always be through the eyes of the world that the image of “itself”, internally experienced as discontinuous, non-unitary and of non-chronological temporality, can be recognized” (Pinheiro & Leitão, 2010, p. 90).

In his philosophical trajectory, originating from literary criticism, Bakhtin focused on the understanding of the creative act, in order to respond to ontological and epistemological impasses inherent in the recognition of the challenges of authorship, i.e., of becoming a Being whose nature would always be dependent on the another, i.e., whose condition is that of constitutive alienation to the voice, to the speech, of the Other. On the other hand, as is known, in the world of arts, the new and estheticizing singularity/uniqueness of the existence is a fundamental artistic trait, and also a condition of the artist’s creative power. For this reason, Bakhtin, as a literary critic, dedicated his writing to the uniqueness of enunciations, the language that comes to life in the arena of voices from the most diverse social otherness.

For this reason, the Bakhtinian purpose would be to reflect on the inescapable uniqueness of the world of life, as an inexorable force of the eventfulness of existence. As mentioned above, the theoretical act, dichotomized by objectivist rationality, should be united as a real action of the Being’s life—in a relationship of moral and responsible necessity (Bakhtin, 1993). Accordingly, the theoretical reason would not be incommunicable with the world of life, but one of its moments, thus restoring the unity among science, art and life, not in a fusional grammar, but in responsive and responsible, i.e., dialogical.

For the philosopher, the aestheticization of life, i.e., its creative and transformative dynamics, would belong to the act of seeing the Being. Accordingly, vision would be a metaphor for thinking about the sensitive and unique refraction of the way in which singularity produces meanings for the world of life and its experiences. Nonetheless, the allegory of vision also teaches us about the never-totalizing partiality of what is seen, a trait of human incompleteness. The act of viewing cannot see everything, since it is limited by the corporeal, spatiotemporal position of the one who contemplates in his perspective/imaginative turn of the otherness with which he relates. However, it is important to consider what the philosopher warns us about empathy: “Pure empathy would, in fact, be a fall from the act-action into its own product, and this, of course, is impossible” (2011, p. 56). With these words, Bakhtin highlights the impossibility of the transposition/annulment of the law of the location of Being. It would be impossible for the individual to have a look that moves from a unique and concrete position in the world (in the real and concrete moment of seeing)—in a fanciful search for extramundane/superhuman neutrality, like the vision of a god. Empathy, as the act of putting oneself in the place of the other, would be a mistaken illusion, pure empathy would be the very death of the place of the alterity of the other, as irreducible difference, and of the very space-temporal and embodied position of the self.

Precisely because of the impossibility of transposing the law of the location of Being, the absolute aesthetic necessity of the other is the foundation of authorship and creativity. Otherness is the possibility of expanding perspectives on the object of experience. Only the otherness in its irreducible difference to the self is able to climb the field of vision and access the author’s blind spots. Even from the point of view of a subjective internality, the internalized otherness is never unison, as it is positioned in a game of tension that is potentially productive to the creative dynamic. Accordingly, we can argue that all creative perspectivization implies a form of axiological summoning of the other in that it expands, broadens and complexifies the aesthetic object.

In Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity (2011), Bakhtin discusses the contemplation of the author’s own life in the creative process of an autobiographical writing. In this process, the indissoluble uniqueness through which it is possible to experience and create the world and its alterities is the starting point for understanding the function of the transgredience of the excess of vision.

(…) the background, the world behind the character’s back was neither elaborated nor clearly perceived by the author-contemplator, and is supposedly given, in an uncertain way, from within the character itself, just as the background is given to ourselves of our lives. (Bakhtin, 2011, p. 17)

The aforementioned “background of our lives”, which is beyond or behind the contemplator, is always imagined perspectively in the uniqueness of the act of vision. This activity is situated as a movement of exotopic search, i.e., a projecting itself on the gaze of an imagined otherness, virtualized by the psyche, an alterity that tries to anticipate. This anticipation would seek to access the transgredient face of the author’s conscience angle of vision, his blind spot, and the world at his back, i.e., his foreign territory, unknown to himself and thus relevant and invested in the creative function.

In a Bakhtinian approach, the creative process would always keep the look of the uniqueness of the author and his ways of negotiating meanings with the otherness that participate in the activity of creative perspectivization, production of surpluses, on the aesthetic object. In this process, the creative act does not detach from the actor’s responsibility for what he/she builds and sees, as even the comprehensive act is also a responsible (and not just responsive) act. The non-alibi is the subject-contemplator’s duty in relation to him/her, to understand it in relation to the uniqueness of my Being-event, always seeking to restore the responsible unity among science, art and life. It is important to highlight that Bakhtin also developed a philosophy of language, considering it the symbolic materiality of the presence and inscription of the other in us, constitutive of Being and its becoming. The voice of the other is a founding component of dialogical subjectivity, and this voice is an enunciative and discursive production, produced along the most diverse socio-historical contingencies and existential trajectories of the self.

Bakhtin’s well-known notion of polyphony emerges as Bakhtin’s praise of Dostoyevsky’s work for recognizing in the author’s writing the expressive greatness of a style supported by the maintenance of the coexistence of a multiplicity of social, historical, familiar and voices, intuited by creative consciousness. These voices interact with the same strength/power (equipollence), giving life to each other through the tension and conflict they contract among themselves in sustaining their differences. The polyphonic novel (Bakhtin, 1999) would then be like a universe that brings together—in a permanent state of tension and democratic utopia—independent and insurmountable consciences in an endless dialogue. Thus, subjectivity would be constituted by this game of forces of the voices that make up the arena of cult-related voices of the actor, in a game of centrifugal (of concentration) and centripetal (of dispersion) forces. The authorship and the creative process would be a particular way of exploring the heterogeneity of voices in the Self-other-world relationship, in other words, a border construction erected through the novelty that springs from the heteroglottic and polyphonic tension of the cultural universe.

Based on the argued assumptions of dialogism, the understanding of the place of perspectivization (Glăveanu, 2015), as an imaginative activity inherent to the creative act, gains a new accent. Accordingly, we modelled, in Bakhtin’s vocabulary, four fundamental premises of the creative process as a field of emergence of novelty as proposed by Glaveanu in “Creativity as a sociocultural act” (2015):

Depending on the context, a multitude of perspectives can be adopted in relation to the same objectivity/reality (objects, people, events, etc.)—(Glăveanu, 2015, p. 170)

Every action is the effect of the subject’s inexorable responsiveness to his/her context. The mediating meanings of action emerge in the uniqueness of the individual’s impact by the alterity of the world external to him/her. Thus, any objective data/concrete materiality of the experience only exists in relation to the subject, and may assume a plurality of meanings contingent on the uniqueness of the author’s consciousness.

Perspectives originate in interaction, constituted in different positions in the material and social world (Glăveanu, 2015 p. 171)

As an effect of the law of location, it can be assumed that perspectives are the effect of the subject’s position in the symbolically constituted world. Accordingly, from the physical place to the social role, it would only be in the game of differential Self-other relationships, operated by contrasts, oppositions and antonyms, that actions are integrated into a system of interactional patterns, through which the subject moves in the process of perspectivization.

Elaborating and taking on new perspectives involves adopting other positions in relation to a given situation (Glăveanu, 2015, p. 171)

In the exercise of transgredience of vision, the decentering of the here and now, first-person plane, to become a kind of contemplative audience of the action itself (Self-for-the-others), produces resignifications proper to the imaginative perspectivization, inherent to the creative process. This exotopy allows not only an approximation to the senses of imagined alterity, but also its integration and/or return to the original perspective, producing, in a reflexive way, two or more perspectivising orientations of action.

Moving between perspectives makes the difference between productive positions for creative action (Glăveanu, 2015 p. 172)

Perspectivization is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the production of the new creative process. More than moving/projecting through the perspectives of action, it is necessary to coordinate and/or integrate them in a dialectical and transforming dynamism of the initial perspectives.

Thus, the current book intends to lead the reader through the plurality of views on dialogical approaches to creativity in Psychology. Dialogical epistemology is a guide that will reveal, in each chapter, different nuances and ways of understanding creativity in the singular transitivity of its most diverse production contexts.

Final Considerations

The chapter sought to develop an understanding of the epistemic turn implied in a recognition of the dialogicity involved in the psychology of creative processes. Through the arguments presented, we hope that the understanding of the dialogical epistemology of creativity makes explicit not only the interpretive power of the Bakhtinian perspective in the psychology of creativity, but also its markedly ethical dimension.

Dialogism democratizes creativity by analysing and understanding it in its historical, material, symbolic and intersubjective conditions, thus differentiating itself from clippings that attribute its genesis strictly to the individual or, in the opposite sense, purely contextualist, excluding the subjective and authorial action of the process. If, for Bakhtin, all authorship is co-authoring, is responsive to the most diverse social voices, we hope that this chapter will produce in the reader resonances that expand a creativity that is also a mark of trusted solidarity (Rorty, 2007), collaboration and co-construction. This creativity would be produced by sustaining the differences in the relationship with others and a creative living that always seeks unity and responsibility among science, art and life.