Of Songs, Texts, and Bleating

Abstract

From personal experiences in teaching, I argue that academic writing can become a Bergsonian sign by conceiving norms, genres, and other structures, patterns, or models as something immobile and absolute that takes precedence over context, purpose, identity, and strategies for knowing and sharing a specific reality. To explain this, I focus on how the essay becomes a name (a form of the Bergsonian sign) and the influence this has on students’ learning. I draw on Henri Bergson’s proposal of the aforementioned notion of sign, but also on his concept of system and his explanation of the nature of life, as expounded by this philosopher in History of the Idea of Time, The Creative Mind, and Creative Evolution. I conclude that writing as sign and system hinders the assimilation of other processes to approach the understanding of the heterogeneity of reality and creates a type of writing without vitality and alien to the context to which it belongs. This has an impact on critical and creative processes.