Abstract:

This communication belongs to a work about a series of conflicts developed throughout my teaching experience in arts education with digital technologies. Much in my teaching practice as in my research, I seek a certain tension between the artistic and the technological.

That work began by reflecting on the way ICTs have superimposed in education. That overlay raises a series of contradictions in arts education, namely in the practices that seek to contradict, deactivate, deviate or invert the functions of technological devices. In this presentation I will focus on the current directives of the educational policies in Portugal, where you perceive not only the absence of these contradictions, but, above all, a harmonizing between ICTs and “competences” that in the past were attributed traditionally to the artistic field. I will base the problematization on the document [Profile of the students when leaving compulsory education], dissecting it through a biopolitical framing. In a way, one questions how is it that such a participated, worked and discussed document, in the educational arena and the social field, in Portugal, insists on the same assumptions of other international documents, namely of UNESCO and OECD, that are repeated throughout the last two decades. Such documents seem to share, besides the content, a certain cybernetic plot. Thus, I seek to understand the web of discourses that made this document possible. If, on the one hand, it is necessary to trace their discursive origins from those political and organizational international platforms, on the other hand, it is necessary to access the process of harmonization, paradigms and signatures of the discourses of psychology with the discourses of technology which, since the 1950s of the last century, have been increasingly naturalised in educational politics. It is in the Post-War period that one understands how computation, cybernetics and creativity have become fundamental for new thought systems. Technology and creativity are intertwined in a new order and they establish new paradigms. Despite the degree of abstraction and the semantic amplitude of the term creativity, it becomes operative and its connotation in those years is clearly positivist, determining educational, cultural and economic models. New forms of government in which the novelty is the objective and constantly objectivised, in a word: programmed.

What does a programmed creativity mean? What is the meaning of a novelty produced by a circuit that awaits it? No wonder that the apparatuses that emerged in our era do not seem to act so much by subjectivization processes but, on the contrary, by processes of desubjectivization. Above all, the digital media reinforce creativity in the operative sense and renew the objective of the programmed novelty. Those media being none other than the product of a programmed school. The modern school was never so close to being mistaken for its own content, which is rather revealing of its purposes. It reveals, at least, an old vice of education in establishing an a priori of how the student has to be. However, this “having-to-be” has entered a circuit that empties “being” and only establishes the duty. That duty does not correspond also to a disciplinary specificity, neither does it convey the disciplined subject; it seems to correspond more to a programmed subject. Behind the robe of creativity and ICT hides a global politics that standardises the national curricula.

Keywords:

Creativity, ICT, Art, Politics, curriculum.