IV Conceptualization of Mind

You can read here about the seminar.

Creativity and playfulness seem to be “natural” classifications to think and talk about what childhood is about and what a child is and should be. The making of this articulation goes back, at least, to the end of the 17th century. Names such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey circulated internationally and were assimilated at local levels as "indigenous foreigners" and "traveling libraries" ( Popkewitz, 2000), contributing to the Western notion of the child and childhood as a time of play and imagination.

The paper intends to introduce the research project CREAT_ED: The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education, focusing on its online archive platform. While the project is still in development, its online archive platform already allows us to problematize how a particular theoretical framework cannot be separated from the methodological and ‘practical’ problems and answers concerning the research tools we need in the project.

The text problematizes the making of the student as a creative and entrepreneurial subject in contemporary times. It argues that creativity is being instrumentalized as a technology of government. In a way, it takes governmentality as a way to analyze how this fabrication of a human kind is inscribed in older technologies for the government of the subject since modernity, particularly through the reactivation of a pastoral and confessional power.

This workshop intends to work through some selected sources of what we call ‘the archive of the creative child’. This archive is mainly constituted by published materials in Europe and the United States, from the end of the 18th century to the Post Second World War.

This is a workshop in which we will introduce the Project The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education. We will focus on the archive that is being constructed and strategies to work with and against this archive. We will mobilize archival materialities and work through some questions with the participants: How was the creative child constructed within western arts educational discourses at the intersection of discourses on race, class, gender, and ableism? Which subject positions are being mobilized? What are the colonialities we can name and deconstruct?

B. F. Skinner was already a well known psychologist - and by that time controversial for defending a stricly behavioristic position - when he produced the address On the Future of Art: “Creating the Creative Artist” in the Guggenheim Museum in March 25 1969.

Psychological tests of creativity, like IQ tests, allowed for the ranking of different kinds of people (Cohen-Cole, 2009). Guilford discussed the need to construct tests to measure individuals' creative abilities, considering other creative individuals. He was not alone. This comparative way of reasoning about individuals was making the creative person and crystalizing its characteristics through certain kinds of expected behaviors that produced differences among different people. Creative people, for instance, were more likely to enjoy modern art, particularly abstract expressionism.

The paper, published in 1958 in Art Education after an address prepared for presentation to the Pacific Arts Association, is set against a discourse of crisis, a crisis in (western, american, urban) societies that is derived from an expansion of technological solutions and their presence in everyday life. That crisis is intensified by automation, gadgets and specialized services, and produces the alienation of people from many everyday challenges and “the joy of mastery over problems” (Guilford, 1958, p. 4).

During the century XVII, in the European Enlightenment, the search and application of new mathematical methods to describe the world and the universe, changed not only our perception of nature but also the perception of the human being and his capacities. The *calculus* appears as a mathematical method to describe physical activity. In an age full of ambiguities and contradictions, divine power and creation dissipate in human hands.