Modernist Pedagogy and Psycho-Technologies: The Scientific Assemblage of the Aesthetic Individual and the Artist-Without-Genius

• In Event: International Studies of the Sociologies of the Knowledge of Science, Visual Cultures and Affective Economies in Education, Part II

Proposal

This paper discusses how the modernist fetish of sciences enabled the expansion of science to domains exclusively belonging to art hitherto. In educational contexts, this transgression was facilitated by the newly founded science of Psychotechnik, which fostered the possibility of aptitude testing, measurement of artistic talent and rationalising the creative process. The psycho-technical laboratories became spaces in which scientific discourse validated the creation of a higher individual type and, in art schools specifically, a new type of artist. Moreover, the aim was not only to train creative individuals but to affect the subliminal reception of the sensible in the audience. The modernist slogan of the new unity between art and technology produced an alternative paradigm in (art) education based on the premise that everyone can learn creative skills. However, through subjection to rational scientific assessment of intrinsic reflexes, psychotechnics dispossessed individuals from the most intimate forms of self-knowledge. Paradoxically, by means of aesthetic appeal, science divorced the inherent and unintelligible quality of genius from the realm of artistic activity. We examine a selection of temporally parallel but geographically distinct practices: Ladovsky’s psychoanalytical pedagogical method and research in the Moscow; Meyer’s and Moholy-Nagy’s psychotechnics in Weimar, and de Vasconcelos psycho-pedagogical activities in Lisbon. Drawing on Foucault, Deleuze and Rose, the paper reflects on how the appearance of the science of psychotechnics in the early twentieth century governed individuals who, under the modernist promise of a possibility of an artist-without-genius, willingly submit to assessment (selection) and training (normalisation). From this theoretical perspective, we question how science acts in the agencement of aesthetics (desires) and pedagogy by distributing expectations of experiences and stipulating modes of being.

Authors

• Wiktoria Szawiel, Institute of Education, University of Lisbon

• Ana Lúisa Fernandes Paz