NEW MEANS AND THE TEACHING OF ARTS
Introduction
A society full of technologies, diverse technologies and digital technologies redimensions our being in the world and the different areas of knowledge: physics, chemistry, ..., but also sociology, anthropology, and arts. In this society full of technologies, an education centered in performativity, performativity in the sense given by Austin (performative enunciation), in the sense retaken by Jean-François Lyotard, French philosopher recently deceased, in his book La Condition Postmoderne (1), is no longer possible.
The term performative in Austin (philosopher of language) and retaken by Lyotard refers to efficiency, the efficiency of an enunciation, term wrongly applied to the dynamics of societies in modern, positivist discourses that comprehended societies as machines.
It was the idea we had in the modern era of the dynamics of societies, institutions, power, system, finally, of humanity: those would function as machines; that is, machines in which an 'input' would generate a predictable 'output'; if we reduced the 'input' and increased the 'output' of societies, we would increase their efficiency. Today we know that to understand society this way, it would have to be stable, and it is not. Society, as well as institutions, power, system (concepts that are effervescing nowadays: power, system), and finally, humanity are in continuous, unexpected and uninterrupted movement, so any prediction of an 'output' from an 'input' is impossible, for societies, institutions, and humanity do not function as machines but as active ecological systems in which a butterfly wing's movement can generate typhoons on the other side of the world. In the same way, a new image can cause a revolution. Nowadays we can observe the clear example of the stock markets.
In the post-modern society, as Lyotard affirms, the generating processes (research) and the knowledge transmitting ones (teaching) happen through instabilities. Those instabilities are constelations in which there are some rules; however, ones in which
the unexpected events are those that make possible from creativity to life on Earth. That is the conception of the Universe of Ilya Prigogine. I have gone from knowledge (generation and transmision) to the possibility of life on Earth and to the contemporary conception of the Universe for that, I have based myself in J-F Lyotard, but also in Christine Hardy from the Research Laboratory of the Psycho-physical Interactions, France, and in Ilya Prigogine – physicist, chemist, researcher, professor with diverse titles published.
The new technologies do not let us predict, in this moment, how far they will go, which social segments will be redimensioned, and in which way that redimensioning will occur. All social segments will be redimensioned.
Education towards creativity, education aiming at the different fields of knowledge is the most tuned for this historical moment. The reformulation proposed here certainly refers to the teaching of arts, but its paradoxal thinking itself claims a reformulation of the educational system as a whole.
