My departure platform is both theoretical and methodological. I start from the understanding of language not only as a way of describing a reality, but as a material practice that makes what counts as reality. I borrow from Michel Foucault (1981 [1970]) these compreehension of discursive practices as constitutive of what can be seen, said, thought, acted on, and also of what is impossible to see, say or do. Tom Popkewitz uses the metaphor of the recipe and the outcome to explain how the outcome becomes a determinate object whose ingredients and historical layers are forgotten when it appears as an essential and finished object. In terms of the arts in education, my goal is to deconstruct the recipe to make visible the ingredients used, and that make possible to think about the arts in education through the rethorics of their impacts and as a way of governing people in the present. This is also what Popkewitz considers as the ‘alchemies’ of school subjects “that transmogrify disciplinary thinking into normalizing pedagogies for making the child who he is and who he should be” (2007, p. 65). This making up of the child is here explored through Hacking’s (2002) notion of ‘making up people’ as a style of reasoning that fabricates certain human kinds. In the discourses about the powers of the arts in education, my intention is to examine the psychological style of reasoning inscribed in the educational purposes of the arts. These discourses, as stated through Popkewitz’s notion of alchemy, do not talk about the arts but about moral ways of living and being that determine who the child is but also who is not the desired child of the 21 st century. The classifications used to describe that child, mainly psychological, will be taken in their historicity. The historian of psychology Kurt Danziger (1997) states that the Western assumption on the universality and validity of many psychological categories used to describe the subject misses its historical construction. Topics such as motivation, creativity, personality, among many others, only acquire their meanings according to a certain system of possibilities. They are not natural objects. My aim in the paper is in disrupting these consensus, as a way of exposing these categories and these unquestionable impacts of the arts in education, as inventions with a great degree of arbitrariness and contingency. Both the arbitrariness and contingency makes what is (im)possible for us to think.

Through the analysis of research papers and governmental documents on the impacts of the arts in education, I will question the systems of rationality embodied in these documents. My intention is to make strange what appears to be natural as a way of depicting how these discourses are not only describing realities, but making those realities as possible to be seen and thought as such. My argument is that the discursive practices attached to the arts in education make up a certain kind of subject and also traces the limits of its abject.