Teachings in crystalline narrations, traversing as subjects of knowledge: man, nature and technology

ABSTRACT

This text aims to highlight teaching in crystalline and fable narratives connecting men, nature, and technology as subjects of knowledge. Thus, it addresses the movement of thought in conversation networks produced in in-service education processes with Elementary and Middle School teachers of a municipal public system. It presents a problematic field dedicated to understanding which thought movements are made from the narratives established in conversation networks. To produce data, we used participant observation and field diary records of the crystalline and fable narratives that emerged in the networks of conversations with the characters-schools (teachers), which are configured as images-narratives of research as crystal-image and fable-image. During the study, the central question assumes two interconnected dimensions. On the one hand, the relationship between the crystal-image and fable-image enhances the movement of teachers’ thinking. On the other hand, the relationships between man, nature, and technology are understood as subjects of knowledge. In their narratives, the school characters visualize the possibilities of teaching to contribute to life and/or the constitution of non-Anthropocene worlds, where the subjects of knowledge are man, nature and technology.

Keywords:
Teaching; Knowledge subjects; Crystalline narratives; Conversation networks

RESUMO

Objetiva destacar a docência em narrações cristalinas e fabulatórias que interligam como sujeitos do conhecimento o homem, a natureza e a tecnologia e, para tanto, aborda o movimento do pensamento na rede de conversação produzidas em processos de formação continuada com professoras do Ensino Fundamental de um sistema público municipal. Apresenta um campo problemático que se dedica a compreender que movimentos do pensamento são produzidos a partir das narrativas estabelecidas em rede de conversação. Utiliza, para a produção de dados, a observação participante e os registros em diário de campo das narrativas cristalinas e fabulatórias que emergiram na rede de conversação com as personagens-escolas (docentes), que se configuram como imagens-narrativas de pesquisa como imagem-cristal e imagem-fábula. No decorrer da pesquisa, a questão central assume duas dimensões interligadas: por um lado a relação entre imagem-cristal e imagem-fábula potencializando o movimento do pensamento dos docentes; por outro, a relação homem, natureza e tecnologia entendidos como sujeitos do conhecimento. As personagens-escolas, em suas narrativas, visualizam os possíveis na docência para contribuir com uma vida e/ou a constituição de mundos não “antropocenos”, onde os sujeitos do conhecimento são o homem, a natureza e a tecnologia.

Palavras-chave:
Docências; Sujeitos do conhecimento; Narrações cristalinas; Redes de conversação

Introduction

This article highlights teaching in crystalline and fabulation narratives, interconnecting men, nature, and technology as subjects of knowledge. To do so, it approaches the thought movement into conversation networks produced on in-service training with Elementary and Middle School teachers from a municipal system. It presents a problem field focused on understanding what thought movements are made from the narratives established in conversation networks. To produce data, we use participative observation and records in field diaries about crystalline and fabulation narratives that emerged in the conversation networks with the characters-schools (teachers), which establish themselves as research images-narratives, as image-crystal and image-fable.

During the research, the central issue assumes two interconnected dimensions: on one hand, the relationship between image-crystal and image-fable potentializing teachers’ thought movement. On the other, the relationship between men, nature, and technology is understood as knowledge subjects.

Starting with the second dimension…

To Agamben (2008), we are faced with a “biopolitical paradigm of modern”. However, it is a biopolitic not only concerned with control, normalization, adjustment, and birth-rate management, sexuality, health, hygiene, and food (FOUCAULT, 2010). Furthermore, according to Buzato (2019, p. 1), “[...] the biological, affective, and human behavior potentials registered in texts we cannot read with the naked eye, such as genome sequences extracted by amateurs intending to be coauthors of their own biology”, or in the application of probability trees that allow machines to learn to do things as well as we do, things that we cannot even describe with words and, therefore, cannot be taught back to us through the machine, through human neurophysiological systems by algorithms that operate us, as part of cybernetic systems we believe to be working (BUZATO, 2019).

To Pelbart (2016), we live in “states of exhaustion” and, according to Agamben (2008), the context of contemporary biopower is no longer responsible for ‘make living’ nor ‘make dying’, but surviving.

In men, it refers to the separation of the organic life from the animal life, the non-human to the human [...], vegetative life, prolonged by reanimation techniques, conscious life, until the limit point that, as geopolitical frontiers, stays essentially mobile, recedes according to the progress of scientific technologies or policies. The supreme ambition of biopower is to enact over the human body the absolute separation of the living and the speaker, of zoé and bios, the non-man and the man, the survival(PELBART, 2016, p. 26).

To Latour (2000), no science, technology, nature, and society are separated from one another but an alliance in sociotechnical networks in which the agents interact and articulate to produce knowledge within a specific context.

Nowadays, we live the exhaustion in all the fundaments through which we justify the arrogance that made us hostage of our alleged certainties, scientifically proved and through men’s position dictated as the center of the word - Anthropocene. This dominant perspective in modernity constantly denies nature (in which men in but a part and not the lord) in a complete lack of ethical commitment, which we cannot establish and maybe we should not even try (LATOUR, 2000).

Thus, we are interested in questioning the increasingly more visible signs of exhaustion, of all these dichotomies over which we ground and justify the arrogance that made us hostage to our own foolishness. All this involves the concept of “post-human”, “[...] without us knowing, as in the case of other “post” (modern, social, colonial, etc.), what is still to come, if, in fact, what we have now is POST what there is and we have not admitted yet” (BUZATO, 2019, p. 1).

Post-humanism already existed as a philosophical field before the relationship between humans and technology became a large-scale issue in human and social sciences. This movement, understood in a broader sense, had many manifestation fronts. There are also other currents, classified as anti-humanist, which question universalism, rationalism, and the sovereignty of the human subject over non-human ones, for example.

Lazzarato (2014, p. 18) states that Foucault and Guattari, in the 1980s, each in their own way, reached the conclusion “[...] that the production of subjectivity and the establishment of a ‘relation with oneself’ were the only contemporary political questions able to guide us outside the dead-lock we are sinking in”. Therefore, Guattari talks about “sensitive territories” and the singularization of subjectivity. Foucault refers to the creation of alterity, of “another life”, and “another world”. Thus, there is the need to resort to “ethical-aesthetical approaches and paradigms - Guattari’s ‘aesthetic paradigm’ by Guattari and Foucault’s aesthetics of existence (LAZZARATO, 2014, p. 21). In this same perspective, there is still Gilles Deleuze and Jaques Derrida, but to Buzato (2019, p. 3), in the case of the relation of education with post-humanism, “[...] the post-colonial and decolonial thought is as or more influent than the studies on human ecology, the philosophy of technology, and the sociology of techno-science.”

[...] Post-humanism does not work as an area or subject but presents itself as a heterogeneous front and, even contradictory: from philosophical debate, cultural practice, techno-scientific innovation, ecological militancy, and/or political militancy. From it, entangles arguments, objects, theories, methods, and, mainly, questions and provocations that emerge the rupture of constitutive binaries of humanism, such as subject vs object, culture vs nature, human vs non-human (machine, animal, object), or mind vs body, etc. Among them, the radical ontological separation of matter vs discourse/language stands out, which was already theorized by Latour (1999) (BUZATO, 2019, p. 3).

To Buzato (2019), we need to build a post-humanism that allows us to see utopic possibilities in a dystopic horizon. The authors, the themes, and the interdisciplinary character dedicated to post-humanism seem to converge to perspectives more closely concerned with the particularities of the movement, “[...] such as the hybridizations human-machine, decoloniality, education, post-human subjectivities, the Anthropocene ethics, the implications of hyper-technological neoliberalism, the rescue of traditional peoples’ knowledge, and so on” (2019, p. 15). It refers to what Latour (2000) calls an actor network, which defines itself as it attracts new bonds (or is affected by something new) and that, with this, has what was initially believed to be displaced to another future.

The idea of coexistence between machine and human, the cyborg, for instance, means the hybridization between man and machine (HARAWAY, 2009). For the author, all of us, in a way, become cyborgs: “[...] a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality and a creature of fiction” (2009, p. 36). Social reality means those social relations experienced, our most important political construction, and a fiction able to change the world.

We are multi-species entangled with other species/materialities (HARAWAY, 2021). “Thinking as a species” inaugurates another type of rationality. Contrary to traditional Western rationality and the representational paradigms (in which there is a separation between our world experience, the world itself, and the knowledge of the world), it is a reflection of our partial connections with human and non-human materialities. “It is an embodied and relational thought, as the concepts and abstraction resulting from the knowledge process do not establish a world separated from the matter and the things” (COSTA; FUNCK, 2017, p. 904). Hence, knowing demands us to insert a continuous commitment and engagement in the matter and in the world.

These innovative theoretical approaches also call for an ontological change: a displacement from the viewpoint that there are different perspectives over an objective and universal reality toward recognition of multiple words/realities. The ontological shift enacts a movement towards things, bodies, and organisms, which does not reduce the cognitive processes of human beings. After all, we are faced with an ecology of knowledge and cosmo-politics that promise to revolutionize subject fields and, mainly, the limits of the perverse dichotomy between human and non-human, establishing eastern modernity and constituting power coloniality (COSTA; FUNCK, 2017, p. 904).

In the 21st-century perspective, this involvement also includes the possibility of separating human beings from their non-human surroundings. Therefore, recognizing a constitutive dependence on other humans and more-than-humans forces us to re-conceptualize what we understand as agency and radically question what we are and can be as human subjects, i.e., how we understand ourselves (BUZATO, 2019).

Broadening the debate to issues of the human species in their relations with the material world, we have to debate the concept of Anthropocene (GAUTHIER, 2014b), a geological era in which the changes caused by human actions are so intense and generalized that the human being establishes a geological force, with extreme consequences to the planet. This way, we should understand the need for a “non-human” turn as a way to decentralize the human in favor of non-humans, understood in terms of “animals, affection, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technology” (GRUSIN, 2015 apud COSTA; FUNCK, 2017, p. 906). This debate is the center of teachers’ narratives in this research: to follow how they see their teaching possibilities to contribute to the life and/or the establishment of non-Anthropocene worlds.

Crystalline narratives and creative fabulation for multi-species new worlds: men, nature, and technology

Singing, dancing, and living the magical experience of suspending the sky are common in many traditions. Suspending the sky is broadening our horizon, not the prospective horizon but an existential one. It is to enrich our subjectivities, which is the matter that our current time wants us to consume. If there is an eagerness to consume nature, there is also one to consume subjectivities. So, we will live them with the freedom we could create, not placing them in the market. As nature has been assaulted in such an indefensible way, let us, at least, be able to keep our subjectivities, views, and poetics over existence (KRENAK, 2020, p. 32-33).

Deleuze points out that fables are a central issue because we are invaded by them as “effects of truth” (FOUCAULT, 1975), consumerism, electronic games, media, commercial cinema, etc. Media establishes our mind as dream consumers, a representative democracy, objects, and symbols. “The cinema is an intense form of resistance to what we might call unrealizable fabulations because they place us in a state of mental torpor and voluntary servitude” (GAUTHIER, 2014a, p. 10).

Therefore, we must fight against this type of fabulations and create a realizable fable. From the living side, the memory, the movement, the duration, and the intuition. It is interesting to see what we can learn from the author to expand our thought and in which direction this expansion goes in science, humanity, nature, and technology.

To Zourabichivili (2004), nowadays, in the organic time, the cogito formulates itself through an ‘I am a habit’, and, in this precarious and threatening time, the ‘I’ can only be developed by another: the cogito of the future is the formula, the I is another. To affirm the future is to put oneself at risk because this emerging other takes its place. Therefore, if the past is a virtual conservation of heterogeneous temporal dimensions that will establish the present, the future is its deepening. Therefore, there is a complementarity between past and future because the present would not pass if it was not forced to pass, but it would not be formulated as another if there was no virtual conservation of heterogeneous dimensions. Two complementary passivities. So, rupture is not between the past and future but between the organic present and these two temporalities (ZOURABICHVILI, 2000). The parallelism between spirit/matter and organic/inorganic is exchanged by the equivalence between active/passive and organic/inorganic, which means that the spirit, as time, passed by the inorganic and the passive side. That means saying that it is no longer revealed by an act but is what happens with the body. In other words, it cannot be thought of separately. Time, as the future, is the intensive line that crosses the body, while habit is its extensive enactment.

If the fable role falsifies memory is because it is not a faculty to the past, to keep the past. It is a faculty toward the future, creating new and powerful images without which the present cannot pass. Fabulation is the power of fakeness because it forces us to pass. It forces us to say, “I am another”. Therefore, it is not a virtual instinct, as Bergson (2006) wished, a faculty that keeps us connected with an instinctive past. Fabulation is the memory of the future.

When I suggested that I would talk about the dream and the land, I wanted to communicate to you a place, a practice that is perceived in different cultures, in various peoples, of recognizing this institution of the dream, not as the everyday experience of sleeping and dreaming, but as a disciplined exercise to seek in the dream the guidelines for our daily choices. [...] a dream not as an oneiric experience but as a discipline related to formation, to cosmovision, to the tradition of different peoples that have in the dream a way to learn, self-knowledge about life, and the application of this knowledge in their interaction with the world and with other people (KRENAK, 2020, p. 51-53).

Certainly, in the image-crystal, the present is suspended, favoring a direct connection between the past and future, allowing us to apprehend the virtual dimension of the past . In the image-fable, the present opens up to the future, letting us glimpse the changes they go through. Therefore, this new image, more than offering an indiscernibility, makes us see the body as a field of forces, as a field of force intercession.

The expansion of awareness by the crystalline description mobilizes the potencies of the “fake” - so-called in our realistic-mediatic context, unrealizable, i.e., what, safe from this context, places itself beyond the duality truth and lie, right and wrong. The realism of newspapers, soap operas, electronic games, and Facebook is an aspect of the unrealizable role of the current forms of domination. For this reason, it works very well. We buy small cheap dreams, day after day, night after night. A realizable fabulation is a form of “awareness” because it shows the reverse side of the media scenario and frees itself. From the perspective of those who do not frequently attend the movies, their production, the cinema’s filmmakers and artists seem generally useless complicated, or decentered, confused, exaggerated…This realizable fabulation works through unknown artifacts, while unrealizable fabulation works through familiar affections, tamed and harmless, a connection of the characters and their perspectives, temporal and spatial, within the being, within us.

Indeed, these perspectives can decline in multiple hues, on a scale from the most probable to the most abnormal, terrible, scary, and unsettling, according to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1997) work. Deleuze calls falsifying narration these creative fabulations that go beyond True or False. He highlights the creative power of what would conventionally be called “fake” in our world. The proposal is essentially political: what is opposed to fiction is not the ‘real’, it is not the ‘truth’ from the masters or colonizers, it is the fabulation role of the poor, while it grants the ‘fake’ the power that turns it into a memory, a legend, a monster (DELEUZE, 1985, p. 196). However, it is also spiritual, in the sense of the word Deleuze took from Bergson (see LAPOUJADE, 2013, p. 95-98). We are within the time; this is our spirituality.

Image narrative processes in the research with teachers

We hope that these creative meetings, which we can still keep, can excite our practice and actions, giving us the courage to leave an attitude of denial toward life for a commitment to life anywhere, overcoming our inabilities to extend the view to places beyond those we are attached and live, the forms of sociability and organization that exclude a great part of this human community, which ultimately use all the force of Earth to suppress the demand for goods, safety, and consumption (KRENAK, 2020, p. 50).

We reach the notion of crystal: in the conversations, differences on how to narrate things coexist, as alternatives between truth and false, impossible to be chosen - “decided”, as the logicians say. When a researcher interviews an old teacher, an activist in resistance movements against colonial-capitalist dictatorship, whose life story conflict with that of those who lived in the same social-historical moment, the truth is simply creating itself in front of our eyes, in the folds of time, in multiple temporalities, as a fabulation power and a forger of illusions of the colonial-capitalist world. Thus, the creation of a “crystal of time” as a work, an invented memory - as beautifully called by Manoel de Barros (BARROS, 2003; 2006; 2008). The more “witness” is the narrative, the stronger its demystifying power. Therefore, the more crystalline is what we can describe (the colorful craziness of the world) because this is how we capture the ‘unthought’ in the thought when accepting the flaws in the effort to announce the truth, to think correctly, or to simply think.

It was possible to update more than simple memories of research procedures in the area of memories, dreams, and thoughts (DELEUZE, 1997). It was possible to update theoreticalpractical processes of knowledge production on how narratives in-service teacher education might potentialize the production of other senses of thought in school or ethical and aesthetical processes of teacher subjectivation.

For this work, we will focus on two axes sought in the conversations established with the teachers. The first refers to how the current “anthropogenic” context reaches the schooling processes in elementary and middle school. The second refers to explicit manifestations in teachers’ conversations about crystalline and fabulation narratives, focusing on the possibilities for the creation of new multi-species worlds: men, nature, and technology.

Methodologically, it is a research articulated¹ with an outreach project held in in-service education meetings with teachers from the municipal system of Serra/Espírito Santo (ES), Brazil, via GoogleMeet, once a month in the evenings of 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Initially, the research was designed for 75 teachers, but there was a change, considering that, on the eve of the beginning of the training, the city of Serra-ES was strongly pressured by the Federal Prosecution Service to anticipate the return to in-person classes in a hybrid model. With the return of in-person work, the teachers ² had time conflicts to participate in the in-service education, thus, leading to a sharp decrease in the number of participants. However, in this context of returning to in-person work and the need to flexibilize the schedule of some teachers and tutoring groups, the meetings were kept with a total of 42 teachers enrolled, divided into 3 groups. We chose to work in smaller groups to increase participation among those involved, besides offering three days a week to attend teachers’ availability. Participation in the meeting was voluntary - the dissemination, enrollment, and organization of the groups were done by the Municipal Secretary of Education of Serra (ES).³ We selected only part of the material produced in one group with 14 participant teachers for this text.

The research and outreach project aimed to: 1) establish a network of conversation and experimentation with teachers from the Municipal System of Education of Serra/ES, seeking to potentialize teachers’ learning through artistic signs and, consequently, the students’ learning in curricula with shared collectives; 2) debate about the possibilities of innovative teaching, less based on recognition processes, and produced through collective forms of teachers’ conversation and action, lived in the immanence plane of micropolitics in/of/with the school everyday routine in fabulation networks, using cinema, literature, painting, photography, graffiti, and others.

This work’s empirical data refers to the conversation networks established with the teachers (CARVALHO, 2009). All meetings were recorded, allowing us to fix the “conversations” developed, during which memories of practices, problematizations, and alternative positions. We start with the relationship between art and experimentation. We established a sequence of exercises to each of them that allowed teachers to gradually leave their comfort zones. In each exercise, we tried to intensify the flows so that the relationship between being affected and affect (feeling and act) created lines of escape and/or noise areas in which the bodies could be impregnated by little perceptions (perceptual opening) initially devoid of a meaning content. Such exercises from practices with cinema, literature, drawing, painting, photography, etc., sought to create affection experienced through the dynamic of collective forces at play in teachers and researchers. Using exercises created a clash-generating field, problematization, an opening for learning and collective action.

We also highlight our option to present the research results at the end of the text, aiming to answer the problems raised. Thus, the speeches ‘produced during the conversation networks will appear in italics, with no left indent but, whenever possible, dialoguing with the theoretical-methodological intersection of the Philosophy of Difference that guides this ‘wrtingtext’. To honor our theoretical reference, we did not identify the speakers, not only because of ethical issues of anonymity but because we wanted to stress the power of collective agencies of enunciation (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 1995). We start from the premise that no speech happens only in the individual sphere, i.e., a speaker does not express his ideas in isolation. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1995, p. 63) say that “an individual, taken in a mass, has a pack unconsciousness that is not necessarily similar to the packs of masses in which he takes part”. Furthermore, “each of us is involved in such agency, reproducing the statement when we believe we talk in its name or talk in its name when producing the statement” (Ibidem, p. 64-65). Therefore, we do not rely on writing that creates fictional names for the teachers, but we believe that the statements will appear with force and pure vivacity. Here, we are more interested in the forces that follow their ideas and how they expand during the conversations with other powers.

Hence, we raise the question: how do men, nature, and technology relate with each other as subjects of knowledge, and thus call upon a way of knowing that surpasses the mathematization of life towards, perhaps, the construction of an area of an expansive community? What do we understand as subjects of knowledge when thinking about this articulation between knowing and producing in the organic and non-organic bodies, mainly in pandemic times?

Suspending to the sky to expand teaching horizons: crystalline and fabulation narratives create new worlds.

In the meetings with teachers during the pandemic, we experienced other new ways of researching and outreach. When joining the composition with fabulations and crystalline narratives of teachers in the meeting with artistic signs, the collective participating in the formation meetings⁴ created forces to deconstruct some ‘truths’ of education; problematized how these discourses, beliefs, and conceptions were produced. Mainly to think if we can renovate these ideas or if we are open to considering other types of logic and dimensions, with different lenses to create diverse ways of curriculum experiences and teaching.

Fabulate. Create possibilities for teaching. Think, with innovative teaching, other ways of thinking and making curricula. Nomad curricula that established themselves moved by the forces of the becoming childhood, teenage hood, and youth. Follow up collective statements that glimpse and wish to produce non-Anthropocene worlds, lives gliding in the spectacle society, lives that have unlearned to relearn, moved by the meeting to build knowledge - the most potent of affections.

Yeah... it’s not easy to problematize these “truths” that were considered, so far, unquestionable. We can see that post-critical studies in education don’t ignore what has already been produced in the world but invites us to think and experience other ways of researching, creating curricula, policies, and education. It problematizes what has been considered as “truth”, questions and instigates us to constantly challenge these truths established for the schools. This provokes and leads us to think and act in another way ⁵ .

In our everyday curriculum experiences, we take advantage of everything good, allowing learning. We throw away everything that does not work. However, sometimes, we keep it because it can work in another moment. We act differently depending on the circumstances. It’s a mixture, of alchemy, “abracadraba”, and real magic [laughter], always seeking to produce something new. We then experience several pathways and many possibilities.

To Deleuze (1990), what we see in crystal is always a fusion of life in all its expressiveness. Pure time. Time and life in their displacements and or differences: “[...] How to preserve the truth if there is against the “force of time”, in the sense that it makes compossible presents into incompossible ones, it makes pasts coexist, not necessarily true, and all the power of falseness claims to be creative?” (PELBART, 2010, p. 20). In the meetings with the teachers in conversation networks, the real and the imaginary become indiscernible because there is not a unique and universal truth in these networks to halt and control the experiences and curriculum collective compositions. There is the force of the inventive time flow cradling teaching. Thus, we asked the group: what does ‘produce something new in our teaching’ mean? How could we think of teaching as collective experimentation?

In our movements of in-service education, we present music, fragments of films, short films, experimentations with cyberculture, and photographs….These movements allow us to walk with a sensitive look to perceive the changes in/of the world and insert us to enter into a relationship, to seek new connections. It’s different. We don’t seek here to bring “a truth”, but an invitation to composition. It’s a “do with””.

I’m wondering if what we’re producing as “new” in our teaching would be what we’re thinking and doing from the events. What emerges from everyday life, unexpectedly, what appears and is not on the script…Then we start experimenting without any assurance of what will happen. But we begin together with it, we agree, and we dispute. One person or another always disagrees, but we do it. I don’t know.... I’m just thinking...

Experiencing teaching as an invention is experiencing the meetings from childhood statements and games, and we’re very reluctant to do so. Allowing entering the becomings-childhood of teaching and dealing with them in our discussions. We’re often faced with our own rigidness (because we were shaped so, to follow this way). I even told you all about the issue of butterflies in my life. When I was a child, I had my own way of seeing, of getting closer to the butterflies, and the relation that I have today because we become very strict, really hard. When I was a child raising my hand, butterflies would land on my finger in my house. This was recurrent. And when I arrived today and saw a butterfly, I’d never try to do this again because I’m an adult. I have another perspective. And I can’t even believe that they’d land on me. We have such rigidness, shyness, and shame, stopping us from joining this connection. I think that experiencing teaching, as collective experimentation, is to allow yourself, to open yourself up, to enter into a relationship with the encounters, and experience them from childhood statements.

The event with the butterflies…With the ‘butterflying’ of a teacher, we deconstructed concepts, problematized the rigidness of science (and morals), creating other possibilities of education, and fabricating other worlds moved by the power of will. In conversation networks, the processes of teachers’ subjectivation were establishing themselves, and, thus, we were affirming the invention and producing new images of schools and worlds. To Lazzarato (2006), an event makes, first, a transformation of subjectivity, of feeling, in which new life possibilities are engendered, and emerge, revealing a process of experimentation and creation: “We need to experience what the transformation of subjectivity implies and create new agencies, devices, institutions, able to use these new life possibilities” (LAZZARATO, 2006, p. 12). Or, as Deleuze (1992, p. 218) states for those who believe in the world “[...] it basically means to raise events, though small, which get out of control, or engender new spaces-times, even if in reduced surfaces or volumes”.

In my house, there is a garden, and my mother takes good care of this garden. There were many butterflies. I was a child and was delighted. I laid on the grass and they would land. There were many, with different colors. After we grow up, we don’t see it anymore. But they are probably around. I don’t think I’m more special for the butterflies. However, when I was a child, I thought so. I was magic. We could allow ourselves to think, the child is free and doesn’t have the adult’s strictness. We’re much freer when we are children. I notice this in my physical posture and the way of placing myself. We often position ourselves with rigidness due to the changing mentality. Social issues are imposed and postures expected from us.

The force of experimentation, affections that permeate us. The power of childhood operates in another time and makes itself alive. It doesn’t tie itself. Fabulation helps us escape these models that try to imprison us. The butterfly escapes, resists.

We can also think about the butterfly as a way of being in the world, navigating, and moving the spaces. Because as butterflies, they have the freedom to go to the gardens, they don’t fit in some area, and they can’t have the freedom to fly. Thus, when we think about theories, they help to wander the spaces, but we can’t reach all places with theory.

I’d like to think about the singular beauty of each butterfly. Each has its own characteristics, forces, colors, which blaze the gardens with their flights, paths… They’re intense. They don’t live long but intensely. They have taste buds on their feet; they touch things and let themselves experiment; the butterfly experiences touch. I also think about when we allow ourselves to touch and experience…affections and affectations. And think about the becoming-childhood of teaching. Fabulate other ways of teaching.

This research-experience⁶ changes us and our surroundings. Breath. Open the pores. Untangle. Unknot. Untie. To butterfly. To dance with the butterflies and children, to enter into a relationship with everything that potentializes and affirms life. Yes, we seek new connections with minorities, with the power of collective action, to think of men, nature, and technology as subjects of knowledge. And, as Krenak (2020) tells us, to be able to live our subjectivities with the freedom we can create, i.e., our poetics on existence.

Why are we so tied in an existence of things, of life, reproducing a unique way of being in the world that can no longer find the butterflies, the fireflies? We don’t let ourselves be permeated. We’re here thinking about what we can do to ourselves. Which are our truths, our discourses. Which discourses produce/produced these truths that tie to us, never to be untied? Today we problematize power relations. How many power productions strengthen the knot, renew, and reproduce, instead of questioning what has been tied to us? And, when we see, the images no longer reach the butterfly.

A colleague told me that she works in a rural school. For her, school is a possibility of encounters and sharing life. However, today, I question how we can produce and invent this feeling of joy in school. For example, just with a click, students can access information. Technology makes everything very fast and ephemeral. Then the teacher says: “My concern is: will I be able to handle it? Will I be able to make my students feel the energy of being in school? This force, this power?”

But, this concern is constant. What awaits me? I think this is the issue of the teacher-student. One thing doesn’t exist with the other. And before, we didn’t have much of this interaction, learning with them, as we have today. Precisely because they’re so ahead of us… We have this opportunity of learning with them, of making this exchange, this interaction with the students. This also allows us to create; we can’t reproduce what we already know. We have to give this space...

Now they have this Tik Tok thing. We don’t like it, we’re against it, there’s a restriction, but there’s a possibility of taking advantage of these things. Now they are in this “meme” trend. In the roll call, instead of answering “here”, they say a meme. Each day is something different. My 12-year-old niece said that her coolest teacher did that, and they had to answer with “mom phrases”. They said, “You’re not everyone!”, “We can buy it on our way back…”, “if I find it, I’ll rub it into your face”. I thought this would cause havoc in the class, but they were all silent. I mean, you used something from their universe and brought it to your world. In the beginning, I was resistant, but later I perceived it could be interesting.

Thinking about the subject of knowledge in the relationship between men, nature, and technology is often difficult because we seek the framework, allowing these “labels” to be attached, reproduced, and we forget these other movements that take place. Thus, several notions of the world go unseen in daily life, such as the butterfly story, with which we do not allow ourselves to get in contact. But worlds are relationships. Images and words create new worlds. What can other world-creating words and pictures do? What scares us, surprises us, what is uncommon? Something that unsettles us because it breaks away from pre-established things, as a truth, as a certainty to produce the new.

[...] producing the new is creating new wishes and beliefs, associations, and forms of cooperation. Everyone and anyone creates, in the social density of the city, in conversation, in manners, in leisure [...]. Invention is not a prerogative of the great geniuses, nor a monopoly of the industry or science; it is the power of the common man. (PELBART, 2011, p. 23).

What matters is the establishment of complex forms of subjectivation, i.e., when teachers talk about what potentialize their lives and perceive how the “new” broadens the processes of learning and teaching, they recompose an existential corporeity and, in a way, re-singularize themselves. Guattari (2012) points out that new forms of subjectivities are created in the same way that artists create new forms from the pallets they have, that is, everything that can contribute to creating a relationship with the other. In an interview, they asked Guattari if life could be invented when all the images were produced beforehand. He answered:

[...] Yes, see the examples of chemists. They work with the same material every day: carbon and hydrogen. The main thing is to eliminate this type of redundancy, serialization, mass production, subjectivity, and the constant demand to return to the same point. It is like the painter’s situation, who buy paints in the same store. What matters is what will be done with them. (GUATTARI; ROLNIK, 2000, p.53).

Thinking about teaching as experimentation…I believe that all fabulations, all the different things we have provoked here, it goes through the agencies of what affects us, the affectations. But what is knowledge? I’d say knowledge is everything produced in everyday life: all that is made in daily relationships and the different educational networks. But what knowledge are we talking about? What is relevant to know? What are we producing, or what has been historically produced?

From whose perspective: the colonized or the colonizer?

If we had to answer with one word, I would say relationship.

I’d say that everything that happens in these relationships, I’d say this is knowledge.

Because the first thing we think about is systematized knowledge, it is what is demanded in schools, but I think that everything we produce is knowledge. You can reach organised knowledge from a relationship with students. When we say that the students know nothing, what are we saying? Often, we don’t allow ourselves to join a relationship with the experiences of those students. How do we create this encounter? With something that makes sense to them.

Does the school talk about things that make sense to the students? How do students build knowledge? What is the relationship between knowledge and affection? Between knowledge and life? Such questions are necessary to make us think about learning and teaching build ethically, associating itself with expressions that move from our understanding and wish. The power is on the temporariness and singularity of each person’s wish.

Knowledge acts producing affections and affections that make knowledge. If knowing is affecting and being affected, which is the relationship between knowledge and affection? Which intensities and possibilities create a life that pulsates and allows an invention in which knowledge is the most potent affection?

Spinoza (2008) affirms that the way we think, and how we know, implies the way we live. For Spinoza, regardless of the type of knowledge, this reflects a way of living. The ethical way presented by Spinoza makes us think about the dignity of living what we are, assuming our problems, aspirations, and wishes, what would lead us to create a singular lifestyle, establishing non-Anthropocene worlds, shapeless but with the power of encountering other words.

It is essential to conceive life, each individuality of life, not as a shape or the development of a form, but as a complex relationship between different speeds, between slowing and accelerating particles. A composition of speed and slowness in an immanence plan. [...] it is through speediness and slowness that we glide between things, we conjugate with something else: we never start, we never restart all again, we never glide through them, get in the middle, hold or impose rhythms (DELEUZE, 2002, p. 128).

Endless compositions...

In this writing, we have sought to create agencies with teachers through conversation networks and encounters with artistic signs to provoke thought. We have bet on crystalline narratives and teaching fabulations to proliferate the movements of thought relating as subjects of knowledge, men, nature, and technology.

Considering knowledge as a relationship allows us to draw perception mutations related to space, body, and time, from the conversation networks with teachers, as part of an existential territory shared with a pulsating life lived and felt daily in school. Pulsating life amidst the (dis)encounters of bodies, spaces, and time, whose power is in multiplicity. In the Nietzsche sense, we found the “power of will” in the effort, the attempt, the search to overcome, seeking for affections that mobilize, move, and incite other possibilities. A wish to want “more”, to fight to reach the “possible”, and go beyond what is current. It is not only a fight to preserve the being, a simple instinct of conservation but a wish to “surpass”, to go beyond, to create new worlds. “Power of will” is the power in movement, which urges the will of being, a will of existence, an attempt at a non-Anthropocene world in which subjects of knowledge are men, nature, and technology.

In this power of will, crystalline narratives and fabulation in conversation networks allow the creation of new multi-species worlds, interconnecting men, nature, and technology as subjects of knowledge.

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• 1
  The research and outreach project “Artistic signs instigating learning and enhancing the training of teachers in the municipality of Serra/ES” is a subproduct of a broader study, registered in the CNPq Research Directory as “Images, artistic signs, instigating learning in curricula in school daily-life: enhancing the constitution of collective bodies”, coordinated by Professor Janete Magalhães Carvalho and approved by CNPq for the period 2020-2025. It had the participation of teachers and members of the research group “With-Versations with the Philosophy of Difference in curricula and teacher training”. The outreach project was registered and approved in the Management System of the Outreach Dean of Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo under the number 2376.
• 2
  With the exception of one male teacher, all other 41 were women.
• 3
  We chose to develop the research and outreach project in the city of Serra, due to an invitation made by the formation management of the education secretary to the coordinator of the research group.
• 4
  The participants in the meeting were: elementary school teachers (8), middle school teachers: art teachers (3), physical education teachers (2) and a pedagogue (1); UFES teachers (3), master’s candidate (1); PhD candidates (2).
• 5
  We kept in the text the marks of the informal oral discourse.
• 6
  To Bondia, “experience is what goes through us, what happens, and touches us”. Therefore, a gesture of interruption is needed, a “stop”: “[...] stop to think, stop to look, stop to listen, stop to think more slowly, to look more slowly, and listen more slowly, stop to feel, to fell more slowly, to take time in the details, to suspend opinion, suspend judgement, suspend the automatism of action, cultivate the attention and finesse, open eyes and ears, talk about what happens to us, learn slowly, listening to others, cultivate the art of meeting, of giving time and space” (2002, p. 24). We rely on and affirm these movements in the conversation networks with the teachers to problematize curricula and teaching.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  06 Jan 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  14 May 2022
• Accepted
  24 Oct 2022