Drawing on Foucault's main reflections about the act of writing, the present essay expounds the intrinsic correlation between ways of writing and ways of living at schools, pointing out the daily agony involved in the writing practices conducted in these contexts. This means that, within the procedures of writing, superlative forces are in battle, both in the sense of the unifying attack of the subjectivation modes implied therein, and in the direction of a radical transfiguration of these same modes aiming at their multiplication. Deepening the theoretical discussion, the text approaches the question of self writing, as formulated by Foucault, as a disproportionate sculptural effort in favor of a subjective dispersion, rarefaction and, then, elision. Next, three recurring arguments about school writing are analytically questioned: its categorization in genres, its examining function, and its subordination to reading. With this critical examination, the purpose is to destabilize the bases for justifying a kind of representational and scientificist appropriation of the school writing activities, as well as to conjure up scenarios divergent from the mainstream. Lastly, it is also an objective here to view writing as a circumstance propitious to the existential styling of the writer, having in mind, with Foucault, the indispensible effort of resistance and ethical self-creation in the face of the subjectivation games typical of school practices. It is the inextricable movement of difference and variation that a writing liberated from the pedagogical conventions of the time affords and, at the same time, demands of all those who pursue it.
Michel Foucault; School writing; Writing processes; Subjectivation modes