The genealogy and the research in education: absurd children as blind zones in the social forces diagram or in the power/knowledge devices ^{1 2 3 4}

Abstract

The essay addresses how genealogical research can contribute to make visible, in the educational processes, blind zones in any diagram of social forces or dispositives of knowledge and power in which children can exert resistance. We use literature to exemplify the strength of children’s inventiveness. We discuss some dimensions of genealogical research: the examination of subjectivation processes; the analysis of the consistency plan and the chance of struggle; the discontinuous sense of history and the weight of tradition; researcher’s sensation of strangeness and attention; the facing of the effects of truth and its dismantling, aiming to escape, not power itself, but particular strategies of the relations of knowledge and power.

Keywords
Genealogical research; Forces diagram; Power/knowledge dispositive; Education; Childhood

Resumo

O ensaio aborda como a pesquisa genealógica pode contribuir para visibilizar, nos processos educativos, zonas cegas existentes em qualquer diagrama de forças sociais ou dispositivo de saber e poder nos quais as crianças podem exercer uma resistência. Utiliza a literatura para exemplificar a força da inventividade infantil. Discute algumas dimensões da pesquisa genealógica: o exame dos processos de subjetivação; a análise do plano de consistência e o acaso das lutas; o sentido descontínuo da história e o peso da tradição; a sensação de estranhamento e atenção do pesquisador; o enfrentamento dos efeitos de verdade e seu desmonte, visando a escapar não ao poder em si, mas às estratégias particulares das relações de saber e poder.

Palavras-chave
Pesquisa genealógica; Diagrama de forças; Dispositivo de saber/poder; Educação; Infância

Prologue: absurd children

In Mozambique, by the end of colonization and the destruction from the years of war, the country sees itself, just a wordless, voiceless girl. This is how Mia Couto (2013) narrates the story of the girl with no words, as no vowels would escape her. Her lips were busy with only indecipherable sounds, in a language of her own. Though they tried, her parents could not understand the girl. When she remembered the words, she forgot the thought. When she built a thought, she would lose the language. She was not mute; she simply spoke a language that does not exist in the current phase of humanity.

The father would give her affection and affliction. One night, he begged, with wet eyes, to talk with her. The daughter kissed a tear and said: sea…And did not say another word. The father was not satisfied. He took his daughter to see the ocean, believing that this would uncloud the reason for her inability. The girl sat on the sand with tears falling on her knees. The world that she imagined endless was, after all, small? There she stayed, as a rock, in silence.

The father then thought that the daughter could only be saved by a story! So, he soon invented one in which a girl asked her father to catch her the moon. The father entered a boat and rowed far away. When he reached the horizon, he dreamt to reach such heights. He held the moon with both hands, very carefully. When he pulled to remove that sky fruit, the Moon shattered; the boat sank, swallowed by an abysm. The beach was covered in silver, flakes of moonshine over the sand.

She looked over the horizon and called: Father! Then, a deep gap opened and, from that scar, blood oozed. However, at this point, the father lost his voice and silenced. The story lost its track in his mind. The girl, suddenly, rose and walked towards the waves, but returned, grabbed her father’s hand and led him home. Over them, the moon was restoring itself. “See, dad? I finished your story! And both of them, enlightened, extinguished themselves in the room they had never left” (Couto, 2013, p. 26).

In another story, Mia Couto (2004) tells the story of the boy that made verses, starting with a verse from a boy who complained: what was the point of having a voice if he was understood only when he did not speak and he questioned if it was worthy waking up if what he lived was less than what he dreamt. This also startled the doctor who asked if there were any similar cases in the family. The mother denied it! She was a homemaker and the father a mechanic, not familiar with the letters. The boy was the result of one of these relations with dirty nails, fuel residues staining the bed sheet, and oily love confessions. All was unremarkable, the shop was barely enough to support the family and the child’s school. However, on the corners of the house, papers scribbled with verses started to appear. To the father’s dismay, the boy confessed, with no hesitation, that he was the author. The father soon declared that the boy should leave school, as that was the result of too much study, dangerous contamination, and bad influences.

The mother defended the studies and the father demanded that the boy should be examined and have a general checkup, mechanical and electric parts. The doctor listed everything and asked the boy if there was something hurting him; the boy replied that life hurt him. The doctor, amazed, then asked, raising his head, what the boy did when he felt those pains. What I do best, replied the boy, is to dream!

There was also a flat-head boy. A boy from a poor rural family, some would say from a unstructured family, as he lived with his maternal grandparents, or better, lived with his grandfather (constantly sick), as the grandmother worked during the week to the rich people in the region, and the mother, single, became a whore, some commented.

The boy liked to go to school, a public primary school. There he discovered the letters and with them created combinations. There he was enchanted by geography maps and the names of faraway places. The boy also liked to go to school, because there he could find his best friend, and, when they met, they abstracted themselves from the defining rules of that place, transfiguring it.

Once they sat cross-legged on the floor, as two adults with their respective glasses over the table and chatted, mimicking, to the despair of the teacher, having a beer at a bar. Because of that, they said it was best to separate them so as not to trouble the good working of the school, as they did trouble.

The teacher did not know what to do with that boy. The stories told about that boy (parents separated, a whore mother…) reached the school even before the boy and weakened him. The boy disappeared with no traces (Baptista, 2001). Then they started to notice that the boy’s head was different, it seemed flat on the front. They asked themselves if he did not have any head problems, if he had no handicap. It would be good to know if the boy had anything, what diagnosis the doctor could give, said the teacher.

Expecting the boy to have something, they gave reality to something the boy had. Unstructured family and something medical, close together, coded a school experience, acting, in anticipation, a control over what could be strange and disturbing in this experience.

Nevertheless, the boy was not reduced to some codes that, organically, ordered the experience. Before there was an inorganic, in the sense of a non-prefixed body, an open body, composed by textures of irreducible worlds that intercross it, a body that suddenly acts by its own presence, portraying the decentralization of life.

This boy had many stories, but not all were told. The moralization of this boy’s behaviors depoliticizes the realities experienced by him, in which men go to bars. Depoliticize even more the stories of fights from these men, told in the bars and, possibly, only in the bar, as a privileged space.

The boy was the materialization of a corporality that acts, without claiming, a priori, the fiction of an agent (Fogel, 2000). The agent is the action itself and the action of a corporality that acts. This materialization triggers the decentralization of life; an attack that disturbs the balance of things….The teacher did not know what to do.

How to bare the weavening established on the not knowing what to do, to inhabit this precarious balance, and to continue in these everyday occasions when these boys attack, triggering a process that gives visibility to the different workings presented in the school routine?

The power and the potency of school educational processes

A genealogical research in education wants to grasp things where they grow (Deleuze, 1992), unraveling the lines in which a peculiar weaving opens to an experience that, because of that, can only be an invention, can only be ‘becoming’.

Thus, the girl with no words, the boy that made verses, and the flat-head boy are projections of possible potencies that can be disconnected and/or disabled amidst school educational relations.

As a hummingbird that, seeking for the food sap, disguises itself as a flower, momentarily indiscernible, children in school routine are crossed by existential lines that frame them so that the configuration of a school routine is not granted to us at first. There is the need to understand the lines of a dispositive, entering them (on the lines) and allowing oneself to feel and experience what inhabits and composes school life.

Explain, problematize, and overcome the limitations of these school routines, as collective bodies, guide the discursive practices presented amidst our argumentation as a condition of its life potency – the vitality of the genealogical research. From this vitality emanates the power that aims to activate the sensibility of the concentration of powers it materializes in the subjectivity of those experiencing it; and, by extension, activates the sensibility of powers that overflow its surrounding landscape and demand a creational work to reshape its contours.

The three great instances that Foucault (1985, 1987, 2002) successively distinguishes- knowledge, power, and subjectivity- have no defined contours; they are chains of variables that stand out from one another. It is always through a crisis that a new dimension, a new line will be found. Thus, we think on moving lines. When talking about security dispositives, Foucault (2008) refers to the understanding that, beside the sedimentation lines, there are also fissure lines, fracture lines. Unravel the lines of a dispositive, in each case, is a work of field reconnaissance, to establish oneself on its own lines; these that are not contained only in the composition of a dispositive, but cross them and, to know it, even if provisionally, should also be crossed.

The first domain, knowledge, refers to the establishment of a network of discourses in the production of knowledge; the second refers to powers in its multiple forms (this would indicate the strategic role of the dispositive and the relation between its discursive and institutional elements); the third refers to the production of subjects (or how subjectivity is produced or, more appropriately, the ways of subjectivation). The multilinear ensemble, defined by Foucault (2014) as a diagram or abstract machine, also characterizes the dispositive as a concrete machine, as concrete agency, derivative from the abstract machine, present in the three investigative domains of writing (Deleuze, 1991).

Thus, the diagram, or abstract machine, is established by multiple lines, curves, and regimes, always trespassed by vectors and tensors, composing the visibilities and invisibilities, enunciations, forces, relations, and subject positions. It is a map of power relations that behaves by non-localizable primary connections, but pass each instance through all points, acting as an immanent cause, spreading by all social field and producing a reciprocal relation between cause and effect, as the relation among power regime, flows of knowledge and powers, and the taming of students’ bodies. To Foucault (1987) there is a correlation between abstract machine and the concrete machine, which he calls dispositives.

Therefore, in Foucault (2008), the idea of diagram is related to the power field, closer to the concept of power field in Nietzsche. In fact, it is located on the sphere of strata and the shapes of expression and content that generate a field of enunciation or sayability and a visibility field. Then, the diagram is always virtual and real. So, the diagram of social powers field merges with the dispositive of the concrete machine acting, in the case focused on this article, in the area of school education (Agostinho, 2017).

In school, life, not as a mirror, reflects life produced in the debilitated fabric of society, to provoke hopelessness, perturbation, but making itself the norm.

Ordered by this logic, contemporary biopolitics seem to assault life everywhere. Schools seem to remind us of this controlled life, a life lived in biopower- children enter school and, automatically, stop being children. In a barely imperceptible movement, children – potency of life, as a becoming – when entering the organizational sphere of school, the political dimension of their lives sound kidnapped to introduce them to an identity game. Children’s bodies are introjected by an a priori identity of school institution, the child becomes, in fact, a student and carries with him/herself all the load of values and signs of this new identity he/she has needs to bare (Carvalho & Roseiro, 2015).

We insert school in this context, moved by a problem that affects us as teachers and students: how does school life connect with the subjectivation processes of children-students in school, in their possibilities of life composition?

In this sense, in this text we aim to problematize how genealogy can be used as a research method, desacralizing the current will of power. Thus, we take the concept of will to power described by Nietzsche (2008) and resumed by Foucault (1979) as the main driving force of human beings, considering that there is a determined total of force in the universe, it is not endless. Time is endless and, before now, there was an infinity of time. Thus, the power that exists today must have been eternally active and equal, or it would have been extinguished. From this we have the notion of something is never at rest, but in constant becoming, considering that the world of forces cannot be over, or in balance, or at rest; from its greatness of power and movement in each time; and all its extension to the whole, referring to the will to power and the will to potency.

In this perspective, the production of knowledge is no longer limited by the examination of the formation and transformation of the discursive systems and starts to consider the political element or, yet, the reciprocal assumption between knowledge and power. Thus, it departs from an essentialist perspective, i.e., considers knowledge as a sparkle between two swords, a product, therefore, of a conflict, of a relation of immanent power. Therefore, Foucauldian genealogy approaches the process of knowledge production in a non-epistemological perspective, not dealing with the essences, because truth is from this world; it is produced in it thanks to the multiple coercions and exerting power effects that can regulate it. (Pinho, 2007).

Hence, in this article we aim to approach how genealogy research, pervaded by the will of potency, can contribute in the perspective of an ontology of the present to problematize the power relations that cross the process of subjectivation in school routine.

To Foucault (1979, p. 171), genealogy is:

[...] the body of research that seeks to rediscover the struggles, and the raw memories of the combats, in the coupling between erudite and disqualified knowledge. It is the search for the historical knowledge of the struggle. This search can only be accomplished by eliminating the tyranny of the encompassing discourses, and the constitution of a historical knowledge of the struggles, coupling knowledge with local memories. It is a matter of activating local knowledge, discontinuous, disqualified, not legitimated, against the theoretical instance that would pretend to depurate, hierarchize, and order them in the name of true knowledge, in the name of the rights of a science held by a few.

Consequently, considering the dimensions of genealogic research as mutually engendered, we present, with no intention to exhaust the theme, some of these dimensions: the processes of subjectivation; the plan of consistence of will, of impulses, and of instincts and the chance of struggles; the discontinuous sense of history and the weight of tradition and moral; the sensation of estrangement and genealogists’ attention; the effects of truth and its dismantle mobilizing and registering in school everyday life, in the interstices between body domestication, the insurgent potencies of absurd children.

The processes of subjectivation

Referring to the works of Michel Foucault (2012) on the History of Madness, which investigates the formation rules of what he called an awareness of the Other (referring to the institutionalization of the mad person and madness), we ask: what current and past temporalities diffusely excite this gesture through which schooled children lose the face of a family childhood? What would compose (and under what rules) the plan that establishes the experience through which children become absurd?

We understand that the sense formed by alterity, the consistency of the feeling of the Other, is not the result of a certain psychological projection grounded in a self-sufficient individual, or a progress in time of the meaning attributed by an enlightened mind, but the social product of its time, an effect of a ensemble dispositive ⁵ (Foucault, 1979) that crosses people who feel and act. We call attention to the historicity of the formation of a feeling towards the Other. If not even the I, this last stronghold of modernity of a supposed stability faced by life flows, it is not grounded in a-historical fundamentals. We understand that, in some way, the experience of the other, subsumed in the child, is something in itself and has always been grounded in the same senses (or even rules) of formation.

In any way, we focus on the subject in relation with time. However, we do that by inverting the Kantian formula in which the subject is conceived as an element of transcendence, as an a priori condition through which the experience of time is subjugated. On the contrary, we understand the subject as an invention, a creation in time, following a temporal process.

In fact, we do not refer to the subject, but the processes of subjectivation, highlighting the primacy of temporal experience, i.e., the primacy of an inter-fabric of heterogeneous lines woven in time, as a condition to create the subject.

Thus, we conceive a genealogical project that, considering the experience of alterity in its ethical-political aspect, in its gravity rips its constructive lines, that is, its pedagogical, economic, medical, philosophical, geographical lines, among others, questioning what they enact together.

We understand that, amidst the constructive lines, we can see the meaning of the alienating gesture that chases away children from their multiple childhoods, meanings that impregnate teachers, pedadogues, teacher aides, parents and, mainly, children themselves. But this is not all, as this would ignore the way these children experience the legibility attributed to them, portraying matrices of otherness that escape all identity representation (Ferre, 2011). Thus, the otherness of the Other, experienced in one’s own skin, becomes heterogeneity, as it refers to the decentralization of life.

In this scenario, between the readability, formed by children, and how this readability is lived, affirming the heterogeneity of life, we can show the rules of formation and the strategic means that compose the feeling of the Other, indicating its evolution in time.

In any case, a genealogic project is dedicated to a subtle reality that cannot be confused with the shape of men or human individualities, though this reality decisively crosses them. The genealogic project implies something of inhuman or infrahuman, i.e., composition lines of experience, lines Nietzsche would label cravings, impulses, instincts, a plan of consistence characterized by an irreducible multiplicity (Deleuze, 2018).

The plan of consistency of craving, impulses, instincts and the chance of struggle

The craving (or the impulse, or the instinct) cannot be calculated by an absolute measure, as its quantum of power results from an inapprehensible fight, balanced by an opportune occasion of an unpredictable routine, as someone that laughs in a public street.

Nietzsche (2016, p. 87-88) writes in “The Dawn of Day”, § 119:

[...] Let us suppose that some day as we pass along a public street we see some one laughing at us. In accordance with whatever craving has reached its culminating point within us at that moment, this incident will have this or that signification for us; and it will be a very different occurrence in accordance with the class of men to which we belong. One man will take it like a drop of rain, another will shake it off like a fly, a third person will try to pick a quarrel on account of it, a fourth will examine his garments to see if there is anything about them likely to cause laughter, and a fifth will in consequence think about what is ridiculous per se, a sixth will be pleased at having involuntarily contributed to add a ray of sunshine and mirth to the world,—in all these cases some craving is gratified, whether anger, combativeness, meditation, or benevolence [...].

The instinct is a quantum of power, it is a craving to dominate "[...] which subjugates by exploiting circumstances in a provisional reign, imposing a singular form and meaning" (Nietzsche, 2016, p. 85-86). Therefore, “we will never find the meaning of something (human, biological, or even physical phenomenon) if we do not know which is the force that appropriates the thing, that explores it, that takes over it, or expresses itself through it [...]” (Deleuze, 2018, p. 11).

The consistency plan of craving is enacted in a register of struggles where thrives a sort of index through which fight is updated on the creation of an everyday life in its minimal traces, drawing folds in the existence, and digging a heterogeneous temporality in things and in men.

The term used by Nietzsche, as explained by Foucault (1979), to name this type of index in which fight and confrontation between instincts are attracted in the minimal creation of something common, is the emergence index. This is very appropriate as the necessary unfolding of the chance of struggle “[...] emerges presenting a singular reality” (Nietzsche, 2016, p. 70).

Therefore, in this register of struggle in and through life, the historical sense that opens up for the genealogist indicates a discontinuous history, as “ [...] The different emergences that can be demarcated are not successive figures of the same signification, they are effects of substitution, reposition and displacement, disguised conquests, systematic inversions [...]” (Foucault, 1979, p. 26). The author continues: “[...] The forces at play obey neither a destiny nor a mechanic, but the chance of the struggle [...]” (p. 28).

It is worth noting that subliminal imitations suggest themselves in this struggle that cannot be apprehended, in which children perceive, on adults, strong inclinations and aversions to certain acts and imitate these inclinations and aversions so that “[...] the reiterated simulations, for a long time, become instincts” (Nietzsche, 2016, p. 158).

As gravity, the repeated imitations polarize the fight, discipline instincts biasing direction. As a lasting coercion, this gravity is an ancestral force (Nietzsche, 2005b), i.e., creates layers of subtle, singular, sub-individual time that intercross, creating a regime of the origins of instincts (Foucault, 1979).

The regime of the origins of instincts, however, is not a past element that excites the present with an unscathed way and sense delineated since the beginning. Nonetheless, this inheritance is not an acquisition, a good to be accumulated and solidified: it is an ensemble of flaws, of fissures, of heterogeneous layers that make it unstable and, within or underneath, threaten the inheritor, in our case, our children.

Thus, the consistency plan of instincts is enacted in a register of war that also thrives in a type of ancestry index or regime of origins through which a fight is opened and updated in the creation of an everyday life. It is a confrontation between asymmetrically built instincts, marked by fights from other times that qualify them, considering their differences, but that, while modulating existence inspires new fights and gestures.

The discontinuous sense of history, the feeling of customs, and/or the weight of tradition and moral

The discontinuous sense of history that opens for the genealogist is supplemented by the dispersive effects drawn by the instincts in dispute. “The research of provenance does not find, quite the contrary: it shakes what was perceived as immobile, it fragments what was thought to be united, it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined to be in conformity with itself. [...]” (Foucault, 1979, p. 21).

In this way, the genealogist, when open to a history made by irreversible ruptures, drawn in a dispersive instinctual field, hesitates as if faced by a mystery. Time becomes foreign, as history, in this case, does not have the limits that we arbitrarily place with the criteria of our contemporary constitution (Nietzsche, 2005a, 2017).

The successive imitations through time create a gravity that decisively polarizes the field of instinctual fight. However, this gravity can also be affected by a type of majority number, when “[...] instincts enter into relation with instincts already baptized as good and bad” (Nietzsche, 2016, p. 35).

In this relation, on the contrary, they embody a specific line of instincts whose forces are dominated. Then, instincts are decanted and deposed from their power. The value they assume is a type of attributed second nature, inherited from an impersonal Other.

Captured by this type of majority number, as a centripetal force, the instincts start to work by preserving a value that is not proper to them, a value that can be transmitted.

However, as transmitted ways of action, they are not customs, that is, they are no longer related to the same experiences as men in the past when, in the context of their times, conceived what was advantageous and disadvantageous for their existences. So, we can say that the instincts form, in this relation, the pale expression of customs. They create the sense for customs (Nietzsche, 2009, 2017).

As a pale expression of customs, “[...] the feeling of customs is the feeling of the age, sanctity and indisputability of customs which one stupidly obeys” (Nietzsche, 2016, p. 25) under the aegis of tradition. Moral action, therefore, is an obedience to a previously established tradition. Moral action, under the auspices of tradition, is the symptom of an instinct devoid from its power; it is the symptom of domesticated or dominated instinct.

We should mention that the lasting coercion, as seen, is a moral expression that limits the perspective and the taming of instincts, becoming an occasion in which an instinct can enact its potency.

As I understand it, training is one of the means of humanity's enormous accumulation of forces, so that generations can continue to build on the work of their ancestors – to grow from them not only outwardly, but inwardly, organically, in what is strongest

(Nietzsche, as cited in Machado, 2017, p. 99).

However, moral can also be the occasion of domestication or taming of instincts, as it works towards its weakening, considering that morals are laws that a group imposes itself when their origins are forgotten (Nietzsche, 2005a). As oblivion spreads its mist over the origin, a feeling of sacredness befalls the origin with a fabulous sense.

The historical sense that opens to the genealogist under the aegis of the other is lost in unfathomable darkness. The metaphysical offspring in the history of moral feelings reduces the foreign to a common denominator, simplifying the multiple, leveling the sinuosities of existence, considering them as equal different things, homogenizing time.

Thus, how do we reach an event in its irreducible construction? How to let the discontinued senses of their traces be heard, if they are silenced by a moral monologue? How to reach these unknown corners of history that, rupturing with today, are closed to us in mysteries?

The sensation of estrangement and the genealogist’s attention

Pointing out that the learner has the measure of his/her learning, according to the power of seeing and thinking, the genealogic interrogation and the historical knowledge mediated by the estrangement of the genealogist suddenly act, changing the devout perception attributed to our values and their origins.

On the metaphysical preconcepts, Nietzsche writes in § 2º of “Beyond good and evil”:

[...] the things of highest value must have an origin that is their own - they cannot derive from this fleeting, deceitful seductive, petty world, this whirlpool of insanity and greed! They must come from the bosom of being, from the intransitory, from the hidden god, from the 'thing itself' – in this, in nothing else, must be its cause! – This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudice by which the metaphysicians of all times can be recognized [...]

(Nietzsche, 2005b, p. 9-10).

For the genealogist, the estrangement, as a sensibility that escapes the hereditary irreflection, is what disturbs the normality of the gaze, a way to unsee the world (Barros, 2010), a poetical act of seeing found in the cadence of a potent experimentation.

Thus, genealogist’s attention becomes a restlessly kinetic in the same act in which men and the world assume a peculiar obtuse aspect, as modulations adrift. In this way, the genealogist’s attention changes the scale, characterized by a glimpse of the events: “[...] there where one least expected them and in what is considered to have no history – the feelings, love, consciousness, instincts the genealogist surrenders to a nauseating vastness of what he does not know” (Foucault, 1979, p. 15),.

Therefore, the genealogic perspective assumes a low angle in which things and men, in a precarious balance, are shown with marks and scars that diversely constitute them in time. In this perception, there is no men, but a man and a peculiar cartography of passions in the little things and, in them, we can hear the roaring rumblings of insurgent instincts which, under the signs of immorality, madness, and crime, “[...] men see gnawing like worms their happy inventor’s hearts” (Nietzsche, 2017, p. 37).

So, the historical sense open itself to the genealogist in irreversible ruptures (Nietzsche, 2005a) as a succession of subjugation processes. Genealogical knowledge, thus, opens up not to the marks and scars that diversely establish men and worlds, but opens these marks and scars in their fringes of tensions.

Something happens as the genealogist advances in the knowledge of the origin of moral prejudices, that is, the fantasy of miraculous origins, in essential senses, in the first and last things, loses its sacred aura.

Genealogical knowledge intervenes denaturalizing or desacralizing the value of values, turning moral deities into laughable figures that no longer have power to bend the genealogist’s knees. This way, we understand that the genealogical knowledge is a propaedeutic of liberation from tradition.

Therefore, the historical sense that opens up to the genealogist diametrically opposes an ethereal and homogeneous time in which the present man presupposes the scope of a monolithic model that unconditionally crosses time or, on the contrary, in which is assumed, in the man of today the erased figure of what man is in his origin or essence.

Genealogists let metaphysicians deal with the “[...] the chimerical elucubrations of first and last things” (Nietzsche, 2017, p. 138), as he/she wants to grab things by the middle, where they grow. “Like the wanderer, the genealogist reconciles himself with the nearest things and does not belittle them as metaphysicians do by raising their eyes to divinities” (p. 139).

In this perspective, retelling a genealogical history is to establish a philosophical position, as it shows that “[...] everything came to be, there are no eternal facts: as there are no absolute truths [...]. Everything in the realm of morality has come to be, is changeable, oscillating, everything is in flux [...]” (Nietzsche, 2005a, p. 78).

Without appealing to a centralizing instance of sense, the language used by the genealogist, when telling this story, has as a model the chance of war, of fight, of confrontation in which unpredictable settlements necessarily take place. Consequently, we can affirm that the historical sense is a knowledge that acts in the present. As stated by Lobo (2008, p. 20): “Work the past, follow the trail of old origins, articulate points of emergence of the current formations is to seek criticizing the present [...]”.

That way, the genealogical procedure, inaugurated by Nietzsche and thought by Foucault, does not produce only historical knowledge. In an ethical and aesthetic manner, the genealogical procedure also brings political implication in the perspective of an ontology of the present.

The effects of truth and their dismantlement mobilizing potencies in school everyday life

The genealogical methodological guidance supposes the analysis of the origin of discourses, their possible crossroads and the surface effects produced by these crossroads, i.e., the “effects of truth”. That is why the role of genealogy is not to discover what is hidden, but “[...] to make visible what is precisely visible – that is, to make appear what is so close to us, so immediate, what is so intimately connected to ourselves that, as a result, we do not perceive it” (Foucault, 2004, p. 44).

The interest of genealogical analysis is to know how effects of truth are historically produced within the discourses not taken as true or false by themselves. We do not seek the ensemble of true propositions to be discovered, but it is what allows saying, recognizing, and accepting proposals as true, to which specific effects of power are tied.

From a structural point of view, the discourses present some key records, establishing its regularity, of which its normalizing character and its self-referentiality are the most visible ones.

Hence, the discursive production that invests in the redefinition of connections between education and the production of school relations is polymorphic, diversified, and very comprehensive. However, we need to consider that there are common characteristics to all these discursive strata. One of them is the strong authority that overlay these discourses. They keep their respectability and legitimacy, even crossing very different ideological, political, and ideological records.

When speaking in the name of peace, balance, learning, etc., the production that composes the repertoire of the discursive formation of contemporary schooling clearly expresses an action of transcendence that makes the very discourse metaphysical, speaking in the name of universal senses. Even if these notions can be defined as varied and even conflicting, they act as key principles, against which nobody can rebel, as their meanings, though imprecise, are considered positive in themselves, assuming a self-explanatory value and, therefore, its universality.

Creating a language is an operation of power. Further, to sacralize a discourse is to grant it a transcendental, unquestionable, power, because it lays in a place beyond what is human, unreachable, thus, dangerous. So, there is the need to restore it to its mundane character, that is, also make it an object of criticism, as a guarantee of the freedom of though and action.

Based on the genealogical analysis, it is possible to perceive how discourses loaded with good intentions, as those on the quality of school education to all children, apparently unquestionable and considered as naturally good, are crossed by relations of knowledge-power. From the sensibility around human nature and moral, such discourses regulate a subjectivation of the subject, revealing the area of intersection in which the techniques of individuation and the totalizing processes that touch the figure of a previously coded subject.

In this sense, genealogical research in education must have as an objective the dismantlement of the effects of truth, through questionings that change the ways to teach how to see, think, and practice the everyday relations in school, producing a new configuration of the fields of knowledge, of legitimation of power positions, and the instauration of truth regimes on life and school education and beyond it, making sense of the existence and producing insurgent movements.

Finishing, but leaving some threads behind to think the possibilities open for absurd children in genealogical studies

In “A prenda”, Mia Couto (2014, p. 105-106) retells us, in verse and here in prose, the story of a boy with the divine gift of invention. He says: the boy received the gifts, because it was his day and that is what they told him. The boy, bewildered, questioned if the other days would not be his. Curious, he approached and peeked. He thought that the gift was nothing, barely existed. He asked what it was and they answered it was a gift. The boy thought: What gift can that be with no shape? They answered Open. The boy thought: How can I open it, if there is not outside or inside? They told the boy to try it. The boy thought: How can I try something that I cannot touch? So, he looked better, focusing not on the gift, but on the eyes of who gave it. That is when what was nothing became everything. Grateful, he reciprocated with a word and a kiss. What they offered him was the gift to invent. A talent to have nothing, but a gift to be everything.

The boy with the divine grace of inventing, as the girl with no words, the boy who made verses, and the flat-head boy are illustrations of here called absurd children which have in common the characteristics of many of our children in the educational system that tame them but, however, in between, allow, through fissure lines, other possibilities of existential opening.

A child can participate in many plans of existence, considering that the other’s feeling is situated in an ensemble dispositive in which coexist a multiplicity of worlds and the identity subject is an invention created in processes of subjectivation of creating time and, therefore, a moral.

Then, it is worth considering that, in the case of struggles, in the plan of immanence, the beings are plurimodal realities, multimodals; and what we call the world is, in fact, the place of many interworlds, an entanglement of plans that sometimes call one another to existence, when in others disperse between applicable worlds (Lapoujade, 2017).

Each existence comes from gestures that establish them and not originate from a creator, because it is immanent to existence itself. Therefore, absurd children surpass the repetitive imitations that discipline instincts, as the past that excites the present is not a stable form of meaning or a well-solidified good, but a fight from the limits of the beings, of the gestures that establish them.

This way, even considering the weight of tradition, genealogic research suspends this weight, seeking through estrangement and through attention to glimpse the events and, inverting, map the otherness lived in the bodies of children-students that makes itself heterogeneity, as it refers to the decentralization of life.

Therefore, genealogical research aims to map not the marks and scars that diversely establish children and their worlds, but study these marks and scars in their fringes of tensions.

So, we want to design the limits of the experience that constitute us, limits that are strongly evident in its ethical-political statute in the occasions forged by flat-head boys, boys who make verses, girls with no words, or boys with the gift of invention. We want, therefore, to know transgression.

That is because force (power, potency, life) is not built in singular; it is always in relation with other forces. Therefore, force, as a local historical dimension of fight in the enactment of different forms of relation between subjects and institutions, is established as another methodological perspective, in the case of genealogical research, encompassing power as repression, as well as power as life expansion, going through the dominated and the dominant, allowing them – through the understanding of the subject as an invention, through the analysis of a plan of consistence and immanence of craving and the chance of struggle, through the understanding of the discontinuous sense of history and the weight of tradition, through the appearance of the sensation of estrangement and the genealogist’s attention, through facing the effects of truth and their dismantling – to escape, not from power in itself, but the particular strategy of power relations that guide someone’s behavior, resist it and/or rebel against it.

• 2
  References correction and bibliographic normalization services: Maria Thereza Sampaio Lucinio - [e-mail]
• 3
  Funding: The authors would like to thank the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico - CNPq
• 4
  English version: Viviane Ramos - [e-mail]
• 5
  When considering the sense of the Other as a ensemble dispositive (Foucault, 1979), we call attention to the triggering nature of social workings, as well as the heterogeneous nature of elements and their reciprocal games, that compose these social workings and embody the sense of alterity we live today.

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Responsible editor: César Donizetti Pereira Leite. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8889-750X

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  15 Apr 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  18 Apr 2020
• Reviewed
  16 Aug 2020
• Accepted
  05 Dec 2020