About research, writing-fiction, and the erasure of the author

To begin the discussion of the proposed theme, we decided to exercise, inspired by ^{Carlos Drumond de Andrade (2013)}, a writing woven between the lived and the invented, as we have done in the productions of the research we have developed with school everyday life (^{Ferraço, 2003}) when, then, there is no claim that writing is characterized or justified neither as a certificate of veracity of what happened nor as a hypertrophy of the Self (^{Roudinesco, 2022})¹.

Thinking with ^{Foucault (2008)}, the writing that intends to achieve the status of truth has a normalizing-normative character that mistakenly seeks to provide meaning and coherence to the everyday events-happenings that are often contradictory and insurrect in our absence, even when we want to have control of our lives. For ^{Deleuze and Parnet (2004, p. 16)}, “Writing does not have its purpose in itself, precisely because life is not something personal. Writing has life as its purpose, through combinations with those who play.”

In Difference and Repetition, ^{Deleuze (2006, p. 18)} asks: “[…] how else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say”. With this, the author encourages us to think that, in fact, writing does not have to do with what is already known but with what we do not yet know. In the words of the philosopher, “We only write at the end of our own knowledge, at that extreme point that separates our knowledge and our ignorance” (^{Deleuze, 2006}, p. 18).

This effort on a writing-becoming in place of a writing-representation or a writing-description implies thinking of research not as an attribute of truth or rescue of the lived, but as fiction, as an invention of other possibilities of the world demanding the erasure of the subject-author-researcher who thinks he can describe the veracity of reality. It is Meirelles who best helps us to explain:

To the old winds I gave the tears I had. The star rises, the star descends… I await my own coming. (I navigate through memory without margins. Someone tells my story and someone kills the characters) (Meirelles, 1958, p. 192).

Using, once again, ^{Foucault (2006)} in his lecture What is an author? we find the questioning of the idea of author-authorship when, for example, he refuses biographical writing and defends anonymity, considering that the notion of author would imply an individualization, meaning the possibility of affirming himself as an author-subject endowed with a full and founding consciousness.

In advocating his point of view, ^{Foucault (2006)} stated that in writing, it was neither the manifestation nor exaltation of the gesture of writing nor the fixation of a subject in a language, but the opening of a space where the subject is always disappearing, becoming the fatal victim of the act of writing itself. For the author, “Writing is now linked to sacrifice and to the sacrifice of life itself. “Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author.” (^{Foucault, 2006, p. 36}), as in the poetry of Meireles:

^{Alves (2015)} infers that the question What is an author? proposed by Foucault, remains open, especially if we consider the changes in the exercise of authorship promoted by the internet and digital media. When asking After all, what will remain of the author’s modern figure?, Alves, based on Foucault, concludes:

In short, the author must be understood as a mode of existence of discourse, a figure specified and enabled to formulate certain statements. The author is not confused with the subject in general, which is, in fact, an abstraction. Rather than a constant subject and a founding consciousness, Foucault invites us to think of contingent forms of subjectivation or of becoming a subject. The author, in these terms, is only a specification of the subject-function, a position that the individual can occupy in the discourse and thus become a subject, take the floor, and play a determined role. Being an author is a way of specifying the subject being, of functioning as a subject of discourse (^{Alves, 2015}, p. 87).

If ^{Foucault (2006)} is the one who helps us to put under suspicion the idea of authorship in research with the everyday lives of Education, it is ^{Certeau (2011)} who, in the text History: science and fiction, when thinking of history as practice, meaning as historiography, helps us to defend the impossibility of having writing that intends to represent reality, going towards our criticism relative to those researchers who consider it possible to reproduce, in their “collections” of data, the facts as happened in everyday life. For ^{Certeau (2011)}, every narrative that intends to report what is happening or what has happened will produce something real insofar as it bases its power of authority on the fact of passing off as a witness of what is, or what was, imposing itself through the everyday events of Education of which it is said to be an interpreter.

From ^{Certeau (2011)}, we have, then, that all authority is based on the real, which, supposedly, is the declaration; it is always in the name of a fact of the real that the adherence of believers is created. Historiography acquires this power while presenting and interpreting the facts. That said, thinking with the author: what could the reader counteract to the discourse that tells him what it is or what it was? ^{Certeau (2011)}. As Certeau replies, the reader will have to accept the law that states itself in terms of events.

However, the ‘real‘ represented does not correspond to the real that determines its production. It hides behind the figuration of a past that the present has organized […]. The operation in question seems to be undertaken quite cunningly: the discourse becomes credible on behalf of the reality it supposedly represents, but this authorized appearance serves precisely to camouflage the practice that determines it. Representation disguises the praxis that organizes it (^{Certeau, 2011}, p. 49).

Still confabulating with ^{Certeau (1996)}, it is possible to perceive, especially in the writing Walking in the city, his effort both with regard to the erasure of authorship and with regard to the limits of representation, and we must unlearn to look. In other words, instead of a look that generalizes, because looked at from above, the author proposes a look interested in the smallest, in the encounters and the details of the events, without the surprises of life.

In this temporal dimension of research taking place in the midst of the networks of everyday life, we become lovers of chance, fascinated by everyday life with its molar, molecular, and escape lines, with its flows and its forms, with its experiments, its subtleties, intimacy, and accidents, making each research an adventure of the unusual, as in Barros’ poetry:

To feel the intimacy of the world, one needs to know:

• a) That the splendor of the morning is not opened with a knife

• b) How violets prepare the day to die

• c) Why do red stripe butterflies have a devotion to graves

• d) If the man who touches his existence in the afternoon in a bassoon, has salvation

• e) That a river flowing between 2 hyacinths carries more tenderness than a river flowing between 2 lizards

• f) How to catch the voice of a fish

• g) Which side of the night moistens first.

etc.

etc.

etc.

Unlearning 8 hours a day teaches the principles.

Repeat repeat – until it’s different.

Repeating is a gift of style.

Things no longer want to be seen by reasonable people:

They wish to be looked at in blue –

Like a child you look at like a bird.

I remember a boy repeating the afternoons in that yard (^{Barros, 1993}, p. 15).

On becomingness and the search for an ephemeral methodology

In the production of data with the problematic fields that we have experienced in our research, it has been a necessary exercise that is not easy to overcome the practices already established in research in Education of trying to explain, interpret, represent, describe, uncover, elucidate, unveil, decipher, clarify, show, among other verbs that denote the possibility of a pre-existing, pre-established reality that exists in advance with its data waiting to be collected².

Unlike merely explanatory and/or descriptive practices, we make an effort towards conversation cartographies (^{Ferraço, 2018}) that throw us into the midst of adventures with everyday life and encourage us to talk, follow processes, follow flows, and get entangled and let ourselves be carried away and (de)subjugate and (de)personify and… and…, as attempts to erase, dilute subjects in their identities-facialities-forms, interested that we are much more in the poetics of the forces of the living and in the reverberations of experiments and events than in the fragile defense of the protagonism of conscious identities.

^{Deleuze and Parnet (2004, p. 22)} wrote beautifully about the strength of the multiplicity of a life: “We are deserts, but populated by tribes, faunas and floras […]. The desert, experimentation on oneself, is our only identity […]” ^{Fontes (2019)}, with sensitivity and emotion, a poet about this condition of experiencing ourselves in search of other meanings of life, without ever intending to reach the end:

I was an astronaut until yesterday, until that fear of distance hit me.

Today I am a gardener, feet on the ground safe.

I’m thinking about tomorrow being something else because I don’t want to garden in the fall.

I want to be on vacation, embrace laziness, and date sleep.

Close the window and let me sleep, until twelve I’m a child.

Next month I’m a mess – I mix socks, toys, romance, and hope.

I really wanted to be yours, and stop being a poet, because I’ve been loving too much, and loving too much also tires me.

I’m not good at waiting, I trade the day for the night.

I lived with dreams for a long time, I was an astronaut until yesterday (^{Fontes, 2019}, p. 28).

Also ^{Certeau (1994)}, in his writing on the invention of everyday life, is dedicated to problematizing the logic of analysis that prioritizes the subject-individual taken in its identity-faciality, that is, the subject understood as the protagonist-conscious-of-its-acts or, even, the self-centered subject endowed with a full and founding consciousness by emphasizing the anonymity of creations. In the author’s words, “[…] it is necessary to turn to the widespread proliferation of anonymous and perishable creations that erupt with vivacity and do not capitalize” (^{Certeau, 1994}, p. 13).

Thus, instead of prioritizing the subject-individual-protagonist, ^{Certeau (1994)} devotes special attention to modes of operation, ways of doing, schemes of action, different ways of socially marking deviations, tactics-strategies of users, networks of antidiscipline, the arts of saying-doing, among other dimensions of everyday life, interested as always has been in the search for a theory of everyday practices. As Certeau thought:

The examination of such practices does not imply a return to individuality. The social atomism which over the past three centuries has served as the historical axiom of social analysis posits an elementary unit-the individual-on the basis of which groups are supposed to be formed and to which they are supposed to be always reducible […]. Analysis shows that a relation (always social) determines its terms, and not the reverse, and that each individual is a locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of such relational determinations interact. Moreover, the question at hand concerns modes of operation or schemata of action, and not directly the subjects (or persons) who are their authors or vehicles (^{Certeau, 1994}, p. 37-38).

By bringing the concept of becomingness³, ^{Deleuze and Guattari (2008, p. 33)} corroborate the discussion on screen by stating that “[...] beco-mingness and multiplicity are one and the same thing [...]” and, with this, they pay special attention to the flows and modes of composition, expansion, propagation, occupation, and contagion among the subjects, assumed as a tangle of lines, in contrast to the view that takes them from their individualities-identities. In the authors’ words:

A multiplicity, is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature […]. If we imagined the position of a fascinated Self, it was because the multiplicity toward which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation of another multiplicity that works it and strains it from the inside. In fact, the Self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. (^{Deleuze; Guattari, 2008}, p. 33).

Following the traces of ^{Deleuze and Guattari (2008)} in their attempts to think of the Self as a threshold, a becomingness of multiplicities, we find, in the beauty of ^{Pessoa’s poetry (1973)}, a breath for our condition of indeterminacy and an incessant search for trying to understand who we are:

Ephemeral methodologies and inventions of the worlds

Consistent with the chapter on the hegemonic discourse of modernity that celebrates the affirmation of the self-centered subject and endowed with full consciousness, the research, which aims to represent reality, shares a discursive genre that, allegedly, seeks to give coherence and linearity to the experiments that happen with school everyday life that are discontinuous, fragmented, multiple, rhizomatic, and diffuse. Thus, unlike the modern hegemonic perspective of thinking-doing research in Education, we have made an effort on an ethical-aesthetic-political attitude toward everyday life, based on what we have called ephemeral methodology:

Thus, research with everyday life is instituted as methodologies focused strongly on everyday lives and on valuing the actions of resistance and survival of its practitioners. Methodologies that are interested in practices, tricks, the arts of saying and doing. Methodologies that problematize what is done, how it is done and by whom it is done. In these ephemeral methodologies with everyday life, we assume there is not a single one, but different paths. Paths followed by practitioners with their arts of doing-saying, which are complex, accidental, plural, multidimensional, heterarchical, unpredictable, and fluid. That open up and allow themselves to be permanently contaminated by the contemporary world. A complexity that never runs out and that, despite being everywhere, cannot be captured. At most, to be lived and with some luck, to be experienced (^{Ferraço, 2003}, p. 103).

Thus, the processes experienced in ephemeral methodologies during our research with the everyday lives of schools forced us to think of⁴ the dimensions of chance and chaos as powers of constitution-emergence of the immanence plan in the problematic field. With ^{Deleuze and Guattari (2001, p. 68)}, we think that: “From chaos the plane of immanence takes the determinations with which it makes its infinite movements or its diagrammatic features.”

^{Clareto (2011)} helps us in this discussion when he writes about the relationships between research, knowledge, and truth in the production of a problematic field. By highlighting the existence of a narrative of modernity that creates a model of the world of the ways in which knowing means accessing the truths of this world, the author gives us clues so that we can question the bubble-research image. In other words, the research is guided by the search for certainties when launching into the world of lights, producing intelligibilities in a narrative that describes the creation of the bubble as a place of true knowledge and safety. For Clareto, according to this model:

Researching is seeking knowledge, it is producing knowledge, always guided by rules established by the investigative method. Thus, the research is governed by a question that asks for an answer to a problem to be solved. What guarantees the success of the undertaking is the correct use of the method established, a priori, as a condition for reaching the truth of that investigation. Death of mystery, of doubt (Clareto, 2001, p. 18-19).

The research thus planned wants to destroy the labyrinth where the chaos of the warm-cold-clear-dark waters prevails, the uncertainties and accidents always operating with the “or”: either privileges the always cold waters, or always hot, or always clear, or always dark. As the author notes, “Preferably always clear, translucent waters. Full transparency. And always-hot. Total comfort” (^{Clareto, 2011}, p. 19).

However, even though they are formed and guided by the bubble--place-of-safety research model, the author encourages us to question: what about the processes that, in our research, resist the symbolic model and escape predictions? How do we assume the everyday events that are of the order of chance, chaos, multiplicity, and difference? For Clareto:

Representation lends to this categorization: it purifies, reduces forms to an identity. But there is that which resists representation and insists on a condition of and: waters and hot and cold and clear and dark. Multiplicity. Conflict. I shake in the tranquility of the bubble. Bubble implosion? (^{Clareto, 2011}, p. 19).

^{Clareto’s (2011)} ideas are in line with our efforts on ephemeral methodologies in research with everyday life when they replace the or of dichotomies with and… and… which, as anticipated, force us not to accommodate to a comfortable representation of school events, stimulating us, as ^{Deleuze and Guattari (2007)} suggest, to situate in the midst of multiplicities, border phenomena, conversations, flows, experiments, because that is where life acquires speed.

Deprived of this image of safety, of the search for truth, how does the research move? At least three possibilities. One, we remain attached to the image of the bubble and pursue it as an ideal […]. Two, we are adrift in this indecipherable, wild sea, which does not submit to the bubble nor to the image of the bubble […]. Three, research moves in the research movement and proposes not to solve problems, but to problematize; it does not propose to represent the world, but to invent it. What does this imply? It implies, perhaps, in the constitution of other values, another ethic that constitutes the immanence of warm-cold-clear-dark waters. No images. With the untimely. No representations. With multiplicity (^{Clareto, 2011}, p. 19).

We advocate, then, a research effort that can flow in the flow of hot and cold and clear and dark waters... with the everyday lives of schools, assuming the dimension of multiplicity of these everyday lives and the creation in networks of practical theories, in order to enhance the ethical-political-aesthetic-epistemological dimension of school events. We think that only in this way will it be possible to perceive the possibilities of subversion of the control mechanisms that exist in these everyday lives, considering that it is in this dimension of everyday micropolitics and border phenomena that the possibilities of becomingness are woven.

Still thinking with ^{Clareto (2011)}, when breaking with the research model that proposes to solve problems, it would be necessary to go towards a methodological intention that would favor the creation of resistance movements by sustaining the problematic field of the involuntary and multiplicities. In our case, we seek to avoid not only the representations-facializations that are frequent in research aimed at solving problems but, above all, the illuminist--prescriptive conclusions that, supposedly, would fulfill the function of improving the failures-absences detected with the production of data. For Clareto:

Research as a problem solver usually proceeds along paths that place the method in its centrality: theoretical-methodological bases are evoked to constitute what is called the issue to be investigated. There has to be a question to carry out an investigation […]. Investigative undertaking that carries the issue as a standard and the theoretical-methodological bases as a support for the standard […]. There is a search to point out ways, solutions, prescriptions, or, in most cases, criticisms of situations experienced in an empirical field (^{Clareto, 2011}, p. 21).

Thus, in the constitution of the problematic field, the intensity of the chaotic movements and flows experienced in the production of the data has imposed on us the need to question not only the research models inherited from the Cartesian sciences but, mainly, to put under suspicion the conceptual ties resulting from some of these models that insist on reducing the everyday lives of schools to places of implantation, reproduction, or representation of government educational policies.

As ^{Clareto (2011)} argues, the meaning attributed to problematic does not refer to problem-solving, to something defective, or a doubtful result, but approaches the Deleuzian thought of an event. Problematic as that which resists the hegemonic model, as that which metamorphoses and is neither named nor captured in its complexity.

The problematic field is resistance: to the instituted research processes, to the bubble-modes of existing. Precarious resistance submerged in multiple waters. Resistance: monstrous, hybrid existence […]. Existence in the labyrinth of waters. Labyrinth experience. No exit. No entry. Just between […]. The problem, as an event that occurs through encounters, is being in the waters. Not abstract waters treated abstractly, but each water in its complex multitude. Each water in its uniqueness. Occurrence. Unparalleled, unmatched. Singularity. Invention of oneself and the world (^{Clareto, 2011}, p. 223).

In this sense, in our ephemeral methodologies, in the midst of the conversation networks (^{Ferraço; Alves, 2018}) that are produced in research with school everyday life, we dedicate ourselves to prioritize attempts to approach-mobilization of the different situations experienced, assuming the need to think with school practitioners and not to or about them. This thinking-doing attitude has led us to the clue left by ^{Certeau (1994}, ¹⁹⁹⁶⁾ in terms of his concern about establishing a condition of empathy with those involved in the production of data.

In fact, in the two volumes of The Practice of Everyday Life, ^{Certeau (1994}, ¹⁹⁹⁶⁾ uses the expression do with seeking to reinforce the importance of situating ourselves in the midst of what is experienced in everyday life so that we can, at least, share-know what is happening in these everyday lives. In the author’s words:

Ordinary culture hides a fundamental diversity of situations, interest, and contexts under the apparent repetition of objects that it uses. Pluralization is born from ordinary usage, from the immense reserve that the number and multiple of differences constitute.

We know poorly the types of operations at stake in ordinary practices, their register and their combination, because our instruments of analysis, modeling, and formalization were constructed for other objects and with other aims. The essence of the analysis work that should be done should be inscribed in the subtle combinatorial analysis, of types of operations and records, which puts into play and into action a doing-with, here and now, which is a singular act linked to a particular situation, circumstances, and actors (^{Certeau, 1996}, p. 341).

This search for establishing a proximity with the Other in the research does not result, as argued, in a personal, individualistic approach but meets what happens between people. In other words, it privileges the relationships that are established with the encounters, with the conversations, with the events, with the experiences. In other words, we are interested in involuntary situations, accidents, and border phenomena (^{Deleuze; Guattari, 2007}) and not in people taken in their identities-facialities because we understand that it is, above all, in these border phenomena that life reinvents itself.

That said, we defend the use of cartographies of the networks of conversations that take place in the everyday lives of schools as one of the main ways of producing data in our ephemeral methodologies in the midst of research on everyday life. In the text A Conversation: What is it? What is it for?^{Deleuze and Parnet (2004)} state that, in a conversation, it is challenging to explain to us. For them, the questions that arise in a conversation are fabricated. That is, it is as if they had a life of their own insofar as they cannot be predicted as if we knew, beforehand, what to say while talking. According to the authors: “This could be what a conversation is. Simply the outline of a becoming.” (^{Deleuze; Parnet, 2004}, p. 12-13). Becomingness is the most imperceptible thing. It is an act that can only be contained in one life and expressed in one style.

^{Deleuze and Parnet (2004)} help us, then, to think of conversations not as systems of representation and/or interpretation of the facts that have occur-red-experienced, but as intensities, multiplicities, accidents, and experiments, which move us and pull us out of our supposed stability-truths. At this point, it is necessary to evoke, once again, the authors when they conclude that:

There are multiplicities that do not cease to overflow binary machines and that do not allow themselves to be dichotomized. There are centers everywhere, like multiplicities of black holes that do not let themselves be crowded together. There are lines, which are not reduced to the path of a point, and which escape the structure, lines of flight, becomings, without future or past, without memory, which resist the binary machine (^{Deleuze; Parnet, 2004}, p. 38).

With this, we can say that conversations, when, in fact, they happen, would have this power to put our clichés-opinions-truths under suspicion, pushing us to the limits of our beliefs-values, and forcing us to think about everyday events with other references. It is as if we were, during the conversations, always experiencing issues that arise among the lines of multiplicities that compose us.

Thus, from these authors, we can infer that a conversation is always an exercise of thought that differs. It is an event, it is negotiation, it is experience. Talking has the sense of rising up and growing in the middle, as in a rhizome. Still, in this sense, by stating that a conversation is different from a pre--formatted debate between experts, the authors conclude: “[In a conversation], there are only ‘intermezzos’, ‘intermezzi’, as focuses of creation” (^{Deleuze; Parnet, 2004}, p. 38).

Researching everyday life and the need to be on the hour of the world

The use of cartographies of conversations in ephemeral methodologies in research with everyday life is affirmed, then, as an ethical-aesthetic-political effort in which difference (^{Deleuze, 2006}) is instituted as an incessant and expansive flow, contaminating school practitioners in the creation of other poetics of existence, affirming politics as active experimentation (^{Deleuze; Parnet, 2004}), and art as that which resists death, servitude, infamy, and shame (^{Deleuze, 2000}), thus favoring the production of worlds where many worlds fit. Thinking with Deleuze:

Believing in the world is what we miss the most. We have completely lost the world. We have been dispossessed of it. Believing in the world mainly means giving rise to events, even if small, that get out of control, or engendering new spacetimes, even of reduced surface or volumes. It is what you call pietás. It is at the level of each attempt that the capacity for resistance or, on the contrary, submission to a control is evaluated. Creation and people are needed at the same time (^{Deleuze, 2000}, p. 218).

This effort to believe again in the world, evoked by ^{Deleuze (2000)}, has nothing to do with an individual attitude of a savior, an action led by a self-referenced subject, idealized as the one we should follow. On the contrary, it is an effect of collective forces that overflow the limits of the different types of control and subjection increasingly present in contemporary societies.

Without strong affective and social bonds, without ethical-political commitments that involve and articulate us, and without common stories, we are adrift from our fate and increasingly fragile in our loneliness. Isolated and helpless, we become vulnerable to totalitarian propaganda, and we become easy prey to fascist power.

Returning to thinking with ^{Deleuze and Guattari (2008, p. 73)}, “[…] becoming-everybody/everything, making the world a becoming, is to world, to make a world of worlds, in other words, to find one’s proximities and zones of indiscernibility.”. Therefore, it is urgent to think of the Cosmos as an abstract machine and each of the worlds as concrete assemblages that effect them. In the words of philosophers, it would be necessary:

To reduce oneself to one or several abstract lines, which will continue to combine with others, to immediately, directly produce a world, in which it is the world that comes into being and we become everyone […].To be on the hour of the world. This is the connection between imperceptible, indiscernible, impersonal, the three virtues. To reduce oneself to an abstract line, a trace, to find one’s zone of indiscernibility with other traits and thus enter into the haecceity as well as the impersonality of the creator (^{Deleuze; Guattari, 2008}, p. 73-74).

This incessant search for the condition of multiplicity, movement in our existences, requires, as the authors argue, that we be on the hour of the world and, with that, eliminate everything that is similarity, analogy, but also everything to put.

And also, with our research in Education, seek to eliminate what exceeds the moment and, with a dose of chance, “[…] So if it is like grass: it made itself of the world, of everyone, a becoming, because it became a necessarily communicating world, because it was suppressed from itself everything that prevented it from sliding between things, from bursting into the midst of things” (^{Deleuze; Guattari, 2008}, p. 74).

We want to end by affirming, once again, the power of research in Education and its consequences in the everyday lives of schools as a possibility to fight against inequalities and also as a form of hope in the invention of other worlds, which has helped us to move forward and decide to continue resisting in search of a beautiful life as Foucault wanted. Believing in the world, deciding on a beautiful life, and seeking to be on the hour of the world have been an effort we have tried to take forward. Every time we think about giving up, we go in search of Quintana:

Life is the duty we brought home.

When you see it, it’s already six o’clock!

When you see, it’s already Friday!

When you see, it’s Christmas already...

When you see, the year is over…

When you see, we lose the love of our life.

Fifty years have passed!

Now it’s too late to be disapproved…

If I was given one day, another opportunity, I would not even look at the clock.

He would always go ahead and throw the golden bark of useless hours on the way...

I would follow the love that lies before me and says that I love him...

And there’s more, be sure to do something you like because of the loss of time.

Be sure to have people by your side out of pure fear of being happy.

The only fault he will have will be that of the time which, unfortunately, will never return (^{Quintana, 2015}, p. 79).