With a Non-Negotiable Rigor before the Words

“[…] he who works his word” (^{Barthes, 2003a}, p. 33), let us be pointed out in the street. To do so, it would be necessary to state something such as: we would like the text we have written here to be understood as if said by a character of a pedagogical poem (fiction acknowledged as a will: teaching and writing as a prophecy). The wordplay is, of course, with “All this should be considered as said by a character in a novel”, a guiding phrase of ^{Roland Barthes (2003b, p. 11)}, the cautioning that with him we will be next to a word sidetracked “according to the necessity of an irreducible plurality” (^{Blanchot, 2003}, p. 139). When writing about his language practices, which is the same as writing about his life (about his teaching life, about his writing life), Barthes provides the first note (trace of the body¹) for the tradition we want to outline here. It is a teaching lineage under the portmanteau writreading as a quality of the language (^{Barthes, 1999}, p. 252) between silence (of Naval Ode) and song (of The Scene of Hate).

Before we go on, we have made a short list of stops: as if, pedagogical poem, writreading.

The expression as if in the works of Roland Barthes refers to an active decision: to act and settle in a zone of exploration of the present. In the specific case of the precisions made by Barthes in the class of December the 16^th, 1978, of the La préparation du roman course, the daily action to be reiterated by him would be, not the commitment to write a novel, but to act as if “writing one” (2005, p. 41). In our case, taking as if as an expression of a method, reading as if we belonged to a certain inventive-teaching tradition and writing the existence of such lineage as if accepted (without dispute) in contemporary educational discourse, provides us the possibility of experiencing the writing and reading² of pedagogical texts in a privileged field of daily life – our writreading notebook (^{Costa, 2022}). Still with Barthes, we could think of such a field (that of the desired research) as the installation space of the figure of the Amateur – one who “[…] (for no reason) gracefully installs himself in the signifier: in the immediately definitive subject”, and whose practice “[…] does not involve any rubato (theft of the object for the benefit of the attribute)” (^{Barthes, 2003b}, p. 65) – and its corresponding topical delimitation in a writing fantasy (^{Corazza, 2010}), by itself producing interventions in the hegemonic discursive act (as the desire-to-write – the desire invested in the plural word – is already a narrative: a way of saying: I love and continue to love: teaching, the word, the class…).

In Class: as if Writreaders in a Pedagogical Poem

For an instant, let us remain here: Éric Marty, in a preliminary note on the publication of Barthes’ courses (see ^{Barthes, 2005}), will treat the scene of the class as the organizing principle of each of the publications, in such a way that the class would be the definitive subject that provides a reading rhythm to the desired Barthesian text. The texts of the courses at the Collège de France would therefore be Barthes’ narrative or poem-installation (teacher, writer: Amateur) in: that of the writing fantasy of a pedagogical poem (and not ³exactly a novel of formation, Bildungsroman, for what is unraveled is not the transformation of a subject but rather a style of a style class) – the desire-to-write linked to as if.

Here we meet: I am a Teacher, I write

In such a class setting, therefore, the reading and writing operations are combined and, with this, we arrange the word in detour on the scene (immediately definitive subject), in which we appropriate what is unfamiliar or alien to us (which subtracts us from heroic teaching narratives), but having as a paradoxical principle of poetic attraction our elective affinities, our way of loving the class – because the Amateur is “the one who practices [...] without the spirit of mastery or competition” (^{Barthes, 2003b}, p. 65), and which, only then, shares a new “[…] order of knowledge, in which the product is not distinct from production” (^{Barthes, 2005}, p. 17). The note for a certain tradition of the use and employment of words, in our own way, therefore, participates in an eminently rebellious (and loving) gesture: our relationship with the teaching tradition is rather musical than museological (^{Campos, 2006}), a tradition of rupture and invention (^{Paz, n.d.}), a canti al scrilettore (^{Corazza, 2008}). In view of this, the motto of mutiny is that ^{Corazza (2013)} will take from ^{Haroldo de Campos (2013)} and will resonate by using translation as a reoperation of culture, as re-creation of tradition through the assault of the word as a sign of writreading (and not as encouragement of the passivity of a reader before the weight of the sentences of a strain of writers, not as revisionism of identification to the entourage of consecrated educational research, not as discursivity aspiring to Volapuk).

From the novel (Barthesian writing fantasy) to the pedagogical poem we have a combination: Barthes-Corazza. With such ambiguity, we displace the words invested with desire (class, curriculum, didactics, teaching, writing, pedagogy, poetics, etc.) by a specific tradition - that of teachers who incorporate the right to poetics in class and live teaching as eminently poetic work (^{Corazza, 2019a}; ^{Aquino; Corazza; Adó, 2018}). Therefore, we would rather not solely name her as thought or philosophies of difference in education, for the purposes of this text; while such coordinates are honest to our efforts, we will argue that we only research (read interestedly) because we teach and write⁴. We just teach, we just write: everyday work, no abstractionist concession, no dull joy, no distinctive-accumulative rejoicing. Just a fight against the full light of salvationist opulence and the interpellations of the positivity of the contemporary banal word. A teaching-minus (^{Costa; Oliveira, 2021a}).

It is by the power of the words that texts reach us

The tradition we evoke (we consecrate) is fortuitously practiced and leaves its traces in the words of studies that treat teaching as an activity of creation of didactics that are updated in curricula (^{Oliveira, 2014}) and as a set of inventive didactics (^{Corazza, 2012}). Finally, it is in teaching that we envision the acts of creation of curriculum and didactics (^{Corazza, 2019b}), whose artistry is not mere application of the procedures of other arts (literature, painting, music, etc.), “but of a different order that cannot be needed, just felt” (^{Aquino; Corazza; Adó, 2018}, p. 3). In such a way, our teaching lineage asserts itself as deliberately inventoried (attracted by invention) in words, in classes, in pedagogical texts, in classes of teachers who write and make others desire-to-write, daily, with the honesty of their efforts.

We come together to “[…] write-and-read with free eyes and cyclopic hands” (^{Corazza, 2008}, p. 28) and not to reproduce “the need to have pale hands/ and to announce the END OF THE WORLD” (^{Andrade, 2012}, p. 11). The line we have drawn does not conform to an employed doctrine, an explained hypothesis, much less a peer review. The lineage is made by alliance to the word – not by parenthood, not by scientific duty, not by the instrumental sharing of knowledge, not by the urge to write and read in the realm of truth, not towards the “[…] litany text in which a word cannot be changed” (^{Barthes, 2003b}, p.166). Adélia Prado, Almada Negreiros, Fernando Pessoa, for example, are written (taught) by us as exemplary pedagogues. The library attached to our classroom is composed of our deliberate reading error, teaches us the epistemologist^{Ricardo Piglia (2006)}, and it is from where we carry words to arrange in class. Because of a specific translational duty of the craft (^{Corazza, 2013}), we also treat texts that witness creation in art, in science, in philosophy as pedagogical poems (^{Deleuze; Guattari, 1997}). However, such materials lend themselves to being circulated in class for being selected by the “idea of fragment as occurrence”, indicating that “[…] the way in which thought meets what it seeks is often linked to teaching” (^{Blanchot, 2001}, p. 30), to the ways of knowing implied in each way of arranging word in class. Otherwise, as Blanchot himself (pedagogue-enigma, writer of a class in the way) could have said in a classroom before our arrival (and if there he had remained waiting for us, light⁵): “The master-disciple relationship is the very relation of the word, when in it the immeasurable becomes a measure and irrelation, the relationship” (^{Blanchot, 2001}, p. 33).

It is by strokes of word that we think in class

Therefore, let us assume the risk of alliance by taking the gesture of a rigorous, joyful responsibility of teaching as our own, a trait that characterizes the work of Sandra Corazza (^{Aquino; Oak; Zordan, 2022}). A trait expressed in the nonconformist word (for it is outside the conformity of institutionalized language) writreading. The freedom to trace, therefore, unties the writing and the reading “from the apparatus of state of which it is now a part of” (^{Barthes, 2004}, p. 54), finding in the montage of writing + reading = writreading the presence of a “revolutionary becoming” (^{Corazza, 2008}, p. 28). Therefore, from now on, our refusal to qualify the work Corazza as a totality, and commitment (whose discretion is constitutive) to propose a semiological adventure through its operations of language.

The word writreading⁶ itself confuses the procedures of a teacher, an intellectual/researcher and a writer, sketching a teaching that teaches Roland Barthes, for instance, prolonged by the hesitation of his words – a ^{Barthes (2004)} who, when studied patiently, begins “to float” (^{Barthes, 2004}, p. 411). If teaching is in the face of speech, as Barthes writes for Tel Quel magazine in 1971 – “[…] let us call a writer every language operator who is on the side of writing; between the two, the intellectual: the one who prints and publishes their speech” (^{Barthes, 2004}, p. 385) –, it (teaching) can still, for the love of words, for working in words and for words, suspend the roles of speech commonly practiced since modern pedagogy, in such a way that in class we are never “t[…] he actors of a judgment, of a subjection, of an intimidation, the promotor of a Cause” (^{Barthes, 2004}, p. 410). By disorienting the laws of speech (adding, demarcating, contradicting), “the imperatives of knowledge, the prestige of the method, the ideological criticism” (^{Barthes, 2004}, p.411), we expropriate the codes of the places of speech by the very approximation (of the word) with the word (of writing).

Barthes teaches in the suspense of floating speech. Blanchot teaches by writing, not speaking. Corazza speaks her class in writreading. These are pedagogical poetics. The portmanteau writreading, a concept made possible by Barthesian writing, thus anticipates the poetic word that will characterize the availability of Barthes-Corazza and which is handed down to us as a teaching duty (^{Costa; Oliveira, 2021b}) – which is the same as saying: desired and invested as a teaching tradition and poetic lineage that teaches by having “writing as a value” (^{Barthes, 2004}, p. 409), a luminous moment.

Teaching in writreading and pedagogical poems

Let us start by recounting a case. An occasion of writreading within the framework of the structuring nucleus of the Zona de Investigações Poéticas⁷ (ZIP), the case of an appropriation instigated by the word as a sign of empty (the title as a tendency, the word as an incitement). The Pedagogical Poem (Pedagoguítcheskaia Poema), written between 1925 and 1935 by ^{Anton Makarenko (2012)}, became a suspended reading, full of successive deviations, an atopic reading – which is not reactive, tactical, literary, but a “drifting habitat” (^{Barthes, 2003b}, p. 62) – traced in ink dreams.

Certainly, what is noteworthy is not conceptual or theoretical and does not configure a genealogical trait of the Corazzian concept of writreading. But its presence participates in Zavgubnarobraz’s prophecy: pedagogues sabotage everything. However, it is from Makarenko’s word given to reading (in suspension) that we can say pedagogue: Makarenko’s writing fantasizes of living together, creates a non-codified space for the class, where teaching never ceases to be postponed, set to hover. Perhaps, we can take the words as a class in sabotage and undo the epilogical teleology that made Makarenko retreat (leave the pedagogical poem and return the word to the place of doctrinal speech) and wish (to our sadness) that “very soon among us they will stop writing ‘pedagogical poems’, to write a simple and direct book: ‘Method of a Communist Education’” (^{Makarenko, 2012}, p. 644).

Let us override the recounting. We see the book as an object; we probe its weight with the trace of the fantasy of a past that is handed down to us. We are incited by its title (word-body): Pedagogical Poem. We take it in writreading. The volume begins to make up the image, the setting of our writing fantasy: it is not a matter of adhering to its content, only of making it a trace of our teaching gesture. And so we go: installed in our pedagogical poetics and subtracted (distracted) from simple and direct manuals, soothing of language.

Teaching in Writreading, Poetics and Pedagogy

In writreading, the zone created by us in infinite ways, we seek the necessary precision. Our ambiguity should be the meeting and passage point, to be expressed by the sign of our teaching triviality (daily life, privileged space of desire). Thus, teaching in writreading as a form of poetic investigation is our common evidence, not communicable without a certain temperature of language, not operative without the expression of our elective affinities. So, what is the fate, the inescapable action that makes us pass the word through the ways of reading, writing, writreading? Teaching, we stutter. Well, it is teaching as the creation of ways of moving through a zone of attraction to plural words and which had previously been shown on other occasions – for example, when animating the didactics of creative translation in ^{Corazza (2012)}, by leading the crossing (traces of a pedagogy of the concept) of the three daughters of chaos (art, science, philosophy) in What is philosophy? of ^{Deleuze and Guattari (1997)}. The word pedagogy in the traces of writreading.

But poetics? Yes.

‘Poetics’ refers to any discourse in which the word conveys the idea: if you love words enough to succumb to them, you withdraw from the law of meaning, of writing. […] My own body (and not just my ideas) can adjust to words, being somehow created by them

(^{Barthes, 2003b}, p. 169).

Poetics as the sum of poetry that signs (is made of) teaching, and that in such a gesture it signals a provisional sunset of the instrumental clarity of speech (the word, the suspense, the silence). We cling to the trivial, we explore the common work of the teaching word (let us remember Barthes and as if). For, let it be said: the sense and the rationale to nationalized teaching is relevant, pertinent, and naturalizable (it becomes instrumental and manual words – clear, direct). To poetry, poetry. As theory and practice of the poem (witness to the conduction of the idea by the word), “crystal fulcrum” (^{Campos, 2002}, p. 26), “[…] poetry is/ a tamed chance/ and abolished on the occasion of the poem”, but “a case of/ provisional sunset” (^{Campos, 2002}, n.p., our writing). “Method = way”, teaches us ^{Barthes (2005, p. 42)}, as the ways of working the teaching word (its speech, its writing) make the meanings vary through a certain pedagogical poetics: the poem (if there is one) if it is done on the occasion of writreading, scattered in the wilderness a lesson – Bildungsgedicht – culminating in the fiery term class.

Teaching and the Big Words

^{Roland Barthes (2003b, p. 143)} will recognize in his work the use of “two species of big words”, one of which would be characterized by its softness. These would be such words which we do not invest in, and which we resort to because of their apparent ease – the lexicon of entrepreneurial, critical-emancipatory, “[…] technicist, humanist, Marxist, constructivist, psychoanalytic, critical or post-critical” emphasis (^{Corazza, 2019b}, p. 3). Such words agree, they allow us to appropriate a language of prompt recognition, to associate ourselves with a retinue of the field. These are words endorsed by great discourses, by bodies associated through their weak pedagogical postures and, therefore, spare us the work of precise ambiguity, of writing with our body (which is the work of teaching in writreading, of creating classes).

There is another species of big words, in which we can glimpse another quality of language. They are favorable words, which become valued at the “body level” (^{Barthes, 2003b}, p. 146). Perhaps, such words would be those indicative of our pedagogical poetics as they lend themselves to a constant remodeling, to a drift – “they are fluid, floating words” (^{Barthes, 2003b}, p. 147). Such words do not participate in the “parasitic uselessness” of all “revisionism”; therefore, through them “[…] we scrutinize recent teaching movements, which problematize the specificity of the act of creating teachers, from the affirmative perspective of the will to power education” (^{Corazza, 2019a}, p. 3). In the context of the big words, favorable words are likely to accompany the variation of classes in writreading, as they are “words whose meaning is idiolectal”, and which, therefore, perform the pedagogical fantasies of teachers, their lineage, their style of teaching. Such words (in Barthes: writing, style, body), “are flirtatious after all”: they are words that “[…] follow whoever they find: imaginary, in 1963, is just a vaguely Bachelardian term […]; but in 1970 […] takes on an entirely Lacanian sense” (^{Barthes, 2003b}, p. 143, author’s emphasis).

Writreading (our word body) evoked as a poetic word (word of the class par excellence), leads our body to the moment of succumbing to soft pedagogical ideas, while we can only adjust our body to such speculative teaching, flirtatious of plural words. Thus, something like teacher training could wander around the question: what are my big words?

Teaching and Knowledge as a Complement to Writing

One of the lessons of our teaching tradition is the need to write before an exemplary library. Let us take writing in its practical dimension as a criterion: it would be a matter of readily having those texts that we would like to have written and, especially, those that write about writing as we would like to live the experience of writing. A library full of favorable words. Galaxies, by ^{Haroldo de Campos (2004)}, would be one of those books that participate in such materialism of language, whose lesson is “[…] to end with writing to start with writing to end/begin with writing” and which insists on warning us that “[…] writing about writing is the future of writing” (^{Campos, 2004}, n.p., initial formant).

In our library of interrupted, fragmentary texts, whose words are crystals (sonorous and imagistic; each a pedagogical poem in its highest degree of concentration of meanings), we would look for “complements, precisions” that would immediately make them “books of knowledge” (^{Barthes, 2003b}, p.176). Knowledge as “theory of the carnal word” (^{Barthes, 2003b}, p. 146), which expresses a desire of (ways of) becoming – sown by reference texts (books therefore idiolects) for our tradition and lineage of writreaders. However, the precisions (complements) pursued by us would be in the order of a pedagogical poetics, of a commitment to the work of the word in our body, in our desire, in our thought – and never in the order of reiteration of common places linked to the exercise of truth. In the words which carry our teachings, there is an exuberance of knowledge ready to be consulted (not consumed, instrumentalized); and it is in writing that we delve into so that “[…] knowledge is kept in its place, as a complement of writing” (^{Barthes, 2003b}, p. 176, author’s emphasis).

Teaching and Writing as Values

It is in the power of the surroundings of a knowing for a poetic lesson that we evaluate a text, a fragment, as a writing gesture. In Writers, intellectuals, teachers, ^{Roland Barthes (2004)} sustains that “our value is the writing”, warning that there would be no possibility of mysticism of knowledge, of misgiving or condemning our discursive practice (whether by the taint of hermeticism, of weak sterility, of the aristocracy of language). This is because writing removes the primacy of meaning as a teaching subject (there is no possession that regulates the desire for the plural word), consisting of a collective and impersonal gesture of resistance to the discourses of interpellation to the reiteration of the present (“speeches, writings, rituals, protocols, social symbols”). Writing “[…] makes language something atopic: without place; it is this dispersion, this detachment that makes it a “materialistic field par excellence” (^{Barthes, 2004}, p. 409) expressing itself in our classes, in our texts.