Curriculum, knowledge and space: a powerful combination?

The motto of this section, it seems, can be expressed in what is conventionally called power. If we agree that the word powerful is a derivation from power, there are paths that can be opened in the course of this paper. With a step back, it would be immediately necessary to suspend or, at least to translate with some adaptations, the immediate correlation that the powerful derivation of the word can trigger. Pursuing the trail of the words power and powerful, depending on which writing lines shall be mapped, or which authors will be mobilized, contributes to the opening of a real gap between one and the other. But let us keep calm. Let us not throw ourselves into the abyss if, when we look at it, it looks back at us². Without the obligation to use the dictionary, it can be seen that the meaning of the word powerful is linked to someone who obviously holds the power.

Our objective in this section, when questioning knowledge, in particular, the recent proposals for reviewing Michael Young’s curriculum theory (2007, 2014), intends how modernity operates in space terms with curriculum, as from a knowledge conception. To support this intention, Veiga-Neto’s dialogue (2002) is again appropriate:

In space terms, curriculum has worked – and, certainly, still works – as the major pedagogical device which has replaced, in modern terms, the Greek invention of boundary as a limitation from where others begin; not exactly the limit at which point we get lost, but the limit from which others come into existence for us, the limit from which difference begins to become a problem for us. In summary, curriculum has contributed – and still contributes – to make the other different and, therefore, a problem or a danger for us. (^{VEIGA-NETO, 2002}, p. 165, emphasis by the author).

Veiga-Neto’s above statement (2002) helps us to problematize the limits/dangers of knowledge characterization, sometimes a binary operation of localization, present, for example, in the antagonism interpreted by Michael Young by offering a distinction between powerful knowledge and from the powerful (YOUNG, 2013, 2014).

In another moment (^{GABRIEL; ROCHA, 2017}), we question Michael Young’s trajectory in his ways to differentiate powerful knowledge from the powerful ones, criticizing the very writings that dealt with the “stratification of knowledge” (YOUNG, 1971). The observation we make here is that the attempt to signify the relationship between knowledge and curriculum involves a translation of the spatial perspective.

Our argument, when differentiating knowledge, considers, above all, a relationship of localization of the production and uses of curriculum, which necessarily implies the conception of power that emerges in the exercise of curriculum interpretation. For this reason, it is convenient to us, at this moment, a dialogue with ^{Foucault (2014)} to highlight one of the many analysis proposed by him about the relationship between power and space:

Power must be analyzed as something that circulates, or rather, as something that only functions in a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybody´s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or a piece of wealth. Power functions and is exercised through networks. In its meshes, individuals do not simply circulate, but they are always in a position to both exercise this power and suffer its effects; they are never the inert or consenting target of power, they are always transmission centers. In other terms, power does not apply to individuals, it passes through them. (^{FOUCAULT, 2014}, p. 284).

But, for what reason, in curricular territories, is it strategic to think of a branched, capillary power? After all, when it comes to curriculum as State policy, are the decisions made not always heteronomous? Would it not be up to curriculum thinkers to occupy the decision centers in the search for a better curriculum? Far from mapping the processes of how a curriculum has been established as an official document (ultimate and undisputed) and if such constitution is heteronomous or not, the view that sees power from its inter-relational ties tends to suspend the presupposed powerful power, determinant, of a specific action.

Assuming that power only exists in operation is to accept, too, that it only exists in transformation (^{BUTLER, 2017}) and, above all, it is to accept that there are spatial processes involved there, i.e.: moving rhizomes of power. A powerful knowledge that is intended regardless of the contexts where it is forged seems, at the outset, to ignore foucauldian formulations of power. At the same time, it allows for a determined logic of space that, in our view, ignores the constitutive multiplicity of spatial at the expense of a displaced knowledge, although universal, and, for that very reason, invariable.

Ultimately, the so-called powerful knowledge, when it does not reach its goal, ends up launching the curricular experience into a fatalistic arena. In Young’s words: “education is concerned, first of all, in enabling people to acquire knowledge that would take them beyond their personal experience, and that they probably could not acquire it if they had not been to school” (YOUNG, 2014, p. 196). Here it is the association between knowledge and personal experience that begins not only to entangle, but also to highlight the entanglement between epistemology and ontology.

As ^{Derrida (1973)} argues, by proposing a break with linguistic universalism and opening the way for difference with the interpretation key that every translation is, rather, a betrayal, as it no longer promises an univocal and unquestionable meaning. And, as much as one is attentive to the non-universal, but locational³ character of knowledge, the risks of universalization are still lurking.

At this point, good intentions may be those that betray us. Why should we be surprised by a claiming idea of universal knowledge, such as that unquestionable knowledge, (un)located in an alleged totality? Is it not precisely this kind of knowledge that guarantees, so to speak, equality among all those who acquire it? Probably, it is from the intercession between these questions that it is possible to question the interrelationships between curriculum, knowledge, and space.

In other words, a sense of universal knowledge, sheltered in absolute totality, is to forbid any possibility of localization for those who know it. That is to say, the characterization of a universal knowledge would be a (un)located knowledge, for being applicable everywhere. Here is a trap of classifying the scale of knowledge as universal. That is, any escalating definition of knowledge, a national base, for example, harbors a universal will, of an absolute knowledge.

Should resorting to anthropology, philosophy, geography, and feminist studies, at this moment, be part of a weird movement? Or, in the words of ^{Young (2014}, p. 196), “why Derrida? No doubt, he is a brilliant philosopher, but does that mean he is also a curriculum theoretical thinker?” Michael Young’s answer to his own question is categorical: “I don’t believe” (YOUNG, 2014, p. 196).

Contradicting the assumption of the theoretical thinker from London, the permeability of the boundaries between the field of the theories of curriculum with other subjects can, surely, oxygenate the curriculum imaginary and, who knows, generate other visibilities for problems still secondary in the arena of the curriculum debate. A little daring: if space is an ontological category of curricular interpretation, then we can infer that the curricular imaginary resorts to geographic imagination. In other words, the inhabited, lived, and everyday space are integral to the inseparability of space-time-curriculum.

This inseparability implies an scale as a variable of the curricular making a complicated conversation (^{PINAR, 2016}) also when it is determined by the spatial outline, because, after all, every full stop of the curricular text, every curricular decision is a selection producer, a producer of antagonisms also spatial. At the time of deep reforms (or curriculum intentions), it seems to us convenient to think that the curriculum scale is not an accidental adjective. Being national or local in curriculum decisions implies a selection of meanings that exclude other territorial arrangements. To put in another way: the scale of the curriculum is not a minor adjective. It is also a production of spatial speech to impose curriculum decision-making.

In this sense, it is interesting to make some pilgrimages (^{INGOLD, 2015}) to other spaces (^{FOUCAULT, 2013}). Starting from a distinction between transport and pilgrimage, the powerful knowledge, supposedly universal, is, as we shall see, doubly displaced.

The pilgrim is continually on the move. More strictly, he is his movement [...] it is a line that advances [...] in a continuous process of growth and development or self-renewal. As he goes on, however, the pilgrim has to support himself, both in perception and materially, through an active engagement [...] the pilgrim has no final destination, because wherever he is, and as long as his life lasts, there is some other place where he can go (^{INGOLD, 2015}, p. 221, emphasis added).

What must mean to have another place to go when, curiously, we are faced with what is understood as universal? In other words, what must exist beyond the universal, or “from a universal reason, from a single subject, from a truth/knowledge valid for all, [which] still marks contemporary education, [and] especially the curriculum [?]” (^{TEDESCHI; PAVAN, 2017}, p. 679). The developments will be diverse, making the powerful knowledge to become, perhaps, dangerous.

To relaunch an arrow shot by ^{Nietzsche (2015)}, it is worth remembering that common good, just because it is common, has little value. But how can a common good or a powerful knowledge, capable of reorganizing personal experiences, become dangerous? In a simple and brief way, an answer can be traced through the writings of Arturo ^{Escobar (2016)}.

Still in this direction, says ^{Foucault (2014}, p. 253): “the spatial description of discursive facts leads to the analysis of the effects of power that are linked to it.” Therefore, spatializing powerful knowledge means not only locating and situating its universality, but also understanding its functionality in the constitution of what ^{Escobar (2016)} called the Worldly World.

When writing about this idea, Arturo ^{Escobar (2016}, p. 22) states that:

[...] perhaps the core aspect of the Worldly World is the ontological division: a specific way of separating humanity from Nature (Nature/culture division) [...] establishing the basis of an institutional structure [...] through which the Worldly World is put into action.

Now, should it not be productive for researchers involved in the curriculum field to investigate the division between nature and culture? In a quick view, without the slightest intention of exhausting the fired binarisms, we can look at the myriad of dualisms related to such separation: civilized, wild; developed, underdeveloped; me, another one; good student, bad student; smart, dumb, etc. Thus, as defended by ^{Tedeschi and Pavan (2017)}:

[...] we start from the understanding that curriculum, education need to problematize the prevalence of a universal way of existence that tends to frustrate the emergence of other ways; need to consider that we live in a world full of possibilities, and letting the other be another singular being, be something that has not been invented yet, enhances other ways of life. (^{TEDESCHI; PAVAN, 2017}, p. 679).

And, with this same perspective, we hear the echoes of the question asked by ^{Butler (2013}, p. 161): “what relationship between knowledge and power makes that our epistemological certainties end up supporting a way of structuring the world that obliterates alternative arrangement possibilities?”.

We suspect that, as a backdrop, the conjunction of a Worldly World and the defense of a powerful knowledge acts in order to generate a specific conception of space that literally serves as a surface where it is possible to erode and exterminate other forms of life and, why not other worlds. That said, it is important to underline that “the understanding of the world is much broader than the western understanding of the world.” (^{ESCOBAR, 2016}, p. 16). Thus, it is in the practice of a theoretical exercise, but no less material, that it is possible to map the appearance of dissonant voices and worlds that, by right, locate what is considered as universal.

What was developed within the modernity project, in other words, was the establishment and the (attempt to) universalizing a way of imagining space (and society/space relationship) that have affirmed the material constraint of certain ways of organizing the relationship between society and space. And that still remains today. (^{MASSEY, 2015}, p. 103).

Indeed, our claim to a conversation between space and curriculum is crossed by conceptions of space that reject a sense of space as a surface. For this reason, it seems to us convenient to review the conception of space, which, according to Massey, involves the refusal of the ultimate foundation and the space–time split. Massey (2015) sought, thus, to praise the multiplicity, the contingency and, not by chance, questioned the perspectives that conceive space as absolute (especially those that see totality as a closed phenomenon) and with that, those that seek the definition of representation of space as an objective apprehension of the real. We understand that the space design project in ^{Massey (2015)} prioritizes the political-discursive debate, and here it can be characterized as a post-foundation⁴ approach to space.

Both in the essays of the 90’s/2000’s as well as his work translated as Pelo espaço (For Space), it is possible to identify a substantively political proposition in the approach of space/spatiality, terms used and defined by her as interchangeable (^{MASSEY, 2004}, ²⁰¹⁵). That is, textually, as noun and verb space/spatiality/spatialize are concepts that ritualize coevalness, which for the author would be the impossibility of representing life. We can read here that there is a strong suggestion to understand the effects of the sense of space, which in turn would escape any attempt or strategy of representation, capture or immobility. In the words of the author:

Space is the sphere of the possibility of multiplicity in which different trajectories coexist, i.e. it is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of more than one voice. Without space there is no multiplicity, without multiplicity there is no space. Whether space is undoubtedly the product of interrelations, then this must imply on the existence of plurality. Multiplicity and space coexist. (^{MASSEY, 2004}, p. 8).

Massey, in fact, with this quote valued multiplicity as an agenda for interpreting space that incorporates contingency, moving away from the explanatory model of authorization of space and time dichotomy, which is certainly in favor of extreme democracy agenda (MASSEY, 1992). The guarantee that there is no multiplicity without spatiality, and vice versa, absorbs a quality of criticism to essentialist forms that propose the emptying of an approach of juxtaposition, rhizomes and incompleteness present in theoretical-methodological approaches “closer” to post-structuralism.

The double displacement of powerful knowledge, then, consists of a destitution of its universal status and, on the other hand, in bringing up to the surface, with the establishment of a map (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2011}), the bottomless (^{LAPOUJADE, 2017}) of what seemed stable, consolidated and ready for “deliver[y] to the next generation” (^{YOUNG, 2013}, p. 226). In other words, the task would consist of a cartography of:

[...] particular nexus between power and knowledge that create a field of intelligible objects, [tracking] the point where this field borders on collapse, the moments of their discontinuities, the places where the intelligibility that it supports so much threatens to expire. (^{BUTLER, 2013}, p. 173).

So far, we have pointed out a different conception of power (^{FOUCAULT, 2014}) that, rather than resonating deterministic airs that power acts engender, points to its productive dimension: power produces. Power produces and is produced by spaces and, from now on, the attention of this paper will turn more specifically to the spatial nexus previously signaled. In this sense, the distinction between pilgrimage and transportation will be valuable and more precisely developed. Or, in the words of Doreen ^{Massey (2012}, p. 134): “what is at issue, then, is not only the way of organizing space and controlling it but conceptualizing it as well”.

For this reason, our effort in this section is to understand space, knowledge, and curriculum as a powerful combination. In this sense, we test the limits of qualifying knowledge as a locational factor, by critically presenting the vision of reducing space to the absolute, to the metric representation. Betting on opening space, following Massey’s problematics (2004, 2015), we shall pursue in the next section to test the possibility of reconfiguring curriculum and space, as an ontological category.

Knowledge-transport and knowledge-pilgrim: another binarism?

One of the effects of modernity was the establishment of a particular power/knowledge relationship which reflected in a geography that was, in turn, a geography of power (colonial powers /colonized spaces). (^{MASSEY, 2012}, p. 137).

In addition, the curriculum has contributed to time spatialization, i.e. for the understanding that time is reducible to space; it can be thought in terms of space, in the extent that it started being seen as folding to the space. (^{VEIGA-NETO, 2002}, p. 165).

We begin this section with two quotations that should be read in conjunction with our suspicion: that (as curriculum and space interpreters) we need to talk. Doreen Massey (British geographer, deceased in 2016) used to alert us about the effects of modernity meaning on space: the construction of a (geographical) science that produced a relationship between knowledge and power subordinated to the colonial project⁵. ^{Veiga-Neto (2002)} denounces that (modernity) produced a curriculum that subordinated time to space, implying a binary relationship instead of inseparability, longed for the apprehension of Doreen ^{Massey’s (2004)} spatiality political philosophy.

It is interesting to note that Doreen ^{Massey (2015)} identified that the social sciences, especially anthropology operated space as an ontic category, measurable and subordinated to time. She developed this reflection by identifying the limits of Bergson’s, Laclau’s and Levis Straus’ appropriations among other icons of the humanities in the 20th century. This point in Massey’s spatial argument challenges us to (re)think:

[...] that what is needed is to pull the “space” out of that constellation of concepts in which it has been, so indisputably, so often, involved (stasis, closure, representation) and to establish it within another set of ideas (heterogeneity, coevalness, lived character, no doubt) where a more challenging political landscape is released. (^{MASSEY, 2015}, p. 35).

This quote refers to both structuralism - recognized by Massey as the paradigm that favored the epistemological construction and the identification of the subject Geography - as well as the contribution of post-structuralism to turn the political into a spatial reference. This quote seeks to illustrate the challenge of thinking about space, so that we share the understanding that any exploration of space at school carries a commitment to problematize what Massey (2004) calls political landscape.

Here we exercise a convergence of thinking about the relationship between space and modernity, building a dialogue between ^{Massey (2004)} and ^{Veiga-Neto (2002)}. In other words, the critical interpreters of modernity propose other lenses for the analysis of their respective objects beyond the production of binarisms and universal explanations. At this point, it is advisable to analyze another quote by Veiga-Neto, which lists agenda suggestions for the field of curriculum.

I am interested in discussing an issue that is more, shall we say, of a background. Instead of curriculum engineering, I am more interested in curriculum architecture or, perhaps better said, I am more interested in curriculum geometry. With this, I want to say that I am interested in describing, examining and problematizing the relationships between curriculum and space re-significations – and also time – that are happening in what some call Post-modernity, others call Advanced Modernity and others, still, Second Modernity, Liquid Modernity or Late Modernity. For me, the most interesting question posed here is as follows: “what does the curricular organization of school education have to do with space-time transformations that are taking place in the contemporary world?” (^{VEIGA-NETO, 2002}, p. 167, emphasis by the author).

When proposing curriculum architecture, ^{Veiga-Neto (2002)} challenges his reader to claim other curriculum meanings and directly repositioning curriculum, space, and time relationship. Such seizure removes from the curriculum its fixity, the curriculum engineering of knowledge expiration. In addition, the agenda suggested by Veiga-Neto at the beginning of this millennium is convenient for the purposes of this essay: curriculum repositioning is to rethink space as an ontological category. Hence, therefore, the irony implicit in the title of this section: Knowledge-transport and knowledge-pilgrim: another binarism?

For us, the title of this section indicates the risk of updating and falling into a space, again, dual. More than that, because it is a complicated conversation (and, still undone), the danger lies in taking two steps forward, but also two steps back. In other words, stay in the same place. But is that possible? If, on one hand it is important to scrutinize the idea of powerful knowledge, on the other hand, how could we close our eyes to the curriculum seal of selection, legitimation, and organization of knowledge? The paradox lies in the perception that curriculum is a decision and, as ^{Laclau (2000)} points out, the contentions of the decision are contingently based. In other words, inspired by Derrida, the decision is a moment of madness.

After all, it is from the so-called powerful knowledge (or from the powerful individuals) that dwell the real statutes in which the evaluative delusions are disputed (VEIGA-NETO, 2012) transvestite in entrance exam vacancies, labor market, master’s degree and PhD studies. In other words, with an agenda where the curriculum is a (political) decision, how would it be possible to turn a blind eye to this (normative) function that regulates lives? Or yet, how can we not close our eyes to such functioning without updating the use of epistemic violence?

A way out, perhaps, is of spatial order. This must mean that there is no prescription ready to be followed. With that in mind, questions like “how does this apply, how do I put this into practice?” have little value. So, if the curriculum has a spatial and spatializing dimension (^{PINAR, 2009}, ²⁰¹⁶; ^{ROY, 2002}; ^{VEIGA-NETO, 2002}, ²⁰⁰⁷; ^{ALVES, 2001}) it is from this dimension that it is interesting to think about what can be called knowledge. With this in mind, we started from two words: method and currere. Although they do not refer immediately to each other, they share meanings, because, after all, “becomings are geography; they are orientations, directions, entrances and exits (^{DELEUZE; PARNET, 1998}, p. 10). Senses, therefore, with at least three senses: sense as something that refers to meaning, sense as something related to direction and sense as something that is felt, that is sensitive⁶, something as a field of unremarkable intensities: “meaning is divergence, dissonance, disjunction” (^{ZOURABICHVILI, 2016}, p. 67).

The etymology of the word method illustrates the possible interceptions between method and currere. Methodos, composed of met, which means through, by means of, and hodós, which means path (^{PESSANHA, 2013}). In other words, the method could be thought as a path through which a space is traveled, and, at the end of that path, knowledge is obtained. While currere “indicates a focus on understanding the action of ‘running’” (^{MILLER, 2014}, p. 2047), i.e. the walk itself (^{MILLER, 2014}, p. 2047). As for method, what matters is not the trajectory, but the order of the path: contingencies are less encounters than accidents. Now “in currere, curriculum ceases to be a ‘thing’ and becomes more of a process, an action, an involvement with and within the world” (^{MILLER, 2014}, p. 2047).

Deepening this distinction is more than mapping the differences between the idea of method and the idea of currere. On the contrary, such movement is designed to understand the possible correlations between both of them. After all, ^{Pinar (2009}; 2016) suggests: currere is a method. Geographical imaginations (^{MASSEY, 2015}) that arise from there, but not yet explained, must also be checked. “The explanation is an implication in something else” (^{ZOURABICHVILI, 2016}, p. 41).

In our case, what is involved, implicating, and complicated, is the space itself. Involved because the explanation of knowledge triggers a spatial narrative to establish itself, implicating because, we return to Massey’s assertion (2004, p. 8) for whom:

[...] without space there is no multiplicity [and] without multiplicity there is no space. [For] if space is undoubtedly a product of interrelations, then this must imply on the existence of plurality: multiplicity and space coexist.

It is complicated because space as a sphere implied within itself does not stop changing its nature - curriculum as space shows a variety of ways of expressing the spatial: disciplinary space (^{VEIGA-NETO, 2002}), space for the production of identities (^{SILVA, 2005}), cultural frontier space-time (^{MACEDO, 2006}) and so on.

In time, it would be necessary to ask what happens to knowledge when it is taken by space, i.e., by the constant difference that keeps revolving and rearranging existence towards directions that do not point to a specific or ultimate end. With Nietzsche’s words (1978, p. 104), we believe that the power of difference reverberates, as if chanting an aphorism, when it comes to knowledge and curriculum. Because:

[...] whoever arrived, even if only to some extent, to the freedom of reason, cannot feel on Earth other than but a wanderer – although not as a traveler towards an ultimate target: for there is none.

Would not a wanderer be a way of existence intimately committed to the contingent multiplicity of space?

In this sense, we understand that the concern between knowledge and truth or, better saying, between thinking as a way to know a true world - and, for that reason, given - ends up erasing all the multiplicity of what can be understood and felt as curriculum or even forms of political action that not necessarily require language of knowledge/truth to establish themselves. In other words, if the curriculum itself is linked to knowledge, we end up not calling into question what establishes and attributes identity to the curriculum. In two questions: what establishes knowledge? Would we be facing a true will? It is not, however, a matter of saying that two plus two is five, even though, at this point literature could make its severe warnings:

And – who knows? – it cannot be guaranteed, but perhaps the only goal on earth, the one towards which mankind tends, lies solely in the constant process of achieving the goal, or, in other words, in life itself and not particularly in the goal, which, of course, must be nothing but two plus two is four, that is, a formula; but, in reality, two plus two is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death. (DOSTOYEVSKY, 2009, p. 47).

In this scenario, we refer to:

[...] politics of truth belong(ing) to power relations that mark in advance what will qualify and what will not qualify as truth, what will arrange the world according to regular and adjustable modes and what will or will not be acceptable within a given field of knowledge. (^{BUTLER, 2013}, p. 171).

Questioning the normative horizons of knowledge, contrary to what it may seem, is not a way to play a game with ready rules. This because:

[...] if there are rules of recognition [...] and these rules are codes of power operations, then it can be concluded that the dispute over the future [...] will be a battle for the power that works within and through these rules. (^{BUTLER, 2004}, p. 30).

In other words, questioning the normative horizons of knowledge makes it possible to dispute by the very rules of the game that define what counts as knowledge.

Such movement, when translated into the field of curriculum, allows us to shift, for instance, the language of measurements:

[...] that characterize the fields of finance and accounting - which include assessments compared to the ‘audit’ financial process—, [because] test creators and those who prescribe them disregard the nuances, the messy details of lives lived. (^{MILLER, 2014}, p. 2051).

However, it can also displace the dual language of knowledge and failure, which, of course, has its spatial dimensions⁷ and implications for curriculum concepts with which we can operate. In short, this movement brings to light “the relationship between the limits of ontology, the link between the limits of what I can be and the limits of what I dare to know” (^{BUTLER, 2013}, p. 171).

In this interrelation in which there is a double interception where the limits of what one can be are conditioned to the limits of what we dare to know, Michael Young’s concerns and nervous defenses (2007, 2013, 2014) towards the need for curriculum theories having knowledge as their preferred object are not only legitimate, but also make sense. Here, it is knowledge as a way of theorizing space that matters. That is because, in Haesbaert’s words: “deep down, nothing in this world is without space. The world is space. Our lives are space, they demand space, they fill space, they make space, and they make themselves as space. There is no way out without space.” (HAESBAERT, 2017, p. 286). To think of other spaces is to think of other worlds, in other lives, and that other lives can make other worlds completely different from a Worldly World.

Lives that, in turn, can think beyond space⁸. Or even where the distinction between life and world, correlates the idea that marks hard boundaries between subject and object; or knowledge as an object appropriated by a subject (^{MACEDO, 2017}), does not work.

The social production of the non-existent clearly accounts for the disappearance of complete worlds, through epistemological operations related to knowledge, time, productivity, and ways of thinking about scales and differences. (^{ESCOBAR, 2016}, p. 15).

To think about scales and differences is to think with space, and it is from an escalating problem that the discussion between knowledge, curriculum and space is again crossed.

This crossing, almost as if by magic, lets a question escape, or, in the same sense, makes a question arise: “what knowledge should compose the curriculum?” (^{YOUNG, 2014}, p. 197). Now, even if such a question does not explicitly evoke space, would it be, for that reason, less spatial? If school time-space, for Nilda ^{Alves (2001)}, can be thought as a material dimension of curriculum, then this dimension is already implicit and implied on the knowledge relationships that will be established in schools.

The problem, however, seems to be to say what knowledge will make up the curriculum. Bearing in mind that, at the same time that this is done, the space itself is not thought as knowledge, thus becoming a surface where knowledge is deposited: the school starts to function as a depository space for knowledge. In other words, the local scale is no longer seen as a living, pulsating dimension, in which knowledge is produced.

From then on, other questions could be asked: would the limits of what can be not also have spatial dimensions? In this sense, it should not be taken into consideration that “the simple possibility of any serious recognition of multiplicity and heterogeneity in itself depends on a recognition of spatiality [?]” (^{MASSEY, 2015} p. 31). Or yet, how to think of curriculum and knowledge without the space being excluded and rejected as an active dimension in this combination? What powers could space raise for thought to think the unthinkable? These are questions that, far from having answers, express the desire for paths to be opened.

In this way, we resume the thread trying to interweave different lines that made up this section of this paper. Thinking the unthinkable, more than signifying a voluntarism and willingness to go to the limit of thought, indicates a rearrangement in the way thought is conceived. It is no longer a thought that is intentionally generated by a thinking subject, but a relationship that is established with what is not yet thought. “Encounter is the name of an absolutely external relationship in which thought enters into connection with what does not depend on it.” (^{ZOURABICHVILI, 2016}, p. 52). Surprisingly, the space appears as the privileged dimension for encounters to happen. Thus, getting to know oneself is associated with thinking, and knowledge associated with curriculum, when space is launched into this combination, both thinking and knowing become spatial processes.

A very generous passage from the article Philosophy and politics of spatiality: some considerations, by Doreen ^{Massey (2004)}, while synthesizing the debate promotes an opening of what can be thought of as space:

The argument is that, for the conceptualization of space/spatiality, it is fundamental to recognize its essential relationship and its constitution through the coexistence of difference(s) – multiplicity, its ability to incorporate a coexistence of relatively independent trajectories. It is a proposal to recognize space as a sphere of encounter, or not, of these trajectories - where they coexist, affect, fight one another. Space, then, is a product of difficulties and complexities, relationship weaving and non-weaving, from unimaginably cosmic to intimately small. Space, to repeat again, is the product of interrelationships. Furthermore, because of this, and as has already been proposed here, space is always in process, in a process of being done, it is never completed. There are always loose ends in space. All this now leads to an additional conclusion. This related character of space, combined with its openness, means that space also always contains an unexpected, unpredictable degree. Thus, like loose ends space always also contains an element of “chaos” (not yet prescribed by the system) [...] Space, in other words, is inherently “disruptive”. Perhaps most surprisingly, given hegemonic conceptualizations, space is not a surface. (^{MASSEY, 2004}, p. 17).

So, if curriculum has an undeniably spatial dimension and, space is an immediately uncontrollable and unpredictable dimension, what would then happen to knowledge? The distinction initially evoked between transport and pilgrimage can be, at last, unfolded. While “transportation [...] is essentially destination-oriented” (^{INGOLD, 2015}, p. 221), “pilgrimage is our most fundamental way of being in the world” (^{INGOLD, 2015}, p. 224). In the idea of knowledge-transport, the student “himself does not move. On the contrary, he is moved, becoming a passenger in his own body” (^{INGOLD, 2015}, p. 221). As for pilgrimage, knowledge can be thought as “paths along which life is lived [...] precisely because knowledge, in this sense, is open and not closed, because it merges with life in an active process” (^{INGOLD, 2015}, p. 224-237). The idea of knowledge transmission loses territory without necessarily, the knowledge itself is thrown away – since it is the outside of the thought that animates it. Learning becomes a continuous process of engagement, always unfinished and never totalizable. A nuisance, however, persists. So many lines to fall into another binarism?

Another annoyance: how to convert apparent binarism into potent ambivalence? This exercise, without pretending to exhaust space, had the intention that, in the neoconservative conjuncture of curricular propositions, it is necessary to write aspiring to the tactic of repositioning (curriculum) questions. For this reason, the pilgrim and transport metaphors in ^{Ingold (2015)} inspire us to identify, in fact, that it would be opportune to rethink binarism as an ambivalence that would reflect other approaches to the problem of curriculum scale, for example.

After all, how to deconstruct the speech of transportation in the current curriculum propositions and to re-signify the pilgrim’s power? This is not a replacement for the meaning of curriculum. Above all, is it about inscribing questions that bother the curriculum implementation process, or exclaiming about the infertility of curriculum engineering? Indeed, without the desire to accommodate the text, with an agenda or a proposal for a matrix to rethink the link between curriculum and space, our provocations signal a willingness to talk about this relationship.