The running boy

It was a Sunday morning in 2005. The clock of the small country church, the one with yellowish walls peeling under the sun, announced the end of another Sunday school. A young boy walked across the churchyard, now filled with passersby, warmly embracing each other amidst severe parched summer weather. He walked through the individuals in a kind of labyrinth, as if each person represented a challenge to be met, an enigma to be answered, a level to be conquered. As he crossed the last acquaintance, he shot through unpaved alleys. The sand ran through his sandals, and it felt like hot coal under his feet, tearing the sweat from his forehead, which fell on his temples, nestling into fuzz that was beginning to grow slightly above his lips - puberty seemed to be approaching at last. Exhausted, the boy opened the gate of the house, tripping on his legs, trembling with exhaustion. He glanced at his watch and realized that, given the unusual position of the hands, he might have lost a few minutes. Did Sunday school take too long this Sunday? Or was it his stubborn legs that insisted on not exceeding the biological limits of his sedentary body? These are some thoughts that popped up as he took the remote control and turned on his television. To his relief, he realized that he was still on time. The picture drizzled, indicating that perhaps the antenna was about to break down. His heart seemed to be leaping out of his mouth. Could it be because of the race or the emotions that this artifact provoked every week? The episode finally began. From then on, not even he could explain what happened every Sunday. It was as if his whole room imploded if, in a millisecond, everything went up in flames – door, window, bed, himself included. All of this was rocked by the old song that was already engraved in his mind: “California, here we come, right back where we started” (^{CALIFORNIA, 2002}, own translation)³. Every Sunday after his return from church, the boy was teleported to another world. At that very moment, during that brief hour, sitting in front of the television, the boy dreamt of other realities that, at that moment, seemed impossible, inaccessible.

The profane image of a boy who flees the temple to live in a curriculum that presents him with other ways to experience his desires seemed, from the start, emblematic. However, we must confess that such a perception is much less caused by the fact that this fragment is part of the repertoire of youth memories of one of the authors of this text and is due more to the understanding that, when it comes to generified addressing⁴, cultural artifacts can provide less normative reasoning for subjects crossed by dissidences in their gender marks. Such dissidence is a mode of (re) existence that undermines the heterosexualizing framework and its correlated founding matrix (^{BUTLER, 2016}) due to its unintelligibility in the face of epistemological frameworks that name what is normal and what is abnormal, and what is livable and what is non-livable (^{BUTLER, 2017}, ²⁰¹⁹). The Running Boy is just one among many other subjects that are out there, taking refuge under the rubble of a host curriculum, who dream together with the protagonists of these narratives and who, with them, trace escape lines to resist the norms imposed on their bodies.

Therefore, we assume the perspective of the curriculum as an artifact that exceeds the limitations imposed by school schemes, the disciplinary workload, and the assignments given by the regulated education professionals. In other words, the curriculum can be a text of power that goes beyond schools’ walls, produced by the various cultural artifacts that we consume in a supposedly unpretentious way (^{PARAÍSO, 2010}; ²⁰¹⁵; ^{SILVA, 2010}, ²⁰¹⁶), resulting from a construction process and linking of cultural meanings to different objects materially and symbolically constituted in a culture (^{CAMOZZATO, 2018}). Cultural Studies inspire this conception, a theoretical-political field that takes as its object “any artifact that can be considered cultural” (^{PARAÍSO, 2001b}, p. 69), such as the serialized narratives we investigate in this study, considering their possibility to teach us “behaviors, procedures, habits, values, and attitudes considered appropriate and desirable” (^{PARAÍSO, 2001a}, p. 144)⁵. And by choosing which and how certain ways of life are presented, such a curriculum proves its ability to qualify the viability of ways of existence, to the extent that the subjects interpellated by it have their lives guaranteed or annihilated (^{BUTLER, 2017}, ²⁰¹⁹).

To inflate such a personal account is to endow it with a certain counter-memory, a record that serves no purpose but to drag other lines that make what happened opaque because “nothing will pass through memory, everything happened on the lines, between the lines” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012a}, p. 89). We do not want to risk making a decal, nor do we intend to bring memory as the status of the true, but rather to inculcate events to it and yield any ontological status in favor of the alliance with becomings. Always the becoming, never the to-be, and never a stable future with reflections of the past; to geographize, journey, drag, go in search of something new. The exercise proposed in this article is inspired by the ambivalent power games between the real and fiction and, grounded strongly by the writings of Michel ^{Foucault (2017)}, shows that if there is any distrust related to fiction, it is that it never stops boring the truth, trapping it at the point where it seems most unquestionable. The real and the fictional are distinct lines of nature, but it is almost impossible to discriminate between them when they come together.

We resort to this specific moment as a provocation intended not only to the already failed claim of distinguishing realities from fictionalities, nor do we wish to return to a discussion already held at other times (^{GURGEL; MAKNAMARA, 2017}). However, it is specifically an epistemic/political way of bringing to research in education other ways of seeing and understanding the pulsating life, the curricula we investigate, the discourses that produce and constrain us, and the sciences we resort to in order to validate our research and the methodologies we invent to account for the objects we scrutinize. In this sense, The Running Boy takes to the limits of indiscernibility what is real and what is not because even if he is the product of a memory of what happened, he is allied to the very curriculum that transfigured him. It is no longer important for us to attribute a stable reality to it; we are crowds of boys and girls who run, scaring us away from the ruins of mortifying curricula and fantasizing about other curricula that infect us with their joyful passions.

In this text, divided into four takes, we present our arsenal of investigative conduct for a curriculum produced from encounters with post-critical theories and the philosophies of difference and inspired by the cartographic procedure of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The argument explored is that the constitutive lines of the curriculum of serialized narratives have presented a multiplicity that makes it understandable as an anthological curriculum, allowing the visualization of its regions of control derived from the state apparatus and its contagion zones, typical of war machines. In this sense, the anthological curriculum is produced in the clash between the hard, flexible, and escape lines composing it.

This process is narrated by a character we created, the Mapmaker in the research. Given what ^{Saer (2012)} describes as the eminently complex character in the situation of fictional production, it is an (auto) fictional elaboration. Therefore, we share his concerns about “treatment limited to the verifiable,” which implies an “abusive reduction and impoverishment” (^{SAER, 2012}, p. 3) that is not alien to our methodological procedures when sanctioned by order of veridiction (^{FOUCAULT, 2017}). It is not a matter of completely dodging a certain rigidity imposed by the “rules of the game” but understanding all these processes as disputes proper to the field we are exploring and the inherent importance of multiplying the meanings of an enterprise that opens itself to fictional possibilities. In this way, the cartographer is both an “I” that writes and shares his memories and a “we” that immerses these fragments to treat them from the writing possibilities that give back to the curricular field what we borrow from his post-critical theorizations: infinite properties of creation and composition; a move away from essences, metanarratives, and transcendence; the multiplication of the lines of forces, the disputes; and finally, the struggles for the imposition of other meanings (^{MEYER; PARAÍSO, 2014}).

The first take of this article is titled “‘maybe I am more comfortable in chaos’: noise and refrain.” In it, the cartographer narrates the process in which he elects cartography as a methodological procedure for research with a curriculum. Then, in the take “Experimenting with a cartographic procedure,” our protagonist highlights the schizoanalysis from the collaborative writing of Deleuze and Guattari and shows the connecting lines of this analytical practice for the composition of his investigative mode. In the take “An anthology of the curriculum,” we are introduced to the different regions that make up the curriculum map of serialized narratives, understood here as an anthological curriculum. Meanwhile, in the take “And life flows between the lines,” the Mapmaker points to the typology of the lines mapped in the curriculum in question: hard lines, soft lines, and escape lines. We conclude with the topic “An end... or a way?”, weaving some opinions about our cartographic experimentation and arguing that what is at stake in this artifact are the different ways we become ourselves and the different subject positions we assume throughout life. Thus, by triggering lines of escape, we bet that the curriculum of serialized narratives opens spaces for other exits and makes available knowledge that does not impose on ordinances, conformations, and normatizations for dissident subjects of genders and sexualities.

TAKE I. “Maybe I am more comfortable in chaos”: noises and refrain

The ticking of the clock hands on the wall of his room denoted, to his despair, that the hours were trampling on each other. Time was speeding up. His cell phone vibrated with social network notifications that stubbornly took his attention away. Brrrrriiiiiimmmm. Outside, it was possible to hear an animal-like symphony that united the birds singing in the same tune around his window, the incessant humming of a cricket near his room, and the barking of the neighbors’ dogs. There was a strange harmony in that deafening noise as if nature itself was trying to find a timbre to modulate a hiss, to tune the tones… Tec-tec-tec-tec-tec. The keys of his notebook were also trying to find a balance in that chaos by accompanying this orchestra’s melody. “All things sing,” thought the Mapmaker. Tired of listening to that cacophony, he started to produce a playlist to listen to while he made the procedural choices related to his investigative practice. Immediately, a song popped up in his headphones, just when he was full of uncertainties and doubts about what should be the methodology used in his research. The song sounded like a religious chant, a hymn lulled into life by the concomitantly sweet and energetic voice of a pagan sorceress. The chant worked like a tuning fork, tuning his methodological instruments with its vibrations. St. Jude⁶, The title of the song, alluding to the Catholic saint of impossible causes, liberatingly announced the possibility of resolution to what had so restless his writing process: “Saint Jude Thaddeus, maybe I feel more comfortable in chaos...” (^{ST. JUDE, 2015}, own translation).

Sensitizing his ears to attentive listening to what Deleuze and Guattari had to tell him, the Mapmaker revisited their works and came to a passage that seemed to rhyme with the song he was listening to: “We launch ourselves, we risk an improvisation; nevertheless, improvisation is to meet the world or be confused with it. We leave home on the string of a little song” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012b}, p. 123). To improvise in chaos, to disperse amid the world, to be confused by the trajectories taken, to deterritorialize at the pace of a song that infects us… ^{Deleuze (1996)} had himself already said on a certain occasion that “music is the history of the becomings and the potency of the future.”⁷ The Mapmaker repeated a few times the phrase of the song he was listening to: “Maybe I feel more comfortable in chaos...” (^{ST. JUDE, 2015}, own translation). It worked as a refrain that began to accompany him in this moment of restlessness.

The refrain is closely linked to the territory, whether it is its exit or entry, whether we return to our known territory or deterritorialize ourselves in search of other territories (^{DELEUZE, 1996}). For the Cartographer, the territory that loomed on his research horizons was nothing new since he had already ventured among these zones during his Master’s course (^{GURGEL, 2018}). However, to return to a territory is always to differentiate it in some way since we never return the same. The Cartographer decided to reterritorialize the space he had briefly left because he believed it was necessary to dig for possibilities to expand it, consolidate it, get out there and take risks to find the new. The chorus is not just a passage or an escape from a territory, for it also implies a return, a “coming home,” even if one never returns to the same territory (^{PARAÍSO, 2019}). In this sense, the refrain points to escapes and returns: when it escapes, it deterritorializes in another possible place; when it returns, it reterritorializes that place that is no longer the same since its escape. Through this geo-song, we leave our homes without becoming stateless; through this musicality, we can enjoy a home in every corner of the world, just like the bird that sings to mark its territory.

The Cartographer learned from ^{Deleuze and Guattari (2012b}, p. 124) that the refrain “always carries the land with it” since it “is territorial, a territorial management.” Therefore, it is “every set of matters of expression that outlines a territory and which develops in territorial motifs, in territorial landscapes” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012b}, p. 139). In this sense, the sound is needed to leave one territory and reach another: the song of a bird searching for the territory to create its nest, a baby crying to find its mother’s breast, the researcher that launches himself into the heart of the world in search of fertile land for the artifact he studies: a song, a cry, a howl. Every animal sings and every animal re/de/territorializes.

“One more aimless conversation, one more battle that has not been won,” was what the song now prompted him as the Cartographer’s thoughts simmered. What could he empirically build in an investigation where all cards had already been played, and all that remained was collecting information for closing a report or writing a document that would make his degree official? What would be his role as a researcher in formulating a thesis that, even before being thought and argued, would already have its grand finale consolidated? More than that, how much passion could be invested in a path that he already knew beforehand, exactly every step to be taken at the risk of changing the purposes previously established, if he allowed himself to be enchanted by other paths? The melody followed: “I am learning, that is why I am going. Even if I am mourning, I am trying to find meaning. Let loss reveal it.” The Mapmaker found himself in a mix of excitement and rediscovery with the last phrase. “Let the loss reveal it...” The chant seemed to warn him: let the loss of supposed originality in your research method reveal other (im)possible paths! Return to your territory of creation! Reterritorialize! After all, the originality of the research is inextricably linked to the originality of our approach to the artifact and how we will investigate it. It is necessary to create and compose other reasonings that make sense for the way we conduct research, understanding that “method,” “methodology,” or “mode” is not a fixed and steady-state but a mobile register in constant transformation and that is only defined by the relations we establish with it.

TAKE II. Experimenting with a cartographic procedure

Schizoanalysis, Rhizomatics, Pragmatics, Micropolitics, Philosophy of Multiplicities, and Stratanalysis. Whatever the name was given to this way of operating with the lines, one must consider that cartography is an investigative practice of encounters. For ^{Deleuze and Parnet (1998}, p. 6), “to encounter is to find, to capture, or to steal; an encounter is perhaps the same thing as a becoming or nuptials”. There are many encounters in a cartographic investigative mode, and they all take place in the unpredictable: encounters with territories that change according to the research; encounters with other forms of knowledge that give us new perspectives and, consequently, update our ways of seeing the artifacts we investigate; encounters with sensations of all kinds, triggering affects and percepts. They are encounters with “movements, ideas, events, and entities” (^{DELEUZE; PARNET, 1998}, p. 6) that can geographize territories while others dissolve to make room for the new, the unusual, the becoming.

To construct the cartography concept, ^{Deleuze and Guattari (2011)} borrow the rhizome image from botany, a tangle of lines with no correlated form or hierarchy, diffusely referring to each other, acting at different speeds, and capable of modifying its form based on its peculiarities. Tired of the “arboreal roots” of modern thought, whose methodological rigidity would cut the possibilities of the act of researching through its fixed and already established a priori goals, Deleuze and Guattari inaugurated an investigation mode: to operate through lines, these “constitutive elements of things and events, which can only mark paths and movements, with coefficients of luck and danger,” to analyze of “the lines, the spaces, the becoming” (^{DELEUZE, 2013}, p. 47-48). Suppose cartography can be understood as a technology capable of reconsidering the dominant meanings (^{GUATTARI, 1988}). In that case, such an investigative mode puts rigidity under suspicion, not in the name of a supposedly imminent “disorganization,” but aiming at evidencing, within chaos itself, what it contains in terms of movements, encounters, and escapes, of lines that it creates and borrows.

Rhizome makes no promises of fruit. Any research that uses a schizoanalytic movement does not intend to seek an end in itself, nor does it claim the results as the finalization of the investigative process. After all, the rhizome is against centered systems, against what is supposed to be pre-established and hierarchical. The rhizome can be better defined as a circulation of states (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2011}), making us abdicate supposed research linearity that would go from one point to another without interruptions or shocks. In other words, the rhizome is an a-centered system that prevents us from following the best way that would throw us onto a predestined, known, and immutable road. Renouncing a safe point, we launch ourselves into the risks of an analytic practice that constantly modifies itself as it expands its connections, connects itself to other points, and conjugates other flows. In this aspect, we start to act by “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, and sting” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2011}, p. 43), whirling those we investigate with other possible artifacts.

We can say that cartography is an investigative process always open because it is the difference itself, as it refuses “any idea of copied fatality” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2011}, p. 30). More than that, when it comes to research in the curriculum, it is necessary to remember that every educational experience is, by excellence, “incredibly messy, unpredictable, immeasurable, impossible to contain, partially incoherent, and impossible to be entirely known” (^{MILLER, 2014}, p. 2061). Cartography could hardly be considered a research method in the strictest sense since it is irreproducible. Bringing schizoanalysis to the investigative conduct means challenging the limits of modern thinking, which has shaped much of the contemporary scientific production and has produced an ideal of what would be the adequate posture of the researcher in this process. Therefore, coupling this apparatus of improvisations derived from the possible connections between cartographic research and curriculum allows questioning whether the theoretical developments that support our investigations have been authorized or not as adequate. Given this eligibility, we interrogate the foundations we are forced to accept as universal, as an invitation to “think differently from what one thinks and perceive differently from what one sees, exploring what can be changed, in one’s thinking, through the exercise of knowledge that is alien to it” (^{FOUCAULT, 1994}, p. 15).

Yes, some people are tired of the tree, roots and decals, and the uniform rectilinear movement of arborescent scientific research. By launching out into the world, fissuring what seemed mostly impenetrable (modern thought), cartographic wandering allows a breaking with uniformity in research, anchors itself in the multiplicity of doing, and grants the Cartographer with the possibility to tread between spaces that until then seemed inappropriate. It matters little to him the biome or the climate, the mother tongue or the culture, the habits or the values. It matters the lines that compose each of these elements and what they provide in terms of connections, openings, and exits, in his “experimentation anchored in the real” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2011}, p. 21).

A cartographic enterprise, whatever it is, cannot be reapplied. After all, the rhizome is not an object of reproduction; it is a short-term memory or even an anti-memory (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2011}). Unlike the decal, which is reproducible to infinity, the map is antigenealogical, unconsumable, and has no referent because when we suppose it is one, it has already been transformed into two. Possibilities that emerge from the rhizome do not allow them to be justified by structural models or genetic axes, being surprised by any attempt at reproduction or copying. To map is to participate in a shifting, unstable process that demands a procedure of uninterrupted creation, in “being” in the process: to become an implicated researcher, to compose along with the scenario that investigates, putting the pieces together to make sense of the whirlwind of events. Mapmaking means running around the world through crowds and deserts, wading through their burrows and multiple entrances and exits, and witnessing the impossible. It is to return and say what you saw and what you felt, trying to translate into words the images of a map that has already crumbled and been transformed into something else. Thus, cartography is a chaotic procedure, a babelic enterprise. It is chaotic because it disturbs and destabilizes: knowledge, impressions, intuitions, perceptions, and hypotheses; because it becomes a creative and creating power that moves, giving rise to becoming. It is babelic because you can hear distinct voices, compose with diverse knowledge, experiment with heterogeneous fields, and join apparently immiscible objects.

The watchword for the cartographic mode of investigating curricula is that of experimentation. In our modus operandi, we experiment with acting, recreating multiple processes, composing using various methods, experimenting with bodies, genders, and sexualities, and, consequently, the worlds created from these encounters that affect us. Experimenting with language, understanding it not as “an external medium or instrument into which I pour a self and where I glimpse a reflection of that self” (^{BUTLER, 2016}, p. 207), but as a performative locus that effectively constitutes the subjects; experimenting with thought, demolishing what is said to be one from the subtraction of the unique, writing the “n-1” in favor of difference, multiplicity, that which makes the curriculum stutter: and... and... and (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2011}). Experiment with that which we pretentiously call “reality,” knowing that it takes on many possible forms, as many as are made possible by our discourses. Experiment with art to liberate the life imprisoned by men since “there is no art that is not the liberation of a life force, there is no art of death” (^{DELEUZE, 1996}, own highlights). Trying with the artifacts presumably known to us, making us foreigners in what sounds so trivial. And not to finish since there is no predominance of beginnings and ends in cartography, experimenting with a curriculum that coincides with life (^{PARAÍSO, 2015}).

TAKE III. An anthology of the curriculum

In his erratic journey, wandering through the various lines that constitute the artifact he investigates, the Cartographer attentively observes the rise of distinct regions on the map produced by the curriculum of serialized narratives. In the encounters engendered by the philosophies of difference and schizoanalysis, he begins to visualize the control regions of this artifact, derived from the State apparatus and its contagious zones, typical of war machines. For ^{Deleuze and Guattari (2012c)}, a “war machine” is an agency derived from escape lines and has little to do with “war” as we understand it - this, in turn, is how the state apparatus locally seizes a war machine that at first does not belong to it. The warlike character of a war machine lies precisely in the smoothing of the territories it composes or occupies and proliferates (^{DELEUZE, 2013}). As a nomadic artifact, “such as pure and measureless multiplicity, the malta, irruption of the ephemeral, and potency of metamorphosis” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012c}, p. 13), the war machine shakes up the models imposed by the state apparatus, which, in turn, pursues it and tries at all costs to capture it. However, the state apparatus refers to an idea of sovereignty, a state form that inspires and stretches the image of thought with its copies and reproductions subordinated “to a model of the True, the Just, or the Right” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012c}, p. 49), coveting universality. This is an apparatus of capture aimed to control the nomadism inherent in war machines, dominate their flows, translate them into predetermined directions and limited movements, and co-opt the becomings. In short, the apparatus of the state yearns to gut the smooth space, controlling everything that threatens to invade or overflow it (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012c}).

When the Cartographer experiments with the curriculum of serialized narratives in a cartographic investigation, he starts to assume it differently based on the nature of the lines constituting it. He notes that those curriculum lines derive from the state apparatus; they are constitutive of striated, overcoded, hierarchical spaces. These lines appropriate a regal science, subjected to a “central black hole that removes all heuristic and wandering capacity” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012c}, p. 20). The royal science intrinsic to the state apparatus aims to fix, sedentarize the powers, determine conducts to block the passage of flows, and reproduce. Yes, reproduce: regulate, identify, and normatize. The state apparatus constitutes “the form of interiority that we habitually take as a model or according to which we are used to thinking” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012c}, p. 15-16).

When serialized narratives present themselves at their state apparatus interface, their lines coerce and limit themselves, and their striated territory is unable to hold escape lines since their concern is to conserve. Thus, the Cartographer began to reflect on those narrative examples he had followed over the past few years. From certain epistemological frameworks, such narratives recognize and qualify certain ways of life (^{BUTLER, 2017}). After all, if “the norms that determine who is or is not human come to us in a visual form” (^{BUTLER, 2017}, p. 18), the artifact of serialized narratives can contribute to determining the livability of subjects. This is because they help compose lives as “livable” and, consequently, others that escape the norms as “deathable,” that is, existences whose “legal and political status is suspended” (^{BUTLER, 2019}, p. 7). Consequently, such narratives begin to function as “frames,” and through their images, we “apprehend, or indeed fail to apprehend, the lives of others as lost or injured,” thus becoming “power operations” (^{BUTLER, 2017}, p. 14). By preserving models and reproducing generified norms, these lines teach segmented ways of being in the world, and they control our bodies and qualify subjects with gender marks.

On the other hand, would there be space for a curriculum to work according to war machine logic? It was not an easy task for the Mapmaker to glimpse it, given the fleetingness of war machines and our inclination to think from models that proceed from the state apparatus. Then, the power of making one’s thought a war machine derives from the Cartographer, operating from the thought of the outside, disentangling itself from that which captures and conforms. Instead of acting by reproduction, they proceed by turns, intermezzo, and glances in the exercise of wandering thought like mobs and packs; after all, “every thought is already a tribe, the opposite of a state” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012c}, p. 49). The war machine does not present models since it is resistant to capture, and, once it realizes it is too apparent to the state apparatus, it changes into another one, making it exist “in its metamorphosis” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012c}, p. 25). Curricula as war machines are producers of smooth, open, turbulent spaces; they are projected in an abstract knowledge, the nomadic science, which differs in everything from that royal knowledge on which the State apparatus is based. This is a “becoming and heterogeneity that opposes the stable, the eternal, the identical, and the constant” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012c}, p. 26), which is always inhibited or prohibited by the impositions of royal science. Going against all the coordinates of a state apparatus that intends to limit its spaces and hierarchize it, the war machine is itinerant; it travels along paths beyond those previously traced by the state apparatus. A war machine is of the order of the tribe, the pack, and the one that runs and escapes endlessly. Therefore, serialized narratives that present themselves as war machines can trigger lines of escape, precipitations that call us to deform the predetermined models from breaches and fissures, allowing us to fabricate other modes of existence. These narratives provide less normative experiences for subjects of dissident sexualities or that escape from generified reasoning, such as the one experienced by the running boy at the beginning of the article. By activating a “creative power,” these narratives move, deterritorialize, and distrust life from the captive places in which it is imprisoned.

In dealing with an open map composed of different lines and capable of being modified along its path of creation (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2011}), the schizoanalytic procedure makes the ambivalent character of the curriculum of serialized narratives evident by pointing out that the marks that generify the subjects cannot be limited to a single and stable model. After all, despite “all the powers that control, demarcate the areas, and opine on avoiding disorganization in a curriculum and demanding its formatting, everything leaks and escapes” (^{PARAÍSO, 2010}, p. 588). If a curriculum can operate, albeit not simultaneously, according to the logic of the state apparatus and the war machine, it is because it is caught in a confrontation: on the one hand, a war machine “that feeds and inspires it,” on the other hand, a state apparatus “that imposes an order of reasons” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012b}, p. 28). Yes, this curriculum has striated and totalized spaces whose static boundaries amalgamate fixed identities, normative knowledge, and binary reasoning. However, there are also smooth spaces that hold dissidences and that invent escape lines for the itinerants that wander through this territory. Therefore, to demonstrate what the constitutive lines of this curriculum are and how they operate distinctively in the fabrication of generified subjectivities is what conditions it as an anthological curriculum.

Through an anthological curriculum, we understand this curriculum’s capacity to manifest itself as an artifact capable of hybridizing different knowledge in the same repository to present us with all sorts of models of sociability, affectivity, and values to be practiced. Such elements can approach or diverge from each other, allowing an update on the differential ways of constituting ourselves as men and women of various types. In this aspect, we can see in the curriculum of serialized narratives, for example, the emergence of a “difficult masculinity”⁸ in the figure of the mobster Tony Soprano, protagonist of The Sopranos, who, in an emblematic scene, when asked by his therapist about the compulsory prostate exam, bravely answers: “I don’t let anyone point the finger in my face!” Concomitantly, such a curriculum proves its anthological character by drawing fissure lines in the composition of other ways of being relative to masculinity, such as that circumscribed by the homoerotic subtext of the serialized narratives Hannibal and Sherlock. In both narratives, although the protagonist “couples” are presented to the audience as a friendly relationship, they covertly denote an ambiguous interest that seems to go beyond mere professional fascination.

However, this phenomenon does not occur only in a relational mode between masculinities and femininities, as if the distinctions of subjects marked by gender were only analyzed in light of the differences between men and women (^{SCOTT, 1995}). The anthological curriculum of serialized narratives produces a veritable constellation of generified subjectivities, whether in relation to the masculine or feminine, whose heterogeneous possibilities show that there is no coherence or stability in what it invests in reaching a specific audience. In other words, a curriculum is anthological when it displays its points of coherence, i.e., the discourses that run through it similarly without shying away from making its points of dispersion visible – that makes it never exhausted in its possibilities of subverting the very logic that seemed to constitute it as such.

TAKE IV. And life flows between the lines

Entering a known territory holds as many dangers as invading unexplored zones. The presumed risks of letting oneself be carried away by the guarantees provoked by the feeling of being at home when choosing an artifact that has been consumed for more than a decade were high for the Mapmaker, which led him to the first step in his schizoanalytic process: no longer reaching the object of investigation, but distancing himself from it. The moment of his becoming a foreigner had arrived; the need to “dig a foreign language into the language itself and take all languages to a kind of musical limit” (^{DELEUZE, 1996}). Here, it is no longer a question of thinking, “is this and not that?” but rather, “why this and not that?”, “how does this work, and how can that also work?”

Instead of questioning what a curriculum is or what it represents, rhizome raises other questions and shows other paths. Because it is not based on affiliations or because derivative structures or axes do not value it, the rhizome is the tempestuous that transforms every being into conjunction and... and... and... Seeking what it is in a curriculum would be to produce roots, fall back on the old arborescent procedures, and decal. It is more productive to identify the types of lines that hold this same curriculum, to question its functioning, and what connections are established with other objects. This geography of the gaze imposes experimentation with that which constitutes the curricula, the objects, the things, and ourselves: the lines, “the meridians, geodesies, tropics, and spindles that do not follow the same rhythm and do not have the same nature” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012a}, p. 83). Of the lines that can be mapped in the curriculum of serialized narratives, the lines of hard segmentarity or molar cut, the lines of malleable segmentation or molecular fissure, and the lines of escape or rupture stand out.

The lines of hard segmentarity or molar cut exist for each of us. They are determined, planned lines in which “one has a future, not a becoming” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012a}, p. 71). They are proper to individuals because our very life “does not stop engaging in an ever harder and drier segmentarity” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012a}, p. 77) because at all times, we are stratified into socially stabilized dual poles and overcoded by the state. These are very determined segments, irreducible binarisms of social class (rich or poor), gender (man or woman), race (white or black), sexual orientation (heterosexual or homosexual), marital status (married or single), family status (father or mother, son or daughter), among others. These are lines that tune-up and conjugate, segments that pass presumably from one to another: I am a child, I become a woman; I am a woman, I become a wife; I am a wife. I become a mother. These lines govern the great metanarratives, delimit the social roles that are coercively attributed to us, support the rigid reasoning that normatizes us, and seek to maintain the coherence of our bodies regarding the genders that are imposed on us. They are lines that scream words of order; safe arborescences that delimit what our possibilities will be exactly compared to what shapes us.

These lines constitute, for example, the already mentioned difficult men of serialized narratives, male protagonists considered “unfortunate, morally incorrect, complicated, deeply human creatures” (^{MARTIN, 2014}, p. 21). Regardless of the main plot, the profession exercised by the protagonist, or particularities that constitute their personalities, such narratives refuse any attributes that disagree with what is established, safeguarded, normatized, that escape from dichotomies and binarisms. Operating from strata referring to the power operations, the lines of segmentarity in these narratives are not made “to disturb or disperse, but, on the contrary, to guarantee and control the identity of each instance, including personal identity” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012a}, p. 73).

The lines of malleable segmentation/molecular fissure, on the other hand, are like “quanta of deterritorialization,” flexible lines, “particles that escape from these classes, these sexes, these persons” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012a}, p. 74, p. 75). They are lines that make the molar cut tremble and crack, that fissure the hard segmentarities. Instead of the large previously determined cuts, the malleable lines have “impulses [...] in the immanence of a rhizome” (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012, p. 72). They are like cracks, small holes through which the rhizome permeates and destabilizes fixed identities. If hard lines impose an irreducible binary order, malleable lines denote some package of de-stratification, even if it is not absolute; they allow for raising becomings and multiplying meanings. These lines can be seen in the composition of the serialized narrative The Good Wife. Although, at first glance, the qualifier of the good wife of the protagonist may suggest precisely the stabilization proposed by the hard lines, this artifact shatters several of the notions attributed relatively to the feminine: even with two teenage children at home, Alicia returns to her job as a lawyer after her husband’s arrest and becomes the “head of the household.” She finds herself in a game of seduction with her old college sweetheart, even though she remains legally married. At several moments in the narrative, she uses the subject position of the good wife to her advantage when, for example, she decides to run on a ballot and uses the matrimonial image to garner votes from the most conservative portion of the electorate. Even though Alicia does not effectively break with the wife model, she is a reminder that the lines that converge in the production of gendered meanings can dismantle it precisely at the point where it seemed most solid.

The escape lines, in turn, are lines that completely break with the stratified models, strip the “self” of any attempt at crystallization, and denote an absolute deterritorialization, an explosion of the two previous segmental lines. These are erratic, fictitious lines that compel the creation of “an entire system to flee as if it bursts tubes.” Fleeing means drawing a line, or lines, whole cartography” (^{DELEUZE; PARNET, 1998}, p. 47). However, one does not escape the world; rather, one makes the world escape, bursting pipes, releasing active forces, and updating ways of life. These are the lines drawn, for example, by the serialized narrative One Mississippi. In this artifact, we are introduced to Tig Notaro, a middle-aged lesbian who mobilizes a deterritorialization process of segmentarity lines related to femininity, visible in how she behaves in different phases of her life. Through a re-appropriation of her own body in the face of the generified knowledge that constitutes hegemonic femininity, Tig runs in an escape line, performing other less normative behaviors. A changing body, a transgressor, prompts us to learn about other, less rigid ways of experiencing our gender and sexuality expressions.

Life unravels or remakes itself in this tangle of lines of a cartographic game. Moreover, those who assume that these lines are dissociated from each other are mistaken. “The three lines do not stop mixing [...], they transform each other and can even penetrate each other” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012a}, p. 77). The Cartographer registers everything; nothing goes unnoticed. Every sound, image, perceptiveness, affect, and movement is subject to his obstinate, stalker-like gaze. He crouches behind bushes and watches life happen. It mimics the artifact it pursues, almost as if it were part of the map itself. And why would it not? We “see, speak, and think of this or that scale and, according to a certain line, may or may not join with the other, even if the other is still myself” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012a}, p. 82, emphasis added). Schizoanalysis invites us to invent other ways of thinking to create other modes of inquiry, other ways of re/existing in a world where we compose. If the Mapmaker metamorphoses into what he maps, it is in an attempt not to succumb to reality, to invent new ways of living. After all, in cartography tracks, we always trace “lines and writing lines, and life flows between the lines” (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2012a}, p. 81-82).

An end... or a way?

It is quite common that the ending of a given serialized narrative is somewhat controversial. For many viewers, the last episode usually summarizes the experience, for better or worse. Thus, it seems to be very difficult for those involved with a serialized narrative to conclude it in a way that pleases everyone; many elements orbit the finalization of a storyline, and there are many desires and longings on the part of the audience, desires that are sometimes opposite. Therefore, we think that finalizing is always a risk, whether in serial narratives or cartographic research with curricula. Closing in a so-called epilogue, as someone who would have the last word and present to peers the results obtained in an investigation, would not conciliate with the schizoanalysis employed here. Cartographic research is improvisational; it does not advocate for well-defined beginnings and ends because its interest is always in the middle, the intermezzo, the rhizome, the space in which things acquire speed (^{DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2011}).

Perhaps the final exercise of the Mapmaker is more like a hiatus – a term used in the audiovisual field to mark the period between seasons of serial narratives. A cartographic interval space: movement, wandering, incessant experimentation, even if it appears to be a period of pauses. In the absence of a better ending, the Cartographer fabricates his open endings: what striated spaces of control and smooth spaces of contagion await him in the exercise of this cartography? What lines could he write in this untimely setting? Which of them will be prolonged, resumed, or interrupted? What generified subjectivities are expected from these lines? And what emotions might this curriculum arouse? Next chapters...

However, by trying some schizoanalytic trails for composing a cartographic mode, Cartographer anticipates some possible lines of force in the mobilization between curriculum, serialized narratives, and subjectivities. He noted a constitutive typology of this curriculum that he considers anthological - the hard, segmented identity lines in the figure of the “difficult masculinity” of certain characters of contemporary serialized narratives, such as The Sopranos’ protagonist; the fissure lines, flexible in the image of a good wife who twists some of the expectations that hang over the hegemonic femininity, without necessarily breaking them in definitive; and the escape lines, those that escape from the strata of the power management and that can be seen in the composition of One Mississippi’s protagonist.

In this process of cartographic immersion, the figure of the Mapmaker and the image of the running boy intersect, producing a kind of fold. By experimenting with the curriculum of serialized narratives, the Mapmaker assumes that what is at stake in this artifact are the different ways in which we become ourselves and how we assume different subject positions throughout our lives. Inspired by ^{Paraíso (2010)}, when he states that the lives of many depend on the curriculum, the Mapmaker returns to his position as an elusive boy, the subject who runs to live in the interstices of a curriculum that would bring up other possibilities that would provide openings for other ways of living. A return to this life-affirmation fulfillment; a return that demonstrates how cartography can be a way of confronting the forms, of betraying that which was so often presented as ideal or exact, of circumventing the flows that stabilize and format. Mapmaking means leaking into unsuspected paths, tearing into investigative territories on uncertain maps, reaching the top of a query only to realize that no answer is possible, and shouting out many others. It means digging into the guts of an artifact on which we scrutinize it and make it laugh. Laugh! Laughing at all the modern logic, at all the suffering before the modernist pretension of how we should carry out our research. To go crazy, out of one’s mind. Mapping means crossing lines of all kinds and combining flows of various orders. It means getting rid of the state apparatus, the General, the Oedipus, the Base Curricula, the Experts, and what is crystallized, safeguarded, diffused, and well represented. Mapping means multiplying, welcoming other ways of inquiring about a certain artifact but without intending to domesticate it.

The Mapmaker believes that the curriculum, as a space of forms and forces (^{PARAÍSO, 2015}), can generate possibilities, destabilize oppressing forces, invest in opening bodies conditioned to no longer feeling, and inflate movements that unblock the flows. A curriculum can do many things; it can do everything! Thus, the curriculum of serial narratives may well serve as a shelter, a den, or a lair. It can open the pores to the emotions, smooth out a striated territory, and make us find a way, a manner, and an exit from what frightens us. It can give rise to good encounters. The Running Boy was surrounded by curricula that haunted him and repressed his joyful passions. However, by resorting to the curriculum of serialized narratives, as in a good encounter with this dream curriculum, he can finally break new ground. When it triggers escape lines, the curriculum of serialized narratives opens up other exits, experimenting with other languages, composing with minor, creeping, deterritorialized grammars. Therefore, they provide knowledge that does not impose orders, conformations, or normatizations on subjects marked by gender and sexual dissidence. In this sense, the Mapmaker ends this text with the image of the running boy who, just like him, also runs to leak other routes in a survey in education, gaining other spaces and multiplying the difference in the curriculum.