Yesterday, October 13, we resumed our study meetings on the cartographic method with the group of undergraduate research (Pibic), master’s and doctoral advisees. This time the circle revolved around two texts published in the same issue of the journal Fractal (2013): “The ethos of trust in cartographic research,” by Christian Sade, Gustavo Ferraz and Jerusa Rocha, and “The cartographer’s formation is the world,” by Laura Pozzana. Read together, the two chapters spoke very closely to what we have been experiencing as we follow the Innovation Hubs (Núcleos de Inovação) of the Innovation Network for Hybrid Education (RIEH).
Pozzana opens with a warning that met with recognition: no one will learn to be a cartographer by reading a text. The learning that forms us happens through bodily inscription, not only through theoretical adherence. The author swaps the question “how does it form?” for a more playful one: “how does it force?” (in Portuguese, como forma? becomes como força?). Instead of a mold to be applied, formation happens through the body’s attentive openness to the collective plane of forces, as we follow the effects of our research practices.
This shift helped us name what we had been feeling. When we started, the group expected cartography to be a set of procedures, almost a protocol. Little by little, and yesterday’s meeting made this clear, we are realizing that we are being formed by cartography. Not in the sense of becoming alike, of homogenizing “the right way to do research,” but in the sense of the understanding that comes from affecting and being affected. Each of us arrives in the field with our own history, our own research time, our own body. And it is precisely this difference that nourishes the group.
Drawing on Varela, Pozzana speaks of the embodiment of knowledge: knowing, acting and creating happen together. The cartographer’s skill is a know-how, not a know-what. We have different “readinesses for action” in each situation, which Varela calls microidentities, tied to microworlds. We recognize this in our fieldwork: the posture with which we enter a meeting with administrators is not the one with which we talk to teachers in a classroom, and neither can be fully anticipated.
The example of the odour kit, borrowed from Latour, makes us reflect. The apprentice perfumer starts out distinguishing only “pleasant” and “foul” and, with training, gains a nose able to perceive ever subtler differences. As they gain a body, they also gain a richer world. This is affectability. We thought together: what is our “kit”? Perhaps the field diaries, the visits, the conversations, the shared readings and this very logbook. Through them we keep educating our eyes and ears to perceive what used to go unnoticed in the Hubs.
Latour also distinguishes the inarticulate researcher, who goes to the field to confirm what they already knew, from the articulate one, who lets the field move them and learns from it. We recalled that on our first visits we carried a script so closed that we barely heard anything that didn’t fit into it. The script still exists today, but as a point of departure, not of arrival.
And what about con-fiding, weaving with? The text by Sade, Ferraz and Rocha took us to another plane of field experience: trust. The authors go back to the etymology of the Portuguese word confiança: con fiar, to spin with, to weave with the other. Trust, in this pragmatic sense (James, Lapoujade), is neither a personal feeling nor a calculation of outcomes. It is the willingness to act when the limits and possibilities of action exceed what we can understand. It is intertwined with two notions: engagement and indeterminacy. We trust because we do not know what will happen, and it is because we trust that we venture into the indeterminate.
The authors contrast trust with a “regime of suspicion” that marks much representation-based research: the vigilance to separate subject and object, the anonymity that turns people into “anyone,” the “pact of double ignorance,” in which neither researcher nor participant says what they really think. The result, drawing on Despret, is the production of docile bodies, participants who answer what they imagine is expected of them.
This touched us directly. The RIEH Observatory’s role is to follow and monitor the Network’s implementation, and we know that for those who host us, when we visit each Hub across Brazil, the arrival of a team linked to a national policy can sound like inspection or evaluation. On some visits we noticed guarded statements and “showcase” answers, exactly the kind of docility the authors describe. On others, the conversation opened up. Difficulties, improvisations and inventions that appeared in no report came to light.
What we discussed yesterday is that, in each Hub, trust and distrust are not fixed states. They are forces in dispute, combining differently at each encounter. There are moments when distrust prevails: fear of exposure, the history of other policies that came and went, the overload of those who must respond to yet another demand. There are others when something opens. Sometimes through a small gesture, unhurried listening, a genuine interest in what the Hub considers important, and not only in what we want to know.
The authors call this something attunement, following Daniel Stern: a sharing of affective states that largely happens outside reflective consciousness, in “vitality affects,” in rhythm, in tone and in the way things are done. That is why trust cannot be decreed (“trust us!”) nor guaranteed by a signed form. It takes time and must be cultivated. The authors propose thinking of research bonds not as a contract, fixed once and for all, but as contracting: an ongoing process, negotiated with the field, in which some directions are defined only together with the participants.
The notion of recalcitrance (Latour) also helped us. When a Hub resists, sidesteps a question or reframes our inquiry, this need not be read as failure or obstacle. It can be a vector of differentiation, an invitation to reposition the way we are arriving. That is what Favret-Saada did in the French Bocage: she was only able to do her research when she accepted being affected, abandoning the position of “owner of knowledge.”
We can say that as we travel through the Hubs, one statement runs through our understanding: no field visit is ever the same. Even if we return to the same Hub, with the same people, something has moved: us, them, the policy, the context. The rigid lines of structures coexist with flexible lines and lines of flight that we only perceive if we are fully present. The cartographer, says Pozzana, is “born in a landscape” that is constituted along with them.
The two texts meet at a point that perhaps sums up what we experienced yesterday. For Sade, Ferraz and Rocha, trust is both the means and the end of research: a means because it sustains engagement, an end because this engagement expands the power of acting of everyone involved. For Pozzana, if all research is research-intervention, all research is also research-formation. In following the RIEH, we are not only producing data on hybrid education in Brazil. We are being formed and, perhaps, helping the Hubs also see themselves as in formation.
We keep weaving together. Until the next meeting.
References
POZZANA, L. A formação do cartógrafo é o mundo: corporificação e afetabilidade [The cartographer’s formation is the world: embodiment and affectability]. Fractal: Revista de Psicologia, v. 25, n. 2, p. 323-338, May/Aug. 2013.
SADE, C.; FERRAZ, G. C.; ROCHA, J. M. O ethos da confiança na pesquisa cartográfica: experiência compartilhada e aumento da potência de agir [The ethos of trust in cartographic research: shared experience and raise of the power of acting]. Fractal: Revista de Psicologia, v. 25, n. 2, p. 281-298, May/Aug. 2013.
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