Abstract

This essay discusses the possibility of turning what Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called “fabulating” into a collective research method, insomuch as Deleuze and Guattari identified it as the invention of a collectivity that does not yet exist, a people to come. Given our current situation, in which the vital force of contemporary collectivities is undermined by the capitalist machine, this text inquires into the possibilities of an insurrection that begins with life in schools. If, as Bergson claimed, fabulating has a dark side that is inclined to the regulation of life, a philosophy of difference, on the other hand, conceptualizes the possibilities inherent in lived immanence. To fabulate would be, then, a question of creating possible existences. As such, this text proposes to fabulate, together with students from a suburban school in the municipality of Cariacica-ES, possible conditions of collective life in the school itself. Faced as it is by the market imperatives that govern the school and its curriculum, fabulation offers an approach and a methodology that promises to overcome this negative educational climate by fashioning larger than life images that transform and metamorphose conventional representations and concepts of collectivities, thereby enabling the invention of a people to come, and the creation of a commons and of a collective body capable of creating cognitive and affective domains that expand the limits of life.