Moving Toward an Intensive Way of Reading

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Ink on Paper: Figurations of the Subject English

Abstract

While current neoliberal discourses shaping national literacy initiatives (i.e. Common Core State Standards) assume that subjects can now rationally design their lives and freely choose to be good/successful readers, the production of literate bodies cannot be so easily disentangled from discourses of gender, race, class (among other things) that regulate what is desirable and thinkable (Davies, Dormer, Gannon, Laws, Rocco, Taguchi, & McCann, 2001) and from complex affective assemblages (Ringrose, 2011) that augment or diminish “a body’s capacity to act” (Massumi, 1987, p. xvi). The overall material effects of discourses are enacted, lived, and experienced through and with active social bodies within productive spaces (Lefebvre, 1991). “Classism [racism, and (hetero)sexism] in education, then, is often expressed through what we do with our body [within spaces]; what we say through our language; and simultaneously how we perceive others’ bodies and their language” (Jones & Vagle, 2013, p. 134). In this way, literate bodies move through the social and are collective, interactive, and interdependent (Brandiotti, 2005/2006). A reader, therefore, is “a cluster of complex and intensive forces” (Brandiotti, 2005/2006) that never completely acts alone, as bodily performatives are enacted within affective assemblages consisting of multiple, participating social actors, “including material texts, material spaces, objects, embodied movements, and relations between bodies” (Leander & Rowe, 2006, p. 449). In this way, “subjects and objects are performed relations within a plane of immanence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987); if you take certain objects away from the [literacy] event (e.g. texts, props, bodies, audience members) the event changes and the notion of the subject/reader changes as well (Dewsbury, 2000)” (Leander & Rowe, 2006, p. 435). In short, how well a reader is able to “choose” to get it “right”-- i.e. appropriate humanist discourses in order to be “successful”--depends upon multiple assemblages (Jones & Vagle, 2013) that are not freely and intentionally chosen by an always rational subject.
Within this paper, I explore my use of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the rhizome to rethink observational and interview data collected from my work in a second grade NYC public school classroom. Using rhizoanalysis, I plug into post-humanist theories of affect, assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), and discourse (Foucault, 1972) in order to explore how students engage in intensive reading (Deleuze, 1990) practices and processes, i.e. embodied literacy activities that affectively and effectively unfold in moment-to-moment interactions with other social bodies. I contend that reimagining literacy as intensive opens up possibilities for moving beyond humanist conceptions of bodies as fully coded/textual sign systems waiting to be read, and towards perceiving of bodies as organized matter, i.e. produced within moment-to-moment social interactions with human and non-human actors (Jones & Vagle, 2013). Reading intensively, then, is about remaining open to the unknown, exploring multiplicities, and mapping out the range of connections that affect and effect literate bodies. In this way, intensive reading enables educators to venture into deterritorialized (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) spaces, challenge their perceptions, and ultimately, re-imagine “literacy” and literate bodies in multiple, more inclusive ways.

Author

• Bessie Dernikos, Teachers College, Columbia University