Literacy, Becoming, and a Corporeal Confederacy

• In Event: Literacy as a Body Without Organs: Democratic Assemblages, Multiplicities, and Intensities of Multimodal Practices

Abstract

“Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it. It’s a question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out” (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1987, p. 151).

While communication studies has been critiqued as having a neurotic obsession with order, structure, control and constancy (Sotirin, 2003); similar critiques could be and have been made of the representational mindset within literacy studies, discourse analysis, and multimodal studies (Author, 2013). The Deleuze-Guattarian (1987) concept of the Body without Organs (BwO) offers an invitation to literacy studies to address three related issues:
a. issues of affect (and desire) as they relate to literate engagements
b. issues of materiality and the physical body as they enter into relationship with discourse
c. issues of temporality, especially in relation to immanence and emergence

The Deleuze-Guattarian critique is not merely a slight recasting of representational obsession, but rather a dismantling through a politics of becoming. Against an analytic practice of identification, such as in the analysis of type/token relations, we are asked to think the assemblage in terms of its becomings and transformations.

How do we proceed with literacy research involving flows-in-time, movements, and intensities? In this conceptual paper I use the developing case of social upheaval against Confederate symbols in the US, including how this issue is being played out in digital media. I consider multiple responses to the Confederacy as attempts to (re)make a Body without Organs that includes desire and affect in a process of production.

In literacy studies, discursive analysis of the struggle over Confederate objects (flags, buildings, statues) might trace lines of signification and stratification created and reinforced through these objects in relations of power. Multimodal analysis, most commonly, would bring to the interpretation of representations multiple arenas of signification for further analysis.

In the midst of it all, how might we locate a body without organs? What are the radical potentials inherent in an approach toward immanent becomings, toward molecular lines of becoming that follow desire and affect? How do we think about the movements and energies of material bodies and bodies of enunciation, as they form these ongoing, emerging assemblages?

To address these issues, I work out a rhizoanalysis that follows affective intensities within digital media productions of the (anti) Confederacy, and also draw on auto-ethnographic data of my own lived history. Presently, I serve as a Faculty Head of House at my university in the U.S. South, in a building official named “Memorial Hall” but still inscribed, in stone, as “Confederate Memorial Hall.” I reside in this building with my family and 80 first year students, building community. What is the becoming of (Confederate) Memorial, in the molar politics of the media (the traditional purview of literacy/discursive analysis) and in the molecular, corporeal politics and lines of flight of lived experience?

Key Reference
Sotirin, P. (2003). Suckling up to the BwO, In J. D. Slack (Ed.), Animations of Deleuze and Guattari (pp. 59-74), New York: Peter Lang.

Author

• Kevin M. Leander, Vanderbilt University