The Call of "Things": Exploring Sonic Vibrations and "Noisy Bodies" in Readers Workshop

• In Event: 61.070 - Sheraton Roundtable 10 - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 61.070-3 - Putting PheMaterialisms Into Practice in Pedagogy and Curriculum

Abstract

In her discussion of “thing-power,” Bennett (2010) draws attention to the vibrancy of materiality and the distributive agency of diverse nonhuman and human actants by raising this question: “Is the power to disrupt really limited to human speakers” (p. 106)? I began to wonder a great deal about this question and why it was that the noise attached to the busy NYC street corner did not count as a distraction in Ms. Rizzo’s first grade class. What about the street, as something nonhuman, disqualified it as an active participant?

In this paper, I “think with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) posthumanist theories of affect and assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Henriques, 2010) to explore how literacy learning within a NYC first grade classroom functioned as an assemblage of transcorporeal encounters. Within Ms. Rizzo’s class, there was an artificial border that presumably divided the nonhuman (e.g. the street noise) from the human, and the rational from the irrational. This border worked to constitute students—and not things—as active literacy participants. In this way, students alone presumably held the power to enable and/or disrupt classroom literacy practices, e.g. student talk as distracting, but not the street noise. However, the conditions of possibilities in Ms. Rizzo’s classroom were neither fixed, easily traceable, nor constituted by human subjects alone. Rather, they consisted of material, sensorial, and affective forces moving together in unpredictable ways to create effects that threatened first graders’ capacities to connect to their social worlds and to particular literacy texts/practices. I argue that the threat of sonic dominance (Henriques, 2010; Gershon, 2018) potentially looms throughout each encounter by constituting particular sounds (e.g. some student talk) and bodies (e.g. boys of color) as “irrational” vibrational intensities, thereby disciplining students into neoliberal sensibilities, or white patriarchal ways of knowing, being, and doing (Stoever, 2016).

Foregrounding the im/materiality of these more-than-human encounters, this paper invites us into the middle of assemblages so as to blur the borders that contain the classroom and disqualify it, as well as certain human bodies, as worthy (literacy) participants. Attending to the middle demands that we think about listening as a social, cultural, historical, and discursive practice, as “‘multimodal’ vibrations experienced by the entire body and interpreted in conjunction with other senses” (Stoever, 2016, p. 16). As such, it asks that we constantly re/orient ourselves toward the call of “things” (Bennett, 2010) and what “bodies” have to say, asking: What things call/do not call to us in particular ways and why? And, how do these calls impact the making of students as successful/unsuccessful “literate bodies” and raced and gendered subjects? This re/orientation inspires ethical implications for pedagogy by highlighting how the everyday embodied practices we engage in may in fact do violence against our students, and even ourselves.

Author

• Bessie Dernikos, Florida Atlantic University