Reanimating Affective Agency

• In Event: Affect in Education

Abstract

Within this paper, I plug into (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) post-humanist theories of affect, assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987), and discourse (Foucault, 1972) to explore observational and interview data collected from my research in a first grade NYC public school classroom. Using rhizoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987), I attend to classrooms as mobile spaces that make, unmake, and remake “literate bodies” in order to reimagine difference (e.g. of gender, race) as an affirmed resource--not a deficit--and disrupt humanist discourses that work to standardize social bodies; maintain a unitary, exclusive vision of good/successful readers; and discount the affective dimensions of literacy learning. Specifically, I explore the dynamic connections that form (e.g., among affects, texts, spaces) as literacy performances move and unfold moment by moment to produce students as particular kinds of readers and subjects.

The findings of this research suggest that the making of successful literacy learners involved will (Ahmed, 2014), or attempts to immobilize matter as an active force in order to affirm students as rational, thinking subjects disconnected from other bodies, spaces, and things. Yet, the vibrant, affectively entangled ways that literacy and literacy performances wildly jumped around in meaning both troubled humanist attachments to rationality and pointed to a wider set of human and nonhuman forces at play to affectively conduct (see Puar, 2012) desirable practices, behaviors, thoughts, and feelings, thereby setting the limits for who could become successfully literate. In this way, bodies, spaces, and things—as a collection of affects—extended relationally into subjects, participated in literacy events, and made particular bodies vulnerable to re/territorialization—all the while reanimating the affective and distributive nature of agency (see Bennett, 2010).

Mapping out these moments and attending to what actual bodies do in this first grade classroom shifts emphasis away from embodied literacy performances as representing an essential truth and towards performances as affective--involving fleshy bodies, desires, dis/comforts, un/intelligibility, and collective effects. As the mapping of affective mobilities in learning spaces is relatively new in the field of literacy education, I see the potential for my research to trouble current meritocratic assumptions of literacy success/failure, which all too often place personal responsibility and moral blame on individual subjects, in order to refocus much needed attention towards learning environments as mobile, permeable spaces (see Leander & Rowe, 2006) where sociopolitical forces (e.g. gender, race, class) circulate to collectively produce--rather than reveal--literate identities.

Author

• Bessie Dernikos, Florida Atlantic University