Thinking the Assemblage: Immanence in the Movements of Narratives, LEGO, and a Child

• In Event: 68.059 - Assembling the Assemblage in Literacy Studies

Abstract

Purpose

In this paper we draw from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 1987) to think about how to engage with children’s interactions that involve texts as well as non-human agents. How does a Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy of the assemblage move us to consider children’s activity, and how we might move toward a more radical “method” of the assemblage in literacy studies? We present the play of a six-year-old boy to demonstrate human/non-human as ever-changing and heterogeneous assemblages of materials-bodies-environments-signs-narratives.


Theoretical Framing

In this article we foreground Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of all matter in a constant state of “becoming” in which the self is forever becoming different than itself. How does play produce difference? In “thinking the assemblage,” we are dissatisfied with the kind of analysis that over-estimates the explanatory power of coherent narrative, and the stability of ideological subject positions, for understanding human existence. While we want to give representations and narratives their due, we also want to understand how representations and associated ideologies or subject positions fail to capture possibility as they enter into movements with non-representations. We are also dissatisfied with analyses that literally lose touch with the connections between humans and material things—things that can be moved and yet move us.


Data Sources/Method

This study is taken from video based observations of a six year old child and his father interacting with LEGO, engaging in this emerging play activity world that arises from the materials, bodies and narratives that are part of the evolving assemblage. As method, we take up schizoanalysis, which indicates breaking up larger social formations or events into their parts. Yet, schizoanalysis is also a movement in time, a movement away from the “body of research” to the contact zone of bodies, objects, and narratives, performing desire and possibility along with children as these unfold within dynamic machinic assemblages. Because this engagement is not a new position, it also cannot be summarized as “an emic perspective” or “understanding like a child.”


Findings

While we offer new ways of thinking and feeling Mike’s play with LEGO, our primary goal is to (re)think the assemblage in literacy studies. We describe the following concepts as findings of method:
1. Thinking and feeling the undifferentiated drives and flows of experience.
2. Thinking the relations of enunciations and bodies of all kinds
3. A commitment to the interaction of the actual and the virtual: “each flow of life becomes in response to what is not” (Colebrook, p. 88).
4. Following movements of territorialization and deterritorialization.
5. Thinking within the flows of the assemblage, and not outside of it, or becoming “imperceptible” (Colebrook, p. 129).


Significance

This paper engages movement in literacy studies, directly confronting how we think about “assembled” wholes, systems, or structures. We consider how a Deleuze-Guattarian approach to the assemblage involves a radically new relationship to the flow of energies, to pre-given narratives or grounds, and to objects.

Authors

• Kevin M Leander, Vanderbilt University

• Gail M. Boldt, The Pennsylvania State University