Writing and Affect

Nam Cho
EDED 629
Dr. Amir Kalan
Nov. 18th, 2021
Affect
• What do you think about the word
‘affect’?

• The picture to the right shows the book

cover design of a book that focuses on
affect and literacy.

• Chinese: qi ( 氣 )
• Synonym: enchantment, emotion

• Affect is non-representational and pre-

semiotic.(10)

• Affect is charged intensity in ways that

keep feeling alive in the event as it
produces an ever-emerging present. (10)
“a joke is funny”(13)
• It’s like explaining why a joke is funny: the feeling, the living
intensities, of funniness wanes.

• The Quality of experience is lost. Our bodies are moved out of the moment and into reflection backwards
upon action ready to be explained. (13)

• The affects of literate activity wane when they are made into “semantically and semiotically formed
progressions, into narrativizable action reaction circuits, into function and meaning.(13)
 ‘Assemblage’
---a word coined by Deleuze and Guattari (1987)

• Image Retrieved from https://aeon.co/essays/a-creative-multiplicity-the-philosophy-of-deleuze-and-guattari

• Assemblage as a coming-together of heterogeneous materials (bodies, things, signs), held together in ways
that might allow for durability but also for dividing up and reorganizing into new assemblages. (6)

• The social dance of life where movement (dislocation) produces movement (intensity)
Radical Pedagogy?
• Value is often allied to what can be articulated. What of the forces in experience that are felt but remain
ineffable? (Manning 46)

• This is radical pedagogy: the commitment to the creation of practices

that foreground how learning creates its own value. (Manning 46)
Our Bodies and dwelling Spaces and Love
• What might it mean to dwell in and toward love while doing literacy “teaching” and “research” (Orellana,
2016). How can our orientations to affect in shaping dwelling spaces enact love across bodies? How might
our pedagogies and mentorships in using literacies (re)make discursive material concepts that move and mark
bodies with more loving potentials? (14)

• We have argued how every moment, every discursive move is part of the world’s differential becoming, and
to feel that, to move and live in that way of being, that is love in all its transformative potential, that is the
Quality of experience that makes itself known as love. (14)
Breaching school literacy learning norms
• Produced by the intra-action between people, objects and events in
the arena of Charlene’s group project, this affect pushes at the
boundaries of what is typically allowed in school. It also prompts
uncomfortable questions about what is to be done with a child who
breaches school literacy learning norms and what may ensue when
that break goes unchecked. (Lenters 51)
Charlene’s Case
• However, even with the equity sought through differentiated instruction, as
• Davies argues, policies connected to neoliberal managerialism predestine class
• room learning assemblages to be end-product driven, a situation that heightens
• “individualism and competition against the other” (Davies, 2009, p. 17). In
• this competitive environment, difference becomes an alienating force. With its
• design orientation, multiliteracies easily becomes an end-product driven form of
• pedagogy and, as we will see, in Charlene’s case, a different-than-expected end
• product in the multiliteracies project indeed served to alienate her from at least
• one of her group mates. (Lenters 53)
Posthuman Conversation
(Christian Ehret and Daniella D’Amico 150-169)

• For well over a century, philosophers have critiqued narrow conceptions of the rational, humanist subject (St.
Pierre, 2016), and these critiques have illustrated how agency exceeds “the human,” or an autonomous being
acting on an inert, external world (see also Ingold, 2013). (Ehret and D’Amico 148)

• Questions of how life feels in becoming relations with texts and how those feelings move bodies toward
more, or less, just acts of doing, making and being together have not been fully explored in literacy research.
How might literacy research itself become in new material forms that affect living and doing education
differently as an ethical charge? And how might the academic writing constitute one such material form?
(148)
Janina (a Holocaust victim and poet)
• The affect of feeling pushing back became the small moments that forced us both to think, to reflect on the
inescapable fragility of our shared us-ness, to know it, and to become with it in more ethical relations in our
writing-with each other. Feeling along each other’s writing for moments of over-knowing and over-explaining
helped put the unsayable into fewer words. (Ehret and D’Amico 167)

• Our desiring writing is both a search toward something itself, and a writing-gesture that brings us into relation
with readers, “another hearer, not one of us,” who through the affects generated across our composition of words
might “apprehend what we are and were” in the process of our searching, much in the way we worked to
apprehend something of Janina’s own searching through writing, though poetry. This writing process was
therefore not a searching for answers and then coming to those answers, but a nonrepresentational approach to
research writing that, for readers, opens to a new experience that can only be felt, a feeling of a feeling of writing
for which there are no words (Ehret, 2018b). (Ehret and D’Amico 151)

• Writing-gestures  Empathy (just feeling together; ‘togetherness’; not science, not evaluation, not explanation)
Summary 1
• There seems to be a philosophical shift in literacy and pedagogy.
• Kant  Deleuze and Guattari
• Human  Posthuman
• Binary mode of ontology and epistemology  Onto-epistemology
• Reason  Affect
• I will try to explain and provide scientific evidence  No, I don’t try
to explain and I do not need to provide evidence. You can just be
there with me and, together, we can become something!
Summary 2

• Affect is an intensity and we humans need to think about the intensities of all
the things around us (Deleuze and Guattari). We are only one of them (i.e.
humans belong to the material world). Therefore, we should de-centre our
position as powerful human beings and should be humble.

• We should consider writing as “writing-gestures”(Ehret and D’Amico 151),

meaning that we write to meet the reader in order to do it together, make it
together and be it together. Writing is a gesture toward empathy. Therefore,
this way of writing will bring healing to people who are suffering from
trauma (e.g. Janine).
Bibliography

• Ehret C. and Leander K. (2019) Introduction, Affect in Literacy Learning and Teaching. (1-20)
• Ehret and D’Amico. (2019) Why A More Human Literacy Studies Must Be Posthuman Encountering Writing
During and After the Holocaust, Affect in Literacy Learning and Teaching. (147-170)
• Lenters K. (2019) Charlene’s Puppies: Embarrassing Obsessions or Vibrant Matter Entangled in Ethical
Literacies? Affect in Literacy Learning and Teaching. (50-66)
• Manning E. (2019) Propositions for a Radical Pedagogy, Or How to Rethink Value, Affect in Literacy
Learning and Teaching. (43-50)