In this article, we explore our concern with the way youth identities and literacy research and practices are framed through a dominant conceptual paradigm in new literacy studies, namely, as articulated in the 1996 New London Group's "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." More than any other text, "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies" streams powerfully through doctoral programs, edited volumes, books, journal reviews, and calls for conference papers, as the central manifesto of the new literacies movement. In what follows, we draw heavily from the work of Deleuze and Guattari to take issue with the New London Group's disciplined rationalization of youth engagement in literacies. We organize our critical exploration of "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies" around Lee, a 10-year-old boy we follow through one day as he engages in reading and playing with text from Japanese manga. Our goal with this rereading is to reassert the sensations and movements of the body in the momentby-moment unfolding or emergence of activity. This nonrepresentational approach describes literacy-related activity not as projected toward some textual end point but as living its life in the ongoing present, forming relations and connections across signs, objects, and bodies in often unexpected ways. Such activity is saturated with affect and emotion; it creates and is fed by an ongoing series of affective intensities that are different from the rational control of meanings and forms. It helps us to keep the distinction between description and prescription sharp and to begin imagining what else might be going on.

The author introduces the concept of vitality and its relation to affect. Stern defined vitality as the feeling of flow and aliveness. The author drew on research from literacy, curriculum theory, and the work of Stern to argue for the value of the concept of vitality for thinking about how literacy comes to feel vital. The author argues that researchers and teachers need to attend to students’ embodied expressions of vitality. These forms of vitality communicate the energy of a given classroom event. The author highlights Stern’s conceptualization of affect attunement—the ability of one party to share the subjective state of the other party transmitted through polymodal matching of vitality forms—as giving rise to and carrying vitality. Central to Stern’s work is that most affect attunement occurs out of conscious awareness, as the body is affected through multiple registers, in its psychobiological rhythms, in multisensory dynamic flow, and in the dynamic shifts and patterns of the body in movement in and out of constantly emergent assemblages. The author argues that in literacy research and teaching, conscious, language‐based learning has been overvalued. Contending that students’ embodied identities create differences in how their expressions of vitality are received in classrooms, the author concludes by arguing for vitality rights: the basic rights of all students to experience themselves as vital members of a classroom community.

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In this article, we think through six-year-old Mike’s play with Lego and with his father, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the break. For Deleuze and Guattari, the break is thought about in relation to impersonal flows of desire that are always everywhere at work and to the refrain, which we describe as materials and energies organized into repeating patterns. The movement of desiring flows in relation to refrains inevitably produces difference; breaks matter insofar as they are the introduction of difference that might make a difference, that produces movement and momentum, the felt life in things. In this article, we take two passes at thinking about breaks and their associated movements. In the first, we come close to the action of Mike’s play to think about materials, narratives and discourses, and about the ways, both predictable and wild, that they assemble and disassemble, hold together and fall apart. In the second pass, we think about the temporal organization of play and how players mess about in time and with time, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1990) notion of chronos and aiôn. After considering the break in Mike’s play, we conclude with reflections on the differences that would be possible were we to allow movement to be immanent to our ways of being as researchers and as teachers.

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