ASMR Literacies: Toward a Posthuman Structure of Feeling
ASMR Literacies: Toward a Posthuman Structure of Feeling

Summary/Abstract: This article describes the ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) video – a visual form of technologically-mediated, intimacy-inducing sound performance – and its accompanying embodied, psychosensory effects as a mode of literacy production and reception that blurs the boundaries between what something might mean semantically and symbolically and what it could mean as a texture of sound whose pleasures are independent of rational thought. What, this article asks, do the affective, sonic entanglements of ASMR imply for literacy teaching, research and learning? Turning to a conceptual assemblage of non-representational theories, this article also draws on the creative possibilities of psychoanalysis. Referring to a number of ASMR videos on YouTube, this discussion considers three major challenges that this sensorially affective practice brings to literacy: radical forms of intimacy, oscillatory readings, and invitations to unintelligibility. This article then concludes by considering ASMR as a posthuman structure of feeling.

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