In many literacy classrooms, students engage in public performances in which they use various texts, movements of their bodies, and verbal interactions. How do we interpret such events? In this article, we critique a representational mode of interpretation and describe an alternate mode. We argue that literacy performances are often about creating differences, including differences in the moving, shifting relations of semiotic resources and differences in the performed identities of participants. Such differences—effects and affective intensities—are lost or overly stabilized within conventional interpretations, which focus on asking how meanings are represented, organized, and produced in performances. Conventionally, the texts of performances (e.g., print, images, speech) are imagined to signify (or re-present) a world that lies behind them. The task of interpretation is approached as reading for meaning. In this mode, we conceive of performances as primarily communicational or informational. Alternatively, using rhizomatic analysis, we follow the emergence of relations and differences by mapping performance-in-motion. We discuss how rhizomatic analysis shifts attention away from fixed meanings and toward action and the new “becomings” that are an important part of literacy performances. Data are drawn from an ethnographic study of interactions in a socially, culturally, and racially diverse high school American Studies classroom.
