123 Knowledge Cultures 10(2), 2022 pp. 123–144, ISSN 2327-5731, eISSN 2375-6527 ASMR Literacies: Toward a Posthuman Structure of Feeling David Lewkowich david.lewkowich@ualberta.ca University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada 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. Keywords: ASMR; literacy; affect; non-representational theory; structure of feeling How to cite: Lewkowich, D. (2022). “ASMR Literacies: Toward a Posthuman Structure of Feeling,” Knowledge Cultures 10(2): 123–144. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc10220226 Received 12 February 2022 • Received in revised form 14 April 2022 Accepted 1 July 2022 • Available online 01 August 2022 Loaded headfirst into the cavity of an MRI machine, the noises and vibrations came suddenly, loud and jarring, knocking around my body with a series of sharp and rapid-fire adjustments, quickly joined by a deep and resonant yet also disconcerting drone, whose threatening orbit seemed to pulse increasingly closer. As I lay inside this infernal machine – inert, eyes closed, my torso firmly wedged into place – I felt in the grips of a kind of terror, surely a shared experience of all who have found themselves trapped in this tube resembling nothing so much as a nightmare of speculative fiction. However, after these initial moments passed, a