Multiliteracies pedagogy has played an important role in the way classrooms worldwide conceptualize literacy learning. And yet, some argue, its orientation toward literacy by design, with an ultimate focus on the production of transformed texts, may narrow the very possibility of opening students' social futures that it seeks to promote. Recent scholarship calls for a re-orientation in pedagogical practices to move away from literacy by design and toward literacy as emergence. Drawing on a case study of a fourth grade classroom, this study focuses on how affect, in particular the visceral forces that propel or diminish capacities for learning, might assist with this re-orientation. Findings suggest that when multiliteracies instruction makes space for affect, new trajectories for literacy learning are enabled.