Narrative and life-story writings are now standard tools for trying to ‘make sense’ of the diverse and cultural changes that we are experiencing. One’s life, whether one’s own or that of others, through the process of writing and re-writing, is seen as made up of a layers of text. This paper looks at the readings of these narratives. The questions asked are: when reading narrative, “does it work, and how does it work?” (Deleuze, 1995, p.8) for the reader. This question immediately sets itself apart from what is often assumed in the process of reading, which is generally interpretation. For Stanley Fish (1980) a sentence is an event, “something that happens to, and with the participation of the reader” (emphasis in original, p.125). Therefore, interpretation is “an analysis of the developing response of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time” (ibid., p.126-127). The concern here is that the reader of narratives of change is caught in a process of identification: this means that for me. The reader takes on a ‘priestly’ role in relation to the story. Also as Bough Bruce (2000) argues “knowing the meaning of something (s symbol, word, image) gives us no clue as to what it does or what is done with it” (p.37).

This paper suggest a shift from trying to understand and interpret the stories of cultural change to engaging with the texts of change, in that the stories are seen in terms of how they work for the reader. A key concept, within the Deleuzian-Guattarian framework, is that of ‘machine’ in order to try and ‘make sense’ of our lives and those of others within particular contexts. Thus, the question posed in reading is: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p.3). The use of the idea of machine, as Claire Colebrook (2002) points out, shifts the emphasis from some proposed whole that often has a specific end, to a production that is immanent: “not the production of  something by someone – but production for the sake of production itself, an underground time and becoming” (emphasis in original, Colebrook, 2002, p. 55). Machines are collectives of connections.

If we see the stories as as a collection of connections that are capable of producing effects, reading then is the process of taking apart and analysing these machines to see how effects are produced. The process of reading is experimental for each reader. The reader links to these different parts of the machine and “is able to make use of the work’s effects in other areas of life: personally, socially, politically, depending on the reader’s desires, needs and objectives” (Baugh, 2000, p. 36). This brings out the politisization of texts.

This paper will be end by asking if this reading that ‘works’ is teachable or not. Can it be closed down in another method?

Baugh, B. (2000) How Deleuze can help us makr Literature work. (Eds) Ian Buchanan and John Marks, Deleuze and Literature. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Colebrook, C. (2002) Gilles Deleuze. London, Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1995) Negotiations. New York: Colombia University Press. Deleuze, G. And Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Scohizophrenia. Fish, S. (1980) Is there a text in this class? Cambridge, Harvard University Press.