Towards a Theory of Reader-Text Assemblages

While the previous chapters addressed readers’ views on the Superhuman, Transhuman and Post/Human in turn, this penultimate chapter develops the notion of the reader-text relationship in Post/Humanist terms as a Deleuzo-Guattarian “assemblage”. Section One described how theories of audience-text relations frequently hinged on a binary opposition between audience and text. Later authors argued that this model’s dichotomy was simplistic and that the comics industry, for example, should instead be seen as engaging in a dialogic encounter with readers. Brown suggests that this is a sympathetic relationship rather than “a struggle for power and meaning”.¹ For Barker, there is a “symbiotic relationship” between producers of formulaic narratives (such as superhero comics) and their consumers: “A symbiote is an organism which lives in a relationship of mutual dependence with another. Although it is possible to study it separately, any full account of its structure and its behaviour depends upon studying it as an organism-in-relation”.² This book proposes reframing Barker’s organic metaphor of the symbiote in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms as an assemblage. While the metaphor of the symbiote presents producer and consumer as a mostly harmonious whole, when considered as assemblage, the relationship between these two parts is itself constantly forming new assemblages: reader AND text AND creator AND history AND science AND so on. This chapter would like to go some way to articulating this concept more thoroughly.