Max Cavitch’s “Serial Ontogeny” begins by noting that, long before the current “memoir boom,” many autobiographers had already been writing multiple, or serial autobiographies. They’ve done so for various strategic reasons and under diverse circumstances, but they all generate, through their refusal (or inability) to tell only one story of their lives, a very different sense of human ontogeny—one that highlights its seriality, its movement through and beyond developmental stages, historical epochs, shifts in identity and identification, and the narrative conventions of the life-course. Changes in serialized conditions (e.g., an escape from slavery, transition to a different gender, exile or naturalization, and class mobility) may mark the gap between multiple, separately published versions of a single author’s autobiography. Some of these serial autobiographies follow upon one another in chronological order; others are distinguished by theme or context; still others are distinguished by accretions to or supplementation of earlier versions. After moving quickly through several variegated examples of autobiographers’ serial ontogenies, the lion’s share of his talk is devoted to the five, serial autobiographies of Alice B. Toklas: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933; by Gertrude Stein), Everybody’s Autobiography (1937; also by Stein), The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954), Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present (1958), and What Is Remembered (1963). Cavitch argues that—with their collaborative and ambiguous authorship, their experiments with autobiographical form, their (self-)positionings in relation both to lesbian serialities and to autobiographical writing, and their disruptive relation to atomistic conceptions of selfhood—these works exemplify the phenomenon of serial autobiography and that to which it testifies: not, chiefly, the self-authored and self-authorized story of a human life, but rather the serial nature of human being.
Zachary Tavlin’s “Serial Unreading” begins by observing that the field of literary theory narrowly missed a widespread engagement with seriality when Franco Moretti chose to replace “Serial Reading” with “Distant Reading” as both title and formula of his influential 2013 volume. In this paper Tavlin proposes to take back the original phrase in order to reinvigorate slowly flagging methodological debates over ways of reading through an engagement with a wider aesthetic field. In 1967, art critic Mel Bochner distinguished seriality from work “in series,” a distinction later elucidated by Briony Fer as the basis of a new attentional aesthetic whereby routine habits of looking are transformed by serial art to foreground experiential dislocation and discontinuous temporalities. Seriality properly conceived does not reduce to or supervene upon sequence; in fact, it is conceptually opposed to it. For that reason, a theory of serial reading must be rethought as a theory of serial unreading, a processual form of attention focused less on chains of words, phrases, or passages (the basis of poetic/lyric reading and thinking in verse) than on a virtual principle of production, whether a formula, operation, algorithm, or—more romantically—an obsessive compulsion. Series resist close reading, but that does not mean serial reading is not close. Rather, the closeness of the serialized object or text becomes an issue to be resolved as reader becomes unreader and vice versa. To show how this works, Tavlin considers three artists who work serially but whose art resists sequences governed by what Edmund Husserl calls protential and retentional structures (whereby the present act of attention dilates and enchains past-present-future in the time of reading): Emily Dickinson, Sol LeWitt, and Ron Silliman.
Brad Evans’s “Serial Relations and the Infinite” begins with the observation that, in the American philosophical tradition, seriality is perhaps most obviously interesting for suggesting the problem of the one and the many, the relation between parts and wholes. His paper explores the scale of seriality by asking about the limit point of serial relations. Henry James tells us that relations really end nowhere, pointing to a philosophical question raging since at least the eighteenth century: is everything connected to everything else, part of a single series; or, alternatively, is everything merely connected to something, in many series? Evans’s paper asks what can be said about the character of the relations that make seriality possible and how to represent the relations between parts upon which any series depends. For example, Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos makes the methodological point that encyclopedic treatments of natural phenomena “ranged in series” does little to give us a true view of nature, and that what is needed is more thinking about “causal relations,” those relations being understood to be both empirical and ideational. Relational aesthetics in contemporary art circles has been said to be participatory, not contemplative; intersubjective, not private; contingent, not portable; collective, not personal; politically provisional and pragmatic, not utopian; collaborative, not confrontational; millennial, not postmodern; open-ended, not whole or complete. What Evans does here is to tackle a small piece of the problem, and consider what might be involved in trying to sketch a description of serial relationality, moving between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, both in and out of print cultural contexts, to argue, ultimately, that one can’t think seriality without relationality.