Abstract

This article develops a theory of serial reading rethought as a theory of serial unreading, a processual form of attention directed toward virtual principles of production, whether a procedure, formula, operation, algorithm, or even an obsessive compulsion. The material specificity of the series’ parts matter but only insofar as the concrete detail suggests its own unwinding, the virtual and nonlinear path to its current state. In other words, the value or facility of serial unreading includes rediscovering the rules governing the production of the work. Thus, unreading is not necessarily an end in itself. In fact, by dispersing and expanding our attentional field, acts of unreading make us better readers of nonserial works. In drawing our attention to their governing rules, operations, or patterns of production, serial works generate a primary principle of criticism: the impulse to reverse engineer the object. To show how this works, I examine three twentieth-century items—one series of minimalist drawings and two poetic works. By choosing a small cluster of examples I aim to mimic the oscillations of serial unreading, the way audiences are required to move from one member of the series to the transtextual techne that produced it. By withholding or abjecting the single finished object (often projecting divergent endlessness), serial art projects its governing intention in terms of techne—which subsists virtually along with the actual work as its formal and efficient cause—rather than deep expression. Moving quickly among individual works, I try to show how the feeling of navigating their expanded, multidirectional fields leads us on a cognitive path (whether we take it or not) toward criticism.