September 12 spend your Sunday afternoon drinks with Serial. The first ever Serial|in|Theory presents a set of interpretations of Michel Foucault’s ‘dispositif’ and Giorgio Agamben’s ‘apparatus’. Presenters include, Mathew Abbott, Aaron Nyerges, Jennifer Hamilton and Kedar Vishwanathan.

Serial | In | Theory is an open-model series of symposia that provide artists, theorists and community a setting for critically loose engagement. Key areas the program aims to engage with include proliferating praxis, philosophy of aesthetics and radical interpretations of texts.

If you’re interested in being part of defining future Serial|in|Theory’s or for more information email serialspacegallery@gmail.com

The inaugural presentations include:

A More Intense Life: The Apparatus of the Art Gallery

And only a few encounters were like signals emanating from a more intense life… (Guy Debord, Critique of Separation).

In What is an Apparatus, Giorgio Agamben presents what seems at first like a bewilderingly broad definition of his key concept: “…literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings…” (14). Crucial to making sense of this are the two words ‘living beings’. The apparatus is not just an item of a equipment, but one which in some sense takes the living - indeed perhaps life itself - as its object (thus a hammer is not an apparatus because of how it guides and manipulates nails, but because of how it guides and manipulates the living being that uses it). In this presentation, I want to examine the political claim underlying this idea, and show how it informs Agamben’s critique of the art institution. What kind of apparatus is an art gallery? What kind of capture of life takes place when an art object is put on display for viewing by spectators? And is there a difference between the art gallery and the ‘art space’? In raising these questions, I hope to show how the concept of the apparatus can help us begin to work through the relation between art and life in contemporary capitalism.

Mathew Abbott is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He has lectured in poetry and the philosophy of film. His most recent publication is “The Poetic Experience of the World”, forthcoming with the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

Undead apparatus, apocalyptic geography in the Americas

With origins in classic Greek, “apocalypse” refers to an ancient genre of writing in which a new world is revealed to human knowledge.  Fittingly, apocalyptic rhetoric has served centrally in the Christian conquest of the geographical ‘New World.’ Erupting generally in “a response to urgency” or crisis, the ability to envision a world at world’s end plays in a network of quasi-biblical rhetoric which in turn functions to direct the forces of capitalist self-assertion into socially stable yet culturally antagonistic strategies for migration and growth. The figure of apocalypse sits as nexus in a network of its own, drawing together popular culture, medieval theology, an economic unconscious, and literary theory into a strategy designed to claim both spiritual and terrestrial geography. Appropriately, this presentation draws from disparate realms, finding an apocalyptic apparatus contrived of a wild variety: Saul Bellow, contemporary cinema, Herman Melville, Bruce Willis movies, the Bible, Jorge Luis Borges, natural disaster photography, Julio Cortazar, etc.. On offer here is a brief cultural history of the apocalypse, one that plays and works in the networks of rhetoric that support and articulate the power, control, and knowledge of American space.

Aaron Nyerges works almost full time as his own personal assistant. On days off he does that which would be nothing but for assistance. By morning he goes east, at midday turns, and by evening west- all for fear of his shadow. He writes to annihilate himself and leave beauty in traces of gray.

Understanding the apparatus during a storm

When trying to define the notoriously elusive concept of the “dispositif”, Michel Foucault claims “the apparatus … is the network”. A whole network, at least at the outset, seems to be more complex than any of its parts and therefore more difficult to understand: a narrative seems more complex than a single sentence. But of course, the parts constitute the whole; if you delete a sentence, you change the narrative. Thus, often a part can provide important clues as to the structure of the whole apparatus. In Shakespeare’s King Lear the famous storm scene is the point at which not only Lear himself, but also the systems of kinship and Kingship that govern the entire dramatic microcosm, unravel. In New Orleans in 2005, the entire legal, social and political apparatus of the region collapsed as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Storms may seem like a natural phenomena that exist outside all human regulation and therefore cannot provide clues to the structure of the apparatus itself, be it the City of New Orleans or the tragedy of King Lear. But, if the effect of a storm is not the same everywhere, it follows that each storm must be related to the particular network that it destroys. This paper will use my research on storms and different examples of storms to argue that we can understand the apparatus best by means of a close reading of the points at which it comes undone.

Jennifer Hamilton is writing a PhD thesis on storms in Shakespeare at UNSW. In August 2010 she went on a study trip to the UK to watch Shakespeare and attend a conference. She’s developing a project tentatively titled “Walking in the Rain” with Performance Space. She likes bike riding and rock climbing.

Objects, Gods, artworks and the captured apparatus

Agamben’s apparatus, indebted to Foucault’s totalised conception of the dispositif; one that encompasses human subjective consciousness as a system of exchange - judgement - between ideas and social institutions, something that Althusser called “material ideology”, is a theory which can help identify the powerful nature - not to be confused with use-value - of objects. What do i mean here? I mean how objects from material cultural production contain their own set of social relations and agency. This short exercise will try to
illuminate how objects that we, in an advanced stage of capitalism, label as artworks and other more primitive, or enlightened, peoples may label as gods. Yet, the point is how the artworks come into being as objects that contain a certain consciousness of their own via the powers that we have invested in them. This includes the powers that they outwardly expose us to. This will be broken into parts; such as what happens to these objects under sacral, courtly and bourgeois systems of production. I will use Alfred Gell’s theory on artworks agentive functions as a counterpoint to Agamben’s theory. This will be in relation to the late capitalist system of display as opposed to another, such as, in a Hindu temple, and how an object which came from a sacral mode of production can be used within a modern gallery setting. I will question notions of how a gallery can be seen to be a late capitalist place of pilgrimage, a sacred site invested with sacral power - one that blurs divisions of production - one where the artists create gods of late capitalism that we the insolent bunch come to receive their agentive functions from at later dates, drunk or not.

Kedar Vishwanathan is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. His topic concerns non-European avant-garde movements, social radicalism, revolution, and the history of Indian modernism. His interests, like many diasporic Indians, lies at the bottom of the Ganges. His latest publication on Indian visual culture can be read at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1594&context=clcweb