[Wgcp-whc] WG/CP--Photocopies now available

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

Dear All--

My apologies for multiple postings in one day. I pass on the following from
Jean-Jacques.

RD

+++++++++


There is short photocopy ready for pick-up in our box at the WHC consisting of
the introduction and first chapter from Steve McCaffrey's Prior to Meaning: The
Protosemantic and Poetics (Northwestern U P, 2001) (approx 20 pages). The
opening sentences, herewith, open up the conceptual threads that inhabit that
book, some of which may be useful in speaking about John Cayley's work (indeed,
such was his suggestion).

"Prior to Meaning studies the ways in which language behaves rather than how
it's designed to function. It traces a limited autonomy of the written mark at
a level both beneath and around the semantic. Collectively the twelve essays
index a general shift in my thinking away from a Saussurean model of language
(langue/parole, signifier/signified) to a different set of provocations found
in Prigogine, Stengers, Deleuze and Guattari, Alfred Jarry, Sade, Leibniz,
Lucretius and in the "other" Saussure, the Saussure of the paragrammatic
notebooks?provocations that led me to consider writing as a material scene of
forces."