McCaffery, steve prior to meaning, the protosemantic and poetics

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Prior to Meaning

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avant-garde & modernism studies

General Editors
Marjorie Perloff
Rainer Rumold
Consulting Editors
Peter Fenves
Stephen Foster
Chritine Froula
Françoise Lionnet

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Robert von Hallberg


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Prior to Meaning
The Protosemantic
and Poetics
 c

Northwestern
University Press
Evanston,

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Illinois


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Northwestern University Press
Evanston, Illinois -
Copyright ©  by Northwestern University Press.
Published . All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
         
 --- (cloth)
 --- (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCaffery, Steve
Prior to meaning : the protosemantic and poetics /
Steve McCaffery.
p. cm.—(Avant-garde and modernism studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
 --- (alk. paper)—
 --- (pbk. : alk. paper)
. Canadian poetry—th century—History and criticism—
Theory, etc. . American poetry—th century—History and

criticism—Theory, etc.
criticism.
. Poetics.

. Experimental poetry—History and

. English language—Semantics.
I. Title.

. Semantics.

II. Series.

. . 
'.—dc



The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of the American National Standard for Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, 

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.-.


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Schlage Geld aus jedem Fehler.
Wittgenstein


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Contents
List of Illustrations, ix
Acknowledgments, xi
Introduction, xv


Insufficiency of Theory to Poetical Economy, 



Zarathustran ’Pataphysics, 



Blaser’s Deleuzean Folds, 



Charles Olson’s Art of Language:
The Mayan Substratum of Projective Verse, 



Richard Bentley: The First Poststructuralist?
The  Recension of Paradise Lost, 



Johnson and Wittgenstein: Some Correlations and Bifurcations
in the Dictionary and the Philosophical Investigations, 



Between Verbi Voco and Visual, Some Precursors of Grammatology:
Scriptio Continua, Mercurius van Helmont, Joshua Steele,
Peter Walkden Fogg, and That Precarious Binary of
Speech/Writing, 



Sade: Writing and Modernity, 



Temporality and the New Sentence:
Phrase Propulsion in the Writing of Karen Mac Cormack, 



Voice in Extremis, 



Jackson Mac Low: Samsara in Lagado, 



The Scandal of Sincerity: Toward a Levinasian Poetics, 
Notes, 

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Works Cited, 
Index, 


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Illustrations
. Ezra Pound, page  from ‘‘Canto ,’’ showing western system of
numerical superscripts, 
. Mercurius van Helmont, Alphabete vere naturalis hebraici brevissima
delineato, pronunciation plates of Hebrew characters, 

. Joshua Steele, Prosodia Rationalis, prosodic notation of part of
Hamlet’s soliloquy, 
. Joshua Steele, Prosodia Rationalis, notation of silence in final bar, 
. Alexander Melville Bell, Visible Speech, table of non-Romanic
characters with corresponding spoken sounds, 
. Peter Walkden Fogg, Elementa Anglicana: or, The Principles of English
Grammar, wordless music and its verbal source, 

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. Tom Phillips, A Humument, monochrome reproduction of original
polychrome, 


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Acknowledgments
First and foremost, my sincere gratitude goes to Erica Federman for convincing me this project could be undertaken and to the State University
of New York at Buffalo for bestowing on me the John Logan Fellowship,
under which auspices much of this work was written and finalized.
To Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, Ray Federman, and Susan Howe,
sincere thanks for their general input on the project and for making my
tenure as John Logan Fellow as cordial and sybaritic as it was demanding. And thank you Scott Pound for the many affable and stimulating conversations in transit between Toronto and Buffalo. Further thanks go to
Robert Bertholf and Mike Basinski for their generosity in showing me some

special items in a very special Special Collections and giving me an office
and library away from home; to Johanna Drucker, Deirdre Lynch, Jerome
McGann, Brian McHale, Marjorie Perloff, and Jill Robbins for keen comments on specific chapters. My gratitude also goes to Susan Harris, Susan
Betz, and the rest of the editorial staff at Northwestern for their diligence
and skill in generally improving the prose style and format. Chapter  would
not have materialized in its present form without my several years of valued
collaboration with Jed Rasula in ‘‘accidental research’’ that culminated in
our anthology Imagining Language. Final thanks are sent beyond words
to Cuisle Mo Chroí, whose patience, emotional support, challenge, reality
checks, proofing, and editorial and stylistic suggestions have made this a far
better book than it would have been otherwise.
An early draft of chapter  was presented at ‘‘The Ends of Theory’’ conference at Wayne State University in . A revised version appeared in
The Ends of Theory, ed. J. Herron, D. Huson, R. Pudaloff, and R. Strozier
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ).
A version of chapter  was presented on the panel ‘‘Virtual Philosophy: Nietzsche and Postmodern Poiesis’’ at the eighteenth conference of the
International Association for Philosophy and Literature at the University
of Alberta, Edmonton, in . It was subsequently presented in a revised
form on the panel ‘‘What Is a Minor Science? Applied ’Pataphysics and the
Stakes of Discourse’’ at the American Comparative Literature Association
convention at the University of Georgia, Athens, in . A revised version
appeared in Open Letter , no.  (winter ), pp. –.
A draft of chapter  was presented at ‘‘The Recovery of the Public World:
A Conference in Honour of the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser’’ at
xi


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Simon Fraser University in . It was subsequently published in a revised
form in the Gilles Deleuze special issue of Discourse , no.  (ed. Réda

Bensmaïa and Jalal Toufic) (), pp. –, and later in The Recovery
of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser, ed. Charles
Watts and Edward Byrne (Vancouver: Talonbooks, ), pp. –.
Earlier versions of chapter  appeared in Ellipsis , no.  (spring ),
pp. –, and in expanded form in the Fragmente , pp. –, ‘‘After
Modernism’’ issue (Oxford, ).
Chapter  was presented in an early draft at Assembling Alternatives: An
International Poetry Conference, University of New Hampshire, .
Chapter  was presented in an earlier form on the ‘‘New Poetries in
Canada’’ panel at the th Modern Language Association convention in
Toronto, .
An earlier version of chapter  appeared in Close Listening: Poetry and the
Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
), pp. –. Incorporated sections formed part of a different essay,
‘‘From Phonic to Sonic: The Emergence of the Audio-Poem’’ published in
Sound Effects: Acoustical Technologies in Modern and Postmodern Writing, ed.
Adalaide Morris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ),
pp. –.
Chapter  first appeared in my North of Intention: Critical Writings –
 (New York: Roof Books, ) and in a revised, expanded form in North
Dakota Quarterly , no.  (), pp. –.
A version of Chapter  appeared in PreTexts , no. , University of Cape
Town, , pp. –.
My thanks and grateful acknowledgments extend to all of the above
magazines, journals, and books that initially published the pieces. I also
wish to extend sincere thanks to the following people for permission to use
their material:

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Carla Harryman for permission to quote from Under the Bridge; copyright
©  by Carla Harryman.
Karen Mac Cormack for permission to quote from Quirks & Quillets;
copyright ©  by Karen Mac Cormack.
Jackson Mac Low for permission to quote from Stanzas for Iris Lezak;
copyright ©  by Jackson Mac Low.
Tom Phillips for permission to reproduce material from A Humument;
copyright © , ,  by Tom Phillips, London.
xii

Acknowledgments


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Page  of Canto  by Ezra Pound, from The Cantos of Ezra Pound,
copyright ©  by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New
Directions Publishing Corp.

Acknowledgments xiii


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Introduction

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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 and Stengers, Deuleuze and Guattari, Alfred Jarry, Sade, Leibniz, Lucretius, and in the ‘‘other’’ Saussure, the
Saussure of the paragrammic notebooks—provocations that led me to consider writing as a material scene of forces. Gathering together a decade of
work, the collection is deliberately nonsystematic. Discrete studies in themselves, the chapters link together by tracing several interlacements along a
broad conceptual plane I’ve termed the protosemantic.
Three other conceptual threads are presidential on this plane: the clinamen, the monad-fold, and the dissipative structure. Like Kristeva’s genotext, the protosemantic is more a process than a material thing; a multiplicity of forces which, when brought to bear on texts (or released in them),
unleash a combinatory fecundity that includes those semantic jumps that
manifest within letter shifts and verbal recombinations, and the presyntactic violations determining a word’s position: rupture, reiteration, displacement, reterritorialization. It is also the invisible in writing, that which
looks at us without actually appearing itself. Like the paragram, it remains
invisible but is already there, establishing an uncanny position from which
we are scrutinized by language. The protosemantic is also a severe and perxv


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sistent alterity because of its minuscule, elusive, yet omnipresent nature and
is accessed through nonsystematic uses and noncommunicative functions
of reading, speech, and writing. Mostly though, the protosemantic informs
and structures the domain of ‘‘betweens,’’ and the perplications produced
in transits, flights, and deracinations.
If a tangible contemporary poetics emerges from these threads, it would
probably comprise a synthesis of force, kinesis, and perturbation; a poetics
of preestablished alterities but also of the retinal grounded more in reading

than writing. What I gesture toward is a material poetics of unstable linguistic systems, like the poetics of turbulence hinted at in Charles Olson’s
claim that ‘‘[t]he real life in regular verse is an irregular / movement underneath’’ (Olson and Pound , ). In this respect, the book extends reflections in North of Intention. There, I considered the paragram as a transphenomenal and ineluctable aspect of all combinatory phonetic writing
systems. Here, I reenvison it as a key factor in formulating protosemantic
subsystems within the written. The paragram authenticates a wild postulate: that the virtual is not the inverse image of the actual but the enjoyment
of the latter’s own self-resonances. Moreover, if ‘‘[f ]ixity is a function of
power,’’ as Houston Baker claims (Baker , ), then the paragram has
its own sophisticated sociopolitical ramifications. (I consider some of these
in my analysis of Johnson’s Dictionary in chapter .) Pertaining as paragrams
do to hidden, nonlinear relations within texts, their disposition commits
all writing to the status of a partly self-organizing system; they are thus
unquestionably not only major agents of linguistic instability and change
but also advance a protosemantic challenge to the smooth instrumentality
of linguistic parlance. A modern-day Addison might label paragrammic
disruption as the negative dialectics of the false sublime, but of interest
to me is how such turbulence and nonlinearity can be exploited through
nonconventional reading habits. Ronald Johnson and Lucette Finas (chapter ), Charles Olson (chapter ), Jackson Mac Low (chapter ), and
William Burroughs, John Cage, and Tom Phillips (chapter ) all appear
here as contemporary writers-of-their-unconventional-readings of others’
writings. These I connect in chapters  and  to a richer genealogy. Two centuries earlier, Richard Bentley devised his own delirious method of textual
recension based on the principle of approximate homonomy, installing a
homophonic saturnalia and a dizzying array of bifurcations into the semantic univocity of Paradise Lost. For his part, Dr. Johnson, in that florilegial
multiple theme park known as his Dictionary, ends up constructing the conceptual, if not ideological, opposite of Saint Paul’s Cathedral—a chiasmic,
xvi

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decentered, lexical edifice of preexistent part-objects. In an exemplary display of sovereign negativity, their near contemporary, Peter Walkden Fogg
(see chapter ), offers his own transcribed erasure of a poem by Hayley as
a form of ‘‘wordless music’’ that appears precessionally as the limit text of
this practice of written-reading. All of these writers share a predilection for
secondary discourses arrived at via annexation, violence, and alteration. I
don’t offer this fact to initiate speculation on a tantalizing ‘‘parasitic sublime’’ but rather to underscore the highly complex dissipative structures
that language and literature truly are.
To return to my three conceptual tools: The clinamen, or atomic swerve,
derives from classical particle physics as outlined by Lucretius and earlier
by Democritus and Epicurus. The concept of the monad I take from the
eighteenth-century philosopher Leibniz and its Deleuzean modification as
the fold. The dissipative structure is a concept developed in contemporary
nonequilibrium thermodynamics. As the latter term is more recent and less
familiar than the others, let me give a brief outline of its form and consequence.
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers are the founders of the science of
nonequilibrium thermodynamics and were a formative influence on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work in the late s. Philosophically speaking, they
escort ontology out of its traditional discursive framework and place it in
the turbulence of systemic complexities. In their radical identification of
being with becoming, they pose a profound irritation to philosophy’s interpretive control over Dasein. In effect, Prigogine and Stengers offer a metaphysics of process rather than of presence, challenging philosophy to open
up to radically alterior forces that disturb the conceptual stability of being.
Avoiding the centrality of human being in this way might encourage reflection on the protosemantics within language. It might be said that Prigogine locates ‘‘identity’’ in verbs, not nouns, in uncompromising action,
temporality, disequilibrium, and change. Physics meets metaphysics not in
the latter’s beyondness but at the former’s point of bifurcation where being
emerges as becoming. Prigogine and Stengers, incidentally, call the scientific period from Newton to quantum physics the science of being. Their
work discloses the vexatious problem of where to place chaos in the passage
of becoming. Is it the birth of order or its breakdown? Their famous dictum
that the path of self-organizing systems is one from chaos to order might be
taken as an overly deterministic and ultimately conservative claim, but my
own interest lies less in the accuracy (or otherwise) of their theory than in
testing its usefulness as a conceptual instrument in poetics and the general

Introduction xvii


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domain of writing. Most stimulating to me is their contention that complex stable systems carry within them unstable subsystems that pressure
the dominant system into disequilibrium and expenditure. (Their term for
such complex systems is ‘‘dissipative structures.’’) At a maximal point the
system bifurcates into either a higher complex organization or into chaos.
Such bifurcation points (transported and renamed by Deleuze and Guattari
‘‘schizzes’’ and ‘‘lines of flight’’) function in a manner similar to Lucretius’s
clinamen as a force toward difference and morphological modification. As
the letter-clinamen can produce a novel word or a nonsensical syntagm (see
chapter  for a tangible enactment), so a bifurcation can precipitate a dissipative structure into either a higher order of complexity or complete disarray. I embrace for poetics the dissipative structure as a new episteme of
becoming whose nature and behavior can be tersely stated by way of the
following postulate: identity is what complex systems escape from. (I investigate the protosemantic notion of a ‘‘becoming meaning’’ in chapter .)
I choose in two chapters to develop the antisocial ramifications in Prigogine’s and Stenger’s concepts: in the singular ontology of Leibniz’s monad (chapter ) and in the concept-type of Sade’s libertine (chapter ).
The clinamen, as stated, is a differentiating effect brought on by a singular
agency. However, the monad, and its contemporaneous link to plication,
radically challenges socially based notions of the outside. Monadic singularity is exemplary of a noninteractive system—what Prigogine and Stengers
call a ‘‘hypnon.’’ The monad, the clinamen, and the libertine are similarly
the invocations of singularities, staking their claim against the faulty collectivity of encoded community.
Describing the emergence of ‘‘automatic poetry’’ at the Café de la Terrasse, Hans Arp makes the consequential claim that in poetry, as in nature,
‘‘a tiny particle is as beautiful and important as a star’’ (quoted in Richter
, –). Automatic poetry aside, the clinamen helps formulate a Poetics of the Particle. If the whole is no longer atomized and if atoms are traced
or tracked along their transits, the result is a micropoetics of delirium. Particle poetics is unquestionably latent in the atomistic linguistics of Lucretius. The clinamen as a protosemantic force is a singular interaction between
virtual force and actual form that creates by modifying its place in a preexistent structure. Marx thought it emblematic of free will; Deleuze and
Guattari of desire; and, in speaking of man as ‘‘a particle inserted in unstable and tangled groups’’ (Bataille b, ), Bataille ekphrastically captures the socio-ontic aspect of the clinamen. But in its mythogemic guise
it appears as the subaltern deity that errs, inducing shifts along fault lines,

xviii Introduction


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ensuring that there is no semantic passage without detour, and introducing noise into systems. Speaking of a ‘‘Jesuitical’’ seizure of the signifier
Lyotard approaches the crucial relation of clinamen-deviance to writing’s
protosemantic, uncertain motility: ‘‘to love inscription not because it communicates and contains, but through what its production necessitates, not
because it channels, but because it drifts’’ (b, ). Jean-Jacques Lecercle
describes language as a ‘‘Labovian ‘system,’ [which] far from being defined
by its constants and homogeneity, is characterized by immanent, continuous variability—variable units and optional rules’’ (, ), but in the
clinamen’s world volatility must supplement—even displace—variability.
Its protosemantic disturbances ensure that ‘‘language,’’ ‘‘meaning,’’ and ‘‘information’’ are bound enduringly together in an asymmetric and volatile
relation. The clinamen is the being-of-movement of an atom, apparent to
itself only in the disappearance of stabilities. It is not a move within or
toward transcendence but an event inside the atomic quotidian, and in its
confluence of unpredictability with inevitability it enjoys the status of a
law. The poetic significance of this lex atomica derives from the innovative
analogy Lucretius draws (in De rerum natura) between atoms and letters
in which cosmic speculation is articulated onto both a theory of language
and a protogrammatology (see chapter ).
If letters are to words what atoms are to bodies—heterogenous, deviant, collisional, and transmorphic—then we need earnestly to rethink
what guarantees stability to verbal signs. (Lucretius’s analogy provides, of
course, the essential link between nonequilibrium thermodynamics and the
incalculable errancy of the written.) In our age of incipient miniaturization, it might be apt to return to the rumble beneath the word. There’s a
stubborn, even tautological, literalness about that protosemantic element
we call the letter. And against Agamben’s insistence that Language is always
‘‘a dead letter’’ (, ), I wish to argue that Language is frequently the
struggle to contain the errant vivacity of ‘‘a living letter.’’ Barthes renders

the precarious entente between letter and word in a characteristically elegant passage. ‘‘Such is the alphabet’s power: to rediscover a kind of natural
state of the letter. For the letter, if it is alone, is innocent: the Fall begins
when we align letters to make them into words’’ (b, ). Innocent, perhaps, but letters also have a puzzling amorous dimension; they are, as Anne
Carson informs us, ‘‘the mechanism of erotic paradox, at once connective
and separative, painful and sweet’’ (, )—and we should bear in mind
that Lucretius dedicates his poem to Venus. Conceived as atoms, letters
intrude themselves as protosemantic events strictly defined by their dynamIntroduction xix


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ics. Being perpetually and unpredictably volatile, they introduce deviance
as the basic rule of all grammata. A condition obtains not of collective signification but of particulate, insular driftings that lead to those Möbian
complexities Lyotard insists are ‘‘[n]ot a matter of separation, but on the
contrary, of movement, of displaceability on the spot’’ (b, ). From
their traditional conception as the minimal thinkable unit, words give way
under the pressure of Lucretian linguistics to a different characterization as
the provisional container of protosemantic animations, holding in temporary check a fecund, unstable lettristic micropedia. Seen this way, texts are
not deficient but paragrammically abundant. (Unlike Iser, I see poems not
as presenting gaps for a reader to remedy, but as informational excesses that
in part impale and in part escape their readers.)
Today our immanent hegemony of informatics—electronic, disjunctive,
digital—finds itself enveloped in a telling aquatic metaphor of its own
making. We say we ‘‘surf the net,’’ poised on a mouse pad like a modernday cybernetic version of Basho’s frog, primed to jump-click into a pool
of endless, concentric data waves. Prior to Lucretius, Epicurus declared
this datatopia to be a void whose wave motility comprises a downfall of
atoms with stochastic inclinations. The swerve from the line in Greek particle theory presages the disjunctive potency of the mouse click. An inclination out of line equals birth, birth itself being a particle becoming wave.
So how does this relate to semiogenesis? Can language be envisaged postSaussure as a particle-wave economy in which the aleatory interactions of
parole enfold in langue and resuscitate the turbolinguistics of Lucretius? The

clinamen certainly lends itself to poetic consideration. In Ronald Johnson,
John Cage, Tom Phillips, and Jackson Mac Low, it manifests as a deviation from a grammatical and linear reader-consumption to a paragrammic
reader-writing. The common practice of these writers is to follow lines of
flight and release a surprising other in sameness. Central to their methods are protosemantic ways of exposing virtualities; the application of an
optical clinamen; a parenklitic reading that deviates from a consecutive,
linear engagement with a syntagmatic chain to open up the virtual inside
the actual. Even the conservative Dr. Johnson reveals lexicography to be a
tempestuous, self-defeating engagement with the errant clinama that inevitably occur in the practice of citation. (Bakhtinians might treat all these
works as fundamentally dialogic, and disciples of Serres as fundamentally
parasitic, but what I emphasize is their common condition as organized systems containing turbulent subsystems.) In Sade’s figure of the libertine we
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find a socioethical clinamen represented so forcefully that it questions the
very ground of our ethics and morality.
Though my third tool, the monad-fold, is only addressed locally in chapter , the conceptual presence of plication is omnipresent (perhaps most
intensely in the grammatological schemes of Helmont and Fogg [chapter ]
and in Johnson’s folding of citations into his lexical series in the Dictionary).
Folds and the clinamen together make available to poetics an alternative
terrain of forces and readily available differentiators in the kinetics of volition and singular sublexical activities. Both the fold and the clinamen are
agents, present everywhere, introducing instability into any steady concept
but never vulnerable to the status of universal epistemes. Moreover, like the
paragram, atoms and monads have an obvious articulation onto the social
sphere, sharing a common relation of variant force fields between bodies.
In this they stand in sharp contrast to Barthes’s and Althusser’s Sausurreanderived, linguistically controlled explanations of the subject.

Differance is a nonconcept historically positioned by Derrida at the terminus of the metaphysics of presence, but like Lucretius’s theory of atomic
deviation, Derridean grammatology perforce reduces to a foundational reliance on the granular. Contemporary science, however, offers revisionary
ratios to this concept. René Thom, for instance, reveals how morphogenesis
is not the birth of grain from grain but the practice of infinitesimal foldings
called catastrophes (Thom ). There are contradictory propositions and
questions in this forced alliance between the fold and the clinamen that I
leave, perhaps provocatively, unanswered. How, for instance, can the plicatory monad be reconciled to the movement of the atom in its vertical fall
through a nonsite? And how can we reconcile the digital atom in a void
and its production of a veritable ars combinatoria with the analog nature
of the fold and its plenum? Jarry engages such momentary conjunctions of
discrepants by appealing to an astronomical term syzygy: it’s the syzygy of
atom and monad, space and plenum that I offer as neither an aporia, a difficulty, nor a transgression of the law of noncontradiction, but as a wedding
of the incompossible.
Deploying this seemingly bizarre conceptual apparatus allows me to consider poems and texts as dynamic structures containing within them subsystemic turbulences, such as the paragram and homophone (exemplars of
the clinamen and fold respectively), and the disruptive logics of citation,
collage, and dictation. As such, Prior to Meaning is less a contribution to
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plications that both inform and contaminate the discursive propositions
(and repressions) ineluctably present in all poetics. And it warns that any
discourse of poetics is doomed to encounter the nature and virtualities of
certain systems of writing.
Perhaps this latter fact encourages a marriage of grammatology and poetics. I initially toyed with the idea of calling this collection Grammatology
and Poetics, and several chapters thread a broad frontier where poetics and
writing systems conjoin, especially in the imagination’s intermittent encounters with scripts and the protosemantic elements residing in notation.
Olson’s early fascination with Mayan hieroglyphs, his seduction by their

impenetratable, uninterpretable alterity (examined in chapter ) is cannily
reminiscent of two earlier nonoccidental fascinations: Athanasius Kircher’s
and William Warburton’s fastidious conjectures on the xenographic impact
of Egyptian hieroglyphs as a silent protoscript. (I might add to this Ezra
Pound’s attraction, via Fenollosa’s theories, to the Chinese ideogram.) Certainly, a major concern of this book is to reveal some of the factual limitations in Derrida’s version of logocentrism, and chapter  offers several
examples that contest the now dominant opinion on the speech-writing
binary as a dyadic opposition in which full speech is valorized over writing.
This collection is also in a way about material bodies: sonic bodies, libertine bodies, proprioceptive bodies, bodies both within and without writing,
and most especially microbodies. Contrary to David Porush’s conviction
that literature has typically had little use for the microscopic except as it
offers up some interesting metaphors (in Hayles , ), I stress a need to
shift attention to those lesser bodies and hope that Prior to Meaning provides material and evidence to warrant a serious consideration of both a
residual and a possible micropoeisis.
It’s now well known through Niels Bohr and quantum physics that in
the infinitely minute world of the atomic the very act of observation produces photonic impacts that profoundly unsettle the phenomenon being
observed. This microphysical fact of non-neutral observation underlies as
much Ronald Johnson’s micropoetic written-reading of Paradise Lost, as
Richard Bentley’s delirious recension of the same poem (in chapters  and ,
respectively), and Tom Phillips’s selective deletions of Mallock’s A Human
Document (chapter ). All offer readings that similarly unsettle a text at
hand.
In many ways Prior to Meaning ramifies and celebrates a single yet resonant declaration in Finnegans Wake: ‘‘The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture’’ ( Joyce , ). Joyce captures in this single phrase
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the nature of grammatological dissipative structures. The protosemantic is
in part the modality of the proteiform graph, that sublexical, alphabetic,
and phonic domain of recombinant infinity that is the Western alphabet in
operation and whose quintessential disequilibrium can be specified as the
excess of information over meaning. In a real sense, then, this book should
be read as an earnest cartographical contribution toward mapping out the
grammatological context of Finnegans Wake. It’s clear from the works I
study that my sense of what constitutes poetry is categorically nongeneric.
I consider the novels of Sade genuinely poetic—Bentley’s editorial practice
and Johnson’s lexicography equally so. Indeed, I hope that the strange affinities that emerge and the dissipative structures I assemble will contribute to
an ongoing unsettling of any stable notion as to what both ‘‘contemporary’’
and ‘‘poetics’’ denote.

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Prior to Meaning

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