Endnotes : : Adventures / Acknowledgements
These adventures into Form and Alcheringa are, like all explorations, preliminary. As an exercise in writing, they have served as a mode of wrestling with the problems of historical analysis and an introduction into attempts at differential reading. As a pedagogical project, this work has taken me into expanded (and agitated!) fields of inquiry in a wide breath of canonical theoretic literature, troves of forgotten magazines, and new depths of hyperspatial crawling. As a method of communication-questioning activity, historic interpretation or dialogic provocation, the thesis is unavoidably incomplete.
Adventures are by definition always on the verge of 'about to happen' (adventurus). In this thesis, I have attempted to bring a performance around the structuralist activities at two points in space-time to the verge of happening. This performance, necessarily, is limited on these pages—is bound to form a certain planar arc of argumentation, or worse, a cohesive critical point. Perhaps as a sort of indifference to the authority of this model, the writing refuses these necessities. Still, the attempt at even a simulated performance of periodical argumentation requires the elimination of certain figures, the erasure of points of interest, the waning of space.
What I hope to have done is set a frame of inquiry from which investigations can emanate from. This thesis, then, delineates a space, sets a screen or a linear point of entry from which an exploration simultaneously agitated in all directions can begin projecting.
From the onset of this project, I have imagined this work as a hypertext. As a record of my progress and a more open field for expression and interpretation, I have been shaping this expanding space in conjunction with the printed form of my thesis. While not strictly included in the guidelines, requirements or specifications for the senior thesis—this is a realm of adventure I consider inseparable from this printed version and hope to continue to investigate. I thank the reader for venturing...
At Baltimore in 1966, Macksey concludes a conference:
Some of the vitality in the "structuralist adventure" as well as much of the confusion undoubtedly stems from the plurality of analytical languages and the internal divisions about the status of the subject in the various disciplines. Yet we hope that the Symposium has demonstrated that this pluralism and these divisions were themselves susceptible to fruitful analysis. While dispelling any lingering dreams of a formalized and "pure" interpretive language which may have survived the philosophic onslaughts of the preceding generation, these sessions have, I think, renewed the urgency of Charles Peirce's isolated plea for the systematic study of methods and for the semiotic analysis of adjacent sign systems, in all their individuality, as keys to the understanding of the way in which communication and its paradoxes constitute the human community….we might turn again to that tenet with Merleau-Ponty, in a late essay, derives from the familiar structural view of ordinary language's self-transcending power in the movement from the intention of the signifiant to the achieves expression of the signifié: "We who speak do not necessarily know what we express better than those who hear us."
Acknowledgments
This thesis could not have been written without the love, support, and encouragement from friends and family. These words indebted to more names than I ought to conjure up here, I am particularly grateful for the academic mentorship of Craig Dworkin, Cornel West and Rubén Gallo, without whom my passion for words would not be what it is today. In addition, the friendship and tutelage of Keith Sanborn, Eduardo Cadava, Keith and Mendi Obadike, Kenneth Goldsmith, Chris Bush and Joan La Barbara has made my time at Princeton exciting, challenging and rewarding. A small sample from a field of loved names:
Over and above all else, I am eternally grateful for my family in Utah, without whom nothing would be.
This paper represents my own work in accordance with University regulations,
