Bright the prospects are not for words; once taken in hand as weapons, beginnings may no longer pulse in them. As though human speech too is beaten, persuasion cast out of its proper temple.* How the senseless murk of noise then encircles everything! – while, naturally enough, responses to this impotence of the persuasive do display the colour of desperate embitterment.
* In the Description of Greece (bk. i, xxii) by Pausanias, an account is given of the Athenian cult of Persuasion (Πειθώ) and its origin. Also germane here are, inter alia, the fragment of Euripides’ lost Antigone (no. 170), and Nietzsche’s ninth Lenzer Heide reflection of June 10, 1887 on “European nihilism” (5, 71).
Even apart from the mobs which remind the historically observant of the mood of a hundred years ago, and not only in Germany, everywhere thickening crowds are returning, even if this time the jostling is done otherwise than with elbows.* So, in avoidance, skirting too close a contact with all that, sometimes, on the avenues of today, softly, one overhears nearby another Einzelgänger humming an old tune –
nach uns wird kommen: nichts Nennenwertes**
– or a line like it, in another language, words beyond persuasion, whistled without fervour, while in themselves not quite replete. “After us” (nach uns) . . . – there is still an us or even a we lodged somewhere in this curious mixture of sentiments. Then one intuits some others do also wonder, each off in his corner: what will be the wind to blow everything clean?
* George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ch. xviii
** Bertolt Brecht, Hauspostille, “Anhang: Vom armen B. B.,” 3, 8
Such a brief interlude, comfort or not, ceases nearly as soon as it began, usually.
Geh ich zeitig in die Leere
Komm ich aus der Leere voll.
Wenn ich mit dem Nichts verkehre
Weiß ich wieder, was ich soll.— Brecht, “An R.”
abends bekomme ich die hauspostille wieder in die hand. hier erreicht die literatur jenen grad der entmenschlichung, den marx beim proletariat sieht, und zugleich die ausweglosigkeit, die ihm hoffnung einflößt. der großteil der gedichte handelt von untergang, und die poesie folgt der zugrunde gehenden gesellschaft auf den grund. die schönheit etabliert sich auf wracks, die fetzen werden delikat. das erhabene wälzt sich im staub, die sinnlosigkeit wird als befreierin begrüßt. der dichter solidarisiert nicht einmal mehr mit sich selber. risus mortis. aber kraftlos ist das nicht.
— Brecht, Arbeitsjournal, vol. i, entry of August 20, 1940
Vor allem aber achtet scharf,
Daß man hier alles dürfen darf.— Brecht, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, act 2, scene 13
Byronic, baudelairien, brechtisch, as by turns one can denominate refusals of the general negation even when it seems indefinitely inescapable, the mood which these better poets have bequeathed (to whom?), for this times are ripe again, spaces being cleared, just because the rubble is obvious. Whether out of it anything worthy of a word or even of a name will come? Doubtful, at this point we’ve arrived at (we?), although something still is signified by the suffix -ful, fortunately. For how much longer? If the assaults on the fortifications of grammar (pronouns!) do succeed, what would be targeted next? Rebellious inspiration itself, as the three honourifics demarcate it? After all, how the poets would laugh at today’s “virtues”!
What then would be the persuasions which the poems might deploy in return?
Will words like theirs soon be exiled to the camps of the negated, cancelled, and annulled? Well, ever more strange operations currently are performed on the wellsprings of history, literature, and art: namely, memory.
If the goal of doing away with grammar is to liberate a zone whose occupants may aver that here it’s permissible to do anything at all (daß man hier alles dürfen darf) – though the rationalisation began to stink already quite some time ago – would they not discover the opposite? Without carrying out the experiment itself, cannot one surmise how nothing at all could be done once grammatical limits are abolished?
O irony! – Irony itself by a multitude of threads remains bound to grammar, not least by virtue of its own binariness, the specific division whereby it is spoken, actively, productively, and sensed, passively, receptively. In all this there may be a clue. Perhaps grammatical strictures have been one of the ironic’s best schools, or even its very condition of possibility. Nulla ironia sine grammatica!
How long then will irony survive if the war is won by today’s trans-grammarism? – Some such term is requisite, because the current trans-movements, beyond their verbiage, do seem to proceed against a common enemy, namely, the grammatical structures of language itself: these they stigmatise implicitly as being the set of chains of which gender or the human are but links. (How not to suspect that others will soon be identified and attacked.) All of it is to be ground up. – Neologisms may or may not betoken the decline of language’s powers, but even so their usage still evinces some linguistic force, of which one should avail oneself sometimes, albeit sparingly, before it like so much else is utterly killed off.
For what do these campaigns seek to make room – the breeding of beings without irony’s or indeed other redeeming qualities? Perhaps this end-game is what the assassins of grammar envision, behind the duplicitous yet unpersuasive veiling of their aims, proving thus to be the willing servants, the proxies of those to whom they’ve allied themselves.