eJournals Colloquia Germanica 56/2-3

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
111
2023
562-3

Dashing Expectations

111
2023
Jan Mieszkowski
This essay considers whether sentences are distinguished by how they meet expectations or by how they disappoint them. The initial focus is on an aphorism of Friedrich Nietzsche in which he describes his ambition to say in ten sentences what others need a book or more to express. The force of this boast is compromised by a suggestive ellipsis and an ambiguous Gedankenstrich, raising the question of whether syntactic and semantic paradigms can account for the vicissitudes of punctuation. It is notoriously difficult to decide whether any given instance of a dash is a stand-in for unarticulated content, a figure of interruption, or a type of grammatical conjunction or logical connector. In an aphoristic review of these problems, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg characterizes language as forever frustrating the expectations of its readers, writers, and speakers. Wishing for a thought often produces only a word; a demand for a word may conjure up a mere Strich. The result, as Martin Heidegger hints in some comments about Nietzsche’s overreliance on Gedankenstriche, is that any linguistic element is perpetually at risk of being exposed as nothing more than a stray mark on the page.
cg562-30223
Dashing Expectations Jan Mieszkowski Reed College Abstract: This essay considers whether sentences are distinguished by how they meet expectations or by how they disappoint them� The initial focus is on an aphorism of Friedrich Nietzsche in which he describes his ambition to say in ten sentences what others need a book or more to express� The force of this boast is compromised by a suggestive ellipsis and an ambiguous Gedankenstrich , raising the question of whether syntactic and semantic paradigms can account for the vicissitudes of punctuation� It is notoriously difficult to decide whether any given instance of a dash is a stand-in for unarticulated content, a figure of interruption, or a type of grammatical conjunction or logical connector. In an aphoristic review of these problems, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg characterizes language as forever frustrating the expectations of its readers, writers, and speakers. Wishing for a thought often produces only a word; a demand for a word may conjure up a mere Strich . The result, as Martin Heidegger hints in some comments about Nietzsche’s overreliance on Gedankenstriche , is that any linguistic element is perpetually at risk of being exposed as nothing more than a stray mark on the page� Keywords: aphorisms, Gedankenstrich, Lichtenberg, Nietzsche, punctuation In der Sprache berühren sich Erwartung und Erfüllung� Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, §445 Even the most modest of sentences raises a host of expectations� We anticipate that its phrases and clauses will be organized in clearly defined hierarchies, working in tandem to impart content or effect a performance. Respecting the rules of grammar, modifiers will be correctly placed, nouns and verbs will ex- 224 Jan Mieszkowski hibit the proverbial “agreement,” and pronouns will refer to their antecedents. In speech, a sentence’s borders will be delineated by familiar rhythms and pauses, in writing by capitalization and terminal punctuation� As long as it is not an aphorism or similarly pithy statement with pretensions to discursive autonomy, a sentence will also have some discernible connection with the language that immediately precedes or follows it� Does this wealth of expectations preclude the possibility of surprise? As we reflect on the considerable conditioning power of formal and pragmatic conventions, we may have to remind ourselves of what might otherwise seem obvious, namely that our engagement with a sentence is frequently distinguished by what we do not or cannot anticipate� In imposing syntactic and semantic constraints on what can follow, the appearance of each new word, phrase, or clause necessarily forecloses on an immeasurably large number of alternative possibilities, but these eminently concrete hints about what is coming next are often incomplete and sometimes downright misleading. In fact, if we start processing a verbal formation and realize that we do know exactly where it is going, this can only mean that we have read or heard it before, that it is part of an overtly repetitive pattern, or that it is the inexorable conclusion to a proper syllogism, the dictates of logic having taken precedence over the whims of compositional freedom: “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates . . .” The tension between the predictable and the unpredictable that informs any sentence may be subtle or acute. Correspondingly, there is considerable rhetorical advantage to be won by stabilizing or upsetting the tenuous balance between the foreseen and the unforeseen. A writer or orator can, for example, choose to deliberately create expectations that are fulfilled or thwarted only a couple of phrases later, although to go too far in either direction is to risk being dismissed as “predictable” or “gimmicky�” The stakes of such negotiations are particularly high for aphorisms, riddles, and other texts that trade on their promise to provide something out of the ordinary in very short order, distilling form and content to such a degree that length and significance become inversely related. When it comes to playing on the relationship between anticipation and disappointment at the level of the sentence, Friedrich Nietzsche is notorious for leaving his readers perplexed about whether their expectations for and subsequent reactions to any given claim are well-founded or overblown. The excitement with which we approach his audaciously dynamic prose is tinged with an uneasy feeling that nothing we have been taught about acclimating ourselves to the patterns of an author’s style is going to prove helpful� Late in Götzen-Dämmerung, Nietzsche offers one of his boldest comments about his ambitions for his work: “Der Aphorismus, die Sentenz, in denen ich als der Erste unter Deutschen Meister bin, sind die Formen ‘der Ewigkeit’; mein Ehrgeiz Dashing Expectations 225 ist, in zehn Sätzen zu sagen, was jeder Andre in einem Buche sagt, - was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt . . .” (153). If Nietzsche’s writing is to win the immortality he envisions for it, he maintains that it will be in virtue of both its form and its content - in fact, especially its content (“der Form nach, der Substanz nach”), albeit a content whose superiority is inextricably bound up with its status as tersely striking and strikingly terse (153; emphasis in original)� It is hard not to read Nietzsche’s boast as a slight on our own compositional powers. If ten of his sentences are worth five thousand of our own, we at the very least have to be concerned about our efficiency. Seeking reassurance on this point, we should remember that brevity is hardly the only stylistic modality worthy of praise� As much as we may laud - or envy - the incisiveness of witty one-liners, superior analyses are just as likely to be distinguished by the systematic scrutiny of detail and the sustained elaboration of a demonstration over paragraphs or pages. It is not for nothing that short forms frequently find themselves under suspicion of being short cuts, more intellectual sleights of hand than substantive interventions, aesthetic novelties rather than reliable sources of insight� In this regard, Nietzsche’s recourse to an ellipsis at the end of his sentence about doing more with less may seem like a cheap trick� A string of three dots can be suggestive, in some contexts provocative, but surely using this trio of marks should not get one credit for condensing more content into fewer words� If it were this easy, we could simply write “. . .” and declare ourselves the masters of pithiness, our preeminence open to challenge only by a writer daring enough to begin and end a text with a single period� In a sentence about saying everything in ten sentences, Nietzsche’s decision to close with a string of dots could even be read as an admission of failure, unless the ellipsis expresses what everyone else does not say, or rather, expresses what everyone else does not say by eliding it� As Wittgenstein might have said in a book - or ten sentences - but did not, “That which is not said must be ellipsed.” “Der Aphorismus, die Sentenz, in denen ich als der Erste unter Deutschen Meister bin, sind die Formen ‘der Ewigkeit’; mein Ehrgeiz ist, in zehn Sätzen zu sagen, was jeder Andre in einem Buche sagt, - was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt . . .” If the overriding claim is that less is more, it is puzzling that Nietzsche provides not one but two labels for the texts he is producing: “der Aphorismus, die Sentenz.” The simplest explanation is that “die Sentenz” is not an appositive for “der Aphorismus.” In this vein, the beginning of the sentence can be scanned “der Aphorismus [und] die Sentenz,” because the two nouns are the subject of the plural form of sein (“der Aphorismus, die Sentenz […] sind […]”) and are referred to with the plural relative pronoun “denen.” 1 The problem is that for every scholar who is adamant that Nietzsche systematically distin- 226 Jan Mieszkowski guishes between these two terms, there is another eager to identify passages in which he appears to use them interchangeably� 2 There is also evidence that when Nietzsche refers to Sentenzen he has in mind the maxims of the French moralists, which he regards as a kind of aphorism, further contributing to the sense that in this particular case he could have just written “der Aphorismus” and been done with it� With this mildly verbose opening to his claim to have mastered brevity, Nietzsche has found an eminently succinct way of acknowledging the myriad problems that arise when we consider whether short forms can or should be exactingly classified and subclassified. In his book-length study of “the shortest literary genres,” Gary Saul Morson illustrates the difficulties involved in yielding to the taxonomic impulse (1). At the outset of his study, he stresses that “there is no agreed-upon definition of terms such as ‘aphorism,’ ‘saying,’ ‘apothegm,’ or ‘maxim,’” adding that “etymology rarely helps, since the meanings of terms shift radically over ages and cultures” (4)� His conclusion is not that one should refrain from developing a classificatory scheme, but that one should do so in full awareness that the decisions one makes on this front will be determined by the aims and parameters of one’s investigation. “Choose a different set of questions,” Morson writes, “and you will arrive at a different classification” (5). Quick to practice what he preaches, he goes on to present a catalogue of short forms grouped “according to their worldviews, the distinct sense of human experience that each conveys” (5)� The result is a curious taxonomy that makes no claims for the generalizability of its own genericism, as if its categories had no currency beyond the argumentative context in which they emerge and hence were not truly categories at all� Etymologically derived from the Greek aphorizein , “to mark off or divide,” the word “aphorism” designates a unit of language that somehow stands apart from the verbal constructions surrounding it, but if neither the aphorism nor its short form brethren can be regarded as well-defined genres, it is hard not to conclude that the borders separating them from “normal” formulations are anything but stable� 3 Indeed, the fact that scholars such as Morson are willing to tolerate nomenclatural compromises that undermine the very integrity of classification itself suggests that singling out pithy utterances in a crowd is no simple matter. The consequences of this conclusion may be far-reaching. If the aphoristic, the epigrammatic, or the proverbial is not a feature of a particular sub-subset of utterances but a potential inherent in any remark, then even the most seemingly mundane or innocuous statement can defy expectations by unexpectedly offering a profundity that disrupts the logical or rhetorical patterns to which it is ostensibly subordinate� Far from functioning as a dutiful cog in a larger machine, each clause of an essay or novel has the capacity to go rogue, Dashing Expectations 227 undermining the text’s organizational parameters as it threatens to eclipse the surrounding material by saying more in one or two lines than will be imparted by the rest of the work� No less troubling is the possibility that the desire to classify short forms stems from a recognition that these miniature texts never fully respect their own atomistic character� Few readers of Pascal’s Pensées or Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragmente have been able to completely resist the temptation to draw connections between the individual pieces, which often seem to comment on one another in complex ways. In one of his notebooks, Nietzsche himself allows that elaborate conceptual networks pervade his collections of aphorisms, which in this respect are not just strings of isolated statements: “In Aphorismenbüchern gleich den meinigen stehen zwischen und hinter kurzen Aphorismen lauter verbotene lange Dinge und Gedanken-Ketten; und Manches darunter, das für Oedipus und seine Sphinx fragwürdig genug sein mag” ( Fragmente 11: 579)� Is the text in which Nietzsche boasts about doing a book’s worth of work in ten sentences, itself some six sentences in length, an aphorism? In the Preface to the Genealogie , Nietzsche refers to the numbered sections of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches as a collection of aphorisms, and commentators tend to follow his lead in using the term for his short pieces� In Minima Moralia , Theodor W. Adorno pays tribute to Nietzsche’s reworking of the traditional aphoristic form, classically a sentence or two, by explicitly referring to the numbered sections of his own book, most of which range in length from half a page to several pages, as aphorisms. Ironically, the author who claims to do the most with the least is thereby credited with having altered the concept of an aphorism to include substantially longer texts. If Nietzsche boasts of being able to accomplish a book’s worth of work in remarkably few words, he not infrequently seems to need a series of sentences to do what Pascal or La Rochefoucauld managed to achieve with one� “Der Aphorismus, die Sentenz, in denen ich als der Erste unter Deutschen Meister bin, sind die Formen ‘der Ewigkeit’; mein Ehrgeiz ist, in zehn Sätzen zu sagen, was jeder Andre in einem Buche sagt, - was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt . . .” Extracted from the half-page aphorism in which it appears, Nietzsche’s bold declaration has become ubiquitous on the internet, where it serves as an inspirational slogan for tweets and other pithy quips, but even this succinct boast of laconic prowess is apparently not succinct enough� In German, Nietzsche’s claim is twenty-three words long, but the English version in which the formulation is widely disseminated is pared down to an even briefer announcement: “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book�” 4 The decision to shorten the sentence in this way is hardly inconsequential, for it is far from self-evident that “what everyone else does not say 228 Jan Mieszkowski in a book” is a restatement of “what everyone else says in a book�” Semantic integrity is clearly not the overriding concern when it comes to paying tribute to the self-proclaimed master of brevity� In the search for a catchy pronouncement about catchiness, the drive to concision takes precedence over considerations of content to the point that anything and everything becomes expendable� In the end, one may well cut just for the sake of cutting. “ - was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt � � �” If we pause before jettisoning this final clause of Nietzsche’s formulation and try to assess its status as essential or inessential, it quickly reveals itself to be a crucial part of what may be an even more ambitious claim than we at first realized. Having bragged that he will need a mere ten sentences where others need thousands, Nietzsche adds that he is not going to say the same thing as everyone else� The suggestive ellipsis at the end of the line underscores the indeterminate scope of this negation, whose reach may be almost boundless. Remaining within the realm of what can be said, what everyone else does not say is everything else - in the wake of Nietzsche’s ten sentences, there should be nothing not-said left to say. Even more curious is that this drive to say everything, or at least everything else, may be indistinguishable from an attempt to say nothing. Far from limiting himself to reflections on the possible and the actual, Nietzsche - always the inveterate thinker of modality - may be bragging that in these ten sentences he is also going to say what was impossible for everyone else to say, whether because they dared not say it, because they did not know it was there to be said, or simply because it cannot be said. Nietzsche will say everything unsayable. In ten sentences� To this point, we have not commented on the dash that helps coordinate Nietzsche’s penultimate and final clauses: “was jeder Andre in einem Buche sagt, - was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt . . .” If the mark is easy to overlook, it is because it appears to be superfluous, doing nothing that is not already achieved by the comma, and this sense that it may be redundant introduces uncertainty about precisely how the two clauses relate� Is the dash a synonym for “and” (“what everyone else says in a book and what they do not say”), or does it signal a hesitation or qualification (“or rather”), in which case the clause that follows would specify exactly what Nietzsche’s enormous ambitions really are in a way that the prior clause did not? Insofar as it is neither part of what is said nor part of what is not said, the dash does not articulate a clear relationship between the sentential elements it ostensibly links, at best pointing to the need for yet another clause in which its ambiguous role would be elucidated� Like an offhand comment in a novel that suddenly shines forth in aphoristic profundity and obscures the surrounding passages, this dash threatens to invert the hierarchy between words and punctuation marks such that the former now exist to Dashing Expectations 229 clarify the latter rather than the other way around. “My ambition,” Nietzsche appears to be explaining, “is to say in a dash what everyone else says in a book, - whatever everyone else does not say in a book�” Nietzsche’s comma and dash are difficult to evaluate, because while the rules of grammar officially reign sovereign over sentences, punctuation is not part of this system in the same way that syntax and morphology are� 5 Organized by formal and informal dicta - largely of indeterminate origin and authority - punctuation practices vary according to the styles and conventions peculiar to specific time periods, regions, and institutions, not to mention the personal preferences of authors or their tyrannical copy editors� 6 In this changeable field, dashes are uniquely challenging, since in contradistinction to a comma or period, a dash is never mandatory, and insofar as there is always an alternative to its deployment - in this case, simply omitting it -each of its manifestations cries out to be interpreted� 7 Until the second half of the eighteenth century, dashes in Englishand German-language texts largely served as substitutes for ellipses, although they were gradually acquiring the role frequently assigned to them today of marking hesitation, a slight change in the direction of a sentence, or a shift in topic or speaker� 8 Around the time the punctuation mark was assuming these new functions, the modern German word for the symbol, Gedankenstrich , was making its first appearances� 9 Das Deutsche Wörterbuch begun by the Grimm brothers (hereafter DWB) offers the following definition of the term: “Strich in der Schrift, um dem Leser einen ausgelassenen oder unausgeführten Gedanken anzuzeigen, auch um ihn auf etwas wichtiges kommendes aufmerksam zu machen, also um ihn zum eigenen Denken anzuregen�” 10 A Gedankenstrich may let a reader know that a thought is being omitted or at least not pursued; alternatively, it may alert the reader to something important yet to come in order to prompt thoughts about it in advance of its arrival. In the first case, the punctuation mark shows what is not happening in the language at hand. In the second, it notifies the reader what is on the horizon precisely so that she can get a head start and begin thinking for herself, which is why the DWB declares that Gedankenpause is a synonym for Gedankenstrich . A sort of timeout in the discourse, a “thought-dash” interrupts what is taking place in the unfolding of a sentence, opening up a space for reflection. The idea that a Gedankenstrich is a signal that something is about to happen retroactively renders its status as a sign of omission ambiguous� On the one hand, the suggestion may be that in indicating to the reader that something is being left out, a Gedankenstrich prompts him “zum eigenen Denken,” perhaps in order to reflect on what is not there and on why it is missing. On the other hand, the implication may be that the reader accepts the omission marked by 230 Jan Mieszkowski a Gedankenstrich precisely by not ruminating on it. In this respect, the pause for thought facilitated by the mark would also be a pause in thought, a moment when the reader stops engaging with the sentence such that nothing is happening, discursively speaking, either on the reader’s part or the text’s. 11 According to both facets of the definition, a Gedankenstrich heralds a disjunction, a gap between what language could do and what it is going to do, or between what language is going to do in the future and what the reader may do in advance of that work. The simplest conceivable character short of a dot, this brief line segment thus marks both the closest proximity and the greatest distance between a reader’s processing of a text and the text’s elaboration of its own conceptual praxis. While the DWB is rarely accused of being concise, it would not be an exaggeration to say that an entire theory of thought and reading has been packed into this thirty-word definition. The entry might even meet with Nietzsche’s approval, assuming that it is the first step toward saying in ten definitions what everyone else says - or does not say - in an entire book of definitions. Turning to a contemporary dictionary, we find that the Duden agrees that a Gedankenstrich heralds a kind of interruption, terming it “eine Pause,” although the lexicographers characterize this as the simulation of a temporal break in speech, thereby sidestepping the potentially paradoxical notion of thinking about a pause in thinking: “Der Gedankenstrich wird häufig dort verwendet, wo man in der gesprochenen Sprache eine deutliche Pause macht” (“Gedankenstrich,” Duden 46). This parallel between writing and speech, however, is unconvincing� A dash is unusual because it can do the work of other punctuation marks (commas, semicolons, ellipses), but it may also do something quite different, or nothing much to speak of, and this protean quality is clearly a product of its status as an essentially written rather than oral phenomenon� After all, one cannot hear the difference between a comma, a semicolon, and a dash. 12 Possibly cognizant of the shortcomings of their definition, the Duden lexicographers add: “Ein Gedankenstrich kündigt etwas Folgendes, oft etwas Unerwartetes an” (46). This may be an instance of being too succinct for one’s own good, or it may simply be that any characterization of a punctuation mark’s duties is bound to be awkward, but the dictionary’s second account of the dash is odd. To announce the arrival of something unexpected is one thing, but to announce that something more will follow is to do no more or less than what any space between words on the page does. By this logic, there could be a dash after any and every word, in which case the punctuation mark would not merely be a thought-pause or a pause-in-thought, but a pause in or substitute for spacing itself ( eine Leerzeichenpause or ein Leerzeichenersatz ). Viewed in this light, the dash becomes a figure for the differential forces in virtue of which phonemes Dashing Expectations 231 and graphemes manifest as distinct elements of signification, dynamics of articulation that can never have a positive presence in writing or speech even as they condition every written or oral sequence. 13 Highlighting the degree to which any mark is significant only insofar as it bears the traces of all the other elements in the signifying system, the dash would be a sort of meta-mark, the mark of the fact that to be a meaningful mark is first and foremost to be marked as not-all-other-marks� 14 In bringing to the fore the play of identity and difference that makes signification possible, a dash risks interrupting the normal work of semiosis, leaving the discourse hanging by a thread, or a line, suspended on a foreign element that it cannot disavow and yet can never claim as its own, as if the Gedankenstrich heralded a permanent Gedankenpause or Gedankenstreik � Rather than clarifying the relationships between the parts of a sentence, the dash would threaten to subordinate them to a more fundamental economy of differentiation and determination. From this perspective, Nietzsche’s “ - was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt . . .” would be redundant, because the dash is already a confirmation of the systemic dominance of the not-said, which conditions what is said to such a degree that all that can ever be said is that the not-said is not being said� Or to put this more succinctly: - At one moment, a dash is a benign echo of the comma that preceded it - the next, it has become a figure for the differential logics that inform all linguistic systems but can never become an object of representation in their own right� What does it mean to elaborate a discourse about a punctuation mark that lurches so precipitously between the mundane and the momentous? Should we follow Nietzsche’s lead and let what is not said about the dash predominate, thereby turning it into the ultimate short form, a verbal element so laconic that it proleptically elides any reference to itself ? In this regard, it is important to note that in their explanations of the Gedankenstrich , both the DWB and the Duden scrupulously avoid using dashes. To understand why, we need only look to Edgar Allan Poe, a champion of this particular punctuation mark who had no compunctions about indulging in its signifying vagaries� In one succinct but by no means simple formulation, Poe writes that a dash “represents a second thought - an emendation ” (cited in Crystal 152; emphasis in original)� Far from specifying what a dash does, this explanation pushes the mark’s determination a dash-length away. Is what follows the dash (“an emendation”) an emendation of the noun phrase that precedes it (“a second thought”), or is “an emendation” itself a second thought, a second thought about second thoughts, which would suggest that “a second thought” is anything but equivalent to “an emendation”? In another attempt to clarify what a dashing clarification looks like, Poe writes that a dash “stands, in general, for these words - ‘or, to make my meaning more distinct ’” (cited in Crys- 232 Jan Mieszkowski tal 153). Ironically, the dash in this sentence is doing something very different from what the sentence says it should be doing, because it introduces or frames the main idea rather than clarifying some prior version of it� In both of his explanations of the mark, Poe uses dashes that end up complicating, rendering ambiguous, or outright contradicting the claims being made about them� The problem is less his excessive reliance on this particular form of punctuation than the fact that the dash appears to be able to play almost any role one cares to ascribe to it, including that of a purely superfluous element that could just as well have been omitted. Historically, this chameleon-like power has been a source of considerable concern, because the dash’s versatility seems to put it in a position to supplant the other elements of a text with no guarantee that their meaning will be preserved in the process. Nineteenth-century grammarians feared that the dash would gradually replace all other punctuation marks, and even parts of words may not be safe from its reach, as we see in the convention dating from the eighteenth century of using dashes to abbreviate or anonymize proper nouns (Mr. W-, Lady K-). 15 The fact that no rule ever mandates the insertion of a dash does not prevent it from popping up anywhere and everywhere. In theory, one cannot reasonably expect it to be the next element in a sentence, but in practice, one may find oneself anticipating that it is never more than a character or two away. At the same time, the fact that the next dash may always be just around the corner is no guarantee that its appearance will constitute a substantive semantic event� Precisely because a dash can be a sort of meta-mark, an emblem of the differential dynamics that allow language to signify, it can also be an admirably efficient tool for pushing signification away. Potentially standing in for anything and everything, the dash may equally well stand for nothing� Perhaps the most vexing thing about this punctuation mark is that no specific instance of it is necessarily implicated in these all-or-nothing logics, which is to say that any given dash may do something entirely ordinary, e.g., indicate a pause. Small wonder that some have called the dash “an invention of the devil” (Crystal 144)� The question of whether a dash can ever meet our expectations for it, high or low as they may be, was a particular concern of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, one of the authors from whom Nietzsche learned much about short forms, as did J. W. von Goethe, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Karl Kraus, among others. In one of his stand-alone remarks, Lichtenberg writes: “Es ist als wenn unsere Sprachen verwirrt wären; wenn wir einen Gedanken haben wollen, so bringen sie uns ein Wort, wenn wir ein Wort fordern, einen Strich, und wo wir einen Strich erwarteten, steht eine Zote” (529). 16 This petite text makes some very large claims, opening with a gesture toward the story of the Tower of Babel, in which, at least in Martin Luther’s translation, the Lord “verwirrt” the language Dashing Expectations 233 of all the lands (Genesis 11: 9)� As is often the case with language about confused language, Lichtenberg’s sentence is anything but confused, unfolding as a series of tidy substitutions of nouns and verbs: we want a thought , we are brought a word ; we demand a word , we get a line or dash ; we expected a dash , and there stands an off-color joke instead. Initially, the verbs seem to intensify in the step from want to demand , but this trajectory is muddled with the advent of expect , which arguably could be either stronger or weaker than the first two impulses. Where the nouns are concerned, the sentence appears to be engaged in a sort of reduction, as a thought devolves into a word that then becomes a punctuation mark, although this trajectory is quickly compromised by the manifestation of bawdy humor, or rather, with a reference to an obscene joke whose humor value we cannot judge since we have not heard it� That we may be the butt of the joke is hardly out of the question. We were definitely not expecting the last word of Lichtenberg’s pronouncement, and when it arrives, we may suspect that we are being teased about our wants, demands, and expectations for this sentence in particular, if not for sentences in general. Goethe famously said of Lichtenberg that where he makes a joke, a problem lies hidden, but here the problem seems to be that the joke is hiding in plain sight, or in plain language. 17 In the eighteenth century, “auf den Strich gehen” and “auf dem Strich sein” were well established idiomatic references to prostitutes working the street (“Strich,” Herkunftswörterbuch 721)� 18 Lichtenberg’s sentence says that we expect a Strich but instead get a joke. In fact, we get a play on words in which the word Strich is the joke� 19 In this short text about thoughts, lines that may be punctuation marks, and risqué jokes, the real joke may be that it is words rather than marks such as dashes that have the upper hand� If it is debatable whether Lichtenberg’s sentence brings us any conceptual or humorous content, it unquestionably brings us the words Gedanken , Wort , and Zote � While there are no perfect substitutes for these terms, the same cannot be said for the other word the sentence has on offer, Strich , in lieu of which Lichtenberg could well have inserted a horizontal line segment, whether a typographically formalized Gedankenstrich or a casual stroke of the pen� 20 One cannot grow grapes by the light of the word day , but can one use the word Strich to alert the reader to what has been omitted, to what is not being thought out, or simply to what is coming next, that is, can the word dash function as a - ? Recalling the long history of anxieties about the dash’s propensity to hijack the roles of other linguistic elements, it may be instructive to think about Lichtenberg’s Strich less as a horizontal line between words and more as something with which to strike out ( ausstreichen ) portions of a text� Lichtenberg’s sentence about confusion takes us from wanting a thought to expecting a dash , so if we employ a rather long Strich to scratch out everything between the two words, 234 Jan Mieszkowski we are left with Gedanken-Strich � Whereas earlier we considered the dash as a figure for the differential dynamics that make signification possible, this editorial exercise would see it become an avatar of designification. The problem with this Strich -trick is that in contradistinction to a line used to cross out words, a Gedankenstrich does not necessarily render absent something that was formerly present. In fact, the goal of Lichtenberg’s sentence may be precisely to challenge our ability to distinguish between Striche and Gedankenstriche , especially if this means simply changing our terms� By writing the word Strich rather than the word Gedankenstrich , Lichtenberg articulates a difference that would otherwise be very hard to make manifest on the page. As any archivist knows all too well, there are many manuscripts in which it is no small matter to discriminate between a horizontal line that constitutes a codified mark and a stray stroke of the pen� Lichtenberg’s short form about a Gedanken and a Strich certainly makes us think about Striche - it puts Strich-Gedanken in our heads - but it also hints that it may be difficult for these thoughts to demonstrate that they are more than musings on idle scratches and scribbles� A Gedankenstrich is an identifiable, iterable character� A Strich may be a Gedankenstrich , or it may be an indication that someone’s pen slipped. In this sense, the dash, the shortest of short forms, is virtually indistinguishable from something equally short but with scarcely any claim to form at all� 21 “Es ist als wenn unsere Sprachen verwirrt wären; wenn wir einen Gedanken haben wollen, so bringen sie uns ein Wort, wenn wir ein Wort fordern, einen Strich, und wo wir einen Strich erwarteten, steht eine Zote.” Does this one sentence say what it might have taken someone else ten sentences to say? Or could a different author - for instance, Nietzsche - have said the same, or more, in fewer words, perhaps even with a single mark? In a list of words and phrases in one of Nietzsche’s late notebooks, we encounter a line that consists of two nouns and an abbreviation: “Interpungiren, Gedankenstriche usw.” ( Fragmente 7: 829). This text about punctuation does not have much punctuation, but it appears that its first word can be read as a general heading - “Punctuating” - and what follows as the beginning of a list of punctuation marks. Importantly, the philologist Nietzsche took some care with his spelling, or misspelling, of the opening word in order to ensure that his gerund would be suspended between the German interpunktieren and the Latin interpungere � The Latin verb originally referred to the practice of putting points or dots between words to separate them on the page, so we find ourselves back at the idea of the dash as a stand-in for the spacing that allows words to manifest as distinct signifying units. The only problem, or Zote , is that in classical Latin scriptio continua was the norm, that is, dashes were not needed because spaces between words were not needed, either. Dashing Expectations 235 Etymologies on our mind, we can rewrite “Interpungiren, Gedankenstriche” as “Punkte und Striche,” “points and lines” or even “dots and dashes.” Like the short and long signals of Morse Code or the 0s and 1s of Leibniz’s binary system, this dualistic mode of signification hints at its own expressive comprehensiveness, as if it could be used to say anything and everything. To be sure, Nietzsche immediately compromises any pretension to completeness with the addition of “usw.”, which indicates that we are dealing with an open-ended or unfinished list, no less than when he followed “was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt” with an ellipsis� That our would-be code of dots and dashes should be complemented by a three-letter abbreviation also underscores the fact that in this case Nietzsche did not put a series of points and lines down on the page any more than Lichtenberg wrote “-” instead of “Strich�” What would it mean to begin a philosophy of language with a dash or a - ? Is Nietzsche suggesting that it is impossible to pen such a mark without betraying an ambition to say in one stroke what others have said - or not said - with an entire alphabet? Or is the danger that with this ultimate short form, to say “-” is already to say all that you have to say and thus to say nothing at all? In a late letter to his sister Elisabeth, Nietzsche declares: “Alles, was ich bisher geschrieben habe, ist Vordergrund; für mich selber geht es erst immer mit den Gedankenstrichen los” ( Briefwechsel 53). For Nietzsche, things only get started once we realize that each time we pen a dash, we are potentially giving up on our old language, as if we were putting a Strich through all the marks with which we have to this point been endeavoring to write. In this capacity, the dash, the ultimate short form, is also the ultimate long form, so extensive that it literally overwrites all other characters. Like a single clause of a novel that upends the entire narrative, this one tiny line segment can spell the demise of a whole graphematic regime, not least because it may be no more than an errant pen stroke� One of the few readers of Nietzsche to have identified his vision of doing philosophy unter dem Strich is Martin Heidegger. Unlike most commentators, Heidegger largely bases his interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy on fragments from the Nachlaß . It is perhaps not surprising, then, that he appears to quote from the aforementioned letter to Elisabeth at the outset of his two-volume book on Nietzsche, albeit in a rather elliptical, not to mention incomplete, fashion: “Was Nietzsche zeit seines Schaffens selbst veröffentlicht hat, ist immer Vordergrund” ( Nietzsche 17)� The relationships between the Vordergrund , Hintergrund , and various other grounds are never a simple matter in post-Hegelian philosophy, a fact that makes Heidegger’s decision to omit the second half of the sentence he is referencing seem all the more cavalier - no less cavalier than the tendency of Nietzsche fanboys to quote their hero’s ambition “to say in 236 Jan Mieszkowski ten sentences what others say in a whole book” without acknowledging the clause that follows in the original� 22 If Heidegger is determined to eliminate the most intriguing part of Nietzsche’s statement, one wishes that he had done so by putting a Strich through the words so that they would still be legible underneath� Recalling his famous decision to write Sein under erasure, such a gesture would have been the ultimate tribute to the uncertain relationship between the word Gedankenstrich and the mark it names, for it would have allowed both to coexist uneasily on the page, each simultaneously overwriting and underwriting the other� That Heidegger did not do this may be an indication that all linguistic elements are already under suspicion of being indistinguishable from stray marks, slapdash scatterings of Striche that are the briefest and most formless short forms of all� What can we expect from a dash? Everything and nothing� With its opening words - “Es ist als wenn unsere Sprachen verwirrt wären” - Lichtenberg’s sentence reminds us that where language is concerned, we are always grappling with the appearance of a confusion whose status as real or merely apparent remains undecidable� Implicit in this observation is the suggestion that one should be able to imagine a different state of affairs in which our expectations for thoughts, words, and punctuation marks would not routinely be confounded. From this perspective, we could read everything Heidegger will go on to say about Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power as a commentary on the will to Strich , which may in due course reveal itself to be a will to Zote � The only catch - and perhaps this is finally Lichtenberg’s obscene joke - is that in scratching out Nietzsche’s account of what is involved in getting going, Heidegger pays obeisance to the authority of one discourse of Gedanken und Striche without confirming that there is a new one to take its place. We thus end right where we began, suspended on the dash between what everyone else says in a punctuation mark and what everyone else does not say in a punctuation mark, which may mean that everything that has just been said was mere Vordergrund - although surely this was to be expected� Notes 1 For a version of this argument, see Westerdale 23. 2 On these questions, see Westerdale 22—24. 3 There is a tendency among scholars to treat “aphorism” as a general term for short forms and “adage,” “saying,” “maxim,” and the like as its subcategories. On the challenges of systematically classifying short forms, including the question of exactly why one should aspire to do so, see Gray 24—36 and Grant� Dashing Expectations 237 4 A Google search turns up hundreds of instances of this quotation. 5 Inconsistency is the norm when it comes to specifying the roles that punctuation marks play in texts� Sometimes we gloss them as if they were stable props or framing devices, little tools that dutifully perform the operations assigned to them by convention. At other moments, we treat such marks as if they were words or letters, signifiers in a differential semiosis and hence polyvalent, unpredictable elements, as likely to do their own thing as anything else� 6 Situated ambiguously on the border between form and content, punctuation is not exactly a part of language, but it is not not a part of language, either. Punctuation clearly has utility, but whether it is ultimately governed by grammatical, rhetorical, logical, or semiotic forces remains something of a mystery. While we rely on punctuation to do everything we ask of it, we cannot entirely shake the suspicion that it may have its own agenda� On the curious history of these perplexing marks, see Brody, Parkes, and Watson. 7 One of the most notoriously enigmatic dashes in German letters appears in Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Marquise von O . . .”, where it initially seems to be an innocuous mark of little consequence and only retrospectively acquires significance as the reader realizes that it may signal the moment in the story when the eponymous Marquise is raped. For a recent study of two similarly vexing dashes, one at the beginning of Hegel’s Logic and the other at the end of his Phenomenology , see Comay and Ruda. 8 In “The Dash in German,” Ursula Bredel observes that in the fourteenth century, “the dash was already used as an alternative to suspension points to mark omissions,” while “a differentiation between suspension points and dashes seems to date back [only] to the eighteenth century” (136, 137). Elaborating on the gradual expansion of the dash’s expressive capacities, Bredel writes: “Beginning in the seventeenth and increasing in the eighteenth century, suspension points and repetitive dashes were used in German also in a rhetorical manner. Referring to Quintilian’s rhetoric, the stylistic usage of suspension points and dashes was newly discovered so that it then became possible to mark (and construct) stylistic ruptures. Initially, this usage referred to unfinished syntactic constructions only while it later referred to unfinished episodes as well (136).” In his 1768 Grundsätze der deutschen Sprache , Johann Jakob Bodmer does not differentiate between Gedankenstrich and Auslassungspunkte (Höchli 225)� The Gedankenstrich is discussed independently of the ellipsis in the 1775 edition of Heinrich Braun’s Anleitung zur deutschen Sprachkunst , where it is said to have been borrowed from English (on this point, see also Dalmas). Not- 238 Jan Mieszkowski ing how quickly the punctuation mark has caught on, Braun deplores German-language writers’ excessive reliance on it, which he characterizes as “der allzu häufige Gebrauch aufgrund eigenen Gedankenmangels” (cited in Menke 172)� For more on the popularity of this punctuation mark and the earliest reflections on its significance by German grammarians, see Rinas 173—77. The etymology of the English word dash cannot be reliably traced back further than its thirteenth-century Middle English instantiations ( daschen, dassen : “to beat or strike”)� The OED suggests that it “may be a comparatively recent onomatopoeic word, expressing the action and sound of striking or driving with violence and smashing effect: compare clash , crash , bash , pash , smash , etc.” (“dash, V. and N. 1”). The first use of dash as “a stroke or line (usually short and straight) made with a pen or the like” dates from the sixteenth century. The OED’s first examples of the term as a reference to a formally codified punctuation mark hail from the early eighteenth century, although already in Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) we find dashes used to show interruptions in dialogue� On the history of the ellipsis-dash relationship in English-language texts, see Toner 3—8. 9 According to the Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache , the first instances of the word “Gedankenstrich” (literally a “thought-stroke” or “thought-line”) appear in the late 1730s, some 60 years before the first example of the term listed in the DWB (“Gedankenstrich,” Digitales Wörterbuch )� Google Ngram’s first example of the term is from 1771. 10 This definition dates from the 1869 edition of the DWB (“Gedankenstrich”). Earlier definitions tend to be more laconic, as in W. Hasper’s 1835 Handbuch der Buchdruckerkunst : “Der Gedankenstrich ( - ) bezeichnet eine Unterbrechung” (cited in Bredel 136n18)� 11 In a recent discussion of the dash, Thomas Glaser emphasizes that it marks a genuine break in a discourse more than a pregnant pause: “Gedankenstriche [stehen] gerade nicht für Gedankenfülle, markieren in figuraler Hinsicht nicht die Aposiopese - sondern den Anakoluth” (85)� 12 Beginning with the Hellenic grammarians, if not earlier, scholars have fiercely debated whether written punctuation marks represent distinct auditory phenomena, create patterns of language that auditory phenomena seek to imitate, or reveal the presence of structural rhythms that ground both speech and writing. On this history, see Parkes. 13 In a recent article, Gerhard Poppenberg makes this point, arguing: “Wenn Beziehung und Unterschied die Artikulation des Syntagmas garantieren, wird das Zwischen der Wörter zum Agenten seiner Bildung. Der Gedankenstrich ist die typographische Gestalt dieses Zwischen, die Figur der Relation, die in ihm als solche sichtbar wird” (90). Refining the claim, Poppenberg Dashing Expectations 239 continues: “Der Gedankenstrich ist die typographische Figur der artikulierenden Lücke und zugleich die Brücke, die der Artikulation Gestalt und Halt gibt” (91)� Other critics have also sought to characterize the meta-discursive significance of the dash. Discussing Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy , a text that may have encouraged eighteenth-century German authors in their adoption of the dash, Joseph Vogl writes: “Mit [dem Gedankenstrich] wird die Sprache zur reinen Graphik verwandelt, in ihm, in seiner Unlesbarkeit, wird die Schriftlichkeit der Schrift selbst lesbar, in ihm manifestiert sich das Rauschen des Textes” (277)� For an ambitious attempt to read the Strich of Gedankenstrich against the Gedanken of metaphysics, see Kammasch. 14 As Jacques Derrida writes: “Whether in the order of spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present� This interweaving results in each ‘element’ - phoneme or grapheme - being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system” (26)� Working from this insight, Derrida famously declares that “différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other� This spacing is simultaneously active and passive […]. It is also the becoming-space of the spoken chain - which has been called temporal or linear; a becoming-space which makes possible both writing and every correspondence between speech and writing, every passage from one to the other” (27). 15 As David Crystal explains, the dash is “the easiest of marks to separate units of sense, whether sentences or parts of sentences, and as a result it has had a long history of antipathy from teachers and stylists who have been concerned that, if writers rely on the dash as a mark-of-all-trades, they will never master the more discriminating uses of punctuation” (144)� In his 1839 Die deutsche Sprache und ihre Literatur, Max Wilhelm Götzinger argues that the dash serves “als Stellvertreter aller möglichen Zeichen, also überhaupt, um eine Pause oder Trennung anzuzeigen” (cited in Bredel 136n19). 16 This sentence was first published in a collection of Bemerkungen � Originally an entry in Lichtenberg’s Waste Books or Sudelbücher (Lichtenberg’s own translation for the English term), it certainly could be deemed an “aphorism,” although it is not obvious that Lichtenberg himself would have embraced this label� For insightful discussions of the theories and practices that shape the Waste Books , see Campe and Wilczek. 17 “Wo [Lichtenberg] einen Spaß macht, liegt ein Problem verborgen,” quipped Goethe (cited in Mautner 39)� 18 I am grateful to Elke Siegel for suggesting this line of interpretation� 240 Jan Mieszkowski 19 In another short text in his Sudelbücher , Lichtenberg grounds his condemnation of empty stylistic innovations in a distinction between earnest language and language produced in jest: “Es gibt eine Art von leerem Geschwätz, dem man durch Neuigkeit des Ausdrucks, unerwartete Metaphern das Ansehen von Fülle gibt. Klopstock und Lavater sind Meister darin. Im Scherz geht es an� Im Ernst ist es unverzeihlich” (389)� It should go without saying that the sentence we have been discussing calls into question the very distinction between what is written “im Scherz” and what is written “im Ernst�” 20 One might suppose that this reference to a Strich is “markedly” ambiguous, since it could refer either to a Gedankenstrich (dash) or a Bindestrich (hyphen), but in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the standard German word for hyphen was Divis � Bindestrich did not emerge until the first part of the nineteenth century, with synonyms such as Trennstrich or Viertelgeviertstrich making their appearance only later still. Subsequent generations have seen the gradual development of an elaborate, by and large obscure vocabulary for different kinds of dashes, including terms almost exclusively used by typographers and typesetters: Parenthesestrich , Gegenstrich , Auslassungsstrich , Bis-Strich , Spiegelstrich , Streckenstrich , and Währungsstrich � On the lexicon of Strich -words, see Gallmann. 21 In this context, one could reflect on Jean Paul’s claim that Gedankenstriche are “Linien, für deren Bedeutung der Zufall nicht gesorgt habe” (cited in Menke 175). In another comment on dashes, Jean Paul observes: “Man durchstreicht ietzt nicht mehr Wörter, aber man durchstreicht doch dafür das leere Papier” (cited in Menke 174)� 22 Numerous commentators have followed Heidegger in discussing the first half of Nietzsche’s sentence without acknowledging the existence of the second half� For a review of this odd tendency in the critical literature along with an overview of the scholarly reception of Nietzsche’s dashes, see Hanshe. Works Cited Bredel, Ursula. “The Dash in German.” The Relation of Writing to Spoken Language � Ed� Martin Neef et al. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002. Brody, Jennifer DeVere. Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play . Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Campe, Rüdiger. “Vorgreifen und Zurückgreifen. Zur Emergenz des Sudelbuchs in Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs ‘Heft E’.” Notieren, Skizzieren. Schreiben und Zeichnen als Verfahren des Entwurfs . Ed. Karin Krauthausen and Omar W. Nasim. Zurich/ Berlin: Diaphanes, 2010. 61—88. 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