On Punctuation Marks

Elizabeth Weinstein

In “Punctuation Marks,” Theodor Adorno calls punctuation marks the “traffic signals” of language; they are images whose inseparable form and function are indispensable to the successful movement or flow of thoughts, as words, on a page, guiding not only the reader’s experience and understanding of a text but the writer’s formation of the original content as well.  An essay or a book without punctuation marks, like an industrial city without traffic lights, would be in a state of anarchy.  Punctuation marks provide, in theory, the infrastructure necessary to harness the written word and avoid that anarchy.  Man created punctuation marks and in a sense, they have come to resemble him.  Put another way, Adorno draws connections between punctuation marks and people, framing several universal human struggles within the context of the punctuation marks that have taken on those burdens.  Man is not free from politics or his own historicity, so why would punctuation?  “Like a drooping moustache,” the semi-colon stops to think at the end of a clause, then perks up and says: ‘wait.  I have more to say.’  Adorno likens the exclamation point to “an index finger raised in warning,” a tribute to the fallen German Expressionist movement that adopted the graphic for effect. At this point in its history, the domineering exclamation “tries to impose an emphasis external to the matter itself.”  In doing so, it reminds us that it and its kin “have degenerated into usurpers of authority,” blowers of hot air.  “In the dash” – scarce in “Punctuation Marks” – “thought becomes aware of its fragmentary character” and rarely makes its way into contemporary writing.  “All it claims to do now is to prepare us in a foolish way for surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising.”

 

The misused dash and the exclamation point warn the reader that they will be of little use: they are conspicuous indicators of forced content, but because of this, they are potentially less threatening that the seemingly docile ellipsis or quotation marks.  When distorted, these characters take on the potentiality for totalitarianism by halting discourse.  Adorno blames the George Circle, which revolved around Impressionist-inspired and Nazi-darling Stefan George and his notion of “pure poetry,” for stealing one of the ellipsis’ three dots.  This cutback was “costuming as exact something whose inherent intention is to be inexact,” thereby nullifying the need for the mark and laying claim to false truths.  Marx and Engels receive Adorno’s next blow for having delegated to quotation marks the task of highlighting ironies.  Doing so is to “violate the very concept of irony by separating it from the matter at hand and presenting a predetermined judgment on the subject,” sowing the seeds of totalitarianism by halting the dialectic.  The near disappearance of the semicolon in modern writing presents the same risks.  Without it, language becomes reduced further and further until in its simplified form it A), suits the needs of the culture industry and simplistic consumer and B), becomes a positivistic “recording of pure facts,” denying syntax and punctuation “the right to articulate and shape the facts.”

 

Adorno asserts that punctuation marks may often bring us one step closer to reconciling the insurmountable gap between word and thought – one reader’s interpretation of a writer’s use of punctuation can tell the reader lots about the author’s intentions and illuminate textual nuances.  Ever the critical theorist, Adorno alerts his readers to the deterioration of language and its consequences for modern man.

 

 

·        Does “Punctuation Marks” fit into the category of essay as described by Adorno in “The Essay As Form?”  Does this essay provide closure?

·        Do you think that marks of punctuation can have a character all their own, or are these hieroglyphs relevant only in the context of the written word?  Does changing use over time do violence to the identity of the punctuation mark by using its supposed universality to frame a specific thought?

·        On p. Adorno writes that the loss of the semicolon leads eventually to writing only for the culture industry, and that “language and subject matter cannot be kept separate in this process.”  How does punctuation prevent positivistic and over-simplified content?

·        Discussing brackets and dashes, Adorno asserts the inadequacy of punctuation.  How is punctuation best used?  What is its highest purpose?