‘What’, Clare Connors asks us, ‘is the grammar of our criticism?’.[1]

From this question, several further emerge: who is the presumed ‘our’? What kind of criticism does that presumed collective do—read—write? And what is meant by grammar?

Grammar, qua Ben Jonson, is ‘the art of true and well-speaking a language’. For Jonson, it is both etymology (words, syllables, letters) and syntax (their ordering). But it is also, he suggests, a vector between an our and an Other: ‘The profit of Grammar is great to strangers, who are to live in communion and commerce with us’. Grammar is that which renders oneself legible, ‘for by it we communicate all our labours, studies, profits, without an interpreter’. Here, on the first page of Jonson’s The English Grammar (1640), Grammar is both a linguistic and mercenary tool, socially profitable as well as fiscally advantageous.

Who polices questions of grammar, parts of speech, connection, and connotation? (Susan Howe)

A legible Grammar in commerce may be a profitable one, but it is also by that nature a shared one: ‘we shew the copy of it, and matchableness with other tongues’ (Jonson). For we turn to Grammar as a well-worn groove, a path established by tongues not our own long ago. The strongest compulsions we feel throughout life are no more than compulsions to repeat a pattern: the pattern is not of our own device (Elizabeth Bowen).[2] Our Grammar is not our own and yet—sometimes, like profit—we think it is.

‘Invention begins by being susceptible to repetition, exploitation, reinscription’, Clare Connors also tells us. Repetition is one kind of compulsion—forming, like Grammar, patterns. Patterns, too, Connors suggests, can be disrupted. Sometimes this is by imagination, othertimes by experiment. Mary Cappello imagines ‘a genre of the yet to be’; Jack Parlett experiments with a building that is not a building at all.[3] What, then, might be the grammar of the yet to be? What is a grammar of criticism that is not a Grammar at all?

At its most alluring, this category is determined by something it is not (Jack Parlett)

Removed from the hold of Jonson’s etymology and syntax, grammar might offer a sideways glance through time, a mode of ‘the yet to be’. This grammar ‘yet to be’ may not always sustain itself in the ‘matchableness with other tongues’, nor may it be entirely dislocated from all other patterns. In Listening to Images (2017), for instance, Tina Campt turns to one futural grammar, asking ‘What does it mean for a black feminist to think in the grammar of futurity?’ It is, she suggests, to both think with and exist beyond a system of temporal rules; ‘It strives for the tense of possibility that grammarians refer to as the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen’. The grammar of black feminist futurity, she writes, is a ‘performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must’, ‘a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now—as imperative rather than subjunctive—as a striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present’.

In 1987, the black feminist and literary critic Hortense Spillers published her own ‘genre of the yet to be’: ‘MAMA’S BABY, PAPA’S MAYBE: AN AMERICAN GRAMMAR BOOK’. At the beginning of this ‘Grammar Book’, Spillers lists several names by which she has come to be known, without those knowing her knowing her name: ‘“Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother”’. ‘Let’s face it. I am a marked woman’, she implores her reader. The racialised system of American Grammar does not render Spillers legible; ‘the profit of Grammar is great to strangers’, perhaps, but not to her. This category—her subjecthood—is determined by something (everything) it is not. Spillers must invent a new Grammar: ‘In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness’.

Spillers undoes historical order, the patterns and compulsions and ‘layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time’. She moves through time, beyond time. For Grammar, qua Jonson, is historical order: if Grammar is something both ‘policed’ and ‘profitable’, then we must remind ourselves of the year Jonson was writing. 1640: the year that the British empire established sugarcane plantations in Barbados, one of the most lucrative industries of the economy of the enslaved. ‘The profit of Grammar is great to strangers, who are to live in communion and commerce with us’ (Jonson).

Amongst ‘marvels of her own inventiveness’, Spiller invents a grammar without Grammar: that which both undoes and prefigures. This is her, in 1987, ‘striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present’. ‘Present’ as one kind of grammar, but not exclusively: a happening right now, a compulsion always already overcome, a pattern of the yet to be and must be.