Digress: to depart from the subject of one's discourse.
In 2017, Michelle Moyd and Yuliya Komska warned that fascism proliferates through “redundant, formulaic, aggressive” expression that gradually becomes ordinary through individual everyday repetition. Attempts to parody it, they explained, only “create a distance, as irony does.” They issued an urgent call for “linguistic disobedience,” and specifically, for “proximity,” which they defined as “full language ownership.”
We opened this handbook in 2017 with a defense of irony, which we were careful to distinguish from parody or cynicism. We described irony as a discomforting moment of intimacy. Irony is the unnerving realization that your very own words have unraveled your position.
Ten years ago, we staked this project on two beliefs, the first being that no one can ever own language. We believed that fascism emerged from a desire to own language. We feared inadvertently fostering fascist sensibilities through our own need to pin words down.
Second, we believed that no expression is immune to irony, not even fascism; we found comfort in the ironic nature of human expression. Irony feels immobilizing but we believe it makes departure possible. It opens a hatch, though you must choose to step through if you wish to escape the dizzying spin of the same same.
Ten years on and we see very little interest in stepping through any opening. We remain stuck. Communication is inert. Perhaps, as Moyd and Komska warned, everyone feels they lack the language to do anything. Maybe, when we peer ahead, the space on the other side appears devoid of any words to live by.
What would it take to terraform it? From what material? Moyd and Komska suggest that we begin anew by speaking of “the simplest of things in the simplest of languages.” That feels like a sure path straight back to fascism.
The problem is not a matter of finding the right words, or the true or plain words. We believe it is necessary to re-inhabit the words we already have by leaving behind the security of the familiar. We must speak without knowing what we are saying and without a sense of direction. We must wander off. Starve the subject at hand. Forget what things mean. Forget what words meant to us. Get lost. Digress.
It’s not an expeditious plan, but we’re already ten years in and so lost. The monsters we fear already speak in a recognizable voice. They already sound just like us. We entertain them every night.