is literature measurable?

I asked the question whether literature is measurable. One can turn this question around to the other one, whether literature is feasible. Can literature be made like a chair, a piece of car bodywork or an electric tube? The question is wrongly posed. Because I forget thereby that in the objects of the handicraft and the industry someone has always already thought before the conception and the function “chair>, “car body”, “electric tube”. The “manufacturer” of these things is only the reproducer of the inventor. In comparison, in literature everything must be invented first. The writer is inventor and manufacturer at the same time. What can be connected, by analogy or technologically, from craft or industrial processes to literature and its “production,” concerns only the side of literature that can be grasped analogously to the technological, for instance the typographical or the phonetic or even the mechanics of the reception and processing of impressions. But only when these things are seen as auxiliary methods, which replace or complement other, older ones, but which can never be ends in themselves, they gain a meaningful place. That literature is a commodity is only the superstition of those who want to hide their secret romance once and for all. But the question whether literature is feasible can mean something else. It can imply that I have the freedom to do what I want. To do whatever seems feasible to me. All manipulations inside and outside and at the borders of language. It can mean the old call for freedom, which from Marinetti and Khlebnikov, from Dada and Surrealism on has not become silent. A blind call, a mere antithetical call, as is so often asserted today? A reputation that events and developments have long since passed over? Still the writer has every possibility to try what seems appropriate to him. (And that would be the second fundamental criterion for the newer literature.) This is not an experiment, for an experiment only proves what one already knows; the experiment has long since degenerated into a test. (And even a copywriter tries more than he tests.) The writer’s trying, of which Brecht reports in several places of his writings on the theater, means that the writer does not yet know what he is doing when he does it. Only the made proves what it is. Only by what is made can I know whether the permission to make was rightly given. That is the dilemma. There are no rules. There are only tendencies. I experience these through the resistance and risk of literary works. Resistance and risk are the general standards I can apply. (heissenbuttel)