Expanded Essay

Date:	2015
Index:	writing

Preamble

This is an essay about the essay - which I think we all are familiar with at some level - only I am considering the essay as method rather than form. By thinking of it in this way, the essay can be expanded beyond its literary confines into other forms (video installation, lecture, exhibition, website, research project, and even institution). What are the ramifications of such an expansion for these forms and for the essay? Before I begin I want to share some examples of my practice that has led into this question.

But first: my educational background has taken me from civil engineering and architecture to creative non-fiction writing and eventually to design and new media art, teaching myself computer programming along the way. Traversing these disciplines, I have been under the influence of radically different theories that don’t add up to a clear, identifiable multi-disciplinary framework; instead, my orientation has been a-disciplinary. The Public School — a project that I initiated in 2007 — is a pedagogical framework that formalizes adisciplinarity, calling itself “a school with no curriculum.” This orientation is consonant with the essay, which has at times been

described as unmethodical and unsystematic, “an extradisciplinary mode of thought”, and existing “outside any organization of knowledge, whether medieval or modern.” In fact, the very foundations of the essay handed down from Michel de Montaigne is a skepticism to prevailing forms of institutionalized knowledge. Looking back at old interviews, I realize I’ve always talked about it in the language that comes up around the essay, for using the metaphor of wandering, or this:

“every three months, the school will have a new manifesto. Part of the thing is, it should, from my perspective, keep going back to the beginnings, it should always be hovering at an unstable point, never totally formalizing into an institution, but at the same time not dissipating into nothing, chaos, where people can’t work it out. And so I think something like this manifesto allows it to critically reassess it’s own priorities and ambitions.”

Another project from 2011 was Public Monument, a proposal for a dormant radio tower that would begin broadcasting in the future - the exhibition was contributions to a time capsule, and that future broadcast would be the opening of the time capsule. Only the radio tower doesn’t exist yet - it only exists in media and language: as postcard, website, rumor. An accompanying lecture traced the history of the use of the use of FM over the previous century up until its impending selloff. An Escape Act was an essay written as a speech in the form of a script for two actors. (It has since become a workshop, a magazine article, etc.). The central thrust of the essay is a proposal “for the formation of something in between a school, a collective, a secret society, and a union.”

The Essay

“The essay flourishes in times of crisis and change,”. It was a form that came about under the realization “that the world was in flux and that knowledge was no longer fixed by authority but in a state of transition.” O. B. Hardison Jr. describes it as “the literary response to a world that has become problematic,” following Michel de Montaigne’s comment that “the world is but perpetual motion; all things in it move incessantly….” I would describe the present as a time of crisis and change. We have a dawning realization that humans have irreparably altered the geology and climate of the planet and a looming anxiety about the consequences; finance and computation are reformatting the world in their image, such that classically human issues and concerns are increasingly irrelevant; the welfare state is torn between the forces of neoliberal austerity and growing fundamentalism; communication media and portable technologies produce a tidal wave of images, video, and sound; if we take the time to think about these and other realities, we realize how little we know about the future and how little faith we have in our ability to shape it.

If the essay does flourish in times of crisis and change, then it should not be surprising that there has been a recent burst in discourse around the essay in the form of compilations (Essayists on the Essay: From Montaigne to Our Time, The Lost Origins of the Essay), conferences (Stalking the Essay, 2013, and Stalking the Essay 2, 2015, at Columbia University; World Cinema and the Essay Film, 2015, at the University of Reading; The Essay II, 2014, at University of Salzburg) and screening series (most notably Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film at the British Film Institute). Additional attention has been given to the essay film with the deaths of Chris Marker in 2012 and Harun Farocki in 2014, both of whom were deeply engaged with observing and reflecting on a very complicated present. Brian Dillon, in a 2012 Frieze “Think Piece” proposed that “the centuries-old form of the essay may well be the genre of the future.”

Textual and video essays both thrive on the internet, due to the availability of tools, ease of use, and avenues of publication. From e-flux Journal to YouTube, there are more platforms and audiences for various types of subjective, critical non-fiction than any time before. Popularity is not always a sign of health, however, and there are signs of what Hito Steyerl called the “essay as conformism,” echoing Theodor Adorno’s dismissal, “bad essays are just as conformist as bad dissertations.” (There are a lot of good essays being written at the moment, though, even if their emergence at this historical moment is as much a symptom of post-Fordist subjectivity as a reaction to it.)

So — what is the essay? An essay “starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about.” While this might otherwise give me license to begin somewhere else than a tower in the southwest of France in the late 16th century, the academic context that I’m in is less permissive. There is longstanding antipathy between the essay and academia, where thesis, treatise, and dissertation are the preferred ‘outputs;’ which is ironic because essays are arguably the most common form of writing in the university classroom. Your Practical Guide to Writing a Thesis, Treatise or Dissertation at the University of Sydney even groups the essay alongside the other three, explaining that the intrinsic distinction between them all is length. In this conception, an essay is an abbreviated thesis; a treatise is an expanded essay.

Your Practical Guide goes on to clarify that an essay under 8,000 words — in other words, not masquerading as a dissertation — does not, unlike the others, require formal supervision. It isn’t only shorter, it’s merely a rehearsal for those longer forms. Graham Good, surmises that its “wide cultivation at the lower levels as a preliminary form still reliant on personal knowledge” is only useful within academia “until the student has acquired enough impersonal knowledge to write research papers and perhaps eventually scholarly articles, where the personal element is minimized.” In an essay called “Essays,” however, Vilém Flusser espouses this “lively” mode of writing over the “depersonalized” “academic style.” What is at stake for Flusser, isn’t simply style, however, “it is not a decision with regard to form only. It also has to do with content. There does not exist one idea that can be articulated in two ways. Two different sentences are two different thoughts.” For Flusser, in other words, the essay is not just an underdeveloped treatise, it is another mode of thought altogether.

Flusser and Adorno are not alone in their way of thinking: in the first page of his introduction to the collection, Essayists on the essay: Montaigne to our time, Carl H. Klaus writes that “[t]he most striking and significant consensus” among the essayists who write on the essay is their tendency “to define the essay by contrasting it with conventionalized and systematized forms of writing, such as rhetorical, scholarly, or journalistic discourse.” For Michel de Montaigne in a tower in the southwest of France, the origin point of the esssay-vector to now, the dominant method was scholasticism, which sought knowledge chiefly through books. Ernst Robert Curtius characterizes an attitude of rebellious empiricism already burgeoning by the twelfth century that would eventually be put to paper in Montaigne’s skeptical Essais three centuries later: “What is the old fool after? Why does he quote the sayings and doings of the ancients to us? We draw knowledge from ourselves; we, the young, do not recognize the ancients.”

But, what is an essay? If it eschews system and convention, then wouldn’t each individual essay be necessarily unique, making it virtually impossible to define? And weighing this impossibility against the thousands of thousands of essays written over the past half-century, how is it possible to say much of anything? Luckily, I’m not the first to be asking these questions — it is a veritable rite of passage when writing about the essay. The first thing to say is that for any assertion that could be made about the essay, there will be one or more particular essays or essayists that contradict it. Just one example: I might make a generalization about the aforementioned personal nature of the essay in contrast to its “academicism,” which according to Flusser “unites intellectual honesty with existential dishonesty” by subordinating the personal responsibility of the author, for example when the “we” or the “one” pronouns are substituted for the “I.” But then Walter Benjamin, whose “characteristic form remained the essay”, refused to write in the first-person, saying “never use the word “I” except in letters. The exceptions to this precept that I have permitted myself could quickly be counted.”

Strikingly, this example used two very similar figures, who were male European Jews, philosophers, and media and translation theorists working in the 20th century, but I could have chosen from an even wider field of essayists. The 1,000 page Encyclopedia of the Essay gives many examples: from the use of the form in early modern science by Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle; to the published commonplaces of early modern Britain; to the singular prose of Nietzsche; to postwar generational commentators like Susan Sontag or Joan Didion; to proto-journalistic pamphleteers, or today’s bloggers; to American transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; to the social and political engagement of many Latin American practitioners, such as Paolo Friere; to the French poststructuralism of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, or Jean Lyotard; to postcolonial perspectives, as varied as Edward Said or Léon Damas. And, I haven’t yet mentioned giants of the form, like George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, E.B. White, or Aldous Huxley.

Although Montaigne is generally credited (and credits himself) with fathering the writing that he called “essais”, it was in England, not France, where it began to flourish. But if, in English, “essay” primarily referred to the literary form, Montaigne’s essai was “a procedure for exploring and revealing the self.” In fact, since Montaigne’s use of essay retained the multiple meanings of the French essayer (meaning to try or to attempt: “Could my mind find a firm footing, I should not be making essays, but coming to conclusions; it is, however, always in its apprenticeship and on trial.”), it has been argued that each chapter might have several essays within it; and since he never referred to a single chapter as an essay, but rather the activity, or the collective body of writing as essays, there is good reason to consider the essay as method rather than form.

Although there is a danger of getting lost, nesting essays within essays or getting a perspective on essays from essays, the essay accepts this possibility without resignation. In fact, these recursions and reflections are often seen by proponents of the essay as potential sites of knowledge. Frequently, commentators on the essay delight in constructing a paradoxical analogy to describe the process, like building a boat while sailing or “a game that creates its own rules.” In this light, the etymological notion of the essay as an attempt or a trial isn’t merely an empty prelude to an unfinished failure, but signals a commitment to an experimental process where subject and object are entangled, not already separated by disciplinary methods or existing systems. Adorno’s analogy is particularly evocative, imagining “the behavior of someone in a foreign country who is forced to speak its language… Such a person will read without a dictionary. If he sees the same word thirty times in continually changing contexts, he will have ascertained its meaning better than if he he had looked up all the meanings listed.”

So, how to describe this method? The difficulty in answering the question is precisely because it is, according to Pater, an ‘un-methodical method’ and for Adorno, ‘methodically unmethodical.’ As I wrote above, the tendency of the essay is to refuse discipline and method, but clearly such a statement is not entirely true and needs to be revised in order to account for the particular method, however unmethodical, that Pater, Adorno, and others see in it.

To put it simply: rather than apply an external, preexisting method to some object of inquiry, the essay stages a situated encounter with that object or event and derives its method in the process. Adorno, whose “The Essay as Form” is perhaps the richest and most quotable discussion of the essayistic method, describes its suspension from “the traditional concept of method” by valuing “how deeply it penetrates its object, not on the extent to which it reduces it to something else.” Graham Good makes the similar argument that “instead of imposing a discursive order on experience, the essay lets its discourse take the shape of experience.” The price of such depth and fidelity to object over method is that its knowledge is not consistent, corroborative and transmittable as in the modern hard sciences. On the contrary, “the essay starts afresh every time” such that its knowledge is particular, contingent, and provisional.

Following from such a refusal to accept a priori disciplinary methods or boundaries, I find myself absorbed in considerations of rules and structures, often imagining how they might be different. Isabelle Stengers describes this tendency in science-fiction “when what they are exploring is the unexpected manner in which a small difference can produce enormous changes in the way things are and when they pursue and at the same time create the consequences of such a difference.” Embedded in this statement is the possibility of the work “making a difference,” of a work operating in the world in a manner not predetermined or limited by the conventions of exhibition. And I would like to follow it even further to suggest that this creativity and inventiveness, these “counterfactual hypotheses” could also be directed toward the methods and boundaries of our own ongoing projects and practices.

I’d like to go back to the idea that the essay is “a game that creates its own rules,” but to approach it from another direction - genre. Graham Good opens his book on the essay by noting that “its initial impulse was away from genre altogether, in the direction of formlessness.” Claire de Obaldia notes that the essay is pushed to the margins of literature, invoking Alastair Fowler’s concept of “literature in potentia,” ultimately reframing the essay from genre to mode, such that “the act of essaying can be applied to any (other) genre.” Likewise, Hamburger wrote, “since the essay is not a form the spirit of essay-writing can assert itself outside the genre.” Or Godard’s famous quote: “I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them.” O. B. Hardison sees it not as evasion, but a kind of transmogrification: “there is … no genre that takes so many shapes and that refuses so successfully to resolve itself, finally, into its own shape.” Reda Bensmaia, in a study centered on the late essays of Roland Barthes, takes perhaps the most radical position: the essay is not simply an evasion of genre, “nor is the essay a mixture of genres,” but it is “the moment of writing before the genre… or as the matrix of all generic possibilities.” In other words, Bensmaia proposes that we don’t attempt to define the essay in terms of existing genres (it is narrative and discursive) but rather take “the essayistic text as primary.” This is a deliberate attempt to look at the essay in another way, not from the direction of genre or rhetoric but more likes Barthes’s ideal of a “writerly” text, “the possibility of writing as ‘procedure,’ or as Barthes puts it a ‘tactics without strategy’.”

Barthes, who made the self-deprecating remark near the end of his life that rather than successfully working in the field of science “I must admit that I have produced only essays,” theorized Charles Fourier’s practice of writing that he called “systematics,” as opposed to “system.” What is the difference? He writes that “systematics is the play of the system; it is language that is open, infinite … its mode of appearance … is not ‘development’ but pulverization, dissemination … it is a discourse without ‘object’ … and without ‘subject’ … It is a vast madness which does not end, but which permutates. In contrast to the system, monological, systematics is dialogical … it is a writing … systematics is not concerned with application … but with transmission … circulation.” The two ways that Barthes sees Fourier accomplishing this delirious writing is through postponement: the writing is always in preparation for the real writing, which is one way that Obaldia thinks about the essay, as paratext [in terms of Gerard Genette, marginal, or threshold, not quite a real text]; and a kind of overidentification [“is not to develop critical potentials, or ironic distance, but precisely to take the system more seriously than it takes itself seriously.”] where, rather than “spontaneistic” opposition to the system, there is “a wild system … whose fantastic tension … goes beyond system and attains systematics.” Or “at once a perfect system and the mockery of all systems.”

“A game that creates its own rules” is an especially interesting summation of the unmethodical method because it doesn’t renounce rules and structures, but it produces them from within, presumably in the open, continuous way that I understand systematics as “the play of the system.” This essayism is not anti-science, spontaneous, driven by pure whimsy, making casual sallies, or other trappings of belle-lettrism. Instead it comes closer to Adorno’s displacement of the essayist: “The thinker does not actually think but rather makes himself into an arena for intellectual experience, without unraveling it;” and the essay becomes a “wild system.” At the very end of the last chapter in his final book, Italo Calvino wonders about a “work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic…..” This chapter is called “Multiplicity,” an ode to the “multiplication of possibilities” that brings to mind Barthes’s permutations, or Bensmaia’s declaration that “what is most important to the essayist is neither … Invention … rhetorical Disposition … nor Knowledge … but … Complication.”

“Multiplicity” was written as a lecture about the novel, but I relate it to the essay: there are few references in the chapter, and they include the essays of Paul Valery; Jorge Luis Borges’s “vertiginous ‘essay’ on time;” and Robert Musil whose discursive method of Essayismus was fundamental to his novel The Man Without Qualities. Calvino focuses on Musil and Carlo Emilio Gadda, who were both engineers, both failed to finish their essayistic novels, and both understood the world as indeterminate, deeply interconnected. “A ‘system of systems’.”

There is a boundary problem here - the work and the world don’t stay on their respective sides - Flusser captures borderlessness of such a method: “Those who live in the form of an essay (that is, those who do not just write essays, but for whom life is an essay in order to write essays) know that the question of what to write presents itself only in negative terms.” This expansiveness of the essay, where writing takes the on the scale of a life (or vice versa) is not an idea unique to Flusser: Walter Pater suggested in 1893 that the method of the essay is “for those who prosecute it with thoroughness, coextensive with life itself;” and three hundred years earlier, Michel de Montaigne argued that by writing he was “forming [his] life.”

For the past year, I have kept a journal for personal, informal writing, usually taking the form of questions, lists, and attempts to work through problems, doubts, and contradictions. It served a similar function for my creative work during the same period, and it’s been one significant place where the research and practice concretely intermingle. While very little of the actual text has gone into any of the “official writing”, it is there that the density of ideas and interweaving of arguments has been taking shape. Sorting and aggregating the journal writing, I mention here some of the more prominent and recurrent threads (some of which you’ll recognize in this essay so far): comparing the essay to a system, or simulation, in terms of their internal rules, boundary conditions, and performative world-making; identifying the rhetorical device of metalepsis, or the interactive, self-reflective form of trompe l’oeil, in the performance of authorship in the essay; questioning the romantic, humanist foundations of the essay, with the hope of finding traditions within the history of the essay that do not presume an individual human subjectivity as a starting point; the function of voice and the voice-over in articulating the embodied perspective of an essay; asking about the potentials of polyvocality and collective authorship through the historically dialogical essay form; investigating how the essayistic mode can inflect other forms, like scripts, novels, press releases, or dissertations; whether the essayistic can be pushed even further into completely new forms of writing, such as computer programming, or whether they are simply incompatible modes; and lastly, to what extent the essayistic is an expression of our contemporary cultural logic, symptomatic of neoliberal subjectivity, and well-suited to a system that invites its own critique (within acceptable bounds).

The essay is dead. Obaldia points to the “superfluousness or ‘outmodedness’ of the essay;” Michael Hamburger bluntly observes that “the essay is an outmoded genre.” Adorno finished off his praise of it with the dismal conclusion that “the contemporary relevance of the essay is that of anachronism. The time is less favorable to it than ever.” Flusser, who primarily wrote essays, responded to his own question “does writing have a future?” in the negative. But in spite of it all, the essay has continued to resurface for nearly the past 500 years. In fact, all these death sentences are delivered by its own enthusiasts, almost ritualistically, as a means to renewal, to pushing the essay onward to new forms. Hamburger went on to write, a page later that “the spirit of essay-writing walks on irresistibly, even over the corpse of the essay.” This essay is written in that spirit.