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Essays and measure
Apprenticeships in genre
Witty, T.
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2019
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Witty, T. (2019). Essays and measure: Apprenticeships in genre.
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Essays and Measure
Apprenticeships in Genre
Essays and Measure
Apprenticeships in Genre
ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT
ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus
prof. dr. ir. K.I.J. Maex
ten overstaan van een door het College voor Promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel
op vrijdag 28 juni 2019, te 12:00 uur
door
Thijs Witty geboren te Schagen
Promotiecommissie
Promotor:
Prof. dr. M.D. Rosello - Universiteit van Amsterdam Copromotor:
Dr. M.A.M.B. Lous Baronian - Universiteit van Amsterdam
Overige leden:
Prof. dr. P.P.R.W. Pisters - Universiteit van Amsterdam Prof. dr. H.Y.M. Jansen - Universiteit van Amsterdam Prof. dr. E. Peeren - Universiteit van Amsterdam Prof. dr. F.W.A. Korsten - Universiteit Leiden Prof. dr. J. Masschelein - Universiteit van Leuven
Introduction 8
0.1 Essays and Measure 8
0.2 A Genre for Crisis 11
0.3 A Baggy Monster? 16
0.4 Here Everything is Admissible 18
0.5 How to Measure with Essays 27
0.6 Chapter Overview 29
Chapter I. A Fantasy Science of Degrees: Barthes’ Bathmology 34
1.1 Introduction 34
1.2 A Fantasy Science of Degrees 35
1.3 The Art of Prolepsis 43
1.4 Commitment Degree Zero 48
1.5 The right distance: Fantasmatic lectures 56
1.6 Arranging his Index cards 61
1.7 Conclusion: Theory, Critical Combat, and Pleasure 65 Chapter II. The Facts are Against Me: Essaying Nonfiction 68
2.1 Introduction 68
2.1 Marc Nichanian’s evidence 69
2.1.1 Subject to Revision 69
2.1.2 From Archive to Shame 74
2.1.3 Beyond-language and the secret 78
2.1.4 Major Philology, Minor Essayism 88
2.2 John D’Agata’s Forgeries 91
2.2.1 Truth, not Accuracy 91
2.2.2 Anthologies and Implicit Theories 96
2.2.3 Enough is enough, enough is not everything 99
2.2.4 Compositional Catharsis 105
Chapter III. In Free Fall: Hito Steyerl’s benevolent skepticism 110
3.1 Introduction 110
3.2 From Critique to Critical Feelings 112
3.3 Everyday Crisis 122
3.4 A Thinker of the Rootstock against the New Accelerationists 127 3.5 How Erasure is Inscribed: artistic research in the museum-industrial
complex 134
3.6 Detection and Disappearance 143
3.7 Conclusion: Have Essays Run out of Steam? 147 Chapter IV. Mourning Essays: Zabel Yesayan for the Present 150
4.1 Introduction 150
4.2 Writing against Disaster 154
4.3 No Genre for Madness 160
4.4 The Weight of a Word 169
4.5 Adequate Syntax 179
4.6 On the Road, Pen in Hand, Turnabouts Ahead 184 4.7 Conclusion: Zabel Yesayan for the Present 190 Coda. Suspended Millennials: Study in the Metrical School 194
Introduction 194 I. 196 II. 202 III. 208 IV. 214 V. 221 Works Cited 222 Summary 238 Samenvatting 243 Acknowledgements 248
“You think an essay should have a hypothesis, a conclusion, should argue points. You really do bore me.”
Introduction
Since a genre lives first in its composition and then in its realization by those who “perform” it […], the essay text, like the poem, like the musical score, is nothing other than notations for performance. If the tentativeness implied by the word essay is its primary identifying principle, its traces in the text embody the directed random func-tion we call subjectivity.
- Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager 0.1 Essays and Measure
This dissertation is about crisis and writing. More specifically, it is about writers who have turned to essayistic composition – some in the hopes of resolving their troubles, others to prove themselves at least worthy of them. In uniting crisis and essay writing, I have three related aims in mind. First, I want to demonstrate how essays can be considered helpful measures for those life uncertainties that resist instrumental and revelatory approaches, such as reportorial objectivity, scientific method, systematic philosophy, or religion. Second, I hope to draw out some of the practical consequences of essayistic measures, both for the crises in question and essayistic writing more generally. Third, I will argue that an adequate understanding of the genre’s efficacy would require a compositional as much as a formal or modal analytic.
The three aims taken up are not without precedent, and in large part a response to two works of scholarship on essayism. In Essayism: Conrad,
Mu-sil & Pirandello (1992), Thomas Harrison proposes the term be taken on as a
new living morality in the wake of otherwise impossible theorisations of perience. For Harrison, essayism “is a response to an ontology in which ex-perience appears already to transpire in the manner of an essay” (4). While he only loosely defines the essay form as open and self-seeking, “freely pur-suing whatever diction, rhetoric, or supporting evidence its argument appe-ars to require” (2-3), essayism, understood here as the form’s mode, indexes more profound qualities, among them the remarkable pluralising capacity it offers to its practitioners, that somehow “does more justice to phenomena than any single point of view, regardless of how encompassing this view
pre-sumes to be” (13). The task of essayism, Harrison concludes, is therefore to give up any impulse to “impose an ideal on the real” (13). A comparable ar-gument is found in Claire de Obaldia’s The Essayistic Spirit (1995), whose more overtly historical tracing puts essayism at the forefront of a generali-sed skepticism that emerges in periods of generic crisis. For Obaldia, such essayism in essence “holds that human reason cannot achieve certainty in any area whatsoever” (31). In her estimation, essayism hence appears as the most comprehensive response to crisis: as systematic reason collapses into “endless deferment”, essayism “becomes the transient and evanescent mode of all discourse” (49).
Both Harrison and Obaldia point towards the intellectual renewals that this otherwise neglected mode of thinking and writing makes possible – precisely due to its marginal position in adjacency to “categorical and unequivocal systems of interpretation” (Harrison 222). This outsider character allows essayism more daring critiques of the evidential and the certain in that its “‘curiously impersonal’ treatment of ‘the subjective’ component” (Obaldia 51) makes it the most robust mode for handing the uncertainties that periods of generalised crisis bring about. Obaldia also notes another benefit of this modal approach to the essay:
The essay as a genre is neglected. Via the mode, on the other hand, one is able to draw attention to the possibility which the essay of-fers, precisely in its quality as a marginal genre, to move beyond the canonical oppositions of traditional generic studies and ultimately to confront ‘literature’ itself as a question, and so to catch up with the central concerns of modern literary theory and criticism. (57)
The neglect of the essay genre also means that there is a lack of accumula-tive knowledge of its literary history and contributions. The historical lin1 The essay nonetheless remains one of the most wide-spread writerly forms, with a
1
relatively sizeable industry to boot, from newspaper op-eds to academic journals, from memoirs, blogs, and school assignments - even the daily millions of modestly formulated reflections and quarrels on social media contain key elements of an es-sayistic approach to writing. There has furthermore been a recent surge in interest in the literary essay, as evidenced by publications like John D’Agata’s anthology se-ries The Next American Essay (2003), Carl Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French’s Essayists on
eage of the genre is nonetheless mostly framed as follows: essays have prob-ably existed ever since Sumerians first carved small notches in clay, but it was only after their formal invention in sixteenth century France via the writings of Michel de Montaigne that they gained recognition as a literary genre. The proliferation of moving type printing presses across Western Eu-rope, as well as several renascent forms of post-dogmatic intellectual inquiry, also allowed the essay to play a pivotal role in the emergence of new intel-lectual communities, contributing in more than one way to the birth of the liberal public sphere. While it must be noted that for several centuries only 2
male members of the lettered class could circulate their essays in such a sphere, mass education in the twentieth century and globalised media tech-nologies in the twenty-first have democratised the essay. While these im-provements have not changed essayistic elitism in any significant way, they have popularised the essay’s compositional particularities to unprecedented levels: if there is some truth to the story that one in every five adults secret-ly has a novel in the works, it would equalsecret-ly hold true that most people who have been subjected to some kind of formal education have also written their fair share of essays.3
Harrison and Obaldia agree that distinct valences of the essay will only become apparent when considered more explicitly as a mode. Hence their consensus that the genre’s history is best traced via modal shifts and innovations. However, the writerly principle of coherence demands that an essay’s compositional open-endedness must eventually be consolidated, if not fixed, in the final presentation of the essay. This fixity, in turn, requires a number of steps that emerge both from the writing process itself and from the rules offered by the genre. This fixity, in turn, requires a number of steps that emerge both from the writing process itself and from the rules offered by the genre.4
See Atwan 2012; Habermas 1992; Obaldia 1995; Thorne 2010.
2
In the coda I will return to this specific subset of the essay.
3
As I will argue throughout this dissertation, such consolidations also apply to
4
other recurrent concepts of essayistic writing: an essayist’s preliminary, hypotheti-cal, and reflective motivations often do not necessarily mean that there is no com-mitment to truths or facts, while conceptions of the essay as a “methodless method” (Adorno, “Essay Form”) in turn suggest that it must somehow generate out of itself the medium of its own existence.
Rather than a separation between form and mode, I am interested in the essay as this unified practice of assaying and consolidating. A compo-sitional analysis needs formal as much as modal approaches, because it re-quires a simultaneity of subjective and objective know-how in the composer: in what ways can a (subjective) essayist modify the (objective) essay form? My research therefore halts at a point where the modal analysis of both Obaldia and Harrison accelerates: I want to better understand how much it
takes for a writer to write essays in times of crisis, in the hope of giving shape
to “what ought to be thought” (Bloch; quoted in Harrison 224) in the absen-ce of new forms.
To better delineate the particular scope of this dissertation let me point out that I am using the following working definitions: by essaying I will refer to writing and thinking intransitively, that is, without transparent ru-les, procedures or objects; by crisis I am invoking an experience of overw-helming uncertainty that requires the invention of new measures in order to be addressable; by measure I think of a course of action taken to achieve a particular purpose, as well as, the ascertainment of a size, amount, or degree of something; and by composition I mean the ongoing negotiations between writer, form, and mode in the practice of writing. None of these definitions fully cover the complexity of their referents, but they do allow me to make relevant and significant juxtapositions. Essaying being a mostly positive res-ponse to the negativity that crisis implies and the difficulties that measure-by-composition entails. Key questions that follow from this include: if es-says offer solutions for some crises, under what conditions and to what de-gree of generalisability? If they don’t, what other compensations might they offer? In the remainder of this introduction, I will try to clarify the relati-onship between essay and crisis, provide a brief review of relevant studies on the essay genre’s history and theory, and compare several key ideas about the essay’s efficacy, as well as summarise how these will be further addressed in the four dissertation chapters.
0.2 A Genre for Crisis
In a brief 1914 piece, the Austrian writer Robert Musil wondered: “Is the essay something left over in an area where one can work precisely… Or: the strictest form in an area where one cannot work precisely?” (“Essay” 48).
Mu-Musil would make a case for the latter, even though this was not at all an obvious choice: he had received his formal education in engineering and ex-perimental psychology at a time of well-entrenched positivism among the Prussian universities and had since become an accomplished scientist himself. He was perfectly aware that scientific recognition would require the removal of all the messy research procedures in the final presentation of knowledge. In this sense, Musil could have easily concluded that essays would always remain leftovers outside the purview of precise reason. But while he respected scientific knowledge, his immediate interests were diffe-rent. As David S. Luft writes, “Musil wanted to move the life of the mind away from academic philosophy in the direction of art and literature, but he wished to do so in a way that was not antagonistic to intellect and science” (Luft xxvii). He wished to find in essays a measure that was com-mensurate with his own diagnosis of modern life. In a remarkable take-down of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918), a fascist diagnosis of modernity, Musil asserted that:
What characterizes and defines our intellectual situation is precisely the wealth of contents that can no longer be mastered, the swollen facticity of knowledge (including moral facts), the spilling of experi-ence over the surfaces of nature, the impossibility of achieving an overview, the chaos of things that cannot be denied. We will perish from this, or overcome it by becoming a spiritually stronger type of human being. But then it makes no sense from a human point of view to try to wish away this enormous danger and hope by stealing from the facts, through a false skepticism, the weight of their factic-ity. (“Aesthetic” 137)
After the ravages of the First World War, a generation had to reckon with the obsolescence of traditional morality. Musil sought to establish a new ba-lance between thinking and feeling, “neither science nor ideology nor pre-mature philosophical totality”, which would “shape the inwardness that was left unformed by the collapse of traditional ideologies in the early twentieth century” (Luft xxi). He came furthest with this pursuit in his unfinished magnum opus The Man Without Qualities. In this epic hybrid of essay and no-vel, Musil explored the possibility of a new ethics through his protagonist Ulrich, a young man who undergoes a series of thorough disenchantments
chantments with the world. Ulrich lives in the Vienna of the Austro-Hunga-rian Empire shortly before the outbreak of the first World War. Here cultu-ral life was defined by the genecultu-ralised worry of psychologists, physicists and philosophers, who each pointed to the overwhelming insufficiencies of the integral explanations of the world provided by positivists. Their devaluation led to a loss of stable ground, which in turn meant a deficiency in what Mu-sil defined as the active world view. Intellectuals were aware that “their thoughts never came to rest, and beheld that eternally wandering remainder in all things, which never comes into order” (267). If science was no longer able to explain everyday experience with a sufficient principle or rule, nihi-lism was impending. But if the essay arises through conjecture and possibi5
-lity, rather than methodical analysis or comprehensive understanding, why should this genre be held in such high regard in moments of acute existenti-al crisis?
Essays don’t have a necessary relationship to either crisis nor mea-surement, but they do have a strong correlation. “Perhaps”, as Joan Retal-lack suggests, “the point is not understanding at all, at least not in the sense of grasping”, but rather that essays “should elude our grasp just because their business is to approach the liminal spectrum of near-unintelligibility – immediate experience complicating what we thought we knew” (48). Etymo-logies of the word essay often point towards such measures of imprecision, emphasising definitions such as trial or attempt, which are both indicative of a measurement, through experimentation, that is loose and rudimentary. However, in one of the few etymological surveys to mention the word’s con-tiguity with precise measurements, Jean Starobinski writes:
Essay, known in French since the twelfth century, stems from the Latin base exagium, the scale, to try derives from exagiare, which sig-nifies to weigh. In proximity to this term we find examen: needle,
Harrison equates this new ontological crisis with the emergence of quantum unde
5
-cidability in the early twentieth century, arguing further that, “essayism in many ways heralds our own contemporary theoretical climate in which categorical and unequivocal systems of interpretation have ceded their authority to pliant and rela-tivistic new methodologies” and that it “wishes to rethink not only the determinati-on of judgement but especially the determinatideterminati-on of those determinatideterminati-ons, the pro-cedures by which decisions are reached” (222).
long narrow strip on the beam of the scale, thus follows, weighed consideration, control. But another meaning of examen designates a swarm of bees, a flock of birds. The common etymology would be the verb exigo, to push out, to chase, then to demand. How enticing if the nuclear meaning of today’s words had to result from the mean-ings in a distinct past! (110-111).
While these meanings are often sidelined in studies on form, their absence allows me to propose a paradoxical alternative: through a slight adjustment of Musil’s formula, I am suggesting that the essay can nonetheless become the strictest form attainable in areas where one cannot work precisely,
preci-sely because it complicates boundaries between genres, combines art and
science, mixes stylistic and rhetorical techniques and willingly embraces formal and thematic eclecticism. Rather than evidence of imprecision, these are also compositional principles that try to convince readers of arguments that would resist communication in more straightforward ways. My hypo-thesis is that essays therefore have the remarkable ability to sustain their own principles of measure. By combining this hypothesis with Musil’s for-mula, I want to investigate how a weighing in the absence of clear measure can be negotiated with and through essays, and explicate the measures that essayists take to fulfil their respective desires for precision.
A measure very generally designates a plan or course of action taken to achieve a particular purpose, or refer a system or scale of units expressing size, amount, or degree of sensible or supersensible phenomena. In music for example, a measure refers to a temporal unit within a composition, even-ly cut among quarters, while in mathematics it is a divisor, i.e. a quantity contained in another an exact number of times. We take a measure when we ascertain the size, amount, or degree of an object, or when we extract a pre-cise quantity of something, usually with the aid of an instrument or device marked in standard units. We also measure when we assess the importance, effect, or value of less tangible phenomena, which often happens through a comparison between persons or objects via a regulatory standard.
If to measure is to control, a crisis looms in moments when such measure is missing. This absence may be real or perceived, caused by a rip-ple or a landslide, but it instills a crisis all the same. When peorip-ple measure without yardsticks they often attain remarkable precision (which is one way
of stating that people improvise and tend to improve this skill over time), but the correlation between measure and crisis that I am interested in is of another order. In question here are situations where improvisation or intui-tion seems difficult, to the point of impossible, where rough estimates are suspect and previous experience seems useless, where no method is at hand and no obvious will for experimentation arises. The hesitation faced in this moment is where I want to begin analysing the essay’s compositional effica-cy. Is there a special relationship between essay and crisis, given that both are in part defined by their contingency, groundlessness and ambivalence? And if that relationship exists, is it possible to think of essayistic compositi-on as a partial soluticompositi-on across the crisis spectrum?
Modern science has the significant benefit of precision: its concept of number makes possible highly precise quantifications of what would otherwise remain qualities. Domains placed outside the purview of sciences tend instead to rely on notions of the incalculable or unquantifiable. The advent of statistics and probability theory has vastly improved the knowled-ge of previously immeasurable phenomena, but it still remains categorically impossible to conjure a mathematics of the specific or the singular. This is 6
why literature or the “human” sciences are often kept at a distance from the “exact” sciences. To the contrary, Michel Serres concludes that these two discourses in fact compete for the same conceptual frameworks: order and disorder, where the aim to to isolate a “sense emerging from non-sense” (“Exact” 15). Whilst measure today predominantly pertains to num-ber, critiques of such measures miss the mark to the extent while people may never attain precision, but can still desire it. Moreover, it is less the (lack of a) quantitative aspect of measure that is at stake in essays, but the qualitative. In The Man without Qualities, Musil writes of his protagonist Ul-rich: “It was more or less in the way an essay, in the sequence of its parag-raphs, explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it— for a thing wholly encompassed suddenly loses its scope and melts down to a concept—that he believed he could most rightly survey and handle the world and his own life” (270). The essay writer for Musil is a possibilitarian, someone who lacks particular qualities of her own but who gains them in
See Agamben 2018.
the course of writing. The relationship between writer and essay is nouris-hed by a maximal curiosity that opposes, in principle, the authority of knowledge specialists. It needs to be demonstrated, however, that this ama-teurism does not automatically make the understanding of essayists impreci-se or in need of a method. Rather, I will explore the extent to which essay-ists manage to develop measures that are at once precise and flexible enough to adequately respond to the contingencies of crisis.
0.3 A Baggy Monster?
Because critical studies are relatively scarce, a straightforward categorisation of the essay remains notoriously difficult, to the point that scholars and cri-tics usually define the genre as indefinable. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, the word essay is often rather loosely applied to a wide variety of texts. Essays also go by many different names, including the frag-ment, meditation, commonplace and reflection, or more recently the op-ed, think piece, blog and hot take. All of the above emphasise subjective and argumentative prose, but also add or subtract essayistic features at will. Characteristics of the essay moreover appear in the majority of other litera-ry genres – such as the novel or the poem – and remain popular in academic disciplines ranging from humanities to the sciences. As O.B. Hardison puts it, “if there is no genre more widespread in modern letters than the essay, there is also no genre that takes so many shapes and that refuses so succes-sfully to resolve itself, finally, into its own shape” (611), whereas G. Douglas Atkins concludes that the essay, “is neither shapeless nor formless, although it resists our vaulted attempts to describe or define that form. We talk as if the essay is at once a form and without one” (127).
In The Observing Self (1987), Graham Good similarly observes that the singularly undisciplined body of studies which the essay has generated challenges the idea that it can ever accrue an “interpersonal body of know-ledge”, and that this resistance against the positivism of accumulative study is caused precisely by a respect for the correspondence between the content (the essay as subject-matter) and the form that these studies themselves take. Unlike the play or the poem, the essay has therefore often shown resis-tance to reaching conclusive judgments about its own proper form and
ob-jects. Instead of taking a place among recognisable forms, it settles for a respectable yet marginal status in the empire of letters.
The essay thus lingers somewhere in the no-man’s land of formless-ness, with numerous essays about the essay agreeing that to pin down this form as a genre would be like grappling a “baggy monster”, “pushed and pul-led” between contending forces (Douglas Atkins). As “a loose sally of the mind” (Samuel Johnson) the essay would resist categorisation because it re-presents “the very denial of genre” (Obaldia 3). Approaching something like 7 the essay will therefore offer, at best, only partial insights.
This leads to a rather unique case for literary taxonomists, since the-re exist few other traditions that have raised so many issues about its gene-ric elements. For the sake of convenience, existing scholarship on the essay can be divided in three categories. The first consists of studies about resem-blances and differences between canonised practitioners of the form. These can best be rubricated under the literary or philosophical monograph. The 8
second stacks ‘essays on the essay’ and tends towards an idiosyncratic nature in providing particular assessments of essays’ unique efficacies but also re-flections on their more singular qualities and limitations. The third category consists of studies about the formal consequences of the essay’s resistance to categorisation and integration into systems, and trace the developments of the essay both historically and theoretically.
Ultimately, these categories create more unhelpful distinctions than increased clarity, as the formlessness of essays paradoxically turns out both an impediment to coherent definition and one of the genre’s defining featu-res. Even though essays presumably shift, shuffle, merge and infest genres,
These sentiments are shared by many others, including Geoffrey Hartman: “So
7
much of contemporary intellectual life consists in reading these all-purpose forms, these baggy miniature monsters which like certain demons are only too serviceable” (247); O.B. Hardison: “If there is such a thing as an essential essay – a real Proteus – it changes into so many shapes so unlike the real one that it requires an act of faith to believe the shapes merely variations on a single underlying identity” (19); Graham Good: “The essay’s initial impulse was away from genre altogether, in the direction of formlessness” (1).
These studies range from Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, David Hume and
8
Robert Burton, to William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Cynthia Ozyck, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and other canonised writers.
they remain consistent in doing so. Christian Thorne challenges the ‘baggy monster’ premise of the essay form altogether, arguing that “this protean quality itself has a rather precise ideological valence”, and that it is time “we tried to wrestle the shapeshifter” (62). Indeed, Greek mythology clearly
figu-red Proteus as a deity: he was referfigu-red to by Homer as “the Old Man of the
Sea”, and although he had a body for all stripes of water, as a shape-shifter he had a distinct form, albeit veiled by a high degree of plasticity. “That, of course,” writes O.B. Hardison, “is why Proteus adopted the strategy of chan-ge in the first place. People who lack faith will turn away convinced nothing is there. We will remember however, the advice of Cyrene: ‘The more he turns himself into different shapes, the more you, my son, must hold onto those strong chains’” (630). In the following, I will therefore outline some of the main recurring ideas and arguments across these three lines of essay scholarship, asserting that the wide variety of observations and assertions about the essay, essayism, essayistic, to essay and the essayist can be thought to-gether, insofar that they all matter in gauging the complexity of thinking together essays and measure.
0.4 Here Everything is Admissible
This approach shifts away from attempts to catch a shapeshifter and to-w a r d s a n a c k n o to-w l e d g e m e n t t h a t to-w i t h e s s a y s “e v e r y t h i n g i s admissible” (Emerson). This is not the same problem addressed in different 9
terms. Rather, the shift posits that while the essay does not exist as a com-pleted form, it is still a form that has some degree of completion. Essays are, after all, texts constituted on the formal level of composition. Both the ‘es-says about the essay’ and more systematic studies I will discuss here indicate what such a shift in perspective yields. I am specifically interested in three recurring identifying features in these studies: the self, mode/modality, and formalism. I will address them in that order, with the implication that these
The full passage from Emerson’s definition: “Here everything is admissible - philo
9
-sophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdotes, jokes, ven-triloquism - all the breadth and versatility of the most liberal conversation, highest and lowest personal topics, and all may be combined in one speech” (D’Agata Next 252).
key features all lead up towards a fourth, most singular one: essays’ place-ment and self-directed tendency towards margins.
First, the self. Virginia Woolf has asserted that the essay is first and foremost a living thing, which makes it unnecessary to venture too deeply into its history or origins. Her claim is somewhat ironic, given that it pref-aces a historicising commentary (on the state of modern essayists in particu-lar), but it provides an interesting take on the improper time of the essay. “Literal truth-telling”, Woolf writes, “is out of place in an essay, where every-thing should be for our good and rather for eternity than for the March is-sue of the Fortnightly Review” (212). Woolf finds the essence of the essay in its opposition to the article, a distinction best expressed in a conflicted rela-tionship to contemporaneity: whereas the article thrives on the trendy, the essay must congeal with time, and eventually transcend it altogether. For Woolf, as style is subordinate to content in the article, so information is secondary to such historical transcendence in the essay. In similar vein, Carl Klaus writes that “Woolf ’s emphatic connection of personality with style, with knowing how to write, clearly makes it the product of art and artifice rather than an unrehearsed emanation of the self ” (79). Inasmuch as tradi-tional/conventional conceptions of the novel have a story and the poem have rhyme, Woolf distinguishes the essay through the inquisitive essaying subject, whose shape can be apprehended by the elusive rhetorical tricks of style:
For it is only by knowing how to write that you can make use in lit-erature of your self; that self which, while it is essential to litlit-erature, is also its most dangerous antagonist. Never to be oneself and yet always – that is the problem. (217)
The essayist finds support from both her most powerful and fragile tool: personality. Knowing how to write well is the prerogative of a good essayist, as well as what allows for a rare meeting point between the personal and the public. For Woolf, the solipsism associated with the essay allows its authors a remarkable degree of freedom in the construction of their essayistic per-sonality. Since the essay relies on rhetorical devices, such as familiarity or intimacy, the first person singular also authorises statements regardless of
their approximation to actual states of affairs. Persuasion, rather, is what arbitrates the truthfulness of essays.
William Gass similarly contends that “the hero of the essay is its au-thor in the act of thinking things out, feeling and finding a way; it is the mind in the marvels and miseries of its makings, in the work of the imagina-tion, the search for form” (20). The objects that the essayist chooses mainly serve as a pretext for forming thoughts about the pressing subjects that are close to the essayist’s own heart. While on the formal level essays makes use of free associations and metaphors?, the focus remains on the essayist in the process of essaying. This is in line with Obaldia’s historical review, in which she concludes that the essay’s resistance to universal points of view of scien-ce and philosophy “is illustrated by its interest in revealing the author’s pro-cess of thinking unconstrained by foregone conclusions” (33). Douglas At-kins similarly finds that a good essayist is an amateur “who has merely done a little reading up”, but also “a layman” whose “field is broad and open, not narrow and devoted to only one type of crop” (42). In all these appraisals, the essay’s proteanism allows for a unique amateurish sincerity: its entry le-vel is relatile-vely low compared to other major literary genres and is, as such, less immediately consequential or at risk of failure - especially when compa-red to more (presumably) daunting forms of argumentative reason such as the treatise or article.
Second, the modal. Robert Atwan warns that placing the essay genre in the realm of amateurish enthusiasm leads to “the persistent undervaluati-on of the essay and the essayistic underpinnings of much imaginative litera-ture [which] has resulted in a sharply skewed canon, the neglect of many important works, and it has helped create a professional rift between litera-ture and composition studies” (13). Rather than asking whether the essay is literature, Atwan suggests that instead we should ask: “can literature exist without it?” (13). In The Essayistic Spirit, Obaldia calls for a similar reevaluati-on, observing that approaches to the essay as a distinct literary genre para-doxically confirm it “has been created from a desire to supplement some-thing, the ‘thematic’, which is already there in the first place”, as well that it is “not (yet) being ‘up’ to literature” (25). Her own notion of the essay as lite-rature in potentia can to the contrary show to what extent all litelite-rature is in essence essayistic.
Réda Bensmaïa shares Atwan and Obaldia’s concerns, similarly argu-ing that the essay should be understood less as precursive to genre than its constitutional matrix, or “mélange” (92). The theory he develops in The Essay
as Reflective Text, a singularly sophisticated study about the genre, begins
with the double premise of the essay’s pluralism and mobility, “where the dissolution of the categories of Author and Reader no longer implies the ‘explosion’ of the work or cacophony, but on the contrary, the multiplication of words and perspectives, the broadening of points of view and the affirma-tion of a ‘fragmentary experience’ of language opening on another mode of completion of the text” (57). Bensmaïa’s approach avoids the circularity of other modal approaches by assessing the essay’s paradoxically “intrinsic ec-centricity”: for him, the essay often shows hesitation in reaching conclusive judgments about its arrangement and composition or in its objects of en-gagement, “insofar as it seems to flirt with all the genres without ever letting itself be pinned down” (96). In this conception, the essay renounces a text structured to be read and written in large masses – according to the princi-ples of rhetorical composition, for example – because it enables a study and analysis of a single text down to its last detail by working back along the threads of meanings. This step-by-step method is never anything but the decomposition of the work of reading, a slow motion so to speak, neither wholly image nor wholly analysis, but fundamentally digressive. None-theless, Bensmaïa asks: “what is the logic that allows the fragments, in spite of their extreme heterogeneity, to constitute a unity?” (6). As he concludes, the apparent lack of order is in fact the essay’s unity:
Definite intention and plan do not guide and punctuate the scansion of what the Essay proposes; rather, the multiplicity and initial het-erogeneity of the elements of the work determine the appearance of particular utterances. Thus what matters to the essayist is not the classical question of rhetorical inventio - finding something to say – nor that of dispositio - putting in order what has been found. Rather it is a problem of complication. (6)
This complication translates well into a chaotic succession of anecdotes, observations and quotations, but is not exclusively the effect of a prior idea. In other words, this difference is not preceded by identity. Instead,
Bensma-maïa finds that “from the very beginning and at an identical semantic and formal
level, there are heterogeneous series of stories, examples, maxims, and the
rest” (9; italics in original). This opens up towards the pluralism already sought after by Michel de Montaigne in his canonical essays, where he con-cluded that “two opinions identical in the world never existed, any more than two hairs or two grains. [...] Their most universal quality is diversity” (quoted in Bensmaïa 9).
Sometimes Montaigne’s tangents only took up a few hundred words, but they would often increase in length with each edition of the Essays. In no less than twenty-six of his 107 essays he would “digress from the subject at hand to ruminate on the problems of reflecting his thoughts in writing” (Klaus, Made-Up 7). For Klaus, these digressions expressed the most detailed and substantial engagement with human consciousness in the histo-ry of the genre, while Thorne concludes that The Essays “offer us a glimpse of a subjectivity that has handed itself over to contingency,” serving as “a case study in the life lived rhetorically, in which the argument on both sides of a question is made to govern every mental act until the self fades away into a gossamer of contradictory opinion” (59). Through the essay Montaig-ne could subjunctively postpoMontaig-ne verdicts on the lives of his contemporaries, as well as his own, and his style was relatively accessible because, as Martin Jay notes, he was “clearly in search of a sympathetic ear” (23).
Unique to the genre is the way essays can paratactically align their contents by downplaying the importance of arrangement altogether, so that “everything occurs as if at every moment a fundamental structure of gap were questioning the double temptation offered by classical ‘system’ and classical rhetoric: the closure of the text as Totality and the mastery of mea-ning as Truth” (Bensmaïa 19). As such, essayistic writing proceeds by “ma-king use of words and following them in a continuous movement of pleasu-re(s), [rather] than in ploddingly reproducing the ‘thoughts’ they are suppo-sed to convey” (24). In sum, the essay records passages of the mind while it is
still thinking, and as such cannot be said to contain positive knowledge per
se, but rather reflections on its many possible forms. This guarantees that the essay is generally conceived in a perspectivalist mood, reliant on the afo-rementioned features of fragmentation, parataxis, and (self-)reflexivity.
The constant revision that characterises the work by essayists such as Montaigne was also made possible with the advent of the moving type printing press. Thanks to these technological advances, reflections about the delights of the flesh and the fluttering of the thinking mind regained popu-larity in a wide variety of writings. The essay became an overwhelmingly open-ended text, at risk of obsolescence with the advent of the book, but also figuring as its indivisible remainder: “the fragmentariness of the work-in-progress, its embryonic, ‘neotenous’ state, is also the permanent feature of a book which cannot be brought to completion, however extending the process of addition and revision” (Obaldia 30). The essay became a fragmen-ted as well as fragmenting text, whose contents could escape the restrictions of genre precisely because it turned out to be the point of germination for all genres. For Harrison, the essay therefore embodies “a utopian attempt to develop the possibilities of form to a virtually infinite degree” (14), which he associates with the unending formations and deformations of self, and this modal dynamic challenges any world view that claimed a pre-structuring of existence.
Third - and in tension with the second - formalism. In opposition to the line of scholarship described above, Carl Klaus has attempted to reach a more general, formal estimation of the genre, finding sufficient consistency in the large body of commentaries on the essay for a “collective poetics”. In every epoch and culture, he argues, essayists are opposed to conventionali-sed and systematiconventionali-sed forms of writing, whether rhetorical, academic, or cri-tical discourses, and “in keeping with this contrast, they often invoke images and metaphors suggestive of the essay’s naturalness, openness, or looseness as opposed to the methodological quality of conventional nonfiction” (Self xv). Klaus retrieves his definition of the essay from a peculiar agreement between the otherwise opposed essayisms of Montaigne and Francis Bacon. He writes that while it is a widely agreed fact that Montaigne predominant-ly took undifferentiated experience as his gospel – leaving it up to scholars or dogmatists to synthesise sense data into concepts – it is far less often acknowledged that Bacon’s The Proficiency and Advancement of Learning (1605) similarly praises fragmentation and open-endedness; as Bacon writes: “but the writing of aphorisms hath many excellent virtues, whereto the writing in method doth not approach” (quoted in Klaus 9). Against common opinion,
Against common opinion, Bacon’s formal and pithy essays are therefore very much in accordance to the backbone of Montaigne’s essay form: undifferen-tiated experience uncontainable in systems or concepts. Klaus explains this correspondence mainly through their shared use of anti-methodological terms, such as disjointedness and brokenness, considering both as marking a caesura between their work and the tradition of classical rhetoric and me-dieval scholasticism. This was a break already declared by Bacon’s contem-porary Sir William Cornwallis, who wrote of the essay as, “a manner of wri-ting well befitwri-ting undigested motions”; for Cornwallis, the essayist was like a “scrivener trying his pen before he engrosses his work” (cited in Klaus, xvi). Bacon has also expressed occasional scorn for the “aloofness” of the experiences described in Montaigne’s Essais, commenting that experiences of this kind are nothing but “blind and silly, so that while men roam and wander along without any definite course, merely taking counsel of such things as happen to come before them, they range widely, yet move little further forward” (Novum Organum 78-79; cited in Jay 31).
In Elements of the Essay, a brief study published in 1969, Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French describe the “genre trouble” of the essay as follows:
The essay is poetic to the extent that its author or speaker appears to be talking to himself rather than to others. A poetic essay takes the form of a meditation ‘overheard’ by the reader. A dramatic essay takes the form of a dialogue between two or more characters. The author is present, if at all, only to perform the minimal duties of a director; to set the scene and identify the characters whose words and actions are witnessed by the reader. In a narrative essay the au-thor becomes a narrator who reports directly to us on persons and events. A narrative essay sees its subject in time and presents it in the form of history. An essay is most essayistic when it comes to us as an argument, an explicit attempt to persuade, in which the author addresses us directly, much as any public speaker would address an audience. (4)
In their desire to classify the unclassifiable, Klaus and Stuckey-French pro-ceed with a strategy of mixing and matching various categories and modi-fiers, presenting four main classes: the persuasive, the narrative, the drama-tic, and the meditative. With regards to the fourth they write:
In reading a meditative essay our attention must shift from structure to texture. Instead of a causal network running through time (a plot), we are likely to find in meditation an associative movement of the mind. Not the persuasive relation of point and support, but a poetic connection of image and idea, is the formal pattern of medi-tation. The images and ideas must be connected or we will have only chaotic rambling. (10)
Their groupings are helpful to the extent that they clarify the essay’s terms of procedure and modes of application, but they do not point towards the possibilities of their use. If there are as many essays as there are essayists, it is so because there are only instances of the law of genre (Derrida, “Law” 59), and if the form of the essay is troubling, it is because it is “a text that destroys utterly, to the point of contradiction, its own discursive category, its sociolinguistic reference” (Bensmaïa 25).
In summary, three signal features of the essay as its own recognisable writerly form are (1) a unique concept of a digressive self; (2) impressive mo-dal flexibility; and (3) a form that troubles genre. These features lead to a disproportional focus on the essay form’s “second class citizenship” in the republic of letters, which in turn compels sympathising scholars to defend and vindicate the genre. For example, in a letter written in 1910, Georg 10
Lukács is at pains to convince his friend Leo Popper that the essay should be considered as an art of its own. He starts out with the observation that essays can only address lived reality indirectly via already existing objects - he uses the examples of books and pictures - which makes the genre deriva-tive of forms that precede it. But while true essayists therefore never create
ex nihilo, they nonetheless have to create from within themselves the
justifi-cation of their use of available forms and objects. For Lukács it was in fact impossible to say that essayists could claim any value independent of such self-created measure, writing that
The essay can calmly and proudly set its fragmentariness against the petty completeness of scientific exactitude or impressionistic
See Atkins 2005, p. 11. For more general discourse on the essay’s marginal status,
10
ness, but its purest fulfilment […] becomes powerless once the great aesthetic comes. […] Here the essay seems truly and completely a mere precursor, and no independent value can be attached to it. (15) Writers including Theodor Adorno find that such precursiveness is also what allows the essay to effectively combat ideology and resist commodified ideas that structure the marketplace of ideas. For Adorno, “the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy. By transgressing the orthodoxy of thought, something becomes visible in the object which it is orthodoxy’s secret purpose to keep invisible” (110). And as Retallack puts it, such “essay writing must take place in the tentative and transitional space-time that is always in between the publicly entrenched vocabularies and grammars of official thought and the writer’s engagement with temporal processes”, con-cluding that “the goal is to resist all those standards that create what Adorno calls the ‘illusion of intelligibility’” (54). On a formal level, this leads Adorno to the literary technique of parataxis, which explains the difficulties readers have in interpreting his essays: one is trained to expect hierarchical distinc-tions between message and (logical) order, but Adorno, as Graham Good notes, “on principle omit[s] these structures, so that each paragraph, each sentence and even each clause stands on its own. The reader has to pattern the work for himself, and this can take as much effort as reading a complex modernist poem” (20). But even though parataxis is by no means typical of essays in general, “this is really due to their being less densely textured, not to their having less tight logical structures” (20). And while ‘the’ essay - as a strategy, concept, form, mode, style - troubles qualification, its status as “pure type of precursor” (Lukács 10) to genres built with systems or me-thods is nonetheless characteristic; the essay is uncertain of itself.
If a writer makes use of essayistic expression, there can be a fixation on a vague notion of something very important, which does not necessarily need to be spelled out yet, let alone demand a systematic circumscription. An essay more true to its name would leave thoughts in a germinal state,
attempted rather than asserted. As such, the essayist is exposed to intellectual
and sensory discomforts that conjure works unlike other writerly activities. Underpinning this is Montaigne’s formula for his own essayistic activity:
0.5 How to Measure with Essays
The above studies agree on the idea that essays challenge the possibility of genre because they seem to borrow so liberally from any genre. As a result, it is difficult to address the specific efficacy of the essay. Thematic inquiries offer viable alternatives to the consistent interpretation of the essay as a genre or mode, a theory that runs the risk of downplaying ideas of shapeles-sness, that give essays their particular weight. Similarly, putting essay and measure in the same sentence also risks creating a self-imposed problem: since essays aren’t causally connected to scientific method or the orderliness of articles, they have no necessary traction with exactitude. However, what also appears throughout the studies discussed above is an interest in how essays detach from form, or refuse to be contained in a single form. The point here is that the essay, as a form, problematises the distinction between
exact and human, and in being a quintessential middle ground, it is
recogni-sably a genre with a highly specific relationship to precision.
This is not a claim about something intrinsic to the essay that would allow it to forge unique conditions for measure. In fact, it can easily be ar-gued that because the essay is a baggy monster it has no features to call its own and may therefore even be considered a privileged target for imprecisi-on. But by moving from an implied to an explicit awareness of the specific efficacy of essays, I instead want to further develop the departing thoughts of Harrison’s conclusion to Essayism: Conrad, Musil, Pirandello, where he states that essayism “imagines the possibility of a subjectivity enhanced by the so-phisticated operational principles already at work in the technological world, a reparation of the rift between the ultra complex organization at-tending the realm of the technical and the stunted mentality to whose servi-ce they are put” (224). The story that could accompany this departure is that we live in an age of calculative rationality, where everything that can be me-asured must be meme-asured and whatever cannot be included in a census, ta-ble, or set, does not exist. There are numerous characterisations of the
“so-“society of calculation”, as well as a range of critical studies in suit. But 11
what is lacking is an inventory of engagements with the limits of measure, that is: cases where calculation is not so much refuted on moral, political or even aesthetic grounds, but actively pursued in the full cognisance of its im-possibility. In short: how can one be very precise in places where precision is exactly what seems to be impossible?
This question is addressed by the following passage from Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Experience of Freedom:
Measuring oneself against the nothing does not mean heroically af-fronting or ecstatically conaf-fronting an abyss which is conceived of as the plenitude of nothingness and which would seal itself around the sinking of the subject of heroism or of ecstasy. Measuring oneself against the nothing is measuring oneself absolutely, or measuring oneself against the very ‘measure’ of ‘measuring oneself ’: placing the ‘self ’ in the position of taking the measure of its existence. … This is perhaps, and even certainly, an excess. In no way and on no register of analysis will one avoid the excess of freedom – for which heroism and ecstasy are in fact also figures and names, but these must not obscure other examples, such as serenity, grace, forgiveness, or the surprises and others still. (71)
Essayism should be likened to this precarious experience of freedom: positi-oned before all genres, essayists see plural options at all times yet must con-tinually deal with the pains of inevitable choice. Such intermittent wagers are themselves acts of measure. These acts of measure are what I will pursue throughout the chapters. The eventual concepts or principles of measure are derived from a study of a number of essayists whose respective works span
In Unexceptional Politics (2018), Emily Apter groups together a wide variety of thin
11
-kers, ranging from political theorists to philosophers and anthropologists, who have each analysed the damaging effects of political rationality and often depart from Michel Foucault’s diagnosis of the reign of homo economicus in contemporary Wes-tern societies. As she writes, “what draws them into orbit is their common focus on calculated existence […] to the way in which capitalist reproduction binds humanity to the scourge of calculated interest” (214-215). In “Shareholder Existence”, she simi-larly uses the phrase “society of calculation” to describe contemporary logics of in-terest and optimisation that are built into current political orders (1324). See also the chapter “Managed Life” in Unexceptional Politics, pp. 213-230.
works span several centuries; incomparable but nonetheless affiliated by a complicated genre. The most precise formulation of method is that of
ap-prenticeship. An apprenticeship is a position where there is confidence in a
mastery that can be transferred, although its contents cannot yet be seen or fully internalised. There is therefore a speculation, a wager, an unverifiable conviction that this relationship is defined by transfer. But apprenticeship is also about the relationship these essayists themselves have with their chosen writing practice: teaching themselves, in the course of writing essays, about the conditions and possibilities for gaining a measure when there seems to be none. Apprenticeship is therefore a method in double: it is the position I have chosen to write approximately about in my cases and essayists, as well as, the place in which these authors inevitable find themselves when they know there are thoughts and feelings that both need and can get out, but method is missing. If “science has no use for the ineffable” (Barthes, Barthes
by Barthes 112) and since the essay form “is concerned with what is blind in
its objects” (Adorno, “Form” 23), then the hybrid relations that essayists must maintain between subjectivity, objectivity, and genre are capable of bringing out new concepts of measure as well.
0.6 Chapter Overview
The dissertation is divided into four chapters, featuring portraits of indivi-dual essayists and close readings of their works. These essayists are otherwi-se known as novelists, otherwi-semiologists, philologists, artists, critics, and philo-sophers. Although many among them would contest these names, they share an interest in the peculiar merits of a genre that troubles coherence. Ano-ther commonality is an acute experience of and struggle with crisis. These crises vary in scope and context, and as such resist both generalisation and comparison, but this distinctiveness is also relative, insofar that all discussed essayists attempt a reckoning with the crisis-situation via something inhe-rently generalisable: the composition of essays. However, the cases are not about the immeasurable and related terms, rather, they attempt to recon-struct concepts or strategies against the premises of immeasurability. At the same time these cases are not about science, defined broadly as the pursuit to attain precision through sophisticated techniques of measure, but about Musil’s formula in its most general sense: the essay as a most precise form
for things that one cannot be precise about. What happens to emotional and social life when a pursuit of measure, for whatever reason, is impeded, for the time being or indefinitely? That is the moment where the essay’s ef-ficacy needs be rethought.
The case studies of my dissertation represent different permutations of the essay, the essayist, and essayism: from commentary to cultural criti-cism, from chronicles to lyricriti-cism, from testimony to creative research prac-tices, they underline particular essayistic characteristics in terms of genre and practitioner, and I also approach them as prisms through which more general features of the essayistic spirit can be gleaned. That spirit, I argue, is about finding adequate measures as much as it is about commitment to the non-disciplinary and anti-methodical virtues of the essay. I also contend that the missing link is a missed opportunity to clarify the status of the essay as a distinct form of writing and thinking.
The opening chapter offers a portrait of Roland Barthes’s writerly life. While he has been widely celebrated as an original practitioner and theorist of the essay, little attention has gone to the fact that his particular brand of essayism was motivated by a paradoxical tension: between his compulsive need for precision on the one hand and his strong distaste for established methods or systems on the other. I discuss this tension in four arenas of Barthes’s intellectual engagement: his political commitments, his career as a teacher, his tendency for anticipatory and equivocal reasoning, and as a literary mourner of his own mother’s death. I argue that in each case Barthes’s fabled bathmology – a fantasy science of measuring the degrees within language – was at work and that its logos is best understood as a high-ly productive conception of the essay.
The second chapter is organised around a single issue yet brings to-gether two writers who work on distant ends of the essayistic spectrum. The question they both struggle with is this: what do you do when you feel for-ced to reason with facts that not only disavow your truths, but actively con-tribute to their obfuscation? The two essayists I discuss are French scholar Marc Nichanian and American critic John D’Agata. Nichanian’s oeuvre has long revolved around the painful observation that history and law can not only be complicit with, but also constitutive of the denial of extreme (mass) violence. His own intellectual project is however exemplary of an essayism
an essayism as a measuring without factual yardsticks, Nichanian’s own con-cept of non-historical history writing conveys an intransigent measuring with the essay form, more constructive than his own reasoning seems to acknowledge. In an entirely different constellation of problems and desires, D’Agata recently completed an ambitious anthology of the essay: three hef-ty volumes containing over a hundred essays, spanning 5000 years, and in-cluding over thirty indexed themes. This scope notwithstanding, D’Agata has repeatedly emphasised that in the process of compiling these antholo-gies he uncovered a forgotten essence of essay writing: the essay’s unique efficacy is its ability to supersede informational and fact-driven mediation, which makes the genre ultimately and at its best a lyrical form.
In chapter three I discuss the oeuvre of contemporary German filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl, whose essayism is representative of a more general tendency in contemporary experimental cinema to reconfigure the nexus between politics and aesthetics through the audiovisual essay. Both Steyerl’s written and video essays stand out for the ways in which they reinvigorate the critical capacity of their literary progenitor, specifically by updating some of Adorno’s maxims about the role that essays should play in a truly democratic society. Throughout these essays, Steyerl maps the im-pact of vast political-economic shifts on social life, specifically the transition from monotonous industrial productivity to the more derivative modes of contemporary accumulation, circulation and consumption. Steyerl offers many new concepts and arguments against the generalising crisis of measure that defines contemporary life. In this chapter, I aim to situate these con-cerns as expressive of an acutely essayistic mood: benevolent skepticism.
In the fourth chapter, I discuss the complex relationship between essays and testimony, and I approach this relationship from three perspecti-ves: mourning, literature, and the civic duty of journalism. The writer cho-sen to bring out these concerns is the Soviet Armenian intellectual Zabel Yesayan (1878-1943), whose essay collection In the Ruins, first published in Constantinople in 1911, is widely considered as one of the most important literary testimonies of the Armenian genocide. Recent translations (into French in 2012 and into English in 2014 and 2016) have finally made her work accessible to new readerships, but the century between initial release and recent circulation in new language communities raises numerous
ques-tions about the longevity of survivor testimony and the temporality of essay-istic journalism. This chapter asks what Yesayan’s testimonial literature could mean for the present, by looking both at her essayistic style and the kinds of circulation the genre permits.
In the coda, I supplement my main dissertation argument with a final case study: the essay’s pedagogical use in contemporary schooling. Being asked to write an essay in school exposes young people to the many confusions and contradictions of compulsory education: while essay assign-ments allow for subjective freedoms unburdened by the fixed methods and objects that make up the majority of standard curricula, they are also highly standardised by that same institutional necessity. The measures discussed here thus refer both of the metrics of school grading and the essay as a pe-dagogical technology, specified to the positive effects an awareness of rheto-rics bring to those who have been marked as intellectually incipient. As it turns out, contemporary students may have Montaigne to thank for this.
Chapter I. A Fantasy Science of Degrees:
Bart-hes’ Bathmology
I have chosen language to love – and, of course, to detest at the same time: altogether trusting and altogether mistrusting it; but my methods of approach, dependent on what was being expressed all around me and what exercised its particular fascinations on me, could change, that is to say: to try one’s hand at something [s’essayer], to please, that is to transform oneself, to abandon oneself: it is as if one always loved the same person, but kept trying out new erotics with that person.
- Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 1.1 Introduction
The work and life of Roland Barthes have been studied with talismanic care. Much of his oeuvre has been retrofitted in the major Euro-American intel-lectual traditions of the twentieth century, and the abundant biographical scholarship has highlighted the personal signatures he has left on them, as well as how much personal circumstances determined his intellectual devel-opments. In this chapter, I ask how Barthes managed to outplay the restric-tions and coercions of his own time, and in line with extant scholarship I find little to fault and a lot to admire in his unwavering commitment to the joys of language and the pleasures of writing. But alongside praise for his 12
accomplishments, I also want to figure out specifically how Barthes’ essay-ism helped him formulate resistant modes of living and thinking within, but also in spite of, the powers that language exerts over its agents.
While Barthes has been widely celebrated as an original practitioner and theorist of the essay, less is said of the paradoxical tension that
Including, in no particular order: Réda Bensmaïa’s The Barthes Effect: The Essay as
12
Reflective Text (1987); Susan Sontag’s Under the Sign of Saturn (1980); Louis-Jean
Cal-vet’s Roland Barthes (1994); Stephen Heath’s Vertige du déplacement: Lecture de Barthes (1974); Annette Lavers’ Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After (1982); Jonathan Cul-ler’s Roland Barthes (1983); Philip Thody’s Roland Barthes: A Conservative Estimate (1977); Vincent Jouve’s La Littérature selon Barthes (1986); Steven Ungar’s Roland
vates his particular brand of essayism: a compulsive need for precision on the one hand and a strong distaste for established methods or systems on the other. I will discuss this tension in four areas of Barthes' intellectual life: his overbearing tendency for anticipatory reasoning, his wavering political commitments, his experimentations with teaching towards the end of his life, and his literary work of mourning after the passing of his mother. What appears in each case is Barthes’ fabled bathmology: a fantasy science of mea-suring degrees within language. While Barthes mentioned the term only sporadically in his work, and never developed it into an actual concept or model for science, I argue that it was structurally at work in a covert mode and that its logos is best understood as a highly original conception of the essay. 13
1.2 A Fantasy Science of Degrees
In a 1973 lecture Barthes gave an elaborate description of his walks in the countryside around Bayonne. One day he saw three different signs within a few hundred yards. Each invoked the same message, “do not enter”, but each sign conveyed this message very differently: one stated “vicious dog”, the second “dangerous dog” and the third “watchdog”. This third sign was osten-sibly the most objective, because it primarily passed along a piece of infor-mation (“A dog is guarding property”), while the first was asserted with ag-gression (“You will be attacked upon trespassing”), and the second seemed mostly philanthropic (“Be careful, for you might be bitten”).
Barthes only explicitly referred to bathmology twice in his published works: in
13
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977) and in his preface to a new edition of Jean
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste (1825/1975). In the latter he mentions
bathmology after discussing the experience of champagne tasting, which gradually
steps from “excitement” to “stupefaction”, with distinct variations throughout. For Barthes, such “tiering of phenomena” on a scale that separates possible degrees within discourses surrounding it, was one of modernity’s most important formal categories (60). For Barthes, Brillat-Savarin’s science of taste was mere irony, since “all gustatory bliss arises from the opposition of two values: the agreeable and the disagreeable, and these are quite simply tautological values - the agreeable is that which agrees and the disagreeable that which disagrees” (66). Brillat-Savarin could go no further than the assertion that taste is the “ability to appreciate” and therefo-re points to an ethos. Bathmology, as “the field of discourses subject to a play of de-grees”, could unify such ethos (61).
