On Adornian Essayism and the Digital Essay Space

‘Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial. […] Imagine what it might rescue from disaster and achieve at the levels of form, style, texture and therefore (though some might cavil at “therefore”) at the level of thought’ (Brian Dillon, Essayism).

Adornian essayism, the belief in the essay form as an arena of intellectual freedom that resists the generic and cognitive constraints of discursive logic, is alive and well in the digital age. Though it was Brian Dillon who turbocharged the popularity of the term ‘essayism’ in 2017, the poetics expressed within the term are more or less Adorno’s ­– it speaks to something that lies somewhere between a philosophy and a genre. As he outlined in his 1958 text, ‘The Essay as Form’, Adorno believed the essay to be ‘the critical form par excellence’ because, ‘as immanent critique of intellectual constructions […] it is critique of ideology’ (18). The essay form ‘accentuat[es] the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character’; ‘the philosophy of absolute knowledge’ is its ‘polar opposite' (Adorno 9, 19). In so doing, the essay form achieves what other kinds of criticism, with a concern ‘not to leave anything out’ (16), fail to do: think freely. Since, for Adorno, the nature of existence is best described by a negative dialectics – inherently fragmented, contradictory, un-synthesisable – a critical form that does not aim for resolution between opposing concepts is an expression of the ‘emancipated mind’ (Lane Kauffman xi; Adorno 20). In short, the essay form was for Adorno a kind of ‘cognitive utopia’, an idealised ‘function of the cognitive experience of a writing subject’ (Lane Kauffman xi). Following Adorno, Dillon asks his reader to ‘imagine’ what this type of writing might ‘rescue from disaster’ and encourages them (despite his nervous parentheses) to make the Adornian leap between what is rescued at ‘the level of form, style, texture’ and what can be achieved at ‘the level of thought.’

Today, the conception of the essay form as an antidote to rigidity of thought underlies the ways in which essays are written, published, grouped, and displayed. In this essay, I take the digital essay forum known as ‘Contemporaries’, published by the academic collective Post45, and in particular their two ‘essay clusters’ ‘Interpretive Difficulty’ and ‘How We Write (Well)’, as self-consciously pertinent examples of this phenomenon. Post45’s essay clusters stage and play with the uneasy relationships between established, recognised forms of literary and cultural criticism on the one hand, and essayistic writing on the other. Founded in 2006, Post45 is ‘a collective of scholars working on American literature and culture since 1945’, whose website is split into three publication streams: ‘Book Series’, ‘Journal’ and ‘Contemporaries’. The Book Series is a partnership with Stanford University Press that publishes full-length critical works. The Journal follows academic publishing conventions: it is ‘peer-reviewed’ and puts out ‘high-quality, field-shaping work.’ The Contemporaries section, meanwhile, is a place for essays. These essays are grouped as ‘curated conversations, or “clusters”’ according to a common theme. The clusters are commissioned according to a title and prompt set out by a guest editor who pitches an idea to the Post45 board. The purpose of the Contemporaries essay cluster is to ‘provide a forum for writers to converse with one another more directly and informally than in traditional academic publications’ ­– such as Post45’s very own Book Series or Journal, perhaps (Post45).

The essay forum is Post45’s play area, so to speak. There, the constraints of interpretive rigour required by the conventions of critical books and journal articles are loosened, allowing writers to write more fragmentarily, haphazardly, inconclusively. More than this, however, the digital physiognomy of the essay ‘clusters’ creates a kind of meta-essayism, mirroring in their groups what Adorno imagined the singular essay to do: ‘construct a complex of concepts’ (23), a ‘constellation’, a ‘crystallis[ed] configuration’ of non-subordinated intellectual elements (13). If we allow ourselves to bridge form and thought as easily as Adorno does, it might even be that the meandering trajectories of their digitally interwoven compositions take place with the same mobility as ‘the emancipated mind’ and therefore represent – and encourage – an Adornian ‘cognitive utopia’. They inspire in the reader the kinds of elastic, multi-directional, textural critical thinking that Adorno idealised.

The 2021 cluster ‘Interpretive Difficulty’, commissioned and edited by Johanna Winant, is perhaps the most self-consciously essayistic Contemporaries cluster. Winant asks her writers to examine in their essays moments where they failed to get to the bottom of an interpretive task in a scholarly book or journal article. The essayists are all, in one way or another, liberated by essayistic fragmentation to deal with logical dead ends and bring them to life in other ways. In her introduction to the cluster, Winant writes:

‘We are all practiced at interpretation: at shedding light and focusing, at fitting pieces together or reframing them. Scholarly books and articles, though they might not always feel this way, are the stories of our triumphs. But what are the stories we don't tell? Sometimes, surely, the light doesn't focus and pieces won't fit […] these essays reason about where reasoning gives way.’

These two metaphors – unfocused light and misaligned fragments – speak to Winant’s thoroughly Adornian approach to essaying. The essay, Adorno argues, ‘thinks in fragments, just as reality is fragmentary, and finds its unity in and through the breaks and not by glossing them over’ (16). Though scholarly books often ‘triumph’ in logical terms, they leave out the fragments – the ‘pieces that won’t fit’ ­– and thus fail at their own task of ‘fitting pieces together’ because they shudder at contradiction. By contrast, in ‘reasoning’ precisely about ‘where reasoning gives way’, the essays in the cluster find excitement in the spaces between the ‘pieces’ that ‘won’t fit’ together – within the cracks of their own logic, ‘in and through the breaks’. Winant’s essayists find those breaks in the logical order, and, rather than discarding the fragments that create them, ‘double down’ on them.  Winant writes in her own essay for the cluster, ‘Pessoa and Other Coincidences’, that when writing her doctoral thesis, she wanted ‘the surety that, with enough information and thought, everything could fit together. But it doesn’t.’ If books are about fitting (forcing?) together what, in the real world, are disparate scraps of ‘information and thought’, then essays are about collecting reality’s scraps and, as Dillon would say, ‘rescuing’ them from ‘disaster.’

Winant’s image of the ‘light that doesn’t focus’ speaks to the essay form’s comfort with the absence of ‘surety’. Essays coordinate fragments of ‘information and thought’ in meaningful ways, but always ‘shrink from any overarching concept to which they could all be subordinated’ (Adorno 16). The precise, ‘focused’ light that to Winant is characteristic of the book or article can be imagined as the lightbulb under the microscope’s stage, manipulated by the scientist to illuminate the minute details of their static, disciplined object. It is harder to shed a beam of light on an object that does not stand still; the essay’s subject matter is imagined here as antagonistic and wily, slinking away from the light, ‘shrinking’ into the shadows. The essay is what follows the breakdown of the ‘scientific mentality’ (Adorno 20); what happens when the object won’t acquiesce under the light. As Adorno says, ‘an unequivocal logical order deceives us about the antagonistic nature of what that order is imposed upon’ (16, italics mine). While books and scholarly articles are ‘stories of triumph’, they are also stories of deceit, or at least, omission. They gloss over the moments when the light did not focus, the pieces did not fit, when the antagonistic subject matter shrank from the writer’s exacting methods.

In ‘Pessoa and Other Coincidences’, Winant essays about the intellectual contradictions she cannot seem to ‘fit together’ in book she is writing. She cannot reconcile simultaneous moments of ‘coincidence’ and ‘contingency’ in literature. Winant frames contingency and coincidence as opposite problems: ‘if contingency imagines life as diverging paths,’ then ‘coincidence is a moment of anastomosis, encounter, reencounter.’ Winant writes that ‘in the book chapter [she is] finishing,’ she describes Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘In the Waiting Room’ as ‘about contingency’. After briefly explaining her analysis of Bishop’s exploration of contingency, Winant stops in her tracks and asks, ‘But it's also coincidental, isn't it?’ If, as she ‘sometimes suspects’, Bishop might also be talking about coincidence, then her ‘interpretation […] sputters and stops.’ This is a point of contention that for Winant does not belong in the book chapter. The chapter does not even exist yet – she is currently ‘finishing’ it as she writes this very essay ­– but she already knows that that book is not the place to grapple with her suspicions. Adorno explains the limitations of discursive thought in dealing with interpretive tension in strikingly similar language to Winant:

‘[T]he staticness of the essay is one in which relationships of tension have been brought, as it were, to a standstill. The slight elasticity of the essayist's train of thought forces him to greater intensity than discursive thought, because the essay does not proceed blindly and automatically, as the latter does, but must reflect on itself at every moment’ (22).

In both Adorno’s and Winant’s imaginations, scholarly textual interpretation chugs down logical tracks like a train; when it breaks down, ‘sputters and stops’, it is taken to the essay space as if it were a repair shop. In her book, Winant’s engine-powered interpretation drives through the object of study ‘blindly and automatically’. It cannot stand still; its discursive logic must ‘proceed’ to its conclusion. When it comes across a moment of tension, it breaks down. Meanwhile, the essay is a place that tolerates ‘sputter[ing] and stop[ping]’; the ‘relationship of tension’ between coincidence and contingency can be safely ‘brought […] to a standstill’ there, in the essay space, while she simultaneously takes the chapter to its logical conclusion. This does not mean the essay does not move through or between ideas. Indeed, in Adorno’s own inconsistent analogy, it also follows a ‘train of thought.’ But the ‘elasticity’ of essayistic thought means that things are less likely to grind to a halt when they reach a logical impasse. The essayist must ‘reflect’ upon these impasses ‘at every moment’ and, if not work through them, at least explore their contours.

The substance and texture of Winant’s essay is dictated by the very intellectual process of facing this impasse. Adorno writes that, in the essay, ‘thought does not progress in a single direction; instead, the moments are interwoven as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of the texture’ (13). When reflecting on the tensions between coincidence and contingency in Bishop’s poem, each interpretive possibility is a thread that is textually and texturally interwoven with others. Winant’s language evokes the motion of a weaver slotting new layers of thread back and forth, over and under the structure of a loom.  She begins by admitting that she ‘goes back and forth on what Bishop’s speaker means.’ In the two short paragraphs where she examines this problem, she begins a sentence with the word ‘but’ four times and uses it twice mid-sentence. Winant asks herself, and us, whether Bishop’s word choices are ‘a matter of her limited vocabulary or of a bigger, stranger, harder problem.’ She tests the consequences of both answers: ‘If it's the former, then […] But if it's the latter […] then […]’ Winant takes the intellectual experience of puzzling over a poem as the basis for these paragraphs, allowing the reader to think through the contradictions alongside her. The words she writes are not a mere transcript of her thinking out loud, however. Rather than a selfish, confused monologue, her essay is a crystallisation of thought process, designed for the reader. Adorno writes that the intellectual experience is not so much ‘reflected’ in the essay form as it is ‘mediated through the essay's own conceptual organization’ (13, italics mine). The essayist does not directly ‘think’ through the essay, ‘but rather makes himself into an arena for intellectual experience, without unravelling it’ (13). By preserving the memory of the intellectual experience, and evoking its textures, the essay can entertain the full complexity of the cognitive process. By contrast, in her ‘Interpretive Difficulty’ essay about writing a book explaining Ludwig Wittgenstein's 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé describes becoming increasingly deflated and depressed upon finishing its final draft precisely because it contained no trace of the intellectual process. She recalls feeling as though ‘the whole enterprise of thinking and looking and writing and doing had disappeared with the book — kerplunk — like a pebble in a well.’ The intransitive, multidirectional processes of ‘thinking’, ‘looking’, ‘writing’, and ‘doing’ materialise when the book is complete into small, singular, hard, smooth, ‘pebble’. The process disappears with melancholy, bathetic onomatopoeia: ‘kerplunk.’ The scholarly book fails, then, where it ‘eliminates the memory of the process by virtue of its form’ (Adorno 13).

So, the individual essays in this cluster permit writers to transcend the discursive and cognitive limitations of scholarly work by way of the multidirectional textures of essayistic thought. But Adornian essayism in Contemporaries goes further: the essay cluster as mode of commissioning and curating enables ideas to interact with one another essayistically across individual pieces. While some clusters keep their essays ‘autonomous’, others turn into ‘epistolary exchanges’ between essayists where they weave one another’s ideas into their own individual pieces (Post45). Take, for example, two essays in the 2019 cluster ‘How We Write (Well).’ Jed Etsy’s essay examines Eve Sedgwick’s use of listing, and Frances McDonald’s essay responds to and builds on Etsy’s. Etsy argues Sedgwick’s sentence ‘works’ against all odds: unlike most of her prose, it is ‘neither especially graceful nor logically exact’; the ‘syntax’ is ‘hard to follow’; it does not have a definitive end; its question ‘bumps along like a jalopy to the point where we lose track of it.’ Yet the sentence works – though he is not sure how. In her own essay for the cluster, McDonald weaves in her own interpretive thread and densifies the intellectual texture of Etsy’s argument. McDonald agrees the sentence works despite being ‘rickety’ and ‘unwieldy’, but she ventures to explain why. She argues Sedgwick’s ‘curatorial logic’ reveals, upon inspection, ‘how [the list’s] contents touch and are touched by one another’. She notes how ‘bristling punctuation […] structure[es] relations. The soft hook of the comma, the sharp jag of a hyphen, and the smooth curve of a parenthesis each suggest different types of touch, different ways of fastening or gripping things together.’ Both essays individually examine the delicate contradictions in the tension between Sedgwick’s syntactical weakness and her potency of meaning, her humour. But as a clustered conversation, ‘each becomes articulated through its configuration with the other’ (Adorno 13). McDonald’s interjection articulates the tensions in Etsy’s response to the sentence; Etsy’s high-level critique necessitates McDonald’s close reading. The collaboration creates a matrix of conceptual coordination, ‘a complex of concepts interconnected’ (Adorno 23). The cluster format enables complexes of Adornian essayistic thought that transcend individual essays.

It is no coincidence that the word ‘cluster’ evokes the metaphors Adorno uses to describe the conceptual strength of essayism. ‘Cluster’ can mean simply a collection of similar things, but it can also refer to a cluster of ‘faint’ stars, ‘forming a relatively dense mass, appearing as a nebula to the naked eye’ (OED). Adorno refers to the organisation of conceptual elements in an essay as a ‘constellation’ (13). Here Adorno borrows the language of Walter Benjamin, who argued in his ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ to The Origin of Tragic Drama that ‘ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars’ (34). Ideas, like constellations, conceptualise relations between objects, but are crucially non-systematic, non-objective, relative to perception. The essays in the clusters are like relatively autonomous stars that come together in the reader’s experience to form a complex whole that is more than the sum of its parts. It is pertinent that the stars in clusters are faint, nebulous; they appear as a vague mass that cannot be thoroughly dissected. They are, in Winant’s words, stories of ‘when the light doesn’t focus’ – imperfect collections of concepts.

This fragmentary, incomplete, constellatory aesthetic is reflected in the digital physiognomy of the clusters.[1] Each cluster displays a rectangular panel, within which are several small rectangular windows containing the individual essays. The panel is made of an image copy-pasted side by side several times, often cropped by the limits of the panel. The reader can track their cursor over each window, which then changes the colour of the background image within that particular window and highlights the essay title. The impression given by the Post45 website’s presentation of the essay clusters is that each piece has its own individual conceptual identity (they have their own title; they change colour when the cursor passes over them; clicking on one takes the reader to a different webpage); but also forms part of a complex whole (the continuity in the background image; the fact they are presented in a continuous grid panel, rather than a list of chapters). The individual essays contain hyperlinked references to one another’s work, creating an ever-intensifying web of interconnectedness between conceptual moments.

The complex created by this cluster of essays is decidedly incomplete. Like the constellatory essay form, the cluster is designed ‘as though it could always break off at any point’ (Adorno 16). The seemingly poorly collaged and cropped background image indicates the fragmentation of essayistic thought that ‘finds its unity in and through the breaks’. The essays form a cluster, a constellation, not a total, not a whole, for the panel itself is a cropped fragment of a larger set of images. In the cluster’s ‘accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character’ (Adorno 9), but in its expansive interconnectedness, it realises an Adornian essayism at the levels of form, texture and web design, and therefore (though some might cavil at ‘therefore’) at the level of thought.