Adorno seems to be arguing that the essay
is a hybrid form that exists between art and science, which has the ability to
present particular insights that are often missed by scholarly forms. He does
not ever provide a clear definition of an essay and, Essay as Form being written in the 1950s, I suspect that his
definition of the essay isn’t perfectly aligned with more contemporary
definitions. The OED’s definition ( “ 8. A
composition of moderate length on any particular subject, or branch of a
subject; originally implying want of finish, ‘an irregular undigested piece’
(Johnson), but now said of a composition more or less elaborate in style,
though limited in range.”) is interesting in relation to his discussion about
the fragmentary nature of essays and the fact that they are generally
inconclusive, but remains somewhat unenlightening. For Adorno, their defining
features are that they deal with some sort of an artifact (something already
produced, whether a scientific or artistic object), are unconcerned with universal truths, and while
unmethodical, are also complex and free from contradiction.
What resonated with me most
about Adorno’s argument is the way that he discussed the division between art
and science—in particular, the way that he made the distinction. In this essay,
science does not appear to refer to STEM fields, nor does art explicitly refer
to the humanities or to the fine arts. Instead, he uses what I would consider
to be a more proper definition of the two. What marks science is not subject
matter but method. Science attempts to address the subject methodically, and to
create well documented and reproducible results, or else to yield facts that
can be validated through peer review. By these standards, literary criticism
can be classed as a science, even without Althusser’s pseudo-mathematic posturing.
By this measure, Essay as Form specifically discusses the
limitations of academic writing in general. Notably, he mentions the way that
academic writing risks losing touch with the object of scholarship by
attempting to examine it from a purely analytical perspective while ignoring
its existence as an aesthetic object (5). By being unconcerned with
objectiveness, essays are able to get much closer to these truths and to keep
the object itself in sight. While I agree with this later statement, I did find
fault with his disdain for objectivity, since certain facts actually are provably
true based on the system of axioms that they developed in, regardless of other
biases or inputs. While all things may be mediated, I’m not sure that has to
clash with the idea that things can be objectively true within the proper
context.
His critique of objectivity
is further developed when he touches on the idea that nothing is unmediated and
that there are certain limiting preconditions for empirical research, and poses
the idea that neither art nor scientific discoveries are made in a vacuum.
While I would argue that essays are also confined by their form, I will concede
that there are biases in the questions that academics ask, the ones they choose
to pursue with any degree of rigor, in what is funded and published by academic
institutions at large.
I was also taken by Adorno’s
level of paranoia. A few times he mentioned the poor public reception of essays
using incredibly strong language. The most obvious may have been at the end of
the text, when he said that, “Through violations of orthodoxy of thought,
something in the objet becomes visible which it is orthodoxy's secret and
objective aim to keep invisible" (23). While it often seemed like he was
advocating for the essay as a means of finding insights that scientific method
couldn’t, here he claims that things are being actively being kept from sight,
implying malice on the part of the orthodoxy. Based on his low opinion of
positivism, it doesn’t seem like he thinks that the orthodoxy is actively
hiding a discovery so much as trying to stop people from learning previously
unknown things that can only be discovered through unmethodical means. This is
still a rather harsh claim.
Harsher still is an offhand
comment at the beginning of the text where he says, "the person who
interprets instead of accepting what is given and classifying it is marked with the yellow star of one
who squanders his intelligence in impotent speculation, reading things in which
there is nothing to interpret." (4, emphasis added). Adorno was a German
Jew who had to leave Germany during World War II, and who later wrote essays
about fascism. As such, I doubt that his decision to mention Nazi Germany’s
symbol for marking Jews was an accident. Tied to something as trivial as the
backlash against essays, it struck me as uncomfortably hyperbolic. But Adorno
also lived through the war and I didn’t, so at the same time I find it hard to
say that he doesn’t have a right. Regardless, his decision to draw this
parallel furthers the idea that the rejection of essays is the result of an
actively malicious opposition.
For Adorno, the essay is
not just a form of discourse but a moral imperative. It represents a sort of
intellectual freedom that opens new, valid avenues of discovery while
abandoning its pretenses of objectivity. Since he holds that the essay can
uncover what empiricism can’t, for him the rejection of the essay would also
mean a loss of knowledge. This is particularly interesting since he mentions the
increasing focus on scholarship as being “originary,” (3) and the notion
"the essay, which is always directed towards something already created,
does not present itself as creation," (17). The essay can be original
without necessarily being new, and it can present previously undiscovered
insights while also being derivative[LO1] .
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