More dialectical than the dialectic: Exemplarity in Theodor W. Adorno’s The Essay as Form

Introduction

How – by what means and in which form – should knowledge be (re)presented in the humanities and social sciences? By illustrative graphs and precise equations that warrant ‘objective’ reasoning? Or through anecdotal examples, surprising thought experiments, and concise metaphors that appeal to our intuition and challenge common sense? Is an argument better brought forth in the form of, say, a tightly logical tractate or through the vivid prose of a meandering essay?

These questions concern, on the one hand, the sometimes highly idiosyncratic style of academic thinking/writing and, on the other, the type of evidence under scrutiny. Thus, ‘it depends’, some might answer. But the larger problem of how close any scientific text is allowed to lean towards more ‘artistic’ formats, and how much it can draw on ‘figurative’ rhetoric means of argumentation to persuade us, demands a more systematic answer than ‘it depends’.

For me, the above questions arose ten years ago when I first started to study Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno’s perhaps most puzzling piece of academic writing: The Essay as Form, first published in 1958 as the introduction to his Notes to Literature (Adorno, 1991 [1958]). ¹ Even for those well acquainted with Critical Theory, this particular text can seem entirely unwilling to yield its particular meaning, since its deep structure often appears as highly enigmatic, making attempts to decipher the logic behind Adorno’s rapid reasoning fail with frustrating continuity. At some point in this author’s efforts, it all appeared like a more or less chaotic anthology of aphorisms, a bit like his opus magnum Minima Moralia, or an opaque monolith, impenetrable by hermeneutic wit. An educated guess here is that many of the Essay’s readers, who are not advanced literary experts or Critical Theorists themselves, share that same feeling of fascination and, simultaneously, bewilderment.

The present essay is a – renewed – attempt to come to grips with The Essay as Form. Naturally, it must build on previous work on the subject matter. Other commentators, however, have used their own strategies to decipher the Essay. Some related it to Adorno’s intellectual biography (Müller, 1997) or to the genre’s complicated history (Schärf, 1999: 257–8). Some tried to explain it through its opposition to systematic philosophy (Sonderegger, 2011) or its affiliation with the negative dialectic method (Varadharajan, 2007). And some others still have investigated it through the lens of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, particularly his philosophy of music (Pourciau, 2007).

While all these avenues are viable, I want to take a road less travelled and just look at the text’s internal mechanics. This will allow me to discern its deep structure without reducing it to a mere example (!) for something else – be that a principle, an idea, a term or whatever else – in Adorno’s thinking. Only in this way, I believe, can the argument presented here do justice to The Essay as Form and its particular type of (textual) reflexivity. To do so, I will proceed as follows:

First, the essay as a genre is discussed. Tapping into some aspects of its complicated history, most (literary) scholars now agree that the essay is difficult, if not impossible, to define in a more general, categorical manner. Most definitions are hardly more than a rather contingent enumeration of adjectives. Hence, my approach will be dimensional. I emphasize that the essay – as form – contains an epistemological dimension allowing it to negotiate the relation between the format of description and what is being described. Additionally, the genre lingers or oscillates between scientific and artistic modes and/or methods of representation. To understand its disciplinary hybridity in this regard is crucial in grasping the peculiar character of The Essay as Form.

Second, the present argument will use a prominent rhetorical trope to prepare for an interpretation of Adorno’s text’s inner mechanics: the exemplum. The reason for this approach might be explained best through a personal anecdote: After I gave up on understanding The Essay as Form, I got engaged with the rhetorical tradition at the University of Konstanz (Germany); contact with literary scholars and philosophers there inspired the realization that Adorno’s text can be scrutinized by using the lens of rhetoric. As both, an essay and a reflection on essayism as a genre, it aspires to be an example in and of itself. This paradox, I propose, gives us the beating heart of The Essay as Form. The argument here will be that the Essay, including the paradox that drives it, can be analysed best by looking at the history and epistemology of the example and exemplarity. Here we might find the right avenue for grasping Adorno’s normative programme of how to write essays that conform to the style and broader goals of Critical Theory. Additionally, if we can conceptualize the Essay’s particular reflexivity in terms of the exemplum and look at Adorno’s application of the example while methodologically using the trope ourselves, this might not only help to build an original as well as consistent account of The Essay as Form but also to arrive at findings about the genre more broadly.

Finally, equipped with combined accounts of the essay as genre and the exemplum-trope, an interpretation of the text in question will be presented. The main tool to reach and map the deep structure of the Essay is going to be Max Bense’s concept of ars combinatoria. Aimed at how the internal dynamics and textual mechanics work, three possible lines of interpretation or themes running through the Essay will emerge. The poetological theme (a) discusses what, in the Essay, an essay is, what it wants, does, how it works, and what the methodological idea behind all of that looks like. The critical/dialectical theme (b) is key to understanding the Essay and elaborates on the distinctions between subject and object, content and concept, what Adorno calls ‘force field’, and why the essay/Essay is ‘more dialectical than the dialectic’. The third and final theme will address the separation or epistemic segregation (c) between art and science. These readings will have two stages: first, smaller examples are collected to show the continuity of each theme, and then one or two larger examples are presented to point toward a particularly interesting moment of crystallization. The conclusion will come back to the questions asked in the beginning.

The essay as genre

‘We don’t know what an essay is.’ This recent statement from German literary scholar Georg Stanitzek (2011: 34) is, it would seem, overly pessimistic. But what appears as a bold assertion can actually draw on a long-standing history in the academic debate about what an essay is. In fact, for more than eight decades students of essayism have been taking, in one way or another, Stanitzek’s position (Hocke, 1938; Schuhmacher, 1957; Horst, 1962; Berger, 1964; Krywalski, 1974; Müller-Funk, 1995; Schärf, 1999; Pfammatter, 2002). Facing an uncontrollably large number of possibly ‘essential’ features (e.g. Martini, 1997: 408), they finally abandoned the attempt to come up with a definitional description of some proto-, ideal- or archetype. Instead, and that proved to be the much more viable road, scholars usually turn to individual essayists and/or individual essays. The present article will follow this lead.

And yet, trying to encounter Adorno’s The Essay as Form solely on its own terms can prove to be problematic. Without establishing at least some historical and systematic boundaries to guide our analytic attention, the interpretation risks becoming incomprehensibly fuzzy. For this reason, it is necessary to briefly sketch some of the dimensions that help us understand the essay not as a particular text but as a ‘fourth genre’ next to poetry, drama, and the epic (Cerny, 1971; Krywalski, 1974; Martini, 1997).

From a historical perspective, Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne established polar opposites in the tradition of non-fictional essay-writing back in the 16th century (for a recent comparison see Hahne, 2015: 49–67; more broadly Schärf, 1999). Bacon stands for the ‘scientific’ style that maintains a strong connection to ideals of objective reasoning. Being the founding father of empiricism, Bacon’s style tries to more or less eliminate the subjective factor; we rarely find the word ‘I’ in his essays. For example, in Of Truth he closely investigates the philosophical tradition – mostly, of the Greek Classics – with great aptitude and a succinctly tight, statesmanlike logic to make his moral point.

At the other end of the spectrum stands Montaigne, who served as a public official as well. His Essais are commonly associated not so much with the sharp analytical scrutiny of a single term or phenomenon; his investigations, like Of Experience or (my personal favorite) That to Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die, are filled with personal opinions, experiences, and anecdotes, sometimes even about his daily moods, habits or bodily fluids. Heavily influenced by the Stoics, some commentators claim that ‘Montaigne was the first thinker in the Western tradition to explore human subjectivity in a profound way’ (Kritzman, 2012: 1).

Since Bacon and Montaigne, who both mark extremes, it is possible to see the essay’s form as being configured within the array of science and art, like two ends of one spectrum. As a result, every individual essay is almost necessarily a hybrid that encompasses elements of both sides. Hence there are many varieties, degrees, and mixtures in combining artistic styles and scientific means.

One important consequence of the genre’s ever-changing constellation on this spectrum is that each individual essay must find its own way of negotiating the specific distance between its mode of representation and its subject matter. In other words, there can be a gulf between talking about grief as an object of interest in other people, their spontaneous reactions, emotional expressions, coping mechanisms, etc., and telling the story of how you lost friends to AIDS and extrapolating from that experience to establish a philosophical point about human life, as Judith Butler did in Precarious Life.

Put in narratological language, every essay has to find its own ‘focalization’. But how does it do that? To better understand this problem, Max Bense has suggested the term ars combinatoria (Bense, 1953: 34). It points to the literary techniques essayists use to energize their text’s ‘speculative dynamics’ (Weissenberger, 1985: 114), while doing justice to the need for being ‘guided by the subject matter itself’ (Bachmann, 1969: 12). These techniques, which can take the shape of ‘style’ or a particular constellation/use of rhetoric means, are much more than a matter of artistic or intellectual virtuosity; they exceed the status of pure ornament. As ‘techniques of coordination’ they do bear an epistemological weight, at least insofar as they aim for a sort of adequacy that is supposed to lead to a greater harmony between form and content. But even if we know that each essay’s ars combinatoria is meant to harmonize the mode of representation and the chosen subject matter, what is the proper way to study it, and thus find out how/whether it accomplishes the epistemological job? The proposition here is pretty straightforward: We must focus on – here, for reasons of brevity – one trope that is of first stylistic significance, easy to identify, and carrying some epistemological burden. There are not many but still a few possible candidates: One is metaphor, a powerful poetic device (e.g. Gibbs, 2008), and the other could be analogy, a potent logical contrivance (e.g. Itkonen, 2005). And although reference to these two will be inevitable, I turn to a third option, the exemplum. It is the most obvious pick, since The Essay as Form is an essay and – as the equivocal title already suggests, a reflection on the essay as such, i.e. its form – it is an example in and of itself.

Example and exemplarity

In Of Experience (Book III, Chapter 13), Montaigne proclaims:

[T]he multiplication of our inventions will never arrive at the variety of examples; add to these a hundred times as many more, it will still not happen that, of events to come, there shall one be found that, in this vast number of millions of events so chosen and recorded, shall so tally with any other one, and be so exactly coupled and matched with it that there will not remain some circumstance and diversity which will require a diverse judgment.

And yet, we might curiously ask:

If the judgment is conceived as the agency responsible for selecting the case, isn’t this very choice nothing more than a confirmation of the circumstantial nature of the case, the way the case in its irreducible singularity is made to fall into place as a prop for the law? (Gelley, 1995a: 11)

Arguing against Enlightenment and idealist philosophical systems, like that of Kant or Christian Wolf, the emphasis on singularity might underestimate the power of examples, namely to change, alter, or re-direct the abstract model they are supposed to illustrate. This potency is evinced most notably by the simple fact that one can always – try to – find counter-examples. If you spot a black swan, not all swans can be white. A basic tenet of Critical Rationalism (Popper, 2002 [1934]), the principle of falsification, depends on counter-examples as resources for scientific progress to move forward and objectivity to remain a horizon worth striving toward. These ideals might not match – or even inform – the daily conduct of actual scientists (Kuhn, 1970). But even if one or two aberrant observations might not, in the conduct of normal research, be able to refute or even nullify a long-standing theory, they can still raise important questions, challenge pre-established expectations or even lead to revisions of a previous interpretation (as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-paradox did in quantum mechanics).

Now let’s take this capability of (counter-)examples and unhinge it from the natural sciences’ theoretical discourse. Can you transpose it to better understand The Essay as Form’s ars combinatoria? Can we take this special feature of examples, which warrants much of their epistemological edge, and apply it to the ‘techniques of coordination’ to learn how the mode of representation is matched with the essay’s themes? I suggest that this is possible, and the next section is going to show how exactly.

But since ‘it is difficult to study the very tools one is using to carry forth the study’ (Lyons, 1989: 4), there is one more qualification to make before we can come to The Essay as Form directly. To explain it, I take a hint form the German philosopher Hans Lipps (1898–1942). In his remarks on the example, he said:

One can give numerous examples for something. […] They illustrate ‘concepts,’ but not for what one can find in the entourage of their determinants and characteristics. Examples for concepts point toward the regard under which something is to be inferred and discovered. (Lipps, 1977: 42ff.)

Three lines of interpretation

If you read Adorno’s The Essay as Form and look for examples to follow certain lines of interpretation, you will have a hard time. The reason for this quandary is surprisingly simple: there are none. Or, rather, they are everywhere. In other words, it is really hard to say what in the Essay might count as an example. And even if you think you have found one, you will be immediately confronted with the next difficult question: Of what, exactly, is this an example? Both these problems are serious and amount to either the impression that the Essay is not much more than a collection of semi-randomly configured aphorisms or that it is one solid block, a monolith to only be swallowed whole by its reader.

This impression, I suspect, is just what Adorno aimed for. It is part of the essay’s endeavour, its overall goal as he saw it. Or, in his own words: ‘The essay does not develop its ideas in accordance with discursive logic. It neither makes deductions from a principle nor draws conclusions from coherent individual observations.’ The reason, Adorno continues, is that the essay ‘coordinates elements instead of subordinating them’, and this coordination is ‘more dynamic than traditional thought by virtue of the tension between the presentation and the matter presented’ (p. 22). So if we intend to find out not only where examples are, but also under what ‘regard’ (Lipps) they turn into examples, we need to scrutinize the ars combinatoria of the Essay.

Despite the emphatic anti-hermeneutical attitude of the text itself – ‘nothing can be interpreted out of something that is not interpreted into it at the same time’ (p. 4) – an entry point has to be chosen. The one I selected here is a distinction between three different readings of the Essay. The first one is poetological (a); its purpose is to (un)cover questions of ‘essential’ features, form, and method of the Essay. I admit right away that this is the most intricate and thus most vulnerable of the interpretative suggestions made, since the text is so extremely self-conscious – ‘[it] must reflect on itself at every moment’ (p. 22) – that almost nothing can be spared from that very particular reflection. In fact, all the selected quotes can, in one way or another, be related to the poetological reading; it is the text’s true meta-narrative. Nevertheless, two other lines of interpretation or themes are identifiable. The second one can be dubbed critical or dialectical (b); it engages the ‘tension’ between subject and object, matter and mode of presentation, concept and content. In this vein, one can locate Adorno’s critique of academic philosophy (most notably, Heidegger’s; Pourciau, 2007: 629–30) and his own approach of emphasizing the non-subsumable negative, e.g. the qualia of subjective experience. The critique of positivism figures into this line of interpretation as well, but it also has ties to the next theme. The third line of interpretation can be called, faute de mieux, epistemic (c). It points to the segregation between the scientific method and art through the course of modernity, and the autonomy both realms have acquired since. Because the essay, as Section II already explained, maintains a rather uneasy or at least complicated relation to (natural) science and art, theme (c) is meant – by example, of course – to clarify Adorno’s position on their segregation.

The procedure to systematically develop these three interpretations operates in two phases. First, each theme will be underpinned with a variety of smaller/shorter quotes from The Essay as Form in order to show how it can be found all over the text. As a second step, two rather long passages are quoted that Adorno himself offers as examples. Except in Proust’s case in theme (c), one of them is going to be rather concrete, like an analogy or thought experiment, and the other more abstract, like an aphorism or philosopheme. Put together, they will elucidate each other and thus show how the essay coordinates its examples.

Such a double-phased strategy is necessary for various reasons: All three interpretations are possible and present throughout the whole text. They crystallize in some paragraphs but then submerge again in others, while, nonetheless, remaining latent all the time. According to the Essay itself, a ‘force field’ is established where all elements are explained only through one another. Additionally, it is obvious that the interpretations themselves are not airtight, logical deductions, but must rely on an inductive reasoning; they are experimentally fragile and always remain open to objection any time another example could be selected. Hence, the method of deciphering the essay somewhat resembles the very same logic that Adorno prescribes for its construction.

(a) Poetological. Not only is the number of qualifications of what the essay ‘is’ nearly ridiculous. Even worse, we are confronted with a massive number of paradoxes: The essay ‘is radical in its non-radicalism’ (p. 9); it ‘does not try to seek the eternal in the transient and distil it out; it tries to render the transient eternal’ (p. 11); it is ‘methodically unmethodical’ (p. 13) and ‘maintains the attitude of someone who is beginning to study philosophy and somehow who already has its idea in his mind’ (p. 14; my emphasis); it is ‘both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like’ (p. 17); being ‘more dialectical than the dialectic’ (p. 19), the essay’s ‘truth gains its force from its untruth’ (p. 20). And finally, you might feel that Adorno is taking you for a ride when he states: ‘No mere contradictions may remain unless they are established as belonging to the object itself’ (p. 22).

How are we to make sense of these oxymoronic propositions? It is obvious that, since they appear in a cluster, these contradictory statements bear systematic value – however ‘anti-systematic’ (p. 12) the impulse may be. On one level is has to do with Adorno’s belief that (scientific) objects can never be fully captured by the theories made up to apprehend, comprehend, and finally represent them in order to dominate them. Thus, the sensitive move by the Critical Theorist is to leave the object’s internal contradictions where they are and in this way let its autonomy, its singularity, and possibly its dignity, stay intact. The essay/Essay tries to reflect its object ‘without violence’ (p. 21). But we shall come back to this issue during the next line of interpretation.

For the essay as form, on the other hand, the definitional contradictions make it ‘a tool for the critique of ideology […], because it includes its own negation that does not conform to rigid, hierarchical ideological schemes’ (Müller, 1997: 7). Were the essay to eschew contradictions, this might render it susceptible to the already compromised logic of positivism which so diligently acquiesces to tertium non datur. And yet, the essay/Essay works with concepts – even if it does not use them as philosophical and/or scientific reason prescribes. Here is the perhaps best example for how exactly concepts are employed by the essay, as Adorno imagines it:

The way the essay appropriates concepts can best be compared to the behaviour of someone in a foreign country who is forced to speak its language instead of piecing it together out of its elements according to rules learned in a school. Such a person will read without a dictionary. If he sees the same word thirty times in continually changing contexts, he will have ascertained its meaning better than if he had looked up all the meanings listed, which are usually too narrow in relation to the changes that occur with changing contexts and too vague in relation to the unmistakable nuances that the context gives rise to in every individual case. (p. 13)

The metaphor of the force field helps to make sense of how the ars combinatoria works, especially when it comes to examples. All more elaborate example given in the text must be seen in ‘cross-connection’ (p. 22) to a number of others such examples. Only together do they start to uncover the ‘irritating and dangerous aspects of the things that live in the concepts’ (p. 12). Against this backdrop, it appears fruitful to use the proposed two-phase procedure in assembling examples, because they are ‘interwoven like in a carpet’ (p. 13). Each theme is now decipherable with regards to the examples, like Lipps put it, as the specific ‘regard under which something is to be inferred [or abducted] and discovered’.

(b) Critical/Dialectical. That the identified themes want to establish a ‘parallelogram of forces’ which orders the elements in the Essay, and thus turns them into examples for examples, equals a reverse-engineering of what the Essay is trying to achieve for itself. However, there is a great vulnerability in both our accounts. And since the essay/Essay is ‘dealing with objects that would be considered derivative, without itself pursuing their ultimate derivation’ (p. 11), we are at risk of ending up highly unsatisfied. Yet, this danger of analytical dissatisfaction, restless striving for ever more clarification and an increasingly strong impression of arbitrariness might just come with the territory: ‘The objective wealth of meanings encapsulated in every intellectual phenomenon demands of the recipient the same spontaneity of subjective phantasy that is castigated in the name of objective discipline’ (p. 4). Perhaps that is why the essay ‘draws its fullest conclusions from the critique of system’ (p. 9) and is the ‘critical form par excellence’ (p. 18). Or, as Adorno says almost at the end of his text: The essay/Essay’s ‘innermost formal law is heresy’ (p. 23).

Still, how the essay, in Adorno’s ‘heretical’ vision, can be critical by challening the way science and philosophy usually think, must reside in the peculiar relationship between concept and content, subject matter and method of (re)presentation. We have already seen some of the inner workings of their constellation in the poetological theme. Now we must expand further to the particular fashion in which the Adornian essay ventures out to capture and thus preserve its object’s characteristic autonomy – without destroying its charms by a philosophical machinery that tears off and grinds up the petals of a rose to find out why it smells so pretty.

As noted above, the essay/Essay refrains from using a dictionary to understand a foreign language, i.e. it employs concepts in an unorthodox way: it does not previously define each and every one, like a diligent scientist or analytic philosopher would, but ‘constructs a complex of concepts interconnected in the same way it imagines them to be interconnected in the object’ (p. 23). Or, as one commentator put it, the ‘interweaving of concepts is itself only the subjective arrangement of an antagonistic and heteronomous totality that eludes discursive logic and presents itself as immanent’ (Varadharajan, 2007: 328). What drives the dialectic motion of the essay, which is said to be ‘more dialectical than the dialectic’ (p. 19), can thus be seen as the attempt ‘to cause the totality to be illuminated in a partial feature […] without asserting the presence of totality’ (p. 16), as, for instance, an usually invisible part of a cathedral will exhibit the same accomplished craftsmanship by which the front portal is done.

The reason why only a ‘force field’ of concepts can invoke such totality is that every ‘subject matter is always a conflict brought to a standstill’ (p. 16). The essay/Essay is so challenging because it ‘requires that one’s thought about the matter be from the outset as complex as the object itself’ (p. 13). Only then can ‘the theory and experience that have migrated into the object’ (p. 17) be grasped successfully. One example Adorno offers to understand how this can possibly work is the beginner’s mind of a philosophy student, who ‘somehow already has its [i.e. philosophy’s] idea in his mind’:

He will hardly begin by reading the most simple-minded writers, whose common sense for the most part simply babbles on past the points where one should linger; instead, he reaches for those who are allegedly the most difficult and who then cast their light backwards onto the simple things and illuminate them as an ‘attitude of thought toward objectivity.’ The naiveté of the student who finds difficult and formidable things [just] good enough for him, has more wisdom in it than a grown-up pedantry that shakes its finger at thought, admonishing that it should understand the simple things first before it tackles the complex ones, which, however, are the only ones that tempt it. Postponing knowledge in this way only obstructs it. (pp. 14–15)

(c) Epistemic. We have now reached the peak of the argument. Yet, one thing remains to be retrieved: the essay/Essay’s relation to the art-science dichotomy (Section II). Now, however, we are in a much better position to measure what, for Adorno, is at stake when he problematizes the essay’s location in regard to art and science as they have been irrevocably severed – or segregated – during the course of modernity. This topic, of course, is at the very core of much of social science research today and therefore entirely beyond the scope of the present essay. Hence, I will confine my remarks to Adorno’s statements in The Essay as Form. However risky this strategy might seem, the Essay in fact crystallizes many of Adorno’s general views on the issue; it operates, so to speak, like a kaleidoscope displaying the myriad of ramifications of modernization as a forceful cultural movement.

The beginning of the present argument (Section II) pointed out that every essay, since Bacon and Montaigne (who are both extensively referenced in the Essay), is a sort of hybrid. Neither fish nor fowl, this highly ambiguous character has provoked, as Adorno explains right from the start, a certain ‘resistance’ (p. 3) from (German) scholars against (essayist) hybridity. Their worldview renders art ‘a preserve for irrationality’ while ‘equating knowledge with organized science’, thus ‘excluding anything that does not fit that antithesis as impure’ (p. 3). Herein lies the very root of the connection between the essay/Essay’s poetological shape and its critical impetus: modernity’s intellectual habitus makes one follow the other. And ‘although it is distinguished from art by its medium, concepts, and its claim to truth devoid of aesthetic semblance’, ‘the essay has something from aesthetic autonomy that is [thus] easily accused’ (p. 4). This ‘something’ consists not only in the freedom of choice in selecting a – really, any – phenomenon or artefact as a matter of interest. More importantly, this ‘something’ consists in the essay’s central concern with and concentration on the mode of (re)presentation. As we have seen above, the ‘mode of presentation’ – including its ars combinatoria – is the main device to ‘salvage, or perhaps restore’ (p. 8) ² something like personal experience, i.e. (a) particular totality. But although ‘with the objectification of the world in the course of progressive demythologization, art and science have been separated’ (p. 6), ‘the opposition between them should not be hypostasized’ (p. 7). In fact, ‘art has always been so intertwined with the dominant tendencies of the enlightenment that it has made use of scientific and scholarly findings in its technique at least since antiquity’ (p. 7).

Alas, as the last quotation example made clear, even if the essay/Essay borrows certain elements from art, art has borrowed many findings from science. (And that also holds true for techniques: footnotes, for instance.) So what, again, makes academics this furious about the essay? Why are they not much more common, or at least much more esteemed, in professional academic publishing? Hasn’t Clifford Geertz (2000 [1973]: 25) himself proclaimed that ‘the essay, whether of thirty or three hundred pages, has seemed the natural genre in which to present cultural interpretations and the theories sustaining them’? Admittedly, Geertz does not belong to the typical bunch of ‘Adorno’s positivist antagonists, for whom equivocation and ambiguity represent roadblocks thrown irresponsibly across the highway of scientific truth’ (Pourciau, 2007: 628). Those ‘positivist’ scholars have cultivated an ‘instinct of scientific purism’ to which ‘every expressive impulse in the presentation jeopardizes an objectivity that supposedly leaps forth when the subject has been removed’ (p. 5). The aversion to the essay, Adorno contends, is ‘an allergy to form’ (p. 5). Less dependency on form, so the – alleged – argument goes, equals more authenticity for the object.

But how, then, are we supposed to imagine an aesthetical truth claim? What is an example, if not for the essay/Essay in particular, then at least for the more general (ideal-)type of artistic knowledge that Adorno has in mind? To give the answer to this question, not two but one single quote – a long one though – will suffice. It concerns one of Adorno’s favourite novelists, Marcel Proust:

The work of Marcel Proust, which is no more lacking in a scientific-positivist element than Bergson’s, is an attempt to express necessary and compelling insights into human beings and social relations that are not readily accommodated within science and scholarship, despite the fact that their claim to objectivity is neither diminished nor abandoned to a vague possibility. The measure of such objectivity is not the verification of assertions through repeated testing but rather individual human experience, maintained through hope and disillusionment. Such experience throws its observations into a relief through confirmation or refutation in the process of recollection. But its individuality synthesized unity, in which the whole nevertheless appears, cannot be distributed and re-categorized under the separate persons and apparatuses of psychology and sociology. Under the pressure of the scientific spirit and its desiderata, which are ubiquitous, in latent form, even in the artist, Proust tried, through a technique itself modelled on the sciences, a kind of experimental method, to salvage, or perhaps restore, what used to be thought of […] as the knowledge of a man of experience like the now extinct homme de lettres, whom Proust conjures up as the highest form of the dilettante. (p. 8; emphasis in original)

Only in this way, which tries to square the circle, can the essay/Essay remain competitive compared to science and art; only in this way can it be persuasive. Herein lies the reason, as Sarah Pourciau (2007: 634) has emphasized, why ‘Adorno plays with a philosophical and theological tradition that sees in rhetoric a morally slippery set of seductive techniques’. The rhetoric tradition is, nonetheless, essential for the essayistic project, ‘whose task is to persuade’ (2007: 635) not by scholastic logic or positivist reason or artistic self-absorption. Instead, the essay/Essay can only manage to persuade by being ‘more dialectical than the dialectic’, radically self-referential, ruthlessly general in speculation, and hopelessly smitten with its subject matter all at once.

Conclusion

Let us return, finally, to the questions that motivated the ambition to understand Adorno’s Essay: What are the suitable forms and proper means in which knowledge in the social sciences and humanities should be (re)presented? Equation or thought experiment, deduction or anecdote, graph or metaphor? Unfortunately, with the (positivist) trend towards quantification (Nelson Espeland and Stevens, 2008) and neoliberalism’s onslaught on academic culture in Europe and beyond (Berg et al., 2016), the answer is quite clear. Equation, deduction, and graph dominate the scene, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, perphaps forever. Regarding the essay, Adorno, even after more than 50 years after his text’s original publication, was right once again: ‘The time is less favourable to it than ever’ (p. 22).

And yet, The Essay as Form remains an example for how to challenge these major (‘positivist’) trends of knowledge production. Both Essay and essay endure as persuasive pathways to intellectual resistance. As such, The Essay as Form in particular can prove to be useful in at least three ways: First, it encapsulates the premises and prospects of critical thinking and writing as only a few other (so short) texts do. Its truth claims are not clear, testable statements, taking the form of some hypothesis. Instead, dynamic ‘force fields’ produce textual constellations that itemize objects on their own, constantly contested terms. Second, The Essay as Form is an example that other essays might follow. In the Notes to Literature it has the pole positon precisely because it formulates a programme for how the other essays in that volume are to be understood, why they are written in this fashion. Future research might answer the question: do they follow the lead or do they deviate, and if yes, for what reason? And finally, The Essay as Form can serve as an example for other writers as well. If nobody truly knows what an essay (essentially) is, at least here you can find proper hints and even directions, on how to build/write one. And since one does not have to be a professional philosopher (perhaps not even an academic) to think dialectically, The Essay as Form could possibly help to create knowledge that doesn’t submit to the identity-principle – that is, if the Essay’s exemplarity is grasped properly.

However, in today’s literary and academic culture, the essay as form and the essay as genre will continue to fight an uphill battle; they will continue to be ‘untimely’ – ‘that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come’ (Nietzsche, 1997 [1887]: 59).