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Marko Juvan
The Essay and Interdiscursivity: Knowledge between Singularity and sensus communis
The production and renewal of knowledge is becoming increasingly organized and systematized into disciplines, especially in the post-Enlightenment modernity; however, as in their essays on essayLukács and Adorno point out, at least since the disintegration of the ancient myth in European societies there has also been preserved a need, however marginal, for discourses that bridge the gap between established types of cultural practices. Such discourses are, as may be inferred from Lukács and Adorno, embodied and intensified in the essay, with its generic indeterminacy and hybridizing the aesthetic, connotative fictionality with conceptual explanations of reality.These non-disciplinary languages traverse the boundaries between the conventional kinds of cultural practices and neglect the disciplinary division of the institutionalized knowledge competences and regulations. Distinguishing themselves through inter-connections and inter-illumination of knowledge from various disciplines,transversal discourses highlight that which the established learning left unsaid and test “specialized” generalizations in the complex and heteroglot “totality” of life experience.The oldest among the transversal discourses is poetic literature.According to Johansen, literature for millennia serves the need of imaging possible worlds, constituted through mimetic transpositions of other social discourses, in which general and disciplinaryknowledge is tested onsingular exemplary cases, such as fictional characters and stories. In the modern era, in which the novel condensed literature’s mimetic interdiscursivity, literaturehas been joined by another transversal discourse – that of the mass media, from the printed book, through the eighteenth-century moral journals to the present newspapers and magazines. Literature and periodicals have confronted specialized knowledge systems and their self-regulation each in their own waythrough open, complex, and contingent semiosis of experience. Literature produces its proper kind of knowledge and renews it in the manner of singularity. According to Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature and Clark’s The Poetics of Singularity, in literature an event of unique existential focalization is textually realized through poetic syntax; that is, through unrepeatable and largely self-referential configuration of information that cannot be exhaustively translated into any existing signifying system (philosophy, science, history, religion, politics, etc.). On the other hand, the print media are tending to a level of translatability, generality, and doxa such as are established by a predictable public opinion through generally accessible language.
It may seem odd that so different types of transversal knowledge – literary and media – have something in common. They are connected by a sensus communis in the logical and rhetorical sense of ‘generally known,’‘common sense,’‘that which is known or can be understood or experienced by everyone,’ and also in Kant’s sense of a “communal sense” (Gemeinsinn) as a necessary prerequisite for aesthetic judgment, for the judgment of taste. The etymology of the French word essai, which gave the title to Montaigne’s texts of 1580–88, includes the well-known meaning ‘experiment, test’, which declaresa provisional, empirical and experimental, skeptical, critical, and individual (singular) relationship to traditional knowledge accumulated in authoritative books. However, the word also includes the sense ‘tasting’, which directs the essay into the semantic field of taste, and with this also evokes the sensory cognition implied in the concepts of the aesthetic and literature.
According to Foucault’s The Order of Things, the early essay (a typically modern genre founded on humanistic, post-Renaissance individualism) would embody the shift from the medieval commenting respectfor traditional knowledge to the empirical and critical relationship to the authority of bookish learning from which modern science developed on the basis of the Cartesian notion of method. According to Graham Good, Montaigne’s and Bacon’s essay did not join the systematic, disciplinary self-regulation and progressism of science, but persisted in the singularity of literary works (The Observing Self), which in contrast to science did not falsify or reduce the truth claims of their precursors. The essay interdiscursively confronted personal experience, invented in the Renaissance, with various areas of discussion, and in the process of writing it shaped its fragmentary, perspectivized, provisionary, and aesthetic truth. Until recently, the notions of the essay as the space for a free, critical, personalized, fluid, and existentially experienced knowledge have prevailed, probably because of Adorno’s influential modernist disdain for the popular and the average. However, regardless of what we know about the literary singularity of the essay, one cannot overlook its reliance on the sensus communis.
The very beginnings of the genre in Montaigne and Bacon are marked by it. The essay actually developed from intertextual connection to the loci communes, from commentary on and use of ancient topics, including thesauri of exempla and sentetiae,such as Erasmus’ Adagia. Notwithstanding its laity and privacy, Bacon’s essays often come close to the didactic tone and composition of sermons (e.g., by the Slovenian Baroque orator Svetokriški), since both of them handle moral topics by the extensive intertextual use of loci communes.Further, Kant’s sensus communisin the sense of Gemeinsinn is represented in the aesthetic relationship to knowledge: as a “semi-literary” genre, akin to autobiography and self-portrait, the essay moves between the “quasi-judgments” of literature (these serve the “disinterested” comprehension of the portrait of a fictitious person or an implied author) and the verifiable judgments of nonfiction discourse in philosophy, literary and art criticism, journalism or science. The essay interdiscursively absorbs the well-defined and clearly delimited concepts of other disciplines and melds them into a promiscuous linguistic valence of the poetic word, the signifier. Being freed from terminological definition, the essayist word connotatively ramifies its meanings into variegated cognitive nets, what gives the singular impression of complex, mental and sensory life experience. I am taking an example from Adorno’s essay on the essay, which, using singular, poeticized wording, transposes into a fictional life situation precisely Adorno’s own theoretical notion about the difference between the disciplinary concepts and their transversal being “already implicitly concretized through the language in which they stand” (12):
“The way the essay appropriates concepts can best be compared to the behavior 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 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 […]” (13)
The knowledge that the essay presentsthus acquires an ambiguous status: its propositions cannot be abstracted from the subject of enunciation and verified extratextually, because they are captured in the modality, through which the perspective of a personal presence – that of the implied author – is revealed in aesthetic experience. However, the criterion of the truth of the aesthetically conveyed testimony is no longer its agreement with the facts established through disciplinary methods, but the authenticity or singularity of the existence portrayed by writing. In his preface to the reader, Montaigne wrote about his essayist approach to knowledge and truth:
“I desire therein to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and ordinary manner, without study and artifice: for it is myself I paint. […] Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book […]”
Finally, the sensus communis in the essay also appears in the sense of ‘common sense’, ‘general knowledge’, and ‘that which is generally understood or comprehensible.’ Essayists have often tackled topics pertaining to general life and experientially accessible to everyone. Montaigne, for example, dealt not only with subject matter belonging to erudite culture, but also with themes of sorrow, idleness, lies, fear, the education of children, while Bacon wrote about death, envy, love, travels, health, and gardens. Such issues were discussed with the help of interdiscursive links to authorities from a range of disciplines (history, poetry, Scriptures, philosophy, etc.) and illustrated by examples taken from personal observation. The essayist’s autonomous reasoning that connectslearned and experiential sources of argument, however, cannot be purely singular; aiming at the understanding and engaging of the “general reader,” the genre of essay has to pay regard to sensus communis and loci communes. For example, stating the self-evident truth that menare afraid of death, Bacon uses a comparison with an equally well-known observation about children’s fear of darkness; in his comparison of revengers with witches, Bacon is adopting a stereotype image of their evil and punishment; he also evokes a “generally known” fact that nobility is envious of parvenus. Using vernacular ever since its inception, the genre of essay has not been immune to stereotypes, prejudices, and common reasoning that have been circulating in common language.Moreover,stereotypes establish the very subject of experience, inasmuch as it is spontaneous and “pre-scientific.” Sensus communis is thus a necessary condition for the essay’s singularity.One of the possible reasons is that, since the eighteenth century, the essay has become established in newspapers, where it is sometimes identified with journalistic genres (e.g., the feature column or feuilleton) and has become also vulnerable to the ideologies and clichéd representations reproduced in them.
The essay’s tension between the singularity of literarized existence and the ideologized knowledge of the (media) sensus communiscan also be shown in contemporary Slovenian texts of this genre. In conclusion, I briefly discuss the examples of Marjan Rožanc and Drago Jančar.The award for the best Slovenian essay is rightly named after Marjan Rožanc (1930–1990). To my view, Rožanc stands outfrom Slovenian essayists with his modernization of Montaignian textual subject– intellectual quest that cannot become reconciled with any apparently definite truth; conflict provoking thinking that grounds the fragmentariness, temporarinessand contradictoriness of knowledge in the equally shaped speaking subject and its bio-political condition; all this cannot but result in a self-critical, sincere, and modest attitude.Transferring knowledge from a range of fields (sports, history, literary history, philosophy, theology, politics, etc.), Rožanc’s essaystransversally intertwine them, either by digressive evocations, typical of the genre’s “anarchic” composition, or in more elaborated and methodical form that comes close to a scholarly treatise. Following Montaignian example, Rožanc self-reflectively limits his knowledge to the condition of his singular, provisional, and elusive experience. In his essays, streams of transversal intellectual reflection informed by philosophy, theology, history, and other disciplines are set into a discontinuous autobiographical narrative about the identity search. The reflection is caught into the unique, irreplaceable, limited body of the essayist and exposed to textual profanization similar to that of the aging Montaigne. Rožanc’s thinking body is imperfect, at times excessive, sexualized, and transgressive, at times sick, suffering, even dying. However, in his singular configuring of meaning, Rožanc, too, is in need of sensus communis. He bases his insights into the existential, metaphysical and social conditions of the modern individual on commonly known representations (also circulated through media), such as basketball or football. He even builds his singular reasoning on deploying widely accepted stereotypes, for example the “national myth” of the Planica ski jump. Further, his fragmented narration of personal identity troubles in terms of metaphysical crisis of modern individualism – represented through interdiscursive borrowings from lives and works of Kierkegaard, Unamuno, Camus, Teilhard de Chardin, Kocbek, and others – is unconsciously organized according to a stereotyped matrix characteristic of the moral and political discourse of the Slovenian Catholicism. Its structure consists of disjunctive equations “God = the meaning of life / no God = absence of meaning” that associate post-Enlightenment liberal humanism with nihilism; within this stereotype, the possibility of the existential meaning outside any theistic transcendence is a priori denied. However, this stamp of religious sensus communis is set forth in a singular, heretical direction: radicalizing the religious prototype of incarnation, Rožanc hybridizes Christian existentialism and Teilhard de Chardin’s teachings of the “noosphere” with the immanence of the vulnerable body, sexuality, and contingencies of living.
Finally, I hasten to add Jančar’s case. Drago Jančar (1948) is among the most award-winning and translated contemporary Slovenian writers;he was three times awarded the Rožanc prize for his essays. During the period of the disintegration of Yugoslav communism and the first years of transition, Jančar’s public position of critical, dissident intellectual impacted on the perception of his essays: they figured as a daring, personally exposed, erudite, polemical, engaged, and literary inventive reflection on the issues of public concern, such as the historical destiny and perspectives of the Slovenian nation, its repositioning in the European context, the need for freedom and other human rights. However, once Jančar’s fictional and non-fictional writingat the turn of the millennium slowly began to be publicly associated with so-called rightist political option, probably because of his increased presence in newspaper and media, ideologically non-sympathetic readings of his essays recently revealed, under the rich layers of literary singularity, many loci communes, striking stereotypes, or prejudices characteristic of anti-leftist and anti-liberal political discourses. The above mentioned change of attitude towards the singular and commonsense “truths” presented in Jančar’s cultural and political essays, published in daily newspapers and printed collections, remains rather marginal on the Slovenian literary scene. But it is not unique. It fits to a larger pattern of shifts that affected the writers’ word in post-communist societies: the word of writers has lost its air of the only possible alternative to the ruling ideology and ceased to figure as the revelation of the authentic truth beyond ideology; it has converted to a word situated among the other words that are also thrown into a plural ideological sphere and its conflicting sensus communes.