An/essay: of the Possibility and Impossibility of Essays

The possibility with which this essay is concerned is the impossibility of essays. If it were the case that essays are not possible, it could still be possible to write as if it were possible to write essays, only the genre or the writing itself would have become ironic. But I[1] am concerned with the decidedly unironic possibility that anyone presuming to write an essay naively assumes a task that has become impossible (perhaps only relatively recently). Traditionally speaking, an essay is a form of writing in which an author[2] expresses and explains an idea, a position, or a point of view, by means of a wide array of devices – extended metaphor, analogy, argument, satire, irony, anecdote, etc. Even when writing ironically, the traditional form of an essay presumes an author’s unironic attitude toward the author’s point[3]; that is, an essay is a form of writing in which the author means to state or at least imply what is stated or implied in the essay. It is the most subjective form of writing, or would be, if it were still possible.

If it were possible to speak of the conditions of possibility of essays, the unmistakable implication of this would-be advent, the advent of the impossibility of essays, would be the failure of one or another or all of those conditions of possibility to obtain.[4] This is not to say that there would be a crisis of subjectivity, of authorship, of writing, of the form of the essay, or of “having a point.” The notion of crisis extends only to the tension or inner conflict of an eidos, or else to the paradox of essence and existence.[5] But the failure of the conditions of possibility of essays would not be reducible to an essential or existential crisis; on the contrary, a crisis is precisely the kind of thing essays might resolve. If essays are no longer possible, this is a measure of the impossibility of any crisis as well.[6] It follows that no one having a crisis is incapable of writing an essay. But it also follows that only a possible essay could resolve a crisis. If essays are impossible, and yet crises remain, this is not the author’s problem.

Since it would be impossible for any impossible essay to resolve a crisis, the impossible essay would not “have a point” in the senses of establishing a position or advocating a policy; any conclusion it might argue would be a conclusion that would be safe to discount or ignore even as it is drawn from its premises.[7] Furthermore, lacking the possibility of “having a point,” the impossible essay could not be written either ironically or unironically. Not unironically, since there would be no genuinely taken position, no conclusion drawn that would be meant. Not ironically, since there could not be – perhaps slyly suggested by means of flourishes, “effects” of writing, legerdemain, or affectations of genuineness – an underlying “true meaning.” The strategic deployment of interlaced, interwoven, intertexted layerings of the essay, or any essay, which have always intended their own Aufhebung in the synthesis of the “point,” the “matter,” the “topic” of the essay, would in the failure of these “purposes” or “uses” of the essay, its set of concerns, simply disperse from the scene.[8]

The set of concerns which have often formed the background context of essays includes history and biography, suggesting that the essay was meant to express a particularity of meaning, erupting from its time, place, and authorial origin. Not that these contextual elements were expressible in the essay itself, nor that, if the essay concerned precisely these contextual elements, it could ever have given expression to the context in its fulness. There wouldn’t be enough space. Is this the seed of the ultimate failure of all essays?

For instance, consider the rhetorical question.[9] A doomed expression from the first. There is no greater example of the attempt to write from a particular standpoint, requiring an expertise of knowledge in the contextual background of the essay the same as or equivalent to the author’s, yet assuming that out of this standpoint, shared in common, as precisely the same, the context of this essay, an impossible superiority of knowledge or insight into the situation enables the author to exceed the exhausted potential of the context, either trading it in or trading upon it in an act of exchange that is in principle unrecoverable by the reader. In that case, no essay ever written can ever be read comprehendingly or comprehensively. Every essay ever written violates its own language of origin, translates the untranslatable futurity of that language itself, the very one in which it is written, but in which it could never yet be written.[10] Fuck![11]

This impossible multitextuality is at the heart of every essay. Nothing without such a multitextuality is an essay. And the essay without such a multitextuality is impossible.

It is obvious that without an essay there is no author, and without an author no subject of the act of writing. But the obviousness of this claim obscures its obscurity, or at least its strangeness. Rereading this same sentence: wherever there is no essay there is no authorial subject – No authorial subject can not write an essay, or to fail to write an essay.[12] From this it becomes clear that the impossibility of unironic or ironic writing is no mere failure of the one who writes but is a failure of the writer to write. (Not that it is easy not to write an essay. In fact it is easier by far to write an essay than not to write it, especially for authors, which explains Woody Allen, Steve Allen, Barbara Allen, Alan King, Stephen King, Billie Jean King and Don King, perhaps, but not Don Ho, who hasn’t written an essay, not that it was easy for him.) This “failure to write” is precisely what is at issue in the impossibility of essays.

III

What are the conditions of possibility of failing to write? Not, surely, that one has neglected to bring a pen, since almost anyone is likely to lend one. In any case, this reduces the possibility of failing to write to the possibility of failing “to write,” failing to engage in the “physical act”of writing. Failing[13] to write[14] is failing[15] to inscribe[16] into experience[17] any signifying[18] chain[19] of[20] any sort[21], from the subjective-authorial stamp[22] to a deployment[23] of a strategy of meaning-giving[24], in short, failing to experience at all.[25] Once again, obscure in its obviousness: failing to write is failing to experience. Not that “experience” has failed, nor that the “one who writes” has failed “to experience,” but that a structure, a way of life, has ended.[26] (Which explains George W. Bush, Busch Gardens, Anheuser Busch, St. Louis, Missouri, Dick Gephardt, Dick Armey and Dick Morris, but not Tricky Dick, who has not only reached the end of life, but also does not claim otherwise.)

If an essay is a form of writing exemplifying all these strategies, “having a point” and expressing a point of view derived from experiences that might be expressed anecdotally as the “things that happened” to an authorial subject who would have a “sense of humor,” or a “genuineness” or a cognizance of what has happened, then it is clear that it is impossible that an essay can any longer be written. Not that no one tries to write essays, nor that it is easy to avoid writing essays. On the contrary: everyone tries to write essays, but all of them are impossible.

Clearly this does not go far enough. The suggestion is that at a certain point it became impossible to write essays, or only possible to write impossible essays. Having clarified what it would mean for essays to be impossible in this double sense, still there is a radically empirical question left to us, namely, are all essays impossible? It is a peculiar fact that there is no way to answer this question empirically, or that any empirical answer would only beg the question. The empirical mark of the impossibility of essays would appear to be the disappearance of essays. But as we have already seen, essays do not disappear on condition that they are impossible, but in fact appear all the more. Supposing that some finite set of essays is a set of impossible essays, we find another empirical question: what is the difference between impossible and possible essays? This question can take numerous forms: When did essays become impossible? Did some historical contingency cause essays to become impossible? Are certain cultural features responsible for the possibility or impossibility of essays? In any case, all of these are spurious questions, for they all presuppose that there ever were possible essays, which is far from evident. The questions only seek to express a consternation, a conviction, or a suspicion; a horror, a disgust, a joy, or a mere marking of the fact that essays are (now, whether or not they had ever been otherwise) impossible.

Could some calamity have befallen essays? Would this calamity have also befallen (necessarily or not) subjects, experience, a culture? What could it have been? Surely not the physical destruction of the documents themselves, for these themselves are not essays but only the carcasses of essays. Then what?

If something has happened to essays, it would have to be the case that this something has always already happened. The mere carcasses of essays are irrelevant to consideration of this point. As for the form of writing, the act of writing, the essay would always have been possible or impossible in exactly the same ways: that the writing of an essay could never be performed, or that the reading of an essay could never be achieved (and here, that one has lost one’s reading glasses could hardly be understood as an impossibility, let alone one that is eminently possible). Even if essays were possible, of what sort of calamity would they be susceptible? One can imagine here various scenarios, but aside from the utter destruction of the universe, it is impossible to imagine what would be sufficient to effect an alteration of essays themselves, as long as there were authors and readers of essays.

To write an essay, it is necessary to begin, within a language one writes already, to set down, “developing” or “expressing” ideas in words. Those words are not the ideas, nor are the ideas to be found in the words – that would reduce the whole business to an outrageous absurdity, like a Dada poem or automatic writing. Neither the ideas, nor the words, nor the author is in command of the essay, and we cannot say that the essay is in command because we are unsure that there is an essay, and in fact, just starting out, obviously there isn’t one yet. How can words develop or express ideas, except by mistaking ideas for words, or words for ideas? Words can only develop or express words, which means that, however closely or distantly any idea may be said to be approximated by words, no idea is expressed in words. In the use of words, then, essays necessarily fail to express ideas.

Then perhaps the expression of ideas by essays takes place in the interstices between words, and perhaps one must “read between the lines,” so to speak, in order to understand the essay as an expression of ideas? E. B. White might be happy with the notion that the best essays have the fewest words, but he would be wrong: the best essays contain no words at all, just interstices. This idea is further shown to be absurd if one considers how it would be to write a two-thousand word essay that contained only two words and several blank pages full of ideas. The exchange rate of words is much higher than the exchange rate of ideas, after all, and this nearly perfect essay would never be published by The New York Review of Books.[27]

To read an essay, it is necessary to begin, on the basis of a language one reads already, to take up words on the basis of which ideas would come to mind. Yet far from a guarantee that ideas can be brought to mind with words, the situation we find is that no words express ideas, that no ideas come to mind from words. One may obviously read the words, but not the essay, which after all is not written in the words but where there are no words.

One must “read between the lines,” that is, one must read, on the basis of a language, non-language, non-words, spaces. Yet where there are no words, there are no words to read. So “reading between the lines” really means: not reading.[28]

Let us begin again, under the provisional assumption that essays are possible, to determine the conditions of possibility of essays in general. First of all, essays must be written by an author in a language. However, second, they must not contain words, or if they do contain words, they must not contain very many. The reason for this is that, given our definition of an essay as a form of writing which expresses or develops an author’s “point,” words, which cannot express or develop any point, are diversions, intrusions, interruptions, or obstacles. Third, if an essay is to be understood by a reader, the reader must not read the words in the essay, but only the spaces between the words, which is to say, more directly: if an essay is to be understood by a reader, the reader must not read it. Fourth, the reader reading the essay must read it in a language, the same language as the language of the writing of the essay by the author. But, since understanding and thus reading the essay is only possible if the reader does not read it, the reader must not read the essay in that same language.

The converse of these conditions condition the impossibility of essays, to wit: (1) essays must not be written by an author in a language; (2) the essay, in order to fail to express a “point,” which the author in any case does not have to make, must contain as many words as possible; (3) a reader must read every word in the essay, but without reading the spaces between the words, which is to say, more directly: readersmustreadasifessayswerewrittenthus; (4) the reader must not read the essay in the same language as the author writing the essay, which is to say that the reader must read the essay, but must read it in that same language, in order to fail to understand it. Es muß etwas geschehen.[29]

Remarkably, the third condition of the possibility of essays and its converse condition of the impossibility of essays, by canceling each other out completely, rending the words and spaces absolutely from one another, in either case make reading impossible. Thus this condition of possibility of essays and this condition of the impossibility of essays are in effect the same condition, simply opposite.

In this case, both possibilities – the possibility of essays and the impossibility of essays – are impossible. We have now discovered how it is that nothing could have happened to essays that would have made them, once possible, now impossible. We have now discovered how it is that certain doubts about essays could have arisen. Since it is not possible that either the conditions of possibility or impossibility of essays could obtain, it has never been possible that there were possible or impossible essays. Therefore, no essays have ever been read or written.

It might seem very postmodern to say that no essay has ever been read or written. It might be; who knows?

[1]It may be impossible to write “I,” but this possibility would be the subject of another essay, if it is true that essays are possible. “Subject,” in the case of this notion, “the subject of another (possibly impossible) essay,” is in this sense meant only as an abstract possibility of the thematic focus of an essay, which could be doubly impossible, if essays are not possible. If it is impossible to write an essay otherwise than ironically, the subject of an essay could still be unironically written about, but in that case the subject would be refracted through the ironic tone of the non-essay, and such a device would have indefinite capacity for exploiting both subject and reader. The matrix of these possible ramifications would be the subject of another essay.

[2]The author may be dead.

[3]See Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony.

[4]See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason.

[5]See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Investigation Six.

[6]See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. See also The Complete Bathroom Reading Book.

[7]See Jacques Derrida, Le Carte Postale.

[8]See Antonin Artaud, The Theater of Cruelty.

[9]Would you like to see Plato, Euthyphro?

[10]See Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, or Eco, How to Travel with a Salmon.

[11]See The University of Chicago Press Big Book of Derrida Commentaries.

[12]See Michel Foucault, Language, Memory, Practice.

[13]See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World.

[14]See Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, Chapter Forty-one: Now what?

[15]See Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

[16]The complex of meanings considered to be attached to this word are for the moment suspended in order to consider how it may be possible to attach a complex of meanings to a word. This is a problem much vexing to many of us, and we would all really appreciate it if you’d quit all that sniggling.

[17]See Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.

[18]See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course de Linguistique Generale, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Language, Charles S. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” and/or Shakespeare, Hamlet.

[19]See www.ultimatebondage.com.

[20]In English in the text.

[21]Examples would include: oranges, mice, satellites, proboscis, or vitality.

[22]That is, the mark of the author as such, rather than the mark of the author as legal person or fictive other.

[23]See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

[24]In a reversal of the vector of meaning-giving proposed first by Husserl (Logical Investigations, Investigation One), then by Derrida (Speech and Phenomena), then by Husserl again (posthumously, Experience and Judgment), and finally by Husserl (Logical Investigations, Investigation One, read from left to right this time). See J. Claude Evans, Strategies of Deconstruction.

[25]For instance:

[26]See G.W.F. Hegel, Outline of the Philosophy of Right, Preface.

[27]See The New York Review of Books, “Submissions Guidelines.”

[28]It is perhaps worth noting that, as a pedagogical policy of the author’s classes, this point has been widely praised by students, who have made the author among the most popular faculty members at the author’s academic institution. It may conflict with some standards of practice of the profession and broadly disseminated educational theory, but as Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) put it: “what do they know? Bunch of capitalist stooges!”

[29]See Max Frisch, “Es muß etwas geschehen.”