From Nick
Our conversation with Christy Wampole and her “Essayism” seminar probed the various genric options available for essay writing, particularly those which emphasize visual and other extratextual elements. Before diving into the Kevin B. Lee pieces, Christy opened with a set of questions regarding the relative dispositional conservatism, or traditionalism, of the different disciplines in which we were trained. What writing practices, research procedures, and argumentative styles become naturalized––and which are demoted––as disciplines crystallize in the pages of scholarly journals, the training of graduate students, and so on? We all shared our respective anxieties about potential professional or reputational consequences if we were to regularly engage in more meditative forms of scholarly intervention. Grace and Christy both mentioned the importance of acquiring a certain rhetorical and linguistic mastery, in the normative valence of that word, before more experimental approaches can be pursued. Fedor rightly noted that, as teaching assistants, we are told to evaluate students on the basis of a front-loaded, “strong” thesis statement that conceals the rhizomatic pathways of thought from which the argument emerged. As Christy suggested, this may be a contemporary byproduct of the humanistic fear of “compromised rigor,” an echo of our conversation with Graham on status envy at the beginning of the semester. Our conversation then briefly pivoted to the alternative modes of academic engagement (Twitter, public history) that have proliferated in the last decade and how this causally relates to Christy’s “essayification” paradigm. Christy and others mentioned the glacial temporality of academic article and book publications, the imperative to “respond” to ever-mutating political or social developments, and, most crucially, the vanishing of stable academic career prospects as possible explanations. We then turned our attention to the video essay materials Christy assigned. Christy and Paul highlighted the degree of technical finesse required both to produce and to interpret these essays. Paul’s comment and Christy’s response echoed Miklós Kiss’s own admonition that “one cannot posit an equivalent relation – and, thereby, a fully reciprocal adaptability – between textual and AV communication of the same information, as their distinctive media work very differently through their performative dissimilarities and idiosyncratic affordances” (108). One takeaway from our discussion of the video essay-form is the importance of pluralizing our reading practices as interdisciplinary scholars. Being able to dexterously move between visual, textual, auditory, and filmic mediums, and questioning their formal boundaries, could raise profound, and vexing, questions about the inversion of the theory-method/object of study divide we discussed in our session with Erin. Two of Christy’s students followed this thread, considering the degree to which the Kevin Lee essay simultaneously conceals and exhibits its technological apparatus, its formal structuring, the practical and discursive “work” that goes into the multimodal construction of an “argument.” Utku ended our class with a provocative and productive question about the dangers of essayistic subjectivism, the tyranny of the “I,” that lurk beneath the surface of non-normative writing styles. Christy concurred––the most effective and affecting essays do not strive to obliterate the subject, but also do not reify it as the sole locus and receptacle of ideational content. The ability to mediate multiple registers of phenomenal, social, and aesthetic experience through the process, rather than the product, of writing could help us refuse choosing between empiricist or speculative-introspective rhetorical strategies.
From Utku
This week, we have focused on the concept of “essay,” both as a specific literary genre, but also as a method of producing and sharing knowledge. Since Montaigne and Bacon, essay has been associated with a literary genre, a specific artistic product that had its proper conventions and limits—though, the idea of essay itself suggests that essay always redefines its own conventions and limits.
Today, interestingly, essay seems to go beyond the limits of textuality and becomes a defining feature of modern individuality. As Professor Wampole mentions in her essay “The Essayification of Everything,” we are increasingly more skeptical of certainties, absolute truths, long commitments, as we become less and less capable of paying sustained “attention” (Week 1 and our discussion with Graham) to pretty much everything around us.
We want to collect experiences, memories, little snippets of knowledge, with the hope that perhaps one day all these might come together and make a meaningful whole. Or maybe, similar to our skepticism of absolute truths, we are also skeptical of any “meaningful whole” (we are all “ironists” in Richard Rorty’s (1989) language. It is hard to arrive at a final judgment on the question whether we are “delaying” our commitments and judgements on truths in life until our “essays” will bring together a grand narrative, or whether we are genuine “essayist,” i.e. enjoying the suspension of any final truths, serious commitments, and paying sustained attention to anything.
I believe that essay perfectly embodies that tension in itself. On the one hand, it tends to fractionalize, make mundane, make conversational, and introduce a certain “lightness” to its topic. On the other hand, it is not meaningless ramble, but it has a tendency to “concentrate on and intensify” the meaning of the topic at hand, as Kevin B. Lee indicates in “The Video Essay: Lost Potentials and Cinematic Futures” (is essay film meaningless vlogging, or can it pass as serious cinema?). Thus, essay is a great way of investigating the boundaries between serious scientific inquiry loaded with jargon and “less serious” ways of meditating on a subject. Personally, I think that “essayifying” my research in this sense (exploring the boundaries between “serious” and “less or non-serious”) should be one of the essential features of my dissertation project. That is why I found our discussion very productive.
Another issue we have mentioned during the class discussion was the “loneliness” of the scholar. Professor Wampole reminded us of the fact that how solitary we are when trying to produce an academic research that is supposed to have a certain language, style, rules of citation, etc. In contrast, essay opens up the the writing to a wider audience (at least potentially, and stylistically). A lighter and more colloquial writing seems to invite the uninitiated to the conversation. Thus, I thought that one can say that essay seeks “friends” while “article” (as an antithesis of essay) seeks “students.” Academic jargon creates hierarchies, while essay seeks a more egalitarian dialogical space. Remember that we described understanding as a capacity to “wonder collectively,” to paraphrase Graham. Perhaps essay contains the possibilities that enable us to wonder collectively. Thus going forward, essay as a way of producing knowledge will be an important method that I will think more about.
