Foreign Body Vol. 2:

Assay/Essai

Othmar Schickel

I. Attempt Number One : the Confinitive Assay

Essay. (Lat. 'to weigh, to balance') The Essais (1580) (in the sense of 'attempts') of the French writer Montaigne gave this form its name, and established many of its conventions. An essay is a short prose discussion of any subject, which tries to persuade the reader to adopt a particular way of looking at the subject. Apart from the occasional exception, such as the philosopher Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), the essay is aimed at a general audience, unlike the THESIS, TREATISE or DISSERTATION which are for specialists. Even 'formal' essays are relatively casual in their use of example and development of their argument. Francis Bacon's Essays (1597) are essays in the manner of Montaigne; some of the titles suggest his range of topics: "Of Death", "Of Love", "Of Cunning", "Of Plantations", "Of Masques and Triumphs", and so on. The PERIODICAL literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided vehicles for several great essayists, including Addison and Steele in The Tatler and The Spectator , and Hazlitt, Lamb and De Quincey in the proliferating literary magazines of the early nineteenth century, such as Blackwood's or the London Magazine. The prose essay is a flexible and lively form in the modern age. The study of literature as a university subject has led to poets and critics publishing collections of critical essays: T.S. Eliot's Selected Essays (1932), for example, have been widely influential. Whimsical informal essays, in the manner of Lamb's "A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig" (1822) or "Old China" (1823), are now confined to humorous magazines such as Punch, but in the daily and weekly papers there are hundreds of outlets for journalistic essays on all subjects. (Martin Gray, A Dictionary of Literary Terms, second, revised ed. 1992, p. 109f.)

To discuss this (or indeed any) attempt to define the term 'essay' can, ça va sans dire, only be chanced in an essay. Moreover, the example given promises to yield to scrutiny rather satisfactorily. There are several points which call for deconstruction, the most obvious of which must be the very double-bind of trying to de-fine an essay by con-fining it. Listing examples in the 'casual' manner of the essayist, a chronological line, or structure, of argument is adhered to; the 'definition' is aimed at the general audience, and it is short: in a nutshell, that quotation could almost be an essay. It is a piece of writing, short and in prose, testing or trying the value of its chosen topic; it is an attempt. It is all that it purports an essay to be, and yet by con-fining 'essay' to these 'con-ventions', it fails to 'de-fine' itself against it. An essay, though, will speculate about such very specific cultural constructs, challenging our notions of "dead certainties".

II. Come Again: Those Absent Presences

Thus, as always, two questions remain virulent: what is an essay, and what is not an essay. It seems impossible and yet necessary, unavoidable, to speculate about these. That I intend to essay. "I do not doubt that I often happen to talk of things which are treated better in the writings of master-craftsmen, and with more authenticity" - Montaigne wrote - "What you have here is purely an assay of my natural, and not all of my acquired, abilities." There are various ways to set about such a task. Etymology, history and conventions are the usual parameters when one seeks to characterize a 'genre'. The excerpt above follows those practices admirably. Yet one thing, apart from general length and detail, is missing: an entry in a dictionary does not declare openly its slant; its assay to "persuade the reader to adopt a particular way of looking at the subject" is at best neutral, and at worst, surreptitious. A telic design on the addressee's reception, then, may be a distinct feature of the essay, according to the 'confinition'. To 'accomplish' that goal, an essay 'puts to test', 'tries out', 'endeavours', 'probes tentatively', 'appraises', and generally 'ventures upon', material apposite to its intent. But these are merely some of the historically valid entries under 'essay' as recorded in various dictionaries. Further, more technical usage suggests 'essay' be a trial specimen, or a proof of an unaccepted design. (However, Descartes not only asserted the famous 'cogito ergo sum', he followed it by 'I doubt therefore I am' and 'I am deceived therefore I am'.) The enterprise of the essay is very much an essay in doubt and deception.

Etymologically, 'exagium' means weight or the act of weighing -or balance-, and 'exigere' (from 'agere') to test or weigh. The result of weighing, obviously, is a balance. Thus an analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition (or something resembling or suggesting such a composition) would result in a balance of arguments. Presumably, however, a balance of more and less convincing con-clusions drawn would seem a tedious essay of the "wise middle way". There are grounds for rebuttal, though. I have already alluded to the fact that all these terms are emblems of absence. They fissure what I am doing, subvert and hinder themselves. Weighing, as opposed to merely counting, the arguments that come into a certain subject area, where will that take me? The result or product of the effort will, so the lexicon reminds us, be an essay, too. Proof may be provided, but it is faulty proof, pertaining to unaccepted designs. Is there no escape from this 'circulus vitiosus exagii' of trial specimens?

No wonder the OED lists as a further entry under essay 'to assail with words'. Rather than just putting to the proof, the essay attacks, tries, tastes, inquires, experiments. The unattainable luxury of the perfect essay, therefore, is supplemented by a series of pithopractic actions, essaying to zoom in on what they are supposed to be. As Derrida has expounded in Of Grammatology, this idea of the supplement owes to yet another essay, Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages, where supplement is a term denoting the double bind of adding to an already complete entity and thus making good an insufficiency. Faulty proof is weighed against the question marks of doubt.

The dictionary item speaks of form, name, and conventions; in a word: of genre. That notwithstanding, there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a genre labelled 'essay'; the essay dissipates, resists restriction. It is in this spirit that in 1623, Galileo Galilei published The Assayer, outlining his conception of thought as opposed to the terminology of Aristotelian philosophy. Considering composition and genre, we do indeed tend to focus on form and convention, organisation, structure, architecture, frame, shape, mould, arrangement, scheme, order, plan, outline, design, pattern, fabric, texture, tissue, particle, fraction, element, instalment, bit, slice, scrap, chip, chunk, lump, gobbet - until the thing dissolves and looks like a faulty proof once more. The maitre a essayer Montaigne himself wrote:

persistence and too much intensity dazzle my judgment, making it sad and weary. My vision becomes dissipated: I must tell it to withdraw and then make fresh glancing attacks.

Adorno saw the essay as a form of subversion of the four Cartesian rules (clear and unbiased perception; detailed analysis according to the possible, necessary, and adequate; ascending logical order from simplest to most complex; exhaustive enumeration and completion of thought). But even the thus accused founder of modern philosophy used the concept of the essay himself, to supply examples and supplement his discourse. A year after publication, René Descartes wrote about the detractors of his Discours de la Methode et Essais,

Compare all their 'real qualities', their 'substantial forms', their countless hypotheses with my single hypothesis that all bodies are composed of parts.

III. Now then: Articulation

Articulation - the act or state of being joined together, or the form or manner in which a thing is jointed - is the condition of articulation, the act or process of speaking or expressing in words. This is what Derrida appears to be saying with and beyond Rousseau in Of Grammatology. Discussing the importance of 'articulation' as both word and concept in Rousseau's Essai sur l'origine des langues, Derrida quotes Ferdinand de Saussure to the effect that in Latin, articulus meant a member, part, or subdivision of a sequence. This entails the double bind of speech subdivided into syllables and into significant units. These ought to form a continuum. Nevertheless, the syllables and (more or less) significant units of this (or any) essay are finally irreducible to anything more helpful than saying that an essay is a piece of written language that seems complete when it is over. This will hardly do, of course.

So what happens between the perception of 'it' and 'it is over'? - "The genre has always in all genres been able to play the role of order's principle", articulates Derrida; "resemblance, analogy, identity and difference, taxonomic classification, organization and genealogical tree, order of reason..." We select and regroup, according to a set of rules exercised in doing so, and thus create all the categories of making sense listed above. Thus in an essay, we look for recognizable, re-markable units, parts of a greater whole, as it were.

Those who strive to account for a man's deeds are never more bewildered than when they try to knit them into one whole and to show them under one light, since they commonly contradict each other in so odd a fashion that it seems impossible that they should all come out of the same shop. (Montaigne "On the inconstancy of our actions", Complete Essays p. 373)

For to order the portions, shares, sections, divisions, subdivisions, we override the impossibility of making any sense for just that moment. Thus the essay, the attempt to bring it all together, avoids being its own caricature, though it will fail by definition. Apart from the fact (returning to the initial 'con-finition') that the satirical magazine Punch no longer exists, anyway: the emendation of cruces is not the sole realm of satire, or even criticism in its most general sense. Rather, it is the business of the essay to supply proof of another attempt, another failure but a better one anyway:

Say for be said. Missaid. From now say for be missaid. All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Any communicable grid will do to elucidate the particular manner of articulate failure. Proverbially, there are four states of the apprentice: unfounded security, founded insecurity, unfounded insecurity, and founded security. The innermost law of the essay, however, is insubordination, blasphemy against the orthodoxy thus made. That is the essay's body, its shape, appearance, and impact. Alternatively, if we wish for a less sequential model, one could think of the articulation of the human anatomy itself; muscles (which move), bones (which build), fat (that burdens), ligaments (to link) and skin (to present) of arguments would be the various metaphoric vessels of aspects the essay touches upon. Interestingly, one of Derrida's metaphors is invagi-nation. Representing the articulation of internal with external, it is used in both pathology and embryology to describe the infolding of an organ or segment, or of the outer layer of cells of an organism, to form a pocket on the surface. That be the essay's body.

IV. Ha Hum: Foreign Bodies

Acting as displacement of and foil to "phallogocentrism", the term invagination replicates the methodological distinction between "inside" and "outside" and eventually troubles it; it problematizes the questions of limit, boundary, margin. So does, nolens volens , the essay. Its own limits notwithstanding, any given essay will seem part of a greater unit, the genre 'essay' for instance, and it will necessarily refer to texts outside itself. It will have to be contextualized. It is that which is within the body but is not part of it, it is inside but also outside. Re-marking (on) certain aspects of the subject matter, it is footnote, supplement, occasional message on the answering-machine. By its very existence it founds the body within which it occurs, lives it and lives off it: but what is the identity of the essay? For 'essay', substitute 'I say', perhaps.

"If anyone is looking for knowledge let him go where such fish are to be caught: there is nothing I lay claim to less. These are my own thoughts, by which I am striving to make known not matter but me." What am I saying with Montaigne, then? Interminable exposition could be a legitimate answer, for such utterances have neither finality nor essence. The essay is not a literary genre, but rather a certain type or mode of discourse (cf. Derrida's recit). It is an attempt, rather literally, at the life of a certain problem. Although that is essayer l'impossible, another assay is always strategically necessary. The essay is Foreign Body in that what is proper and what is not proper will have been 'put into question', disordered, aligned differently. 'Probing', 'appraising', 'assailing', 'penetrating', 'articulating' etc: the essay is also, etymologically legitimated, a driving out, an exorcism: ex-agere. Dealing with its matter, it is both inside and outwith, thereby 'de-fining' its selves, and its others.

Thus the essay's actuality is anachronistic, its displacement chronic. What appears to be inside, intrinsic, is actually external, foreign, outside: the essay is the balancing act of an attempt bound to fail. By the inexorable logic that governs such relationships, an essay brings a host to life and dissects at the same time, affirms and annihilates in the same breath, questions the answers before it releases them. In this manner, the 'consciousness' of an analytic, interpretative, or critical prose text of limited length resembles or suggests its own composition in its presentation of the idea of an 'essay'. Furthermore, then, there be four functions of the essay as regards consciousness: affirmative, anamnetic, comparative and progressive. If imagined as physical forces, they would be down, back, sidewards and forwards. Thus, founded on tradition, bouncing off the surrounding context, propelled and held back by its attempt at itself, the essay would not need to go anywhere, but oscillate and point towards various directions. Its poles comprise the systematic or expository (e.g. Descartes) and the rather idiosyncratic (e.g. Montaigne), the orthodox exorcism (see introduction & etymology, or 'confinition') as well as "blasphemy" and "subversion" (as in Derrida or Adorno).

J'en ai connu qui meditaient sans fin sur ce petit mot, auquel ils attribuent une profondeur imaginaire, et dont ils ESSAYIENT de preciser la mysterieuse resonance. Mais un mot est un gouffre sans fond. (Paul Valery)

Dat Deus Incrementum, one plus one is at least three, for the sum is greater than the parts. Yet the essay neither plays the totality's trump against the components nor does it restrict itself to fragments or absolute singularities: "The text guards itself, maintains itself - like the law, speaking only of itself, that is to say, of its non-identity with itself. It neither arrives nor lets anyone arrive. It is the law, makes the law and leaves the reader before the law."

Its aporia is that which is not seen and thus both elucidates and conceals. Speaking of the body of the text, between heading and footnote, Derrida asserts that all modes of secondariness are tried and mimed and made parasitic and grafted, tattoed (inserted on the body). To me, not a great fan of tattoes, an essay is rather like a bikini. It covers the important areas with limited material, more or less cunningly connected; no two of them will appear the same, for they cling to different bodies. And, arguably, a bikini is really there to expose what it does not cover, thus supplementing its body with a double-bound texture.

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