The Essay and Interdiscursivity: Knowledge Between Singularity and Sensus Communis

Abstract

Knowledge is increasingly becoming organized by discipline; however, according to Lukács and Adorno, the essay genre represents a persistent need for discourses that distinguish themselves through transverse crossing of knowledge from various disciplines and through the testing of “specialized” generalizations in the complex “totality” of life experience. The oldest among such transversal discourses is literature, and in the modern era this has been joined by print media: newspapers and journalism. Literature produces and transforms knowledge through singularity; according to Attridge and Clark, literary texts are singular inasmuch as they configure information that cannot be translated into any conceptual system. On the other hand, newspapers and journalism are tending towards a level of translatability, generality, and doxa such as are established by public opinion through a generally accessible language. Both types of transversal knowledge – literary and journalism – 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 Kant’s sense of a “communal sense” (Gemeinsinn) as a necessary prerequisite for aesthetic judgment. – The etymology of the French word essai (including the sense “tasting”) evokes the sensory cognition implied in the concepts of the aesthetic and literature. Foucault saw the essays of Montaigne and Bacon as embodying the shift from the medieval commenting relationship toward traditional knowledge to the empirical and critical relationship from which modern science developed. However, the essay did not join the systematic drive of science, but persisted in the singularity of literary works. It interdiscursively confronted personal experience with various discursive fields, and shaped a fragmentary, perspectivized, and aesthetic mode of truth. Regardless of the literary singularity of the essay, which realizes Kant’s notion of the “aesthetic idea”, the genre also relies on the sensus communis. It developed from intertextual commentary on ancient loci communes, but its mode of knowledge is aesthetic: the essay absorbs the concepts of other disciplines and melds them into a “promiscuous” poetic semiosis, which, by producing ramified representations, evokes the complex totality of experience. On the other hand, essayists often tackle topics accessible to the “general reader”, and they are not immune to stereotypes and common sense. Since the eighteenth century, the essay has become established in newspapers, where it is has become susceptible to the ideologies of the day. The essay’s tension between the singularity of literarized existence and the ideologized knowledge of the (media) sensus communis is also evident in contemporary Slovenian examples (e.g., Marjan Rožanc and Drago Jančar).