Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Mapping Woolf’s Montaignian Modernism
that arguments in diff erent disciplines must be governed by “fi eld-dependent” criteria
rather than any universal logic.
Adorno, however, is more radical and is much more concerned that the form of his
writing draw philosophy away from any pretension to science and closer to art; the essay
naturally proceeds, Adorno writes in his unmistakable dialectically aphoristic prose,
“methodically, unmethodically” (101). Th us, Adorno has no use for such Toulminian
structural terms as “claim,” “data,” “warrant,” “backing,” or “rebuttal,” for in the essay
“concepts do not build a continuum of operations, thought does not advance in a single
direction.” Rather, Adorno continues, “the aspects of the argument interweave as in a carpet….
Th e thinker does not think, but rather transforms himself into an arena of intellectual
experience without simplifying it” (101). Th e apparently more autonomous subject
of Toulminian argumentation, a subject committed to the “control of nature and material
production” (98) thus dissolves for Adorno into an open space in which ideas appear to
bounce off one another with radical freedom.
Th is emphasis on free play, for Adorno, is closely related to his understanding of
rhetoric, which, like Toulmin, he sees as something that the “scientifi c mentality,” privileged
since Descartes, has long sought to “do away with” (108). But unlike Toulmin,
Adorno associates rhetoric more with presentation than with persuasion. Adorno also
goes further than the young Toulmin in his explicit rejection of the Cartesian philosophic
model, declaring that the essay, which passively “shys [sic] away from the violence dogma”
(98) also “gently defi es the [Cartesian] ideals of clara et distincta perceptio and of absolute
certainty” (102). 3 At the same time, he writes, the essay even more aggressively registers a
“protest against the four rules that Descartes’ Discourse on Method sets up at the beginning
of Western science and its theory” (102; non-Latin emphasis added). 4
Th ough their styles are very diff erent, Montaigne, Adorno, and Virginia Woolf all write
in a mode that wavers between submission, assertion, passivity, and activity, even presentation
and persuasion. We might even begin to think of the essay itself as a “passive-aggressive”
form—one, however, detached from the negative associations contemporary psychology has
conferred upon its associated tendencies. Rather than symptomatic of illness, we might
see this mode of writing as part of a deliberate strategy for opposing authoritarian entities,
avoiding dogmatism, resisting (in Adorno’s language) “identity thinking.” 5
In fact, it seems quite appropriate—especially when we think of Woolf’s and Adorno’s
writing (and inevitably, by association with the latter, Walter Benjamin’s)—that passive-aggressive
“disorder” was fi rst introduced in a United States war department bulletin
in 1945 by psychologists dealing with “reluctant and uncooperative soldiers” who only
followed orders with “smoldering resentment and chronic, but veiled hostility.” Th eir
behavior was characterized by “a mixture of passive resistance and grumbling compliance”
that clinical psychologist Michael Stone observes, “has probably been an aspect of
human nature for millennia” (360). Even the associations of passive-aggressive behavior
with procrastination and inaction link it to the essay—memorably described in Johnson’s
dictionary as a “loose sally of the mind” and more recently as a form “branded as idleness”
(Adorno 93) by more rigid “enlightened” minds, bent on categorizations, not unlike the
term “passive-aggressive disorder” itself. My own use of the term represents something of a
loose and idle misuse that recognizes the tension and uncertainty inherent in the concept
rather than irrefutable truth.
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