Entertainment Essayism

Many are quick to denounce the decline of fiction in our present times. The production of nonfiction, however, deserves scrutiny. There is a genre of books invading the Brazilian publishing market and, possibly, the market worldwide: entertainment essayism. Before long, if things continue this way, it may even become a category at the Jabuti Prize. Very soon—if one still retains some faith in humanity—people may realize that there is a difference between essayism as thought and essayism as entertainment. Or perhaps, judging by the Brazilian book and publishing market, as well as by its circuits of consecration, they will never realize it.

The entertainment essay is the kind that would ideally be written by the Medalhão described in Machado de Assis’s short story “Theory of the Medalhão.” Upon reaching adulthood, the son is advised by his father to become a medalhão. He is taught to sprinkle elements of erudition into his discourse, while scrupulously avoiding any original thought.

“Entertainment essayism” presents the following characteristics: a light style with witty remarks, a performance of reflection, but without the effective production of depth or originality. It could be compared to popular science books. The difference is that we are not speaking of science understood as such, but rather of those who appropriate the discourses of Literature, the Arts, Philosophy, and the Humanities (with their controversial epistemological status between science and art) in order to deliver a parody of a tradition known as essayism.

Careful observation of bookstore displays and of the catalogs of large commercial publishers would reveal its unmistakable existence. There are already clear equivalents of the genre in literary criticism, linguistics, history, anthropology, gender theory, political philosophy, and so on. From abroad, many would not hesitate to point to Byung-Chul Han as an example. The South Korean author based in Germany seems to operate according to a principle common to all entertainment essayists: he gathers ideas that, despite their philosophical appearance, were previously developed by other authors with greater singularity and therefore can be regarded as part of the public domain.

The entertainment essay is constructed with an intellectual varnish. It cites academics, thinkers, artists—generally in simplified versions stripped of their complexity. Freud reduced to a handbook: behaving as though reflecting on Freud meant making jokes about psychoanalysis à la Woody Allen. Yet, like all surface-level and ornamental knowledge, it fails to so much as tap the actual body of psychoanalytic theory.

Instead of effectively questioning relations of domination between men and women or the definition of gender as Beauvoir or Butler do, it becomes a pastiche of critique, in which the results are already known in advance and frequently turn into complicit jokes.

The entertainment essay replaces doubt with picturesque anecdote. Examples are stacked according to the logic of playful curiosity, rather than with the purpose of investigating a question. At its worst moments, the entertainment essay is a more extended expository version of The Curious Person’s Guide. The sensation is that of being fed several informational drops. It takes the form of an Antiquarian Cabinet of Curiosities. Macabéa’s talking clock radio—now in its cultured version. From the standpoint of textual typology, the entertainment essay is more expository than argumentative, since it resembles an extended newspaper column rather than engaging epistemologically in anything specific. It piles up cases, examples, and small units of meaning, while concealing the emptiness of its purpose.

The entertainment essay presents nothing new, yet must pose as novelty. That is why the entire apparatus and countless professionals in the industry will adjust the book so that it has a striking title or at least a striking subtitle. People may suppose that the work sheds new light on an urgent, pressing theme currently in vogue. When the knowledgeable reader scrutinizes it, however, what appears is a compilation of familiar ideas. It is a cascade of déjà vus. The genre is built upon a strange paradox: it presents no consistency of thesis, while at the same time remaining affirmative, because it parades facts, reasonings, and variations of what is already known.

If written today, the entertainment essay might be about Postcolonialism, the Anthropocene, Artificial Intelligence. The intention is to suggest that something important and urgent must be addressed. Entertainment essayism has the habit of falling into the self-deception of failing to distinguish between intellectual fashion and critical contemporaneity.

In the curation of references typical of entertainment essayism, there must be a bit of the classical and a bit of the contemporary-cult. In this way, the perfect dose of Distinction is achieved. Its prestige is built upon a balance between erudition and contemporaneity. The entertainment essay preserves the cool aura of someone who knows what the next fashionable thing will be.

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Traditionally, the essay genre in its strong sense is not merely cultivated prose, nor prose intended to make author and reader feel cultivated. Rather, it is an examination of objects and problems. In entertainment essayism, we find moderately cultivated prose meant to pass the reader’s time. The essay in question does not make one think. It merely occupies the hours. At best, it is informative, since it compiles signs of erudition.

What was not yet understood—what one sought to understand and which escaped thought itself—was the basis of essayism. Essayism sought to attempt to think what had not yet been thought. At its root, it is an anti-positivist snare. And one may say further: a discreet one, for it consumes its object from the edges and with delicacy. The essay knows in advance that it is a form defeated by the elusive subject it cannot master in its entirety. It does not make a spectacle of truths, discoveries, or victories. It is thus the opposite of the eureka-moment of entertainment essayism. Entertainment essayism is triumphalist.

A crucial difference occurs in the treatment of the object-theme. In essayism, writing seeks to become saturated with the object, in order to grasp it with such precision that, for this to occur, it is necessary to admit the inability to describe it in its totality. Before language is exhausted, essayism reaches the limits of knowledge and the zones of obscurity of the objects examined. Essayism admits not-knowing. For this reason, its model is that of the Stalker exploring the enigmatic zones of Tarkovsky’s film. The other model draws its inspiration from action blockbusters.

It is the perfect product for a time in which people’s critical capacity has atrophied to such an extent that even reflection comes packaged in ready-made ideas. That is to say, if literary essayism reached mastery in authors such as Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag, and, in Brazil, became fertile in the work of authors from distinct theoretical traditions such as Roberto Schwarz and Silviano Santiago, “entertainment essayism” feigns thought but delivers vulgar simplifications. In many respects, it is the opposite of what was once understood as the essay, in which the author worked through a theme while maintaining suspended doubts and even the postponement and impossibility of definitive conclusion. Even when the matrix of knowledge is not strictly philosophy, essayism retains something of philosophical perplexity. Thus it approaches literature, culture, society: revealing them in their fissures and enigmas.

Intellectual work, even in a relatively modest manner, should, after initiation and formation within a field of knowledge, propose new contributions to that same field. In theory. For intellectual and academic work is not a monad floating beyond society and the publishing market. It is therefore itself affected by the influxes of both spheres.

Increasingly, formally trained academics have become authors of entertainment essays. One reason for this is probably the fact that academia is pressured—not only, but also—by funding agencies to demonstrate its relevance to the general public. This movement constitutes a demand that academics measure themselves against influencers and content producers. It remains to be asked, however, whether, by embarking on such an enterprise, academics elevate the level of influencers, or simply descend to their level. What is certain is that the two groups are meeting in mediocrity.

Even from a personal standpoint, more and more academics seek glory and laurels in the praise of the general public. If you are a sub-celebrity in the intellectual world, with a presence on social media, invitations to traditional or new media outlets—there you are! You are an entertainment essayist—at least potentially. And you may claim that space or be invited to occupy it at any moment.

When he published The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, Guy Debord brought into the world a luminous work that, according to himself, found new confirmations with each passing day. He perceived with nearly prophetic lucidity the manner in which spectacle diluted any sense of specialization. There is an intrinsic incompatibility between specialized knowledge and the knowledge that seeks validation by public opinion and common sense—as though a discussion that demands specific formation could be decided by popular vote. Thus knowledge itself, and the university as a space for the construction of counter-hegemonic knowledge, are increasingly threatened.

These results are obtained through the construction of form and style. When reading an entertainment essay, one might recall another read the previous year. Yet it is not even possible to remember what leaves no strong impressions. Even when exploring very different themes, different entertainment essays frequently manipulate the same type of mass authorship—and one that almost always sounds anodyne.

Ideology crystallizes and operates in form, style, expression. Pasteurization guarantees the expansion of readership and is confirmed even in lexical choices aimed at producing jocular commentary.

Two different books may, for instance, employ the adjective “jaunty” to further disqualify a viewpoint deemed inferior. Examination of ideas? Openness to contradiction? Not at all. Condescending irony. After all, there is no need to strive too hard to criticize a viewpoint already defeated from the outset. The entertainment essay often satisfies itself by presenting a brief and corrosive critique of an intellectual tendency exposed through a straw-man fallacy. The discursive logic of cancellation comes to dominate intellectual production from within. Instead of careful argumentation and demonstration—mic-drop gestures. Intellectual imposture falsifies, in a single stroke, both knowledge and the ethics of argument.

There is nothing effectively to be shown, expressed, or pointed out. There is not even a desire to persuade, since the audience is frequently already convinced in advance. Sometimes an entertainment essayist cites another entertainment essayist. After all, it guarantees that he is citing someone who, like himself, when thinking something, thinks nothing of consequence.

*** The entertainment essay is a mutant hybrid that suggests reflection but delivers ready-made thought. Entertainment essayists may avoid the most obvious expressive clichés after careful editorial revision, but they cannot rid themselves of clichés of reasoning. In some cases, even references and examples are predictable. In other words, those who believe everything can be solved through well-revised prose are mistaken. Worn-out ways of seeing and thinking are not detected by technical text revision. Even if they could be, one might question whether that would not run counter to the editorial objective of selling books.

An adjustment is made between what public opinion expects and what ought to be said. If the foundational essay once played against the reader—and even against itself—the entertainment essay plays to the audience. Its target audience is the eternal average public. It does not want to read self-help, nor the latest comforting work of Japanese fiction. It finds Machado de Assis and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda too complex. So why not a middle ground? Something halfway toward cultural journalism?

Entertainment essayism promises reflection but fires off data and concludes hastily—and, in general, the conclusions are banal. Ideas one has already encountered in other forms on the web. Perhaps even shouted by someone on a social network. It is thought for those who have neither time nor disposition to think.

In the end, it is the perfect complement for an age that lives on Fake News. One needs only to fire off a few correct data points, line them up in carefully standardized Portuguese revised by a major publisher, insert a few amusing remarks and… there you have entertainment essayism. Essayism with abundant name-dropping and little displacement of perspective. The reader leaves the book as they entered it, but with a few additional references. Perhaps that is the principal function of entertainment essayism: to allow contact with references to books to be included in future reading lists. The book itself will likely soon be forgotten, since it does not haunt the page with doubt or with the unknowable.

Reading a good essay is like squeezing a lemon. One attempts to extract the juice to the maximum, and even so a few drops remain inaccessible. In the good essay, there occurs a fusion between thought and expression. Entertainment essayism hardly lends itself to rereading, because it is transparent at first encounter. It says very clearly what it has come to do, while at the same time having come to do nothing in particular.

In theory, the essay should differ from the chronicle, but even this becomes increasingly blurred, and even a magazine that claims to specialize in essays may increasingly replace the space of thought with first-person accounts. The chronicle is commonly labeled a typically Brazilian genre and, in principle, should not be discarded as incompatible with the essay. In reality, first-person narrative goes back to earlier times and to works of thought of the highest order, such as Confessionsby Saint Augustine; Meditations by Descartes; Montaigne’s Essays; Walter Benjamin’s dialectical images in works such as Berlin Childhood around 1900, and so on. Even Plato values personal experience when he takes his relationship with Socrates as the starting point for writing the Socratic dialogues. The great problem of our time is not autofiction understood as such, but rather the aesthetic experience of the surface, which does not plunge into the unfathomable and the complex. Contemporary fiction and nonfiction resemble one another in their obsession with self-confirmation.

In entertainment essayism there is nothing speculative or investigative. For that, the author would have to inhabit a certain epistemological skepticism. Nor is there any commitment to truth as a frontier experience. For that, one would need to risk missing the mark—but also risk striking it. Entertainment essayism is a profession of faith with interchangeable values. It constitutes an update of the famous joke attributed to Groucho Marx: if someone does not like your principles, you can always exchange them for others.

Perhaps it is the ideal book for middle and upper classes to read during vacations while sunbathing by the pool, imagining themselves very informed, very left-wing. It has not yet occurred to major publishers to explore more firmly the market niche of “reactionary readers,” for they remain skeptical that such readers actually read anything. Entertainment essayism is predominantly progressive.

It emerges from consensus—even if from within only one social segment—and, at the end of the book, concludes with the same consensus. What should have been demonstrated is never in fact demonstrated, because reflection gives way to the appearance of reflection. It becomes proof of social belonging through opinion, and for that very reason any possibility of dissent, contradiction, and effective difference is quickly repressed and eliminated.

*** Contemporary society deludes itself with the idea that it suffices to constantly invoke the power of reading in order to reaffirm its commitment to critical thought. None of this is guaranteed in advance when we observe the rise of modes of writing that, due to their enormous contingent of dead matter, allow for more passive readings—and which end up sabotaging, by force of example, the very meaning of complex, deep, and disruptive reading. After all, contemporary society has intensified the practice of reading through WhatsApp and other social networks. The content and characteristics of what is read should also be called into question. For this very reason, it becomes important to discuss entertainment essayism and its similarity to obsessive binge-watching of feeds and streaming platforms. The reader of this kind of book stands somewhere between a zombie and an automaton turning pages. There is probably no significant qualitative difference between entertainment essayism and content creation for social media, nor in the way both products are consumed by the public. This is not the creative version of leisure, but the administered version: since people do not spend time alone with their own thought, they do not cultivate it independently. Instead, tags and slogans function as shortcuts for acquiring a shared vocabulary that reveals itself as a kind of enlightened totalitarianism.

What is flattened is not only language as expression: it is the world itself, reality itself, transformed into an entertaining companion easily assimilated within a few hours. Later, the reader will comment on the entertainment essay they have just read with friends while driving up the mountains, and instead of producing astonishment, surprise, or questioning, they will hear unanimous agreement. If everyone thinks the same thing, the likely outcome is that no one is actually thinking.