When “Essay” Becomes a Template: The Endangered Conceptual World of Essayistic Research

In current academic and cultural circulation, the term “video essay” has become a dominant label for short-form audiovisual scholarship. Yet many works that circulate under this name reproduce the architecture of the academic paper: a pre-scripted thesis, linear argumentation, signposted claims, and conclusory takeaways in which images primarily function as illustration. This paper argues that such practices do not simply represent a stylistic variation of the essay. They constitute a methodological displacement. What is increasingly produced is an audiovisual paper rather than an essay in the philosophical sense. Here the essay is understood as a non-identitarian mode of inquiry that proceeds through constellation, montage, and problematisation, refuses final definitions, and treats concepts as provisional in relation to the object.

I propose that this terminological drift is not neutral. Under conditions of platform optimisation and institutional evaluation regimes, essayistic inquiry becomes difficult to recognise and therefore difficult to sustain. The essay’s capacity to hold uncertainty, to think by juxtaposition rather than deduction, and to generate knowledge without closure is flattened into standardised templates of “explain, prove, conclude.” Framed through the conference theme of endangered conceptual worlds, I treat “the essay” as a fragile conceptual practice whose specificity is pressured by academic instrumentalisation and narrative standardisation.

Methodologically, the presentation develops a compact typology distinguishing audiovisual papers from essayistic audiovisual research. It also proposes criteria for evaluation that protect essayistic method within artistic research contexts. The aim is not to police a genre. It is to clarify terms, recover methodological possibilities lost in current usage, and reopen space for essayistic practices that can function as genuine research without being forced into the paper’s demonstrative logic.