NOTES

Introduction: Epistemic Croquet

1. Juergen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique, no. 22 (Winter 1981), pp. 3-15. Jean François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne, Paris: Minuit, 1979.

2. English versions of citations from Die Verwirrungen des Zoëglings Toerless and from Books One and Two of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften are from the English translation of these works by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser: Young Toerless (New York, 1955); and The Man without Qualities, 3 vols. (London, 1953-1960). Hereafter all references to these works will follow the quotations directly in the text, e.g. (M.w.Q., 25), (Y.T., 123). Translations of citations from the Nachlass and from Musil’s journals and essays, as well as from secondary sources in German, have been made by William Lee.

3. Robert Merril, ed., “Introduction,” Ethics/Aesthetics Post-Modern Positions (Washington: Maisonneuve Press 1988), p. vii.

4. I deal with this transdisciplinarity and the politicization of science that it implies in “La Scientization de la politique/La Politicization de la science,” in Le Tiers Communicationnel, ed. G. H. Brunel, Pierre Boudon, and Marike Finlay, Montreal: Editions Preambule, 1989.

5. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften in Gesammelte Werke, ed. A. Frisé (Hamburg, 1978), vol. I. Hereafter all references to this work will follow the quotation directly in the text, e.g. (DMoE, 35). It should be noted that there are several earlier cloth and paperback editions of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and that there is no consistency in the pagination among any of the various editions. It should also be noted that there is much argumentation about the reconstitution of the last volume of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Frisé and Philippe Jaccottet, the French translator of Musil’s novel, believe in the fidelity of Musil’s earlier sketches and later notes for the completion of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. However, Kaiser and Wilkins, the English translators, for somewhat “moralistic” reasons, did not translate any of the last volume, saying that Musil’s notes could not be depended upon and that he had really not intended to have the incestuous experiment realized. We have to admit that we find this argument irresolvable on grounds of intentionality, nor do we see it as particularly pertinent to exclude any of Musil’s writing from the field of discourse which we consider to be his own. Therefore, in citing Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften we treat the last volume as an integral part of the text. However, we had to be content with translating it ourselves and citing only the German original.

6. I wish to acknowledge my debt to Timothy J. Reiss, who as my teacher impressed me with his reading of Peirce, which informs this work throughout.

7. Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du discours (Paris, 1971), p. 49; The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 228.

8. Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, pp. 50-51.

9. Ibid., p. 49. See also Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 1 (Paris, 1966), p. 260: “La langue n’est pas possible que parce que chaque sujet se pose comme “je.”

10. Timothy J. Reiss, “Cartesian Discourse and Classical Ideology,” Diacritics (Winter 1976), pp. 19-27.

11. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Donald Bouchard, ed., Language, Countermemory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 113-138.

12. Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” p. 3.

13. Fritz Mauthner, Woerterbuch der Philosophie: neue Beitraege zu einer Kritik der Sprache, in Alan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York, 1973), pp. 127-128 (emphasis added).

14. See Karl Kraus, Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit, in Werke, ed., Heinrich Fischer (Munich: Koesel Verlag, 1952-1966), 14 vols. See also Toulmin and Janik’s excellent account of the epoch in Wittgenstein’s Vienna.

15. Robert Musil, “Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs,” Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwuerde (Berlin: 1908).

16. Patrick Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity (The Hague, 1965), p. 95.

17. Marike Finlay, Dialogical Strategies/Strategic Dialogues: A Discursive Analysis of Psychotherapeutic Interaction, New York: Ablex, forthcoming.

18. Robert Musil, “Interview with Oscar Fontana, ‘Was arbeiten Sie?’ ” (April, 1926), in Musil, Prosa und Stuecke, Kleine Prosa, Aphorismen, Auto-biographisches, Essays und Reden, Kritik, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. II (Hamburg, 1978), p. 942. Hereafter all references to this volume will follow directly in the text, e.g. (G.W. II, 942).

19. Robert Musil, Tagebuecher, in Gesammelte Werke; Robert Musil, Prosa, Dramen, Spaete Briefe (Hamburg, 1952), p. 722. Hereafter all references to this work will follow the quotation directly in the text, e.g. (Tgb., 384).

20. Dietrich Hochstaetter, Sprache des Moeglichen: Stilistischer Perspektivismus in Robert Musils “Mann ohne Eigenschaften” (Frankfurt, 1972), p. 107.

21. Dietrich Hochstaetter and Helmut Arntzen, Satirischer Stil. Zur Satire Robert Musils im Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Bonn: Bouvier, 1970), p. 39.

22. Beda Allemann, Ironie und Dichtung (Pfullinger, 1956-1969), p. 211.

23. Candace Lang, Irony/Humor, (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

24. Linda Hutcheon, Theory of Parody: The Teaching of Twentieth Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985).

25. Hutcheon, “A Postmodern Problematics,” in Merril, ed., pp. 1-10.

26. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris, 1966), p. 62. See also Leo Spitzer, “Linguistic Perspectivism in Don Quixote,” in Linguistics and Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 41: “It is as if language in general was seen by Cervantes from the angle of perspectivism. . . . Perspectivism informs the structure of the novel as a whole: we find it in Cervantes’ treatment of the plot, of ideological themes as well as in his attitude of distantiation toward the reader.”

27. Juergen Habermas, “Neoconservative Culture Criticism in the United States and West Germany,” in Habermas and Modernity, ed. R. Bernstein (Cambridge: MIT Press, 78-94).

28. Frederich G. Peters, Robert Musil: Master of the Hovering Life (New York, 1978), p. 15. A single quotation from Peters’ hermeneutic approach will mark off his hermeneutics as compared to our own aims in this section: “Musil believed that the universe was without inherent meaning and that beneath man’s feet there yawned a dizzying abyss. Having now considered some of Musil’s intentions, we may with some curiosity examine the nature of Musil’s literary style, the form of expression chosen by this self-declared moralist, rationalist, mystic and nihilist.”

29. Toulmin, From Logical Analysis to Conceptual History, quoted in Wittgenstein’s Vienna, p. 166.

I. The Potential Habit of Many Realities

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London, 1963), pp. 194-256, quoted in Heelan, p. 81.

2. Heelan, p. 81.

3. Robert Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zoeglings Toerless, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. II, pp. 77-80.

4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (Frankfurt, 1921-1964), p. 115.

5. Peter Nuesser, Musils Romantheorie (The Hague, 1967), pp. 13ff. Johannes Loebenstein, “Das Problem der Erkenntnis in Musils kuenstlerische Werk,” in Robert Musil, Leben, Werk, Wirkung, ed. Karl Dinklage (Vienna, 1960), pp. 77-131.

6. Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations, p. 12, quoted in Janik and Toulmin, p. 81. See also Einstein, in Holton, “Mach, Einstein, and the Search for Reality,” Daedalus 97 (Spring, 1968): 662. Einstein is quoted in Holton as saying that the positivists, namely Mach, were wrong in thinking that they could do without a real world in the sense that Einstein later in his life insisted upon, a Spinozian, Leibnizean sense of the universal laws underlying the ordering and construction of the universe. “It is the postulation of a ‘real world’ which so to speak liberates the ‘world’ from the thinking and experiencing subject. The extreme positivists think they can do without it; this seems to me to be an illusion, if they are not willing to renounce thought itself”.

7. Juergen Habermas, “Comte and Mach: The Intention of Early Positivism,” in Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston, 1968-71), p. 81.

8. Musil, Beitrag, p. 33.

9. Ibid.

10. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 87: “Although the concept of fact is elucidated by means of the doctrine of elements, the function of knowledge itself remains in obscurity. . . . Mach only undertakes reflection in order to direct it against itself, dissolve the subjective conditions of metaphysics, and destroy prescientific schematizations. . . .”

11. Ibid., p. 82.

12. Ibid., p. 87.

13. Ibid.

14. Allemann, p. 198.

15. Mauthner, Woerterbuch, in Toulmin and Janik, p. 128.

16. Max Planck, “The Unity of the Scientific World Picture,” in Physical Reality, in Holton, p. 662.

17. Musil, Beitrag, pp. 5 and 15.

18. Mach, in Musil, Beitrag, p. 53.

19. S. G. B. Brush, “Mach and Atomism,” Synthèse 18, 2/3 (April, 1968): 192-216.

20. Capek, Milic, “Ernest Mach’s Biological Theory of Knowledge,” Synthese 18, 2/3 (April, 1968): 177.

21. Heelan, p. 31.

22. Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley, 1962), pp. 175-176.

23. Heelan, pp. 174-175: “Colors, sounds, etc., which constituted the World-for-us, took on a new symbolic character and became a ‘language’ which ‘spoke’ of the physical structure and intrusions behind them. . . . The ‘language’ appropriate to an instrument when it ‘speaks’ is ‘physicalist language’ insofar as it ‘translates’ the hidden state of the object into a uniquely determined sensible sign.”

24. Heelan, pp. 175-176.

25. Ibid., p. xii.

26. Ibid., p. 184: “The reduction of the wave packet then is nothing more than the expression of the scientist’s chocie of a measuring process which is different from the means used to prepare the pure state.”

27. Habermas, Knowledge, pp. 89-90.

28. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York, 1972), p. 64.

29. Ibid., pp. 454-455.

30. Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (vols. 7 and 8 ed. Arthur Burks) (Cambridge, Mass., 1931-58). Unless otherwise specified, subsequent references to Peirce’s writings will be placed within the body of the text directly following the quotation in the following form, which indicates the volume and the number of the section in this edition, e.g. (5.257).

31. Regarding the “transmutation of values” see Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris, 1973), pp. 127ff. “Musilkritik” generally recognizes Musil’s debt to Nietzsche. However, the fact that it is Clarisse who is the “Nietzsche-junkie” in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and that Ulrich and the narrator constantly take a narrative distance from Clarisse, as well as the fact of Clarisse’s ensuing madness, indicate a more problematic relation between Musil and Nietzsche than one of direct influence. We will try to show that Musil, while acknowledging the critique which Nietzsche makes of theories of knowledge and values, as well as of discourse, seeks another solution to the dilemma than the one Nietzsche proposed, this latter having ended in madness.

32. Friederich Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3 (Leipzig, 1900-1915), pp. 903 and 440: “If all objective knowledge (cognition) is declared to be merely [knowledge of] appearances, then there is no longer any possibility of a synthesis: Our cognitive apparatus is not designed for ‘cognition.’ In as much as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning at all, the world is knowable: but it can be interpreted differently; there is not a single meaning lying behind the world, rather countless meanings. Perspectivism. We analyse the world according to our needs, our drives and the for and against.”

33. Heelan, p. 177.

34. Ulrich Karthaus, Der andere Zustand: Zeitstrukturen im Werke Robert Musils (Berlin, 1965), p. 69.

35. Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (Paris, 1959), p. 203.

36. Heelan, p. 42.

37. Helmut Arntzen, Satirischer Stil bei Robert Musil (Bonn, 1970), p. 64.

38. Mach, in Musil, Beitrag, p. 53.

39. Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, p. 1929:

40. C. S. Peirce, “Letter to Lady Welby,” (Oct. 12, 1904), in Thomas Olshewsky, ed., Problems in the Philosophy of Language (New York, 1969), pp. 22-30.

41. C. S. Peirce’s Letters to Lady Welby, vol. I., ed. Irwin Lieb (New Haven, Conn.: 1953), p. 32, in David Savan, An Introduction to C. S. Peirce’s Semiotics (Toronto, 1976), p. 1.

42. T. J. Reiss, “Archéologie du discours et critique épistémique: Projet pour une critique discursive,” in Philosophie et litterature, ed. Pierre Gravel (Montreal, 1979), pp. 143-189: “If experiment is included in nomothetic representation which presents as well the process of observation, if the process of observation necessarily and always changes that observation—then the laws of discourse which account for it must be in a dialectical relation.”

43. Heelan, p. 175: “Of itself, the instrument is ‘dumb,’ it waits to be questioned by the scientist, and the form of the question structures its response. For example, . . . the data may evoke a mere description of its material reality (a bubble chamber track) or an explanation of its intentional reality (a signature of an Omega-minus particle)—or an assertion or denial of a hypothesis (the Eightfold Way). The instrument responds to the noetic intention of the scientist; it does not create it. It ‘speaks’ only if ‘questioned’; and the structure of its response mirrors the structure of the ‘question asked’ of it.”

44. Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, quoted in Heelan, p. 108. “We have observational or operational concepts—things-for-us.”

“The human way of discerning the presence of this activity then, is to study, to recognize its effects on other things . . .” For the importance that Peirce attaches to the notion of Interpretant, see Savan, pp. 29ff.

45. Peirce, “Letter to Lady Welby,” (1908), in Charles Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (New York, 1927), p. 288: “Now the problem of what the ‘meaning’ of an intellectual concept is can only be solved by study of the interpretants or proper significate effects, of signs. . . . some important subdivisions. The first proper significate effect of a sign is a feeling produced by it. This ‘emotional interpretant’ . . . it will always involve an effort. . . . it will always do so through the mediation of the emotional interpretant. I call it the energetic interpretant. . . . But what further kind of effort can there be?” (5.475-6) “. . . I will call it the logical interpretant, without as yet determining whether this term shall extend to anything besides the meaning of a general concept.” (5.476)

46. Gregory Bateson, “Information, Codification, and Metacommunication,” in Bateson and Jurgen Reusch, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York, 1951-68), p. 419.

47. Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris, 1969), pp. 117ff.

48. Bateson, Ecology, p. 275.

49. Ibid., p. 338.

50. Juergen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, 1979), p. 30.

51. Ernst Mach, The Structure of Mechanics, 5th ed., trans. T. J. McCormack (Lasalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1945), p. 580, in R. S. Cohen, p. 137.

52. Habermas, Knowledge, p. 85: “Mach’s shallow materialism blocks off epistemological inquiry into the subjective conditions of the objectivity of possible knowledge. The only reflection admissible serves the self-abolition of reflecting on the knowing subject. The doctrine of elements justifies the strategy of ‘thinking nothing of one’s ego; and resolving it into a transitory combination of changing elements.’ ”

53. Peirce (5.314): “. . . there is no element whatever of man’s consciousness that had not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word or sign that man uses is the man himself. For as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is an external sign; that is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the words homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought.”

54. Foucault, L’Archéologie, p. 67; Archaeology, p. 49.

55. Foucault, L’Archéologie, 61; Archaeology, p. 45.

56. Foucault, L’Archéologie, p. 63; Archaeology, p. 46.

57. Foucault, L’Archéologie, p. 59.

58. Ibid.

59. Mikhail Bakhtin and V. N. Volochinov, Le Marxisme et la Philosophie du Langage (Paris, 1977), pp. 27-28; M. Bakhtin and V. N. Volochinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), p. 11.

60. Jerzy Pelc, “On the Concept of Narration,” Semiotica 1 (1971).

61. Oskar Marius Fontana, “Erinnerungen an Robert Musil,” in Karl Dinklage, ed., Robert Musil, Leben, Werk, Wirkung (Wien, 1960), pp. 336ff. In 1942, at the age of 62, Musil died leaving his novel unfinished. There remained no neat scheme waiting to be rounded off. In the unfinished fragments for a continuation of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, one may discern a certain uncertainty, a lost direction with several alternatives posed for a solution to Ulrich’s life and his epoch, none of which are definitively decided upon. In Part Two, I will try to illustrate that Musil’s practice of process and incompleteness is the type that Lyotard describes below, i.e., a “continuous destruction of bourgeois institutions” as opposed to the false ideology of progress which is merely ‘trompe l’oeil’.

Jean-François Lyotard, Dérivé à partir de Marx et de Freud (Paris, 1973), p. 40. “. . . the incompletion of a work is theoretically the subterraneous guarantor of the continual creation and destruction of institutions that the bourgeoisie calls ‘progress’. But it is the very opposite, really an incompletion, while capitalist progress and mobility are illusions, mobility in a system itself static that book I of The Capital will give its canonical expression.”

62. Burton Pike, Robert Musil: An Introduction to his Work (New York, 1969), p. 158.

63. Hermann Pongs, Romanschaffen im Umbruch der Zeit. Eine Chronik von 1952-1962, vol. 4 (Tuebingen: Verlag der Deutschen Hochschuhlererzeitung, 1963), pp. 330-345.

64. Peirce (6.07).

65. T. J. Reiss, “Peirce, Frege, la vérité, le tiers inclus et le champ pratique,” Langages (1980), p. 123.

66. Mauthner, Beitrage, vol. 1, p. 92, in Janik and Toulmin, p. 129.

67. Bateson, Ecology, p. 410.

68. Ibid., p. 393.

69. Ibid., p.396. Bateson is also very careful to define message as a relationship, (p. 275).

70. Ibid., p. 289. “. . . all perception and all response, all behaviour and all classes of behaviour—. . . must be regarded as communicational in nature.”

71. Ibid., pp. 484ff.

72. Heelan, p. 5. “A World is also intersubjective. . . . This overlapping of Worlds is a condition sine qua non of communication between people.”

73. Foucault, L’Archéologie, pp. 161-163, and 41; Archaeology, p. 29.

74. Garbis Kortian, Métacritique (Paris, 1979), pp. 115-116; Metacritique: the Philosophical Argument of Jürgen Habermas, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 120-121.

75. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, “Musil und die Quadratwurzel,” in Dinklage, ed., p. 169. Musil admits the uncertainty of his own judgments and the necessity of allowing for their surpassability when he speaks of the number of times he has changed his view of Rilke and Hoffmannsthal, concluding that “there is no objective judgment but only a ‘living one’” (Tgb., 865, my paraphrase). “Musil’s method is in fact the provisional method of a believer who simply believes in nothing and therefore must always be ‘exact’ in order that he does not accidentally accept something which he has not yet verified. He himself called this method—presumably in reference to Cusanus’ ‘De Docta Ignorantia’—the ‘methodology of unknowing.’“

76. George Gentry, “Habit and Logical Interpretant,” in Studies of the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Philip Wiener and Frederick Young (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952).

77. Werner Heisenberg, “Remarks on the Origin of the Relations of Uncertainty,” in The Uncertainty Principle and Foundations of Quantum Mechanics: A Fifty Year Survey, ed. William C. Price and Seymour S. Chessick (New York, 1977), p. 6. The concept of indeterminacy does not signify a causality but indicates a change in the mode of expression and grasping of “that” which has been called “knowledge.”

78. Heelan, p. 90.

79. Heelan, p. 154. “On the one hand, the elementary particle is not phenomenally real; for it has ‘no colour, no smell, no taste; . . . and the concepts of geometry and kinematics, like shape or motion in space, cannot be applied to it consistently.’ On the other hand, it is not a pure (inhaltsleer) idea, for it can be ‘converted from potency to act,’ by the process of measurement and observation. Heisenberg called it real but potential.”

Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, p. 186, in Heelan, p. 154: “In experiments about atomic events we have to do with things and facts, with phenomena that are just as real as any phenomena of daily life. But the atoms or elementary particles themselves are not as real: they form a world of potentialities and possibilities rather than one of things and facts.”

80. Heelan, pp. 153ff.

81. Werner Heisenberg, Martin Heidegger Festschrift, (1959), p. 291, in Heelan, p. 151.

82. Heisenberg, The Physicist’s Conception of Nature, p. 15, in Heelan, p. 152.

83. Heisenberg, The Physicist’s Conception of Nature, p. 291, in Heelan, p. 152.

84. Heelan, p. 54.

85. Ibid., p. 82.

86. It was Baumann who first pointed out the close similarity between Musil’s theory of possibility and partial solution, on the one hand, and the principle of uncertainty on the other hand.

Werner Heisenberg, Physik und Philosophie, 1959, p. 37, in Gerhart Baumann, Robert Musil, Zur Erkenntnis der Dichtung (Bern, 1965), p. 173: “. . . as a rule we can only predict probability. No longer can objective phenomena be determined by mathematical formulas, but only the probabilities of the occurrence of certain phenomena. It is no longer the . . . occurrence, but rather the possibility of occurrence . . . that is subject to strict natural laws. . . . The probability function, unlike the mathematical model of Newtonian mechanics, does not describe a definite occurrence, rather, at least in regard to the process of observation, an aggregate of possible occurrences.”

87. Albrecht Schoene, “Zum Gebrauch des Konjunktivs bei Robert Musil,” in Deutsche Romane von Grimmelshausen bis Musil, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt, 1966-1974), pp. 290-318.

88. Reiss, “Archéologie du discours,” pp. 177ff.

89. Ibid., p. 185.

90. Umberto Eco, L’Oeuvre ouverte (Paris, 1965), pp. 17ff.

91. One might, contrary to the interpretation that Russell gives to the Tractatus, interpret Wittgenstein’s definition of a “Bild” as a definition of potentia, in that it is both contextually situated and only possible:

“2.202 Das Bild stellt eine moegliche Sachlage im logischen Raume dar.

2.203 Das Bild enthaelt Moeglichkeit der Sachlage, die es darstellt.” Wittgenstein, Tractatus, p. 18.

92. Emile Benveniste, “Sémiologie de la langue,” Semiotica 1 (1969).

93. Capek, p. 177. “Anticipating Peirce and Dewey, he [Mach] defines any problem which man faces as a result of conflict between an established mental habit and a widened field of observation; when our thought becomes adjusted to this widened field of experience, the problem disappears or using the words of C. S. Peirce, ‘the doubt is appeased.’ The adjustment of our thoughts to experience is, according to Mach, quite analogous to the adjustment of physical organs to their environment; in fact, this change in thoughts (Gedankenumwandlung) which we observe in ourselves is merely a part of a wider evolutionary process.”

94. Mach, Analyse der Empfindungen, p. 294, in R. S. Cohen, pp. 139ff: “The same elements are related to the self through many points of connection. The points of connection, however are not permanent. They are constantly arising, vanishing, and changing. Nor does the association of “Verknuepfungspunkten” with the self contradict a Peircean semiotics, since this would amount to saying that the self is a collection of pockets of habits, a paraphrase of the Peircean phrase that “matter is mind hide-bound with habit.”

95. Bateson, Ecology, pp. 131-132.

96. Peirce (5.295-97). “[. . .] attention is the power by which thought at one time is connected with and made to relate to thought at another time; or, to apply the conception of thought as a sign, that it is the pure demonstrative application of a thought-sign. [. . .] Attention produces effects [interpretants] upon the nervous system. These effects are habits, or nervous associations. [. . .] Thus the formation of a habit is an induction and is therefore necessarily connected with attention or abstraction.”

97. Peirce (5.295). “. . . since an act cannot be supposed to determine that which precedes it in time, this act can consist only in the capacity that the cognition emphasized has for producing an effect (interpretant) upon memory, or otherwise influencing subsequent thought.”

98. Mach, Conservation, p. 49, in R. S. Cohen p. 139. Mach, as well, insists upon the mnemonic aspect of coded representation: “What we ‘represent’ . . . behind the appearances (has) only the value of a memoria technica, or formula whose form, because it is arbitrary and irrelevant, varies very easily with the standpoint of our culture.”

99. Bateson, Ecology, p. 501. “The phenomenon of habit formation sorts out the ideas which survive repeated use and puts them in a more or less separate category. These trusted ideas then become available for immediate use without thoughtful inspection, while the more flexible parts of the mind can be saved for use on newer matters. . . . frequency of use of a given idea becomes a determinant of its survival in that ecology of ideas which we call Mind; and beyond that survival of a frequently used idea is further promoted by the fact that habit formation tends to remove the idea from the field of critical inspection.”

100. Peirce (6.58-59). “. . . there is probably in nature some agency by which the complexity and diversity of things can be increased; and that consequently the rule of mechanical necessity meets in some way with interference.

“By thus admitting pure spontaneity or life as a character of the universe, acting always and everywhere though restrained within narrow bounds by law, producing the infinitesimal departures from law continually, and great ones with infinite infrequency.”

See, regarding stochastics, Michel Serres, La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce: Fleuves et turbulences (Paris: Minuit, 1977). The “Clinamen” for Serres is one of the first elaborations of a theory of change via stochastics.

101. Bateson, Ecology, p. 381.

102. Ibid., p. 497.

103. Ibid., p. 500.

104. Heelan, p. 43. “Heisenberg’s insistence on ‘observable quantities’ was a return to the individual and empirical manifestations of reality which, as such, to our way of knowing, are penetrated with a certain quality.”

105. Theodor Wiessengrund Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (Frankfurt, 1958). Interestingly enough, another type of sign-production noted for breaking with habits is that of modern music, referred to by Adorno as fracturing the norm, and by Brelet as contradicting determinacy by means of chance and discontinuity.

G. Brelet, “L’Esthétique du discontinu dans la musique nouvelle,” in Musiques nouvelles (Paris: Klinsieck, 1968), p. 266: “Discontinuity is an open gap in determinism through which the contingency of chance and freedom can penetrate; the unforeseeable.”

106. Musil, “Tagebuecher,” in Kaiser and Wilkins, “Musil in die Quadrat-wurzel,” in Dinklage, Leben, Werke und Wirkung, p. 157.

107. In relativity physics, as well, field replaced the classical notion of ontological substance, as Einstein explains: “A new concept appeared in physics, the most important invention since Newton, the ‘field’ (p. 142). The acknowledgement of the new concepts gained more ground and the “field” eventually eclipsed the substance. . . . a new reality was created, a new concept for which there was no place in Newtonian mechanics. Slowly and by a constant struggle, the notion of ‘field’ succeeded in occupying the first place in physics and is among the fundamental concepts of this science” (p. 230).

Albert Einstein and L. Infeld, L’Evolution des idees en physique (Paris: Payot, 1978), pp. 142 and 230. It is as field that energy may be conceived as potentially realizing both waves and particles.

108. Bateson, Ecology, p. 188.

109. Ibid., pp. 265-268. “Does the older materialist thesis really depend upon the premise that contexts are isolatable? Or is our view of the world changed when we admit an infinite regress of contexts linked to each other in a complex work of meta-relations? . . . Does the possibility that the separate levels of stochastic change [in phenotype and genotype] may be connected in the larger context of the ecological system alter our allegiance in the battle?”

110. Foucault, L’Ordre du discourse, p. 32; Discourse on Language, p. 222.

111. Foucault, L’Archéologie, p. 39; Archaeology, p. 27.

112. Cohen, pp. 133 and 142.

113. Heisenberg, in Heelan, p. 150.

114. See also Peirce (8.012) and (7.319).

115. Peirce (5.316-17): “Finally, as what anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known in the ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is, only by virtue of its addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed. In this way, the existence of thought now depends on what is to be hereafter; so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community. [. . .] The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation.” There is some argument among Peirce scholars as to whether the knowledge of the community ultimately leads to the complete and total field of truth. The case of the ultimate interpretant is posed once again. Habermas describes Peirce’s notion of the community as an epistemological ideal of the same nature as the categorical imperative: “The structure of scientific method guarantees both the revisability of all individual statements and the possibility in principle of an ultimate answer to every emerging scientific question” (Habermas, Knowledge, p. 92).

116. It is on the basis of the Peircean notion of consensus of the community that both Apel and Habermas will be seen to posit a consensus of communicational norms or postulates of validity, which will be seen to be essential to any theory of utopian, communicational interaction: “The illocutionary force of a speech act, which brings about an interpersonal relationship between consensually interacting participants, arises from the binding force of acknowledged norms of action: to the extent that a speech act is part of consensual interaction it actualizes an already established value-pattern” (Habermas, “Some Distinctions in Universal Pragmatics,” in Theory and Society 3, No. 2 (Summer 1976), p. 158). In other words Habermas and Apel avoid speaking of referentiality and of empirical objectivity by placing truth at the level of intersubjectivity, where interaction should bring about a mutual understanding. The level of objects in the world, or states of affairs, have their status and meaning as a consensus derived through communicative interaction: “In none of these dimensions, however, are we able to name a criterion which would allow an independent judgement on the competence of possible judges, that is, independently of a consensus achieved in a discourse” (Kortian, Métacritique, p. 120; Metacritique, p. 125).

117. Foucault, L’Archéologie, pp. 250ff; Archaeology, p. 191.

118. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, 1976), p. 290.

119. Foucault, L’Archéologie, pp. 242 and 243.

120. Bateson, Ecology, p. 263.

121. Ibid., p. 254.

122. Ibid., p. 244.

123. Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, pp. 22-23.

124. Habermas, Communication, p. 5 (my emphasis).

125. Habermas, Communication, p. 35.

126. Ibid., p. 23.

127. Ibid., p. 158.

128. Habermas, “Some Distinctions,” p. 156.

129. Ibid., p. 165.

130. Ibid., p. 167.

131. Habermas, Communication, pp. 1-69.

132. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, pp. 151ff.

133. Ibid., pp. 128-129. “A semiotics of code is an operational device in the service of a semiotics of sign-production. A semiotics of code can be established—if only partially—when the existence of a message postulates it as an explanatory condition. Semiotics must proceed to isolate structures as if a definitive general structure existed; but to be able to do this one might assume that this global structure is a simply regulative hypothesis and that every time a structure is described something occurs within the universe of signification which no longer makes it completely reliable.”

134. Ibid., p. 128.

II. The Ghostliness of Narrative

1. Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (Paris, 1959), pp. 217ff.

2. Wladimir Krysinski, “Musil vs. Scarron ou l’indétermination du romanesque,” The Canadian Journal of Research in Semotics, No. 1 (1981), pp. 15ff.

3. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problèmes de la Poétique de Dostoievski (Lausanne, 1929-1970), pp. 21 1ff.

4. Foucault, L’Archéologie, p. 71.

5. Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, pp. 9-10; Discourse on Language, p. 216.

6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris, 1976), pp. 244-247.

7. Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen und des Verhaeltnisses des Physischen zum Psychologischen (Jena, 1911), p. 199.

8. Henri Bergson, Le Hire: Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris, 1940-1972), p. 113. “Raidure, automatisme, distraction, insociabilité, tout cela se pénètre et c’est de tout cela qu’est fait le comique de caractère.”

9. Bakhtin and Volochinov, Le Marxisme et la philosophie du langage, p. 15.

10. Habermas, “Some Distinctions,” p. 165.

11. Very briefly, a word of warning is due here. First of all, one might object that what I am doing is merely to postulate structures of communication instead of those of narrativity, making for an equally abstract, absolute system. I hope that the comparisons that I have made between codes in linguistic semiotics and codes in communicational semiotics will serve to outline the advantages of postulates of communication over those of “langue.” However, the risk still exists that one may pose absolute categories as a filter for all communication, at the expense of the specificity of the actual practices of discourse. The cautions of indeterminacy and relationality theories of discourse which I have worked around to in the preceding chapter should illustrate the difference and epistemological advantages which set a theory of communicational postulates off from a theory of codes, as leading to a theory of discourse production. Eco reiterates these epistemological reservations when he states that some contexts cannot be coded: “Other contexts which can be seen but cannot be coded and possible circumstances which are either unforeseeable or excessively complex and which make up a cluster of different extrasemiotic factors . . .” (Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, p. 130).

Basically, what a communicationally oriented theory of discursive habits recognizes that a linguistico-semiotic theory does not is that, due to the very relational, interactional nature of all communication, including the dialogue between the text and the critic within a context, every critical category and result is a product of a communicational relation, hence is relative, biased, and partial: “A semantic system or subsystem is one possibility of giving form to the world. As such, it constitutes a partial interpretation of the world and can theoretically be revised every time new messages which semantically restructure the code introduce new position values. . . . But in general, any addressee will turn to his own particular world vision, in order to choose the subcodes that he wishes to apply to the message. To define this partial world vision, this prospective segmentation of reality entails a Marxist notion of ideology as “false conscience.” Ideology is therefore a message which starts with a factual description and then tries to justify it theoretically, gradually being accepted by society through a process of overcoding” (Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, p. 31).

It now remains to be seen what kinds of communicational, semiotic habits could possibly be produced in an analysis of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, as well as broken by ironic interaction.

12. Habermas, Communication, p. 29.

13. Ibid., p. 29.

14. Ibid., p. 29.

15. Ibid., p. 67.

16. Ibid., pp. 63-64.

17. Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton, 1941-1971), p. 182.

18. Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, p. 41; Discourse on Language, p. 225.

19. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie (Paris, 1961), p. 53; Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 37.

20. Foucault, Folie, p. 98. Regarding the principle of exclusion, Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, p. 11.

21. Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, p. 23.

22. Foucault, Folie, p. 233; Madness, p. 227.

23. Foucault, Folie, p. 260; Madness, p. 251.

24. Ibid., p. 200.

25. Ibid., p. 99.

26. Ibid., p. 99; Madness, p. 79.

27. Foucault, L’Archéologie, p. 60; Archaeology, p. 44.

28. Foucault, Folie, p. 107.

29. Foucault, p. 189; Madness, p. 189.

30. Bakhtin and Volochinov, pp. 115-116.

31. Ibid., p. 146.

32. Ibid., p. 9.

33. Krysinski, “Musil vs Scarron,” pp. 15ff.

34. Hochstaetter, p. 17.

35. Goetz Mueller, Ideologie Kritik und Metasprache (Munich, 1972), p. 2.

36. Blanchot, p. 219.

37. Foucault, L’Archéologie, p. 160.

38. Karl Kraus, Werke, vol. III, p. 329, in Janik and Toulmin, p. 89.

39. Louis Marin, La Critique du discours (Paris, 1975), p. 285.

40. Ibid., p. 298.

41. Ibid., p. 33.

42. Ibid., p. 288.

43. Blanchot, p. 202.

44. Wolfgang Frier, Die Sprache der Emotionalitaet in den “Verwirrungen des Zoeglings Toerless” von Robert Musil (Bonn, 1976), p. 168.

45. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problèmes de la poétique de Dostoyevski (Lausanne, 1929-70, pp. 10-12; Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), p. 4-5.

46. Bakhtin and Volochinov, pp. 14-15.

47. Ibid., p. 28; Marxism, p. 11.

48. Bakhtin, Dostoievski, p. 38 and pp. 134ff.

49. Ibid., p. 134; Dostoyevsky, p. 93.

50. Bakhtin and Volochinov, p. 146.

51. Ibid., pp. 127ff.

52. Ibid., pp. 127ff.

53. Schoene, pp. 290-318.

54. Blanchot, p. 271.

55. Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, p. 61; Discourse on Language, p. 231.

56. Velimir Klebnikov, Zanguesi, “Introduction,” in Krysinski, “Musil vs. Scarron,” p. 24.

Conclusion

1. Wladimir Jankélévitch, L’Ironie (Paris, 1964). The original edition of this work bore the subtitle “ou la bonne conscience.” Irony, for Jankelevitch, is defined in relation to a play on the double meaning of “conscience” in French. Irony is a form of consciousness, i.e., a theory of knowledge. But irony is also a form of conscience, in the sense of moral or ethical presentiment of what “ought” to be.

2. Musil, Prosa, Dramen, Spaete Briefe, p. 726.

3. Nuesser, Musil’s Romantheorie, p. 12.

4. Bateson, Ecology, p. 455.

5. It is observed that this (utopian) man as a man of action is already present today; but exact people do not concern themselves with the utopias latent within them. In this connection the essence of utopia is described as an experiment in which the possible variations of an element of life and its effects are observed, a possibility freed from and developed out of the constraining binds of reality. The utopia of exactitude produces a man in whom can be found a paradoxical combination of exactness and indeterminateness. Beyond the temperament of exactitude everything in him is indeterminate. He attaches little value to morality, since his imagination is focused on changes and, as is shown, his passions disappear and there appears in their place a goodness with something like primal fire about it (DMoE, 1878).

We must emphasize that we are not even beginning to take into account the vast literature on Utopia. Our aim here is to present a very limited argument, namely that irony realizes the discursive utopia as emancipatory interaction. This theory of Utopia stems directly from the Frankfurt School and matures in its relation to communication in Habermas and Apel. Of course there would need to be a development of this notion of utopia in relation to many other theories of utopia. This is a task which remains for the future.

6. Blanchot, pp. 212-213.

7. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London: Longmans and Green, 1908), pp. 381-425.

William James, in a study on mystical, ecstatic experiences in various ethnic societies finds a common obstacle in all cases, namely that of making the mystical state last. “Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they fall into the light of the common day” (p. 381).

8. Blanchot, p. 215.

9. Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Hamburg, 1957), p. 1594.

10. Allemann, p. 183.

11. Arntzen, in Manfred Sera, Utopie und Parodie bei Musil, Broch, und Thomas Mann (Bonn, 1969), p. 3.

12. Peter Szondi, Poésie et poétique de l’idéalisme Allemand, trans. Jean Bollack (Paris: Minuit, 1975), p. 109.

13. Ibid., p. 109.

14. Krysinski, “Musil vs Scarron”, m.s., p. 3.

15. Pike, p. 160. Although we agree with Pike’s qualification here regarding irony, we do not accept what he says about myth, since we give to the notion of myth the same interpretation as do Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1944-1972), pp. 43ff. For Horkheimer and Adorno, myth is the reification, the false purporting to truth, and the systematization of what was earlier an emancipatory, non-total-itarian moment of reason.

16. Goetz Mueller, Ideologie und Metasprache (Muenchen, 1972), pp. 152ff.

17. Jean-François Lyotard, “Adorno come diavolo,” in Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Union General d’Editions, 1973), pp. 115ff.

18. Bateson, “Information, Codification and Meta-communication,” pp. 418- 422.

19. Ibid., pp. 418-423.

20. Ibid., p. 423.

21. Ibid., p. 418.

22. Ibid., p. 420.

23. Ibid., p. 420, my emphasis.

24. Bateson, Ecology, p. 63.

25. Ibid., p. 502.

26. Ibid., pp. 502-503.

27. Ibid., p. 483.

28. Kortian, Métacritique, p. 91; Metacritique, p. 97. For Habermas’ argument that emancipation must apply to all types of communicational interaction and not merely to an economic base-structure, which is the particular interest of orthodox Marxism, see Habermas, Communication, pp. 97-98.

29. Kortian, Métacritique, p. 71; Metacritique, p. 78-79. “In its prospective and normative moment, this reflection unites critique with the emancipatory cognitive interest by adumbrating the objective conditions of the context of application of the theory. This leads Habermas to elaborate a theory of communication centred on the concept of a universal pragmatics . . . The task of universal pragmatics is to set out the necessary and sufficient conditions of a possible communication which operates counterfactually, to diagnose the splitting of symbols produced in speech subjected to systematic distortions, and to attempt in this way to create the regulative canons of a constraint-free communication which has recognised normative force.”

30. Habermas, Communication, p. 114.

31. K. O. Apel, in Habermas, Communication, p. 205. See also Juergen Habermas, “Preparatory Remarks to a Theory of Communicative Competence,” in Habermas-Luhman, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (Frankfurt, 1971), pp. 101-141, my translation.

32. Habermas, “Some Distinctions,” p. 165.

33. Kortian, Métacritique, p. 71; Metacritique, p. 78.

34. Habermas, “Some Distinctions,” p. 163.

35. Ibid., p. 163.

36. Ibid., p. 163.

37. Ibid., p. 164.

38. Karl Otto Apel, “From Kant to Peirce”, Proceedings from the Third International Kant Congress (1970), p. 92.

39. Ibid., p. 100.

40. Horkheimer, Critical Theory (New York, 1972), p. 211.

41. For an excellent discussion of Peirce’s notion of abduction and its relation to the formation of new habits, see K. T. Fann, Peirce’s Theory of Abduction (The Hague, 1970), pp. 28ff.

42. Peirce equates abduction with analogy in the following article: C. S. Peirce, The Lowell Lectures, vol. 1, no. 8 (1903), p. 61, cited in, Fann, p. 15.

43. Foucault, L’Ordre du discours, p. 53; Discourse on Language, p. 229.