0.0 An Imbroglio of Phaenera

Among the infinitely expanding discursive fields which interact in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, we have selected the following as essential for an analysis of Musil:

[1] A field of narrative (i.e., récit), where narrative is understood as a configuration of “representeds,” i.e., the story of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

[2] A field of narration or of enunciation understood as the “apparent” and “underlying” sources which produce or position the enunciateds. The determination of the first field depends on this second one. However, it is not in fact easier to isolate elements of this second field than it is to do so for those of the first field.

[3] A field of extraneous discourses—a sort of intertext including other so-called narrative texts, literature, journalism, societal doxa etc. This field emerges when one questions the assumption that the second field (narration) is a single fixed identifiable, human source. It is seen that, in fact, these other discourses work to position the discourse in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

[4] A field of metadiscursive consensus—such practices would include not only Musil’s metalinguistic commentary about his own discursive production, but also a certain representation of the “Musilkritik” including, for example, Blanchot’s interpretation of Musil’s narrative as one that heralds the reign of “impersonality.”¹

[5] An interdiscursive epistemic field. As has been illustrated, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is situated not only by literary or “narrative” discourse fields, but also by discourses from other discursive series (Tynianov), including the philosophy of language, modern science, and sociohistorical theory. As Janik and Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna and Schorske’s Fin de siècle Vienna both so well portrayed at the turn of the century all discourses were thoroughly interconnected; i.e., Wittgenstein’s Tractatus could not be fully understood without relating it to other discourses or to other disciplines of past, present, and future fields (Kant, Mach, Musil, Freud, Kierkegaard, Heisenberg, Einstein, etc.).

[6] A field comprising, last but not least, our own critical interpretive discourse, which is responsible for choosing and relating the former five fields, must also be acknowledged as having certain epistemological biases and as being composed of certain limited fields. In this way the choices in relating these fields also become somewhat relativized. The configurations which are placed into relief are de-absolutized because they depend to a degree upon our own strategic choices and interpretive filters. Just as Musil claimed to be writing for no one in particular (namely for no one in the present generation), so too must the interpretations generated by our own discourse take into consideration other past, present and future interpretations: “Thomas Mann and people like him write for people who are here; I write for people who are not (yet) here” (Tgb., 880).

Our own critical discourse had indeed related many of the above-mentioned fields. Also, we readily would admit that much traditional discursive criticism, although sometimes unawares, relates many of these fields and seeks a consensus (if somewhat vicariously and selectively) of the various domains of discourse. In general, most critics of discourse would include among the possible domains of discourse the author’s metalinguistic commentary, the comments of other critics, and the discourses from the surounding epistemic climate. However, most critics tend to refuse to see that their own critical discourse is equally as situated and contextually relative as are the discourses that they claim to say truths about. The best proof of this would be the pamphlet-type battles over “right” vs. “wrong” schools of criticism. Perhaps the drawback of such interactive criticism is an operational problem, that of simultaneously relating all of these various fields. Because triadic sign-field relations have been shown to be infinitely expanding and infinitely variably interrelated, a speaker would ideally have to talk about all of these fields simultaneously. At the same time he would have to relate his own interpretive fields to the host of others which belong to the community of investigators. No one critic of discourse has yet succeeded in transcending the classical discursive traits of exclusivity, possessiveness, and knowledge’s “will to truth.” No one has succeeded in an conscious attempt to remain fully open to the discourse-field of the community. The alternative to this scenario would be to undertake discursive criticism in conjunction with a whole community of investigators where many active Interpretant-fields are brought into play in search of a consensus, thereby avoiding confinement to one particular individual’s limitations and prejudices. But even then, biases, in this case those of the epistemic community, would still remain.

Also, the continuum and flux of the various fields make it impossible to order or hierarchize definitively, or causally and linearly to link one field to another. For example, one cannot say that Musil’s discourse was causally “influenced” by the fields of discourse of modern physics. One may only say that they interact more or less directly and that the temporary delimiting isolation of this interaction is a product of the Interpretant-discourses which postulate or produce the interpretive result, including this present one.

Within fields we find what Peirce would call habits of sign relations or what Foucault refers to as discursive procedures, i.e., regularities or constraints generalized from particular discursive practices. In the following analysis these levels will not always be extricable one from the other. Rather the level of the enunciated will be enmeshed with the enunciation, and so on.

1.0 A Partial Solution to the Irony in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften

One could argue that, in Musil, irony sometimes functions as an isolated case of binary opposition of meanings/signifieds. For example, Musil himself refers to the double significance of Arnheim’s and Diotima’s communication when he calls their silence an ‘ambivalent’ one. At one point the narrator plays on the contradiction between the corporal, sensual and the “spiritual,” lofty traits of Diotima’s character. One could simply reduce irony to a pocket of oppositions of figural versus literal meanings as, for example, in the following: “. . . in the very moment, that is to say, when he wanted to fling himself down at Diotima’s feet reckless of his beautifully creased trousers and, indeed, of his future . . (M.w.Q. 2:225; DMoE, 510).

Wladimir Krysinski, in an analysis of the first paragraph of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, locates Musil’s irony in a narrative modalization which results in the following binary oppositions of “topoi”: the “Tatsaechliche” vs. the “Gespenstische des Geschehens”; the factual vs. the ghostliness of experience; the scientific topoi of discourse vs. the human type of knowledge.² Of course, there is a wide consensus among critics that, in Musil, there exist both binary oppositions and a dependence upon changes in narrative perspective and voice. However, such “Partialloesungen” (pocket solutions) to irony in Musil, taken as binary opposition, not only remain within the classical, logical episteme of the “exact”—an episteme whose exclusivity was rejected by Musil—but also such an approach limits itself to one particular context, for example, the first paragraph.

Any study of Musil should contextualize any enunciated within a context which is far broader, dynamic, and complex than a series of binary, semantic oppositions. Indeed, we have seen the difficulty of isolating semantic categories, let alone structural configurations. The problem then is to find a new, or at least a more flexible, less classical way of talking about contextualization and modalization in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, a way that is consistent with the epistemological positions outlined in the preceding chapter.

1.1 Interference of discursive practices

It is possible, to a limited degree, to discern certain fields of enunciation which position an enunciated, often allowing for a partial, stable interpretation, a “Partialloesung” of irony as a binary opposition or as an interference of one field with another. For example, Clarisse’s discourse addressed to Walter presents a case par excellence of interference of one discursive habit or procedure with another. Walter is carrying out a long diatribe when Clarisse interrupts him merely, or rather precisely, for the sake of disturbing him; she asks if he wants a beer when in fact there is no beer in the house:

The lines floated in waves from his lips.

Clarisse watched these lips in amiable astonishment, as though they had sent a pretty toy flying up into the air. Then, remembering her role of good little housewife, she interrupted:

“Do you want some beer?”

“Hm? Why not? I always have some, don’t I?”

“But I haven’t any in the house!”

“Pity you asked me,” Walter said with a sigh. “I mightn’t have thought of it.”

. . . But Walter had now lost his equilibrium and did not quite know how to go on. (M.w.Q. 1:69; DMoE, 63-64)

1.2 Multiplication of contexts: Frames of reference

On a level other than that of the “apparent” or represented senders and receivers in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, it is also evident that Musil was addressing his enunciation to a certain field of receivers who inhabited “Wittgenstein’s Vienna.” For example, it is well known that the character Arnheim is modelled after Walther Rathenau, the German author, industrialist, and statesman. Obviously, one context of reception would be the concrete sociohistorical one of those who would recognize this “personnage a clef.” But is it really necessary to recognize this context of reception in order to appreciate the various discursive configurations around the character of Arnheim? Obviously not! “Arnheims” may be found in every context, culture, and time. The field of applicability of Arnheim not only extends further than the temporally and spatially limited cultural codes of “Musil’s Vienna.” What is more, the significance of this character grows and becomes potentially universal in relation to the development of Western history as it is progressively situated in more and more contextual fields. The fields of reception of the enunciated cannot be isolated or tied to the distinct, referential coordinates of any one particular field. Rather, these fields potentially spread out over infinitely expanding spatio-temporal contexts. A further example serves to illustrate how crucial it is to be able (or unable) to isolate and fix positioning contexts of discourse. If one takes the syntagm, “Collateral Campaign,” and situates it purely in relation to immediately apparent enunciated contexts, one is constantly confronted with a great flux of all of the possible meanings that this term may cover.

In Book 2, Chapter 22 of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, the Collateral Campaign is described by the narrator (via Ulrich’s focus) as incarnated by “an influential lady of ineffable intellectual charms, waiting in readiness to devour Ulrich.” The Campaign, in the above context, is somewhat carnally reduced to the person (body) of Diotima and to a collection of elements or charms such as sensuality and ambition, which constitute this gracious lady.

In Part I, Book 2, Chapter 37 of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, the Campaign is described by the narrator, who adopts two foci, first that of Tuzzi and secondly that of the host of participants in the Campaign. Tuzzi’s focus circumscribes the Campaign as what “beseiged Tuzzi’s home.” The rest of the participants see it as what “claims to find a chance to help truth come into its own at last.” Ranging from Diotima’s person through the status of a nuisance to the most universal of truths, the meaning of “Campaign” undergoes a radical metamorphosis depending upon the discursive context which situates it. The above are just two very limited, isolated examples of contextualization, from a great number which appear within the text itself.

Furthermore, if we position the meaning of the Campaign in relation to the time of writing of the novel, i.e., the extended period including the outbreaks of both World War I and World War II, its significance would change completely. The Campaign is understood as one of the paths leading to war. But what does it mean to understand the Campaign in relation not only to the two World Wars, but also to the “repetition” itself of such wars and such campaigns, both historically prior and subsequent to the death of Musil? In this case, one can see how the infinite expansion of situating contextual fields changes the significance of the syntagm “Collateral Campaign.” This “repetition” adds a dimension of sinister ineluctability and cynicism to the roles of the discursive and political. It is far from original to suggest that discursive praxis constitutes “Campaigns” in society throughout history. The Campaign also finds a contextual home in the political and discursive practices at the time of this present reading of Musil.

At this stage of our reading of Musil we suggest that a host of currently popular critical tools and concepts have actually derived from the epistemology elaborated in Part One. Such concepts as dialogism, polyphony, and interdiscursivity all refer to the materiality of contextualized semiotic interaction as ongoing sign-production.

This explanation of contexts in relation to various fields of discourse is described by Bakhtin in a remark that gives us some direction as to how to begin to analyze this discursive phenomenon and its social and epistemological implications:

. . . the discourse of our practical experience is full of words belonging to others; there are those we mix our voice with, forgetting to whom they belong, there are those we use to strengthen our own words, accepting them as an authority, finally there are those we people with our own expectations which are foreign or hostile to them.³

For Bakhtin, as well as for other pragmatists such as Austin and Habermas, what we study when we study discourse is no longer a syntactico-semantic structure, a “langue” or a grammar composed of atomistic elements. For Bakhtin, the basic unit to be studied in discourse analysis is the dialogue, i.e., interaction. For Austin, it is the speech act or utterance. And, for Foucault, it is the organization of the field of utterances, where they occur and circulate [and] the configurations of the enunciative field,⁴ i.e., the relations between various discursive practices.

These theorists have begun to study how various enunciateds are positioned in relation to the events in which they are manifest in order to see how they are understood in relation to many fields of origin and shared meaning.

A word’s meaning and truth can no longer be said to exist outside of its contexts of use. Indeed, the word’s meaning and truth are constituted or produced by this use, just as the result of a scientific experiment is constituted in and through that experimental interaction.

Foucault describes how one may view discourse in relation to its social contextualized configurations, i.e., discursive interrelations: “I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.”⁵

Perhaps the key to an alternative mode of discursive “analysis” of complicated communications such as Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften lies in a study of the materiality of these internal discursive procedures as interrelated events, as well as of the configurations that they form and the claims that they make on the social order in which they appear. Rather than undertaking yet another semantic analysis of content, one would analyze the habits of procedures of the discourse-event itself in relation to as many other discourse-events as possible.

2.0 Expanding Triadicity: One Enunciated, Many Contexts

One of the most striking examples of ironic contextualization in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is the mis en relief of certain singular triadic sign-functions and the constant positioning and repositioning of them within various other sign-field relations or discursive practices. First, an enunciated is isolated and defined in a more or less stable, “referential” way. Then this stable definition is destabilized and destructured. The utterance recurs, but in a qualitatively different way since it occurs in a different contextual field. We shall refer to this operation as a form of “deterritorialization” in the sense of Deleuze’s definition of this term.⁶

As will be seen, the shifting from one contextual field to another is carried out in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften by almost all of the characters as well as by the narrator. The receiver is also provoked by the text to reposition sign-functions. This deterritorializing shifting occurs most evidently around the following sign-functions: “Geist” (DMoE, 152-158), “Erloesung” (DMoE, 517ff.), “Genie” (DMoE, 33-35, 44-47, 1254-71), and “Liebe” (DMoE, 191, 144, 355, 496, 521ff., 744, 901). However, although many enunciative fields effect this deterritorialization, what is of interest is the particular way in which each does so. It will be seen that while both Ulrich and Diotima deterritorialize others’ discourses, Diotima does so in a way that lends itself to the ridiculous, whereas Ulrich does so in a way that provokes epistemological and ethical doubt.

Each contextual use of the particular sign-function may be temporarily isolated as a sign-functional “potentia” having a partial and temporary meaning (“Partialloesung”), which is immediately surpassed with each new context of use. When the interpreter of the sign-function tries to find an ultimate or total Interpretant for all of the potential sign-functional relations, he finds that the various meanings add to, interfere with, translate for, substitute for, overuse, and misuse each other, making it impossible to fix any single, absolute meaning. Within a synchronic instant there may exist a meaning which is temporarily isolated, but it cannot with-stand the flux of relationally constituted meanings for any longer period of time. This discursive procedure of continually repositioning a sign within new contexts, of seeing the sign from new perspectives, of never arresting its sense, is of course, the procedure earlier referred to in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften by the narrator as “essayism” and “experiment.”

2.1 The many interpretants of “Genie”

A much-used word in the circles of the Campaign is “Genie.” One particular use in the sense of Wittgenstein’s term, “language-use,” of this sign-function catalytically incited Ulrich to reflect upon the various meanings produced within the many contexts that situated this term.

A journalist had written that a certain race horse was a “genius” (DMoE, 44). Ulrich began his search for a recuperation of this use of the term first of all in relation to the dictionary definition of the term, as though looking for a fixed referential or at least literal value to attach to “Genie”:

“It is most evident,” said Ulrich to his sister, “when, as usually happens only by chance, one becomes aware of a little-noticed sign, namely, that we have the habit of pronouncing ‘genius’ and ‘genial’ differently, and not as if the second came from the first”. [. . .]

“At that time, after the conversation with Stumm, I took a look in Grimm’s Dictionary,” Ulrich excused himself. “The military word ‘genius’, that is, the ‘soldier-genius’, naturally has come to us, as many military expressions have, from the French.” (DMoE, 1257)

Then Ulrich proceeded to expand the situating discursive field. He gave the various etymologies of the word “Genie” ranging from Goethe to Kant, as well as the various ways that the term was used (DMoE, 1258).

Somewhat later, after this abundance of discursive complexes, we switch over to Stumm’s reflective positioning of the word:

“What exactly is a ‘genius’,” he asked. No one has ever called a general a ‘genius’!” [. . .] I think I can tell you what a ‘genius’ is: It is not just someone who is very successful, but rather someone who also, so to speak, goes about his business backwards!” And Stumm went on to argue his point using the great examples of psychoanalysis and the theory of relativity. (DMoE, 1259)

Add to the above several remarks made earlier concerning Clarisse’s expectation that Walter would become a genius, the social world’s pronouncement that Walter was a genius, the remark made early in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften by the narrator concerning the genius and ruin of Kakania: “Yes, in spite of much that seems to point the other way, Kakania was perhaps a home for genius after all; and that, probably, was the ruin of it” (M.w.Q. 1:34-35; DMoE, 35). The sign “Genie” combines with various sign-relations in many discursive fields in an infinite number of possibilities. These infinitely expanding combinations make it impossible to attach any single signification to the Representamen “Genie,” to see meaning as anything more than a contextualized discursive production shifting throughout a variety of fields.

We may schematize the shifting sign-fields of “Genie” as in figure 3, whereby the various contexts produce various meanings, all of which battle with each other for supremacy.

2.2 “Erloesung”

The constant enunciative positioning and repositioning of a sign-function within many various use-contexts, is also effected by Stumm in relation to the “Wortgruppe Erloesen.” The various over- and misuses of this term point to the “inflation of language” evident to both Stumm and the reader. Stumm’s consideration of all of the uses of this term illustrates its “corruption,” its inflation.

Stumm himself calls it a “geschwollenes Wort” (DMoE, 518). Once again, the result of his accentuated repositioning of each sign-function is the impossibility of associating an object, a denotation, or a referential meaning to any word: “The world of those who write and those who have to write is full of big words and ideas that have lost the objects to which they refer . . . and the surviving concepts must be used” (M.w.Q. 2:26; DMoE, 326).

Fig. 3

We might then define the “inflation of language” as the overflowing of a word with multiple but unarrestable meanings given the complex fields of discursive circulation that assume the word.

2.3 “Geist”

Not only does the infinite contextualization of a sign-function disturb any referential meaning of the term, but also certain idealistic assumptions about certain terms are dismantled. This dismantling of ideology occurs as a sort of explosion of overcoding. For example, Ulrich initially attempts to hold onto the idealistic and ideological assumption that mind/spirit/intellect (“Qeist”) is the highest human value: “Geist[gilt] als das Hoechste und ueber allem Herrschende” (DMoE, 152). Here “Geist” and “human value” are rendered synonymous by overcoding, or myth, as Barthes would say. Reflecting upon the various uses of this sign-function, Ulrich recalls many of the cliche, overcoded uses of the term, remarking that “Geist” is considered to be the highest manifestation of all things. “Geist” is even the superlative qualifier for aspects of life which are situated on the lowest link of the chain of being. Here Ulrich is faced with a conflict between a shifting contextualization which relativizes and a word-usage which absolutizes and mythologizes while simultaneously attempting to be applicable to even the most banal of concrete contexts:

Mind and spirit [ = Geist], when in combination with something else, are the most widespread thing there is. There is a masculine mind, a cultured mind, the greatest living mind, the spirit of loyalty, the spirit of love, ‘keeping up the spirit’ of this cause or that, ‘acting in the spirit of our movement’ and so forth. How solid and unimpeachable it sounds, right down to the lowest level! (M.w.Q. 1:177; DMoE, 152)

Musil, then, brilliantly turns this contextualization into a decontextualization. Many people had attributed an absolute value to the term “Geist,” but when Ulrich tries to see what this value is, independently of the various contexts which have situated it, the word is emptied of sense, so to speak, once it is totally “decontextualized,” “deterritorialized” or “demythologized,” reduced to silence.

But when the spirit stands alone, a naked noun, bare as a ghost to whom one would like to lend a sheet—what then? One can read the poets, study the philosophers, buy pictures and have discussions all night long. But is it spirit that one gains by doing so? . . . Perhaps, if one knew more about it, there would be an awkward silence round this noun ‘spirit’. . . . (M.w.Q. 1:177; DMoE, 152)

In other words, the inability to fix any specific context if only for a moment leaves us with no meaning at all!

In another definition of “Geist,” Ulrich sees this somewhat elusive term operating as an Interpretant-context which gives meaning to other sign-functions. “Geist” can cause the sign-function “beauty” to have fluctuating Interpretant-effects such as “good,” “bad,” “magical,” etc.:

The mind [Geist] has learned that beauty can make things good, bad, stupid or enchanting. The mind dissects and analyses a sheep and a penitent sinner and finds humility and patience in both. . . . It regards nothing as firmly established, neither any personality nor any order of things or ideas. Because our knowledge may change with every day, it believes in no ties, and everything possesses the value that it has only until the next act of creation, as a face to which one is speaking changes even while the words are being spoken. (M.w.Q. 1:178-79; DMoE, 153-54)

As this continuous, triadic situating and resituating of “Geist” unfolds, where first of all other words become Interpretants of the sign-function, “Geist,” and then vice versa, “Geist” becomes all three functions; the Object is “Geist,” the Representamen is “Geist,” and the Interpretant is “Geist”: “Geist” means nothing since it can only be reduced to itself in a tautologically sinister language game: “And all at once the whole thing presented itself to Ulrich comically, in the question whether in the end, since there was certainly plenty of mind and spirit knocking about, all that was wrong was that the spirit was mere spirit and the mind had no mind?” (M.w.Q. 1:180; DMoE, 155).

The destruction of any absolute meaning or even of any relatively stable meaning for such terms as “Geist,” “Erloesung,” “Liebe,” and “Genie,” illustrates the negative, aggressive, tendentious attitude of discursive practices traditionally associated with irony. The interaction of various contexts of discourse and the differential enunciative positioning leaves intact no myth, no ideology, and no value associated with any particular sign-function. An infinite discursive practice attacks and places into question the claims to exclusivity and power that Foucault associates with the specific, “undisturbed” discursive practices of knowledge.

While we have not devoted much space here to the discussion of the relationship between Nietzsche and Musil, this comparison having already made up a large body of traditional Musil critique, we might suggest that whereas discourse is the will to power in Nietzsche and in Foucault’s renditions of him, for Musil, the discursive project is constantly to recontextualize, de-absolutize, de-exclusivize discourse and thereby mitigate its claims to power.

3.0 Discursive Habits Constitute the Subject: Infinite Sign-Practices
Disperse the Subject

This radical contextualization of signs destroys the absoluteness not only of certain key-words, but of characters as well, since these are defined, indeed constituted, as sign-functions. As such, characters have no other status than that of the elements of the discourses which constitute them. To state it in yet another way, character is nothing more than a configuration or a habit of discursive elements which circulate within the field labelled by the proper name/“deictic”—for example, “Moosbrugger.” This view and practice of characterization as discursive configurations of elements comes very close to Mach’s reduction of the subject to nothing more than a series of elements: “[It is] not the ego that is primary, but rather the elements (sensations). . . . The elements form the ego.”⁷ Musil, too, expressed the decentralization and deessentialization of the notion of character: “. . . the personality will soon be no more than an imaginary meeting-point for all that is impersonal” (M.w.Q. 2:210; DMoE, 474), although he sees it as a condition of the age more than as a state of being to be advocated.

However, even where character is constituted by the discursive events that assume him/her, some characters are more rigidly constituted, so to speak, than others.

In the following quotation one finds the distinction between the ridiculous sense of contextualization and tragic discursive orientation. In Diotima’s report to Ulrich of Arnheim’s evaluation of his (Ulrich’s) role in the Campaign, we may isolate three types of discursive procedures: (a) Distortion through rigid recontextualization: Arnheim’s rigid, blind resituating of humanist, aesthetic discourse into the realm of business, and vice versa; (b) Acontextualization: ignorance of the original context such as is the case with Diotima’s unreflective imitation of Arnheim’s discursive habits, and her application of them to the context of her adulterous and ambitious tendencies; and (c) Super-positioning of contextualizations: Ulrich’s critical reflection on the habits of others and his inability to adopt one particular firm stand even in defense of this fluctuation of perspectives:

“I [Arnheim] should be inclined to fear that his influence on Count Leinsdorf was not a fortunate one, were it not that this true nobleman is so securely enshrined in the great traditional feelings and ideas upon which real life is based that he can probably well afford to bestow this confidence.”

These were strong words, and Ulrich had deserved them. But Diotima did not take so much notice of them as she might have, because it was the other part of Arnheim’s pronouncement that made an impression on her—his way of regarding estates not as something to be owned in an estate-owning spirit, but as a form of spiritual massage. She thought this magnificent, and let her thoughts wander after the idea, imagining herself as the lady of the manor in such a setting. “I sometimes admire,” she said, “the broad-mindedness of your criticism where His Highness is concerned. All that is, after all, a vanishing period of history, isn’t it?” “Yes, to be sure,” Arnheim replied. “But the simple virtues, courage, chivalry, and self-discipline, which that caste developed in such an exemplary way, will always keep their value. In short, the noble lord and master! It is a type to which I have learnt to attach more and more importance even in my business activities.” (M.w.Q. 2:22-23; DMoE, 323-24)

While Ulrich adopts a critical overview of all of these discursive idiosyncrasies, Diotima is completely unreflective about the way that she uses Arnheim’s discourses “a la mode” to justify her infidelities and to glorify her “arrivisme” (i.e., to displace the discursive sphere of aristocracy while imitating it, situating it in the discursive sphere of bourgeoisie, since, as a bourgeoise she can never belong to it, make her own discourse enter wholly into the aristocratic sphere). Arnheim seems completely unconscious of certain inconsistencies which arise between the fundamental values of capitalism and those of honor, aesthetics, humanism, etc. Part of Arnheim’s success is due to his slipping contextual humanistic discourse into the realm of economics, discourse based on exchange or the principle of adequate mediation. The discourse of exchange lends power and credulity to all that he says, and humanism excuses or at least occults some of the un-esthetic factors of Arnheim’s profession (DMoE, 407ff.). But, one must ask, does not what is described as the greed, power, and the exploitation underlying the capitalism of the turn of the century somewhat betray the precedents of these other “humanist” discourses? Or perhaps what is made apparent here is that “humanist” discourses themselves are facades of a common, underlying social and political power struggle in that they too seek possession and power at the expense of the “Other’s” discourses. It is perhaps such contextual inconsistency between the humanist claims and the capitalist procedures of Arnheim’s discourses that causes Ulrich and Tuzzi to reject them as a mixture of “soul and the price of coal”:

There was a confidence-trick involved in this union between the soul and the price of coal, a union that was at the same time a useful dividing-line between what Arnheim did with his eyes wide open and what he said and wrote when he was under the twilight spell of his intuitions. And there was something else, which caused an even greater sense of discomfort in Ulrich and which was new to him: things of the mind [Geist] in combination with wealth. (M.w.Q. 1:334; DMoE, 281)

. . . but people believe Arnheim because they are at liberty to imagine him as a big, rich man who is sure to know all about what he is talking about, has been to the Himalayas himself, owns motor-cars and wears as many benzol rings as he likes! (M.w.Q. 1:253; DMoE, 214)

This combination of mind [Geist], business, good-living and well-readness was something he [Ulrich] found in the highest degree intolerable. (M.w.Q. 1:207; DMoE, 176-77)

Diotima’s and Arnheim’s discourses are particularly overcoded because of a hyperbolization of a certain lack of self-reflectiveness and because of a certain rigidity with which they place one discourse into the context of another discourse (i.e., soul into business) to which it does not apply without great inconsistencies. What is more, both tend to overhabitualize or overcode the sign-functions within two or more seemingly incompatible contexts. This results in an inflation and “ideologization” of these sign-functions: in the following Diotima shifts from a “sacred or ritual” sphere to an everyday sphere: “She [Diotima] was capable of uttering the words ‘the true, the good and the beautiful’ as often and as naturally as someone else might say Thursday’” (M.w.Q. 1:43; DMoE, 42). [Elsewhere, the narrative commentary explicitly states that this lack of communicative competence, i.e., knowledge of contextually pertinent language use, in Diotima’s discourse amounts to nothing more than “cliche” (DMoE, 277).]

Finally, in Ulrich’s somewhat misogynous perception of Diotima’s corporeal discourse, the inflexibility of her pseudointellectual, pseudospiritualist speech is exposed in all its distorted communicative incompetence: i.e., the voluptuous deictics of body language completely contradict—are split off from—the “pseudointellectual or reverential” enunciateds: “How pleasant she [Diotima] would be . . . if she were uneducated and easy-going and as good-natured as a big warm female body always is when it hasn’t any particular idea in its head!” (M.w.Q. 1:328; DMoE, 276).

The bourgeoisie’s constant displacement of the mediational trait of the discourse of exchange—capital—by those of intellectuality, of humanism, and of love, is exposed in all its confusion and inflexibility in the following narrative commentary which inserts a mixture of Diotima’s language-use (i.e., “Seele”) and Arnheim’s discourse field (i.e., “Kapital”) into the context of Diotima’s struggle with carnal temptation and social ambition: “Probably what she called ‘soul’ was nothing but a small capital for love that she had possessed at the time of her marriage” (M.w.Q. 1:119; DMoE, 104).

One might add here that the automatism and rigidity of Diotima’s transference of discursive contexts and the unreflectiveness with which she does so, are traits which Bergson, in Le Rire, attributes to the phenomenology of the ridiculous.⁸ Diotima’s discourse amounts to a kind of low comedy. She unreflectively and rigidly imposes the constraints of one context upon the enunciated from another without being aware of the curious shifts in meaning and “truth” that she operates by so doing. She rigidly recontextualizes. This makes her the perfect victim for Ulrich’s destabilizing ironic recontextualizations.

4.0. Clearing the Way for Alternative Discourse: Disturbance of
Communicational Postulates

The constitution of an alternative discourse must begin by breaking with the constraints of traditional discursive habits. Up to this stage of our analysis of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, what we have called discursive habits and configurations, as well as discursive fields and context, have been defined somewhat vaguely and elusively. It remains to be seen if there are any constants among these habits and if so, what their relations are, not only to character, but also to the structure of society.

According to Bakhtin, discerning various configurations of communicational habits and fields might also reveal the various social organizations of the epistemic climate in which a discourse was written, as well as something about the present context of textual reception or concretization: “Thought does not exist outside of its potential expression and thus not outside of the orientation and the thought itself.”⁹

Relating irony to what Habermas terms a “mutation of certain communicational postulates” may indicate more clearly what the nature of the violated habits of discourse are. Later we will see that these communicational postulates may do more than indicate social relations; they may constitute them.

4.1 Opposition of “is” versus “ought”: Irony as critical theory/praxis of
communication

Habermas has stated that irony plays on the disparity between the modes “is” and “ought,” whereby the communicational postulates that “are” are violated in order to propose what communicational postulates there “ought” to be:

At the same time, we intentionally utilize the confusion between essence and existence, because it is precisely the irreality of the appearance of the essence which provides us with the disclaiming clue that the literal meaning of ironic usage or of a metaphor, i.e., that which is immediately perceived in an allegorical image, ought not to be taken literally or directly. . . . Because this intentional employment of illusory phenomena presupposes the mastery of the mechanism of illusion, we may, contrariwise, regard the understanding of derivative modalities of play, of idealized constructions, of symbolic imagery, of irony, of formalism, etc. as a test of stability of ego delimitations. The joke lends itself particularly well as a test case, because the comic effect of a joke springs from relief that one has not allowed oneself to be led into modal confusion.¹⁰

Habermas is referring here to Critical Theory’s distinction between facticity and their duty to criticize it in relation to utopian possibility. Habermas’ theory of irony corresponds overtly only to our first partial definition of alternative discourse as irony, as “habit-breaking.” In our second definition of alternative discourse as infinite interaction, “modern” discourse will be seen not only to break habits, but to approach the Habermasian, Utopian quasi-ideal of emancipated interaction.

From the above quotation it is apparent that discursive perturbance, in disturbing nonideal communicational postulates and in feigning these nonideal postulates, also presupposes the possibility of ideal postulates. Habermas differentiates between the communicational postulates of everyday communication and those of “symbolic or allegorical constructions.” This suggests that the text of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften must be related to both Utopian ideals and actual practices of communication if one is to understand the “is” and the “ought” of Musil’s communicational theory and praxis.¹¹

4.2 Disruption of validity claims taken as pragmatic rules of interaction

Habermas outlines three basic validity postulates of communication which, if adhered to, would produce a “perfect” communication act. These validity claims have the aim of “coming to an understanding” with the other person, i.e., of tending toward a perfect communication. The three criteria that must be adhered to are as follows:

(1) Propositional content: One must give the hearer something to understand. The proposition must be a true proposition, fulfilling the requirement called “Wahr” by Habermas. This condition does not deviate very much from the classical criterion of referentiality, whereby Habermas is trying to retain the last remnants of a semantico-referential paradigm: “To choose the propositional sentence in such a way that either the truth conditions of the proposition stated or the existential propositions of the propositional content mentioned are supposedly fulfilled.”¹²

(2) Second, Habermas postulates a claim of sincerity, veracity or rightness (“Wahrhaftigkeit”) so that the hearer can have confidence in the sincerity of the sender, i.e., in his intention to say the truth: “The speaker must want to express his intentions truthfully (wahrhaftig) so that the hearer can believe the utterance of the speaker.”¹³

(3) The speaker must conform to recognized norms of communication so that his utterance is likely to be “understandable” (“verstaendlich”) by the hearer. The speaker must choose a comprehensible (verstandlich) expression so that the speaker and hearer can understand one another: “To perform the speech act in such a way that it conforms to recognized norms or to accepted self-images (so that hearer can be in accord with speaker in shared value orientation)”.¹⁴ One may restate these postulates quite simply: (1) To represent something in the world; (2) To express the speaker’s intentions truthfully; (3) To establish legitimate interpersonal values.¹⁵

Within the third category there are three subcategories as exemplified by the discursive behavior of Agathe in relation to her husband Hagauer. Agathe leaves Hagauer without giving any reason except that she did not want to return. This is a violation of the norm of “Begruendungsverpflichtung” (the obligation to provide grounds). Secondly, Agathe, in suggesting that she would be perfectly capable of stealing a gold cigarette case despite the fact that she has neither a need nor a motive for doing so, demonstrates a case of failure to provide justification (“Rechtfertigungsverpflichtung”). Thirdly, Agathe’s aim to disinherit Hagauer, regardless of the law, to falsify the will, is an example of a flagrant rejection of the obligation to prove trustworthy (“Bewahrungsverpflichtung”).¹⁶ Both Ulrich and Agathe, in delegitimizing these validity claims of social communication, carry out an ironic discourse and are dubbed the criminals/outlaws (“die Verbrecher”) by some unidentifiable voice which provides the chapter headings: “And now here was Agathe on the point of leaving the confines of the moral territory, about to venture out upon those limitless deeps where there is no other criterion than whether a thing will lift one up or let one down” (M.w.Q. 3:155; DMoE, 797).

And, to this degree, Musil’s heros, in their experimental year, radically violate the modern democratic project for an ideal society based on an ideal speech situation as proposed by Habermas.

4.3 New Discourse: Alternative pragmatic postulates

However, at the same time that this ironic revolt against such conventions of discourse is carried out by Agathe and Ulrich, both are simultaneously seeking to create their own ideal, mutual communication system where the postulates would constitute a new discourse. Their new discourse would be one where the postulate of referentiality does not hold, one which does not share the conventional constraints of comprehensibility in society; rather, it would be one which fashions its own ways of communication, unconstrained by society, i.e., the discourse of the other state (“anderer Zustand”). These postulates, however, have certain drawbacks for our argument here in that they are still very general and fail to illuminate the innovativeness and the complexities of the communicative practices in Musil’s narration.

It might be more fruitful to postulate several other habits of communication from which Ulrich’s and Agathe’s discourses deviate. These habits will be seen to overlap with some of Habermas’ postulates of communicational validity, as well as with several of what Foucault calls the “internal procedures of the materiality of discourse.” Furthermore, some of these communicational habits approximate several of the categories posited by a semiotics of narrative (such as the code of character or that of mimesis). As with the communicational habits of referentiality and identifiability of participants, very often the Interpretant-intuitions may be quite similar to those found by traditional semiotic analysis of narrative. The main difference lies in the epistemological and ontological truth claims of the latter as opposed to the relativity of the validity of the former.

For example, in the first paragraphs of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and in some of the chapter headings, one finds a violation of the romanesque communicational postulates of the identifiability of the participants of discourse. The use of the impersonal: . . . “even though it is somewhat old-fashioned: it was a fine August day in the year 1913” (M.w.Q. 1:3; DMoE, 9) leaves the identity of the narrating subject—the subject of enunciation—in doubt. Also, in the opening chapter the identity of the dialoguing characters is first hinted at and subsequently repealed, leaving their identity an enigma which was never intended to be solved: The hermeneutic code is introduced only to be revoked. “Let us assume that their names were Arnheim and Ermelinde Tuzzi—but no, that would be a mistake, for Frau Tuzzi was spending this August in Bad Aussee, accompanied by her husband, and Herr Dr. Arnheim was still in Constantinople. Se we are confronted with the enigma of who they were” (M.w.Q. 1:4; DMoE, 10).

Or again, in the chapter title, “Wem gibst du Recht?” (DMoE, 119) (“Whose side are you on?”), there is a fundamental plurality and unidentifiability of the sender and the receiver. Obviously, from the specific context of the chapter, the question is posed to Bonadea by Ulrich. Still we would not have read the context before we read the title. However, this could also be a question posed by Ulrich to himself (an interpretation corroborated by the larger context of the whole novel), by the narrator to Ulrich, by the author to the narrator, by the author to the reader, by the reader to himself, and so on, depending upon the romanesque and extraromanesque contexts of enunciation and reception which reposition this heading.

In the first chapter, one finds yet another postulate of communication disturbed, the postulate of identifiability of levels and types of discourse. To begin with, the headings of the opening of the book switch levels and types of discourse with no identification of the voices that “speak” in each case. The book begins with the heading, “Erster Teil” followed by the remark “Eine Art Einleitung” (“A kind of Introduction”) followed by the title of Chapter 1, “Woraus bemerkenswerter Weise nichts hervorgeht” (“Which surprisingly enough does not get us anywhere”). Here there are at least two levels of discourse: a) that of the “author” of the book, the supposedly neutral and impersonal organizer who follows the standard divisions of the “novelsque” genre, and b) that of metalinguistic commentary, which, in both cases, mocks the standard divisions and the roles of the introduction and development of a communicational structure, in this case the “novel,” in general.

In the first paragraph, there is a constant switching between at least three types or “fields” of discourse with no linguistic markers of subject of enunciation. In the impersonal voice and perspective of positivist “scientific” or “factual” discourse the geo-meteorological facts are “neutrally described”: “There was a depression over the Atlantic. It was travelling eastwards, towards an area of high pressure over Russia, and still showed no tendency to move northwards around it. The isotherms and isotheres were fulfilling their functions” (M.w.Q. 1:3; DMoE, 9).

Then, once again with no formal mark of identification of the speaking voice, a metalinguistic voice takes over, interrupting the former discursive level or type in order to state: “In short, to use an expression that describes the facts pretty satisfactorily, even though it is somewhat old-fashioned” (M.w.Q. 1:3; DMoE, 9). And finally, the type of discourse known as “common usage” enters into play, opposing scientificist discourse, to restate what the scientific discourse has already said: “It was a fine August day in the year 1913” (M.w.Q. 1:3; DMoE, 9).

Not only could the speaker of the last remark be millions of people and no one specific, but the repetition of the content of the weather report, where only the types and levels of discourse change, violates another postulate, that of informativity, i.e., adding to the reservoir of propositional content that the receiver is already supposed to possess. In terms of referentiality, no new information is added by restating the weather report. It is precisely this violation of the postulate of informativity that highlights the radical relativization of the various levels and fields of discourse. It is not the informational content, but the triadically constituted message which changes according to the discursive Interpretant-contexts that situate the Object—weather. It is this change, despite the fact that the Object remains fixed (i.e., the weather on an August day in 1913), that discursively practices triadic indeterminacy and dynamics.

The private holiday language (“Urlaubsprache”) of Agathe and Ulrich, enclosed within its own diadic monad and cut off from society, is an example of a defiance of the postulate of social comprehensibility. The solipsistic relation of Ulrich to the other members of the Campaign is also a violation of this postulate. Defying the postulate of comprehensibility amounts to an anti- and asocial discourse, unconcerned with following the norms and values of society which are necessary for one’s utterance to be understood.

The most accentuated case of the defiance of the principle of communicability is the discourse of Clarisse. Clarisse’s discourse is an intertextual “take-off” on Nietzsche, whereby the progression begins with a disruption of normal laws of syntax and moves toward a complete neglect of any semantic coherence, in favor of pure phonetic play on the signifier: “My darling—my lordling—my ling! Do you know what a ling is? I can’t work it out. I think perhaps Walter’s a weakling.” (All the ‘-lings’ were heavily underlined) (M.w.Q. 3:52-53; DMoE, 711).

The result of ignoring the principle of comprehensibility, in both Nietzsche’s and Clarisse’s cases, was total solipsism, where, on the island, even Ulrich could no longer communicate with Clarisse’s new language, a stochastic conglomerate of hieroglyphs: “– – – –” (DMoE, 1753). Clarisse’s practice of discourse gravitates rather toward the Derridian theory of language as “differance” and absence (“lack”) of meaning than toward any dynamic and shifting triadic constitution of meaning.

The difference between a discourse which recognizes the postulate of comprehensibility and one which does not is what lies between a Kierkegaardian, solipsistic theory of language and the interactional practice of discourse as shifting fields of meaning. For Kierkegaard, both “indirect expression” and “infinite inwardness/subjectivity” were associated with ironic discourse. Communication, for Kierkegaard, was not comprehensibility; it was an indirect provocation of the receiver to inwardness: “[Indirect communication] is communication by means of reflection reflecting a subjective truth and a notion of an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriate process of the most passionate inwardness.”¹⁷

Some of the more severe critics of Lacan’s concept of “le manque” (“l’absence”) and of Derrida’s insistence on “la differance” would insist that they go no further than a solipsistic performance of vocables—“du Bulgare” according to some. Furthermore, these same critics would insist that a theory of discourse based on the lack of meaning can only lead to a psychotic slippage along the surface of the signifier in the absence of any meaning to integrate the self. The psychotic play on the signifier ends up in the obsessive paralysis of a Kierkegaard, or the madness of a Nietzsche or a Clarisse.

But the constant narration of Musil’s novel does not leave intact Ulrich’s and Agathe’s social discourse nor the Nietzschean play on the “supplement” of the signifier. As the novel unfolds, the demands of the social force these delimited sign-fields to open up.

An alternative practice and theory of the subject and discourse would have to surpass the confinement to the empty signifier were it to avoid paralysis or psychotic disintegration, the primary task to which this work addresses itself.

5.0 Interdiscursive Interference—Habit-breaking—Dislocation of
Fields of Discourse

Certain habits of communication, articulated in certain fields or configurations, form either types of characters or types of discourses. Foucault speaks of these various configurations of discursive production as constituting societies of discourse, taken as institutions or disciplines, which are based on a certain hegemony of procedures of discourse and knowledge: “. . . the ‘fellowships of discourse’, whose function is to preserve or to reproduce discourse, but in order that it should circulate within a closed community, according to strict regulations, without those in possession being dispossessed by this very distribution.”¹⁸

These disciplines or “societies” of discourse refer to certain institutionalizations of discourse, certain fields of practice and power. In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, much of the effect of irony is a result of the interaction of these various fields or disciplines which relativize and destroy each other’s closure, absoluteness, and claim to validity and power. Each of these disciplines is constituted by a field of habits of discourse which, we shall argue, by virtue of their overcodification and unrecognized partiality, also constitute ideologies.

5.1 The fields or types of discourse in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften

In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, one could present a typology of the various discourses that circulate throughout the field of the novel. Any such typology must, of course, acknowledge its own relativity and Interpretant-dependence. Nevertheless, it would serve as a heuristic way to describe which habit-configurations make up the discursive fields of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and of “Musil’s Vienna,” as well as describing how irony, as habit-breaking and discursive interaction, dislocates these fields. Where, as we argued in Part One, a fixed absolutized partial field is considered to be ideological (Eco) then a disruption of that field would amount to a demystification of ideology, a disturbance of its hegemony. Although it would be too tedious to present a justification of each and every type of discourse in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, it is possible to describe how certain types of discourse are practiced loosely and continuously throughout the novel. They interact with, come into conflict with, “prick leaks in,” or try to exclude and even explode each other. There are many of these discourse-types. Each claims to be absolute and to enjoy power exclusively at the expense of other discourses. The sheer multiplicity of these discourses, each of which claims to be absolute, tends to self-destruct their exclusive truth claims. Knowledge, in the classical episteme, is based on a political economy of the scarcity of a discourse’s ability to be “right.” “Everyone can’t be king!” But there are many types of discourse found in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften which make classical discursive validity claims for themselves, which are in turn destroyed or relativized by the simultaneous presence of many other absolutist discourses, making the same exclusive claims.

As we have constantly suggested throughout, the potential of modern discourse is not dissociated from providing legitimated readings of texts nor from addressing ethical, psychological and political dilemmas confronting subjects of the postclassical episteme.

The canon of Michel Foucault has always been praiseworthy for applying his approach to discursive criticism to such social ethical issues as the penal system, medical practices, the treatment of the mentally ill, and the ordering of sexuality. To this degree his work is more “applied” than that of Habermas. In any case, neither of these thinkers would espouse a formalist divorce of aesthetics and ethics, nor be content to play on the signifier. Despite Foucault’s critique of Utopianism, he follows in the modern project of seeking a more socially just, less authoritarian, less hegemonic order of discursive and social practices.

The work of Musil is very modern in this regard as well; it constantly raises within the narration a host of social, psychological and political practical dilemmas: How does an intelligent being live in modernity? As with Foucault a key dilemma is the relationship between reason, madness, and criminality.

Figure 4

5.2 Moosbrugger: Criminal or saviour? madness or reason?

One example of the proliferation and relativization or contextualization of discourses in order to address the issue of reason, madness, and criminality is that of the Moosbrugger sign-function. Around the sign-function “Moosbrugger” circulate many types of sign-productions which both triadically situate and are situated by this sign-function. Each of these discourses claims exclusively to say the truth (“Will to truth”) about the object “Moosbrugger” and, what is more, claims to be in the field of truth (Foucault) in order that it may say and legitimize this truth. Among these discourses one may isolate the following fields or types in a sort of hierarchical order of the power that each exercises over the other in society (figure 4).

It should become obvious as the discussion of these types progresses that each of these discourses operates according to the classical episteme while claiming exclusive and absolute knowledge and power for itself. Their mutual exclusion make hierarchization necessary, i.e., for a system of power to make one subordinate to the other. All the while, the dynamics and elusiveness of the sign-function “Moosbrugger” place into doubt and provide an Interpretant-context for each of these other disciplines. At the same time, Ulrich’s insistence on viewing the Moosbrugger case simultaneously from the perspectives of all of these various disciplines will be seen to expose the occulted partiality of each discursive field which takes itself for the totality.

Questions of context are questions of value. Who is Moosbrugger? Is Moosbrugger an Object to be studied by society? Is Moosbrugger a Representamen, a symbol of something about/for society? Or is Moosbrugger an Interpretant-effect, interpreting society for us through a certain very specific filter? Hinging upon the reply to these questions is the reply to the axiomatic question: “Is Moosbrugger a criminal or a crucified saviour?” Does society, including any of its discourses, have the right, the power or the validity to pronounce upon Moosbrugger and can it stabilize the contextual uncertainty of the very grave ethical value which the Moosbrugger case exemplifies? Inextricably linked to the semiotic questions of the Moosbrugger case are questions of ethic value, which is seminal to any discursive analysis that inscribes itself within the project of modernity.

The Moosbrugger case opens with the discursive proceedings of the police interrogation and investigation and their “interpretation” by the media (DMoE, 68, 119). These proceedings include a description of the forensic detachment of the police (Book I, Chapter 18), as well as a reproduction of a part of the juridical discourses that try to circumscribe Moosbrugger.

In the same chapter, the narrator reproduces some of the remarks likely to made by the doxological discourses of society: “Says the accountant to his wife as he slips into bed one night: ‘What would you do now if I were Moosbrugger?’” (DMoE, 69).

In Chapter 30 of Book I, Ulrich “hears voices,” and continues to reflect upon the complexity of the ethical decision in a labyrinthine way. Clarisse’s discourses about Moosbrugger in Chapters 38 and 53 lend a Nietzschean perspective to the problem of morals. Ulrich’s father, in Chapter 111, also discusses the juridical quarrel regarding the hypothesis of diminished responsibility. In Chapters 87 and 110, the reader is presented with Moosbrugger’s own voice and perspective on the social discourses which attempt to interpret and manipulate him. In Book II, Chapters 32 and 33, preparations are made to visit Moosbrugger, on which occasion the psychiatric-medical discourses come into interaction with both the philosophical and the juridicial discourses. And earlier, Leinsdorf benevolently stayed the hand of the executioner, in a gesture of disinterested but omnipotent intervention, above and beyond the powers of all the previously mentioned discourses. Even Bonadea, Rachel, Diotioma, and Arnheim are periodically seen to concern themselves with Moosbrugger, and, what is more, directly or indirectly, Moosbrugger with them.

By positioning Moosbrugger in relation to some of the various discourses mentioned above, it will be shown that Moosbrugger is simultaneously Object of the others’ discourses, Interpretant of their discursive functioning, and Representamen or symbol—a keyword to which one may attach many meanings. For example, Moosbrugger becomes a Representamen, a password for Bonadea, which has the Interpretant-effect of allowing her to infiltrate Diotime’s circle. For Clarisse, as well, Moosbrugger is a Representamen. “Moosbrugger” is the Representamen which substitutes for both “God” and “Anti-Christ.”

5.2.1 Journalistic discourse may be characterized by the following sub-habits of communication: (1) communicational claims of referentiality and factuality (i.e., presenting a true propositional content about something out in the world); (2) non-necessity of identifying the participants of the communicational act, whereby the (3) “impersonal,” “objective” source of the journalistic “enunciated” is divorced from the status quo yet able to represent what the “public” (“everyman”) needs or wants to know. (Journalism, under the guise of “objective reporting,” traditionally acknowledges no bias of its own; any bias it might acknowledge is that of the discourses it reports, not that of the fields from which it itself originates.) The following report illustrates the so-called referential, objective factuality and shows how this discourse functions according to the principle of excluded middle. There is a victim and a henchman, a good guy and a bad guy, and never the twain shall meet, and never shall journalism have any direct implication in the decisions of these values!

The reporters had described in detail a throat-wound extending from the larynx to the back of the neck, as well as the two stab-wounds in the breast, which had pierced the heart, the two others on the left side of the backhand the cutting off of the breasts, which could almost be detached from the body. They had expressed their abhorrence of it, but they did not leave off until they had counted thirty-five stabs in the abdomen and described the long slash from the navel to the sacrum, which continued up the back in a multitude of smaller slashes, while the throat showed the marks of throttling. From such horrors they could not find their way back to Moosbrugger’s kind face, although they themselves were kind men and yet had described what had happened in a matter-of-fact, expert way and obviously breathless with excitement. They made little use even of the most obvious explanation: that here they were confronted with a madman—Moosbrugger had already been in lunatic asylums several times on account of similar crimes. (M.w.Q. 1:75; DMoE, 68)

Already at this stage a certain narrative modulation occurs which challenges the claims of factuality, objectivity, and impersonality of journalistic discourse. In the above, the narrator reports a slight contradiction between how (a) the so-called extreme concern over “factuality” encouraged the journalist (b) not to leave out one single “sensational,” gruesome detail, while using quantification to lend an impression of exactness. The principle of Objectivity and markers of value come into conflict. What is more, the reporter emphasized the contradiction between the friendly looks of Moosbrugger and his status as a criminal (principle of excluded middle), instead of finding therein a possible uncertainty or “complementarity.” The press’s theory of explanation seems to be one of relating events either causally or contradictorily but never complementarity.

Ulrich asks himself a question which places into doubt the claims of complete objectivity and independence from the interests of other discourse, such as, for example, those of the police and that of the public taste for “bloody details.” Ulrich asks himself: “Where was the source of all of these details reproduced by the news?” a question which is far from innocent. The answer to this question is also suggested: “Perhaps from the discourse of the police, but then again perhaps from other discourses such as fiction, the alter ego of journalism”: “Where had the reporters got their nimble expertness in describing the work of his knife?” (M.w.Q. 1:139; DMoE, 120-21). As well as being governed by a principle of factuality, the journalistic discourse also operates according to a principle of linearity and causality, a procedure evidenced by the search into the roots of Moosbrugger’s life for a chronologically linear and causal explanation of the “crime.” “As a boy Moosbrugger had been a poverty-stricken wretch, a shepherd lad in a hamlet so small that it did not even have a village street; and he was so poor that he never spoke to a girl” (M.w.Q. 1:76; DMoE., 69).

Finally, the narrative commentary which englobes all of this discourse on journalistic discourse completely undermines the principle of factuality and the true vs. false dichotomy, making them categories nonpertinent to explanatory knowledge. In other words, narrative modalization serves to ironize the habits of journalistic discourse by reducing them to the status of probable fiction and arbitrariness, the implicit opposite of factual experience: “The probability of learning something unusual from a newspaper is far greater than that of experiencing it; in other words, it is in the realm of the abstract that the more important things happen in these times, and it is the unimportant that happens in real life” (M.w.Q. 1:76; DMoE, 69).

The play between probability and being, where the latter is found more in writing than in existence, places into doubt the claim of any discourse to “represent the facts.” It remains probable.

5.2.2 Psychiatric discourse: Reason’s use of madness/madness’ irony of Reason

For Michel Foucault, the discourse of madness is an ironic sign-production in that it mixes up any distinction between real and imaginary, between true object and illusion or image: “Madness is here, at the heart of things and of men, an ironic sign that misplaces the guideposts between the real and the chimerical, barely retaining the memory of the great tragic threats—a life in society, the mobility of reason” (our translation).¹⁹

If the discourse of madness is an ironic destructuring of the classical discourse of Reason, what then is psychiatric discourse, the discourse on madness? If Moosbrugger’s discourse is ironic, what then are the discourses about Moosbrugger? It is perhaps these latter, discourses on madness, that the former, discourse of madness, ironizes. We may begin by isolating some of the traits of discourse on madness, the psychological, medical and psychiatric discourse, all of which assume Moosbrugger’s madness as their Object.

Moosbrugger’s madness itself, as well as the “voices which Ulrich hears” (“Ulrich hoert Stimmen”), serve to reveal the habits of these various discourses on Moosbrugger and to disturb and disarm them as well as to loosen the constraints they pose.

The psychiatric discourses, whether they absolve or condemn Moosbrugger, function according to the principles of excluded middle and of exclusivity of truth. Moosbrugger is either a criminal responsible for his actions or insane and hence innocent:” . . . an attitude in keeping with that of the psychiatrists, who had declared him normal quite as often as they had declared him not responsible for his actions” (M.w.Q. 1:75-76; DMoE; 68-69).

Clarisse witnesses the following carnival (à la Bakhtin) of discourses when she visits Moosbrugger in the asylum and witnesses a poker game between Moosbrugger, a priest, and two psychiatrists of opposing schools, Pfeiffer and the assistant. The psychiatrists situate their respective positions at opposite poles of the axis. Pfeiffer, on the one hand, claims that society needs “bad people” and hence it should not just declare them insane but rather punish them as evil: “Moosbrugger fist] zurechnungsfaehig” (DMoE, 1547). On the other hand, he claims equally exclusively and absolutely that anyone who commits a murder is insane and the responsibility of society; hence there are no criminals, only insane people:

. . . to handle with great skill every criminal whose mental health was in question like a ball that one is supposed to force through the gaps of science to reach the goal of punishment. (DMoE, 1548)

Then the priest is asked to pronounce a judgement, but he refuses to do so, saying that, in the end, God will decide: “It is only religion that insists on personal responsibility for every sin before God, and such questions are, therefore, in the end nothing but a matter of religious conviction. . . . God has the final word” (DMoE, 1549).

The exclusive claim to absolute knowledge of each chapel is evidenced by Friedenthal’s introduction of Clarisse in which he says that she had come from Paris to see that: “. . . nowhere in the world are the sick better taken care of than here” (DMoE, 1548). What is more, the mention of God is inserted in order to illustrate that he who has the perfect possession of reason and knowledge (of the discourse on madness from the field of sanity/reason) also has the equivalent of the knowledge of God or at least one which is grounded in God. He is, as Descartes said, “maitre et possesseur de l’univers.” Indeed, as Foucault’s theory would have it, madness is necessary as an affirmation of the absolute power of reason by virtue of the former’s submission to the latter. The age of reason absolutely needed madness in order to affirm its own reason relative to what was not reason.²⁰

The conflict between the two psychiatrists is a conflict of classification, of division and of ordering, all of which are internal procedures of classical discourse:

One need only think of each of those abbreviations linked up with hundreds, or at least dozens, of printed pages, each page linked up with a man with ten fingers, a man who writes it, and for each of his fingers ten disciples and ten opponents, each disciple and each opponent also with ten fingers, and to each finger the tenth part of a personal idea, and one gets a faint picture of what truth is like. (M.w.Q. 2:28485; DMoE, 534)

With the beginning of positivism, represented in psychiatry by Tuke and Pinel, one of the primary concerns was to order, to classify, to separate, and to hierarchize types of madness and criminality.²¹ The bibliography of discourses on madness in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften reflects the way that madness itself is classified, i.e., dependent upon science’s labelling and ordering of madness, in this case by means of societies and journals that treat the topic: “AH., AMP., AAC., AKA., AP., ASZ., BKL., BGK., BID., CN., DTJ., DJZ., FBgM., G.A. . . . ZSS., Addickes ibid. Aschaffenburg ibid., Beling ibid, and so on. Or, translated into words: Annales d’hygiène Publique et de Médecine légale, ed. Brouardel, Paris . . .” (M.w.Q. 2:284; DMoE, 533). The object—illness—is discursively constituted by knowledge of it.

However, this positivistic separation of the criminal from various degrees of insanity is shown, in the passage on Clarisse’s visit to the asylum, to be more a form of repression or surveillance than a merciful or philanthropic mission. Foucault sees this separation of madness from criminality, and the confinement of madness, as an overcoded form of tyrannical and puritanical surveillance and repression, veiled as humanitarianism and philanthrophy:

Eighteenth-century positivism linked madness more firmly than ever to confinement, and this by a double tie: one which made madness the very symbol of the confining power and its absurd and obsessive representative within the world of confinement; the other which designated madness as the object par excellence of all the measures of confinement. Subject and object, image and goal of repression, symbol of its blind arbitrariness and justification of all that could be reasonable and deserved within it; by a paradoxical circle, madness finally appears as the only reason for a confinement whose profound unreason it symbolizes. ²²

Moosbrugger, on the other hand, simply affirms his own responsibility and guilt as though it were merely to escape from these totalitarian categories, which as the Other’s discourse, try to possess and reduce him.

Hence too he [Moosbrugger] hated no one as fervently as the psychiatrists who believed they could dispose of his entire difficult personality with a few long Latin or Greek words, as though for them it were an everyday matter. As always happens in such cases, medical opinion as to his mental state fluctuated under pressure from the juristic body of ideas. (M.w.Q. 1:80; DMoE, 72)

This philanthropy of psychiatry is but a panoptic reinforcement of social control via an exclusive discourse of knowledge. In the penal system, Moosbrugger is subjected to a “degradation process” (R. D. Laing), whereas in the asylum, he is not tied; he plays poker freely in the society of other doctor/observers. However, the asylum’s discourse is one of therapeutic, monological inequality Moosbrugger is the Object of the others’ discourses; in the end, they do not dialogue “with” Moosbrugger. And, what is more, Moosbrugger has been brainwashed into quietly acquiescing in his role as Object. He is happy to be a curiosity, the center of attention! As Foucault states, the absence of chains is not madness liberated, but rather madness mastered. Moosbrugger is constrained to respect the right of others to speak about him without speaking with him. And Moosbrugger must acknowledge that they speak the truth: He must judge himself as they judge him: “Something had been born, which was no longer repression, but authority.”²³ Once one party alone has the power to discourse, there can be no interaction, no dialogue, no freedom with and for madness.

Moosbrugger is made to attest to the fact that words belong to others. He also recognizes and demands the “justice” of the punishment levied upon him by reason, i.e., death. In confinement, Moosbrugger renounces any more conflict with society and welcomes the end. His discourse has been subsumed by all other social discourses. It no longer struggles for a field of its own.

The positivistic discursive categories of psychiatry try to reduce the dynamic form of Moosbrugger’s existence to a set of technical terms. Moreover, they force Moosbrugger to revolt and proclaim his own sanity, i.e., his own responsibility for his actions, independent of any social determination. These discourses force Moosbrugger to sign his own death warrant when they force him to cry out in revolt against their classical procedures, as in a sort of “Catch 22” situation: “Justice has been done” (DMoE, 84-85).

The various psychiatric discourses of knowledge merely talk about and over the head of Moosbrugger: “There thus existed between these four men a cordial understanding that Moosbrugger’s head was at stake, but that did not bother them” (DMoE, 1549). Their discourse has not arrived at the Freudian stage, a stage where the madman is no longer reduced to silence but where he is encouraged therapeutically to dialogue: “. . . il [Freud] restituait dans la pensée médicale la possibilité d’un dialogue avec la déraison.”²⁴ Although Freud’s dialogue was asymmetrically weighted in favour of the thaumaturgical doctor, and although Musil was highly critical of Freud, they were contemporaries in Vienna who both seemed to be proposing, however imperfectly, an interactional alternative to the established discursive power structures so well exemplified by the procedures of the discourses on madness. According to Foucault, it was not until Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Artaud, and Van Gogh that madness became an Interpretant of society, reflecting something about it rather than being reduced to the status of an Object for society’s scrutiny. Madness, as an Interpretant for society, forced society to justify itself in the face of the sacrificial victims of its own “reason.” Accordingly, Clarisse and Ulrich are forced to wonder if Moosbrugger is not a saviour, the sacrificial one, the hero of their epoch. Moosbrugger becomes an Interpretant for society, but also a Representamen which substitutes for the sign-vehicles “Saviour” and “Anti-Christ”: Foucault expresses this triadic shifting excellently when he suggests that, later, reason does not judge madness but madness judges reason:

What is necessarily profane in a work returns; at the time of the failed work, of madness, society experiences guilt.²⁵

After Port-Royal, men would have to wait two centuries—until Dostoievsky and Nietzsche—for Christ to regain the glory of his madness, for scandal to recover its power as revelation, for unreason to cease being merely the public shame of reason.²⁶

The maieutic, and heuristic functions of Musil’s irony come to the fore once Moosbrugger is treated not merely as the Object of a sign-function but as a genuine triadic semiosis, as an Interpretant for the society of discourses, which had tried to render him a static Object of society’s claims to truth and power (cf. figure 5).

Let us generalize: in the nineteenth century, psychiatric discourse is characterized not by privileged objects, but by the way in which it forms objects that are in fact highly dispersed. This formation is made possible by a group of relations established between authorities of emergence, delimitation, and specification.²⁷

To summarize, we may hierarchize the discourses on madness in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as follows:

[1] therapeutic versus penal confinement;

Fig. 5

[2] social versus penal confinement dictated by norms of behavior;

[3] planes of psychological characterization and taxonomy;

[4] relations between authority and medical decisions (Leinsdorf and the juridicial system);

[5] the filters of observation lent by psychiatric, forensic, and juridicial interrogation;

[6] means of communciation between political authority, public opinion (journalism), and medical and juridical authority.

The conflict between hierarchies of power in the relations between medical and juridicial discourses on Moosbrugger, and hence the contextual relativity of what claims to be absolute, should illustrate the ironic result of the juxtaposition of these two discourses on Moosbrugger.

5.2.3 Socrates revisited: Jurisprudence, the great silencer

Jurisprudential discourse, while posing as the source of right judgement, is initially dependent on the filters of the questionnaires of the police and of psychiatry. The court case and convictions are based on a confession that Moosbrugger made to the police in order to “help out the latter’s career.”

In seeking to establish Moosbrugger’s biography, the order of his actions, and the causal relations between his various violent attacks, juridical discourse exemplifies its own concern for the classical scientific procedures of structure, linearity, causality, and hierarchy, just as much as it shows us the journalistic and psychiatric adherence to these same discursive principles: “This judge rolled everything up into one, starting with the police-reports and the vagrancy, and then presented it to Moosbrugger as his guilt” (M.w.Q. 1:84; DMoE, 75).

However, Moosbrugger’s own interpretation of his life illustrates that here is indeed a bias in the filters of knowledge of the juridical discourse. Its “objectivity” is questioned by Moosbrugger’s impression that the connections made by juridical discourse were of no pertinence to his person at all: “But for Moosbrugger it all consisted of separate incidents that had nothing to do with each other, each of them with a different cause, which lay outside Moosbrugger and somewhere in the world as a whole” (M.w.Q. 1:84; DMoE, 75).

The discourse of jurisprudence does not recognize the ideal communicational postulate of equal access to discourse (as proposed by Habermas). Moosbrugger tries to appropriate the juridical discourse for himself in order to explain his case. However, Moosbrugger does not belong to the juridical society of discourse/field/discipline. Moosbrugger is not in the field of truth and hence his discourse is not accepted as truth nor as powerful: “There were two kinds of tactics fighting each other, two kinds of unity and logical consistency; but Moosbrugger had the less favourable position, for even a cleverer man could not have expressed his strange shadowy agruments” (M.w.Q. 1:84; DMoE, 75).

Instead of listening to Moosbrugger’s somewhat hyperbolic or parodistic appropriation of their discourses as defenses of his actions, the members of this professional society of discourse rejected it, merely declaring Moosbrugger to be intelligent, hence meriting a harsher sentence!

Moosbrugger was aware that everything from discourse to women belonged to others. He realized, implicitly, that the exclusivity of their societies of discourse, their claims to know the truth about an object—Moosbrugger—gave them power to reaffirm the socioeconomic order of things, i.e., to condemn Moosbrugger rather than to let him, as Interpretant, cast any aspersions upon their own discourse and conduct:

Moosbrugger was wrathfully aware that they all talked just as it suited them and that it was this talking that gave them the power to treat him any way they liked. (M.w.Q. 1:279; DMoE, 235)

All women were already someone else’s law, and so were all apples and all beds. And the gendarmes and the magistrates were worse than the dogs. (M.w.Q. 1:281; DMoE, 237)

Foucault points out that the complex of discourses on madness resulted in a submission of the medical discourse to socioeconomic concerns. Men were “cured” either through work camps or through confinement, depending on whether society needed a greater workforce or to rid itself of unemployed vagabonds. The discourse of knowledge, both psychiatric and juridical, was not one of interaction; it was a hierarchically organized strategy to maintain power within the hands of the few who already possessed it.

It has been illustrated above that there are certain recurrent, recalcitrant habits of discourse which are shared by the societies of discourse in power and which, like ideology, propagate a certain false consciousness of the relation of truth to society. Moosbrugger’s awareness of the relation of possession of certain fields of discourse to the preservation of power and the socioeconomic status quo serves to demystify the professed objectivity and relativize the absoluteness of these classical discourses.

5.2.4 “Moosbrugger is the table”?

When Moosbrugger, instead of being an Object, becomes an Interpretant for himself and for society, several other discursive procedures enter into play in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. These procedures dislocate those of the discourses of knowledge. Moosbrugger, as vehicled in the discourses of the narrator, Clarisse and Ulrich, becomes an Interpretant-effect of the whole episteme in which he appears: “The gloominess of his mind was connected with the gloominess of the times” (DMoE, 1718).

Moosbrugger’s discourse flagrantly defies the classical discursive procedures of excluded middle and of propositional content, as well as that of comprehensibility. His discourse does not conform , to the referential, axiological, syntactical norms of human understanding. When asked to add 14 and 14, Moosbrugger replies, “anywhere from 28 to 40, but why stop there?” (DMoE, 240). When shown a picture of a fox, he replies that “it could be a squirrel but then again it could also be a hare” (DMoE, 240). Need we note the potential mode of his thought? Whereas for discourses of knowledge each Object and Representamen has its absolute, established relation, Moosbrugger, on the other hand, feels no remorse at vertiginously substituting one for the other, including other sign-functions for himself, in a passage not unlikenable to Ionesco: “The table was Moosbrugger. The chair was Moosbrugger. The barred window and the bolted door were himself” (M.w.Q. 2:111; DMoE, 395).

At this point we may also recall that we argued earlier that Peirce’s own naming, renaming, classification, and reclassification of signs was tantamount to an infinite substitution of one triadic sign-function for another. Moosbrugger’s ultimate irony resides in his reduction of the status of the object or act, the crime, the murder, to discourse itself. A harmless discursive symbol, “Rosenmund,” is mutated, transformed, substituted for by a monstrous Interpretant-effect. The word becomes a crime and the crime is reduced to the status of the word. The crime is a pure discursive formation, a switch from one commonplace word, “Rosenmund,” to a horrendous, metamorphosized witch, and then to the act of slaughter. All this occurs within the new discourse of Moosbrugger, a discourse that constitutes Moosbrugger’s “anderer Zustand”: “ ‘Your sweet rose-lips,’ but suddenly the words gave way at the seams, and something came about that was very distressing: the face went grey, just like earth under the mist, and at the end of a long stem there was a rose. Then the temptation to take a knife and cut it off . . .” (M.w.Q. 1:285; DMoE, 240).

Moosbrugger’s crime becomes what Foucault has referred to as the “discursive formation of the object/event.”

5.2.5 Madness versus referentiality

Whereas the discourses of classical science rely upon a distinction of the sign from the referent, of Representamen from Object, regardless of the Interpretant, madness, says Foucault, is a complete confusion and indiscrimination of the difference between the Representamen and the Object, between sign and reality, and between illusory image and truth. The example par excellence is hallucination. The great antiscientific ironist, Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling, made an ironist’s career out of Abraham’s inability to know which was which, reality or hallucination. Madness occurs when the images, which are so close to the dream, receive the affirmation or the negation that constitutes such an error.²⁸ “Before us appears the great theme of a crisis that confronts the madman with his own meaning, reason with unreason, man’s lucid ruse with the blindness of the lunatic—a crisis which marks the point at which illusion, turned back upon itself, will open to the dazzlement of truth.”²⁹

For triadic semiotics and quantum mechanics, the image may become the object reality and yet also turn against itself, declaring itself to be only a created reality, constituted by the image itself. In Peircean semiotics the object, the Representamen and the Interpretant are constantly uncertain, constantly substituting for each other. Is this a semiotics of madness or a mad semiotics? Certainly it is not a semiotics of the Age of Reason.

6.0 Ulrich! Man without Qualities—Discourse without Habits

The ironic relativization of the discourses which claim to know Moosbrugger initially occurs in Ulrich’s discourse as a Socratic expression of the complete lack of knowledge and comprehension. Ulrich cannot grasp the relationship of Moosbrugger’s discourse to that of jurisprudence. As Moosbrugger leaves the court after being sentenced to death, crying that ‘justice has been done,’ Ulrich feels completely confused by the “imbroglio” of discourses that had led up to the verdict of guilty and to Moosbrugger’s reply (DMoE, 84-85).

Apart from this “Socratic ignorance,” Ulrich demonstrates several other discursive practices which contribute to habit-breaking and to the ironic interaction of discourses.

6.1 Radical relativization of the discourse of the Other

Ulrich’s first technique is to recontextualize all that is said about the Object, Moosbrugger, in relation to the Object, society. For example, for those who take Moosbrugger to be an exceptional case which does not implicate them, Ulrich replies that Moosbrugger constitutes a sort of collective archetype of all mankind, one which is embedded deeply within the subconscious: “Yet somehow Ulrich could not help thinking: if mankind could dream collectively, it would dream Moosbrugger” (M.w.Q. 1:85; DMoE, 76). However, Ulrich does not let the meaning of Moosbrugger rest there. He provokes a radical discursive recontextualization of Moosbrugger.

Ulrich “performs” the same substitution of one sign-function for another, making Moosbrugger a critical Interpretant of elements of society in relation to Bonadea and to the hypocrisy of puritanical mores in Viennese society. He suggests to Bonadea that she always sides with the participant in the act but not with the act itself (which makes her own nymphomanic acts unjustifiable as well): “‘What it comes to, then, Ulrich insisted, ‘is that you are for the victim everytime.’ . . . . ‘But if you so consistently condemn the act,’ Ulrich answered. . . . ‘how then, Bonadea, are you going to justify your adulteries?’ ” (M.w.Q. 1:138; DMoE, 120).

In a more global context, the Moosbrugger case is relativized by other statements made by Ulrich regarding values in general: “I believe it can be proved to one a thousand times by all the usual sturdy arguments that something is good or beautiful, and it’ll be all the same to me. I shall take my bearings solely from whether its presence makes me feel a rising or a sinking” (M.w.Q. 3:122; DMoE, 770).

Not only do the classical values of good and evil become problematic for Ulrich, but he can also make no absolute distinction between the image of a murderer and the image of the rest of mankind: “The split in him was different; it lay precisely in the fact that he repressed nothing and so could not help seeing that what the murderer’s image faced him with was something no stranger, or any less familiar, than any other image in the world” (M.w.Q. 2:439; DMoE, 653).

Elsewhere, Ulrich situates the same Object, rigor, not only in the context of Moosbrugger’s methodical stabbing, but also in that of the thinker, the soldier, the politician, etc. In the former, rigor is a sign of guilt or of madness; in the latter series of Interpretant contexts, rigor is a quality to be valued:

If a murderer proceeds in a matter-of-fact and efficient manner, it will be interpreted as particular brutality. A professor who goes on working out a problem in his wife’s arms will be reproached with being a dry-as-dust pedant. A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success. Of soldiers, executioners and surgeons, on the other hand, precisely the same coldbloodedness is demanded as is condemned in others. (M.w.Q. 1:174; DMoE, 149)

At another point, the exclusivity of the Object, Moosbrugger’s madness, is threatened by the narratively modulated suggestion that Ulrich (the protagonist) also has certain traits of madness and marginality in relation to society. Not only Moosbrugger has hallucinations, but Ulrich as well “hoert Stimmen” (DMoE, 119).

6.2. Trying on discourses for size

Throughout his discourse on Moosbrugger, Ulrich adopts various other discursive habits, as if experimentally, i.e., “essayistically” trying them on for size, only to cast them away as insufficient and as too partial, while recognizing their value as “Partialloesung.” In speaking with Bonadea about Moosbrugger, Ulrich pleads the causes of the law, of social medicine, of frightened society, of psychiatry, of “humanism,” etc.

Having adopted no one point of view, no one discourse with which to sum up Moosbrugger, Ulrich reflects upon himself with dissatisfaction, but in a way which reveals completely his attitude toward all discursive habits and fields of habits. The only habit that Ulrich possesses is that he does not fix any habit at all! His only perspective is to be perspectivist! But even this habit is “perspectivized” by Ulrich in a supreme gesture of discursive metaperspectivism.

Urlich’s discursive practice proceeds by using temporary pockets of established habits and then by juxtaposing them, a procedure which places in relief the incompatibility of so many absolutist discourses. The political discourse, the scientific, the military, etc., all claim to have exclusive mastery of logical rigor, and yet they have no comprehension of the “rigor” of Moosbrugger’s murder:

“What is there left of me?” Ulrich thought with bitterness. “A man, perhaps, who is brave and incorruptible and imagines that for the sake of inner freedom he respects only a few external laws. But this inner freedom consists in being able to think everything, in knowing—in every human situation—why one need not bind oneself to it, and in never knowing what one would wish to be bound by!” (M.w.Q. 1:314; DMoE, 265)

6.3 Radical auto-relativization of relativization

Ulrich becomes an Interpretant not only for other discourses about Moosbrugger but also of his own discourse about Moosbrugger and for his own discourse about other discourses. He becomes a voice which simultaneously points out its own limitations, which consist in never being able to decide upon a particular discursive practice and, correspondingly, upon a praxis in the social or ethical arena. Ulrich criticizes himself for possessing only the capacity: “. . . for discovering two sides to everything—the moral ambivalence that characterised almost all his contemporaries and was the disposition of his generation, or, one might even say, its fate. . . . What right had he to treat Bonadea badly?” (M.w.Q. 1:314; DMoE, 265).

The problem of discourse’s relation to values reemerges when Ulrich reproaches himself for being so critical toward the discursive habits of others, especially Bonadea’s, when he himself is not capable of any discursive praxis whatsoever, merely of temporarily borrowing them in order to criticize them.

However, while Ulrich points out that his tendency of discarding discursive habits does destroy ideology in society, he also indicates a further advantage of his discursive process. If one recalls that, for Bateson and Eco, the overcoding of society’s discourses is tantamount to neurosis and ideology, whereas the overcoding of the psyche is madness, Ulrich is quite correct to distinguish himself from the madman. For Ulrich, the madman has only certain limited, fixed, entrenched, imprisoning habits; the sane man has every discursive possibility since he is not predetermined by specific habits: “A person who is responsible for his actions can always do the other thing, too, but a person who is not never can!” (M.w.Q. 1:315; DMoE, 265). Could this imply that it is precisely this communicational irony taken as a disruption and shifting of discursive practices which safeguards man’s sanity. Insanity is not unreason but rather an overcoding or a severe limitation of possibilities. Habit breaking is freedom.

Briefly, there are several habits which Ulrich refuses to overcode. These habits may be treated as postulates of communicational praxis or as discursive procedures.

[1] The postulate of propositional content or of representation of something true about the world is openly violated by Ulrich when he speaks with Agathe: “. . . and the reality of it was really quite great! . . . What reality am I talking about? Is there another?” (DMoE, 1084). It will be recalled that Musil defines the plurality of the objects of observation, which depend on the multiplicity of contexts of experimentation, as irony: “Where there are fewer external objects, extend the irony also to the situation of a person like Ulrich” (DMoE, 1841). The constant changing of the Object of discourse, with no pretension to fix the Object (in this case Moosbrugger), makes it impossible to hold a postulate of referentiality: “. . . but his thoughts were still far from inclined to be tied down, and so instead of speaking out immediately, he preferred to change the subject” (DMoE, 1254).

[2] The postulate of sincerity is also disregarded by Ulrich with the added twist of uncertainty that Ulrich himself does not know whether he is lying or not: “Ich weiss nicht einmal selbst, ob ich luege” (DMoE, 216). Ulrich’s violation of this postulate is related by the narrator to the violation of the same postulate for narrativity. The narrator admits of the impossibility of narrating without lying, when he speaks of the drive to confabulate, “Lust zu fabulieren.”

[3] All that Ulrich says is without the conviction lent by the postulate of sincerity. In the most complex of discursive investigations, Ulrich maintains the distance of an experimenter who is not really involved in what he is saying.

[4] The violation of another postulate, the postulate of the author as subject of enunciation, also contributes to the detachment of Ulrich from any particular discursive field of habits. Ulrich does not identity himself as the sole source or unique place of the practice of any one discourse. Rather, the words speak Ulrich! The habits adopt Ulrich temporarily until yet other habits displace them: “Ulrich felt the probe. It was as though he were speaking in some strange language in which he could go on talking fluently, but only externally, without the words having any roots in him” (M.w.Q. 2:316; DMoE, 558).

At one point, Ulrich is astounded (yet he sees it as an aspect of the discursive process) to find that Diotima is using his “own” discursive techniques; they are the exclusive property of no one: “ ‘So it’s come to this, has it,’ he said to himself, ‘that this giant hen has begun talking exactly like me?’” (M.w.Q. 2:327; DMoE, 566).

[5] The final trait of discourse which Ulrich refuses to observe is that of linear, causal, continuous development of argument and reference. Each time that Ulrich begins to define or explain an object, his discourse breaks off, or else he displaces the field of reference from one triadic field to another without arriving at a conclusion in the previous triadic relation. Ulrich dialogues with himself in his journal as he tries to define “love,” “necessity,” “possibility,” or “motivation,” all of which are interconnected in the triadic expansion of the discourse fields. He shifts from trying to define “love” to trying to define “motivation” and then moves on to a definition of “necessity” etc., in an attempt to circumscribe some more firm or stable system of meaning and belief:

I have just said “the hands of the binder,” and have given myself over to the rocking sensation of a metaphor, as if this woman could never be a corpulent, elderly person. That is moonlight of the wrong kind! . . . In the middle there is something that I have called motivation. In life we do not usually act according to motivation, but according to necessity, in a chain of cause and effect. (DMoE, 1421)

The flux and nonalliance of Ulrich’s own discourse with any particular standpoint is indicated by Ulrich’s own realization that “in this perspective his standpoint, that divided himself off from others, was neither here nor there” (DMoE, 247ff.).

The lack of totality or continuous development of any particular sign-relation is evidenced by the constant breaking-off that Ulrich’s discourse undergoes when he is trying to describe a delicate and difficult phenomenon, i.e., his very inability to fix a discourse practice and hence to engage continuously and with commitment in any singular praxis at all. The inability to decide upon any discourse or upon any action is what seems to distinguish Ulrich from all of the rest of the characters in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften with the exception of Agathe:

Lucky the man who can say ‘when,’ ‘before’ and ‘after’! . . . In their basic relation to themselves most people are narrators. They do not like the lyrical, or at best they like it only for moments at a time. And even if a little ‘because’ and ‘in order that’ may get knotted into the thread of life, still, they abhor all cogitation that reaches out beyond that. What they like is the orderly sequence of facts, because it has the look of a necessity, and by means of the impression that their life has a ‘course’ they manage to feel somehow sheltered in the midst of chaos. And now Ulrich observed that he seemed to have lost this elementary narrative element to which private life still holds fast, although in public life everything has now become non-narrative, no longer following a ‘thread’, but spreading out as an infinitely interwoven surface. (M.w.Q. 2:436; DMoE, 650)

“And now I will tell you all about why I don’t do anything,” . . . “One can’t do anything, because—but you won’t understand this anyway—” he began, going right to the beginning, but then he took out a cigarette and devoted himself to lighting it. (M.w.Q. 2:64; DMoE, 357)

To summarize, Ulrich not only relativizes and disrupts discursive habits by placing them into relation with each other, but he is a man without qualities and a man of possibilities precisely because he is a man without fixed discursive habits, a man of all possible discourses, unconstrained by any particular postulates of communication. This, of course, is the discursively manifest phenomenon of the “experimental life” and of Ulrich’s perspectivist predisposition for essayism as a mode of expression. The drawback lies in the inability to act as long as no habit is pragmatically proposed as leading to or justifying a particular action.

It is this, Ulrich’s incapacity to fix discursive habits, which makes him incapable of laying claim to any specific qualities and of undertaking any action of life:

An unpractical man—and he not only appears to be so, but actually is—will always be unreliable and incalculable in his intercourse with other people. He will perform actions that mean something different to him from what they mean to others, but is reassured about everything as soon as it can be summed up in an extraordinary idea. . . . And since the possession of qualities presupposes that one takes a certain pleasure in their reality, all this gives us a glimpse of how it may all of a sudden happen to someone who cannot summon up any sense of reality—even in relation to himself—that one day he appears to himself as a man without qualities. (M.w.Q. 1:13-14; DMoE, 17-18)

However, as will be seen, this inability to fix a discursive habit becomes itself a severe constraint. Later, in dealing with the question of discourse, epistemology, and interest/values, this problem will be seen to resurface even more acutely. How can one remain discursively, epistemologically consistent, as Ulrich tries to do by not accepting as total any limited field or practice of discourse, and yet summon the conviction in certain values which is necessary to make choices that lead to PRAXIS?

7.0 Quasi-direct Discourse—the Impersonality of Irony

Throughout Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften neither Ulrich nor the narrator (not to mention Musil), acts (functions) as authorial, controlling voice, i.e., as the subject of enunciation. No single, exclusive, anthropomorphic source of discourse can be isolated for the context of the whole novel.

What Volochinov/Bakhtin refer to as the relativity of voices in quasi-direct discourse best explains the constant production of signs and their constant contextual interaction, independent of any single controlling voice or of any frontiers of discourse. Other terms that Bakhtin uses to describe this new narrative phenomenon are “dialogism” and “polyphony.”

The extent of this interactional production of discourses is so vast that, in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, one cannot speak of a narrated or even of narrative any more. All that we have in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is constant narration, a constant production of discourse. This makes Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften an innovative practice of the novel were it not that, potentially, one should recognize all discourse as merely a constant production of signs. In this case, what singles out Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is its self-recognition as a failed narrative and as a constant narration (7.3).

7.1 Sharing words

In the opening books of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften one might disagree with the above argument that the narrator seems to situate the discourses of others in a form of free indirect discourse centered around his own and Ulrich’s voices and foci. An example of the controlling frontiers of the narrator’s reporting voice in relation to the reported voice occurs in the narrator’s relativization and criticism of Ulrich’s indecisiveness:

“Why,” Ulrich suddenly thought, “why didn’t I become a pilgrim?” . . . Why did he live so vaguely and undecidedly? Undoubtedly—he said to himself—what kept him, as under a spell, in this aloof and anonymous form of existence was nothing but the compulsion to that loosing and binding of the world that is known by a word one does not like to encounter alone: spirit. And though he himself did not now why, Ulrich suddenly felt sad and thought: “It’s simply that I’m not fond of myself.” (M.w.Q. 1:178; DMoE, 153)

The quotation marks, the punctuation, the switching of pronouns, the adjectives in the narrative discourse, all are opposed to or separated off from Ulrich’s own discursive expressions. There is no infiltration or interaction between these delineated discursive fields. Ulrich is a character whose voice the narrator reports, a narrator who may once have had something in common with, or have been identical to Ulrich, but who now takes his distance from him in the form of discursive barriers. He cannot assume his own discourse, as he says, because he does not love himself.

Bakhtin argues that free, indirect discourse sets up boundaries between the speech that is doing the reporting and the reported speech. It retains its own contractual and semantic autonomy, while leaving the speech texture of the context perfectly intact.³⁰ He states that, although the reporting and the reported discourses interrelate with each other, they do so as structures closed off from one another. In other words, there is no triadic overlapping and interlocking of semiotic fields or contexts.

However, as the novel progresses the tables turn on the dominance of any reporting voice over the reported voice. Ulrich’s voice, for example, is so much infiltrated by other discourses and vice versa, that he asks himself: “ ‘So it’s come to this, has it,’ he said to himself, ‘that this giant hen has begun talking exactly like me?’” (M.w.Q. 2:327; DMoE, 566). The infiltration of the reporting with the reported discourse, to the degree that they are no longer discernible one from the other, and the subsequent relativization of values amount to what Bakhtin calls “quasi-direct discourse.” For Bakhtin, quasi-direct discourse exhibits far more social interaction and receptivity to the discourses of the Other than does free indirect discourse. Quasi-direct discourse is the active relation of one discourse to another within the mobile, constructional activity of language itself. Language is no longer subsumed under authorial authority. Quasi-direct discourse is a sort of “steeping” of the reporting context within the reported context and vice versa. They begin to sound like each other, and it becomes impossible to situate a particular sign-function exclusively within the context of one or the other. There is a mixture of the contextual time and space frames as well as of the respective style and tone dimensions. This is true to the degree that any sign may apply equally well to various fields of frames.³¹ Quasi-direct discourse derives its tone and word-choice from direct discourse; its verbal tenses and persons are derived from indirect discourse.³²

The following example is simultaneously a thematization and a performance of quasi-direct discursive infiltration. It shows most clearly how the various sign-functions dialogically “go both or many ways,” so to speak:

Today, when everything under the sun is talked about in the same breath with everything else, when prophets and charlatans make use of the same phrases except for shades of difference that no busy person has time to track down, [. . .], it is very difficult to assess the value of a man or an idea correctly. [. . .]

But it [the great writer] must be someone whose importance is already an established fact, so that the words can intelligibly be pinned on to him, though it does not in the least matter where. And such a man was Arnheim. (M.w.Q. 2:25-26)

One might suppose that the reporting voice is uniquely that of the narrator, were it not that in the choice of nouns—”Charlatan”—the expressed distaste for Arnheim already implicates a penetration of the reported voice of Ulrich. There are also sign-functions which indicate the infiltration of the context of the “high-society of Diotima’s parlour,” as for example, “no busy person has time,” “great writer,” “shades of difference.” There are also overtones of the context of pseudoscientificity in the syntagms “to assess the value of” and “established fact.” Nevertheless, the authorial voice also uses all of these phrases as one could equally well imagine Ulrich doing. The fact of the matter is, as is so well stated in the above quotation, that ‘it becomes impossible intelligibly to pin words onto particular speakers.’

Quasi-direct discourse explains more fully the interaction of discourses in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften that Krysinski refers to as “le discours quasi-citationnel”³³ or Hochstaetter as the “Zitatcharakter,”³⁴ both with reference to Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. There certainly do exist certain consensual overlappings in what is meant by these terms. There are no discernible boundaries between quoted and quoting discourses; there is no controlling, quoting voice. One can only speak of discursive interaction and interpenetration in these cases.

Another example of the interaction and infiltration of one discourse by another is the penetration of Agathe’s discourse by Lindner’s discourse. The cliché sign-functions of Lindner, the moralist, undergo a radical semantic transformation once they interact within the context of a character who is fundamentally “socially irresponsible” (according to Ulrich): “Had she followed him with her eyes, she would have been struck by this man’s stiff, skipping gait as he went down the rocky path, for it was cheerful, proud, and yet, nervous, gait” (DMoE, 1045).

Throughout the novel such an infiltration of discursive fields occurs intertextually per se. Clarisse’s discourse is inflected with Nietzsche’s discourse, Diotima’s with Maeterlinck’s discourse of the “silent language of love,” and Arnheim’s with the discourse of Rathenau.³⁵

The dominance of quasi-direct discourse necessitates a reexamination of the status of the source of discourse and of the referential properties of verbal and pronominal deictics. Who is the speaking subject or author? No one in particular and potentially everyone in general. Musil’s writing dispenses with the assumption that there is an isolatable, fixed, anthropomorphic subject of discourse; he speaks rather of a collective “we” subject of enunciation: “Things which lay claim to objective validity, not just subjective. Perhaps as a criterion: statements to which one can prefix the pronoun ‘we’” (Tbg., 239).

One could not find a more succinct expression of the epistemological criterion of validity elaborated in Part One under the rubric of “public objectivity.”

Elsewhere, Musil describes his role as simply that of a “Beobachter”—an observer—as opposed to that of some sort of emanator of discourse (Tgb., 817).

It is Blanchot who best describes the innovative formula of enunciation in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as “impersonal,” where no single, personal voice controls either discourse or knowledge. Rather, some deindividualized interactive collectivity of voices or even discourse itself, independent of any person, is responsible for sign-production:

. . . where “I” would refer neither to the character of the novel, nor to the author, but to the relationship between the two, the “I” which is not an “I” that the author must become by depersonalizing himself through art—which is essentially impersonal—and by this character who accepts the fate of impersonality. . . . But by the end he feels even more drawn to third-person narration and hesitates continually in accepting the perhaps unbearable obligation. ³⁶

Such also is the way that Foucault describes the new conception of discourse, in which its authorial source³⁷ is not considered to be any single, anthropomorphic subject.

Rather than originating from a single point of origin, discourses circulate within certain romanesque boundaries, subsumed under the deictic “Robert Musil.” Quasi-direct discourse in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften marks a radical extension of the individualization and dispersion of the subject of enunciation. Just as in paradise Agathe and Ulrich had the feeling that words were choosing them, so too does Musil when he states: “I strive to create a situation that lies outside myself . . . I am then not the one who speaks; rather, the sentences exist outside myself, like some material that I must manipulate” (Tgb., 682). The author is a manipulator and a facilitator of discourse rather than its source. The following words from Karl Kraus indicate that such a dispersion of the subject of enunciation in a host of other discourses was common to the language philosophy of Musil’s Vienna: “I command the language of others. Mine does what it wants with me.”³⁸

“Le discourse se pratique” says Foucault, a reflexive expression which indicates that discourses generate themselves and interact within variously circumscribed fields independent of any subject of enunciation. The ontological status of the subject of enunciation falls into doubt in this case, as opposed to a situation where discourse ontologically founds the subject and vice versa (Benveniste).

All that we may assume is the ontological status of discourse itself, as opposed to that of any subject. This is Louis Marin’s revolutionary view of deictics, which he regards as revealing merely the “pure being in its extreme generality”³⁹: “the Verb has become the thing itself, invisibly present within it, and the thing, itself absent, thus makes the Verb visible”;⁴⁰ “. . . the thing stated becomes by the act of speech the act itself, the body-subject.”⁴¹

Marin insists that it is the use of neutral deictics, such as “il,” “est,” and “on,” which accentuates the dethroning of the subject of enunciation:

By eliminating the personal subject of enunciation, confinement to the third person authorizes the ontological advent of the representations of the world of things. . . . “It,” subject of the verb “to be,” is the authentic neuter which indicates the indescribable emergence of being and thing and excludes any reference to a subject of representation and discourse. . . . “It is” refers to being in general, to the beginning of its emergence.⁴²

Such also is the function of the extensive use of the impersonal and the passive modes of discourse in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: “Against his will, thinking went on in him” (M.w.Q. 1:284; DMoE, 240). “It is life that thinks around man and dancingly creates for him the connections that he himself, when he makes use of his reasoning power for the same purpose, can only laboriously glean together and never to such kaleidoscopic effect” (M.w.Q. 1:284; DMoE, 409). The “es” and the “er” displace the “Ich,” to which Musil attributes no psychological, anthropomorphic, ontological status; “Ich” exists in the same way as discourse exists: “I tell a story. This ‘I,’ however, is not a fictitious person but the novelist. An informed, bitter, disappointed human being. ‘I’ . . . But also what I have encountered in the other characters in the novel” (Tgb., 579).

The impersonal—deindividualized, interactive—status of discourse in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is the crowning of our whole argument regarding the relation of the subject to discourse. Both knowledge and discourse are impersonal in modern discourse and hence fundamentally uncertain. “The impersonality of knowledge, of the scholar, discloses an obligation it [modern discourse] perilously consents to and whose changes to reality it looks for, if the reality of the times were not a century behind the knowledge of the times.”⁴³

Frier, also, draws the connection between the use of the impersonal and the ontological, between representational and epistemological uncertainty:

One notices that the “es” [it] and the “etwas” [something] work together in the representation of uncertainty and produce a context of their own. The special characteristics of “etwas” are its function as a very indefinite indication of quantity (semantic level) and its declarative function (synactic level).⁴⁴

7.2 Dialogism and polyphony

Musil describes his narrative in terms of the dialogical tension established between various positions of discourse and the fluctuating reality that results from the lack of any governing, dominant, authorial position: “What I say will contain my mistakes and, to the extent that I am no fool, my virtues; but what matters is not this personal variation, but rather the objective context” (Tgb. 664-65).

One may also recall that Musil describes his work as “work simultaneously irradiating each other” “sich gegenseitig bestrahlende Worte” (G.W. II, 1147). In this regard, it seems fair to equate irony and the quasi-direct narrative as the absence of a dominant voice, with what Bakhtin calls “dialogism” and “polyphony.”

The plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness and the genuine polyphony of full-valued voices are in fact characteristics of Dostoevsky’s novels. It is not a multitude of characters and fates within a unified objective world, illuminated by the author’s unified consciousness that unfolds in his works, but precisely the plurality of equal consciousnesses and their worlds, which are combined here into the unity of a given event, while at the same time retaining their unmergedness. In the author’s creative plan, Dostoevsky’s principal heroes are indeed not only objects of the author’s word, but subjects of their own directly significant word (neposredstvenno znachashchee solvo) as well. . . . the task of constructing a polyphonic world and destroying the established forms of the basically monological (homophonic) European novel. (Bakhtin’s emphasis). ⁴⁵

For Bakhtin, the basic unit of all discourse is dialogical interaction:

Any enunciation belonging to a discontinuous communicational process is a feature of dialogue, in the broad sense of the term thus including written works. Enunciation, understood as part of the social dialogue, is the basic unit of language . . .⁴⁶

At one point, dialogism is described in the same way that Peirce describes signs, i.e., as continuously interacting with and substituting for each other:

The understanding of a sign is, after all, a set of references between the sign apprehended and other, already known signs; in other words, understanding is a response to a sign with signs. And this chain of ideological creativity and understanding, moving from sign to sign and then to a new sign, is perfectly consistent and continuous: from one link of a semiotic nature . . ,⁴⁷

The roots of dialogism and polyphony were found, by Bakhtin, to lie not only in the Menippean Satires, but also in Socratic dialogues, whose links to irony are historically self-evident.⁴⁸

What is more, for Bakhtin, polyphony, dialogism, quasi-direct discourse, all have very significant axiological, epistemological and social implications in relation to other more classical forms of discourse: “The menippea is characterized by extraordinary freedom of philosophical invention and invention within the plot.”⁴⁹

For Bakhtin, the vicissitudes of the utterance and the speaking personality in language reflect the vicissitudes of verbal and ideological interaction.⁵⁰ Bakhtin suggests that free-indirect discourse belongs to an episteme of the “classical inviolabilities of the boundaries of an authorial dominance.” He describes this discourse as a linear style, as an ideological assurance, and as dogmatism where there are clear-cut external contours for the speech of the other. The internal individuality of the other is minimized in favor of the dominance of the privileged reporting position. Bakhtin associates this discourse with the “authoritarian dogmatism of the Middle Ages,” and with the “rationalistic dogmatism of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.”⁵¹

On the other hand, quasi-direct discourse is a plethora and flux of types and levels of discourse. All intonations are dispersed and are no longer summed up by one voice or person. All speech and values flow freely into one another in an open field or circuit. The difference is ideological. Bakhtin relates this discursive episteme to what he calls the “realistic and critical individualism in its pictorial style and tendency to permeate reported speech,” and with “relativistic individualism beginning with the development of this interaction and its decomposition of the absoluteness of the authorial context.”⁵² We wish to suggest here that the dominant discursive function of the modern episteme is quasi-direct, polyphonic, dialogical, discursive production and interaction. This interactional view and practice of discourse contributes to the freedom and the relativity of this episteme; such also is the “Geistige Bewaeltigung” toward which Musil confessed to be striving in and through his discursive production of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

7.3 Narration in the impossibility of narrative

At the opening of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften a man and a woman are presented. They are then introduced as possibly being Arnheim and Ermelinda Tuzzi. Finally, they are left unidentified since these two latter characters ‘could not possibly’ have been in the streets of Vienna at the time.

At the end of Ulrich’s bewildering and not quite registered experience of being mobbed, rescued, and seduced, the narrative voice intervenes saying: “That was what happened” (“So hatte es sich ereignet”) (DMoE, 30). However, Ulrich did not quite know what it was that had happened.

Later, as much discourse circulates around the sign-function “Collateral Campaign,” one finds the following chapter titles, despite the fact that nothing happens because of all the talk around the Campaign. Events are always pending but nothing ever actually occurs in the Campaign:

A great event is on the way. Count Leinsdorf and the river Inn. (M.w.Q. 3:388; Chapter 34, DMoE, 994)

A great event is on the way. Meseritscher of the press. (M.w.Q. 3:391; Chapter 35, DMoE, 996)

A great event is on the way. Bringing a meeting with some old acquaintances. (M.w.Q. 3:399; Chapter 36, DMoE, 1002)

A great event is on the way. But nobody has noticed it. (M.w.Q. 3:423; Chapter 38, DMoE, 1022)

In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, the status of the event, especially of the represented event, is very problematic. The crisis of referentiality is responsible for this problematic status. What occurs in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is a divesting of the act/event of its ontological status within representation:

There was a great deal going on, and one was aware of it. One thought well of what was done by oneself, and thought the same thing dubious if it was done by others. Every schoolboy could understand the details of what was going on, but as regards the whole there was nobody who quite knew what was really happening, except a few persons, and even they were not sure whether they knew. Only a short time later it might all just as well have happened in a different order or the other way around. . . . (M.w.Q. 2:179; DMoE, 449)

All that occurs in the plans for the “Parallelaktion” is the action of discourse, the event in Diotima’s salon where discourse upon discourse is produced and interacts with its counterparts: “The Collateral Campaign paraded in all its glory and brilliance: eyes beamed, jewels glittered, wits flashed” (M.w.Q. 3:388; DMoE, 994).

Moreover, due precisely to this problematic status of the event, events are often represented in the subjunctive mode of possibility (potentia) in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.⁵³ They could always have been otherwise:

. . . even God probably preferred to speak of His world in the subjunctive of potentiality (hue dixerit quispiam—here it might be objected. . .), for God makes the world and while doing so thinks that it could just as easily be some other way. (M.w.Q. 1:15; DMoE, 19)

It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything’s having come about as it has. It might just as well have turned out differently. (M.w.Q. 1:151; DMoE, 131)

In the “Parallelaktion” things “may” happen, that is to say, “possibly,” but, what is more, they happen only as discursive (as opposed to empirically “real”) events: “it had not been anything real” (“nichts Wirkliches gewesen”) (DMoE, 34); “the esoteric idea of an event without anything actually happening” (“geheimssinnigen Vorstellung eines Geschehens ohne dass etwas geschieht”) (DMoE, 1237); “. . . as if one were not a human being at all, but merely a figure in a book” (“als waere man kein Mensch, sondern bloss eine Gestalt in einem Buch, . . .”) (DMoE, 592).

One example of the problematic status of the event is Ulrich’s experience of the “Major’s wife,” with whom he had a passionate affair, whereby the reality of the event is no longer retrievable or representable: “Ihre welt war ihm in zwischen so fremd geworden, dass ihn die Aussage, sie sei die Frau eines majors gewesen ergoetzlich unglaubhaft anmutete” (DMoE, 123).

It is the problematic and de-ontological status of the event, as opposed to a representation of the “real” events, which interests Musil. “I am not interested in real explanations of real events. My memory is bad. Besides, the facts are always exchangeable. What interests me is the spiritually typical, I might even say the ghostliness of the event” (G.W. II, 939).

Finally, it is due to the ghostliness of events, i.e., the dubious status outside of discourse, that both Ulrich and Musil consider the event to be unnarratable and unrepresentable:

And now Ulrich observed that he seemed to have lost this elementary narrative element to which private life still holds fast, although in public life everything has now become non-narrative, no longer following a ‘thread,’ but spreading out as an infinitely interwoven surface. (M.w.Q. 2:436; DMoE, 650)

Although they could not have said what exactly had taken place. (DMoE, 1083)

The fact that the event could not be represented, that reality could never be presented as anything more than a likeness (“ein Gleichnis”) leads to a new kind of discursive practice, a practice of narration as infinite discursive presentation (Darstellung) instead of a narrative as representation (Vorstellung) of some extradiscursive act or object: “The point of the story in this novel is that the story the novel is supposed to tell is not told” (DMoE, 1937). Representation is impossible, hence abandoned by Musil. Presentation is all there is. Not only does the communicational episteme give rise to an alternative to representational narrative; it also presents an alternative to the referential epistemology of the classical episteme—we arrive at a pragmatic, interactional epistemology.

As Blanchot explains, Musil derives this technique from his inability and refusal simply to represent a story: . . . his refusal of narrative which is at the origin of his narratives.⁵⁴ Musil himself at one point states that he derives a narrative technique from his inability to represent a period of duration, a remark which reinforces the temporal dislocations irony. Musil is quite unable to adhere to the referential episteme. It is in crisis!

The “narrating of unnarratability,” “the ghostlines of events,” the “enclosure within the discursive event alone,” all these phrases point to Musil’s trade-off of narrative representation in favor of infinite discursive, communicational, narrational, interactional praxis. Musil’s insistence upon the relativity of events, their possibility (and hence their dependence upon hazard and their status as pure materiality of discourse), all bring him close to positioning and practicing a discourse like the new discourse that Foucault says we should work toward:

In the sense that this slender wedge I intend to slip into the history of ideas consists not in dealing with meanings possibly lying behind this or that discourse, but with discourse as regular series and distinct event, I fear I recognise in this wedge a tiny (odious, too, perhaps) device permitting the introduction, into the very roots of thought, of notions of chance, discontinuity, and materiality.⁵⁵

Somewhat by chance, somewhat discontinously, Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is the discursive practice which is, par excellence, built up of the pragmatic material interaction of infinitely expanding fields of other discursive practices. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is not narrative; it is a constant narration made up of other narrations, a discourse of and with other discourses.

Herein lies the major transformation that Musil’s discursive practice effects on the procedures of the classical episteme, thus heralding the opening of the modern episteme. We cannot but strike a consensus with Krysinski, who placed the following remark from Klebnikov at the head of his article on Musil: “Narrative is architecture built on words. Architecture built on narratives is the master narrative.”⁵⁶ In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, discourse, by virtue of its theorization and its praxis of opening up its own narration or discourse to other narrations and discourses, becomes the “surrécit,” thus championing communicational interaction and heralding the end of referentiality and anthropocentrism in discourse.