INTRODUCTION

EPISTEMIC CROQUET

“The problems appear unmodern. The problems of the present day are unmodern!” (DMoE, 1938)

0.0 The Potential of Modern Discourse

Does modern discourse have within it the potential to address present-day unmodern problems or must it give way to some post-modern alternative? The Potential of Modern Discourse begins with the hypothesis which it subsequently seeks to substantiate that the modern project is not yet finished with. In the light of the current “querrelle entre les Anciens et les Modernes,” read between the moderns and the postmoderns, this is a risky point of departure. Writing by way of refutation of François Lyotard’s La Condition post-moderne, Jürgen Habermas paraphrases the postmodern claim that we have witnessed the end of the great narratives of history, indeed the end of the ontology of this subject, and the possibility of meaning and of history altogether.

“Postmodernism definitely presents itself as Antimodernity.” This statement describes an emotional current of our times which has penetrated all spheres of intellectual life. It has placed on the agenda theories of post-enlightenment, postmodernity, even of post-history.¹

Modernist formalism has often been accused of divorcing ethics from discourses of aesthetics and now postmodernism,² that is, a certain current of it, theorizes and practices the end of linking discourses of knowledge with ethics of legitimation of practice, indeed the only “ethical” discourse being the one which plays on the surfaces of the signifiers or traces of language. In this study we wish to hold firmly onto the modern project of undoing the split between ethics and discourse, aesthetic or scientific. In this sense the very transdisciplinarity of this work which makes major leaps from the novel through political theory and philosophy of language to physics is making the statement that discourse is not ontologically distinct from ethics and politics.³

All are textual forms of world transforming and world constituting practices. If Michel Serres’ Northwest Passage, and Prigogine and Stengers’ Nouvelle Alliance⁴ are considered to be postmodern incidences of the transgression of disciplinary boundaries, we can only remind the reader that such tendencies existed “in potentia” in the Romantics. Musil was soldier, physicist, and novelist, and Peirce posited semiotics as an interdisciplinary approach to all studies.

The Potential of Modern Discourse is most certainly “post-structuralist”; however, it would not be accurate to label it “deconstructionist” or “postmodern” in that, while cognizant of and constantly referring to the war on totality, a nihilism of values, the glorification of disorganization and random mapping, it does not content itself with pure stochastics, the dispersion of the subject, and the end of ordering history altogether. It seeks to surpass the failings of classical representational discourse but to maintain the modernist project of constituting an ethical discourse without regressing to the position of a master narrative such as that of the privileged position of the occidental, white, male Christian industrialist, e.g., Musil’s character Arnheim.

Rather than reacting against the classical theory which transcendentally guarantees that the map equals the territory, by producing a purely random mapping, we are attempting here to explore the potential of modern discourse to produce what Jameson, in the vein of Bateson, would call a “different cognitive mapping.” This is a project to explore the potential to rework the rules (habits or procedures) by which subjects gain a sense of place in the global system of history.

0.1 Epistemic croquet

The object that Alice is trying to hit is living and dynamic. The instrument with which Alice is trying to hit the object is also alive. The environment in which Alice is playing her game is fluctuating and changing. And of course, so is Alice herself, as well as the other players who interact in a sometimes conflictual way. The aim of the game, to connect up the object, the instrument, the environment, and the players, with a certain order, is thwarted at every instant by a random change in one or more of the variable elements of the game. And, finally, the stakes of the game are high indeed. When one fails to give at least the impression of succeeding, the bad queen, or those who claim power, threaten to implement strategic action. The croquet game in Wonderland is a most fitting analogy for the problems of knowledge and representation facing modern science and discourse, including our own meta-discourse.

Trying to write about Robert Musil and C. S. Peirce is very similar to Alice’s croquet game. There are probably as many Peirces as there are Peircean texts, and Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften⁵—The Man without Qualities—quite simply never came to an end. Thus, rather than attempting to construct a closed system which would explain either author, or to interpret the meaning of their work once and for all, we have chosen to seek and place into relief a certain epistemological richness in the very difficulty that these texts present to the theorist of discourse. In other words, we have chosen to espouse fully the movement and the interactions of epistemic croquet in our own critical discourse. Rather than seeking the singular correct reading of Peirce, or which of Peirce’s texts are the “real” Peirce etc.,⁶ rather than putting a closure on the narrative in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften that Musil said could never be narrated, we will attempt to make these writers play croquet with each other, we will place them into dialectical interaction, and this within the context of the much vaster game of the discourse of knowledge at the time in which they were writing.

One of the main and we hope original contributions of this work is the attempt actually to apply a particular reading of Peirce’s triadic semiotics to a text in order to determine if it can possibly function in practice and not merely as semiotic theory. Thus, we elaborate at length upon Musil’s own theory of discourse, while attempting to illustrate that Musilian narrative and Peircean semiotics are paradigmatic of the transformations of the epistemic climate of the times and that such an alternative semiotic theory would be required to talk about other textual practices of the age. Our aim here, then, is to construct theoretically an alternative theory of discourse which would account for certain scientific and literary tendencies at the turn of the century, and, furthermore, to begin to render such an alternative theory operative for the analysis of discourse, however embryonic that attempt may be.

Musil’s narrative practice in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften inserts a certain radicalization and expansion of contextuality in discourse, an epistemologically explicit surpassing and criticism of past scientific and interpretative discourses: a search for a replacement of them. In C. S. Peirce’s triadic semiosis we can find a practice animated by a similar motive. Through the definition of the sign as continuous interaction, indetermination, and contextualization, a criticism and surpassing of established discursive practices is posited. At issue in both Musil’s narrative and Peirce’s pragmatics is a radical contextualization of the episteme: a radical redefinition, common perhaps to the whole of discourse in the time and space of what is now chronologically referred to as “modernity,” a period ranging roughly from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, although we must recognize immediately the problems of periodization.

We will explore the contextualization of discursive formations by Musil and Peirce—and, in particular, the relevance of Peircean pragmatics to the understanding of Musil—and seek to relate our inquiry to the role of discourse in the work of Werner Heisenberg, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas in an effort to see if it is possible to constitute what one could call a “modern episteme.” The primary textual “object” of our exploration will be Musil’s novel Der Mann ohne Eigenshaften.

While Nietzsche’s linkage of the will to knowledge to the will to power and its developments by Foucault interest us in our work on classical discourse, in this study we are more interested for purposes of studying Musil and Peirce in Foucault’s insistence on the materiality of discourse and on discourse as practice and procedure, which owes less of a debt to Nietzsche and more of one to the pragmatic philosophers of language such as Peirce and Wittgenstein. Much traditional writing on Musil has stressed the influence of Nietzsche. However, while Musil does address issues raised by Nietzsche, notably in his treatment of the character Clarisse, we will argue throughout this work that the epistemology espoused by Musil is far more akin to the pragmatics of a Wittgenstein and a Peirce than to the “Gay Science” of a Nietzsche.

The strategy of writing of this book is meant to be a re-presentation of the epistemology elaborated in the content of the book. We jump back and forth from Musil to Peirce to Heisenberg by way of the gesture of temporarily isolating synchronic cross-sections of the sign-field and then open onto other such synchronic cross-sections in the writing of the inheritors of the potential of modern discourse such as Habermas, Foucault, and Bateson.

At first glance, especially at the table of contents, this work may appear to be a series of distinct units of thought by a variety of writers from a host of disciplines. We would ask the reader to bear with us in a writing and reading exercise which sets out to reenact the very epistemological position developed in our work’s thematics.

To show our orchestrating hand from the beginning, we might state, somewhat paradoxically, that our research and writing strategy depended on allowing a less than “engineered” consensus to emerge from among a host of discourses that were grappling with the crises of positivist knowledge and authoritarian politics around the turn of the century. We also refer to a second set of texts of more recent, if not contemporary, writing in an effort to show that the “fortune” of this earlier emergent procedure among its heirs such as Foucault, Habermas, and Bateson has been one of consolidating the consensus of a community of investigators, which for Peirce will be seen to be the legitimation of truth and validity that replaces any correspondence theory of truth. The substance of this consensus is that modern discourse does have some potential after all to resolve the crises of classical representational discourse in the light of the demands made by twentieth-century society upon discourses of knowledge.

Nor do we deal exclusively with authors in this work, something which would be awkward in the light of the modern problematization of the classical tenet of the author as subject and source of discourses. For this reason we make no attempt to enter into a discussion of whether Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is autobiographical. We are interested in fields of sign production which exhibit certain habits or regularities of discursive practice. Two of these fields of habit we refer to with respect to Musil as “irony” and “essayism,” practices of discourse which go beyond classical discourse. We have chosen to emphasize irony and essayism as the traits of modern discourse with the most potential by way of an implicit rejection of the more typical Nietzschean reading of Musil and the solution to the crisis of representation.

The radical practice and comprehension of irony in this novel require some other means than a syntactico-semantic, referential metalanguage to account for it. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften seeks, in all avenues of discursive practice—scientific, social, political, erotic, economic, artistic, and narrative—an alternative discourse of knowing and of acting, as well as an alternative kind of narration. Musil’s narration develops into an attempt to create or to produce a discourse which would avoid the pitfalls and the assumptions of classical discourse.

In Part One we suggest that there exists a consensus among various theorists of all types and disciplines of discourse, ranging from philosophers of language to philosophers of physics, concerning the inadequacy of existing “scientific” discourses. What is more, most of these epistemological thinkers have also suggested various ways (not all of them fully explicit or feasibly operative) of overcoming the limitations of classical discourse in order to fulfill its scientific and social functions. Indeed, most of them suggest that the functions of discourse themselves must change. We plan to show that the critique of discourse in Musil’s narrative and Peirce’s triadic semiotics overlap with and add to the theory of knowledge of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics by Werner Heisenberg.

In Part Two, we begin to practice a possible alternative applied critical discourse based on the theories of discourse of the “modern episteme.” We make an attempt to apply it to the discourse of Musil’s novel, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Our very method here is already Peircean in that it seeks a consensus as some sort of collectivist and constructivist foundation of the validity of science in order to replace any notion of a transcendentally guaranteed absolute truth. We also seek to practice a type of “Interaction” of discourses, rather than remaining attached to a single, fixed perspective which lays claim to absolute truth for itself. This makes the alternative discourse what we could call a “co-constructivist” discourse of knowledge.

0.2 The classical episteme: A review of the discursive procedures

Any work which proposes to discuss modern discourse cannot, of course, neglect some treatment of premodern or classical discourse as a backdrop of past critical theorizing from which to assess modern discourse. The Potential of Modern Discourse follows from where our previous works, The Romantic Irony of Semiotics: Friedrich Schlegel and the Crisis of Representation and Powermatics: A Discursive Critique of New Communications Technology left off. These earlier studies have dealt with the tenets, limitations, and crises of classical discourse at great length, while The Potential of Modern Discourse sets out less to review classical discoveries and more to salvage certain modern tendencies as viable transformations of, and alternatives to, classical discourse. In the study on Romantic Irony we reviewed classical theories of aesthetics and rhetoric showing how they conform to what Foucault called the representational episteme. In Powermatics we demonstrated with the aid of a discursive analysis how contemporary discourses on and practices of new communications technology conform to the age-old procedures of classical representational discourse as opposed to being at all revolutionary, as is often claimed.

Briefly, then, we may review those tenets of classical discourse without replaying the entire exercise of their discernment in a corpus of texts. The postulates which make up this earlier episteme, as stated by Foucault in L’Ordre du discours and in L’Archéeologie du savoir will serve to illustrate the task at hand for any would-be successor to this episteme:

(1) The doctrine Foucault refers to as the “Thème de l’expérience originaire” is a belief that facts precede discourse just as our experience of facts precedes our conscious grasp of them: “This asserts, in the case of experience that even before it could be grasped in the form of a cogito, prior significations, in some ways already spoken, were circulating in the world, scattering it all about us, and from the outset made possible a sort of primitive recognition. [. . .] Things murmur meanings our language has merely to extract.”⁷

(2) Second, there is the referential theme of “universelle médiation,” which assumes that discourse is the transparent mediator between logos and object or concept, giving an immediate synthesis or mediation of, on the one hand, consciousness or knowing subject and, on the other hand, object or concept of knowledge. Signs are supposed to refer adequately and transparently to external or internal reality, thereby constituting the postulate essential to representation, referentiality , and the belief that syntax reveals the order of the world while semantics is its referent.⁸

(3) The theme of the “sujet fondateur” assumes that the isolated human subject is the sole source and author of discourse, and is its point of origin, unmodified or unperturbed by any other source or place of mediation. This postulate of this theme gives the subject the authority to know perfectly, and to say objectively, its object.⁹

(4) The complete objectivity of truth and meaning (whereby the active or relativizing role of the subject’s consciousness and discourse supposedly filters all objects of knowledge transparently), suggests that there is no subjectivity of knowledge, no permutation on the part of the source of discourse which says its knowledge of the object.

(5) A corollary of this last postulate is that a fixed, objective, absolute knowledge is possible, and what is more may be possessed by a single knowing subject to the exclusion of all other subjects. For example, Descartes’ “Method” is first an individual’s private method, which all others should adopt.

(6) If postulates (1) through (5) are accepted, then the possibility of scientific truth, be it the science of physics or the science of philosophy and interpretation, is unquestionably secure.

(7) Where science is secure, so too are its models and its capacity for true model formation, i.e., models which refer to the reality of the object under study. These postulates of the security of reference (i.e., science and its models) are necessary, for example, in order for rhetoric and semiotics to pose the syntactico-semantic models of irony.

(8) Finally, where discourse exists in the unquestioned possibility of saying that which is “true,” absolute, fixed, objective, knowledge there exists a corollary of the investment of power in the one who says “true”: “a technical utility whose end is the amelioration of human life and a special power to one who can produce this utility.”¹⁰ In classical discourse the modality of “knowing” is accompanied by that of “power.”

However, even in these earlier works we have not simply left classical discourse intact; rather, we have illustrated the theoretical and practical crises of such a discourse of knowledge. The infinite self-reflexivities of Schlegel’s ironic discourse were seen to radically contextualize classical discourse, both in theory and in practice in that it resists representational critical models such as those of Saussurean structuralist semiotics. Furthermore, we have argued that the classical discursive procedures underpinning technological and political discourse can no longer function practically without occulting a host of contradictions and undemocratic interests. These two critiques, then, have necessitated a quest for an alternative, postrepresentational, modern discourse in order to solve the epistemological, ontological, ethical, and political crises of classical discourses of knowledge and power. This is the foremost task which this work sets out to begin to accomplish.

We introduce this problematic in this present work by showing how Musil’s Ph.D. dissertation on Mach and his reflections in Young Toerless on the problematic of Kantian synthetic knowledge in a modern world without a divine transcendental set the stage for the necessity of a more pragmatic theory and practice of discourses of knowledge and legitimation.

0.3 Constituting the modern epistemic context

Modernity’s paradoxes of modern physics, of “exact and human,” of “theory and praxis,” of “story to be narrated” and “inability to narrate,” will be seen to highlight modern discourse as a dominant episteme where procedures of uncertainty and relativity prevail. Modern discourse will be seen both to negate and deviate from classical, referential, absolute, and powerful discourse. The discourses of Peirce and Musil, we will wish to argue, place the postulates of classical discourse into question by opposing referential, absolute knowledge with such notions as the “plurality of realities” (Musil) “triadicity” (Peirce), and “uncertainty” or “complementarity” and “perturbation” in experimental procedure (Heisenberg). The extreme realism of the “thème de l’expérience originaire” will be shown to be countered with a view of the “Man without Qualities” who is nothing more than a discontinuous collection of discourses. This notion is reconfirmed by Peirce when he states that everything, even man, is a sign, and much later echoed by such “postmoderns” as Foucault, who states that the subject is no more than a “field” of discourses, or an authorial “function.”¹¹

To the classical notion of the possibility of absolute knowledge, Musil will be seen to oppose the notion of “Teilloesung” (“partial solution”) which parallels Peirce’s notion of habit and field taken as only a temporarily isolatable context of study within an infinitely expanding sign field. We will also discuss Heisenberg’s development of a similar solution to the plurality of realities via his concept of “potentia,” which we will show to be epistemologically coherent with the Peircean notion of habit. What Peirce refers to as the “infinite production of signs” and Heisenberg as the “continuum” of the energy field will be seen to be quite comparable to Musil’s discursive practices of “Essayismus” (“Experiment”).

We will explore Peirce’s, Habermas’, and Bateson’s notions of “Interaction” and Heisenberg’s notion of “public objectivity,” precursors to Bakhtin’s now popular notion of “dialogism,” to see if they provide concepts for Musil’s search for a practice of an ideal dialogue (“Heiliges Gespraech”). In addition, the concept of discourse as “Interaction” will begin to explain how Musil contextually relativizes various classical absolutist discourses, that is to say, how he sets them into a mutually relativizing dialogue. Finally, after the failure of the utopian experiment which takes the form of an incestuous dyadic discourse of solipsism between Ulrich and Agathe, Musil, in the “Nachlass,” poses the necessity of social reintegration, a notion which reiterates the Peircean definition of truth in terms of the consensus of the community. This modern project was later to be taken up by Habermas in his “modern” search for postulates of communication which would establish consensus as a democratic basis for legitimation in the community.

0.4 The practice of interactional triadic semiosis

Musil, like Peirce in the triadic contextualization of his own writing, not only talks about or theorizes, but, more importantly, practices discourse as irony, experiment, essayism, partial solution, interaction, dialogism, relativity, and finally as continuous production of discourse. All of these discursive procedures will be viewed as an attempt to derive an alternative discourse of knowledge as a basis for social practice.

Not only does he make irony and essayism main threads of the elaboration of an alternative discourse, but certain practical political dilemmas subtend the whole work. These are the crucial questions to be addressed by any discourse of knowledge which posits itself as legitimating praxis. One such issue to surface time and again is that of the relationship between discursive constitutions of reason, madness, and criminality in the work of Musil, Bateson, and Foucault. Another constantly subjacent theme is that of war or the relationship of relinquishing a discourse of certainty to the likelihood of entering into strategic action. We have not chosen these themes; rather, they have imposed themselves on any discussion of the potential of modern discourse to suffice as a guiding discourse in the late twentieth century.

In order to show that Musil goes beyond the classical, referential type of discourse in practice, it will be necessary to make an attempt to render some of these notions operational for a critique of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. The attempt can, however, only be embryonic, if only for the reason, as will be seen, that it would require a whole community of investigators to study the complexities of the whole sign-field. No single authorial subject could englobe the complexity of the multitudinous, interacting fields throughout time.

0.5 The utopian potential of modern discourse

Musil describes his hero, Ulrich, as confronting the question of how an intelligent being can live in modernity, a quest that is carried on through two world wars. Thereby he reaffirms the modern project of finding a discourse with which to guide and legitimate praxis. As seen earlier, one of Habermas’ main criticisms of the postmodern worldview is that it preaches the end of history in the sense of some form of directed teleological attempt to alter the world in time and space.

Postmodernism has placed on the agenda theories of post-enlightenment, postmodernism, even of post-history.¹² A modern discourse with potential would have to demonstrate that it is impossible to discard history and that it can come to terms with history. One of the major criticisms of the pragmatics of Peirce and Wittgenstein is that it ignored history in the sense of concrete materially situated agents deciding about values and acting in time and space. Whereas, from the very beginning the issue of modern discourse and its “postmodern” potential centers around the problematic of “morality” in Musil as well as in relation to the critiques of pragmatics for neglecting morality. We are thinking here of the common criticisms of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations for dealing with “beetles in a box” rather than concrete materialist contextual issues of ethics in the life-world. Peirce, also, has often been criticized for an absence of social morality in his pragmatic thought, an attack that we will seek to reply to by pulling out of pragmatics an implied ethics in the sections of the book dealing with “utopia” and “induction.”

While Peirce and Wittgenstein did not often write specifically about materialistically framed issues of the subject in history, this is not to contend that a more pragmatic approach to discourses of knowledge and the power-knowledge relationship is necessarily ahistorical. We will attempt to uncover an implied politics in Peirce’s work. However, in order further to make the point that a pragmatic philosophy of language grounded in communicative interaction is not ahistorical we will make constant reference to the work of Bakhtin. It is our none-too-original contention that Bakhtin, in his Marxism and Philosophy of Language, elaborates a pragmatic theory of discourse as an interactive production of meaning within concrete social contexts which shift and which are themselves altered by discursive production. In other words, we will wish to argue that a pragmatic theory of discourse is by no means at counter purposes with a materialist theory of history; this may explain how Musil could simultaneously be so concerned about history while theorizing and practicing a radically contextualized production of meaning.

Musil’s modern discourse must be situated within the sociohistorical context of his contemporary period of crisis, where, in view of modernization, technocratization, dehumanization, urbanization, and warmongering aggression (all thematized in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) the question of discourse’s relation to social praxis and to utopian possibility imposes itself. Musil’s so-called constructive irony sought to construct a new social ethics of praxis.

To achieve this discourse Musil begins by functioning within its limitations and acknowledges its own irreducibility to a classical paradigm. The ignorance associated with Socratic irony returns in modern discourse as uncertainty and indeterminacy. The discourse of knowledge comes to include the will to knowledge, a triadic discursive horizon in which the subject appears as constituting knowledge, a relation which is a mode of the Peircean sign-function. What is the relationship of this new discourse to the classical episteme? What more does this new discourse require than ironic unknowing, its sincere or feigned ignorance practiced in irony from the time of Socrates onward? In other words, does not the method of grasping the epistemological problems of classical discourse, namely irony’s heuristics, also become the possible procedure of discourse which surpasses these limitations? Modern discursive practice (as conceived and practiced by Musil, and as implicitly or explicitly developed by the pragmatic theorists of discourse, Peirce, Habermas, and Foucault) may be the solution to the short-comings of classical discourse. The problematic of the relation of modern discourse and discursive criticism to history as social praxis aimed at change is an imperative consideration of any pragmatics of socio-discursive analysis. For example, contemporary with Musil’s works are Mauthner’s pragmatic concerns for an action-oriented language practice and for a view of language as practice. “What really matters, what really has meaning, is not the image a word or sentence conjures up, but the action that it suggests or commands, warns from, or prohibits.”¹³

This pragmatic turn will also be seen to have occurred first of all in much of the philosophy of language of the times and to have thrived since then. Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations, and later Austin in How to Do Things with Words, are two other theorists of language who emphasize language as practice according to conventional rules which establish interrelationships between speakers as well as between them and the world they set out to know. Janik and Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna has done a far better job at illustrating this than we could ever hope to. While we have referred to Wittgenstein as yet another case of the shift from the analytical referential to the pragmatic, we must also refer the reader to Janik and Toulmin’s discussion of this preoccupation with the “fact/value” issue. This raises the whole question of values and their legitimation of practice in history. We will see that this pragmatic turn was taken up by contemporary social and political theory, more specifically in the work of Juergen Habermas and Michel Foucault, both of whom sought to analyze power relations as a function of pragmatic discursive relationships and rules.

0.6 In search of a consensus among “discontinuous systems”:
Transdisciplinarity

Just as Foucault must justify juxtaposing biology, economics, and grammar in his Archeology of Knowledge, some explanation is due for our choice of theorists of discourse; namely, philosophers of language such as Peirce and Foucault, physicists such as Mach and Heisenberg, social theorists and epistemologists such as Habermas and Apel, all of whom we use to “contextualize” Musil’s theory and practice of discourse.

The epistemological dilemmas which we see these theorists groping with are much the same as those which Toulmin and Janik and Schorske find to situate the epoch to which Musil belonged. What they refer to respectively as “Wittgenstein’s Vienna” and “Fin de siècle Vienne” gave rise to Wittgenstein’s speech pragmatics, of the Philosophical Investigations which went beyond even his own analytical, referential, formal, or transcendental logic of the Tractatus (although, as Janik and Toulmin argue, the seeds of this movement were already in the Tractatus). In this epoch we find not only the physics of Mach, on whom Musil wrote his doctoral dissertation, and who is known as the precursor of relativity physics, but also the psychoanalysis of Freud, the great destroyer of the myth of the “objective” cogito. Here we find not only Mauthner, one of the first pragmatists of discourse, but also Karl Kraus, a politically relativizing satirist; not only Schoenberg, who placed the laws of harmonic music into question, but also anti- or arepresentationalist painters such as Klimt and Kokoschka.

What is more, Janik and Toulmin’s as well as Schorske’s books situate their critique of decadent, bankrupt procedures of reasoning and their search for a new discourse, within the center of non-discursive practices leading to political, economic, and sociopsychological crises. Events of these crises include the economic collapse of 1873, the defeat of Austria-Hungary by Prussia at Sadow, the escalation toward World War I, the exposure of “moral degeneracy” among what had appeared to be “respectable” politicians and noblemen, the great number of suicides among the prominent young intellectuals of Viennese society, the inability to come to grips with technological modernization, and the dwindling of both the power and the democratic procedures of Franz-Joseph’s empire.¹⁴

Our preoccupation here with the relation of Musil’s epistemology to modern science was provoked in part by none other than Musil’s own constant thematization of this problematic of scientific discourse under the heading “exactness and soul” (“Genauigkeit und Seele”) as well as by the fact that Musil was himself a scientist earlier in his career. Having written his doctoral dissertation on Ernst Mach,¹⁵ he criticized his positivism yet flirted with some of Mach’s more relativist moments. In addition, throughout Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Musil demonstrates his awareness of the paradoxes of classical knowledge when confronted with modern problems such as criminal ethics or the inadequacy of Boltzmann’s calculus of probabilities to solve the crisis of referentiality. For example, at the very beginning of the novel there is a passage mocking the certainty of modern-day “Kakanian” citizens that accidents (involving mutilation and death) are accounted for statistically and need no longer concern us, once they are transformed by the exact sciences: “According to American statistics,” the gentleman observed, “there are over a hundred and ninety thousand people killed on the roads annually over there, and four hundred and fifty thousand injured” (M.w.Q. 1:6; DMoE, 11).

We will round out this discussion of modern discourse and an alternative to classical science with reference to Juergen Habermas’ attempt to construct a social theory based on a modern project of communication as universal pragmatics. It is this, our concern with moral issues, which necessitates the extensive treatment of Habermas’ communicational ethics grounded in a universal pragmatics. As K. O. Apel was first to point out, Habermas has attempted to bridge a concern for a Peircean pragmatics of discourse with the moral dilemmas of modernity without transcendentals, thereby making of pragmatics the new summum bonum.

Habermas is crucial to our conclusions because it is his work on the speech ethics of pragmatic claims to validity which attempts to solve the dilemma of reconciling a theory of discourse with existential problems of morality. Habermas’ own doctoral dissertation dealt extensively with the American pragmatists, including Peirce. Also, in his book Knowledge and Human Interests, he devotes a good deal of consideration to both Peirce and Mach. Habermas, then, takes up the challenge, which we have described to be elaborated by Peirce and Musil, that of resolving the problem of ethics in a theory of discourse as social communicative practice. He does so partially, we will argue, in a very Peircean and agonistically Musilian manner, i.e., by retaining pragmatics while seeking a “quasi-universal” ground for an emancipatory, humanly interested one, couched implicitly—counterfactually—in every speech act, however distorted it be in practice. Habermas’ critique of communication is the culmination of this search for an “ethical” modern alternative to classical discourse. Habermas will be seen to attempt to uncover the implicit emancipatory interest in this discursive pragmatics.

It is perhaps Patrick Heelan, in his excellent study of Heisenberg’s philosophy of physics, who most succinctly expresses the pertinence of the epistemological arguments and findings of modern scientific discourse to the social sciences and humanities:

Logically implied in Heisenberg’s view of the measuring process is the position that the behaviour and pattern of objects in human empirical consciousness are also subject to quantum mechanical laws. Acts are specified by their objects. If then the object of empirical consciousness is identical with reality, and if reality is subject to the quantum theory, then the behaviour and pattern of objects in human empirical consciousness is also subject to quantum mechanical laws. The quantum theory then takes on the character of a universal explanation for physical and mental events. ¹⁶

To provide some intellectual historical background, modern discourse will be situated here within the consensus of a certain axis of development which counters the classical language philosophy based on the formation of universal, absolutely fixed, syntactico-semantic categories. This latter axis might be seen to begin in modern times with the interpretation which Bertrand Russell gave to the Tractatus, and which led to developments in analytical language philosophy based on syntax and its referentiality. The counter axis, still often struggling for respectability in positivist, analytical circles of language philosophy, is the interpretation which Janik and Toulmin give to the Tractatus. They find there exists no break between Wittgenstein’s first work and its sequel, twenty years later, Philosophical Investigations. This latter work is based on finding laws of language-use which change with each context and hence lay no claim to transcendental, absolute universality.

There is one striking absence in the group of thinkers to whom we refer in this reconstruction of the transformation of an episteme, namely Sigmund Freud, also a prominent figure in Wittgenstein’s Vienna. This is no reflection upon the importance that Freud occupies in this transformation of the episteme. Indeed, as Habermas has so well argued in his three chapters on Freud in Knowledge and Human Interests, Freud’s interactive self-reflective hermeneutics, as well as the revolutionary concept of transference-countertransference, are a radical deviation from the dominant classical scientific paradigm of the age. Indeed, one might make the argument that the notion of transference-countertransference around a patient’s text is a precursor to Peircean triadicity and to Heisenberg’s concept of the perturbation effect. We have omitted Freud here more due to the extant body of research on his epistemological innovativeness than due to any wish to diminish his centrality. He is but one, however crucial, of many writers and scientists who were transforming the episteme at the time yet with whom we have not had the space or the expertise to deal. We are, however, in a sequel to this work dealing extensively with Freud in an attempt to read the ontological sphere of interiority back into pragmatics.¹⁷

Finally, this book makes the argument that modern discourse, including Musil’s irony, is a discourse-practice, a pragmatic series of games, which cannot be resumed under any absolute laws of syntax or semantics. Furthermore, modern discursive practice must be “explained” by means of a new, modern critical discourse. Hence our task in Part Two of developing an alternative critical discourse that can be applied to a modern narrative text.

0.7 The modern potential of “constructive irony”

Often in Musil we find many of the procedures of modern discourse associated with what Musil calls irony, more specifically “constructive irony.” It would be wrong to assume that irony has not changed since Socrates. The following perusal of some of the general thoughts of Musil about irony will indicate that he develops a new, modern, epistemological, constructive, utopian irony, while at the same time acknowledging his sources in Socrates, Schlegel, and Pirandello.

First of all, a consensus of Musil criticism generally agrees that Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is predominantly ironical. Musil constantly notes in his Tagebuecher and in the “Nachlass” that irony is a necessary element in his narrative:

. . . irony is the style of writing I am best suited for.

If I describe my life as an exemplary life of these times which I want to pass on to later generations, then everything becomes tempered with irony, and the objections I have raised simply fall away. (Tgb., 891)

To be ironic. Poet/politics. This is also the attitude to take. (Tgb., 934)

In the following list of various types or manifestations of irony in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Musil appears to treat irony thematically, while insisting upon all of the following features of irony: experimentality, its treatment of history and language in terms of its moral practice and ideology, social significance, and its psychological context:

Ironic novel of education Agathe-Ulrich?

Ironic portrayal of the most profound moral problems;

Irony is in this case gallows humor.

Irony: Agathe takes seriously what she is told: father, teacher and male ideology, etc. . . .

Ironic: The man inclined to God is psychologically an individual who lacks a sense of community. The pseudo-neurotic.

Ironic: The religious person as the evil one. The criminals—the women. (DMoE, 1843)

That irony is treated less as content and more in terms of discursive practice becomes more evident in the following qualification of it as a search for a new narrative technique. This technique, in turn, is strictly tied to the existential emphasizing of the direct tie between narrative and life, where both are taken as discursive practice: “Satiric narrative technique can usually be reduced to the formula: play dumb. Assumed naiveté. This is also the essence of those who make compliments which leave one in doubt as to what is meant” (Tgb., 584).

In the interview with Fontana, Musil says that he counterbalances a tendency toward essayism with irony.¹⁸ However, essayism, in Fontana’s sense of the word, is not the same as in Musil’s description in Ulrich’s life and his own narration as essayism, as will be seen further on. Essayism is rejected here in Fontana as a sort of classical reflective discourse, whereas irony is featured as an active interaction and socially implicated practice. Irony is that which counteracts a referential, reflective exposition:

Interviewer: And are you not afraid that the structure of your novel might tend toward the essayistic?

Musil: Indeed I am. And I have therefore employed two means of guarding against it. First, a basic ironic attitude, which, I hasten to add, does not mean for me a gesture of superiority, but rather a form of struggle. (G.W. II, 941)

Musil cites the following Schlegelian fragment whereby irony is seen as the guiding principle of the novel as well as being inextricably tied to Socratic dialogism. “Novels are the Socratic dialogue of our time. In the face of school-wisdom, the wisdom of life has fled to this liberal form.”¹⁹

In the Tagebuecher, Musil recognizes the close ties of modern irony to Socratic irony and proposes irony as a compositional technique for a forerunner of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, namely Rapial: “Note: Socratic and modern irony. See manuscript ‘What is a Rapial’ for the complete treatment” (Tgb., 964).

In another note Musil approaches very closely a Schlegelian notion of irony as parabasic reflective distanciation and reserve in the face of that by which one is impassioned—a form of renewed parabasis: “Satiric technique: Even what one loves must be thought through and mastered until it appears satirical” (Tgb., 585, cf. Schlegel, Kristische Fragment, No. 37). From his words about Pirandello and romantic irony it is evident that Musil is thoroughly familiar with the narrative distanciation techniques of parabasis in irony and with the close tie between romantic and modern irony: “Set to rights: the romantic or even Pirandellian irony of it: the character over the author” (DMoE, 1943).

The full epistemological consequences of ignorance are also associated with modern irony by Musil who, while drawing upon the background of Socratic maieutics, emphasizes that modern irony is not a feigned ignorance but a genuine, epistemological standpoint of uncertainty: “To be Socratic is to feign ignorance. To be modern is to be ignorant” (G.W. II, 920).

That Musil considers irony to be manifest as discourse practice or as discourse presentation, rather than in the content of the representations themselves, is evidenced in this next remark, which also links discourse practice with the pragmatic context of opposing self-presenting ideologies: “Irony is: to portray a cleric in such a way that it could also be a Bolshevik. To portray a fool in such a way that the author feels: yes, in a sense, I am like him too. This kind of irony—constructive irony—is relatively unknown in today’s Germany” (DMoE, 1939). By his concluding remark in this passage, Musil is affirming the limitations of his contemporaries’ theories and practices of irony, a limitation which he says a modern, constructive, and ideologically conscientious practice and theory of irony must overcome.

Irony is constructive in that it mixes various character types, various ideological positions, presented in discourse. This interaction relativizes and hence destroys the absoluteness and the ensuing power of each discourse; hence it explains irony’s contentiousness, its battle plan, as well as its sociopolitical Utopian role, i.e., to destroy ideology. Furthermore, the author himself cannot enjoy a privileged position of absolute power over discourse or over his representations since he must admit his discursive similarity to the presentations of the “fool.” The authorial enunciative position is “deabsolutized” by irony. Irony constitutes a utopian constructive vector pointed against and away from the totalitarianism of self-sufficient, isolated, impermeable, ideological positions.

Hochstaetter perhaps best of all illustrates the epistemological and ideological import of “constructive irony” in Musil. He describes it as that which relativizes falsely grounded arrogance, places reality into doubt, and situates the hero in a larger totality than that of the illusions of realism of “Seinesgleichen”:

This kind of constructive irony corrects false pride by bringing the arrogant but uncertain spirit face to face with the phenomena of reality. It mediates the destructive aspect of the irony and the hero’s constructive efforts in the superior knowledge that in the end both that which has been rejected out of prejudice and that which has been provisionally affirmed somehow carry the mark of a lost or utopian common interest. This irony is constructive, because it secretly makes a concession to that which has apparently been condemned once and for all, because it corrects the prejudice of the narrator and his heroes and thus transcends the realm of the possible. In addition, it is constructive because it relegates to the realm of generality the apparently singular and eccentric endeavors of the hero.²⁰

The relation of this “constructive irony” to the problem of values, taken as a problem of justification or legitimation of social practices, cannot be overemphasized. Irony is not merely a reversal of values but an essential uncertainty or “ambiguity” of value, where there is a “good-bad” (“Gut-Boeses”) and a “bad-good” (“Boeses-Gutes”). Constructive is that which, “. . . by recognizing that there is something false and something true in everything, shows that everything is false, so that it will be kept in mind that everything is on the way to becoming true.”²¹

Finally, irony is constructive in that it rejects the discursive procedures of the classical episteme. Musil rejects the principle of excluded middle in another definition which he gives to his novel, which is itself a constructive definition in that it aims at a “performance” of the replacement of traditional, classical metalanguage about his novel: “This book is not a satire but a positive construction. It is not a confession but a satire” (DMoE, 1939).

Irony is also to be seen as utopian and constructive in that, by relativizing closed ideological positions which are not utopian, irony “prepares the way” or leaves the way open for what would eventually be utopian. But this negative dialectic will be seen to be not the only way in which ironic discourse is utopian.

“Irony is not a gesture of superiority, but rather a form of struggle” (G.W. II, 941). Battle or conflict may be seen in terms of an antagonistic interrelation of various discursive positions. These positions are no longer able to exclude each other by claiming absolute truth and power for themselves. Musil’s irony will be seen to be not a referential, metalinguistic reflection upon ideology, but a discursive, interactional conflict, a type of unreduced, radical dialogue. This relationality of irony is insisted upon once again as the relationality of things and not merely as mockery and fun making: “It is out of the connection between things that irony nakedly appears. Irony is considered to be mockery and ridicule” (DMoE, 1939).

Given the above remarks, those who would hold on to a restricted definition of irony in Musil (such as Allemann gives when he says that irony in Musil is merely a self-parody of the author’s own point of view²²) must yield before the enormous, far-reaching, epistemological, and ontological complexity that Musil reads into this term. There is no dominant, parodying voice of irony in Musil’s narrative; Musil himself describes his narrative in terms of the lack of a first principle or an epistemologically certain or non-contingent ground (DMoE, 133). Irony is the discursive position left once the transcendental guarantee of knowledge and power is lost.

Whereas Candace Lang in her recent work Irony/Humor²³ comes down in favor of the play on the signifier or trace and the postmodern dispersal of the subject at the expense of the self-reflectiveness of irony, we would tend to define irony as infinite semiosis where each new sign-relation radically de- and recontextualizes meanings. Nevertheless, meaning, however mobile, does exist as constituted pockets of linkage between a sign-vehicle, an object, and its effect upon a sign-user. Meaning is not “le manque” (Lacan). Also the subject is not eliminated, as postmoderns would contend. It is not “Qualities without the Man” but rather The Man without Qualities. In other words, man as himself a sign is a subject in constant process such that the meaning constellations he assumes constantly vary. This is not tantamount to de-ontologizing the subject! These partial, ever-surpassable fields of meaning and identity are partial meanings within possible contexts all potentially alterable within other contextual productions of signs by sign-users. Musil’s practice of “essayism,” we will wish to argue, was just such an attempt at partial meanings, in the realm of possibility: whence the potential of modern discourse. It is this aspect of modern discourse that we will insist upon as an alternative to the “deconstructionist” insistence on lack of meaning and dispersion of subjectivity.

0.8 “Modernity” and irony

This definition of irony as a potentially modern discourse taken as radically contextualized production of meaning throughout constantly substituting sign-fields also goes in a somewhat different direction from that of Linda Hutcheon’s recent work on irony as a key theme in postmodernism, where she emphasizes the paradoxical relation of the parodic and ironic to the past. For Hutcheon postmodern fiction is historiographic metafiction that is self-reflective yet historically grounded. Postmodernism for her is paradoxical or doubly encoded. Language is arbitrary yet frontiered. Even Lyotard’s declaration that we have lost faith in our master narratives becomes itself a master narrative.²⁴

But we would disagree that the modern vs. postmodern debate between Habermas and Lyotard is merely an issue of Marxism vs. neo-Nietzscheism as Hutcheon contends when she argues that the former “inscribes a metanarrative with precise values and premises,” whereas the latter “problematizes both the product and the process of inscription.”²⁵ We will argue that modern discourse is not confident in the capacity of metanarrative to refer to object narrative, nor is the question of value precise and simply grounded. What is more, we will attempt to illustrate that not only Joyce but also Musil, one of the great modern narrators, though in a different vein, problematizes the product and the process of narrating/writing/inscription, but without neglecting the question of values and ground.

When Hutcheon argues that postmodernism cannot step outside that which it contests, that it is implicated in the values it chooses to challenge, we would propose that this is precisely the modern dilemma of a Musil, a Peirce, and the Copenhagen interpretation of the results of quantum mechanics experiments. What is more, we will argue that there is much potential in this very modern dilemma.

In short, much of what Hutcheon would call the ironic mode of postmodernism we will find to be quite modern. Since the turn of the century “moderns” have been preoccupied with the crisis of representation, the problematization of the status of reality, the distinction between fact and telling and between narrated and narration, the self-reflexive acknowledgment of the subject’s complexity within the system under study, the inadequacies of totalizations, and the melting of disciplinary boundaries such as literature as distinct from science.

However, where we will define irony as the radical contextualization of meaning production whereupon one text is then repositioned within other sign-fields, this does not deviate substantially from Hutcheon’s definition of parody as the ironic mode of intertextuality which enables critical, non-nostalgic visitations of the past. Peirce would refer to such intertextuality simply as inevitable semiosis. Again, however, we will attempt to show this to be a fundamentally modern development, one which can contend with the problems facing modern society, as opposed to a postmodern reduction of all to simulacrum (Baudrillard).

Musil constantly couples the words “irony” and “modern.” Although we have circumscribed the word “modernity” chronologically it is not wise to do so restrictively or exclusively. “Modern” and “modernity” refer rather to a discursive episteme as characterized by specific postulates of discourse, just as “classical” refers to a set of other discursive postulates. Irony has disrupted the discursive postulates of the classical episteme, namely referentiality, analyticity, representation, true and false value systems, scientificity, absolute knowledge, taxonomy, and systematization, all represented in the discourses of Descartes, Newton, Locke, Chomsky, and the structuralists, among others. To a certain extent, the modern episteme is characterized by an exposition and interrogation of the classical postulates. Irony taken as a dislocation of codes, and as negative self-critical process in discourse, would reflect these aspects of anticlassical modernity. However, both irony and modernity are characterized by other than purely negative means. Modern discourse is more than a negative determination. This is where the difficulty of talking about discourse and modernity begins, i.e., at the place where modern discourse transcends itself as solely a negative transgression of classical discourse. To suggest but a few of the possible traits of (ironic) modern discourse which we will elaborate upon, we might mention:

• dialogism,

• continuous progression and productivity,

• constant interaction of various discourses and their situating fields,

• replacement of representation by re-presentation,

• emphasis upon the materiality of the discourse as opposed to its referent or signified,

• a “performative” quality replacing a metalinguistic/critical quality of one discourse’s relation to another and to the whole epistemic field in which it is situated,

• relativity, indeterminacy of truth, or object of knowledge,

• mobility of the moments of observation and object of observation.

Such varied discourses as those of Cervantes, Kierkegaard, Joyce, Sollers, Musil, and Pirandello might fit into the “modern” episteme, all by virtue of their resistance to classical representation and the creation of new procedures. One other theorist to see the diachronically transcendent, epistemological modernity of irony and its consequent destruction of the classical representational episteme is Foucault, in the following remarks upon the irony in Cervantes (who, it must be remembered, was described as a complete epistemological “perspectivist” by Spitzer’s somewhat Nietzschean criticism of Don Quixote):

Don Quixote stands for the negative of the Renaissance world; writing has ceased to be the prose of the world, resemblances and signs have untied their old alliance; similitudes are deceiving, becoming illusion and delirium; things remain obstinately in their ironic identity: they are no longer anything but what they are; words wander off to adventure, without content, without resemblance to fill them; they no longer designate things; they lie dormant between the pages of books amid the dust . . . the signs of language have no more value than the flimsy fiction that they represent. Writing and things no longer resemble each other. Between them, Don Quixote wanders off to adventure.²⁶ (our translation)

Where the modern and postmodern part ways, we will argue, is around the notion of the simulacrum (Baudrillard), the total Nietzschean negation of the real and the Derridean, Lacanian declaration of the sole existence of the trace in the absence of meaning and wholesale substitution of signifiers for each other. For with these declarations the modern historical project of linking ethics, politics, and discourse of knowledge must be relinquished.

These postmodern tenets would spell the end of Freud’s very modern hermeneutic project and thus we can only disagree with Hutcheon’s citation of Lyotard that postmodernism is psychoanalysis, the attempt to understand the present by examining the past, the orientation toward the presence of the past. This superpositioning of sign-fields throughout time would be the way toward accomplishing the impossible task of grasping what Peirce called the “ultimate interpretant.”

Whereas antitotality is certainly not invented by postmodernism, since Schlegel and Adorno both directed it against Hegel, Habermas may be correct to state that such tendencies as the evacuation of the subject, meaning history, and value from discourse “do not emit any clear signals.” Is, as Hutcheon argues, postmodernism’s problematization sufficient? Habermas is well aware of the German philosophical significance of ironic “infinite negativity” when he asks, “but where are the works which might fill the negative slogan of ‘postmodernism’ with a positive content?”²⁷

To this we will answer that they are less in a Nietzsche, a Lacan, a Derrida, or a Baudrillard and far more potentially in a Musil, a Peirce, or a Heisenberg.

0.9 “Apologia”

Finally, given all of this talk about a new discourse, some apologies are due before embarking fully upon an investigation of Musil and Peirce. What we undertake in Part One is little other than a rather straightforward thematic/semantic, perhaps almost hermeneutic interpretation of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, whereby we illustrate an interpretation of Musil, whom we regard as dealing with the same epistemological impasses and as making the same critique of classical, referential, scientific discourse as do Heisenberg and Peirce.

One consolation may be that our thematics does tie into pragmatics in that it recognizes its own interpretant determination, seeks to establish a consensus, and allows various discourses to interact. We hope to have avoided a Boothean or Hirschean-type hermeneutics, which has been practiced as a critique of Musil by F. G. Peters, Robert Musil: Master of the Hovering Life.²⁸ Their assumption is that interpretation can (is morally obliged to) grasp the initial unique authorial intention. This obviously is not our task here. The aim of this reading is to show that possible triadic, contextual positionings of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften may occur among various other epistemologically oriented discursive practices. Still, one may consider this “hermeneutic” attempt to be a sort of interim stage, one which from within the hermeneutic, logical space of critical discourse tries to show the necessity of getting out of it and the possible directions to take in doing so. This quest is but a continuation of Janik and Toulmin’s:

Is there any method of doing for language-in-general what Hertz and Boltzman have already done for the language of theoretical physics? Is there (that is) some way to map the scope and the limits of the “sayable” exhaustively from within, so that in both, it can be seen how descriptive language in general used to give a bildliche Darstellung in the Hertzian sense of a representation in the form of a mathematical model of all matters of fact, and also the “transcendent” character of all ethical issues—which make them amenable only to “indirect communication”—at the same time shows itself as the byproduct of the analysis. ²⁹

Musil asked that he be read twice, once in his entirety and once in part (DMoE, 1941). First we must do a rather inadequate hermeneutic reading of the whole in order to seek directions on how we should read Musil a second time, in part, “in potentia,” in “Teilloesung.” Parts One and Two of this study might be read as just that: two readings of Musil and Peirce.