2.0 The Ethics of a Quest for Utopia: Practical Experiments in
Utopianism

While the Vienna Circle is often interpreted as ignoring or rejecting problems of value, Toulmin and Janik’s reading of Wittgenstein argues that, contrary to the Cambridge School’s Russelian, positivistic reading, even in the Tractatus the problem of values, inherited mostly from thinkers such as Kierkegaard, who was the most popular philosopher in Vienna at the time, hovers over the whole work.

The ethical quest in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is one for a utopian existence which would be an alternative to “Seinesgleichen,”⁵ i.e., earlier defined as a confidence that sense experience reveals of Reality. utopia in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften has three dimensions. “Die drei Utopien” are: (1) utopia as a new way of living, (2) utopia as a new way of reasoning, of perceiving Reality, and (3) utopia as a new discourse or a new way of communicating (DMoE, 1925):

The utopia of inductive reasoning.

The utopia of alternative (not rational, motivated, etc.) life in love.

Also the utopia of essayism. The utopia of the pure “other condition” [anderer Zustand] with its opening or branching off to God—Mysticism without occultism . . .

Even though utopias they still have different degrees of reality. (DMoE, 1881-82)

In this formulation, Utopia is certainly not classical science with its true/false distinctions. Utopia would be a new discourse, a perfect communication.

All three aspects of the utopian quest tie directly into the quest for a new discourse, one where reference is not the central function: “. . . how does that find its way into morality? . . . you’d already be across the frontiers of the lunatic realm! But that’s just the way every word needs to be taken, literally, otherwise it rots away into a lie. Yet one mustn’t take any word literally, else the world turns into a madhouse!” (M.w.Q. 3:96; DMoE, 748-49).

2.1 Utopia as total/perfect communication

The first experiment that Ulrich made with utopia was that of the exact life, which he later found to prove inadequate. Subsequently he sought utopia in an experiment with mysticism and the “other State” (“anderer Zustand”) which led to the incestuous experiment with Agathe in the “voyage to paradise” (“Reise in Paradies”). The journey to paradise, undertaken by Ulrich and Agathe, as the title indicates, was a search for utopia. However, this search was a very special one. It was a quest for a perfect discourse, one which would unite both beings in perfect, ecstatic, communication with each other, a creation of the “anderer Zustand.” To a degree, i.e., in a closed, temporally limited field or context, this perfect very areferential yet fully communicational discourse was realized: “. . . words do not cut it in such circumstances, and the fruit remains on the branch, even though one expects to bite into it immediately: this is undoubtedly the first secret of daylight mysticism” (DMoE, 1088-89).

Maurice Blanchot perhaps best describes the transformation of discourse in the utopian experiment of the “anderer Zustand” by saying that language is transformed, that the primordial antithetical schism is bridged and that communication ensues even in silence. The mystical experience of love entails a very new type of discourse:

Reality does not suffice. He who opens the way to the imaginary gives to the impossible an almost material existence where brother and sister unite one with the other. Language and Love are bound in one. In order to appreciate the change undergone by abstract language in contact with the “limitless, marvelous, amazing and unforgettable state in which everything would be united by a single “Yes,” one must look to the common ground shared by the intoxication of feelings and the mastery of words which would transform the two, making dry abstraction into a new kind of passion and the transports of feeling more clear-headed. Words which are in great need of silence. ⁶

Nevertheless, the utopian experiment still failed. Two explanations are given for this failure of the “journey to paradise.” The first problem was that of making the intensity of the ecstatic moment last in time: “Mystische[s] Gefuehl [. . .], das [. . .] niemals zur ‘vollen Wirklichkeit’ gelangt!” (DMoE, 1243).⁷

The second difficulty, and the one which interests us most here, is isolation from the community and the sense that Ulrich and Agathe had of wasting their lives while the world continued to evolve regardless of them: “Er sieht, wie ihr Leben sich verliert und auch seines” (G.W. II 941). The “anderer Zustand” was realized as a communicational practice that had completely isolated itself from the world: “But brother and twin sister, the T and the ‘not-I,’ feel the inner conflict of their commonness; they fall into ruin together with the world and flee” (G.W. II, 940).

It was due precisely to this isolation from society that the utopian could not be found in the journey to “paradise”: “But the attempt to fix and hold on to the experience fails. The absolute cannot be maintained” (G.W. II, 940).

Elsewhere, Agathe had asked Ulrich if, in succumbing completely to the dictates of desire one did not give way to frivolity, capriciousness, and snobbism. Ulrich replied: “Yes!” The signal of the failure of the utopian experiment was not only Ulrich’s need to act, but also Agathe’s compulsion to begin to “socialize” with the other guests at the hotel. In short, the failure of their utopian experiment proved that one could not simply neglect the need for praxis in the social arena and flee into a dyadic monad closed off from the world.

The quest for utopia in the “andere Zustand,” then, was rejected by both Ulrich and Musil due to its impotence to extend perfect communication in society, i.e., in the public sphere: “The utopias did not yield any practical results. The ‘other condition’ [anderer Zustand] is no prescription for practical life” (DMoE, 1905).

Blanchot points out one very key factor when he says that, despite the failure of the communication of the “anderer Zustand” to come to terms with the demands of the community, the book continues: “. . . perhaps by establishing an ethics capable of opening up the world community to a liberation movement, forever uncommon, renewed and pure. A failure which however does not end the book.”⁸

3.0 Utopian Moment versus Utopian Process

The book does not end with this failure of the other state. If the utopian experiment failed, then where does the continuation of Musil’s discursive practice lead? It leads to two propositions: The first argument is connected to the observation that, in direct relation to the failure of the various utopian experiments (including the utopia of “exactness,” of the collateral campaign, and of the “anderer Zustand”), there was an increase in violence resulting finally in the outbreak of the war. All of these experiments led to war. And war reopened the question of the value and possibility of praxis in society: “All lines end in war.” “The like of it [Seinesgleichen] leads to war” (DMoE, 1902). “The man who blends brutality with humane phrases a foreshadow of the future” (DMoE, 1927). It is as though there were for Musil a direct relation between “War” and the inability of any theoretical experiment including Ulrich’s (but not exclusively) to lead to a socially integrated utopian praxis. This failure results in the outbreak of the war: War is the same as the “other condition” [anderer Zustand] (DMoE, 1932). “I find myself in a completely defenseless position. [The] irresolvable situation of the theoretician. . . . If one does not have the practical energy (talent) for it, one simply goes to war” (DMoE, 1933).

To rephrase more succinctly, and more colloquially, while Ulrich is still “pussy-footing it around” in his hermetic and discursively solipsistic utopian experiments on the social front, war is about to break out. These two events are not unrelated. In the vein of Habermas, the failure to practice an ideal communication socially leads to a breakdown of dialogue and to strategic action, i.e., war.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to argue that, because of the outbreak of the war, Musil’s novel, and consequently his irony, are fundamentally distopian and pessimistic. Musil insists that his novel is utopian, that it continuously seeks the intellectual/spiritual conquest of the world and its accompanying new morality:

The interviewer: Although your novel gives the characters no way out other than the plunge into mobilization, I do not believe it is to be taken pessimistically?

Musil: You are right about that. On the contrary, I make fun of the decline of the West and its prophets. What we need is a new morality. Our old one is insufficient. My book might be able to provide material for such a morality. It is an attempt at dissolution and the suggestion of a synthesis. How do I categorize my novel? I would like to contribute to the spiritual overcoming of the world. Also by means of the novel. (G.W. II, p. 941)

What is more, Musil does not say that the utopian aspect of his novel is realized in any particular moment. On the contrary, he describes his discursive practice as one which is infinitely utopian. “What I offer in the novel will forever remain a utopia; it is not ‘tomorrow’s reality’” (Tgb., 862). With the failure of one particular utopian experience the novel itself does not become distopian. To understand the “process” of utopia is to understand the nature of irony’s utopia as process. Utopia is not fixed; it is not a pocket of habits nor an absolute field of truth. “A utopia is not a goal but a direction.”⁹ Utopia is not an end but a direction or a vector: one which is both portrayed and produced by the infinite production of narration in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

4.0 A Normative Discourse and Utopian Discursive Praxis

How is it that discourse can play a utopian role in history? According to Allemann, for example, the discursive irony in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften has absolutely no utopian function. Allemann qualifies irony as the opposite of utopia, speaking of the “absolut(e) gegenironisches Prinzip der Utopie.”¹⁰ On the other hand, Arntzen relates Musil’s irony/satire directly to utopia, saying that “Satire ist Utopie ex negativo.”¹¹

At this stage, it might be useful to recall a similar difference of opinion regarding the utopian function of romantic irony. Here Peter Szondi contradicts Friedrich Schlegel himself. Schlegel insists that the qualities of discourse which were earlier identified with irony lead to a new, utopian world. Szondi, on the other hand, argues in a somewhat Hegelian vein that irony remains a negativity which does not accept its transgression toward future utopia:

Consequently, negativity, irony, thought of as surpassing the former, itself becomes negativity. It attains its ends either in the past, or the future,. . . In such a manner, it shuts itself off from the road to perfection which, in its own way, proves to be intolerable, and the fact that it [irony] leads in the end to emptiness is the real tragedy.¹²

For Szondi the view of irony which refuses utopia altogether is indeed a tragic view, tragic, that is, as opposed to ironic. If Szondi allows for any utopian moment in irony, it is only a negative dialectical moment. Ironic utopia, for Szondi, is what aims at utopia by virtue of its criticism of what is not utopia: “Everlasting agility characterizes modern man who lives in class. To become aware of one’s chaotic existence, to experience it on a conscious level, is to adopt an ironic attitude towards it. But this idea also leads to utopia—‘From this confusion and chaos, a world can spring forth.’“¹³

4.1 The negative dialectics of utopia as ironic critical discursive praxis

This negative dialectical view of discursive irony is the only type of utopia that many of Musil’s critics find in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. In general the only discursive utopia is grasped as a sort of negative theology, whereby utopia is defined only by virtue of all that irony contrafactually shows not to be in existence. This is what Krysinski refers to as the “apophatic function” of irony in Musil.¹⁴ “There’s some great intoxication emanating from the Word, an obscure memory, and sometimes one wonders if everything we experience isn’t just scraps of some ancient wholeness of things destroyed long ago, shreds that we once fixed together into one piece and got it all wrong” (M.w.Q. 3:96; DMoE, 749).

Such an apophatic view is easy to speak about in discursive terms. One may define this first stage of the utopian function of alternative discourse as that which breaks up fixed habits or fields of discourse. These fixed habits are distopian by virtue of their partiality and their ideological overcoding, as well as their false pretense of totality and of utopian identity. To paraphrase Adorno as earlier cited, a critical discourse is utopian to the degree that it shows that “Das Ganze ist das Unwahre,” and that “despair was given to us for the sake of hope.” However, we should not forget that Adorno’s own followers turned against him in the end for having gone no further towards utopia than a theoretical critique of distopia. There was no affirmative moment in critical theory, something that we will see Habermas set out to rectify.

4.2 The ultimate interpretant

In terms of Peircean semiotics, the positive as opposed to utopian tendency of discourse may be discussed in relation to what Peirce calls the “ultimate interpretant.” Is the “ultimate interpretant” the end of the semiotic process where one arrives at a perfect, utopian, socially just, legitimate knowledge? Or is the “ultimate interpretant” that which destroys any fixed pockets of habits of knowledge that purport to be total knowledge? At this point Peirce defines the “ultimate interpretant” as the fully rational, absolutely systematized, or habit-formed universe, i.e., the final knowledge of all things: “an element of pure chance survives and will remain until the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetrical system, in which mind is at last crystallized in the infinitely distant future” (6.33).

What should be noted here, though, is that such an ultimate interpretant never really occurs—rather it is a counterfactual possibility for the infinitely distant future (except in the death of the entire community).

At another point, Peirce simply defines “ultimate interpretant” as “self-conscious habit.” This will be seen to approximate Habermas’ insistence on the liberating capacity of the self-reflective process:

The habit conjoined with the motive and the conditions has the action for its energetic interpretant; but action cannot be a logical interpretant, because it lacks generality. . . . It somewhat partakes of the nature of a verbal definition, and is as inferior to the habit, and much in the same way, as a verbal definition is inferior to the real definition. The deliberately formed, self-analyzing habit—self-analyzing because formed by the aid of analysis of the exercises that nourished it—is the living definition, the veritable and final logical interpretant. (5.491)

Musil, in places, describes his discursive production, and more specifically his irony, as that which does battle against falsehood and distopia in quest of, or in preparation for, the utopian:

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)

Fiction is in essence the struggle for a higher human nature. (G.W. II, 1021)

In a note for the end of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Musil states that all ideology leads to war, and in this case, the role of alternative ironic discourse is simply to destroy ideology. Irony would be a negative force which would keep us “pure” in expectation of utopia: “But for the sake of a world that may yet come one should keep oneself pure” (DMoE, 957).

Burton Pike is another critic who describes the utopian function of Musil’s irony only in terms of what we earlier called clearing the way in the sense of a destruction of, or distanciation from, the nonutopian, in preparation for what is utopian: “Irony is the way to myth and utopia, for only a person who is detached from life and able to weigh its possibilities in expectation of an ultimate ideal is aware of the value of myth and utopia.”¹⁵

But it is Mueller who best illustrates the negative dialectics of Musil’s irony with regard to utopia. Mueller says that Musil poses the problem of “substantielle Sittlichkeit ohne diese im Hegelschen Sinne aufzuheben.” In other words, Musil poses the problem of theoretical and ethical knowledge, while refusing to synthesize, in false totality, the antitheses of the “ought” and “is” of theory and world history, even though they “ought” to be synthesized. This is an alternative discourse’s utopian role as negative dialectics,¹⁶ and irony is one such discourse.

An example of negative dialectical utopianism in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften would be the transcendence of fixed pockets of morals, i.e., of validity claims, whereby Ulrich’s constant recontextualization shows that “Every morality has a limit, a point beyond which it ceases to function” (DMoE, 1862). An alternative discourse imposes a practice of the transmutation of values such that any ethical, moral, or practical judgment is shown to be a partial one and not the total one, as classical scientific discourses would proclaim. Alternative discourse, in the form of common infinite semiosis, transcends all partial pockets of sign-relations and consequently the limitations of the actions based upon them. Such a discourse would go beyond the doxa of “good” in search of an ethical expansion of the field to include the “good bad”: “Ironic defense against the objection that only bad people are portrayed: The good people are for the war. The bad against it! In general the novel must discover and represent the ‘good bad,’ since the world needs it more than the ‘good good’” (DMoE, 921).

The possibility of utopia in the form of progressive social action does, however, presuppose that certain value positions have been legitimated as a basis for praxis. In other words, if, as in instrumentalist, control-oriented discourse, good is the false good, then alternative discourse as negative utopian force must become the good bad. As J. F. Lyotard once said of Adorno, where evil is on the side of God then good has no choice but to side with the devil.¹⁷

4.3 The possibilities of alternative discourse as constructive utopia:
Affirmation of value and interest

Nevertheless, besides this negative utopia, Musil’s alternative discourse goes beyond a mere apophatic function and toward positing an alternative in the positive or constructive sense. Poetry is a battle, but a battle for a higher human existence: “um eine hoehere menschliche Artung” (G.W. II, 1021). For Musil, alternative discourse not only exposes and destroys distopia, but also, irony is constructive of utopia (“Konstruktive Ironie”). Here alternative discourse not only holds out for utopia as constructive irony, it also presents its potential “possibilities”: “Utopias are pretty well the same as possibilities” (DMoE, 246). But what, then, is the nature of this constructive, possible utopia which would go beyond a negative dialectic? Alternative discourse moves away from an epistemology based on facticity (empiricism) and toward an episteme of the possible, the potential realm where choice and value are not excluded but avowed.

In order to grasp a utopian function of constructive irony, two other notions must be considered, that of the difference established by Bateson between codification and value, and that of emancipatory interest in communicational interaction for Habermas.

In the framework of the theory of communication, Gregory Bateson differentiates between codification and value in order later to show that, although classical, occidental, (i.e., positivist scientificist) thought makes this separation, it is really epistemologically quite impossible to do so. Epistemology and ideology are two sides of the same coin. The notion of a system of codification is meant to refer to the process through which the individual, seeking to reconcile incoherencies and hence obstacles to decoding the world, tries to “achieve a congruence between something in his head and the external world.” He does this by “altering what is in his head.”¹⁸

The system of values, on the other hand, is meant to refer to the reverse process, where “the individual attempts to achieve a coincidence of the external and the internal by altering the external to fit his internal model, i.e., according to a configuration of his value system.”¹⁹

According to Bateson, occidental, classical, scientific thought has long held that it can separate value from codification and as such objectively know its object. This discourse of knowledge claims to be completely free from the subject’s values, biases, or prejudices of knowledge: “Human beings in occidental cultures do really talk and act as though these processes were separable.”²⁰

Contrary to classical scientificist occidental thought, ecological thought would recognize and accept, as do perturbation theory and Peircean interactional semiotics, that the subject’s values are in operation during all types of knowing, whereby the subject merely adjusts its knowing apparatus to the object. In other words, in a modern, postclassical episteme, the discourse of science would no longer be able to occult its value judgments. These latter are fully active in any and every process of knowing. What is more, somewhere between the processes of knowing and evaluating there is action, the middle term: “. . . he [the observer] begins to form an image such that, acting in terms of that image, he will achieve his goal. It is also evident that perception determines values as we see things, so we act. . . . Action would seem to be the middle term in which perception and value meet.”²¹

Value applies not only to the process of information-gathering, but also to negative entropy in the sense of biological and informational survival, i.e., in the sense of defying the second principle of thermodynamics: “Negative entropy, value, and information are, in fact, alike insofar as the system to which these notions refer is the man plus environment and insofar as, both in seeking information and in seeking values, the man is trying to establish an otherwise improbable congruence between ideas and events.”²²

Now, says Bateson, referring to none other than Freud, the presence of value in determining knowledge is nothing new and is not necessarily pejorative:

it is well known that wish and perception partially coincide. Indeed this discovery is one of Freud’s greatest contributions. [. . .] he [the person] must act in terms of what he knows—good or evil—and when he acts he will meet with frustration and pain if things are not as he “knows” them to be. Therefore he must, in a certain sense, wish them to be as he “knows” they are.²³

4.4 Affirmation of value—liberation from repression

This affirmation of value is quite comparable, in both its Freudian and self-reflexive epistemological overtones, to the following remark made by Peirce: “To negate our inherent prejudices in pretending to liberate ourselves from universal doubt is nothing more than a form of repression” (1.109). And although it cannot be discussed at length here, not only Habermas’ Knowledge and Human Interests, but the whole enterprise of Critical Philosophy is a discourse levelled against the positivist, scientificist assumption that knowledge is objective and divorced of all “interest.”

Both Habermas and Bateson suggest that, due to the impossibility of exorcising value from scientific discourse, rather than pretending to be objective while simultaneously using the accompanying power to reinforce certain interests (such as technocratic interests), an alternative discourse would acknowledge its values or interests as science and include in our calculations those values which would fulfill certain social requirements: “We must introduce moral and ethical considerations to our relation with nature and reevaluate the way advanced technology arrogates nature, [or] we will destroy our environment which is part of our circuit of survival.”²⁴ This ecological-cybernetic alternative, suggests Bateson, depends upon a flexible interaction with other ideas/signs: “But the survival of an idea is also determined by its relation with other ideas. Ideas may support or contradict each other; they may combine more or less readily. They may influence each other in complex, unknown ways or in polarized systems.”²⁵

Bateson insists that both information and the environment become ecologically entropic (he equates this state to neurosis at the individual level) when limited, restricted, and strategically controlled: “Some ideas become pathogenic when implemented with modern technology.” Employing cybernetic “lingo,” Bateson equates over-habit-forming with nonflexible, noninteractive, “hard-programming,” the ideological implications of which are present everywhere: “The variable which does not change its value becomes ipso facto hard-programmed: [. . .] another way of describing habit-formation.”²⁶

Based on the above considerations Bateson suggests a new science with a new, international interest or value-system. This new interest is itself based on “interactionality,” whereby one interactionally studies the interactions of man and the environment, the latter of which is itself a huge interaction. The ideal of an ecology is based on the ideal of free interaction. Of course, when Bateson describes the environment in this way, one cannot resist relating it to Peirce’s notion of the ever-expanding, triadically interactive semiotic field: “Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e., differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits.”²⁷

Before embarking upon the investigation of the type of utopian international interests that Bateson, Habermas, and Bakhtin suggest and beginning the search for the relation of alternative discourse to utopian communication, one remark from Musil serves to illustrate that wish and value were also very high on his scale of priorities: “I would be very grateful to the public if it paid less attention to my aesthetic qualities and more to my will” (G.W. II, 942).

What then are these interests of science? In keeping with the Frankfurt School and Critical Philosophy Habermas would argue for the impossibility of classical, positivist science and proposes as its replacement an advancing of emancipatory interests proper to all types of human interaction. Habermas suggests that the mechanical Marxists have interpreted Marx as restricting the demands for emancipation to the activity of work, the economic sphere. Habermas himself applies these interests to various levels of power in all spheres and types of human interaction, especially those of the activity of communication. Just as Foucault refuses to restrict his analysis of discourse and power to the economic or state spheres of society, so too does Habermas: “social interaction, which includes communicative activity, the struggle for recognition and class antagonisms, that is, ethical and political praxis. . . .”²⁸

For Habermas, the emancipatory interest has historical grounds that posit it as emerging out of cognitive dissonance. Science cannot be objective, and thus it should defend certain interests of society and the community (the polis), the interests that have been proposed since the beginnings of Greek philosophy and which have persevered throughout the whole of Judeo-Christian thought. These interests are those of equal opportunity, emancipation, self-development, autonomy (“Muendigkeit”), free, unconstrained interaction of citizens, etc.²⁹

The utopian interest that Habermas is advocating is a practice of all types of communication which would follow certain emancipatory and freely interactional procedures. First the mutations of any ideal communication are exposed as they occur in reality and then the utopian alternative is proposed “counterfactually.” By “counterfactual” Habermas means the opposite of the fact, yet affirmed as a negation of that fact. The mutations of an ideal communication are overtly identified by Habermas with the strategic, compulsory action of both forms of totalitarian discourse, e.g., Stalinism and capitalism: “capitalism as an individual strategic action oriented towards controlled social organization.”³⁰ The interactional interest acts as the alternative form of reasoning and social organization to Weber’s concept of Western bureaucratic rationality based on purposive, rational, instrumental action.

Habermas’ distinction is between the ideal communicational interaction and the reality from which the former is, so to speak, counterfactually “extrapolated.” A discourse, such as Agathe’s and Ulrich’s violation of pragmatic universals, which exposes the mutations of an ideological discursive habit or a pragmatic validity claim, posits and defines in one and the same stroke the counterfactual possibility of the ideal undistorted discourse. The quasi-ideal discourse would be the opposite or the absence of the factual permutations. According to K. O. Apel, pragmatics links with the question of value in that these interests in communicational interaction comprise a “universal ethics of speech” based on the: “. . . symmetrical distribution of opportunities for the selection and execution of speech-acts that relate to propositions as propositions, to the relation of the speaker to his utterances, and to the observance of the rules.”³¹

Ideal communicational competencies must not be thought of either as real objects or as transcendental structures in the Kantian sense. Their ontological status is one of possibility, “potentia.” It is one of an ideal based on the counterfactual extrapolation from the particular, individual speech-acts. The ideal speech situation is not a real universal, merely a quasi-universal in that it exists merely as potentia:

The last and the most important structural condition of possible conversation is that of the speaker’s act, contractually, i.e., as if the conditions outlined above were actually realized. Hence the concept of an ideal speech situation is not merely regulative (as in Kant) nor existential (as in Hegel) because no society as yet allows these conditions to be met.

Hence, the ideal speech situation may be compared with a transcendental illusion, but not so in the sense of being a metaphorical extension of a category of Reason, rather as a constitutive condition of possible conversation. Hence it is a constitutive appearance, and a pre-appearance, a utopian moment.

It cannot be determined a priori whether this pre-appearance is merely an illusion or is an empirical condition for the (even if only asymptomatic) realization of its utopian moment. Hence it contains a practical hypothesis. From that hypothesis—the critical theory of society takes its departure.³²

Kortian, writing about Habermas, elucidates quite clearly the “nontranscendental” implications of counterfactuality: “Counterfactual qualifies the norm in its relation to the facts that it is supposed to measure. To speak of distorted communication in effect presupposes reference to an ideal of successful communication. The function of such an ideal is critical or ‘counterfactual.’ “³³

The difference between counterfactual utopia and the utopia that arises out of the negative dialectical discourse might be exemplified by the difference between Habermas’ and Adorno’s social theories. Whereas Adorno only managed to criticize what was not utopia, Habermas went one step further in using the failings of reality as a basis upon which to propose possible solutions in the sense of a contextually but partially realizable potential, i.e., as something toward which the pragmatics of discourse should tend. Rather than remaining within complete negativity, Habermas surpasses Adorno and dares to posit certain traits of (positive) utopia beyond a negative dialectic. What is more, these traits are properly pragmatic, discursive traits. This potential for utopia would then be the ideal speech situation toward which discursive pragmatics must strive.

4.5 Irony → discourse; discourse → utopia; irony → utopia

To return briefly to the problematics of irony as alternative discourse, it remains to be shown that the discursive traits counterfactually suggested by Habermas as a “universal pragmatics” correspond to the radical definition which we gave at the end of Part One to the discursive procedures of the interactional episteme as infinite, free, interaction of discourse-product ion, above and beyond various pockets of habits. Of course, we are far from suggesting that anyone has ever realized such a utopia, merely that some discourses have come closer or have tended toward it more than others; Musil’s ironic narration is one of them.

Earlier it was seen that Habermas had defined intentionally distorted communication as a distortion of validity claims of communication once the consensual legitimation of those rules had broken down. Both the understanding of communication and the legitimation of action are dependent upon an acceptance of these claims by participants. Once their validity is questioned, new communicational postulates must be found if the rules of the language game are to be consensually legitimated rather than strategically enforced (i.e., by forceful and repressive action of all sorts). Therefore, the first utopian role of an alternative discourse is the “liberation of speech acts from the imperative network of interactions [which] expresses itself in the differentiation between speech and its concomitant normative background.”³⁴ In other words, alternative discourse’s first degree utopian function is a norm-breaking function, only this time the norms are communicational constraints.

The question posed by Habermas, then, is the following: Once these validity claims are no longer accepted by the participants, such as Ulrich and Agathe in the utopian experiment, as the “good” validity claims, i.e., as claims which serve the interest of all speech users and legitimate practical decision-making, how do we decide upon new ones? It is here that the second, constructive definition of discourse as utopia enters into play. Once it has delegitimized the laws of communicational competency, utopian or emancipatory discourse must move to the plane of discursive interaction, i.e., discussion free from constraint and infinitely expanding. Discourse must make this shift in order eventually to arrive at a new temporary set of constraints upon which to legitimate purposive action. However, this discursive interaction is no less a praxis than is communicational practice.

Habermas, unlike Foucault, distinguishes “discourse” from “communication” in that the latter obeys certain constraints and the former is a free interaction in the absence of such constraints: at a self-reflective level pertaining to communication, discourse is where we discuss the rules we will follow by a consensus which is to be constructed in free and open communication:

. . . “discourse” as that form of communication which is free from the constraints of the very process of action and experience, and which allows for an exchange of arguments on hypothetical validity claims, (whereby truth and legitimacy may count as discursively redeemable validity claims, while veracity can only be subject to a test of consistency over a period of continued interactions).³⁵

As opposed to communication based on validity claims and rules which serve as the normative background in the former definition of irony as a norm-breaking function, discourse is a continuous production of signs “liberated from the imperative network of interactions” and hence discourse “expresses itself in the differentiation between speech and its concomitant normative background.” It is in “discourse” that the rules of interaction can be abandoned in favor of an interaction which explicitly questions and thematizes these very constraints: “It is only with the transition to ‘discourse’ that the validity claim of an assertion or the claim for the legitimacy of a command, viz. the underlying norm, can explicitly be questioned and topicalized in speech itself.”³⁶

For Habermas, freedom implies this right to question and change the rules or norms of communication. This notion is very much akin to Peirce’s earlier discussed concept of the self-reflective habit. For Habermas, there is a transcendental, emancipatory moment in the reflection upon discursive constraint, a reflection necessary for these constraints to be loosened or dispensed with. The metadiscursive moment is emancipatory for Habermas, although one might argue that it adheres to the same episteme that it comments on.³⁷

To carry this argumentation one step further, it may be recalled that at the end of Part One, modern discourse was identified with pure, infinite, interactive discourse production, i.e., with semiosis. Secondly, for Habermas, free, emancipated interaction is the utopian form of communication. It therefore follows that modern or alternative discourse in its most farreaching and radical sense, i.e., as the practice of discourse pure and simple, is precisely the interested, utopian, emancipatory interaction that discursive practice is considered to be. In order to appreciate the impact of this “deduction,” it cannot be overemphasized that discursive interaction is a form of social praxis. As far as Habermas is concerned, communicational interaction is the basis for social praxis which may be either utopian or distopian. Alternative discourse is simply infinite semiosis, unconstrained by procedures and epistemological assumptions of classical discourse. Discourse as infinite interaction is utopian, emancipatory interaction. Therefore, such an alternative discourse is utopian praxis!

Habermas’ theory of discourse corresponds to Peircean semiotics and Foucauldian theory of discursive constraint. We argue that they are not incompatible. First of all, K. O. Apel reads a utopian summum bonum into Peirce’s theory of discourse, whereby:

Just as Kant, as an analyst of consciousness, had to postulate as a presupposition of epistemology, that by cognition something like the synthetic unity of consciousness has to be reached, in just the same way modern logicians of science starting from a semiotic basis of analysis, could, or rather should, postulate that it must be possible, for something like the unity of intersubjective interpretation of the world to be reached by the way of interpretation of signs.³⁸

However, Peirce, just like Musil’s Toerless, could not accept Kant’s occult transcendentalism, i.e., the problem of explaining the necessity of our ideas being determined by categories. What Peirce replaced this transcendental justification with was a consensual legitimation within the community, arrived at through semiosis, i.e., infinite triadic interaction. This is Peirce’s summum bonum, one which is a utopian, social, semiotic ideal based on unlimited interaction within the community:

The real [. . .] is that (more exactly: the object of opinion) which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a community, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge. (5.322, emphasis added)

Apel argues that “the highest point of Peirce’s transformation of Kant’s transcendental logic is the ‘ultimate opinion’ of the indefinite community of investigators.”³⁹ However, we must not be led into assuming that one day all semiosis will stop once it has arrived at the truth. One word from the above quotation alerts the reader to the opposite of closure: “indefinite.” An “indefinite community” is one which is constantly interacting and expanding. The only way for the community to expand indefinitely is in and through discourse. Hence, for Peirce, truth is dependent upon infinite semiosis. Truth is infinite semiosis, a semiosis which is nevertheless firmly anchored in the community, hence in communication. Because the community is indefinite, truth is always a possibility (“potentia”) realized only as contrafactually limited but ever expanding interaction. Peirce’s renowned definition of pragmatic truth also emphasizes possibility in the subjunctive mode, something which is often ignored in favor of an emphasis on practical outcome. “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have” (5.402, emphasis added).

The “self-analyzing habit,” which is akin to what Habermas calls the self-reflective moment in analytical discourse, is for Peirce the “final opinion” associated with the “ultimate Interpretant.” The “ultimate Interpretant” may be just the very knowledge of the conditional possibility and interactional relativity of truth and meaning based upon all possible, conceivable circumstances which can never be finalized or arrested. A utopian version of truth, which might be better termed “validity,” may be the acceptance and practice of semiosis as infinite interaction and production of discourse within the community. As such, the community’s and truth’s indefiniteness would be recognized and respected. The social consequences of such a recognition are not slight. Where interaction and emancipation are the guidelines of truth (though it means that truth is indefinite and divested of any absolute power), then the distopian, repressive forces of unilateral, absolute discourse of knowledge will also lose their power:

Truth is that concordance of an abstract proposition with an ideal limit towards which the investigation would tend to lead to scientific belief; the abstract proposition may possess this concordance in virtue of its avowal of its inexactness and of its unilaterality, and this avowal is an essential ingredient of truth. (5.565)

Musil, in a key passage, expresses the role of the author in terms almost exactly similar to those which define infinite semiosis. The writer seeks the unknown, the analogical, the possible solution. This quest is without end. The duty of the writer is constantly to invent new solutions, new interrelations, new constellations, new variables, and new prototypes:

This is the native territory of the writer, the domain of his reason. Whereas his opponent seeks the stationary and is content if he can construct according to his calculations as many equations as there are unknowns, for the writer there is from the outset no end to the number of unknowns, equations, and possible solutions. The task is: to discover every new solution, connection, constellation and variable, to produce prototypes of occurences, enticing models of human existence, to discover the inner man. (G.W. II, 1029)

Musil’s practice of narration never ceases to do this except perhaps in death, death being the only point for Peirce where semiosis ends, although of course his readers carry on the process. What is more, Musil explicitly states the necessity of reinserting the search for utopia into the community, and hence the necessity of rejecting the “anderer Zustand.” “It is not a question of making the “other condition” [anderer Zustand] the bearer of social life. It is much too fleeting” (Tgb., 660). utopia must relate theory and society: “utopia of the age of experience. Through the creation of a society oriented towards spirit” (DMoE, 1916).

What Musil calls “new irony” or “constructive irony,” which we would associate with an alternative discourse of knowledge and praxis, is strongly tied to the social: “New irony. Forms of society, moralities, etc. are wholes in which the particulars appear to be determined” (Tgb., 631). “New irony” is a moral affirmation and a form of society/community! As such, new, “modern” discourse based on interaction is the discursive practice which, for critical thought, reinserts the individual back into the social and makes his interactive practice a condition of knowledge, i.e., a central feature of an episteme alternative to instrumental positivistic science:

. . . speech is accepted as the organ of the community. Critical thinking is a function neither of the isolated individual nor of a sum-total of individuals. Its subject is rather a definite individual in his real relation to other individuals and groups, in his conflict with a particular class, and, finally, in the resultant web of relationships with the social totality and with nature. . . . Furthermore, the thinking subject is not the place where knowledge and object coincide nor consequently the starting point for attaining absolute knowledge.⁴⁰

5.0 “Induktive Gesinnung” and “Abduction”

Finally, above and beyond Tyche, how does this potential of modern discourse explain the emergence of alternative or new possibilities? This new type of discourse, taken as unconstrained, utopian interaction and which can only be spoken of counterfactually, would have to involve a new type of reasoning. Curiously enough, both Peirce and Musil began to formulate such a new type of reasoning in relation to a new type of discourse and a new logical space. However, neither got much further than naming and vaguely describing it, a major limitation of their work, we would contend.

In the notes for the completion of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Musil suggests that the only alternative utopia to be experimented with, as both an ethical and practical solution for living, is what he calls “induktive Gesinnung”:

The utopia of the “other condition” [anderer Zustand] is superseded by inductive reasoning. (DMoE, 1860)

Perhaps make the “idea of the inductive age” the main point after all. Induction requires presuppositions, but these must only be used heuristically and must not be considered unchangeable. The weakness of democracy was the lack of any basis for deduction; it was an induction that did not correspond to the underlying spiritual standpoint. (DMoE, 1860)

Beyond these rare hopeful politically oriented remarks, Musil says little about inductive reasoning. This last possible salvation, an alternative to traditional classical deductive reasoning, is perhaps also a counterfactual ideal (Musil calls it “heuristisch”) which cannot as yet be positively realized, but merely posited as possibility. Musil gives some indication as to what “induktive Gesinnung” could be, but he puts it forward only as a “direction.” “Induktive Gesinnungen” at least allows the direction to be known.

“Induktive Gesinnung” reaffirms the importance of a democratic community of interacting investigators in their quest for truth, as opposed to that of the absolute individualist truth of classical science. This new reasoning is “. . . [an] attempt at a natural morality of inductive cooperation” (DMoE, 1930). Inductive reasoning does not ignore the necessity of finding a reasoning which is applicable not only to mathematical or theoretical problems but also to ethical problems of value and praxis in society. Inductive reasoning is described as a “complicated moral mathematics” (“komplizierte moralische Mathematik”) (G.W. II, 1080) and as an inductive moral (“die selbst den Kriterien genuegt, die sie auferlegt . . .” (DMoE, 1864). Nevertheless, the type of ethic sought in this new reasoning is not absolute; rather it is a “dynamische Ethik” (Tgb., 552). “Induktive Gesinnung” is the only alternative left for legitimation of motivation for life’s actions: “The utopia of motivated life and the utopia of the ‘other condition’ (anderer Zustand) will be dealt with starting in the journal group of chapters. All that will remain—in a reversal of the order—will be the utopia of inductive reasoning. With this the book will end” (DMoE, 1887).

Finally, Musil equates “induktive Gesinnung” with the givens of the community taken as the social state of affairs. The knowledge yielded by “induktive Gesinnung,” just as the Peircean summum bonum, is completely, socially interactional: “The utopia of inductive reasoning or of the given social condition” (DMoE, 1885).

Peirce names his alternative form of knowledge “Abduction.” This alternative is for Peirce the only logical operation which introduces any new ideas and hence the possibility of getting out of an old logical space of tired habits (8.388). Peirce’s notion of abduction, which he also refers to as “hypothesis,” and earlier in his career as “induction,” is even terminologically quite closely related to Musil’s notion of “induktive Gesinnung.” Just as by “induction” Musil did not mean the same as J. S. Mill’s definition of “induction,” but rather pointed to a new way of reasoning, so too Peirce saw the need to expand the meaning of this term and hence eventually changed it to “abduction.” Later in his work, Peirce said that most of what he had previously called induction was really “abduction” (8.227). As did Musil, Peirce sought, in abduction, some new way of reasoning that could go beyond observable facts and the limitations of distopian reality:

By induction, we conclude that facts, similar to observed facts, are in cases not examined. By hypothesis, we conclude the existence of a fact quite different from anything observed, . . . (2.636)

Abduction supposes something of a different kind from what we have already observed, and frequently something which it would be impossible for us to observe directly. (2.640)

Although abduction is tied to the process of habit formation, it is supposed to describe how it is that we form new habits or new hypotheses to explain certain habit phenomena (6.144, 2.711, 6.286).⁴¹

What is more, abduction is not merely a method: it is the search for a new method of methods (i.e., a whole new episteme?), one which would guide all sciences in the attempt to transcend distopian reality via social praxis (where, by praxis, we mean the union of theory and practice).

“The producing of a method for the discovery of methods is one of the main problems of logic” (3.364). This notion also corresponds to the earlier-mentioned suggestion that utopian discourse is free, unconstrained interaction, whereby various methods would lend aspects to each other, rather than exclusively isolating themselves within their own, privatized realms of truth.

One is justified in saying that, for Peirce, the utopian possibility of going beyond the established facts of a method and finding a new method which would be not only counterfactual but also suprafactural lies in abduction. By suprafactual we mean based on possibility rather than on factuality. Abduction is the possibility of a new “Zusammenhang,” a new metaphorical relationship or analogical relation (as Musil and Peirce respectively phrase and practice it).⁴² For Peirce, abduction is never what reasoning is, rather what “reasoning ought to be” (2.7). Both abduction and inductive reasoning are potential reasonings of the future, as well as being possible reasonings: “Abduction merely suggests that something may be” (5.17), (6.475), (8.238).

However, while simultaneously remaining in the realm of the possible, abduction also should ultimately reach utopian truth (2.781). What can this truth possibly be?

We might suggest, from what Peirce says below and from the fact that Musil himself continuously substituted new utopian suggestions for old ones, that abduction is a utopian kind of reasoning which grows out of itself and surpasses itself. For example, Peirce says that abduction is the essence of pragmatism (5.196, 6.469, 6.606), and hence may be seen to have grown out of Peirce’s pragmatic thought. He then says that abduction goes beyond the logic of pragmatism: “Pragmatics is not the whole of logic of abduction” (5.196). Without belaboring the point, alternative discourse, taken as a specific form of reasoning within the logical space of classical discourse though opposed to it in modern discourse, seems to have grown beyond the very type of reasoning from which it had arisen. The utopian potential of modern discursive practices is to transcend the conditions of possibility of the classical episteme against which they arose.

What is abduction or “induktive Gesinnung?” Are we justified in talking about such sketchy utopian suggestions? How do these new types of reasoning, left by their authors in the embryonic stage, relate social communication to progressive political action? Is there a chance of ever realizing such a discourse or will it remain always in the realm of the counterfactual?

One could in good faith answer all of these questions only with a remark from Peirce and another from Foucault, two pioneers in the search for a new discourse. These remarks apply equally well to induction and abduction as they do to this present discourse on an alternative to referential discourses of knowledge:

“We must not make hypotheses that will absolutely stop inquiry.” (7.480)

I believe we must resolve ourselves to accept three decisions which our current thinking rather tends to resist, and which belong to the three groups of function I have just mentioned: to question our will to truth; to restore to discourse its character as an event; to abolish the sovereignty of the signifier (our translation).⁴³

Whence the potential non-ending of narration in the middle of a sentence with three suspension points . . .