Robert Musil and the techne of Rewriting Modernity

Abstract

This essay examines Robert Musil's intervention in the problematics of modernity by drawing out parallels between his theory and performance of Essayismus and Jean-François Lyotard's notion of “rewriting.” Lyotard proposes rewriting as an alternative to so-called postmodern challenges to the modern on the grounds that the postmodern tends to reinscribe what it seeks to rewrite, notably a teleology bound up with a critical overcoming of the modern. Lyotard assimilates rewriting to the work of Durcharbeitung in Freudian analysis and to the work of the imagination in the Kantian aesthetic. Both of these avoid “critique” in operating apart from “reasoning, argument, or mediation” and without any “empirical or cognitive interest.” My thesis is that the essayistic discursive technique that characterizes Musil's engagement with modernity operates as an instance of Lyotardian rewriting that, nevertheless, is capable of something like a critical cognition of modernity. Connecting Musil's Essayismus and Lyotard's rewriting allows us to both explore potentialities of Lyotard's practice of rewriting, as well as to begin reconceiving the working through of modernity carried out by The Man without Qualities.

Keywords:

• essayism
• Jean-François Lyotard
• modernity
• Robert Musil
• postmodernism
• rewriting

Notes

Jean-François Lyotard, “Rewriting Modernity,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1991), 24–25.

Ibid., 25.

Ibid., 27.

Ibid., 28.

Ibid., 29.

Ibid., 28.

See, for example, Jürgen Habermas's account of this unfolding in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1987).

Lyotard, “Rewriting Modernity,” 29.

Ibid., 31.

Ibid., 31.

Ibid., 31.

Ibid., 32.

Ibid., 32.

Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 10.

Lyotard, “Rewriting Modernity,” 32.

Ibid., 31.

Ibid., 31.

The critical discussion of Essayismus in Musil is extensive. Marie-Louise Roth provides an excellent introduction to Musil's appropriation of the essay in her chapter “Essay und Essayismus bei Robert Musil” in Probleme der Moderne: Studien zur deutscher Literatur von Nietzsche bis Brecht (Tübigen: N. Niemeyer, 1983). Another good place to start is Robert Musil: Essayismus und Ironie, ed. Gundrun Brokoph-Mauch (Tübigen: Francke, 1992).

Robert Musil, “Helpless Europe,” in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresse, trans. and ed. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 130.

Ibid., 130.

Robert Musil, “The German as Symptom,” in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, trans. and ed. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 176.

Ibid., 177.

Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. and ed. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (New York: Knopf, 1995), 35.

Ibid., 267–68.

Ibid., 95–96.

Ibid., 95.

Ibid., 96.

Ibid., 261.

Ibid., 262.

Ibid., 267.

Musil, “The German as Symptom,” 177–78.

Robert Musil, “On the Essay,” in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, trans. and ed. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 48.

Ibid., 49.

Robert Musil, “Sketch of What the Writer Knows,” in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses. Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, trans. and ed. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1990), 62.

Musil, “On the Essay,” 49.

Ibid., 48.

Robert Musil, Diaries: 1899–1942, trans. Philip Payne, ed. Mark Mirsky (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 313.

Musil, The Man without Qualities, 383.

Ibid., 391–92.

Ibid., 270.

Ibid., 388.

Ibid., 388.

The layering of subjunctivities is even more prominent in the original German: “Was man ein Zeit alter nennt—ohne zu wissen ob man Jahrhunderte, Jahrtausende order die Spanne zwischen Schule und Enkelkind darunter verstehen soll—dieser breite, ungeregelte Fluß von Zuständen würde dann ungefähr ebensoviel bedeuten wie ein planloses Nacheinander von ungenügenden und einzeln genommen falschen Lösungsversuchen, aus denen erst wenn die Menschheit sie zusammenzufassen verstünde, die richtige und totale Lösung hervorgehen könnte” (emphasis added). Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 2 vols., ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 358.

Musil, The Man without Qualities, 393.

Ibid., 273.

Ibid., 392.

Lyotard, “Rewriting Modernity,” 31.

Two assertions stand out in connection with Musil's suspicion toward systematic philosophy: “Philosophers are despots who have no armies to command, so they subject the world to their tyranny by locking it up in a system of thought” (The Man without Qualities 272); and: “Ich bin kein Philosoph, ich bin nicht einmal ein Essayist, sondern ich bin ein Dichter.” Robert Musil, Tagebücher, 2 vols., ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976), I: 665.

For an excellent discussion of the way The Man without Qualities carries out experiments with possible orientations in modernity, see Patrizia McBride, The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2006).

Musil's elaboration of the “Other Condition” occurs, in addition to other places, in the essay “The German as Symptom,” in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, trans. and ed. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 150–92. A good starting place for critical discussion of his notion of the Other Condition is Heribert Brosthaus, “Zur Struktur und Entwicklung des ‘anderen Zustands’ in Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 39 (1969): 300–440.

Musil, “The German as Symptom,” 184.

Lyotard, “Rewriting Modernity,” 32.

Ibid., 25.

Musil, “The German as Symptom,” 169.

Musil, “Helpless Europe,” 122.