The Klagenfurt Edition / Klagenfurter Ausgabe (inside Musil's Brain)

One of the earliest manuscripts of the collection, Musil's diary entry on the new name he coined for himself, "monsieur le vivesecteur," 1899

For some time I have been working with the Klagenfurter Ausgabe (Klagenfurt Edition) of Musil's works and voluminous literary and biographical remains. It is a searchable, hyper-text collection in DVD form of upwards of 50,000 paper pages of versions, drafts, notes, letters, diary entries, and supplementary documents relevant to Musil's attempts. The Musil papers are supplemented by expert critical-historical commentary, indexes, and glossaries edited by Walter Fanta, Klaus Amann, and Karl Corino, three of the most knowledgeable Musil experts in the world. I don't imagine that anyone knows the details about the contents of a Musil document or the chronology of a Musil event or text better than these three men; what he read when, where he was when and with whom, which version of which passage was written first, which abbreviation refers to what or whom, who was who in the world of Austria and Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. While I am not usually one to recommend digital formats for reading, this particular project seems rather more in harmony with the author's intentions than many others, precisely because of the non-linear nature of Musil's writing and revision process. One can move effortlessly between different versions of passages (perhaps written in different decades), between facsimile photographs of the original manuscripts, replete with cross-outs, alternate words, attempts, variations, and what seem to be infinite cross-references of terms, words, concepts, authors' names, places, metaphors, ciphers, which all lead to even more connections, explorations, possibilities, correspondences. Oh, I got carried away. I meant to say, between versions in reading texts, in facsimiles, in transcriptions (which include notations about changes and markings), and commentaries, indexes, and glossaries. It really is as close as one can get to sojourning in the non-linearity of someone's brain. And what a brain, at that! One can search for and follow ideas and words through decades of associations, and watch the evolution and development of concepts and themes central to Musil's project. His "utopia of the next step," whereby no idea, event, or concept should be evaluated until seen in the context of whatever it itself creates, is an apt metaphor for this collection of ideas, just as long as one does not see the steps as leading up to a definitive destination or conclusion. In fact, one of the most interesting things about seeing the manuscripts in this way is that, despite editors' natural attempts in the past to arrange the material in a linear order, the ideas do not really develop in any mono-direction, but circle rather, out and back, out and back, so that Musil is still asking the same questions, with surprising freshness and openness, in manuscripts from the late 30's as he was asking in the early teens. Another significant aspect of this edition is that it allows one to see Musil's radical perspectivism at work, i.e, his faithfulness to examining and trying out even the most disturbing or dangerous perspectives or positions. We see him in the freedom of his laboratory experimenting with different stances and attitudes, teasing them out to their farthest connotations, comparing them to seemingly opposing stances. Like that straight line which Nicolas of Cusa speaks of in his On Learned Ignorance, we find these originally uni-directional strands curving around to create circles (the straight line becomes a circle in time), and surprising meetings, meridians, metaphors, coincidences of opposites are found. Unfortunately (but inevitably due to the gargantuan nature of the project) this edition only exists in German; but we are working on a much more modest version in English. To learn more you can look at the website, in German, or contact me to order one (they cost $199. & $6. for mailing from Austria to the USA.). What a great holiday present for your favorite Germanist!

What does it mean to find another human being?

Edvard Munch, 1896

Perhaps here and now is a good place to admit that I don't fully understand what it means to "attempt to find another human being." Does it mean to find one other human being, in conjunction, relationship with one's self? Someone to whom one can relate, thereby implying the inherent overwhelming difficulty of this task and the endless alienation of human existence?  Or does another human being mean an übermensch of sorts? A different kind of human being, beyond even the lonely self? A new type of person, a new and different way of being human? Another possible understanding of the phrase might be an attempt to find a human being who is truly other, one whom one cannot possibly merge with or be a mirror of. These recent discussions (below) of strangers, exiles, idiots, and artists have made me wonder. I think, of course, also, of another Musil attempt, from the novel, the "attempt to love a scoundrel" with all its connotations for the question of loving one's neighbor as one's self, and of the terrible but thrilling frisson of embracing that extreme other, one's feared or hated self, brother, enemy, beloved. For what is more frightening, after all? Finding one's self subsumed into otherness or the alternative of infinite separation?

Georg Simmel's "The Stranger"

Hilary Philips has pointed out to me the similarities between my last post and some ideas in Georg Simmel's 1908 essay "The Stranger," which I had not read before. Simmel writes of a stranger who does not come and leave, but rather one who comes and stays. He continues:

"He is fixed within a particular spatial group, or within a group whose boundaries are similar to spatial boundaries. But his position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it,which do not and cannot stem from the group itself..."

Further, "The stranger, like the poor and like sundry "inner enemies," is an element of the group itself. His position as a full-fledged member involves both being outside it and confronting it". 

Speaking of  the nature of trade, which involves contact with the outside from a fixed point inside a society, Simmel notes that, "the classical example is the history of European Jews. The stranger is by nature no 'owner of soil'--soil not only in the physical, but also in the figurative sense of a life-substance which is fixed, if not in a point in space, at least in an ideal point of the social environment. Although in more intimate relations, he may develop all kinds ofcharm and significance, as long as he is considered a stranger in the eyes of the other, he is not an owner of soil."

But, it is just this strangeness which determines his power in the society, the stranger's "objectivity" and freedom:  “Another expression of this constellation lies in the objectivity of the stranger. He is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and therefore approaches them with the specific attitude of "objectivity." But objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement...Objectivity may also be defined as freedom: the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given. The freedom, however, which allows the stranger to experience and treat even his close relationships as though from a bird's-eye view, contains many dangerous possibilities. In uprisings of all sorts, the party attacked has claimed, from the beginning of things, that provocation has come from the outside, through emissaries and instigators. Insofar as this is true, it is an exaggeration of the specific roleof the stranger: he is freer practically and theoretically; he surveys conditions with less prejudice; his criteria for them are more general and more objective ideals; he is not tied down in his action by habit, piety, and precedent.”

From Kurt Wolff (Trans.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press, 1950, pp. 402 - 408.

Extraterritoriality, Negative Capability, and Utopia

From the 1516 version of Sir Thomas More's Utopia

The intellectual and the Jew, Musil notes, are both extraterritorial, stateless beings. The intellectual, at least, is, at best,  not merely international, one presumes, but actually a-national, outside of nation, state, territory, stance. Unaffiliated. But does that mean objective or disinterested? I would think not. One can observe in a very interested way the goings on of a world one is not exactly part of when one is, ultimately, both dependent upon that world and hoping that it might in fact change, evolve, dissolve into a less-entrenched version of itself. The intellectual or artist, leaving for the moment the Jew aside (who serves Musil here as noble model of extraterritoriality and autonomy, yet who also was often at the time of Musil's musing the intellectual of the pair as well), observes, creates, and critiques the world from the margin, in hopes that her utterances will have some effect on it; but she does not react in the same way as the other inhabitants to whatever occurs, to the seemingly good or seemingly bad turn of events; happenings, people, works are not judged by the same criteria as the others use, for her intentions are not to maintain the unexamined status quo at all costs, nor indeed, to necessarily violently overturn or destroy it out of a sense of excluded resentment (for her outsider status is not a punishment, but a choice, or, if not a choice, at least a holy necessity); but rather, her intention is to question it, open it up to fresh air and new light, to see it from different angles and in new contexts. This openness requires a resistance to settled sureties, Keats's (Shakespeare's) "negative capability" which does not grasp after certainties, but is most comfortable in undoing and revolving possibilities. The artist is only alive in that non-place; utopia.
But how does one come to be extraterritorial? Or, rather, why is not everyone so?  Emerson said: man wishes to be settled...but only insofar as he is unsettled is there any hope for him. But how is it possible for most people not to ask the first questions which lead to this fruitful unsettling? To ask the most basic questions of what appears everywhere to be a given: what is reality? what is the chief end of man (as Thoreau puts it)? what is most needful?  Questions which do not have answers. Their resistance to simple answers makes them, indeed, a foreign language,  phrases from the mother tongue of  the land of Extraterritoriality.

Stupidity, Being Towards Death, Art (on Dostoevsky's Idiot)

, Totentanz, Karl Ritter, 1921.

While looking for images of Death I discovered that not only is stupidity often a woman, but death (which is not a feminine noun in German) often is too. In this image (Totentanz by Karl Ritter, 1922) she may merely be death's lure, if not herself the one condemned to die. Well, woman, at least, is effective, rousing to life, to frustration, to anger, challenging passive man to sin, to madness, leading him to distraction, destruction, eventually to death.

Stupidity, Musil writes in notes for his essay, is a Proteus, is a Verwandlungskuenstlerin, a transformation artist (a feminine transformation artist, perhaps only because the noun Dummheit is feminine in German, perhaps for more insidious reasons). It becomes clear, as one reads through the notes, that, like everything else as seen by Musil, the value and nature of stupidity depends upon one's perspective. What is stupid in some contexts is intelligent in others. What once was stupid now is known to be the height of cleverness. What some people call dumb is holy, wise, original, poetic. Musil notes, however, that in most cases our general society equates intelligence with Sachlichkeit (objectivity) and Vernunft (Reason), and Tuechtigkeit (capability), all qualities which are, he explains, stupid when untempered by other forms of perception, knowledge, and judgment. To be too objective is, he notes, a sign of a certain limited personality; which is not intended, of course, to undermine the importance of intellect. If stupidity is a Verwandlungskuenstlerin or, elsewhere in the notes and finished essay, simply a Kuenstlerin, then art itself necessarily avails itself of the protean nature of seeing, creating, envisioning, forming, precisely by temporarily escaping from the stronghold of pure objectivity and the reign of what is, into the open unknown of what could be. As Musil writes elsewhere: die staendige Verwandelbarkeit des Gegebenen (the constant changeability of the given) is the fundamental basis of creativity and metastable ethics. So it pays to be a bit  stupid, i.e., uncertain, grasping and fumbling, to see things new, with innocent and fresh eyes. Even, indeed, if the all-too rational and measured world may mock us for it.
I am rereading Dostoevsky's The Idiot, with these questions in mind. In an early scene, the beautiful but eccentric society sisters Aglaia, Alexandra, and Adelaida interrogate Prince Myshkin about his experiences in Switzerland, where he has been ill,where he has been "almost an idiot". Alexandra confesses that she has trouble finding subjects for her paintings, and Myshkin suggests that one needs only to learn to see things and the subjects will reveal themselves. He had just been talking about his "fits" and how they would break the logical sequence of his brain; but that everything would  suddenly appear "strange". The prince, Dostoevsky writes, "had learned to see things abroad"...which Myshkin then humbly doubts. Perhaps, he says, he didn't really learn to see things. And yet, he admits, he was happy. We might compare this to the dissolution of a logical narrative or rational structure, interrupted by a vision of timeless beauty, for later, in another description of the moments before his fits, Myshkin remarks that he experienced such ecstasy as to finally understand the saying that "there would be no more time" and that he would gladly give his whole life (a narrative of connected events) for one of these moments. When the prince says, basically, well, I don't know, perhaps I haven't learned to see things, but I have been happy, Aglaia interrupts: "Happy? You know how to be happy?...Then how can you say that you didn't learn to see things?" Because, of course, even this young girl knows that most people are not in fact happy at all. Which really is rather stupid!
Seeing (by which new, fresh seeing is implied) is inextricably related to happiness, to a happiness unmeasurable by the normal standards of society. And, mark well, it is not even a happiness like romantic love (one of the only exceptions in society to the rule of Reason): "I haven't been in love, answered Myshkin, I...have been happy in a different way".
Myshkin's ecstatic trances, based on Dostoevsky's own epileptic experiences as well as his near-death escape from the firing squad, are very similar to Musil's Other Condition, a state of heightened wholeness, significance, feeling, conviction, fleeting and selfless. Less well-known than Dostoevsky's shocking reprieve before the firing squad is Musil's near death experience as a soldier in the First World War. Musil writes, in "Ein Soldat Erzaehlt" (A soldier narrates), in time-suspending detail, about his mystical experience under fire on the battlefield, about how he underwent a " baptism by fire" and how he "suddenly believed" like a virgin. The motif of a false alarm recurs in Musil (in the mock shooting in the farce Vinzenz) and in Dostoevsky's Idiot (in Ippolit's misfired suicide) (In both cases, the person "shot" thinks he or she is really about to die) as well as in Myshkin's narration of a man condemned to death and released at the last moment. What does this near death experience have to do with happiness, or stupidity? How might contact with death make one stupid or happy? Well, it would depend, wouldn't it, on what the world around one looked like, on the context and relative value given in the society to momentary experience, to significance, to beauty.
 An experience of mortality invests a human with a heightened ethical propensity for "being toward death" implying a motivation to live every moment as if it were the last. When Myshkin describes the man reprieved from the guillotine, he notes that the condemned man had thought that, were he not to die, "he would live each moment as an eternity and not waste one". But, he has to admit, when pressed, that after he was saved from death, "he didn't live life like that at all; he wasted many moments". And yet, sounding almost like Musil in his ambivalent utopianism, Myshkin continues about the possibility of a reform of this sort: " For some reason it is impossible...and yet somehow I can't believe it". In any case, whether it is impossible or not to live every moment as an eternity and not waste one, to do so would certainly be deemed idiotic in a society which avoids the reality of death at all costs. But why, since death in fact is the most objective (sachlich) thing there is! Indeed, there is not one of us who is not condemned to death. To ignore this seems, really, the greatest of delusions and fictions! Which may be why Myshkin, in another scene, insists that he himself, the great dreamer and idiot, the unworldly saint and innocent, is actually a materialist. Or why Musil said that the great man of the future will be both a mathematician and a mystic? Or maybe this is why art, created by that great transformation artist, stupidity herself, is always reminding us of death, if only by its quickening to life.

Feminist Existentialism? The Actor of herself!

Lotte Lenya

Musil sounds almost like Simone de Beauvoir in his essay "Woman, Yesterday and Tomorrow" (1929):


"Woman is tired of being the ideal of the man who no longer has sufficient energy to idealize, and she has taken over the task of thinking herself through as her own ideal image, The panting adulation of older men even seems funny to her, and therein lies a great purification of the atmosphere. She no longer wants to be an ideal at all but to create ideals, to contribute to their formation just as men do,even if, at the moment, with no particular success...This sense of reality on the part of a category of human being who for centuries was condemned to play the ideal of another is today perhaps the most important aspect of this question. I am not on the side of those who complain about the matter-of-factness of young women. The human body cannot in the long run experience itself only as the receiver of sense stimuli; it always turns to becoming the portrayer, the actor of itself in all the relationships it enters. Thus, its natural drive always combines with a specific system of ideas and feelings, and through the centuries this ideologizing is like a fountain that rises and falls. Today it is close to its deepest point, almost swallowed up; but it will doubtless rise again in a new combination. Countless and different possibilities are available, and the future really conceals them only like a veil, and not like a city wall fortified with prejudices"(Precision and Soul, 213).

Is this really a man who would belittle the woman artist?

On (not over) Avital Ronell on Musil's "Über die Dummheit" (On/Over the [feminine] Stupidity)

Emmy Hennings of the Cabaret Voltaire, a "woman artist"!

Reading again Avital Ronell's reaction to Musil's essay "Über die Dummheit"  (On [Over] [the] Stupidity)along with the essay in question (See Ronell: Stupidity, 2002). Ronell registers nausea mixed with a sort of fascination for what she describes as Musil's escape into misogyny in the middle of what started as a brave attack on the Fatherland.  He doesn't seem to her quite ideologically clean. There is something too polite about him, something too tainted with Enlightenment values of rationality and civilization.I understand her discomfort. Not that I need my Musil to be as impeccably ideologically correct as Ronell seems to...but there is, indeed, something strange going on here. Something does not smell right. Why does he keep referring to this stupid woman, as if woman herself were the personification of this feminine noun (Die Dummheit) which the intellectual is above (Über)? Musil, to be more specific, presents woman (and even a woman artist) as an example--makes an example of her--rather suddenly and, it is true, rather oddly. Is his sudden abuse of woman a barely disguised attempt to evade the brutal bully he evokes in this 1937 address, but cannot attack directly? Is he really sinking to that low reaction of the cowardly weakling who wants to at least be more powerful than someone else (woman in this case), as bullies do when they are confronted with forces they cannot reckon with?
Perhaps; but if so, his own argument throughout the address would be all too easily called in to attack him back. For how is this "we men" (whom Musil whispers to before admitting his ambivalent response to the talkative woman artist) different from the other "we" that he evokes in the essay? A we that cowardly garners power and strength by association with some nation, party, art movement, or sect?  A collective we whose assumptions and sense of premature certainty of judgment could only be called "stupid"by the individualist and self-described slow-witted man, Musil? This peaceful woman artist appears also as a disconcertingly poetic voice, one who answers in more than single words when one plays free- association games with her, answers that "bring the poet close to the idiot"or reveal "the poet in the idiot"?  She is, in fact, the only representative of art in the address, and as Musil maligns her, one might ask whose voice he really speaks in. And doesn't Musil say earlier in the address that the physically weaker person who is clever knows how to hide that cleverness from the stronger brutes? So as not to irritate them, so as not to let on that one is in fact capable of criticizing the superior powers? If this does not describe the role of woman, even today, I don't know what else it describes, except for that of the intellectual under the iron heel of a totalitarian government. Is woman, then, presented by Musil as a weaker stupider victim to excite the natural bloodlust of the bully in all of us (especially "we men"? )? Or as a very subtle (perhaps too subtle) object lesson in how this sort of thing works? I do not want to engage in special pleading for Musil, to announce that he is ideologically clean; nor do I want to argue that the woman in this essay is really the hero. Not entirely anyway. Perhaps she talks too much, is vain, hasty; perhaps she lacks just the right amount of reason mixed with her feeling. Perhaps Musil is on the defensive. Of course he is on the defensive.
Yet, as premature closure is something that both Ronell and Musil agree on as being a prime characteristic of stupidity ( i.e., coming too quickly to conclusion, thinking that one has complete mastery over something or someone, believing one has understood all of it), we do right to register our discomfort (nausea even), but  to continue to explore what is incompletely in the air here.  Indeed, it is a very strange essay, filled with a more than usual amount of ambivalence and an even less than usual amount of closure for Musil.  He rarely connects the different strands of ideas, rarely shows us directly how one section contradicts the other, how the different types of stupidity are hopelessly mixed up on the hierarchy of good, bad, dangerous, higher, lower, peaceful, violent, brutal, passive, victimized stupidity. The address asks a good deal of the reader (or listener). It seems, often, to not make sense. Is it in code? Could he have spoken directly at that time if he wanted to? About an address he presented in 1934 in Vienna he noted that its success consisted in the fact that he had dared to give it all, that he had dared, at all, to speak.
And let us just note that Musil takes a good deal of time showing that those who use the word "stupid" are themselves usually rather stupid themselves, that, in fact, usually, or often, when one is reduced to a state where invective is the only choice, a state too stupid for words, a state where one is at a loss, has lost one's head, where there are simply no words to describe how put out, irritated, annoyed, confused one is, one is, in fact, stupefied, stupid. A state of panic wherein one uses all the words one can think of, hoping to come upon the right one just as a fly beats its head against a closed window hoping to find an opening.The content of the imprecise term stupid (or vulgar or kitsch or...) is less important, says Musil, than the act of abuse inherent in its use (domestically, politically, critically). It is an act of brutality, in itself stupid.  So, Musil may be utterly unaware of his own complicity here, in gathering together a group of male artists to collectively titter over the stupidity of a woman artist; or perhaps he is demonstrating the way in which stupidity (the supposedly higher kind, the intellectual stupidity, in fact) is contagious, a "dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself (Precision and Soul, 284);  he may just be being even more clever than is at first obvious. At least I hope so.