a. As fictionalised philosophy: what is real in the world? How do emotion and reason interact?
Musil: critique of impressionism: opposition to intellect, emphasizing the need to speak to "the heart or to some similar organ."
Impressionist epistemology ignored "the fact that there is no report of experience which does not presume a spiritual system with the help of which the report is ‘created’ out of the facts."
"The Critique of Pure Reason is an attack on the idea that by reason alone we can discover the nature of reality. Kant’s conclusion is that knowledge requires both sensory experience and concepts contributed by the perceiver."
"The transcendental deduction: to prove that any experience whatever must conform to the categories [substance, cause, effect, etc.] and that the experience that is thus produced is of an objective world, not a merely personal subjective creation of each individual." (Warburton)
Luft: "Nietzsche led the way for Musil by identifying science as dead art, psychology as the queen of philosophy, grammar as the key to modern riddles. Nietzsche, rather than Freud, served as Musil’s mentor in the realm of the unconscious, examining the relationships between drives and values. Still more importantly, Nietzsche offered a view of art, not as an escape, but as the fundamental human activity."
"Imaginary numbers suggest the possibility of bridging two apparently disconnected realities, the possibility of calculating with unknown, irrational, and irreducible quantities." (56)
b. As a sexual drama: the formation of sexual identity, homosexuality and heterosexuality (Weininger).
Luft: "Freud, Weininger and Musil all reflect a cultural preoccupation with sexuality and the meaning of masculinity and femininity."
Two sexual interpretations of the novel: Oedipal (Freudian) or in terms of gender roles. One explains through the family, the other through society.
Freudian
Musil himself critical of psychoanalysis:
Closed circle of argument (disagreement=resistance=proof that the complex exists).
"with such treatment the human being, even when softly and magnetically stroked, learns again to feel himself the measure of all things" (i.e. treatment is self-indulgent, everything that happens to you is important).
Psychoanalysis describes a particular cultural moment.
"women no longer have laps; how can you return to it when she’s wearing ski-togs?"
However:
Musil belongs to the same cultural milieu as Freud, hence the relevance of "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love."
"Psychic impotence"
"Two currents–the affectionate and the sensual–whose union is necessary to ensure a completely normal attitude in love have, in the cases we are considering, failed to combine."
"Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love" (251)
"People in whom there has not been a proper confluence of the affectionate and the sensual currents . . . have retained perverse sexual aims . . . whose fulfilment seems possible only with a debased and despised sexual object."
"psychical impotence is much more widespread than is supposed, and a certain amount of this behavior does in fact characterise the love of civilised man [and woman]"
"there are only a very few educated people in whom the two currents of affection and sensuality have become properly fused . . . . the man is assured of complete sexual pleasure only when he can devote himself unreservedly to obtaining satisfaction, which with his well-brought-up wife, for instance, he does not dare to do." (254)
"the final object of the sexual instinct is never any longer the original object but only a surrogate for it. Psychoanalysis has shown us that when the original object of a wishful impulse has been lost as a result of repression, it is frequently represented by an endless series of substitutive objects none of which, however, brings full satisfaction." (258)
Bozena and "the whiff of the cowshed" (34)
Bozena undermines Torless’s idealism about his mother (40-41)
Basini, sex & mother (156)
"how to treat women if you’re a sensualist"
"little sons" and "young gentlemen"
Conclusion (217) "the faint whiff of scent that rose from his mother’s corseted waist."
Gender Roles
Freud only touches on adolescent homosexuality indirectly, through the concept of perverse object choice i.e. one that satisfies sadistic or "pre-genital" impulses. Cf. Torless p. 37.
Gender roles satisfy society’s need to impose order on sexual desire; cf. Torless’ desire to be a little girl, p. 128. (shared by Musil himself)
[Show transparencies of gender roles]
In a single-sex school (or prison), inmates reproduce gender polarity within a single sex. [For women, see Maedchen in Uniform]
Negative aspects of this:
Roles become rigid, are treated as if they were "real" or biological; no room for playfulness.
Roles are used as channels for the expression of [sadistic] power.
The "male" and "female" roles reproduce the system of sexual domination in the external society, but in an exaggerated form because the roles are arbitrary, and therefore need to be policed more strictly.
Klaus Theweleit: After the creation of a unified Germany in 1870, and their defeat of the French in 1871, it was absolutely the military constructing the body. The model for all people was male, grim and disciplined. The military was said to be the school of the nation; you had to go and bear it, and come out of it a different person than you had been before. You came out German.
Members of the Freikorps not only formed the backbone of the Nazi SA, but were involved in numerous acts of political terror, including the assassination of Walther Rathenau. Ernst von Salomon, one of these assassins, describes his reaction to months of brutal mistreatment, torture, and rigid discipline at military school:
I began to notice my body stiffening, my posture gaining in confidence. When I thought back to childhood games at home, I was filled with bitter shame. It had become quite impossible to move with anything other than dignity. On the rare occasions when a senseless desire for freedom surfaced, it invariably shattered against a new determination and will. My new-found capacity to follow orders to the letter was double compensation for losing the joys of roving unrestrained.
[18]Salomon here demonstrates the tremendous power of the drill, not only to create a "docile body," in Foucault's terms, but also to create a masculine subject who takes pleasure in his body's rigidity and power, in his capacity to follow orders, and finally, if Theweleit is correct, in his capacity to kill.
[19] The drill is successful when it has inscribed a new form of subjectivity in the soldier's body - when, to go back to Foucault's term, the soul has been recast in the image of what Theweleit calls 'the soldier-male.' The soldier-males take pleasure in their disciplined bodies, in their capacity to carry out the drill, and in disciplined activity such as work; but they react violently to the prospect of any bodily corruption, going so far as to kill in defense of the boundaries of their carefully-crafted bodiesApart from war, the soldier males Theweleit analyzed organize their lives on the model of severe military discipline and maintain relationships primarily with other men within a strict hierarchical order. By disciplining the body, rendering it hard and nearly metallic, they create a kind of protective armor designed to shield them from their fear of dissolution. This fear emanates from the sense of an inner void, or lack of psychic coherence, which is then projected outward. Often it takes the threatening form of a miasma associated with both femininity and the unruly proletarian masses. The texts Theweleit analyzes frequently describe this miasma as bloody, oozing, a viscous liquid with the power to contaminate, overwhelm, or destroy whatever it comes into contact with. The creation of body armor is designed to render the fascist soldier male resistent to this contagion, but also, and perhaps most importantly, serves to render him impervious to sensual or erotic pleasure. For sexual communion with another implies the breaching of both psychic and corporeal boundaries.
Men themselves were now split into a (female) interior and a (male) exterior the body armor. And, as we know, the interior and the exterior were mortal enemies. What we see portrayed in the rituals are the armor's separation from, and superiority over the interior, the interior was allowed to flow, but only within the masculine boundaries of the main formations. Before any of this could happen, the body had to be split apart thoroughly enough to create an interior and an exterior that could be opposed to each other as enemies. Only then could these two parts re-form in peace', in the ritual."<18>
Cf. p. 152: "if [Reiting] didn’t beat me, he wouldn’t be able to help thinking I was a man, and then he couldn’t let himself be so soft and affectionate to me."
Beineberg’s motives, same p.: antinomianism plus apprenticeship in domination (sex & sadism both ways of "breaking down" the Other).
Masculine "hardness" is reinforced by homosexuality: logical extreme of the homosociality of military, sports teams, fascism.
Torless’ path to homosexuality:
Discovery of beauty (148) makes up for lack of aesthetic education.
Bisexuality of the artist (Coleridge)
d. As a moral and political allegory: the nature of total institutions; a prophecy of the rise of Nazism.
(M’s journal, late 30s: "Relation to politics. Reiting & Beineberg: the dictators of today in nucleo. Also the idea of the mass as object of constraint."
"Would we then have thought that the putsch-officer would become the leading type in the world?!")
Reiting is "practising" for power: 51-52.
Reiting’s liking for mass-movements, 175.
Reiting prefigures the power-worshipping side of fascism, Beineberg the esoteric.