Waggish

David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Tag: robert musil (page 2 of 7)

Robert Musil: from the Diaries

13 August 1910. Before I went to sleep, one or two other things occurred to me about my way of working (in the novellas). What matters to me is the passionate energy of the idea. In cases where I am not able to work out some special idea, the work immediately begins to bore me; this is true for almost every single paragraph. Now why is it that this thinking, which after all is not aiming at any kind of scientific validity but only a certain individual truth, cannot move at a quicker pace? I found that in the reflective [gedanklich] element of art there is a dissipative momentum — here I only have to think of the reflections that I have sometimes written down in parallel with my drafts. The idea immediately moves onward in all directions, the notions go on growing outward on all sides, the result is a disorganized, amorphous complex. In the case of exact thinking, however, the idea is tied up, delineated, articulated, by means of the goal of the work, the way it is limited to what can be proven, the separation into probable and certain, etc., in short, by means of the methodological demands that stem from the object of investigation.

In art, this process of selection is missing. Its place is taken by the selection of the images, the style, the mood of the whole.

I was annoyed because it is often the case with me that the rhetorical precedes the reflective. I am forced to continue the inventive process after the style of images that are already there and this is often not possible without some amputation of the core of what one would like to say — as, for instance, with The Enchanted House or The Perfection of a Love. I am only able at first to develop the thought-material for a piece of work to a point that is relatively close by, then it dissolves in my hands. Then the moment arrives when the work in hand is receiving the final polish, the style has reached maturity, etc. It is only now that, both gripped and constrained by what is now in a finished state, I am able to “think” on further.

There are two opposing forces that one has to set in balance — the dissipating, formless one from the realm of the idea and the restrictive, somewhat empty and formal one relating to the rhetorical invention.

One only says what one can say within the frame of what is available; since the point of departure is arbitrary there is an element of chance about it. But the point of departure is not absolutely arbitrary, for the first images are after all products of a tendency that, hovering before one’s eyes, sets the direction for the whole work.

Tying this together to achieve the greatest degree of intellectual compression, this final stepping beyond the work in accordance with the needs of the intellectual who abjures everything that is mere words, this intellectual activity comes only after these two stages. Here the effect of the understanding is astringent, but here it is directed toward the unity of form and content that is already present whereas, whenever it is merely a question of thinking out the content, it dissipates. (Even in cases where one already has the basic idea around which everything is to be grouped, as long as the capacity for creating images is missing it will not work; if one restricts oneself in the extensive mode one goes too far in the intensive mode and one becomes amorphous.)

Robert Musil, Diaries, Notebook 5 (tr. Payne)

Burton Pike on Robert Musil: To Analyze and Order Experience Without Reducing It

Robert Musil is difficult to write about. He outsmarts most of his commentators. Burton Pike’s “Robert Musil: Literature as Experience” is one of the better essays I’ve read on him, trying to link Musil’s hard-to-pin-down process in The Man Without Qualities to Husserlian phenomenology, and also with Susanne Langer’s theories of art that draw heavily on Ernst Cassirer’s theories of symbolic forms.

Musil attended the University of Berlin from 1903-1905, while Stumpf, Dilthey, and Simmel were teaching there, and he read and remarked on Husserl. I haven’t seen that much criticism exploring these connections (I haven’t looked too deeply), but they certainly merit it.

Pike’s essay focuses on Musil’s attempt to bridge the gap between lived experience and language through the host of characters and emotions and ideologies he meticulously dissects in The Man Without Qualities. My response is to ask whether the problem is made more difficult by thinking of it as a gap.

Can Musil’s project be better served, and saved, by reformulating it in a more language-centric way? Rather than bemoaning a myopic focus on language, should those following the spirit of Musil appropriate its study?

Robert Musil: Literature as Experience

Burton Pike, Studies  in  Twentieth-Century  Literature 18,  no.  2  (Summer  1994)

My general argument is that writers of the early modernist generation, and certainly Musil, were not blocked by language’s presumed inability to represent experience, but on the contrary were struggling to develop a new kind of literary language that would adequately represent experience as a cognitive process as it was then coming to be understood.

It might also be said of modernist literature generally that it resists the attempts of theory to reduce literary expression to the problem of language alone. This kind of literature uses language to project images that incorporate action in an envelope of sensory experience rather than using it descriptively or discursively. The senses, emotions, affects, moods, and subliminal effects involved in perception and experience are considered essential. It is too reductive, as some critics would have it, to consider literary language as merely a doomed attempt at some kind of rational discourse that eludes both writer and reader, a fruitless butting one’s head against the walls of the “prison-house of language.”

I would extend this to say that it is a trap to separate language and experience as though they are separate or as though one is a subset of the other. They are inextricable, each possessed of certain aspects that the other cannot make fully manifest (it is important that this be bidirectional and that we recognize that language has capacities beyond one person’s experience).

The simultaneous disdain of both experience (via attacks on “Cartesianism,” “subjectivity,” and the like) and language (by blocking it off from thought, experience, and the world) demarcates a desiccated zone for linguistic exploration that turns solipsistic all too easily. Derrida may well be the sine qua non of this approach, but one can argue that people from Quine to Brett Bourbon also fall prey to this temptation. It is ubiquitous.

The anchoring of modernist literature in perceptual and sensory images possibly illustrates what Wittgenstein meant when he wrote in the Philosophical Investigations that “a picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 48, ¶115). Suzanne Langer expressed something similar when she said that the artist’s way of knowing feelings and emotions “is not expressible in ordinary discourse [because] … the forms of feeling and the forms of discursive expression are logically incommensurate, so that any exact concepts of feeling and emotion cannot be projected into the logical form of literal language” (Langer 91).

On the other hand, Langer presupposes that literal language is an unproblematic concept. Husserl’s epoche (ἐποχή for you Greek readers)his method of bracketing off mental experience from our presuppositions–assumed an ability to get at pure experience that seems a bit optimistic. But the apparent failure of that project does not result in a conception of two worlds–one of feeling and emotion, one of language–that are incommensurable.

Rather, the perceptual and sensorial accompany both domains, but in heterogenous ways. The challenge which faces any serious writer is in getting language and conceptual experience partly to line up, through a monumental force of will and organization.

In fact, this task is really easy if you line them up in the conventional, contemporary ways which we receive from our birth on. But then you have written something of no importance whatsoever.

The burden of language as Musil understands it is not to mystify, but to analyze and order experience without reducing it. He makes his characters, within their immediate fictional situations, attempt to relate to each other and the world through their changing perceptual and sensory envelopes in terms of the experiences he tries out on them. What we can know, according to Husserl, is not the actual physical world but only our experience of it. Unlike Husserl, Musil is quite rigorous in making this process experimental and in developing a literary language that can express it with great precision. He puts all his major characters in this same experimental stance.

This is a tough enterprise for a writer, for not only is representing the complexity of experience thus understood a boundless task, but it rejects as impossibly artificial (not “true to life”) the traditional literary notions of plot, dramatic action, and characterization that normally provide a guiding structure for readers as well as writers. The results are contradictory and paradoxical: self and world, as Musil treats them, dissolve into a flow of endless “possibilities,” of the kind so lovingly developed in The Man without Qualities. The only way to temporarily arrest this flow, Musil postulates, is for an individual to attain an attenuated, tentative, ineffable, and quite transitory mystical state that he calls the “other condition,” an ecstatic state of heightened awareness similar to that advocated by Walter Pater.

This is a very modernist move, and I think it is a valuable and not-common-enough move to link it to Husserl. (Thomas Harrison talks a fair bit about this in his book Essayism.) Pike is a bit off-base on Husserl but the description of Musil’s method as being one of exploring the objects of thought does link Musil to Husserl, and their methodologies are not so different, though Musil is far more empirical.

This postulation of an ideal state of awareness and reception is most vulnerable if we think of it as an emancipatory suspension of all conditions on our thinking and our self. That’s a pretty high bar. If considered more modestly as either

  1. a suspension of some core prejudices and predispositions, or
  2. a framework-destroying entertaining of contradictory, coextant, and willfully foreign concepts;

–then there is still the possibility for something genuinely innovative to arise. Musil’s method can survive the attack better than Husserl’s original conception of the epoche. I tend to believe that any genuine epoche would require cessation of thought altogether, making it not terribly useful for present purposes.

The problem with regarding thoughts and sensations as a stream or flow with intermittent stases is, to quote William James, “introspectively, to see the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to conclusions, stopping them to look at them before a conclusion is reached is really annihilating them…. Let anyone try to cut a thought across the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see now difficult the introspective observation of the transitive tract is…. Or if our purpose is nimble enough and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself…. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like … trying to turn up the light quickly enough to see how the darkness looks” (quoted in Holton 124).

Musil, who was quite familiar with James’s work, understood this dilemma very well: throughout his diaries, essays, and interviews he worries endlessly about the technical problems this posed for him as a writer. Rejecting narrative in the traditional sense, he relies on a narrator external to the action to frame and control the experimental process as it unfolds. But since each scene is limited to representing the envelope of perceptions, sensations, actions, and experiences of the characters who are perceiving, sensing, acting, and experiencing within it, each scene tends to become a hermetic unit and mise-en-abyme. No extended dramatic narrative (for which characters must be defined as consistent types or counters) is possible. Musil’s “non-narrative narrative” consists of a sequence of quasi-independent micro-narratives, each of which could be extended at will in any direction or interspersed with other micro-narratives. Like Husserl, Musil believed in building up and analyzing all the data that hypothetically constitute experience. He did not, like Thomas Mann or Hermann Broch, for example, begin with an a priori set of values or literary notions.

This might explain why Musil had trouble finishing anything, notably The Man without Qualities and his essays: the experimental path he set up, “the path of the smallest steps” as he called it, that would ultimately reconcile the potential of probability with the reality of what actually happens, can never end. This is a negative consequence of his dedication to a hypothetical approach that gives primacy to “a scale of degrees of probability,” and that defines certainty as only the closest approach to the greatest achievable degree of probability—a kind of Zeno’s arrow of probability suspended in its flight toward certainty.

It’s worth noting that a significant change does take place between the two published mammoth parts of The Man Without Qualities. The appeal to the mystical experience only really kicks in with the arrival of Agathe, when it seems clear that Musil is trying to get beyond the critical approach that dominated Pseudoreality Prevails and move tentatively toward a more constructive approach in Into the Millennium (The Criminals). The critical approach remains and it does not sit easily with the constructive project, something for which Musil has suffered criticism. I think it is here that the unfinished nature of the book makes it hardest to judge the role of the constituent approaches.

The conflicts and paradoxes inherent in this approach to fiction are set out at the very beginning of The Man without Qualities. A scientist and mathematician, Ulrich is unable to fix any actual or potential moment in the flow of experience as definitive, or to fashion a language that could mediate the flow of experience in any reliable fashion, such as empirical science demands. In his very first appearance in the novel, Ulrich is standing behind a window in his house with a stopwatch in his hand, trying without success to freeze the flow of traffic and pedestrians on the street outside in a statistical measurement.

Representation, and the language that is its vehicle, can only be valid in Musil’s view if rendered with the utmost precision. The Man without Qualities contains a veritable catalog of the ways people talk, write, and interact in their lives, and these ways are considered unsatisfactory and insufficient. Each social class, profession, and individual in the novel is given his/her/its/their own hermetic vocabularies and grammars. Musil included mystic, philosophical, and scientific language, as well as the everyday conversational idiolects of each of the characters in the novel. (Each character speaks in his or her own style, idiom, vocabulary, and syntax, crossing but rarely intersecting with the others.) Musil even includes body language, as well as the inner, unrealized language of the inarticulate and the insane! The problem, as he saw it, lay in somehow fashioning a language that would overcome these obstacles and permit objective communication of the whole complex flow of experience from person to person and within society as a whole, and thus make true communication possible.

This is awfully close to Habermas’ fabled Ideal Speech Situation, though I’m not sure if Pike means to invoke it here. I do not think that “objective communication” is necessarily the goal. I believe Musil would have backed the distinction between the natural sciences and human sciences that Dilthey drew, and thus would have asked different things of the science he was constructing for The Man Without Qualities than he would have asked of physics.

I’d have to look carefully at Musil’s language to figure out what he thought. He criticizes contemporary literature for Gegenstandslosigkeit, a lack of objectivism, an embrace of abstractions that make it solipsistic and inward-turning, no longer attuned to present-day reality. But to include this in literature is not to embrace objectivity per se but to extend the warrant of literature to contain all these unsatisfactory means in the hopes of realizing satisfactory communication. The critical project is a necessary part of the constructive project.

There would seem to have been in the early phenomenologists and in Musil an underlying idealism that has since been lost, a belief that in spite of the increasing solipsism and dehumanizing specialization of modern life there is some sphere or some level—one hardly knows what to call it—in or on which all the conflicting and apparently unrelated fragments, self and world, feeling and intellect, science and society, skepticism and belief, could somehow be melded into a coherent, ethical whole. This might explain why the phenomenological basis is no longer fashionable in literary criticism and theory, and why language-based criticism, with its entrenched skepticism about idealist assumptions, has become dominant—it suits the temper of our time, which is disillusioned about any form of larger unity in the world. In the tradition of idealistic philosophy, phenomenology conceived experience as the experience of an individual person, but underlying the phenomenological enterprise was the intention of bringing about moral and ethical reform on the level of the larger community, and the belief that this could be done through an awakened subjectivity that would somehow expand outwards from the individual to the social and cultural world. Our time, however—as Musil himself trenchantly observed many times in his essays and in The Man without Qualities—has moved instead to a collectivist mode of thinking in which political, ideological, ethnic, and tribal thought and behavior rather than the individual’s subjectivity have become the framework for social thought, and in which literary characters, no longer the anchoring centers of the world they had been since Romanticism, have become in extreme cases cartoon characters. In collectivist fashion the contemporary human sciences, psychology, medicine, and sociology approach the individual only as a statistical manifestation of generalized and abstracted characteristics. (Thus the disease is more important than the patient, who represents for the medical profession only a manifestation of it, a “case.”)

Pike’s point is that the recent dominant trends of art and literature have echoed and reinforced the instrumentalization and taxonomizing of human experience rather than challenging it. This seems hard to deny, although bad literature has always done this to some extent.

But Pike paints the picture as rather dire by phrasing it in a somewhat transcendental way: by saying that we must construct a unity and understanding that seems ever more difficult to reach as the world gets bigger, faster, and more complicated. If Musil couldn’t build this unity, what chance do we have?

What Pike calls “an awakened subjectivity that would somehow expand outwards from the individual to the social and cultural world” seems unlikely when phrased that way. Better to think of it as latent possibilities in language and action (in which subjectivity participates), beaten-down and ignored by the dominant forces of the world, to which we can attune ourselves through open-mindedness and study.

I think this is what Musil was after in the first place, hence why he needed to spend such great time dissecting unsatisfactory languages. Not an awakened subjectivity, but an expanded world. All our experience is already in our language, if language can only be wrangled into sufficiently compelling conceptual forms. Faced with the richness of language’s conceptual possibilities, many writers and scholars have sought to reduce and contain it. Destroying this reduction of language would be enough to avoid the reduction and ignorance of experience.

Shakespeare’s Sick, Twisted Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure is a sick and disturbing play. Every change Shakespeare made to the source material, including the shift from tragedy to comedy, made it even more twisted. It’s never a good idea to speculate on Shakespeare’s motives, but this sickly comedy leaves religion, politics, and theater all looking terrible.

The quick summary of the relevant plot points: the Duke thinks he has been too lenient in governing Vienna (nice choice of setting!), so he turns his power over to the hypocritical puritan Angelo, who promptly sentences Claudio to death for getting his fiancee pregnant. Claudio’s chaste sister Isabella, a nun, pleads for clemency, and Angelo says he’ll spare Claudio, but only if she sleeps with him. So she does, but Angelo executes Claudio anyway, because he’s worried that Claudio will kill him if he ever finds out.

But no! The Duke has been in disguise as a friar the whole time and arranged it so that Angelo’s ex-fiancee, whom he dumped when her dowry sank at sea, pretended to be Isabella in bed. The Duke also manages to prevent Claudio’s execution by conveniently substituting a prisoner who just died of illness the same day. The Duke reveals himself and lets everyone off, including pardoning an amoral murderer who’s been sitting on the fringes of the action (and whom the Duke was initially going to substitute for Claudio before the other prisoner happened to drop dead). Then the Duke proposes to Isabella and the play ends before she can answer.

To the basic tale, Shakespeare added the bits after “But no!”, borrowing from a few other plots, in order to turn the grim morality play into a comedy. You can go on for ages looking at the various mirrored situations and the oozing moral and physical viscera all over the place, but I want to focus on the biggest problem of all, the Duke, and particularly his rhetoric.

Any interpretation of Measure for Measure that does not turn on an indictment of the Duke renders the play morally indefensible. He carelessly then carefully manipulates and tortures the characters as much as a Coen Brothers villain, and were the tone different, it would play as A Serious Man or a Kleist tale.

This has been a longstanding view. Coleridge was nauseated by the whole play, and I’m genuinely scared by those who see the Duke as some sort of moral paragon. E.K. Chambers (1906) gives a standard indictment:

The duke can be nothing but a travesty of a Haroun-al-raschid. Why does he conceal from Isabella, in her grief, the knowledge that her brother yet lives? To what purpose is the further prolongation of her agony, after his return, by the pretended disbelief of her story and the suspicion cast upon the friar, in whose person he has counselled her?

These are the antics of a cat with a mouse, rather than the dispositions of a wise and beneficent ruler; and it is difficult to see anything in the grave elaboration of them, except a satirical intention of Shakespeare towards theories about the moral government of the universe which, for the time being at least, he does not share. As yet, indeed, his nascent pessimism has only advanced to the point of finding ineffectiveness and not deliberate ill-will in the ordering of things. The thorough-going denunciations of King Lear are still to come.

E.K. Chambers

Now, there is room for some complication here. The Duke himself has some bizarre quirks, as well as the evident split personality.First he abdicates power, then he abdicates knowledge, as though the combination of the two is too great a burden for him to bear. And obviously it is.

But I want to pay attention to his rhetoric. No one else in the play speaks like him. Every time he opens his mouth, the play goes into another register, whether he’s in verse or prose. His speech is just as labyrinthine as his theatrical machinations. He speaks in some of the twistiest rhetoric of anyone this side of Love’s Labours Lost. Even his moralizing is knotted up:

That we were all, as some would seem to be,
From our faults, as faults from seeming, free!

III.ii

Did you get that? “If only both (a) we were as little subject to our faults, and (b) faults were as free of being in disguise–as much as some people seem to be free from faults.” It’s a bizarre and unbalanced construction that uses the two similes in unorthodox fashion, especially since at its heart is an incoherence: Faults should be as free of disguise as much as faults are in disguise.

This is par for the course for the Duke. His opening discourse on governing is little better, to the extent that scholars from Samuel Johnson on have wondered if miscopying had marred the meaning.

Of government the properties to unfold
Would seem in me t’affect speech and discourse,
Since I am put to know that your own science
Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice
My strength can give you. Then no more remains
But that, to your sufficiency, as your worth is able,
And let them work.

I.i

I could believe in the textual corruption if the obfuscatory rhetoric didn’t fit so nicely with the Duke’s personality. Throughout the whole play, the Duke’s rhetoric tends to fall on empty ears anyway. He can be as cryptic as he wants, because (a) he is pulling the strings, and (b) no one really cares what he says. People want things from him; they have no relationship with him.

When the Duke visits the condemned Claudio in prison, his “comfort” to Claudio is like Hamlet’s soliloquy as delivered by Polonius, encouraging Claudio to accept death as a release from the pain of life, even as he plots to free Claudio from the freedom from life of death.

Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep….
If thou art rich, thou’rt poor;
For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear’s thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none;
For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner.

III.i

The Duke’s “comfort” works on Claudio…for about a minute. As soon as Isabella shows up to tell her of Angelo’s bargain, Claudio jumps at the chance for life and tosses the Duke’s stoicism into the rubbish bin:

CLAUDIO: To die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible and warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; . . . ’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death. . . .

III.i

The Duke’s high-falutin’ rhetoric is not only pointlessly obfuscatory, but no one is listening. Whether the former caused the latter or vice versa is a question for later.

For right now I’ll just maintain that the Duke’s bloviation is intimately tied up with his peculiar sense of morality. Indeed, he frequently sounds like a cross between Polonius and King Lear‘s Edgar. The Edgar connection, which must have been made before but which I haven’t seen, is most blatant in his deception of Isabella. He tells the audience:

But I will keep her ignorant of her good,
To make her heavenly comforts of despair,
When it is least expected.

IV.iii

These lines could come straight from Edgar at Dover Cliff in King Learjust as he tricks Gloucester into thinking he’s been saved by God from his attempted suicide. But there Edgar attributes the miracle to God’s presence. Here the heavenly comforts are those of the Duke himself.

And so it’s at least understandable that some would try to allegorize the troublesome plot. One of the more popular ways to justify the Duke has been to turn the whole thing into a Christian allegory. This was G. Wilson Knight‘s approach, and it’s ironic that after pointing out Hamlet’s moral perfidiousness, Knight would then go on to construct an elaborate mechanism to excuse equally bad actions performed by a character in with much greater power and far less excuse. G. Wilson Knight: right on Hamlet, wrong on the Duke.

But these arguments are great precisely because they mirror Christian theodicy. The play is not an allegory, but it is a nasty analogue of the sort of behavior you see in God in the Old Testament.

William Empson does condemn the Duke, as you’d expect, but even though he loathed Christianity with uncommon passion, Empson doesn’t press the point that the game-playing Duke does rather resemble the Judeo-Christian God at his wackiest, with Job, with Isaac and Abraham, with Jephthah and his daughter, etc.

While the seemingly endless cycle of Judges mirrors the “No one has learned anything” ending of Measure for Measure, the Book of Job seems most present. The cruel deceptions, the implicit, staged “bet” with the devil Angelo, blithely pardoning an amoral murderer (who uncannily anticipates Moosbrugger in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities) while berating someone who had the audacity to insult you, the staged, last-minute interventions: the Duke’s mood swings and arbitrariness are quite Yahwehish. It’s not exact and it’s not an allegory, but the similarity is unmistakable.

The opaque rhetoric, then, is there to underscore the Duke’s sheer unaddressability and his disconnection from the rest of us mortals. His rhetorical skills have turned cancerous, weaving his words into thick knots that no one can fully decipher, certainly not the other characters. His rhetoric can hypnotize, but only momentarily; excluded from human discourse, it’s only his exercise of power that affects the other characters. Turning this sort of divine relationship into a secular comedy makes it into a cruel joke.

By the end of final scene, the other characters seem more tired than anything else, as the Duke rolls out his mercy. He’s God, and we’re just grateful we’re still alive by his arbitrary grace. The sophistry piles up as he justifies his actions, and certainly no one will call him on anything. (They promptly fall all over him with praise and gratitude.) The Duke claims Claudio no longer fears death and can enjoy life even more now:

And you may marvel why I obscured myself,
Labouring to save his life, and would not rather
Make rash remonstrance of my hidden power
Than let him so be lost. O most kind maid,
It was the swift celerity of his death,
Which I did think with slower foot came on,
That brain’d my purpose. But, peace be with him!
That life is better life, past fearing death,
Than that which lives to fear: make it your comfort,
So happy is your brother.

V.i

Angelo, who expresses great remorse and says he just wants to die, also gets off free and marries his ex-fiancee. (Assuming that his death wish is sincere, sparing Angelo does make for a bit of an “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” situation, cf. the Harlan Ellison story where all-powerful God/computer AM keeps five humans around to torture and play with after killing everyone else.)

The Duke doesn’t propose marriage to super-chaste Isabella at the end so much as dictate it (she doesn’t get to respond). Why not? He’s the Duke! He knows the value of everything and the price of nothing, which is just as bad as the reverse. Sure a murderer went free and everyone is scarred for life, but didn’t we have a good time? The Duke did!

By making the comedic resolution utterly unacceptable, Shakespeare does penance for the laughter thrown at the oh-so-funny manipulations of previous comedies. Yes, this is what happens when misunderstandings and manipulations pile up: queasy horror.

There’s a lot more that could be said and countless further complications. But the Duke is the heart of it all.

From Robert Musil’s Diaries, 1919

I do not ever know if it is my good spirit or my evil spirit that speaks these words within me. But it simply has to get out.

Since I awoke to life I have always seen things in an “other” way. That means: in places, clear criticism, in places, clear suggestions, well thought through. Some I have written down and published. But much more has remained at a level of dark antipathy. Half raised up, then sunk down into obscurity. Intuition sensing far-reaching connections that the understanding has not followed.

The understanding that has had the benefit of scientific training is loath to follow if it has not been able to build itself bridges for itself whose load-bearing capacity is calculated exactly. Here and there I completed the calculations for a single area of such a bridge; dropped the work again in the conviction that it is not possible, after all, to finish it. I could sit down and gather material in the way that it has been done in similar assiduous, large scale experiments — Wundt, Lamprecht, Chamberlain, Spengler.

But what remains when this is done? When the breath has evaporated with which one tried to bring such fullness to life, there is nothing but a dead heap of inorganic material.

The five-year-long slavery of the war has, in the meantime, torn the best piece from my life; the run-up has become too long, the opportunity to summon up all my forces is too short. To renounce or to leap, whatever then happens, this is the only choice that remains.

I renounce any systematic approach and the demand for exact proof. I will only say what I think, and make clear why I think it. I comfort myself with the thought that even significant works of science were born of similar distress, that Locke’s. . . .  are in fact travel correspondence.

I want to develop an image of the world, the real background, in order to be able to unfold my unreality before it.

Robert Musil, Notebook 19 (1919)

Profiles in Type L: General Paul Van Riper

A few months back, in Battle Lines, I talked about the divide between the free-market technocrats and the conservative old boys in American society, dubbing them Type L and Type C respectively. To review:

  • Type L: libertarian, technocratic, meritocratic, pro-business, anti-government, laissez faire,  pro-science, positivist, secular, elitist, progress-driven, Whiggish, optimistic. “The best should have the power.”
  • Type C: tradition-oriented, pro-status quo, nationalistic, protectionist, isolationist, xenophobic, social conservative, pro-business, pro-government (at least in regards to furthering other goals), pro-religion, cronyistic, chauvinistic. “The powerful should have the power.”

(Remember, I don’t identify with either of them! They’re just all we have.)

I had no trouble coming up with big-name examples of Type C (see: nearly our entire political system and corporate overlords), but had a harder time thinking of big-name Type L’s who weren’t associated with technology or economics. Part of this is that these are probably the only relevant places in society where Type L’s can thrive without being utterly annihilated by cronyism. The space for someone like Arnheim in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities doesn’t really exist, and I’m not sure if it ever did. Musil had to contrive a situation for brilliant (but oh so wrong) thinkers to be in positions of political power, and while the voices of the time speak through his characters, I suspect his characters may be improvements on their models, no matter how much he damns them.

Perhaps some CIA wonks might qualify, along the lines of George Smiley, but somehow I doubt it.

Alec Guinness as George Smiley - Insert Star Wars Reference Here

But tonight I thought of someone in the military who fits the bill: Paul K. Van Riper.

 

Paul K. Van Riper

Van Riper first came to notice when he very publicly failed to give the military the results that they wanted in their Millennium Challenge 2002 (note corporate brand). The war game was supposed to prove the validity of Rumsfeld’s super new strategies of high-tech, low personnel forces, and Van Riper took on the “Red Force,” some unnamed Middle Eastern player.

Hellbent on showing Rumsfeld how stupid he was, Van Riper used all sorts of clever gambits to render the high-tech stuff useless. In exchange, the Army cheated, ignoring his orders, handicapping him and resurrecting US forces to ensure the US won against Red Force. Van Riper, already retired, went public:

Van Riper said this approach ran counter to his notion of how an experiment should function. “You don’t come to a conclusion beforehand and then work your way to that conclusion. You see how the thing plays out,” he said. [Type C never says this.]

Van Riper said the blame for rigging the exercise lay not with any one officer, but with the culture at Joint Forces Command. “It’s an institutional problem,” he said. “It’s embedded in the institution.” [Who is he, David Simon?]

He was highly critical of the command’s concepts, such as “effects-based operations” and “rapid, decisive operations,” which he derided as little more than “slogans.” [Type C never ever says this.]

“There’s very little intellectual activity,” Van Riper said about Joint Forces Command. “What happens is a number of people are put into a room, given some sort of a slogan and told to write to the slogan. That’s not the way to generate new ideas.”

Van Riper’s single-mindedness can sometimes rub other experiment participants the wrong way, said a retired Army officer who has played in several war games with the Marine. “What he’s done is he’s made himself an expert in playing Red, and he’s real obnoxious about it,” the retired officer said. “He will insist on being able to play Red as freely as possible and as imaginatively and creatively within the bounds of the framework of the game and the technology horizons and all that as possible.

“He can be a real pain in the ass, but that’s good. But a lot of people don’t like to sign up for that sort of agitation. But he’s a great guy, and he’s a great patriot and he’s doing all those things for the right reasons.”

Van Riper is probably about ten miles to my right on all sorts of issues, but his very visible break with the US military and civilian leadership in this exercise and again shortly after the start of the Iraq war sets him aside from the military leadership as a type. So in a Frontline interview, while he praises Colin Powell even as he trashes McNamara and Rumsfeld, he also says anti-cronyistic things like this:

I see inside the United States Army the germs of a second intellectual renaissance that’s approaching these problems. And they’re not caught up in the sloganeering that most of the Joint community’s caught up in. They really are studying; they’re having conferences. The conferences aren’t love fests, where they put out some idea and try to get people to sign up to it. It’s a real debate, real argument, trying to synthesize some new knowledge out of it.

Is there anything in the current Defense Department that would lead you to believe those ideas will flourish?

I see nothing from the highest levels of the Pentagon that would lead to this. What I see is a support of the Joint Forces command by edict being told to be innovative. You cannot demand innovation. You can’t simply say to an organization, as Mr. Rumsfeld apparently did to the Army: “Be more innovative. You’re not innovative enough. Service Chief, you’re out of here.” That’s not the way to do it.

This is, of course, exactly what so many non-technical executives say to their R+D people, and this is exactly the response that the R+D people always have, right down to the ridicule of love fests. Type C’s have love fests because they are celebrating all being rich white guys; how can they not have love fests when they get together? They certainly would not let ideas get in the way. They say stuff like this:

Gen. William “Buck” Kernan, head of Joint Forces Command, told Pentagon reporters July 18 that Millennium Challenge was nothing less than “the key to military transformation.”

Van Riper would not use the phrase “the key to military transformation,” and I bet he never had a nickname like “Buck.” (He’s clearly more Sterling Hayden than George C. Scott in the Buck/Rip(p)er dichotomy.) And I bet he hates William “Buck” Kernan. We have an apparently near-perfect recreation of that sort of love fest Type C in David Rasche’s Rumsfeld/Bolton character from Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop:

These sorts do not like to lose wargames, ever. Reality must shift to accommodate them.

[This may be why I am more sympathetic to the analytic philosophy community than a lot of bloggers out there. The only thing worse than a room of people fighting over abstract issues and shutting each other down is a room of people all agreeing with the most powerful one there, be it Rumsfeld or Derrida. This is an oversimplification, obviously, but I don’t think I’m too far off the mark.]

Van Riper, who has been retired for many years, was last heard from in 2006 calling for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation. What took him so long? Though I share some of Gary Brecher’s respect for his cleverness in U Sank My Carrier, my intention is not to praise Van Riper. I suspect he adheres to a form of realpolitik that I would find morally repugnant. I suspect he has his own sort of obsessive myopia indicated by tidbits like this: “General Van Riper would spend his chow break by issuing speeding tickets all across MCB Quantico.” I suspect I would find him rather scary. But if you are looking for the counterweight to the current ruling class of CEOs and politicians, people like Van Riper are probably the best you can do.

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