On the Utility of Art for Politics: Musil's "Armed Truce of Ideas"

Abstract

A phantom haunts Germany today. It is ghost of intellectual invested with a critical mission. In course of last decade established notions concerning social and political role of intellectuals have increasingly come under scrutiny as space of cultural production has become more than ever politically contested. In a recent analysis of this historical transformation Peter Uwe Hohendahl observed that the critical function once attributed to intellectual seems to have evaporated. 1 Hohendahl is careful to emphasize specificity of German situation in which critical mandate of intellectual is understood as being rooted in sphere of aesthetic. In this context aesthetic sphere is conceived as locus of a distinctive knowledge which is qualitatively different from other cognitive practices, most notably science.2 Hohendahl's diagnosis is complemented by Andreas Huyssen's assessment of disorientation and historical shortsightedness displayed by German intellectuals after Wende.3 What drives Hohendahl's and Huyssen's analyses is recognition of a need to reformulate critical function of intellectuals in light of profound historical transformations. But, as Huyssen has noted, this step demands that assumptions underlying intellectual's claim to authority be reexamined today, particularly as they apply to relation between aesthetics and politics. This essay addresses this question by revisiting modernist origins of paradigms that have currency today and by seeking alternative models among competing discourses that once challenged these categories but have since been obscured. In particular Robert Musil's reflection on art and politics, which seemed so untimely in his own day, is examined as a vision whose time may have finally come. Much of today's vocabulary for conceptualizing relation between art and politics remains indebted, whether knowingly or not, to controversies that drove aesthetic debates of 1930s within German Marxism. In spite of important differences in emphasis and argumentation, opposing sides that emerged from these debates were aligned with respect to two mutually exclusive positions that construed aesthetic as intimately related to or, conversely, as incompatible with politics. While first model, paradigmatically articulated by Georg Lukacs, sought to place art's critical potential in service of a political narrative, opposing paradigm, embodied in its most radical form by Theodor W Adorno, embraced dialectical negativity of an autonomous aesthetic sphere as only critical space available in an administered world.4 Despite these differences both stances share a fundamental premise, namely, assumption that any critical activity presupposes a privileged vantage point for assessing real. In both models it is intersection of aesthetic and political discourses that provides critic with a superior standpoint from which to observe and account for history and society.5 It is this self-understanding of intellectual as endowed with a more encompassing view of whole that increasingly has been called into question by fundamental transformations in fabric of postindustrial societies. Given high degree of complexity of advances in industrial societies, Hohendahl writes, [...] there no longer seems to be an obvious mandate for writer to assume leadership. 116 Hohendahl's argument is indebted to Max Weber's characterization of modern societies as shaped by an unrelenting process of rationalization and proliferation of distinct domains of experience. The intellectual no longer enjoys a self-evident critical mandate because multiplication of perspectives and discourses-not just those underlying different realms of modern life, but within field of cultural production itself-makes any argument concerning intellectual's privileged viewpoint difficult to sustain. …