Recent events have impelled perhaps even the least reflective among us to question the significance of our activities and to reconsider whether what we spend our time and energy on is meaningful, or valuable for ourselves and the world. In times of trouble, when we consider our personal mortality or the end of civilization as we know it, in crises wherein our own or others’ suffering can no longer be denied or ignored, it is only natural to ask what our role in perpetrating, condoning, or ameliorating wrongs might be. At such moments, artists and writers whose work is not explicitly political in nature are often called upon to justify our work as “relevant.” If we do not comment on the concerns of “the now,” but look at the world from the “perspective of eternity,” or perhaps just from our own local or personal microcosms, we may be deemed self-indulgent, privileged, escapist.
Between March and September of this year, amid a global pandemic, a public and violent airing of racial grievances, a particularly nasty and deeply corrupt political campaign season, devastating wild fires in the west coast of the U.S.A., along with a widely-shared sense of the possibility of civil war or apocalypse or both, I was finishing a translation of the Austrian writer Robert Musil’s Theater Symptoms: Plays and Writings on Theater. I have already spent decades with Musil, whose 140thbirthday is on November sixth. Musil was the author of the modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, a work that asks many searching questions about the historic changes of his world in the tumultuous period spanning the two world wars. Not only was Musil a philosopher and social analyst of extraordinary insight and lucidity, but he was, first and foremost, a creative writer, an artist, whose concerns were aesthetic, formal, and personal. The book I was translating, made up of creative and philosophical texts written between 1921 and 1929, was a mixture of the worldly and other-worldly, the ethical and the aesthetic. — Was this meaningful work? Is it still meaningful now?
Amid the unrest, the daily dread, the call to act or to weigh in with just the right tone of voice on social issues, some might question the significance of my seemingly myopic attention to what many will reductively view as yet another dead, white, European male. And yet, Musil himself struggled to create in times of intense turmoil and horror, and nevertheless persistently affirmed — explicitly and in the example of his commitment to his work — the vital ethical importance of non-conscripted, irreducible aesthetic activity for society. Art, in other words — in Musil’s words, in my own translation and paraphrase—is essential to our human experience, not just as pleasure (certainly not, in Musil’s moral universe, as diversion), but as a realm of open-ended exploration and experimentation, a realm that teaches us complexity and compassion and strengthens our imagination for the subtle yet sometimes revolutionary consequences of even the smallest shift in the dynamic relationships of forms, words, sounds, nuances, acts. Looked at from Musil’s perspective, our work as artists and writers (and translators) does have value. Especially now.
Way back in 2009, when I was working on another Musil translation — Literature and Politics — a book edited and introduced by Klaus Amann, I read an essay called “Speaking in Tongues,” by the English novelist Zadie Smith. She discussed the tendency of the American public to expect politics to be black and white, uncritically patriotic, simplistically partisan, and blandly, carefully politically correct. She wondered if the newly elected President Obama, who had been maligned by some throughout his campaign as Janus-faced and many-voiced, might in fact represent a positive new turn in American politics, where the openness and multiplicity prized in literature and philosophy might become possible in the public realm of statesmanship. Smith invoked Keats’ idea of “Negative Capability”: Shakespeare, as the Romantic poet wrote, was “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. What Smith termed “speaking in tongues” is related to the art of Nietzschean perspectivism practiced by Musil, whose great unfinished novel explores the nature of possibility against the backdrop of a collapsing empire of sureties. The state of being “without qualities” referred to in its title, far from a negative nihilistic characteristic, was for Musil a state of radical open-ended possibility, the challenging but honest condition of modern uncertainty. Back in 2009, our president’s tendency to “speak in tongues,” an art usually seen as antithetical to the narrow realm of practical and political life, seemed — for one utopian moment — to signal a fruitful confluence between the open-ended realm of ethics and aesthetics and the more practical science of politics.
Unfortunately, Smith’s high hopes for a general cultural turn toward openness and free-thinking were not fulfilled. Instead, we are now, four years into the age of president Trump and his opponents, even more polarized as a nation, and bound, even more rigidly, to partisan positions and increasing narrowness of thought. Contemporary limitations on discourse (“No free speech for fascists”; “hate speech”) float in the same ethers as Orwellian “thought crime,” as deviations from orthodox, socially-controlled beliefs and accepted terminology are swiftly censored without consideration. Musil — living the dystopia which Orwell saw playing itself out in Europe and the Soviet Union — explicated a related term coined by the Nazi regime: “Gleichschaltung” — a word, he writes, that is “another measure of the strangeness of what is happening today with the German spirit”. He devotes two long aphorisms to an attempt to define this dangerous neologism, both of which utilize his characteristic analogic awareness to illustrate the threat posed by politics to “Geist” (i.e., spirit, intellect, cultural life). The explication in the second aphorism suggests that to preserve intellectual integrity in the face of such forces is an essential political act:
Gleichschaltung
1) The word
It marks the strangeness (it will be difficult for foreigners to understand it) of what is happening today in Germany, that this word Gleichschaltung, which plays such a large role in it, cannot be directly translated into other languages. This word was suddenly there one day out of nowhere for the not-yet-National Socialist Germans. Lamps, machines are gleichgeschaltet[switched into conformity] — and Germans are too. Difference between norms and similarities. It has active and passive meanings in psychiatry. Levers and similar mechanisms, electric currents ein- und ausschalten [switch on and off]. Schaltwerk [control unit]. Schalthebel [switching lever]. In general: Gleichstrom [co- or parallel current]: a current whose direction remains the same. There is a Batterieschaltung [accumulator switch] for galvanic elements, next to and following one another. One speaks of (different) modes of Schaltung in dynamo machines. Likewise in an electrical lighting system. Schalten, Middle High German. To push, tow (esp. a ship), into movement, to force. In New High German it becomes = to steer; Old High German scaltan = to push, New High German it is Schalter = sliding sash [window] from Middle High German schalter, schelter = [a] bolt. Schaltjahr [leap year] already in Old High German because of the day that is “shoved in.” To shove is also a basic meaning of schalten. Walten really means to be strong, see Gewalt [violence].
Musil concludes this definition by noting the connection between Gewalt [violence] and Verwalten [powers /government /administration] and by regretting that everything, nowadays, is permeated with National Socialist spirit. But it was not just the repression under the Nazis that concerned him.
Musil and many other radical thinkers of the past (Adorno, say, or Marcuse) warned against the danger — from all sides of the political spectrum — of conscripting art to rigid, one-dimensional ideology. Yet, in the wake of our most recent national reckoning with issues of police violence, white supremacy, and racial, gender, and economic inequality, exacerbated by an ongoing deadly global pandemic, we are called upon to dispense even more with nuance and open-mindedness, because, as many strident voices urge, some words and some thoughts lead to immediate harm; because some people and some positions are beyond respect. As media pundits sensationalize and polarize in the interest of ratings, as thought is reduced to sound bites and slogans, our ability to consider complexities, to consider contradictions and subtleties, is sacrificed. At great cost. Once a liberal value, free speech and free thought are deemed by many too dangerous to be allowed “in these times” — as if we had all forgotten that the suppression of such liberties also comes with its own comparable dangers.
As I worked, translating Musil’s reviews on Expressionist political plays, Yiddish theater, and philosophical discussion of the tension between artistic innovation and formal traditions, amid the backdrop of contemporary outrage, violence, competing narratives, and revolutionary fervor — half focused on the sensationalism of the now and half on understanding the cultural milieu of Musil’s texts and the niceties of translation problems — I was not the only one to catch a familiar cadence in the contemporary discourse: a cadence eerily reminiscent of the ideological battles of the 1920s and 30s in the years leading up to the Age of Totalitarianism.
Today, we are enjoined to be solidly partisan when it comes to politics, and, at the other extreme, expected to repudiate such partisanship and patriotism by embracing a global vision without boundaries, without differences. We are caught within the paradoxes of diversity, multi-culturalism, political correctness and alleged post-racialism. Extremes of Left and Right are literally fighting it out in the streets in a way ominously reminiscent of the battles waged in inter-war Europe, between factions which would develop into Communists and Fascists, internationalist and nationalist totalitarian movements. Musil, who fought in World War I and participated in liberal political reform, began taking the temperature of the cultural-political body of Europe in the inter-war years, noting distinct symptoms of danger, tensions between an exhausted bourgeois individualism and a threatening collectivist totalitarianism. He speculated on world-disarmament and the elimination of nation states. He philosophized about what he called the “plasticity” or the “shapelessness of the human being,” in response to the scientific and philosophical discourse of his contemporaries. He was skeptical about the solidity and fixedness of delineated identity, which led him to question National Socialist theories and to prefigure some of today’s discussions about the fluidity of race, nationality, masculinity and femininity (he was fascinated with the hermaphrodite).
No matter what his conclusions on any of these complex questions might be, what is most significant about Musil’s thought today is his commitment to remaining non-conscripted to any one ideology, while still struggling to act ethically in a time of terrible confusion. A far cry from today’s censorious “cancel culture,” Musil defended the absolute value of considering and talking about anything — the more controversial the speculation or thought experiment the better. Musil’s own challenge — of negotiating a position, as committed artist and free thinker, as Fascism in Austria and Germany, on the one hand, and Communism in Stalinist Russia on the other, demanded political allegiance by all creative artists — faces us today in a new, but familiar guise.
Yet, over the last hundred years, media, commodification, advertisement, simulation, and “hot takes,” have all contributed to a world even less prepared to negotiate the complexities of real problems than in Musil’s time. His critique of the increasingly commodifying nature of the art world prefigured the concept of the “culture industry” associated with Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School. He illustrated the insidious way in which art and thought are instrumentalized, co-opted, stripped of their shimmering and irreducible dialectical aliveness. He might not have been able to imagine just how quickly or how pervasively contemporary social media is now able to reduce complex political and social movements to branded slogans, memes, and merchandise, or just how pervasively the art object — in Benjamin’s sense — would be divested of its “aura” and its particular powers, but he did see how dangerous the tendency toward reductive marketing was, not just for art and thought, but for everything that makes us human and humane. His analysis, in notebook entries, essays, and in his philosophically rich fiction and drama, sheds a particularly insightful light on the still-unresolved contradictions pertinent to today’s tension between the individual and the collective, thoughts and emotions, tradition and change, idealities and realities. I can think of no better ethical guide for any artist or non-conscripted thinker attempting to earnestly negotiate the minefields of today’s politically coercive ideologies.
A year before the Austrian Anschluss with Nazi Germany, Musil dared to give a provocative speech he called “On Stupidity”. He saw it coming. It was a thinly-veiled critique of the treacherous and brutal nature of totalitarian anti-thought. Stupidity in this lecture was of two kinds. One, a child of the long legacy of the Holy or Shakespearean Fool, akin to Dostoevsky’s “idiot,” was positively weighted: a writer, like Musil himself, was this kind of “stupid”. Similarly, women, outsiders, Jews, mystics, who, due to their social status as extraterritorial, insignificant, harmless, in their relative lack of concern for the acclaim or rewards of the world, were at liberty to speak the truth, free to question prevailing orthodoxies. “The idiot,” according to this picture, is “the other,” par excellence. The “intellectual and the Jew,” wrote Musil elsewhere, as if he were talking about the type of the man without qualities, are both extraterritorial, stateless beings — blessed and cursed with the attributes of the stranger. The stranger, as explicated by the German sociologist Georg Simmel, referring to the role of the Jew in contemporary German society, was “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”. The stranger’s “dangerous possibilities,” Simmel suggests, proceed from the fact that “he is not tied down in his action by habit, piety, and precedent.”
The other kind of stupidity is dangerous in another way (note that, for Simmel and Musil, the danger of the stranger is a good danger). This stupid is the brutal totalitarian kind: an all-too swift and gratuitous tendency to come to simple and — ominously — final solutions. This kind of stupidity is the stupidity of bullies, the kind of people who call other people names (like “stupid”) for not immediately jumping on their band wagon. This kind of stupidity is related to the damaging effect of media on our minds—the danger of reducing complexities to sound bites. The political nature of Musil’s “On Stupidity” address is much clearer in the preliminary notes, where he was able to be more forthright, revealing that he felt himself as artist and human directly endangered and maligned by the invectives of the totalitarian regimes in power. In one instance he notes the danger to which one who questions the prevailing valuations of stupidity exposes himself. He could be accused of having a “destructive attitude during the contemporary historical development,” which he calls “the ether swoon.” Later in these notes, Musil comments about the German “herd instinct” which had already existed before it found its current political form, and then about the relevance of sadism, “because our time has developed a social sadism” related directly to “humanism’s lack of resistance.”
While humanism does not know how to defend itself, society, Musil laments at the start of the address, is guilty of its own resistance, a resistance to art which he calls a special kind of “art stupidity”. The word stupid, he notes further, had often been used to ridicule poetry in more intellectually happy and liberal times; but now it has been replaced in part by “political and national invective” and an unconscionably excessive aggression aimed at anyone who would dare to see differently, not to mention those who, like Musil himself (who referred to himself in the title of one essay, “Ruminations of a Slow-Witted Man”) take their time in carefully reflecting upon difficult questions.
Musil, whose unfinished novel is a flagrant object lesson of his philosophical aversion to closure, believed in a conduct of life based on two related utopias, called “the utopia of the next step” and “the utopia of the motivated life.” The former required that no act, word, experience, or thought should be judged without seeing what it brought in its wake. The second was, in part, the desired result of the first: a heightened mode of life wherein one resisted forming habits, whether in morals or formal arrangements, avoided clichés (which he called congealed metaphors) in behavior or art, and cultivated a practice of living words and living thought.
Such a conduct of life is further exemplified by the difference between utopian thought — a fruitful constant questioning of “what if?” — and the danger of the frozen utopia /dystopia where such questioning becomes anathema. Fruitful resistance to premature closure and to polarized posturing is an aesthetic practice of flexible ethical aliveness in the face of stale and outmoded received ideas, absolutes, and finalities. In conscious distinction to the parole of “final solutions,” Musil chose to approach provisional answers to unanswerable questions and, furthermore, to do this in the language of literature. He chose to write a novel instead of a work of philosophy precisely to avail himself of the techniques of subconscious imagery and infinitely associative metaphor, variation and repetition, deferral and suspension of time and narrative, realms he knew from his extensive studies of psychology, anthropology and religious experience to be dangerously close to the pre-logical, primitive, mystical, or insane. Musil considered the realm of artistic experience to be the foundation of ethics and of a motivated conduct of life, even though acting according to ethics or ideals is considered foolish, escapist, unrealistic, if not anti-social or threatening, even today. But society, the state or nation, as Musil repeats again and again in the aphorisms and sketches from the period of Gleichschaltung, is in dire need of the autonomous voice of the non-conscripted artist, the holy fool who dares to ask “stupid” questions in the face of orthodox pieties. Such a radical mode of being may strain even the most die-hard ethical-aesthete in times of immediate danger to one’s self and others, when one feels called upon to take a stance against unthinkable horrors. Precisely how to bear witness, how to respond is, in such times, no longer an academic abstraction.
Musil’s experience speaking at the 1935 Paris “Writers’ Conference in Defense of Culture” — and the aftermath of that experience — provides a vivid historical example of the perils of polarized thinking. To the dismay of the Communist organizers of this anti-fascist conference, Musil dared to suggest that not only German and Austrian Fascists, but the Soviet Communists, too, were a threat to the ethical and artistic integrity of the artist. He was heckled off the stage; himself called a “fascist.” A few other thinkers — Simone Weil and Andre Gide — dared to raise concerned voices of dissent at this time. It was a small and marginalized group who failed to parrot the Party line. And yet, their premonitions proved justified. Many of the people who condemned Musil’s speech, Austrian and German artists among them, found themselves fatally condemned, in no time at all, by the Communist regime they were defending against criticism.
Many, who did not manage to conform to the changing requirements of the totalitarian regime, who were not successful in tailoring their art or in participating in the revolution in precisely the accepted way, were murdered — following show trials — or merely divested of career, livelihood, identity—cancelled. The revolution devoured its own. Musil, who had participated in movements for liberal reforms, saw the horrors of German and Austrian Nazism first-hand, as his friends and colleagues were removed from their positions as cultural and educational leaders, as his books were banned and burned, as neighbors disappeared, as he and his Jewish wife were forced into exile and poverty, was uniquely aware of the encroaching horrors. Yet he did not find himself able to do much more, without endangering his and his wife’s life, than “bear witness” in a mostly private way. He did not throw himself into the “Resistance,” in part because it was not in his nature as a thinker and an intellectual to affiliate with any “ism,” to chant slogans, or to take immediate risky action; but also, one presumes, because he was committed to his own work as an artist — in itself an important act of anti-Fascist resistance.
Many who warn of the encroaching signs of Fascism today tend to focus their concern on the signs coming from the Right, reminding us quite rightly of the legacy of the Nazis; but they all-too often neglect to discuss the specter of Leftist totalitarianism. This in itself is a repetition of the dynamic of the 20th century, when really the only people who were fighting Fascism were Communists. One was forced to choose, as one may feel compelled to do today, between one or another totalitarianism. But one would do well to remember that (while it is certainly not a contest) the Stalinists ended up slaughtering even more innocent people than the Nazis. Musil, who scandalously refused to affiliate with Soviet totalitarianism even as he firmly repudiated German and Austrian Nazism, was keenly aware of the dangers both constituted for the artist and ethical individual, as well as for the health of democratic society.
Anyone concerned with finding a meaningful stance between the realms of ideologically-driven political engagement and some form of artistic autonomy and critical freedom of thought would be wise to take such dangers seriously. Zadie Smith’s 2009 essay wondered whether politics might at that time come to be tempered by the sort of intellectual freedom of thought and perspectivism modeled by literature, thus approaching some sort of fruitful detente between the two perennial rivals. With comparable utopian fervor, Musil insisted — amid the ideological horrors of the 1930s — that the prime goal of politics was to ensure to artistic and intellectual practitioners the freedom to work unburdened by political, economic, or social instrumentalization. Such intellectual freedom would, he proposed, foster and ensure political freedoms as well.
Reading Musil’s writings on the role and responsibility of the artist in a particularly treacherous political and social situation, we see him continually negotiating between what, on the one hand, he calls the “duty to bear witness,” and elsewhere, the “challenge and duty to speak. To practice criticism,” and, on the other, his commitment to preserving the artist’s autonomous position in a time of Gleichschaltung. We also see him merely struggling to survive. Suffering under the ban of his books, wearied by the effort of shuttling back and forth between Germany and Austria, two lands without any market for his work, existential crises become a matter of life and death, not solely of ethics and aesthetic principles. It is hard to imagine — even in our own challenging moment — just how excruciatingly difficult it must have been for Musil and his contemporaries to hesitate on the razor-sharp edge between speaking out and remaining silent, as the clock ticked and millions of lives were in the balance. Amann’s book, Literature and Politics, paints a picture, at times harrowing, always compelling, of how a particularly conscientious man, committed with preternatural obsession to the completion of a never-ending novel, negotiated a life as author and as responsible engaged witness to the treacherous regimes of German and Austrian Fascism. And Musil’s own attempts to bear witness, his notes for articles never published, the aphorisms intended for publication in foreign papers when to publish them in Germany or Austria would have meant suicide, the speeches he actually dared to give and the revisions, reflections, and his own responses to responses to these speeches, show Musil struggling mightily under the strained tug of war between reality and possibility, freedom and censorship, fear and bravery. When he decided to withdraw his name and contribution from a fledgling journal organized in resistance to the Nazi regime, he justified his reasons well enough, but then reflected, “Just the same, bravery speaks with a different voice; it knows no such considerations, and the brave man fights back when he is attacked. Very often he is then helped by luck. For days I have been feeling miserable in the midst of this conflict.”
Musil’s writings themselves testify to his excruciatingly nauseating ambivalence and often make for hair-raising reading. Musil’s words, his work and commitment to art, while in poverty in Swiss exile, show him struggling to work out impossible formulae in an impossible time, straining to make sense of the senseless and find some way back to sanity. A way back to ethics and humanity and, indeed, to a world wherein he might peacefully and safely feed himself and his Jewish wife Martha, and continue, un-harassed, work on the novel he had come to regard as his destiny.
Before the fall, in the relatively normal 1920s, his theater reviews, essays on the commodification and instrumentalization of the theater, and the plays he wrote in the decade before the devastations of the 1930s and 40s, stand as vital documents of a time not unlike our own present ’20s. The worst seems possible, even probable. Yet we can hope and work to avert a repetition of the last age of Totalitarianisms. While researching the actors and actresses, directors and playwrights Musil writes about in the pages of Theater Symptoms, I found that many of them perished, either in Nazi concentration camps or Stalinist gulags; others sold their souls to one or the other devil; some, like Musil, lived out their interrupted lives in exile and poverty, others took their lives, and a lucky few immigrated, like my own maternal grandparents, to America, or elsewhere. These people, artists and fellow human beings, once vibrant and alive on the stages, in the cafes, battling it out in the newspapers and the streets of Europe, call us to attention and remind us of the importance of art. Art as an autonomous realm where dichotomies can dynamically struggle, where imagination is boundless, where no solutions are final. These artists and poets, as the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” give us the courage to go on with our work, be it art, politics, teaching, learning, and being critically reflecting and open-minded humans, as if our lives and the lives of many others depended on it. I think they do.