Kakanien als Gesellschaftskonstruktion. Robert Musils Sozioanalyse des 20. Jahrhunderts by Norbert Christian Wolf (review)

Robert Musil has always occupied something of a liminal position, especially among Anglophone, but also among European (even German) readers as well. He is well known and read among professional Germanists, but disproportionately less among non-experts. Musil has never achieved the popular status of, for example, Proust. You could say that the achievement is not equal in both cases, although in 1999 a group of ninety-nine scholars, writers, and critics elected The Man Without Qualities the most important German novel of the twentieth century. They could be wrong, of course, but if one has actually read Musil’s masterpiece one gets the sense they aren’t. There are undoubtedly many explanations for this kind of dual reception, but among these it must be said that as a whole Musil scholarship to date has not been very successful at connecting his work to the larger concerns (intellectual, historical, philosophical) that exist outside the realm of specifically German literary studies. To take just one non-trivial example, there has been virtually no systematic effort to read Musil into the problematics of poststructuralism, despite the fact that this set of concerns has come (and in a sense gone) in most other areas of literary and cultural study. It is of course not the responsibility of Germanists to make their heroes others readers’ heroes, but one still gets the sense of a lost opportunity to argue for a more important place for Musil in Western intellectual history, current as well as past.

One recent attempt to read Musil into more contemporary theoretical connections is Norbert Christian Wolf’s Kakanien als Gesellschaftskonstruktion. Robert Musils Sozioanalyse des 20. Jahrhunderts, which makes use of the sociological analytical methods of Pierre Bourdieu. Wolf’s “Gesamtanalyse” (something like a “total analysis”) of The Man Without Qualities consists of three parts. Part I lays the theoretical ground work. As Wolf explains, in contradistinction to Bourdieu’s more general “field theory” which relies on the cultural context to explain the literary artifact, the critical practice he deploys here draws on the literary text to illuminate the structure of the cultural field from which it emerges. The analysis relies on two fundamental concepts in Bourdieu’s theory: habitus and field. The concept of the habitus tries to capture the subjective dispositions (patterns of perception, thought, and action) which an individual acquires from her/his immersion in a particular social field (network of power relations) understood as a social space structured by rules, expectations, opinions, etc. In other words, the objective structures of the field are inculcated into the subjective dispositions of the individuals who inhabit it. Just as an individual’s habitus implies a practical understanding of one’s social field, an author’s conscious or unconscious understanding of the world puts her/him in the position to propose characters whose action and speech express a certain implicit understanding of the world represented in the novel and as that relates to the social field in which the author exists. In this way, one fundamental operating assumption of Bourdieu’s and Wolf’s method is that the fictional text provides itself with the instruments necessary for its own sociological analysis. That is, the novel offers an implicit reconstruction of the epoch and society against which not only the action and the characters but also the appearance of the novel itself can be read. Part I also provides a thorough discussion of the fundamental conceptual components of Musil’s novel and the cultural analysis on which it is based. These include terms familiar to Musil scholars: Gestaltlosigkeit, Eigenschaftslosigkeit, Möglichkeitssinn, Essayismus. Detailed discussion of these central terms allows Wolf to integrate the largely new theoretical approach and established critical concerns in Musil scholarship, thereby building important bridges between existing and new understandings of Musil and his work.

Part II constitutes the body of Wolf’s interpretation of Musil’s novel and, following Bourdieu’s theory, views the setting of Musil...