symploke

In the January 14, 2000 issue of the journal Science, Stephen Jay Gould published an article titled “Deconstructing the ‘Science Wars’ by Reconstructing an Old Mold,” referring to the familiar conflict between scientific realists and humanist social constructivists. The primary battleground is whether science describes a world it finds ready-made or makes that world in the process of “discovering” it: whether “reality” is a product of nature or culture. Gould is not the first to characterize this dispute. In 1956 C. P. Snow referred to science and the humanities as “two cultures” having less and less to do with each other. A more recent—and a spectacular—battle was Alan Sokal’s mischievous prank in the journal Social Text. In fact, according to the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour, some version of the science wars has been with us since the advent of modernity, and, Latour argues, the science wars will not go away until we cease being modern because they are the inevitable product of the intellectual practices of modernity itself. Ceasing to be modern does not mean becoming post-modern; rather, it means becoming what Latour calls “nonmodern.” Latour’s nonmodern-ism is an attempt to understand the production of scientific knowledge without recourse to an a priori distinction between Nature on the one hand and Culture on the other. For this fundamental distinction is itself a product of modernism’s intellectual habits.

Drawing on Latour’s analysis of the science wars, I want to propose the essayistic narrative technique of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities as the discursive strategy of nonmodernity, and therefore as an alternative to the modernist operations which produced and perpetuate the science wars and what they entail. In a 1921 review of Oswald [End Page 183] Spengler’s Decline of the West Musil asserts that “the pointless battle in contemporary civilization between scientific thinking and the claims of the soul can be solved only by adding something, a plan, a direction to work in, a different valuing of science as well as literature!” (“Mind and Experience” 149). Musil’s essayismus is that plan, direction, and different valuing. His theory of essayismus ¹ and its discursive practice in The Man Without Qualities (1930–1943) operationalizes a nonmodern worldview closely analogous to Latour’s, a conception of the complexly mediated relation between humans and nonhumans already taking shape in Musil’s 1908 dissertation on the physicist Ernst Mach. Musil’s essayismus is first an attempt to configure a discursive space—the essay—between domains ordered by rational regularity and those not susceptible to systematic structuring: that is, between science on the one hand and art and life on the other. Secondly, the practice of essayismus leads to de-reification of ontological distinctions, resulting in what Musil terms “the other condition” in which “the border between the self and nonself is less sharp than usual” (“German as Symptom” 186). As a discursive mediation of science and art, the ordered and the chaotic, the nonhuman and the human, essayismus parallels Latour’s nonmodern effort to re-orient and re-organize the modernist intellectual operations which continue to carve up experience in unsatisfactory ways.