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Musil und das kakanische Verwaltungswissen

  • Burkhardt Wolf
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2023/2024
This chapter is in the book 2023/2024

Abstract

The ›administrative knowledge‹ that Robert Musil’s epochal Man without Qualities negotiates bears witness to the diffusion of bureaucratic concerns into the most diverse areas of life that is typical of modernity: in addition to public administration, which in Kakania (as already in the historical Habsburg Empire) functions as a surrogate of a modern state system, the organizational model of entities such as the Parallel Action is thematized, as is management in the spirit of a new, creative capitalism or the chiliastic notion of a celestial bureaucracy. Administrations open up spaces that Musil conceived as a playground for human and political possibilities, and their practices enact the concept of authorship to which Musil himself was committed.

Abstract

The ›administrative knowledge‹ that Robert Musil’s epochal Man without Qualities negotiates bears witness to the diffusion of bureaucratic concerns into the most diverse areas of life that is typical of modernity: in addition to public administration, which in Kakania (as already in the historical Habsburg Empire) functions as a surrogate of a modern state system, the organizational model of entities such as the Parallel Action is thematized, as is management in the spirit of a new, creative capitalism or the chiliastic notion of a celestial bureaucracy. Administrations open up spaces that Musil conceived as a playground for human and political possibilities, and their practices enact the concept of authorship to which Musil himself was committed.

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