The General Enters the Library: A Note on Disciplines and Complexity
The General Enters the Library: A Note on Disciplines and Complexity
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将军进入图书馆：关于纪律和复杂性的说明
作者：
David Wellbery
在罗伯特·穆西尔的《没有品质的人》的第85章中，斯图姆·冯·博德韦尔将军参观了维也纳的国家图书馆。斯图姆·冯·博德韦尔将军与克劳迪亚·乔查特和霍莉·戈莱特利一起，是现代文学中最滑稽成功的名词发明之一。他正在寻求解决这个困扰着知识分子、艺术家、教授、政府官员和社会名流的问题，这些人参与了“平行行动”的宏伟文化工程。在对现代性的彻底误解中，斯图姆希望找到一个单一的主导理念(或理念)，在这个理念下，20世纪初奥地利社会无可救药的异质价值观和努力可以被纳入其中：一个普遍令人信服的规范，一个总体的综合体。厌倦了充斥着他作为军方代表的特设委员会会议上的无方向言论，这位头脑简单的军官突然想到，这个收集和编目所有知识的地方，一定蕴藏着他和他的同胞们作为他们的文化使命而承担的堂吉诃德追求的圣杯。在那里，在图书馆里，知识的顶峰或组织中心必须屈从于他的掌握：一本书，甚至一本书中的一句话，在这本书中，至高无上的思想已经达到了其无懈可击的表述的终极。在1930年出版的一部小说中，将这位军人讽刺为认识论上的朴素，这是一个很好的巧合。同年，卡尔·曼海姆的经典文章《智慧的ziologie》发表，其中--
In the eighty-fifth chapter of Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, General Stumm von Bordwehr—who, along with Clawdia Chauchat and Holly Golightly, is one of the most comically successful onomastic inventions of modern literature—visits the state library in Vienna. He is seeking a solution to the problem boggling the minds of the intellectuals, artists, professors, government officials, and socialites involved in the grand cultural project of the “parallel action.” Ensconced in the thoroughgoing misunderstanding of modernity that sustains the pointless project, Stumm hopes to locate the single leading idea (or Idea) beneath which the hopelessly heterogeneous values and endeavors of early twentieth-century Austrian society could be subsumed: a universally compelling norm, an overarching synthesis. Tired of the directionless talk that fills the meetings of the ad hoc committee on which he serves as the representative of the military, the literal-minded officer has hit upon the thought that the very site where all knowledge is collected and catalogued must harbor the grail of the quixotic quest he and his compatriots have assumed as their cultural mission. There, in the library, the pinnacle or organizing center of knowledge must yield itself to his grasp: the one book, and perhaps even the one sentence in the one book, in which that supreme Idea has achieved the finality of its unassailable formulation. It is a telling coincidence that this satire of the military man as epistemological naif occurs in a novel published in 1930. That same year witnessed the publication of Karl Mannheim’s classic article “Wissenssoziologie,” which in-