Knowledge of regulation and the sense of possibilities

The research project is founded in literary and cultural studies. It will analyse discourses of regulation and experimentalisation in the period from 1914 till 1933, i.e. a period in which a certain type of governance that is called `gouvernemental` escalates and collapses in Europe. It deals with the intercommunicative relationships between a knowledge of regulation and the processes of discipline and normalisation (applied psychology, ergonomics, insurance business, regulation of population, war technology and military organisation), with the production of new subjectivities (techniques of self-experimentation, self-observation as an objectifying introspection, statistical registration of human behaviour), with the experimentalisation of political and administrative processes, with the modelling of knowledge about the body (in sciences of sexuality, prosthetics and anthropology) and with the position occupied by concepts of potentiality in this configuration. We shall analyse "possible bodies" und "possible spaces" blueprinted in literature as components of a history of violence and government, and we shall focus especially on those moments when the construction of possible worlds slips into phantasms of regulation. The project will probe the knowledge about regulation and control as well as the experimentalisation of knowledge in general in literature, in political theory (and in neighbouring discourses such as political economy), in the experimental sciences (applied psychology, engineering, medicine) and in philosophy. We shall compare contemporary texts from different domains with the method of historical discourse analysis. In terms of a "poetology of knowledge" (Joseph Vogl) , the project will inquire when and with which functions the discourse of (self)regulation, experimentalisation, essayism, of an "experimental society" (Robert Musil) emerges. It will also concern the issue how personal conduct, as well as the control of conduct, is organised, how this organisation deploys and authorises itself and how it spreads. By reconstructing the form of knowledge about regulation at the beginning of 20th century, we aim to contextualise current neo-liberal argumentative patterns and to scrutinise them. In our opinion, argumentative patterns coined in the beginning of 20th century have resurfaced in recent years. We maintain that particularly the recent reference to moments of self-regulation (of individuals, markets, etc.) are worth a historical consideration, as well as the reference to risks and dynamic systems that would require new forms of control, and the resulting promises of freedom for a "enterprising" subject. Such a historical exploration could show which concepts of power and violence are sedimented in these liberal conceptions of government. Authors the project will deal with: a. Literature/essays: Rudolf Brunngraber, Alfred Döblin, Thea von Harbou, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Jünger, Robert Musil, Otto Soyka, Robert Walser b. Administrative and operational sciences, medicine, economics (insurance discourse, prosthetics, psychotechnic, statistics, imaging methods, scientific management): Georg Schlesinger, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, Fritz Giese, Hugo Münsterberg, Narziss Ach, Kurt Lewin, Magnus Hirschfeld, Heinz von Foerster, Otto Neurath c. Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans Vaihinger, Otto Neurath, Edgar Zilsel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen

The project addressed two of the early twentieth century`s fundamental forms of knowledge, which interact in a relationship of considerable tension: a knowledge that enables "government" in the sense of shaping and steering society, and a knowledge that seeks the as-yet-unknown as a resource and tries to tap a range of capacities - psychological, economic, biological - by means of experimentation. A "normalising", regulatory knowledge of the biopower that intervenes in life in the form of security dispositifs contrasts with a "minimally invasive", liberal notion of politics that makes strategic use of the self-regulation of fundamental economic processes through the concept of interest. In an open field of possibilities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, governing increasingly consisted in recognising potentialities or producing probabilities that structured the field of action. In that process, it was precisely gestures of possibility that fuelled the desire to regulate. Our research revealed that the category of "behaviour" in the early twentieth century was crucial to the interaction between the sense of possibilities and the knowledge of regulation. Whether in its sense of restricting possibilities or of opening them up, "behaviour" seemed to offer a way for regulation to access the uncontrollable and the contingent - such as affects, motivations or the will of singular individuals - in order to optimise society, population policy or the economy. Our project thus allied the question of how knowledge of behaviour emerged to the question of how it was staged, using this perspective to investigate literary texts in terms of the interplay between fictions of regulation, history of science, and interventionary interests. Robert Musil`s novel The Man Without Qualities, for example, proposes a poetics of behavioural research in which the literary medium is used not only to analyse human actions and reactions, but also to steer them by drawing up models of behaviour. Yet in Musil`s virtually impenetrable thicket of study notes and rough drafts, reflections and self-commentaries, the mass of the written tangles into a "mare`s nest of forces". Conversely, Peter Altenberg`s collections of aphorisms, structured in analogy to a daily paper, show the feedback mechanism of such (vain) attempts to manage behaviour impacting on poetics: the reader is now offered a loose series of advisory "extracts" and "recipes for life", to be picked out and playfully configured at a kind of literary buffet. In the course of the research, it emerged that in the interwar period the disciplines of education, psychology and ergonomics - along with the life and natural sciences (including neurology, physiology, chemistry, pharmacology) - were not only pursuing research as a social practice, but also maintaining a close relationship with the arts. If Robert Musil and Bertolt Brecht integrate Kurt Lewin`s procedures of aptitude testing and workers` training into their aesthetic frames, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Bernfeld conceptualise theatrical forms as a method of investigation and as a regulatory space of child behaviour. Here, art is simultaneously both research and intervention.