Autopoietic modernism: literature, reflexivity, and the ecology of meaning in Robert Musil – Watson (2025, preprint)

[Sound because I was searching (in a lazy internet way) to see if anyone had coined ‘autopoeitic drift’ before me]

Preprints and early-stage research may not have been peer reviewed yet.

Abstract

This article proposes that Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities anticipates the systemic reflexivity that defines modern social and ecological life. Reading Musil through Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis, Luhmann’s theory of second-order observation, and Watson and Brezovec’s recent work on autopoietic ecology, the essay argues that the novel functions as a living system 1 : a network that reproduces meaning through continuous self-observation. Musil’s portrayal of Kakania reveals a society that endures through procedural vitality rather than belief, exposing the recursive operations that sustain modern institutions. In this context, Laclau’s notion of the empty signifier and Derrida’s différance illuminate how communication survives the exhaustion of meaning, while the rise of populism and mistrust in institutions mark the global extension of Musil’s crisis of reflexivity. Ulrich and Agathe’s “other condition” represents the counter-movement to this drift-an experiment in relational consciousness that models the ecological coupling absent from bureaucratic systems. Their intimacy, interpreted through Haraway’s situated knowledges and Latour’s actor-network theory, exemplifies an ethics of recursive relation rather than transcendence. The essay concludes that Musil’s unfinished modernism articulates an autopoietic ethics: a mode of responsiveness and adaptation suited to a world in which meaning, communication, and life are co-extensive operations. In translating early modernist reflexivity into contemporary ecological terms, Musil offers a paradigm for rethinking ethics and politics under the conditions of global systemic interdependence. I treat autopoiesis as a structural homology rather than a biological literalism: the novel models how meaning reproduces its own enabling distinctions. This clarifies Musil’s contemporary relevance: under audit cultures and platform governance, communication increasingly survives by reproducing procedures after conviction has waned.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/397379750_Autopoietic_modernism_literature_reflexivity_and_the_ecology_of_meaning_in_Robert_Musil

[Other uses of the phrase ‘autopoeitic drift’ appear to be around the maintenance of a specific ‘living’ artowrk or set of artworks:]

https://www.getty.edu/publications/living-matter/keynote/

Click to access RivencRoth_LivingMatter.pdf

[And this, which speaks of Assemblages and Plato, Tarski and, um, other things too:]