Philosophizing Brecht : Critical Readings on Art, Consciousness, Social Theory and Performance [1 ed.] 9789004404502, 9789004404434

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Philosophizing Brecht

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts General Editor Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe Editorial Board Anna Bonshek Per Brask John Danvers Amy Ione Michael Mangan Jade Rosina McCutcheon Gregory Tague Arthur Versluis Christopher Webster Ralph Yarrow

volume 55

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cla

Philosophizing Brecht Critical Readings on Art, Consciousness, Social Theory and Performance

Edited by

Norman Roessler Anthony Squiers

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: “Philosophizing Brecht”, © Jim Grilli 2018. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Roessler, Norman, editor, author, | Squiers, Anthony, editor, author. Title: Philosophizing Brecht : critical readings on art, consciousness, social theory and performance / edited by Norman Roessler Anthony Squiers. Description: Leiden | Boston : Brill Rodopi, 2019. | Series: Consciousness, literature and the arts | Philosophizing Brecht: An Introduction for Dark Times / Anthony Squiers -- The Performance of racialized bodies and Brecht’s operatic anthropology / Kevin S. Amidon -- Consciousness in Brechtian acting: de-familiarizing the self / Peter Zazzali -- Brecht and film theory: how Brecht’s theory and Method impacted the development of “screen theory” / Jeremy Spencer -Philosophizing with Brecht and Gunther Anders: what Is wrong with moralism? / Wolfgang Fritz Haug -- Philosophizing with Brecht and Plato: on Socratic courage / Anthony Squiers -Brecht, the popular, and intellectuals in dark times: of donkeys and “Tuis” / Philip Glahn -Brecht, dialectics and dialogical art: an engagement with contemporary art practices / Jose Maria Duran -- Philosophizing Brecht: an (In)conclusion / Norman Roessler. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019015818 (print) | LCCN 2019020636 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004404502 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004404434 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Brecht, Bertolt, 1898-1956--Criticism and interpretation. | Brecht, Bertolt, 1898-1956--Knowledge--Philosophy. | Brecht, Bertolt, 1898-1956--Political and social views. Classification: LCC PT2603.R397 (ebook) | LCC PT2603.R397 Z79466 2019 (print) | DDC 832/.912--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019015818 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1573-2193 ISBN 978-90-04-40443-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-40450-2 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To my parents, Berni and Tom Buszek for all their loving support ­throughout the years—AS To my father, Robert L. Roessler, and my children, Julian McFadden ­Roessler and Eliza McFadden Roessler—NR

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We must let philosophy escape again. It’s imprisoned. Bertolt Brecht, Me-ti

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Contents Notes on Contributors  viii 1 Philosophizing Brecht: An Introduction for Dark Times  1 Anthony Squiers 2 The Performance of Racialized Bodies and Brecht’s Operatic Anthropology  7 Kevin S. Amidon 3 Consciousness in Brechtian Acting: Defamiliarizing the Self  24 Peter Zazzali 4 Brecht and Film Theory: How Brecht’s Theory and Method Impacted the Development of “Screen Theory”  47 Jeremy Spencer 5 Philosophizing with Brecht and Günther Anders: What Is Wrong with Moralism?  75 Wolfgang Fritz Haug 6 Philosophizing with Brecht and Plato: On Socratic Courage  93 Anthony Squiers 7 Brecht, the Popular, and Intellectuals in Dark Times: Of Donkeys and “Tuis”  121 Philip Glahn 8 Brecht, Dialectics and Dialogical Art: An Engagement with Contemporary Art Practices  145 José María Durán 9 Philosophizing Brecht: An (In)Conclusion  179 Norman Roessler Index  203

Notes on Contributors Kevin S. Amidon Ph.D., is Associate Professor of German Studies at Iowa State University. His publications explore the interdisciplinary spheres of critical theory, race, evolutionary thought, the Frankfurt School, German and American history, gender history and theory, eugenics, opera, and theater. José María Durán Ph.D., teaches Cultural Studies at the School of Music Hans Eisler in Berlin. His publications include La crítica de la economía política del arte (2015), Iconoclasia, historia del arte y lucha de clases (2009) and William Morris: trabajo y comunismo (2014). Felix Fuchs is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at McGill University. He works on Marxist theory and world literature. His research on literary form focuses on Global Anglophone literature since 1990 with a focus on South Asia. Philip Glahn Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Critical Studies and Aesthetics at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. His research and teaching focus on the histories, theories, and practices of art as technology, labor, and activism. His book Bertolt Brecht was published in 2014. Jim Grilli holds a B.A. in Fine Arts, from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA. He was a 2017 Fellow at The Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and had a Community Partnership in the Arts Residency at the Fleisher Art Memorial in 2017. Wolfgang Fritz Haug Ph.D., Habil., is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. His many publications include Kritik der Warenästhetik (1971) and Philosophieren mit Brecht und Gramsci (1996). He is Editor-in-Chief of the 15  ­volume Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus and a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences.

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Norman Roessler Ph.D., is Associate Professor at Temple University. He was Editor of the International Brecht Society’s Communications Journal from 2006-2011 and wrote the Introductions for the Penguin Classics Editions of Brecht’s plays (2007). Jeremy Spencer Ph.D., is an Associate Lecturer of Fine Art Contextual Studies at Camberwell College of Arts, London, UK. His work has been published nationally and internationally in journals such as Historical Materialism, Artfractures Quarterly, Rebus and the Journal of Visual Art Practice. Anthony Squiers Ph.D., Habil., is an Associate Professor of Government at Tarrant County College and Privatdozent für Amerikanistik at the Universität Passau. He is the author of An Introduction to the Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht: Revolution and Aesthetics (Brill|Rodopi, 2014). Peter Zazzali Ph.D., is a stage director and Associate Professor at the University of Kansas, he has acted and directed in over 150 productions. He is the author of Acting in the Academy: the History of Professional Actor Training in US Higher Education (2016).

Chapter 1

Philosophizing Brecht: An Introduction for Dark Times Anthony Squiers Abstract This essay serves as a general introduction to the volume. It contextualizes, problematizes, and theorizes Brecht given the grim realities of our present day. Expounding on Brecht’s idea that dark times call for extraordinary virtues, it explores the importance of the project of philosophizing Brecht now and argues that Brecht offers unforeclosed and liberating possibilities which are rendered through his willingness to perplex, empiricism and practical attitude toward philosophy.

In a journal entry from March of 1940, Bertolt Brecht wrote that he was “considering a little epic work, the fears of herr keuner [sic]”1 and jotted down a few ideas that would ultimately take the form of his collection of parables and aphorisms, Stories of Mr. Keuner [Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner]. This entry provides a candid glimpse at the preoccupations he was struggling with at the time. Keuner, according to Brecht: “is afraid that the earth may become uninhabitable if too great crimes, or too great virtues become necessary before a man can make enough to live on. thus herr keuner flees from country to country, since too much is asked of him everywhere, be it self-sacrifice, or bravery, or cleverness, or desires for freedom or thirst for justice, or cruelty, or deceit etc. all these lands are uninhabitable [sic].”2 Brecht wrote this passage in Sweden less than a month before the threat of Nazism would force him and his family to flee yet another country seeking safety. This time it would be to Finland and then later the United States. Earlier it was Germany for Denmark and Denmark for Sweden. There was a real background of urgency looming, not just for Brecht and his family but for all humanity. The enemy was winning and threatening to eradicate history’s

1 Brecht, B., Rorrison, H., & Willett, J. (1996). Bertolt Brecht Journals. New York: Routledge, 48. 2 Ibid.

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progress, to destroy the socialist project and all that for which Brecht aspirated. These were indeed finsteren Zeiten [dark times]. In Keuner, against the bleak, sinister times that enveloped him, Brecht says of the eponymous character: Mr. K. spoke disparagingly of the efforts of the philosophers to describe all things as fundamentally unknowable. ‘When the Sophists asserted that they knew a great deal without having studied anything,’ he said, ‘Socrates…came forward with the arrogant assertion that he knew that he knew nothing. One might have expected that he would add to his sentence: because I, too, have studied nothing… But, he does not appear to have said anything more, and perhaps the immeasurable applause that burst out after his first sentence and that has lasted for more than two thousand years would have drowned out any further sentence.’3 Brecht’s literary choices were anything but arbitrary. They were thought out, debated and had to have utility. So, why has Brecht summoned Socrates in this parable, which he considered a response to a crucial moment for the trajectory of history? What use does Socrates provide? Why turn to him in such dark and urgent times? The answer seems to lie in Socrates representing the origins of the Western intellectual heritage. By turning to Socrates poetically, Brecht signifies a return to that heritage’s provenience. This is not a surprising move for Brecht. In this volume, we will see that the failures of this heritage to unleash the emancipatory potential of the future is a consistent, reoccurring Brechtian theme. For example, Haug’s essay shows this disappointment and Brecht’s practical end-around to the problems of philosophy was where philosopher, ­Günther ­Anders’ attraction to him lay—in his attempt to move beyond the self-­obsession of philosophy—a self-obsession Brecht hints at with the sophists’ “immeasurable” self-congratulatory applause. According to Haug, Anders sees Brecht’s transcendence of mere philosophy by employing “the artistic mode of representation in order to revolutionize the representational mode of philosophy,” thus allowing real social issues to be addressed. For Anders, Brecht has not only called out the intellectual heritage for its failings but has also identified where the fault lies, in its representational mode. This is not unlike how Glahn frames the issue below, arguing that at the core of Brecht’s critique of the Tuis (an inverted acronym for intellectuals Brecht 3 Brecht, Bertolt, and Martin Chalmers. Stories of Mr. Keuner. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2001. Print: 41.

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used derogatorily) is their neglect of the “‘actively transformative’ dimensions of thinking.” Contrary to this was Brecht’s actively transformative approach to philosophy, his art—precisely the representational mode which attracted Anders to Brecht. However, Brecht would not have to return to the roots of the Western intellectual heritage just to point out its failures. In his mind, as Glahn’s essay illustrates, he was surrounded by figures who could sufficiently represent this. If this was all Brecht wanted to do, he could have written a parable about Adorno or Lukács. This leads us to believe there must be something more to Brecht’s reversion to Socrates. Indeed, there is an unsubtle desire for a recrudescence, a breaking out afresh in the way Brecht discusses Socrates. There is something about Socrates that Plato, Xenophon and then two-thousand years of social, political, and aesthetic theory have distorted, missed, misrepresented, made “fake news”—but, have not totally obscured or negated. Specifically, it is that which has been drowned out by the self-interested applauds of the sophists (or at least that which might have been said during the applauds). Brecht returns to Socrates, to represent something redeemable and reusable within the Western intellectual heritage. In short, Brecht turns to Socrates in those dark times for the same reason we now turn to Brecht in our own dark times. It is in hopes of seeing the unforeclosed possibilities, liberating possibilities which are rendered through a willingness to perplex and a practical attitude toward philosophy. This willingness to perplex is defined by a disposition to confront complexity, ask difficult questions and be ready for even more difficult answers. The practical attitude toward philosophy is defined by a readiness to engage in the material realm, to be a philosopher of praxis. Both these characteristics are essential to the characterisation of Socrates Brecht paints in his short story, “Socrates Wounded,” as we will see later in this volume and they are essential to the characterisation of Brecht made by this anthology’s contributors. Brecht’s willingness to perplex is an intellectual inclination to confront social life in all its complexity. Social life is a multifaceted and intricate system of contradictory parts which can only be truly understood when understood in relation to all the other contradictory parts and to the system of contradictions as a whole. Understanding, then, is no easy task. To succeed, one must be prepared to look from multiple vantages, to enter from different angles, to formulate complicated questions and most of all persist in asking them. Moreover, the willingness to perplex compels one to venture into foreign intellectual terrain, to transgress disciplinary boundaries. Brecht paid little heed to disciplinary boundaries. He perplexed and let it go where it needed to be of use. He transgressed discursive bounds, penetrated the social world from

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d­ ifferent angles, foraged in strange intellectual fields. Because of this attitude, the prolific and diverse forms his perplexing took and the intellectual terrains in which he ventured, he can be placed sensibly in dialog with a wide variety of discourses which allow the social world to be more fully revealed. In this volume, this ranges from contemporary art practices vis-à-vis Althusser, Kester and Bakhtin (Durán), to acting theory vis-à-vis the neuroscience of Damasio (Zazalli), to classical philosophy on courage (Squiers), to film theory and the Screen problematic (Spencer) and more. These types of dialogs in themselves create innumerable possibilities for a greater, more generalized understanding of the complex social world. They add dimensions of comprehension that can help to identify and diagnose social maladies. But, when we couple them with Brecht’s practical orientation to philosophy—his materially transformative interventions—we get to the crux of Brecht’s usefulness in our dark times, curing the sickness. Brecht was keenly aware of the dialectical interplay between theory and praxis, the ideological and the material. He intuited the way we conceive our world shapes our material realities and that those material realities mould the way we understand the world, which in turn plays back on the material realities, which in turn plays back on our understanding ad infinitum. This is a ceaseless pas de deux between the ideological structure and material conditions which although characterised by tension between the two which results in changes to both, when left on their own these elements tend to be mutually reinforcing, mutually reassuring. The ideological mostly confirms the material, the material mostly verifies the ideological. Changes tend to be small, incremental. It is a tedious, protracted process which has the practical consequence of prolonging suffering and material horrors. Furthermore, there is a certain psychological comfort to be found in it. It creates an assuredness, a confidence. Under normal circumstances the material and ideological correspond so closely there’s hardly a hint that things could be otherwise. The notion that other truths could exist, other possibilities rarely emerge. One takes perception of the world for granted. It seems totally natural, complete, matter-of-fact, timeless and by extension so does that which is perceived. In this way, the ephemeral, the historicised (e.g., particular forms of exploitation, suffering and misery) take on the appearance of being natural, eternal and matter-of-fact. They are simply taken for granted. Brecht’s solution to this as Glahn succinctly puts it in his essay below, is to be in “a critical, analytic engagement with the apparatuses that produce knowledge and experience in order to change them (both the apparatuses and the knowledge and experience).” His solution is to intervene in the material world through artistic representations so that the material is no longer allowed

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to comfortably, reassuringly correspond to the ideological and vice versa. It is to disrupt the accustomed material world by producing unaccustomed representations of it which when internalised into the ideological framework of those who see them are cognitively unsettling. In this anthology, Amidon has taken Brecht’s insight on representing the world and turned it into a practical goal for the performer, to not allow the performing body to work against the exposition of gestic elements by becoming “falsely particular”—a “fetishizable object,” and for Zazalli, the insight leads to conclusions about the type of conscience self-awareness an actor needs to produce representations which can disrupt. Practical applications like these can help undo the natural, complete, matter-of-fact, timeless, taken-for-granted comfort one has with their perceptions forcing them to see things differently—to see there is another way. Taken together, Brecht’s willingness to perplex and practical attitude toward philosophy form an experimental attitude. Ultimately, Brecht was result-­ orientated and was therefore willing to: try different things, be innovative, ­reinvent, put things to the empirical test to discover what works and what does not. There was always a tentativeness to Brecht’s material interventions, an open, never final characteristic. In sum, Brecht’s representations of the material world were designed to undermine hegemonic ideology and produce cognitive uncertainly which would force people to conclude that humans are largely responsible for the construction of their ideological and material reality and that they are therefore not bound to how things are presently. Alternatives are possible. This argument does not make Brecht an important Marxist thinker. It is not unique. However, Brecht did not just make this argument. He developed novel approaches to go about changing the reality. This is why he is a significant figure. He represents a materially transformative impulse which is exactly why he needs to be philosophised, put in dialog with other thinkers. This has a dual purpose. It opens Brecht up to new dimensions of social understanding and it opens up a transformative potential in other thinkers. In the journal entry above, Brecht raises the idea that dark times call for extraordinary virtues. This is a reoccurring idea in Brecht’s thought. In Me-ti he says, “As a general rule, every country that needs to be specially moral is badly administered” or rendered more poetically, “The weaker the farmer’s brain, the stronger must be the muscles of his ox.”4 The idea is that the more corrupted the society, the more that is required in terms of morality and virtue on part of

4 Brecht, B., & In Tatlow, A. (2016). Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti: Book of interventions in the flow of things, 63.

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the people by their rulers. In such societies “People in general…can’t refuse to practise special virtues”5 because they are needed to survive. One only needs to consider the special virtues that are called for today to see we too are in dark times. How much self-denial is required of the hungry who cross desserts to feed themselves? How much self-sacrifice is required of soldiers who die in wars for the material advantage of billionaires? How much courage is required of their families? How much endurance is demanded in a society of mass shootings? In misogynistic orders? How clever does one need to be when pollution, climate change and nuclear holocaust threaten the planet with annihilation? Brecht pragmatically recognised that extraordinary virtues will continue to be practised “as long as those in power can use [them].”6 But, in an adroit dialectical move, he also understood that the special virtues which are useful to rulers (e.g., the “bravery, incorruptibility, sacrifice, discipline”) are precisely those needed “to overthrow those in power…and transform a country [so] that special virtues are no longer necessary in order to live.”7 Special virtues do not always have to be made useful for the rulers. They can be put to work against them. Varus required great courage of Arminius; but, great courage was also what was required to deal a coup de main that helped collapse a thousand-year order. The willingness to perplex, praxis-minding thinking and an experimental attitude are virtues that the ruling classes can certainly use. They can use it to make their war machines more destructive or to shape a more controllable, compliant, and complacent populace or to extract more value from workers. Nevertheless, the willingness to perplex, praxis-minding thinking and an experimental attitude are also virtues which can be used to undermine the ruling order. They are virtues which can break open new possibilities. In short, they are virtues which make alternatives possible—the hope of this book. This is why we philosophize Brecht in our dark times. 5 Ibid., 64. 6 Ibid., 64. 7 Ibid.

Chapter 2

The Performance of Racialized Bodies and Brecht’s Operatic Anthropology Kevin S. Amidon Abstract Taxonomic tropes and themes, particularly gender and class, but also race, function together in Brecht’s plays to create overdetermined characterizations. Parallel to these characterizations, he developed a multilayered theory of performance that emphasizes how those who enact text should approach the representation of diverse human types and groups. His encounter with Chinese acting established foundational elements in this theory. In parallel to his theoretical thinking about performance and race in the mid-1930s, Brecht was developing his stance toward operatic representation. While these two conceptual spheres, race and opera, might appear far apart in their content, they parallel each other closely in their theoretical stakes. The work of Joy Calico reveals that the way the voice becomes fungible through operatic performance both repelled and fascinated Brecht, such that this voice-object of opera accompanied his work as a kind of dialectical foil throughout his career. When read through the lens of race, this insight can be extended to reveal how the acting body itself becomes a fungible object, one that Brecht’s theories of estrangement and gestus strive, however inadequately, to make aesthetically and politically productive.

Throughout Brecht’s body of dramatic work, characters show a wide range of markers of race. Occasionally, they derive straightforwardly from geographic references, as in the Asian settings suggested in the titles of Der gute Mensch von Sezuan or the (reconstructed) Die Judith von Shimoda. Sometimes they emerge within the dramatic text, for example in the “Alabama” imagined repeatedly in the early scenes of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. Brecht’s characters also often bear markers of abstract difference that can be read as allegories of race, perhaps most obviously in Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe. Bound up with these figurations of race are also a palette of gendered themes that range from the homosocial to prostitution to the woman in moral conflict. Furthermore, class issues always stand at the center of Brecht’s thematics, particularly after his turn toward Marxism.

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Taken together, Brecht’s wide-ranging figurations of diversity provide productive material for reflection upon what scholars, since the revival and ­reanalysis of an existing anthropological term in the 1970s, have called racialization. Rohit Barot and John Bird describe the complex history and usage of this term, and come to a cogent summary that points to its usefulness in Brechtian contexts: Racialization is used consistently to indicate process and change at the cultural level… This is perhaps its most useful connotation; that…there is no one, fixed ideology of race but a range of ways in which structures and ideas are racialized… [I]f racialization is a process then it is a process that constructs bodies and psyches and may…look very like the forms of visceral hatred of older racial theories.1 The gender theorist, Jasbir Puar further emphasizes that markers of difference beyond traditional racial characteristics—in her case sexuality but even gender and class—participate in racialization because it refigures static naturalistic discourses as social processes: “I deploy ‘racialization’ as a figure for specific social formations and processes that are not necessarily or only tied to what has been historically theorized as ‘race.’”2 Brecht’s characters, whether they are marked racially in more concrete or more abstract ways, participate in, and reflect upon, processes through which their bodies are racialized: marked with difference that matters in the dramatic worlds in which they live and interact. Brecht’s taxonomic tropes and themes, represented as embedded in social processes from which gendered, class-marked, and racialized bodies emerge, function together to create the characterizations in his works. Beginning in the later 1920s and proceeding through the 1930s, Brecht argued with increasing sophistication that characters can be rendered effectively only through enactment of his theories of gestus and the estrangement effect (Verfremdungeffekt / V-Effekt). His works therefore carry with them a multilayered theory of performance that highlights, even in ways beyond those that Brecht himself foresaw, the representation of diverse human types and groups—contested also through type, stereotype, and caricature—at the center of performance. Brecht’s theories of performance also grew in many ways out of his encounter with a theatrical form that gave him, throughout his career, significant 1 Rohit Barot and John Bird. “Racialization: the genealogy and critique of a concept.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, no. 4 (2001): 601–618. Here 613–614. 2 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke UP, 2007), xii.

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i­ntellectual and artistic difficulty: opera. Opera, with its presentation of the body of the performer through the extremes of vocal display, focuses spectatorship on what can be seen and heard emerging from the body. It offers up the visible and sounding body for spectatorial consumption, and therefore easily becomes readable as what Brecht famously marked it as in his notes on his own operatic text, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny: “culinary.”3 In short, the body matters in all theater, but in opera the stakes of its performance rise to a particularly high degree. Recent theories of operatic performance have emphasized the ways in which the operatic voice emerges as an object, as a kind of mediator between the unique performing body and the represented text. These understandings of the function of the voice add layers of complexity to Brecht’s performance theory by potentially interrupting and refiguring the gestus and the V-Effekt. Furthermore, the taxonomic categories that can mark the performing body—particularly race—appear to be subject to a similar dynamics linking the spectator and the performing body. The racialized body is an object not only of culinary consumption, commodification, and display, but enacts a dynamics of mediation between text and performance similar to that of the operatic voice. Operatic voice and racialized body therefore exist in ongoing and correlated tension with the material of Brechtian performance theory. The potential political-economic Entfremdung [alienation] characteristic of both the racialized body and the operatic voice exists in tension with Brecht’s perception of the necessity for Verfremdung [estrangement] in theatrical practice and spectatorship. This tension not only contributed to Brecht’s own theoretical development during his lifetime, but it continues to characterize the conflicts over Brecht’s legacy today. Among the taxonomic thematics that arise across Brecht’s work, race may be the most difficult to trace through his thought and practice, because it seems at once both subtle and obvious in its figuration. Brecht’s dramatic characters often carry racializing markers, but through dramatic action they are often geographically or situationally estranged from their spaces and places of origin. This complicates their enactment of processes of racialization—the marking of their bodies with difference—through perception and reception by other characters and audiences. Furthermore, it is difficult—despite the racialization so clearly present in Brecht’s characterizations—to find something akin to a race concept in Brecht’s theoretical writings. Particularly in the essays and aphorisms that surround the development of the principles of epic theater in 3 For an exploration of these dynamics of spectatorship see: Kevin S. Amidon, “‘O show us…’: Opera and/as Spectatorship in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny,” The Brecht Yearbook 29 (2004): 222–236.

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the 1930s and 1940s, Brecht often speaks of class and of the human in general, and also of scientific approaches that enable epistemic access to the human, including in particular psychology, sociology, economics and history.4 Race, however, is largely absent on the surface of Brecht’s arguments. Nonetheless the fraught and violent history of the race concept, along with the concept’s central deployment in colonial policy, seem as if they would logically have to motivate Brecht’s many and overt concerns with exploitation and inhumanity. Rarely, however, do they do so obviously. Thus, the friction between Brecht’s tentative and mediated approaches to race and what appears to be its necessary position at the heart of his concerns requires and rewards close analysis. A number of scholars have identified, explored, and critiqued the ways in which Brecht’s theoretical writings appear to manifest a lack of interest in race, and further how his dramatic works seem to traffic in stereotype and caricature as much as they engage racialization critically. Significant throughout this scholarly spectrum is the history of the emergence of Brecht’s Marxism, and the ways in which class appears to subsume race in Brecht’s increasingly Marxist thought.5 An early example is Maria Alter’s 1967 essay “Bertolt Brecht und die rassischen Minderheiten” [Bertolt Brecht and Racial Minorities]. In it Alter reads episodes in Im Dickicht der Städte and Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches in which racially marked characters appear on the stage. In them, she argues, the characters clearly stage awareness of their own racialized, minority status. She compares them to the abstracted characterizations in Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe to draw out the ways in which apparently raceconscious characters remain exceptions in Brecht’s work. Representative moments in which race emerges onto the surface in Brecht’s plays therefore serve to demonstrate how, for Brecht—and ever more so as issues of racial prejudice and exclusion became subsumed into his developing Marxism—race conflict becomes an artifact of bourgeois society that requires confrontation through class struggle. She concludes that “Brecht does not see the problem of the relationships between races as a true problem, but rather as a byproduct of the ­social structure. He appears to be saying that if class consciousness were 4 See for example the essay “Vergnügungstheater oder Lehrtheater,” in Bertolt Brecht, Schriften, vol. 2, part 1, [Werke, Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. 22, part 1] (Berlin/Frankfurt am Main: Aufbau/Suhrkamp, 1993), 106–116. Edition hereafter cited as bfa. In the section of this essay entitled “Theater und Wissenschaft,” Brecht notably does not mention ethnology. Nonetheless German sociology in the 1920s overlapped considerably with the sphere of ethnology. See below. 5 For a recent exploration of the tensions in Marxism related to race, racism, and otherness, see: Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

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present, racial prejudice would necessarily disappear.”6 Alter thus diagnoses a central aspect of Brecht’s conceptualization of race along lines that have characterized the scholarly discourse ever since. Christian Rogowski’s contribution to the 2004 Brecht Yearbook constructs a complex reading of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny around the racemarked moments in Brecht’s other dramas. Rogowski identifies the troubled and contradictory valences of Brecht’s relationship to the linked spheres of race and gender, and develops a critique of the ways in which Brecht’s practice masks rather than highlights them. His consistent use of scare-quotes around “Rasse” demonstrates how the race concept seems always to remain at a distance from Brecht’s theoretical discourse and theatrical practice, and rarely shows up in Brecht’s own words. Brecht’s representational strategies point to both race and gender as spheres of conflict; but, received forms of prejudice and exclusion receive, in Rogowski’s reading, essentially no critical re-figuration in the works themselves, and devolve largely into stereotype. The surface-level characterizations in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, particularly of women and potentially multi-racial people, appear to stage a world in which the dynamics of exploitation become the focus of sustained critical engagement. Nonetheless this promise is not carried out, and Rogowski concludes that Brecht is simply disinterested in the problems of race and gender: “Through its disinterest in gender and ‘race,’ Brecht’s criticism of the capitalistic, bourgeois-patriarchal social order brackets out two central components of the commodification of human relationships.”7 Rogowski thus insists that Brecht’s blind spots about human diversity not be papered over with arguments that the social-critical aspects of Brechtian practice redeem the failure to expose gendered and race-marked injustice and exploitation. Loren Kruger has also dug deeply into how Brecht’s work and theories can be understood in and through racialized contexts. In her Post-Imperial Brecht: Politics and Performance, East and South, she argues that “Brecht’s legacy should not be mapped only on the Cold War axis of West to East, or only on the post-colonial axis of North to South.” Kruger seeks, rather, “multiple lines of force, so as to highlight the intersection and interference of these axes.”8 She places Brechtian texts, methods, and practices into tension with p ­ erformances, readings, interpretations, and stagings by others, especially those who come 6 Maria P. Alter, “Bertolt Brecht und die rassischen Minderheiten,” The German Quarterly 40.1 (Jan 1967): 66. 7 Christian Rogowski, “Schattenboxen: Zum Warencharakter von Geschlecht und ‘Rasse’ in Mahagonny,” The Brecht Yearbook 29 (2004): 336. Translation Amidon. 8 Loren Kruger, Post-Imperial Brecht: Politics and Performance, East and South (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 376.

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to Brecht from outside the European sphere.9 Her examination of the work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar, who worked with some of Brecht’s former students at the East Berlin Volksbühne for a time in 1976, reveals how racial thematics pose a challenge for those who wish to further develop Brechtian principles to address intercultural tension and conflict. Kruger reads Özdamar’s plays and memoirs as pointing precisely to race as a key site of absence in the Brechtian toolbox: “Although clearly drawing on Brecht, she [Özdamar] also highlights the limits of Brecht’s own relatively unreflected use of racial, especially orientalized stereotypes…”10 Kruger further develops several other intertextual moments. Particularly revealing is her analysis of the reception of the South African dramatist Athol Fugard’s work, with its clear themes of racialization and exclusion, in East Germany. Exploration of Brecht’s critical writings for sites where race becomes readable leads most directly to one essay from the 1930s that stands out because it raises the spectre of race both in its general theme and in its specific content. This is the important theoretical text “Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst” [Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting] that Brecht wrote in the latter half of 1936, but did not publish in its original German until 1954.11 It has been the focus of discussion by a range of commentators, but only a few have highlighted race as a central theme in it. Katrin Sieg, however, directly confronts the issue of race in this essay. She notes, in keeping with the sense identified by Alter and others, that Brecht avoids the race concept in favor of class-oriented thought. Her critical reading parallels Rogowski’s in taking on Brecht’s blind spots, and she argues that the essay reveals “the point where Brecht’s faculty of tactical thinking fails,” because “Brecht appears to have misrecognized the racial discourse of his time.” This problem represents, in Sieg’s reading, an example of “the failure of the Left…to develop a critical discourse on race.”12 She critiques how “the Brechtian spectator is thus firmly ensconced in the orientalist dichotomy of domination that empowers the Western 9

For a further reading of South African refigurations of Brecht’s work (the Junction Avenue Theatre Company of Johannesburg’s Love, Crime, and Johannesburg, a rewriting of Die Dreigroschenoper) that cites Kruger but continues to subsume interpretation of race and racialization entirely into Marxian analysis of capitalism and crime, see: Florian Nikolas Becker. “Capitalism and Crime: Brechtian Economies in The Threepenny Opera and Love, Crime and Johannesburg.” Modern Drama 53, no. 2 (2010): 159–186. 10 Kruger, Post-Imperial Brecht, 328. 11 bfa 22.1, 200–210. References hereafter parenthetical. For dating of the essay see bfa 22.2, 959. 12 Katrin Sieg, Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 63. Rogowski also notes this reference (“Schattenboxen,” 340n28).

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s­ ubject with its colonial and racist underpinnings.”13 Her own explorations of “ethnic drag” attempt to address these dynamics of domination by revealing how multiple layers of performance affect the racialized body, from the individual subject’s performance of her own identity to the staging, representation, and critique of performativity that takes place in numerous theatrical and quasi-theatrical contexts. She concludes forcefully that “the texts I examine [Lessing’s Nathan der Weise; Karl May’s Winnetou novels; Veit Harlan’s Jud Süss; Özdamar’s Keloglan in Alamania; Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzel­ macher] illustrate the necessity—and historical difficulty—of adjusting leftist critiques of representation (exemplified here by Brecht’s essay on estrangement effects) to a critique of race.”14 That necessity remains alive, and Brecht’s work and legacy continue to stimulate it. Interpretations like those of Rogowski, Kruger, and Sieg, which highlight the elisions and lacunae in Brecht’s relationship to the race concept, point to still further moments of significance, and their insights can bear further expansion and elaboration. “Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst” contains, in one of Brecht’s most vivid theoretical formulations from the period in which he was most actively developing the discourses of epic theater and the estrangement effect that became his theoretical legacy, a statement that stands out as one of Brecht’s most straightforward invocations of the visible human traits—in this case skin color—that carry so much of the content of the race concept. This deployment comes at the central point in the essay where Brecht develops his argument that the “V-Effekt” [estrangement effect] “had primarily the purpose of the historicization of the represented processes” (207).15 Brecht argues here for a “historicizing theater” [historisierendes Theater] in specific contrast to “bourgeois theater” [bürgerliches Theater], for such historicization carries the potential to unpack the ways in which human beings are falsely “generalized” and made “eternal:” Bourgeois theater works out the timeless in its objects. The representation of the human being hews to the so-called eternally human. Through the organization of the plot such “general” situations are created that the human being per se, the human being of every era and every skin color can express itself. All events are only great leading concepts, and in answer to these leading concepts comes the “eternal” answer, the unavoidable, usual, natural, simply human answer. An example: the black-skinned 13 Sieg, Ethnic Drag, 61. 14 Sieg, Ethnic Drag, 259. 15 All translations from Brecht in this article are by the author, unless otherwise noted.

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­ uman being loves like the white human being, and only when the story h has extorted from him the same expression delivered by the white (and they can, in theory, ostensibly reverse the formula) is the sphere of art created. The particular, the different can only be acknowledged in the leading concept: the answer is communal; in the answer there is no difference. (208) Brecht therefore indeed does acknowledge, and in this unusual case approaches the deployment of, a race concept, here in the figure of skin color. In “Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst,” in fact, the essay that the editors of the Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe declare to be the first dateable written text in which Brecht names and explores the “Verfremdungseffekt,” race provides a central conceptual and rhetorical fulcrum.16 As the rather well-known story goes, the writing of “Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst” was motivated in part by Brecht’s encounter in Moscow with the Chinese opera performer Mei Lanfang, whose practice Brecht takes as one of his points of analysis in the text. His rather cursory set of reflections on Mei Lanfang’s technique can of course hardly be considered extensive engagement on Brecht’s part with the traditions and techniques of Chinese theater. Critical commentary on Brecht’s misapprehension of these techniques of Chinese acting goes back decades, and it is clear that Brecht was most interested in exploring how his own perceptions of Mei Lanfang might serve the purposes of his theorization about the practice of epic theater and the V-Effekt.17 Some of Brecht’s own acknowledged difficulty with the composition of the essay, which Margarete Steffin reported to Walter Benjamin in a letter in September 1936, may have stemmed from this tension between the necessity to provide some kind of reasonable representation of Chinese acting and the polemical theoretical purpose of the essay as an argument about performance practice. Nonetheless, “Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst” is interesting not for what it claims or imagines about Chinese acting traditions, but for the ways in which it raises theoretical and critical questions about race while connecting these reflections to Mei Lanfang and his practice only obliquely if at all. Brecht’s approach throws into high relief the discontinuities and contrasts between the local, particular, embodied aspects of his thought 16 17

bfa 22.2, 959. An early example of such critical engagement: Renata Berg-Pan, Bertolt Brecht and China (Bonn: Bouvier, 1979), 164–165. See also: Joy Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 173n47.

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and the taxonomic, universalizing aspects of race concepts that tend to mask and distend the individual human beings to which they are applied. Brecht’s approach to scientific knowledge in the 1930s reveals sympathy for universalizing epistemic moves, fully aware as he is of the relationships between knowledge, investigation, and social power.18 Brecht’s approach to race here thus makes manifest the ways in which his incipient theories do not always move without friction among the concepts they attempt to distinguish: performer and performed, showing and shown, form and content, discrete and representative. Furthermore, it is also in Brecht’s most complex and fraught reflections on theatrical form—his encounter with opera—that the stakes of these conflicts are raised to the highest degree. Race, in fact, provides a close conceptual correlative of the same issues that made Brecht uncomfortable about opera: the potential for the performative aspects of embodied practice to become politically, financially, or conceptually fungible, and therefore to fixate attention upon that which is falsely individual. Race and opera both troubled Brecht, and they did so because they both carry the potential to turn the performing body against itself by making it falsely particular as a fetishizable object. Opera and race both rely at once too much and too little upon the body for them to fit comfortably into Brecht’s thought. They therefore redouble Brecht’s concern with the voice and the body, and become the focus of the endless wary fascination that he shows for them throughout his career. In “Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst,” Brecht theorizes the imagined Chinese performer as the artist who squares the circle of the problems of race (directly) and opera (indirectly) by transcending both the limitations of the body as a marked, racialized object that captures fetishistic interest and as a representative specimen in epistemological schemes. Brecht’s most far-reaching, and therefore troubling, claim about Chinese performance is that it derives from things that are secret and esoteric, but at the same time proto-scientific. It enables knowledge claims, and therefore epistemological control, because it makes out of theatrical practice a kind of anthropological play that is both mimetic and anti-mimetic at once. Brecht seems to be making a dialectical argument, but one that betrays a measure of ambivalence: he 18

Sieg summaries this aspect of Brecht’s thought expansively: “The fact that, for Brecht, race marked the limits of the social realm as that which could be changed, and was instead relegated to the natural realm, which could only be mastered, attests to the complex genealogy of his scientism—its affiliation with enlightenment anthropology, with Marx’s antisemitism couched in class terms, and finally with his own contemporaries’ casting of historical processes in crassly racial and eugenicist terms, across the ethnic, class, and political spectrum.” Ethnic Drag, 64.

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­ osits that the potential effectiveness of Chinese acting comes from some origp inary and unknowable sphere of the universally human, but that in becoming manifest through the performer it enables the possibility of knowledge. ­Furthermore, this is not abstract knowledge, but rather epistemologically generated political power that seeks and makes revolutionary interventions in the world. Brecht therefore represents the Chinese performer as maintaining a privileged relationship to the natural world, enabling knowledge of it: Out of the secrets of nature (especially human) he makes his secret; he does not allow himself to be looked into as he brings out the natural phenomenon. Nature also does not yet allow him, who brings the phenomenon out, insight. We stand before the artistic expression of a primitive technology, an originary stage of scientific knowledge. The Chinese artist gains his estrangement effect from magic’s witness. (206–207) The Chinese actor seems only semi-conscious of the dynamics of her practice, which serves nonetheless to increase further the power of that practice. Brecht concludes this passage with another of his hair-raising aphorisms, one that mixes economic, political, scientific, and artistic metaphor, and can hardly fail to be read against itself when one remembers that Brecht was in close personal contact with Walter Benjamin as he was writing these words in the latter part of 1936: One also may not simply declare that the position suggested here is proper to science, but not to art. Why should art not attempt, naturally with its own measures, to serve the great social task of the domination of life? In fact only those who require such a technique for very specific societal purposes can study the V-Effekt in Chinese acting with profit. (207)19 19

Benjamin was working at this time on an essay that gave him several years of trouble in its conception: the essay “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in which the relationships between history and representation receive their deepest exploration. A thorough exploration of the relationships between Brecht’s and Benjamin’s reflections upon history and visual representation in the “Verfremdungseffekte” and “Eduard Fuchs” essays—and especially their overlapping interest in the significance of the tensions between generality and particularity—would provide a fruitful basis for a further essay. Nonetheless it is clear from the historical documents explored by the editors of the Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften that Benjamin, despite substantial misgivings about the Fuchs project, finally undertook the completion of the long-delayed essay while in Brecht’s company in Denmark in August 1936, at the same moment that Brecht was struggling with the composition of the “Verfremdungseffekte” essay. See: Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften ii.3,

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Brecht has not chosen here the concept “domination of nature” [Naturbeherrschung] that became in the 1940s so central to the thought of the exiled Frankfurt School. Rather he has chosen “domination of life” [Beherrschung des Lebens]. This choice, directed toward political revolution, points further toward a confluence of material around the race concept that stood among the central moments of the disciplinary sphere of biology in the early twentieth century. Biology at the time, and in the discursive spheres intimated by Brecht here, meant much more than just the investigation of living phenomena. They meant intervention in them, often for the purposes of excluding, penalizing, or destroying forms of life, human or otherwise, considered inadequate to the standards applied to the “domination of life.”20 Here, then, emerges yet another moment of tension in Brecht’s thought, as his thought displays some resonance, or even sympathy, with an epistemological sphere—biology— that carried interventionist strands that could be so useful across the political spectrum. In the remainder of his essay on Chinese acting, Brecht goes on to explore what he calls “historicizing theater,” specifically for its epistemological potential. Historicizing theater does something at once anthropological and antianthropological, for it seeks the particular, but specifically as the source of knowledge: “It throws itself fully and completely into that which is something’s own, the special, that which requires investigation about everyday processes” (209). Here, the sphere of possibility of the race concept, in Brecht’s invocation of skin color earlier in the essay, expands further under the surface of Brecht’s discourse, for the Enlightenment core of the race concept begins here to show its dialectical complexity: it seeks the general and the eternal, but at the same time it imposes that generality upon the particular.21 Historicizing theater reveals this tension, because it appears to generate, precisely through its concern with particularity, the possibility of knowledge. Nonetheless that knowledge itself serves the “domination of life.” Brecht raises these tropes here in the service of the spectre of revolution, but his language evokes as much the dialectic of enlightenment—knowledge in the service of the direct domination of

20 21

Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Eds. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 1316–1317; 1326–1327. See: Kevin S. Amidon, “‘Diesmal fehlt die Biologie!’ Max Horkheimer, Richard Thurnwald, and the Biological Prehistory of German Sozialforschung,” New German Critique 104 (Summer 2008): 103–137. See for example: Jon M. Mikkelsen, ed., Kant and the Concept of Race (Albany, NY: suny Press, 2013).

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people—explored ten years later by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialektik der Aufklärung as it does any liberating potential in radical political change.22 Brecht’s theorization of historicizing theater therefore moves, like his deployment of the race concept, recursively between the general and the particular, between the taxonomic and its necessary specimens. Bourgeois ­theater seeks to generalize human experience. In this way, it participates in the “­de-racialization” that Barot and Bird identify as a significant early historical usage of the term in the service of an argument, by the anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith, for the superiority of European and Anglo-Saxon peoples. Here they reference the Oxford English Dictionary quoting Keith’s book Ethnos, or The Problem of Race Considered from a New Point of View (1931), though the oed reveals that Keith was not in fact the earliest user of the term: “Where Huxlely went wrong was in believing that when Europeans belonging to separate racial stocks…were planted together…they became, if I may coin a term, deracialized.”23 Bourgeois theater thus masks the reality of human particularity, and creates false representations that serve economic exploitation. Brecht’s historicizing theater attempts to enable the representation of that particularity, but in ways that would put it in the service of general goals of political and social transformation. Race therefore becomes the barely acknowledged mediator of the endlessly troubled relations between the individual expressive capacity of the performer and the possibility of political theater. Brecht’s imagined Chinese performer is a performer whose practice potentially transforms this tension between the false universality of the “human being” and the unknowable particularity of the represented individual into something more. That imagined performer is simultaneously Chinese and universal, racialized and generalized, mysterious and scientific, embodied and transcendent. Formal and technical questions of theatrical practice that Brecht approached at this time further deepen the stakes of these issues. At the time that Brecht was composing his reflections on Chinese theater, he was continuing his conflicted encounter with opera. That encounter points to a tension in his thought that runs in parallel to race as a mediator of particularity and knowledge. The performing body in opera—marked indelibly by its overwhelmingly present vocal display—draws attention to itself and becomes fungible in ways 22

23

For a thorough introduction to Horkheimer and Adorno’s form of Critical Theory that emphasizes the question of domination see: James Bohman, "Critical Theory," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato .stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/critical-theory/. Barot and Bird, “Racialization,” 602.

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that bring to the foreground the friction between the general and the p ­ articular in a manner that recapitulates the dynamics of the racialized body. Just as the racially marked individual is subject and object at once, the singing voice in opera is not just an artifact of the performing body, but a mediating instance that renders the voice into object. That object demands such attention to its sublime particularity that it interrupts the dialectics of the particular and the universal that lies at the heart of Brecht’s theories of the 1930s and 1940s. The significance of the operatic voice-object to Brecht’s entire theoretical and theatrical corpus has been given an extensive and subtle reading by Joy Calico. Her reading can be elaborated to reveal the complementarity of race and opera in Brecht’s thought, and how they worked together to motivate the development of Brecht’s theories and techniques. Calico summarizes Brecht’s encounters with race on the American stage during his exile, and demonstrates not only that he was intrigued by the possibilities presented by African-American actors on stage in all-black and mixed productions, but that this ­fascination overlapped significantly with his ongoing engagement with the forms and practices of opera.24 She argues that the most interesting root of Brecht’s ambivalence about opera derives from the inherent propensity of the operatic singing voice to come apart from both the body of the performer and the content of the singing, and thereby to establish itself as voice-object. This voice-object—the object of both the desire of the audience for vocal beauty and of the performer’s own technical strivings—potentially disrupts, in Calico’s reading, the possibility of a constitutive element of the epic theater explored and advocated by Brecht in his theoretical work in the mid-1930s, particularly “Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst:” the gestic split between performer and performed. In Calico’s forceful expression: During the mid-1930s, Brecht was forced to develop a highly pragmatic performance theory because his pieces were now performed without the benefit of his direct supervision. Whereas gestus had been situated almost exclusively in the performer’s visible body in motion or stasis, new circumstances prompted him to locate the gestus in the fixed, notated 24

Calico explores at some length the well-known attempt by Clarence Muse to put on an allAfrican-American production of The Threepenny Opera in 1941–42; the mixed production of The Private Life of the Master Race at the City College of New York in 1945–56; and the Broadway production of Brecht’s adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi in 1946, in which the African-American actor Canada Lee wore something like vestigial whiteface (something the New York Herald Tribune called “a stunt new to the annals of the theater”). Calico, Brecht at the Opera, 78–87. On these productions see also James K. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 132–150.

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score, which was then realized via the performer’s temporal, sounding body… I maintain that Brecht did not anticipate the emergence of the voice-object when he shifted the emphasis from the showing body to the sounding body.25 Furthermore, she argues that the voice-object undermines some of Brecht’s arguments about gestus and dramatic technique. At the very least, it highlights the tensions and frictions within those arguments: I will show that the byproduct of situating the gestus in the musical score, therefore requiring a sounding body for realization, is that the body produces the voice-object in the process, a phenomenon that dominates all else on stage and resists containment in the gestus. (44) These dynamics of the voice-object are congruent with the tensions produced by Brecht’s imagination of the gestic techniques of the racialized Chinese actor. Calico in fact notes the significance of Brecht’s encounter with Mei Lanfang for his theorizing in the mid-1930s (9, 143n47). The voice object thus heightens the stakes of the gestic split as Brecht explores it in “Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst.” In the essay, he argues that the gestic split emerges through the act of the Chinese artist “looking upon himself:” In this way the artist divides the mimetic (representation of observation) from the gestic (representation of the cloud), but the latter loses nothing by this, for the posture of the body works backward upon the face and lends it its entire expression… The artist has used his face as the empty page that can be inscribed by the gestus of the body.26 Brecht imagines that the actor’s reflection upon his own embodied practice and physicality tears the veil of sentimentalizing, universalizing identification from theatrical practice. This is no straightforward process, however, because the operatic voice-object always holds the potential to interrupt it. The voiceobject represents the most extensive form of the singer “listening upon herself” technically, but (almost) always in the service of the transcendent masking of the visibility or audibility of the technical effort involved in vocal production. As the opera and performance scholar Carolyn Abbate argues, this overcoming 25 Calico, Brecht at the Opera, 8–9. References hereafter parenthetical. 26 bfa 22.1, 201.

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of the limitations of the sounding body to achieve the extremity of operatic representation pushes operatic performance into the sphere of the “drastic,” interrupting and upending not only for the spectator but also for the scholar and critic those “gnostic” moments that emerge from the interpretation of operatic texts and scores.27 Brecht himself sometimes recognized this ­possibility—and Calico argues that he in fact “attempted to suppress the voice-object through various performance instructions so that audience members would not succumb to its siren song” (70). Nonetheless, it makes, like race, continuous and dialectical trouble for Brecht’s dramatic theory, for it comes between the performing body’s actions and the spectating body’s reception, linking them in ways that make the epistemic goals of Brecht’s theories—the spectator being “driven toward cognition,” as Brecht advocates in his “Anmerkungen zur Oper Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny.”—into something more complex and fraught than Brecht himself imagined.28 Abbate’s focus on the drastic in operatic performance points, perhaps, to a means by which performing bodies that reveal the stakes of their own racialization might become something not disruptive to Brechtian theory and practice, but a productive extension of it. Brecht’s blind spots about race might, therefore, become a means to their own overcoming. Abbate stages her arguments from a position that stands against simplistic Brechtian tropes: “Prescribing a critical distance from the performance experience, ever since Brechtian estrangement, has seemed to guarantee liberal credentials. Yet this can foreclose much that is of value, both intellectually and morally, in encountering a present other at point-blank range.”29 That present other, as performing, audible body, carrying its marks of racialization, engages the spectator in more than culinary pleasure, more than consumption. It demands to be seen as “I:” This first person, this I who isn’t going to forget, must be willing to walk onstage once what counts is the live performance that once took place, experienced only by those who were present. That is the reason why casting one’s lot with performance and the drastic has seemed so difficult: there is no place to hide.30

27 28 29 30

Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30 (Spring 2004): 505–536. Calico derives her important elements of her discussion from Abbate’s work. See Calico, Brecht at the Opera, 201n89; 202n99; 202n100. Bertolt Brecht, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Frankfurt/Main: edition suhrkamp, 1955), 88. Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic,” 532. Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic,” 536.

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This impossibility of forgetting, of the indelible memory of the encounter with the other as performing presence, becomes the threshold to a kind of knowledge that is sufficiently embodied to do justice to the history of embodied, racialized individuals. Elin Diamond’s work provides perhaps the most spirited advocacy for an approach to Brecht that makes manifest a productive encounter with the other that holds the potential to realize the promise of Abbate’s “drastic,” and thereby make the voice-object itself part of that encounter. The performer’s body and voice must not work separately as moments of spectatorial delectation, but together as direct experience of the other and the processes of othering. Diamond builds her arguments around the dialectical idea of the “not, but” found in Brecht’s 1940 essay translated by John Willett as “Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which Produces an Alienation Effect:” the Brechtian actor strives, dialectically, to represent not only what she shows, but what she chooses not to show. Spectators must therefore become productive interlocutors, because the actor’s body always represents more than an object on display. It enacts the historical traces of its gendered, racialized identity: The Brechtian “not, but” is the theatrical and theoretical analog to the subversiveness of sexual difference, because it allows us to imagine the deconstruction of gender—and all other—representations. Such deconstructions dramatize, at least at the level of theory, the infinite play of difference that Derrida calls écriture—the superfluity of signification that places meaning beyond capture within the covers of the play or the hours of performance. This is not to deny Brecht’s wish for an instructive, analytical theatre; on the contrary, it invites the participatory play of the spectator, and the possibility for which Brecht most devoutly wished, that significance (the production of meaning) continue beyond play’s end, congealing into choice and action after the spectator leaves the theatre.31 Diamond strives to make out of Brecht’s ideas, in spite of their blind spots, a basis for engagement with the gendered, racialized other. She insists that the realization of Brecht’s vision of an epic theater that does justice to the history of the racialized body is possible: “Yet with all these qualifications, Brechtian theory imagines a polyvalence to the body’s representation, for the performer’s body is also historicized, loaded with its own history and that of

31

Elin Diamond, “Brechtian Theory / Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism,” tdr: The Journal of Performance Studies 32.1 (1988): 86.

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the ­character…”32 Brechtian-feminist critical and performance practice therefore offers a means to render out the troubling object-character of both voice and race, a means of realizing a productive engagement with the other. Such engagement requires, however, more layers than Brecht himself foresaw. Brecht’s encounters with opera and with race thus function together in ways that not only reveal the gaps and inadequacies within Brecht’s own theories, but can point to where they might most fruitfully be extended and expanded: the voice-object as troubled mediator of the gestic split must be understood, represented, and enacted alongside and as part of its correlative, the racialized body. The body as racialized object further mediates and frustrates the gestic split because it is at once something imposed epistemically and investigationally, but also quasi-performative. Race, in the full context of Brecht’s ambivalent encounter with it, thus becomes something akin to the Ur-gestus, the magical-physiological grounds of the possibility of epic theater, and thereby of politics. These moments thus point, without resolution but always emergent through their constitutive tension, to something that will continue to exercise us as long as human beings perceive—and seek to understand, explain, and represent—difference. 32

Diamond, “Brechtian Theory / Feminist Theory,” 89.

Chapter 3

Consciousness in Brechtian Acting: Defamiliarizing the Self Peter Zazzali Abstract In describing Charles Laughton’s agreement to play the title role in Galileo, Brecht observed that the actor wanted to make a “contribution” to society through the “dissemination [of] ideas…about how people really lived together.” Performed in Los Angeles in 1947 during the aftermath of the Second World War and on the cusp of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s so-called “Red Scare,” Laughton’s Galileo was apt for the politics of its time, insofar as the play jointly addressed institutional dogmatism, government corruption, and the fearful ignorance of the body politic. Laughton’s performance exemplified Brecht’s gestic approach to acting by defamiliarizing himself from the role in favor of underscoring the drama’s sociopolitical messages. As such, his approach was in stark contrast to the widely practiced Stanislavskian method in which actors were expected to “find themselves” in a role towards creating a character that “truthfully” represented human behavior. What was Laughton’s self-awareness or consciousness of his performance? Whereas the Stanislavskian actor uses himself to subconsciously gel with a character, Brecht’s theory is the opposite: “the actor should refrain from living himself into the part…” These two varying approaches raise questions about the acknowledgement and function of the “self” in an actor’s work, thereby offering an intriguing point of analysis for Brechtian performance. This article will examine the Brechtian actor’s aesthetic through the lens of consciousness. Thus, it will account for the actor’s praxis relative to the sociopolitical implications of Brecht’s epic theatre.

In describing Charles Laughton’s agreement to play the title role in Galileo, Brecht observed that the actor wanted to make a “contribution” to society through the “dissemination [of] ideas…about how people really lived together.”1 Performed in Los Angeles in 1947, during the aftermath of the Second World War and on the cusp of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s so-called “Red 1 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Methuen, 1964), 164.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004404502_004

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Scare,” Laughton’s Galileo was apt for the politics of its time, insofar as the play jointly addressed institutional dogmatism, government corruption, and the fearful ignorance of the body politic. Laughton’s performance exemplified Brecht’s gestic approach to acting by defamiliarizing himself from the role in favor of underscoring the drama’s sociopolitical messages. As such, his approach was in stark contrast to the widely practiced Stanislavskian techniques in which actors were expected to “find themselves” in a role towards creating a character that “truthfully” represented human behavior. What was Laughton’s self-awareness—or consciousness—of his performance? Whereas the Stanislavskian actor uses himself to subconsciously gel with a character, Brecht’s theory is the opposite: “the actor should refrain from living himself into the part…”2 These contrasting approaches raise questions about the acknowledgement and function of the “self” in an actor’s work, thereby offering an intriguing point of analysis for Brechtian performance. This essay will examine the Brechtian actor through the lens of consciousness by accounting for the actor’s praxis in the context of the epic theatre. My methodology will infuse Brecht’s theatrical theory, especially as it pertains to acting, with studies in consciousness, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. As such, I attempt to bridge the institutional schism between science and the humanities that according to Bruce McConachie has resulted in “two cultures,” within which “many humanists and scientists have tended to regard their ­academic ‘Other’ with a mixture of bewilderment, skepticism, and scorn.”3 In keeping with McConachie’s cross-disciplinary logic, I will deploy the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s theories of “the self” to elucidate Brechtian acting. Thus, Damasio’s theory of the three selves—the proto, core, and ­autobiographical—frame my analysis. To further demonstrate how consciousness works in Brechtian acting, I put Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of “defamiliaration” in conversation with the Verfremdungseffekt. I will likewise compare Brecht to Stanislavski’s acting system while calling upon Damasio to explain the neurobiological differences between their two approaches. Finally, I will apply this paradigm to the work of Augusto Boal, a notable Brechtian actor trainer, whose methods can be seen as an echo of his forebear. Ultimately, the essay’s goal is to better understand how consciousness operates in Brechtian acting. Specifically, I will show that like the Boalian actor, the Brechtian actor makes multiple uses of his ­consciousness 2 Ibid., 137. 3 Bruce McConachie, “Preface,” in Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, eds. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (New York: Routledge 2006), x; also see Bruce McConachie, Theatre and Mind (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2013).

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exemplifying what Damasio calls an “ensemble of brain devices” that allows us to perceive, understand, and act upon the world around us. This paradigm is applicable to both Brechtian and Stanislavskian actors, insofar as they too use some combination of their three selves. However, I will show that while both depend on their autobiographical selves (albeit in distinct ways) there are important differences in how they engage the core self and proto-self. One of the foremost experts on Brecht, his former assistant Carl Weber, suggests that the former had little interest in actor training: “Brecht had scant confidence in theatre schools; he firmly believed in learning-by-doing…”4 Perhaps that explains in part why most scholarship has focused on Brecht’s theatrical theory, directing, and dramatic oeuvre. Despite his significance to twentiethand twenty-first-century theatre, and the corresponding amount of published materials to prove as much, his approach to acting has been underrepresented. To be sure, there is a handful of outstanding writings that examine Brechtian acting, namely John Rouse’s “Brecht and the Contradictory Actor,” Margaret Eddershaw’s “Actors on Brecht,” and most recently David Barnett’s Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory, and Performance.5 While these works address Brechtian acting, none undertakes the role of consciousness therein, much less examines the actor’s sense of “the self.” This essay endeavors to do both. Throughout history consciousness has been difficult to define. From Plato’s theorization of the soul and Hippocrates’ depiction of the senses to Cartesian duality and monistic approaches in philosophy and psychology, our understanding of consciousness has remained unresolved since the beginning of civilization. The fact that multiple academic disciplines and professions study it, each with their own range of conflicting theories, demonstrates as much. Consciousness’ multivalence ranges from philosophy, neuroscience, physics, and psychology to more correlative fields such as religious studies, artificial intelligence, and of course, the arts. As William James once said, “its meaning we know as long as no one asks us to define it.”6 It is a philosophical and scientific conundrum. In distancing from strictly philosophical discourses on the subject, the scope of this essay locates consciousness in the context of neuroscience, 4 Carl Weber, “Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, eds. Peter Thomson and Glenda Sacks (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press 1994), 169. 5 See John Rouse, “Brecht and the Contradictory Actor,” in Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, ed. Phillip B. Zarilli (New York: Routledge 1995); Margaret Eddershaw, “Actors on Brecht,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, eds. Peter Thomson and Glenda Sacks (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press 1994); and David Barnett, Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory, and Performance (New York: Bloomsbury 2015). 6 Quoted in Arne Dietrich, Introduction to Consciousness (New York: Palgrave 2007), 20.

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b­ efore applying it to Brechtian acting. To frame my analysis, I would like to fundamentally identify consciousness as a “way of being” in which an individual becomes “aware of something within oneself,” especially an awareness of the mind–body continuum of one’s emotional and corporeal experience.7 Thus, our definition addresses the nexus between a person’s emotions, thoughts, sensations, physical state, and volition in relation to external or internal stimuli towards contextualizing the actor’s consciousness. I am therefore positing consciousness as subjective, a move that makes sense in that I am relating it to actors, who have agency in making “conscious” decisions in constructing their performances, much in the spirt of Laughton’s Galileo referenced earlier. While any responsible study of consciousness must address and include the reciprocal role of the “subconscious,” or a state of being in which one is unaware of one’s experience, my aim is to understand the actor’s varying levels of awareness during rehearsal and performance alike: or to put it more simply, the extent to which he consciously goes about his work. I want to focus on the actor’s conscious—and unconscious—experience through the lens of Damasio’s neuroscience and then apply it to Brecht. At the risk of overstatement, Damasio’s early writings position him in the pantheon of philosophy and physiognomy, most especially as it applies to Descartes, Spinoza, and James. His titular choice Descartes’ Error suggests as much, as he frames his case against Cartesian dualism by debunking his subject’s contention that the mind and body are separate “machines” devoid of a neurobiological system causing one to experience emotion, feelings, physical sensation, or relatedly, to reason, think, and make judgements, moral or otherwise.8 His critique can also be read as a tacit denial of Plato’s bifurcated conception of the body and spirit, as especially conceived in The Phaedo, in which Socrates’s soul is explicitly divided from his corporeal demise.9 Moreover, Damasio locates the mind and body as an “organismic” integration, thereby hearkening the philosophical framework of Spinoza, whose depiction of emotion and feelings as an “ensemble of affect” is germane to his own thinking some 350 years later.10 Spinoza proves to be the basis for Damasio’s corrective, which also problematizes the comparatively recent work of James, who despite his seminal findings in 7 8 9 10

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary and Thesaurus, http://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/consciousness (accessed 25 February 2017). Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books 1994), 249–250. See Plato, Selections from The Phaedo, Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/ Plato/phaedo.html (accessed 26 February 2017). Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (London: Heinemann 2003), 8.

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physiognomy, neglected to comprehend the complex role that emotions (and feelings) play in determining consciousness by “giving little or no weight to the process of evaluating mentally the situation that causes the emotion.”11 Thus, Damasio presents the experiencing of emotion as a psychophysical dynamic that is as complex and symphonic as it has been historically controversial and confusing, most especially when addressing it in relation to consciousness. Damasio defines consciousness as “a state of mind in which there is knowledge of one’s own existence and of the existence of surroundings.”12 This knowledge depends on “content” such as the awareness of others performing everyday actions, all of which are perceived through the senses. As such, consciousness occurs in varying levels of presence and can be understood as a fluid and fluctuating condition contingent on given circumstances. If one were doing something routine, for example, their level of awareness would be significantly less acute than if they were having a triumphant or traumatic experience. Essentially, we engage our consciousness in multiple degrees and contexts during the course of any given day when we are awake. Consciousness is distinct from wakefulness, however, in that it pertains to being present to oneself and one’s surroundings. While one needs to be awake to be conscious, there are gradations of wakefulness that correspond with one’s presence and sense of self. It is the neurological recognition of the self that is the basis for Damasio’s analysis of consciousness; the two are mutually inclusive, as “the self bespeaks individuality, without which consciousness is inconceivable.”13 This of course is crucial to understanding the work of the actor, insofar as his sense of self will fluctuate from moment-to-moment in a given performance, and moreover, vary according to his approach. Thus, the Brechtian and Boalian actor is considerably more self-reflective in his performative experience than the Stanislavskian, who is trained to transform into his character by “subconsciously” becoming the role. The very concept of self is a complex and dynamic process that comes in many forms.14 What Damasio terms our “proto-self,” for example, pertains to our primordial feelings (e.g., pleasure or pain) that spontaneously infuse our consciousness into a symphony of emotions occurring throughout our day while sleeping or awake. When we are driven by sexual desire or become 11 Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 130. 12 Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Vintage Books 2010), 165. 13 Antonio Damasio, “Feelings of Emotion and the Self,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences vol. 1001 (October 2003): 254. 14 Ibid., also see, Antonio Damasio, The Feelings of What Happen: Body and Motion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt 1999), 168–233.

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e­ motionally overwhelmed, we encounter our proto-self; viscera govern this state of being. This level of consciousness is distinct yet related to the “core self,” which Damasio describes as a modification, indeed a “pulse” of the protoself that allows individuals to sense their thoughts relative to their surroundings. As such, the core self is a slightly more evolved state of being than its ­primordially-oriented counterpart. Both the core and proto-self are experienced in the present—“the here and now”—without significant awareness of the past or future. They are not confined to human experience, but exist in animals, reptiles, and birds too. Whereas the proto-self is entirely instinctual, the core self allows us to process and perceive objects (e.g., external as well as internal) and order them into some sense of meaning and comprehension. When a being uses its sense of sight, for example, it engages its cognitive ability to see an object and correspondingly “formulate a perspective,” (no matter how infantile or sophisticated), towards underscoring the being’s individuality and consciousness.15 Our core self operates when we “mindlessly” complete everyday activities such as getting up in the morning to shower, shave, and indulge in morning coffee; it is the recognition of “the self” at its most fundamental level in the context of the habitual. Like the proto-self, it is a basic level of consciousness and can operate outside the realm of language, which explains why Damasio claims that nonhuman species also function at this level of awareness. Damasio’s third level of consciousness, and the one most distinctive to being human and applicable to the work of actors, is what he calls the “autobiographical self.” The “autobiographical self [is] a set of memories of the individual’s unique past,” a storehouse of experiences defining one’s “biography”; as such it is the grist that shapes the actor’s process.16 Whether a Stanislavski-trained actor using his personal experience to build a character or a Brechtian performer deploying critical thinking to support the political ethos of a production, some form of the actor’s autobiographical self is at play. Unlike the core and proto selves, which operate in the present, the autobiographical self combines an “individual’s unique past” towards achieving “expected experiences,” or to put it in the language of actors, the use of one’s personal background to create a character in service of a performance.17 It operates by sending signals through our neural pathways that allow us to behold a phenomenon, to listen intently to important information, or experience physical affection among thousands of other human actions and interactions. As the core self remains intact during 15 16 17

Antonio Damasio, “Investigating the Biology of Consciousness,” Physical Transactions of the Royal Society of Biology vol. 353 (1998): 1880. Ibid., also see Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 180–183. Damasio, “Investigating the Biology of Consciousness,” 1180.

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these moments and the proto-self produces primordial feelings, the autobiographical, or “extended” self, functions with one becoming acutely conscious of one’s situation; it is a heightened state of awareness—a presence—that results in lasting memories. This “extended consciousness” constitutes the ontological state for most live performance and applies therein to the work of actors, insofar as the actor is “consciously” crafting his performance from his repository of learned experience: memory. This is not to suggest that the actor is only practicing the so-called “Method approach” of recalling a personal event to substitute for the character’s emotional experience. While what Stanislavski termed “emotional recall” does indeed exemplify Damasio’s autobiographical self, the latter’s depiction of “extended memory” is nuanced to the point of being applied to numerous approaches and contexts relative to acting. Indeed, extended consciousness could as readily pertain to the Brechtian’s use of gestus or the Boalian’s embodiment of the “Joker.” It is not a zero-sum game, but rather a matter of degree of use relative to a specific approach to acting, within which Damasio’s three selves and their corresponding levels of consciousness form an “ensemble [that] produces the result we seek to explain.”18 The question then remains what combination of these levels of consciousness do actors employ in their work. Does it differ from rehearsals to performances and if so, how? Moreover, do these levels of consciousness vary ­according to a given acting style? The latter is particularly germane to this essay since Brechtian performance deploys a decidedly different self-awareness than other acting styles, namely those associated with Stanislavski. Brecht distinguished his approach from Stanislavski’s, claiming the Russian master’s method “[throws] the actor back on his ‘natural sensibilities’” to create a lifelike performance measured by the “truthful” rendering of the human emotion. Stanislavski trained his actors to achieve a subconscious way of playing in which their imagination is the conduit for a “sense of belief” in their character and its given circumstances.19 His process, however, would be consciously explored through psychophysical actions in pursuit of clearly chosen character objectives. These choices function as stimuli that arouse the actor’s creative state “towards putting [the] subconscious to work” in achieving “artistic truth.”20 Thus, the Stanislavskian actor’s conscious mind gives way to his subconscious one.

18 Ibid., 24. 19 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 95. 20 Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor’s Handbook, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts Books 1963), 134–135.

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Damasio adds to the chorus of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychologists who credited Freud’s study of the unconscious. Describing this state as a process operating below the “sea level of consciousness,” Damasio aptly articulates how artists have used their subterranean mind to stir their creative muse: Freud certainly seized on a wellspring of evidence for the unconscious when he concentrated on dreams… This same wellspring has been tapped by artists, composers, writers, and all manners of creators attempting to free themselves from the trammels of consciousness.21 The freedom Damasio cites applies to an artist’s psychophysical constitution at the point and time of engaging a creative act. Whether it occurs in the exploration and/or refinement of said artwork—the sculptor chiseling away at a block of cement; the musician becoming one with her etudes; the actor exploring character choices in rehearsal—or whether it unfolds during performance, the artist’s creative domain is his subconscious. The surrealism of Dali, atonalism of Schoenberg, and transcendentalism of Emerson exemplify how the subconscious serves as a muse for artists. Indeed, this phenomenon suggests why many creative discoveries actually come to people in their dreams or shortly after they have awakened. A corollary to this is when artists reach a point in the creative process when they simply trust their technique and surrender to the subconscious for inspiration. In a certain sense, they proverbially throw away their technique, or rather, they strategically choose not to think about it in favor of allowing their creative forces to work. In the case of Stanislavski, this lives in the actor’s ability to trust that his consciously applied choices (e.g., scoring a role; learning blocking and lines; etc.) will unlock his imagination towards experiencing emotional truth in his role, thereby providing the audience with a credible replication of human behavior derived from fictional circumstances. Contrarily, Brecht was not interested in exact representations of life onstage: verisimilitude. As David Barnett asserts, he sought an “abstracted approach” in which the actor “emphasizes artificiality” to distance himself from the “figure” he plays, thereby causing the spectator to investigate the play’s sociopolitical considerations. In what Barnett terms “cognitive realism,” the actor “cleaves” himself from the part to “signal” a theatricalized—unnatural—reality ­negating

21 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 189.

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the audience’s proclivity for empathy.22 Brecht therefore privileged a work’s narrative, and by extension, its implications for society and the human condition. Though his actors would bear some semblance of reality in rendering a “character,” they did not become immersed in a role to the point of transformation and catharsis. Whereas Stanislavsksi’s system was designed to “truthfully” represent three-dimensional figures from realistic and naturalist dramas, Brecht deconstructs mimesis and was motivated by sociopolitical messaging. Thus, he positions his epic aesthetic in opposition to a “dramatic one,” with the former contradicting the linear, plot-driven, empathic approaches derived from an Aristotelian ethos. This point is underscored by Boal, a self-described Brechtian, who famously criticized Aristotle’s legacy. Echoing Brecht, he steadfastly claimed that theatre should “educate, inform, organize, influence, [and] incite to action [and not] simply be an object of pleasure,” or be reduced to the “culinary” as Brecht might say.23 Whereas Stanislavski and his acolytes followed nineteenth-century developments in behavioral and natural science towards “implicating the spectator in a stage situation [the main ingredient for catharsis],” Brecht sought a stylized affect in which the audience’s ability to empathize with a character was substantially subdued, if not outright negated, thereby enabling them to critically consider relevant sociopolitical themes.24 Thus, Brecht’s well-documented Verfremdungseffekt caused a shift in the consciousness of the spectator. Brecht drew much of his philosophy on acting from Eastern performance traditions, most especially from the famed Chinese actor, Mei Lan-fang: When Lan-fang was playing a death scene a spectator sitting next to me exclaimed with astonishment at one of his gestures. One or two people sitting in front of us turned round indignantly and ssshhh’d. They behaved as if they were present at the real death of a real girl… In their case the A-effect had misfired.25 The Chinese theatrical tradition emphasizes storytelling through a selfreferential style that bears commonality with a “circus” or “fairground”

22

David Barnett, 106–111. For a useful analysis of Brechtian acting, see Barnett’s “Brecht and the Actor,” in Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory, and Performance (New York: Bloomsbury 2015). 23 Augusto Boal, “Aristotle’s Coercive System of Tragedy,” in Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York: tcg 1985), ix–50. 24 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 37. 25 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 95.

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­performance.26 Whereas the Stanislavskian actor uses his conscious mind to deploy his subconscious towards absorbing the character, his Chinese counterpart contrives a presentational style consisting of physical and vocal gestures that transcend the psychological and empathic. Borrowing from an Eastern ethos, Brecht asks his actors to comment on their performance as if they are “acting in quotation marks” instead of attempting “to become another person.” This practice is perhaps best demonstrated by Brechtian gestus, otherwise understood as the audience’s didactic decoding of the semiotics pertaining to a deliberately crafted gesture that underscores the narrative’s sociopolitical themes. The quintessential example of gestus is Helene Weigel’s famous “silent scream” as Mother Courage. Upon learning that she has lost yet a third child during the Thirty Years War, Weigel’s Courage recoiled into a ball while seated, before unwrapping her torso, extending her arms upward, and opening her face as she undulates forward. Yet no sound accompanied these movements. Hers was a gest that resonated in accordance with the titular character’s tragic discovery. By not vocalizing the experience, Weigel caused the spectator to witness the shell, “the quotation,” of a mother losing her child in the cruel path of war, a war that Courage has taken full advantage of financially by shilling her wares to both factions. In the key of gestus, Weigel very consciously deployed what Damasio calls the core self, insofar as she deliberately prompted the audience to engage the economic implications of warfare, a level of didacticism that would have become muddled had the audience empathized with Weigel’s character. Damasio describes our three selves as a “moveable feast” of mindsets that are as fluid as they are collaborative.27 While each relies on different parts of the brain (e.g., brain stem engineers the proto-self), they collectively participate in the process of self-formation. Following Damasio, the vernacular of Western acting suggests a blending of the primordial and autobiographical selves towards achieving transformation. With the former representing our primordial feelings and the latter our extended memory, it stands to reason that they apply to a Stanislavskian approach. Commonly used terms and phrases such as “becoming the role,” “surrendering to the character,” “emotional and sensory recall,” and “using the ‘self’ to find a part,” all indicate ways of being that transcend the simple completion of pedestrian tasks such as those brought to bear on the core self. Thus, the actor’s subconscious becomes the path to sublimity for Western actors. But is this really the case? And where does it leave us in considering the reciprocal roles of self and consciousness in the work of Brechtian 26 Ibid., 2. 27 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 182.

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actors, especially as it applies to sociopolitical themes? The remainder of this essay will endeavor to unpack, explore, and answer this very question. 1

The Role of Consciousness in Defamiliarizing the Familiar

Damasio depicts the three gradations of consciousness (proto, core, autobiographical) as fluid and interrelated. While the core consciousness is essential to acknowledging “the self” relative to one’s surrounding circumstances and the proto level of consciousness pertains to the rawness of the primordial, our extended consciousness (autobiographical) consists of the warehouse of our experience and is therefore largely responsible for how we create meaning: “Extended consciousness is the capacity to be aware of a large compass of entities and events, i.e., the ability to generate a sense of individual perspective, ownership, and agency, over a larger compass of knowledge than that surveyed in the core consciousness.”28 Actors render meaning onto their roles according to the context of the work. Whereas a Stanislavskian actor would presumably use his warehouse of memory to create a character that represents human behavior to elicit the audience’s empathy, his Brechtian counterpart would use the same repository of experience to a decidedly different affect. Or put another way, the Stanislavskian actor relies on a commensurate balance of his proto and autobiographical selves to cause the spectator to enter a state of emotional identity with the character, whereas Brecht’s actors primarily operate from the latter in seeking to “defamiliarize” the familiar. As Damasio argues, the autobiographical self “calls for very elaborate coordinating mechanisms, something that the core self can, by and large, dispense with.”29 Likewise, the Brechtian crafts and delivers his performance with a state of awareness that is decidedly reliant on his conscious mind; Weigel’s very choreographed and didactically purposed silent scream is such an example—as would any other form of gestus. The Boalian would assume a similar state of consciousness in playing the “Joker” or construing a work of Forum Theatre, insofar as they are techniques requiring a tactical deployment of extended experience largely devoid of intuition and viscera, the traits most closely associated with the ­proto-self. On the other hand, the Stanislavski actor is comparatively driven by a combination of his primal (proto-)self, which he uses in conjunction with his extended memory; the degree to which he does so and to what affect differ from the Brechtian, and by extension, Boalian. As such, he has a rich emotional 28 Antonio Damasio, The Feelings of What Happen, 198. 29 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 212.

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experience commencing from the neurological “structures of the insula,” the area of the central nervous system in the brainstem responsible for the cognition and formation of emotion, the process for which is motivated by the subconscious.30 The operative word in the title of this chapter, defamiliarization and its application to the Brechtian actor’s consciousness can be traced to Viktor ­Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique” (1917). In helping to shape Russian formalism, Shklovsky coined “defamiliarization” towards explaining the role consciousness has in the presentation and reception of art. Arguing that “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known,” to make objects “unfamiliar,” he describes, “[the] habitual and unconscious” as performative and spectatorial states that lull the artistic beholder into listlessness.31 A blithe appeal to an audience’s empathy is consistent with this theory in that a reiteration of the familiar will cause the spectator to surrender her agency by emotionally responding to a performance at the expense of engaging it with imagination and intellectual critique. Following Shklvosky, the artist must represent the natural world by perceiving it anew by honoring the grotesque and transcending the pedestrian: “After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it… but we do not see it—hence we cannot say anything significant about it.”32 Using Tolstoy as a model, Shklovsky contends that the artist makes the familiar appear strange towards reimagining and rethinking a given subject or object. In keeping with Tolstoy as an example, he cites Kholstomer, a short story with a horse as its central character. The personification of the beastly protagonist facilitates a debate about property ownership in Czarist Russia, a particularly relevant subject for the time (1886), and therein exemplifies Shklovsky’s theory. By defamiliarizing the reader’s commonplace—or habitual—understanding of both horses and bourgeois society, Tolstoy presents his message: a sociopolitical critique of land (and slave) ownership in late-nineteenth-century Russia. Brecht likewise deploys defamiliarization in the key of contradiction in many of his dramas. To name just a pair of examples, the anatomical strangeness of the binary citizenship of “Yahoo” in Roundheads and Peakheads, as well as the contradictoriness of the dapper yet demonic Macheath in The Threepenny Opera, each demonstrate a dialecticism in which the familiar is made unfamiliar. With respect to the latter, for instance, a nameless Street Singer introduces the lovable villain of SoHo 30 31

Damasio, “Feelings of Emotion and Self,” 260. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” https://paradise.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/Viktor_ Sklovski_Art_as_Technique.pdf (accessed 20 November 2016): 2. 32 Ibid.

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to Weill’s lively jazz and the comforting rhythms of an organ grinder, while serenading his audience with lyrics portraying Macheath as a grisly killer, rapist, and thief. The song’s musicality is juxtaposed against its lyrics, a gestus that lays bare the fact that Macheath—like many unscrupulous individuals in positions of sociopolitical power—is a walking contradiction of charm and dastardliness, elegance and corruption. The “familiar” characteristics associated with someone of status and grace become problematized through the V-Effect by “defamiliarizing” the subject and exposing him for what he is: a cruelhearted killer. The Brechtian actor exemplifies this process by contradicting the familiar. A decidedly conscious practice, he relies on his warehouse of memory—his autobiographical self—in conjunction with his core self to craft a performance that prompts the spectator’s critical consideration of sociopolitical matters. With respect to the former, the actor’s life experience consists of conscious and subconsciously infused memory that predisposes him to behavioral patterns and selections of human action. When one sees a hot stove, for instance, assuming their autobiographical self is not impaired and they are not a child whose memory is ignorant to the potential danger at hand, the image “hot stove” and knowledge that to touch it would result in burning oneself prevents one from doing so.33 Borrowing from the basis of semiotics, the image is a sign bearing meaning and known information. Such “lifelong learning” develops as part of a coordinated neurological process that is psychophysical—experience developed through the mind–body continuum—and has a determinative effect on how we jointly perceive and “act” in the world. The Stanislavski actor, therefore, uses his autobiographical self as a resource for personalizing the role in hope of arousing the audience’s empathy, a goal achieved through familiarity and an associative identification with the character’s given circumstances. Perhaps the most applicable example of this would be Stanislavski’s emotional recall technique, an extrapolation of late-nineteenth-century psychology by which an actor focuses on an object associated with a past event towards reexperiencing the emotions of the event. A wide range of these so-called “Method” actors have used emotional recall throughout their careers, most notably those trained under Lee Strasberg in the U.S. The depth and size of an actor’s emotional release would determine the extent to which his proto-self is engaged, insofar as he experiences a raw and primordial attachment to his emotions thereby causing him to play “subconsciously” and elicit a cathartic affect. Brecht’s actor uses his autobiographical self quite differently while disengaging the proto-self in favor of the core self. Instead of eliding his life experience 33 Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 214.

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to form a personal and emotional attachment to the character, he relies on his autobiographical self to harness information steeped in signage that he can contradict. Again, Weigel’s scream suggests as much. Instead of trying to experience Courage’s emotional loss, something that the autobiographical self would logically prompt her and her audience to do, she pushes against this impulse to defamiliarize the familiar. Once this gestus is practiced to the point of being woven into her performance, the modifying function of the core self then allows Weigel “to sense that the contents of [her] thoughts are [her] own,” thereby regulating her performance in the key of defamiliarization.34 This approach is also exemplified in a handful of notable performances of the signature character in Brecht’s allegorical satire on Nazism and the blithe pursuit of power, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Written during the apotheosis of Hitler’s rule (1941), the play centers on the corrupt rise of a Chicago gangster who will stop at nothing to satisfy his desire for power and greed. Making his fortune in the cauliflower trade, the title character wields terror and revenge against his sworn and perceived enemies in a humorous parable that is applicable to many sociohistorical contexts. Henry Goodman’s portrayal of the role, in the National Theatre’s 2013 production, balanced “Monty Python” with “Richard iii” by striking the contradictory attitudes of a “wimpy…bandy-legged, sniveling” gangster whose despotism reigned supreme. Goodman “channeled Charlie Chaplain” in an appropriately exaggerated performance that juxtaposed the comical and the sinister.35 As such, he could be compared to Antony Sher’s Ui some twenty years earlier, in which a “Chaplainesque” approach facilitated the antonymous traits of an awkward and shy street thug.36 In a 2010 production of the play done in the U.S., German director Heinz Uwe Haus cast Ui as a very short woman while having her render the role as a man. A clear example of Brechtian gestus, or the “gist” and correspondent “attitude” towards breaking the spectator’s framework for the familiar, Haus used cross gender casting to distance the audience from the narrative.37 Staged at the University of Delaware’s Resident Ensemble Players, the leading actress, Carine Montbertrand, executed Haus’s vision by craftily seducing the audience in what one critic termed “a creepy review” while still creating space for them to “resist” being taken in by Ui’s Machiavellian machinations.38 Haus cast ­Montbertrand 34 35 36

Damasio, “Investigating the Biology of Consciousness,” 1880. Lyn Gardner, “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui—Review,” The Guardian, 26 September 2013. Margaret Eddershaw, “Actors on Brecht,” In The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, eds. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 269. 37 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 42. 38 Norman Roessler, “Brecht’s Arturo Ui in Delaware (1st review): Brecht Dissects Hitler (with a little help from Looney Tunes),” Broad Street Review, 8 May 2010.

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to accentuate Ui’s contradictoriness as an awkward charmer and a conniving despot. “Not trying to fool anyone that [she] was a man,” Montbertrand adjusted her voice to speak in a lower range “to suggest a man” while not calling attention to it “being obviously false.”39 She also used costume pieces to assume the role in different stages of representation, namely Ui the thug, Ui the dictator, and a female announcer at the play’s outset. In changing personas, Montbertrand created a gest by which the audience plainly saw she was an actress deliberately moving in and out of these different roles (and genders), thereby fulfilling Haus’s strategy for distancing and prompting critical analysis.40 From Goodman to Montbertrand, these approaches demonstrate the defamiliarizing of the familiar as discussed earlier. In what is famously known as Verfremdungseffekt (Alienation Effect), this technique is the cornerstone of Brecht’s epic theatre, an aesthetic jointly adherent to entertainment and instruction. With respect to the former, it is important to remember that while Brecht maintained a sociopolitical ethos in his work, he strongly believed that theatre first and foremost had to amuse the audience: Generally there is felt to be a very sharp distinction between learning and amusing oneself. The first may be useful, but only the second is pleasant. So we have to defend the epic theatre against the suspicion that it is a highly disagreeable, humorless, indeed strenuous affair.41 Indeed, Brecht’s admiration for Shaw’s balancing of didacticism and “fun” is foundational to epic theatre.42 The timely use of music, placards posting scene titles, and a gestic acting style all constitute Brecht’s ability to address sociopolitical subjects through humor and cheerfulness. Such an approach is contingent on clear storytelling and a deft deployment of gestic devices that jointly distance and defamiliarize the audience from the narrative’s otherwise dire contents. We can see this in his plays, nearly all of which wield amusement in the context of seemingly serious circumstances. From Courage’s loss of her children and Ui echoing Hitler to Macheath’s murderous lechery and Gayly Gay’s automaton-like conscription, matters of sociopolitical significance are couched in narratives rife with slapstick, farce, one-liners, song, and musical interludes that appeal to the spectator’s sense of fun while providing instruction. 39

Quoted from Peter Zazzali, “Interview with Carine Montbertrand,” Communications from the International Brecht Society 39 (Spring 2010): 123. 40 “Interview with Andrea Barrier,” Communications from the International Brecht Society 39 (Spring 2010): 132. 41 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 72. 42 Ibid., 12.

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In establishing empathic distance between the audience and the characters, an actor must craft a performance towards defamiliarizing the former with the latter’s given circumstances. For example, Brecht cites Peter Lorre’s Gayly Gay in Man Equals Man as appropriately “acting nothing but episodes” that “establish new rules for the art of acting” by “playing against the flow.”43 Instead of disappearing into a three-dimensional character filled with emotional truth relative to Gay’s harrowing circumstances, Lorre “worked on the spectator in an [un]usual way” by breaking up the syntactic delivery of his lines in abrupt, meandering, and disjointed undulations that withdrew the spectator from empathically identifying with Gay “and left to make her own discoveries.”44 This was especially the case during Gay’s execution scene when Lorre’s delivery contradicted the severity of the character’s circumstances through modulating his pitch and tempo in making his lines nonsensical, thereby underscoring the political gest being communicated: Gay is a victim of social engineering whose misguided wartime courage results in his unjust execution. We can assume that Lorre’s consciousness during this sequence pertains to Damasio’s core self in that he very deliberately utilized a deconstructed speaking style that commented on the character’s situation as opposed to filling it with emotional truth and conviction. Core consciousness connotes the very quotidian process of the self in action and completing tasks. It is not an ethereal state, but rather, a concrete way of being in which humans—and animals— focus upon a given object relative to said task. Thus, an actor executing a stylized gesture like Lorre’s speaking or Montbertrand’s signature walk for Ui ­exemplifies the usage of the core self, the most fundamental state of consciousness, at moments such as these in performance. When asked what was going through her mind when she would traverse the stage, Montbertrand claimed, “I am always aware of what I am doing with my body and voice and how I want to use them to effect the audience.”45 To return once more to the Stanislavski/ Brecht binary, her description relied more on the core consciousness’s application of a technique as opposed to the Stanislavskian actor’s reliance on his emotional reservoir amassed throughout his life: the autobiographical self. The core self is also the primary source for how the Brechtian actor delivers a story. Perhaps this point is best explained in Brecht’s essay, “The Street Scene,” where in the context of a “demonstrator” recounting a traffic accident he argues, “the object of the performance is to make it easier to give an opinion on the incident”—the spectator’s opinion, not the actor’s. This is the very 43 44 45

Ibid., 54–55. Ibid., 54. Carine Montbertrand, interview with author, 15 November 2016.

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point of how the thorny consideration of the actor’s emotional life factors into Brecht’s template for performance. The actor’s job is to simply and clearly communicate the story, a task oftentimes hindered by becoming overcome with emotion. Claiming that the demonstrator “need not be an artist,” he must avoid “transforming” into a character who has a point of view on the accident he reports.46 He therefore assumes an objective role in distancing himself, and by extension, the audience from becoming empathically engaged in the incident. This distancing—or estrangement allows the actor and spectator alike the mental capacity to then “criticize constructively from a social point of view.”47 The Brechtian actor’s primary responsibility is to communicate the sociopolitical message of the narrative, an outcome achieved by “shifting focus away from the character” in favor of prioritizing the story. As John Rouse argues in his essay, “Brecht and the Contradictory Actor,” “Brecht reveals himself as a director who gives the text absolute priority” by treating it “as an historical document” to be “painstakingly researched” in transmitting a narrative that is ­subjected to the audience’s sociopolitical critique.48 For such a critique to ensue, the actor summons a keen text-analysis skill towards creating a performance replete with stylized gestures and distancing techniques that disassociate himself and the audience from becoming immersed in any single ­character’s experience. The actor’s role is to function as a signpost for communicating social ideas in conjunction with storytelling, a practice that emphasizes the sociopolitical responsibility of his work and does not delve into the psychological complexities and motivations of the character. When transmitting a story such as described in “The Street Scene,” the actor orchestrates his actions and feelings in a clear and calculated manner. Traditional neuroscience suggests that one’s feelings are internally induced whereas emotions are stimulated physically, and as such, the former is a more conscious state than the latter. This has telling consequences for actors in that when they become immersed in emotion they are doing so unconsciously and vice versa when it comes to experiencing feelings. Oftentimes, Brecht’s Alienation Effect is misunderstood as an attempt to divorce the actor—and ­audience—from feeling anything, which is preposterous in that humans are always feeling something. Distinguishing between feelings and emotions can therefore help us better understand the way actors use their reservoir of emotions as formulated by and contained within their extended memory for the 46 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 124. 47 Ibid., 125. 48 John Rouse, “Brecht and the Contradictory Actor,” In Method Acting (Re)Considered, ed. Phillip Zarrilli (New York: Routledge 2002), 250–251.

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purpose of creating a role. Damasio differentiates feelings from emotion in claiming that the former “should be reserved for the private, mental experience…while the term emotion should be used to designate the collection of responses, many of which are publicly observable… No one can observe your feelings.”49 The emotional responses he references are of course stimuli, the manifestation of which “do not require consciousness.”50 Moreover, they are noticed by others, a distinguishing characteristic from how Damasio explains our feelings: “In practical terms…you cannot observe a feeling in someone else although you can observe a feeling in yourself when, as a conscious being, you perceive your own emotional states.”51 Thus, the manifestation of feelings is a conscious and decidedly private experience occurring at a subdued scale in comparison to how we encounter and express our emotions. When Weigel is crafting her “silent scream” she is most certainly experiencing her feelings, but given the empathic distancing of the gestus, her emotional activity is kept in check. Contrarily, the Stanislavskian actor portraying a cathartic moment would be inclined to harness and deliver his wealth of emotional expressivity—all of which would be drawn from his autobiographical reservoir—in prompting the audience into a similar emotional encounter. Nonetheless, this neurobiological framework is not a binary, as both our feelings and emotions coexist along a continuum in which consciousness and unconsciousness pivot. For the purpose of this essay, again, it is a matter of degree in differentiating how consciousness and emotion occur in these two approaches to acting. An actor who curtails his emotional expressivity in favor of a distanced, perhaps even detached transmission of his role/character towards telling a story requires a skillset that is distinct from the actor who attempts significant levels of emotional pitch. To borrow yet again from Damasio, “we can control, in part, the expression of some emotions—suppress our anger, mask our ­sadness— but most of us are not very good at it and that is one reason why we pay a lot to see good actors who are skilled at controlling the expression of their emotions.”52 Whether an image, a thought, a memory, or some other inductor, emotions are prompted by both literal and nonliteral objects, a biological function that undergirds the actor’s process. As indicated earlier, we can plainly see this in Stanislavski’s emotional recall, a technique that had significant implications for modern acting in that an actor could re-experience an emotion 49 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 42–43. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 48.

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and channel it into his performance by homing in on the requisite trigger: an object/image closely connected with a select memory. This orchestration of emotion is likewise relevant for Brechtian actors in that they have command of their psychophysical instruments to the point of controlling their emotions in facilitating Brecht’s aesthetic: telling a story in disjointed episodes that cause the spectator to critically engage sociopolitical matters. To return again to Weigel’s iconic gest, her approach to the silent scream disallows both the actress and audience to experience what would otherwise be a cathartic event. Despite the moment’s tragic implications, Courage has gained financially from the war, thereby contributing to the narrative’s contradictory essence. Weigel thus rendered a dialectical attitude in responding to the untimely death of her third child, thereby making the mother’s loss of a child appear “unfamiliar.” In doing so, she had to emotionally distance herself from Courage’s given circumstances and consciously utilize her autobiographical and core selves to defamiliarize the familiar. Consequently, the spectator was able to critically consider the narrative’s sociopolitical messaging. 2

Consciousness and the Boalian Actor–Spectator Relationship

Brecht’s legacy can be traced to numerous theatre practitioners, the most significant of which is arguably Augusto Boal (1931–2009). A political activist who spent fourteen years in exile from his native Brazil, Boal incorporated Brecht’s teachings into a “Poetics of the Oppressed,” a theatrical movement dedicated to social justice. Otherwise known as “Theater of the Oppressed,” Boal’s system is as daring as it is practical in its attempt to “transform society” through techniques designed to empower spectators to be proactive in contributing to the theatrical experience.53 Following Brecht, Boal juxtaposes his system against Aristotle’s Poetics, which he labels “coercive” in its reification of a hegemonic order that causes spectators and performers to shed any sense of political justice in favor of becoming immersed in “fear” and “pity,” the Aristotelian recipe for an emotional purgation: catharsis.54 The protagonist elicits an empathic response from the audience and correspondingly compromises their ability to critically engage and actively contribute to the performance. Boal’s ideal spectator is not a passive bystander, but an invested participant in shaping the theatrical event. 53 54

Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York: Urizen 1979), x. Ibid., xi.

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This is oppositional to Aristotle and the ways in which his Poetics has been interpreted for centuries as a guide for luring the spectator into an emotionally immersive experience by which the status quo surreptitiously prevails. The spectator is compelled as if by nature to share in the protagonist’s experience and worldview, with the latter occurring as a fixed entity immune to social change. As such, this phenomenon can be applied to a number of theoretical paradigms, including Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and Bourdieu’s symbolic violence, both of which examine how culture can be used interchangeably for democratic and totalitarian purposes.55 From an Aristotelian perspective the protagonist becomes a source of judgement, and it is the actor’s portrayal that mesmerizes the audience into believing the theatrical truth of the character’s downfall towards a shared catharsis. Boal critiques this process for its “purgation of all antisocial elements,” thereby leaving the spectator without agency or ownership in the production and reception of the theatrical event. An act of “intimidation,” Boal aptly asserts that the Aristotelian model has been the basis of dramatic structure for centuries and continues to frame the “consciousness” by which actors and audiences perceive scripted drama in media ranging from theatre and film to television and the internet.56 In brief, he sees it as an antiquated system privileging empathy over social awareness and critical discourse in formulating what Brecht pejoratively tagged as “culinary.”57 Boal’s Forum Theatre perhaps best signifies his deployment of performance as a vehicle for social change. Steeped in a Marxist ethos, Boal describes Forum Theatre “as a sort of fight or game” replete with rules and guidelines involving actors and spectators alike who “facilitate serious and fruitful discussion.”58 He founded the technique in 1973 while working in Peru for a government official with “leftist ideas.”59 In exile from Brazil, at the time, Boal sought to apply theatre to prompt awareness of the injustice being endured by an impoverished community on the outskirts of Lima.

55

See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and trans. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press 1994); and Antonio Gramsci, Further Selecions from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Derek Boothman (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press 1995). 56 Ibid., 46. 57 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 39. 58 Augusto Boal, “Forum Theatre,” In Acting (Re)Considered 2nd edition, ed. Phillip Zarrilli, (New York: Routledge 2005), 268. 59 For an informative history of Boal’s Forum Theatre, see Michael Taussig and Richard Schechner, “Boal in Brazil, France, and the usa: An Interview with Augusto Boal,” Tulane Drama Review 34.3 (Autumn 1990): 50–65.

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The real beginning was when I was doing what I called simultaneous playwriting using people’s real experiences. In one of these a woman told us what the protagonist should do. We tried her suggestions over and over again but she was never satisfied with our interpretation. So I said, ‘Come onto the stage to show us what to do because we cannot interpret your thoughts.’60 The decision to invite spectators onto the stage to shape the outcome of the narrative provided the basis for Forum Theatre. Essentially, it works with the players presenting a situation that bears sociocultural relevance to the audience and therein poses questions, problems, and solutions for enacting political change. There is a scripted text that “clearly delineates the nature of each character” to allow the spectator “to recognize each one’s ideology” relative to the issue under investigation.61 The narrative plays out to a moment of social crisis at which point a spectator is permitted to intervene, replace the protagonist, and change the trajectory of the narrative by introducing her solution for the crisis. This process unfolds in an improvisatory manner with one of the actors serving as a “joker” whose responsibility is to orchestrate and facilitate the game while “encouraging both parties (actors/audience) not to stop playing.”62 The event concludes after a number of participants have shaped and reshaped the narrative by undertaking the role of the protagonist, thereby lending to the Forum Theatre’s culminating activity: a discussion of the experience with the aim of promoting sociopolitical action. It is the latter point that is crucial to Boal, who defines theatre as a “weapon” that is useful only to the extent that it incites social change on behalf of the oppressed.63 Like Brecht, Boal’s approach to theatre is Non-Aristotelian in that it “does not produce catharsis,” but instead tries to “[stimulate] our desire to change the world.”64 It therefore demands a level of consciousness among the actors and audience that is distinct from conventional theatrical fare in that their awareness focuses on the sociopolitical relevance of the narrative at the e­ xpense of becoming emotionally attached to a character. Whether creating a Forum 60 Ibid., 56. 61 Boal, “Forum Theatre,” 268. 62 Ibid., 270. 63 Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, ix. Brecht also describes theatre as a weapon in the battle for sociopolitical change. For a useful comparison of their two aesthetics, see Andrew Robinson, “Augusto Boal: Brecht and Beyond—The Boal Method,” in Ceasefire (August 2016) https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/augusto-boal-brecht-boal-method/ (accessed 3 March 2017). 64 Boal, “Forum Theatre,” 274.

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piece that claims justice for exploited farmers or an oppressed social group, the actors and spectators jointly partake in a performance that summons a dialectical consciousness involving Damasio’s three selves: the proto, core, and autobiographical. In the case of the latter, the participants rely on their extended memory for the intellectual and emotional knowledge amassed from their past. The laborer who has spent decades tirelessly working for a pittance in draconian conditions, for example, has an ontological connection to being exploited by the capitalist superstructure in ways that no fictional character in a drama could ever have. One is actual, the other make-believe—which is precisely Boal’s point. Thus, the worker’s autobiographical self keenly contributes to the production and reception of a Forum Theater piece and is viscerally connected to its contents based on a lifetime of memory. Given that the purpose of Forum Theatre is to perform for the very group being oppressed and/or exploited, the audience will understand firsthand the subject being presented. The actors are also likely to have a deep emotional connection to the issue being addressed. The Boalian actor and spectator are thus motivated in part by their subconscious, proto self, insofar as they are innately attached to the piece’s subject matter. Again, no one understands the need for agrarian reform better than a farmer whose livelihood so closely depends on it. Its challenges and potential solutions are in his bones—so to speak. By removing the veneer of the performer/spectator relationship, Boal empowers all participants to share in a pedagogical encounter that prompts social awareness and corresponding political change. This is distinct from the Brechtian actor whose aesthetic is still just that: an aesthetic and not a political exercise.65 While Brecht’s theatre is obviously political, a point that attracted Boal to his work in the first place, it is a director-driven approach in which the audience does not contribute to the performance as active participants, as is the case with Forum Theatre. Surely Brecht did not want his audience to be lulled into passivity either. Indeed, he clearly sought to engage their critical judgement towards enacting change. Perhaps the variance in their related approaches can be traced in part to their decidedly different experiences as exiled émigrés, insofar as Brecht led a comparatively plush life in the U.S. and Western Europe while Boal’s was fraught with struggle and poverty. Thus, Boal’s plight to create 65

In describing Boal’s approach to performance as a “political exercise,” I am addressing the fact that he worked with amateur actors and members of marginalized communities, in what, in my view amounts to a performative event that is distinct from Brecht’s highly crafted, designed, and rehearsed “aesthetic.” I do not intend to minimize Boal’s project; indeed, his work has obviously had a significant impact on acting theory and theatre for social change initiatives. Nonetheless, it would be misleading to characterize his work as theatrical productions conceived as an aesthetic enterprise.

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performances that could change the lives of the marginalized, disaffected, and oppressed would appear to be more viscerally induced than his predecessor. 3 Conclusion The Boalian actor’s multiple uses of his consciousness exemplify what Damasio calls an “ensemble of brain devices” that allows us to perceive, understand, and act upon the world around us.66 This paradigm is also applicable to the Brechtian and Stanislavskian actors, insofar as they too are using some combination of their three selves (proto, core, and autobiographical); the question is a matter of degree in that the former engages his core self and the latter his proto-self. Both depend on their autobiographical selves, yet do so in distinct ways, with the Stanislavski-trained actor relying on his reservoir of experience to generate the emotional firepower to fill his role and the Brechtian using it as a way to forge an empathic distance in the actor/spectator relationship. For his part, the Boalian deploys a comparative balance of his selves and corresponding levels of consciousness. As indicated above, his proto-self subconsciously informs his autobiographical self, thereby spawning the basis for the Forum Theatre experience: a viscerally felt political cause in conjunction with one’s lived experience (extended memory) as driving forces behind the production and reception of the theatrical event. The manifestation of the event is dependent upon the actor’s core consciousness, which orchestrates his performance into something tangible. The core self causes us to make decisions such as what story to tell, what action to play, how to approach a character, how to acknowledge a feeling, and ultimately, it allows us to construct a performance. It is at the heart of Brecht’s strategy for making the familiar seem unfamiliar, which explains why it is the level of consciousness most applicable to the Brechtian actor’s work. Though the Stanislavskian and Boalian likewise use some part of their core self to consciously make choices in crafting their role (e.g., the very act of learning lines is a core-self activity), Brecht’s approach to theatre lends to cool-minded didacticism inherently disassociated from empathy, a performative state by which one’s emotional experience is suppressed if not erased. As such, the Brechtian actor and spectator alike are free to cerebrally engage a topic in the context of an aesthetic that uses distancing techniques that are specifically designed to make the commonplace appear strange, render the logical illogical, and defamiliarize that which we would otherwise deem familiar. 66 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 22.

Chapter 4

Brecht and Film Theory: How Brecht’s Theory and Method Impacted the Development of “Screen Theory” Jeremy Spencer Abstract This intended paper will address the dialogue between Brecht’s theory and method and the authors associated with the development of so-called “Screen Theory” of the British film magazine Screen between 1971 and 1979. Authors such as Stephen Heath did not read Brecht to appeal to the authority of a person but to articulate a “truly dialectical practice” in a new situation, namely, the reflection on cinema and the intervention of the practice of film in ideology. Heath was concerned with how Brecht’s theory and practice could be used to understand film as an “ideological intervention” and therefore the “possible actuality” of Brecht’s dialectical work. This paper explores the actuality of Brecht’s ideas—his “critical lessons”—in the context of Screen, as part of the magazine’s defence of political modernism or the “politics of form,” how they were mobilised in relation to political cinema, semiotic theory, and psychoanalysis.

1

The Actuality of Brecht in Screen

This essay addresses the impact of Bertolt Brecht’s practice and theory on the British film journal Screen. It addresses how Screen theory formed by using certain emphases of Brechtian aesthetics to pose the problem of the politics of film and resolve the “difficulties related to the artistic and ideological intervention of film.”1 Contemporary political film signaled the actuality of Brecht, but Screen did not aim to define an essential Brechtian cinema, although, Jean-Luc Godard’s counter-cinema was an important exemplar.2 It was paradoxical to 1 Stephen Heath, “From Brecht to Film: Theses, Problems (on History Lessons and Dear Summer Sister),” Screen, vol. 16 no. 4, 1975: 34. 2 In brief, it argued that counter cinema constructs new meanings through strategies like montage or fragmentation that interrogate and disrupt the fabric or the language of commercial cinema and therefore an ideological depiction of reality.

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cite Brecht as an exemplar of revolutionary cinema. The collaborative project Kuhle Wampe (1931) did exemplify Brechtian cinema in its use of montage and the application of Brecht’s theatrical strategies to the different conditions of film. The impact of Brecht in the journal was most strongly felt in the formation of a politicized and rigorous theory of film. Although there was never a ­homogeneous “1970s Screen theory,” the trajectory of Screen exhibited an increasing theoretical coherence. Screen attempted to theorize the relations between film, ideology, and politics and it is this articulation and Brecht’s place within it which is the focus of this essay. Screen devoted two issues to Brecht and film in the mid-1970s. The Summer 1974 issue included important essays on Brecht and revolutionary cinema by Colin MacCabe and Stephen Heath alongside work by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and Brecht himself. The editorial named Brecht, Sergei Eisenstein, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and John Heartfield as exemplary for contemporary revolutionary or political art.3 MacCabe described his “Realism and the Cinema: Notes on some Brechtian theses” as a “set of digressions”; Heath characterized his “Lessons from Brecht” as just “notes” and “readings” that recast Brecht’s writings on literature and art, rethinking them “in new articulations.”4 The essays were a kind of plagiarism of Brecht’s writings, demonstrating a dialectical practice of appropriation and recasting informed by Brecht himself who “did not use his capacity for appropriating and assimilating the knowledge of others to claim it as his own knowledge, but with a generative purpose, in order to make it function.”5 Through this kind of plagiarism, Screen opened Brecht’s formulations to the different situations of film, to make them function differently, as part of the journal’s reflections on cinema and exploration of the relationship between artistic practices and ideology, specifically, artistic practices as specific interventions in ideology. In the summer of 1975, Screen’s editorial board organized a set of screenings and seminar discussions at the Edinburgh International Film Festival held that September on “Brecht and Cinema/Film and Politics.” Screen’s Winter 1975/6 issue edited by Ben Brewster published transcripts of the spoken papers delivered at the event.6 The festival’s “Press Release No 1” explained that: 3 Ben Brewster and Colin MacCabe, “Editorial: Brecht and a Revolutionary Cinema?” Screen, 15:2, Summer 1974: 4. 4 Stephen Heath, “Lessons from Brecht,” Screen, vol. 15 no. 2, 1974: 103. 5 Bernard Eisenschitz, “Who does the World Belong to? The place of a film,” Screen, vol. 15 no. 2, Summer 1974: 67. 6 The transcribed and edited papers discussed films screened the previous day. Stephen Heath’s “From Brecht to Film: Theses, Problems” discussed Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s History Lessons (1972) and Nagisa Oshima’s Dear Summer Sister (1972). Colin ­MacCabe’s “The

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Whenever questions of the relations between revolutionary art and revolutionary politics are on the agenda, Brecht’s name is bound to arise. His insistence on a dramaturgy that entertains and yet encourages thought, that provides enjoyment and instruction without emotional identification, has a clear relevance to any counter-cinema which aims to undermine the reactionary effects of the dominant cinema and yet must take into account, in some sense compete with, its popularity.7 Screen had its beginnings in the early 1950s with the launch of an occasional mimeographed newsletter called The Film Teacher that evolved into the periodical Screen Education first published in October 1959 by the Society for Education in Film and Television (seft), an independent body funded by the British Film Institute and disbanded in 1989. Screen Education was relaunched as Screen in 1969.8 Under the editorship of Sam Rohdie (1971–1974) Screen established a theoretical foundation for film studies. Rohdie aimed to develop “a politics of education and of film” and a rigorous methodology to foster an “aesthetics of film, film theory, an understanding of the object film.”9 Interviewed in 2015, Rohdie spoke of “a desire to find a new critical language combined with the fact that this new found theoretical seriousness was directed to a traditionally despised area, not simply film, but the industrialized, commercialized and popular American cinema. There was something outrageous if not scandalous about this taking of position.”10 Screen took a decisively theoretical approach to film under Rohdie. The journal drew on structuralism and semiology, Althusserian Marxism, and the theoretical debates and critical rethinking of established analytical concepts such

7 8 9 10

Politics of Separation” drew on Brecht’s notes on his and Kurt Weill’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, first performed in Leipzig in 1930, to consider the political aesthetics of Jean-Luc Godard’s films Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967) and Tout va bien (1972). Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen’s “Brecht in Britain: The Independent Political Film” discussed The Nightcleaners (1975) and Alan Lovell’s “Brecht in Britain: Lindsay Anderson” discussed that director’s If … (1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973) and the effects of Brechtian aesthetics on British culture and cinema. “‘News’ Edinburgh International Film Festival press release 1975, unpaginated,” Working Together: Notes on British Film Collectives in the 1970s, edited by Petra Bauer and Dan Kidner, Focal Point Gallery, 2013: 113. See Annette Kuhn, “Screen and Screen Theorizing Today,” Screen, Vol. 50 no. 1, March 2009: 1–3. Sam Rohdie, “Editorial” Screen, Vol. 12 no. 2, July 1971: 5. Deane Williams, “Some Things You Never Learn: An Interview with Sam Rohdie,” screeningthepast.com, www.screeningthepast.com/2015/01/some-things-you-never-learn/. Accessed 21 Sept. 2017.

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as auteurism then underway in France in Cahiers du Cinéma and Cinéthique. The Screen project was diverse, concerned and involved with film criticism, the dominant realist aesthetics of contemporary popular film and television, the institution of the cinema itself, cinema history and the history of revolutionary cinema in the Soviet Union. The Winter 1971/2 issue included material on Soviet silent film and the cultural and aesthetic debates of the 1920s avant-garde, publishing writing from the literary journals Lef and Novy Lef by Osip Brik, Boris Arvatov, Sergi Tretyakov, Dziga Vertov, Vladimir Mayakovsky—his “Our Literary Work” was concerned with the materiality of language and realism. 2 The Screen Problematic The “Screen problematic” of the earlier 1970s drew on Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology and Althusserian Marxism more broadly, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Brechtian criticism and theory, and Russian formalism in developing a theory of the cinema; the two issues on Brechtian aesthetics appeared in what Antony Easthope remarks were the “heroic days of 1974–76.”11 This was an ambitious theoretical construct founded on the “encounter of Marxism and psychoanalysis on the terrain of semiotics” that opened an intellectual terrain for the political analysis of cinema.12 Screen adapted Brechtian aesthetics to a different ­object and context that brought Brecht into dialogue with contemporary cultural and critical theory. Althusser’s theory of ideology is outlined in “Marxism and Humanism” (1964), “Theory, Theoretical Practice, and Theoretical Formation: Ideology and Ideological Struggle,” written in 1965 but never published in France, and most importantly, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation)” (1969). In the earlier essays, Althusser argued that it was necessary for men and women to possess a certain representation of the world which related individuals to their conditions of existence and to each other; this is who he broadly understood ideology. Althusser advances a number of theses in the later essay: all ideologies represent imaginary relationships between individuals and the social relations in which they live; the ideas or representations constitutive of an ideology have a material existence—ideologies have a material existence in the actual practices and rituals of what Althusser 11 12

Antony Easthope, “The Trajectory of Screen, 1971–1979,” The Politics of Theory, edited by Francis Barker, et al., The University of Essex, 1983: 122. Stephen Heath, “Jaws, Ideology and Film Theory,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media, Issue 4, Autumn 1976: 26.

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names as the ideological state apparatuses (he lists among others the religious, educational, family, and cultural apparatuses). His central thesis concerning the specular structure and function of ideology is the interpellation or hailing of “individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject”— through the recognition of a Subject written with a capital S, concrete individuals are interpellated as subjects; for Althusser, “there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects.”13 In his essay on the function of the mirror-stage, Jacques Lacan described the child’s jubilation in fully assuming his specular image “in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form,” of taking pleasure in a mirage which anticipates “the maturation of his power.”14 Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni’s editorial “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” first published in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1969 and then translated in Screen in 1971, outlined the French film review’s area of critical activity as the relation of different films to prevailing ideologies. Films that operated against ruling ideology on two fronts, those of the signifier and signified, were those that constituted “the essential in cinema, and should be the chief subject of the magazine.”15 Screen was similarly concerned with film’s different relations to ideology, however, the adoption of psychoanalysis in the journal took it beyond the critical aims of Cahiers du Cinéma. The politics of a critical and realist art was, Heath argues, “the posing of another subjectivity.”16 Insofar “as a film fixed the subject in a position of imaginary dominance through the security of vision then it fell immediately within bourgeois ideology, insofar as it broke that security it offered fresh possibilities.”17 For Stephen Heath, art was “a struggle in ideology by the distance it establishes in respect of the ideological homogenisation of reality; a distance which, destruction of the forms of universality, is the demonstration of a class position.”18 For Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen, “all artistic production is a struggle within ideology.”19 They were writing about Nightcleaners, an exemplary feminist and political film first 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” On Ideology, Verso, 2008: 54, 44. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan, Routledge, 1989: 2, 3. Louis Comolli, and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism (1),” Screen Reader 1: Cinema/Ideology/Politics, edited by John Ellis, seft, 1977: 6. Heath, “From Brecht to Film,” 36. Colin MacCabe, “Class of ’68: elements of an intellectual autobiography 1967–81,” Tracking the Signifier: Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature, University of Minnesota Press, 1985: 9. Heath, “From Brecht to Film,” 35. Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen, “Brecht in Britain: The Independent Political Film (on The Nightcleaners),” Screen, Winter 1975/6: 103.

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screened in 1975 and made by members of the Berwick Street Film Collective about the campaign to unionize night cleaning workers. Johnstone and Willemen argue that the film-makers were impelled to employ certain techniques, procedures and representational devices originally pioneered by Brecht. Indebted to Althusser and Lacan, the analysis of film and its function in the reproduction of subjectivities was a political project to explain how capitalist social relations reproduced themselves in non-coercive ways. It was, as Stuart Hall comments: a very ambitious theoretical construct indeed—for it aims to account for how biological individuals become social subjects, and for how those subjects are fixed in positions of knowledge in relation to language and representation, and for how they are interpellated in specific ideological discourses.20 Screen was critical of the educated but gentlemanly amateurism of contemporary writing about film; a semiology of film developed in the work of authors such as Christian Metz challenged a situation in which film and the cinema were never allowed to be objects in their own right but merely the excuse to talk about something else, usually the personal beliefs and prejudices of the critic himself. A semiology of film focused on the systems that constitute a film did not yet exist and the theoretical methods and techniques through a distinct object could be established were borrowed from other discourses, those of the Freudian unconscious and structural linguistics. The work of Christian Metz’s was a step towards establishing a specific object of study and semiology as the theory of the production of meanings, it was argued, was an essential theoretical framework for the analysis of what then became film texts. The Spring/Summer 1973 issue of Screen on Metz and cinema semiotics included an essay by Julia Kristeva on the nature of the semiotic activity intended to defend semiology as a self-critical and self-questioning discourse that offered a rigorously scientific theoretical framework for the study of film. Following Kristeva, semiological analysis was conceived politically, which operated a radical questioning of the approaches and concepts of conventional aesthetics or what Stephen Heath, drawing on Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author” (1968), named as the “habitual reflexes” of contemporary film 20

Stuart Hall, “Recent Developments in Theories of Language and Ideology: A Critical Note,” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, eds. Stuart Hall et al. Routledge in association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies University of Birmingham, 1992: 159.

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c­ riticism, the personal cinema of an original author. Heath understood the emphases of semiological analysis as the means to “finish” with a conventional aesthetics focused on originality and self-expression; it was a “critical science” that operated “a ceaseless destruction of the whole ideology of representation.”21 Semiology, Kristeva remarked, offered “itself as the area of interrogation, analysis and criticism of metaphysics.”22 Screen acknowledged its role in introducing and investigating the developments in semiotics especially the application of semiotic concepts to film analysis in the work of Metz. Semiotic approaches fractured the experienced organic unity of the text into what becomes the contradictory interplay of different and possibly impoverished codes. However, this interest in the semiotic project or approaches did not preclude social and historical analysis; Screen valued kinds of semiological analysis that did not preclude the final integration of textual codes back into wider social processes. It is historical materialism which equally extended and critiqued semiological approaches to the analysis of film. Historical materialism studies discursive prices in relation to the other non-discursive practices which constitute the social formation. A historical materialist account of the cinema raises the problem of ideology; this involves approaching film’s function in the reproduction of ideology and the place of film within ideology, and its place in the historical present that is produced through essential struggles. Following Walter Benjamin, a historical materialist approach to film seeks to disinter what is most valuable in a historical continuum of film according to the demands of the present or what is “most actual and contradictory.”23 Screen identified a split in semiological investigations, distinguishing schematically those writers like Barthes for whom semiotics was a methodology to radically denaturalize literature through its fragmentation into different, contradictory codes, and writers such as Todorov, who understood semiological analyses as valuable in their own right. A semiological approach led Barthes to a theory of the text, characterized by an inherent polysemy, which in the language of psychoanalysis, did not easily accept the constitution of subjectivity and the unconscious in the symbolic order, the order of language and culture, as unproblematic or self-evident, but instead repeatedly returned to this constitution. In Screen, psychoanalysis was primarily a concern with the processes or passage through which “the small human animal” becomes a ­subject

21 22 23

Stephen Heath, “Introduction: Questions of Emphasis,” Screen, vol. 14 no. 1/2, Spring/Summer, 1973: 9. Julia Kristeva, “The Semiotic Activity,” Screen, vol. 14 no. 1/2, Spring/Summer 1973: 25. Ben Brewster and Colin MacCabe, “Editorial,” Screen, vol. 15 no. 1, Spring 1974: 5.

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through its submission to the oppositions and differences of language.24 “In the Oedipus,” Anika Lemaire explains, “the child moves from an immediate, non-distanced relationship with its mother to a mediate relationship thanks to its insertions into the symbolic order of the Family… In the Oedipus, the father plays the role of the symbolic Law which establishes the family triangle by actualizing in his person the prohibition of union with the mother.”25 Through the Oedipal moment, the child is introduced to the symbolic order, “seizes him before his first cry, assigning to him his place and role, and hence his fixed destination.”26 Brewster and MacCabe’s editorial to the Spring 1974 issue which considers the relationship of semiotics, historical materialism, and psychoanalysis and defined the Screen project concluded with Brecht. They write: “It is Brecht, along with Eisenstein, who stands as one of the great examples of those who have both been actively involved in the revolutionary politics of this century, but have also been fascinated by the problem of the sign—of the process of signification.”27 The next issue of Screen developed the problems raised in their editorial from the perspective of Brecht’s artistic practice and theory of art, namely, semiotics as a means to fracture the unity of the text; the place of film within ideology; and the relation between the ideological effects of film and the symbolic order. 3

Brecht’s Strategies and Emphases

Brecht wrote in 1927 that is was not yet possible to say definitely what epic theater was in that its essential or defining principles had not yet been worked out in detail. He understood epic theater to represent a radical transformation of theatrical practices and techniques and as an element within a new superstructure for the “practical rearrangement” of contemporary society. Brecht identified its novelty and differentiated it, defining it as theater which appealed to the spectator’s reason rather than his feelings; it did not offer a shared experience, but neither did it disallow the possibility of the spectator’s emotional involvement in a performance.28 24 25 26 27 28

Colin MacCabe, “Presentation of ‘The Imaginary Signifier,’” Screen, vol. 16 no. 2, Summer 1975: 7. Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, Routledge, 1977: 7. Louis Althusser, “Freud and Lacan,” On Ideology, Verso, 2008: 163. Brewster and MacCabe, “Editorial,” 9. See Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by John Willet, Methuen, 1964: 23.

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Brecht criticized the irrationality of conventional opera determined by relationship of its different elements, thus, although it aims to reproduce a solid and rational reality, this is lost in the music, which makes the reality unreal and unclear. The introduction of music results in an unreality and irrationality that Brecht understands in terms of hedonism and pleasurable experience, he names a “culinary” opera, but acknowledges that it did contain philosophical and dynamic elements. Brecht identifies a “struggle for supremacy between words, music and production,” which is bypassed by the introduction of the modern methods of the epic theater which Brecht characterizes as the “radical separation of the elements.”29 The fusion or the integration of the elements of the work degrades them equally. And for Brecht, this “process of fusion extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art.”30 Brecht considers the different emphases of epic theater and the different experience of the spectator which results from them: a more natural attitude displaces the pleasurable intoxications and sensual satisfactions of the old opera. Brecht questions the value of producing opera purely as entertainment and devoted to pleasurable illusion, but he acknowledges that the old opera survives because it fulfils human needs and meets the demands of the existing cultural apparatus. For Brecht, the theatrical apparatus was resistant to conversation or alteration of its function or purpose; this was problematic for Brecht in that epic theatre was concerned with representation itself, the manner in which a given content is represented or signified. In contrast to the culinary focus of the old opera, Brecht poses instruction and communication. For Brecht, the form or arrangement of epic theater denied the spectator’s desire for a definite objective and his emotional participation in a chain of events. Epic theater desired of the spectator a different attitude, first to the theatrical experience itself, and following this, to the world; Brecht was anxious to teach the spectator attitudes that led to the desire to change the world. Brecht described the technical innovations which would achieve a different and definite political attitude or psychological effect, which functioned to deny or block the spectator’s complete empathy with the performance. Brecht remarks on sedulously controlling empathy for a play’s success; if art appeals to the emotions as it does in bourgeois theater then reason is necessarily and consequently “switched off.”31 Brecht intended the strategies and technologies of

29 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 37. 30 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 38. 31 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht Journals, edited by John Willett, Methuen, 1993: 14.

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epic theater like screened and projected films, images, and captions to control or prevent the spectator’ being carried away. However, for Brecht, Aristotle’s Poetics had established that empathy was the foundation of theatrical experience. In establishing a theory of Athenian tragedy, Aristotle argues that the purpose of tragedy is the representation of serious events that involve individual suffering and which evoke pity and fear; this evocation will affect the catharsis or “purification” of these emotions in the spectator; the spectacle of suffering is intended to be pleasurable. Brecht’s historically and socially specific form of theater is “non-Aristotelian.”32 Brechtian theater rejected catharsis and organic unity, displaced by constructive montage and the development of a looser structure of more or less independent scenes. As Benjamin writes, “Brecht’s drama eliminates the Aristotelian catharsis, the purging of the emotions through empathy with the stirring fate of the hero.”33 Brechtian strategies and techniques make it difficult for the spectator to empathize with the represented events and to lose himself in the flow of a temporally unfolding narrative. For Brecht, “If empathy makes something ordinary of a special event, alienation makes something special of an ordinary one. The most hackneyed everyday incidents are stripped of their monotony when represented as quite special.”34 Brecht cites the alienating nature of Chinese acting—he had seen a performance by Mei Lan-fang’s company in Moscow in 1935—in explaining the evolution of an epic theater, outlining the different ways in which the alienation effect can be achieved. The Chinese actor, Brecht writes, never acts as if there were a fourth wall and so expresses his awareness of being watched; a disillusioned audience can no longer believe it is the unseen witness or voyeur to a real event. Chinese actors are self-reflexive, which Brecht describes as “an artful and artistic act of self-alienation,” which has the effect of the spectator “losing himself in the character completely.”35 In contrast, the Western actor tries to bring the spectator as close to possible to the represented events, exhausting himself in trying to convert himself completely into the character in question. Instead of seeking this kind of conversion, Chinese actors show the character played and quotes that character’s lines; he signifies emotion mechanically and as such the audience is never entirely “carried away” and can take another, opposed attitude to those represented. 32 Brecht, Journals, 124. 33 Walter Benjamin, “What is Epic Theater? (ii),” Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, edited by Michael W. Jennings, et al., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006: 304. 34 Brecht, Messingkauf Dialogues, 76. 35 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 93.

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To achieve an alienating effect, the “actor must give up his complete conversion into the stage character.”36 In the European context, Brecht explains that the alienation effect was achieved in different ways, not only by techniques of acting but through technologies and staging. Verfremdung, the central concept of Brecht’s theory and practice, usually translated as “distanciation” in Screen, has the sense of “estrangement” and “defamiliarization.” The alienation effect “consists in the reproduction of reallife incidents on the stage in such a way as to underline their causality and bring it to the spectator’s attention” and therefore “facilitate the mastering of reality.”37 Brecht denies that epic theater is “a highly disagreeable, humorless, indeed strenuous affair.”38 He refutes the usual contrast between learning and amusement, seeing no opposition between a theater which is instructive and one that is amusing; learning is mutable, socially and historically determined, it means different things to different people, but however we understand it, “there is such a thing as pleasurable learning, cheerful and militant learning.”39 Brecht’s spectator, then, is interested and entertained, a thinking expert; he is absorbed only to the extent that he is “astonished at the circumstances within which he has his being.”40 As an aesthetic device or technique, distanciation was intended to make the spectator adopt a critical attitude through the estrangement of familiar objects which he will perceive differently with an “astonished eye.”41 It is arguable that Brecht developed the technique as a weapon against fascism. He comments on fascism’s “grotesque emphasizing of the emotions.”42 Distanciation becomes “a means to shock people out of a passive-fatalistic acceptance of authoritarian and manipulative politics.”43 However, the technique has its roots in the theories and practices of the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s and represents the politicization of Victor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization. For Shklovsky, poetic language was a kind of artificially distorted speech by which language itself becomes strange and unfamiliar, a reader or listener would no longer perceive meaning automatically. The concept and strategy is based on the assumed familiarity of the social world and the need to see it afresh, to recover 36 Brecht, Journals, 83. 37 Brecht, Journals, 81. 38 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 72. 39 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 73. 40 Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, nlb, 1977: 18. 41 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 144. 42 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 145. 43 Stanley Mitchell, “From Shklovsky to Brecht: Some preliminary remarks towards a history of Russian Formalism,” Screen, vol. 15 no. 2, Summer 1974: 76.

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powers of perception that have become automatic, numbed, or paralyzed. Through the shock of estrangement, self-evident social conditions become unfamiliar and therefore questionable. The function of art was to construct linguistic forms or devices, kinds of figural language, that estranged everyday life. This is emphasized by Shklovsky, who in a similar way to Brecht, considered art “the enemy of habit” because of its power to renew and recover human perception. As his essay “Art as Technique,” first published in 1917, explains: [A]rt exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms ­difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.44 In Brecht’s more political formulation, which contrasts with Shklovsky’s perceptual aesthetic of renewal, the familiar means the “natural” and therefore the ideological, which through its estrangement is revealed as historical and therefore changeable. Brecht’s critique of the spectator’s empathetic identification with the spectacle was an important emphasis for Screen. Heath understood Brecht’s political aesthetics in terms of a productive realism which established a distance within ideology in the sense of estranging ideological practices—habits and rituals—which explains Brecht’s emphasis on montage construction and literarization, on quotations that interrupt the flow and unity of a text. What Heath valued in Brecht’s practice was “the ceaseless displacement of identification… the introduction precisely of a constant distance, a critical movement that produces not a totality but a play of contradictions, an idea of transformation.”45 4

Brecht and Realism

Screen understood realism as a crucial area of theoretical debate in that it had become the dominant aesthetic in film and television since the Second World War. Brecht revised his avant-garde allegiances and influences under the 44 45

Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, edited by David Lodge, Longman, 1992: 20. Heath, “Lessons from Brecht,” 111.

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­ ressure to develop a meaningful Marxist concept of realism in opposition to p the doctrine of Socialist Realism. His writing on realism emphasize questions of knowledge and cognition rather than modernist reflexivity and formal experimentation. Brecht’s strategies and techniques aim to reveal the workings of capitalist societies; however, his realism is productive rather than reflective, intending to alter social conditions in and through their representation in art. Treating staged events as straightforward reflections of reality is to leave the realm of art, Brecht comments. Realism, as formulated through the Brecht–Lukács debate of the 1930s, is at the heart of Brecht’s aesthetics. Against Lukács, who held to a version of realism with foundations in the nineteenth-century novel, Brecht problematized the relation of artistic practice to reality: Realistic means: discovering the causal complexes of society / unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power / writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught up / emphasizing the element of development / making possible the concrete, and making possible abstraction from it.46 Brecht argued that identifying realism with a given historical form or set of aesthetic conventions had sterilized and “debased” it; he was incredulous that Lukács had proposed the recuperation of historical modes of representation and rejected the view that the conventions of realism developed in the nineteenth century were relevant to the contemporary political situation, namely, “capitalism in its fascist phase.”47 For Brecht, taking “ancient and outmoded forms, forms obviously inseparable from their erstwhile content or social function” and imposing them on new practices was exactly the formalism critics such as Lukács had condemned of modernism.48 “Individual works,” Brecht argued, “must be assessed according to how far they have grasped reality in a concrete instance, and not according to how far they correspond in formal terms to a proposed model of a historical type.”49 The concept of realism for Brecht was fused with the problem of knowledge—grasping reality ­objectively— rather than an adopted form copied from historical models. As Brecht writes: 46 47

Bertolt Brecht, “Against Georg Lukács,” Aesthetics and Politics, Verso, 2007: 82. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Art and Politics, edited by Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles, Methuen, 2003: 227. 48 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht Letters: 1913–1956, translated by Ralph Manheim and edited with commentary and notes by John Willett, Methuen, 1990: 246. 49 Brecht, Brecht on Art and Politics, 227–228.

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For time flows on, and if it did not, it would be a bad prospect for those who do not sit at golden tables. Methods become exhausted; stimuli no longer work. New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change.50 From Lukács’ perspective, however, modernist literature only represented the immediacy of reality, “exactly as it manifests itself to the writer” and had failed “to pierce the surface to discover the underlying essence, i.e., the real factors that relate their experiences to the hidden social forces that produce them.”51 In contrast, realism uncovered “the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society” so that we can “observe the whole surface of life in all its essential determinations.”52 Heath follows Brecht to critically refocus the concept of realism. He argues that as it is conventionally conceived, usually according to the idea of the photograph, realism denied “any knowledge of production…by the tautology of reflection…appearance becomes the truth of a reality cleared—the work of the mirror—of all relations, of all processes of production.”53 Brecht had criticized conceptions of realism in which the writer’s material was supposed to be shaped directly by experienced reality so that realist writing becomes “a process of direct experience” in which “no knowledge is necessary.”54 Brecht wanted a realism informed by historical materialism that critically formed social and historical reality, “opposed to the myth of reflection,” and that would be the “crisis…of appearance.”55 As the production of knowledge, rather than the immediate reflection of a given appearance, artistic practice includes the author and reader of the work of art, which for Heath, is theorized as distanciation in Brecht’s writing. MacCabe uses Brecht’s critique of realism to explore the structure of com­ mercial cinema which has its origins in the conventions of the ­nineteenthcentury novel. The classic realist text is hierarchical: “there is a hierarchy amongst the discourses which compose the text and this hierarchy is defined in terms of an empirical notion of truth.”56 A transparent and privileged 50 Brecht, “Against Georg Lukács,” 82. 51 Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” Aesthetics and Politics, Verso, 2007: 36–37. 52 Lukács “Realism in the Balance,” 38, 39. 53 Heath, “From Brecht to Film,” 35. 54 Brecht, Journals, 7. 55 Heath, “From Brecht to Film,” 35–36. 56 Colin MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema: Notes on some Brechtian Thesis,” Screen, vol. 15 no. 2, Summer 1974: 8.

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­ arrative ­functions to state the adequacy and truthfulness of the other spoken n discourses enclosed in inverted commas. This discourse “simply allows reality to appear and denies its own status as articulation.”57 For MacCabe: The unquestioned nature of the narrative discourse entails that the only problem that reality poses is to go and look and see what Things there are. The relationship between the reading subject and the real is placed as one of pure specularity. The real is not articulated—it is.58 These features of the classic realist text imply that it cannot represent the real as contradictory and it positions the subject in a relation of “dominant specularity.” “It is clear that the classic realist text,” MacCabe argues, “guarantees the position of the subject exactly outside any articulation—the whole text works on the concealing of the dominant discourse as articulation—instead the dominant discourse presents itself exactly as the presentation of objects to the reading subject.”59 He does suggest the possibility of contradiction in that the classic realist text can be progressive, in representing a strike or protest positively, for example, and cites Marx and Engels’ writing on Balzac and Lenin’s writing on Tolstoy in support. In contemporary cinema and television, the cinema of Costa-Gavras and Ken Loach’s television documentary for the bbc Cathy Come Home (1966) broadcast as part of The Wednesday Play series, exemplifies the kinds of subject matter that contradicts ruling ideologies. MacCabe values artistic strategies through which “the reading subject finds himself without a position” and revolutionary art which displaces rather than confirms the position of the subject within ideology, exemplified by Brecht’s film project Kuhle Wampe and Godard’s cinema.60 So, for MacCabe, rather than subvert or disturb subjective identities, a revolutionary art displaces the subject within ideology against the “reactionary practice” of commercial cinema which produces a unified subject petrified “in a position of pseudo-dominance offered by the metalanguage” which speaks the truth of the other discourses of the film.61 As Johnston and Willemen argue, drawing on an earlier essay by MacCabe, the metalanguage that characterizes realism in resolving contradiction “places the subject outside the realm of struggle, ultimately outside the realm of meaningful action altogether.”62 Kuhle Wampe and Godard’s Tout va Bien 57 58 59 60 61 62

MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema,” 9. MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema,” 12. MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema,” 12. MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema,” 19. MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema,” 24. Johnston and Willemen, “Brecht in Britain,” 103.

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have a different relation to metalanguage, they do not privilege a dominant explanatory narrative to provide a ready-made knowledge, or offer a resolution of contradiction—the defining characteristics of the classic realist text. In offering social and artistic contradictions or relating the fictional material in different ways, the reader must produce a meaning for these films. 5

Brechtian Cinema

Brecht wrote of the incompatibility of the cinema and other arts such as drama and literature; he believed cinema would eventually take over their functions but did not think it could adapt their forms. Epic theater did also borrow from cinema, as Brecht acknowledged. A separation of elements or the materials of expression characterized experimental theater and Brecht recognized the advantages of treating music, action, and stage design as independent components or elements. Colin MacCabe’s essay, “The Politics of Separation” develops Brecht’s discussion of the separation of elements or expressive materials in theater to consider the characteristic separations or disconnections of cinematic elements in two of Godard’s films, Tout va bien (1972) and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967), an “essay” on prostitution in the context of the transformation of the built environment of the Paris banlieues starring Marina Vlady. MacCabe explores the political implications of the “filmic weaknesses” of Deux ou trois choses. The film disrupts the continuity of sound and image and there is often no diegetic motivation for the music or silences of the film. MacCabe asks what the purpose or aim of these separations is, in other words, what are their politics, which is, following Brecht, the separation of the spectator from a homogeneous work of art and the subsequent formation of a different, critical relationship. In seeking to outline the theory and practice of epic theater, Brecht had described how the different elements of artworks were degraded by their integration or combination and argued this this process of fusion extended to the spectator. He argued that “Witchcraft of this sort must of course be fought against. Whatever is intended to produce hypnosis, is likely to induce sordid intoxication, or creates fog, has got to be given up.”63 The spectator’s “active appropriation” of these elements or materials, which for MacCabe characterized epic theater, was the precondition for knowledge opposed to the intoxication and hypnosis condemned by Brecht. MacCabe sums up the desired Screen aesthetic: “we want a text whose fissures and 63 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 38.

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d­ ifference constantly demand an activity of articulation from the subject.”64 As Brecht writes, “By means of a certain interchangeability of circumstances and occurrences the spectator must be given the possibility (and duty) of assembling, experimenting and abstracting.”65 MacCabe wants to know what kinds of text will produce a critical rather than intoxicated spectator and to answer this question he makes a detour through a psychoanalytical account of the formation of the subject juxtaposed with another central concept of epic theater, namely, the gest as it is defined by Benjamin in terms of interruption. ­Benjamin had explained that the task of epic theater is the “representation of situations”—which means their discovery or defamiliarization—which is fostered by an interruption in the action.66 The gest is a set of ideological relationships that are revealed by their interruption: Brecht’s aim is to tear an action or gesture from its immediacy and insert it into the causal processes through which social relations are reproduced. In other words, Brechtian aesthetics disallow or block the spectator’s identification with a filmed or performed gest so that the social relations that determine it could be effectively analyzed. With the suicide of the young, unemployed worker of Brecht’s Kuhle Wampe in mind, MacCabe argues that “to delineate the web of relations which constitute the gest it is necessary to conduct a constant struggle against the world of pleasure and belief which collapses the difference of knowledge into an identity.”67 In comparison to Brecht’s Kuhle Wampe, MacCabe criticizes the typical separations of Godard’s Deux ou trois choses as purely formal; the film’s separation of the soundtrack and image does not allow the spectator to perceive analytically a set of social relationships that determine its theme of prostitution and could be enjoyed stylistically as “the tics of an original genius.”68 According to MacCabe, the spectator is untouched by the separations of Godard’s film and in Brecht’s terms, is still fused within to become a passive part of a total, integrated work of art. For MacCabe, although his film is characterized by and demonstrates a fundamental heterogeneity of filmic elements Godard remains nostalgic for a perfect image in which sound and image coincide or punctually coalesce which, in part, explains its weakness as political film. It was primarily the theory of epic theater that made Brecht an exemplar of revolutionary cinema in Screen: “his reflections on his own work in literature, theater and cinema and on the politico-aesthetic controversies of his 64 Colin MacCabe, “The Politics of Separation,” Screen, vol. 16 no. 1, Summer 1975: 48. 65 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 60. 66 Benjamin, “What is Epic Theater (ii),” 304. 67 MacCabe, “Politics of Separation,” 50. 68 MacCabe, “Politics of Separation,” 53.

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day ­provide the framework within which it is possible to begin to think of a revolutionary cinema.”69 However, Screen did publish articles on Brecht’s realized collaborative film project Kuhle Wampe, made in Berlin in August 1931 and screened with cuts following its initial prohibition in cinemas in the city in June 1932.70 The film was intended for a working class audience and was the last production of Prometheus, founded in 1926 for the distribution of the work of Soviet film-makers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov (the firm distributed Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, premiered in Berlin in April 1926). Screen published Brecht’s own reflections on the film’s production and critical reception and commentaries on the film by Bernard Eisenschitz and James Pettifer. For Pettifer, the film derived from an Expressionist aesthetic that creates symbols unrelated to the complex structure of social relations. Screen was interested in historical models and exemplary practices for a contemporary revolutionary cinema, but although exemplary in its use of montage and how Brechtian theatrical techniques could be applied to the very different conditions of the cinema, Kuhle Wampe should not simply be copied by revolutionary film-makers working today. Revolutionary artworks more than any others are necessarily interventions within specific aesthetic and political conjunctures.71 As such, the question was not how “Brechtian” Kuhle Wampe was but rather the nature of its intervention within a specific political and ideological conjuncture. In a similar way, contemporary radical film should not be measured against an earlier essentially Brechtian model. Screen criticized simplifications of Brecht’s practice in the cinema of the time. Alain Resnais’ Stavisky (1974) and Lindsay Anderson’s self-consciously radical and intellectual O Lucky Man! (1973), a surreal account of the experiences of a young salesman for the Imperial Coffee Company working in the north of England, exemplified Brecht’s de-politicization and vulgarization. The translation of Walter Benjamin’s “Left-Wing Melancholy” (1931) in Screen was intended to support this critique. In his review of the satirical poet, novelist, and journalist Erich Kästner, Benjamin describes critically a politically disengaged left radical intelligentsia, driven by fashion and novelty, transforming revolutionary impulses into consumable distractions and amusements.72 69 70

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Brewster and MacCabe, “Editorial,” 6. James Pettier explains that “Kuhle Wampe” is “a slang term in German meaning, roughly, ‘blown out,’ or having had a stomachful of beer.” The name refers to a colony located on the Müggelsee lake in the Eastern suburbs of Berlin, founded in 1913, where the family in the film are compelled to move to after the suicide of their son. Brewster and MacCabe, “Editorial,” 4. See Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy (On Erich Kästner’ new book of poems),” Screen, Summer 1974: 28–32.

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Kuhle Wampe’s story was derived from a newspaper report read by the Bulgarian-German director Slatan Dudow about the suicide of an unemployed worker. Brecht writes that the first part of the film showed “the fate of an unemployed youth who never finds his way to the workers’ militant struggle and who is driven to death by the cutbacks in unemployment assistance for young people, in the name of Brüning’s emergency decrees.”73 Kuhle Wampe derived from mediated rather than “raw” reality: it begins with a montage of newspaper headlines detailing unemployment figures that situate the narrative historically. For Benjamin, writing critically in reply to the German essayist and playwright Oscar Schmitz’s review of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), the unemployed youth was portrayed superficially as a “type” rather than an actual, differentiated individual. This was also the opinion of the “clever” and “acute” censor of the film, obviously aware of “the significance of the aesthetic within a given society.”74 Brecht and Dudow had not portrayed a “real individual,” a flesh and blood human being with particular worries and particular pleasures, and ultimately, a particular fate, but a “type” whose fate is shared rather than unique and socially determined.75 The film is a family drama and the young man who commits suicide in its first part is represented as a relatively anonymous worker and a member of the family, someone’s son. He opens a window, pauses, takes off his watch and carefully places it on a table so it will not be broken in the fall, moves a potted plant to the side, holds the window frame, and then jumps from the fourthfloor apartment, the camera shows his letting go of the window frame and his cry as he falls; we see the watch in close-up, recording the time of his death. The neighbors’ response is dismissive and impersonal: “one unemployed less.” Earlier, he sits silently at the dinner table as he is harangued by his equally unemployed father, he does not seek to defend himself, and we do not know him as an individual but via the social relations he inhabits and the technologies or instruments on which he depends: his possibly valuable watch, his bicycle that has become an instrument of work: Pettifer describes the film’s “off-centering of any individual character.”76 In its construction, the film does largely offer a continuous dramatic narrative but it is demonstrative and analytical and disconnected from the consciousness of and the audience’s empathy for any one character. The narrative was interrupted with “foreign 73 74 75 76

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Film and Radio, edited by Marc Silberman, Methuen, 2000, 207. Eisenschitz, “Who does the World Belong to?,” 72. See Bertolt Brecht, “A Small Contribution to the Theme of Realism,” Screen, vol. 15 no. 2, Summer 1974: 46. James Pettifer, “The Limits of Naturalism (on Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Cluck and Kuhle Wampe),” Screen, vol. 16 no. 4, December 1975: 15.

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e­ lements” that compelled the spectator to assume a critical position towards the action. Brecht describes the film as “a montage of a few fairly self-contained parts” that “depicted the desperate situation of the unemployed in Berlin.”77 The autonomous elements the film contains do interrupt its narrative: images of Berlin apartment blocks and the natural and innocent landscapes of Kuhle Wampe itself (it is a refuge—a camp site on the outskirts of Berlin) are autonomous sequences in relation to the film’s narrative overall; in one sequence, the father reads aloud a salacious newspaper story about Mata Hari while his wife writes out a food budget, the fragmentation of the sequence, the tension between its elements, and the opposing themes of glamor and mundane reality, is increased through images of groceries and prices that punctuate the scene. Screen published Roland Barthes’ essay “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein” (1973) to explore the relationship between modernism’s avant-garde sector and Brecht. Barthes distinguishes Brechtian theater from a modernist concern with the text understood in terms of productivity and intertextuality. Barthes argues that representation begins with the subject’s gaze cutting out a geometric space in which objects are observable and contained. This is the tableau: “a pure cut-out segment with clearly defined edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into light, into view.”78 In epic theater, the individual scene is more important than the whole in the pleasure and meaning it offers: Barthes describes a series of segmentations which are sufficiently meaningful in themselves, as such, there is no maturation of meaning in the play, instead, there is a series of demonstrative segmentations. Each of these segments is a “pregnant moment” or “perfect instant,” each is a hieroglyph in which can be read the historical meaning and consequences of represented action. Brecht’s idea of the social gest continues that of the pregnant moment, which Barthes defines as a particular gesture, a bodily movement, in which a whole social situation can be read. Brecht discusses the gest in terms of estrangement and surprise; and it is more an attitude to language and expression than the “explanatory or emphatic movements of the hands.”79 The social gest for Brecht is socially relevant and allows the spectator to draw conclusions about society, he defines it as “the mimetic and gestural expression of the social relationships ­prevailing

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Brecht, “A Small Contribution to the Theme of Realism,” 45. Roland Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, Fontana Press, 1977: 70. 79 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 104.

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between people of a given period.”80 It means taking up a critical or ironic position towards a given subject-matter that would otherwise be banal and empty, Brecht argues. Subject-matter should not be allowed to speak for itself or be simply expressed; the artist should take a definite position towards it when it is represented. For Barthes, representation itself, as an act of separating or cutting out, is gestural but not necessarily social in the way Brecht means. All representation, Barthes argues, has its origin in the subject who gives meaning to what he sees, taking the position of its support and point of departure. For Barthes, it is ultimately the law embodied in the revolutionary party which cuts out and originates Brecht’s epic scene or Eisenstein’s filmic shot. Revolutionary or militant authors and film-makers like Brecht or Eisenstein in their commitment to socialist art necessarily remain within a policed world of representation and are therefore distinguishable from the modernist experimentation of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which would exemplify the theory of the text that Barthes elaborates.81 Barthes’ critique of representation draws upon Freud’s analysis of the structure of the fetish. The fetish is the substitute for the woman’s absent phallus; through its creation the perception of an absence, which can never be completely erased, can nevertheless, be denied. The fetish functions in terms of the disavowal of a threatening knowledge to assure the subject’s position, their continued happiness: the structure of the fetish is the disavowal of a horrifying knowledge of lack of belief. The way that the fetish is structured through denial and affirmation, this duality, is important to Screen’s critique of photography and cinema. The fetish is “that object which places the subject in a position of security outside of that terrifying area of difference opened up by the perception of the mother’s non-possession of the phallus.”82 Heath draws on Freud and Barthes to explore the structure of representation analogously to that of fetishism. He argues that representation positions the subject in a state of ignorance—representations produce the subject in a position of separation and confirmed in an imaginary coherence which is conditional on his remaining ignorant of how this position is actually produced and how this mechanism functions; the viewer is held pleasurably and reassuringly in a position of

80 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 139. 81 Interestingly, given Barthes distinction of the text from kinds of representation that are determined by the law of the revolutionary party, Brecht refers to modernist art and Joyce’s alienation of representation in Ulysses, a book he had enjoyed reading as satire: Joyce “alienates both the way of representing…and the events.” See Brecht, Brecht on Film and Radio, 10. 82 MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema,” 22.

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disavowal. The photograph sustains the fetishistic structure outlined by Freud. As Heath writes: The photograph places the subject in a relation of specularity—the glance—holding him pleasurably in the safety of disavowal; at once a knowledge—this exists—and a perspective of reassurance—but I am outside this existence (the curious tense of the photo: the anterior present), the duality rising to the fetishistic category par excellence, that of the beautiful.83 The fetishistic structure of representation exemplified by the photograph is clarified by Benjamin. He argues that the development of photography transfigures the world as beautiful. For Benjamin, photography’s independence had resulted in a kind of creative “arty journalism” that had capitulated to fashion; a “fetish” most at home in advertising. Creative photography was fetishistic for Benjamin because it endowed “any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists.”84 Benjamin quotes Brecht’s view that photography epitomized a conventional view of realism as simple reflection or reproduction. For Brecht, “the simple ‘reproduction of reality’ says less than ever about that reality. A photograph of the Krupp works [an armaments factory in Essen] or the aeg [General Electric Company] reveals almost nothing about these institutions.”85 As such, art could not begin with immediate experience of reality and it was necessary to construct or invent. The photograph for Brecht was the “sublimation of reality into passive ideality,”86 which, as Brecht argues, is combatted by the articulation or the operation of the photograph with language and through the use of montage construction—this is a “constructive photography” pioneered in the practices of the historical avant-gardes and typified in Soviet avant-garde film. Brecht’s argument that the simple reproduction of reality tells us nothing about that reality is taken up by Johnston and Willemen in their essay in Screen on British political film and their critique of cinéma-vérité approaches. According to the Brechtian emphasis, the point is to transform the structure of the photograph and then cinema—or more exactly, the fetishistic structure of representation on which photography relies by its punctuation and through montage. 83 84

Heath, “Lessons from Brecht,” 107. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” Selected Writings: Volume 2, Part 2, 1931– 1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings, et al., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005: 527. 85 Brecht, Brecht on Film and Radio, 164. 86 Heath, “From Brecht to Film,” 36.

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Heath argues that a key battle of the cinema prominent in Brecht’s work is against fetishism, theorized by Benjamin’s writing on Brecht in terms of the concept of aura, which focuses those qualities of works of art most threatened by modern technologies of reproduction, namely, authenticity, and an artwork’s unique existence in a particular place. For Benjamin, Brecht exemplified the demand to radically restructure the apparatuses of cultural production and distribution which can easily assimilate revolutionary themes without calling into question its own existence. The German pioneering photographer of New Objectivity, Albert Renger-Patzsch’s The World is Beautiful (1928) exemplified what it means to supply a productive apparatus without changing it. Benjamin criticizes this work because it transfigures the social conditions it documents into beautiful and therefore pleasurable images: in this “modish” practice, poverty “is made an object of consumption and ‘contemplative enjoyment’ ”87 Benjamin’s solution is Brechtian—he recommends the literarization of images, the breaking down of the barrier between writing and image with the aim of restoring to photographs a revolutionary use-value; in applying captions and so transcending the specialization of intellectual labor of writers and photographers, the cultural apparatus could be transformed towards socialism. Benjamin values an apparatus that can turn consumers into producers—spectators into collaborators—and the model for this apparatus and practice is epic theater. Brecht’s strategies of distanciation—defined as a mode of analysis rather than just a set of formal techniques—aims to undermine the fetishistic structure of representation and it is this which distinguishes Brecht’s aesthetics from those of Lukács. Brechtian realism is criticized by Lukács for its ­didactic, schematic, and allegorical quality but he notes favorably that Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and The Good Woman of Setzuan, while ­anti-Aristotelian, were involved in “problems of humanity,” with “living human beings, wrestling with conscience and the world around them.”88 For Heath, distanciation is “a work against separation-and-identification” realized through the strategies of epic theatre which introduces a critical distance between the spectator and the actor. It should not be surprising, Heath comments, that Benjamin’s discussion of epic theater describes “a certain refusal of separation”—in his notes on epic theater, Benjamin refers to the filling in of 87 88

Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” Selected Writings: Volume 2, Part 2 1931–1937, ed. Michael W. Jennings, et al., trans. by Rodney Livingstone and Others, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005: 776. Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, translated by John and Necke Mander, Merlin Press, 2006: 88.

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the abyss of the orchestra pit that separates the actors on the stage from the audience, its decreasing significance undermines the auratic nature of theatrical performance. Its strategies aim to pull the spectator into an activity of reading and ultimately include him as an active participant; montage “offers exactly a way of cutting the spectator into and beyond the film in a (multi-)position of reading.”89 The specific emphases of Brecht’s critical theory were intrinsic to the formation of the Screen problematic. His strategies were intended to encourage critical attitudes and prompt the spectator to either justify or abolish social ­conditions. Brecht’s spectator adopts a “smoking-and-watching attitude” to epic theater which changes the quality of the performance; the distracted spectator cannot easily be carried away by the spectacle.90 Brecht imagines his spectator as an expert but he remarks sardonically that his strategies do not necessarily lead to any better use of the theater. In clarifying the confusions of Brecht’s contemporary scholarly reception which reduces the Brechtian model to a set of formal devices or techniques divorced from dialectical thinking, Koutsourakis argues that, for Brecht, “both self-reflexivity and anti-illusionism were not simply motivated by the will to remind the audience they are watching a film/theater production. They are practices that intend to draw attention to processes outside the world of the cinema.”91 “Illusionism” is a mode of artistic experience that appeals to the emotions rather than the intellect and desires the audience’s empathetic and passive involvement with the events shown or presented. However, writers associated with a “cognitivist” stance on the reception and experience of film cognitive film theory have argued the Brechtian critique of an Aristotelian aesthetics of catharsis has oversimplified the nature of emotional responses to fiction and their political consequences. Murray Smith argues that Brecht’s theory of spectatorship is premised on the belief that empathy deadens our rational and critical faculties, a premise which for Smith is extremely vulnerable to criticism based on contemporary cognitive science and philosophy. Although emotion cannot be reduced to cognition, it is always integrated with perception, attention, and cognition; emotion and cognition are not “implacably opposed” as they are for Brecht.92 Drawing on 89 Heath “Lessons from Brecht,” 112. 90 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 44. 91 Angelos Koutsourakis, “Utilizing the ‘Ideological Antiquity’: Rethinking Brecht and Film Theory,” Monatshefte, vol. 107 no. 2, Summer 2015: 258. 92 Murray Smith, “The Logic and Legacy of Brechtianism,” Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996: 133.

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Shklovsky, Smith argues that all artistic representations necessarily distance us to function aesthetically and therefore the opposition between empathy and distanciation does not survive critical scrutiny. Smith turns to Stephen Heath’s “Lessons from Brecht” as an important bridge between Brecht and Screen theory. Smith explains that Heath characterizes empathy in terms of separation. Heath essay does argue that separation defines the very mode of representation of classic “Aristotelian” theater and cinema; as a mechanism, this mode produces a coherent subjectivity in a position of separation. Following Walter Benjamin, Heath defines epic theater in terms of a refusal of what is a fetishistic mechanism or structure of separation characteristic of classic theater and film. Breaking down the separation of audience and stage depends on the critique of the spectator’s identification with the performance and a theater of essentialized suffering and catharsis. Brecht’s conception of distanciation allowed Screen to pose the problem of representation politically; that is, to understand how the mechanism or the formation of representation functioned politically to construct subject positions. But Heath’s focus in outlining a political film is not subjectivity per se, instead it is the formation of representation taken as a kind of fetishism; the task was to show the contradictions in the apparent coherence of representation rather than reproducing this coherence from a different side, namely, that of the realism defended by Lukács. Brecht’s rejection of cathartic drama is a crucial difference between him and Lukács. For Heath, film and theater are “in” representation and the theoretical task of political film is to displace that representation politically, not to reproduce its coherence but to demonstrate the contradictions that coherence avoids, the liaisons it assumes and guarantees. Such a demonstration—distanciation—is a work that is theoretical, the constant production of a reflexive knowledge that transforms particular representations, displaces them in their forms.93 Smith argues that although Heath’s Althusserian and psychoanalytical framework can explain the empathetic spectator, that is, the positioning of an individual in ideology or the subject-positions that representation allows, his theoretical framework cannot account for the critical spectator or a critical consciousness. Smith views the desire of changing the spectator’s practical attitude to the world as “intrinsically self-defeating” and “deterministic.”94 He 93 94

Heath, “Lessons from Brecht,” 119–120. Smith, “Logic and Legacy of Brechtianism,” 139.

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argues that: “The estranging text becomes simply a miniature ‘ideological apparatus,’ eliciting a different set of ideological answers, but still through a process of ‘interpellation.’”95 For Smith, the Brechtian analysis of film developed can be objected to in that all representation necessarily involve distanciation; strong emotional responses to characters does not result in an intoxicated identification or cloud the spectator’s rationality or reasoning.96 However, Heath’s discussion of Brechtian aesthetics is not founded on simple oppositions or a simplistic dualism that Smith’s critique appears to presuppose. The emphasis Heath finds in Brecht as part of his critique of Lukácsian realism is “the ceaseless displacement of identification” and “a play of contradictions.”97 Moreover, Heath does suggest a critical consciousness in the specific form of the persona of the reader included within and an active, collaborative producer of the works. The principle of montage, Heath argues, is the means to realize the active inclusion of the spectator into the film from the position of reading. Following Barthes, this is an impersonal reader, “without history, biography, psychology,” who is born through or in the act of reading.98 Heath describes a “constant process of reading…displacing the spectator from the positions in which he is interpellated in the classic film.”99 Heath values art as a production of critical and theoretical forms for the interrogation and definition of reality, an avant-garde activity that necessarily will struggle with conforming traditions. But his formulation and the view of the reader as an active and creative participant in the work seems antithetical to the self-defeating theoretical project which unknowingly exchanges one kind of unfreedom or subjection for another insisted upon by Smith. According to Carl Plantinga, “ideological criticism” had retreated from affective pleasures as intrinsically harmful and he cites Brecht to support his claim: “I’m not writing for the scum who want to have the cockles of their hearts warmed.”100 However, Brecht’s remark is from the relatively early “Conversations with Bert Brecht” of 1926 and these words are not actually Brecht’s own. Brecht denies epic theater is a “strenuous affair,” describing his audience laughing and weeping; there is no obvious distrust of feeling or emotion found by Plantinga. Angela Curran comments that Brecht’s views on emotion changed 95 96 97 98

Smith, “Logic and Legacy of Brechtianism,” 139. Smith, “Logic and Legacy of Brechtianism,” 144. Heath, “Lessons from Brecht,” 111. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, Fontana Press, 1977: 148. 99 Heath, “Lessons from Brecht,” 120–121. 100 Carl Plantinga, “Notes on Spectator Emotion and Ideological Film Criticism,” Film Theory and Philosophy, eds. Richard Allen and Murray Smith. Oxford University Press, 1997: 14.

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over the years and he increasingly saw a critical role for emotion in epic drama.101 For Brecht, it was not true that epic theater simply renounces emotion but aims to arouse and reinforce feelings of justice, freedom and righteous anger. He argues that the critical attitude that epic theater seeks to develop in the spectator should be passionately felt.102 Brecht’s encouragement of critical judgment does not exclude affective participation. He encouraged the pleasure of learning; Barthes discovered in Brecht an “ethic of both pleasure and intellectual vigilance.”103 Theater is imbued with imagination and humor for Brecht and it is arguable that he does not disavow “emotion” in art but an aesthetic ideology in which fundamentally linguistic entities are taken to possess phenomenal effects. This formulation appears in the work of the literary theorist Paul de Man. Although it is difficult to ever forget that we are at the theater or cinema, and we probably do not need reminding, it is equally difficult not to conceive of our lives according to the schemes of fictional narratives. Ideology itself, as de Man defines it, is exactly this “confusion of linguistic with material reality, of reference with phenomenalism.”104 The reflexive and anti-illusionist aesthetics supported in the Screen journal are in critical opposition to exactly this confusion of film materials with the phenomenal world, which as ideology, naturalizes social and historical relationships. 6 Conclusion This essay has addressed the reception and adaption of Brecht’s critical theory and practice in the context of the development of the Screen problematic. Brecht was the subject of two issues of Screen but there was no appeal to the person nor the “trimmings” of a personality. The central role of his fragmentary theoretical writings on literature and art, politics and society, in the development of the Screen problematic is often unremarked and overshadowed. However, the ideas and formulations found in his writings were recast and rethought productively within the different context of film theory as part of Screen’s analysis of cinema and the relation between art, ideology, and ­politics. 101 Angela Curran, “Bertolt Brecht,” The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, Routledge, 2009: 331. 102 Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 227. 103 Roland Barthes, “Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes,” The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1972–1980, University of California Press, 1991: 225. 104 Paul De Man, “The Resistance to Theory,” The Resistance to Theory, University of Minnesota Press, 2002: 11.

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A modernist critique of conventional aesthetics was recast to critique the ideological nature of orthodox cinema in terms of posing another subjectivity that would demonstrate a class position, of displacing the subject positioned by the mechanisms and processes of ideology. Brecht’s vision of the spectator who activity assembled the “determining factors” of a drama in an activity of reading was key to this politicized art. There was the suspicion, however, that Screen put too much weight on Brecht and took for granted his compatibility with the Screen problematic and film theory. Screen’s reconciliation of Althusserian Marxism with psychoanalysis to analyze the ideological function of film did emphasize subject construction in terms of pleasure and belief and this particular appropriation and adaption of Brecht could be argued to conceive an ahistorical subject locked in a “dream state” while watching films—Brecht does himself evoke restlessly dreaming sleepers. Screen does appropriate Brecht in this way. The journal drew on the emphases of Brecht’s critique of photography and cinema as new forms of representation and reception and his analysis of the rigidity of the cultural apparatus.105 Brechtian strategies and theory of art (montage, literarization, a specific formulation of realism as critical and historically reflexive) were central to the development of a critical defense of modernism in opposition to realism in the journal. Brecht figured decisively in what Sylvia Harvey described as the dream of relating semiological to ideological analysis with the concomitant desire to develop a radical aesthetic practice that could cause radical political effects. In his critique of traditional forms of realism and his espousal of a broken or interrupted textual construction, one that transparently showed the joints or “knots” between the individual episodes of a story, Brecht exemplified the “political modernism” elaborated in Screen in its heroic period.106 His modernism was to do with the theories of text and spectatorship I have outlined: the modernist text is not legally governed and allows for activities of reading and the participation of the audience, the expectation that the subjectivity of the reader or spectator will complete or produce the meaning of something unfinished. It is clear that there is no “pure” Brecht in Screen—the main contributors of essays on him read him through his interpreters, Benjamin and Barthes. Brecht is mobilized to support and quoted within a coherent critical and theoretical structure in juxtaposition with Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis—theories of the constitution of subjectivities in capitalist societies. 105 See Koutsourakis, “Utilizing the ‘Ideological Antiquity,’” 250, 251. 106 See Sylvia Harvey, “Whose Brecht? Memories for the Eighties,” Screen vol. 23 no. 1, May– June 1982: 48.

Chapter 5

Philosophizing with Brecht and Günther Anders: What Is Wrong with Moralism? Wolfgang Fritz Haug Abstract This essay reconstructs Günther Anders conversations with Bertolt Brecht. It argues that Anders was attracted to the way Brecht creates art by using it philosophically, employing the artistic mode of representation in order to revolutionize the representational mode of philosophy. This type of philosophy for Anders allowed for engagement with the real problems of the time which was of imminent importance because of a fading capacity to act in the face of an overwhelming necessity for action brought about by the victory of technocracy. Anders believes Brecht’s poetic importance resides in what Anders calls Brecht’s “pronounced-ness”—its ability to develop the power of judgment. Anders finds in this an implicit moral commitment, which compels one to fulfill the duties of the age despite the fact that they are both futile and indisputable. Although Brecht resists this type of moralistic formulation of his work and Anders concludes this to reveal a fundamental incongruity in the thoughts of the two, the essay finds a reconciliation in the notion of the morality of practicality and the practicality of morality.

1

Introduction by Felix J. Fuchs

“If you arrive too early, you still do not come at the right time,” Günther Anders mused in 1982, ten years before his death.1 Reflecting on his own untimely considerations, Anders proved himself not just attuned to his times, but to what was to come. Twenty-five years after his death—in the age of neoliberal ­globalization—his philosophical analysis seems to have fully materialized. 1 Liessmann, Konrad Paul, Philosophieren im Zeitalter der technologischen Revolutionen [­Philosophizing in the Age of Technological Revolutions], Munich 2002: 7.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004404502_006

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It is in texts like Anders’s The Outdatedness of Humankind,2 published in German between 1956 and 1980, that we find an analysis of the increasing submission of human beings to machines—rather than using the machines, we are used up by them. His reflections point us to Marx’s Capital and its analysis of machinery as a juggernaut that swallows up human lives. Like Marx, Anders thus reminds us of the deep moral commitment at the heart of the Marxist project. The question of moral commitment is also the central question of Wolfgang Fritz Haug’s essay “What is wrong with Moralism?” Taken from Haug’s Philosophieren mit Brecht und Gramsci [Philosophizing with Brecht and Gramsci], which examines the links in thought and action between the German playwright and the Italian Marxist, the essay focuses on Brecht’s encounter with the philosopher of the age of technology, Anders. As Haug emphasizes, it takes a “Gramscian horizon” to mediate between the two. It is Gramsci’s grasp of “the ethical as a prerequisite for the possibility of an aggregated societal agency ‘from below’” which gives a sense of what not just the material value of ethics could be, but what a historical-materialist conception of it should look like. Haug reminds us that we need to return to this complex dialogue about morals between Brecht and Anders in order to fully understand the stakes of revisiting the representatives of Western Marxism— from Adorno through Benjamin, Bloch, and Gramsci to Lukács—and reading them, to borrow from the Kenyan writer and Marxist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, globalectically: as speaking from their own historical and social context but in relation to an emerging global capitalist culture in the true age of technology.3 As Haug points out in his essay “Philosophizing with Marx, Gramsci, and Brecht”:4 “Brecht and Gramsci are essential as alternative approaches within the Marxism of their epoch. Therefore, they are of vital importance to anyone who is interested in a new Marxist takeoff and, generally speaking, in a renaissance of critical theory and practice of the social.”5 It is for this reason that we should not just view them as representatives of that Western Marxism which Perry Anderson famously called “a product of defeat.”6 Instead we should read them as a point of departure that allows us to renew Marxism with the same unwavering commitment to the future. 2 Anders, Günther, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Band ii: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution [The Outdatedness of Humankind. Volume ii: The Destruction of Life in the Age of the Third Industrial Revolution], Munich 1980. 3 Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, New York 2012. 4 Haug, Wolfgang Fritz, “Philosophizing with Marx, Gramsci, and Brecht,” in: Boundary 2, 34.3, 2007: 143–160. 5 Haug, 158. 6 Haug, 42.

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What Is Wrong with Moralism? How the Philosopher Günther Anders Probed the Poet-Philosopher Brecht on the Matter of Ethics

2.1 The Other Philosopher In Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues7 the Philosopher famously compares his interest in theatre with a scrap metal dealer’s concern for an orchestra’s brass instruments. This articulates Brecht’s life-long and well-hidden self-conception. He saw himself as a philosopher who uses theatre for his own purposes and according to its material value—“thus, an Einstein who, as Menuhin, celebrated his triumphs,”8 as Hermann Klenner puts it. Gerd Irrlitz subtly softened the scandalous nature of this claim, when he called Brecht the philosopher among poets. At the same time, these statements are both directed against the disdain for the philosophizing Brecht on part of the Marxist-Leninist philosophers or of the famed historian of Western Marxism, Perry Anderson.9 What if we now entered the stage like an anachronistic brass buyer ourselves by in turn describing Brecht as the poet among philosophers? His 1935/36 proposition does not contradict this: “Whatever knowledge may be contained in poetry, it has to have been realized completely in poetry.”10,11 Nor is this contradicted by the idea that art can be taken up as “a distinct and original ability of humankind” which is “neither moral in disguise, nor embellished knowledge alone, but an independent discipline, which represents the various disciplines in their contradiction.”12 As an autonomous representation of all other areas of practice, art does in fact have an affinity for philosophy—which admittedly is initially only one of the disciplines that art can represent, yet in its own way is capable of representing all disciplines. Brecht creates art by applying it philosophically. He is able to do so without stripping art of its autonomy because he employs the artistic mode of representation in order to revolutionize the representational mode of philosophy. He certainly does not have metaphysics 7 8

9 10 11 12

Brecht, Bertolt, The Messingkauf Dialogues. Translated by John Willett. London: Methuen, 2002. Klenner, Hermann, “Von irrationalen Urphänomenen und anderem Unfug. Kein schwierigerer Vormarsch als der zurück zur Vernunft.” [“Of Irrational Primal Phenomenona and Other Nonsense. No Advance more Complicated than that back to Reason.”] In: Brecht 88. Anregungen zum Dialog über die Vernunft am Jahrtausendende [Brecht 88. Inspirations for a Dialogue about Reason at the End of the Millennium], published by Wolfgang Heise, Berlin/gdr 1987: 136. Anderson, Perry, Considerations on Western Marxism. Translated by London: Verso, 1976. Translator’s note: Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine. Brecht, Bertolt, Große kommentierte Berliner Ausgabe [Extensive Annotated Berlin Edition], Berlin-Weimar-Frankfurt/Main, (Hereafter: GA), 22.1: 114. GA 22.2, 755; Brecht, Bertolt, 1967, Gesammelte Werke [Collected Works], 20 volumes, Frankfurt/Main (Hereafter: GW), 16: 645.

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in mind, which would claim to represent the root and essence of the various disciplines. Indeed, a philosophy in its own right is required in the first place to determine who the other philosophers during Brecht’s lifetime in fact were, among whom he supposedly was to be counted as the poet (according to our argument which has yet to be put to the test). Immediately, a quarrel erupts about what we conceive to be philosophy. Amongst an audience that is not dominated by professional philosophers it might still be permissible to say: the philosophers of any given time are ordinarily neither the professors of philosophy nor the ones they consider to be among them. Sören Kierkegaard according to their judgement was not an “actual Philosopher but merely…a so-called poetphilosopher.”13 The Greek scholar Nietzsche, who never attained a chair in philosophy, famously stated that professors of philosophy feed on philosophy in the same way maggots feed on a corpse. The exceptions to this rule, the philosopher of the “Nothing that nots” [des nichtenden Nichts], Heidegger, and the philosopher of negative dialectics, Adorno, confirm this mean prejudice. Who were the remaining philosophers in Brecht’s time? Putting the question in those terms, we are always drawn back to figures like Walter Benjamin or Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ernst Bloch or Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci or likewise Günther Anders, who was still publishing under his legal name, Günther Stern, in Paris in the 1930s. The professors of philosophy, in any case, have not accepted Brecht as a philosopher. He was, however, recognized by a philosopher like Anders who did not desire a chair of philosophy because he was aware of how here, as a rule, “philosophy takes refuge in its preoccupation with philosophers and itself in order to avoid any engagement with the real problems of its time.”14 Himself unrecognized up until a few years before his death, and then endowed in his last years with honors which, for the most part, remained empty gestures because they were without consequence—coming from those who did not follow his teachings—he had no difficulties to recognize the philosopher Brecht, a fact which even Anders’ later criticism of Brecht cannot belie. To understand the ways in which and the topics about which Anders philosophized, you have to recall his thesis of the epochal “victory of t­ echnocracy”— the idea of a shift of the base, from the social conditions in production to a 13 14

Löwith, Karl, “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche” [“Kierkegaard and Nietzsche”], in: Dt. Vierteljahresschrift f. Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte [German Quarterly for Literature and the Humanities], H. 11, 1933, 43–66: 50. Lohmann, Margret, “Vom Außenseiter zum Modephilosophen? Ein Bericht über die Forschung zu Günther Anders” [“From Outcast to Fashionable Philosopher? A Report regarding the Research on Günther Anders”]. In: Das Argument 214.38, H. 2, 1996, 253–264: 262.

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sort of historical bloc which unites technical advancement and the machismo of the powerful elites who simultaneously fob off the masses through the media. This notion—pessimist in its outlook, much like the dialectic of enlightenment, yet more precise and advancing beyond it—because it confronted the then emerging epoch of unrestrained technology by singing its own deadly melody back at it—thus making Heidegger’s announcement of the breakthrough into the “gigantic” [das Riesenhafte] in comparison look like child’s play: it is the Philosophy of the Atomic Age whose mythical name, “the atom,” stands for the productive forces of high technology, and whose destructive power was first demonstrated in the desert of Los Alamos, and then unleashed on Japanese metropolises. The discussion would have to stick to the subject matter in itself, however, instead of focusing on texts and theses, which can at best be acknowledged in their fecundity. But how complex is this “subject matter in itself!?” To think transnational high-tech capitalism, and to examine how its politicians confront a task, which very much resembles the squaring of a circle: pushing for a global regulation whose dual purpose would be to prevent ecological collapse as well as the atomic and chemico-bacterial inferno that might be unleashed. Considering these conditions and their aporias would in no way be extrinsic to Marxism, but in fact represents the concrete analysis of the epochal framework of concrete conditions, and thus, sit venia verbo Leniniano belongs to the “living soul” of present-day Marxism. Perceiving a fading capacity to act in the face of an overwhelming necessity for action falls within the range of this reflection as well, and the axiom of the prisoner Gramsci will have to be tested against this reflection (just as our lives will have to be tested against Gramsci’s maxim): Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. It is a maxim that Anders might not have admitted, but according to which he has acted until his last breath, more than few before him. For the writing on the wall, which his “pessimistic” intellect constantly spelled out, had something inherently optimistic as an act of the will—not too different from the bell-like resonance of his voice which still rang from the shriveled-up body of the old man. What needs to be discussed then is the “secret Marxism” of Günther Anders and in how far, his discourse is riddled with historical-materialist insights,15 indeed presupposes a Marxist hinterland, if not even a Marxism which should be taken for granted. Of course, this is not the traditional terrain of Günther Anders. His field was the borderland between Neo-Kantianism and phenomenology. Here, Anders-Stern had socially repurposed keywords like Situation and 15

cf. Clemens, Detlev, “Günther Anders—ein Marxist?” [“Günther Anders—a Marxist?”] In: Das Argument 214.38, 1996, H. 2: 265–273.

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Being-in-the-World against Heidegger as early as 1930 in a lecture at the Kant Gesellschaft. The evidence suggests that he developed a similar relationship to Marxism as would Jean-Paul Sartre later on: as an existential hermeneutic, so to speak, within the framework of a historical-materialist determination of periods and relations. In the end, he was laureate of a Bavarian academy, but kept his distance; as “the prophet of the nuclear age” he was nevertheless not unaffected by the seductions of this cult status ascribed to him, and he was courted and claimed even by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.16 Of course, he never ceased to be a Voltairian, “indigestible” to the debate culture of the Christian academies, and an obnoxious critic of religion, who nevertheless was not a philosopher of the carnal world, but rather a Cartesian dualist, whose body was as foreign to him as “moon rock.” And he was the proponent of violence as counter-violence, of forceful sabotage against the mega-machine of a technocracy which in his eyes was leading mankind into extinction. It seems necessary to take a look at Anders who is political in a different sense, in the sense of the socio-political antagonisms, indeed, a look at Anders the Socialist. Here, his Philosophical Shorthand Notes on the Vietnam War, whose style can best be compared to that of Karl Kraus and The Torch17 first catch our eye. In a note on the preface of the second volume of The Outdatedness of Humankind [Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen] from 1980, he thus designates his active opposition to the Vietnam War: “Of course, I cannot claim that while putting these reflections on paper I dared to hope for a victorious conclusion of the war. Rather I counted this fight, and my extremely humble contribution to it, amongst the duties of the age which are, while hopeless, nevertheless irrefutable.”18 This bespeaks a moral commitment, which compels to fulfill the indisputable duties of the age despite the fact that they are futile. But the argument is still being developed, and it appears that it has to cover up a turning point. What seemingly finds expression here is a providence, which does not allow its vision to be blurred by the moment of victory. Instead it already takes aim at the horror of a “normal” thereafter, and targets so to speak the war in peace which can hardly be challenged: “And even today,” he continues in 1980, “my feelings toward the victory of North Vietnam and of the Vietcong are those of suspicion and disbelief since it contradicts my conviction that technocracy has already won.”19 In their defeat, the usa are not 16 Translator’s note: a center-right newspaper. 17 Translator’s note: a satirical newspaper, 1899–1936. 18 Anders 1980, 431. 19 Ibid.

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defeated, and the victors could “very well soon be drawn back into a more or less covert dependency on their allegedly beaten adversary.”20 What is expressed here is on the one hand a pathos of failure which has been rendered productive in a Sartrean sense. On the other hand, what manifests itself here are elements or at least premonitions of an analysis of dependency and exploitation in terms of a peripheral capitalism—mediated by the world market and the regulatory mechanisms designed to protect its flanks. Twelve years earlier, in a casual text—provoked by the bitter occasion of the suppression of Czechoslovak reform communism by the invading troops of the Warsaw Pact—Anders had confessed himself to be a Socialist. This text was the editorial for the 48th issue of Das Argument,21 which appeared in October, 1968. It is a piece of writing which has become more and more interesting with increasing historical distance. This text forces a double break: not merely with the forces which support the invasion of Prague, but also with the forces in the West which support the War in Vietnam. First and foremost, it is a text whose author professes to be a Socialist at a difficult moment, when this also means renouncing material advantages. In the Western press, the hacks for the dominant interests of the West rub their hands in glee …, while the real Socialists, whether they belong to a party or not, stand by in outrage, shame and gloom, knowing full-well that what these writers see as the unmasking of Socialism, and depict as its established “custom,” has nothing to do with its objectives and nature, but rather represents its outrageous abuse. Nevertheless, what holds true in some sense is that the violation of the čssr is worse and more deplorable than those violations we are accustomed to on a day-to-day basis in the nonsocialist world; worse precisely because these violations are occurring among “us”: namely are being acted out among Socialists… Ergo: Under no circumstances can we…become allies of those, who gleefully welcome this development… Those among us, who add their voice of mourning and outrage to the choir of jubilation, commit a second betrayal against Socialism in addition to the one that has already taken place.22

20 Ibid. 21 Translator’s note: a journal for Philosophy and Social Sciences, founded in West Germany, in 1959. 22 Anders, Günther, “Editorial” (Part 1). In: Das Argument [The Argument] 48.10, 1968, H. 4–5: 261ff.

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I did not have the prerequisites for the courage to such clarity. In a second editorial for the same issue of Argument I wrote among other things: “But to keep this distance, from which it would become apparent what concerns us, seems almost impossible.”23 In a third editorial, Friedrich Tomberg declared that the Federal German24 Cold Warriors, while knowing that they would not be able to sidestep the recognition of the gdr, nevertheless clung to their ultimate goal. “A new offensive, if not of smiles, then at least of humanity and fraternity, is imminent.”25 So far, he was certainly not in the wrong. But then, following a factually correct statement, we encounter a normatively wrong sentence and an example of wishful thinking: That the Socialist states will not shy away from meeting it with armed force has become indubitable over the past few weeks. Socialism must not gamble again with the authority it had once won. That is what the reformers in Prague had to hear from the Soviets. But…only when, based on this, the Socialists themselves are able to convince and activate the masses—through moral integrity, true education and a humane practice toward dissidents—the counter-revolution will have lost its game.26 Of the three editorials in the October 1968 issue of Das Argument, from a historical distance, only Günther Anders’ argument is tenable. We should have left it at that one editorial. Of course, the circle of the journal would have already split back then and not just ten years later. In the construction of Günther Anders’ mental universe, Marxism was a superstructure above the morals of “an agnostic moralist,” as he described himself. His “pessimism” served a moral function in a situation, which he, as mentioned above, interpreted as the victory of technocracy. That made it even more difficult, to argue with him. He was only inclined to engage in a dialogue based on the rules of fencing, where, of course, agreement is not the main concern. Indeed, for Anders, as for the Socrates of late Plato, his interlocutors often were reduced to puppets without a position and substance of their own in their dialogues—one needs only to recall the acridly one-sided dialogues with “Mrs. Cow.”

23 Haug, Wolfgang Fritz, “Editorial” (Part 2). In: Das Argument 48.10, 1968, H. 4–5: 262ff. 24 Translator’s note: West German. 25 Tomberg, Friedrich, “Editorial” (Part 3). In: Das Argument 48.10, 1968, H. 4–5: 264ff. 26 Ibid.

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On the subject itself, it was next to impossible to talk with him in order to engage in an attempt at communication. One always had to take his attitude into account beforehand and might not even attempt a dialogue at that point, simply because one could sense that he had made up his mind, not in favor of one side of the societal antagonisms, and even less in favor of a party, but in favor of one side of a contradictory positional problem. You anticipated it like a trap, whose inner workings you understood, and into which you were all the less willing to fall. His decided one-sidedness could be taken as a necessary provocation, or simply as keeping pace with the media, which is precisely how Anders talked about it when he called it characteristic of Brecht’s language. To this, we now return. 2.2 Anders with Brecht In order to avoid another failure in the effort of having a dialogue with Anders, or maybe also just to place this failure in an honorable tradition, let us attempt to go back to and listen in on another non-conversation, one that has been arduously furnished with a happy end:27 a conversation about a fundamental issue, about Morality—namely the encounter of Anders alias Günther Stern with Bertolt Brecht. The meeting in 1962 is narrated by Anders himself. If you were to read only Brecht, it would never even cross your mind that the encounter had taken place. The context, in which Anders makes an appearance in Brecht’s working journal, is tied to the demise of a belief in progress, at a point of the consolidation of a historical eclipse, which has the potential to heighten the pessimism of the intellect into despair. In August 1941, Brecht notes the suicide of his friend and counterpart in inspiring conversations, Walter Benjamin, in his Arbeitsjournal.28 “I am reading,” he writes, “the last work he sent to the Institute for Social Research. Günther Stern gave it to me with the comment that it is complex and obscure, I think he also used the word ‘indeed.’”29 Anders is then mentioned only one more time, and only indirectly, in the entry, in the form of a rebuttal: Brecht summarizes Benjamin’s historical-philosophical theses, his critique of the progress paradigm of history, and concludes: “In short the little treatise is clear and presents complex issues simply (despite its metaphors and its judaisms) and it is frightening to think how few people there are who are prepared even to misunderstand 27 28 29

Translator’s note: English in original. Translator’s note: Translations from the Arbeitsjournal, if not otherwise noted, are based on Brecht, B., Rorrison, H., & Willett, J. (1996). Bertolt Brecht journals. New York: Routledge. Journals, 159. The translation of this passage has been amended.

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such a piece.”30 In other words, the encounter was a posthumous one with Walter Benjamin, not one with Anders. Anders is mentioned in the Arbeitsjournal a second time, a year later on August 13, 1942: “at Adorno’s Horkheimer, Pollock, Adorno, Marcuse, Eisler, Stern, Reichenbach and Steuerman are discussing Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’…suffering has created culture; so is barbarism likely to ensue if they put an end to suffering?”31 Pollock is apparently convinced by Keynes’s thesis that capitalism could be rid of crises through state contracts. Brecht mischievously reports in the mode of free indirect speech: “Marx could not predict that governments would one day just build roads!—Eisler and I, somewhat tired of the way things are going, lose patience and then ‘get across everyone’ for lack of anywhere else to get.”32 Günther Anders—“Stern”—was not mentioned except in the list of names. And he cannot be found anywhere else in the Arbeitsjournal either.33 Compared to this, Anders’ version looks like a complementary counterworld. The first dialogue, which he recites in 1962, is a completely Anders-like dialogue: The mischievous wise man, namely Brecht, against the idiot, a blustering actor. Brecht here takes the position, which Anders would later always occupy himself. Anders intervenes. The actor makes a gesture toward Brecht, pointing with the thumb at Anders, “a sign that may have signified roughly: This guy was just hired to polish our words and give them a glossy finish.”34 From the point of view of the rest of the story, this opening appears to be ironic. The following dialogues take, except for one interlude, a completely different direction. First of all, we here see the “positive” Anders, and secondly one who has a difficult position to hold in the conversation with Brecht. It has to be mentioned in advance that for Anders, Brecht is “the poet” of the age per se. Let us ponder for a moment Anders’ appraisal of the writer, Brecht. What Brecht has in common with Kafka is that the world of his “creatures is a legal one”: “Every Brechtian play could be called ‘The Trial.’”35 The difference to Kafka—a distinction which for Anders establishes Brecht’s towering greatness—resides

30 Ibid. 31 Translator’s note: Amended translation. Journals, 252. 32 Ibid. 33 Editor’s note: He is actually mentioned one other time on 18 Jan. 1942, “wiesengrundadorno here. he has grown round and fat and brings an essay on Richard Wagner, not uninteresting but restricted to grubbing around for complexes, inhibitions, suppressions in the consciousness of the old mythmaker, in the manner of Lukács, Bloch, Stern, all of whom are merely suppressing an ancient form of psychoanalysis.” 192–193. 34 Anders, Günther. Mensch Ohne Welt: Schriften Zur Kunst Und Literatur. [Human without World: Writings on Art and Literature.] München: C.H. Beck, 1993. Print: 136. 35 Ibid., 142.

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in what Anders calls Brecht’s “pronounced-ness” [Ausgesprochenheit].36 He understands Brecht’s theatre as a school that develops the power of judgment. “What he intends to do in his plays, is to force prejudices to ‘justify themselves’; to change unspoken judgments (in Brecht = class prejudices) into spoken ones, into rendered verdicts.”37 Anders calls this contrast to Kafka “magnificent”: “How much more Socratic and truthful is he, despite his wiles! As, in Brecht, the messenger actually has to understand the message in order to be able to transmit it, reason and human dignity are saved.”38 The description tells you at least as much about Anders as about Brecht. In any case, for Anders, Brecht is a luminary of unachievable greatness. Anders himself is not famous and in addition also isolated. “I belonged nowhere,” he would later recall about his time in emigration: I was not a Heideggerian anymore…did not belong to the circle of Adorno and Horkheimer, was never a member of the Frankfurt Institute and did not belong to the party. Essentially, I was not being taken seriously: not by Brecht, because my philosophizing was not Marxist enough; and not by the academics, because I refused to philosophize as a scholar about the philosophy of others.39 Anders, the one who is not famous, therefore makes an effort to impress the famous Brecht. Initially, he attempts this by providing surprising takes on Brecht’s theatre. He explains to Brecht that his style in theatre has been shaped according to the model of the physical practicum: an experiment, comparable to the ones in the natural sciences, and, as in a practicum, an experiment to be showcased and exhibited: he proposes that the Brechtian theatre should be understood as experimental drama. Accordingly, Anders also reads Brecht’s title Versuche not as an essay or approximation but as experiment. One has to imagine Brecht’s reaction, when Anders discloses to him that he is “the only truly academic poet.” He justifies this by pointing out that Brecht transplants the professor on stage. Here, one must recall how Brecht introduces the philosopher to the theatre in the Messingkauf. Next attempt. Praising the poet, in a way that is supposed to get his attention, Anders tells him: Your style is, precisely because you transplant the 36 37 38 39

Ibid., 142. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 141. Anders, Günther, Christian Dries, and Henrike Gätjens. Die Weltfremdheit Des Menschen: Schriften Zur Philosophischen Anthropologie. [The Unworldlyness of Humankind: Writings on Philosophical Anthropology.] 2018: 439.

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professor on stage, not a style at all, but the thing in itself. Brecht takes the bait: So my style is not a “hollow mold,” he says tentatively, and whoever takes it up, will be contaminated by its content. Anders mentions the cunning smile with which Brecht accompanies this comment, “not actually mischievously: much rather ‘achieved.’”40 The pleasure which Brecht wants to afford the audience through what Anders calls his style, consists of “taking pleasure in the demonstrated changeability of the world,”41 and “the pleasure taken from the demonstration comes precisely from the thrill of anticipating…something real… Or at least a possible realization.”42 This is exactly the area in which Anders in the meantime, and from then on until his death, strives to exorcise this thrill. What is strange is that Anders’ recollections of Brecht were not published until years after The Outdatedness of Humankind, where the victory of technocracy has already spoiled the pleasure afforded by change. Yet at the time, he explains: it would be misleading to call Brecht a writer; calling him a “teacher” would be “much more appropriate.”43 Anders observes that we do “not in fact primarily understand [Brecht’s oeuvre] as ‘books.’”44 He tentatively entertains the thought that this is due to the fact that Brecht does not so much write as speak. “Maybe his accomplishment has precisely been to restore the original gestus of speaking; that he ‘addresses’ us.”45 But of course, we are initially addressed through the media, by “parties and laundry detergent companies,” by opinion and entertainment. “They [the media] all address us, in familiar ways even, they try to reason with us, in order to make us believe that the things they have to offer are nostrae res [our things].” Anders now perceives that Brecht is completely and naturally aware of this. He in fact “expects an individual who has been shaped by these means, and now writes against them.” Brecht can only then be seen as “correctly profiled,” once you take into account “the ‘false address’ which today advances in its most wholesale fashion as a blueprint,”46 whose plea Brecht takes up and repurposes, that is defamiliarizes, by incorporating distance. But the purpose of distance is the intervention, the partisanship—expressions which Anders avoids, but effectively outlines. He observes that one would 40 Anders 1993, 141. 41 Ibid., 137. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 149. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid.

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never even think to speak of a poetics of commitment [Tendenzdichtung]47 when it comes to Brecht, although the commitment of his plays very much speaks to us directly. To Brecht himself, this does not occur either. “Just as the term ‘baker of commitment’ would not occur to a baker… And with reason. It would be a pleonasm.”48 Anders sees Brecht combining morals and aesthetics and praises his work for its “beauty of ethical authority.” He then hurries through opinions which nowadays hold the status of official dogmas: For to want nothingness; or to deliberately not say what you want; or to deliberately not want, what you say—that this should be the source of the poet’s legitimacy (despite the fact that this has long since been counted as self-evident…) is truly audacious.49 However, here his explicatory abilities fail. He explains Brecht’s singularity through the existentialist categories of “situation,” “decision” and “leap”: Brecht is supposed to have “leaped out” of this situation, in fact he is never even supposed to have accepted it in the first place. “Text and text intention [Werk und Werkabsicht] coincide for him in the most organic way; poiein and prattein50 are one and the same; and this congruence is in no way less important than the common identity of ‘theory and praxis.’”51 Anders is incapable of breaking down into distinct concepts the difference between partisan restraint, or even subordination to a party line, and (quite “independent”) partisanship. He puzzles over this: “How far his ‘cause’ is identical with that of the ‘party,’ only the gods know.”52 But Anders undeniably senses “that today there is no written text, which has as little to do with the ‘social realism’ [sic!] of the official party dogma as Brecht’s work.”53,54 He praises Brecht’s “unswerving acumen, on which he draws when playing the fool”;55 47 Translator’s note: Tendenzdichtung; the German term for tendentious literature. 48 Anders 1993, 147. 49 Ibid. 50 Translator’s note: poiein, Greek, create, produce; prattein, Gr., act. 51 Anders 1993, 147. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 147–148. 54 Translator’s note: Anders here mentions “Sozialen Realismus” referring to “Socialist Realism.” In German, the distinction is nevertheless clear because what in English is referred to as “social realism,” is called Neue Sachlichkeit, referring to a literary movement in the Weimar Republic. 55 Anders 1993, 148.

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what it shows is “a diplomatic art, which is in no way inferior to his poetry.”56 And in direct opposition to the predominant ideology, Anders declares Brecht’s work to be standing out not despite, but because of its commitment. The examples are almost Aristotelian in character and invite further thoughts. If Brecht is great as a poet, it is “as little despite his commitment, as a great poet of love is great despite his love; or a great doctor despite his intention to heal.”57 If you were to exclude the “political” intervention in order to enjoy Brecht as “beautiful,” you would “distort him” according to the prevailing transformation of “the totality of history into a storeroom of neutral objects of pleasure.”58 2.3 A Non-conversation about Moral Philosophy Strangely enough, Anders then wants to dissolve precisely this unity of poiein and prattein, which he identifies with the unity of commitment and beauty. For the conflict which runs like a thread through the conversation and brings it near a point, at which communication is no longer possible, is first and foremost about the explication (which Brecht refuses to allow) of an implicit morality. Anders senses it in Brecht’s combination of directness and distance, in his politeness, and later on in his friendliness—but detects it especially in the what-for [Wofür], for-whom [Für-Wen], and for-the-sake-of-what [Worumwillen]. Brecht’s response to moral philosophy is plain and simple, an allergic reaction. Anders notes that even after ten years the front lines have unchangeably remained in place. “These conversations have very much become the reproduction of a single, and not exactly exemplary, model conversation.” Brecht rejects the traditional vocabulary of morals (obligation [Sollen], duty [Pflicht] and so forth), which to him speaks in “a supernatural voice,” and holds the opinion that “ethics is nothing but religion in disguise” and that “the talk of ‘what-is-supposed-to-be’ [Seinsollenden] is ontological nonsense.” Anders believes that Brecht carries Marx too far, when he states his opinion that moral postulates as they are aimed at the individual would “educate people to leave the world, meaning society, intact.” He points Brecht’s own practiced understanding of a “politico-pedagogical task” out to him.59 The setting of the conversation is still of interest in so far as you can see two accurate one-sidednesses—but that is almost as much as two real ­falsehoods— standing against one another. Brecht has no theory for the politico-ethical drive of what he practices and of the people who he wants to excite for change; 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Anders 1993, 142.

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and the theory which Anders, who correctly identifies the lack thereof and recognizes the need for such a theory, offers to him, is not sufficient. Anders thus explains: “The sanctioning of the ‘obligatory’ [das Gesollte] (so, the authority which mandates and makes the obligatory mandatory) is as unfamiliar to me as it is to him.” And he explains further: With this he, Anders, does make the “concession of moral agnosticism.” Brecht cannot, of course, accept this “concession.” But, it is not because for him as a theoretician, “the alternative of church and laboratory” would be “exhausting,” as Anders suspects. Brecht in turn apparently does not know how to put into words, what bothers him about it, and he claims thus to have heard in Anders’ words merely “the voice of the cleric.” Yet, Anders is entirely right in his intuition that there is something for which he lacks the words that Brecht would immediately have understood: indeed, we cannot treat ourselves like air, he says, the same way we cannot treat “our passion (and therefore the fact that malice makes us feel resentful, that we get ‘fired up,’ that we chase after new tasks) [this way]…and get back to our positivist business as usual.” Benedetto Croce could have jumped in here and recognized in this passion the political subjectivity, which intervenes in the actual coming into being of history. Antonio Gramsci in particular—Croce’s critic, who is nevertheless willing to learn from him—would have intervened with his practical-political explications of the ethical. For Gramsci grasps the ethical as a prerequisite for the possibility of an aggregated societal agency “from below,” which springs from civil society itself. This is, of course, of particular importance for the proletarized masses, the “subalterns,” who—without their own culture of organization—are barely more than formal members of civil society and occupy even that position only as a result of revolutions or the lost wars that counterrevolutions had turned into. Not extrapolation from primary and highest norms, but catharsis, a cleansing of the civic body of feelings and judgements dictated by a corporatist group egotism, the building up of a vision of justice, which is capable of including all groups that do not profit from someone else’s reign—within this Gramscian horizon Brecht could have viewed himself in a way that would have, if not necessarily resolved, at least mediated the opposition to Anders. Without Gramsci’s mediation, Anders’ Neo-Kantian and agnostic morality places Brecht on the side of form and thus of justification. Brecht dismisses Anders with the contention that critique and indignation—which are according to his insight a “socially very productive affect”60—are not always already 60

Arbeitsjournal, 24.11.42.

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“normative” acts in themselves. He despised “moralism,” considered its intervention in art to be entirely out of the question. What would have given him pause, however, is how Gramsci reorganized the question “of the so-called ‘moralism’ in the arts, of a ‘matter that is extrinsic’ to art”: One simply cannot grasp the fact that art is always bound to a specific culture or civilization and that in the struggle for the reform of a culture one strives for and arrives at a transformation of its ‘content.’ This means, one has to work on the creation of a new art not externally (by demanding an instructive, formulaic, and moralizing art), but from within—­ because man per se is changed, insofar as the conditions are changed whose necessary expression man is.61 Anders could not have come up with such arguments. Although he considered Brecht to be an outstanding poet not despite but because of his political philosophy, he was still not really able to commit himself to it. 2.4 The Break It seems as if Brecht wanted to provoke his counterpart into shedding his scholastic skin. Anders on the other hand catches him red-handed in terms of morals, when Brecht, in mentioning a speech by Goebbels, as Anders recounts, says of lying “in a so to speak uncontrolled moment”: “That is not permitted, that must not be!”62 Anders immediately sees the self-contradiction and does not fail to twist the knife in the wound: “Why is it that the truth in fact must be,” he asks, “and has to be? And not the lie? Why should it not be ‘permitted’ (Brecht’s word) and not allowed to rule (Brecht’s word as well)?”63 Anders records that Brecht neither responded to this nor simply remained silent, but instead broke out in mocking laughter. Here Günther Anders’ account unexpectedly switches into that present, which has no date: “Presumably he understands my question as little as I understand his laughter. Here is a point, where two completely different and ultimately untranslatable languages meet their limits.”64 This is the break. 61

Gramsci, Antonio, Gefängnishefte, kritische Ausgabe, published by the German Gramsciproject under academic direction of Klaus Bochman and Wolfgang Fritz Haug, 10 volumes, Hamburg 1991–2001: 14, §14. 62 Anders 1993, 145. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid.

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Anders shifts the termination of their conversations, which he of course narrates as a temporary one, to a later section. As a matter of fact, Brecht ­improvises—provoked by Anders’ constant return to an insistence on a ­practical-moral idealism of the what-for and the for-the-sake-of-what, but maybe also simply because he ascribes a material value to this argument, which he intends to secure for use at a later time—an idealist character for his sketchbook so to speak. Those who know Brecht’s plays, can imagine what kind of use this would be… Anders’ report continues: “In short: To not answer my question; or to give me the opportunity to assess it, Brecht appropriated it, defamiliarized it, and transformed it into a behavior which is characteristic for a specific type of individual.”65 What hurts Anders especially is that in “the process of improvising this character, [Brecht proceeds] in a manner that is completely detached, and so to speak dry and sterile”: “The phrases which he put into the character’s mouth in their modified version (after having plucked them from my lips), resembled a written text that he was reading out loud.”66 The character, which he thus creates for Anders from Anders’ comments, is perceived by Anders himself to be of “a blinding credibility, comicality and ludicrousness.”67 Anders notes that his fascination was about the same as his resentment to having been used as “material for a caricature,” and his shock about the fact “that this combination of Wagner and a spy was supposed to be my mirror image.”68 Anders recounts that he left the room and went into the kitchen to Helene Weigel. We thus find out in passing that Weigel is present and yet also absent: doing housework. But Anders does not leave this scene without a last riposte. Addressing an approaching third person—who, once more, is described in Andersian fashion as a dull creature that had better keep their mouth shut and who turns to him with an eager, yet in his opinion gloating, “So?”—he says: “That philosophical questions cannot be refuted by comedy characters, should be something you’re aware of, considering the fact that the notion has been around for 2,500 years.”69 While the fool, to whom for all appearances those words are meant, responds with bewilderment, Brecht lets out a sharp “very true.”70

65 Ibid., 152. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid.

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2.5 Adjournment In the evening, the practical and the ethical, more specifically their proponents, are reconciled. The son is sick, and Anders asks Brecht pointedly “whether fetching the medicine for the boy now would be considered ‘practical.’”71 Brecht answers: “To not fetch it, would be immoral as well as unkind.”72 Anders in turn believes that this is an exceptionally practical answer. “As a result,” Anders’ little book concludes, “things took a turn for the peaceful and comfortable.”73 But the questions had barely been carved out, and certainly not answered. It seems as if the Andersian moral philosophy expects transcendental guarantees, which can no longer exist for reasoning after Marx and Nietzsche and even less so for a Philosophizing with Brecht and Gramsci. This “No-Longer”—the fact that there are no longer metaphysical ­guarantees—carries only the surface appearance of a loss; what has been lost was in the first place only an appearance, an illusion, if not merely “ontological nonsense.” But, will it be possible to ground the moral on a solid base which is not again just moralism? Or does the philosophy of praxis deserve, if it does not approach history in a moral way, but morality in a historical-materialist fashion, the remonstration with the “in psychopathology well-known phenomenon of a lack of moral sense?”74 Translated by Felix J. Fuchs 71 Ibid., 153. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Tugendhat, Ernst, Probleme der Ethik [Problems of Ethics], Stuttgart 1984: 61.

Chapter 6

Philosophizing with Brecht and Plato: On Socratic Courage Anthony Squiers Abstract This essay does two things. First, it provides a framework for understanding Brecht within analytic philosophy by demonstrating how his notion of gestus can position him within philosophical discourse. Second, it provides a case study of Brecht’s adapted story, “Socrates Wounded” using that framework. This case study examines the story in relation to Plato’s accounts of Socrates fighting at the battle of Delium with specific attention to the theme of courage. It finds that while both agree that courage is found in the wisdom to do the morally just action, they disagree on the nature of that wisdom and on what acts can be considered morally justified. It also finds that while both authors insist on a moral imperative to act courageously the respective imperatives have different roots and that the two thinkers disagree as to whether or not one must be steadfast in order to be brave.

1 Introduction In political philosophy there’s a tradition of reading classical narrative texts as philosophical treatises. The Homeric epics, the plays of Sophocles, Plato’s dialogs, and utopian fictions like Moore’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis are considered canonical texts in the field. Political theorists are accustomed to taking these works and extracting socio-political positions. While contemporary narratives are less frequently analysed in modern political philosophy, one can still extract philosophical positions from such works. This is especially the case for the philosopher-poet Bertolt Brecht who was particularly cognizant of philosophical issues when composing narrative texts. Previously, I have shown how Brecht’s philosophical points can be excavated from his plays if one treats those works as constitutive elements of his political philosophy.1 In this essay, 1 Squiers, A. (2014). An introduction to the social and political philosophy of Bertolt Brecht: Revolution and aesthetics. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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I would like to extend this idea, moving past the familiar, well-trodden paths of the standard Brecht texts into an area which receives little attention from Brecht scholars, his literary prose. The purpose is twofold: First, it will demonstrate that these under-appreciated writings too can be valuable sources for reconstructing Brecht’s thought. Even if a reader is familiar with them, they can be rediscovered as troves of philosophical insight. Second, it will do something which is rarely done in Brecht scholarship, put Brecht in dialog with one of the cornerstones of Western social discourse, Plato. Both of these moves point to an opening up of Brecht research into new, fertile areas and hint toward the potential of a philosophized Brecht. Below we will examine one of Brecht’s short stories “Socrates Wounded” (Der verwundete Sokrates).2 In brief, this story gives a rendering of Socrates’s actions at the Battle of Delium and reveals a considerable amount about Brecht’s understanding of courage through his critique of the story made famous by Plato. Thus, this story not only illustrates that there are significant philosophical gems within Brecht’s literary corpus but also that political theorists who feel more comfortable with the statement/counter-statement procedures of analytic philosophy can treat at least some of Brecht’s narratives as philosophical texts because they deal with themes and respond directly to figures within that tradition. For example, we can be confident that this story is a critique of Plato for two reasons. First, written accounts of Socrates fighting at the Battle of Delium appear to originate with Plato. At least, they are the oldest known written accounts. This makes them the most probable source on which subsequent retellings, including Brecht’s are based.3 Second, in the 2 Brecht finished this story in 1939 (Brecht, B., Rorrison, H., & Willett, J. (1993). Journals: [1934– 1955]. London: Methuen, 20) and it appeared in his Tales from the Calendar (Kalendergeschichten), a collection of short stories and poetry published in 1949. In English rendering, it is found in his collected short stories (Brecht, B., Willett, J., & Manheim, R. (1983). Short stories, 1921–1946. London: Methuen.) and Tales from the Calendar (Brecht, B. (1961). Tales from the calendar. London: Methuen.). 3 Brecht co-opted the misunderstanding motif and other elements from Georg Kaiser’s play Der gerettete Alkibiades [Alcibiades Saved] (See: White, J.J. (2007). “The Thorn of Socrates: Georg Kaiser’s Alcibiades Saved and Bertolt Brecht’s Sokrates Wounded.” In Trapp, M.B. (2007). Socrates in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Florence: Taylor and Francis.). In addition to this play, Kaiser wrote an influential essay on Plato (Kaiser, G. & Morgan, B.Q. (1962), “Plato as Dramatist.” The Tulane Drama Review, 7(1), 188–190.) arguing that a more intellectual theatre could be derived from Plato. Kaiser, then was overt in his engagement with Plato, a fact to which Brecht could not have been unaware (See: Puchner, M. (2010). The drama of ideas: Platonic provocations in theater and philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.).

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exposition of “Socrates Wounded,” Brecht frames the story by referencing Plato’s depictions of Socrates and introducing the theme of courage, which as we will see is intrinsic to all three of Plato’s accounts of Socrates at Delium. It states: “Socrates…was considered not only the cleverest of all Greeks but also one of the bravest. His reputation for bravery strikes us as quite justified when we read in Plato how coolly and unflinchingly he drained the hemlock which the authorities offered him in the end for services rendered to his fellow-citizens.”4 After first reconstructing the Platonic position on courage to understand what Brecht is reacting against, we will examine Brecht’s position. This will be accomplished by reconstructing it by means of an interpretive summary of the story. Specifically, we’ll see several similarities and key differences in how Plato and Brecht understand courage. In short, both thinkers believe courage is something which can be fostered. Furthermore, both present Socrates as a model of courage. They do this by emphasising the importance of his actions and by defining him as courageous because of those actions. As we will see, both represent Socrates’s bravery in acting in a morally justified way. For both, Socrates is a thinker compelled to do the morally justified act—something which both present as a type of wisdom. In terms of the differences, we will see that Brecht and Plato disagree on the nature of that wisdom and what morally justified acts are. For Plato, unquestioningly participating in battle is, while for Brecht considering the social class implications of war and opposing it is. There is a major difference then in the attitude Socrates has toward the battle as represented by each. Brecht endows his Socrates with a critical attitude to reveal social antagonisms which Plato ignores. This critical attitude leads Brecht’s Socrates to do a courageous and morally justified act—an act that is revolutionary because it challenges a crucial mythological element that maintains a structure of class discrepancies. For Brecht, courage is a willingness to question exploitative social orders and doing something revolutionary about them. Additionally, we will see that, for Brecht courage is not the things poor people are compelled to do when they do not have the luxury of doing o­ therwise— when they are forced into fearful situations by social forces. Understanding this point is important because it is indicative of Brecht’s notion of courage as found in many his works. In this way, this essay can be read as a primer to such plays as Life of Galileo and especially Mother Courage. Finally, while Plato believes courage must entail steadfastness, Brecht insists that one can waver and still be brave. 4 All quotations of “Socrates Wounded” are taken from the newer translations provided in Short Stories, 1921–1946. Here: 139.

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Plato’s Socrates at Delium

In Plato’s writings, there are three different, direct references to Socrates participating at the Battle of Delium. These references are made in the Laches, the Apology, and the Symposium. In the Laches, Laches claims that Socrates is both a credit to his father’s name and to Athens because of what he witnessed of him at the battle.5 Directing his comments to Lysimachus, Laches states that Socrates was with him in the retreat and that “if the rest had chosen to be like him, our city would be holding up her head and would not then have had such a terrible fall.”6 In the dialogue, this reference to Delium establishes Socrates as a man of courage and demonstrates his credibility in discussing the subject. This is important because, as we will see, courage is the principle theme of the dialogue. In the Apology, Plato has Socrates himself mention being at the battle. In it, Socrates makes an analogy between his steadfastness in battle and that of this steadfastness to live the examined life. He states: [W]herever a man stations himself, thinking it is best to be there, or is stationed by his commander, there he must…remain and run his risks, considering neither death nor any other thing more than disgrace. So I should have done a terrible thing, if…at Delium, I remained where they stationed me, like anybody else, and ran the risk of death, but when the god gave me a station, as I believed and understood, with orders to spend my life in philosophy and in examining myself and others, then I were to desert my post through fear of death or anything…It would be a terrible thing, and truly one might then justly hale me into court…7 Finally, the most detailed account of Socrates at Delium, is told by Alcibiades in the Symposium: [W]hat a notable figure [Socrates] made when the army was retiring in flight from Delium: I happened to be there on horseback…The troops were in utter disorder, and he was retreating along with Laches…Here, indeed, I  had an even finer view of Socrates than at Potidaea—for 5 Plato. (1995). Laches. In Plato & Lamb, W.R.M. Plato in twelve volumes, Vol. 9, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 181a-b. 6 Laches, 181b. 7 Plato. (1966). Apology. In Plato, Fowlers, H. N. & Lamb, W.R.M. Plato in twelve volumes, Vol. 1, 28d-29a.

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­ ersonally I had less reason for alarm, as I was mounted; and I noticed, p first, how far he outdid Laches in collectedness, and next I felt…how there he stepped along…“strutting like a proud marsh-goose, with ever a side-long glance,” turning a calm sidelong look on friend and foe alike, and convincing…that whoever cares to touch this person will find he can put up a stout enough defence…both he and his comrade got away unscathed: for, as a rule, people will not lay a finger on those who show this disposition in war.8 3

The Unity of the Virtues and Courage as Wisdom

In all instances where Plato highlights Socrates’s actions at Delium a common theme emerges—Socrates’s virtue, particularly the virtue of courage. In Symposium, which is principally concerned with the subject of erotic love, Alcibiades offers the anecdote to establish Socrates as a brave man. This comes as part of his larger argument about the virtuosity of Socrates, in general, which is developed through various examples of Socrates’s past actions. The effect of Alcibiades’s argument is to portray Socrates as a worthy object of erotic love. By the end of it, Alcibiades sets Socrates up as a model to be erotically desired because he is virtuous in the different ways virtue manifests, including bravery. The way Plato has Alcibiades describe Socrates as virtuous on so many accounts is consistent with the way Plato treats virtues elsewhere in his writings. In Plato’s early dialogues especially, he makes a case for the unity of the virtues.9 The virtues are united, for Plato, because each stem from the “knowledge of good and evil.”10 If one has this knowledge (s)he will act virtuously because the knowledge will direct one’s action toward the good, regardless of the type of endeavour in which (s)he is involved. Thus, for Plato, all the virtues can be reduced to the knowledge of good and evil and consequently definable

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Plato. (1925). Symposium. In Plato & Fowlers, H.N. Plato in twelve volumes, Vol. 9, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 221a-c. See: Vlastos, G. (1981). “The Unity of the Virtues in the Protagoras.” In Platonic studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Devereux, D. (1992). The Unity of the Virtues in Plato’s Protagoras and Laches. The Philosophical Review, 101(4), 765–789; Brickhouse, T. & Smith, N. (1997). Socrates and the Unity of the Virtues. The Journal of Ethics, 1(4), ­311–324; Rabieh, L. (2006). Plato and the Virtue of Courage, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. Brickhouse & Smith, 313.

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simply in those terms.11 Furthermore, many commentators have pointed out that the knowledge of good and evil, for Plato, is “an alternative designation of wisdom.”12 Wisdom then is “the key to understanding the unity of the virtues.”13 If one is wise (s)he will be virtuous because (s)he will seek good and shun evil in all things. Wisdom is at the heart of the way Plato has Socrates define courage in the Protagoras as well as the way he formulates it in the Republic. For example, in the latter part of the Protagoras, Socrates argues that courage is “the wisdom that knows what is and what is not dreadful.”14 Similarly, in the Republic, courage is defined as “under all conditions…preserv[ing] the conviction that things to be feared are precisely those which and such as the lawgiver inculcated in their education…[It is knowing] what and what sort of things are to be feared”15 and later he says, “unfailing conservation of right and lawful belief about things to be and not to be feared is what I call and would assume to be courage.”16 Interestingly, however, in the Laches, a dialog devoted to the theme of courage, the simple definition of courage as wisdom is not readily accepted by Socrates. 4

Courage in the Laches

The Laches begins with Lysimachus and Melesias enlisting the help of Nicias, Laches (two Athenian generals) and later Socrates in determining a fitting education for their sons. Particularly they seek these men’s opinions on whether hoplomachia (a type of sword fighting in armour) is a worthwhile subject of study for the boys. After laying out their assorted reasons, Nicias supports it while Laches opposes it. Socrates is then asked to break the tie. Characteristically, Socrates argues that such an answer requires expertise, not a majority vote to decide.17 Socrates next begins an intellectual approach to forming a position on the matter. He suggests that this requires an inquiry into the underlying rationale for asking about hoplomachia in the first place. It is decided 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Devereux, 765. Devereux, 773. Devereux, 773. Plato. (1967). Protagoras. In Plato & Lamb, W.R.M. Plato in twelve volumes, Vol. 3, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 360d. Plato. (1969). Republic. In Plato & Shorey, P. Plato in twelve volumes, Vol. 8, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, iv 429b-c. Republic, 430b. Laches, 184e.

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that what Lysimachus and Melesias are really interested in, is not hoplomachia per se but a proper education for the boys more generally. Given this, the participants conclude that they first need to address the issue of education. Together they agree that education is about fostering virtue and military education (the part of education under which hoplomachia would fall) is primarily concerned with fostering a particular part of virtue, courage. Socrates suggests then that they should first determine what courage is, then they can better decide whether sword fighting in armour can foster it. Laches is the first to venture a definition of courage. He defines it as “willing to stay at his post and face the enemy, and…not run[ning] away.”18 While Socrates agrees that this is an example of a courageous act, he explicitly rejects it saying it is not an adequate definition.19 The problem is that what Laches presents is not an all-encompassing definition. Socrates shows Laches this by providing him with examples of acts (like fighting in retreat20) which would not fall under the definition of standing and fighting but nevertheless they both agree are courageous. Socrates then suggests that Laches attempt another definition which applies to all circumstances of bravery. On his second attempt, Laches defines courage as “a certain endurance of the soul.”21 After a couple of follow up questions from Socrates, Laches refines that understanding to mean a prudent endurance. Unlike the case with Laches’s first attempt, however, Socrates does not explicitly refute this definition. He does however challenge Laches by saying that he does not believe “all [prudent] endurance…can…be courage.”22 Socrates then goes on to give Laches examples of prudent endurance (like a doctor refusing to give food and drink to a patient with lung ailments) which Laches agrees would not be considered brave. In this exchange, and in his attitude more generally, Socrates tries to get Laches to refine his second definition. For example, in the passage just quoted, Socrates gets Laches to a point where something can be excluded from the definition. Socrates shows Laches that courage cannot be all types of prudent endurance and Laches agrees. What, then has been excluded? What type of endurance is exemplified in the example of the doctor refusing food and water for the benefit of the sick patient and why is not that considered courage? There appears to be a problem 18 19 20 21 22

Laches, 190e. Laches, 191c. Laches should have been able to recognise this given that he used Socrates’s actions in the retreat at Delium as evidence of Socrates’s bravery. Laches, 192b. Laches, 192c.

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with the way prudent endurance is conceived. The actions of the doctor are dictated by a prudence derived from a technical knowledge (in this case of medicine), not a moral knowledge of good and evil. The distinction between technical and moral knowledge, which Plato draws in the Republic and in the Charmides23 is summed up nicely by Santos when he classifies it as, “a distinction between being wise or knowing what the alternatives before one are and which alternative is likely to materialize, and being wise or knowing the comparative values of worth of the alternatives before one (the distinction between knowledge of fact and knowledge of value).”24 Next, Socrates asks Laches to consider who is braver, a combatant on the weaker side of a battle who stays and fights or one on the stronger side who stays and fights, if they take into consideration things like the possibility of reinforcements and the relative strengths and strategic position of the opposing armies. Laches says that the one on the weaker side is braver than the one on the stronger side even though the one on the weaker side appears to be less prudent. Similarly, Socrates continues by asking Laches who is braver one who does a dangerous job like horsemanship or diving with less skill or one who does it with more skill. Again, Laches says it is the one who does it with less skill even though that person is more imprudent. But, Laches realises that these answers do not sound right and comes to the conclusion that since courage is a virtue and imprudence is not, the imprudent endurance of those examples cannot be bravery even though he had previously said they were. Although Laches does not realise it, his fault lies again in thinking about courage in terms of a prudence derived from technical knowledge not moral knowledge. In the first instance, he draws his conclusion by applying the technical knowledge of battle strategy and warfare and allowing this to shape the way he approaches the issue. In the other cases, he allows the technical knowledge specific to particular occupations shape his view. Through this focus on technical knowledge, Laches finds imprudence in the soldier who with a technical knowledge of battle stays and fights on the weaker side as well as those who partake in risky occupations with less skill. However, one can imagine that if Laches rejected the premise put forth by Socrates that 23 24

Republic, iv 438d-e; and Plato. (1967). Charmides. In Plato & Lamb, W.R.M. Plato in twelve volumes, Vol. 12, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 170b-c. Santos, G. (1969). Socrates at Work on Virtue and Knowledge in Plato’s Laches, Review of Metaphysics 22, 433–460: 446.

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these things should be examined through the lens of technical knowledge and instead insisted they be viewed through the lens of prudence according to the dictates of moral knowledge, his conclusions could be quite different. Suppose, for example, this rephrasing of the question: “Who is more courageous, a person with right moral convictions or a just moral position who stands and fights on the stronger or weaker side of a battle?” The conclusion about prudence would likely change. In this case, the one who stays and fights on the weaker side no longer seems imprudent. On the contrary, that person appears to have run the prudent course because what is at risk is not simply a matter of the soldier’s life. The moral position itself is in jeopardy. As Santos puts it, in these sections, Laches does not consider “how the agents conceived the values of that for the sake of which they were enduring and the values of the alternatives to enduring.”25 Nevertheless, “clearly information on these points will make a difference to our judgement whether the agent’s endurance is wise or foolish.”26 At this point in the dialogue, Laches admits to Socrates that he is confused. In response, Socrates asks him if he finds it acceptable that they have not found a suitable definition. Laches does not find it acceptable and Socrates follows up by asking him if he is willing to “be steadfast and enduring in [the] inquiry, so as not to be ridiculed by courage herself for failing to be courageous in [the] search for her, when [they] might perchance find after all that this very endurance is courage”27 (italics added for emphasis). Laches answers that he is quite ready. As we will see below, this willingness of Laches to trudge on, despite his perplexity is a crucial element of the dialogue with implications toward locating a definition of courage in it. After Laches’ two attempts at defining courage, it is Nicias’s turn. However, instead of offering his own definition, he offers what he heard Socrates say previously, “every man is good in that wherein he is wise, and bad in that wherein he is unlearned…if the brave man is good, clearly he must be wise.”28 With this response, Nicias, returns Plato’s Socrates’s simple definition of courage as wisdom. However, Nicias’ attempt does not satisfy Socrates. He presses Nicias on which kind of wisdom he has in mind. Again, like with the exchanges with Laches, we see Socrates’s preoccupation with clarifying exactly what type of wisdom is involved in courage. 25 Santos, 447. 26 Ibid. 27 Laches, 194a. 28 Laches, 194d.

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Pushed, Nicias says that bravery is the “the knowledge of what is to be dreaded or dared.”29 At this, Laches reinserts himself into the conversion, objecting to this definition, stating “surely wisdom is distinct from courage.”30 Socrates replies, “Nicias denies that.”31 Here, Socrates does not reveal his own thoughts on the matter, only relaying those of Nicias. We therefore cannot take Socrates’s remarks as a refutation of Nicias definition. They do, however, serve to coax Laches into taking the lead in the inquisition of Nicias. Laches asks him a few questions and receives rather evasive responses. This causes Laches to get frustrated and he accuses Nicias of “dodg[ing] this way and that in the hope of concealing his own perplexity.”32 Socrates expressly agrees with this. Irritated, Laches says he has had enough with the inquiry and Socrates again takes the lead interrogating Nicias. But, Laches’s silence does not last long, and he again interjects into the conversation to accuse Nicias of sophistry. This time, he also implores Socrates to get Nicias to provide meaningful answers. In response, Socrates tells him, “That is what I propose to do, my good sir: still, you are not to think that I will release you from your due share of the argument. No, you must put your mind to it and join in weighing well what is said.”33 Again, Socrates beseeches Laches to persist in the pursuit and again Laches agrees to continue the investigation. In the end, Nicias fails to provide a suitable definition of courage, falling short on two accounts. The first account is substantive. Socrates walks Nicias back to the foundations of his argument and gets him to see his definition is the same as the knowledge of good and evil and therefore indistinguishable from wisdom, something which is required by all the other virtues.34 Thus, what Nicias has defined is not courage per se but virtue in general. In these passages, Socrates does not deny that courage has a component of wisdom. He only suggests that it is not sufficient in itself to differentiate courage from the other virtues. Although Plato has Socrates define courage like this elsewhere, it does not suffice here. The problem, as Devereux sees it is not that Nicias defines courage in terms of wisdom but that he neglects “some other factor essential to courage, apart from the knowledge involved.”35 What Plato’s Socrates demands is “a distinctive definition of this virtue, a definition that indicates how it differs

29 Laches, 194e. 30 Laches, 195a. 31 Ibid. 32 Laches, 196b. 33 Laches, 197e. 34 Devereux, 774. 35 Ibid.

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from wisdom and the other virtues.”36 This is made clear in the dialogue when Socrates suggests that they examine courage as one part of virtue.37 The second reason Nicias fails has to do with his approach to solving the problem. As we have seen, what Socrates poses is ultimately a moral question. Yet, Nicias attempts to answer it as if it were a technical one. He has previously learned what Socrates has said on the subject and simply repeats it back to Socrates as if this were fact. Since Nicias lacks moral expertise, he overlooks that the question requires more attention, specifically that it requires an investigation from the moral perspective not a facts-based one. After Nicias’s failed attempt to define courage, the group admits it has been unable to come to any expressed definition of courage. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion that they continue the investigation later and Socrates is asked to take charge of the boys’ education. While the dialog seems to end in aporia, a good case can be made that, in fact, a suitable definition of courage has been established, not through the words of the interlocutors but by example of their actions. At the end of the dialogue, Lysimachus and Melesias entrust their sons’ education to Socrates. They do this after already demonstrating a sincere desire to make sure their sons receive the kind of education that their fathers38 received, as opposed to the type they themselves received which prepared them only for idle, aristocratic lives. If Socrates could not answer the question about what courage is and consequently be able to determine what lessons would develop this virtue in their sons, why do they entrust him with the boys’ education? This suggests that an adequate definition can be found in the dialogue and was seen by Lysimachus and Melesias even though it cannot be found in the words of the interlocutors. But what, then is that definition? Since so much of the dialogue is devoted to Socrates pushing Laches and Nicias on their definitions of wisdom and wisdom is central to how Plato has Socrates define it in the Republic and the Protagoras it seems fair to conclude that this is a necessary component. But, as we have seen, it is not just any type of wisdom. Laches failed because he conceived wisdom as technical knowledge and Nicias failed, in part because he approached the question of what courage is by applying a technical knowledge in pursuit of an answer. The wisdom that is required is the wisdom that deals with moral issues, i.e., the moral wisdom discussed above. Indeed, Socrates hints at this when he declines to 36 Ibid. 37 Laches, 190b-e. 38 Lysimachus’s father was Aristides and Melesias’s father was Thucydides. Both fathers were accomplished generals and statesmen.

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break the tie and instead suggests that the question be decided by expertise. This leads to a conclusion that the expertise should be in “young men's souls” [i.e., psyche].39 Lloyd translates this as “moral nature” and states, “The Greek psyche is more than ‘soul.’ It is the seat of man’s will, desires and passions. It is also the organ of his nous, i.e., his reason, thought and judgment.”40 The interlocutors then embark on an inquiry into whether they have such an expertise. Furthermore, from the discussion above, we also saw a definition of courage also requires distinguishing it from the other virtues. So, what is this distinguishing quality? Many scholars have argued, with good cause that it is endurance or steadfastness,41 as Laches suggests.42 Devereux, for example, points to Socrates imploring Laches to be steadfast as evidence of this thesis.43 Hoerber makes a similar point arguing that “true bravery implies both knowledge (as presented by Nicias) and action (as emphasized by Laches).”44 Particularly, it is Laches’ action of not retreating from perplexity that Hoerber discusses. Similarly, Dobbs argues that “Laches’ superiority to Nikias is manifest…in his willingness to acknowledge his own perplexity and to attempt a genuine inquiry to resolve it.”45 But, it is Socrates who best exemplifies this steadfastness in the pursuit of moral wisdom. According to Hoerber, “Socrates proves to be the hero of the dialogue. He manifested his prowess in ergon at Delium; he portrays his wisdom in logos by examining the attempted definitions of courage in the dialogue. 39 40 41

Laches, 185e. Plato, Williamson, W. & Lloyd, A. (1891). The Laches of Plato. Port Hope, Ont., 9. O’Brien, M.J. (1963). The unity of the Laches, Yale Classical Studies, 18, 133–147; Santos; Dobbs, D. (1986). For Lack of Wisdom: Courage and Inquiry in Plato’s “Laches.” The Journal of Politics, 48(4), 825–849; Gould, C. (1987). Socratic Intellectualism and the Problem of Courage: An Interpretation of Plato’s Laches, History of Philosophy Quarterly 4, 265–279; Devereux; Rabieh; Yonezawa, S. (2012). Socratic Courage in Plato’s Socratic Dialogues. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20(4), 645–665. 42 On objections to this point see Devereux: “In the final argument Socrates clearly asserts that knowledge of good and evil is sufficient for all the virtues. So it appears that [the] suggestion that endurance is essential to courage cannot stand…However, one might think of endurance as a quality one could not fail to possess if one had knowledge of good and evil. If endurance were a necessary concomitant of knowledge of good and evil, then there would not necessarily be any conflict between the sufficiency of knowledge thesis and the claim that endurance is an essential and distinctive characteristic of courage” (778–779). “For Socrates, the power of knowledge of good and evil manifests itself as a kind of endurance; the capacity to endure ‘comes with’ the knowledge” (783). Gould also makes a similar point. 43 Devereux. 44 Hoerber, R. (1968). Plato’s Laches. Classical Philology, 63(2), 95–105: 102. 45 Dobbs, 828–829.

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Plato depicts Socrates’s superiority to each contestant in his respective area of specialty, surpassing Laches in ergon and transcending Nicias in logos.”46 Likewise, Dobbs suggests that Socrates demonstrates “courageous responses to perplexity”47 and that his actions provide a demonstrated example of what courage is. He suggests that through Socrates’s example the Laches “as a whole penetrates beyond the role of courage in individual sacrifice and reveals courage itself as a firmness or perseverance resisting the terrors of the unknown.”48 This is a point Yonezawa is in agreement with, when arguing that “the Laches suggests that Socrates’s behaviour is a paradigm for courage.”49 In sum, then we can see that the Laches does present “a coherent definition of courage [as] wise perseverance.”50 This definition is consistent with what we have seen in the Laches and with how courage is presented in the Apology.51 5

Courage in the Apology

In the Apology, as part of his defence, Plato has Socrates draw a comparison between the virtue of bravery as he exhibited it in battle at Delium (and elsewhere) and his commitment to living the examined life, regardless of the consequences. Essentially, Plato’s Socrates argues that just as he could not have acted uncourageously in battle and not maintain his post because it would have been morally wrong, he also could not give up on the examined life. In both cases, despite the risk of death, Socrates remained firm in his commitment to what he considered the morally just action. 46 47 48 49 50 51

Hoerber, 100. Dobbs, 828. Dobbs, 826. Yonezawa, 646. Rabieh, 28. This definition is also consistent with the way Plato describes courage in the Republic. In it, he discusses the element of persistence when he makes the analogy between a soldier’s courage and the dye of a piece of cloth. In this analogy, he suggests that just as care must be taken in dying cloth to maintain the integrity of the colours, there must be care in the education of soldiers so that their courage does not get “washed out by those lyes that have such dread power to scour our faiths away, pleasure more potent than any detergent or abstergent to accomplish this, and pain and fear and desire more sure than any lye” (iv 430a-b). In other words, the soldier must be steadfast in the face of things which could jeopardize their bravery like fear and pain. Furthermore, both elements of steadfastness and wisdom can also be found when he defines courage as the “unfailing conservation of right and lawful belief about things to be and not to be feared” (iv 430b). Here, Plato discusses wisdom (e.g., “what is to be feared”) based on a knowledge of the law, which Plato treats as a moral object, in the Republic.

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Schmid has also recognised that Plato treats courage as wise endurance, in the Apology, arguing that: In the Apology… Socrates presents himself as a man oriented toward autonomously chosen ideals which define the moral limits beyond which he cannot go, whatever the cost to him personally, and which set the directions in which he must go, to preserve his self-respect. His intellect plays the all-important role of re-examining on practically a daily basis what is ‘worthy of fear’52 Similarly, Yonezawa argues that in the Apology, “All of Socrates’s remarks concerning his courageous actions include the view that courage is remaining steadfast to what is just in the face of death.”53 From this discussion on Plato’s notion of Socratic courage we can conclude that, for Plato, courage means morally wise perseverance. 6

An Interpretive Summary of “Socrates Wounded”

With a Platonic definition of courage derived from Plato’s narratives now articulated, we have something with which to compare Brecht’s position. We can now turn to reconstructing a Brechtian position on courage. To do this, we will pay particular attention to the gestic instances Brecht preserved from Plato’s accounts and the ones he provides. Gestic incidents are according to Brecht, the “particular attitudes adopted by [one] toward other men.”54 For Brecht, these attitudes are: a product of historically determined social relations which reveal something about those relations, “usually highly complicated and contradictory”55 and are divulged in one’s actions, physical movements and words. Elsewhere, I have categorised them as the eidetic substance of social relations which Brecht aspired to represent in his theatre—the “collection of truths about social relations…extracted from…[ideology and] put forth in a way Brecht conceives as bare facts—open, pure, unadulterated realities that are ready to be observed by the audience.”56 52 53 54 55 56

Schmid, W.T. (1985). The Socratic conception of courage. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 2(2), 113–129: 116. Yonezawa, 646. Brecht, Rorrison & Willett, 104. Brecht, B., & Willett, J. (1992). Brecht on theatre: The development of an aesthetic. New York: Hill and Wang, 198. Squiers, 104.

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Points of gestic commonality between the source text and Brecht’s account can be seen as points of philosophical agreement. Where Brecht diverges from the original text at least two things are possible: 1) that this divergence is designed to reveal gestic instances which specifically contradicts the way social life is portrayed in the original or 2) to reveal something on which the original is silent or missed. Above we saw that Brecht frames his story in relation to what we know of Socrates from Plato and to the theme of courage. Additionally, from the outset, he also frames the story in class-based terms. In the very first sentence, for example, Brecht introduces Socrates as “the midwife’s son”57 and later in the opening paragraph informs the reader that Socrates fought, “in the light infantry, since neither his standing, a cobbler’s, nor his income, a philosopher’s, entitled him to enter the more distinguished and expensive branches of the service.”58 This exposition clearly highlights the lower social standing of Socrates, bringing it to the readers’ attention and suggesting that his social status is crucial to a full appreciation of the tale—an idea which is further evidenced in the continued emergence of the theme throughout the piece. For example, there are frequent references to Socrates as a “cobbler,”59 the text refers to his house as “little”60 and he and his wife are said to be “in no position to throw food away.”61 Not only does Brecht take care to highlight Socrates’s social standing from the very beginning of the story, he also clearly ties this theme to the one of courage. This is done in the final sentence of the introductory paragraph when Brecht has the narrator say that despite Socrates’s lower social standing the reader, “may suppose, his bravery was of a special kind.”62 If we are reading the story in the hopes of reconstructing a Brechtian position on Socratic courage a very important clue is revealed in this. Specifically, the specialness of his courage is tied to his social class. This is a point we will return to below. After an initial paragraph of exposition, the action begins with Socrates preparing himself for the battle which the soldiers know to be imminent. He does this by chewing onions which “in the soldiers’ view, induced valour.”63 The narrator then informs us that Socrates’s “scepticism in many spheres led to credulity in many others; he was against speculative thought and in favour 57 139. 58 Ibid. 59 139, 142, 144, 145, 147. 60 143. 61 148. 62 139. 63 Ibid.

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of practical experience; so, he did not believe in the gods, but he did believe in onions.”64 Although the image of Socrates chewing on raw onions for fortitude is light-hearted, even comical, its inclusion reveals two important traits of Socrates’s thought, as Brecht understands it. First, it establishes Socrates as someone whose thought is rooted in materialism and empirics, not metaphysics. He does not believe in the gods which are metaphysical constructs. Yet, he believes in the onions because he has been able to experience their efficacy. His concern is with what is evidenced and experienced in the material life-world, not what is speculative. Second, it defines Socrates as a philosopher orientated toward practical ends—a man of action. Brecht shows Socrates using the knowledge he has gained through experience to inform his actions toward specific desired ends—in this case the inducement of valour. In this way, Brecht prioritises Socrates’s actions over his thoughts. It is what he does, not what he thinks that is important. This is an idea which becomes even more apparent later in the story as Brecht’s Socrates struggles to choose a course of action. Brecht’s prioritisation of Socrates’s actions is reminiscent of Plato’s accounts, particularly in the Laches. In it, we remember, Plato chose to have Socrates demonstrate what courage was, not define it verbally. While it would be problematic to make a broad generalisation about Plato’s philosophy based solely on the texts studied above, we can say that Plato does at least make a case for the primacy of action in the Laches. The primacy of action then is an example of a gestic element Brecht chose to preserve. Furthermore, Brecht’s scene with Socrates eating the onion reveals a commonality in the way that Plato and Brecht conceive of courage. Particularly, for both these thinkers, courage is not something which is fixed or given in the human condition. It is something which needs fostering. Brecht shows this by presenting a Socrates who attempts to induce it by eating onions while Plato, in the Laches demonstrates this with the notion that education can be a vehicle toward developing it in the youth. Although, as we will see, there are some significant differences in how Brecht and Plato understand courage, they do agree on this particular point. Here again we see another gestic element which Brecht preserves. In addition to eating the onions, Brecht also has Socrates reflect on the battle plan and the war more broadly, in the moments before the battle. The reader is told that the day before a young cavalry officer explained to Socrates that the plan was for the infantry to wait “loyal and steadfast” to take “the brunt of the enemy’s attack. And meanwhile the cavalry advances in the valley and falls 64 Ibid.

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on him from the rear.”65 Initially this plan “struck Socrates as good, or at any rate not bad”66 however, “in the grey dawn [before the battle], the plan struck Socrates as altogether wretched.”67 “What did it mean: the infantry takes the enemy’s attack?” Socrates ponders, “Usually one was glad to evade an attack, now, all of a sudden, the art lay in taking the brunt of it. A very bad thing that the general himself was a cavalryman.”68 The way Brecht has Socrates critically reflect on the situation which befalls him, in this passage stands in stark contrast to the attitude Socrates maintains toward the battle as presented by Plato, in the Apology. Plato depicts Socrates as unwaveringly dedicated to the authority of the state. For example, he says that “wherever a man…is stationed by his commander, there he must…remain and run his risks” and “when the commanders whom you chose to command me stationed me, both at Potidaea and at Amphipolis and at Delium, I remained where they stationed me” because not to do so would have been “a terrible thing.”69 In this, Plato’s Socrates does not question the legitimacy of his orders. He does not provide room to consider the motives or reasons for them. Nor does he open the door to an evaluative process by which one could determine the propriety of following the orders. The legitimacy of the order and propriety of carrying it out are taken for granted. For Plato’s Socrates, fidelity and service to the state is an unquestioned good. It is so sacrosanct, in fact, that he draws an analogy between the fidelity to the state and the fidelity to the gods. He was equally morally obligated to follow the orders of those in control of the state and to adhere to the demands of the gods that commanded him to lead the examined life. They are equally imperative and categorically followed. Brecht’s Socrates on the other hand rejects this. Instead of uncritical obedience to orders, he contemplates their motives. In this case, his reflective approach leads him to two interrelated conclusions: the poorer classes are at more risk and they risk their lives for the financial well-being of richer ­classes. These things are evidenced in his ironic statement about it being too bad the general was in the cavalry not the infantry. Those of lower social standing are relegated to the infantry where they are subjected to the most risk while the rich are protected by their horses. Even though it is the poor who are ­subjected to the most danger, they do not benefit from the war. Brecht presents this as a widely understood notion among the poor who comprise the infantry. 65 140. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Apology, 28d-29a.

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“[P]rofits [are] made by the big armourers,”70 Brecht’s Socrates overhears another infantryman say and later he himself says that the reason for the war is “the shipowners, vineyard proprietors and slave-traders in Asia Minor had put a spoke in the wheel of Persian shipowners, vineyard proprietors and slavetraders.”71 Facetiously, he says that this is, “A fine reason!”72 for a war, simultaneously critiquing the war’s economic motives and class dependent outcomes. Even though Plato recognises the fact the cavalry was in less danger than the infantry when he has Alcibiades admit that he “had less reason for alarm” at the battle because he “was mounted,”73 he is silent about the class dependent discrepancies the war produces and the motives for it. These then can be understood as gestic additions of Brecht’s. Brecht would have seen them as “truths” about social relations (manifested as war) which needed highlighting or clarify because they had been either ignored, overlooked, obfuscated, or otherwise omitted from Plato’s original. While Socrates ponders the class dimensions of the war, the Persian attack comes on suddenly and fiercely. Immediately overwhelmed, Socrates flees backwards in retreat without trying to mount a defence. As he is fleeing, however, he manages to get a thorn stuck through his sandal and deep into is foot, incapacitating him. In extreme pain, he tries to remove the sandal; but, the thorn has pinned it to his foot. Finding himself in this precarious situation, “[h]is dejected eye fell on the sword at his side. A thought flashed through his mind, more welcome than any that ever came to him in debate. Couldn’t the sword be used as a knife?”74 Here again we see Brecht portraying Socrates as a practical thinker, one whose thought is orientated to achieving desired outcomes. He employs his intellect toward removing the thorn that is preventing him from fleeing to safety and consequently making him susceptible to the Persian onslaught. The pragmatic idea that his sword could be used to remove the thorn is more welcome than any idea he has ever had in debate. It is more welcome because it has immediate practicality. It is an idea that he can use right away to save himself. Socrates’s attitude toward the sword also reveals the logical extension of his realisations about the class dimensions of the war. A thinker orientated toward action, he declines to use his sword against the Persians, choosing instead to flee. By this, he is electing through his actions not to use his sword in defence 70 139. 71 140. 72 Ibid. 73 Symposium, 221a. 74 141.

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of the interests of the ruling classes. Nevertheless, Brecht’s Socrates is willing to use the sword as a implement toward achieving the right type of outcome—in this case removing the thorn so he can get to safety. Before he has a chance to put this idea into practice and remove the thorn, however, the battle again descends upon him. Unable to flee further because of his injured foot, Socrates, “did not know what to do and suddenly…started to bellow. To be precise it was like this: he heard himself bellowing.”75 Simultaneously, he begins swinging his sword around wildly, knocking over a Persian fighter in the process. Then, again “Socrates heard himself bellowing.”76 “Not another step back, lads!” he implores his compatriots, “Now we’ve got them where we want them, the sons of bitches!…If anyone retreats I’ll tear him to shreds!”77 Encouraged by what they perceive as Socrates’s exemplary bravery and gaining confidence from it, several other Athenians soldiers come to his side. United, they follow his lead and begin shouting war cries. This gives the impression of a much larger force. Hearing these cries, the Persians fall back fearing an ambush and the Athenians are given a reprieve. The ruse works long enough for the cavalry to re-enforce them, leading to a Persian defeat.78 At this point, Alcibiades, a general rides up on horseback and sees Socrates lofted up on the shoulders of his fellow foot soldiers. The soldiers tell Alcibiades “how, by his unflinching resistance, [Socrates] had made the wavering battle-line stand firm.”79 Under the impression that Socrates did something heroic, the soldiers carry him in triumph first to the baggage-train headed home and then from the train to his house. They place him onto his chair and tell Xantippe, his wife, of his perceived heroics. Xantippe is sceptical, however. After the soldiers leave, Xantippe asks Socrates if the whole thing was a joke, speculating that he had really made of fool of himself. Socrates denies this

75 142. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 In Plato’s version and the account provided by Thucydides (Thucydides, Warner, R., & In Finley, M.I. (1972). History of the Peloponnesian War. Harmondsworth, Eng: Penguin Books, 4.93-100), the Athenians are routed; but, in Brecht’s version they are victorious. While this is a change to the original, it does not in itself seem to contain gestic material. Instead, Brecht seems to be using this alteration for dramatic effect which sets the necessary background for a major gestic instance later on. Specifically, having a victory celebration in the story provides for opportunities where Socrates’s supposed heroics can be discussed and these discussions and the action Socrates takes as a result of them is where the gestic instance is revealed, as we will see. 79 143.

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t­elling her he “gave battle.”80 Trying to make sense of actions which she sees as inconsistent with Socrates’s character, she next asks him if he was drunk. To this, Socrates replies, “No. I made them stand firm when they were retreating.”81 Still sceptical Xantippe retorts, “You can’t even stand firm yourself”82 and drops the subject asking him to give her a salt shaker which is on the table. But, Socrates is evasive and replies that he would rather not eat because of an upset stomach. The truth of the matter is, however, that “in no circumstances did he intend to stand up and show her that he could not put his foot to the ground.”83 According to Socrates, “She was uncannily sharp when it came to nosing out something discreditable…And it would be discreditable if the underlying reason for his steadfastness in battle came to light.”84 Xantippe’s scrutiny makes Socrates feel uneasy. An internal conflict is developing within him. He is reluctant for people to find out the truth about what happened to him during the battle. He does not want to appear “discreditable.” But, he also would not feel comfortable lying about the situation. Moreover, he realises that he has not heard the last word on the subject. More scrutiny is to come. Soon others would proclaim his heroics and attempt to get him to ­accept public accolades. “What pleasure it would give them” he thinks to himself. “to throw in [Alcibiades’s] teeth: Yes, you won the battle, but a cobbler fought it.”85 Socrates is able to identify why the story will not just go away and this reason reveals again Brecht’s preoccupation with the class dimensions of the war. Even though the generals get the credit for victories, it is the grunts from the poorer classes who do the hard work. They know the role they played and will not be shy in letting the upper classes hear about their contribution. Early the next day Socrates’s expectation that the story would not simply go away is bared out. A group of his students visit to acclaim and congratulate him. They claim that his actions marked a “historic date for philosophy… [because he] had demonstrated…that the great thinker could also be the great man of action.”86 In response, Socrates manoeuvres in the direction of coming clean saying, “That’s all rubbish what you’re saying…I didn’t do anything at all.”87 His students interpret this as meaning his apparent battlefield heroics 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 144. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 145. 86 146. 87 Ibid.

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are nothing in comparison to “the greatest intellectual feats”88 he performed over the years. Showing his disapproval with their misunderstanding, Socrates groans before elaborating: I didn’t win [the battle] at all. I defended myself because I was attacked. I wasn’t interested in this battle. I neither trade in arms nor do I own vineyards in the area. I wouldn’t know what to fight battles for. I found myself among a lot of sensible men from the suburbs, who have no interest in battles, and I did exactly what they did, at the most, a few seconds before.89 We have just seen that Brecht attempts to define Socrates as a philosopher of action. But, here Socrates disagrees with his students when they say his actions in the battle make him a “great man of action.” Although Brecht wants the reader to see Socrates as a philosopher of praxis, this indicates that this is not the sort of action Brecht thinks makes him one. If this is not the type of action that makes Socrates a notable philosopher of action, what would according to Brecht? We will see the answer to this question shortly when Socrates reconciles his internal contradiction of whether to divulge the secret of his wound. Although Socrates attempts to disabuse his students a second time, they again misunderstand him. They take his rebuke as an argument that his actions were morally justified because they were defensive, telling him, “that’s what we said… He did nothing but defend himself. That’s his way of winning battles.”90 However, Socrates’s point was not about the moral virtue of fighting only in defence. Instead, it was that he was forced into a position of danger because of the economic interests of others (i.e., the owning classes) and was therefore compelled to defend himself. His self-defence is secondary, an unfortunate consequence of the machinations of the rich. He was structurally situated in a position of danger, not because of the decisions that he made but by those of others and only defended himself because he had no other option. If he had any option, he would not have chosen to risk his life for a cause from which he derives no benefit, in the first place. What his students miss is Socrates is trying to emphasise that he and his compatriots, as poor men, are not interested in the war because they are not financially interested in it. This is a very practical point Socrates is trying to make. He could have died because of the decisions of the ruling classes. This is a much more immediate 88 147. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid.

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and concrete idea than a normative theoretical position regarding the justified use of violence. Nevertheless, his students are oblivious to this and run off to the gymnasium “in deeply savoured discussion.”91 This contrast between the story’s protagonist and the ridiculous students again reveals Brecht’s prioritisation of practical thought over speculative. After his pupils leave, four officials come to Socrates’s house and request that he go to the Areopagus so that a tribute could be paid to him. Incapable of walking because of his injury and still desiring to hold on to his secret, he feigns rudeness and disinterest to them to get them to go away. They leave; but, this is not the end of it. Antisthenes is the next to visit. With his close friend and confidant now with him, Socrates thinks that “he really ought to lay the difficult case before”92 him. But, just as he seems poised to, Antisthenes informs him that “Giorguis is going about telling everyone that [he] must have been on the run and in the confusion gone the wrong way.”93 With this, Socrates decides not to tell the truth to Antisthenes because this revelation would provide “trumps his opponents would hold” over him.94 Just then, Alcibiades shows up and tries to get Socrates to accompany him to the Areopagus and accept an award for his bravery. At this point, Socrates considers lying about what happened. He begins a falsehood about having sprained his foot but, considering this was “a matter of uttering the first real lie in this affair”95 his “speech failed him. All of a sudden he no longer wanted to produce his tale.”96 He confesses to Alcibiades. After absorbing the information, Alcibiades asks him why he did not just say he had some other sort of wound. Socrates retorts, “bluntly,”97 “Because I’ve got a thorn in my foot.”98 In response, Alcibiades does not reveal any emotion but tells Socrates, “I think you’re brave enough. I don’t know anybody who in this situation would have told the story you’ve just told.”99 Socrates’s confession, sets up the last scene. In it, Xantippe and Socrates are alone in their house. Xantippe is washing Socrates’s foot and removing the thorn. As she is doing this, she admonishes him for not telling her about the thorn earlier. “It could have meant blood-poisoning” she tells him; to which he responds with the final words of the story, “Or worse.”100 91 Ibid. 92 150. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 151. 96 Ibid. 97 152. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 153.

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7 Discussion Socrates’s vague retort to Xantippe compels the reader to consider what would be “worse.” While certainly there is ambiguity in it, the most consistent answer would be that Socrates is referring to letting the mischaracterisation of his actions persist and ultimately taking the credit people are offering him. To arrive at this conclusion, we need to review Socrates’s position about the battle and war more generally. Throughout the story he was clear about the class disparities of the war. For him and the subaltern classes there was no reason to fight. The whole thing was a product of the machinations of the rich, orchestrated for their own benefit. The poor just get caught up in it. Socrates’s impulse is to question this, to critique it and then when it came time for the fighting to avoid it as best he could. These actions suggest that he is opposed to this type of war. This opposition persists after the battle as well and is revealed in his comments to his students. This sheds light on why he refuses to take credit for bravery in the battle. Continuing the farce and accepting the laurels of battle would be inconsistent with his stated and revealed opposition to the war. It is inconsistent because such an action would help propagate the cult of war heroism which is a mechanism that helps fuel these types of wars by encouraging the poor to fight for the benefit of the rich. They are encouraged by the ideas that there is virtue (especially bravery) in it and that one can obtain social recognition through being seen as brave in battle. In the end, Socrates eventually reveals the source of this injury because he is reluctant to re-enforce a key mythological element that keeps the social structure of class discrepancies together. Morally, Socrates was compelled to come clean. He could not perpetuate the cult of heroics because he knew the consequences of it—the perpetuation of wars where the poor (including himself) are used as mere useobjects for the economic benefit of the rich. In Socrates’s moral imperative, we see another point of commonality in the way Plato and Brecht portray Socrates. Both see him as a philosopher who is compelled to do the morally justified act. However, they disagree on what constitutes a morally justified act. For Plato willingly participating in the battle is, while for Brecht opposing it is. Furthermore, both these thinkers present Socrates as courageous and locate that courage in doing the morally justified thing. However, again there is a disagreement between them as to what the morally justified thing is. We can take Socrates’s action of openly opposing the war a step further. For Brecht, it is the kind of action that he has in mind when he characterises Socrates as a philosopher of action. Socrates’s action is a socially progressive action because it exposes the social contradiction that the poor sow but the rich reap. Seeing this contradiction can lead to people questioning the status

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quo which in turn could lead to them challenging it, and ultimately undermining it. This is why Brecht prioritises Socrates’s actions over his thoughts. Brecht is a materialist and believed that humans are largely responsible for the construction of their own reality through the material conditions they set for themselves. Praxis is the shaping of those material conditions and is the vehicle of social progress. Alcibiades reaction to Socrates’s confession seems to reveal that Alcibiades understands this especially when we compare his reaction to that of Antisthenes and Xantippe. Antisthenes coughs uneasily at Socrates’s admission and Xantippe laughs aloud but “Alcibiades leant back in his chair and contemplated the philosopher on the couch with narrowed eyes.”101 For him, as a member of the ruling classes, the exposition of this social contradiction is not a matter of social awkwardness. Nor is it a humorous one. A great social truth has been exposed before him, a contradiction laid bare and this truth, to paraphrase Gramsci, like all truths, is revolutionary. Alcibiades knows what is predicated on the cult of heroics. As a general he relies on it as an organising principle and motivating factor and as a member of the ruling classes he enjoys its fruits. Nevertheless, even though Socrates’s way of thinking is antithetical to his interests, Alcibiades still sees courage in Socrates’s action although he cannot fully appreciate it. Alcibiades tells Socrates that he does not “know anybody who in this situation would have told the story [he’s] just told.”102 Certainly, the “situation” Alcibiades refers to is the thorn in Socrates’s foot. But, there is also a wider social context to his situation. Socrates is a poor man who had an opportunity to take advantage of the events for the improvement of his own social position. But, he speaks a revolutionary “truth” not caring about the costs to his reputation or the possibility of personal gain. This brings us back to Brecht’s notion articulated through the narrator that the specialness of Socrates’s courage is tied to his social class. In this story, Brecht shows us what courage for a poor person is, in part by showing what it is not. Bravery is not the things poor people have to do because they do not have the luxury of doing otherwise. It is not what they are forced to do to survive in a situation which is not of their own making. In this case, it was not the actions Socrates took to save his life while he was compelled by the decisions of the ruling classes to fight in a war in which he had no reason to fight. Brecht makes exactly the same point in Mother Courage and Her Children when Mother Courage explains how she got her name. She states, “They call me Mother Courage “cause I was afraid I’d be ruined, so I drove through the 101 152. 102 Ibid.

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bombardment of Riga like a madwoman, with fifty loaves of bread in my cart. They were going moldy, what else could I do?”103 Even though she risked being killed by this action she had to do it. If she stayed put, the bread would have gone bad before she had the opportunity to sell it. If she lost her inventory she would have been ruined financially and ended up starving to death. We can see, then, like Brecht’s Socrates, she had no choice but to act in the way she did. But, this action is not courageous according to Brecht. Her name is meant to be ironic. We know this because it was not courage that prompted the actions which inspired her nickname. She tells us herself that she did it because she was afraid. Like Mother Courage, Brecht’s Socrates also acted out of fear. He ran because he was afraid. He swung his sword because he was afraid. In sum, Brecht presents the case that courage is not having to act out of fear for oneself while in a fearful situation especially when that person was forced into it by social forces beyond her or his control. So, what then is courage for Brecht? From the way that he portrays Socrates, we can say that it is first a willingness to question exploitative social organizations and second doing something revolutionary about them. Previously, we saw how Plato defines courage as wise perseverance. Like Plato, Brecht’s version of courage also implies a certain type of wisdom. However, while Plato believed that courage entailed some type of moral wisdom which is distinct from technical knowledge, Brecht’s wisdom is a technical one. It is a social scientific wisdom—the wisdom to see and understand the world from a class-based perspective. Brecht’s wisdom does not rely on metaphysical standards to determine what is right and wrong. The standards it employs are material—specifically who benefits economically and who does not, i.e., who is financially “interested.” But courage is more than just this type of wisdom for Brecht. It is also the willingness to do something about the social conditions one comes to recognise through it. Like for Plato, courage for Brecht is acting on wisdom. In this way, Brecht sets the groundwork for moral imperatives like Plato. Although, the foundations for those imperatives and the conclusions that they lead to are different, as we have already seen. Moreover, the question of steadfastness is another point on which Brecht departs from Plato. Plato’s Socrates seems always to know with certainty the morally justified action. Plato does not present him as conflicted or wavering. Brecht, on the other hand portrays a Socrates who osculates before d­ oing what is right. Brecht’s Socrates must weigh the options and consider before he chooses. The presentation of options and characters who must make 103 Brecht, B, et al. (1972). Collected plays, volume 5. London: Methuen, 25.

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hard (even counterintuitive) choices between them is a pervasive element in Brecht’s oeuvre. Through it, he forces his audience to pass judgement on the character’s actions. Brecht is consistent with this formulation elsewhere in his work. For example, he uses almost the exact same design that we see in “Socrates Wounded,” in Life of Galileo while treating the issue of courage. In it, Brecht emphasises that Galileo first renounces his scientific findings (a symbolic rejection of science itself) out of fear of death at the hands of the inquisition. Later, however, he secretly chooses to return to his studies. At the end of the play, one of his former students, Andrea visits him in his home. Galileo explains why he could not stay away from science: I have reviewed my case and asked myself how the world of science…will judge it…the pursuit of science seems to call for a special courage. Science trades in knowledge distilled from doubt…science aims at making doubters of everybody. But princes, landlords and priests keep the majority of the people in a pearly haze of superstition and outworn words to cover up their own machinations…Our new art of doubting delighted the people. They grabbed the telescope out of our hands and focused it on their tormentors—princes, landlords, priests.104 Like his Socrates, Brecht’s Galileo was conflicted but ultimately is courageous and does the morally justified thing. In Galileo’s case, this is returning to science. Notice too how Brecht presents Galileo’s rationale. Brecht’s Galileo does not return to science because he was intellectually stimulated by it. Nor does he return to it because it stands as an abstract, metaphysical good in itself. He returns to science because it exposes an exploitive social order and gives the subaltern classes a means of challenging that order and improving their material conditions. In a word, he returns to it because it is revolutionary. 8 Conclusion This paper has examined the notion of courage vis-à-vis Plato’s writings which served as the original basis for Brecht’s story. The first step in this was to articulate a Platonic conceptualisation of courage which he defines as wise perseverance. The next step was to examine Brecht’s text where we found several similarities and differences in the two’s formulation of courage. 104 Brecht et al., 93.

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In summation, both thinkers believed that courage is something which needs fostering or encouragement. Their respective texts can be seen as doing just that because they present Socrates as a model of courage. They do this first by emphasising the importance of thoughtful action and then by defining Socrates as courageous because of the actions he takes, specifically taking the morally justified route. Lastly, both Brecht and Plato treat Socrates’s doing the morally justified thing as a type of wisdom. This wisdom creates a moral imperative to act in certain ways, for the two. Nevertheless, they have different notions regarding the nature of the wisdom required to be courageous and subsequently do the morally correct thing. Whereas Plato believed that courage entailed some type of moral wisdom distinct from technical knowledge, Brecht understands the wisdom as a technical one. Specifically, he sees it as a wisdom derived from a class-based social scientific Weltanschauung. It is because Socrates sees the world in this way that he does what he does. Moreover, Brecht and Plato disagree on what acts can be considered morally justified. For Plato, willingly and unquestioningly participating in the battle is morally justified, while for Brecht it is to consider the class implications of the war and opposing it. There is a major difference then in the attitude Socrates maintains toward the battle as represented by each. Brecht uses a critical attitude in his Socrates to reveal a social antagonism (particularly in relation to war) on which Plato is silent. This critical attitude ultimately led to Brecht’s Socrates doing what Brecht presents as the courageous and morally justified act of admitting the truth of his injury thus exposing a social contradiction. This, it was argued, is a revolutionary act in that it challenged a key mythological element that kept a social structure of class discrepancies together. For Brecht, courage is a willingness to question exploitative social orders and doing something revolutionary about them. But, the root of his moral imperative to act courageously is different than that of Plato’s. Brecht does not root this imperative in a metaphysical standard like virtue as Plato does. Instead, he roots it in material interests. Socrates should not perpetuate the cult of heroics because it propagates a system of class-based exploitation that exploits poor people like him and threatens their lives. Additionally, courage for Brecht is not the things poor people are forced to do when they do not have the luxury of doing otherwise. It is not acting out of fear while in the fearful situations one is compelled into through social forces that perpetuate class systems. It is understanding these forces and challenging them. Finally, Brecht and Plato differ on the question of steadfastness. Whereas, Plato believes that courage must entail steadfastness, Brecht allows for internal

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conflict. For Brecht, the moral decision is not come upon easily. Short term economic considerations complicate it. Social structures and the forces they produce work against it. One must, therefore, perplex over the decision. The purpose of this essay has been to move beyond the standard Brecht texts to demonstrate that his literary prose is also a valuable resource for reconstructing his socio-political thought. It has done this while examining an important philosophical concern of Brecht’s, courage. It is my hope that this essay can spark renewed interest in Brecht’s literary prose and serve as an ­example of how he can be put in dialog with the intellectual scaffolding of Western philosophy to not only highlight the points of overlap but also tease out Brecht’s original contributions.

Chapter 7

Brecht, the Popular, and Intellectuals in Dark Times: Of Donkeys and “Tuis” Philip Glahn Abstract This essay discusses Brecht’s “technics of aesthetics,” his attitude toward class struggle as the active engagement with the tools of intellectual-as-material production, as articulated through the playwright’s disdain for the passive politicking and complicit posturing of his contemporaries in the face of capitalist exploitation and fascist violence. Accusing the “Tuis” or “Tellekt-uell-ins,” including Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, Georg Lukacs, and the “Frankfurtists,” of wanting to save Geist and Kultur rather than addressing questions of ownership and power, Brecht instead sought a proletarian understanding of art as active contest over the mechanisms of representation and imagination, the devices that link the perception of the given to inscribed as well as latent histories and thus multiple, potential futures. Brecht’s attempt at determining a “useful” position of artistic agency and solidarity is traced through his writings on popular culture and communication apparatuses, his poetry, letters and plans to pen a “Tui-novel.”

1 While visiting Brecht in Svendborg, Denmark, in the summer of 1934, Walter Benjamin jots down his impressions of the German playwright’s study: on one of the supporting beams Brecht has painted the sentence “The Truth is Concrete,” and he has placed on the windowsill a little wooden donkey with a nodding head and a sign around its neck that reads, “I, too, must understand it.”1 Read through the biographic lens of artistic idiosyncracy, Benjamin’s seemingly passing recollection in his diary gives a deceptively simple account of Brecht’s aesthetic politics: a vulgar Marxist materialism and a dogmatic pedagogy. 1 Walter Benjamin, “Notizen Svendborg Sommer 1934,” in Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, vi. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (eds.), (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 526.

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But  if understood as a Benjaminian allegory, placed within the context of Brecht’s artistic practice in general as well as his particular situation in the early 1930s, this description of the workplace signals a crucial relationality among authorship, emancipation, and the tools of production—material, intellectual, and otherwise. This relationality articulates a method that emphasizes both the making and function of culture in terms of their usefulness, that posits art as a set of tools, measured by their impact. Art’s transformative potential, when understood and wielded as a technology of mediation and organization in the struggle over the acquisition of experience, lends this relationality an evolving relevance and urgency. And while the impact of Brecht’s work in theater and the performing arts is well known and documented, it is remarkable to see the playwright’s method of inquiry and change (or change-as-method) manifest in the visual arts and its discourses—a field defined by the very contest between image and experience, ideal and real, reflection and action. In the decades following World War ii, when the canons of artistic theory and practice operated under the defensive spell of negative dialectics, Brecht’s work emerged, sporadically but consistently, as a counter-model of popular, collective agency.2 As we find ourselves in an ever-changing yet continuously and emphatically capitalist politics of material and immaterial production, distribution, and consumption, Brecht’s ruminations on the role of art and artist in social labor remain necessarily useful. Brecht’s time in Denmark was a period of exile, of geographic and in many ways technical and philosophical distance from his audience, raisings questions of how to reach whom, about what. Hitler’s rise to power had left many German intellectuals and artists homeless, in flight from the places they lived and worked, their sites of experience and engagement. Brecht himself was left pondering what it meant to be a writer—having left Germany behind, he feared that he had lost his language, his stage, and his audience. More crucially, he was obliged to question the role of his work, of words and images, poetry and theater, as weapons in the fight against fascism. What remained of the function of such devices, in light of their apparent failure to mobilize a fabled proletariat against the forces of their exploitation? What power persisted in an avant-garde committed to social and spiritual progress? .

2 I have tried to partially sketch this impact of Brechtian aesthetics, focusing on artistic production in the US in the 1960s and ’70s. See “The Brecht-Effect: Politics and American Postwar Art,” Afterimage (November–December 2006): 29–32; “Brechtian Journeys: Yvonne Rainer’s Film as Counter-Public Art,” feature article, Art Journal (Summer 2009): 76–93.

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Brecht’s assessment from Denmark in 1933 has a bitter and satirical tone: I felt rather superfluous, and a careful survey of my surroundings as well as a few visits alerted me to the fact that, as happens occasionally in the life of Völker [the people], now a truly great time had begun, where people of my kind only disturb the great picture.3 As remarks written after an odyssey of displacements with brief stops in Prague, Vienna, and Paris before Denmark, these sentences seem to render concrete the truth of the people’s willful, violent ignorance. Given the painfully obvious ­disillusionment with the proclaimed historical inevitability of a proletarian revolution and art’s role as a procuring device for class consciousness, it is remarkable that writers like Brecht remained dedicated to advancing the forms and needs of emancipatory struggle. But this is precisely where the playwright differed from many of his contemporaries, at least those who would recast themselves as purveyors of higher freedoms and disinterested cultural values. As Fredric Jameson has argued, Brecht’s study of Marx led not to a doctrinaire political art but to a politics of aesthetics, to a method of eingreifendes Denken [thinking as action], of actively engaging in history as a material, yet constructed and thus transformable, constellation of ideas, experiences, and manifestations.4 A crucial aspect of Brecht’s ruminations in exile regarding the techniques and technologies to be utilized in the struggle against fascism were his dialogues with other intellectuals and their methods, most prominently the ­often-polemical exchanges with and accounts of what Brecht called Tuis and their works. “Tui” is an acronym derived from a play on the word “intellectual” (“Tellect-Ual-In”), and Brecht’s disdain for what he called “the intellectual of this time of markets and commodities … the lessor of the intellect” had already manifested itself publicly during the late 1920s through printed altercations with the likes of Thomas and Klaus Mann and poems such as “700 Intellectuals Pray to an Oil Tank.”5 In both cases, Brecht takes higher minds to task for their unwillingness or inability to ponder the usefulness of their cultural labor. And with the rise of the Third Reich, the question of who uses cultural production and how, in whose interest art works even though, or especially when, ­aesthetic ruminations are presented as disinterested, as symbolic liberation 3 “Unpolitische Briefe” (1933) in Bertolt Brecht, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, xxii, Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller (eds.), (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1989), 13; hereafter gba. 4 Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London and New York: Verso, 1998). 5 Notes for The Tui-Novel (1935–7), gba xvii, 153; gba xi, 175–176.

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from ideology, took on an increasing urgency. Simply considering oneself on the correct side of history, an ally in the struggle of liberation, hence occupying, to use Benjamin’s words, a progressive tendency without critically analyzing the function of technique, was deemed not only insufficient but reactionary.6 In “Linke Melancholie” (Leftist Melancholia), a 1931 review of Erich Kästner’s latest collection of poems, Benjamin echoes Brecht’s ideas regarding the inadequacy of merely rehearsing revolutionary ideas: The leftist-radical publicists of the types of Kästner, Mehring or Tucholsky are the proletarian mimicry of collapsed bourgeois ranks. Their function is to generate, politically speaking, not parties but cliques, literarily speaking, not schools but fads, economically speaking, not producers but agents.7 To both Benjamin and Brecht, the expression of political and aesthetic ideals had to be replaced with an analysis of how words are utilized, to ultimately change their function, and of who had the power and the means to utter them, and to whom. According to Brecht’s own recollections, it was in this time of exile that plans to work extensively on what he called “the abuse of intellect” were being sketched.8 In Svendborg the notion of a “Tui-novel” appeared for the first time: an expansive and ambitious undertaking that the writer would never complete, a project in a “fragmentary and disarrayed state,” over many pages “almost incomprehensible,” and thus deemed by many a scholar practically adverse to a “frontal critical analysis.”9 According to Benjamin, Brecht found himself at a crossroads, with a “strange indecisiveness” about how to pursue the Tui-complex while working to elaborate and revise the new pedagogical needs of an anti-fascist aesthetics: how to adequately engage in a politics of form without falling prey to turning politics (and tendency and technique) into formalist exercise.10 It could be argued that this conundrum was the reason 6

Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin, ‘Der Autor als Produzent,’ an address delivered at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, 27 April 1934, reprinted in Gesammelte Werke ii/2, 684. 7 Walter Benjamin, “Linke Melancholie,” Die Gesellschaft, 8, vol. 1 (1931), reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften iii, 280. 8 “Turandot oder der Kongress der Weisswäscher” (1953), gba xxiv, 411. 9 Walter Benjamin, “Notizen Svendborg Sommer 1934,” Gesammelte Schriften vi, 530; Franco Buono, “Die drei Kongresse der Tuis,” in Brechts Tui-Kritik, edited by Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Berlin: Argument Verlag, 1976), 71. Buono cites a 1943 journal entry by Brecht wherein the playwright complains that he “wasn’t even able to begin” the novel. Ibid. 10 Ibid.

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that the Tui-project necessarily remained ongoing, unfinished, and consisting of a multiplicity of works, adhering to Brecht’s demand for art’s historically specific immersion in the particular circumstances and contexts of ideological and material production. Looking back in 1953, Brecht listed Tui-related works including “the play Turandot or The Whitewashers, existing mostly in the form of plans and sketches,” “the novel The Tuis’ Demise, a collection of essays, TuiStories, a series of small plays, Tui-Tales, and a small volume of tracts, The Art of Spittle-Licking and Other Talents.”11 The project thus spans Brecht’s years in Weimar, in Danish and American exile, and his time in East Berlin; it engages with Thomas Mann and Kästner as much as the 1935 and ’37 International Writers’ Congress for the Defense of Culture, with Georg Lukács’ socialist realism as well as Theodor Adorno and the “Frankfurtists’” dawn of enlightenment; with capitalism and fascism (and fascism as a form of capitalism) and a version of “real existing socialism.” His critique of the spittle-lickers and culinary thought-providers is always also a dialogue with his own Haltung, his attitude and means, technique and tendency. Like the Tuis, Brecht is a Kopfarbeiter or “head-worker,” and questions of ownership of the means and devices of intellectual-aesthetic production are at the very forefront of his concerns. As Wolfgang Fritz Haug has ­argued, the Tui is not a “naturalistic figure” but an “always present relationship of functionality.”12 And it is Brecht’s goal to articulate this complex of interdependencies among power, value, and art, to politicize it by showing the determined and evolving quality of relations among, in the summation of Franco Buono, “the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism in Germany,” “the idealistic character that thinking had acquired in capitalist society and that thinking’s interested administrators and disseminators, the Tuis,” and “its authentic Land of Milk-and-Honey—liberal democracy—governed by the ‘most free constitution in the world,’ written by the Tuis themselves.”13 This is an analysis of Denktechnik, or “thought technique,” of thinking manifested by and in art and culture, in outlooks, perspectives, and gestures, in ideas, objects, and experiences; of ideology to be judged by its consequences, and in turn subject to material forces, and is thus directly tied to Brecht’s contemplation of his own thinking’s application, of intellect as action, as practice. In this scenario, then, to return to Benjamin’s allegorical account of Brecht’s Svendborg study, the truth is concrete precisely because it is material, an image on a physical structure, the beam that supports the house. The sign around the 11 “Turandot oder der Kongress der Weisswäscher” (1953), gba xxiv, 411. 12 Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Zur Aktualität von Brechts Tui-Kritik,” in Brechts Tui-Kritik, 15. 13 Buono, “Die drei Kongresse der Tuis,” 72.

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donkey’s neck refers to itself as much as its maker, a self-reflective reminder of a pedagogical dialectics that rejects the monologic bestowal of knowledge in favor of an active engagement in the struggle over the mediation of different experiences. The donkey is less the pathetic idiot than a smart and willful, a useful and often-stubborn companion, a mediation between an apparently spontaneous and volatile imposition of self-willed refusal and a self-less, otherdirected, quasi-mechanical toil. It is not so much a symbol for a homogenous, abstracted audience as it is the model for a consciousness grappling to come to terms with its own potential, its labor, its strength. 2 A recurring issue regarding the ongoing relevance of Brecht’s work has been precisely the question of relationality, the “what, how and for whom,” or, as Sylvia Harvey inquired, a reconsideration of Brechtian notions of socialism, “scientific thinking,” and audience.14 Writing in 1982 in Screen, Harvey proposed that any serious recovery of Brecht’s demand that the intellectual and creative production be not just an interpretation of the world but an active tool of its transformation would have to take into account that the times are constantly changing, and with them, art’s commitment to emancipatory struggles.15 Intellectual-artistic engagement during “dark times,” as Brecht called them, in moments of crisis, ought to be rooted in their particular difficulties, which, according to Harvey, in the postwar period meant an acknowledgment of the limited appeal, the “negative connotations” of “communism” and “class struggle” at a time when oppressive regimes had come to embody the barbaric realization of once-utopian ideals.16 Capitalism, as many Cold War i­ntellectuals 14

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Recalling the three basic questions of every economic organization, “What, How, and For Whom” is the name of an influential activist curatorial collective whose work over the past years has been framed by a decidedly Brechtian outlook. The collective’s iteration of the 2009 Istanbul Biennial “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” was named (and framed) after the well-known song from Brecht, Elizabeth Hauptmann, and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera; a 2010 exhibition carried as its title Brecht’s famous dictum: “Hungry Man, Reach for the Book. It is a weapon.” Sylvia Harvey, “Whose Brecht? Memories for the Eighties,” Screen 1 (1982): 45–59. Screen, the leading journal of film and television studies with significant impact on visual arts practice and discourse, was a central voice in the Brechtian reconsideration of a popular-activist culture and published two influential special issues on Brecht in the mid1970s: “Special Number: Brecht and a Revolutionary Cinema” (Summer 1974) and “Brecht and the Cinema/Film and Politics” (Winter 1975/6). Harvey, “Whose Brecht?,” 46.

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on both the left and the right repeatedly pointed out, had, for better or worse, emerged victorious in the contest of ideologies and resources, apparatuses and technologies. Further, Harvey called for an updating of Brecht’s “scientific attitude,” “a pleasurable and change-oriented form of learning; this attitude looks at the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of reality, and asks how things could be different; it proposes the transformation of nature and social reality.” This outlook appears to Harvey as overtly optimistic and teleological in an era when Lindbergh’s Flight is more likely to deliver bombs than critical modern self-­discovery and Galileian ruminations over the utility of progress are drowned out by calculated exploitation of resources and labor.17 Lastly, there is the aforementioned question regarding “the possibility of working for a popular left-wing culture.”18 This type of aesthetic purpose and orchestrated communal action in unleashing the desires of those neglected and oppressed by the institutionalized tenets of bourgeois individualism seems untimely to Harvey, now that social movements have replaced class identity, and mass culture has unified fragmented and marginalized groups as consumers rather than agents of social change. A trajectory of manifest populisms has either replaced or made undesirable the revolutionary myth of the emancipatory potential of the popular. But times have, yet again, changed since then. Since the crumbling of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, capitalist expansion has been marked by a series of ongoing crises, challenging the binary ideology of Cold War politics from both without and within. Scholars like Alain Badiou and David Harvey are re-presenting the “Communist hypothesis” for reconsideration, emphasizing capitalism’s growing demand for legitimization of its increasingly visible and continuously violent oppressions and exploitations.19 Digital technologies and information networks are sites of exchanges and labor, enabling both increased exploitation and alienation and potentially the formation of new publics and constituencies, new agents in the struggle over knowledge and experience. The concerns with culture’s role, of how to wield the tools of perception, interpretation, and creativity remain urgently pertinent. In 2009, the activist curatorial collective What, How, and For Whom/whw reacted to the greatest recession since the Great Depression with the Brechtian inspired call-to-arms “What Keeps Mankind Alive?,” using the Istanbul Biennal as a lens and site to pose timely, essential questions about material and immaterial needs by drawing 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 47. 19 Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London and New York: Verso, 2010); David Harvey, “The End of Capitalism?” Penn Humanities Forum lecture, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, November 30, 2011.

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parallels between the economic and political turmoil of the Weimar Republic and the potentials and limits of an increasingly interconnected world.20 The exhibition and catalog foregrounded a quote by Jameson: “Brecht would have been delighted, I like to think, at an argument, not for his greatness, or his canonicity, nor even for some new or unexpected value of posterity (let alone for his ‘postmodernity’), as rather for his usefulness—and that not only for some uncertain or merely possible future, but right now, in a post-Cold War marketrhetorical situation even more anti-communist than the good old days.”21 The Biennal became a self-declared “prism” and a platform for critically engaged curatorial and artistic endeavors: “Was it not somehow possible, we asked ourselves, to give the public some form of ‘agency,’ making choices that would boost their capacity for action.”22 The curators drew out historical connections and continuities, such as recurring moments of “global economic crisis,” “massive rightward shift of the electoral body,” and the “effective depoliticization of the language of politics” in order to present historically specific artistic actions engaging, among others, issues of “would-be politically neutral art as a means of policing the art world” and “the masses making history,” of “avant-garde as active principle” and art as a “means of political education,” of naturalized conventions that “obscure the truth” and the neoliberal “normality” of war as the underbelly of the “good life.”23 whw thus constructed a constellation between perception of self and world, between given and potential modes of production and utility of art and, or rather art as a form of new subjectivity, “where new political subjects and spheres of action are being constituted beyond representation.”24 “‘And if you think this is utopian, please think why is it such’ (Brecht).”25 In a recent issue, the influential art, politics, and theory journal e-flux invited contributions under the inquiry “How much fascism?” The editorial was quick to answer “Quite a bit, it would appear,” cautioning against creating simplistic historical equivalencies while urging a reexamination of specific tropes, such as the potential complicity of cultural production in the resurgence of populist demands for patriarchic nationalisms and völkisch social formations 20 21 22 23 24 25

whw, “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” 11th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey, September 12–November 8, 2011. Fredric Jameson, quoted in whw (eds.), What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Texts (Istanbul: 11th International Istanbul Biennial, 2009), 53. whw, “This is the 11th International Istanbul Biennial curators’ text,” in whw (eds.), What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Texts, 95. Ibid., 98–120. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 102.

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and identifications.26 Looking for “new conceptual weapons,” for “alternative social, political, and cultural projects,” the editors asked whether one ought to look to “the classics” for inspiration—“Wilhelm Reich, Benjamin, Adorno?” They conjured Brecht’s Tui-critique almost verbatim when they further inquired whether art can be “anything other than part of the problem—part of an international, urban-cosmopolitan elite that has for too long been factually complicit in the extreme inequality that fuels the fascist success.”27 Thus, it is particularly instructive now, for any cultural producer seeking to contend with the particular ideological and material repercussions of an increasingly global neoliberalism, to revisit Brecht’s “what, how, and for whom,” his “technics of aesthetics”—an attitude toward class struggle as an active engagement with the tools of intellectual-as-material production, as articulated through the playwright’s disdain for the passive politicking and complicit posturing of his contemporaries in the face of capitalist exploitation and fascist violence. Accusing the “Tuis,” including Thomas Mann, André Gide, Georg Lukács, and the “Frankfurtists,” of wanting to save Geist and Kultur rather than addressing questions of ownership and power, Brecht sought a proletarian understanding of art as an active struggle over the mechanisms of representation and imagination, the devices that link the perception of the given to inscribed as well as latent histories and thus multiple, potential futures. Rather than complicity with the powers that be, Brecht’s contentious dialogue with the purveyors of what he called “culinary thinking” was an attempt to determine a “useful” position of artistic agency and solidarity and thus an active engagement with the aesthetic-political economy of his time.28 3 What Brecht’s Tui-critique is a triangulation of a particular “what, how, and for whom,” of socialism, eingreifendes Denken, and a proletarian public. In a sense, 26

Sven Lütticken, et al., “Editorial—The Perfect Storm,” e-flux, #76 (October 2016), http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/76/74373/editorial-the-perfect-storm/; accessed November 3, 2016. 27 Ibid. 28 “Gespräch über Klassiker” (1929), gba xxi, 310. Brecht explains that in times of crisis, “where the pleasure of thinking meant a direct threat to bourgeoisie’s economic interests,” at those moments “if it wasn’t completely suspended, thinking became increasingly culinary.” (Ibid.) Thus, to Brecht, “culinary thinking” is a thinking to be consumed, an attitude toward art that renders it commodified, an art that produces easily digestible ideas and attitudes, and is thus hardly any thinking at all.

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then, socialism is the beam supporting the house; it is both material and ideology, an Überbau as well as its manifestation. Alfred Bebel called anti-Semitism “the socialism of fools.” Brecht also understood that not all forms of collectivity are created equal, that despite fascism’s rallying of the masses, socialism as a method and model was not a failed utopia; the choice was not between the people and political ideals but among different notions of collective identity as the tools facilitating and exteriorizing experience. If anything, fascism’s sociomythical unity presented a form of false consciousness not only because of the deceptions and misinformation on which it was built, but indeed because as an idealization or mere image of collectivity, it did not just hide but offered a legitimizing sheen to fascism’s institutionalization of capitalist exploitation and murderous inequality. Hence Brecht’s characterization of Hitler as the “house painter,” offering a garish renewal of old facades to hide and legitimize oppression and abuse of power.29 Brecht grew equally disenchanted with the actual existing socialism of the Soviet Union and the creative-intellectual means utilized to maintain it. Though he never explicitly called Georg Lukács a Tui, Brecht’s argument with the Hungarian writer exiled in Moscow presents a scathing critique of realism as a tool of ideological appeasement rather than struggle. The playwright’s ­attitude toward the Soviet Union was marked by hope and fear, desire and disappointment. In the early 1930s, he strained to hold on to Moscow as an inspiring manifestation of actual proletarian rule, of progress, and as an example for political revolutions worldwide. After a successful 1932 premiere of Kuhle Wampe in the Soviet capital, Brecht accepted an invitation to visit the ussr on the occasion of a “Brecht evening.” Once there, he was euphoric about the new Moscow metro, and, as late as 1937, when the Moscow trials and Stalinist purges were well underway, Brecht praised the Russian “liberation of productive resources” and abolition of profit, the source of all inequality, which despite its forced implementation he thought would ultimately provide collective as well as personal freedom.30 On the other hand, he rejected the very idea of a state as the “source and product” of “regulations” and “hierarchies,” despite the fact that “those without possessions had assumed power.”31 The reality of socialism and Socialist Realism had to come about dialectically rather than be ordained. Though often mediated, even veiled in parables and allegories (in poems such as the 1938 “The Farmer Addressing his Ox” and the Book of Changes, written 29 30 31

Brecht refers to Hitler as a “housepainter” frequently. See, for example, “Das Lied vom Anstreicher Hitler” (1933), gba xi, 215. “Befreiung der Produktivkräfte” (1937), gba xxii, 302. “Über den Staat” (1937), gba xxii, 304.

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throughout the 1930s and published posthumously), Brecht’s growing disdain for Russian politics came to express itself most vehemently and publicly in an exchange with Lukács. What later became known as the Brecht–LukácsDebate shows Brecht’s idea of socialism not as a doctrine to be implemented but a method, an artistic and political, a popular rather than populist realism as critical relationality between the given and the possible. The “public” dimension of this debate was relative: intended as part of a series of articles about Expressionist literature among writers including Klaus Mann, Alfred Kurella, Ernst Bloch, and Lukács in the Moscow-based exile-journal Das Wort in 1937/38, Brecht’s contributions were never published. It remains unclear whether this was the author’s own decision or an intentional exclusion by what he resentfully called “the Moscow clique.”32 Though he was officially one of the three editors of the journal, his geographical distance and non-partisan attitude effectively marginalized Brecht as the publication’s focus increasingly turned toward a realization of the doctrine of Socialist Realism. Letters and journal entries document plans to send essays and responses to Das Wort and at the same time feature notes expressing reluctance to partake “in this formalist criticizing,” finding it “highly damaging and disorienting.”33 Brecht’s essays are a response to Lukács’ concept of a realist literature rooted deeply in the tradition of the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel. Lukács rejects a modernist, avant-garde experimentation in technique as formalist, even decadent, and as such merely mirroring the appearance and subjective perception of a superficially fragmented world, thereby neglecting the underlying systemic stability of capitalist society. Instead, Lukács calls for a quasi-­ autonomous art, a progressive bourgeois culture, that is able to (indeed, in light of fascism as a mass movement, needs to) transcend the populist experience of reality for a more removed, contemplative mediation of more essential, objective historical factors. Art was to construct an ideal type, an abstraction, from which a true, not felt, reality could be deduced: “Great realism, therefore, does not portray an immediately obvious aspect of reality but one which is permanent and objectively more significant, namely man in the whole of his relations to the real world, above all those which outlast mere fashion.”34 Brecht’s objection to this concept of realism, as articulated in the then-­ unpublished texts “The Essays of Georg Lukács,” “On the Formalistic Character 32 33 34

Journal, July 27, 1938, gba xxvi, 316. Letter to Willi Bredel, July/August 1938, gba xxix, 107; letter to Johannes Becher, September 8, 1938, gba xxix, 109. Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance” (orig. published in Das Wort, Heft 6, 1938), reprinted in Aesthetics and Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 48.

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of the Theory of Realism,” “Remarks on an Essay,” and, most famously, “Popularity and Realism” (all 1938), is its lack of historically specific engagement with the experience of reality at a particular moment and thus a privileging of art as the presumably correct assessment of a social totality. Brecht, in contrast, was interested in using all available techniques and means to articulate and directly engage in concrete social ambiguities—between the ideal and the real, ideology and experience, theory and practice—and therefore art itself, as the devices of mediation and communication, as images of the given and potential of the latent, had to always be considered as an integral part of any realist endeavor. Lukács, according to Brecht, artificially and nostalgically places the “human” at the center of art, rather than the “masses” and the tools that make them both subjects and objects of history. For Brecht, rather than retreat, one ought to critically struggle over the means of production, cultural and otherwise. The solution is “not a way back. It is not linked to the good old days but the bad new ones. It does not involve undoing techniques but developing them. Man does not become man by stepping out of the masses but by stepping back into them.”35 Though he shares Lukács’ observation of how “capitalism impoverishes, dehumanizes, mechanizes human beings,” Brecht believes the philosopher’s aesthetic policies to be counter-revolutionary: “It is the element of capitulation, of withdrawal, of utopian idealism which still lurks in Lukács’ essays…it gives the impression that what concerns him is enjoyment rather than struggle, a way of escape rather than advance.”36 The problem lay with, as Fredric Jameson has discussed, what Brecht perceived to be Lukács’ “Stalinism”—less his problematic but complex party affiliation than the “popular-frontism of his aesthetic theory,” the ongoing belief in a progressive bourgeois culture.37 This, to Brecht, was a culture that retreated into a rigid formalism administering rather than engaging with popular experience and the conflicting tools and sites of its expressions. About Lukács and other writers associated with “Russian literary policy,” the playwright tells Benjamin: “They are, to put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes them uncomfortable… And they themselves don’t want to produce. They want to play apparatchick and exercise control over other people.”38 The means of production are wielded in “technical tyranny.”39 Socialism and realism, or rather socialism as realism, meant 35 36 37 38 39

Ibid., 69. “The Essays of Georg Lukács” (1938), reprinted in Aesthetics and Politics, 68–69. Fredric Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion,” in Aesthetics and Politics, 202–203. Walter Benjamin, “Notizen Svendborg Sommer 1934,” Gesammelte Schriften vi, 537. “The Essays of Georg Lukács” (1938), reprinted in Aesthetics and Politics, 68.

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something different to Brecht—not a utopia as distant, removed fantasy, an idealism, or an ideal to be implemented, but rather a “critical utopia” that is to be constructed, out of the given, by the people, not for them, an emancipation rooted in the acquisition of experience. 4 How The cultural historian Tom Moylan opens his discussion of “critical utopia” with the following quote from Brecht: For in struggling with new structures never before experienced, people also struggle with the old images and make new ones: to distinguish that which has now become possible, to show the disappearance of that which is untenable as already accomplished. Thus, in great models they show themselves the New, which is difficult to imagine, already functioning. Now since these new models were already made from the old, were formed from the given, the old appear to be false, but they aren’t. They only became that way.40 For Moylan, as for Brecht, the images provided by “great models” are those actively established in relational opposition to the “affirmative culture maintained by dominant ideology,” the latter including so-called dissociated oppositionality, an affirmative alternative that “contains and coopts” said models into the “maintenance of the given systems.”41 The utility and use-value of cultural production are assessed by their operational relationality to existing structures of power, not their idealized dissociation from it. For a writer like Kurt Tucholsky, this meant advocating a poetry judged not by its “tendency,” by its sheer revolutionary convictions, but by its transformative function, a Gebrauchslyrik that had only one role available to artists, “none other than that of a helper.”42 For Brecht it meant an art dedicated to “popularity” and “realism,” in short, a critical, analytic engagement with the apparatuses that produce knowledge and experience in order to change them (both the apparatuses and the knowledge and experience). Brecht defined “popular” as the reflexive, emancipatory 40

Quoted in Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), 1. 41 Moylan, Demand the Impossible, 7. 42 Kurt Tucholsky, “Gebrauchslyrik” (1928), in Gesamtausgabe—Texte und Briefe, Bd. 10: Texte 1928, edited by Ute Maach (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2001), 546.

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wielding of productive devices by the people, “realist” the use of such devices so as to reveal how one’s perception and thus navigation of the world has been shaped, and to show that this making contains a multitude of other applications and outcomes, allowing for a different understanding of the past and, in turn, the present and the future. It meant “emphasizing the element of development [and] making possible the concrete, and making possible abstraction from it.”43 To enable possibilities was of decidedly urgent importance once the Nazis had taken power, especially since Brecht saw the rise of fascism not as part of an inevitable, “natural” historical trajectory but as a political consequence to be deconstructed. In a 1933 essay titled “Regarding the Defeat,” he writes: In order to continue the struggle it is important to recognize that a defeat has been dealt and that this defeat has to be understood in all of its extent. This recognition is difficult, since one is weakened; to articulate it though is something different; it is a political matter.44 Brecht saw fascism as an extreme form of capitalism (“a most naked, bold, oppressive and deceitful capitalism”), even as its logical conclusion, and any form of politics of aesthetics that failed to recognize the crucial question of Eigentumsverhältnisse (property relations) with regard to cultural production was considered complicit in the totalitarian institutionalization of exploitation.45 In 1934, the Pariser Tageblatt asked German writers living in exile for contributions on the topic “The Mission of the Poet 1934.” In the December issue it printed answers by authors including Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann, and Arnold Zweig. Brecht’s essay “Poets Ought to Write the Truth” begins with the observation that few people would deny that poets should tell the truth, but that the problem lies precisely with the fact that too often truthtelling, or at least the willingness to write with candor and honesty, is taken for granted, while its difficulties are rarely examined or taken into account. The truth, for Brecht, means to “present things in such a way that they become wieldy”—the truth needs to be “practical.”46 Encouraged by Johannes R. Becher, Brecht expanded his argument and penned his widely lauded “Five Difficulties When Writing the Truth,” published in the German-language journal Unsere Zeit (Our Time) while the Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller 43 44 45 46

“Popularity and Realism” (1938), reprinted in Aesthetics and Politics, 82. “Über die Niederlage” (1933), gba xxii, 19. “Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit” (1934), gba xxii, 78. “Dichter sollen die Wahrheit schreiben” (1934), gba xxii, 71.

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issued printings disguised under the heading “Practical Guide to First Aid” to be smuggled into Germany and distributed there.47 Though its public impact is difficult to gauge, the essay became widely known among the émigrés. Brecht, who referred to the piece as a “tract” or “treatise,” considered the act of politicizing speech the very core of truth-telling. This politicization famously includes: the courage to write the truth; the keenness to recognize it; the skill to wield it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands the truth will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among the many.48 Declaring that “truth is not merely a moral category … not only a matter of ethos, but a matter of ability. The truth needs to be produced,” Brecht sought a direct dialogue with his exiled colleagues.49 On the heels of his truth-essay, Brecht spoke at the first International Writers Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris in 1935. In a letter to Karl Korsch he remarks that the congress provided him with lots of material for his Tui-project, singling out Heinrich Mann’s talk about “human dignity and the freedom of spirit” as an example of a depressing lack of imagination.50 Brecht’s contribution echoed Walter Benjamin’s earlier appeal to necessarily link literary tendency and technique, to politicize the form of aesthetic production as much as any author’s moral convictions.51 Thus while speakers like Mann and Gide called on the delegates to “save culture,” Brecht demanded that they fight the “root of evil.” In his speech, “A Necessary Observation Regarding the Fight Against Barbarism,” he argues that the rawness and fanaticism of fascism are not part of a repressed natural drive but instead “fixed in the business transactions that could not be exercised without it.”52 It may be noble and necessary to save culture, but it was more important to save the people from the “prevailing property relations whose sustainability make these atrocities necessary.”53 The audience was stunned, some were furious, as the playwright’s appeal to class struggle ran counter to the event’s goal to unite writers in a common front. Brecht in turn expressed his disgust with the event and his peers in a letter to Georg Grosz: “We just rescued culture. It took us four days and we decided to sacrifice everything rather than let culture perish… Fascism was generally

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

“Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit,” 71–89. “Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit,” 74. “Über die Wahrheit” (1924), gba xxii, 96. Letter to Karl Korsch, June/July 1935, gba xxviii, 509. Walter Benjamin, “Der Autor als Produzent,” talk at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, April 27, 1934, Gesammelte Schriften ii, 683–701. “Eine notwendige Festellung im Kampf gegen die Barbarei” (1935), gba xxii, 145. “Eine notwendige Festellung im Kampf gegen die Barbarei,” 146.

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condemned—because of its unnecessary cruelty.”54 At the second International Writers Congress two years later, Brecht took aim at the Tuis once again, claiming (in absentia) that culture had to be defended, but was “not solely a geistige, but also, and especially, a material thing, [and thus] has to be defended with material weapons.”55 The concreteness of truth was manifest in the experience of the people, the devices that produce and disseminate perspectives and attitudes, and the organization of the mediation of experience. The theater, the book, the p ­ icture— all were part of the material weapons Brecht alluded to. But, like Benjamin, the poet was very much interested in a technification of art, or rather an analysis of the aesthetic function and utility of popular and mass-communicative devices, including folklore, tales, and psalms as well as photography, film, and the radio. He never succumbed to a defensive reiteration of cultural high-low binaries but demanded a functional analysis and transformation of all cultural production, an approach Jameson has called “popular mechanics:” “it puts knowing the world back together with changing the world, and at the same time unites an ideal of praxis with a conception of production.”56 This “Brechtian aesthetic” famously theorized and applied the Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement effect) in the theater, asked the audience to engage with not only the story they were told but the very tools of its telling. The appropriation of the techniques and forms of folk songs and ballads, poems and novels was used to draw attention to the workings of the familiar, the traditional and therefore often unquestioned, presumably timeless and apolitical vehicles that perpetuate a culture’s memories, a nation’s identity, a social body’s sense of belonging, while asking its audience to sing and think the old along with the new. Artistic devices were treated as technologies and technology as aesthetic tools, as means of socio-psychological exteriorization, of relating, of reaching out, making sense, negotiating between individual and social selves and their environment. Brecht’s “radio theory,” a body of essays and ruminations that he worked on over decades, discussed the role of mass media as purveyors of collective perceptions and sensibilities. The 1932 text, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication” addresses the necessity to think of the aesthetic potential of the radio rather than the “aesthetic question” of the “possibility to separate opera from drama and both from broadcast media.”57 Thus, Brecht proposes the 54 55 56 57

Letter to Georg Grosz, June/July 1935, gba xxviii, 510. Speech at the Second International Writers Congress for the Defense of Culture (1937), gba xxii, 325. Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion,” 204. “Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat,” (1932), gba xxi, 556–557.

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Umfunktionierung or re-functioning of the apparatus’s distributive orientation: “The radio is one-sided where it should be two-.” Brecht envisions a “network of pipes” that lends a “truly public character” to its operations, to “make culture into something of ideological consequence” rather than perpetuation and stabilization of the status quo. Addressing the role of artists and intellectuals, he concludes: “It is not at all our job to renovate ideological institutions on the basis of the existing social order by means of innovation. Instead our innovations must force them to surrender that basis. So: for innovations, against renovation!”58 But to turn users into producers, to recognize and further encourage the audience to actively participate in the making of culture was not restricted to simply providing access to the material apparatus, to shout back into the ether. The mass distribution of irrelevant subject matter, whether “high” or “low,” in the guise of public culture led to the isolation of the listener (in an earlier essay Brecht had lambasted “the colossal triumph of technology to finally make Viennese waltzes and cooking recipes available to the entire world”).59 Instead, Brecht wanted “to put [the listener] in relation.”60 This relation meant the understanding and reconceived usefulness of culture as technology and technology as culture, as well as the experiences, concerns and desires of the audience in their time. Subsequently (and in Brecht’s case continuously) “oil, inflation, war, social struggles, family, religion, wheat, the meat market” became subjects of—and subject to—technological mediation.61 The radio is one of the technologies where a Brechtian method has, to this day, made itself felt in art and telecommunication-activist projects, sometimes through direct influence, at other times through a kindred sense of resistance and transformation. This critical lineage ranges from the pirate broadcasts of The Voice of Algeria’s central role in the North African anti-colonial struggles of the 1940s and ’50s—where, according to Frantz Fanon, “listeners were enrolled in the battle of the waves” and jamming signals lead to an active reconstruction of competing voices, a montage of subjects and subjectivities—to Bologna, Italy’s 1970s Radio Alice, which sought to not add more traffic to an already plentiful ether—one geared to a public reduced to consumers (as Felix Guattari described the contemporary commercial media landscape: “They talk, oh yes indeed, they talk all the time.”)—but to change “the discourse of order” through “interruption and subversion,” to build “collective competence” 58 59 60 61

“Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat,” 557. This translation is John Willett’s. See Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 53. “Radio—eine vorsinflutliche Erfindung?” (1927), gba xxi, 217. “Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat,” 556. “Vergnügungstheater oder Lehrtheater?” (1935), gba xxii, 110.

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through a different use of the apparatus—a “micro politics” of specificity, ambiguity, and antagonisms.62 Drawing on the work of micro-radio pioneer Tetsuo Kogawa and directly on Brecht’s Radiotheorie, the Berlin-based art collective Mikro.fm continues to insist on such politics in the age of the Internet. In online and in-person workshops, the group teaches how micro-radio transmitters can be fashioned from repurposed remote-control toy cars and garage door openers. The resulting devices then have a range of one or two city blocks and can be used to generate or retransmit content, from and over the airwaves or via digital platforms. The main purpose is to create a relationality, a functional awareness and eingreifendes Denken between the local and the global, between the particular, self-conscious present and future needs of a socio-geographically constructed public and a broader network of constituencies, ideas, and horizons. Brecht published collections of writings conceived specifically for mass distribution, working feverishly to overcome the geographic and ideological limitations imposed by his exile. Written with Hanns Eisler, Margarete Steffin, and Elizabeth Hauptmann and printed by Editions de Carrefour in Paris, Songs, Poems, Choirs was conceived as an anti-fascist response to the appropriation of Volk culture in Germany. The added “32 Pages of Musical Scores” point to the intended use-value of the book. It addresses the causes for the Weimar Republic’s decline into fascism (including the First World War, the Nazis’ exploitation of hunger, unemployment, and class struggle), persecution, concentration camps, and antifascist resistance; and reminders of past revolutionary struggles to encourage picking up where they left off. The Svendborg Poems, issued as a collection by Wieland Herzfelde’s Malik Verlag in 1939, present a similar attempt to reach and construct multiple publics, including “Children’s Songs” and the previously published photo-essays that constitute the “German War Primer,” juxtaposing sometimes complimentary, often ambiguous visual and written accounts of past and present events in an effort to establish the reader as an active agent of meaning-making. Published in Das Wort in 1939, “Questions of a Reading Worker” offered a set of provocative inquiries regarding the ownership of labor and history: “Who built the Seven Gates of Thebes? In the books one only finds the name of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the rocks? . . The great Rome is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them?”63

62 63

Frantz Fanon, “This is the Voice of Algeria” (1959), in A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 85; Felix Guattari, “Millions and Millions of Potential Alices” (1972), in Molecular Revolution (Suffolk, UK: Penegrine, 1984), 236–237, 241. “Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters,” (1939), gba xii, 29.

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Throughout his European exile, the playwright remained committed to a popular, realist theater and wrote (and when possible staged) several plays, including The Round Heads and the Pointed Heads (1933), Senora Carrar’s Rifles (1937), The Private Life of the Master Race (1938), and Mother Courage (1939). And in light of the radio’s prevalent role in the Third Reich and its increasingly violent homogenization of the public sphere as a monologic Volksempfänger (the Volk’s receiver), as the Nazis’ primary propaganda tool, Brecht kept writing pieces for German radio, like the German Satires, which were aired in 1937 by the Deutscher Freiheitssender, an anti-fascist station based in Madrid targeting listeners in Germany. An art of truth-telling is determined by what Brecht called “film-seeing,” the creation and perception of one’s environment as shaped by the possibilities of technology: “Irreversibly the technification of literary production” guides the author to use the available “instruments” to adequately show reality but, more importantly, “when writing, to lend to his attitude the character of employing the instruments.”64 5

For Whom (and by Whom)

Fleeing the Nazis’ invasion of Scandinavia, Brecht and family landed on U.S. shores in 1941, settling in Los Angeles and reviving both social and political proximities to other German émigrés. Ironically, it was the City of Angels, flaunting its unapologetic mass-production of cultural commodities like film and stardom that had become home to some of Germany’s leading artists and intellectuals, including several members of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research: Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Friedrich Pollock, whom Brecht referred to as “the Frankfurtists.”65 At gatherings in the Hollywood Hills and attempts at collective, New York-based publishing efforts, Brecht had the opportunity to further nourish the disdain he felt for his fellow cultural producers and their ongoing defense of categorical aesthetic and moral values against the fascist hordes. As polemical and baiting as Brecht was (by his own and, for example, Eisler’s account), the relationship to the other German exiles was in many ways more productive and nuanced as the playwright often let on. The social, professional, and, at times, financial ties to people like Feuchtwanger, Fritz Lang, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Lorre certainly benefitted and grounded Brecht and family in their time of displacement.66 ­Intellectually 64 65 66

“Der Dreigroschenprozeß” (1931), gba xxi, 464. “Anschauungsunterricht für ein neues Sehen der Dinge” (1929), gba xxi, 304. For a detailed account of these and other relationships, see James Lyon, Brecht in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

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and ­artistically, regular lunches and parties and the ensuing discussions with the likes of Herbert Marcuse and Heinrich Mann gave Brecht the opportunity to reflect on his own position toward the mass cultural apparatus so vividly and intimately experienced in Hollywood as well as toward the theatrical and journalistic environment of New York. Fredric Jameson has remarked that what “they [Adorno and Brecht] share is evidently a sarcasm, a dialectical cynicism about the present; what separates them is then the principle of hope.”67 Or, at least, a difference manifest in how Brecht judged ideology and aesthetics on the basis of its “Folgen,” “its results, its outcome in practice,” and whether or not it was, in turn, folgenlos, (without consequences).68 Unlike many of his peers, Brecht made an effort to perceive German Nazism in terms of class, hence a matter of political consciousness and material needs that allowed for an understanding, but not a justification, of the German people’s willingness to embrace fascism as a radical form of exploitation and oppression. He referred to the German people as those “first conquered” by Hitler and argued that the Nazis took advantage of the dire economic situation at the end of the Weimar Republic to turn the proletariat against itself in competition over jobs and food, that the people did indeed have as much of an interest in the war as its regime insofar as they fought for work and land.69 The essay “The Other Germany: 1943,” published in parts in the journal The German American in 1944, was an attempt to convince a U.S. audience to differentiate between a people and the apparatus: “Somewhere near Smolensk a Silesian solider points his gun at a Russian tank that will crush him if it is not stopped. There is hardly any time to realize that what he is pointing his gun at is unemployment…War demands everything, but it provides everything too. It provides food, shelter, work.” The text continues with the observation that there was “an enormous miscalculation somewhere:” The regime had to choose war because the whole people needed war; but the people needed war only under this regime and therefore have to look for another way of life. The road to this conclusion is a long one. For it is the road to social revolution.70 Thus, the fight against fascism retained a crucial ideological component, the struggle over the means of cultural production, of perception and self-­ perception among those dismissed by a justifiably repulsed Left as a fabled 67 Jameson, Brecht and Method, 163, n26. 68 Ibid., 158. 69 “The Other Germany: 1943,” (1943), gba xxiii, 24. 70 “The Other Germany: 1943,” 27–28.

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revolutionary force turned violently compliant mob. In 1942, the Intercontinent News in New York published a telegram signed by Brecht, Feuchtwanger, and Heinrich Mann, which begins with the lines: “Germans! This is a call for salvation, for everyone and for you too, Germans! You have plunged the world and yourselves into calamity… Only you can abort the most ruinous and senseless of all wars.”71 Other exiles were harder to convince of Brecht’s perceived role of the people’s complex historical role. To Brecht’s great frustration, Thomas Mann and Bruno Frank retracted their signatures from a position paper, composed by Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Frank, Brecht, Ludwig Marcuse, Feuchtwanger and others in 1943 in an effort to support the appeal of an organization of German prisoners of war and émigrés in the Soviet Union to “the German Volk to force its oppressors to surrender unconditionally” and the “necessity to sharply distinguish between the Hitler regime and the social strata connected to it on the one hand and the German Volk on the other.”72 According to Brecht, Mann felt that the statement conveyed an overt patriotism and constituted a betrayal of their hosts and allies. In response, Brecht wrote a bitter poem titled “Upon the Nobel Prize Winner Thomas Mann’s Authorizing the Americans and the English to Punish the German People Ten Years for the Crimes of the Hitler Regime” and reminded himself in his journal of the debilitating “resolute woefulness of these ‘bearers of culture.’”73 Brecht was equally uncompromising in his assessment of the members of the Frankfurt Institute. His journal entries and letters from the early 1940s recall several encounters and conversations, usually in highly abbreviated and polemic form. Though the playwright himself never sought the support of the Institute, he was aware of the painful critiques and rejections of Benjamin’s submissions to the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, especially those contributions that the editors deemed too Brechtian. Brecht reports of “gardenparty” [sic] encounters with “the Doppelclown Horkheimer and Pollock” portray the exiles as “rested heads” and “academic palm trees” hoping for Hollywood film roles as “Pfaffen” or “bible thumpers,” coming to the overall assessment that la is a “treasure trove” for the Tui project.74 The feeling was mutual. Horkheimer et al. found Brecht’s popular dialectics to be overtly simplistic and anti-­intellectual, considering him as a petty bourgeois poser and defender of S­ talinist politics. Adorno was himself not above the occasional crude and 71 72 73 74

gba xxiii, 423. Journal, August 1, 1943, gba xxvii, 161. “Upon the Noble Prize Winner Thomas Mann’s Authorizing the Americans and the English to Punish the German People Ten Years for the Crimes of the Hitler Regime,” (1943), gba xv, 90–91; Journal, August 2, 1943, gba xxvii, 163. Journal, August 1941, gba xxvii, 12–13; Letter to Karl Korsch, September 1941, gba xxix, 215; Journal, October 10, 1943, gba xxvii, 177.

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personal remark and infamously accused Brecht of spending hours pushing dirt under his fingernails in order to appear more proletarian.75 One of the main differences between the Institute and Brecht revolved around the question of for and by whom culture is to be produced. Brecht saw in the work of the Frankfurtists a deep distrust and rejection of any form of popular ideas, desires, and experiences and thus their entire enterprise devoted to defensive self-preservation. In 1942 Hanns Eisler tells of a seminar at Adorno’s that Brecht was not invited to “because they were afraid of him. And the drivel that surfaced there would have not made it over anyone’s lips had Brecht been around.”76 He himself was asked to attend because “one wanted to signal a loyal attitude to the workers’ movement.”77 Apparently, Horkheimer remarked with alarm that Vice President Wallace’s demand that after the war, each child in the world ought to receive a daily pint of milk, was “a giant threat to culture,” which Brecht later interpreted as a fear of “the century of common man,” a fear that saw popular culture as simply the masses’ expression of either unbridled desire in the face of scarcity or idle contentment.78 Thus, the Institute, in Brecht’s opinion, restricted its operations and goals to self-­maintenance: “With their money they keep afloat about a dozen intellectuals, all of whom have to turn in their work without the guarantee that the Zeitschrift ever publishes them. They can therefore claim that ‘to save the Institute’s money was their main revolutionary duty during all these years.’”79 Another journal entry recalls that Eisler made the following suggestion for the Tui-novel’s plot: A rich old man dies, troubled by all the misery in the world. He bequeaths a large sum of money for the establishment of an institute that is supposed to discover the misery’s source, which is, of course, the old man himself.80 Brecht, on the other hand, sought practices of truth-telling, realism, and popular art as actively and reciprocally engaged in questions of relationality to audience and constituency. Notes for the never-completed Tui-novel contain fragments considering a variety of institutions and apparatuses such as school, church, art, and political parties and specific historical events such as the 1919 75 Interview with Herbert Marcuse, paraphrased in Lyon, Brecht in America, 258. 76 Hanns Eisler, quoted in gba xxvii, 428. 77 Ibid. 78 Journal, June 16, 1942, gba xxvii, 105. 79 Journal, August 9, 1941, gba xxvii, 12. 80 Journal, May 12, 1942, gba xxvii, 94.

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Spartacus uprising and the Weimar constitution, proposing a “materialist” approach to the technologies of production, rather than an “idealist” one. The Tui-story The River Mis-ef contemplates how philosophy has lost its concern with the world and grown increasingly preoccupied with thought as such.81 What went missing along the way are both the social and the eingreifende or “actively transformative” dimensions of thinking, the re-functioning of the apparatus from below. According to Brecht, both fascist and bourgeois culture concern themselves with their audience only as receivers, as consumers, whereas a proletarian aesthetic is defined by the revolutionary potential of an alienated constituency. One could argue that Brecht’s entire oeuvre is directed at unleashing the creative power resulting from the ambiguities and complexities brought forth by the relationality between knowledge and material experience, between how the world is said and ought to be and is portrayed, mediated, and internalized on the one hand and how it is lived, perceived, and encountered on the other. Scientific thinking means not understanding the world “as it really is” but articulating the truth of how the mediation of experience is organized at a particular moment in history. Thus, Brecht’s project is more proletarian than for a proletariat, an ostensibly homogenous group defined in advance (and maybe that is why his notion of audience remains, arguably, so murky). It addresses circumstances of ownership rather than essential social traits and thus could be read as made for both the Tuis and anyone else renting and selling their intellectual and physical labor to a purpose other than social progress and emancipation, out of choice or out of necessity. Brecht aimed to work beyond the distinction between audience and producers, his Lehrstücke or “learning plays” abandoning the former altogether: “The Lehrstück teaches by being played, not by being seen.”82 The proletarian theater does not activate a passive viewer but engages a consciousness of the existing and thus the potential processes of production. Knowledge is derived not from the outside, as a corrective, as the abolition of “false consciousness” but includes experience as something dialectically determined by ideas and histories, categories and values. This knowledge contains what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge call “fantasy,” the productive incompatibility of the heterogeneity of proletarian experience under ideology, the places where things do not quite add up, rub against, fall short, and thus enable a peek at what could be different if history were perceived as constructed rather than inevitable, natural:

81 82

Der Fluß Mis-ef (1933–35), gba xvii, 117–119. “Zur Theorie des Lehrstücks” (1937), gba xxii, 351.

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In its unsublated form, as a mere libidinal counterweight to unbearable, alienated relations, fantasy is itself merely an expression of this alienation. Its contents are therefore inverted consciousness. Yet by virtue of its mode of production, fantasy constitutes an unconscious practical critique of alienation.83 History is both apparatus and technology and the donkey (as proletarian entity) both tool and product, subject and object. For the donkey, to understand then means to consciously utilize the devices that organize and mediate that which is possible right around the corner. Similarly, an art is called for that, as Brecht demanded, has emancipatory rather than continually oppressive and exploitative “consequences,” that changes rather than perpetuates the given. Where the Tuis were averse to production, to ideological innovation, the new collective, emancipatory labor was supposed to take its chances, to problematize and produce, out of a consciousness of alienation, new needs and new social formations, new histories and new futures: “You never know where you are with production; production is the unforeseeable.”84 As the struggle over the tools and technologies that organize experience continues today with unforeseen fervor, and the arts are asking, now more loudly and vehemently than in decades, what critical, productive resistance could look like, forcing even the most established institutions to consider their place, means, and audiences from a proletarian perspective (in the Brechtian sense), an innovative and imaginative, yes, a fantastic reconsideration of the role of the artist and intellectual in dark times seems more pressing and timely than ever.85

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Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (London and New York: Verso, 2016), 33. “The Essays of Georg Lukács” (1938), reprinted in Aesthetics and Politics, 68. The editorial in the most recent issue of Artforum (at the time of writing of this essay), arguably the most established and leading art publication in the world, is asking: “In these times of fear and loathing, what can a body do? Put up a hand to resist, to stop the madness, to raise a defense; gather, perform, march.” (March 2017): 215.

Chapter 8

Brecht, Dialectics and Dialogical Art: An Engagement with Contemporary Art Practices José María Durán Abstract This essay explores the claim made by the so-called dialogical aesthetics that the emphasis of today’s socially engaged art lies on a modality of engagement and theatricality that follows the footsteps of the historical avant-garde. It asks if the framework of dialogism is an adequate one for the analysis of today’s socially engaged art practices that claim to be transformative. In searching for an answer, it examines the intersection of thinkers such as Brecht, Althusser, Voloshinov and Medvedev in the context of contemporary art practices.

1

Introductory Remarks

This paper attempts a reassessment of Brecht’s dialectics in a “dialogue” with socially engaged contemporary art practices.1 It asks if Brecht’s dialectical innovations can still be relevant for contemporary art practices and what these innovations mean for an understanding or interpretation of social reality that serves to question it. In doing so it points to ways of overcoming its maladies. In reassessing Brecht’s use of dialectics, Marx is the obvious place to start. An examination of how much of Marx can be found in Brecht’s dialectical innovations would logically follow. The examination of Brecht in relation to Marx or in terms of his position as a Marxist philosopher is hardly something new.2 Today, we witness a renewed interest in Brecht’s philosophical concerns.3 A reassessment of Brecht’s use of dialectics cannot ignore Marx. The key issue 1 Our main focus is on visual art practices. We are not going to engage in description or critique of concrete works. Our concern is on the whole theoretical. Nevertheless, we will draw on concrete examples to illustrate our position. 2 See Haug, Wolfgang F. Philosophieren mit Brecht und Gramsci. Hamburg: Argument, 1996. 3 Cf. Squiers, Anthony. An Introduction to the Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht: Revolution and Aesthetics. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014; see the contributions to this volume.

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for us is the notion of the Darstellung, i.e., the dialectical presentation that, as we will argue, Brecht, following Althusser, puts to work in his theatre praxis.4 Our interest in Brecht’s dialectics has its origin not in Brecht himself or in dialectics as such, but in a critical framework for socially engaged contemporary art practices that is associated with the work of the American scholar Grant Kester.5 In his book Conversation Pieces, Kester argued that today’s socially engaged art, inasmuch as it focuses on forms of reception and collaboration that produce new forms of subjectivity and challenge formal concerns, draws on the legacy of the historical avant-garde and, in particular, on the innovations of Piscator and Brecht as well as Soviet avant-garde artists like Mayakovsky, Eisenstein or Rodchenko. Although the claim is not thoroughly substantiated, it gives the contemporary art practices that he addresses some historical tenability. Kester sees a parallel between Brecht’s and Piscator’s innovations, “in which the spectator is ‘no longer allowed to submit to an experience uncritically,’”6 and the process-based approach of socially engaged art that solicits “the viewer’s interaction in a direct or accessible manner.”7 Kester writes: “The relevance legacy of modernist art…is to be found, not in its concern with the formal conditions of the object, but rather in the ways in which aesthetic experience can challenge conventional perceptions…and systems of knowledge.”8 This was a major preoccupation for Brecht. For example, when he comments on Piscator’s stage, he points out that technical advances achieve little if they are used to vindicate formal conditions. Because the question is not about electrifying the institution, that is, the upgrade of the work of the classics by modern means, but supplying it with new materials; it means

4 See Haug, Wolfgang F. “Dialectics.” Historical Materialism 13.1 (2005): 241–265. Print: 247. 5 See Kester, Grant H. “Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art.” Afterimage 22.6 (1995): 5–11. Print; Kester, Grant H. “Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework For Littoral Art.” Variant 9 (1999/2000): n. pag. Variant Archive; Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces. Community + Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004; Kester, Grant H. The One and The Many. Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011; Kester, Grant H. “The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism.” e-flux 12.50 (2013). 6 Kester 2004: 84. Kester is quoting Brecht’s unpublished essay “Vergnügungstheater oder Lehrtheater?” Brecht, Bertolt. Schriften zum Theater 1. 1963. Reprint. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967a: 264–265; see Brecht, “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and translated by J. Willet. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992: 71. 7 Kester 2004: 82. 8 Ibid., 3.

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judging the suitability of the stage for a work that does not contribute to its regeneration (Erneuerung) but to change (Veränderung).9 Kester’s critical framework elaborates on earlier concerns among artists and scholars about how artistic social engagement should be addressed beyond its role within governmental programs of social inclusion that, for the most part, had been treating art in purely instrumental terms. As it became apparent that these art practices presented a challenge to the basic assumptions of aesthetic modernism, the question of the need for a new theoretical articulation was raised. For example, in the early 1990s, Suzi Gablik referred to art practices oriented to dynamic participation that create a sense of community and do away with an art system based on discrete, self-contained objects.10 She asked for a new theoretical framework, a process-oriented one, that can account for the transformation of the Cartesian and Kantian aesthetic tradition.11 Following these concerns, Kester has argued that although the art practices under consideration build on the avant-gardist tradition, they diverge from it in a fundamental manner, one that means not only a departure from the modernist avant-garde but also entails a fundamental critique of it. This critique is consubstantial with the very mode of engagement that characterizes these art practices, which take on collaborative encounters and conversations actively intervening in the social space without necessarily having to produce a “closed”—or, ready-to-wear—work of art. The main characteristic of these works is their ongoing status, their process-based approach, which allows viewers or participants to become literally involved in the work, in fact contributing to its transformation over time.12 Kester argues that the analytical tools of modernism, as they are shaped to serve object-based practices, have failed to grasp these new art practices in their own terms. A new analytical framework that outdoes the shortcomings of modernism is then needed; one that can address what today’s socially engaged art is actually doing.13 This analytical framework is dialogism. Socially engaged art practices that

9 10 11 12 13

Brecht 1967a: 135–137, also Brecht, Bertolt. Schriften zum Theater 3. 1963. Reprint. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967b: 1004–1005. Gablik, Suzi. The Reenchantment of Art. 1991. Reprint. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998: 146–166. Ibid., 163. Throughout Kester’s Conversation Pieces, we find neatly addressed, current and early community and socially engaged art projects. For a survey of the literature see Kester 2004: 193–194n6. Examples could be long-term projects like Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International or more temporary ones like Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument. Kester 2011: 10.

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adopt a process-based approach can be better understood as dialogical art practices.14 However, as we reflect on this new dialogical framework, we must ask how it fits with the claim that today’s socially engaged art—i.e., dialogical art, according to Kester—builds on the avant-gardist tradition, because in Kester’s version modernism is not dialogical at all. In fact, the dialogical framework put forward by Kester points to a totalizing critique of modernism because it is caught up in a mode of thinking that works with assumed oppositional categories and antagonisms which correspond with what is commonly understood as dialectical thinking.15 Although, Kester carefully avoids discussing dialectics, dialogical art practices themselves point in this direction, that is, they are a form of social engagement that outdoes the ways in which dialectical thinking takes hold of reality.16 In our view, as Kester opts for dialogism as an analytical tool he is making a conscious theoretical move that challenges modernism, including Brecht and other key figures of the political avant-garde, in terms of its dialectical bias. Eventually, this is a theoretical move against Marxism.17 Dialectics and dialogics are then posited as contending theoretical methods. So, does this mean dialogism has come to top dialectics as an adequate method for the explanation of social reality? Against this view, we will argue that dialectics and dialogics cannot claim the same theoretical space for the analysis of social reality because they refer to rather different things. Dialogics refers to communication as social phenomenon—and art cannot be other than dialogical in this respect—and dialectics is a theory-praxis that presents existing social forms in a manner that is relational, that is, in which the inner connections come to the fore.18 In this respect, dialectics help reconstruct the notion of dialogics in terms of social praxis. Hence, both notions are not mutually exclusive, quite the opposite. 14

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18

Kester 1999/2000, 2013. Although Kester argues for the analytical suitability of the notion of “dialogical art practices” throughout his writings, he does not feel the need to attach himself to just one all-inclusive theoretical framework. He is very cautious in not theorizing too much. He makes the case for a descriptive method of analysis that relies on what one sees. Cf. Kester, Grant H. “Introduction.” Field 3 (2016): n. pag. Field. A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism. Web. 15 June 2016. See Jameson, Fredric. “The Three Names of the Dialectic.” Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 2009, pp. 3–70. Kester 2004: 64–65, 87–88 and 2011: 61–65. Somehow ironically Marc James Léger has suggested that Kester’s critique of Marxism and dialectics “should be recognized as the only significant, constructive element” of his theory. Léger, Marc James. Brave New Avant Garde. Essays on Contemporary Art and Politics. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2012: 50. Jameson 2009: 17.

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We want to explore this understanding of dialectics and dialogics in the light of Brecht’s theatre praxis. For this purpose, we will proceed as follows. We begin engaging with Kester’s analytical framework, that is, with his understanding of dialogism for contemporary art practices. Then, we will confront Kester’s dialogism with a different approach to dialogics closer to Brecht’s use of dialectics, which we will examine drawing on Marx’s Darstellung. We will argue that Brecht’s theatre praxis makes visible the differently accentuated voices of which social relations consist. And from this dialectical perspective we may speak of Brecht’s theatre as dialogized. This aspect reveals a strong link between the political avant-garde of the early twentieth century and many socially engaged art practices of today. Finally, we will use concrete examples to illustrate that the manner in which dialogism is put to work in Kester’s critical framework may not suit real practices, many of which show a dialectical base. 2

Kester’s Dialogical Aesthetics

2.1 The Critical Framework Under the name dialogical art practices Kester puts forward a critical framework that offers an understanding of some contemporary art practices that challenge the critical and theoretical conventions of the modernist tradition, in their mode of operation. The critical framework is needed because of the flaws of a conventional art criticism that fails to “see” properly.19 But, Kester maintains that the critical framework does not imply the importing of a given theory into the analysis of concrete practices as a kind of “master discourse” or “self-evident apparatus” that would contradict the very dialogical nature of the practices under consideration. For Kester, dialogical art is obviously dialogical and the relevance of the critical framework is given by experience. Accordingly, the resulting theoretical assumptions appear as the obvious content of observations. Although Kester refers to the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin as the key thinker of dialogism and to the work of Habermas on communicative interaction, which he discusses in important ways, he does not claim that regarding his critical framework he just follows Habermas or Bakhtin. He avoids theorizing too much, and this despite his claim that he does not argue “against theory on behalf of some naive empiricism.”20 It seems that for Kester dialogism is not a theoretical concept proper. 19 20

Kester 2016, 2011: 63–64. Kester interviewed in Wilson, Mick. “Autonomy, Agonism, and Activist Art: An interview with Grant Kester.” Art Journal 66.3 (2007): 106–118. Print: 108.

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In the following, we are going to isolate some theoretical notions and positions that collide with Kester’s critical framework. Our aim is to show that the theoretical question at stake in the background of Kester’s critical practice is to play dialogics against dialectics. 2.1.1 Theoretical Setting Kester argues that to be able to open up to the effects of contexts and others, the dialogical artists surrender agency and intentionality and in this way take issue with “the underlying teleological orientation of the modernist avantgarde”21 and its reliance on “a single monadic consciousness (epitomized by the figure of the radical artist or theorist).”22 The question of agency suggests productive connections with the pragmatist tradition (Dewey, Mead) and, in particular, with the work of the German pragmatist philosopher Hans Joas, whose non-teleological approach to action as it is contained in the notion of “meaningful loss of intentionality” aptly describes for Kester the artistic agency of dialogical art projects.23 The bracketing of intentionality is also put forward by Richard Sennett in his recent study of cooperation, part of his project on social craftsmanship.24 Cooperation, Sennett argues, has to do with understanding complexity in an open-ended way: one has to get outside oneself, “to open up to others,” to become “aware of the differences and learn how to work with them and not against them.”25 A “good craftsmanship” of social interrelations is based on dialogical practices, according to Sennett.26 The crucial issue is that the reciprocal exchange is not about an agreement between parties or the righteousness of one’s positions, nor about the creation of new forms of consciousness. It is about valuing what the different participants are expressing as meaningful for them. Kester postulates that dialogical exchange encourages a form of interaction that goes “beyond the limits of fixed identities, official discourses, and the perceived inevitability of partisan political conflict.”27 The main achievement of dialogical art practices is seen as creating 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Kester 2011: 115. Ibid., 138. The claim that both a “teleological orientation” and a “monadic consciousness” underlie the aesthetic discourse of modernism, including that of the political avantgarde, is in our view extremely disingenuous. Ibid., 114–115, 137–138. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. 2008. Reprint. London: Penguin, 2009; Sennett, Richard. Together. The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. 2012. Reprint. London: Penguin, 2013. Ibid., 21, 72, 208–212. Ibid., 6, 18–20; 2009: 289. Kester 2004: 8.

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a common ground of understanding, a consensual basis that Kester draws on using Bakhtin’s dialogism and Habermas’ universal pragmatics. The relevance of Bakhtin for Kester lies in the reciprocal effect, “the provisional blurring of boundaries between self and other” that the dialogical exchange theorized by Bakhtin implies.28 It has been argued that Bakhtin “makes the enormous leap from dialectical, or partitive, thinking, which is still presumed to be the universal norm, to dialogical or relational thinking.”29 This is the basic chasm that Kester identifies between aesthetic modernism and dialogical art practices. He argues that the discursive practices encouraged by dialogical art have exposed modernism, including the political avant-garde, as monological thinking.30 Against monological modernism, dialogism stands for flexible identities that strive for reconciliation: it is “intransigently pluralist,” writes Holquist.31 To achieve a form of background consensus is crucial, and Kester turns to Habermas’ discourse ethics in this respect. What Kester finds of interest in Habermas’ discourse ethics is that it puts forward a form of interaction where everyone is competent and does not result “in universally binding decisions.”32 Thus, if interactions result in a consensus, this is not “a universally applicable solution” but, rather a pragmatic response.33 Important for Kester is that dialogical art practices do not take an agonistic or instrumental form. For example, the boat-colloquies organized by WochenKlausur in 1994, part of the project “Shelter for Drug-Addicted Women,”34 were concerned with encouraging socio-political relations between agents that normally would have taken 28 29

Ibid., 122. Clark, Katerina and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984: 6. 30 The basic distinction between “dialogical” and “monological” is based on the linguistic root of the words. While “mono-logism” suggests one logic, which for Kester comes to mean the dominant logic of the modernist artist and the modernist aesthetic discourse as it is realized in the modernist artwork, “dia-logism” points to at least two logics (the prefix “dia” means “through” or “going apart”) implied in the social exchange; but so does “dialectics,” a word that derives from the Greek dialegesthai (to make conversation) meaning originally the art of discourse. 31 Holquist, Michael. Dialogism. 1990. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2002: 35. 32 Kester 2004: 109. 33 Ibid., 111. Kester is also critical of Habermas’ “unproblematic background consensus” based on “ontological stable agents,” because it tends to underestimate the specific context in which subjectivities find themselves challenged. Kester 2004: 14, 113; see McCarthy 1982: 290. What is found in the dialogical exchange, Kester argues, is “a willingness to accept a position of dependence and intersubjective vulnerability relative to the viewer or collaborator.” Kester 2004: 110. 34 See http://www.wochenklausur.at/projekt.php?lang=en&id=4.

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opposite sides, which resulted in creating a boarding house for drug-addicted sex workers. WochenKlausur was able to create a sort of Habermasian ideal speech situation that proved itself successful. The redemption of deliberative democracy is seen as its main achievement.35 Hence the space created by such projects becomes a practical manifestation of democratic practice. When Suzi Gablik first pointed to the dialogical impulse of the socially engaged art projects of the early 1990s, she saw a parallel with the political challenge posed around the same time by those who tore down the Berlin wall.36 Habermas’ ideal speech situation functions both as a pragmatic and counterfactual norm. While universal pragmatics treat the communicative competence as “an a priori knowledge,” the rational reconstruction of it, Habermas has argued, “call[s] for inquiries undertaken with empirical speakers.”37 But, this does not change the fact that Habermas builds his universal pragmatics on transcendental grounds, on the universal and necessary a priori conditions that appear in every speech situation.38 This normative principle implies the intervention of an idealist conception of human reality—a “myth of origin” as Lecercle calls it39—into the materialist domain of human social interrelations. This intervention is not without consequences. Because the subject of the Habermasian ideal speech situation, which is the subject at the basis of Kester’s critical framework and that Habermas claims is made of actual persons, is, in reality, rooted in the Kantian (legal) subject capable of bearing rights and obligations, who is in full possession of her rationality as owner of her thoughts, of course, but also of her things, which is to say, of her goods. What the ideal construction of this subject conceals is that consciousness, the communicative competence, is already socially determined by class positions and class relations, what for Brecht was a crucial, even scientific point of departure. It implies a displacement of class in favour of flexible identities.

35 36

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Kester 2004: 110–111. Gablik 1998: 157. Kester briefly mentions the work of Ken Hirschkop, who has suggested a strong link between Bakhtin’s dialogism and democracy, and subscribes to Hirschkop’s view of the “democratic intersubjectivity” as an essential component of all dialogical art practices. Kester 2004: 8, 193n3. Following Bakhtin, Hirschkop argues for a dialogical art form that would make democracy a fact. Hirschkop, Ken. Mikhail Bakhtin. An Aesthetic for Democracy. 1999. Reprint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002: 56, 77. Habermas, Jürgen. “What Is Universal Pragmatics?” Communication and the Evolution of Society. Translated by Th. McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979, pp. 1–68: 24–25. McCarthy, Thomas. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. 1978. Reprint. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982: 276; Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. A Marxist Philosophy of Language. 2005. Paperback. Translated by G. Elliott. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009: 45–57. Ibid., 51, 55.

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A displacement of class has been characteristic in post-Marxist thought. It is not that class has disappeared from the leftist discourse, but it has lost “a secure abode” and found “its philosophical right to existence contested.”40 In the political philosophy of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, antagonism is the new concept that has displaced class. There are fundamental disagreements between Laclau and Mouffe and Kester, especially regarding Mouffe’s characterization of the social space as intrinsically agonistic.41 Kester would not subscribe either to Mouffe’s portrayal of critical art in terms of dissensus.42 But, their views are not mutually exclusive. We can establish a parallel between the “polyphony of voices” emphasized by Laclau and Mouffe: “each of which constructs its own irreducible discursive identity” against universal and unitary discourses, and the plurality of identities and conversations that constitute the material of dialogical art practices.43 Beyond terminological subtleties, the manner Kester presents socially engaged art practices seem to congenitally contribute to the “democratic revolution” championed by Laclau and Mouffe.44 They share a fashionable post-Marxist escape from orthodox Marxism and dialectics.45 40 41 42 43

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Therborn, Göran. From Marxism to Post-Marxism? London: Verso, 2010: 140. See Mouffe, Chantal. “Art and Democracy. Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space.” Art and Research. A Journal of Ideas, Context and Methods 1.2 (2007): n. pag. Art & Research. Web. 2 Sept. 2016. See Kester 2011: 223. See Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. 1985. Reprint. London: Verso, 2014: 175. The polyphony of voices points to the deficits of the traditional Marxist class analysis, i.e., the concept of the working class as “universal class” and, in their view, the reductionist characterization of antagonistic struggles as class struggles. However, whatever shortcomings we may detect in the traditional Marxist class analysis, the core of it still holds: that the exploitation process in which unpaid labour is extracted or “pumped out” directly from the producers is a class process and the producers occupy class positions within this process. See Resnick, Stephen A. and Richard D. Wolff. Knowledge and Class. A Marxian Critique of Political Economy. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. As Ellen Wood has put it, positing “the working class and its struggle at the heart of social transformation” is not simply “an act of faith,” but it is “based upon a comprehensive analysis of social relations and power.” Wood, Ellen M. The Retreat from Class. A new “True” Socialism. 1986. Revised edition. London: Verso, 1998: 14. Laclau and Mouffe 2014: 150. According to Kester, a characterization of the social space in agonistic terms only allows for fixed positions and subjectivities. See Kester interviewed in Wilson 2007: 114–115. However, a conception of the social space as occupied by antagonistic forces is not totally foreign to him. Kester 2004: 150 and 1995. The real point of disagreement is that Laclau and Mouffe’s model of the social space entails a rejection of the Habermasian rational consensus. Mouffe is critical of the kind of consensus implied in hegemonic liberal thought,

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2.1.2 The Critique of the Political Avant-garde Kester has strongly objected to those “revelatory gestures” that charge the artist with “awakening the working class, multitude, or precariat to its revolutionary mission by revealing the hidden contradictions of capitalist power.”46 Kester calls it “discursive determinism,” a notion that he derives from the vulgar Marxist concept of economic determinism, thereby establishing a strong analogy between two forms of discursivity and modes of thought.47 The “revelatory gestures” are mainly those identified with the political avant-garde, which is characterized by an “orthopedic aesthetic” that seeks to transform the viewers’ consciousness.48 It is not that viewers cannot feel challenged by the work and thereby change their leanings. The problem, according to Kester, is that “this orthopedic orientation preserves the idea that the artist is a superior being, able to penetrate the veils of mystification.”49 These works rely on a fixed or, in Bakhtinian fashion, monological discursivity being the reactions of the audience anticipated “by the behavioural apparatus of the piece itself.”50 This is the core of Kester’s critique of the political avant-garde. Kester thinks of modernist aesthetics as always privileging a pre-existing discourse that is revealed to the audience through an experience of shock or “epiphany” (sic): namely, “the hierarchy of great art for Greenberg or Fried; the political analysis of capitalism for Benjamin” and Brecht.51 “In each case,” Kester argues, “emancipatory aesthetic knowledge is equated with what is prior to or beyond shared

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while Kester advocates a sort of grass-roots consensus more in line with Sennett’s. In any case, Laclau and Mouffe have shown their agreement with Habermas on the subject of the necessary recognition of the plurality of voices and identities that make up the democratic society. See their preface to the second edition of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2014: xvii. Kester 2011: 222–223. See Kester 1999/2000. Kester 2004: 87. Ibid., 88. See Kester 2013. Brecht was concerned with how the work on the stage makes useful predictions about the “movements” of the audience, that is to say, about its participatory stand. In his notes on non-Aristotelian drama Brecht refers to the search for causal laws that can only be observed acting in larger groups of individuals like classes. So, he treats the audience from the point view of individuals that are members of a class society. Brecht 1967a: 278–280, 282–283. This is not a banal issue and, as we will later see, it crucially points to how conditions determine behavioural responses. Brecht’s ideas about the social causal bond reveal his interest in logical empiricism and the writings of Otto Neurath. See Giles, Steve. Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory. Marxism, Modernity and the Threepenny Lawsuit. 1997. 2nd edition. Bern: Peter Lang, 1998. Kester 2004: 84.

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discourse.”52 The aesthetic “shock” experienced by the audience of Brecht’s plays, Piscator’s film projections or Rodchenko’s photographs implies a conception “of the viewer as an inherently flawed subject whose perceptual apparatus requires correction.”53 Accordingly, Brecht appears as a deviser of a series of devices that work as catalytic agents for a defective perception that needs to be corrected if reality has to be apprehended as it really is. The political avantgarde artist does not “engage with the viewer as he or she actually is, here and now” but as a “subject-to-be-transformed.”54 The dialogical artist does just the opposite, Kester argues, and by questioning the artwork “qua object,” transforms it into a process of communicative exchange and thereby challenges the “fixed categorical systems and instrumentalizing modes of thought” typical of modernism.55 We think that Kester’s view illustrates a misunderstanding of Brecht and the political avant-garde in a crucial way, because the production of the artworks was only possible after an active engagement with, a constant process of learning from the social context. In the dialogue that takes place as a preparatory study for the adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Brecht points out that one of the main goals of the adaptation is to come up against dialectics. One of his collaborators at the Berliner Ensemble wonders if such experience would be reserved for those experts who are already familiar with dialectical thinking. But, Brecht argues that dialectics comes up in popular ballads and show booths at fairs.56 His interest in the popular speaks for a continuous search for those means that produce an accomplice to recognition—although not in terms of identification but of taking a stand—between the work and its audience.57

52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 88. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 90. 56 Brecht, Bertolt. Schriften zum Theater 7. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964b: 246–247. Squiers has examined the influence of Mao’s On Contradiction in Brecht’s adaptation. See Squiers, Anthony. “Contradiction and Coriolanus: A Philosophical Analysis of Mao Tse Tung’s Influence on Bertolt Brecht.” Philosophy and Literature 37.1 (2013): 239–246. Print. 57 Brecht’s views on the popular are scattered throughout his theoretical fragments. They are at best elaborated in his essay “Volkstümlichkeit und Realismus” written in 1938, see Brecht, Bertolt. Über Realismus. Edited by W. Hecht. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971: 67–74; although, first published in Sinn und Form in 1958. Here Brecht refers to the proletarian and agitprop theatre as a rich source of innovative means and forms of expression, because they exploit forgotten elements of great popular art periods. Ibid., 73.

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2.2 A Preliminary Assessment of Kester’s Critical Strategy Kester’s strategy is for the most part descriptive. But, even a descriptive method is not devoid of a theory on which to build its analytical framework. The manner in which Kester challenges the political avant-garde and today’s critical art against the methods of the dialogical art practices is revealing of a philosophical position, one that works in the background of his critical practice although it appears as the “spontaneous” content of that practice: namely, a mode of thought manufactured outside the practice that posits dialogics against dialectics, a fashionable anti-Marxism in the name of flexible identities that strive for reconciliation.58 This philosophical position is not theoretically stated but surfaces in the way the categories at work are woven together for the analysis. This strategy allows Kester to present his critique of modernism as the obvious result of practical observations. However, as Brecht wrote, if we were to go along with the obvious it would mean that we have given up understanding.59 We argue that Brecht’s praxis demonstrates that the claim on the side of dialogics against dialectics is fallacious; or, in Althusser’s terms, is not “correct.”60 The difference with Brecht’s own concerns about method and theory cannot be more apparent. We argue that Brecht’s intervention in the theatre is one that inasmuch as it is based on firm principles, is constituted in the practice itself. That is, it has not been fully “cooked” in advance at the expense of the practice. This would imply a teleological mode of thought, which is not the case. In his posthumous book on dialectics Me-Ti61 Brecht warns us against plans that make us their servants: “Leave as much as possible open. It’s easier to quarrel over plans than when realizing them and when realizing them more things occur to you than when planning. Beware of becoming the servants of ideals; otherwise you’ll soon become the servant of priests.”62 Brecht is speaking about the realization of socialism—or the Great Oder, as he refers to it in the book. But, his advice not to plan everything in advance—and this is basically the strategy stressed by Lenin in “On Climbing High Mountains,” one 58

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On the notion of “spontaneous” philosophy, a philosophy that does not appear as such but pervades the theoretical practice in crucial ways see Althusser, Louis. “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists.” Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. 1990. Reprint. Edited by G. Elliott. London: Verso, 2011, pp. 69–165. Brecht 1967a: 265. Althusser speaks of philosophical theses as “correct” [justes] just as we speak of a “correct decision” or a “just war” (these are Althusser’s examples). Althusser 2011: 74. See Haug, Wolfgang F. “Nützliche Lehren aus Brechts >Buch der Wendungen