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Оглавление1. ON STANCE, AGENCY, AND EMOTIONS IN BRECHT (1989-2000)1
—To Jochen Fiebach, friend for fifty years of worrying about theatre and socialism: er bewahrte die Haltung—
0. Preliminary
It is well known that Brecht focused on a thinking capable of intervention into relationships among people (eingreifendes Denken) through the condensed and displaced guise of poetry and art. In order to do this he needed a mediation which would be sufficiently incisive without being simply doctrinal ideology.
I have a twofold thesis in this paper: First, the red thread or central insight which unites all the periods and all the genres of his work and life was the concept of Haltung. It is a posture-cum-attitude, imperfectly translated as stance or bearing. That Brecht thought of Haltung as supremely important may be suggested by two examples, about literature and theatre. In an early Me-ti story Brecht claimed “to have renewed the language of literature...by putting only stances into sentences and letting the stances always appear through the sentences” [GKA 18: 78-79]; and in his sketches for “dialectical dramaturgy,” the stage should be composed of groupings “in which or toward which the single person assumes particular stances” while the audience groups change their stances and grow into productive co-workers by studying and judging the stage stances [GKA 21: 440-42]. I shall discuss Brecht’s overarching views about it, and two principal ways he sought to particularize this general, so to speak syntactic, concept by finding sociohistorically pertinent macro-stances. As of ca. 1928 on, he formulated it as a semantic cluster around the concept of a redefined pedagogy, but after his emigration this concept was dropped as no more pertinent and too narrow, and replaced by meanings clustering around a redefined notion of production, productivity or productive critique.
My second thesis is that this bearing is (as any interest) not to be disjoined from certain kinds of emotion. In fact, I assume that for Brecht any Haltung implied an emotion, and viceversa.
A few other key overarching rubrics could perhaps be found. I shall here mention only, in order to get it out of the way, the term of Wissenschaft (science). It seems to have been first used by Brecht in 1929 (GKA 21: 270-75), at the confluence of his enthusiasm for flying machines—evident in The Flight of the Lindberghs—and for the first Soviet Five-year plan; and it was foregrounded in his most finished and deservedly famous but—as usual for Brecht—open-ended and not final theoretical tractate, the Short Organum for the Theatre. Wissenschaft is in German, first of all, much wider than the English term of “science” (see Suvin “‘Utopian’”), since it denotes any systematically organized body of knowledge, for example theology or literary studies. Second, Brecht finally recognized its inadequacy for serious theorizing, based on abuse of science by the “Western” and of Marxism by the “Eastern” class societies: “the term [scientific age] by itself, as it is usually used, is too polluted” (GKA 23: 289, ca. 1954). What he permanently retained from this semantic field was his insistence on the necessarily experimental, Baconian character of genuinely modern art. At any rate, the writer of the Life of Galileo could scarcely be suspected of an uncritical scientism, just as the lifelong proponent of self-management should not be supposed to have had any illusions about technocracy (or bureaucracy).
1. On Haltung or Stance
Gegen Abend fand mich Brecht im Garten bei der Lektüre des Kapital. Brecht: “Ich finde das sehr gut, dass Sie jetzt Marx studieren—wo man immer weniger auf ihn stösst und besonders wenig bei unsern Leuten.” Ich erwiderte, ich nähme die vielbesprochnen Bücher am liebsten vor, wenn sie aus der Mode seien.
Benjamin, Gespräche mit Brecht, 25/7/1938
[Toward evening, Brecht found me in his garden reading Capital. Brecht: “I find it very good that you are now studying Marx—when he’s met with ever less frequently, and especially among our people.” I answered that I preferred to take up the frequently mentioned books when they were not in fashion.
Benjamin, Talks With Brecht, diary note of 25/7/1938]
1.1. The Haltung of Pedagogy (Teaching and Learning)
I begin with the story Tu Wishes to Learn Fighting and Learns Sitting from Brecht’s Me-ti: The Book of Turns:
Tu came to Me-ti and said, I wish to take part in the struggle between classes. Teach me. Me-ti said, Sit down. Tu sat down and asked, How should I fight? Me-ti laughed and said, Do you sit well? I don’t know, said Tu surprised, how should I sit differently? Me-ti explained that to him. But, said Tu impatiently, I didn’t come to learn how to sit. I know, you want to learn how to fight, said Me-ti patiently, but for that you must sit well, for we are just now sitting and we want to learn while sitting. Tu said, If one always strives to take up the most comfortable posture and get the best out of what there is, in brief if one strives after enjoyment (Genuss), how can one then fight? Me-ti said, If one does not strive after enjoyment, does not want to get the best out of what there is nor take up the best posture, why then should one fight? (GKA 18: 176-77)
What is here translated as posture (Lage, how or where a body lies; also situation, position, location), Brecht usually calls, more actively, Haltung, which is in German—as most other key Brechtian terms—a fruitful polysemy or pun centrally involving dynamics and full bodily involvement; while Genuss is stronger than enjoyment, much like jouissance, and I have argued in the essay on Life of Galileo how central it is to Brecht’s Epicurean horizon (see Suvin, “Brecht’s Life”). This may be seen developed in a poem about Weigel preparing for the role of señora Carrar:
Thus my body is relaxed, my limbs are
Light and on their own, all the prescribed bearings
Will provide them pleasure.
[So ist mein Körper gelockert, meine Glieder sind
Leicht und einzeln, alle Haltungen, die vorgeschrieben
sind
Werden ihnen angenehm sein.]
(“Lockerer Körper” [Relaxed Body], ca. 1937, GKA 14: 376)
In our epoch, the pragmatic orientation toward concrete situations of human relationships (Situationsbezogenheit) and the need to present them as alterable entails that texts should be experimental, and that they present Haltungen that unite the subject’s body-orientation in spacetime with that body’s insertion into major societal flows of things.
The preoccupation with Haltung, present from early on (cf. GKA 19: 285-91), underwent a first crystallization during the great economic and political crisis of 1929 to 1933, when Brecht focussed on a vanguard which should teach others the proper ways of such a union of personal orientation and collective location. Parallels to the Leninist concept of a political vanguard are clear, and may indeed help to explain Brecht’s conditional adhering to Lenin’s central notion of the Party—alongside with Brecht’s lifelong adhesion to Rosa Luxemburg’s notion of worker’s councils; yet Brecht gave it a characteristically heterodox twist by positing a theatre (and radio) vanguard. This meant, first, allotting theatre an at the time totally new (though historically well-known) function, that of a teaching-cum-learning apparatus or Pädagogium, a term denoting “educational institution” but to which Brecht provided a new connotation on the model of Planetarium or Laboratorium. Obversely, it also meant planning “a chain of experiments which used theatrical means but did not need theatres proper” (GKA 22.1: 167), so that it might perhaps be better to categorize it within the superordinated category of spectacle or public show.
Brecht envisaged a wide spectrum of educational practices in such a radically new institution. However, for reasons both of practical organization and of self-clarification, Brecht began writing fictional performance texts for these “pedagogical experiments” which he called Lehrstücke. His term was somewhat misguided in its kinship to Lehre (doctrine) or lehren (instructing), concepts which were not at all central for Brecht, so that in 1936 he insisted to have it translated into English as “learning plays” (GKA 22.2: 941, Steinweg Lehrstück 48).
At the height of such work, expecting a civil war and revolution in Germany, Brecht envisaged two different forms, the Great Pedagogy and the Small (or Initial?) Pedagogy. A note in the Brecht-Archiv (further BBA with file/leaf numbers) reads:
The Great Pedagogy utterly changes the role of playing. It abrogates the system of player and spectator. It knows only players who are at the same time students.... The mimetic playing becomes a principal part of pedagogy. The Small Pedagogy in the transitional period of the first revolution, on the contrary, merely democratizes theatre: the division still fundamentally exists, but the players should if possible be amateurs (the roles should be such that amateurs have to remain amateurs), the professional actors and the existing theatre apparatus should be used to weaken bourgeois ideological positions in the bourgeois theatre itself, and the spectators should be activised. Plays and way of playing should turn the spectator into a statesman....The actors must estrange figures and events for the spectator, so that he finds them remarkable. The spectator has to take sides instead of identifying himself [with the figures and events]. (BBA 521/996, ca. 1940, in Steinweg Lehrstück 23-24)
As is made clear from a number of passages, the Great Pedagogy presupposes a post-revolutionary state of democratic socialism based on a dialectics between the vanguard and the self-organizing masses, the lineaments of which Brecht saw in the Soviet 1920s on the model of Lenin’s program in The State and Revolution (cf. GKA 21: 398 and Steinweg Lehrstück 207-10). In such a dynamic state of permanent cultural revolution people’s acts would no longer be constricted by overriding Not (necessity and misery) but they would be educatable through learning new bearings (cf. GKA 18: 34; BBA 112/54, ca. 1929, in Steinweg Lehrstück 18). All this should have been developed in an extensive theory of pedagogy which at that point Brecht was planning (cf. GKA 24: 90 and both the Steinweg titles). One is titled “Theory of Pedagogies”:
Bourgeois philosophers make out a huge distinction between those who act and those who reflect. The thinker does not make this distinction.... There is no distinction between true philosophy and true politics. A result of this understanding is the thinker’s proposal to educate young people through theatre playing, that is, to make of them simultaneously those who act and reflect, as it is proposed in the guidelines for the pedagogies.... (GKA 21: 398)
A defining and fundamental characteristic of the learning process Brecht envisaged was his enmity to a closed “world view” or systematized doctrine. For one thing, knowing is necessarily dynamic: “in the teaching, the learning must be preserved. The Lehrstücke are not simply parables that provide an aphoristic moral with emblems, they also investigate.” (BBA 827/13-15, ca. 1930, in Steinweg Lehrstück 23) As Benjamin formulated it, the traditional, Schillerian statement that the stage is an ethical institution is justified only if a theatre does not only communicate cognitions but also produces them (18); Benjamin went on to perspicaciously characterize Brecht’s whole theatre by connecting investigation with the gestual attitudes.2
Even more important, however, Brecht diametrically counterposed two kinds of learning. One, using theatrical means, engages the whole body without splitting the sensorium from the brain and dovetails emotion and reason precisely under the concept of bearing or behaviour (Verhalten, cf. for example GKA 21: 421-22); this makes it possible to fruitfully use contradictions. The other kind is a learning through systematized notional constructs, which tend to false harmony and univocity, for Brecht necessarily present in any doctrine. Therefore, “the teaching should not spread a specific cognition but carry out a specific bearing (Haltung) of people.... When taking up a proper bearing, truth, that is the right cognition of circumstances, will manifest itself.” (BBA 827/07, ca. 1930, in Steinweg Brechts 101) Brecht is astonishingly modern in such considerations, pitting the juggler-philosopher as educator against the priest, and again best exemplified through some Me-ti stories. One of them, “Vorsicht bei der Verwahrung von Erfahrungen” (“Prudent Custody of Experiences”) distinguishes between experiences and judgements, and calls for great caution not to take the latter for the former: “A proper technique is necessary to keep the experiences fresh so that they can remain a permanent source of new judgements.—Me-ti called that kind of experiences best which resembled snowballs. They can serve as good weapons but they do not keep too long. For example they cannot be held ready in the pocket for long.” (GKA 18: 90-91) Another, crucial Me-ti story warns forthrightly, “Make No Image of the World”:
Me-ti said: The judgements which are won by dint of experiences usually do not correlate with each other as the events which led to the experiences. The unification of the judgements does not give an exact image of the events lying beneath them. When too many judgements are tied to one another, getting back to the events is often very difficult. It is the entire world which generates one image, but the image does not include the entire world. It is better to associate judgements with experiences than with other judgements—if the judgements should serve the purpose of governing things. Me-ti was against constructing overly comprehensive images of the world. (GKA 18: 60)
Across a quarter century, very little had changed when the director Brecht in the 1950s carefully grounded the believability of each stage event on analogous events possible in everyday life, that is, “vertically” athwart and against any pre-established harmony of the syntagmatic notional and textual, “horizontal” concatenation (cf. Bunge 332 and passim).
Of course, Brecht’s goal was to influence people and society as a whole. Furthermore, the determining context of all of his “pedagogical” exertions was the clear realization that the education he wanted was only feasible if favoured by the general drift of society: “Thus the lack of bread in the shack educates to stealing, or the Bible educates to hungering. He who has to have a potato must bow down, because the ground demands it or the boss. Such is the education to bowing down.” (GKA 22.1: 55) Brecht’s pedagogy is one for stormy but favourable winds. A provisional summing up, provided in a short note called “On the Theory of the Lehrstück” (GKA 22.1: 351-52), did not at all aim at a transmission of judgements, even of general or parabolical ones, but at a critical appropriation of a way of thinking, of a method, incarnated in the players’ bearing (cf. Steinweg Lehrstück 102). The goal of such learnings is to learn the method of learning. For Brecht, “The concept of the right way is less good than that of the right walking” (GKA 22.1: 569).
Brecht’s project could be articulated by discussing his concept of experiment and his even more sophisticated concept of a scientific or epistemological model. More briefly, it may be illustrated by his stance toward jazz. Though that stance was complex, since he found jazz mostly used in brutal and stupid ways, Brecht wanted his kind of playing to follow the technical method of jazz, “namely the montage way which makes the musician into a technical specialist. Here possibilities were shown of arriving at a new union of personal freedom and ensemble discipline (improvising with a fixed goal)....” (GKA 24: 99-100, cf. GKA 21: 188) Another analogy was that to team sports: “These players should play so that...all attempt to work out the few basic ideas, like a football team” (BBA 521/95, ca. 1930, in Steinweg Brechts 105). Brecht hated one-way transmission so much that he was, at the same time as he planned a theory of pedagogies, also planning a radio theory whose main plank was the demand for a two-way teaching communication between the radio performers and the listeners (GW 18: 117 ff., esp. 127-34). Another Me-ti story goes so far as to say, “If anybody affirms that 2x2 = 4 because 8 minus 5 equals 7, I shall immediately say that twice two is not four.... I cannot stand it when truth is believed or spoken like a lie, without proof or out of calculation.” (GKA 18: 110-11) The clear polemical point goes here against official Marxism in Stalin’s time; it is paralleled somewhat more tactfully in the Messingkauf speech on the useful “judgments, forecasts, and pointers” of Marxism’s engaged thinking as opposed to the harmonious “world views” in many “sentences/propositions [Sätze] by the Marxists” (GKA 22.2: 717).
In practice, this meant that Brecht wanted the players of his “plays for learning” to radically distinguish those of his guidelines that contained views about performing from those about meaning and application. The former were to be tested through mimesis (and Brecht frequently expatiated, both theoretically and practically, on such mimetic criticism), the latter were personally untestable and thus at best temporary scaffolding (“working hypotheses,” GKA 21: 415) and at worst disembodied doctrine:
The study of the guidelines about meaning is not necessary for the study of the guidelines about performing, and thus neither for the performing, while the study of those guidelines about meaning without studying the other ones and without playing is even dangerous. Therefore the guidelines for playing should be read first, and only after the student has performed the document [that is, the play text], the study of meaning and application should follow.... The guidelines are full of mistakes as far as our times and its virtues are concerned, they are unusable for other times.
(BBA 112/57 and 66, ca. 1930, in Steinweg Lehrstück 21)
A final but omnipresent aspect, which too can here only be suggested, is Brecht’s dialectical stress not simply on critique but on outright negativity, such as would be usually considered “bad” or indeed dangerous and horrifying. Any “positive” action is meaningful—rather than automatic and unfree—only as a choice out of a spread of stillborn possibilities: for example, “To consent means also: not to consent”; or, faced with a teaching, one can adore it or despise it (BBA 529/14 and BBA 112/69, both ca. 1930, in Steinweg Lehrstück 24 and 19). But more than logic is at stake here. At stake is, first, the dialectical sublation of the asocial element. From the figure of Baal on, Brecht was obsessed by sensual and other values inherent in anti-social behaviour. In the already cited “Theory of Pedagogies” he allots it a central role in the development of the post-revolutionary state or community: “The State can best correct human asocial instincts, since they arise out of fear and ignorance, by extorting them from each in an as far as possible perfect form, almost impossible to attain for the individual. This is the basis of the idea of using theatrical playing in pedagogies.” (GKA 21: 398, underlined by DS) And further, in the Lehrstück “an educational effect may be expected from an (as magnificent as possible) reproduction of asocial acts and bearings” (GKA 22.1: 351). While it is possible that Brecht was here building on the Soviet experiences in educating the huge numbers of besprizornye, the post-Civil-War nomadic orphaned children sometimes treated by playing out a kind of psychodrama, and while he was—more remotely—perhaps also trying to socialize Freud’s return of the repressed (cf. Steinweg Lehrstück 138 and 142), the central impulse at work here is not clear though obviously of supreme importance for Brecht’s thought and work.
What is finally at stake in Brecht’s “pedagogy” is the full socialization of the community. Using his frequent image of a roaring river, what should happen is not only a channelling of the deviant energies but also a redrawing of the rationalistic norms for channels or riverbeds. To anticipate my next section on productivity: “Not all human productivity is included in the always limited present production.... Very sharp ears for the productive element are needed. It is a masterpiece to keep it from destruction, that is, to keep it from destroying and to keep it from being destroyed.” (GKA 22.1: 132) In fact, Brecht finally concluded that there was no such thing as asocial people or instincts in themselves, only asocial roles or functions, such as that of the private possessors of the means of production (AJ, GKA 26: 331).
1.2. The Haltung of Producing (Productivity, Creativity)
The Nazi victory deprived Brecht of any chances for teaching with help of an organized societal network. Furthermore, it interacted with Stalinism to take off the historical agenda Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s ideas about, and early Soviet experiments with, self-management and a gradual elimination of State apparatus. In the new situation Brecht abandoned the project of Pädagogium but not the underlying impulse at organized learning of a method that centers on bearing. The method and bearing to be learned, it turned out, was one of a productive critique, or of a critical productivity.
My thesis in this section is that in the Marxist tradition, beginning with Marx himself, there are two largely incompatible but intimately associated meanings of “production”: the economistic one, taken from Adam Smith and other bourgeois political economists, and the anti-alienating or creative meaning which is part of Marx’s central utopian critique, taken from a revolutionary fusion of Enlightenment and Romanticism; and furthermore, that Brecht largely and very originally moved from the first to the second meaning. These two meanings may be associated with Marx’s central opposition between exchange-value and use-value, in which the inherent limit of capitalism is precisely restriction of production of use-values by exchange-value and, as its obverse, the growth of productive forces at the expense of the “main force of production, the human being itself” (Marx, Grundrisse, discussed further in Suvin “Living Labour,” 437-52; cf. Harvey 2, 105, and passim). In these circumstances, as already the young Hegel had noted, “The value of labour decreases in the same proportion as the productivity of labour increases” (239). Marx’s examples for production in the first sense are all quantifiable productions founded on capital and produced for profit. In this case, “our production is not a production of man for man as man, that is it is not a social production. As person, none among us has a relationship of pleasure to the other’s product.” (Marx 459) Most interestingly, his examples for qualitative production in the second sense, not reducible to profit, are actors producing a play, piano players producing not only music but also “our musical ear,” and the madman producing delusions (ibidem 109). Artistic production is indeed (together with scientific production) taken as a paradigm for such non-alienated production of use-values.
Brecht has his share of “vulgar economist” references to production (and of course this economism is not so vulgar when applied to situations of poverty and low productivity). His defence of Stalin was, for all strong reservations, based on the great surge of production in the USSR (cf. GKA 18: 108, 139, and passim), just as his objections to capitalism were based on its being “no more able to further the production of life’s necessities in the form of free competition” but of having to resort to “production of instruments of destruction” (GKA 18: 146-47)—of, in effect, making for death rather than life. However, some usages from the 1930s already show an ambiguity or passage between this meaning and production in the wider sense of productivity meaning any creativity. This turning seems marked by compromise terms such as “productive behaviour” (GKA 18: 152, and cf. the Me-ti story On the Productivity of Individuals, GKA 18: 138).
While the term “pedagogy” is abandoned by Brecht by the mid-1930s, references to creative production become especially frequent from 1940 on, as testified by Brecht’s journal. Non-Aristotelian theatre, always tied to an “evaluative Haltung” (GKA 21: 440-42), is now defined as “simply [one with] a spectator who produces the world,” and as using for the basis of its emotions, alongside curiosity and helpfulness, “human productivity, the noblest of them all” (AJ, GKA 26: 439 and 441-42). “Learning” is now equivalent to “mental producing” (GKA 22.1: 63). The key passage, which explicitly identifies production as non-economistic productivity, seems to be a notation from March 7, 1941:
The great error which has prevented me from making the little Lehrstück of The Evil, Asocial Baal was my definition of socialism as a great order. It is, on the contrary, much more practical to define it as a great production. Production is, of course, to be taken in the widest sense, and the struggle goes for the full unfettering of everybody’s productivity. The products may be bread, lamps, hats, pieces of music, chess moves, irrigation, complexion, character, plays, etc. (AJ, GKA 26: 468)
The concept of an all-sided deployment of productivity is amplified in a note of 1949. In a characteristic move, this begins with a counterproposal to (or, ambiguously, amplification of—at any rate in a supersession of) Lenin’s famous dictum that communists deduce their morality from their struggle, which was shared by Brecht as late as 1931 in The Measures Taken; and it ends by punning on the theatrical sense of sich produzieren, “showing off” and/or “producing itself”:
If one wishes to deduce all morality from productivity and one sees the highest thing in a huge exfoliation of everybody’s productivity, one must take care to lift the interdict from mere existence, indeed from the resistance against being used. I love: I make the beloved productive; I repair a car: I make the drivers drive; I sing: I ennoble the hearing of the hearer, etc. etc. But then society has to have the ability to use everything, it must possess such a “capital” of what has already been produced, such a plenty of offers, that the individual’s production becomes as if a superfluous, so to speak unexpected thing. If productivity is the highest thing, then strikes must still be honoured. (In the esthetic domain it is already so. The asocial element also pleases; it is taken as sufficient that it “produces itself.”) (AJ, GKA 27: 305)
Obversely, to produce oneself is also to show off, as in the conclusion of the Short Organum: “The spectator should produce himself in this theatre in the easiest way: for the easiest mode of existence is in art” (GKA 23: 97).
Around 1954, planning a series of songs for a play on the Chinese God of Happiness, Brecht noted: “The highest happiness is called productivity” (BBA 204/71, in Tatlow 546). When first thinking of this cycle of songs, he had also noted it should be an entirely materialist work, “praising ‘the good life’ (in both senses). Eating, drinking, dwelling, sleeping, loving, working, thinking, the great pleasures.” (AJ, GKA 27: 159). Though he probably didn’t know the works of young Marx, the parallel to Marx’s “Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, opining, perceiving, willing, being active, loving” (MEW Ergänzungsband I.: 539), is striking.
A whole Brechtian theory of personality could be reconstructed around the axis of productivity; for example, “indignation, this socially highly productive affect” (AJ, GKA 27: 140). I shall therefore insert a discussion of some main points about Brecht’s notion of agency and character before I get to emotions as such.
As can be seen in the above diary note, in a rare series of exceptions to the interdict he had put on himself in the mid-1920s against writing about erotics (which he never observed in poems), Brecht identified love as a paradigm of productivity: “Love is the art of producing something with the capacities of another person. To this purpose one needs regard and affection from the other person.” (GKA 18: 40—see on this theme Haffad). Here are some further Me-ti and Keuner stories with this horizon (the first story was probably stimulated by the anecdote about Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein):
When Mr K. Loved Somebody
“What do you do,” Mr K. was asked, “when you love somebody?” “I make a design of that person,” said Mr K., “and I take care that it turns out similar.” “What? The design?” “No,” said Mr K., “the person.” (GKA 18: 24)
Kin-jeh on Love
I speak not of carnal joys, although there would be much to say about them, nor of being in love, of which there is less to say. With these two phenomena the world would get along, but love must be examined separately, as it is a production. It changes the lover and the beloved, whether in good or bad ways. Already from the outside, lovers appear as producers, and of a high order at that. They show passion and unstoppability, they are soft without being weak, they are always looking for friendly deeds which they may do (in the end accomplished not only for the beloved). They build their love and bestow upon it something historical, as if they reckoned upon the writing of a history. For them the difference between no mistake and only one mistake, a difference which the world can safely ignore, is immense. If their love makes of them something out of the ordinary, they have only themselves to thank; if they fail, they may excuse themselves almost as little with the faults of the beloved as the leader of the people with the faults of the people. The obligations which they take on are obligations against themselves; the severity in relation to the violations of obligation which they muster up is unparallelled. It is the nature of love, as of other huge productions, that the lovers take many things earnestly which others would treat lightly, the smallest touches, the most unnoticeable half-tones. The best succeed in bringing their love into full harmony with other productions; then their friendliness becomes universal, their inventiveness is of use to many, and they support all that is productive. (GKA 18: 175-76)
Love, critical productivity, and the making of images memorably intertwine in these texts (cf. also the “Lai-tu” stories, GW 12: 583-85, and the texts Lovers Make Images of One Another and On the Drawing Up of Effigies, GKA 18: 61 and 20: 168-70). Their dynamic and personalized images, verified by integral bodily contacts, are the symmetrical obverse of those systematically all-encompassing “images of the world” forbidden by Brecht’s pedagogy as unproductive.
This approach may also throw a new light on Brecht’s well-known predilection for female, and especially for maternal figures. The maternal ones (die Mütterlichen)—as Grushe is called at the end of The Caucasian Chalk Circle—love the children productively: not simply, nor even primarily, as their biological bearers but as their social enablers and nurturers. This is largely why Shen Te loves Sun, in The Good Person of Setzuan: she sees in him the potential aviator furthering human communication. A truly productive love is not privatizing: the lovers who “are always looking for friendly deeds which they may do” in the end accomplish them “not only for the beloved.” Love and motherhood are equally revolutionary within an unjust society, just as they converge in the call for a utopian future of friendliness when people will be helpers to people. Grushe takes up little Michael because she had just avowed her love to Simon; Shen Te’s necessity (and misery) in resorting to her alter ego Shui Ta to defend her unborn child is the strongest intrinsic critique and condemnation of capitalism à la Setzuan, and so is Mother Courage’s necessity to deny her dead son in the long war of Germany (there is little or no fathering in Brecht’s work). Erotics in a wider, diffuse and sublimated sense, are strong and omnipresent in Brecht’s plays, but in the sexual sense rather rare. The male relationships in his early plays cannot in my opinion be interpreted as sexual, and thus neither as homosexual. However, after an initial tinkering with the whore as businesswoman, his plays somewhat shamefacedly slighted erotics. If female figures are still clearly privileged in them, it is because they stand for the ultimate alienation of the subject under capitalism, “precisely because [women] can be physically reduced to a commodity,” as well as for “what [Brecht] saw as ‘productive’ or ‘unproductive’ responses to socio-political situations” (Nussbaum 229 and 231)—for example Grushe or Kattrin vs. Natella or Courage. Negative critique and positive production thus embrace in the Haltung of love as “a micro-model” of the great productivity (cf. Haffad 212-13 and 246).
Another emblem of nurturing, parallel and subsidiary to love, is cultivation of a garden or of a fruit-tree, one of Brecht’s favourite ancient topoi, present in many of his poems and notes. It is perhaps best explicated by contraries, in the poem on The Plum Tree (Der Pflaumenbaum, GKA 12: 21) rendered justly famous by Benjamin’s commentary (GS II/2: 566-67). The plum tree, railed round in a city courtyard, can’t grow for lack of sun: “The plum tree never bears a plum/ So it’s not easy to believe./ It is a plum tree all the same/ One tells it by the leaf.” (adapted from translation by J. Willett and R. Manheim).
Mothering, irrigated cultivation, and good car-driving are bundled together in the farewell words of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, since they all bear fruit:
And you
Who have heard the story of the chalk circle, take note
of
The wisdom of our fathers, that what there is should belong
To those who do well by them, and thus:
Children to the Motherly, that they thrive,
Cars to good drivers, that they be driven well,
And the valley to the waterers, that it bear fruit.
[adapted from Manheim-Willett]
Again, coincidences with some of the best in contemporary feminist thought could, probably to the dismay of both sides, easily be found here (cf. Nussbaum 241-42 and passim). In this play, his supreme achievement, “Brecht created the mother-educator of the future in which all traditions are revised or replaced by new, more productive...relationships between people” (Nussbaum 238-39). It is a frontal clash between, on the one hand, the self-management of productive cultivation and of engaged art together with social motherhood and—discreetly—love against, on the other hand, the society of class injustice and civil as well as ethnic warfare. The constellation of the producing cooperatives and the Singer of the framework, plus Grusha and Azdak inside it, versus the upper class is one of productivity against possessivity (cf. Suvin Brecht, ch. 6).
At some points, thus in the Short Organum, Brecht inclined to call the basic societal bearing of this productivity simply criticism (Kritik). Such a critical Haltung (GKA 22.1: 226) or productive critique is “the grandest characteristic of a human being, it has created most of the goods of happiness, best improved life” (GKA 22.1: 569). Therefore, “if only it is left unhindered, [productivity] may prove the greatest pleasure of them all”:
21.
If we want now to give ourselves to this great passion for producing, what ought our representations of people living together to look like? What is that productive bearing in face of nature and of society which we...would like to take up pleasurably in our theatre?
22.
The bearing is a critical one. Faced with a river, it consists in regulating the river; faced with a fruit tree, in grafting upon the fruit tree; faced with locomotion, in constructing vehicles and airplanes; faced with society, in overturning society....
(GKA 23: 73, translation J. Willett)
Such a bearing entailed a lifelong mistrust of ethics, which Brecht saw as a set of idealist notions that had little in common with the necessities in and of life. Nonetheless, just as he had in the Messingkauf and Short Organum finally adapted rather than abandoned theater and esthetics, he finally also found a way to refunction rather than refuse the categorical imperative in favour of a “productive mode” of imagination, creating what is not present to sense (Kant 164). Here is a testimonial of the revocation:
Me-ti and Ethics
Me-ti said: I haven’t found many “You must” sentences which I would desire to pronounce. I mean now sentences of a general nature, sentences addressed to the generality. But one such sentence is: “You must produce.” (GKA 18: 179)
Two consequences following on this stance should be briefly invoked. First, the lovers’ friendliness and the producers’ good humour are conducive to a “joyous criticism” (GW 16: 637) which is not too far from Nietzsche’s joyous knowledge and quite near to Bakhtin’s gay plebeian truth. An autonomous creative force of socialized humanity, it is its own measure. At best, a kind of qualitative felicific calculus may be applied to it, as in: “The proposition: A man’s goal is to have pleasure is bad for the reason that it boxes the ear of the good proposition: Humankind’s goal is to have pleasure.” (GKA 23: 361) Second, the presupposition for all such constructive production is the destruction of destructivity. Brecht’s analysis of his best transposition of our age’s contradictions, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, shines as a lighthouse to our present:
The more Grushe furthers the child’s life, the more she endangers her own; her productivity works for her own destruction (underlined DS). This is so under the conditions of war, of the existing jurisprudence, of her isolation and poverty. (GKA 24: 346)
1.3. Haltung: Language and Class History
How did Brecht arrive at this central tool of his, Haltung? As usual, by productively refunctioning the German language as the concrete consciousness of both the upper and the plebeian classes. Also as usual, he went back to and built on the meanings stemming from before the caesura of the bourgeois or Romantic split of people into an “inner” and an “outer” image and life. He took from it the full bodily involvement and changed it by a melding with his peculiar variant of dynamics from below.
I shall proceed in this subsection by an abbreviated overview of the material from the great historical dictionary of German semantics by the Grimm Brothers (see a fuller account in Suvin “Haltung”). It shows that Haltung becomes a frequent term only in and after the Romantic period. Haltung is a sign of two fundamental changes: first, of growing demographic density in the budding capitalist economy and city life; second, of aristocratic need to insist on “proper” behaviour in all social classes and of subaltern German bourgeois fear of failing to do so. The main meaning of Haltung may be identified as “orientation toward a precise way of somebody’s behaving,” which always involves the body and a bearing toward other people. Only beginning with ca. 1848 Haltung is also applied to “inner” mental activity (cf. the Heyne ed. 1877 edition of the Grimms’ Dictionary, and even more so in the Duden dictionary of 1993).
In particular, within the meaning of Haltung as precise bodily bearing in a hierarchical interpersonal relation, the Grimms show it as positively evaluated in the meaning of strong, determined, worthy behaviour (festes, energisches, würdiges Verhalten), for example “eine Frau von Haltung”; it also borrows connotations from physical and moral solidity: “Gesimse, die wenig Haltung haben,” “eine Neigung die ohne Haltung...ist” (both from Kant).
What is most important here: the dominant semantics was a discourse originating in the ruling class, whose own stance is from above downward and requires from subordinates the stance from below upwards—in both cases formalized as a stiff vertical: “[er] blieb Bedienter in Wort, Gebärde, Haltung” (Immermann, Münchhausen); Brecht too uses “servile bearing” (lakaienhafte Haltung) for subaltern intellectuals and for clerics (GKA 21: 428). This is often found when Haltung is taken absolutely (and thus without adjective), as strong, determined, dignified—or obversely servile—self-discipline; it is then cognate to two significant lexemes: Fassung and Beherrschtheit, taking hold or controlling as a vector uniting social pressure and personal acquiescence (which is echoed in Max Weber’s and Brecht’s Einverständniss, consenting). Most suggestive for these clearly moral and political evaluations is eine militärisch stramme Haltung, “a military upright bearing” (a metonymy for rigid behaviour). It inserted the body personal into the body politic, just as did widely used stock phrases such as “die Haltung verlieren, oder sich Haltung zu geben”, “etwas mit Haltung aufnehmen.”3 Brecht knew this all-pervasive original meaning very well before refunctioning it, and used it first in a Strindbergian movie scenario of his from 1921 (GKA 19: 106) and also at the end of 1926, in the sense of “taking hold of oneself” in poem 7 from the “Lesebuch für Städtebewohner”: “Sie brauchen jetzt keine Haltung mehr zu bewahren/ Es ist niemand mehr da, der Ihnen zusieht” (GKA 11: 1963).
From Aristotle’s heksis and Cicero’s habitus on, Haltung always “stands” or mediates between potentiality and action (as well as between nature and nurture, necessity and choice, thus malleability and teachability). This diachronic tradition is in Brecht synchronically renewed by means of materials and insights from the early writings of Marx (alone or with Engels) with their orientation on praxis. The classical formulations are in the Theses on Feuerbach: “Praxis is a sensual human activity” uniting subject and object (#1) and mediating between the “changing of conditions and people changing themselves” (#3); the human subject “is the ensemble of social relationships” and not “an abstract—isolated—human individual” (#6); last not least for the participation of the observer in the observed, “the standpoint” of the “practico-critical” materialism is “social humanity” (#1 & 10) (MEW 3: 5-7). And in the first section of The German Ideology: “Consciousness can only be conscious being, and the being of people is their real life process” (26). To the contrary, in the later Engels “praxis” is rarely used or substituted by references to applied science and technology (for example in his Dialectics of Nature, MEW 20: 393). Furthermore, in Engels’s influential formulation, people are supposed “to draw their moral views in the final instance” from the economic relationships in which they live (Anti-Dühring, MEW 20: 87).
The Marxian orientation on practice is quite compatible with possibly secondary but not unimportant confluences of Brecht with US pragmatism and behaviorism, primarily Watson (and US movies); with translations of Chinese philosophy, primarily of Mo Ti, Lao Tse, and Confucius, and the impact of Chinese and Japanese dramaturgy4; and with early bourgeois philosophy, primarily of Descartes and Bacon. All the above were assiduously studied by Brecht from the end of the 1920s on, with much reliance on Korsch and on translations of Lenin (Brecht praised the Haltungen of Ford, Einstein, and Lenin and planned to write “Die Haltungen Lenins,” GKA 21: 383 and 26: 319). One could perhaps illustrate Brecht’s position as being synchronically in the middle of a square on whose angles were the German semantic tradition, Marx, Lenin, and pragmatism and diachronically an updating of Eaast Asian collectivism.
1.4. A Conclusion
If one is now to inquire into the reason and meaning of Brecht’s redefining the semantics of Haltung and allotting to this “bearing” a central role in his work and approach to the world, my thesis would be the following: Haltung is Brecht’s semantic micro-unit of praxis for the active subject. In conscious opposition to several important social usages, Haltung has simultaneously three functions: 1/ a refusal of the bourgeois and individualistic concepts of an internalized and atomic character (Charakterkopf, Seelenkäse); 2/ a revaluation of the Right-wing and militaristic-cum-servile stress on Strammhalten, that is, statics and hierarchy; 3/ an alternative to the faceless “economics as last instance of all behaviour” in orthodox “Historical Materialism” from Engels through Kautsky to Stalin. As such a witty alternative, Haltung mediates between two uses of “intervening thinking”: in practical relationships of people to each other and in systematic cognition about people (Menschenkunde).
The anti-individualistic function of Haltung is of a piece with the dismantling of the “individual” or the monolithic Self as center of universe. This is a central theme of Brecht’s, foregrounded in his work from Man is Man and Mahagonny to The Good Person of Setzuan: “the destruction, explosion, atomisation of the individual psyche is a fact.” What remains is, however, not at all a Nothing—”lack of nucleus does not mean lack of substance, we have thus a new structure in front of us, which has to be determined in new ways” (GKA 26: 476)—but subjects capable of action or agency as Marxian “ensembles of social relationships.” All of Brecht’s figures are confronted with situations of choice, all are bipolar agents (saying yes and no), much akin to the “typified masks” (Charaktermasken) from Marx’s 18th Brumaire with flexibly allegorical behaviours and orientations. Possibly the two most important types are the true intellectual or the “Thinker”: Keuner, Me-ti, Azdak, and the ambiguously perverted variant of Johanna Dark and Galileo; and the motherly one: Wlassowa, Kattrin, Courage (fully perverted case), Shen Te, Grusche.
Thus, Brecht was constantly preoccupied with Haltung as a practical and cognitive tool that ensures the naming—and bestowal of meaning—of a subject’s body-orientation. As could be seen also from the little Me-Ti story cited at the beginning, the foregrounded materiality of the movements and postures is not only a sign for the orientation of the thinking but also its almost magical induction and guarantee. In other words: the sensual Being-Thus (So-Sein) in a given changeable situation is the guarantee that the acting subject in an always already concrete existence will avoid, by means of her enjoyment and critical evaluating, being sacrificed to fetishized abstractions—for example, “the future,” “the struggle”—but will instead assume a fertile, sensual, and therefore unshakable orientation toward them. The best presentation of this stance may be found in Brecht’s probably most optimistic text, the Caucasian Chalk Circle, where a brief Saturnalian interregnum suspending class power allows Azdak to help himself—for example to drink and sex—and to help as well the concrete seeds of the future, Grusche and the Noble Child (cf. Suvin To Brecht, chap. 6). Brecht’s fascination with helpers—the “motherly” women, but also Azdak or the sage teacher figures—who take practical measures to meld the difficult today with a productive tomorrow, gives a face to and embodies this preoccupation.
For these reasons, Haltung proved similar to some other attempts on the Left to fuse theory and everyday practice. Most similar to Brecht are Benjamin’s use of the same term, first independent of and then in dialogue with Brecht, Gramsci’s notion of “philosophy of practice,” and Bloch’s notions of “upright posture” (aufrechter Gang) combined with orientation toward a horizon. Lukács’s use of standpoint (Standpunkt) in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein is characteristically more abstract but has even so allowed highly interesting reinterpretations by materialist feminists (cf. Jaggar Feminist and Hartsock) and “theologians of liberation” as “the privileged standpoint of the women” respectively “of the poor” (cf. on both Jameson). There are also parallels to Bakhtin, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, as well to Bourdieu’s “habitus.”
2. Approaching Brecht and Agency
2.0. Introduction
Here would be the place for a theory about agency (and dramaturgic agents) in Brecht. This would test what light the “stance hypothesis” could throw on some crucial practices in Brecht’s opus, understandable also as epistemological concepts, such as personality. I cannot develop it at all adequately in this essay, but I shall put forward one main thesis and a few sub-theses as corollaries.
Thesis: Brecht’s understanding of agency strongly privileges personality (Subject) as opposed to character (the Cartesian Self). From this follow some corollaries, such as:
1/ The downgrading of heroism and upgrading of comedy.
2/ While character is disembodied (a laicization of soul), personality is indivisible from body.
3/ While character is a dogmatic or ideological apriori, a mononuclear interiority, and only rational (or better, only conceptually established), personality is a bipolar spread of possibilities permeated by an ensemble of relationships and reposing on a union of reason and emotion, senses and sensorium.
My stark opposition character-personality may be an imperfect instrument, as all Manichean or “digital” dichotomies. As my final table in 3.3 may also indicate, Brechtian productivity is a strange mixture of ostracism and cannibalism, that is denegation as cutting off and supersession by subsumption. However, for all its limitations, I believe this approach is here mandatory precisely in order to clearly refuse fruitless (dogmatic, undialectical) dichotomies between emotion and reason, character and type, distance and nearness, etc., that the individualist Self brings and that Brecht’s whole work rebels against.
2.1. Defining Terms
I am here simplifying, streamlining, and sometimes contaminating Jean-Pierre Vernant’s and Paul Ricoeur’s approaches to individuation (Colloque de Royaumont “Sur l’individu,” 1985). They distinguish three notions, which can in French be elegantly called “l’individu stricto sensu,” “le sujet,” and “le soi” (or “le moi”). The first is a not further divisible physical token of any logical type, and especially of a biological species; I have failed to find for it a better term than the French individual, though perhaps we could call it a particular. At any rate, this sense must be sharply distinguished from the ideologized bourgeois sense of individual as Self (the third notion here—which is in fact reached by a deliberate confusion of this first notion with this one). It designates any Something (this cat, piece of bread or province) by three principal means: definite description, proper name or indicator (pronoun, adverb, etc.). The second is a human—and I would argue often an animal—”individual” communicating in her own name, expressing himself “in the first person” with traits that differentiate her from others of the same logical type-token and biological species-variety-race (etc.)—most importantly, from an ethnic, class or gender group. To the individuation of the first term this adds identification, and I shall call it the Subject. For a Subject, the pronoun “I” is no longer a shifter, an itinerant marker applicable to any speaker, but it is anchored in a fixed stance or bearing; this makes dialogue possible, where—however—the anchoring is reversible, “I” can be understood as “thou” and viceversa (cf. Ricoeur 62). Finally, the Self (ipse, Selbst) is constituted by the practices and stances “which confer upon the subject a dimension of interiority..., which constitute him from within as...a singular individual whose authentic nature resides wholly in the secret of his inner life, at the heart of an intimacy to which nobody, outside of herself, can accede...” (Vernant 24; cf. Suvin, “Polity”).
To ground this a bit in terms of agential theory and literary genres: the biography and the epic would correspond to a particular human—usually a famous, type: the warrior, the statesman, the Amazon. The autobiography or the pre-bourgeois lyric correspond to the Subject, which can perhaps be deciphered as a type seen from within (for example, the poet, the lover, the hermit). Vernant remarks that in Hellenic lyrics the first-person subject gives his own sensibility the status of “a model, a literary topos...[so that] what is felt individually as interior emotion...acquires a kind of objective reality” (30-31). Only the genres of confession, beginning with Augustine of Hippo, the intimate memoir, and the profoundly changed post-Renaissance lyric and prose epic (that is, the novel) would correspond to the Self, the interiorized character seen simultaneously from inside and outside, as public and private, therefore stereometrically or “in the round.” No doubt, all kinds of grey zones, precursors, and anachronisms must be conceded to this scheme if it is to work. Nonetheless, it seems to be at least getting at a very significant, perhaps central set of distinctions. In this optic the best Modernist practice, most clearly in Brecht, is playing off against individualism and its agential interiority the medieval, Antiquity or Asian featuring of Subjects as types rather than a Self as character (more in Suvin “How Can,” “Subject,” and “Brecht and Subjectivity”).
2.2. The Downgrading of Heroism and Upgrading of Comedy
The Cartesian character is a Thing-in-itself, a Kantian noumenal interiority understandable only through its phenomenal outer manifestations. Its supreme attempt to become a Thing-for-us, indeed a Thing-and-Image-for-the-Community, is heroism. It is well known that Brecht hated heroism deeply. The community must be extremely bad, he argued repeatedly in his plays, if it asks for the Subject’s sacrifice unto death. Obversely, the ethical consolation that this is post mortem idealistically compensated by tragic glory (or assumption into Paradise) looked to him as wedded to the concept of individualist character and therefore as hopelessly unrealistic. Notoriously, Brecht preferred the materialist comedy, which he upgraded from the depths of repressed and often alienated short semiotic forms as a great subversive form. As the fulminations of Sloterdijk against metaphysical subjectivity (the “Self”) have it,
“[in] the confrontation between the mega-thinker Plato and the gutter mime Diogenes....[t]he clown as philosopher shows the philosopher that there is an alternative to the spiritually heroic ascent into the life of ideas.... [A]t the time of the breakdown of metaphysics, the voices of [such] wisdom are becoming audible again. These are the voices of the oldest dissidence, they belong to women, children, ecstatics, rogues, plain people....” (209-10)
Brecht put it pithily as the title and upshot of his seminal 1930 Herr Keuner story: “Weise am Weisen ist die Haltung” (Haltung Is the Wisdom of the Wise, GKA 18: 13); this coincidence too testifies to Brecht’s pertinence for our times. And as Benjamin found out on the material of the “plays for learning,” the Brechtian protagonist is not a traditional hero, the athlete of fixed certainties, but a quick and changeable, that is wise, learner—including teachers who can still learn (776). As the learning teacher in The Naysayer remarks of the Boy’s refusal to die unless upon an extremely good and defensible cause: “What the boy says is reasonable, even if it is not heroic” (cf. Suvin, “Use-Value”). Conversely, when such cause exists, when it is the salvation of the Mother and the res publica as in The Yeasayer, or of the children of Halle as in Mother Courage and Her Children, then the Boy’s or Kattrin’s death are, their heroism is (exceptionally!) necessary. But even then, it testifies to the contrary rule that ought to prevail on a habitable planet.
2.3. Body—>Death—>Politics
Sub-thesis: Character is disembodied (a laicization of soul), personality is indivisible from body:
Dialectically, the affirmation (or with Spinoza, the determination) can best be gauged from the negation, as convex from concave. Does the elimination of Self, of individualist character—as in the re-mountable (ummontierbar) Galy Gay—also necessarily mean the elimination of Subject or personality? This may be a central theme in Brecht’s plays, foregrounded from Baal and Man Is Man through Mahagonny and all the Lehrstücke to the large post-Hitler plays. Descartes would say it does: he taught that “this ‘me,’ that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body”; “I am a thinking thing,” proclaim the Meditations, whereas “I possess a body with which I am very intimately conjoined” (1:101 and 190). But in a Brechtian (or Marxian) optic, if Self disappears, the Subject’s body does not. It remains the Subject’s anchorage and validation for saying “here” or “now,” for inscribing the Subject’s time and space into the socially recognized time and space. This holds not only for location and dating but also for the name (cf. Ricoeur 64-65) and what Brecht often—especially in the Lehrstücke—calls, in the Chinese tradition, “the face.” The body, phenomenologically pinpointing and validating the “inscription” of its here, now, and name/face into the central collective categories of space, time, and agency, grows in a devaluation of Self not less but much more important. How does it relate to other bodies, how does it perceive the natural and social universe? We can call the perception question (even etymologically) esthetics, and the relationship question politics. Clearly, there is no wall between them, since (for example) sexual relations belong to both; as explained earlier, they subtend and suffuse much of Brecht’s work, though he did not choose to focus on sexual relationships in his later plays. On the other hand, however, both the esthetics of rightly perceiving the world of bodies and their stances, and the politics of collective bodies and their interplay with, including shaping of, singular bodies (cf. Suvin, “Subject” and “Polity”), became for Brecht necessarily foregrounded discourses and domains.
Furthermore, most of Brecht’s plays, with a few important exceptions, end with an actual or a living death, and the Lehrstücke usually with a killing. The immensely significant Baden Lehrstück on Consenting, for example, turns on the question of who is able to die: and Brecht noted that from the answer “Nobody” there follows the necessity of turning everything upside down, of a radical all-sided revolution (BBA 827/25, ca. 1930, in Steinweg Lehrstück 24). That people should become able to die properly—presumably with a wise consent to a proper community which will go on—seems therefore one of the main anthropological reasons for personal and political radicalism. Once more the surprising modernity of Brecht’s horizons, here comparable to Bakhtin’s account of the people’s immortal body and its breakup under the bourgeoisie in his Rabelais book, becomes apparent.
I do not have spacetime here to discuss at appropriate length even the third corollary of my general thesis about Brecht’s agents: Character is a dogmatic or ideologically aprioristic, mononuclear interiority, only rational (as opposed to senses and emotion); while personality is a bipolar spread of possibilities permeated by an ensemble of relationships, and reposing on a union of reason and emotion, senses and sensorium.
3. A Conclusion: Emotions Intertwining with Haltung as Basis for Acting
3.1. Here would be the place for an extended argument just why and how emotions are not split from cognition, and how Brecht may help us to understand emotion. I have written about this at length in a separate essay (Suvin, „Emotion”). Here I shall repeat from it merely Brecht’s foundational diary note of November 15, 1940, where he defined his theatre “in emotional categories...for a change” from the usual “bad definitions as especially intellectualistic”:
This is possible without any problems, since in the epic theatre the emotional line and the intellectual line remain identical in the actor and in the spectator. It would be necessary [for such a defining] to build on the basis of curiosity and helpfulness a set of emotions which balances the set based on terror and pity. Of course, there are other bases for emotions too. There is above all human productivity, the noblest of them all. (GKA 26: 441)
I have tried to indicate how a whole Brechtian theory of personality, including emotionality, could be reconstructed around such a stance. It is variously associated not only with curiosity and productivity but also with happiness, friendliness, love, and “indignation, this socially highly productive affect” (GKA 27: 140). A constant tenor of Brecht’s may be found in his defense of a certain type of flexible but critical reason, refusal of uncritical submersion in both stupidity and corrupt emotions, and attempt at contradictory reconciliations of emotion and reason in a proper Haltung.
While it is important to show some serious—though not central—blind, and sometimes black, spots in Brecht’s treatment of the female gender in life or in effigy, it is at least equally important to show that he had an understanding of subjecthood or personality that refused the patriarchal or militaristic downgrading as well as the Hollywoodian or philistine misuse of emotion. This understanding crystallized out of Brecht’s own cognitive emotions and insights as the image and concept of Haltung.5
Haltung is akin to Halten, “to stand” in the sense of Was ist haltbar?, what may withstand or stand up (to pressure etc.). Brecht is much exercised with flexibility and a Daoist softness winning over rigidity; this is perhaps most memorably encapsulated in his poem Legend on the Coming About of the “Tao-te-king” Book. But understanding leads to withstanding: the insistence on durability is also of supreme importance to Brecht, one of whose favourite slogans was “Steel stood,” taken from an ad for a skyscraper that withstood the 1923 Tôkyô earthquake (GKA 22.2: 801). Thus, emotion is an integral part of any action; in any consideration of agency, such as Brecht’s meshing or intervening thinking, emotion cannot be split from cognition, from thought in the widest sense.
How and why do, then, emotion and bearing fit together? I shall here attempt to sketch only two matters. First, what general stance toward the cognitive value of a refusal of the emotion-reason split may we read out of Brecht (and some feminist theoreticians)? Second, what are some innovations directly readable in Brecht as regards a possible feedback between emotion and stance (Haltung) as a gestural critique of ideology?
3.2. The powerfully hegemonic division of reason vs. emotion, where reason is seen as: masculine, analytic, proper to the mind, cold, objective and universal, public, etc., while emotion would be: feminine, synthetic, proper to the body, warm, subjective and particular, private, and so on is, obviously, both intellectually and politically scandalous:
it is necessary to rethink the relation between knowledge and emotion and construct conceptual models that demonstrate the mutually constitutive rather than oppositional relation between reason and emotion. Far from precluding the possibility of reliable knowledge, emotion as well as value must be shown as necessary to such knowledge. (Jaggar, “Love” 156-57)
This does not confer any magical efficacy on emotions as compared to concepts. Like concepts, emotions have an epistemic potential. But both may be erroneous; both need subsequent validation, though possibly in incommensurable ways (for example, asymmetrically, by each other). “Although our emotions are epistemologically indispensable, they are not epistemologically indisputable. Like all our faculties, they may be misleading, and their data, like all data, are always subject to reinterpretation and revision.” (163)
In order to begin such a rethinking, I propose two converging directions. First, to ground the relation of emotion to reason in Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling,” a crucial site of social knowledge and conflict, which he defines as:
not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind,...as a set, with specifical internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension.... [S]tructures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution.... [Yet this solution] is a structured formation...at the very edge of semantic availability....(132-34)
Second, even more radically, I propose querying the terms of debate (as I did at length in Suvin, “On Cognitive”). Rather than speak about emotion vs. reason, it might be useful to say that the class of “not conceptually expressibles” is not cognitively empty: for example, that a quartet, a sculptural frieze, a theater or video performance, a metaphoric system or indeed a personal emotional configuration may be no less cognitive than a conceptual system (though, no doubt, in different ways). Obviously there may and will be cognitively empty or banal symphonies, paintings, metaphors, and emotions galore, just as there are concepts and conceptual systems galore to which almost all of us would deny a cognitive status: Disney movies or 20th-Century Great Man charismatics are cognitively neither better nor worse than—say—sociobiology or “Creation theory,” since all zeros tend to be equal. Obversely, both the conceptual and the non-conceptual ways of understanding, when they are actualized epistemic potentials and not institutionalized mimicries, may allow people to deal with alternatives, that is with not merely or fully present objects, aspects, and relationships. The entities which were not present to people’s perception and reflection now become available for evaluative inspection, choice, and subsequent intervention by means of a cognitive organon: conceptual, emotional or whichever.
What can, in this hypothesis, count as understanding, cognition or knowledge? Anything, I would maintain, that satisfies two conditions or, better, two aspects of one condition: that it can help us in coping with our personal and collective existence; and that it can be validated by feedback with its application, modifying existence and being modified by it. I see no permanent or “anthropological” reason to allot (or withdraw) a special privilege to any human activity or faculty here, for example to words, numbers, geometrical figures, arranged sounds, concepts, metaphors, movements or what have you; though it might almost go without saying that particular social groups in particular historical chronotopes will always have specially privileged activities and sign-systems.
3.3. As to feedback between emotion and a gestural critique of ideology, I shall summarize my views in the following table. Since theatre as an activity (performing) is for Brecht simultaneously an experimental laboratory for and a condensation of everyday life, the table holds for behaviour-patterns in both theatre and life:
BOURGEOIS CHARACTER—BRECHTIAN SUBJECT
| Gesturer, hidden under the character’s emotion, induces the same emotion in him/herself | Gesture may be emotional, gesturer is not. Stage role may induce same or different emotion in spectator. |
| Gesture always depends on emotion | Gesture sometimes causes emotion |
| Conflation, fusion of elements/media on stage to infect spectator | Separation of elements/media on stage, addition in spectator |
| Emotion continuous and contagious, submerges passive spectator identifying with central character/s/ | Emotion fluctuating, depends on active traffic spectator/ characters |
| No psychic distance to undisputed central value | Fluctuations of distance to disputable values |
| Empathy only | Sympathy/antipathy |
| Necessarily ideological | Critique of ideology possible |
Works Cited
1. Texts by Brecht
Brecht, Bertolt. Gesammelte Werke in 20 Bänden. Werkausgabe Edition Suhrkamp. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1967. [GW—retained where better organized than GKA].
Brecht, Bertolt. Werke. Grosse Kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe. Suhrkamp & Aufbau V., 1988-2000 [GKA; within it, the Working Diary (Arbeitsjournal) is preceded by AJ].
Steinweg, Reiner. Das Lehrstück. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1972, 6-67.
—, ed. Brechts Modell der Lehrstücke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976, 31-221.
2. Secondary Literature
Bakhtin, M.M. Rabelais and His World. Transl. H. Iswolsky. Cambridge MA: MIT P, 1968.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980-87 [GS].
—. Versuche über Brecht. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966 (now in GS II/2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980).
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1. This essay would have been difficult to write or even conceive without the stimulating surveys by Haffad on love as productivity and by Steinweg on pedagogy and learning in Brecht. Except where otherwise noted, all translations are mine, with thanks to my students Andrew Wood and Caroline Schütze who helped to translate some of the Me-Ti stories. I have added punctuation and caps when translating the notes from the Brecht Archive, and made some changes in other translations. My thanks also go to Marianne Conrad, Joachim Fiebach, Dorothea Haffad, Wolf Haug, Walter Hinck, Ishida Hiromi, Franz Norbert Mennemeier, Tilman Reitz, and Cornelia Thiels. Parallel and often overlapping arguments are to be found in a number of my items listed below, especially in “Brecht and Subjectivity.”
2. Benjamin was the first and remains the best commentator on Brecht’s Haltungen; another full study would be needed to do justice to his rich discussion of Brecht’s plays and poems (cf. also Steinweg Brechts 403 and 491).
3. The “military connotations” and “conservative tradition” of Haltung are discussed in Nägele 141-57. Very usefully, he connects its use in Brecht both with Halt! (Stop!) and Verhalten (behaviour), as well as with the usage in Benjamin who stressed more the stop or caesura, and concludes that Haltung represents “an intricate economy of movement and rigidity.” Earlier important investigations are to be found in Steinweg, especially 134-39. I should mention three interesting though subsidiary clusters of meaning, possibly of special interest to a playwright and the author of St. Joan of the Stockyards. First, an old one pertaining to the “holding” of festivities: “Haltung eines Spils mit grosser Versammlung des Volks, celebratio ludorum” (vgl. “Verhalten” in “das V., gestus, motus corporis...”—Kasp. Stieler, Der teutschen sprache stammbaum..., Nürnberg 1691: 746, cited in the Grimms 25: 514). Brecht’s important though somewhat opaque concept of Gestus could to my mind only be clarified within this semantic field: Nägele adopts, after Benjamin and Steinweg, the idea that Gestus is “the smallest element of a Haltung” (152). Second, a newer semantic cluster indicating the momentary “stand” of affairs and of prices on the market, including the stock-market: “Spiritus in steigender, festen, flauer, weichender, sinkender Haltung” (Weserzeitung 1853); in Meyer’s Konversations-Lexikon of 1908 (671), this is the only entry s.v. Haltung: “it means the course of affairs,” for example “matte, feste, abwartende Haltung.” Third, a tradition within mime which used “attitude” as its basic theoretical term, intricately connected with arrested emotion, see Wylie, esp. 48-52.
4. Brecht cherished the Chinese cultural sphere precisely because of its rich culture of clear stances (he planned to write a play on Confucius). For example in Japanese kamae means physical-cum-psychological “assuming an attitude” or “attitude assumed” both in formal arts such as judo, flower arranging or tea ceremony and in everyday life, and it is defined as “action in [the] reduced form [of]...a single moment.” The parallel between “Tu Wishes To Learn Fighting...” and the famous swordsman Musashi’s instruction to a novice—itself in all probability heavily indebted to Chinese models—is so close that it amounts to an overlap (see Lee 55 and 57).
5. I find with pleasure that this conclusion has been earlier arrived at by Dümling (626), whose excellent book is most useful for discussing Brecht’s bearings—not only as concerns music.
