I recently discovered this paper. It's an earlier draft of a paper that I gave at the University of California-Irvine, as well at the Marxist Reading Group in Florida. Unfortunately, that later, revised draft has long since disappeared into the ether. To be honest, I wasn't sure if any version of this paper still existed until about a half hour ago, when I discovered it in my sent emails. Guess there is some value in saving that stuff, after all. I'm tempted to try to revise this for publication, but it would have to appear significantly different than this to get published. I encourage folks to make suggestions of sources and revisions for the paper. It would be greatly appreciated.
In order to understand Bertolt
Brecht’s concept of the aesthetic, one must bring in a second important and
linked concept, crisis. Despite the
arguments of Marxist revisionists such as Edward Bernstein, the capitalist
world system had arrested its conflicts on neither the inter-state level, nor
the level of class conflict. The
inception of the Weimar Republic was marked by crisis, the global crisis of
capital, inter-imperialist rivalries, and even the very definition of the
German nation-state. This, in turn, was
preceded by the crisis of the First World War, which in turn was preceded by a
crisis in both art and language, the sprachkrise. This turns us to a form of art that depends
on the form of the experiment in order to negotiate this relationship to that
crisis. We must first define the
experiment within the context of modernity, then we need to understand Brecht’s
particular take on that process in relationship to the construction of a new
social function of art. The works of the
Lehrstucke then become a way to exam
how he produce the practices he would later theorize.
To
understand the relationship between experimentation and art, we need to take a
brief detour into Adorno’s theorization of this relationship in Aesthetic Theory. Adorno offers a sort of developmental
narrative of these practices, moving from a more traditional instrumental and
scientific definition of experimentation to a definition that moves into the
realm of the unknown and the non-identical.
The initial approach to the experiment looks much more like the
classical experiment of the enlightenment.
The experimental occurs when the artist consciously thinks about the
artistic process, as opposed to taking in the process unconsciously,
transferring a set of practices from science.
As Adorno notes, “even as late as 1930 experimentation referred to
efforts filtered through critical consciousness in opposition to the
continuation of unreflected aesthetic practices.” Within
this definition, the experimental act becomes the critical weighing of effects
of a particular aesthetic practice, a concept that is intimately linked to a
mode of instrumentality that is, of means and ends. The experiment then still can hold onto the
goals of the enlightenment, a sort of predictability and repeatability.
But this concept of the experiment
is also linked to risk. Risk becomes
necessary because of the continually threatened status of art. Adorno posed this threat within the following
terms. “Art, socially dispossessed, is in no way sure that it has any binding
force of its own.” This falls back into a familiar narrative
about art. Art is born out of its own
dispossession from its social function.
The question which is then continually posed is, what does it take to
return to this function and position within society? For Adorno, this question drives this
process, while at the same time, it is an impossibility. However, the experiment becomes the manner in
which art flails towards this impossibility.
This failure gestures towards a futurity that is both contingent and, to
some degree, unpredictable. The
possibility of creating something new is dependent on the possibility of that
new form not succeeding. As Adorno
notes, “experimentation takes shape as the testing of possibilities, usually of
types and species; it therefore tends to degrade the concrete to a mere
example.” The experiment moves in the
direction of constant testing, of focusing on the means of production, rather
than the ends. Often the product itself
is irrelevant.
However, this conceptualization of
the experimental is transformed into a far more aleatory concept. As Adorno notes, the experimental process is
focused on the unexpected. The
experiment begins to point to a form of art that could not have been predicted
at the beginning of it production. This
breaks the art form out of the subjective control of its producer, reversing
the initial formulation of the experiment itself. The effort to consciously control the
production of the art form to move it into a new productive realm reverses
itself and becomes a way that the work of art is thrown into the unknown of the
future. For Adorno, this reveals
something inherent about the artistic process.
As he puts it, “art becomes conscious of something that was always
present in it.” What it becomes conscious of is the fact that
as long as the art form remains in a stable form, it can continually fall back
into the form of a thing, or mere commodity, losing its ability to critique the
current social system or meaningfully contribute to the creation of its social
relations. Instead, it enters the
disposable commodity flow of capital.
So for Adorno, the drive to
experimentation becomes a way of trying to escape the reification of capital,
which is inescapable as long as that system of social relations exists. And once more, the concept of art as an
autonomous realm comes precisely out of that system of relations. The constant drive for novelty, or what Ernst
Bloch refers to as the novum of global capitalism is both the driving force of
global capitalism and is also the form that the resistances to global capital
take. Capital is constantly driven by the
desire for the new, new markets, new forms of labor to exploit, new
commodities. This drive for novelty
creates a different conception of time that allows for this sort of openness
that allows for one to shift from certainties to predictabilities. With the question of temporality, capitalism shifts
from a form of time that is both cyclical and full of meaning, to one that is
empty and homogenous.
In
addition to the question of futurity, empty and homogenous time can be linked
to the concept of exchange value and the universalization of the money
form. To understand this, we need to
return to the first chapter of Capital.
Marx starts off by defining two opposing concepts, use and exchange
value. Use operates qualitatively. An object has use value insomuch as it
fulfills a particular function. To an
explicate this, a Bible might act as family keepsake in one situation, a form
of edification in another, and as a door prop in still another. Use is singular and cannot be put into a
relation of equivalence. Exchange, on
the other hand, can. It does this by
draining of all particularities. It, the
commodity, becomes an expression of the congealed, socially necessary labor
time needed to produce it. It is this
transformation that allows for the commodity to be entered into a series of
relations of equivalence. The money form
becomes the expression of this empty mode of equivalence, par excellence. It operates as a mode of potential, able to
transform itself from C to M to C, or from M to C to M’.
Although Marx is hesitant to make the analogy,
the emptiness of the word form can be linked to the emptiness of the money
form. The sign, as an assemblage of
letters, can be shuffled into another arbitrary formation and can be linked to
another assemblage, which is then linked to another signifier. Nietzsche sees, in the gap between signifier
and signified, a kind of abyss that can only be filled in by a sort of social
contract of language. In this sense,
socially necessary labor time acts as an analogue to this social contract,
being defined by both the constructions of socially necessary labor time in the
past (in the form of constant capital) and by the demands of the working class
within its development in the class struggle.
This dimension of the signifier plays a central role within modernism,
the absence of stability in the signifier leading to an experimental fecundity
in the language, producing new forms and processes.
At this point, the perspectives of
Adorno and Brecht shift considerably on how art factors into this structure of
capitalism. For Adorno, this process is
defined by negativity. He noted that "the artwork is not only the echo of
suffering, it diminishes it.” Art, which is constructed under the
domination and exploitation of capital, the experience of primitive
accumulation, whether in the form of the enclosure of the commons or
colonialism, can never fully capture or understand this experience. However, that lack of ability to capture that
experience, that alienation from that experience gestures to something that is
essential in the structure of capitalism, the inability to close the
dialectical process with a form of synthesis, the inability to end the process
of critique. However, we will drop this
dimension of the discussion to turn to the aspect of Adorno’s work that relates
to Brecht.
However, we’ll see some distinct
differences with Brecht’s work, although there is a profound connection around
this question of the experiment. To begin with this question of the experiment,
it may seem that Bertolt Brecht’s goal in the process of this experimentation,
the production of a new people, would go against this aleatory concept of
experimentation that we find in Adorno.
This temptation is most apparent when Brecht himself poses a concept of
experimentation in his polemics with Lukacs.
Brecht argues that “in art there is the fact of failure, and the fact of
partial success.” We’re returned to the logic of
instrumentality that describes the initial mode of experimentalization. Brecht notes this dimension through an
exploration of the failure in various experiments. “Experimental phases can then be noted, in
which an often almost unbearable narrowing of perspective occurs, one-sided or
rather few sided emerge, and applicability of results becomes problematic. There are experiments which come to nothing
and experiments which bear late fruits or paltry fruits.” The experiment then again is linked to a
narrative of failure, but there are some distinct differences in that
narrative. For Brecht, there is the
notion that there can be some sort of success, a gesture towards the new form
of collective aesthetic engagement. But
perhaps more significantly, Brecht grants that failure puts the very notion of
the experiment under question in a manner that Adorno would not consider,
holding onto a utility of literature.
However,
Brecht’s concept of experimentation takes on greater traction when the concept
of the people is introduced. This
concept is developed in a knot of concerns within his contribution to the
debates over expressionism with Lukacs.
The concept of the people is the implicit third term, linked up with the
aesthetic category of realism and the notion of the popular. These three add up to a form of art that both
focuses on process and cannot be determined in advance. In short, we return to a form of the
experiment that Adorno identifies with the later form of aleatory art. However, this experimental form gestures
towards the possibility of a new social function for art and, in turn, a
radically new structure of society. The
initial forms of the experiment may invariably fail, but these failures allow
for other experiments to occur, which may lead to some form of revolutionary
transformation. The experiment is the
working through of this process, the testing of new social formations,
projects, and structures.
The
question of the definition of realism becomes the first term that must be
defined to engage with this process.
After all, it is Lukacs’ definition of this term in opposition to the
experimental form of expressionism that defines this debate. For Lukacs, the definition of realism comes
out of the creation of the novel during the first half of the 19th
century, in particular, the historical novel.
The realism of the historical novel is dependent on both recognizing the
complex structures of the society and the dynamics that define those
structures. Lukacs notes, “A total
historical picture depends upon a rich and graded interaction between different
levels of response to any major disturbance of life. It must disclose artistically the connection between the spontaneous
reaction of the masses and the historical consciousness of the leading
personalities.” The historical picture can be produced
through a complex structure of social mediations, mediations between social
classes, between the mediocre protagonist of the novel and the world historical
personalities. The novel presents a
synthetic view of the antagonistic totality.
The
ability of the novel to produce this kind of understanding of society declines
after the revolution of 1848 and the increasing insurgency of the proletariat. With this transformation, the novel can no
longer hold together the structures of synthesis found in the earlier
novel. For Lukacs, this represents the
decline and eventual failure of the bourgeois novel, which is simultaneously
linked up to the decline of the bourgeoisie as a progressive force in
history. Lukacs then spends the final
section of the text trying to discover where the new forms of critical and
historical realism are occurring within the literature of his time, primarily
the literature of the popular front. He
argues that one can find a number of successful projects that begin to
accomplish this task once again in the fight against fascism, although he is
far less sanguine about this possibility in the 1960 introduction.
Brecht
is highly critical of this narrative of realism, primarily on the grounds that
he saw this as a formalistic definition of the term realism. The accusation of formalism is primarily
dependant on the fact that Lukacs’ definition of realism is both completely
dependent on the form of the novel, and even more specifically, a set of 19th
century European novels. He notes, “We
shall take care not to describe one particular, historical form of novel of a
particular epoch as realistic—say that of Balzac or Tolstoy—and thereby erect
merely formal, literary criteria for realism.” Lukac’s fault is that he defines realism
trans-historically based on the particular dynamics of a specific time period. The dimension of formalism places an
expectation that social relations will remain static, at least at the
structural level. It profoundly denies
the profound dynamism of capitalism that defines Marx’s conceptualization of
that social system. The novel is caught
up in the dynamism of that social system, and if one judges it based on earlier
formal criteria, it must necessarily fail.
In this situation, Brecht argues for a sort of aesthetic eclecticism in
understanding the concept of realism. He
notes, “Our concept of realism must be wide and political, sovereign over all
conventions.” Realism then moves from a commitment to a
particular generic verisimilitude to a political commitment.
This
commitment is linked to the particular form of Marxism that Brecht took on in
the late 1920’s, a form of Marxism that blurred the lines between structures of
the representation of reality and attempts to transform that reality. We can see this when we see Brecht’s definition
of realism.
“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.”
Realism then is always linked to
particularity. It relates to a
particular mode of society and it is related to particular class relations. At the same time, it is also perspective on
that particularity that is defined through perspective. The realistic view comes from a particular
‘standpoint’, a ‘standpoint’ that is defined by one that ‘offers the broadest
solutions for the pressing difficulties’ of a particular society. Therefore, realism must be dynamic in two
senses. In the first sense, realism must
be defined by particularity, because reality is in constant motion. One never steps into the same reality twice,
so to speak. At the same time, realism
must be a part of that movement that defines reality, to understand the world,
it must act in that world, in a manner that contributes to the class struggle. Brecht puts this need in strong polemical
terms.
“If we wish to
have a living and combative literature, which is fully engaged with reality and
fully grasps reality, a truly popular literature, we must keep step with the
rapid development of reality. The great
working masses are already on the move.
The industry and brutality of their enemies is proof of it.”
The perspective that we have alluded
to is now given a very particular identity, the proletariat, which is defined
by its rapidity and by its movement. It
is created through the particular movement of capitalism itself, the movement
from the countryside to the city, the construction of the factory, etc. The construction of the proletariat mirrors
the construction of capitalism as a whole.
In effect, the proletariat as a collective identity becomes the
subjective face of the social reality of global capitalism itself. To understand capitalism, the defining
structure of the world, must necessarily link up to the movement of the
proletariat, its goals, dreams and projects, and the only way to accomplish
that is to merge with those projects.
To understand this project, we need
to introduce a second term, one that Brecht brings up in the previous passage,
the popular. He notes that ‘a truly
popular literature’ is the only literature that “fully grasps reality.” In effect, the popular links art and
literature to the dynamic structure of reality.
It accomplishes this through its own production, which is defined by
non-continuity that is by gaps, setbacks, and destruction. The popular is far better defined by Adorno’s
term the non-identical, than it is by the static concepts of realism as set up
by Lukacs. Brecht defines this process
in the following enigmatic terms. “There
is not only such a thing as being popular,
there is also the process of becoming
popular.” It is this second term that is far more
important to the work of Brecht as it defines the goal of the author in a
society defined by class struggle. The
term ‘becoming’ becomes central in understanding this process as that it points
to the fact that the popular is neither static, nor is it always already in
existence. It is a term that comes up in
moments of revolt, but disappears into the domination of capital.
Brecht emphasizes the forms of
mystification and obfuscation that enter into the process of neutralizing the
popular.
It is precisely
in the so-called poetical forms that ‘the people’ are represented in a
superstitious fashion, or, better, in a fashion that encourages
superstition. They endow the people with
unchanging characteristics, hallowed traditions, art forms, habits and customs,
religiosity, hereditary enemies, invincible power and so on. A remarkable unity appears between tormenters
and tormented, exploiters and exploited, deceivers and deceived; it is by no
means a question of the masses of ‘little’ working people in opposition to
those above them.
Art then has the possibility of
suppressing the production of this active and resistant sense of the popular
through a form of ‘superstition’. The
‘poetical form’ can do this through the presentation of a people that is
unchanging in nature, defined in classically ethnographic terms, customs,
traditions, and religion. Just as this mode
of representation allows for the neutralization of a colonized people, the
static image of the people of the metropole allows for a similar control. At the same time, this static image
neutralizes the class antagonisms that define these societies. A false unity is presented between the figure
of the exploited and the figure of the exploited, those who lie and those who
are lied to. An image of the whole is
produced through this deception that allows for the perpetuation of this
inequity. It is precisely this which
becomes the superstition mystifying and covering up the structure of the
system.
It would be worth returning to the
question of Lukacs, if briefly. It is
this possibility of mystification that seems to be driving Brecht’s animosity
towards his understanding of aesthetics, because an earlier, authentic vision
of reality can slip into this ‘superstition’ or mystification of reality. Furthermore, Lukacs’ synthetic concept of
totality has the ability to contribute to this process of mystification, by
suppressing the antagonisms of the social structure. If one goes back to the literature that
Lukacs thinks of as literature in decline, one sees a literature that gestures
to a destruction of the synthesis that defines the hegemony of the earlier
era. For all the problems of this
literature, it is a genuine attempt to understand the non-synthetic dimensions
of the structure, the very things that are suppressed by Lukacs’ demand for
synthesis.
So then what does it mean to produce
a genuinely popular form of art? Brecht
links it up to popular movements.
“Popular means: intelligible to the
broad masses, adopting and enriching their forms of expression/assuming their
standpoint, confirming and correcting it/representing the most progressive
section of the people so that it can assume leadership, and therefore
intelligible to other sections of the people as well/relating to traditions and
developing them/communicating to that portion of the people which strives for
the leadership the achievements of the section that rules the nation.”
A genuinely popular form of art
resists those forms of mystification that define the neutralization of a
people. This is accomplished first and
foremost by recognizing the qualities and abilities that exist in latent form
in that people, putting those qualities and abilities in a conscious form and
allowing for their development. At the
same time, it offers the ability to correct forms of mystification that have
come into being. The popular does this
by linking it back to the history of a people through its traditions, although
in a manner that doesn’t present those traditions as static. Those traditions can be redeveloped and
rethought, and transformed to deal with contemporary reality. All of these dimensions are directed towards
producing modes of revolutionary organization and the overthrow of the ruling
class.
However, this project must be
understood in terms of its lack of predictability. The project needs to be linked back to the
contingency of the process itself.
Brecht asks,
“Is there no
solution then? There is. The new ascendant class shows it. It 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 again by stepping out of the masses but by
stepping back into them. The masses shed
their dehumanization and thereby men become men again—but not the same men as
before.”
The solution occurs by stepping into
the daily practices of the masses, that is to say, the ascendant class of the
proletariat. Furthermore, the solution
is defined by futurity, rather than some form of the golden age. Instead, it is defined by the everyday
conditions of exploitation of that insurgent class, the techniques that define
its domination. The possibility of
solution exists in a scattered form, in the everyday forms of cooperation that
define the very possibility of the work day, the forms of common sense that are
mutated, the dimensions of everyday practice that are not within social
synthesis.
However, one cannot predict how
these elements come together in order to end the practices of
‘dehumanization.’ As Brecht notes, ‘men
become men again—but not the same men as before.’ It is precisely this new man,
which becomes the unknown quality of the process, the aleatory element that
cannot be predicted, but is nonetheless the goal of the whole process. This then turns the emphasis of the project
to the process of production itself, returning us to the question of the
experiment, which provides the quality of surprise and the non-subjective to
the artistic process.
For Brecht, he links this aleatory
dimension of the experiment with his acts of collaboration with workers, who
break him out of the traditional space of the theater. It adds a dimension to the production that “was
never literary or stated in terms of theatrical aesthetics.” This non-aesthetic dimension of class
conscious workers links the project back to an attempt to create a socially
useful form of art, but not one that is either conservative or
predictable. Instead, the workers were
willing to consider the validity of the most non-conventional forms of artistic
production and representation if it contributed to the process of collective
critical consciousness. As Brecht notes,
“The workers
judged everything according to the truth of its content; they welcomed every
innovation which helped the representation of truth, of the real mechanism of
society; they rejected everything that seemed theatrical, technical equipment
that merely worked for its own sake—that is to say, that did not yet fulfill,
or no longer fulfilled, its purpose.”
The process becomes linked to this
truth function, that is, to the critical understanding of the ‘real mechanism
of society.’ The experimental process is
directed to finding this social mechanism within the dross of the purely
‘theatrical, technical.’ This process of
discovering social reality can never stop, as that the very nature of that
reality is constantly in flux. Hence,
the innovation becomes welcome, the unfamiliar a way of reorienting one’s self
with the crisis of representation. At
the same time, this process allows for the honing of skills and new forms of
intersubjective relations that Brecht insists are crucial to transforming the
society. The workers leave with a new
set of tools for creating the new, if unknown future society, as well as
contributing to an artistic process. At
points, when he had the time and money, Brecht was willing to stretch this out
indefinitely. During a DDR, state
sponsored production of Galileo, Brecht responded to the criticism that if the
practices continued at this rate, the production would come into being in four
years, by agreeing and stating that this would be a productive framework.
But this is getting us away from the
focus of the crisis that put these artistic practices into focus, that is,
during the crisis and collapse of the Weimar republic during the late 1920’s
and the early 1930’s. Brecht wrote a set
of plays known as the Lehrstucke
during this period that focused on the very artistic practices of
experimentation and working with non-actors, which were later defended in the
expressionism debates, and were used as an example against Lukacs’
conceptualization of realism. Of these
plays, the most useful to look at are three short plays, Der Jasager, Der Neinsager,
and Die Massnahme. All three are reworkings of a tradition No
played known as Taniko or The Valley-Hurling, and each of the
revisions were produced in non-traditional theatrical spaces, and with the
collaboration of non-actors. The first
two plays were written for a school opera, while Die Massnahme was written worker’s theatrical groups. None of the productions ever got the
extensive production schedules that they were intended for, and could be
considered only ‘partial successes at best if one uses the terms that Brecht
sets up for the concept of the experiment.
At the same time, it is precisely
the partial nature of the work that makes it interesting for the conversation
at hand. The plays take an older,
popular literary form and repeatedly work through that material in order to
produce a new form of art that is relevant to the present of its
production. Each of those productions
went through extensive revisions and processing with collectives, generally
linked up with the worker’s movement.
This constant reworking of the material transforms the play from a
traditional affirmation of a social symbolic to a much more unstable and
dynamic sense of that symbolic. Each of
these revisions takes us farther away from the original production, and into a
new artistic form, although it’s a question whether that process is ever
entirely successful.
The first two forms of the play,
attempts that were intended to be presented in tandem, although never were,
hold onto the more traditional form of the play. They are both simple two act plays defined by
the same narrative arc. A boy, whose
mother is sick, goes on a journey with his master to obtain knowledge from
beyond the mountain. The boy goes on
this journey in order to get medicine to cure his mother, medicine apparently
only available in this distant village.
The boy is told of the danger on the voyage, but he insists on going on
the voyage. While on this journey, the
boy becomes sick and the party tells him that he must be thrown into the valley
and killed in order to continue the journey by the traditions of the society.
The difference in the narrative
occurs in the decision itself. In the first
version of the play, the young boy accepts the decision, and affirms the
tradition of the society. The tradition
of the society demands this voluntary affirmation of the custom, which is
acceded to by the boy. The play ends with the following speech on the part of
the boy. “I knew quite well that if I
made this journey/ I might forfeit my life to make it./ I was thinking of/ My
dear mother/ That drove me on to join you./ Take then my jug/ Fill it with a
healing draught/ Bring it to my mother/ When you return home.” This acceptance is slightly modified because
of the son’s relationship to the mother, and the ability to obtain medicine to
cure the mother at the end of the journey, but the boy accepts the nature of
the society, and states that he should be treated the same as others.
The second version of the play
reverses this decision. Instead of
accepting the custom as it was created, the boy responds to the question with
the following statement, “My answer was wrong, but your question was more so. Whoever says A does not have to say B. He can recognize that A was wrong. I wanted to fetch medicine for my mother, but
now I have become ill myself and it is no longer possible. And I want immediately to turn back, as the
new situation demands. I am asking you
too to turn back and take me home. Your
research can surely wait.” The group accepts this decision after some
discussion, and returns to the village to install a “new custom”, a “new law”
in the village. The decision then
becomes transformation of the law, a revision based on the revelation that
occurred because of the refusal.
Both plays then center on the nature
of the decision, and focus on the importance of the individual’s decision to
either confirm or deny the necessity for sacrifice in the social symbolic. In the first, this act is of simple
acceptance. It follows in the tradition
of the old No play, which ritualizes the need to uphold rituals and traditions. While the second refuses that, pointing to
the possibility of a new social symbolic.
This second version of the play innovates on the first version by
introducing contingency of the act itself, but it keeps within the logic of the
first version in that it stays focused on the single act, keeping the lesson
focused on the morality of the single decision.
One either affirms the old symbolic or, in turn, affirms a new order.
The next version of the play, Die Massnahme, however is a considerable
revision of the earlier versions of the play.
The narrative is moved from the timelessness of the original and is set
in the relatively contemporary class struggle of the present. It also expands that narrative, moving it
from two acts to eight acts. The play
also introduces several new characters, including the control chorus, the four
agitators, along with other characters that define each of the other
scenarios. At the same time, the figure
of the master disappears. The actors
switch positions throughout the play, performing different roles throughout the
narrative. The idea, evidently, is to
allow each individual to play the figure of the young comrade.
The role of the social symbolic also
becomes much more contingent. As The
Control Chorus notes,
“All those who
fight for Communism must know how to fight and how not to fight; to tell the
truth and not to tell the truth; to be servile and also how not to be servile;
to keep one’s promises and also not keep them; how to confront a danger, how to
avoid danger; to be known by sight and unknown.
All those who fight for Communism have just this to be said in their
favor: that they are fighting for communism.”
Two important transformations occur
within this narrative. First, the
narrative shifts from the perspective of those who want to maintain a certain
social order to one that wants to overthrow that moment. Second, and more importantly, the narrative
is no longer focused on a single and definite decision. The figure of the individual who fights for
Communism is continually involved in a process of contingent decision-making,
each moment possibly calling for radically different actions. The narrative has moved from a position of
ethical commitment to critical instrumentality, a position defined by constant
critical engagement and decision making.
Each decision exists only in the conjuncture of its own production, only
contingently defining other decisions.
The following acts of the play
follow a series of critical errors made by the figure of the young comrade,
each being defined by a commitment to an abstract moral code, rather than the
instrumental needs of the situation.
This begins with the decision to act as the advocate for the coolies,
rather than create a situation where they advocate for themselves. The second focuses on the failure of the
organizer to continue organizing strike breakers to hold the picket line,
instead getting caught up in a single incident of injustice. He then refuses to do the necessary work to
form a necessary alliance, and also produces a premature insurrection. Each of these moments, the young comrade
tries to switch his role from the critical facilitator of other’s actions to
becoming the actor himself, to move from a critical and instrumental position
to an inflexible and moral position.
Against this singular position,
defined by error created through inflexibility, the narrative offers a second
position, defined by a cohesive collectivity, the party apparatus, which is
defined in the following terms when challenged by the young comrade.
“We are it./ You and I and them—all
of us./ Comrade, the clothes it’s dressed in are your clothes, the head/ that
it thinks with is yours/ Where I’m lodging, there is its house, and where you
suffer an/ assault it fights back.”
This links the figure of the party
to the intimate inter-personal relations of the young comrade and the agitators
that he is leading. The party literally
is dressed in those individuals clothing.
It thinks their thoughts and fights in defense of assaults of its
members. This collectivity allows for a
critical decision making process, a process that is not marked by
transcendence, but rather is marked by an immanent decision-making
process. It allows for the wisdom of
each of its constitutive parts to contribute to a project.
The definition of this collectivity
is expanded on by The Control Chorus, who produces a much more cohesive image
of the party.
“ One man may have two eyes/ But the
Party had a thousand./ One man may see a town/ But the Party sees six
countries./ One man can spare a moment/ The party has several moments./ One
single man can be annihilated/ But the party can’t be annihilated.”
The understanding of the party then
shifts from one that emphasizes inter-subjectivity to one that produces a
metaphor of a composite body, multi-eyed, far seeing, and eternal. The body of the party then can allow for the
process of critical instrumentality to go forwards, through its ability to
understand each particular event within larger social settings. It is able to do this through its collective
construction, a construction that is defined by the continual discussion that
defines the very artistic production that Brecht privileges in his own work.
The narrative ends with the same
need for sacrifice that comes up in the first two narratives, and it follows
the first narrative in affirming that sacrifice. This affirmation of the sacrifice then
reverses the emphasis on critical instrumentality that defines the rest of the
narrative. In the end, the young
comrade’s ethical decision to die becomes the moment in which the decision to
tell the truth, to confront the danger, becomes the correct ethical
decision. The critical instrumentality
of the other decisions is then ultimately founded on a need for commitment, and
for sacrifice. This sacrifice allows for
the entire critical operation to continue, and for the success of the
revolution, however, this moment can only be recognized at its need. It remains out of the realm of prediction.
However, even this more fully
realized version of the play remains, in its own way, partial and
incomplete. It was shown only a few
times and was extensively criticized by the communist press, for it
abstraction, and for its emphasis on the ethical. It can also be asked if the sacrifice at the
end of the play returns the play to the original religious and transcendental
structure. A second and just as obvious
point could be made that the play did not translate into the revolutionary
transformation of German society, a project that Brecht had intended it to
contribute to. At the same time, it
gestured to the collective forms of artistic production that marked the
revolutionary avant-garde of the next world revolution, that of 1968, whose
final results remain undetermined.
