Walter Benjamin on Brecht
September 26, 2020
Some excerpts from Walter Benjamin’s Understanding Brecht (Benjamin, 1998), plus notes. See also a previous post on Brecht and the Chinese Opera.
The point at issue in the theatre today can be more accurately defined in relation to the stage than to the play. The abyss which separates the actors from the audience like the dead from the living, the abyss whose silence heightens the sublime in drama, whose resonance heightens the intoxication of opera, this abyss which, of all the elements of the stage, most indelibly bears the traces of its sacral origins, has lost its function. The stage is still elevated, but it no longer rises from an immeasurable depth; it has become a public platform. Upon this platform the theatre now has to install itself. That is the situation. But, as happens in many situations, here too the business of disguising it has prevailed over its proper realisation. (Benjamin, 1998, p. 1)
Žižek said of the Wire that it is a community staging its own story to and for itself. This is the sense in which, for them at least, the stage “rises from immeasurable depths”—it rises from the inside. To say that it is now a “public platform” is to say that the audience encounters it from the outside, as if looking in through a window.
Epic theatre casts doubt upon the notion that theatre is entertainment. It shakes the social validity of theatre-as-entertainment by robbing it of its function within the capitalist system. It also threatens the privileges of the critics. These privileges are based on the technical expertise which enables the critic to make certain observations about productions and performances. The criteria he applies in making his observations are only very rarely within his own control; he seldom worries about this, but relies upon ‘theatre aesthetics’ in the details of which nobody is particularly interested. If, however, the aesthetic of the theatre ceases to remain in the background, if its forum is the audience and its criterion is no longer the effect registered by the nervous system of single individuals but the degree to which the mass of spectators becomes a coherent whole, then the critic as he is constituted today is no longer ahead of that mass but actually finds himself far behind it. (Benjamin, 1998, pp. 9-10)
The naturalism of the fourth wall gives the audience the illusion of being “the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place”. These two things go together: the “reality” of the representation and the critical anonymity of the audience. This allows it to function as consumer entertainment—the observational perspective of the audience is effectively homogenised, ensuring that everyone’s “expert” opinions speak in the same discourse. This allows a body of criteria to form which provide a publicly stable way of assessing the “quality” of a production. These criteria and how to apply them—always in the background of the social unconscious—demarcate (for the first time in the bourgeois theatre) the domain of expertise of the critic.
Epic theatre attacks the basic view that art may do no more than lightly touch upon experience—the view which grants only to kitsch the right to encompass the whole range of experience, and then only for the lower classes of society. This attack upon the basis is at the same time an assault upon the critics’ privileges. And this the critics have sensed; in the debate over epic theatre they must be considered an interested party. (Benjamin, 1998, p. 10)
The supreme task of an epic production is to give expression to the relationship between the action being staged and everything that is involved in the act of staging per se. (Benjamin, 1998, p. 11)
The apparatus of staging is revealed through the interruption of the action and its decomposition into gesture. (See also Donald Davidson’s deflationary account of metaphorical meaning.) Gesture, here, is the material component of the action. The materiality is foregrounded by e.g. repetition of the gesture, text in posters on the set wall, etc. Revealing the stage apparatus as apparatus forces us to encounter the gesture as gesture, by interrupting our ability to encounter it as action.
Twice Galy Gay is summoned to a wall, the first time to change his clothes, the second time to be shot; in both cases the summoning gesture is the same. He himself uses the same gesture twice: the first time to renounce the fish he wanted to buy, the second time to accept the elephant. This is the kind of discovery that will satisfy the interest of the audience who frequent epic theatre; it is with discoveries like these that they will get their money’s worth. (Benjamin, 1998, p. 12)
Brecht opposes his epic theatre to the theatre which is dramatic in the narrow sense and whose theory was formulated by Aristotle. This is why Brecht introduces the dramaturgy of his theatre as a ‘non-Aristotelean’ one, just as Riemann introduced a non-Euclidean geometry. This analogy should make it clear that what we have here is not a competitive relationship between the forms of drama in question. Riemann refused the axiom of parallels; what Brecht refuses is Aristotelean catharsis, the purging of the emotions through identification with the destiny which rules the hero’s life. (Benjamin, 1998, p. 18)
The sympathy of Aristotelan catharsis is that of the external audience to the “real scene” they are the unseen spectator of. This phenomenon is similar to what Žižek and Pflaller have called interpassivity, a kind of vicarious identification which unloads responsibility for action onto the other. (Canned laughter is a favorite example: the TV laughs so you don’t have to.) This is a special kind of identification, enjoyable in its production of affect without involvement or responsibility. It is the identification we feel with the gazelle chased by the cheetah in the nature documentary.
The relaxed interest of the audience for which the productions of epic theatre are intended is due, precisely, to the fact that practically no appeal is made to the spectator’s capacity for empathy. The art of epic theatre consists in arousing astonishment rather than empathy. To put it as a formula, instead of identifying itself with the hero, the audience is called upon to learn to be astonished at the circumstance with which he has his being. (Benjamin, 1998, p. 18)
The task of epic theatre, Brecht believes, is not so much to develop actions as to represent conditions. But ‘represent’ does not here signify ‘reproduce’ in the sense used by the theoreticians of Naturalism. Rather, the first point at issue is to uncover those conditions. (One could just as well say: to make them strange.) This uncovering (making strange, alienating) of conditions is brought about by processes being interrupted. (Benjamin, 1998, p. 18)
The “making strange” is meant in exactly the same sense that a word is made strange by its repetition. It is a foregrounding of the materiality of the word, or the gesture, which just is its very capacity to participate in different narratives—materiality in this sense is narrative indeterminacy.
[Interruption] is, to mention just one of its aspects, the origin of the quotation. Quoting a text implies interrupting its context. It will readily be understood, therefore, that epic theatre, which depends on interruption, is quotable in a very specific sense. That its texts are quotable would be nothing very special. But the gestures used in the process of acting are another matter. (Benjamin, 1998, p. 19)
References
- Benjamin, W. (1998). Understanding Brecht. Verso.