In Leviathan's Belly. Darko Suvin
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et al. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Transl. P.P. Ferguson. Cambridge: Polity P, 1999, 131-39.
1. 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,