Brecht and Critical Theory: Dialectics and contemporary aesthetics

209 Pages·2005·8.467 MB·English

by  Sean Carney

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ISBN 978-0-415-34974-1
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Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies
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Brecht and Critical Theory
Bertolt Brecht’s theories of political theatre position him as one of the most
important and controversial playwright/directors of the twentieth century.
Brecht maintained that unless ideas were useful they should be discarded
and this presents a challenge to contemporary Brecht scholarship: what to do
with Brecht today? Brecht and Critical Theory argues that Brecht’s aesthetic
theories are still highly relevant and that an appreciation of his theory and
theatre are essential to an understanding of contemporary critical theory.
This book examines the influence of Brecht’s aesthetic on the pre-eminent
materialist critics of the twentieth century: Louis Althusser, Walter Ben-
jamin, Roland Barthes, Frederic Jameson, Theodor W. Adorno and
Raymond Williams. Sean Carney goes on to re-read Brecht through the lens
of post-structuralism arguing that there is a Lacanian Brecht and a Der-
ridean Brecht, the result is a new Brecht whose vital importance for the
present is located in theories of decentred subjectivity. Brecht and Critical
Theory maps the many ways in which Brechtian thinking pervades critical
thought today, informing the critical tools and stances that make up the
contemporary study of aesthetics.
Sean Carney is Assistant Professor of Drama and Theatre in the Depart-
ment of English at McGill University, Montreal.
Routledge advances in theatre and performance studies
1 Theatre and Postcolonial Desires
Awam Amkpa
2 Brecht and Critical Theory
Dialectics and contemporary aesthetics
Sean Carney
Brecht and Critical Theory
Dialectics and contemporary aesthetics
Sean Carney
First published 2005
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 2005 Sean Carney
Typeset in Garamond by Wearset, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-415-34974-5
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Note on the text viii
Introduction: Brecht now 1
1 Brecht and language 9
Marxism and rhetoric 9
Brecht and postmodernism 12
Verfremdungseffektand Unheimlich 14
Psychoanalysis and class-consciousness 22
Brecht and class 25
Gestus, language, negation 29
Marxism and science 35
Lacanian gestus 38
2 Dialectical images 45
Dialectic at a standstill 45
Jetztzeit 50
Dialectical images 52
Modelbooks 59
Kafka’s gestus 62
Trauerspiel 66
Brechtian Trauerspiel 71
Mourning as a socially symbolic act 76
Hamlet 78
‘Marx – das Unheimliche’ 80
3 Brecht and myth 83
The structuralist activity 83
The ruins of costume 85
vi Contents
Brechtian photography 88
Brecht and myth 91
Numen and punctum 94
The maternal 100
Fetishism 103
Peaceable speech 105
The art of living 108
Seismology 112
4 Brecht and narrative 116
An ethics of Marxism 116
The political unconscious 121
Contradiction 125
Allegory’s violence: Life of Galileo 130
Jameson, Frye, anagogy 135
Menippean satire 138
Dialogism and the dialectic 139
Der Dreigroschenroman 140
5 Brecht and tragedy 152
Dialectics in the theatre 152
Negative dialectics 157
Dialectical stereoscopy 161
Adorno and Brecht 164
Endgame 168
Modern tragedy 173
Brechtian tragedy 177
Conclusion 185
Notes 188
References 190
Index 196
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for permission to include excerpts from Brecht on Theatre: The
Development of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by John Willett. Translation
copyright © 1964, renewed 1992 by John Willett. Reprinted by permission
of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. I am also
grateful for permission granted by Suhrkamp Verlag, and Methuen Publish-
ing Limited, to quote from Brecht on Theatre. Material is copyright © 1957,
1963 and 1964 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.
This book is based on dissertation work completed under the supervision
of Ian Balfour, Barbara Godard and Hersh Zeifman. I am grateful to all
three for their support. I must single out Barbara Godard, my primary
supervisor. Her commitment, dedication, generosity and energy are an
inspiration to me. The research for this book was supported by Ontario
Graduate Scholarships and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada fellowship. My thanks to Joe Whiting and Yeliz Ali at
Routledge for their encouragement. Finally, my partner Jackie Buxton’s
support throughout this process has been immeasurable, and she has had a
powerful influence on my work. I dedicate this book in equal measures to
my parents and to the members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees
Local 3903, past, present and future.
Note on the text
I have modified the Harvard reference system in order to avoid anachronism
in the text and to accommodate a style dominated by close reading and fre-
quent quotation. When it is clear that subsequent quotations in the same
paragraph are from the same source, I’ve given only page numbers. More-
over, the date that is given in the text is the original date of publication of
the work cited. The date of the specific edition or translation used is given
in the list of works cited, at the end of the entry, if it differs from the ori-
ginal date. For the sake of simplicity I have suspended this rule and allowed
for anachronism in my citations of Brecht on Theatre: the Development of an Aes-
thetic, due to the unique nature of this work, which draws upon materials
from various sources. Readers are referred to Brecht on Theatre for John
Willett’s historical contextualizing of individual writings by Brecht.
Introduction
Brecht now
This book proceeds from a single overarching idea: the dramaturgy of
Bertolt Brecht constitutes a unique modern aesthetic that opens new
avenues of thought about art and life. What follows is not, however, only a
consideration of Brecht’s aesthetic. It is an examination of various responses
to this aesthetic, while at the same time being itself another response to
Brecht’s aesthetic. This book is an attempt to make something new out of
Brecht, even as it remains faithful to the core tenets of Brechtian thought.
These chapters are a return to Brecht, yet they also ‘go beyond’ Brecht, in a
manner which I consider Brechtian, since, as I suggest, a central Brechtian
activity is to take up and contain an historicized and perhaps antiquated aes-
thetic object and remake it, through theatre, into something new and vital.
Brecht’s work makes possible a new kind of critical thinking about
theatre, because Brecht was not only a playwright, not only a director, not
even only what today we call an artistic director of a company, but he was
also a poet, a theoretician, polemicist and political commentator. But Brecht
is more than the sum of these parts. Brecht is ultimately a figure for the
ongoing potential for theatre to stretch its boundaries and to restage its
content in new and unanticipated ways. Brecht’s thought encourages us to
rethink our critical perceptions of theatre in general; his work suggests the
possibility of examining all theatre from a Brechtian perspective. In this I
think that Brecht is unique. His aesthetic provides tools for transforming
works of art of various ideological underpinnings into dialectical activities.
Just as Brecht staged classics such as Dom Juan and Faust only in order to
push against the grain of the drama and bring out the dialectical kernel in
the canonical work, so I am interested in examining the ‘complex seeing’
that Brecht’s work offers for looking at theatre in general. While the idea of
a Brechtian theatre can mean many things, here I will take it to mean, above
all, theatre that absorbs and actively rewrites dramatic tradition in a politic-
ization and dialecticizing of dramatic form.
Underlying Brecht’s aesthetic is the assumption that theatre is ideo-
logical, but that it need not only be ideological. It can also be something
else: ideology plus. Ideology contains a political potential that can be
exploited by dialectics. In what follows I consider the question of what