complice in humanity

In his 1931 essay “Left-wing Melancholy,” which presents a critique of the poetry of Erich Kästner, Walter Benjamin makes a proposition about the “task” (Aufgabe) of “political lyric”:

Was Wunder, da sie ihre Funktion darin haben, diesen Typ mit sich selbst zu versöhnen und jene Identität zwischen Berufs- und Privatleben herzustellen, die von diesen Leuten unter dem Namen »Menschlichkeit« verstanden wird, in Wahrheit aber das eigentlich Bestialische ist, weil alle echte Menschlichkeit – unter den heutigen Verhältnissen - nur aus der Spannung zwischen jenen beiden Polen hervorgehen kann. In ihr bilden sich Besinnung und Tat, sie zu schaffen ist die Aufgabe jeder politischen Lyrik, und erfüllt wird sie heute am strengsten in den Gedichten von Brecht.

[It is surprising that their [the poems’] function is to reconcile this type of person to himself, and to establish that identity of professional and private life which these men understand by the name “humanity” but which is in truth the genuinely bestial, since authentic humanity—under present conditions—can arise only from a tension between these two poles. In this tension, consciousness and deed are formed. To create it is the task of the all political lyricism, and today this task is most strictly fulfilled by Bertolt Brecht’s poems.]

In this somewhat involuted formulation, Benjamin describes as the task of political lyric its capacity to create “authentic humanity.” In contrast to recourse to a humanity that is actually “bestial” because it is formed through the identity rather than the difference of professional and private life, “authentic humanity” would be formed through the maintenance of this tension. In Benjamin’s estimation, the easy reconciliation, or identity, of professional and private life involves the absorption of “life” into professional interests, constituting the “bestiality” of bourgeois consciousness. The formulation is marked by the indeterminacy of the object (sie) of this task: sie zu schaffen--“to create it,” humanity; “to accomplish it,” the tension between poles; “to form them,” consciousness and deed. This indeterminacy is not merely an index of overdetermination, of the multiply determinate processes invoked by the task, but points to a series of mediating processes that must be moved through in order to oppose humanity and bestiality in such a way that an idea of “genuine humanity” can also be preserved.

This scene, a scene that retains “genuine humanity” as a possible outcome of not reconciling one to oneself, begins to articulate the terms of complicity upon which political consciousness—and political lyric following the Brechtian model—is based. Benjamin values political lyric because it prevents an individual from becoming reconciled with himself—and from this tension, “consciousness and deed” can be seen to arise. Such tension can be described in the terms of guilt that complicity proposes.

Complicity, Mitschuld, or Teilhaberschaft, is defined as “association or participation in or as if in a wrongful act,” and it’s the “complice” part of this that is important, as it sets up a relation between the act, or crime, i.e. what has been done, and a nebulous idea about what counts as “association or participation” in this act. In this sense, then, the problem that underlies complicity—and onto which this work opens—is a problem of part/whole relations, and how one can be seen, or see oneself, as having a part in a wrongful act. It could be said that complicity raises a question about the phantasy or reality of the wrongful act—and this, perhaps, in a way not dissimilar to the stakes of reality/phantasy in Freud’s thinking about seduction. So if complicity begins with an assumption that there is a crime and therefore someone who can assume guilt for it, it ends more speculatively, with relations of guilt as Freud describes in The Ego and the Id (and/or Civilization and Its Discontents), where something like aggression, the need for punishment, pushes guilt into a fantasy formation. Indeed, it becomes easy to see how complicity is a structure of fantasy. I am interested in relations of “associations or participation” that register at the most minimal level, and thus that hold this question of in what way the notion of “taking part” can be construed. If the effective relation of guilt/aggression holds complicity in place, at once offering an explanation for it and suggesting how it contributes to the compelling hold that complicity seems to have in thinking about political agency. 

In what way—in what place, in what time—is living itself a form of complicity; more: in what way—in what place, in what time—is it not?

bit by bit

The point being: to forget the object, or the terms of this object, and to pick it up again, after it has acquired a strange familiarity, which is the externality proper to itself. 

Does this psychoanalytical process of abstraction, following the determinations of the Real in object relations, suggest an alternate ontological figure for capitalism, as it's interesting to note that Toscano's reading of "real abstraction" takes the Lacanian real as real: "This ontology of real abstraction--which is inextricably political, historical, and economic--is, in Finelli's view, a dual ontology to the extent that it both affirms concrete reality as a 'specific articulation of differences' and reveals the void at the heart of Capital, as it were, as the fact of the Real of its abstraction--to speak in a Lacanian vein--is its absence of determinations, the fact that it has no historical or cultural content per se" (Toscano, "The Open Secret of Real Abstraction" 276). My reading of object relations permits thinking about a "real" that is not void or absence, though it too appears in this form. For if there it is the object's perspective that is the real--and all of the terms of inaccessibility that go along with this--then abstraction's connection to thought might also not be as Toscano describes in the Marxian schema, where "abstraction precedes thought," and as he qualifies, "More precisely, it is the social activity of abstraction, in its form as commodity exchange, that plays the pivotal role in the analysis of real abstraction" (281). 

Psychoanalysis loses grip of the way that abstraction is a social activity; it seems to immediately dispense with the idea of anything social, about activity. But if this all sits inside of the inaccessibility of the perspective of the object as a form of knowledge, if this is something like psychoanalysis's grounding of "knowledge" in the parameters of the irrational, it might mean something else for abstraction to precede irrational thought, for even if this is implied in the Marxian analysis of real abstraction, lingering in the phantasy world of real abstraction would imply a form of "knowing" somewhere between Winnicott's notions of relating and using. Impossible to sustain this perspective, which includes the "false" separation of psychic interiority from the "world," it is perhaps a way of thinking about the Real not as void, but as a space in which the Real is acquired, and acquired, as it were, bit by bit. 

Along these lines, the lines about forgetting the object, this is the very first post I made to this blog, back on Thursday May 3, 2007: 

where does a strange silence begin? some have suggested that it is in the forest, the sound that a falling tree makes when no one is around to hear. at times, for brecht, it's the talked-about tree that is the strange silence. A Strange Silence is the title of the project, my dissertation, the thing that everything here is a footnote to, especially the poems, since they are the leaves, what is left over.
from 4/4/07//:

and the green fall to unsafe water:welcome to the 21st century let not many other things be spared--save your happiness; this was Brecht's nightmare.Humanity, the human dog, wants to let go to forget, dismiss, judge, pee wherever it wants.a condition remiss, or a saying unheard.in the woods, we are all quiet; it is solace.and save to other things, too, save to find yourself alone. the distance is unmarked. cross-hatches are what i saw in the desert and didn't draw.the things nightmares are made of leave you with the distance of their unmarkings. becky's dreams are about writing (ask me how i felt when my mom died. it's a feeling i can't think of). i watch her grow.communism is short-lived. the brown notebooks are filled. you are always thinking of brecht. his return is unsettling, a time when autonomy in writing is needed.

picture: smoke-covered Minneapolis, with winds shifting downward from the wildfire in Alberta. 
Question posed by RT: "To what extent is it missing from psychoanalysis or occluded in the general category of mourning--the sociology or ethnography of objects and the real abstractions that make them?" Question abstracted and taken up in both "Psychoanalysis and Lit II" and "Poetry as Cultural Critique," classes which have now come to an end. I don't think I've ever said this seriously before, either, least of all to a class, but "it's been real."

counting in silence

What does it mean to draw attention to Brecht's poetry--to poetry in general--without redeploying the terms of genre, without, for example, deriving from the contrast of his poetic work and his dramatic, a distinction that matters, as genre distinction? At the end of this semester's poetry class, it seems three conclusions were reached: 1) as David Lloyd suggests in "A White Song," that poetry is a condition of "endless readability"; 2) that poetry is something that is an experience of feeling language; and 3) that poetry represents the perspective of the object. Potentially, each of these involves a certain "unrealizability topos," a term Christopher Nealon uses to describe the non-closure of language in the world it discloses. Is it simply that "poetry" names the space for talking about these things--always these things--at the expense of other things?

In reading Brecht, I am drawn to the spaces of non-closure, those spaces that also mark or play at something like the entanglement of illusive appearance and reality in Marx, their nearly impossible extricability from one another. Where is the desire for this extrication? (would be one place to start). Seen in another way, the scene of this extrication takes place only opposite to another no-less real scene--that of the absence, lack, or hole of the Real. Thus Lacanian psychoanaysis and Hegelian dialectics allow for the fantasy of locating oneself on one side or another and develop from the resultant dynamism a sense of the governance by convention of these spaces, as genre. Staying with the impossibility of this extrication is not the equivalent of saying there is no outside; it is a matter of saying there is nothing, outside--of counting in silence, of literally "counting in" silence, as a positive, substantive form of omission. Brecht's lines from "To Those Born After":

Ah, what kind of times are these, where
a conversation about trees is almost a crime
because it includes a silence about so much injustice! 

Was sind das für Zeiten, wo
Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist
Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschliesst!

On first reading, these lines register an experience of civilian guilt, a feeling or acknowledgment of one's complicity in the injustice of the world. This complicity, while both implicating the individual and registering the injustice in the world, also holds a place for oneself outside of that imagined world. If the trees could not be imagined as standing outside of the injustice of the world--fantasized as not included--then the terms being spoken about would not even be of human conversation about trees, but about the trees speaking themselves. Complicity then registers this kind of fantastic activity of hallucinating oneself into a scene so that one actually comes to stand outside of it. This is the entire mode in which Brecht's poetry--and the problem of civilian guilt that I also come to describe through the illusiveness and indeterminacy of the poetic speaker--toils. The inadequacy or failing of this mode is a way of thinking about how "silence," a term that is meant to signal the unrealizability of a gest(ure) that is not properly social or symbolic, is not just about what is left out of conversation, the merely "mental abstraction" of reality that retains the rights to perspective, but also consists of something, or has substance as such.

In what sense would this kind of silence be (almost) criminal? The crime here would not be one's guilt or complicity in injustice, as is implied in the first reading; to count in silence, to speak poetically (i.e. in a conversation about trees) would be a crime on the basis of the constraints on speaking in "times, where" saying nothing is already saying too much. This kind of silence would not be inadequacy; it would already be too much. Counting oneself in in order to count oneself out--the defensive move that Brecht's work manifests--defends against the world, and in doing so, speaks to the limitation of the mode of complicity as moving toward the kind of political, socialized realization that Brecht imagines possible.

picture: the North Shore (from my first trip there). Poetry questions, thanks to the members of "Poetry as Cultural Critique." All other things are very old and the effort is to see what remains to maintain.

Further thoughts on the non-space of the university

At an institutional event today—a forum on unionization sponsored by the faculty senate and the MN Daily—I was reminded of what institutional space does. It frames a debate around the terms of those who represent power but appear as the market, as if those terms were somehow simply “there” to be represented. This is common enough and easily perceptible as the structure and effect of capitalism, but within an institution, such as the public university, where this phenomenon also sits as subject to a critique of power/knowledge, to behold it is yet another thing. This is a comment about incivility, on the one hand—it’s a comment about the space not being able to hold, within the terms it had established, a challenge to this frame itself. In this regard, it’s possible to see the apparent contingency of the event being called to an end before I got a chance to ask my “question” as far less contingent than that. I was about to ask a fairly “civil” “question” (the discussion, it had been stressed, should be considerate and should be civil, as should the Bureau of Mediation Services hearings, which had taken place in the preceding week), but also to call into question the terms that were being put forth, including the terms of civility (from which I also feel myself excluded, as someone who has been identified as too angry or as too aggressive, in tone, which I also feel amounts to my exclusion from the BMS hearings). The fact is, incivility is not an appealing position for unionization, either. The question, my question—How is it that a union could address and be critical of the changes in the public university in the past ten to fifteen years?—is always to be balanced against needing to appeal to individuals’ self-interest, in other words, strategically needing to validate the concerns expressed by both Aaron Sojourner and Joel Waldfogel about the compression of salaries, for example, when Waldfogel’s salary is over three hundred thousand dollars. So this is the point at which my civil question turns uncivil, and I hope that in writing about it, I can also attempt to do some further work on understanding the “work” of contingency in the university.

I have come to use the phrase “contingent faculty” to identify those who work in a position “without guarantee” at the university. This can include non-tenure-track faculty who are already included in the faculty instructional unit but don’t have tenure positions (term assistant professor, contract assistant professor). Here, contingency is seen as a politicized term, which many of these people may not identify with, due to the closeness of their standing to the tenure line and their disinclination to instead identify with those perceived as being still below, or of a different type of employee altogether. This group below, at the University of Minnesota, is understood as part of the P&A category (Professional & Administrative) and what I am writing to address is the unchallenged claim that held at tonight’s event, which was that these two groups of employees—tenure-line faculty and P&A instructional (“professional”) faculty—have separate interests and are distinct groups.

Waldfogel put forth this claim by initiating a distinction between tenure-line faculty and contingent faculty on the basis of research work, that contingent faculty teach “to eat” (and he has sympathy for anyone in this position and hopes they can find a way to get better terms) but that this is fundamentally different from what faculty do. He cited his own “research” study on those who supported the University of Oregon unionization and found that those who had a greater interest in research were less likely to be supportive of unionization. It’s easy to see where the argument goes, but I was struck by this formulation: “More productive, less supportive.” He went on to cite how just like other “amenities” that can be used (like the sports facility and new recreation center) to attract graduate students, amenities are need to bring in research faculty and unionization would be less appealing to those folks.

In my question turned uncivil, I would say, the only difference between my productivity and yours is that yours is paid for and supported by the institution, including this pathetic “research” study put forward to us tonight, which confuses effect for cause and is blind to the conditions of production.

I do research, I publish peer-reviewed articles, and I have a press interested in reviewing a book manuscript for which I will receive no “course release” to work on, no sabbatical to take, and no institutional grants to apply for. The people who are invested in maintaining this distinction, even at a very minimal level, are those who directly benefit from not having to share the responsibility of doing the work done by these employees. These are tenure-line faculty who can afford to “not get” the difference between the way that contingent labor is valued and the way their own is (acknowledging that there are still many who do get it). Is there much of a difference between the elitism espoused by Joel Waldfogel and the structure of this institutional space (the forum event itself) in which such a difference could go unchallenged? I wonder, tonight, how many more of such things I can sit through—the annihilating feeling of no one objecting to these terms (except, thank you, Michael Goldman). Waldfogel called the “method” of his research study “hogwash,” but its terms still stood. His measure of productivity was challenged but its ontological presuppositions were not and do not tend to get challenged even by faculty members in my own department (all of whom claim to be concerned about contingent faculty): the fact that within the university, the adjunct occupies the position, according to the definition in Merriam-Webster of being “added or accompanying in a subordinate capacity.” This is further qualified, in Merriam Webster, as “attached to a faculty or staff as a temporary or part-time member.” It is in this light that the stakes of Waldfogel’s phrase, “more productive, less supportive” emerge. In the humanities, productivity’s more familiar name is publication. The “more supportive, less productive” side, in contrast, is not, in actuality, another side, it is an included aspect of this productive labor, in all of the ways that are described in Marx and taken up by Silvia Federici, Selma James, and other Marxist feminists. Of course, this makes apparent the investment in the invisibility of this work. The way in which the reality-effect of the two sets of separate interests flickers and blinds.

I would go on to say: see here, your productivity is the result and real abstraction of so much other productivity. And this is probably obvious to a number of people in the room. It’s not the “market,” it’s the politics of the university. What’s less obvious, though, is what all the silence is about. Why didn’t I just say—I was right in front of the microphone when it was called done—oh, I’m sorry, I’ve got this question and I really just have to ask it? We’ve all been here, and we’ve been waiting, and we’ve heard enough from you. Silence, complicity (the past participle of adjungere, “to link up, join, add, attach”), “civil” guilt. This is also an a/effect of the terms in which it was all framed. The adjunct is included; she is invited to speak, so long as it’s in these terms; she can stand in line for the microphone, to ask her question, but her turn will never come. She will never get to decide about the terms of productivity, even though, ontologically, she is committed to that productivity. I think when we say that tenure-line faculty “don’t get it,” this is what I we mean, even though it’s often offered as an excuse or justification for this lack of understanding.

I can’t help but think of this “not getting it” in those terms that Brecht uses in explaining his dissatisfaction with how Mother Courage (in his 1938 play Mother Courage and Her Children) was received by audiences. He was disappointed that by and large, audiences felt empathy for Mother Courage (Anna Fierling), who killed, or let die, her three children, in her blind drive to profit off of the war. Brecht was disappointed that audiences empathized with her conflict rather than that they able to perceive that she “didn’t get it.” I often think about that difference when it is described (empathetically) that faculty “don’t get it.” Can Mother Courage be seen differently for not getting it, for not perceiving her life is contingent upon the death of her children? As Rei Terada describes in “Repletion: Masao Adachi, Landscape Film and Real Abstraction,” this distinction is also apparent in thinking about real abstraction, that “understanding real abstraction by definition departs from the sensory experience of real abstraction rather than being constituted in it.” Brecht’s dissatisfaction with the reception of Mother Courage can be seen in this way; it’s no wonder that he gives up on experience. He would have to in order to want to insist upon Mother Courage’s not-getting-it. If, in Terada’s model, understanding real abstraction can be seen as constituted by the sensory experience of real abstraction, not-getting-it is already inside all of that. Not-getting-it isn’t a transcendental position that fails to think outside itself; not-getting-it is the condition in which real abstraction is experienced, sensorily, by contingent faculty. It is a different kind of failure.

Although “contingency” is a term that is located, philosophically, opposite to necessity, perhaps as Merriam-Webster again, “happening by chance : affected by unforeseen causes or conditions : not patently necessary : unpredictable in occurrence or outcome,” contingency bears traces of the same kind of dependence that comes up with the term “adjunct”: “dependent on, associated with, or conditioned by something else.” Etymologically, this goes further, through an association with “touch,” as the present participle of contingere “to touch on all sides.” Contingency is a position whose associated sensorial experience is one of being touched on all sides by not-getting-it, so that one’s merely being the effect of this is equivalent to one’s annihilation, or feeling of being destroyed, even when “included.” It’s not just about the visibility of the work done by these faculty, although I often come back round to that; it’s about the way in which these positions form the basis of a critique of the institution of the university that does not in turn continue to valorize the uncritical linking of power/knowledge.

Last week in the BMS hearings, a senior lecturer in the Carlson School of Management testified, via his experience on the faculty senate, to the percentage of courses taught, across the university at each level (from 1000-level courses to 8000-level courses), by non-tenure-track faculty. Beginning with 1000-level classes, this number was over 50%; even at 8000-level courses, the number was still around 39%. The university maintains a quoted standard that no more than “25%” of courses should be taught by non-tenure-line faculty. These are courses that should be taught by tenure-line faculty; that they are not illuminates the extent to which the university is underfunding departments with enrollments that exceed their faculty teaching capacity. Where does this divestment in teaching come from? It does not come from “the market,” even if the market were some kind of veritable Mississippi, dividing the campus in two; it comes from the political investment in the financialization of the university, its professionalization, and its optimalization of profit (plus everything else and all that). No one can get out of it, but can you feel “dead” to it even as you are touched on all sides? That space that is most appropriated, most exploited, most alienated? How do you not-valorize that space?

being born later

In his recent book, The Bonds of Debt, Richard Dienst devotes a couple of paragraphs to Bertolt Brecht`s poem, ``An die Nachgeborenen.`` It is actually Benjamin who Dienst is discussing, and in particular a phrase of Benjamin`s that is often difficult to locate, and may in fact only be represented here in fragments: ``for the sake of the hopeless, we are given hope.`` Dienst describes Benjamin`s awareness of the schizophrenic organization of the Jetztzeit, that ``complex interval between wishful expectation and dread, teaching us to practice different modalities of anticipation and suspension, long patience and outright refusal (166),`` connecting Benjamin`s notes on Brecht`s poem to these ``conflicted moods`` (166, Dienst`s words). Benjamin`s notes read:

[line scratched out:] Example of genuine historical representation: `An die Nachgeborenen.` We claim from those born later not thanks for our victories but rather remembrance for our defeats. [not scratched out:] That is consolation: the only kind that can be given to those who have no more hope for consolation. (Dienst 166)    

The footnote attributes this passage to Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften Band I/iii (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag), p. 1,240), and although it is not the passage that I mention above, the common theme of consolation, from which Dienst distills an idea about remembering defeat, and in fact, establishing continuity on the basis of notions of defeat or failure. These grounds of  ``infinite indebtedness,`` which for Dienst also refer to the phenomenological aspects of the given, aspects that qualify it not as inert or fixed, but as fluid, ``to be drawn out in our encounter with it,`` form the basis of the types of political subjectivity that Dienst imagines possible.

Dienst`s point of departure suggests that thinking in dark times has to do with negotiating this point of historical continuity and transition. In the last lines of the poem, Brecht writes,

Think—

When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also of the dark time

That brought them forth.

The lines anticipate the perspective of historical judgment, proposing that the consolation is not only a form of historical forgiveness, but that such a position of spectatorship is central to the formulation of subjects who take up the project that Brecht (or Dienst or Benjamin) describes. Brecht`s seemingly straightforward caveat is also contorted by his effort throughout the poem to articulate the limits of speaking in dark times. And although his poems tend to be organized around the themes of state oppression and class conflict, they articulate less visible arguments about political agency. In actuality, they articulate the struggles of the bourgeois subject, struggles that become presented and seemingly resolved in terms of morality, and predominantly, in terms of complicity. If complicity is the only way that the bourgeois subject experiences political agency, the problem (and its solution) is not that to deal with the problem of debt we must refuse the morality of guilt and personal responsibility that accompanies it, or that, as Nietzsche found, guilt produces bad morality, but that the refusal of guilt as a form of moral or ethical activity or the construction of an alternative (take for example, Timothy Bewes` promotion of ``shame`` in his book, The Event of Postcolonial Shame) is an expression of its very centrality in conceptualizing political agency. Brecht is the great thinker of this bourgeois guilt, the thing that keeps the bourgeoisie from being able to identify as proletarians, and this is also why the problem of morality is one of identification. In other words, the circularity of refusal and recuperation works much like the aesthetic identification that is the object of Brecht`s critique. Projects that articulate the possibility of  ``refusing guilt,`` or ``refusing debt,`` are thus not that far from Brecht`s project refusing aesthetic identification, and there can be something to take from his determinations of complicity.
    
picture: Selected Poems by Bertolt Brecht, cover by Roy Kuhlman (Grove Press, 1959).

blind contours

These blog writings began as things that could not be included in my dissertation. i suppose at some point, my feelings about the dissertation began to change. i think at this time, the content of what was included here also changed. though the dissertation is hopefully changing in positive ways, what is here is not. and that is largely because there is very little here. this is very sad to me. at the same time, the fact that there is not very much here seems to be one of the phenomena that i am trying to explain in my dissertation. i am writing about how poetry is able to theorize about political activity. one of the outcomes of this is that i am able to see and to say how poetry can engage in political action. in the first chapter, which deals with the Bertolt Brecht, i suppose i am trying to see how poetry sees its removal from the realm of politics, and how Brecht theorizes its return. one of the consequences of this removal from politics is the loss of external reality. by external reality, i mean things that are registered as belonging to the world--the "many-sided world," according to Brecht. i feel like not being able to write things in this blog is related to the loss of external reality, of my external reality. i think this relationship--that is, to external reality--is always very tenuous anyways. i think it takes a lot to maintain it, but the "work" of its activity is not always that clear. in fact, i think the work is downright murky; it is dark.

One of the things that has made the dissertation writing go better is that i am slowly realizing how slowly i need to proceed in order to present an intelligible argument. sometimes i am surprised at how "beyond me" this has seemed. i have begun to think that this process is somewhat like drawing blind contours. i have held onto this practice for quite some time, since high school, i think. the task is to move your pen as slowly as your eyes trace the object you are drawing, not looking at your paper until you have finished tracing the whole object. what results is, of course, never realistic, but it is rare that the object that is traced is not at all intelligible on the paper. i have never grasped the idea, exactly, that in writing, my pen might have to move as slowly. the value of the patience of sticking with it blindly to end goes without need to say more. so perhaps that is something

the lost posts

As my "Humanities Core" (http://www.humcoretrapp.blogspot.com/) blog threatens to overtake "Zoo" in sheer number of posts, as November begins, as the pressure to finish chapter one increases, and as i get used to idea that the letters are still not about love... as all these things, I really hope that I am picking up again, on these postings. Even with this, there is the sense of loss and redemption, and perhaps this where to begin. I had come to the conclusion that redemption is what Brecht wanted to thwart through his development of anti-aristotelian theater.


In "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting," Brecht's 1936 [1949] essay relating his observation of Mei Lan-fang's theater company in Moscow to his development of the estrangement-effect, Brecht's concerns seem primarily to involve what we have come to understand as consciousness-raising. It seems possible find in hte essay the repetition of a call for consciousness. From the beginning, he writes: "The efforts in question were directed to playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious." It follows, therefore: all of the readings of his didacticism, his empiricism, his objective reality, his undeserved greatness... all of these things deal with and assert the primacy of the "conscious plane" to Brecht.


The interesting part of this process seems to be the way in which "identifying with" the actions subconsciously becomes Brecht's shorthand for the way that theater, and art in general, has functioned since Aristotle. It is what Leo Bersani has called "the culture of redemption," what Benjamin saw as the messianistic, what myths of "primitive accumulation" allow, and, as Savvy T and I discuss endlessly, it is the predominant justification and grounds for the production and study of literature. Or is it itself an uninvestigated, assumed uncritical blah blah blah ideology? But this percolating idea about Brecht's non-redemptiveness is that art, for Brecht, does something other than affirm (positively or negatively) the adequacy of the relationship between form and content (which, for Aristotle, is intricately related to the interdependency of the soul and the body), that before art conveys the coincidence of form and content (something accidental?), it does something else: this is the question that it seems even the very consideration of involves the willingness "to suspend belief."

Picture: Cozydan t-shirt design. thanks to Becky for buying.

not making waves

If the "hard things do give way," as Brecht wrote, it is hardly a reassurance, although it is one that Benjamin holds onto, and esteems, when he speaks of Brecht. We might be inclined to want this--the passing away of tension, the eventual ease of transformation, the hopeful sense that change is endless--but with Brecht, one does not dwell with this too long. More than the sense that things can change (and counter to the obvious rendition of "change, not mere interpretation"), Brecht seems to find that the sense of "being otherwise" depends upon a tenuous perception of the difference between the rules that govern and the society that persists. The insight here is perhaps not so profound, but what I think Brecht offers is the idea that art is not there to change or even to reflect the possibility of change, but that art is there to maintain this tenuousness. What is the work of maintaining this disjunct, one that might be seen to correspond to the inadequacy of the relationship between content and form, or between reality and representation?

chose consequence

In a 1934 essay titled "In the Fight against Injustice even weak Weapons are of Use" ("Man muss das Unrecht auch mit schwachen Mitteln bekampfen"), Bertolt Brecht defends The International League of Human Rights, against leftist criticism for its "individual aims" in its efforts to prosecute rights violations. The organization was banned by the Nazis in 1933. He writes:

"I did not go as far as many, who claimed to be observing a wholesale, long-term collapse of the large-scale organizations which aimed to change the social structure completely, but I too saw the tough and important small-scale activities of frequently disparaged organizations like the League of Human Rights, which actually saved many people, which constantly and untiringly exposed injustice with its small voice, and which galvanised many to return to the struggle. So we saw that the fight against injustice must not only be waged in the most ultimate way, addressing all of its causes, but also in the most general way, i.e., using all the means available, even the most feable. For even worse than the illusion that it is possible to eradicate unnecessary misery without removing its causes is the illusion that we can fight the causes without their consequences, separately, without recourse to the weakest and most feable of means. I have seen how knowing about these terrible things actually prevented many people from combating their terrible consequences." (Brecht on Art and Politics 140-141)

Brecht is here writing about the transformation of Germany into a Nazi state, a moment and a historical shift which remains inaccessible. I find it interesting that he is talking about this moment--one that the historical record tries to shore up in various ways. The problem that he describes is what counts as "doing enough" and he here argues that even the smallest effort needs to count. The position that he takes here is one he is characteristically criticized for, since it is often read as a moment of compromised investment (in communism vs. capitalism at all costs even to the extent of praising Stalin), of failed dialectic (see David Pike's inflammatory argument in Lukacs and Brecht), or of apologetic politics (as reform socialist); in one way or another he doesn't hold the line. In other places, in his poetry, for example, Brecht seems to phrase this conflict between possible action and principled action in terms of "the times"; with a pseudo-utopic nostalgia he documents the things disallowed by the darkness of the age--and this darkness is the spread of fascism, of the imperial rule of Germany, and therefore and in turn the spread of the capitalist mode of production. To an extent, the equation of fascism and capitalism seems to be the confused relation behind each of the above-mentioned positions he is criticized for. Confused, not in terms of interpretation alone or in terms of the history, but in reality, i.e. for Brecht. Whether or not this equation was right (or true, as Brecht might claim) seems to be a question that is lost to us, but the question of the political efficacy of small actions is one that constantly circulates in places where intellectual labor is a form of political activity.

So it could be said that Brecht's phrasing of these pairs--capitalism/fascism, condition of possible action (unfriendliness)/principled action (friendliness), cause/consequence--represent a strained equality. I am not sure that this is the best way to phrase a relationship that seems to have the markings of a base/superstructure form, but I feel that given the moral weight of the terms, the type of conflict and commensurability that Brecht presents is a version of his "realism," and thus of his reality. In other places (such as most of the ones cited by David Pike), Brecht seems to hold blindly to the "conditions of production" as the bearers of reality. This might be especially clear in his address at the First International Writers' Congress in Paris in 1935 ("A Necessary Observation on the Struggle Against Barbarism"), where he is clear that the conditions of ownership bear upon every relation man has in society. It might also be clear in places where he equates these conditions to the "truth" of communism (and the lie of capitalism). But in this little piece, it seems less clear that one's project need always be with the conditions, or the cause. That the weakest weapons might be what is needed to fight some of the consequences seems to formulate still a need for weapons, a clarity of "a cause," and the sense that any action counts.

image: Dragon, Tim Hawkinson (2007)

the dream of the totalitarian mind

"The traumatic neuroses and the war neuroses may proclaim too loudly the effects of mortal danger and may be silent or speak only in muffled tones of the effects of frustration in love."
--Freud, "Introduction to Psychoanalysis and the War Neurosis"

Addressing the fifth annual Psychoanalytic Congress in Budapest in 1918, Freud argued that the work that had been done by psychoanalysis on treating peace-time neurosis could be extended to the treatment of war-time neurosis. Through this timely discussion of war neurosis before "official representatives from the highest quarters of the Central European Powers," Freud defended psychoanalysis against its dissenters, and also attempted to put the techniques of psychoanalysis to use in a larger social context. The paper, "The Psychoanalysis of War Neuroses" was later revised as the introduction to a collection of papers on war neurosis given at the Congress by Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, and Ernst Simmel. Freud "laments," in his introduction, that the ending of war resulted in the collapse of state organizations that were interested in the problem of mental illness. In the following year, Freud testified to the Austrian War Commission against the use of electric shock therapy as a treatment for war neurosis, concluding that the cause of war neurosis was without doubt "psychical," and recommended the use of psychoanalytic therapy instead of corrective electrical treatment. Freud acknowledges the operative logic of war that justified the treatment of war neurotics "as maligners," but ends up condemning medical professionals who "may have forgotten that the patient whom he was seeking to treat as a maligner was, after all, not one." His sensitivity to this confusion alludes to a violence that is measured in the slightest degree, by "the strength of the current." Drawing a parallel between degrees of "curative" violence and the extreme external violence of war, Freud addresses the complicated issue of treatment in Brechtian "dark times." He writes, "the insoluable conflict between the claims of humanity, which normally carry decisive weight for a physician, and the demands of a national war was bound to confuse his activity." The activity that Freud here testifies against revolves around the question of what it means to continue "care" for the recovery of a patient even when a time seems to demand that the "cure" of a patient be "the restoration of his fitness for service." My work on the strange silence of postwar poetry begins with the problem of complicity in the activity of war, and involves the implicit parallel between the autonomy of therapeutic care and artistic practices of estrangement and obscurity.

the project

where does a strange silence begin? some have suggested that it is in the forest, the sound that a falling tree makes when no one is around to hear. at times, for brecht, it's the talked-about tree that is the strange silence. A Strange Silence is the title of the project, my dissertation, the thing that everything here is a footnote to, especially the poems, since they are the leaves, what is left over.

from 4/4/07//:

and the green fall to unsafe water:
welcome to the 21st century
let not many other things be spared--save your
happiness; this was Brecht's nightmare.
Humanity, the human dog, wants to let go
to forget, dismiss, judge, pee wherever it wants.
a condition remiss, or a saying unheard.
in the woods, we are all quiet; it is solace.
and save to other things, too, save to find yourself
alone. the distance is unmarked. cross-hatches
are what i saw in the desert and didn't draw.
the things nightmares are made of
leave you with the distance
of their unmarkings.
becky's dreams are about writing (ask me
how i felt when my mom died. it's a feeling
i can't think of). i watch her grow.
communism is short-lived. the brown notebooks
are filled. you are always thinking of brecht.
his return is unsettling, a time
when autonomy in writing is needed.