ON BERTOLT BRECHT

Reading by Rev. Dr. T.C. Marshall

 

Benjamin, Walter. Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott

(NY: Shocken, 1978)

 

Brecht, Bertolt. Bertolt Brecht’s Refugee Conversations / Flüchtlingsgespräche. Ed. Tom Kuhn. Trans. Romy Furslund

(London: Methuen, 2020)

 

Brecht on Theatre. Ed. & Trans. John Willett

(NY: Hill & Wang, 1964)

 

The Good Woman of Setzuan in Two Plays by Bertolt Brecht. Trans. Eric Bentley

(NY: Meridian Classic, 1983)

 

“By the Way”:

The Practical Application of Benjamin’s Remark re: Laughter

            Many writers have taken notice of a small “by the way” comment that Walter Benjamin made in his essay-talk “The Author as Producer.” This essay, a talk apparently never delivered, works with a variety of ideas to approach what an author can produce and how it gets produced. Benjamin’s “by the way” seems to pop up among those thoughts and then get left behind. That may make it seem to be of no great importance, but its assertion is related to several larger issues in Benjamin’s oeuvre. It directly bears upon aesthetic history and even art theory, and the view of it shared by Benjamin and his friend Bertolt Brecht.

            “The Author as Producer” works with how meaning is produced like goods are produced, how intellectual or artistic labor can produce not just thought and art but new and actively progressive thought and art. In a passage about Brecht’s concept and practice of “epic theatre,” the subject of humor pops up. Benjamin says Brecht’s epic theater “is less concerned with filling the public with feelings, even seditious ones, than with alienating it in an enduring manner, through thinking, from the conditions in which it lives.” This “alienating” is a distancing for perspective in thinking, but the surprising little comment that follows names an unlikely-seeming source for this thinking: “It may be noted, by the way, that there is no better start for thinking than laughter. And, in particular, convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides better opportunities for thought than convulsion of the soul” (235-236). 

This can be read in a few possible ways. Some have seen it as an encouragement towards work with “the content of the form” as they see meaning coming from the interplay between form and content; others lean towards a plea for “embodied thinking” as they see meaning coming from the concreteness of the senses. One major interpretation can be found in Terry Eagleton’s influential book, The Ideology of the Aesthetic. The book usefully lays out a history of the concept of The Aesthetic with chapters on several major thinkers and how they used the aesthetic angle with its emphasis on the senses.  Eagleton puts the weight of this directly on the body, following the classic dialectic between body (aesthesis) and mind (noesis). He culminates his Benjamin chapter with mention of the famous laughter quote, and he puts its importance in terms of connection with the grounding body. That doesn’t quite explain the part about thinking and how it starts.

            A number of writers have seen the essay as encouraging new thought about form and content, but Benjamin specifically discusses this as a dead end because it is a false dichotomy. We will see, as we read the essay for the context of Benjamin’s “btw” remark, that the actual focus in his thinking was on how meaning is produced in the theater itself and how the history of The Aesthetic affects expectations and possibilities there. This is his target, and his idea of the author as a producer gets its focus from the idea and practice of collaboration with (rather than simply empathetic understanding of) the proletariat and their sympathizers.

It is not the “content” or the “form” per se, nor is it our grounding bodies that he would move us to work with; instead, Brecht and Benjamin focus on the “form of logic” that is used by the arts. The Aesthetic tradition moves us through feelings as it was designed to, in the bodily focus brought about in response (as Eagleton shows) to abstracted thought. Its logic is Hegelian or resolving, while the move toward thinking advocated by Brecht and Benjamin involves the “suspended” logic of a dialectical process like that in the sense of Humor.

We have been used to a logic of binary oppositions and preferences: right vs wrong, fact vs fiction, feeling vs idea, body vs mind, etc. The aesthetic that, as Eagleton showed us, arose in dialectical response to philosophy’s previous focus on things of the mind moves us through emotion and “identification with” the experience of others towards a sublime perspective. It reflects Sensibility through Sensation and affirms the audience’s sense of proper preferences and tastes. Its own evolution and development towards sureness about these things leads then to the subsequent turn toward Humor, rising out of such self-assuredness. This is visible at least as far back as the 1848 publication of Eureka in which Poe makes fun of “cuttle-fish … profundity” (1275). Humor reveals contradictions and pretenses in the Aesthetic and its relation to Mind. To put this all down to re-asserting “the body” is merely to return us to binary (body/mind) thinking and its preferences (which immediately mock themselves). Walter Benjamin is, instead, looking at logics with a turn againstthe aesthetic logic based in the body (v. Eagleton) and toward the doubled logic of Humor based in the tensions of thinking. He follows Brecht in this.

Brecht took some bold steps, including a challenge to how the production and consumption of Art works. We can see that Brecht meant a fairly serious challenge when he asked politely “Shouldn’t We Abolish Aesthetics?” in a letter to the Berliner Börsen-Courier published 2 June, 1927. In his letter to a Mr X (identified as Prof Fritz Sternberg, a collaborator), Brecht writes of how sociological study could “prove that there was no justification for this [contemporary] drama’s continued existence” based on “the assumptions which once made drama possible” (Brecht in BOT 20). This is because “new plays only served the old theater.” Brecht calls for “a chance to capture the theater for a different audience” in a “great epic theater which corresponds to the sociological situation” with plays that “are not going to satisfy the old aesthetics” but “are going to destroy it” (22). This doesn’t specify what the old aesthetics were, but we know (with Eagleton’s help) that their signs are emphasis on sensitivity, sensations, and feelings as they raise the view of the aesthete. In the old aesthetics of the theater, this is the mechanics of “identification with [or of] characters”—of entering their feelings for a “sentimental education.” It puts ideas aside or presents them within these sympathies as it looks for The Good and The True eternal (-ized) values. These are the characteristics of The Aesthetic that Brecht is out to avoid, even to “destroy.” As he tells it, these are the outdated or outmoded ways of a theater (and art) that is moribund. Brecht, like a lot of artistic visionaries, declares that the old will be swept away by the new epic approach in “our existing class structure’s inevitable collapse” (note to Mahagonny quoted on BOT 22). Bourgeois ways will go, and he will help them exit via a fresh aesthetic of looking at the big social picture framed in small significant moments analyzed by the audience—thanks to his new approach to the art.

Benjamin’s analysis of the situation a decade later in “The Author as Producer” builds its main points in a somewhat rambling way, but it underlines a couple of key innovations in the epic theater as game-changers. The epigraph to this talk is taken from Ramon Fernandez, poet Wallace Stevens’ celebrated friend. It suggests that the goal of Benjamin’s essay is to make “intellectuals” aware of their “conditions as producers.” The piece begins by reminding us of some “unfruitful” literary controversies over artistic freedom versus the “correct political line.” Then Benjamin touches on the form/content version of this and calls it “the textbook example of the attempt to explain literary connections with undialectical clichés.” For him, the “dialectical approach” must insert literary productions “into the living social context.” (220-222)

            Benjamin writes, “Rather than ask, ‘What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?’ I should like to ask, ‘What is its position in them?’” He reminds us that the only constant in literary history is change and suggests that his time is facing “a mighty recasting of literary forms.” Here he appears to want to surprise us literati with a focus on journalism and the newspaper when he says, “the conventional distinction between author and public … begins … to disappear in modern times” when the reader is at all times ready to become a writer because the news makes her “an expert” with “access to authorship.” (Set aside for now what has happened to this since in terms of “fake news” etc.) “It is, in a word, the literarization of the conditions of living that masters the otherwise insoluble antinomies.” It is on this functional basis that Benjamin insists on the primacy of active “position in the process of production.” (222-228)

This is where he brings in Brecht as the one who coined the term and technique of Umfunktionierung (taking something out of its normal functioning). Here, Benjamin points out how other techniques are trapped within the history and functioning of bourgeois theater. He says “the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication can assimilate astonishing quantities of revolutionary themes” and “propagate them”—without calling itself into question. This sentimentalization is the weakness he sees in the work of the left-wing intelligentsia. He finds it in even the latest artistic movements, in theater and music and photography, in art that aims “to renew from within—that is, fashionably—the world as it is.” He cries out for an art that will “eliminate the antithesis firstly between performers and listeners and secondly between technique and content” because “political tendency alone is not enough.” Writing has new tricks to learn. “An author who teaches writers nothing, teaches no one.” In leading us to Brecht, Benjamin wishes to reveal “the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal.” He then makes it clear that these “other producers” are not all artful authors by saying, “this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers—that is, readers or spectators into collaborators.” (228-233)

            For a prime example, he gives us Brecht’s “epic theater.” He characterizes it as having several key techniques, with “interrupting the plot” to focus on revelatory “situations” as chief among them. Benjamin says this “constantly counteracts an illusion in the audience” by distancing the situation until it reveals its reality. This gesture (or gestus, v. Jameson 113-163) is meant “to expose what is present” somewhat obliquely, allowing the spectator to see it without involvement or identification with the characters. This moment is where Benjamin says the epic theater “is less concerned with filling the public with feelings, even seditious ones, than with alienating it in an enduring manner, through thinking, from the conditions in which it lives.” Then comes the line about laughter: “It may be noted, by the way, that there is no better start for thinking than laughter.” And then the joke about convulsions in the gut rather than the soul. (235-236) 

            The context of the whole article gives the reasons why he asserts these things. He does not put a “because” in these sentences besides perhaps the idea of “better opportunities for thought,” but his reasoning is clear. The logic of his talk has said that these chances are available because of stripping away theatrical illusions and producing class consciousness, because of a new perspective from a distance and yet at home in our lives, and because of an audience that can collaborate in the production of meaning.

            “The Author as Producer” ends with critical questions about the would-be author: “Does he (sic) succeed in promoting the socialization of the intellectual means of production? Does he see how he himself can organize the intellectual workers in the production process? Does he have proposals for the Umfunktionierung of the novel, the drama, the poem?” Finally, Benjamin emphasizes how taking this position of collaborative production will bring correctness of political tendency, higher technical quality, and distance from vague “spiritual” qualities like those celebrated by fascism and The Aesthetic. (238) This is not an opposition of “embodied” thinking to the “spirit” of “pure” living and its high truths. It is, rather, a position that allows production to occur collaboratively. Rather than descending from the “on-high” of the traditional aesthetic, this is a recipe for thinking that arises from the people. It gets help from refreshed theatrical techniques and from Humor—to make that possible.

            To get how Humor contributes requires some analysis of how Humor works. Freud did a pretty good job of explaining that in his book on Der Witz, though he dragged Humor and the Comic a long way over toward his dream theories. Freud’s casting of the personal unconscious put his theory of wit into a context that might seem a-political or even anti-political. It goes so far as to include a positing of “elite” aptitude among “the few people … capable of the ‘joke-work’” (xi). However, as he approaches the structure of witticisms of several kinds, Freud makes room for general Humor alongside the specifically Comic, and he gives a long paragraph to Mark Twain’s work and its general sense of Humor (222-223). Freud remarks there that our Humor is produced “at the cost of annoyance, instead of getting annoyed” (223). The politics of this are obviously not critically progressive, but Freud gets to an important thought for progressives or even revolutionaries here. “The condition required for comedy to arise is that we should be prompted to use two different ways of imagining for the same idea simultaneously or in rapid succession (225). This doubleness appears also on the list of “joke-techniques” early in the book. Along with “condensation” (borrowed from his work on dreams and the unconscious) and repetition of “the same material” from different angles, the third one is “Double meaning,” of which he finds several types (31). These ideas are all about perspective and multiplying it in one way or another. And that can be revolutionary rather than calming or adaptive. Perspectives in conflict, even actually resolved in Freudian discharge, can show the reality of class consciousness.

            And this is where Freud nearly meets Benjamin, in the recognition of conflicting perspectives and in the collaboration with the audience in drawing out the social context for them. The personal psychology idea that these can be buried or somehow resolved by jokes is Freud’s falling away. Benjamin chose to notice something more. For Walter Benjamin, laughter starts our thinking, rather than completing it or relieving feelings. It is not a release from tensions so much as the display of them. From there, it can become recognition of lived conflict and even the resolution to do something about it.

            Benjamin prized the double perspective of Humor, whether as the larger background in Twain’s look at things like “setting the slaves free,” or as specific instances of joking around about everyday issues like property ownership. Brecht’s work is a magnificent example of multiplying perspectives by theatrical technique. In The Good Woman of Setzuan, he gives us a curious doubling with the appearance of Shen Te’s “cousin” Shui Ta to help her with her tenant squatter-leeches. When he first actually appears, one of these characters admits, “But that was a joke; she hasn’t got a cousin” (24). Brecht’s stage techniques will have let us in on the real joke; we know that he is she, Shui Ta the fictional cousin is really Shen Te herself taking on a different pose towards others—less “good” to them and their taking advantage of her. The logic of this set of scenes plays out a complex web of negations and doublings. Shui Ta is and is not Shen Te. Shui Ta is both a complement to and a negation of Shen Te. Aristotle’s study of the logic of negation in Prior Analytics made it clear that several poles and different modes of negation are involved in this logic (I:xlvi). There is both contrariety and contradiction in what Brecht sets up. Shui Ta appears to be the opposite of Shen Te, her contrary in being male and tough and distanced. This amusing to us because we’ve seen it in our experience and because he is actually she. He is not different; he is her, taking actions she knows she must. We have Te and we have not-Te. We have Ta, and we have not-Ta. As Aristotle showed us, Not-Te is not Ta and Not-Ta is not Te. This is both high logic in Aristotle and somewhat low humor in Brecht. A.J.Greimas incorporated these elements into his concept of the Semiotic Square that generates meaning; in his logic, all four corners play a part undeniably their own and also dependent on interplay with the other three.

Greimas can help us see how Te, Ta, Not-Te, and Not-Ta and the tensions between them are all necessary to the background of Brecht’s humor. They are all also positions in the lived world. Humor is the technique for holding these tensions in suspension while examining them. That is Brecht’s prescription for the theater to advance and help us in our social progress. That is Benjamin’s recipe for what he calls “thinking”; it literally starts in laughter, jump-starting, convulsing in surprise, gut-chuckling, or guffawing. Multiplying our perspectives, Humor enables us to grasp more than one angle at once in order to see that answers find their truths in dialectical context. One incident might look one way from the angle of traditionally plotted theater but another way if seen from working-class consciousness of social or economic position. Using both angles and one’s own positioning allows location by triangulation, and a laugh.

Bringing the audience to this awareness takes the interplay of Te and Ta and their Nots in us. What they laugh at will determine what they can critically think about. Their laughter will start from the embodiment of contradictions in their response. Embodiment in a multitude is part of this approach, but it is not the embodiment so much as the shared possibilities of thought that matter to its potential success. Thinkers like Terry Eagleton and Jacques Rancière have historicized the shifting attitudes of art production and consumption and the theorizations about them; they both have ended up looking back to The Aesthetic to pull people through. Brecht and his buddy Benjamin would suggest we move on to embrace elements and techniques beyond aesthetic realization of truths, moving into critical thinking but doing it through laughter. Humor is dialectical, without final resolution but progressing via re-framings whose contradictions make us laugh. The history of art-making told by Rancière shows re-framings through iconic, dramatic, and aesthetic modes settling toward the self-improvement approach of The Aesthetic. Eagleton shows how many of the great thinkers of this latest regimen (or “regime” in Rancière’s parlance) used the aesthetic emphasis on sensibility and sensation to put “the body” forward as measure of experience. Benjamin had, however, already gone them both one better by following Brecht towards laughter and how it exceeds the body, how it starts up dialectical thinking.

Brecht’s own sense of Humor is best elaborated by his character Mr Ziffel in Refugee Conversations. The fun of this exposition lies in its (faux) naiveté. The humor of these pages about Humor leaves us wondering a little what to take seriously about Hegel’s dialectic, but even that is answered by the passage and its laughter. Brecht has two characters unfold a little irony about Nordic humor. Mr Ziffel and his companion Kalle are discussing different national cultures, and in this conversation (#11) they focus on Denmark and its “proverbial sense of humor” (Refugee Conversations, 60-64). This seems to be just some kind of joke about the Danes’ lack of humor until Ziffel adds a political perspective: “It’s intolerable to live in a country where there’s no sense of humor, but it’s even more intolerable to live in a country where you need a sense of humor” (62). The next thing he says seems almost non sequitur but links the dialectic to this need: “Whenever I think of humor, I think of the philosopher Hegel.” Mr Ziffel says, “He had the potential to be one of the greatest humorists of all the philosophers, the greatest since Socrates, who had a similar method,” and we know we are in for some fun with philosophy and dialectical reasoning. Hegel “had such a good sense of humor that he couldn’t even conceive of something like order, for example, without disorder,” Ziffel points out to his companion. He continues by asserting that Hegel “was convinced that the greatest order in to be found in close proximity to the greatest disorder: in fact, he even went so far as to say they were to be found in exactly the same place!” Here Mr Ziffel explains the dialectic in terms that make it seem like an impossible contradiction. That which is Not-order cannot sit where Order sits, unless you follow Aristotle and Greimas in your logic of contraries and Freud in your double-meaning Humor—which is what Mr Ziffel is doing, with Mr Brecht behind him as prompter. We hear some of Hegel’s wisdom but in terms of showing its ridiculousness: “nothing is identical with itself” sounds absurd, impossible, just plain funny. However, the explanation allows the basic idea of the dialectic to be presented: “everything that exists changes inexorably and relentlessly into something else—namely its opposite.” This raises humor by linking contraries and contradictions in one logic, just as Freud showed was necessary in setting up laughter. It is also another demonstration of the multiple perspectives of the Greimasian Square rising from a basic pair of contraries linked for definition with their contradictions in a complex pattern of tensions. Mr Ziffel brings us to an understated basic Marxian perspective behind Hegel’s thinking: “Our conceptions of things are very important.” He then metaphorizes to concretize: “They’re the handles by which we can move things.” He says Hegel tries to show us “how we can intervene in the causes of ongoing processes,” though it seems he is leaning into Marx there. Mr Ziffel closes his discussion with two punchlines. One is saying that Hegel, “like all great humorists,” delivered his pronouncements “with a completely straight face.” Mr Ziffel’s other final point is that he has “never met a humourless person who understood Hegel’s dialectic.” Laughter is a big help in thinking dialectically. (62-64)

These last laughs balance each other in a fresh little contradiction: was Hegel serious or not? Mr Ziffel would have it as “Yes and No.” Is Brecht serious? Not on the surface but certainly in the way he provokes laughter with serious ideas. The presentation of those ideas of dead-pan humor in high philosophy put a dead-serious laugh right where it can bridge contraries and contradictions, where it can reveal social contradictions—even about philosophy itself, and its potential for social progress. Brecht would have us learn as we laugh at our situation and laugh at ourselves as we embrace the revelations of contradiction in society and in thinking. Hegel is funnier than we thought, and Brecht is more serious than he might at first appear under cover of what KRS One would call “edu-tainment” based in humor (“Edutainment”).

    Getting the humor requires simultaneous vision from at least two angles for the audience, like in the backward twist there that flip-flops what and who is funny. Brecht provides this doubleness, cleverly and consistently. He avoids positing any single position to provide an answer to any particular issue. The plays and dialogues enlist the audience, entrusting them to combine angles and work out truths for themselves. Brecht begins from the common audience desire to be entertained, and his writing uses their laughter to start their thinking, just as Benjamin says. “Doubled over” with laughter, they reflect on their own lived dialectics and join the author in the production of meaning. This is what Walter Benjamin is talking about in his “by the way” remark, a co-production of engaged dialectics and a fresh chance for involvement as they unfold in our shared life.

_______________

Bibliography

Aristotle. Prior Analytics in Loeb Library Aristotle I. Trans. Hugh 

Tredennick. Cambridge,MA: Harvard UP, 1938.

Benjamin, Walter. Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund 

Jephcott. NY: Shocken, 1978.

Brecht, Bertolt. Bertolt Brecht’s Refugee Conversations / 

Flüchtlingsgespräche. Ed Tom Kuhn. Trans Romy Furslund. London: Methuen, 2020.

---. Brecht on Theatre. Ed. & Trans. John Willett. NY: Hill & 

Wang, 1964.

---. The Good Woman of Setzuan in Two Plays by Bertolt Brecht. Trans. 

Eric Bentley. NY: Meridian Classic, 1983.

Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 

1990.

Freud, Sigmund. The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious / Der Witz 

und seine Beziehung zum Unbewusten (1905). Trans. Joyce Crick. NY: Penguin, 2003. 

Greimas, A. J. On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. 

Trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins. Foreword Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: U of Minn P, 1987.

Jameson, Fredric. Brecht and Method. London: Verso, 1999.

KRS-One. “Edutainment” on Edutainment. NY: 

Boogie Down Productions, 1990.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Eureka in Poetry and Tales. NY: Library of 

America, 1984. 1257-1359.

Rancière, Jacques. Various titles including The Aesthetic Unconscious

(2009) and The Politics of Literature (2011).

 

*****

Rev. Dr. T. C Marshall is retired from community college English teaching. He now works as a critic, poet, performance artist, literary scholar, Alzheimer's caregiver, and fritillary farmer in San Diego. This piece is from one of his big projects—Serious Laughter: Roots of Critical Thinking.