"This Great Passion for Producing": The Affective Reversal of Brecht's Dramatic Theory

Abstract

"This Great Passion for Producing"The Affective Reversal of Brecht's Dramatic Theory Vidar Thorsteinsson (bio) Brecht, always a teacher, was no ordinary teacher. When he took a moment's rest from playwriting and directing to compose his magnum opus of dramatic theory, A Short Organum for the Theatre, Brecht had such faith in the affective powers of his theatrical techniques that he threw instruction off the stage with the strongest proclamations of his entire career on the topic: "Not even instruction can be demanded of it," he wrote of his theatre (180).1 From now on, Brecht's theatre would engage its audience exclusively through that frequently reviled and discredited thing, pleasure; it would provide "no more utilitarian lesson than how to move pleasurably" (SO, 180–81). Given the playwright's enduring reputation as a cultivator of spectatorial intellect and his previous, well-known critique of empathy and rejection of the "mental immaturity" given us by the "emotional suggestibility of a mob" (Gobert, 14), how are we to understand the resolute confidence with which Brecht affirms the role of emotional pleasure over instruction in his last but most acclaimed treatise on dramatic theory?2 In short, Brecht appears to have made a discovery: Leaving behind his prior suspicion of affective spectatorship for its connotations of impotence, maudlin empathy, and political docility, Brecht now sees how the political itself is constituted affectively. Politically cogent theatre does well to orient itself toward the affective—not merely because theatre knows how to make a political lesson "fun," as Brecht approvingly put it (SO, 180)—but because "passion" and "attitude" (SO, 185) point to and arise from the sociopolitical terrain itself and hence facilitate our critical engagement with it no less than intellectual insight does. For Brecht in the late 1940s, affect becomes a potent way of mapping the two pivotal and overlapping zones of revolutionary leftist politics: the sphere of production and the sphere of political action. [End Page 57] Granted, insofar as it remains inadequately understood, production must be accounted for at the cognitive level with the help of materialist critique, but Brecht's late dramatic theory is now more eager to chart the territory of production through an affective, emotional, and bodily exploration. Accordingly, as class-based militancy emerges out of an orientation toward and within production, the revolutionary subject is also affectively constituted, going beyond the catharsis of private individuality and recomposing itself experimentally as a feeling and desiring collective. It is in this passage from a desire for production to a desire for social change where Brecht's theatre now finds itself pleasurably interposed, ready to enhance, connect, and facilitate between the two. The late Brecht's passionate defense of political–theatrical affect has been somewhat occluded by the partly justified and by no means ignominious portrayal of him as a didacticist. While the role of instruction, pedagogy, and judgment in Brecht is fully deserving of attention in its own right, the current interest in affect theory makes our reassessment of the affective Brecht an altogether timely and urgent undertaking. Indeed, reading the German playwright with a central philosopher of contemporary affect thinking, Gilles Deleuze, opens up some possible beginnings for this reappraisal. As this essay aims to show, Deleuze's writings are of help in shedding light on why the great socialist artist-teacher finally abandoned learning and oriented his theatre productively and politically toward the body, desire, and affect. It has been pointed out how Brecht's critique of mimetic representation, decentering of subjectivity, and emphasis on the constructed nature of social relations can be related to some strands of poststructuralism. Herbert Blau hence has read Brecht with Jacques Derrida, and Elizabeth Wright has read him with a host of French post–World War II authors from Jacques Lacan to Jean-François Lyotard.3 However, apart from references to a couple of passages in Cinema 2 where Deleuze discusses Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard, no work to this date has brought Deleuze and Brecht into serious dialogue. Alongside our slow recovery from Brecht fatigue and the steady presence of poststructuralist philosophy as a matter of hot debate on the academic Left, it is time to...