Response to Drifting and Navigating, Part 1

From: R.G. Davis
Date: November 21, 2009 7:42:42 GMT+01:00
To: Anthony Marcellini
Subject: Re: artpractical.com : The Istanbul Biennial: Not Going the Distance

re: Marcellini's paragraph:

“In their use of direct address and aims to make the audience self-aware, Brechtian strategies confront us with provocative and partial moral facts that are typically exaggerated, shown immense in size and dire in consequence, made clearly visible, and offer little recourse. In this Biennial, confronted with the question 'What keeps mankind alive?' we have no answer. "

If you or they took more than the one-liner and read or sang the rest of the song from 3P0 [The Threepenny Opera]… (Brecht) provided an answer as of 1927.

Here is the rest of the song:

"Second Threepenny Finale” or
"What Keeps Mankind Alive?"¹

 What keeps mankind alive? [spoken]
(asked a number of times through the song )

 Two verses:

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching: that's where it begins.

You lot, who preach restraint and watch your waist as
     well
Should learn for all time how the world is run:
However much you twist, whatever lies you tell
Food is the first thing. Morals follow on.
So first make sure that those who now are starving
Get proper helpings when we do the carving.

Final Chorus:

What keeps mankind alive? The fact that millions
Are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced
     oppressed.
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed.
For once you must try not to shirk the facts:
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.

[Music by Kurt Weill— very important to sing it accurately]

The second much more complex response is that the notion that Brecht argued for direct address is bogus… farcical interpretation of distancing, alienation, Verfremdungskeffect and all the jabber and silliness associated with that term. On stage people talked to each other, and only rarely did a singer—a singer—speak out to the audience.

As for “didactic” the term in American English is an anathema to the anti-intellectual and bourgeois notion of free-minded anti-teaching. We wouldn’t have anyone speak directly to us, except on television, in the movies, in campaign speeches, or TV skits and fiction films. It would be too didactic.

So setting up a misinterpretation of Brecht makes it easy to dismiss his contribution. To elevate his work beyond those of Weimar, Erwin Piscator, Kurt Weil, Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau (as well as his designer Caspar Neher, his actress Helena Weigel and about 40 others) makes it all easy to distort, dismiss and then reject any social critique of bourgeois ideology, Kantian and Aristotelian aesthetic, and make a mess of anything called socially critical art/culture or even political events.

Addendum: I don’t think Brecht was or had or interested in moral judgments (another implied distortion) rather ethical perhaps. When he became a Marxist, his intention clarified into exposing the workings of society(s). Morals are usually associated with good/bad… BB was dialectical even in his bathroom.

For further reading, I suggest the plays, not the theory—or see the films of early productions. Everyone who quotes the theories most often gets it wrong/or distorts it...never having seen the practice and the "pudding."²

Best,

From the west

Rgd/PhD