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Important Benjamin
By Douglas Robinson on April 6, 2006
This is an invaluable collection of essays and diary entries that sheds as much light on Benjamin
himself as it does on his truculent and difficult friend Brecht. Another way of putting that is that the
Brecht this book sheds light on is Benjamin's Brecht, who is also, due to the high esteem we hold
Benjamin in, a Brecht with a good deal of currency in the field today. Brigid Doherty, for example, in "Test
and Gestus in Brecht and Benjamin" (MLN 115.3 (2000): 442-81), explores the Benjaminian Brecht (and
perhaps the Brechtian Benjamin) in persuasive and useful ways:
"Interruption, as we have seen, is also the epic theater's technique for representing Gesten and making
them quotable. 'The more frequently we interrupt someone engaged in an action, the more gestures we
obtain. Hence the interrupting of action is one of the principal concerns of epic theater' [a quotation
from this edition of Benjamin on Brecht, p. 3]. In epic theater, that mode of interruption resembles
techniques of photographic representation employed in psychotechnical testing. Interruption fixes, as if
cinematographically, the 'strict, frame-like enclosure of each element of a Haltung (i.e., each gesture)'
(UB 3; GS II.2, 521). The frames of the gesture are like the frames of a strip of film, and hence they are
also like the projections that hovered behind the action in the 1931 production of Mann ist Mann, which
was designed by Caspar Neher. Those projections recapitulated elements of the action in telegraphic
prose and, you will recall, in arithmetic. In epic theater, projections are gestic; they function as
interruptions, and their own form is punctuated either paratactically or mathematically. Seen that way,
the projections call to mind Benjamin's likening of the epic actor's presentation of quotable gestures to
the setting of type for emphasis: 'he must be able to space [sperren] his gestures as the compositor
spaces words' (UB 11; GS II.2, 529). That metaphor in turn recalls Brecht's assertion of the need for
'footnotes' in dramatic writing, as well as his emphasis on the writer's desire to emulate the apparatus, a
point I have said we should understand in relation to Benjamin's claims about the 'training regimen' of
Hemingway's prose, and hence in relation to his thoughts on Haltung as the interrupted action of a body
in motion. All of which underscore the mechanical aspects of writing, understood in terms of a text's
capacity to represent Gesten" (Doherty 474-75).
Doherty has here selected from the first version of "What Is Epic Theatre?"--the first essay in Benjamin's
book--some of the most strongly structuralizing of Benjamin's interpretations of Brecht, making it seem
as if for Benjamin epic theater was largely an abstract matter of forms or frames or spacings, rather
than, say, a series of complex interactions. This is not entirely accurate: Benjamin does in passing
recognize the importance to epic theater of the various relationships "between stage and public, text
and performance, producer and actors"--"For the stage, the public is no longer a collection of hypnotized
test subjects, but an assembly of interested persons whose demands it must satisfy" (2)--and indeed
Doherty's first quotation, from page 3 of that essay, seems to take us to a rehearsal, where Brecht is
pushing his actors to complicate their gestic movements: "The more frequently we interrupt someone
engaged in an action, the more gestures we obtain. Hence the interrupting of action is one of the
principal concerns of epic theater." But that "we" is not Brecht running a rehearsal but people in general,
indeed a kind of generalized or universalized principle of human behavior disguised rhetorically as an
interactive intervention. And in any case Benjamin's emphasis on the quantification of interruptions and
gestures ("The more frequently we interrupt someone engaged in an action, the more gestures we
obtain") comes out of his remarks just previous on the framing of the gesture ("it has a definable
beginning and a definable end ... this strict, frame-like, enclosed nature of each moment of an attitude
...," 3), which in turn set up his discussion of the serial spatialization of gesticity, the likening of
interruptions or "haltings" to cinematic frames on a strip of celluloid, "punctuated either paratactically or
mathematically," or to typesetting, and thus to "the mechanical aspects of writing." Hence also,
presumably, the temptation to use the literary text of Mann ist Mann to represent the estranging effect
of the Brechtian Gestus (Benjamin 2-3, 8-9, 12-13): for a depersonalizing or desomatizing critique, the
truest form of any theatrical or literary effect is one that has been abstracted out of the realm of human
interaction.
And this is largely what Benjamin gives us of Brecht: a Brecht removed from the context he most
insistently inhabited, the theater, the interaction between actors and audience, the impact of actor
bodies on audience bodies and minds. Benjamin is brilliant, of course, but his is the brilliance of the
study, the text, the abstract structure, and that is largely what he finds in Brecht as well. If you're a
depersonalizing poststructuralist or a structuralist Marxist like Fredric Jameson (see his Brecht and
Method), you'll find this book indispensable. If you're doing performance studies or working in the
theater and are mostly interested in Brecht's thoughts on estranging gestic acting styles, you may want
to give this book a pass, and read John Willett's superb collection from 1964, Brecht on Theatre.
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