The revolutionary vision of emancipation continued to live on only in the slanders of the counter-revolutionaries.

—Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State” (1940)

The idea that “unions are nothing more than an object-lesson demonstrating in a practical way the uselessness of any action other than revolutionary politics,” was an idea popular when Eduard Bernstein wrote this line in the Preconditions of Socialism (1899).1 For Bernstein, of course, unions were one of the few “indispensable organs of democracy,” but he knew this idea was controversial, especially among Marxists. By the time Max Horkheimer offered his account of “The Impotence of the Working Class” in 1927, unions had become a central target of Marxist criticism.2 As Zamora’s essay makes clear, terminal unemployment, a condition that helped define a new post-proletarian revolutionary subject position, has been a core value of Marxist criticism at least since the 1960s. Here, I want to point out a few “preconditions” of Zamora’s account of the division of the working class in the hopes of a raising a few questions about whether the utopian vision of the precariat is a necessary feature of Marxist analysis or a dispensable one, and if it is dispensable, then what version of Marxism is this. Moreover, I wonder whether these earlier formulations of what we might call “lumpen idealism”—a set of claims that emerges as the theoretical foundations for diversity politics—might alter the general historical picture of neoliberal politics. If it is already the case in 1927 that subject positions—poverty as a mode of being—define a new political reality, then how does that alter our vision of the structural relation between diversity and neoliberal economics? What does the prefiguration of contemporary ideology in the prewar period amount to, if anything? Finally, it seems that the basic problem of Marxist analysis in the later 20th century up to today has been its incapacity to deal with changing political and, especially, economic phenomena. Obviously the word “changing” here is contentious from a Marxist perspective. Fine. Nonetheless, did the tenor or practice of various consumer critics, war critics, champions of the multitude, change a jot during or since the downturn? More like double down on 2007 terms, or 1967 terms.

* * *

When Horkheimer’s “Impotence of the Working Class” appeared in Dämmerung in 1934—his first book, a collection of brief essays written between 1926 and 1931—it was by far the longest entry in the volume. Horkheimer’s text offers an analysis, and suggests revisions for, part 7, chapter 25, of Marx’s Capital, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.”3 Chapter 25 has been crucial to the work of several of us associated with nonsite because it is here that Marx explains the central function of unemployment in a capitalist economy and for that reason offers some important terms for understanding current-day economic facts, especially those associated with the economic downturn. In October of 2009, for instance, the unemployment rate in the United States reached 10% (as of today that number is around 7.3%). And while this is not quite comparable to the unemployment rates in Germany (or the US) when Horkheimer was writing—in 1929 around 1.5 million Germans were unemployed; within a year the figure had more than doubled and by early 1933 unemployment in Germany had reached a staggering six million or around 32%—his analysis provides some of the clearest terms available for understanding the theory of unemployment within Western Marxist thought.

Two things should underscored about the ongoing discourse of unemployment on the Left. First, that Horkheimer was clearly capturing or describing a “new” reality that had not received adequate attention within traditional Marxist theory. For Horkheimer, unemployment was so severe that it seemed to require a shift in the basic terms of political economy, above all a shift in the conceptualization of the so-called “subject-object of history” as Lukács defined it. Second, that the terms by which Horkheimer articulated this “new” subject of hopelessness became, as Zamora has brilliantly shown, the central ones of Leftist politics from the 1960s forward. While I will not be able to fill in the gaps between Horkheimer in 1927 and André Gorz (and Rancière, and Badiou, and Negri, and Zizek, and Butler, and Harvey, and Fraser) in the 1970s, I do want to suggest some larger continuities in the theorization of the unemployed. Once the door had been opened onto the phenomena of the chronically unemployed, it appeared there was no closing it. Which is to say, even though the intervening period—at least between 1945 and 1979—was characterized by something wildly different than rank unemployment, nothing about this fact altered the vision of revolutionary progress centered on the figure of the precariat. It would be fairer to say exactly the opposite. The “affluent society,” as Kenneth Galbraith described it in 1958, was the source of endless lament on the Left (the Right’s attitude toward the growing equality in wealth is another, but related, story).

What should strike us about Horkheimer’s analysis is at once the dissimilarity of the situation he describes and our situation, and the utter identity of the claims made against the (employed) working class throughout a period when the unions and the welfare state were making serious strides in the elimination of unemployment and the suffering associated with it. Of course, for Horkheimer and others, one of the central facts of the Nazi state was its realization of full employment. As I will show, this achievement was not viewed as a contingency, but rather spoke to the identity of capitalist and fascist efforts at eliminating unemployment (there were two forms of “state capitalism”). Moreover, if Horkheimer’s vision was to retain the revolutionary force of the unemployed against those of the owners and the employed (of any class), then, as of 2008, it has become clear that Horkheimer as well as the writers Zamora considers, have achieved their aims with unprecedented success. With one exception of course: high unemployment, low revolutionary force.

* * *

Part of Marx’s argument in chapter 25 of Capital is to show how with the increase in mechanization there is a decrease in employment. The consequence of this, according to Horkheimer, is a modification in the “reciprocal relations of the various strata of the proletariat.” It introduces a change in the “consciousness” of the “respectable employed worker,” including, or perhaps especially those with “temporary” jobs, and the consciousness of the “regularly unemployed strata.” What is at stake for Horkheimer, as it is for Zamora (and myself), is the “solidarity of the proletariat.” Horkheimer’s concern is that as the “community of shared interests [between employed and unemployed] shrinks more and more” so will the solidarity between the two groups. Horkheimer’s basic assumption is that there is a loss of shared interests among the two groups, not that there is a feeling that there is one (a feeling, one might add, that might be—or is—a product of “false consciousness”).

Horkheimer is quick to point out that there have always been various layers of the “reserve army.” In the earliest phases of capitalism there existed a lumpenproletariat—a “relatively insignificant segment from which the criminal element is recruited”—whose character was defined by “obvious qualitative contrast” with the proletariat as a whole. Excepting the lumpen, class division was formerly characterized by a “steady transition between those who worked and those who didn’t.” In the past someone who was out of work “might be hired the next day, and the man who had work was much like his unemployed colleague when he lost it.” High rates of turnover still lent themselves to common cause in the fight to eliminate the rule of capital. By 1927, the period of steady transition—high turnover—was over, and with it the solidarity of the proletariat. Unemployment occurred “from birth on” and it was increasingly tied to one’s basic self-definition.

What had changed? According to Horkheimer, the sheer “wretchedness,” the “utter hopelessness,” of contemporary life was so “unevenly” distributed that it made revolution increasingly a matter of “individual concern.” For the poor, but employed, one didn’t want to risk even the barest forms of revolutionary sentiment, and thereby risk becoming one of the unemployed. “For the employed workers whose wages and long-term membership in unions…assure a certain, albeit small, security for the future, all political acts involve the danger of a tremendous loss.” Alternately, for the unemployed, they have nothing to lose “but their chains.” This is the reason for the historically unprecedented “gulf” between the employed and not employed. The formerly unified proletariat become divided against one another as the unemployed lumpen become the revolutionary force and the employed (poor and rich) emerge as capitalists.

It should be clear that Horkheimer’s aim here is not to show the mistake that generates this vision of class interest, or how this kind of division between layers of the poor is the fulfillment of the most basic of capitalist fantasies. It is not a description at all, but an effort to introduce a shift in Marxist analysis. There is a new agent of history, one Marx could not have imagined: the wretched of the earth, one whose very existence is defined by joblessness.

At the foundations of Horkheimer’s analysis is the belief that “Work and misery no longer come together, people no longer experience both.” Here is the nub of Horkheimer’s account: those who work enjoy a degree of comforts (a tragic situation for revolutionary foment); those who do not, live a life of sheer suffering, a suffering that can only set them free in the long run. And while I will not elaborate this point here, I would argue that it is this claim that grounds the larger Frankfurt School account of political economy. It is the kind of claim Herbert Marcuse will make famous with his vision of “Liberation from the Affluent Society.”4 According to Marcuse, “The insanity of the society…is the degree to which it is capable of conquering poverty and reducing the toil of labor and the time of labor and of raising the standard of living.” It is insane to ease the lives of poor people (at least ones with jobs), or, more important, it is insane to rid society of poor people, because those formerly revolutionary (“wretched”) subjects necessarily find themselves more “integrated” (a word in obsessive circulation) into capitalist society. They won’t risk revolution, because their lives are too “comfortable.”

This is what Horkheimer means when he says (in a later piece of writing) that “Marx’s and Engel’s teaching that the struggle for higher wages and shorter hours of work would finally put an end to the prehistory of mankind is a pathetically secularized Messianism, infinitely inferior to the authentic one.”5 Marx and Engels were duped (like the employed poor) into believing that unions could save them. Beginning in 1940 Horkheimer developed a broad-ranging and influential thesis about unions, what he called “the theory of rackets.”6 In a world defined by rackets “All have become employees, and in the civilization of employees” everyone loses their “dignity.”7 As he put it in the same note on Marx and Engels, “rackets control everything more or less according to plan, the capitalists through conflicts among each other and with the unions.”8 It is important to see that Franz Neumann, at the same moment Horkheimer put forward the “racket theory” responded in detail with his account of Behemoth (1942).9 As Neumann observes in his introductory note to the book, he chose the word Behemoth to explain National Socialism because it described a “non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness and anarchy,” which is to say, it was anything but in “control of everything according to plan.”

In 1927 the separation of work and misery was not yet a matter of political ontology for Horkheimer. Horkheimer still recognized the structural function of the reserve army in the depression of wages. Nonetheless, the misery of the existing order bears “ever more exclusively” on the lower segment of the working class. But there remains a key problem with the “new element” of the excluded: they have “no understanding of theory.” They waver, they are disorganized, they are young, they are violent, they are mostly dumb. They lack those “human qualities” necessary to implement socialism. Those that have a “direct interest” in socialism (the unemployed) and those with a “clear theoretical consciousness” (the employed, but struggling) are found among separate elements of the proletariat.

These separate elements find expression in competing workers’ parties: Communist and National-Socialist. Again, one finds here a root claim of Frankfurt School analysis: the poor (but unionized) found their refuge among the Nazis while the “new element” joined the Communist Party. But there’s little ultimate difference. The “theoretical” expressions of the unemployed result in the “mere repetition” (the “undialectical preservation”) of the slogans of the Communist Party. As Horkehimer explains, the Communists are theoretically bankrupt. Rather than provide reasons for their beliefs, they “refer to authority.” They, like the fascists, use “physical force to make their better informed opponents see reason.” As for the reformists—Bernstein, after all, is still alive—they are no longer aware that “human conditions cannot be effectively improved under capitalism.”

If at the beginning of his account Horkheimer describes a shift in the nature of the proletariat then by the end he is describing the difference between “social groups.” The entire “inhumanity of the capitalist production process” is laid on the unemployed—alienation, poverty, marginalization, intolerance, disenfranchisement—while the worker assumes the “positive capacities acquired through his integration in the production process.” It is the putative task of the social democrats, defined here through a set of philosophical commitments to “relativism,” to make the two groups quarrel. If the two halves of the missing whole don’t add up, it is because the social democrats don’t want them to.

Throughout the 1930s Frankfurt School political economists Friedrich Pollock, Kurt Mandelbaum10 and Gerhard Mayer developed their analyses of “state capitalism” a set of claims then popularized by Marcuse in “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State” (1934)11 and Horkheimer in essays like “The Authoritarian State” (1940)12 and “The End of Reason” (1941)13 and in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). As I am suggesting here, these arguments are well under way with “The Impotence of the Working Class” of 1927, even if the terms are still being worked out in the text. By the time Horkheimer comes to publish his follow up to Dämmerung, the collection called Notizen (the two were published together in 1974 and in 1978 in English), any hedging of terms has been eliminated. Horkheimer’s aim in the later text is clear: it is practical politics of any kind that is at fault. Here is Horkheimer in a note entitled “Philosophy of History, a Speculation”:

Ultimately, everything in politics…adds up to the guaranteed, secure standard of living…. And here we come to the question concerning the substance of mankind, the actual speculation about the philosophy of history. If prehistory comes to an end [as Marx suggested] because food, housing and clothing are no longer and nowhere a problem for anyone, will the higher, the real history, culture as it is called, begin, or do the movies and the stars in the countries that have arrived show the kind of regression that will then set in? I believe that mankind will only have so-called nobler needs, needs beyond the natural ones, if these natural needs remain unsatisfied…. Even the violence which inheres in education really loses its ground when everything is available and misery at an end. It seems that regression is the only goal of progress.14

The total identification of politics with the provision of comforts seals the fate of any thought of this world. True culture (not the one provided by the culture industry) requires lack, requires suffering, to remain culture. And when history begins, learning ends: the “inherency” of violence in education is no longer justified in a world made soft through (false) security.

To preserve culture, one might be tempted to enforce poverty as lack. Or at least this is what Bertolt Brecht said after attending the first “seminar on needs” at Adorno’s home in Los Angeles in June of 1942. The seminar was chaired by Adorno and attended by Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Friedrich Pollock (to say Brecht, along with Hanns Eisler, were the odd men out would be an understatement). Among other things they discussed Vice President Henry Wallace’s “The Price of Free World Victory” from earlier in the year. Wallace spoke of the capacity for capitalism, through scientific advance, to satisfy basic human needs:

Modern science, which is a by-product and an essential part of the people’s revolution, has made it technologically possible to see that all of the people of the world get enough to eat. Half in fun and half seriously, I said the other day to Madame Litvinov: “The object of this war is to make sure that everybody in the world has the privilege of drinking a quart of milk a day.” She replied: “Yes, even half a pint.” The peace must mean a better standard of living for the common man, not merely in the United States and England, but also in India, Russia, China and Latin America—not merely in the United Nations, but also in Germany and Italy and Japan.15

To say that Wallace’s vision of the “century of the common man” was not embraced by the Frankfurt School would put it mildly. It was a deceptive utopia designed by the exploiters, whose purpose was to further integrate the exploited into the system of capitalism. Here is Brecht’s report in his Arbeitsjournal: “horkheimer quotes, with some alarm, a pronouncement of vice-president wallace’s, that after this war every child in the world must get pint of milk daily.”16 What was Horkheimer alarmed about?: the state of culture in a world well fed. Brecht continues: “the institute is already addressing the question of whether it might not be a colossal threat to culture if capitalism dispenses (as it is fully capable of doing, according to the economist Pollock) so much milk (not only of human kindness).” Distribution of basic needs to the poor results in the cessation of striving for difference, for that “qualitative leap out of the dimension of progress.”17 Brecht returned for some further insults two months later, for the second “seminar on needs,” this time the subject was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The thesis of the evening was (yet again) “when physical needs have been satiated…[Wallace’s speech continues to be a theme] spiritual needs suffer.” Pollock spoke of how “capitalism can rid itself of crises simply by means of public works.” (As Brecht quips, “marx could not predict that governments would one day just build roads.”18) Brecht finally took up the question as to whether culture required suffering. Looking around the room Brecht found himself in agreement with the Frankfurt School thesis on need: “the institute need only look around to see that affluence alone does not create culture, for is there not affluence here, and is there any culture?” Then again, “suffering has been created [by this] culture; so is barbarism likely to ensue if they put a stop to suffering?” Brecht’s formula is too neat; he clearly felt provoked. Nonetheless, to say that our culture—the assorted mystics of the unemployed on the Left—creates suffering is truer than Brecht could have imagined. Suffering is the defining trait of a heroic proletariat, the Multitude, that doesn’t know itself yet, but that the Left is helping to discover themselves—by making more of them, or at least providing the theoretical justification for their existence.

To Me-ti as a young painter, whose father and brothers were barge-haulers. There ensued the following conversation: “I don’t see your father, the barge-hauler, in your pictures.”—“Should I only paint my father?” “No, there could be other barge-haulers, but I don’t see any in your pictures.”—“Why does it have to be barge-haulers? Aren’t there other things?”—“Sure, but I also don’t see other people who work a lot and get paid very little in your pictures.”—“Can’t I paint what I want?” “Sure, but what do you want? The barge-haulers are in a terrible situation, one wants to help them or should want to help, and you know the situation, you can draw, and yet you draw sunflowers! Is that excusable?” “I don’t draw sunflowers, I draw lines and patches and the feelings I sometimes have.”—“Are they at least the feelings about the terrible situation of the barge-hauler?”—“Maybe.”—“You have forgotten them and now you only remember your feelings?” “I participate in the development of painting.”—“Not in the development of the barge-hauler?” “As a human being I’m in the Association of Mi-en-leh [Lenin], which wants to eliminate exploitation and oppression, but as a painter I develop the forms of painting.”—“That’s like saying: as a chef I poison the food, but as a man I buy medicine. The situation of the barge-hauler is so awful, because they cannot wait. While your painting develops, they are starving. You are their messenger and you take too long to learn how to speak. You feel something general [Allgemeines], but the barge-haulers who have sent you for help, feel something specific [Besonderes], namely hunger. You know what we don’t know, and share with us what we know. What does this mean: you learn to operate ink and brush when you have nothing specific [bestimmtes] in mind? You only find it difficult to operate ink and brush when something specific [Bestimmtes] should be expressed with them. The exploiters are speaking of a thousand things, but the exploited speak of exploitation. You erstwhile barge-hauler!”

Translated by Todd Cronan 

Critique of Empathy

1. Truth in Art. Artists have almost always discouraged those who wanted to see a criterion in the degree of similarity of their images of reality with reality itself. At least in our time, painting considered as the capacity to paint similarly was seen as mere craftsmanship; it had nothing to do with art. Even with jobs where it concerned copying—be it a garden, a pet or a family member—value was placed on perceptibility, one must be able to have the illusion that it was the beloved object. (Here the buyer was somewhat sensitive when artists were only delivering him their associations on the occasion of the object.) In general, artists probably arrived at the fact that the optical use that one could make of an object was as pleasurable as any clever use which one could make of an object that has been manipulated. (One can also discover the pleasure in the body part that lines up cleverly.) The enjoyment of the cherries of Cézanne is thoroughly understandable, though perhaps not those of Apollonius, which birds pecked at.

It was a real asset to the viewer when he learned to make a new use of a thing presented this way, or a new use of his eyes.

2. The best way for an emotion to occur in art is the way it occurs in the rest of life. One does not live to have emotions, but one lives and has emotions.

3. From an emotional standpoint, one can both see better as well as worse, that is, the interests, emotionally assembled [umgesetzt] to make our actions more practical or less practical.

Translated by Todd Cronan

The Blue Horses

I like the blue horses of [Franz Marc] which stirred up more dust than the horses of Achilles. And I’m irritated when the painters are told they are not to paint horses blue; I don’t see any crime in that, society can surely stomach such minor rearrangements of reality. Yes, in a pinch, let’s say, in order not to upset the painter, our biologists could even try to breed blue horse hides, if it does not take too much time, on a very small scale of course. Nevertheless some assertions on the side of the defenders [of Marc] irritate me. Namely, I highly doubt whether through arts education one can make the working people supporters of blue horses, and even more, I doubt whether such an education would be desirable. If there is still there a class of people who stand in a very different relationship to the environment than [Marc] and I do, to people for whom these animals must be groomed, unharnessed, corralled, shod, slaughtered, they do not have, like us, only impressions of horses. Footsteps in the sand may be very attractive for the casual hiker and idler, but they might not satisfy the cobbler so much. In order not to prefer footprints in plaster, he first had to free himself from all sorts of demands for accuracy, which he feels every day.

Translated by Todd Cronan

The Worker Who is a Painter

Since you’re a painter, we would like to know how you see things. Surely you see things differently from us, because you have a finer optic nerve. So you can perceive in things aspects that we cannot make out. Seeing gives you pleasures that it does not give us, but you can give us these pleasures, these pleasurable views: through your pictures.

Since you’re also a worker, we would like to know how you see things, as one of them who bring about so many things and with whom so many things are produced. Surely you see things differently than the rulers, because you live differently and have different goals.

Since you are a worker who paints, you can show us things differently through your pictures than we are accustomed to seeing them: more precise, richer, more practical. Surely a bowl is for you a different thing than for your employer. You not only see lines and colors differently from other painters, but also the bowl as bowl you see differently. Also you perceive a different side of people with the help of your lines and colors.

Translated by Todd Cronan

On Chinese Painting
from a letter to George Grosz (1936)

As we know, the Chinese do not use the art of perspective. They don’t like looking at everything from one single point-of-view. In their pictures several things are ordered in relation to each other the way a town’s inhabitants are distributed throughout the town, not independent of each other but not in a state of subordination which threatens their very existence. It is necessary to look at this comparison a little more closely. The families we are comparing with these things live in a town, represented in our picture, in greater freedom than we are accustomed to living in. They don’t exist just by virtue of their connections with a single family. The Chinese composition lacks an element of compulsion to which we are completely accustomed. This order requires no force. The designs contain a lot of freedom. The eye is able to go on a voyage of discovery. The things that are represented play the role of elements which can exist on their own, and yet in the relationship which they form on the page they constitute a whole, if not an indivisible one. You can cut the pages into sections without rendering them meaningless, but also not without altering them.

The Chinese artists also have lots of room on their paper. Some parts of the surface appear to be unused; but these parts play an important role in the composition; judging by their extent and their form they appear to be just as carefully devised as the outlines of the objects. In these gaps the paper itself or the canvas acquires a quite specific value. The basic surface is not simply denied by the artist through covering it up completely. The mirror in which something is here mirrored retains its value as mirror. Among other things that signifies a laudable abandonment of the thorough subjugation of the viewer, whose illusion is not fully completed. Like these pictures I love gardens in which the gardeners have not shaped nature completely, which have space, here things lie side by side.

Translated by Anthony Maslow

Prospectus of the Diderot Society

International societies of correspondence devoted to the interchange of scientific experience have existed for hundreds of years. The arts (we are concerned here with the theatrical arts, including the cinema) have not known corresponding societies of this sort. This fact may be explained by the traditional contrast between the methods of science and of art. The sciences have their technical standard, their common vocabulary, their continuity. For the arts (as we have known them hitherto), with their thoroughly individualistic character, such features have not been considered necessary.

As long as the theater was regarded simply as a medium dedicated to the self-expression of the artistic personality, it was hardly possible to speak of a technical standard of theatrical art, except with regard to innovations in the mechanics of stage lighting, scene shifting, etc. For one artist to borrow from another a means of expression is to admit failure—to parade in borrowed plumage. (Be it noted, however, that this taboo does not apply to the soulless machinery of the stage!) On the other hand the tasks assumed by science have never been limited to the capacity of individuals. The criterion of science has been, not the degree of individual talent, but the degree of general advance in the mastery of nature.

Like the theater, science works by constructing images of life, in a fashion peculiar to itself. Scientific images seek to control the factual world. This is not so with the images created by the theater. Theatrical images, shaped to a greater or lesser degree by the creative will of individuals, have sought rather to construct an independent world of emotion—to organize subjective sensations. For this purpose neither accuracy nor responsibility is required.

In recent decades, however, a new kind of theater has developed-one which sets itself the goal of an exact picture of the world and which admits of objective, non-individualistic criteria. The artist who belongs to this theater no longer attempts to create his own world. He does not set out to add to a stock of images which are essentially portraits of the portrayer. He does not assume that the laws of life are already codified and immutable. On the contrary, he regards the world as unknown and in constant process of change. His purpose is to create images informative of the world rather than of himself.

It is not easy to create images which will aid in mastering objective fact. This attempt naturally encounters great difficulties, and obliges the artist to refashion his technique to suit his new purpose. The visionary ignores discoveries made by others; experiment is not among the mental habits of the seer. The inner eye has never needed microscope or telescope. But the outer eye needs both. Unlike the visionary or the seer, the artist in pursuit of a new goal finds no subliminal apparatus ready to serve him. He must renounce the technique of hypnotic enchantment. Under certain circumstances he must even forego the usual method of emotional communication used by the artists of earlier periods. The building and projection of this new type of image is a technical process beyond the limited capacity of individuals. The new artist therefore helps to develop a technique which will be at the service of all artists. To this end he offers inventions of his own and makes use of the inventions of others. (Thus, in spite of the great differences between them, the stage and the cinema can operate together, insofar as both dramatic mediums explain nature and human relationships.)

THE DIDEROT SOCIETY intends to help gather systematically the experience of its members; to create a terminology; to review, scientifically, the historic conceptions of theater. It will collect the reports of artists engaged in experimental work in theater and film, and arrange for an interchange of these reports. (Papers sent to the Society may be published simultaneously elsewhere, with the subtitle: Report to the Diderot Society.) Members receiving reports from other members abroad will endeavor to place these writings in periodicals in their own language. It is proposed that an editorial board reissue all papers, numbered, in book form. The scope of any paper is left to the discretion of its author. Papers may be comprehensive essays or brief notes. They may describe an entire theatrical production; a mechanical discovery or intention of great or minor importance; experiences with audiences or with stage artists. Unsolved problems may be submitted. Technical details are especially interesting. Scenic innovations such as the treadmill stage (Piscator); analyses of new rhythmic forms; problems in the projection of stage or screen characters; the social meaning of certain texts; the dramatic development of a theme; utilization of facts; planning of preliminary work; study of source-material, of documents or of scientific methods; suggestions for a technical terminology; critiques of criticism, etc., etc.—all these may be the subject of reports to the Society.

There being no dues or other requirements, the Society will be considered organized when a sufficient number of qualified experimental workers indicate their willingness to contribute papers at their convenience, along the lines indicated. For the present the address of THE DIDEROT SOCIETY will be: care Brecht, Svendborg, Denmark.

The Society will welcome information regarding periodicals or journals interested in publishing its reports.

Signed: BRECHT, SVENDBORG

Translation by Mordecai Gorelik 

Devoting this nonsite issue to Brecht inevitably raises the question of why we should be reading Brecht now.1 But we might just as well ask, as Dana Ward does in his most recent book of poems, The Crisis of Infinite Worlds, why haven’t we been reading him all along:

Bertolt Brecht was a great writer with a special feeling for the question of solidarity, & it seems people don’t talk much about him anymore is there some idea that his work is too didactic or plain in its political motivations to satisfy certain contemporary sensibilities conditioned to prize only those aesthetic objects that reflect an education in certain critically (& now canonically) privileged strategies of experimental modernism & postmodernism I guess I mean is the avant-garde too myopic to really love Brecht?  I’m not sure about any of this of course but I have an image of him in my mind that I love where he’s on a little fishing boat with Benjamin have I conjured this picture for my private pleasure or is there a photograph like this in circulation? My favorite poem of Brecht’s is called “Concerning Poor B.B.” & the insouciance in it is manly, very social & delicious in perhaps the way we remember Snoop Dogg as a teen. (52-53)

Ward’s answer to why we haven’t been reading Brecht is itself posed as a question: “is there some idea that his work is too didactic or plain in its political motivations to satisfy certain contemporary sensibilities…?” It’s not surprising that Ward calls our attention right away to something that has been of consistent interest to those who do read Brecht’s work, namely “its political motivations.” What is immediately surprising about this question, however, is that having foregrounded Brecht’s politics, Ward’s answer to why the work goes unread nevertheless doesn’t come down to the politics but to something else: “certain contemporary sensibilities.” What exactly is meant, then, by “contemporary sensibilities”?

Insofar as these “sensibilities” explain whether or not we’re inclined to read Brecht, the determining factor in the equation, apparently, is whether something does or does not “satisfy” them. Ward’s choice of the word “satisfy” is suggestive to begin with, but all the more striking is that what fails to provide the requisite satisfaction is once again not Brecht’s political motivations but something else: it’s the style (“didactic and plain”) in which they present themselves that fails to “satisfy.” From the standpoint of whether a particular style can “satisfy” our “contemporary sensibilities,” we don’t have much further to go before Brecht’s unpopularity is a matter of taste and its solution a matter of marketing. Enter the “manly, very social & delicious” Brecht, stripped of the “didactic and plain” attire of his “political motivations” and re-clothed in the style of a teenaged Snoop Dogg.

The title of the poem in which Brecht appears is “Things the Baby Liked, A-Z,” and the poem itself is organized in tercets, with three lines for each letter of the alphabet. It’s an alphabet song of sorts, in which “B” stands (albeit temporarily) for “Brecht.” We have already begun to see the force of Brecht’s makeover, which transforms his work from being defined by its “political motivations” to being defined by its ability to “satisfy” and be “delicious.”  Is Ward simply saying that for Brecht to appeal to “contemporary sensibilities,” we need to be able to see his work as an aesthetic rather than a political project?  But that doesn’t seem quite right, because it doesn’t account for why this Brecht belongs among the “Things the Baby Liked.”  Another way to put this is to say that Brecht’s “didactic and plain” style, the form his work takes, has reasons for being what it is, reasons that include his political motivations.  But no reasons at all, aesthetic or political, are required for the baby to like Brecht (or for Ward to love the image of Brecht in his mind). Brecht only needs to satisfy baby’s taste, or as Ward puts it, his “contemporary sensibilities.”

Which brings us to the question of what is meant here by “contemporary” (especially if the best way to appeal to our “sensibilities” is to approximate the feel of a late Eighties Snoop Dogg).  The ease with which Ward can move the social into the same register as individual preference, replace political motivations (fairness and justice, say, or the critique or defense of capitalism) with consumerist ones (pleasure and satisfaction), and make Brecht himself look like Snoop Dogg, is completely consistent with the degree to which these  “sensibilities” are contemporized: they’re an index of what we want right now, but also of who we are right now, neither of which will be what they were 5 minutes ago. That is, the old Snoop envisioned as a teen is appealing to our sensibilities because he is more new (more contemporary) than the newest Snoop (rebranding efforts notwithstanding).2 The rapid shifts Ward makes from modernism’s committed Brecht, to postmodernism’s distasteful Brecht, to post postmodernism’s Doggy-style Brecht positions both Ward and the “Things the Baby Likes” within the recently charted territory of so-called “metamodernism.”3

“Constant repositioning” is a phrase Timotheus Vermeulen has used to characterize the movement (Vermeulen “Interview”). And in one of the first academic publications on the subject, Vermeulen and his collaborator, Robin van den Akker, depict how the world appears from a metamodern perspective in terms that could just as easily describe a “crisis of infinite worlds”:

…[M]etamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern. One should be careful not to think of this oscillation as a balance however; rather, it is a pendulum swinging between 2, 3, 5, 10, innumerable poles. (Vermeulen and van den Akker)

Once the poles among which we find ourselves “oscillating to and fro or back and forth” are not just 2 or 5, but “innumerable,” we inevitably start swinging from one aesthetic or political commitment to another, too:  “For us,” Vermeulen says in a later interview, “the prefix meta indicates that a person can believe in one thing one day and believe in its opposite the next. Or maybe even at the same time. …It repositions itself with and between neoliberalism and Keynesianism, the ‘right’ and the ‘left,’ idealism and ‘pragmatism,’ the discursive and the material, web 2.0 and arts and crafts, without ever seeming reducible to any one of them” (Vermeulen “Interview”). Metamodernism, with its innumerable poles, succeeds in turning beliefs (political and aesthetic alike) into something more like attitudes or inclinations. Ward’s Brecht moves easily into this frame, among the “things the baby likes” one moment, among the dislikes in another, out of liking range altogether in another. The modernist Brecht, meanwhile, surely would have choked on his cigar at the idea of such “constant repositioning” (liking communism one moment and National Socialism the next?).  The metamodernist, “social and delicious,” Brecht might look like he can swing between “innumerable poles.” The modernist Brecht clung to the pole he had.

Hannah Arendt understood this well and condemned Brecht’s art for it.  That is, she saw Brecht’s aesthetic commitments as consistent with his commitment to communism, and his unwavering commitment to communism, including Stalin’s version of it, even in the wake of the purges, as, in effect, collaboration with totalitarianism in its most brutal form.   For Arendt, this consistency (or better yet, complete refusal of any “repositioning”) manifested itself in an aesthetics that, from the beginning to the end of Brecht’s career, could not tolerate the “personal” and thereby made him an enemy of the individual, and particularly, of freedom of expression.

The extent to which Arendt values the “personal” is particularly vivid in her decision to make the centerpiece of her essay Brecht’s poem “Der Herr der Fische,” which she claims is  “among his very best works” and “the only strictly personal poem he ever wrote” (Arendt loc. 3270).   The eponymous “Herr” in Brecht’s poem “Der Herr der Fische,” however, in his visits with the men and women of his fishing village, is, if anything, strikingly impersonal:

And though he never contrived
To remember their names
Where their work was concerned
He knew all sorts of things.4(Brecht Poems 95)

Whether the poem is as “strictly personal” as Arendt thinks is clearly contestable.  But she understood Brecht’s larger aesthetic aims sufficiently well to imagine that whatever is “strictly personal” about this poem, it must be something Brecht actively sought to suppress: “he never published it; he did not want it to be known.” Moreover, what Arendt views in Brecht’s artistic practice as a repression of the personal becomes in her account, a personal trait of Brecht himself, one that she understands as simultaneously a “great virtue” and a “curse.” (loc. 3269-70). The reason “Der Herr der Fische” is, for Arendt, “strictly personal,” despite its impersonal central figure, and the reason she believes that for Brecht it’s sufficiently scandalous that it needs to be kept from public view, is that it is, at bottom, a “self-portrait”: “Brecht’s portrait of the poet as a young man—for this, of course, is what it really is—presenting the poet in all his remoteness, his mixture of pride and humility, ‘a stranger and a friend to everybody,’ hence both rejected and welcome, good only for ‘Hin- und Widerreden’ (‘talk and countertalk’), useless for everyday life, silent about himself, as though there were nothing to talk about” (loc. 3299-3301).  The scandal for Brecht, on this account, is that the poem exposes him candidly talking about himself.  The scandal for Arendt, however—the scandal of Brecht’s art as a whole—is that it’s only in this poem that Brecht is “strictly personal”; in the rest of his work, he consistently chooses to be “silent about himself.”

Arendt was writing about Brecht at the height of the Cold War, at a moment when communist states like the Soviet Union were under constant attack for, among other things, the enforcement of their citizens’ silence about themselves. And when Arendt imagines what she views as Brecht’s isolation as an artist during the 1920s, when “Der Herr der Fische” was written (“he cut a rather solitary figure among his contemporaries”), it’s his refusal of the personal, set against a contemporary cohort who “resented the fact that the world did not offer them shelter and the security to develop as individuals” that keeps him apart (loc. 3256).  But in the half century since 1968 (the year Men in Dark Times was published), and particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the systematic economic exploitation by capitalism that Brecht believed a communist state could overturn has instead overturned most communist states, and, if anything, intensified.5 At the same time, “talking about [one]self” and the freedom to “develop as individuals” have never been more valued.  If there’s a “crisis of infinite worlds” for poets like Ward, writing at a moment when the commitment to human capital in the form of self-actualization seems to be at a world-historical peak, the “crisis” looks to them more like a cause for celebration than for revolution.  As one reviewer of Ward’s collection puts it, “Dana Ward’s ‘The Crisis of Infinite Worlds’ is based on the idea that talking about someone and what they do makes them more familiar to you. Ward takes us to an alternate universe where to quote from movies, graffiti, and the experience of walking through commercial stores is a way to relate back to the origin of our feelings, and is a trajectory towards the infinitely possible worlds our expressions can create” (Gregorian).6

My contribution to this nonsite Brecht feature is certainly intended at least in part to suggest a very literal understanding of Brecht’s current relevance. If we think for two seconds about the moment in The Messingkauf Dialogues where the Actor recalls a role in which he “pointed out that all the wheels would stop turning if the strong arm of the proletariat so willed it,” the reasons might seem too obvious for comment: “It was at a moment,” the Actor goes on, “when several million workers were going about without work.  The wheels had stopped turning whether their strong arm willed it or not” (Brecht Messingkauf 21).  At a moment when closer to 200 million worldwide are “going about without work,” it’s hard to imagine a clearer reason to be reading Brecht.  But there is another important reason, one that should be (but hasn’t been) so obvious.  For if it’s true, as Ward suggests, that many of our contemporaries and immediate predecessors—and particularly poets—haven’t been interested in Brecht, it isn’t quite right to say that it must be because Brecht’s work is “too didactic or too plain in its political motivations” (or, we could say, too committed). Rather, I would argue, if Brecht has held little interest, with respect to aesthetics and politics alike, it’s because aesthetics and politics alike have been “strictly personal,” transformed into a matter of “talking about [one]self”—of expressing one’s attitudes and “special feelings”—instead of what they were for Brecht: impersonal, a matter of accuracy and normative judgment.

Brecht believed art, in the form of what he called “epic theater,” could “give an accurate representation of great financial operations on the stage” (cited in Jameson 91). Verfremdungseffekt or V-effekt, Brecht’s term for the technique by which he believed the epic theater could achieve this, functions above all to prevent the theatergoer from identifying with the characters acting on the stage.  Brecht’s strategy of blocking empathy is designed, as he put it, “to alienate the social gest underlying every incident,” where “[b]y social gest is meant the mimetic and gestural expression of the social relationships prevailing between people of a given period” (Willett 139).7 Such “alienation” is intended to prevent the theatergoer from becoming absorbed in the emotional crescendo and release of traditional theater, but the larger goal of short-circuiting the audience’s empathy is to create a critical distance from existing social life and its relations of production—including those specific to theatrical and literary production. Imitated with a difference, social roles, customs, and habits are foregrounded, commented on, rendered forced or unnatural, performed self-consciously. “What is involved,” writes Brecht, “is…taking the human social incidents to be portrayed and labeling them as something striking, something that calls for explanation, is not to be taken for granted, not just natural.  The object of this ‘effect’ is to allow the spectator to criticize constructively from a social point of view” (Willett 125).  What a Brechtian method aims to produce, in other words, is a specific effect on its audience:  a critical apprehension of the disparities and contradictions of capitalism—implied in the events being depicted as well as in the depiction itself—and in turn, the will to effect revolutionary change.

Brecht’s artistic commitments to the alienation effect are political and sociological, to be sure, but the difference (from what Brecht imagines as “traditional” theater) that this technique rehearses is ultimately a logical one.   That is, in estranging or alienating us from social life as we live it, the epic theater is designed to produce the recognition that we ought to be living otherwise. But Brecht’s epic theater also rehearses the categorical difference between these two things, between the world of our everyday habits and practices, in which social life runs its course, and the world of art, in which we evaluate, criticize, and see the reasons for a need to change. One is the world in which we have our emotions, responses, and social exchanges (our “special feelings” and “sensibilities”); in the other, we discern their formal outlines and apprehend their workings in the service of just or unjust states of affairs.  By marking the separation of these worlds from one another, Brecht insists on a logical distinction that runs like a vein of ore through modernism—it’s the difference, say, between personality and impersonality in T.S. Eliot, between impressionism and imagism for Ezra Pound, or in the case of Gertrude Stein, between human nature and the human mind.  This abiding logic, in connection with the fact that the modernists who adhered to it and forked to the right politically were responding to the same “grand financial operations” that inspired Brecht’s sustained commitment to the communist left, is one subject of this essay.

The other, which I’ve already begun to elaborate, harkens back to Ward, and more specifically to the imagined scene in which Brecht “is on a little fishing boat” with Walter Benjamin. From a strictly historical perspective, the fantasy of Brecht and Benjamin being, as it were, “in the same boat” isn’t all that implausible, either literally or figuratively.  After all, in 1933, both had separately fled Nazi Germany to avoid persecution. Moreover, in 1934, Benjamin spent some time with Brecht, who was then living in the Danish city of Svendborg, on Funen island in the Baltic Sea.  A fishing boat would not have been impossible to come by. We might bear in mind, too, that in April of that year, two months before arriving in Svendborg, Benjamin had prepared a lecture entitled “The Author as Producer” to deliver before an audience of the Institut des Études du Fascisme in Paris. In it, Brecht (now famously) serves to illustrate the contention that literature can only have the right politics if it has the right literary technique (a more extreme version of which claim would be something like no good politics without good art). Benjamin goes further and turns the Brechtian alienation effect—the inducement “to criticize constructively from a social point of view”—into a kind of revolution in itself.  Brecht’s epic theater, Benjamin argues, presents “an improved apparatus for [our use],” one that “leads consumers to production” and “in short…is capable of making co-workers out of readers or spectators” (Benjamin 93). It’s as if, for Benjamin, the alienation effect were a kind of cure for the alienation of labor, handing the means of production from the capitalist to the worker. In giving us not only the author as producer, however, but the reader/spectator as producer as well, Benjamin has also bequeathed to contemporary poetry the basis for the aesthetics we find in Ward, one that can just as easily stand on its head and celebrate “The Author as Consumer.” What Ward’s “infinite worlds” give us is an infinite array of attitudes and affective poles from which to swing, an A-Z of ever new (and old) things to “like.”  We can call it “metamodernism” (but in another 5 minutes, we might wish to call it something else).  It’s fitting therefore, that when the metamodernist views Brecht and Benjamin in the same boat, they appear to him as either of two possibilities:  a “picture conjured for personal pleasure” or a “photograph,” a mechanically reproduced object that might or might not be “in circulation,” for which there might or might not be a market.

2.  The Judgment of the Man on the Street

Across an expansive body of work on the technique of alienation, Brecht recurs frequently to what he sees as two particularly effective models for a method of acting suitable to the revolutionary aims of the epic theater: the method whose origins he locates in the techniques of professional actors in the Chinese theatre (which I’ll return to later) and that which he identifies with more or less impromptu reenactments of events in ordinary life, such that, for example, bystanders recalling an accident become analogs for the actors and the audience of the theater.  As we shall see, these turn out to be versions of the same thing insofar as they both are built upon an understanding of citation.  I want to begin with the example of the accident that Brecht describes in a 1938 fragment as “The Street Scene.”  “It is comparatively easy to set up a basic model for epic theatre,” Brecht writes,

For practical experiments, I usually picked…an incident such as can be seen at any street corner: an eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place.  The bystanders may not have observed what happened, or they may simply not agree with him, may ‘see things a different way’; the point is that the demonstrator acts the behavior of the driver or the victim or both in such a way that the bystanders are able to form an opinion about the accident. (Willett 121)

It’s easy to map most of the “street scene” elements onto their counterparts in the theater. The “demonstrator” clearly inhabits the role of the actor; the bystanders are the audience for his “demonstration”; and the demonstration itself is equivalent to the actions taking place on the stage. It should also be clear by now that the epic theater equivalent of “form[ing] an opinion about the accident” is, as Brecht puts it in the passage I cited earlier, “to constructively criticize from a social point of view.” But insofar as “forming an opinion,” is “the point,” of the street scene, we can learn something by negation from the three other considerations Brecht lists that are not.

The three things Brecht determines to be beside the point are: 1) “The bystanders may not have observed what happened.” 2) “They may not…agree with” the demonstrator.  And 3) They “may ‘see things a different way.’“ We notice right away that the third almost serves as a paraphrase of the second; however, Brecht is actually marking an important difference here, and we can begin to grasp it by registering that the phrase “see things in a different way” allows for two completely incompatible meanings.  One is already available in the previous statement that “The bystanders may not agree with the demonstrator.” Their disagreement requires that there be a truth of the matter about which some will be right and the others wrong. Either the driver hit the brakes, or the driver hit the gas. The pedestrian had stepped into the crosswalk, or else she hadn’t. In everyday parlance, we often say two people “see differently” and mean by it simply that they disagree. Brecht’s quotation marks around “see things in a different way,” moreover, serve to remind us that this is a conventional way of expressing the idea, a manner of speaking. At the same time however, we can use the same phrase to mean something like the opposite: we can say we “see things in a different way” and mean that we each have a different experience of things.  In this case, to paraphrase the difference as disagreement would be to render nonsense. It would be as if one bystander said to the other, “No, you didn’t see it that way.”

What, then, does it mean to “form an opinion about the accident,” if disagreeing about what happened, seeing what happened differently, and (to go back to the first of the three), failing to see what happened at all, are equally beside the point?  So far I’ve just been following the translation but it’s worth noting here that the word that Brecht uses to capture what is “the point,” “Urteil,” has strong juridical connotations of the kind that “opinion” carries only in its more restricted uses (my German to English dictionary, for example, lists for “Urteil,” the following connotations: judgment, sentence, decree, conviction, decision, finding, and verdict). If we are Brecht’s bystanders, then, the “point” of the street scene seems to be that opinions of this kind can be rendered independently of our having seen the incident, of determining its causes, or of our distinctive perspectives about it. On what basis then, is our opinion formed?

The answer emerges especially clearly if we put “The Street Scene” version of the accident scenario together with an earlier version of it, in a passage from a poem written in 1930 called “On Everyday Theater”:

Take that man on the corner: he is showing how
An accident took place.  This very moment
He is delivering the driver to the verdict of the crowd.  The way he
Sat behind the steering wheel, and now
He imitates the man who was run over, apparently
An old man.  Of both he gives
Only so much as to make the accident intelligible, and yet
Enough to make you see them.  But he shows neither
As if the accident had been unavoidable.  The accident
Becomes in this way intelligible, yet not
intelligible, for both of them
Could have moved quite otherwise; now he is showing what
They might have done so that no accident
Would have occurred.8 (Brecht Poems 177)

Now, from a few paragraphs later in the “Street Scene” prose fragment, here is a two-sentence version of this section of the poem, telescoped down to just a few of its lines, and delivered in the voice of the “man on the corner”:  “The driver was guilty, because it all happened the way I showed you.  He wouldn’t be guilty if it had happened the way I’m going to show you now” (Willett 127). In the poem, judgment consists explicitly in reaching a verdict: “now he is delivering the driver to the verdict of the crowd.”  We needn’t doubt that it’s the judgment of the crowd in the street scene that is at issue, and by analogy, the judgment of the epic theater audience. The first clause from the prose version, meanwhile, enacts the pronouncement of a verdict (“the driver was guilty”), which in turn is presented as the result of the demonstration in the second clause, “because it all happened the way I showed you.”  Moreover, while the sentence tells us the driver is guilty because of what happened—the accident itself and what the driver did—at the same time, it shows us that the verdict is pronounced “because” of the reenactment and what the performer did—“the way I showed you.” In other words, we have two simultaneous renderings, one in which the actions of the driver determine his guilt and another in which the imitation of those actions compels a verdict. They inhabit the same sentence but they are not the same proposition.

The poem’s version achieves this same differentiation by other means.  It separates what literally happened from its reenactment by means of a subordinating conjunction, a line break, and a rapid shifting of tense. In “he is showing how / an accident took place,” what actually “took place” is grammatically subordinate to the man’s “showing how.”  But the empirical events and their representation are also severed: spatially, by the line break; grammatically, insofar as the subordinated clause reads as a stand-alone sentence—“An Accident took place” (this is true of the German as well); and temporally, insofar as the accident takes place in the past tense and its reenactment in the present (it “took place” while “he is showing how/…this very moment”).  “This very moment,” of course, is intended to modify the line that follows (“he is delivering the driver to the verdict of the crowd”) in which the “man on the corner” performs his demonstration.  But by positioning “this very moment” in the same line with “an accident took place” instead of with the line containing the sentence it modifies, Brecht achieves the further effect of reminding us that the sentence, “An accident took place,” albeit in the past tense, is itself a representation occurring not just in the grammatical present, but “this very moment,” as in the paradigmatic moment of reading, where the sentence is present before its reader. In the poem “this very moment” is also, as we’ve already seen, the moment in which the delivery of the performed reenactment coincides with the delivery of the verdict: “he is delivering the driver to the verdict of the crowd.” Thus the poem gives us two separate worlds:  one consisting of what “took place,” the empirical world of accidents, causes and effects, on the one hand; and on the other, a representational world, the world of the reenactment, but also of judgment, for the poem insists, both grammatically and propositionally, that that the latter is where verdicts reside.

We now see that “forming an opinion about the accident,” the part of the street scene that models the alienation effect and is the point of epic theater more generally, is a matter of rendering judgment, of assessing a wrong. The second sentence in the prose “Street Scene,” “He wouldn’t be guilty if it had happened the way I’m going to show you now”—and its counterpart in the poem—“Now he is showing what/They might have done so that no accident would have occurred”—make clear that reaching a verdict entails our judgment not just of what is wrong, but of what is right. In the prose version, the model of the epic theatre compels our recognition of the conditions of a better world, one in which the accident would not take place. The poem is even more emphatic; the demonstrator depicts a world in which “no accident would have occurred.”

The minute “forming an opinion about the accident” becomes a judgment of what is right, not just for this world or that, but in effect, for all possible worlds, the spectator is in the business of making truth-claims, and therefore in the business of the normative and absolute. The “opinion” that the model of epic theater seeks for us to render is one that obtains, in other words, regardless of whether we identify with the driver or the pedestrian, feel pity or rage. And by the same token it’s a judgment that obtains regardless of the driver’s or the pedestrian’s point of view, or for that matter, the demonstrator/actor’s point of view.  The judgment remains the same, regardless of “the way we see things.”

3. Finance Modernism

I want to turn for a moment to two other poems by Brecht that illustrate, by showing us the same thing from different perspectives—literally by citing themselves, repeating the same words—that judgment is not a matter of perspective. We’ll begin with one of Brecht’s best known poems, “A Bed for the Night”:

I hear that in New York
At the corner of 26th Street and Broadway
A man stands every evening during the winter months
And gets beds for the homeless there
By appealing to passers-by

It won’t change the world
It won’t improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation
But a few men have a bed for the night
For a night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway.

Don’t put down the book on reading this, man.

A few people have a bed for the night
For a night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway
But it won’t change the world
It won’t improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation.9 (Brecht Poems 181)

The poem begins with a situation that is itself understood as repeated (it takes place “every evening”), signaling that the need to shelter the homeless, taken up by the man who stands every evening at 26th and Broadway, is an ongoing state of affairs.  The next three lines, which will become the last three lines of the poem, make a pronouncement on the man’s activity: “It won’t change the world / It won’t improve relations among men / It will not shorten the age of exploitation.” The next three lines, turning on the oppositional conjunction “but,” introduce themselves almost as a response to the previous lines, and they seem to offer a qualification of their judgment, as if the speaker were saying, “what I just said may be true, but at least a few men have a bed for the night.” The reason for thinking the judgment might be qualified—in other words, for treating it as relative rather than absolute—is clearly based on what appears good, but from a limited perspective, that of the “few men” who succeed in receiving “a bed for the night.” When this line is repeated in the last stanza, however, it no longer functions as a countervailing claim about the judgment that giving a few homeless a bed for the night changes nothing.  In its second incarnation, the line serves instead simply as a description of what’s happening in the world at a given moment. At the end of the poem, the lines of judgment that stood to be qualified in the previous stanza now return with the full force, the force of final judgment, and as a direct response to the claim that called upon us to view these matters from the point of view of those served by the charitable actions of man in the first stanza. By the time we reach the end of the poem, even though we have seen these lines quite literally from different perspectives as we move our eyes down the page, the judgment that they pronounce (the judgment against a capitalist order that produces men in need of a bed for the night) has not changed.

One word among the six repeated lines does, however, undergo a change from the first iteration to the second, and the force of the change is much easier to grasp in the German. The word for those few who “have a bed for the night” is “Männer” in the first instance, then becomes “Menschen” in the second.  “Männer,” the plural of “Mann,” in German is used to refer to an individual person gendered male, while “Menschen” refers to all humankind. In the context of the unfolding of the poem, then, it’s as if recognizing the homeless as members of the class of mankind, rather than as individual men in need, is a precondition for the type of judgment that occurs in the final lines of the poem.  At the same time, however, insofar as the lines of that judgment occur first in the series of iterations, it’s as if judgment itself is the precondition for the shift from seeing the homeless as individual men to seeing them as representative of mankind. If we go back to the beginning of the poem, it’s worth noting that the ones who get a bed for the night do so through the man (“Mann,” not “Mensch”) appealing to the good graces of the passers-by. The homeless are “Männer,” in other words, when their conditions are a matter of empathy; once they are “Menschen,” the judgment can reveal the homeless and the charity that serves them alike as effects of systematic exploitation.

Another poem exemplifying this device of repetition/self-citation consists entirely of its repeated lines. And in this case, the poem announces its subject matter clearly in terms of point-of-view:

The peasant’s concern is with his field
He looks after his cattle, pays taxes
Produces children, to save on labourers, and
Depends on the price of milk.
The townspeople speak of love for the soil
Of healthy peasant stock and
Call peasants the backbone of the nation.

The townspeople speak of love for the soil
Of healthy peasant stock
And call peasants the backbone of the nation.
The peasant’s concern is with his field
He looks after his cattle, pays taxes
Produces children, to save on labourers, and
Depends on the price of milk.10 (Brecht Poems 212)

We can see at a glance that the first of the seven-line stanzas gives us two perspectives: the first four lines are devoted to that of the “peasant,” and the last three to that of the “townspeople.” We start with the simple, unadorned descriptions of the practicalities that occupy the peasant’s mind, all of them fully legible in economic terms. The lines devoted to the townspeople, by contrast, serve also as a perspective on the peasant, only now he appears as a clear type, and painted in highly idealized terms.

The second stanza starts by repeating, word for word, the idealized view of the townspeople, then repeats word for word the view of the peasant.  This time around, however, the peasant’s point of view reads as a corrective to the townspeople’s idyllic image of him.  The concerns of the peasant reemerge, now quite literally from beneath the idealized picture of the townspeople, as harsh realities that have been painted over, as it were, by the picture of him that hangs over them. But before we are tempted to say that this poem invites us to violate the directives of Brecht’s epic theater and identify with the peasant’s familiar financial worries, we should notice that the peasant’s concerns make their own omissions.  That is, the worry that from his perspective appears simply as the “price of milk,” and, especially when the prices are high, contributes to his need to “save on laborers,” is an index of an economic totality, a system of relations of production that includes the townspeople, and for that matter, their perspective on the peasant.

In Germany between the end of World War I and when this poem appeared in 1934, the price of milk could certainly testify to the kinds of consequences its fluctuation could have for peasants and townspeople alike. Obviously during the period of stunning hyperinflation of 1922 and 1923, to have said that “prices fluctuate” would have been the understatement of the century. A bottle of milk that cost the equivalent of $1.20 in 1922 would have risen to a price of 2 million dollars in September of 1923, and by November it would have cost a cool 3 billion. By 1931, however, the monetary pendulum had swung the other way; Germany was in a period of deflation, accompanied by widespread unemployment and general reductions in wages and social spending.  By 1934, Brecht was in exile, and Hitler had risen to power on a message of love for the soil and healthy peasant stock who are the backbone of the nation.

The point here isn’t that “The Peasant’s Concern” is really a poem about the Nazi takeover of Germany or even a poem about the price of milk.  For Brecht, as we have already seen, and as the technique of word-for-word quotation that he deploys serves to make plain, the price of milk and the changing political regimes in which it fluctuates are alike effects of capitalism. Momentous changes in the price of goods (or in the value of the money to buy them) can (and do) occur without altering the market system in which those goods and money come into being in the first place.  What both Brecht’s self-quotation poems do is to distinguish between the variable, phenomenological effects of markets—the price of milk goes up or down, this or that homeless man gets a bed for the night—and the market logic that entails both homelessness and price fluctuations.

In the period between World War I and 1933, the German case was the most extreme, to be sure, but the U.S. as well as the other major powers of Europe had also seen wide swings between inflation and deflation, whether as a result of unintended shocks in supply or demand, or as a result of deliberate national strategies for inducing them. What’s striking in the work of the three other modernists I mentioned at the beginning of this paper—Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot—is that their work not only invokes the monetary policies that affected what Stein called “the meaning of money,” but that the meaning of money becomes for each of them something against which to measure the meaning of poetry.11 Thus, for example, in The Waste Land, not exactly forthcoming in its views on political economy, the pervasive tropes of fluidity read a little differently when one considers Eliot’s employment in the Foreign Department of Lloyd’s during the time in which he wrote the poem. “I am busy tabulating the balance sheets of foreign banks to see how they are prospering,” wrote Eliot to his sister Charlotte in one of many letters that also complained bitterly about high prices for goods that were not in scarce supply (Eliot Letters 1 162). Now consider these well known lines from the brief “Death By Water” section of The Waste Land:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
                                        A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. (ll. 312-316)

Juxtaposed with “profit and loss,” “a current under sea” is hard not to read in this context as a somewhat distorted homophonic pun on “currency.” And if we consider the lines in the previous section that introduce us to “Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna Merchant / Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants / C.i.f. London: documents at sight” (ll. 209-211), what is otherwise among the more baffling of the endnotes Eliot provides with the poem, becomes another occasion for a pun on currency: “The currants were quoted at a price ‘carriage and insurance free to London’; and the Bill of Lading, etc. were to be handed to the buyer upon payment of the sight draft” (fn 210).

Pound’s writings of the early to mid-30s, in their explicit embrace of Mussolini and social credit, are nothing if not a response to the kinds of volatile monetary conditions that had much earlier made Eliot, as he told his sister, so keen to know “the assets and liabilities of every bank abroad” (Eliot Letters 1 162) and that Brecht had understood as cause for revolution. In 1933, the same year that Brecht was fleeing Nazi Germany, Ezra Pound was busy publishing his own denunciations of capitalism in response to ongoing instability in the value of currency, a problem he believed fascism could solve.  Pound, however, unlike Brecht, criticized capitalism not so much for its impoverishment of the worker as for its impoverishment of the artist and the arts.  The problem he argues, in “Murder by Capital,” is “maladministration of credit” (for which Pound, like Hitler, chose to blame Jews), and the solution, he suggests, is to replace the banks with a system of social credit administrated by the state. The idea behind social credit was to redistribute state wealth among the citizens in the form of vouchers to be used in direct exchange for goods. Pound imagined that the “slips of paper,” would “correspond[] to extant goods,” and the value of the currency, if we wish to call it that, would remain constant because each slip of paper would be earmarked for a specific good. The absence of such a system, Pound contended, was “at the root of bad taste” (Pound Selected Prose 229). Pound’s fantasy of a one-to-one correspondence between the commodity and the currency used to purchase it (a fantasy also, of the end of price fluctuation from the perspective of the consumer) had its analogue, moreover, in Pound’s highest standard for poetic achievement, in which “The meaning of the poem can not ‘wobble.’“ (Pound Gaudier-Brzeska 257). Insofar as the poetic meaning that both Pound and Eliot sought was something that belonged not to the wobbling world of fluctuating interests rates and prices—that is, to contingencies of the material conditions of production and consumption—but to an unwobbling world that is of the same order as the absolute world of judgment that Brecht severs from the world of individual experiences and perspectives as well as the fluctuating price of milk.

4.  Revolution and Anti-Theatricality

It should be clear by now why another central component of Brecht’s alienation method involves overcoming both the spectator’s and the actor’s inclinations to identify with the characters and prevent becoming consumed by their characters’ actions and feelings. In a 1936 essay, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” Brecht proposes Chinese acting as an ideal model for the epic theater because its techniques, he believes, are the most effective in defeating any tendency to empathize. This defeat is accomplished in large part, Brecht claims, by the actor removing from his performance all traces of illusion that the events are real and his actions genuine. He “never acts,” Brecht writes, “as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him.  He expresses his awareness of being watched…. The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place. …A further means is that the artist observes himself” (Willett 91-92).  As Brecht points out, the fiction of the fourth wall and the actor who performs as if the audience did not exist are among “the European stage’s characteristic illusions.”

The greatest exponent of these “illusions” was the French aesthetic philosopher Denis Diderot. Brecht’s insistence, meanwhile, on the actor’s utter self-consciousness and the collapse of the fourth wall couldn’t appear more diametrically opposed to Diderot’s essentially anti-theatrical commitments. Diderot’s instructions to actors in his 1758 Discours sur la poésie dramatique are striking in their contradiction, virtually point for point, of the techniques that Brecht extols in Chinese acting.  Here is Michael Fried’s translation, from Absorption and Theatricality:  Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot: “Think no more of the [spectator],” writes Diderot, “than if he did not exist.  Imagine, at the edge of the stage, a high wall that separates you from the orchestra.  Act as if the curtain never rose” (Fried Absorption 96).  For Diderot, as Fried explains, these imperatives were transferable to works on canvas, so that what compelled the beholder of certain paintings by Chardin, Greuze, and Vien, whose figures were depicted in the acts of reading, drawing, or, most unselfconsciously of all, sleeping, was their achievement of what Fried calls “the supreme fiction that the beholder did not exist” (Fried Absorption 103).  The condition for producing convincing absorption in both painting and the theater for Diderot—the illusion that the beholder did not exist—would eventually become, most pervasively in the literature we have come to associate with modernism, not so much a fiction or an illusion as the ontology of the autonomous work of art.  For Brecht of course, there is no theatrical situation in which the beholder does not literally exist, but as we shall see, he proves to be no less committed than Diderot to the logic of autonomy if not to its ontology.12

Gertrude Stein, meanwhile, in a series of lectures delivered between 1934 and 1936, produced, as I have argued elsewhere, what is surely among the most consistent and explicit modernist defenses of this ontology of the work of art, and she does so in thoroughly Diderotian terms. A work of art is only a masterpiece, Stein argues in “What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There so Few of them” insofar as it “is an end in itself.” What she means by this is that the masterpiece is not an end for anyone or anything else. What it is as a work of art is independent of what it is for any reader or beholder who encounters it.  Stein elaborates this claim by differentiating the “entity”—the being as “an end in itself”—achieved by the masterpiece from the “identity” that structures situations that entail an audience.  To illustrate this difference, she specifically invokes oratory and letter-writing:

One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say, that is the reason that oratory is practically never a master-piece. …It is very interesting that letter writing has the same difficulty, the letter writes what the other person is to hear and so entity does not exist there are two present instead of one and so once again creation breaks down.  I once wrote in writing The Making of Americans I write for myself and strangers but that was merely a literary formalism for if I did write for myself and strangers if I did I would not really be writing because already then identity would take the place of entity.13 (Stimpson 356-357)

When Stein declares that she wrote her novel The Making of Americans (which she certainly believed was a masterpiece) for an audience of “myself and strangers” only to qualify that claim by saying that her audience was “merely a literary formalism,” the qualification is a matter of kind rather than degree.  For Stein when the audience is formal, what it isn’t is literal, which is to say, there is no audience at all.

If no audience at all is a requirement of the ontology of the masterpiece, it’s hardly surprising that in Stein’s aesthetic theory, plays pose a deep problem with respect to their claim to be art.  What defines the theater for Stein (and what she thinks differentiates it from literature and painting), is the necessity of an audience, which means that the play, in her terms, cannot be an entity—it consists in the recognition of its audience and therefore is a matter of identity—and therefore cannot be a masterpiece.  Indeed, Stein imagines the relationship between the play and its audience in terms of a temporal disjunction that she also links to identity, an unfolding in time that is quite the opposite of the “completed presence” of the masterpiece as entity: “The thing that is fundamental about plays is that the scene as depicted on the stage is more often than not, one might say is almost always in syncopated time in relation to the emotion of anybody in the audience” (Stimpson 244). As she puts it a few pages later, “The emotion of you on one side of the curtain and what is on the other side of the curtain are not going to be going on together.  One will always be behind or in front of the other.” (Stimpson 245).

The logic that separates great painting and acting from theatricality in Diderot and masterpieces from everything else in Stein is a logic that also defines modernism against a postmodernism that above all seeks to solicit the reader or beholder.  From this standpoint, Brecht looks less like a modernist and more like a postmodernist avant la lettre.  As we have already begun to see, however, the very thing Brecht demands from his audience, namely their judgment, is necessarily atemporal and absolute, much as Stein envisions the entity achieved by the masterpiece. “The Business of Art,” Stein writes in “What Are Master-Pieces,” “is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present.” This “complete actual present” is offered precisely by way of contrast to the unfolding temporality of remembering and recognition that constitutes “identity” in Stein’s terminology.14 The operative word here is “complete.” In Brecht it is the same presentness of judgment, as we have seen it achieved in Brecht’s poems, and as it is inscribed in the “Urteil” that is the “point” of epic theatre.  In short, there is no contradiction between the imperative of the theater to address the spectator in Brecht and its imperative to ignore the spectator in Diderot.  In each case the art never consists in the response of this or that viewer; it is the work or the judgment that holds regardless of who is viewing.

Brecht sought to make the theater revolutionary by making it anti-theatrical.  There can be no revolution, of course, without revolutionaries; hence Brecht’s interest in behaviorism and advertising, which, as Todd Cronan shows in “Art and Political Consequence,” Brecht imagined might be employed to manipulate theatergoers’ affective responses in controllable ways.  But Brecht’s investment in these tactics doesn’t make the aesthetics of his theater any less anti-theatrical or its revolutionary politics, any less indifferent to the revolutionary (or not) feelings of its audience. Brecht could hope for a predictable response in the theatergoer—the desire for revolution—just as the advertising industry can hope to produce predictable responses in the consumer—the desire for this or that commodity.  But Brecht understood that the reasons for revolution—systematic exploitation and the structures of capitalism that entail it—are the same regardless of how many (or how few) theatergoers can be made to see them or feel something about them.  The reasons for buying a commodity, meanwhile, are potentially as many as the consumers available to buy them, and advertising’s job, which Brecht understood perfectly well, is to capitalize on the most likely hits or to invent new ones.  Brecht also understood that the reasons of the consumer (her likes and dislikes) and the reasons of the revolutionary (her political beliefs) are categorically and incommensurably distinct.   After all, there is no coherent account of political disagreement (or for that matter, aesthetic disagreement) without appeal to beliefs that are normative, subject to judgments of truth or falsehood, right or wrong, good or bad.  The likes and dislikes of the consumer, meanwhile, however they may lend themselves to statistically based claims for what is or is not “normal,” are precisely non-normative—there is no account of them that can be coherently framed in terms of disagreement or coherently admit to judgment.  The fundamental anti-theatricality of both Brecht’s aesthetics and his politics—their fundamental indifference to the responses of an audience is, in short, necessary to their claims to deliver judgment.  Which is to say that Brecht proves to be a difficult fit for a metamodernist fantasy of oscillating among “infinite worlds” made up of “infinite selves” and their infinite inclinations.  For metamodernism, in this respect, is nothing if not capitalism’s fantasy of the market, one in which what we “like” can also masquerade as a politics.  Reading Brecht correctly might well serve as its antidote.

The truth must be spoken because of the consequences which follow from it for behavior.

—Brecht, “Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth”

 

One thing I’ve learned, and dying I will tell you: It makes no sense to say there’s something deep inside you that won’t come out! Can you think of anything that has no consequences?

—Brecht, Saint Joan of the Stockyards

There is a peculiar note recorded in Brecht’s journal for December 2, 1942:

a great discovery: the need to buy vitamins here in the form of pills. i was already clearly aware how bad my brain was functioning, how quickly i tired, how low one’s vitality gets, and so on. five days of taking vitamins and i was fit again. what striking proof of the social origin of the proletarian “inability to think”!1

Brecht a little more than a year in Los Angeles discovers the wonders of vitamins. How serious is the claim about the “social origin” of thinking? But it is not really about the social origin of thinking, it is more about the chemical and biological roots of it.

A similar line of thought is recorded by Walter Benjamin in his “Notes from Svendborg” where he relates his encounters with Brecht over the summer of 1934 in Denmark. At the conclusion to his notes he mentions, in Brecht’s company, that he is reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He also writes he isn’t feeling well and for Brecht these are not unrelated events. “Reading this novel was the main cause of my illness,” Benjamin recalls of their conversation. Apparently, Brecht is speaking from personal experience. “By way of proof for my illness he told me how, when he was young, a chronic illness whose germ had been latent in him for a long time broke out one afternoon when a schoolfriend played Chopin on the piano, at a time when Brecht was already too enfeebled to protest. He ascribes to Chopin and Dostoevsky particularly dire effects on health.”2

Is this a joke? Why Chopin and Dostoevsky specifically? How serious is the idea that artworks—or rather, the formal properties of music—induce physical effects on their listeners? Hanns Eisler recalls an evening with Brecht at Adorno’s home in Los Angeles where they listened to Adorno’s Stefan George settings, “Vier Lieder nach Gedichten von Stefan George,” op. 7 (1944). Brecht’s response is cutting, if not an obvious insult: “It reminds me greatly of Chopin.”3 Knowing Brecht’s feelings about Chopin (and Adorno surely did), one begins to see the point of the otherwise anomalous appearance of Chopin’s Funeral March in Brecht’s Man Equals Man.4 The final number performed at Widow Begbick’s canteen, the song played at Galy Gay’s funeral, has the soldiers “carry the crate on their shoulders and sing to the tune of Chopin’s Funeral March: ‘Now he will drink his Irish whisky no more.’”5 For Brecht, the song is a further act of violence.

And if music could kill, it could also heal. There were “times when music could be used to treat disease!” Brecht writes in “On the Use of Music in Epic Theater.” Brecht observes that composers have largely forsaken the art of healing through music: “Our composers on the whole leave any observation of the effects of their music to the café proprietors.”6 That Brecht was fundamentally concerned with the “effects” his plays had on the audience is uncontroversial, but that those effects were inevitable and unstoppable is more surprising (and potentially problematic). Nonetheless, it is clear Brecht had a traditional vision of aesthetics in mind; it was the “science” of feeling.

On occasion Brecht appealed to sociological research in the study of effects on the audience: “One of the few actual pieces of research which I have come across in the last ten years was the statement of a Paris restaurateur about the different orders his customers placed under the influence of different types of music. He claimed to have noticed that specific drinks were always consumed to the works of specific composers” (BT, 153). Brecht makes the exact same point in his notes for Eisler and Adorno on film music.

Composers know little about the effects of music. Generally they leave their study to barkeepers. One of the few research results I have seen in the past decade was the notice of a restaurant proprietor in Paris about the different drinks his guests ordered under the influence of different music. He claimed to have found that certain beverages were always consumed with music of certain composers. Undoubtedly the cinema would benefit much if composers were in a position to deliver music that had more or less precisely determined effects on the audience [Der Film würde unzweifelhaft viel gewinnen, wenn die Musiker imstande wären, Musik zu lieferns welche einigermaßen exakt bestimmbare Wirkungen auf die Zuschauer ausüben würde].7

How exactly could this research be utilized in the theater? Could it be marshaled to produce a new subject, as it were behind the viewers’ back?8 Brecht implied that theater and film directors could learn from the science of advertising and “produce music which would have a more or less exactly foreseeable effect on the spectator.” Did Brecht imagine he could produce correct political subjects through the right kind of music? Did he seriously envision an art with “exactly foreseeable effects” on the viewer? More importantly, what kind of effects did Brecht hope to borrow from the lessons of advertising?

Brecht was guided at this point by contemporary developments in philosophy and social psychology.9 “Behaviorism,” he writes in the “Threepenny Lawsuit,” “is a psychology that, based on the needs of commodity production, seeks to develop methods to influence the customer, an active psychology” and therefore “quintessentially progressive and revolutionary” (FR, 172). Progressive and revolutionary, that is, in the way that capitalist techniques of control are: when they are refunctioned from their invented purpose they become weapons in the war against their inventors. This is the point of the opening epigram to the lawsuit: “Contradictions are our hope!” (FR, 148). Brecht elaborates this idea throughout the text, noting how capitalist techniques contain their own contradiction if they are pushed to their limits. So it is that “Behaviorism’s limits are those that correspond to its function in capitalism. … Here again the road leads only over capitalism’s dead body, but here again this is a good road” (FR, 172). Put to alternate purposes, the commercial effects of advertising could assume a revolutionary role. Verfremdungseffekt is simply behaviorism with a Marxist bent. As the Philosopher observes in the Messingkauf Dialogues, he aims to identify “certain laws that might enable me to make predictions” and in the “possibility of influencing” people according to these laws.10

And if Brecht sought to influence the audience in exactly foreseeable ways, he nonetheless fundamentally distinguished this task from what he understood as the “suggestive” use of effects. In Brecht’s finely tuned hypnotic terminology, the estrangement effect is a mode of influence but not of suggestion. In a passage entitled “Influence the audience (by the inductive method)” from the 1936 performance notes to Round Heads and Pointed Heads, he writes of the necessity for controlling effects in order to draw out the right responses from the audience:

A considerable sacrifice of the spectator’s empathy does not mean sacrificing all right to influence him. The representation of human behavior from a social point of view is meant indeed to have a decisive influence on the spectator’s own social behavior. This sort of intervention necessarily is bound to release emotional effects; they are deliberate and have to be controlled.11

One might wonder what distinguishes Brecht’s vision of a work that produces a “decisive influence” on behavior from the kinds of suggestive control of the audience he ceaselessly critiqued.12

One of Brecht’s guiding assumptions, his theatrical ontology, is the belief in the consequential nature of all actions. Effects, of some kind, were an inevitable fact of all art (and of life itself). The task is to control them, putting them to specific ends to influence the right kinds of behavior. Suggestive effects are ones that wash over the audience, putting them in a state of mind undifferentiated from life outside the theater. Alternately, the artist’s task is to control effects; to attempt to foresee the result—to intend one’s effects on an audience, even if that prediction might fail—is the aim of leftist aesthetics.

Taken at face value, Brecht’s pursuit of “decisive influence” and “exactly foreseeable effects” on audience behavior seems to undermine his basic political aims and his affirmation of human reason to reach the right kind of politics. As Adorno famously argued, Brecht was authoritarian precisely because of his prioritizing of political effect over artistic autonomy. “As a virtuoso of manipulative technique, he wanted to coerce the desired effect,” Adorno wrote.13 From Brecht’s perspective, there is an essential difference between the “‘direct,’ flattening, impact” of traditional theater and the “indirect impact” of epic techniques.14 The epic stage is indirect insofar as it set out to “block” the spectator and “prevent his complete empathy”15 with the events onstage, thereby “leaving the audience to decide the matter for itself.”16 This was a distinction Adorno found uncompelling.

For Adorno, putting the matter the other way around, autonomy was politically driven from the start and hardly autonomous. “The resoluteness of [the work’s] distance [from the world] … concretizes the critique of what has been repulsed,” he writes in Aesthetic Theory. So it is hard to see exactly where Brecht and Adorno differ in their accounts of political efficacy (both assume it is indirect), except to say that Brecht is forthright in his claims about effects (whether they worked or not is beside the point). Adorno’s putative “defense” of Brecht is that Brecht’s didactic “theses took on an entirely different function from the one their content intended. They became constitutive … and contributed to the collapse of the unitary nexus of meaning.”17 From the other direction, Adorno facetiously notes how in Brecht’s “best work” it is “hard to determine just what the author … meant.”18 An argument that was entirely different from the one that asserted that the meaning of every work of art was inherently “ambiguous.”

In one sense, Adorno was correct; Brecht sought, through research, to produce “desired effects” in his audience. Adorno’s defense, on the other hand, is untenable. Adorno’s assertion that works of art necessarily, by virtue of their objecthood, mean otherwise than what the author meant makes it impossible to disagree with his (or any) interpretation of the work. On what grounds could one disagree, if not by virtue of asserting what an author meant (even if that information is constitutively unavailable)? And if the claim to having a “decisive influence” on audience behavior was controversial, consider too that Brecht claimed that a work of art was “necessarily … bound to release emotional effects.” The latter, it seems, was a formula for naturalizing empathy in art. In a way, it was.

Consequences

Brecht’s deepest engagement with the problem of artistic effects (and an associated range of loosely behaviorist ideas) appears in a 1939 fragment entitled “Is it worth speaking about the amateur theater?” “In the arts, if nowhere else,” Brecht writes, “the principle that ‘if it doesn’t do much good, at least it can’t do any harm’ is quite mistaken” (BT, 239).

Most people have no clear idea of art’s consequences, whether for good or for bad. They suppose that a spectator who is not inwardly gripped by art, because it is not good enough, is not affected at all. Quite apart from the fact that you can be “gripped” by bad art as easily as by good, even if you are not gripped, something happens to you. Good or bad, a play always includes an image of the world. Good or bad, the actors show how people behave under given circumstances. (BT, 239)

All art produces consequences, he insists. “There is no play and no theatrical performance that does not in some way or other affect the dispositions and conceptions of the audience. Art is never without consequences”; bourgeois and socialist critics alike assume that “our morals are affected by it” (BT, 240). Brecht thus concludes that “political, moral and aesthetic influences all radiate from the theater: good when it is good, bad when it is bad” (BT, 241).

Brecht cites an idea derived from William James’s and Carl Lange’s theory of emotion that says physiological affects generate specific emotional states, rather than the traditional account of emotions which assumes the reverse. Brecht offers a thumbnail version of the theory: “weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from weeping” (BT, 241). Characteristically, Brecht gives the seemingly biological and timeless theory of weeping a specific human setting: a funeral. He observes how “education proceeds along highly theatrical lines … [as] can be seen at funerals, whose meaning escapes children entirely. These are theatrical events which form the character. The human being copies gestures, miming, tones of voice.” In a sense, Brecht is projecting an affective picture of human education, but even here affect is situated, contextualized, in a particular setting. So even if it is the case that behavior comes first and “logical arguments only come later,” those mimetic habits occur within a space of reason (BT, 241). The situation is no different than the one where the customer hypnotically orders his drink as though to accompany café music.

Recent commentary has focused on Brecht’s investment in the priority of bodily response over “logical arguments.” Brigid Doherty, in “Test and Gestus in Brecht and Benjamin,” addresses the problem of influence in the “era of psychotechnics.” Doherty considers how, according to Brecht and Benjamin (with special emphasis on Benjamin’s “Karussell der Berufe” of 1930), one’s “own occupation has influenced his or her mood, opinions, and relations with colleagues, as well as how each would compare the person she or he was at the time of taking up an occupation to the person she or he has become in performing that occupation.”19 Similarly, in “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Miriam Hansen offers an influential assessment of the role biomechanics played in Brecht’s and Benjamin’s theories of artistic influence. According to Hansen, “A major reference point in this regard is Sergey Eisenstein who, drawing on and revising William James and the conservative philosopher Ludwig Klages … sought to theorize the conditions of transmitting or, more precisely, producing emotion in the beholder through bodily movement.”20 She continues:

Seeking to adapt Klages’s (metaphysically grounded) concept of expressive movement for a materialist theory of signification and reception, Eisenstein, like his teacher Vsevolod Meyerhold, returned to James’s axiom that “emotion follows upon the bodily expression” (“we feel sorry because we cry”), although Eisenstein modified James by insisting on the two-way character and indivisible unity of movement and emotion. Without going into distinctions here, what seems important to me … is the notion of a physiologically “contagious” or “infectious” movement that would trigger emotional effects in the viewer, a form of mimetic identification based in the phenomenon known as the Carpenter Effect. The recourse to neuro-physiological, mechanistic, and reflex psychology may not be as sophisticated as the insights of psychoanalysis; yet it may have been more in tune with new, technically mediated forms of aesthetic experience, predicated on mass production, unprecedented circulation and mobility, and collective, public reception.21

Hansen’s and Doherty’s media-based claims—the centrality of “psychotechnics,” “new, technically mediated forms of aesthetic experience predicated on mass production, unprecedented circulation and mobility”—grounded as they are in Benjamin’s writings, do not reflect Brecht’s purposes. (Brecht considered Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,” with special reference to the notion of aura, “pretty abominable.”22 ) Most forms of media theory assume that new forms of technology influence behavior independently of the intentions of their users or receivers. Brecht’s interest in behaviorism, in contrast to contemporary media theory, is an interest in how people express themselves in their deepest intentions, expressions hidden from conscious awareness. Unconscious behavior, for Brecht, is not collapsible into unintentional or precognitive response to stimuli. Despite Hansen’s emphasis on the “two-way” character of Brecht’s interpretation of the James-Lange theory, she nonetheless assumes the viability and usefulness of “neuro-physiological, mechanistic, and reflex psychology,” which treats response as a matter of “movement and emotion.”

Given the recent emphasis on technological and biological concerns in Brecht,23 it is important to see how Brecht substantiates his point about response in the essay on amateur theater by reference not to music but to film. He describes his affective response to seeing George Stevens’s 1939 (loose) adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Gunga Din.” I cite the passage at length as it touches on Brecht’s most basic claims about the role of affect in art:24

In the film Gunga Din, based on a short story [sic] by Kipling, I saw British occupation forces fighting a native population. A tribe—the term itself implies something wild and uncivilized, as opposed to the word “people”—attacked a body of British troops stationed in India. The Indians were primitive creatures, either comic or wicked: comic when loyal to the British and wicked when hostile. The British soldiers were honest, good-humored chaps and when they used their fists on the mob and “knocked some sense” into them, the audience laughed. One of the Indians betrayed his compatriots to the British, sacrificed his life so that his fellow-countrymen should be defeated and earned the audience’s heartfelt applause.

My heart was touched too: I felt like applauding, and laughed in all the right places, despite the fact that I knew all the time that there was something wrong, that the Indians are not primitive and uncultured people but have a magnificent age-old culture, and that this Gunga Din could also be seen in a very different light, for example, as a traitor to his people. I was amused and touched because this utterly distorted account was an artistic success and considerable resources in talent and ingenuity had been applied in making it.

Obviously artistic appreciation of this sort is not without effects. It weakens the good instincts and strengthens the bad, it contradicts true experience and spreads misconceptions, in short it falsifies our picture of the world. (BT, 240)

Brecht is disturbed by the power of the film’s effects, as though the director could have predicted all of them without the audience’s awareness. In the film, Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. play sergeants in the Royal Army fighting off a murderous Indian cult in colonial British India. Brecht feels himself, as though at a biological level of behavioral response, mirroring their moves, identifying with their roles. And yet, his affective responses are upended when he exits the theater. Looking back, he senses his feelings were manipulated, as were those of everyone watching the film. Like the café owner, the film director made the audience consume, against their conscious will and morals, his (and Kipling’s) politics.

Recall that Brecht admired the café owner’s and the director’s capacity to control response and that he sought to put behavior research to use in the theater. The problem with Stevens’s film is not that he produces “foreseeable effects” on the audience; the problem is not even the politics of the director—Brecht assumed a properly educated political subject could resist suggestive effects—but rather the kind of effects deployed. Brecht is just as critical of “Leftist” suggestive effects as he is of conservative ones. It “is not enough to produce empathy with the proletarian rather than the bourgeois,” he insists, “the entire technique of empathy has become dubious (in principle, it’s entirely conceivable that you could have a bourgeois novel which encourages empathy with a proletarian).”25 Brecht further notes that one can have a “complete theatrical experience” based in a picture of real life that is “entirely misleading” (BP, 121). And if empathy with the proletariat does not constitute a Leftist politics, Brecht also argues the opposite. Consider his seemingly peculiar statement that Hitler’s “general intention, to improve himself by copying others [by studying acting], is not ridiculous—even if his choice of models was” (AP, 195). Hitler understood as well as Brecht the necessity of mimetic models, only Hitler’s were suggestive, while Brecht sought models that would teach one how to guide an audience to reason for themselves.

Empathetic attractions are ubiquitous and normal: human beings mimetically respond to other humans automatically (recall Brecht describing children at a funeral, or kids at a movie). Chopin, café owners, Hollywood film, and bourgeois actors and directors exploit this primordial fact. The point of Brecht’s theater is to introduce cognition into mimesis, to “divide the audience,” to provide space to reflect on, even refuse, one’s affective responses, not just succumb to them. And yet, Brecht also assumes that the kinds of responses his plays produce would lead to certain predictable results. But the predictability of response he intends is not a matter of the viewer’s normal response to stimuli—the products of empathetic identification—but rather to the normative demands of educated response; that is, socially, historically, and culturally saturated, normative responses allow for a failure to respond.

The problem of affective response in Brecht is difficult to see because the normal and the normative overlap so closely on the level of language. Paraphrasing Aristotle’s Poetics, for example, Brecht explains that when the actor imitates events from life those “imitations are supposed to have specific effects on the soul” (BP, 17-18). The crucial mistake of Aristotelian aesthetics is not the production of “specific effects” on the audience, but rather that those effects occur at the level of the psyche or soul, that is, to the biological subject. Aristotle appeals to the normal subject for his research into audience response and that biological body inevitably responds to stimuli in the way that drugs affect any normally functioning biological unit. That is why empathy, in Brecht, is always identified with the effect of drugs.

Like his experience of seeing Gunga Din, Brecht describes sound film as a “blooming branch of the international narcotics traffic” (BT, 153). He watches

entire rows of people transported into a peculiarly doped state, wholly passive, self-engrossed, seemingly the victims of severe poisoning. Their vacant, gaping gaze shows that these people are the helpless and involuntary victims of their unchecked emotions. Trickles of sweat prove how such excesses exhaust them. (BT, 152)

The music-benumbed audience in the grip of a poison attack is not a specific feature of film media. The effects available to silent film are crucial to Brecht because they allow for contradiction, for performances that work “against the sentiment that the music called forth” (a point further made by Eisler and Adorno in Composing for the Films) (BT, 153). Brecht assumes that the intentions behind most silent films are different from those of sound films; it is not a matter of the ontological nature of the medium, as it is in part with music. Brecht rejects predetermined emotional reactions, but not predictable ones. The latter, crucially, allow for a failure to come off and require activation by the viewer—what he called “the active, creative element” in response (BP, 153)26 —while normal response always occurs, whether one assents to it or not.

Shakespeare offers a test case on the difference between empathy and influence. The Philosopher in the Messingkauf Dialogues ribs the Actor about his performance of Lear: “As your Lear cursed his daughters, a bald-headed gentleman next to me started gasping in such an unnatural way that I wondered why, having lost himself completely in your wonderful portrayal of madness, he didn’t start frothing at the mouth” (BP, 22). Brecht’s point here, part of the joke, is that the actor is better than he lets on. The actor cannot actually bring himself to produce a wholly seamless performance, one that hypnotizes the spectator through the actor’s total identification with the fevered Lear. Brecht calls for the abandonment of the “expedient of suggestibility, which comes about as in epilepsy, where the epileptic carries along with him everyone disposed to epilepsy” (AP, 72-73).

Bearing in mind the distinction between normal and normative claims in Brecht’s approach to effects, it is easier to see the potential value of the contemporary sciences. Brecht frequently calls on writers to be aware of the latest developments in the science of the self. “Only very few of our ‘realists,’” he writes, “have … taken notice of the development of views on the human psyche in contemporary science and medical treatment. They are still stuck with an introspective type of psychology, a psychology without experiments, a psychology without history, etc.” (AP, 248). He repeatedly draws on the lessons of “physics” and “modern physiology,” of Pavlov’s experiments with dogs, to explain theater (BP, 18, 38). The Dramaturg in the Messingkauf Dialogues asks about the “direct transfer of emotions” like “when horror is aroused by horrific actions” (BP, 38). The Philosopher explains that at the theater one typically experiences “rich, complex, many-sided incidents which could be compared to those of Pavlov’s dogs: feeding plus bell-ringing” (BP, 34). For a failed actor, these complex events only show “secondary features,” a dulled set of reactions, not the full sweep of emotions, which is why the actor is “making the audience ill, just like Pavlov and the dogs.” Given Brecht’s understanding of the power of suggestive effects, one gathers that the illness is neither a joke nor imagined. The Pavlov experiment finds its way into Mother Courage when Eilif recalls how he strategically starved his soldiers in order to make a raid (a massacre) on peasants storing ox meat. They were so hungry that “their mouths watered if they even heard a word beginning with me … like measles.”27 What Eilif, Hollywood directors, Pavlov, and café owners share is a commitment to hypnotic suggestion and what the audiences share is a susceptibility to its effects.

Brecht’s relation to Pavlov is complicated. Pavlov was largely celebrated by Lenin and his research was supported by the Soviet Union (the admiration did not go both ways as Pavlov held little regard for Lenin). The Marxist revision of Pavlov comes out clearly in the “Threepenny Lawsuit.” Here, Brecht argues, “the reflexes are biological; only in certain films of Chaplin are they already social” (FR, 172). He goes on:

the great American comedies depict the human being as an object, and could have an audience entirely made up of reflexologists. Behaviorism is a psychology that, based on the needs of commodity production, seeks to develop methods to influence the customer, an active psychology, therefore, quintessentially progressive and revolutionary. Its limits are those that correspond to its function in capitalism. (FR, 171-72)

These sentences have been the source of trouble for commentators. It appears that Brecht is distinguishing the café owner or industrialist influencing the customer from the Pavlovian responses of the audience at a Chaplin film. Chaplin performs a scene open to the audience’s evaluation, while the café owner, performing his actions offstage, does not. In this sense, Pavlov was a crucial theorist of the normative. Pavlov showed how one can ring a bell and have the dog attack the owner under the right circumstances. The problem is that this implies that Pavlov, like an actor or director, is someone who could persuade dogs (the viewers of epic theater) of the wrongness and rightness of their salivations (their actions) independent of their associations with food (the object of empathy).

Suggestion/Influence, Empathy/Action

As Brecht explains in a short but important text written at the beginning of 1941, “On the Gradual Approach to the Study and Construction of the Figure,” what needs to be avoided at all costs is a mode of acting that “obscures from the spectator the process by which [the actor] himself gained knowledge of the figure” (BT, 228). To appear before the audience “already transformed” into a character is to show someone “free of influences and therefore also apparently unable to be influenced” (BT, 228). This kind of “general, absolute and abstract person” is the antithesis of the “step-by-step” construction required for properly epic theater. The audience must see how subjectivity is terminally influenced by others, for good and for ill.

In the period between January 11 and February 1, 1941, Brecht’s Journals are filled with discussion of the problem of influence, of how to understand “the social effect of works of art” (J, 130). The question, again, is not whether art has social effects, but what kind they are. In his journal entries Brecht presents a slightly revised picture of epic theater. He now claims that “empathy in non-aristotelian theater” is a “rehearsal measure,” that is, one can use empathy in preparing for a role (J, 124). Above all, Brecht writes, “whatever empathy is achieved should incorporate no element of suggestion, i.e., the audience is not to be induced to empathize too” (J, 124-25). Here, Brecht introduces a crucial distinction between empathy and suggestion, which he elaborates over the next several entries.

Although “in reality” empathy and suggestion “occur separately,” Brecht observes how difficult it is to maintain this distinction in current modes of theatrical production because “an actor … empathizing himself and inducing the audience to empathize (suggestive empathy)” is “identical” (J, 125). “Today’s actor,” he contends, “cannot imagine effects being achieved without empathy, nor effects without suggestion” (J, 125). Even Brechtian performers Helene Weigel and Hermann Greid seem to reject the idea that empathy and suggestion can be separated in practice. Brecht observes that the only performance precedent for this kind of distinction is comedy (and, outside theater, silent film). The question Brecht raises is “can the preventive techniques used in comedy to avoid empathy also be employed by tragic actors”? (J, 125)

In his January 14, 1941, entry Brecht again stresses that the “actor should empathize with person presented in the play” but adds that it should not happen “on a suggestive basis, i.e. not so that the eventual audience would be forced to participate in this empathy” (J, 125). Brecht draws out the artifice of suggestive acting, showing that it is a set of objective techniques. Brecht dissects this artifice: “Tension in certain parts of the muscular system, head movements executed as if pulling on an elastic band, the feet as if wading in tar, intermittent stiffness, sudden changes, moments of restraint, also monotony of voice, remembered from church responses” (J, 125). As Brecht makes clear, suggestion is derived from the literature and practice of hypnosis. Suggestion is a technique the hypnotic operator uses to put their patient into a state of passive openness to the operator’s commands. According to Brecht, a certain pattern of muscle, head, feet, movement, voice “induce hypnosis” and that “snakes, tigers, hawks and actors rival one another in this art” (J, 125-26). That is, snakes, tigers, and hawks use suggestive techniques to lower the defenses of their prey before they pounce and consume them. Above all, Brecht wants to dissociate “convincing, rounded acting” including empathetic acting and its effects from suggestive acting and its effects.

Brecht goes on to describe the traditional acting as a “simultaneous act of auto-suggestion and suggestion: he suggests to himself that he is somebody else, and he suggests to the audience that he is that other person” (J, 126). The actor drugs himself in the performance and induces the audience to feel the same. The classical actor “makes his simulation suggestive, i.e. he forces the audience to go through it with him” (J, 126-27). What marks the suggestive mode of acting as problematic is the automaticity of its effects. The audience is unable to think and feel other than what the actor, as hypnotic operator, wants them to. Brecht’s seemingly casual reference to the hypnotic powers of snakes and tigers is more serious than it appears. He writes that in the “case of hypnosis by snake movements or by the look of a tiger, simulations also occur—of the movements or of rigidity” (J, 127). At this point Brecht hedges some of his more forceful claims about the separability of empathy and suggestion. “I cannot yet see exactly whether the act of empathy (which is an act of auto-suggestion) can be carried out without the suggestion affecting the audience,” he writes. He provocatively describes the possibility of empathetic acting without suggestive effects as “straightforward imitation, which in turn can of course only affect the persons presented” (J, 127). Indeed, marking a surprising shift of emphasis in his theorization of epic theater, he offers that “in the same way as the act of empathy the a-effect can also be used on a suggestive basis” (J, 127). As the latter makes clear, Brecht’s concern bears on suggestive effects, on audience response, rather than on techniques of empathy or alienation.

Despite some equivocation over the separability of empathy/alienation and suggestion, he now writes that for actors “there is sometimes a fear of being unable to achieve any effect at all, except on a suggestive basis.” Rejecting this claim, Brecht returns to his basic supposition: “one thing at least is certain; there are some actors who ‘have presence’ without using any of the known means of suggestion” (J, 127). Brecht briskly closes off the line of inquiry—“I do not set much store by all these speculations”—and considers the problem of empathy and suggestion as a practical manner. “It is more important to find exercises … which produce the desired effects. They are relatively easy to check” (J, 127). How does one check the success of a “desired effect”? Part of the answer is to say that suggestive technique generates a sequence of readable reflex actions. “Is the moment of reality in question sufficiently exposed to causal scrutiny or not?” (J, 127) The latter is possible with any technique other than suggestion.

Almost forty years after Theodor Adorno delivered what had seemed to be a death blow to some of Bertolt Brecht’s most attractive claims, Roberto Schwarz had the audacity to return to a very basic question: How does Brecht mean what he means?2 The problem is precisely that of autonomy, or rather its lack: in Adorno’s essay on the question, the problem of “commitment,” or art’s heteronomy to politics.3

As is well known, Brecht’s theater aims explicitly at autonomy from the market. Entertainment of course precedes the market: opera “was a means of pleasure long before it was a commodity.”4 But under present conditions, “art is a commodity” whose value derives, in the case of opera, from “the social function of the theater apparatus, namely to provide an evening’s entertainment.”5 In Mahagonny, this pleasure is artistically neutralized by framing it:

As for the content of [Mahagonny], its content is pleasure: fun not only as form, but as subject matter. Pleasure is at least to be the object of inquiry, even as the inquiry is to be an object of pleasure. Pleasure enters here in its present historical form: as a commodity.6

The two sides of the chiasmus are not symmetrical. The inquiry as an object of pleasure (Mahagonny) is a commodity; pleasure as an object of inquiry (Mahagonny) is not. Supported by the theater apparatus, epic theater is all the same within it a “foreign body.”7 But autonomy from the market is understood to be heteronomy to something else. The goal of epic theater is “to develop an object of instruction out of the means of enjoyment, and to convert certain institutions from places of entertainment to organs of publicity.”8 Even as the culinary is retained, in other words, Brecht turns the ancient defense of poetry—“delight and teach”—more fundamentally into a choice of priorities: “Vergnügungstheater oder Lehrtheater?”: theater for pleasure or theater for learning?9

Adorno raises an objection to this orientation that is in its essence very basic, and that returns to Hegel’s critique, in the introduction to his lectures on aesthetics, of the possibility of defending art by referring to its ends. From the most abstract perspective, the choice Brecht imposes is no choice at all: both theater for pleasure and theater for learning are theater “for” something; that is, both are to be judged by their effectiveness as a means to some external end. If the work of art is not to “have its end and its aim in itself,” but is rather to be valued as a means to some other end, then the appropriate focus of judgment shifts away from the work of art both to the end it claims to serve and to the efficacy of its status as a means.10 For Hegel’s critique, it matters not at all whether the purported ends are noble or base: Hegel’s offhand list includes “instruction, purification, improvement, financial gain, striving after fame and honor” (64). The point is rather that neither moment—neither that of the work of art’s status as a means (essential or arbitrary?), nor that of the status of the ends to which it is subordinated (desirable or not?)—is self-evident. This applies as well to today’s academic empathy-peddlers, amateur subjectivity-modelers, community do-gooders, and civic boosters as it does to yesterday’s radical theater.

In the early 1950s Adorno is, to say the least, suspicious of the ends to which Brecht is committed. More devastatingly, however, Adorno points to the implausibility of the work of art as a means. In order to do what it claims to do—namely, to “strike in images the being of capitalism” (416)—Brechtian theater has recourse to the technical means available to drama as a medium. But from the perspective of propositional truth, of the revolutionary doctrine the work of art is supposed to contain, these technical means are distortions. And here Adorno does not merely disagree with Brecht, but rather shows Brecht necessarily disagreeing with himself. In Saint Joan of the Stockyards, for example, Brecht legitimately requires a certain level of coincidence to condense an entire ensemble of contradictions onto the single figure of Joan. But “that a strike leadership backed by the Party should entrust a decisive task to a non-member is, even with the greatest latitude for poetic license, as unthinkable as the idea that through the failure of that individual the entire strike should fail” (417). The point here is not that Brecht should have written a treatise on revolutionary action rather than a play, but rather that a play cannot be at the same time a treatise on revolutionary action—or at least, not a good one. Indeed, the very requirement that Saint Joan be a play falsifies the treatise it also claims to be. The ostensible thesis of Saint Joan—that individual do-gooding is a compensatory substitute for collective action—is subverted by the fact that everything hinges—necessarily, since this is a play—on the success or failure of Joan’s individual do-gooding. Rather than, as might be expected, bluntly refuting Brecht’s claims, Adorno folds them delicately into what they seek to oppose, effectively aligning Brecht’s dramaturgy with formal aestheticism. For the next move is to insist that Brecht’s didacticism is in fact a formal principle rather than a political one. “Brecht’s technique of reduction would be legitimate only in the field of ‘art for art’s sake,’ which his version of commitment condemns as it does Lucullus” (419).

The brilliance of Schwarz’s late intervention is to see that this critique is devastating to Brecht’s claim to didactic effectiveness, but not to the play for which this claim is made. The loss is not as great as it might seem: after all, Schwarz reminds us, the Brechtian “lessons” are “of modest scope” and it is not obvious that they remain today ahead of historical developments (43). “Thus, against claims to the contrary, the truth of the plays would not lie in the lessons passed on, in the theorems concerning class conflict, but rather in the objective dynamic of the whole” (44). This is not to say that Brecht’s plays have no cognitive content or that they have no political potency, but rather that their content and their politics are mediated by the self-legislating nature of the autonomous work. As a corrolary, when the work falters as a work, as Mother Courage does in its third act, the ostensible contents and politics of the play scatter to the wind like so many good intentions.

Schwarz’s revelatory re-reading of Saint Joan, which indeed brings this objective dynamic forward, deserves careful attention on its own account, but one aspect is particularly important here. “Relying on his exceptional gift for pastiche, [Brecht] presented the vicissitudes of class conflict and the calculations of the canned-goods cartel… in verses imitative of Schiller, Hölderlin, Faust II, expressionist poetry, or Greek tragedies (perceived as German honoris causa).” In Hölderlin’s “Hyperion’s Song of Destiny,” for example, which Schwarz highlights as central to the play’s system of citation, human destiny is figured as heroic errancy: to wander without consolation, “Like water from crag / To crag hurled down.” In Saint Joan, it is rather falling stock prices that are “Thrown like water from crag to crag.”11

In its barest outline, specifically modernist pastiche as a reciprocal commentary between the heroic past and the prosaic present is hardly new with Brecht; in terms of conspicuous virtuosity, the “Oxen of the Sun” episode in Ulysses had already developed this mode much further than Brecht ever cared to. But the Brechtian difference is a profound one, which in Schwarz goes by the circumspect label “unity of process” (49), otherwise known as history, or what in yet more abstract terms is the Hegelian “identity of identity and difference.” In other words, the peculiarly Brechtian sting lies not in the difference between the classical source and the modern material, but rather in their identity, which is not only in the design of the artist. The petty brutality of the businessman is the endpoint of romantic striving rather than its negation: “something of Mauler already existed in Faust” (56).

But there is no lesson in this identity, no external end to which the dramatic image is subordinated; rather the two moments of Faust and Mauler are posited as an identity in the dramatic image. That is all. What is presented is not a doctrine but a figure: Faust-as-Mauler, a poetic idea. We learn nothing from this figure about the way capitalism works; rather, Brecht opens up a line of questioning by way of a sensuous configuration. The Brechtian idea is a matter of positing available contents in a particular way: a familiar action (say) as the product of alterable motives rather than human nature; or bourgeois ruthlessness as continuous with bourgeois revolution.

In a well-known series of lists, Brecht contrasts traditional (dramatische) and epic (epische) form.12 Some of the categories are primarily formal (is the sequence of events linear or in curves?), while others are more obviously ideological (are people unchangeable, or are they rather changeable and changing?). But the ideological commitments, which are indeed crucial, cannot be considered lessons. Even if the epic idea—say, “human nature is not given”—could be demonstrated to be correct, all that a play can demonstrate is its plausibility: an Aristotelian category rather than a particularly Brechtian one, and one which Brecht jealously preserves by framing his implausibilities as implausible. Saint Joan is successful precisely because it does not break fundamentally with the norms of art inherited from the early romantics. Doubtless, it critiques these norms, but it critiques them as poetry: indeed, it fulfills rather emphatically Schlegel’s demand that any critique of poetry be itself “poetry through and through and equally a living, vibrant work of art.”13

None of this, and this is the point to emphasize, blunts the materialist edge of Brecht’s critique. Meaning is produced through a poetic critique of poetry, but this does not mean that meaning is restricted to the realm of poetry. The meaning, that is, is deeply compatible with the set of extractable lessons that Brecht is prevented from presenting without crippling distortion by the limitations of the form. Brecht’s critique of Hölderlin and Goethe is along the lines of Marx’s critique of Hegel or indeed Adorno’s critique of Heidegger: by introducing concrete content back into abstract language, Brecht posits an identity between vulgar, everyday social content and sublime, abstract thought. The sublime existential risk of a world universally without guarantee becomes the risk of losing some money. (For others its endpoint, the “Unknown” in Hölderlin’s song, is simply unemployment). Brecht’s poetic idea—the petty manipulation of the stock market (petty in its motivations if not in the damage it wreaks) narrated in the language of human destiny—requires no particular accuracy in its depiction of the operations of the stock market, and is entirely produced by, rather than hindered by, dramatic condensation. When St. Joan is considered, perversely, as being about poetry rather than about capitalism (or about revolutionary organization), it loses none of its Marxist sting, because the ground that unites Faust and Mauler is the historical identity (Schwarz’s “unity of process”) of a class. “Unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nonetheless required heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and the subjugation of nations to bring it into being.”14 The bourgeoisie emerged in blood and glory, but soon enough had to subordinate its grand ideas, and anyone who still thought them, to the business of making money.

Pastiche—again, quite different from the pastiche that is practically standard modernist operating procedure, and also entirely different from the postmodern re-animation of dead forms—functions somewhat differently in The Threepenny Opera, where class-typical behavior is transposed across classes. The obvious example is bourgeois industry transposed to lumpens: Peachum’s begging industry and, climactically, Mac’s “What is the robbing of a bank against the founding of a bank?”15 But the example on which Brecht seems to have expended the most energy, at least following his “hints for actors,” is that of love—or, more accurately, the ideology of love, that discredited “damned ‘can-you-feel-my-heart-beating’ text” (239). When Mac, the notorious criminal, marries Polly, daughter of the begging-agent, his second concurrent wife, in a horse shed, catered by members of his gang, the elements are in place for broad parody. And indeed we get some of that: a bit about the distinction between Chippendale and Louis Quatorze (244), generally omitted from contemporary productions, is pure Marx-brothers buffoonery. But the irony is not as straightforward as it appears.

The actors should avoid representing these bandits as a gang of those pathetic individuals with red kerchiefs about their necks who lively up fairgrounds and with whom no respectable person would drink a glass of beer. They are naturally dignified men: some portly, but all (aside from their profession) sociable. (433)

The spectacle of criminals putting on a bourgeois wedding in a stable is absurd not because the criminals are buffoons but because they are, aside from their profession, bourgeois. (Mauler, the captain of industry in St. Joan, is equally—aside from his profession—sociable). Even the genuine buffoonery conforms to this pattern. The omitted laugh line mentioned above comes at the expense of “Captain” Macheath, the pretentious lumpen, who doesn’t know the difference between Chippendale and Quatorze but pretends he does. Here the buffoonery seems to operate in the expected direction. But his henchmen, who do know the difference, allow themselves to be corrected. So Mac’s ignorance is a luxury, not a deprivation: he isn’t an ignoramus, but a philistine.

So when Mac, in the midst of setting up house in a barn with a stolen Chippendale grandfather clock, intones, a few moments later, “Every beginning is hard,” he is not citing Goethe’s famous line from Hermann und Dorothea, but repeating the cliché it has become. Brecht, on the other hand, is citing Goethe. Goethe’s line continues: “Every beginning is hard; hardest is beginning a household”—this last word translating Wirtschaft, more commonly enterprise or business. This entire scene, with its semi-rustic setting in the middle of London, is a commentary on Hermann and Dorothea: disreputable Mac, in the position of the refugee Dorothea, is repeating the words of the respectable father (and indeed is making a practical match), while it is Polly, at the center of the conflict between the household as centrally an enterprise and the household as centrally a love match, who occupies the position of the son, and who indeed embodies the contradictory impulses embodied in Goethe’s “Wirtschaft”:

It is absolutely desirable that Polly Peachum should impress the audience as a virtuous and agreeable girl. If in the second scene she has demonstrated her entirely disinterested love, now she exhibits that practical outlook without which the first had been mere frivolity. (434)

The manifold overtones of this parody could be pleasurably pursued into the deepest nooks and crannies of the scene, but the import of this moment for now is that while the scene is clearly about class—specifically, the economic content of bourgeois sentiment—it is only about class by being first about poetry.

Of course, there is more to theater than poetry. “Epic theater is gestic,” wrote Benjamin. “To what extent it can be poetic in the traditional sense is a separate matter.”16 But what is the Brechtian Gest? For Benjamin, it is a matter of interruption, which is to say a question of framing. Benjamin draws the appropriate conclusion from this:

In short, the action [is] interrupted. We may go further here and consider that interruption is one of the fundamental procedures of all form-giving. It reaches far beyond the sphere of art. It is, to pick out just one aspect, the basis of quotation. Quoting a text implies breaking ties with its context. It makes sense, therefore, that epic theatre, which is based on interruption, is quotable in a specific sense. The quotability of its texts would be nothing extraordinary. That of the gestures it makes use of is another matter entirely.

“To make gestures quotable” is one of the essential accomplishments of epic theatre.17

But the issue of quotation, far from being “a separate matter” from that of Brecht’s traditional literariness, is the core of his traditional literariness. The quotation—the twisting and turning repetition of Hölderlin’s “crag to crag,” the ironic repetition of Goethe’s “Every beginning is difficult”—is precisely gestic; indeed, as we have seen, the latter poetic gesture is intimately bound up with an ensemble of other gestures: those of Polly, Mac, and Mac’s subordinates. “From where does epic theater take its gestures?” asks Benjamin. “The gestures are found in reality.”18 Surely correct, but not very helpful. From what order of reality does epic theater take its gestures? Brecht “makes gestures quotable” precisely by quoting them—which is to say they are already quotable. The order from which they are taken is textual. The “damned ‘can-you-feel-my-heart-beating’ text” (239) may refer to romantic Lieder, just as “Every beginning is difficult” refers to Goethe. But it belongs equally to the ways lovers act with each other, just as uttering platitudes belongs to the way people act at a wedding. These are two different kinds of text—the gesture proper may experience itself as spontaneous, while the literary gesture is part of a self-overcoming aesthetic field—but they are both texts nonetheles, or else they would not be quotable. When, in The Godfather, Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, fleetingly registers the fact that his own hands do not shake as he lights a cigarette during a life-or-death bluff, this is a powerfully effective actorly gesture. But since it belongs only to the narrative situation, it is not a social citation and therefore not a Brechtian gesture—a fact which does not preclude an esoteric citation of other filmic cigarrette-lightings. As the notes for actors make clear, narrowly gestic elements are a matter of embodied ideology, a social script: “Efforts not to slip on a slick surface become a social gest as soon as slipping would mean losing face.”19 The procedure followed in both Brechtian pastiche and gestic acting is the same, namely citation, or framing a preexisting text in order to create a unit of meaning.

With reference to music the question of gesture acquires a new density. In “On the Gestic Character of Music,” which precedes Brecht’s first published comments on gesture, Kurt Weill proclaimed that “today the composer may no longer approach his text from a position of sensual enjoyment.”20 Weill is contending here with the Brechtian problem of the entertainment-commodity. But what is proposed here is both more radical and less prudish than his statement suggests. The target of Weill’s criticism is the “theater of the past epoch,” which was “written for sensual enjoyment. It wanted to titillate, to irritate, to arouse, to upset [kitzeln, erregen, aufpeitschen, umwerfen] the spectator.”21 So “to irritate” and “to upset” are included under the heading of “sensual enjoyment.” Indeed what Weill forbids to what he calls “gestic music” is to provoke any kind of affective state in the spectator. This is not really a surprise, being very much in line with Brecht’s anathematization of such theatrical effects as “coerced empathy.”22

But surely the production of affective states in listeners is part and parcel of what music is: to take only the most basic element, any perceived musical beat is enough to organize the internal or external movements of a listener.23 In the first episode of the 1967 television series The Prisoner, the fact that the village is a totalitarian dystopia is established not by the video panopticon, which can in the end be evaded, but by the fact that the soothing music cannot be turned off. Hegel, no expert on music, did however understand this: while poetry expresses (ausspricht) an idea—which is then part of the meaning of the work—music can at most provoke one (den Anstoß geben)—an idea which is then merely “ours,” not part of the work itself.24 Weill seems to have painted himself into a corner: the thing music is forbidden to do is precisely the thing that distinguishes music from the other arts.

We will come to Weill’s solution in a moment. But we should take a minute to appreciate that any solution to Weill’s dilemma will also solve a dilemma for us. For what music does par excellence—provoke affective states in listeners—absolutely forecloses, under current conditions, the possibility of its being a medium for artworks. For any provoked effect is, under current conditions, always already a commodity—as Schwarz puts it elsewhere, “In a capitalist regime, any form of utility suffices to make anything or anyone ‘an official member of the world of commodities’ (Marx, Das Kapital II, 20.8).”25 If “in a capitalist society, production for the market permeates the social order as a whole, then concrete forms of activity cease to have their justifications in themselves. Their end is external, their particular forms inessential.”26 In other words, no commodity can plausibly produce a meaning—whose end is by definition essential—and no musical subjective effect is, under current conditions, not a commodity.27 This has the unhappy consequence that the music one likes is, insofar as its ends are bound up with effects for which one likes it, excluded from the category of art. So the question of how to produce music whose aim is not to produce effects is an urgent one.

The paradigmatic modernist solution—the purely music-immanent exploration of music as a medium—is, however, precisely what Weill seeks to overcome:

The recent development of music has been predominantly aesthetic: emancipation from the nineteenth century, struggle against extra-musical influences (program music, symbolism, realism), return to absolute music. […] Today we are a step further. A clear separation is taking place between those musicians who… as if in a private club, work on the solution to aesthetic problems, and others who will undertake to engage any audience whatever.28

Even as the moment of music-immanent development is seen as a forward step, two contrary imperatives are suggested at once: to engage an audience beyond the specialized restricted field of musicians and experts, and to produce meanings beyond those that only the restricted audience cares about, which is to say meanings that are not purely music-immanent. These two imperatives seem to be aligned, and they have a certain populism in common. In fact, as Weill is well aware, they are deeply in conflict. In a market society, the first imperative can be satisfied only by risking the market—“any audience whatever.” But the second imperative, to produce political meanings of the kind Weill is after, is one that the market is indifferent to; one which, in fact, is unmarketable, since meanings that can be sold—that is, meanings for which there is a demand—are not meanings at all, but commodities. A political meaning that satisfies a demand is not a meaning, but a purchasable point of social identification.

What is Weill’s solution? His own commentary in “On the Gestic Character of Music” and elsewhere is not particularly helpful on this score. But his practice is quite clear. The “Cannon Song” from Threepenny Opera is a martial variant of a barroom singalong, what might be classified generically as a barrack-room ballad. Like all good singalongs, it may well move a listener familiar with the piece to want to sing along, and the reason that it has this power might be something brain science or some other discipline can one day explain. Then again, some listeners may not be so moved, and the failure to be moved is in principle susceptible to explanation. But for Weill, this effect or its lack is irrelevant. The “barrack-room ballad”—the phrase is Kipling’s—is in Weill’s hands a gest, which is to say, a citation. Cannon Song frames the gesture, and in so doing creates a meaning, which is to present military camaraderie as deeply creepy.

Brecht’s text is also a citation, a pastiche of Kipling’s martial ditties like “Screw Guns”:

For you all love the screw-guns—
the screw-guns they all love you!

So when we call round with a few guns,
o’ course you know what to do—hoo! hoo!

Jest send your Chief an’ surrender —
it’s worse if you fights or you runs:

You can go where you please,
you can skid up the trees,
but you don’t get away from the guns.29

In Brecht’s text, racism and genocide move from (barely) subtext to text in a way that is deliberately unsubtle. On the page it falls a bit flat, but in Weill’s rousing mess-hall setting it is quite spectacular:

The troops live under
The cannons’ thunder
From cape to Cooch Behar.
And if it rained one day,
And they had chanced to stray
Across a different race,
Brown or pale of face,
They made them, if they liked,
Into their beefsteak tartare.30

What is the source of “Cannon Song”’s creepiness? Like so many of the songs in Threepenny, the tempo marking is already a citation: “Foxtrot-Tempo.”31 The basic rhythm is indeed a foxtrot (foursquare rhythm with accents on the offbeats), and the introductory trumpet part develops a jazzy motif, culminating in the ragtime cliché of bar six. But the “swing” of the initial motif is written in as a dotted eighth note followed by a sixteenth note, and meant to be played as written, so it jerks rather than swings. The antiphonal saxophone line recalls jazz call and response—except it arrives a beat early, interrupting and disrupting the trumpet line rather than repeating and endorsing it. The introductory bars do not lead to the tonality of the verse, but rather have no obvious tonal center or direction. The angular melodic line of the introduction—as becomes clear when, in the first repetition of the initial idea, the interval of a fifth is tightened up to an augmented fourth in bar three—is not about to subordinate itself to the business of dancing. Meanwhile, the instrumentation—in particular, the use of the lower brass—emphasizes the relationship between popular dance music and marching music, a connection which bears on the meaning of the song. When the song lands on a tonal center (bar seven), the underlying harmonic movement becomes conventional, tied to the cycle of fourths (see particularly bars 14-16), which can be intuited or arrived at analytically. But this structure is estranged by avoiding triads, and the movements they imply, almost entirely: the harmonic surface consists of paired sets of fifths juxtaposed on the on and off beats. The result is both estranging—the movements are conventional, but now robbed of any illusion of necessity—and vaguely orientalizing, which is emphasized by the largely pentatonic melody. The song finally becomes diatonic and tonally centered only with the martial refrain, which, in a series of descending half notes (“cape to Cooch Behar”), spells out a minor chord (F# minor) and lands on its dominant—the first conventionally outlined chord of the song. This is the music of the beer hall—or the recruiting station. But the middle voice, a teetotaler or a pacifist, already puts this tonality in doubt. The dominant lasts disorientingly long, tightening up into a diminished chord rather than resolving. Finally, at the height of the barbarism of the lyrics, arrives a cadence that centers on another fully spelled out dominant, which occurs in bar 34, at the climax of the song (the “beefsteak” before “tartare”). But the implied cadence is doubly false, both misleading about where it is going and where it is coming from. It ought to lead to A minor, but leads to D minor instead. And while the melody at “They made them, if they liked” (measure 32) suggests that we are still essentially in F# minor, measure 33 is already in D minor. So the false cadence is not only false, but rather than lead somewhere surprising, it leads exactly nowhere. The overall effect, if one cares to look at it this closely, is to remove all sense of naturalness from the underlying conventional structures. The song hews just close enough to conventional forms—foxtrot, march, barrack-room ballad; cycle of fourths, largely nachsingbare melody, climactic cadence—to borrow their effects, while at the same time denaturalizing them by formal means which are not effects except inasmuch as they aim at the variously translated Brechtian “disidentification effect,” which in the terms of the present study is not strictly an effect but rather a set of techniques for forestalling or framing effects and subordinating them to interpretations. All this is simply to read as immanent to the song what it is hard to imagine any listener denying, namely that the product of these formal distortions is deeply creepy.

“Today the composer may no longer approach his text from a position of sensual enjoyment.” If one imagines setting a war anthem in a state-sanctioned patriotic film, the first thing on the composer’s mind would be producing the singalong effect, an identificatory esprit de corps, in as many people as possible. If one imagines setting one in a commercial film, the first thing on the composer’s mind would be the same, but for a different reason: to appeal to as many people as possible who already want to experience identificatory esprit de corps. Brecht’s and Weill’s version functions entirely differently, since you need not feel the force of the singalong (though you do need to understand its system of references, if not with any specificity) to understand Weill’s meaning, which is to fuse the brutality of Brecht’s lyric with the social cohesion of military esprit de corps, not after all so different than that of the dance hall, and in doing so to impose an interpretation.

But chances are you will feel its force: “Cannon Song” remains, all this aside, a rousing air. This is irrelevant to “Cannon Song”’s meaning as a work of art, but it is far from irrelevant to “Cannon Song”’s success as a popular entertainment. As Brecht says, “Theater remains theater, even when it is didactic theater; and so long is it is good theater, it is entertaining.”32 If “Cannon Song” failed as a rousing air, that would not change its meaning; but nor would Threepenny have been, in the five years before the Nazis came to power, translated into eighteen languages and been performed more than 10,000 times, and nor would we be talking about it today.33 “Up to the stable scene the audience seemed cold and apathetic, as though convinced in advance that it had come to a certain flop. Then after the Kanonen song, an unbelievable roar went up, and from that point it was wonderfully, intoxicatingly clear that the public was with us.”34

“No opera here!” (245) demands Mac, in a work called an opera, a word intended as little ironically as the “threepenny” that precedes it.35 The gesture is echoed (but not cited) some twenty years later, in Rio de Janeiro, by Janet de Almeida and Haroldo Barbosa:

Why Argue with Madame?

Madame says the race won’t improve
That things are going downhill because of samba
Madame says samba brings sin
That samba should be put out of its misery
Madame says samba is nothing but race mixing
Color mixing and cachaça
Madame says that the democratic samba
Is cheap music with no value

Let’s be done with samba
Madame doesn’t like anyone to samba
All she can say is samba is shameful
Why argue with Madame?

Doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo

Next Carnaval, sure,
My block from up in the ‘hood will sing opera
On the street among the press of thousands
You’ll see us all singing a concerto
Madame has a screw loose,
She only talks poison, my God what a shrew
Samba, democratic, Brazilian
To the roots, that’s what has value.36

The cast of characters seems straightforward: Madame; the protagonist, who lives in a working class neighborhood, belongs to a samba school, and is presumably in Madame’s employ; and the samba school, a metonym for the “press of thousands” at Carnaval, itself a metonym for the Brazilian people. Digging a little deeper, one learns that “Madame” was a real person, the conservative cultural critic Magdala da Gama de Oliveira, otherwise known as “Maggy,” who occupied highly visible perches on radio and in the journal Diário de Notícias, and whom the journalist and composer Fernando Lobo had recently apostrophized in a critical essay as “Madame.”37 So from a historical perspective the position of the protagonist becomes more complicated: he is still working class, but the conflict between him and Madame is only metaphorically a class conflict, since the cultural conflict it centers on takes place entirely among journalists: not only “Maggy” and Lobo but also Almeida and Barbosa were journalists as well as, in the case of the latter three, composers.

As suggestive as it is, this historical meaning is essentially a private one. It is a professional spat, not without interest, that a little research allows us to eavesdrop on. It is symptomatic of a recognizable ideological field. But no attempt is made to inscribe this historical meaning in a normative field, and as far as the meaning of the song goes, we are pretty much back where we started.

Or we would be but for the little wordless interlude before the final stanza, which is a close paraphrase of measures 20-24 of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.38 Here the historical meaning of the song—the appropriation of the political subjectivity of the working class by the progressive bourgeoisie—is inscribed directly in the musical material. Not content to be more democratic and sensible than Madame (and presumably a better dancer), the protagonist must show himself to be more erudite as well: an advantage not available to the man from the hill neighborhoods. Without the interlude, “singing a concerto” is the approximate speech of one who doesn’t have any very precise idea of what a concerto is. After the interlude, “singing concertos” is a winking reference, in case we missed it, to what has just been accomplished. In other words, the lyrical voice identifies with the working class—but only when “Madame” is in the third person, that is when he addresses himself to the “people,” which is to say the lower orders plus the progressive bourgeoisie. But the borrowed passage from Tchaikovsky is, out of earshot from the hills, addressed only to Madame, to the bourgeoisie as such.

Much more can be said about this peculiar combination of popular identification and ironic distance, which has not disappeared from progressive Brazilian discourse, than is relevant to the argument at hand. What is important for the moment is that musical form only has meaning here as a citation, of which there are now two: the borrowing from Tchaikovsky, and what, in the light of the Tchaikovsky, appears as a borrowing of the samba form. But in neither case does musical form mean anything outside of its status as a citation: to the world of erudite music on one hand, and to the world of (idealized or real) communally organic musical form on the other. However, citation works here precisely the opposite of how it works in Brecht and Weill. In the earlier case, citation is a technique of disidentification, for freeing the dramatic work from the obligation of producing an empathic relation to the action and replacing it with a questioning one. In the later, it is a technique for producing a double identification: the first one public and universal (the identification of the lyrical voice with the people), the second private and particular (the identification of the lyrical voice with the cultural elite).

One is tempted to point out that the choice of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto is a particularly appropriate one, since there too a folk dance, in this case Ukrainian, is contrasted with a Romantic theme, or because its long introductory melody, from which Almeida’s and Barbosa’s quote is taken, is an easily digestible line that can be absorbed by the culture industry without difficulty.39 But in the above-cited interview, where Barbosa sings a bit of the interlude, there is nothing to suggest he regards the song as anything but a jeu d’esprit, an unframed gesture.40 The framed, Brechtian equivalent might involve one actor saying something quite reasonable to another while surreptitiously winking to the audience. But the unframed wink is not an idea about duplicity but rather duplicity itself.

It would have been convenient for the current discussion if João Gilberto, in rescuing the song from oblivion, had overcome this duplicity in Brechtian fashion. However, bossa nova is a resolutely anti-theatrical form (“Retrato em branco e preto,” which Gilberto performs immediately before “Pra que discutir com Madame” in a famous concert, begins with a cluster of small intervals that mimics—in Chico Buarque’s lyrics, in Tom Jobim’s composition, and in Gilberto’s interpretation—a man mumbling to himself) and has no interest in working through theatricality and coming out the other side.41 Rather, in Gilberto’s performance the social conflict that Almeida’s and Barbosa’s lyric embodies is turned—as is the case with bossa nova generally—into a problem that musical form attempts to supersede. Though both the approach and the politics are quite different, the problem invented and confronted by the bossa nova generation is Weill’s: “to create a music capable of satisfying the musical needs of broader strata of society, without giving up artistic substance.”42 In other words, the project of the bossa nova generation is to exploit fully the real advances made possible by class segmentation, while creating a music that in principle does not depend on that segmentation for its reception. Or, in yet other words, to produce an art music that is not an elite music, a music that is samba and Tchaikovsky at once.

Compared to the work of the bossa nova composers, “Pra que discutir com Madame” is, but for the interpellated Tchaikovsky, compositionally banal. It seems likely that it was revived by Gilberto for its thematic relevance to the bossa nova project rather than any particular formal interest. However, the basic innovations of bossa nova form are, in Gilberto’s performance, in place: the chord structure is highly textured with elaborations from the upper extensions; the guitar rhythm is complex, derived from samba: the thumb operating, on the pulse, independently from the other fingers, which structure the rhythm in syncopated variations that suggest (though this is an illusion) a complete improvisational freedom from repetition; the vocal line combines a vibrato- and glissando-free technique, an almost conversational vocal quality (essential to its fundamental anti-theatricality), extraordinarily precise intonation, and, most importantly, the constant suggestion of a completely unfettered relationship to both the pulse and the syncopated line. When these elements are all performed by one person, such that the relationship among the three central elements of pulse, chordal rhythm, and vocals is at every point intended, the result is a performance of exceptional musical density. An index of this density is that in concert Gilberto often repeats an entire form three or more times—and yet one never has a sense of repetitiveness, to the point of not recognizing the repeat when it comes. But bossa nova remains a popular art form: not only are the songs themselves, even when they are of substantial formal interest, accessible, but the individual elements are within the reach of anyone who wants to learn them.

Much more can be said about the aesthetic ideology of bossa nova, which is the musical exponent of a developmental populism whose central ideologeme, full of contradictory implications, is the development of productive forces unmediatedly in the interests of the entire national population. The point to emphasize at the moment, however, is that the eclipse of bossa nova is not an artistic endpoint but an historical one, as developmental populism is decisively displaced by military coup, dictatorship, and integration with North American capital. Bossa nova itself continues to evolve after its historical relevance has faded, reaching an artistic zenith in the early 1970s with Jobim’s “Águas de março.”43 But by the time “Águas de março” had been recorded (1972), a new movement, Tropicália, had already come and gone. Indeed, bossa nova had already become a subject for pastiche by the musicians of the Tropicália movement: Caetano Veloso’s “Coração vagabundo,” from 1967, is a superb bossa nova—but it is a master’s thesis on Tom Jobim’s compositional technique, not a development of it or out of it.44

After the coup, the drive to modernize the Brazilian economy continues, but now severed from the drive to develop the economy more or less evenly. The new music of the dictatorship period, Tropicália, brutally reorients the dialectic of the most ambitious Brazilian music. The elements to be drawn together musically are no longer high and low—between which no identity, real or ideal, is imagined—but modern and archaic elements, which are not to be synthesized but allowed to exist in patent contradiction. In the manifesto-song “Tropicália,” for example, the refrain sections are organized into paired opposites.45 But these are organized along the lines of temporal contradiction, not class contradiction: bossa nova versus straw huts, Ipanema versus Iracema—but never straw huts versus Ipanema.46 In another manifesto-song, “Panis et Circenses,” these contradictions become a matter of form.47 The melody is deliberately insipid—an awkward live performance from the period serves as well as a valiant effort by the great Marisa Monte to show how hard it is to make “Panis et Circenses” into a conventionally good song. This little melody, performed as flatfootedly as possible; a military fanfare; an anticlimactic perfect cadence followed by an awkward silence; a half-note accompaniment that kindergarteners could perform; all of these are buried under the weight of contemporary recording techniques, particularly tape montage—a decelerando performed by a thumb on the tape reel, desultory dinner conversation, the Blue Danube—under the direction of Rogério Duprat, who had trained with Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. As Roberto Schwarz says of this Tropicalist effect, which exposes tacky content to “the white light of the ultra-modern,” it is “like a family secret dragged into the street.”48

Tropicália, which has been glossed over far too quickly here,  marks a pivotal moment. The brutality and rapidity of the transition from a proto-socialist to a right-wing society integrated with Northern capital having taken place practically overnight, Tropicália registers all the contradictions of what will come to be called postmodernism in a form that still marks them as monstrous. However, the mark it left on Brazilian music was probably less in the music itself, and more in the training it afforded a generation of Brazilian musicians. Indeed, already by Veloso’s 1969 “white album,” an entirely new project, developed from but distinct from that of Tropicália, had emerged in its full outlines.49 The first thing one notices about Veloso is the album’s diversity of covers: a traditional Bahian maritime song, a cynical tango from the 1930s, an overwrought ballad from the 1940s, and a recently recorded bossa nova. Then there are pure pastiches: a march in the style of the electic Carnaval bands, a Portuguese fado, and a stab each at brit-pop psychedelia and album rock.50 Only with the final two tracks on the album—one each by Veloso and by Gilberto Gil, his primary collaborator and guitarist on the album—do we approach recognizable tropicalist procedures. “Acrilírico”—a portmanteau word combining “acrylic” (new and synthetic) and “lyric” (ancient and organic) and producing “bitter” between them—is a spoken concrete poem including taped sound fragments. Gil’s “Alfômega,” perhaps the distillation of the gleeful antisociality of Trópicalia, cruelly builds concretist wordplay around the Portuguese word for illiteracy, and sets it within what is essentially a rock song, performed here in a way that can only be described as groovy—leaving the question open as to whether the setting is a specimen of advanced or peripherally derivative culture. But surely, in the light of what has gone before, these last two tracks are not to be understood any differently than the other ten: Tropicália is included in the miscellany, not the principle of the miscellany itself. From the standpoint of the 1969 album, the logic of Tropicália has already been superseded.

Except where to do so would deform the musical material beyond recognition, the album’s material is treated uniformly throughout, so “Chuvas de verão” (a samba-canção by Fernando Lobo, from the same period as “Pra que discutir com Madame”) can serve to illustrate the procedure followed in the album as a whole. The orchestral embellishments and interludes in Francisco Alves’s 1948 recording are dispensed with. (The flute line is alluded to in a brief whistled introduction which, unlike the original, does not deviate from the structure of the song itself). The entire rhythmic and harmonic structure—the former greatly diversified and loosened up, though aligned closely with the pulse and still, like the original, a samba-canção—are brought within Gil’s guitar line, whose virtuosity is entirely unobtrusive. The vocals are sung without vibrato or glissando, pitched very precisely, and recorded close to the microphone, such that the vocal quality is intimate: even when the vocals sweep upward (for example at the first vocal line and particularly at “trazer uma aflição”), the dynamic range is kept narrow, so that the dramatic effect of the wide interval emphasized in the original recording is minimalized and, as it were, internalized. (Even in “Atrás do trio elétrico,” the vocals are double-tracked rather than sung loudly). In other words, though the song is not a bossa nova, the procedures followed so far follow bossa nova sensibilities. The studio production is peculiarly noteworthy. Rogério Duprat adds an orchestral part that is, on its own, a fine and tasteful accompaniment, far better than the original to which it also occasionally alludes. But the aural qualities of the orchestral line are completely different from the guitar and vocal parts: it is as though the latter were recorded in a bedroom, the former in a cathedral. The overall effect is the opposite of most studio production. Instead of producing the illusion of a seamless performance, where “the process of fusion reaches out to the spectator, who is fused right in and now represents a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art,” the result is a “radical separation of the elements.”51 And this is for entirely Brechtian reasons. The orchestral line is far too high in the mix. Since the orchestral accompaniment is intermittent, this serves to separate it further from the guitar and vocal basis rather than drowning it out; but it also dramatizes the “great primal war” between structure and embellishment, which cannot be simply eliminated, as it is part of the popular form. Instead of being combined to produce an effect, the elements are separated to problematize a relationship.

In confirmation of all this, the orchestral parts are mixed down in just one channel, so that if one earphone is removed, or the balance is turned all the way to one side, they can be completely eliminated. (The guitar and vocal parts are mixed down in both channels, and so cannot be eliminated). The struggle between structure and embellishment is thus decided in favor of structure. This is far too easy. Like the last minute of The Hurt Locker, it answers the question it was supposed to be asking: totally obscured is the role embellishment plays in the structure itself. What is important to note at present, however, is that this procedure is quite different from the Tropicalist one. Whereas earlier Duprat and his collaborators had used the recording studio to ironize brutally the cultural raw materials that were brought into it, here the studio frames the musical material—which now appears as structure rather than as raw material—without assuming a position superior to it. There is, in other words, no irony in the new relation to the material.

The one possible exception makes an interesting case. The recording of Chico Buarque’s “Carolina” was received scandalously, as an ironic attack on Buarque. Without context, it is hard to see why. Buarque’s recording is dominated by an orchestral accompaniment that is by turns saccharine (strings) and tacky (muted horns), and with an embarrassingly—for a Brazilian recording, almost unbelievably—lame percussion line, played on hi-hat. Indeed the whole recording is not a bad approximation of a bad American approximation of bossa nova. Buarque himself does not do much with the vocal line except occasionally sing it out of tune. Not even Buarque himself much cared for “Carolina,” which comes out as a far more interesting piece of music in Veloso’s version.52 The song is stripped bare in precisely the same fashion as “Chuvas de verão” (the orchestral line does not even enter until the final fifteen seconds or so of the song), with Gil producing a marvelous distillation and revision of the rhythmic and harmonic structure on guitar, adding some color and complexity to the basically uniform pulse—a discreet rock shuffle is briefly introduced—and diatonic structure of the source material.

Nonetheless, it is hard to see Veloso’s “Carolina” as other than parodic. Buarque is at that moment a hero of the large and culturally hegemonic Left, which is friendly to Marxism even where the latter is not fully incorporated conceptually. Veloso, though he emerges from this Left—one of his first musical commissions was incidental music for a production of a Lehrstück of Brecht’s, The Exception and the Rule—is a figure for what looks in retrospect like an insurgent liberalism. Buarque is, meanwhile, a talented amateur but an amateur nonetheless. “Professionalism” is a privileged term in Veloso’s vocabulary as it was for Brazil’s first “cannibal” modernisms; it entails the market, without doubt, but it more immediately refers to the anti-imperialism of cultural import substitution, the development of a local culture industry sufficiently specialized to be able to compete with progressive first-world culture on the latter’s own terms. This is the aesthetic ideology of peripheral modernists from James Joyce to Oswald de Andrade to Chinua Achebe, and it relegates amateurism to “dilettantism” (according to Júlio Medaglia, a vanguard composer and tropicalist arranger) and putatively authentic culture to “macumba for tourists” (according to Oswald de Andrade, in a phrase the tropicalists were fond of citing). When Veloso sings “Carolina” with lazy intonation—seen nowhere else on the album and virtually nowhere else in his oeuvre—it is hard not to see the gesture as deliberate. Further, the lyrics—a reminiscence of a failed seduction—lend themselves easily to a political interpretation, the cold Carolina representing the bourgeoisie that turns its back on “a blooming rose, everybody dancing, a falling star,” the lyrical voice representing the revolutionary vanguard trying to show it all these things. Whether the song is taken to be purely romantic or as a political allegory, the lyrical voice paints himself in a too-flattering light. Veloso’s interpretation, sung barely above a whisper, provides just enough internal distance from the lyric to turn it into a dramatic monologue, the dashing revolutionary revealing himself as a lazy lothario whom Carolina may have been wise to ignore.

In an early account, Veloso claims that the inspiration for the recording was a girl, the “antimuse of Brazil” (“antimusical” being a key word in the bossa nova manifesto-song “Desafinado,” “Out of Tune”) singing “Carolina” on a televised amateur talent contest.53 This is scarcely credible. On the other hand, it confirms, precisely in its incredibility, everything said above. As much as the inflated sentiments of 1940s popular song, traditional maritime melodies, Carnaval marches, Portuguese fado, and so on, a robust sub-professional musical culture is a part of (a precondition of) the exceptional professional musical culture in Brazil. In other words, this account is an attempt to make “Carolina” consistent with the rest of the album, and if this is implausible, that marks a failure of “Carolina,” not a misunderstanding of the aims of the album. A later account is more plausible, and more interesting still. “When I recorded ‘Carolina’ in an estranging way [is the Brechtian adjective intentional?]… [i]t was not necessary to attack Chico to affirm our position. We were certain that Chico’s creation itself would benefit by its own relativization.” To “relativize” without “attacking,” indeed to turn into art by relativizing, to estrange: in other words, to frame. This is the mode of the album itself. And indeed, it is this account that finally fits the musical facts. The ambivalences of “Carolina” are highlighted, even as the musical distillation itself is nonjudgmental, even reverential.

On the procedure outlined here, and on the logic of the separation of elements it entails, all of the lyrical content of the album is radically relativized in the same way as that of “Carolina.” “Os Argonautas” may move you to a beautiful seafaring resignation (“To navigate is necessary; to live is not”); “Atrás do trio elétrico” may make you want to dance behind a massive Carnaval bandstand (“Behind the electric trio, only the dead don’t go”); “Alfômega” may fill you with a properly rock euphoria entirely inappropriate to its content. Because they are good songs, they probably will; and the affective jolt they provoke is their market raison d’être. But whether they do or not, they are unavoidably about these affective states, which is a raison d’être of a completely different order.

The approach to producing meaning is quite in line with that pursued by Weill and Brecht; the meaning produced is, of course, quite different. The post-Tropicália project is, as Veloso and Gil write in a song (from the 1993 album Tropicália 2) about Brazilian Cinema Novo, “conversas sobre jeitos do Brasil,” conversations about characteristic Brazilian ways and attitudes. What emerges from the album as a whole is a musical portrait of Brazil, elaborated from a certain standpoint, necessarily incomplete, and by no means excluding foreign influences.54 Indeed, this is the mode of Veloso’s career henceforth. Tropicália 2 is, from the standpoint of the current argument, misnamed: it is, practically track for track (though none of the songs are repeated) a sequel not to the original Tropicália but rather to Veloso’s 1969 “white album.”55 This mode has become in no small measure that of ambitious Brazilian music itself, from musicians as divergent in their tastes, approach, and level of seriousness as Lenine and Daniela Mercury.

The ideological limits of this project are obvious. In principle there is no reason these ways and attitudes cannot, as they are in Brecht and Weill, be class attitudes, professional attitudes, historical attitudes, and so on. But in that case the national frame would be relativized, and in practice the relevant categories tend to be regional, and historical in the very limited sense of being credited with having contributed to the Brazilian national character. The project sits entirely comfortably with Veloso’s liberalism (and with contemporary American, and increasingly globally hegemonic, cultural neoliberalism). A rather better son of the bourgeoisie than he imagined in 1964, Veloso’s world view is one of profound sympathy with the lower orders, who after all make most of Brazil’s music. But the sympathy does not extend to an inclination to share political or economic power with wider strata of society, and indeed Veloso’s attitude toward a real democratization of political and economic power can in the balance hardly be viewed as progressive.56

As may have been glimpsed here and there in the above account, this attitude has its own, particularly Brazilian trajectory. But it is not unique to Brazil. A profoundly egalitarian attitude combined with a high tolerance for material inequality emerges, in Schiller, virtually with the aesthetic itself:

In the aesthetic state everything—even the tool that serves—is a free citizen, having equal rights with the noblest. […] Here, in the realm of aesthetic appearance, the ideal of equality—which the political fanatic would fain see realized—will be fulfilled.57

Of course, the thing that, more than any other, reorganizes material, hierarchical relationships into mere differences—classes into niches—is the market. Roberto Schwarz summarizes the tropicalist position:

[The] reconciliation of the present with itself, in all its levels, without exclusions, was the—more satirical than complacent?—imitation of or subjective assimilation to the point of view of commercial cultural programming. Radio stations and TV also cover the gamut of the public’s interests, without regard to what is regressive or advanced, so long as they are profitable. A world full of differences and without antagonisms begins to look like an enormous market.58

Schwarz is speaking here of Tropicália; if it is correct that the post-Tropicália moment subtracts the irony from the tropicálist procedure, then the satirical option disappears, and one is left only with the complacent assimilation to the market. And indeed, Veloso embraces this interpretation. In concert, before singing a song in Spanish, Veloso launches into a digression about how singing in foreign languages grants a kind of privileged access to the Other. A beat, then: “It’s also good for market exposure.” Veloso means both statements sincerely, but the laugh line only works because of their asymmetry: the second puts the first in doubt, but not the reverse.

A cynical position is, however, preferable to a naïve one, and Veloso recognized early on that not recognizing market considerations—“many times the only decisive ones”—was no longer an option.59 “The important thing for us,” wrote Weill in a letter to the Musikblatter des Anbruchs in 1929, “is that here, for the first time, the breakthrough into a consumer industry has been achieved.”60 Both Weill and Veloso, in order to reach “broader strata of society,” skirt the edges of Gebrauchsmusik, music that fulfills a certain, in this case affective, need. Weill risks the market by choice. For Veloso, as we shall see, there is no choice to be made; after the dramatic foreclosure of the real possibility of a non-market society, he understands himself to be already contending with a situation in which it is unmediatedly the case that “any form of utility suffices to make anything or anyone ‘an official member of the world of commodities.’” In an 1974 interview, Veloso outlines with remarkable concision the overpowering of restricted fields by the culture industry: “On one hand, Music, violated by a new communicational process, is forced into both innovation and slavery; on the other hand, Music protected and impotent.”61 Cynicism and clear-headedness, both present, become difficult to discern.

We have arrived at least at an approximate sense of the ideological content of Veloso’s “conversation about Brazilian ways”: a liberal image of a country full of differences but without conflicts, an image that looks uncannily like the market. The practice of pastiche is directly implied by the real absorption of culture into the market, a process which Veloso both ambivalently celebrates and observes with stark clarity. The old meanings—modernist ones, bossa nova ones—are suddenly irrelevant, not because they have ceased to signify or evolve, but because the networks that found their significations and developments relevant have been overpowered by a market, which doesn’t. When bossa nova retreats into informal networks that no longer seem to have any relevance when confronted with the explosion of the Brazilian culture industry, a new set of possibilities, bound up with the relativization and appropriation of superseded styles, emerges. This relativization should be absolute; it should entail a properly postmodern irony, in which, due to the absence of meta-narrative sustained by non-market networks, the only principle of selection available is the whim of the artist, which is then necessarily placed in a position superior to the styles it subsumes. Indeed, this the case with Tropicália, with the advantage over paradigmatic postmodern culture that this shift is registered as intolerable: slavery or impotence. Veloso, however, overleaps this logic.

The inevitable issue from bossa nova is commercially stillborn and, culturally, insulating itself from the market, which it nonetheless needs to survive. We are trying to resume the lost trajectory.62

Astoundingly, Veloso conducts this autopsy in the name of continuity, rather than of a radical break. The new set of possibilities is seen in terms of a “lost trajectory,” which is none other than the “linha evolutiva” or evolutionary line that Veloso has done so much both to invent retrospectively and to introduce into Brazilian musical discourse as an unavoidable concept, but which cannot, if it is to function as a principle, be subordinated to his own taste.

It is with great difficulty that a few moments of organicity are achieved in our work; every once in a while something recognizable condenses, only to be lost in the confusion soon after; we make a samba without even thinking about it, it turns out to be so beautiful, we rejoice, believing we’ve realized something fine in the trajectory of this language—but there are so few musicians who are able to hear it, enrich it, understand what it can mean, learn from it or, in the course of history, re-teach it; and even those that there are have few opportunities to respond to each other.63

One wonders if, despite being central to Tropicália, Veloso was ever a tropicalist at all: the post-tropicalist project is already expressed here, full-blown, complete with liberal-nationalist overtones, in 1965. But the important thing to note here is that the market cares about an “evolutionary line” or a “lost trajectory” about as much as it cares about second-wave protest bossa nova. Veloso writes, as usual, with remarkable precision. What is at stake is not what music means, but what it “can mean” in terms of a national musical development when framed by someone who understands it. The entities who could plausibly care about such an evolutionary line are precisely two. First, the nation, the referent of “we” and “our”—but purely in the sense of an imagined community, not a national market, because the national market is none other than the “confusion” in which the evolutionary line gets “lost.” Second, the musicians who are able to discern in their practice a matter in hand to be developed, in other words a Bourdieusian restricted field of musicians “responding to each other”—but it is precisely the lack of this field that Veloso laments. Neither of the entities to which an “evolutionary line” could plausibly matter exist. The market, however, does exist. As we saw above, music “needs” it; there is no longer any other mode of distribution equal to the culture industry. But Veloso, despite everything, is not making music for the culture industry, which is, again, the confusion in which everything worth saving is lost.

In other words, Veloso’s musical practice entails a politics quite separate from his appeal to the market, which veers uneasily between realism and cynicism, and despite his liberal nationalist ideology, which veers uneasily between empathy and paternalism. He has discovered, in the market, a condition of possibility for a form of meaning that is, in principle and of necessity, autonomous from the market. One way of thinking about this is to say, a bit pathetically, that already in 1965 Veloso’s work is oriented toward producing meanings for an audience that is “to come”; and at least in this sense his work represents a certain resistance to the present, however feeble. Another way is to say that in a neoliberal moment, when the market as the horizon of all human endeavor is the strongest (but also practically the only) arrow in capital’s ideological quiver, and universal valorization practically its only (but also its most socially devastating) imperative, Veloso presents a valuable model.

The one genre which Veloso has proven unable to master, though undeniably a part of the Brazilian landscape, is rock. It is easy enough to see why: “I composed the songs [on his first of three rock albums, Cê] and planned out the album before I had even formed the band.”64 Veloso has produced some interesting covers of rock songs, perhaps most notably Nirvana’s “Come as You Are,” but they are interesting because, in separating the elements and tightening up their interrelations, he uncovers the songwriting behind the rock song.65 But as we shall see shortly, songwriting is not essential to rock—it may even be inimical to it—and it would be hard to make the case that his covers improve upon the originals. His two best rock songs, “Abraçaço” and “A bossa nova é foda,” from his most recent album, almost manage to abjure songwriting: “I let things flow as they wanted to, the songs, because the band was already together. I present an idea, they do it, everything works out.” Which is not to say that spontaneity is a musical value, but rather that spontaneity can be a useful constraint on songwriting, forcing other musical values to occupy more space.66

The White Stripes’ “Hello Operator” is about as far from songwriting as it is possible to get and still remain recognizably music.67 Though a suggestion of private meaning seeps through, the lyrics make as little public sense as the children’s rhyme “Miss Susie,” from which the first two lines are borrowed.68 They are not set to a melody, the pitch being determined by English speech patterns, as is the rhythm, which is regularized just enough to conform to a beat. The vocal quality is an assertive juvenile whine. The drum part under the lyrics consists entirely of quarter notes, on the beat, four to a measure, with the bare minimum—accented snare on beats 2 and 4—to qualify it as a rock beat. The guitar part is also minimal: two open chords, a fourth apart, each held for half a beat on the first beat of each measure. (The guitar will fill some of the empty space with simple blues lines; elsewhere, the drum part will add exactly one eighth note to the straight quarter note pattern). There is nothing in the basic structure of the verse that an able-bodied non-musician couldn’t learn to play—indeed nothing that a non-musician couldn’t come up with on her own—in a pair of afternoons.

The verse of “Hello Operator” is, in other words, the precise minimum organization of sound required to make a rock song—but not necessarily a rock song there would be any reason to listen to. Once the rock song has been stripped down to its minimal constituent parts, the question is what is the minimum necessary to make a compelling rock song. And the answer is stated, as clearly as a beethovenian symphonic theme, immediately following the verse, in the drum solo.69 The phrase “drum solo” in a rock context summons the wrong connotations, as this one is played entirely on the rim of a snare drum, is short (four bars and an introductory bar), is repeated twice, and consists in its second half entirely of quarter notes. It is also quiet, so quiet that the hum from a guitar pedal can be heard under it until the latter is muted at the beginning of the first full measure—an apparently non-musical sound that reads as accidental, but, since it could have been fixed in the studio, must be understood as intentional. The solo is, in other words, emphatically framed. It consists of two ideas. The first—two quarter notes comprising half a measure—barely counts as an idea. The second is a cliché about as old as recognizably American popular music: it is none other than the ragtime cliché from bar six of “Cannon Song,” the rhythm Debussy hammers to death in “Golliwog’s Cakewalk.”70 What “Hello Operator” is then about, what reverberates back to the beginning and culminates in the climax of the song, is the exploration of this idea, the relationship between an absolutely minimal musical phrase, two quarter notes, and a minimal syncopation with the same duration.

After the idea is presented by the drum, the guitar displays the pattern in a different light. Leading out of the drum solo, the guitar, transposing the syncopated pattern a half beat, changes its value and its musical function: rather than beginning on a downbeat, it ends on one. The initial statement of the idea on the snare drum is quiet and tentative, beginning from nothing, wavering from the pulse; the chordal guitar line, tightly aligned with the pulse, asserts the shifted pattern at volume, landing hard on a downbeat, and a new section develops the transformed idea. The relation between the two statements is that of premise and inference. And as the transformed pattern is repeated, the guitar introduces a new chord: the subdominant, whose introduction has the expected effect of confirming the other two chords as tonic and dominant, and produces the unexpected illusion of opening up the harmonic possibilities of the song: in Lou Reed’s immortal words, three chords and you’re into jazz.

(With regard to the question of the rhythmic relationship between the drums and the guitar, this may be the place to point out that in much of the White Stripes’ music, the guitar and drums switch their usual rock functions. Keith Richards can push or drag the beat, Charlie Watts’s job is to pull him back in; but in “Hello Operator” the guitar maintains the pulse, while the drum line is allowed to waiver. That this is possible is itself part of the meaning of the song: what is essential is an element strongly tied to the pulse and an element loosely tied to the pulse, not the traditional division of labor between drums and guitar. Why this is necessary is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it may suffice to point out that common to all the musical forms emerging from the blues is a conception of musical time as produced by musical events, rather than as a homogenous medium in which musical events occur. In the later evolution of the blues, for example, the tension between adhesion to and liberty from the pulse is, as it were, professionalized and brought within individual musicians’ roles. In a piano concerto, the failure of the soloist and the conductor to cohere rhythmically is fatal to the performance; in rock a degree of rhythmic incoherence is not only tolerable but constitutive.)71

The song is bookended by elaborations of the central idea. The first is a two-bar guitar introduction based on an impure fifth scalar tone. Since it precedes the first explicit statement of the idea, it initially reads as an improvisation. But in retrospect there can be no doubt that the introduction is composed. It sounds moderately complex, but it is assembled out of precisely four elements, which derive from the two simple ideas presented in the drum solo: straight quarter notes, the syncopated pattern (what we will first hear on its own as the drum version), the same pattern transposed half a beat (which we will first hear on its own as the chordal guitar version, but which has yet a third value here, landing on a backbeat instead of a downbeat), and straight eighth notes, a variation on the minimal straight quarter notes phrase. The break is repeated precisely halfway through the song, and also provides an ecstatic climax. What ought to be a guitar solo, essentially postponing the climax once all the ideas have been stated, is played on a heavily distorted harmonica. (As with the switch in rhythmic function between guitar and drums, the arrangement, though extremely basic, isolates musical elements in their function by changing the standard instrumentation.)72 To end the song, the single guitar line re-enters, in unison with the harmonica, with a third variation on the developed two-bar idea from the introduction. The unison is rough; again this could be accidental, but since another take or two would fix the problem, it must be regarded as intentional. After the rigorous separation of elements throughout the song, the climactic gesture of the convergence of guitar and harmonica is that of two lines of thought—the harmonica and guitar are mixed down into separate channels—simultaneously leading to the same conclusion. The affirmative value of these two bars is hard to exaggerate: it is a musical Q.E.D.

As if to confirm this, the name of the album on which the song appears is De Stijl, a movement which famously championed the abstraction, simplification, separation, exposed articulation, and balance of elements. The album title doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know already, but it is a useful reminder that the simplification involved in “Hello Operator” aims at abstraction rather than primitivism.73 As de Stijl’s foremost theoretical exponent put it: “Arms, legs, trees, and landscapes are not unequivocally painterly means. Painterly means are: colors, forms, lines, and planes.”74 The first thing one would want to say about the reading of “Hello Operator” undertaken above is that, unlike our earlier analyses of Weill and Veloso, the esoteric meaning of the song—it is about the musical potential of a rhythmic cliché, about what musical elements are necessary to rock, and why—has no obvious relationship to an exoteric meaning. The adolescent aggression of the vocal quality could almost qualify as a kind of social gesture. But the nonsense lyrics, and the fact that the development of the idea occurs only elsewhere than the verse, are designed to undercut this possibility, though they cannot foreclose it entirely. (We shall return to this issue later.) As one of the narrators in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad remarks, “the songs… have titles like ‘Pet Rock’ and ‘Do the Math,’ and ‘Pass Me the Kool-Aid,’ but when we holler them aloud in Scotty’s garage the lyrics might as well be: fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”75 Aggressivity is, tautologically, social. But as much as possible aggressivity is here reduced to a timbral quality, a tenor whine. “Hello Operator” is, in this sense, abstract: its musical idea is developed in near-complete isolation from non-musical or referential content, to which it can therefore no longer be subordinated. Simplicity then becomes a gesture of attention rather than inattention. If a country song is, in the great songwriter Harlan Howard’s famous formulation, three chords and the truth, then the White Stripes’ definition of a rock song is three chords and an idea.

The well-nigh neo-plasticist songs like “Hello Operator” form one of the axes of the White Stripes’ project: to produce a theory of rock that is purely music-immanent. Even when these songs, as with the possibly even more successful “Fell in Love with a Girl,” do not state an explicit musical thesis, the challenge they set is the same.76 The aim is to produce a rock song to which nothing could be usefully added and from which nothing could be taken away without harm—songs that aim at producing a rock song with the minimum necessary elements, and which are therefore necessarily about what these minimum necessary elements are. “Fell in Love with a Girl” consists of three elements: a drum pattern (with no variations), a rhythmic-harmonic pattern (two variations) and a melodic pattern (three variations). Since the variations overlap, there are essentially three total variations: two make up what are structurally verse and a third makes up what is structurally chorus, though the same ideas underlie both. But since they don’t overlap perfectly—and because the first version of the rhythmic-harmonic pattern (which is repeated under the third variation of the melodic pattern that occupies the place of the chorus) implies the second—there must be a repeat. The repeat finishes and the song is over, at one minute and fifty seconds: there is nothing further the song can say. As Joss Stone’s cover demonstrates, the song can hold one’s interest—quite a different matter—for twice that time, at the cost of overpainting it with cherubs.77

The White Stripes’ project continues along another axis, however, one which will probably be more obvious. White Stripes albums are larded with historical references (the B-side of the “Hello Operator” single is a cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”), and it is instructive to compare the function of these to Weill’s and Veloso’s.78 The most conspicuous example on De Stijl is a simplified but basically straight cover of Blind Willie McTell’s “Your Southern Can Is Mine.” An affirmative relationship to the material in Veloso’s vein would be hard not to read as claiming an identity with McTell that would be difficult to defend. A negative, disidentificatory one in Weill’s vein would be equally indefensible: from what perspective, exactly, would a Piedmont Blues song be ironized? The lyrical material—a song that, at least on the surface, celebrates domestic abuse—raises the stakes along the same ethical axis, but with the polarity reversed. At the level of musical form, identification is dishonest, disidentification unthinkable; at the level of lyric, identification is unthinkable, disidentification dishonest. The performance is infused with a mischievous glee (but McTell’s is infused with a similar glee) at raising the same sets of hackles for completely contradictory reasons.

The White Stripes give up the game in the last twenty seconds of the track, but we will return to that in a moment. The riddle to the presence of “Your Southern Can Is Mine” on De Stijl can be solved entirely immanently. The relationship to the social material behind “Your Southern Can Is Mine” is neither affirmative nor critical, but nonexistent; it is raised only in order to be refused. The relationship is, rather, purely musical. In both McTell’s original and the White Stripes’ cover, the guitar part is built out of two elements: a quarter note pattern, accented on the offbeats (in McTell’s version, the effect is like stride piano played on guitar) and a syncopated pattern of the same length: none other than the second, shifted statement from “Hello Operator” of the ragtime rhythm we first saw in bar six of “Cannon Song.”79 In other words, both “Your Southern Can Is Mine” and “Hello Operator” work on the same musical material. The relationship to the material is un-ironic in the sense that McTell’s music is taken absolutely seriously. But there is no identity asserted between the White Stripes and McTell, precisely because no identity is asserted of either one separately. The only identity asserted is between McTell’s musical material and the White Stripes’—a musical identity between ragtime guitar and rock—and that identity isn’t so much asserted as demonstrated.

The White Stripes simplify the song harmonically, stripping down to open fifths a couple of common turnarounds that form the harmonic bones of the song. An early rival is said to have complained of the White Stripes’ early performances that they sounded like they wanted to play the blues but didn’t know how. Of course this was meant as a critique. But “wanting to play the blues without knowing how” is not a bad description of a key moment in the historical development of rock. These relatively straight covers tend to strip adornment and abstract from the original, but leave the core of the song intact. Many of these are blues covers like “Your Southern Can is Mine,” but the cover of Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee” would also fit in this category.80 These ask the same question of what elements are necessary—and it is a surprise to discover that Dylan’s original includes a number of unnecessary ones—but also open up a historical element that is, nonetheless, a purely musical history.

A non-musical clip appended to the end of “Your Southern Can is Mine”—and of the album De Stijl—confirms all this. Without context, the clip is mysterious. One man asks another if something is wrong, why is the other acting so uncomfortable. The second man responds that he was in a traffic accident the night before, but nobody got hurt. The clip sounds old; there is a difference of power and class between the two men, but the accents are hard to place. The staginess of the first voice suggests nothing so much as a 1940s film. In fact the first man is Alan Lomax, and the second is Blind Willie McTell himself.81 The moments that precede the included clip give the context. Mctell has just recorded some songs for Lomax, for inclusion in Lomax’s folk song archive for the Library of Congress, in Lomax’s hotel room in Atlanta. As Lomax apparently cannot tell, but is obvious to contemporary listeners, McTell is uncomfortable because Lomax has been trying to bully him into singing some “complainin’ songs.” By the time Lomax asks expressly for “Ain’t it Hard to be a Nigger, Nigger?” (McTell reponds, cautiously: “Well… that’s not… in our time”), a modern listener will be squirming almost as badly as McTell. The clip included on De Stijl begins “You keep moving around, like you’re uncomfortable.” Why include this clip? Because Lomax is asking McTell to do what we tend to want McTell to do, which is to connect his music to an historical experience, as the product of an historical identity. McTell refuses, for reasons that may be philosophical or may be pure cautiousness. But the clip isn’t about McTell, it’s about Lomax; his position is an unquestionably false one, requiring someone to assert an identity that is instead being forced upon him—“Ain’t it hard to be a nigger, nigger?”—but it’s also the position we are in, as long as we take the ethical bait of “Your Southern Can is Mine.”

The straight, geneaological covers are to be distinguished from another aspect which we will not spend much time on here, namely the deformative covers: covers that turn a country song (“Jolene”), a pop song (Burt Bachrach’s “I Don’t Know What to Do with Myself”) or a camp pseudo-bolero-cum-tango (Corky Robbins’s “Conquest,” a hit for Patti Page in 1952) into a rock song.82 There is nothing pure about any of these aspects: a swamp-rock cover of Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down,” which takes a fleetingly brief (two-second or so) slide-guitar coda from Johnson’s recording and turns it into the principle of the new performance, is both deformative and geneological, and very far from merely domesticating like the Rolling Stones’ version.83 Nor is there, despite expectations, anything ironic about it, any position of superiority taken with regard to the material: despite the violence done to the appearance of the original, the idea at its core is preserved and taken seriously. It is not difficult to see that the idea of the deformative cover lines up with the pure rock constructions, asking the same question from a different angle: what makes some songs amenable to this treatment and not others? What constitutes, in other words, a rock musical idea?

This orientation also goes some way towards explaining the presence of a trifle like “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)” on the album. It doesn’t take a trained ear to recognize it as Richie Valens’s “La Bamba” dressed up as punk-pop. But of course it is already a mistake to call it “Richie Valens’s ‘La Bamba,’” because “La Bamba” is itself a rock version of a traditional son jarocho. In the other direction, there is a long history of rock songs that are “La Bamba” dressed as something else: “Twist and Shout” (The Isley Brothers, The Beatles), “Wild Thing,” (The Troggs), “Hang on Sloopy” (The McCoys), “Louie Louie” (The Kingsmen), “Good Lovin’” (The Rascals), “Get Off My Cloud” (The Rolling Stones), “Stand” (R.E.M.), “Closer to Free” (The Bodeans)… and these are only ones that have some plausible claim to substantiality: once you start finding it in the chorus to Abba’s “Name of the Game,” you realize there’s no end in sight. The I-IV-V7-I cadence of “La Bamba,” with its strong melodic implications, is part of the DNA of rock. That is, “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)” aligns the genealogical meaning of blues covers like “Your Southern Can Is Mine” with the formal meaning of songs like “Hello Operator.” Even though “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)” isn’t much of an accomplishment, it has a clarifying value for us because unlike the blues, “La Bamba” is a one-off. While there is no doubt a national, regional, or ethnic mythology built around son jarocho, that mythology is not even plausibly part of the history of rock. Only “La Bamba” is part of the history of rock: once the trail turns ethnographic, the White Stripes’ project has nothing to say about it. Valens’s own relation to “La Bamba” is purely musical: the song was in U.S. pop circulation before his version, and the song would not have been a part of the Anglophone rocker’s musical heritage in any meaningful sense.84 Indeed, it doesn’t matter if the genealogy suggested by “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)” is the right one: “Louie Louie,” a more obviously recent assemblage—an amalgam of ersatz Jamaican sentiment and a Cuban riff borrowed from René Touzet—precedes “La Bamba” as a rock recording. Whether the trail ends in Veracruz or the Caribbean, and whether either one is real or imagined, doesn’t really matter. But the facts that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger (As Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys) covered “La Bamba” before the Rolling Stones existed, that Jimmy Page famously borrowed from Valens and cites “La Bamba” as an early obsession, and that The Plugz recorded a pretty good punk version, tend to validate “La Bamba”s centrality to the musical history of rock.85

Spotting musical references, borrowings, and influences—real, imagined, and misunderstood—is as endemic to pop music criticism as purple ekphrasis, especially among journalists who have no vocabulary for analyzing a musical object. But the White Stripes make extensive use of pastiche proper—songs whose musical content is “This is what a Bob Dylan (Led Zeppelin, Cream, Jane’s Addiction) song sounds like.” These, together with the genre excercises—from blues shuffle to scottish reel—add up with the straight covers to a project remarkably like Veloso’s: a collection that assembles itself into an account, and in so doing produces a meaning behind the back of the market. But once the similarity is pointed out, the difference becomes immediately clear: the meaning is of an entirely different order. Veloso’s meaning is unavoidably a nationalist meaning, not in any very complex sense, though there are certainly complexities to be teased out, but in the bare sense that the unifying principle proposed by his post-Tropicália musical orientation can only be Brazil. Non-Brazilian elements are not shied away from, but they are understood as sources, and in that sense internal to Brazil after all. The unifying principle behind the White Stripes doesn’t immediately appear that different, as the elements are nearly all assembled from within the U.S. But the hallmark of Veloso’s nationalism, his generous musical catholicism—which has both positive and negative implications—is completely missing from the White Stripes. The genealogy they produce is a genealogy of rock, not of the United States. Music from outside the history of rock is only included if it can be reduced to an idea that can be the basis of a rock song. Non-rock music also descended from the blues—funk, R&B, soul, to say nothing of jazz—is completely excluded. As their cover of “Lord, Send Me an Angel” shows clearly enough, this has nothing to do with a fear of treading on racially sensitive territory.86 Once the paths that lead out of the blues diverge, the White Stripes have nothing to say about the ones that don’t lead to rock.87 Indeed, even the history of rock is, given the formal restrictions imposed by the imperative toward abstraction, a limited one: missing genres, particularly those that require more expansive musical elaboration or ornamentation, are relegated to later projects and different bands.88

Until now we have more or less ignored or derogated lyrical content, in keeping with the White Stripes’ practice, which tends to suppress the importance of lyrical content by restricting it to private obscurity, nonsense, or purely generic meanings. But lyrical content cannot be ignored entirely: it can be reduced to “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” but not to “darn darn darn darn darn.” Adolescent agressivity is clearly an indispensable element. But adolescent aggressivity is framed or otherwise relativized rather than expressed. When Jack White says categorically, “I never write about myself. I’m not going to pretend like ‘Oh, I’m waitin’ on a train, and my baby’s comin’ back,’” he’s not saying anything that’s not already true of every lyricist, including many who are taken to be, or let themselves be taken to be, expressing some kind of train-taking or other authenticity.89 But the White Stripes are careful to internalize the literary frame, so that any imputation of expression is not only a categorical mistake but also a literary one. To take an almost arbitrary example, the bridge of “There’s No Home for You Here,” with its perfectly simple, perfectly direct hatred of bourgeois normalcy, is distilled rock sentiment:

Waking up for breakfast
Burning matches
Talking quickly
Breaking baubles
Throwing garbage
Drinking soda
Looking happy
Taking pictures
So completely stupid
Just go away

Though in the bridge and the title the target might as easily be tourists, the song is generically a kiss-off song, so the hatred is aimed at a specific woman as well as at monogamy in general:

I’m only waiting for the proper time to tell you
That it’s impossible to get along with you
It’s hard to look you in the face when we are talking
So it helps to have a mirror in the room

I’ve not been merely looking forward to the performance
But there’s my cue and there’s a question on your face
Fortunately I have come across an answer
Which is go away and do not leave a trace

The situation is clear enough. But the speaker’s self-regard, apparent already in the self-understanding of breaking up as a performance, is literalized in the fact that he is looking not into the girl’s face but into a mirror as he delivers the coup de grace. So adolescent aggression is presented as inseparable from adolescent self-regard: hardly a novel thought, but one that serves its purpose, which is to relativize the content of generalized antisociality that is necessary to the song. The point is not to write great poetry—great poetry would not be a rock lyric—but to write a rock lyric that is minimally self-framing.

A second technique—and one which may also be at work in “There’s No Home for You Here,” with its hatred of soda drinkers and picture takers—is the substitution of a private meaning for the public one that ought to be the core of the song. “Ball and Biscuit,” in the song of that title, evidently refers to an illicit sexual practice, a drug recipe, or some kind of mindblowing combination of the two:

Let’s have a ball and a biscuit sugar
And take our sweet little time about it

The lyric, mostly spoken in a bullying drawl over a slow blues-rock, hovers—the vocal equivalent of Jim Morrison’s image on an album cover—between sexually threatening and ridiculous:

Right now you could care less about me
But soon enough you will care, by the time I’m done
…
Go read it in the newspaper
Ask your girlfriends and see if they know
That my strength is ten-fold girl
And I’ll let you see if you want to before you go

The drug-related possibility quickly loses plausibility as the song turns out to be, more than anything else, about the gestural content of guitar solos. There are three guitar solos in the song—an absurd number for anyone, much less the White Stripes who tend to avoid them or keep them short. All three are spectacular, and spectacularly hyperbolic, the middle one introduced by “I can think of one or two things to say about it”—“it” still having the same grammatical referent as “take our sweet little time about it,” namely “a ball and a biscuit”—and concluded by “Do you get the point now?” immediately before a third solo is launched into. The gestural equivalence of rock guitar solos and sexual swagger has never been lost on anyone, but again it is self-framing rather than profundity which is aimed at, and if ever a work of art managed to fuse fun as an object of inquiry and inquiry as an object of fun, this is it. However, it takes only a moment’s research to discover the literal referent of “it”: “ball and biscuit” is slang for an old omnidirectional microphone fomerly used by the BBC, one of which was hanging from the ceiling at the studio where the song was recorded.90 This doesn’t change the meaning of the song, which says nothing about microphones and still promises a “girl” a transcendent and dangerous sexual experience. But that experience, the lyrical core of the song, is nothing, just a suggestive piece of language: a fact which both evacuates the meaning of the lyric and heightens the meaning of the social gesture of the form itself, since the meaning insists without a literal signifier.

Why is this derogation or relativization of the lyrics necessary? To the degree that the function of a pop song (the reason there is a market for it) is to amplify, monumentalize, and universalize an experience which is of necessity (because appealing to a market) general, which is to say trivial, then these techniques are straighforwardly Brechtian disidentification techniques. They present the “fun,” or affective charge, of adolescent antisociality (or of swaggering male sexuality), but by making themselves about the affective charge of adolecent antisociality (or of swaggering male sexuality), they wrest their autonomy from the requirement to produce that effect, which would otherwise subsume it. But one has also to remember the peculiar place that music holds in Hegel’s system: either it is, after literature, the art form closest to philosophy (that is, to the idea as such), or it is not really art at all. But these two judgments refer to two different objects: music with lyrics, and music without. Hegel had no concept of music-immanent meaning, and so misunderstood instrumental music. But song as such is still illuminated by Hegel’s understanding, in that both of his judgments are real dangers to be avoided. As long as music accompanies lyrical content, it is liable to become a matter of giving bodily amplification to a meaning that is aimed at by the lyrics, which assume primacy. (If Schumann’s “Abends am Strand” gives some sense of the possibilities this fact opens up at an earlier moment in music history, a glance at any journalistic pop review will confirm the limits imposed by it for music that confronts normativity only as the market).91 In this case, music produces an effect, which the listener suffers, rather than a meaning. The song as such tends to the kind of synthetic mush that Weill despised.

But the second judgment must equally be avoided. In the last scene of the concert film Under Great White Northern Lights, Meg White sits next to Jack White on a piano bench while he sings and plays their song “White Moon.”92 About halfway through the song, Meg White begins weeping, which continues throughout the song. Surely, the song is provoking an affective state, one that music has been known to produce even in Brechtians. But what is “White Moon” about? At first glance it appears to be nonsense; on closer inspection, it centers on Rita Hayworth, or rather images of her, in various contexts but mainly as a pinup above an army bunk during World War II. Obscurities remain, but there is nothing particularly shattering about the lyrical content. If one feels that there ought to be, this is because the song is musically a dirge. So Meg White is crying not because of the words, but in spite of them: in other words, her reaction is provoked rather than mediated through something expressed. This musical motive force might seem to be a desirable thing. But, to continue paraphrasing Hegel, the reason she is crying therefore is “merely hers,” which is to say not part of the song at all. Perhaps she has a visceral reaction to this song, but if so it is idiosyncratic. (To insist that the song is about Ida Lupino would be incorrect; but it makes no sense to say it is incorrect not to cry when listening to it.) On the other hand the film has provided Meg White with ample reasons to cry: the stress of a punishing concert schedule, performing in a ridiculously exposed context in front of thousands of people, nights spent in hotels too wired to sleep but too tired to get off the couch, with an ex-husband who seems to spend precious down-time worrying about the next night’s tempos. Relief? Exhaustion? Fury? All possible, but even more obviously these reasons are “merely hers” rather than part of the song.

Music’s motive force is thematized within the song: “Oh Rita oh Rita, if you lived in Mesita, I would move you with the beat of a drum.” One is immediately suspicious, not that Jack White has deliberately set up this scene, which would be sadistic, but that the White Stripes, who seem to have had a hand in making the film—presumably the matching his-and-hers red and white propeller planes were neither a logistical necessity nor the filmmmaker’s idea—include this scene as an allegory of the paradox of music’s motive force. At any rate, the point is made. If the music is subordinate to the lyrics, then the song is a pop commodity. If one finds this line a little too direct, one can at best say that music is reduced to producing amplificatory effects. If, on the other hand, music circumvents lyrical content altogether, then it does not even pass through the illusion of meaning, instead directly producing effects that are not part of the song itself. The problem confronted is the same as that which led Weill to “approach his text from a position [other than] sensual enjoyment”: In Jack White’s terms, if “it’s just… trying to make us feel good, [you] could just as well be making drugs or a computer game.”93

Two kinds of meaning are aimed at by the White Stripes. First, purely music-immanent meaning, which is to say the exploration of musical ideas in the way neo-plasticism and other abstract pictorial movements explore painterly ideas. Second, a music-immanent theory of rock, which necessarily includes social content but which, also necessarily, abstracts from it as much as possible. For both kinds of meaning, lyrical content has to be retained, but neutralized, and the logic is straighforwardly Brechtian: fun—or whatever other effect—is to be included, but an internal distance from it is required if meaning is to be plausibly asserted.

Kurt Weill, Veloso, and the White Stripes produce music under substantially different historical conditions. Nonetheless, the family resemblance of their approaches is not coincidental. All three understand musical meaning in the same way—as either music-immanent or gestural-citational—and the obstacle to it posed by the market—which nonetheless cannot be avoided—in the same way. While all three recognize the horizon of purely music-immanent meaning, it is only the White Stripes who attempt to produce it within a market-transmitted form. This is apparently paradoxical, as The White Stripes are furthest from the possibility of a modernist, medium-immanent form of meaning sustained by a restricted field—a form of meaning which is rejected by Weill for political reasons, and by Veloso for historical ones. But perhaps there is no paradox; only when the old, non-market, classically modernist horizon is all but forgotten does the attempt to assert a medium-immanent meaning within a cultural field saturated by exchange value begin to seem necessary.

This return to the ambition of music-immanent meaning is, from the perspective of the current study, conceptually the most unexpected development among the three projects. But it comes at a cost. White Stripes concerts ended with a rock version of the variously-titled “Boll Weevil Song,” best known through a Lead Belly version recorded by Alan Lomax in 1934.94 There is a certain pedagogical force to the exercise itself, which is made explicit when the song is taught to the audience as a singalong. In a typically self-aware move, the act of teaching the song is (as it was in Lead Belly’s version) incorporated into the lyrics. But while the pedagogical element of the White Stripes’ project is not negligible, it has no ambitions beyond the purely music-immanent. Of course, if what has been said above is true, music-immanent pedagogy is the only kind of pedagogy music can be expected to accomplish. But there can be no mistaking the fact that the White Stripes’ project is, in terms of its political content, the least substantial of the three. Indeed, it is hard to imagine it having a politics at all. There is nothing that exempts political meanings from the logic of the White Stripes’ project, or indeed from the logic of the commodity form. Any political meaning must either be relativized—in which case it is a politics that is interesting only so far as it is a rock politics, and thus music-immanent after all—or immediately fall prey to a market logic where it becomes a consumable point of identification, no different than other pop identifications.

But it is the aim of the present study to show how, under present circumstances, the production of artistic meaning—that is, the production of the unvalorizable within a society that subordinates every activity to the production of value—is itself a politics. It is not merely a matter of producing a line of flight along which artists can, within a value-saturated cultural field, produce non-values, which is to say meanings—though artists may certainly experience it that way. Rather, in a neoliberal regime—whose essence is the demand that everything be valorized—the production of the unvalorizable lodges a “foreign body” at capitalism’s ideological weak point. The political effectivity of such an act is necessarily beyond the scope of this essay. We are concerned with the problem of securing meaning against the ideological horizon of a fully market-saturated society. Meanings circulate or fail to circulate, compel or fail to compel. Success in the former, which is easily quantifiable, does not guarantee success in the latter, which is not. Nonetheless, one would want to avoid repeating Schönberg’s dogmatic error that because Threepenny was popular, it must not have been understood.

70. The pattern, in Weill’s cut time, is written: . The shifted version would be, again in cut time: .“Hello Operator” would be transcribed in 4/4 time, where it would look different, but the difference is purely customary—cut time being used for quick march-derived tempos—and has no bearing on the rhythm.↑

Unlike the traditional industrial novel or its Soviet variant, the production novel, both of which foreground scenes of factory labor, Brecht’s Threepenny Novel focuses exclusively on the maneuvers of finance capital, a level of commercial enterprise unadulterated by the material stuff of productive capital. It depicts abstract economic “development” in its purest metaphysical state.2 The plot of the novel is organized around three overlapping financial systems: Peachum’s consortium of street beggars, Coax’s ship venture, and Macheath’s commercial syndicate. Having left behind his life as a street cutthroat long before the action begins, the Macheath of the Novel is an aspiring businessman and founder of a chain of discount retail stores called the B-Shops. In search of investment capital to finance his enterprise, he begins, as in the Opera, to court young Polly, daughter of the wealthy Peachum. Through a complex series of machinations and plot turns, Macheath manages over the half-year depicted in the novel to restructure and expand his enterprise, absorbing the stores of his competitors and becoming, by the end of the novel, the esteemed director of a major bank.

Brecht borrowed Macheath’s business strategies for the B-Shops from the latest corporate practices, modeling this system in part after the one pioneered by the Karstadt and Epa concerns in the late 1920s; an even more important source were the tactics developed by shoe manufacturer Tomas Bat’a, the legendary “Henry Ford of Eastern Europe” who combined factory production methods with a chain of retail outlets to create one of the first vertically integrated industrial concerns.3 Thus, the setting for the novel may recall London at the turn of the twentieth century, but the capitalist strategies depicted in the 1934 book were entirely state-of-the-art. Brecht describes these economic networks and transactions in exquisite detail. He writes, as one reviewer suggested, “with the utterly grueling meticulousness of a specialist,” sparing the reader none of the technical minutiae of his protagonists’ financial activities (quoted in Werke, 16:424). A sheet of calculations made by Brecht while writing The Threepenny Novel attests to his meticulous attention to such details. Here he drew inspiration from the novels of British author Samuel Butler, whose “pedantry in matters of money” he found to be “extremely productive literarily” (Werke, 21:361).

As the consummate modern capitalist, Macheath is passionless, motivated only by a purely rational calculus. Just as he feels no carnal passion for Polly but views her merely as an opportunity to capitalize his B-Shops, Peachum similarly sees in his daughter’s marriage only a potential source of financial gain. None of the novel’s conflicts originate in the drama of human passion, and few of its reversals of fortune offer emotional gratification to the reader. Certainly one feat of The Threepenny Novel, then, is that Brecht manages to motivate narratively 400 pages of what are, in effect, financial transactions. Eschewing the “narrative desire” of the traditional dramatic novel, Brecht’s book compels its reader without any recourse to emotional intensity and catharsis, capturing the reader’s attention instead with the more phlegmatic and sublimated pleasures of logical analysis, riddle solving, remainderless bookkeeping, and, of course, utmost verbal wit.

The version of capitalism depicted in The Threepenny Novel was one that, by this historical moment, no longer corresponded to any properly human scale. As Henry Ford observation from 1923, “big business is really too big to be human.”4 The economist Joseph Schumpeter similarly explained in 1928 that “the enterprise of the ‘liberal’ era was usually the enterprise if one man, i.e. of one family,” while the contemporary corporation had exploded this anthropomorphism, substituting for it the abstract “entrepreneur function” (Unternehmerfunktion) that “is never purely embodied in concrete person; its essence [Wesen: thus also ‘its being’] must therefore always first be extrapolated analytically from a relatively complicated conglomerate.”5 As it incorporated ever more social functions into its integrated network of managed production and consumption, the corporation indeed began to merge with the state itself during the interwar years. Schumpeter thus explained that, from a sociological perspective, “the modern enterprise has outgrown the driving forces and human types of economic competition and, in its essence, structure and methods, has started to resemble a kind of public administrative body.”6 This was, of course, the decade in which the state began to assume control over the maintenance of human capital by introducing comprehensive social welfare systems, as Foucault observed in his late lectures on biopolitics; simultaneously, the state also began at this time to intervene in economic issues at the national level through policies of fiscal and monetary intervention that seem routine today but, as David Harvey points out, were unprecedented before the 1930s.7

Needless to say, capital’s evolution from the assembly line to the multinational corporation and, eventually, to a quasi-state did not make for a great dramatic plot. As Brecht observed, the atrophy of the human dimension under monopoly capitalism was accompanied by a certain disfiguration of the novel’s form. With a typically Brechtian reflexivity, the entrepreneur Macheath waxes nostalgic for the good old times as a street thug when everything was simpler, more straightforward, and more human:

All of this haggling disgusts me, a former street gangster! Here I sit and quibble about percentages. Why don’t I just take out my knife and stick it into them if they won’t give me what I want? What an undignified way of doing business, smoking cigars and signing agreements! So I’m supposed to smuggle in little propositions and make subtle intimations! Why not just say straight out: Your money or your life!…All of this hiding behind judges and bailiffs is undignified!…Clearly one can’t get anywhere today with the simple, straightforward and natural methods of street robbery. The latter have the same relationship to today’s business practices as sailing ships do to steam ships. But the old days were more human [die alten Zeiten waren menschlicher]. (Werke, 16:358)

Sentimentalizing the simplicity, even humanity of his former gangster life in The Threepenny Opera, Macheath reminisces about an era before the endlessly mediated legal machinations of finance capital, the good old days when conflict was still chiefly dramatic, not bureaucratic. His words recall Kracauer’s famous 1925 line about a celebrated Weimar murder case: “Only in a human world does a crime have a criminal.”8 Macheath, alas, is no longer a criminal because the world is no longer properly human.

But the distinction Macheath draws here between the old and the new is not solely one between two phases in the development of capitalism. The distinction also applies meta-textually to the two phases of his life and exploits as a character in two different works, first in The Threepenny Opera (which takes place in 1837) and then in The Threepenny Novel (which takes place in the early 1900s). In other words, when he observes that “the old days were more human,” the novel-character Macheath is speaking at once about an earlier historical moment of capitalism as well as his prior incarnation on the theatrical stage in The Threepenny Opera. Here Brecht provides a canny reflection on the status of figuration in the two Threepenny projects. Like the transition from “heroic” to monopoly capitalism, the transition from the 1928 play to the 1934 novel is accompanied by a loss in figural concretion and a dehumanization of the contents of the work. Indeed, because it always involves bodies on stage, theater is far more immediate and “human” than the written word. Some, such as the playwright-turned-novelist Eric Reger, argued that this ineluctable anthropomorphism disqualified theater from representing the modern corporate enterprise. The dramatic arts were simply too mimetic, sensuous, and concrete to depict the abstract metaphysics of contemporary finance capital. Writing about the modern “petroleum complex,” for example, Brecht once noted that “petroleum creates new relationships,” although these relationships eluded representation in contemporary art and literature: “Petroleum resists depiction in five acts; today’s catastrophes do not unfold in a linear fashion, but in cycles of crisis in which each fungible ‘hero’ changes with the individual phases, etc.” (Werke, 21:303).

In a statement written between the Opera and the Novel and published in Reger’s journal Der Scheinwerfer (The Spotlight) in 1930, Brecht’s collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann explained the difficulties that arose in attempting to depict modern economic processes on the stage. When Brecht recently attempted to write a play about the Chicago wheat futures market,

We collected a lot of technical literature for this piece. I myself interviewed a series of specialists; and towards the end Brecht began reading texts on economics, since he found the financial practices to be extremely opaque and so he had to see how things stood with theories of money. But even before he began making discoveries about this material that were extremely important for him, he already knew that the (great) form of the drama as it was known then was just as unsuitable for representing modern processes such as the distribution of the world’s wheat or the construction of railroads as it was for representing the lives of the individuals who control our era. The traditional form of the drama was not even suitable for depicting actions with consequences [Handlungen mit Folgen]. Such things, he said, are not dramatic in our sense, and if you “poeticize” them, then they are no longer true; furthermore, there is no such thing as drama any longer, and if you see that today’s world no longer fits into the drama, well, then the drama no longer fits into today’s world.9

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the project discussed here, Joe Fleischhacker, never made it to the stage, but instead shared the same fate as Sergei Eisenstein’s unrealized project in the late 1920s for a film of Marx’s Das Kapital. The resonances between the two projects are indeed noteworthy, as Eisenstein’s film came up against problems very similar to those faced by Brecht. As Eisenstein explained in his working notes for the unrealized film, depicting the modern capitalist enterprise presented a unique challenge, since it required the thorough “de-anecdotalization” of the source material: the “detachment from a specific place,” the division into “nonfigurative chapters,” the leap “from representation of ordinary life to abstract and generalized imagery,” and, thus, the “complete departure from the factual and anecdotal.”10 “Deanecdotalization” was effectively dedramatization. With the gradual movement away from “the factual and anecdotal,” the artwork sheds its empirical referentiality and documentary specificity.

For the same reasons as Eisenstein, Brecht developed an art form that was far more abstract and analytic than the traditional theater. His epic technique–“drama with footnotes,” as he called it–was already a step in this direction. More radical in its renunciation of the anecdotal and the mimetic, however, was The Threepenny Novel. For example, the book provides few vivid descriptions of the characters, giving the reader little idea of what Macheath or Coax looks like.11 Equally antitheatrical is the almost complete absence of dialogue. Instead, the characters hold forth in lengthy, quasi-philosophical monologues, and at those rare moments when they do converse, their words are seldom rendered directly, in quotation marks, but are instead recounted and summarized by the narrator. Indeed, there is so little dialogue in the text that one is hard pressed to imagine that the author of The Threepenny Novel was one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century.

Nevertheless, for all his novel’s abstraction, Brecht insisted that sensuous perception could not be rejected entirely, that art must not be abandoned for the abstract analytic of science. What was needed, rather, was a strategy for depicting capital’s mechanisms without spurious anthropomorphizing. “Here there was much to see, much to make visible,” he wrote of his experiments in representing the capitalist system (Werke, 21:460). Ultimately what seemed to offer the ideal compromise between art and science was the detective novel, a genre that appealed to him because of its particularly close kinship to logical thought. In a 1938 essay “On the Popularity of the Crime Novel,” he likened the detective story to a crossword puzzle, praising the structural rigor of a genre whose riddle is resolved through the meticulous and diligent application of the scientific method (Werke, 22:504-510). As if conducting an experiment, the literary detective proceeds by gathering data, eliminating hypotheses that are revealed as false, and positing causal schemes where probabilities run high. This investigative method demanded a diffuse economy of attention, which Brecht praised as superior to the emotional intensity of dramatic catharsis. In contrast to classical dramatic forms such as the bourgeois tragedy, which hones the spectator’s attention on the red thread of the plot, detective genres require an open mode of perception that proceeds inductively. To remain vigilant for possible clues, the reader cannot allow herself to be misled by the human drama of the plot. Since every trivial piece of information must be read forensically, as a potential clue to the text’s riddle, the reader must pay equal attention to every bit of detail and seemingly meaningless incident.

Of course, crime novels require murders and trials, and Brecht obligingly outfits The Threepenny Novel with two of each. But, significantly, in neither case is the actual culprit ever found. This is because in both cases the culpable party is a disembodied system, or collective agent. So, for example, an owner of one of the B-Shops, Mary Swayer, is driven to suicide as a result of the wolfish business practices of Macheath, who ruins his shopowners in order to gain advantage over a competing retail concern. In her case the accused is acquitted, because, under the laws of capitalism, murder through material privation is, of course, completely licit. Coax, too, is murdered, and seemingly more directly: attacked first by a member of Macheath’s gang, he stumbles away only to be finished off minutes later by someone under the charge of Peachum. Yet like Swayer’s demise, the cause of Coax’s death is indeterminable precisely because it is overdetermined, the consequence of multiple batterings delivered by two parties working independently of each other. The agent responsible for delivering the death blow is not clear. Just as Swayer’s death is not directly attributable to Macheath, who is only following good capitalist strategy when he forces her to financial ruin, Coax’s death cannot be blamed entirely on any one of his assailants, nor on the two men who commissioned the murder independently of one another. And when Coax’s alleged killer is finally found, it is the wrong man who is tried and hanged. The book ends, then, with a third collective murder. In this last case, it is society itself that commits the crime, in an act of class justice.

The overdetermined deaths of Swayer and Coax raise complex questions about the attribution of guilt and agency in cases of collective crime. Such issues were of course highly relevant at the time that Brecht wrote The Threepenny Novel in 1933-1934, when the victories of European fascism prompted consideration of the relationship between collective violence and regressive social configurations. Novels about corporate crime, in particular, provide an important resource for thinking about the agency and behavior of such “aggregate persons” (Verbandspersonen), as Stefan Andriopoulos has demonstrated. Although on the surface The Threepenny Novel is a corporate crime story, the subtext of this narrative, with its focus on collective crime and guilt, is clearly that of European fascism. In strictly legal terms, corporate bodies, like the state, are not subject to the law because they lack the features of concrete personhood necessary to assume guilt for a crime.12 And so despite the panoply of crimes in the capitalist jungle of The Threepenny Novel, from murder and theft to rape and extortion, in the end no responsible parties can be found for these acts. In a functionally differentiated and bureaucratized corporation that disperses agency across a number of individuals, these forms of violence are not attributable to any one person, but are, rather, shared by all. The guilty party cannot be established in Brecht’s novel because the guilty party is the capitalist system itself. Thus, while The Threepenny Novel engages the conventions of the traditional detective novel, it simultaneously short-circuits the method of forensic inquiry that is intrinsic to this genre. Or to borrow Benjamin’s words from his review of the book, “Brecht’s procedure consists in retaining the highly developed technique of the crime novel but neutralizing its rules” (Schriften, 3:447-448; Writings, 3:8).

In addition to the two trials that seek (and fail) to resolve Swayer’s and Coax’s murders, a third, still more significant trial takes place in The Threepenny Novel, which Brecht saves for the final pages. This event is nothing less than Judgment Day itself. Presiding over the trial is one of the characters in Peachum’s outfit, an invalid veteran of the Boer War named Fewkoomby. The proceedings, which take place in a dream, promise to track down all those who have ever been responsible for economic exploitation and to repay all of those who have ever been expropriated. As the “greatest arraignment of all times,” the trial promises, in other words, to discover the historical source of social inequality itself, the very foundational injustice of capitalism (Werke, 16:380). Needless to say, the task is not an easy one. Fewkoomby’s conservative estimate is that the proceedings will last several hundred years. The investigation will be exhausting, but Fewkoomby reasons that the only way for capital to repay all its debts is to reconstruct the labors of all expropriated generations, both past and present.

So Fewkoomby begins by subpoenaing the dead. “Everyone who had ever set foot on this earth was allowed to voice his plaints” (Werke, 16:381). He questions not only physical laborers such as the suicide Mary Swayer but also those who performed the ideological work that perpetuated the injustices of capitalism. So, for example, the judge interrogates a priest who, earlier in the novel, promulgated religious parables that reinforce the political quiescence of the masses. As the inquiry proceeds, however, it becomes clear to the judge that he will never arrive at the definitive source of value. Each interrogation leads to still more interrogations. With mounting confusion, Fewkoomby begins to rave at the dead:

There is the wall of the house—where is the bricklayer? Is he ever really paid in full? And this paper! Someone had to make it! Was he sufficiently compensated for it? And this table here! Is there really nothing owed to the man who planed the wood for it? The washing on the line! The line itself! And even the tree, which didn’t plant itself here. This knife here! Is everything paid for? Fully? Of course not! We have to send around a circular asking everyone who isn’t paid in full to register! The history books and biographies won’t suffice! Where are the wage lists? (Werke, 16:391)

With the failure of this forensic inquiry, both the dream and the novel break off abruptly. Fewkoomby’s noble but misguided attempt to reconstruct the genealogy of the commodity is doomed, since each particular instantiation of dead labor is always built on more labor. In the end, the trial may not arrive at the source of inequality, but this very failure succeeds in exposing the absurdity of the physiocratic conceit that there could be a foundational or natural “origin” of value.

Althusser once observed that Brecht’s work displays two distinct “forms of temporality that do not achieve any mutual integration, which have no relation to one another, which coexist and interconnect, but never meet each other, so to speak.”13 Through this noncoincidence, Brecht’s industrial novel winds up demonstrating the incongruous temporalities of capital and the human. The Judgment Day episode questions the very adequacy of a genetic framework for describing the “development” of capital. As Lukács once noted, the novel’s historical emergence as an aesthetic form responded to capitalist society’s “need for genetic explanations” and, for a time at least, its genealogical narratives flourished from the structural resemblance between the evolution of the business enterprise and the generational sequence of the bourgeois family. But this homology was short lived. As Brecht’s Judgment Day demonstrates, the mechanisms of monopoly capital had grown too complex by the 1930s and could no longer be modeled using the traditional novel’s genealogical framework. When the subjective temporality of Bildung yields to the abstract scheme of Entwicklung, when “formation” gives way to “development,” the Industrieroman definitively parts ways with the Familienroman. The movement of capital, Fewkoomby discovers, does not observe the linear concatenations found in “history books” or the anthropomorphic time of “biographies.” As his demand for “wage lists” suggests, mathematical languages are more adequate for depicting modern capital than narrative ones.14 Fewkoomby’s attempt to reconstruct the genealogy of capitalist production, to parse the commodity out in linear time, ends up trapped in a tautological circle, since the human mind cannot comprehend the paradoxical fact that capital seems always to presuppose itself.

It is worth pointing out here that The Threepenny Novel is not just a book about capital. It is also a book about Kapital. Brecht’s commentators have amply documented The Threepenny Novel’s numerous borrowings from Marx’s opus, such as the passage describing the death of Mary Ann Walkley, which Brecht quotes virtually verbatim from Marx.15 But, beyond the content and imagery, correspondences between the two works can also be found at a deeper structural level. Indeed, far more intriguing for our inquiry are certain parallels in the construction that raise questions about the aesthetic strategies Brecht borrowed from Marx to represent capital. It was likely Karl Korsch who should be credited for leading Brecht to the insight that the textual design of Das Kapital was integral to understanding capital’s mechanisms. In his 1932 introduction to Das Kapital, Brecht’s initiator into Marxism wrote, for example, of the “aesthetic attraction” of “the Marxian mode of presentation.”16 Marx’s explication of capital’s properties and logic is not purely theoretical or scientific, Korsch insisted, but relies on certain strategies of textual exposition. Because the mechanisms of capital can be grasped only within an “artistic whole,” as Marx characterized his text, Das Kapital tries to develop a mode of presentation, or Darstellung, that is proper to its subject matter.17 The challenge of presenting the system of modern capital adequately had in fact precipitated Brecht’s turn to Marx in the late 1920s. As he confessed to a Moscow audience in May 1935, aesthetic concerns, not revolutionary sentiment or political conviction, led the playwright to Marx. While working on Joe Fleischhacker, the fragment discussed in the earlier quote by Hauptmann, Brecht ran aground on the problem of how to depict the mechanisms of the wheat futures market, which seemed to him to be “inexplicable” and “incomprehensible.”18 So he began to read Marx. He turned to Das Kapital because the structure of this “artistic whole” contained the solution to the aesthetic aporia that he had encountered in his attempt to bring the system of finance capital to the stage.

Nowhere is the structural rhyme between The Threepenny Novel and Das Kapital clearer than at the end of each book, where Fewkoomby’s dream of Judgment Day mirrors Das Kapital’s final section, “So-called Primitive Accumulation.” Both chapters wrestle with a contradiction that is fundamental to the (il)logic of capital and thus a seemingly insuperable obstacle to its depiction: the impossibility of retracing the steps of accumulation back to a foundational act of expropriation, back to an original crime. This task is impossible because capital has no historical genealogy, but instead operates outside of linear time. “What Marx proved,” Balibar noted, “is not the fact that capitalism has liberated the development of the productive forces once and for all, but the fact that capitalism has imposed on the productive forces a determinate type of development whose rhythm and pattern are peculiar to it, dictated by the form of the process of capitalist accumulation.”19 Confronted with these particular rhythms and patterns, Brecht decided to stage Fewkoomby’s investigation as the biblical Judgment Day, an event at the end of time that transcends the laws of historical sequence. Ultimately this investigation fails, breaking off abruptly, because Fewkoomby’s forensic mode of inquiry has no purchase on the laws of capital’s “development,” which elude these causal schemes.

In his introduction to Das Kapital, Korsch described the contradiction encountered by Marx, who, even after hundreds of pages of detailed economic analysis, still faced “an unsolved problem to be elucidated, which proves in the last analysis to be non-economic in character. This problematic residue may be expressed in the following question: what was the origin, before all capitalist production began, of the first capital, and of the first relationship between the exploiting capitalist and the exploited wage-laborer?”20 After explicating the structure and mechanisms of capital, Marx must still answer the impossible question of when and how the capitalist order first appeared in the world. This, of course, is precisely the question that motivates Fewkoomby’s investigation. As Marx explains, however, this moment can never be located historically since capital has no genealogy. In the absence of any historical beginning, capitalism grounds itself in the legend of “so-called primitive accumulation,” a mythical account that circulates as a justification for economic inequality. In authenticating the “naturalness” of capitalist governmentality, the myth of primitive accumulation “plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology….Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past. Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other, lay rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living….Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property.”21 This fairy tale—which Brecht, incidentally, lifts directly from Das Kapital and places in the mouth of a priest in The Threepenny Novel22—envisages an origin to a set of productive relations where, in reality, no such origin exists. The cosmological myth of primitive accumulation is an ideological strategy to conceal capital’s tautological structure, Marx writes: “The whole movement, seems to turn around in a never-ending circle, which we can only get out of by assuming a primitive accumulation (the ‘previous accumulation’ of Adam Smith) which precedes capitalist accumulation; an accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure.”23 Fewkoomby’s inquiry attempts to return to this point of departure, but, as Brecht shows, he cannot reconstruct the different phases of commodity production from the table back to the wood back to the tree. Capital is an underivable figure. By setting this figure within the narrative framework of a novel, Brecht exposes the limitations of the latter’s intrinsically genealogical structure for an analysis of the modern capitalist enterprise.

In a letter sent to Brecht the same month that he wrote the conclusion to The Threepenny Novel, Korsch had in fact addressed this theological aspect of capital, noting the “profound consonance between [the] Bible and Capital.”24 Staging Fewkoomby’s inquiry in a dream of Judgment Day, in a state of absolute synchrony, posits a vantage beyond historical time from which it become possible to solve the metaphysical riddle of capital. It offers a view of the world as seen by the divine eye, a view foreclosed to human perception. As Frank Kermode argues in his famous study of narrative and apocalypse, The Sense of an Ending, the setting of the Judgment Day provides “what [the psychologists] call ‘temporal integration’—our way of bundling together perception of the present, memory of the past and expectation of the future, in a common organization. Within this organization that which was conceived of as simply successive becomes charged with past and future: what was chronos becomes kairos.”25 Because capital’s development eludes linear modeling, because its mechanisms observe laws that are, by their nature, generic rather than genetic, understanding capital demands an ahistorical approach. Thus, on Judgment Day, Fewkoomby throws out the narratives of the “history books” and “biographies,” calling instead for “wage lists,” a precise diagram of what Marx called “the relations of capital” (das Kapitalverhältnis).

The impossibility of portraying capital’s development through a series of successive moments, then, is the epistemological problem upon which Brecht’s industrial novel pivots. On the one hand, capital generates in its subjects a complex architecture of time: its psychology of credit and deferred gratification establishes a horizon of futurity not found in societies whose mode of production lacks private property and techniques for amassing resources. But at the same time capital exempts itself from the very temporal rule it has created, defying the basic laws of chronological sequence that are fundamental to the mechanisms of compound investment and accumulation. At least in the era of heroic capitalism, the development of the business enterprise could still be modeled on the generational sequence of human reproduction. By the time of the consolidation of the great industrial concerns at the turn of the twentieth century, however, capital had sloughed off this human face. Not surprisingly, interest in the concept of primitive accumulation has since increased to the point where, today, in the era of global vertical integration, it has become utterly central to the Marxist analysis of capital. Recent accounts of primitive accumulation focus on the paradoxical temporality of this phenomenon, characterizing it variously as “something of an infinite regress,” an “endlessly iterated event,” or a “basic ontology of alienation.”26 As structuralist Marxism demonstrated decades ago, this aporia is central to the capitalist mode of production. Étienne Balibar’s famous description of primitive accumulation as a case of “ahistorical historicism” captures the paradox succinctly: “Marx’s critical recognition (against political economy) of the historicity of capitalism—the fact that capitalist relations are neither natural nor eternal but rather the product of conditions with a determined genesis—is balanced by an incapacity to think about and analyze the very history of capitalism.”27 The emergence of das Kapitalverhältnis—the capitalist relations of production—is not a historical event, but rather a “conjunction” or an “encounter” (gegenübertreten) between owners of the means of production and the workers who sell their labor-power. Once established, this relationship “reproduces itself on a constantly extending scale.”28 Thus, primitive accumulation is less an event that took place somewhere in the remote historical past than an ongoing process of continuous expropriation.29

The parallax construction of The Threepenny Novel attempts to capture the insoluble contradiction between the historical account of capital, which unfolds genealogically in the narrative about Macheath’s enterprise, and the structural account, which is presented sub speciae aeternitatis in Fewkoomby’s dream. Ultimately these two perspectives cannot be mapped onto one another. In the body of the novel, time moves inexorably forward, and yet when the end of the story is finally reached, the steps that led to the conclusion of the narrative, paradoxically, cannot be retraced. For Fewkoomby, the crimes cannot be reconstructed. This is the case, it would seem, because the temporality of capitalism, the time of “development,” eludes mnemonic inscription. As Balibar observes, the “analysis of primitive accumulation thus brings us into the presence of the radical absence of memory which characterizes history (memory being only the reflection of history in certain predetermined sites—ideology or even law—and as such, anything but a faithful reflection).”30 If the architecture of time and memory in any given culture is articulated by its specific mode of production, The Threepenny Novel demonstrates, further, that capitalism’s violent expropriation of these means of production is also simultaneously an expropriation of time itself, the result of which is a generalized condition of amnesia in which history transpires without leaving a trace. Because human memory is inscribed and transmitted in symbolic languages and mechanical operational sequences that are exterior to the individual subject, every society, observes the paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, will inevitably cultivate “false” memories in its subjects, memories that are by nature collective and transindividual.31 But it seems that capitalist society alone generates the very incapacity to remember.