Louis Althusser

Althusser, Louis. 1969. "The 'Piccolo Teatro' Bertolazzi and Brecht." In For Marx, Penguin Press (1965).

Spectatorship:

Spectatorial consciousness in Althusserian model:

  • Enlist spectator for an active and living critique
  • Production of a new consciousness in spectator

Estrangement model versus Identification model of Fascist

  • Techniques of decentering by not relating to or focusing on the hero
  • Attack the invisibility of the ideological apparatus
  • Mechanics of not knowing oneself
  • Hegemonic spectator
  • Consciousness is purely psychological

Spectatorial consciousness in Brechtian model:

  • Not a community of spectatorship
  • Structural recognition of how to change the situation
  • Method is for political ends (for whose politics?)

Althusser, Louis. 1971. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 127-184. New York and London: NLB.

Ideology and the State:

  • IIIIIDEO
  • Ideas are a product/reproduction of the means of production
  • Theory comes out of a set of practices
  • Repressive State Apparatus
  • Ideological State Apparatus [We know about this normalizing system because we act (within) it]:
  • Religious, educational, family, legal, etc.
  • The Church has been replaced by The School
  • School as determining the working classes
  • Subjecthood:
  • Interpolation of individuals as already subjects
  • Subject participates in the practices of the ideological apparatus

Walter Benjamin

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In Illuminations, New York: Harcourt (1937).

  • Aura: that which cannot be reproduced
  • Reproduction is what is killing art

Bertolt Brecht

Brecht, Bertold. "A Short Organum for the Theatre." In Brecht on Theater, edited and translated by John Willet, 179-205. New York: Hill and Wang.

Nature of Art:

  • Emphasis on historical specificity: each society produces its own kinds of theater
  • Art is by definition a political intervention. It can never be apolitical

Role of Pleasure:

  • Art works producing entertainment. Theatre’s ultimate purpose is pleasure
  • Pleasure and politics: Marxist approach to pleasure in politics
  • Pleasure does not need justification

Rationality versus Emotionality:

  • Need to work with emotions, but at distance (anti-theatrical)
  • Theatricality trains the audience to be a good (complaint) audience, anti-instrumentality of the endeavor (as opposed to fascist art?)
  • Alienation effect “A” effect
  • Brechtian theater contradicts the hegemonic training of actors in the US

Contradictions

  • Rational as reason and emotion as the irrational
  • Role of Science not thought through although scientific methods were to be used for social life.
  • Relationship between the working class and intellectuals

Proposal for Theater:

  • Its goal was to transform audience to a state of suspicious inquiry. Make strange the ordinary
  • Its t
  • ool was making the state of things looks “strange.” Split between representation and the reality of the object represented.
  • Theater was to be for “children of the scientific age”
  • Simple plays provided weak pleasure while stronger pleasure was derived from more complex ones.
  • Attitude towards society the same as attitude towards nature
  • Appeals to rationality (as opposed to the irrationality of fascism)
  • Anti-naturalist: making things look strange: separating the character and the actor/actress so there is no way of identify both

Adorno

Theodor Adorno on Brecht, "Commitment." In Aesthetics and Politics.

Nature of Art:

  • There is no un-political art, for there is no outside of society
  • even when oppositional, art is always part of society
  • Committed art: explicit political involvement and message of art. Art as a means
  • Autonomous art: art for art’s sake. Art as an end

Trauma and Violence:

  • Showing suffering was obscene
  • Audience c
  • onsumerism / victimizing the audience by portrayals of violence
  • How to talk about violence without reproducing violence?
  • Reenactment of traumatic situation can be healing