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The chapter reads nothing like an interview or a one-on-one and is really Benjamin's reflections on his conversations with Brecht. We read only Benjamin, and the Brecht Benjamin knew and presented with a giddy favour. It is July 4, 1934 and the duo are placed in Brecht's sickroom we are told, where they contend on a theory Benajmin had proposed in an essay titled 'the author as producer.' To acquire a comprehensive understanding of their contentions, one examines the hinge of this sickroom debate “ Benajmin's The author a sproducer.
At the outset, benjamin shuns the tiresome dichotomy formed of art and life in the teleological discourses on literature since the 19th century.
His hypothesis is that 'a work which exhibits the right tendency must of necessity show every other quality as well' Political and literary tendency to benjamin are not two distinct threads that may be extracted and examined separately, but a solitary member that determines a works final quality in mirroring each other.
Benjamin chastizes the Left intellengentsia of Germany for experiencing their solidarity with the proletariat only in the mind and not as producer.
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“ Amazing as always, gave her a week to finish a big assignment and came through way ahead of time. ”
The writer here is positioned within the mode of production, and whether s/he likes it or not, has to assume responsibility as such. To Benjamin, the right question to ask should not be What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? But what is its position in them? And Benjamin argues that it is a work's literary technique that determines its place within a mode of production “ technique being the composite of content and form.
Jean Paul Sartre takes up a similar position in his book What is Literature? Where he emphasizes on the materiality of our existence and notes that we are always necessarily in a situation, that nothing is possible outside of our realities. The writer too exists in a situation, and all his pursuits of writing are located within this materiality. Sartre here is making a case for engaged writing, and essentially posits that whether a writer names his reality or not, he takes a position in either case. To Sartre all prose is necessarily engaged writing.
Benjamin echoes just as much in his essay when he says Nothing will be further from the mind of an author who has carefully thought about the conditions of production today...He will never be concerned with products alone but alawys, at the same time, with the means of production. In this vein he goes on to uphold Brecht's writing, in particular, his epic theatre, as being of supreme quality. He invokes Brecht here directly where Brecht is deriding the sample apparatus for tragedies and operas prevalent at the time “ Believing themselves to be in possession of an apparatus which in reality possesses them, they defend an apparatus over which they no longer have control, which is no longer, as they still believe, a means for the producers but has become a means to be used against the producers. Benjamin cites Brecht's epic theatre to demonstrate his positions “ Epic theatre, as Brecht declared, must not develop actions but represent conditions. Benjamin further stresses, Epic theatre does not reproduce conditions, rather it discloses, it uncovers them.
Adorno was Benjamin's disciple and pupil. A difficult relationship for Adorno who disagreed with Benjamin's primarily materialist theory of art and his heroization of Brecht as the socio-political messiah. In his book Aesthetic Theory, Adorno addresses the question of art's function in the transformation of society. Adorno claims in Aesthetic theory that ''art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art...it criticizes society by merely existing. To Adorno proper art is necessarily autonomous. Adorno somewhat like benjamin rejects the simplistic binaries of art for art's sake versus art for life's sake. Art, in Adorno is dialectical - it is both a product of society and at once opposes society. There is no autonomy as such then, and in the realization of this illusion, there is a truth. Why and how is art still capable of such autonomy, one asks. Adorno writes-- In all art that is still possible, social critique must be raised to the level of form, to the point that it wipe out all manifestly social content.
Adorno's gripe with Brecht is located in the latter's overtly propagandistic writing which reduces the underlying socio-political problems to 'mere episodes' by reification of everyday life. About Brecht's play Saint Joan, Adorno writes, in his essay Commitment: The play is set in a Chicago half-way between the Wild West fables of Mahagonny and economic facts. But the more preoccupied Brecht becomes with information, and the less he looks for images, the more he misses the essence of capitalism which the parable is supposed to present. Mere episodes in the sphere of circulation, in which competitors maul each other, are recounted instead of the appropriation of surplus-value in the sphere of production [. . .].
What Adorno demonstrates in his criticism of Brecht is that form is not anatagonistic to content, as much as Brecht would have liked for it to be, but that Brechtian form eventually conceals the real horrors. Adorno then must be understood as a critic opposed to propaganda, not to political art. A thorough argument on the various modes of writing would require one to engage with the genealogy of this debate acutely and would comprise of an engagement with the arguments of thinkers such as Jean Paul Sartre, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, Herbert Marcuse, Leon Trotsky among many others. The limitations of time and space limits me to merely draw a skelatal framework of the points of contention in a few of these thinkers, namely Sartre, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno.
Walter Benjamin's Interview Like Conversations with Brecht. (2016, Sep 18). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/walter-benjamins-interview-like-conversations-with-brecht-essay
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