One of the things that interests me about Brecht’s theoretical project is his focus on creating work that resonates strongly with contemporary audiences. The world as he knew it was one firmly rooted in “the scientific age” of modernist utopian possibilities. He saw theater as a tool to open up fracture points in contemporary society in order to make possible a transformation in class consciousness.
He writes in A Short Organum for the Theatre:
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
Brecht’s work, to my reading, has always concerned itself with the extremes of society, the revolutionary consciousness and potential on the one hand and the reactionary counter-revolutionary forces on the other. But as he says in the above quote we must concern ourselves with the contemporary reality. We must use the system as it is, and through an exploitation of its fracture points, transform it into a more perfect world. He makes this second point more explicitly, a little earlier, when he states that “[t]he theatre has to become geared into reality if it is to be in a position to turn out effective representations of reality, and to be allowed to do so.”
Theatre, for Brecht, was to be an Event, in the Zizekian sense, an authentic experience which fundamentally alters the experience of events not only after its occurrence but alters the experience of the past as well. The theatrical Event was to be of such a magnitude that one’s whole orientation to the social experience would be fundamentally and irrevocably altered.
So what does this have to do with tweeting about Kanye West?
What I was thinking about specifically was the extreme of contemporary hip hop embodied in the radical political critique espoused by groups like Dead Prez or BDP (KRS-One) on the one hand and such acts as Kanye and Fergie on the other. Bling bling capitalism juxtaposed against social revolutionaries mediated through contemporary performative/artistic experience. How does Kanye’s Golddigger intersect with KRS-One’s Love is gonna get cha(Material Love)? But of more interest is the question: how does the technology through which these songs are experienced interact with the audience?
What twitter does, in a similar way to other social media like blogs, facebook, myspace and so forth, is to blur the distinction between life, audience, and performance. When surveillance is total, and everyone is on camera, then everyone is an actor. So then we have the consumption of culture as a performative act. We tweet about the song we are currently listening to and fold the performance of the song into the performance of subjectivity on-line in a way that presents it immediately as commodity and reifies the subjective performance.
This is the world we are in. The “scientific age” has been passed by for the “information age” and we are no longer gears in the machine but statuses in the social group blog. So the audience/actor takes the stage and incorporates cultural commodities into the performative feedback loop. The subjective experience of identity shifts along the audience/actor continuum and becomes complicated as that experience gets mediated through various technologies. Is a retweet performative? Has the subjective experience then become another cultural object to be consumed or does it still contain the potential inherent in performance? Has the subject/object dichotomy been pulled out of the either/or world and brought into the light of both/and?
Brecht makes it clear that “[n]ot everything depends on the actor, even though nothing may be done without taking him into account. The ‘story’ is set out, brought forward and shown by the theatre as a whole.” I would argue that this extends to contemporary performative technologies.
While Brecht set out in his day to reconceive Theatre and Opera into a medium appropriate for his contemporary world I could easily imagine him shifting the very stage from the physical world to the digital world. Perhaps his performances would only appear in Second Life or as episodic narrative released via twitter.
Despite all this conjecture, the question still remains: how might these technologies be utilized to exploit fracture points in contemporary culture in order to unleash the revolutionary potential of the masses? Or to look at it a different way: is the very search for those points of fracture, and the desire for social revolution, an idea tied up with the modernist notions of a bygone era? Have the differences been so radically folded into one another that we no longer have such dichotomous existence but rather the uneasy experience of both/and?
I certainly don’t know the answers to those questions but I would love you to retweet this piece if you enjoyed it.
