Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Delaware
helmling@odin.english.udel.edu

 

Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method.London and New York: Verso, 1998.

 

Fredric Jameson’s oeuvre is daunting for almost every possible reason. Besides its sheer bulk, the difficulty of its themes, and its notoriously demanding prose style, there’s the vast scope of the cultural materials it takes on. Nothing cultural is alien to Jameson, as Colin McCabe once put it (in words quoted on the back cover of Brecht and Method). One of the strengths, indeed a condition, of Jameson’s encyclopedic achievement is a programmatic dispassion toward his subject matter, an eschewal or renunciation of polemic so unemphatic that many readers miss it. Jameson’s work is never uncommitted, but the sorts of inquiry he undertakes aim to open possibilities that polemical reflexes, for which the only question is for-or-against, generically foreclose.

 

Nevertheless, throughout what Terry Eagleton has called Jameson’s “curiously unimpassioned” corpus (74), there are seams of warmer feeling, when Jameson touches on figures he particularly admires–Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes, and Gissing, to name a few. He has often enough indulged this impulse at book-length; hence there’s a special category or genre of work within his oeuvre, which, without losing critical measure, nevertheless functions as a celebration of and hommage to writers who are especially important for him. His first book, Sartre, is an example; Marxism and Form likewise celebrates the canonical figures of Western Marxism (and insinuates Sartre into their company). A cooler, but unmistakably appreciative, survey occupies The Prison-House of Language (the pages on Barthes and Lacan are especially warm); Late Marxism renews and expands the Adorno chapter of Marxism and Form. The most conflicted, and therefore the most interesting case is the book on Wyndham Lewis, in which Jameson advocates for a literary achievement committed to a politics he abhors.

 

Brecht and Method belongs in this special category of Jameson’s “appreciations” or homages. And yet this new book also belongs in a category of its own–for I’m tempted to declare it the most unusual work within Jameson’s corpus. Jameson’s writing, for all its difficulty and despite the above-noted dispassion, has always been very dramatic: it generates a continuous anxiety about critique’s, revolution’s, or socialism’s ambitions and possibilities, their possible success or failure, enacted in his own “dialectical sentences” as a chronic self-consciousness about his own project’s success or failure. His topic, whether a problem or a figure, has invariably been a vehicle and a model of our (your, my, Jameson’s, everyone’s) entrapment in the prison-house of “ideological closure,” and of our efforts to break out. Throughout his career, Jameson stipulates this “mimetic” or performative ambition for “dialectical writing” as such, under whatever names (theory, critique, scriptible). In his homages, the celebrated figure (Adorno, Lewis) appears in unavoidably heroic colors, and the rhetoric takes on the “stoic” and “tragic” accents Jameson has praised in the prose of Lacan (Ideologies of Theory 98, 112). Such a rhetoric seems tailor-made for Brecht–politically partisan avant-gardist, cathexis-object for Cold War passions, refugee in America from Hitler during the war, state-sponsored dramaturge to the Stalinist GDR after it (this last, I expected, an especially potent theme, for few critics are as alive as Jameson to the ironies of “success” in the fields of cultural production).

 

So I’d assumed Jameson’s Brecht was foreordained to a certain angst-charged treatment. But Jameson surprises us again, with a book almost–what to call it? tranquil? serene?–in its assurance of and pleasure in Brecht’s interest and relevance, his “usefulness,” Jameson avers, for us, whether we ever realize it or not. The book’s ease and brevity–a mere 180 pages in 20 bite-sized chapters–present the reader with (by Jamesonian standards) an uncharacteristically low-pressure reading experience. As for tone, Jameson’s usual accents of the “stoic” and “tragic” are gone–so much so as to tempt recourse to the word “comic,” if we stipulate that comedy needn’t mean laughs. Brecht at least has laughs (Jameson, no), but if “comedy” seems an anomaly in this connection, that only attests the extent to which Brecht’s art manages to circumvent, or dialectically outleap, the stale binary of comedy/tragedy. And as if in some bodily sympathy with or methexis in the Brechtian gestus or “method,” Jameson’s own prose here seems for once to have left behind his chronic preoccupation with the danger of critique’s unavoidable stylistic or textual effects devolving into mere Weltanschauungen or ideologies (here the stale binary is “optimism/pessimism”).

 

This is why Brecht and Method seems to me a book unlike any of Jameson’s other writing. For once, anxieties programmatic elsewhere in his work are gone. They are apparently not, at least in connection with Brecht, “useful,” and “usefulness” is a motif sounded from Brecht and Method‘s opening sentence:

 

Brecht would have been delighted, I like to think, at an argument, not for his greatness, or his canonicity, nor even for some new and unexpected value of his posterity (let alone for his “postmodernity”), as rather for his usefulness–and that not only for some uncertain or merely possible future, but right now, in a post-Cold-War market-rhetorical situation even more anti-communist than the good old days. (1)

 

Useful, Jameson explains, in the way that Brecht judged drama, or learning things, or Stalin (!) useful: useful as provocation to new thought, as substance of new experience, useful above all as (that eminently useful thing) pleasure. Brecht’s assumption that useful things will normally afford some degree of pleasure helps motivate the (by Jamesonian standards) uncomplicated pleasures of this unique Jamesonian text.

 

Hitherto, Jameson has been chronically wary of pleasure, or at least of the ideological uses to which it is put, especially in the discourses of theory. Plaisir, jouissance, dérive, íntensité: such watchwords of blissful consummation usually figure, in Jameson’s quotation marks, as symptoms of a premature and unearned utopianism, a sort of “infantile leftism” of theory generally, and of “The Ideology of the Text” (see the mid-’70s essay of that title) in particular. In “Pleasure: A Political Issue” (1983) Jameson worked to redeem Barthesian plaisir and jouissance from the naïveté of Barthes’s more libidinous disciples, by infusing it with the angst, terror, and dread of “the sublime” (shortly to become a key theme of the crucial “Postmodernism” essay [1984]). In Brecht and Method, “the sublime” itself is reconfigured as encompassing, not oppositional to, the ridiculous. Brecht’s power to conflate the revolutionary apprehension of history with farce becomes a kind of sublimity (an effect not, however, unique to Brecht: think of Joyce’s “Ithaca,” Pound’s Hell cantos, Eliot’s “Mrs. Porter and her daughter / Washing their feet in soda water”).

 

Elsewhere in Jameson, the effect of such a conflation of binaries would be to augment the angst of both; here the gesture affirms an aplomb that is as much Jameson’s as Brecht’s. As usual, Jameson’s own corpus provides a theorization of this new Jamesonian textual effect. In the 1977 essay “Of Islands and Trenches,” Jameson opens a space for the “neutralizations” of antinomic ideological closures (stale binaries), to enable “the production of utopian discourse.” I don’t call Brecht and Method a “utopian discourse,” nor does Jameson call Brecht’s work utopian, but “neutralization” will do as a characterization of the book’s unprogrammatic program.

 

Or I should rather say, its “method”–in senses the book develops from its very title on. A long if shaggy tradition (from, say, Pascal and Swift, to, say, Hans Gadamer and Sandra Harding) has indicted the ideology of “[scientific] method” as a content-neutral procedural program, thereby guaranteed to produce unbiased, objective “truth” in its results. (Positivism, as someone joked, is a game whose first rule forbids you to know what you’re talking about.) Marxism’s claim to be a “science” has always defied this supposedly non-partisan premise (though too rarely in a way to assimilate hermeneutics, as Jameson urges it should in Marxism and Form). Jameson recalls Lukacs’s effort, in “What is Orthodox Marxism?”, to deploy the notion of Marxism as a distinctive method of open-ended inquiry against the threat, under Stalin, of its calcification into dogmatism. In Jameson, as in his models, “method” (however named) must be autocritical, must question its own presuppositions, and distrust its results even as it elaborates them: it must anticipate and resist their reification and attempt, however impossibly, their dereification in advance. Operatively, this effort should enact that “unity of theory and praxis” that can figure for us here as one of Marxism’s longest-standing “neutralizations” of a sterile binary. And the locus for all this, not merely the model but the substance of Brecht’s “method,” is of course his practice as playwright, dramaturge, activist, and impresario. Jameson understandably shies away from talk of Brecht’s “aesthetic,” and he suggests that drama, since it is performance- rather than text-based, is generically more resistant to the reifications and (some of the) other liabilities of the aesthetic that the term has come to connote in the usages of recent theory.

 

All of this matters because orthodoxy and dogma are terms so often mobilized against Brecht’s “didactic” achievement. Jameson cites the Horatian ut doceat, and remembers that Brecht’s urge to teach has long disqualified him from validation as “modernist,” to the extent that modernism proscribed didacticism (compare dismissals of Pound on similar grounds), or indeed, discursiveness itself (Eliot’s denigration of “meaning” as a lure, like the meat the burglar brings for the watchdog; cognate suspicions of any meaning or sense legible by the codes of a received semiotic still inspire, and encumber, the higher-brow cultural productions of postmodern “theory”). We’ve already seen Jameson, in the sentence quoted above, warding off any conjuration of a “postmodern” Brecht; likewise the question of Brecht’s modernism barely ripples the surface of the text. (Mo/pomo: another binary neutralized.) Rather, Jameson dissolves the complaint of Brechtian “doctrine” itself, daring any complainant to specify, on any issue, a particular Brechtian dogma, let alone a system of doctrine or a doctrinal cast of mind more generally. (Brecht’s detractors make this point negatively when they dismiss Brecht as a failed dogmatist, his “doctrine” falling short of systematic consistency, and lapsing into mere plumpes Denken.) Rather, Jameson insists, Brecht’s “method, and even his dialectic” (Brecht and Method 25) is an un- and anti-systematic, un- and anti-doctrinal “pragmatism” among whose choice gambits is to “turn a problem into its solution, thereby coming at the matter askew and sending the projectile off into a new and more productive direction than the dead end in which it was immobilized” (Brecht and Method 24)–a “method,” please note, inverting Jameson’s own usual method, which is to problematize what had hitherto passed for at least working solutions. Not that Brecht doesn’t problematize–the point of the famous (too-famous) “V-effect” (from the German Verfremdungseffekt: Jameson explains that the usual translation, “alienation effect,” misleadingly assimilates Brecht’s term to Marx’s Entfremdung). Jameson translates Verfremdung, with an eye on Shklovsky’s ostranenia, as “estrangement,” and stimulatingly operates some “Estrangements of the Estrangement-Effect.” The point here is that “estrangement” provides another “neutralization” of Brecht’s supposed dogmatism problem, for if the ruse of dogma is to internalize itself in the subjectivity of the addressee, the V-effect tends the opposite way. “Estrangement,” we might say, proves to be not only “interpellation[‘s]” conceptual opposite, but also its specific antidote.

 

So “doctrine,” too, is “neutralized,” and therewith Brecht’s “ideology.” We evoked above Jameson’s “neutralization” of the Weltanshauung impasse, usually locatable on a continuum with ideology; Jameson here prefers to speak of Haltung and gestus, and he posits early in the book a Brechtian sinité, a Chineseness of bearing or “persona” (Jameson here declares a heavy debt to Anthony Tatlow), “paradigmatic of the expansion of Brecht’s work into that ultimate frame of the metaphysic or the world-view”:

 

Hermeneutics of belief, hermeneutics of suspicion: the option is suspended when the Tao itself opens up around a secular and cynical Western writer like Brecht, who cannot be assumed to believe in this immemorial “world-view”… but takes it as what Lacan would call a “tenant-lieu,” a place-keeper for the metaphysics that have become impossible. Thus, not a “philosophy” of Marxism exactly (for such a philosophy would immediately fall back into the category of degraded world-views… ), but, rather, what such a philosophy might turn out to be in a utopian future…. Yet Brecht’s theatricality saves his sinité even from this provisionality…. (Brecht and Method 12)

 

Above I tried “tranquil,” “serene,” even “comic” as possible characterizations of this book’s unique Jamesonian effect or affect: perhaps I can now propose “Chinese” as the (admittedly recherché) mot juste for what Jameson, with a finely calculated diffuseness, variously evokes as “the Brechtian”: an “idea of Brecht,” a “general lesson or spirit” not identifiable or simply coextensive with the written corpus itself. Its usefulness, Jameson urges, is nothing less than that of “offering Marxism its own uniquely non-Western–or, at least, non-bourgeois–philosophy in the form of a kind of Marxian Tao…” (Brecht and Method 30). The projection of “our” tradition’s ideological binaries onto Chineseness “neutralizes,” even estranges, the charge intrinsic to them in a Western habitus of psychology, thus enabling their function as if (in the Althusserian formula) “without a subject”: that Brecht’s Chineseness is an elected rather than a native affinity promotes rather than vitiates this effect (an instance, you might say, of “problem” made over into “solution”).

 

We hear less and less nowadays of the “without a subject” problem or project, as if this utopian aspiration of a generation ago has been tacitly dropped as unworkable. Jameson’s implication is that Brecht met this predicament long before theory did, and negotiated it better, and in still “useful” ways (on which, more later). I have just indicated how Jameson projects all this under the rubric of “doctrine”: “Doctrine” is the first of the three headings under which the book’s twenty brief chapters are gathered. The second is “Gestus,” a term which has long encoded for Jameson that Barthesian “writing with the body,” that penumbra of textual effect or affect exceeding the mere words on the page (see the opening sentence of Sartre) that has been Jameson’s quiet, career-long (and mostly unnoticed) heresy, in our age of the linguistic turn, against the orthodoxy of nothing-outside-the-text. Brecht’s working methods–workshop, collaborative, the whole process from composition through final performance best envisioned as continuous rehearsal (perpetual revolution by other means)–his gestus as writer and dramaturge, in short, similarly sublates Brecht’s own subjectivity into the work. The book’s third section, headed “Proverbs,” implicates similar motivations and/or effects in Brecht’s penchant for (reinvented) folk- and peasant-forms, in which something like a collective voice submerges the individuality of a particular speaker–an effect as salient in Brecht’s poems (since Romanticism, the normatively most “subjective” of genres) as in his playwrighting–and, Jameson’s closing “Epilogue” suggests, as characteristic of Brecht’s embrace of the modern as of his penchant for settings suggestive of “Chinese” remoteness (Asiatic despotism).

 

Jameson’s almost nostalgic evocations here of Brecht’s sense of the modern (the human scale and heroic mystique of Lindbergh’s “The Spirit of St. Louis”), sheerly as writing, make an interesting contrast with similar passages in Fables of Aggression: Jameson’s prose here evokes not only the Brechtian impersonality, but also something of the nostalgia for the personality itself of Brecht’s greatest Anglophone emulator of the ’30s, W. H. Auden, in contrast with the Lewis-like energy and Luciferianism inflecting Fables of Aggression. The “Epilogue” to Brecht and Method is a prime example of Jameson’s power as a writer to offer hommage in the evocation less of a verbal style (Brecht’s, Lewis’s) than of a whole authorial body language or scriptible–“sentences,” as Jameson once characterized it, “whose gestus arouses the desire to emulate it, sentences that make you want to write sentences of your own” (Ideologies of Theory 21).

 

That remark was prompted by the example of Barthes, and Barthes’s constant presence throughout Brecht and Method makes a good note to close with, not least because Jameson argues that by way of Barthes, Brecht has had his impact on “theory” no less than on theater. Not merely that Barthes’s Mythologies is satirical “very much in the tradition of Brecht,” nor even that it “paved the way for the triumphant entry of the estrangement-effect into French theory” (the “denaturalizations” of Mythologies as estrangements distinctly Brechtian in their humor no less than in their political point). Brecht’s mobilization of theater “as the very figure for the collective and for a new kind of society… in which the classic questions and dilemmas of political philosophy can be ‘estranged’ and rethought” (Brecht and Method 11) transmitted itself first of all in the example of Brecht’s own “theoretical” writing, more recently by way of Barthes, to the practice of “theory” as the present generation has known it.

 

Indeed, in what I take to be the most elusive and difficult pages in the book, Jameson massages the “proairesis” of S/Z into something rich and estranged to a degree exceeding any Verfremdung of Brecht’s that I can recall. (If Mythologies seems, yes, Brechtian, S/Z is very clearly, or very obscurely, something else altogether.) Jameson assimilates “proairesis” to “autonomization” (one of the richest motifs of his work of the past decade), a de-linking or de-motivating of coincident features or effects that he registers sometimes as a loss (as with the famous parody/pastiche binary in the “Postmodernism” essay), but at other times as a gain (as here, when the “becoming-autonomous” of familiar associations permits their dissociation–or defamiliarization, or estrangement–into new configurations). In this very specific case, Jameson projects the Barthesian “proairesis” as a delinking of “agents” from their “acts”–a way of putting it that would seem to owe much to Kenneth Burke’s “dramatistic metaphor.” Whereas Kant (Lukacs’s type of the bourgeois philosopher) reposed all virtue in our assent to the categorical imperative to own our acts (choose our fate, enjoy our symptom), Brecht and Barthes, Jameson suggests, aspire to a syntax in which “acts” are, as it were, their own agents–or rather, projectable in a hermeneutic which contrives to bypass the problem of their agency altogether.

 

This is not merely to reprise, but to reinvent the now-passé prospect of a radical defamiliarization of the ideology of the bourgeois self, and I regret the extent to which my brief sketch refamiliarizes it again. Jameson’s beautifully evocative prose evades, as mine cannot, those familarizations, in the process enacting the utopian impulse specific to “theory” itself, of a writing not reducible to the property of the writer. And (at the risk of making it sound familiarizing), it collects a useful sense from those pages of S/Z, the most impenetrable in the book, in which verbs in the infinitive become, by fiat, “names” (“What is a series of actions? The unfolding of a name”). And by elaborating a single instance in which Brechtian “methods” project themselves into applications never more than merely latent in Brecht himself, Jameson here makes the case, proposed at the outset of the book, for Brecht’s continuing “usefulness.” It’s a usefulness predicated on the continuing rehabilitation of modernism in Jameson’s work of the 1990s,¹ that “uneven development” whereby the still-modern, in our postmodern time, emerges as more modern than we. A cognate hope for the continuing potencies of an uncanonized, still-fresh, modernism animated the book on Lewis–but in a very different key: the reinvention of Lewis needed ingenuity in its evocation and evasion of Lewis’s retro-ness (not to mention his rightist politics). The “relief” of these predicaments in Jameson’s meditation on Brecht’s centenary gives us a new register of the Jamesonian scriptible as well as new senses of, and uses for, Brecht our post-contemporary.

 

Note

 

1. See my “Jameson’s Postmodernism: Version 2.0,” PMC 9.2 (January 1999).

 

Works Cited

 

• Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain. London and New York: Verso, 1986.
• Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory. Vol. 1. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.