• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

A Dramaturgy of Montage and Dislocation 187 CHAPTER 10 A Dramaturgy of Montage and Dislocation: Brecht, Warburg, Didi-Huberman, and the Pathosformel Jonathan W. Marshall Abstract Drawing on the art historical criticism of Georges Didi-Huberman and Aby Warburg, Brecht is here reconsidered as a montage artist who not only produces on-stage juxta- positions, but one whose dramaturgy fractures and divides the body against itself in its fleeting response to pain—what Warburg called the “pathos formula.” By keeping con- stituents within a state of suspended tension, Didi-Huberman argues such iconographic formulations communicate not only “knowledge—visible, legible, or invisible—but … the intertwinings, even the imbroglio, of transmitted and dismantled knowledges” and “not-knowledges.” The perpetual sufferings of history elude full visibility, emerging “like a flash” within a dramaturgy of dialectical montage. This gives such a dramaturgy its ethical character. An Ethical Response to a History of Dislocation: Dialectic Montage Writing with images of World War Two fresh in his mind, Bertolt Brecht in- sisted that The dislocation of the world: that is the subject of art. It is impossible to affirm that, without disorder, there would be no art, nor that there could be one: we know of no world that is not disorder. No matter what the universities whisper to us regarding Greek harmony, the world of Aeschylus was full of combat and terror, and so were those of Shakespeare and of Homer, of Dante and of Cervantes, of Voltaire and of Goethe. However pacifistic it was said to be, it [theatre and art] speaks of wars and whenever art makes a treaty with the world, it is always signed with a world at war. (qtd. in Didi-Huberman, Atlas 120) Brecht’s characterisation of history as the violent, traumatic experience of “dis- location” calls for an ethical response, for the artist who is cognizant of such a © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004346376_012 188 Marshall history to evoke this sense of traumatic dislocation in his or her art, as well as for artists and audiences to work towards an end to this state. As Karl Marx put it, “philosophers have only interpreted the world . the point, however, is to change it” (“Theses on Feurbach”). There is however a risk in an ethical stance designed to amend current or historical discontinuities. In responding to these processes of dislocation and violence, one might simply patch over these caesuras with a newly harmoni- ous or quieting discourse, as with the “Greek harmony” or the Aristotelian the- atre that Brecht critiques. If one summons and puts into play images of the suffering society, or of the suffering body, one should nevertheless avoid refe- tishising pain as an image which one can cognitively possess or simply feel pity for (Dauphinée 139-55), in contrast to Aristotle’s insistence that theatre and drama should “imitate” only those “actions which excite pity” (2:13). Shoshanna Felman cautions against any such representations which presents to the view- er mere symbols or “‘generalities of bodies—dead, wounded, starving, dis- eased, and homeless. In their pervasive depersonalization’ . appear[ing] as an ‘anonymous corporeality’” (qtd. in Dauphinée 142). Maintaining a sense of disquiet, of unresolved separation and tension in the image, in its framing, and/or in its content, might therefore help to give the audience’s response an ethical content, holding at bay any easy or uncritically accepting solution, and so acting as a prompt for action and change. The question then is how to provoke an ethical questioning in the part of the audience, without closing that intellectual and affective reflection off, to suspend judgement. Drawing on Brecht and others, art historian Georges Didi- Huberman describes one possible response to ethically complex images as Something like a suspended attention, a prolonged suspension of the moment of reaching conclusions, where interpretation would have time to deploy itself in several dimensions. There would also be, in this alternative, a dialectical moment—surely unthinkable in positivist terms—consisting of not-grasping the image [and] . thus of letting go of one’s knowledge about it. (Confronting 16) As Hans-Thies Lehmann claims of postdramatic theatre, “Synthesis is can- celled. It is explicitly combated” producing something like the “‘sublated’ semi- otics” of “Dream thoughts” and “hieroglyphs” (82-4). Indeed, Lehmann’s articulation of such dramaturgical strategies suggests a connection with Didi- Huberman and Brecht at the level of iconography, arguing that many contem- porary European dramaturgs deploy an unfinished assemblage of visual materials so as to “stop theatre time and to transform the temporal events into .

Load more

  2

Copy Link