3.2. The powerfully hegemonic division of reason vs. emotion, where reason is seen as: masculine, analytic, proper to the mind, cold, objective and universal, public, etc., while emotion would be: feminine, synthetic, proper to the body, warm, subjective and particular, private, and so on is, obviously, both intellectually and politically scandalous:
it is necessary to rethink the relation between knowledge and emotion and construct conceptual models that demonstrate the mutually constitutive rather than oppositional relation between reason and emotion. Far from precluding the possibility of reliable knowledge, emotion as well as value must be shown as necessary to such knowledge. (Jaggar, “Love” 156-57)
This does not confer any magical efficacy on emotions as compared to concepts. Like concepts, emotions have an epistemic potential. But both may be erroneous; both need subsequent validation, though possibly in incommensurable ways (for example, asymmetrically, by each other). “Although our emotions are epistemologically indispensable, they are not epistemologically indisputable. Like all our faculties, they may be misleading, and their data, like all data, are always subject to reinterpretation and revision.” (163)
In order to begin such a rethinking, I propose two converging directions. First, to ground the relation of emotion to reason in Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling,” a crucial site of social knowledge and conflict, which he defines as:
not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind,...as a set, with specifical internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension.... [S]tructures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution.... [Yet this solution] is a structured formation...at the very edge of semantic availability....(132-34)
Second, even more radically, I propose querying the terms of debate (as I did at length in Suvin, “On Cognitive”). Rather than speak about emotion vs. reason, it might be useful to say that the class of “not conceptually expressibles” is not cognitively empty: for example, that a quartet, a sculptural frieze, a theater or video performance, a metaphoric system or indeed a personal emotional configuration may be no less cognitive than a conceptual system (though, no doubt, in different ways). Obviously there may and will be cognitively empty or banal symphonies, paintings, metaphors, and emotions galore, just as there are concepts and conceptual systems galore to which almost all of us would deny a cognitive status: Disney movies or 20th-Century Great Man charismatics are cognitively neither better nor worse than—say—sociobiology or “Creation theory,” since all zeros tend to be equal. Obversely, both the conceptual and the non-conceptual ways of understanding, when they are actualized epistemic potentials and not institutionalized mimicries, may allow people to deal with alternatives, that is with not merely or fully present objects, aspects, and relationships. The entities which were not present to people’s perception and reflection now become available for evaluative inspection, choice, and subsequent intervention by means of a cognitive organon: conceptual, emotional or whichever.
What can, in this hypothesis, count as understanding, cognition or knowledge? Anything, I would maintain, that satisfies two conditions or, better, two aspects of one condition: that it can help us in coping with our personal and collective existence; and that it can be validated by feedback with its application, modifying existence and being modified by it. I see no permanent or “anthropological” reason to allot (or withdraw) a special privilege to any human activity or faculty here, for example to words, numbers, geometrical figures, arranged sounds, concepts, metaphors, movements or what have you; though it might almost go without saying that particular social groups in particular historical chronotopes will always have specially privileged activities and sign-systems.
3.3. As to feedback between emotion and a gestural critique of ideology, I shall summarize my views in the following table. Since theatre as an activity (performing) is for Brecht simultaneously an experimental laboratory for and a condensation of everyday life, the table holds for behaviour-patterns in both theatre and life:
BOURGEOIS CHARACTER—BRECHTIAN SUBJECT
| Gesturer, hidden under the character’s emotion, induces the same emotion in him/herself | Gesture may be emotional, gesturer is not. Stage role may induce same or different emotion in spectator. |
| Gesture always depends on emotion | Gesture sometimes causes emotion |
| Conflation, fusion of elements/media on stage to infect spectator | Separation of elements/media on stage, addition in spectator |
| Emotion continuous and contagious, submerges passive spectator identifying with central character/s/ | Emotion fluctuating, depends on active traffic spectator/ characters |
| No psychic distance to undisputed central value | Fluctuations of distance to disputable values |
| Empathy only | Sympathy/antipathy |
| Necessarily ideological | Critique of ideology possible |
Works Cited
1. Texts by Brecht
Brecht, Bertolt. Gesammelte Werke in 20 Bänden. Werkausgabe Edition Suhrkamp. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1967. [GW—retained where better organized than GKA].
Brecht, Bertolt. Werke. Grosse Kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe. Suhrkamp & Aufbau V., 1988-2000 [GKA; within it, the Working Diary (Arbeitsjournal) is preceded by AJ].
Steinweg, Reiner. Das Lehrstück. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1972, 6-67.
—, ed. Brechts Modell der Lehrstücke. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976, 31-221.
2. Secondary Literature
Bakhtin, M.M. Rabelais and His World. Transl. H. Iswolsky. Cambridge MA: MIT P, 1968.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980-87 [GS].
—. Versuche über Brecht. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966 (now in GS II/2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980).
Bunge, Hans Joachim. “Brecht probiert.” Sinn und Form Zweites Sonderheft Bertolt Brecht (1957): 322-36.
[Descartes, René.] The Philosophical Works of Descartes, 2 Vols. Eds. E. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1911.
Duden—Bildwörterbuch der deutschen Sprache s.v. “Haltung.” Mannheim: Dudenv., 1993, 3: 1453.
Dümling, Albrecht. Brecht und die Musik. München: bei Kindler, 1985.
Gorelik, Mordecai. New Theatres for Old. New York: Dutton, 1962 (orig. 1940).
Grimm, Johann, and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Bearb. v. M. Heyne [1877]. München: DTV, 1991, Bd. 10 and 25.
Haffad, Dorothea. Amour et société dans l’oeuvre de Brecht. Alger: Office des Publ. Universitaires, 1983.
Hartsock, Nancy C.M. Money, Sex, and Power. New York: Longman, 1983.
Harvey, David. The Limits to Capital. London & New York: Verso, 1999.
Hegel, Georg W.F. Jenenser Realphilosophie, Vol. 1. Ed. J. Hoffmeister. Leipzig: Meiner, 1932.
Jaggar, Alison M. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Totowa NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985.
—. “Love and Knowledge,” in eadem and Susan Bordo eds. Gender/Body/Knowledge. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989, 145-71.
Jameson, Fredric R. “History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Product.” Rethinking Marxism 1.1 (1988): 49-72.
Kant,