22.
The bearing is a critical one. Faced with a river, it consists in regulating the river; faced with a fruit tree, in grafting upon the fruit tree; faced with locomotion, in constructing vehicles and airplanes; faced with society, in overturning society....
(GKA 23: 73, translation J. Willett)
Such a bearing entailed a lifelong mistrust of ethics, which Brecht saw as a set of idealist notions that had little in common with the necessities in and of life. Nonetheless, just as he had in the Messingkauf and Short Organum finally adapted rather than abandoned theater and esthetics, he finally also found a way to refunction rather than refuse the categorical imperative in favour of a “productive mode” of imagination, creating what is not present to sense (Kant 164). Here is a testimonial of the revocation:
Me-ti and Ethics
Me-ti said: I haven’t found many “You must” sentences which I would desire to pronounce. I mean now sentences of a general nature, sentences addressed to the generality. But one such sentence is: “You must produce.” (GKA 18: 179)
Two consequences following on this stance should be briefly invoked. First, the lovers’ friendliness and the producers’ good humour are conducive to a “joyous criticism” (GW 16: 637) which is not too far from Nietzsche’s joyous knowledge and quite near to Bakhtin’s gay plebeian truth. An autonomous creative force of socialized humanity, it is its own measure. At best, a kind of qualitative felicific calculus may be applied to it, as in: “The proposition: A man’s goal is to have pleasure is bad for the reason that it boxes the ear of the good proposition: Humankind’s goal is to have pleasure.” (GKA 23: 361) Second, the presupposition for all such constructive production is the destruction of destructivity. Brecht’s analysis of his best transposition of our age’s contradictions, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, shines as a lighthouse to our present:
The more Grushe furthers the child’s life, the more she endangers her own; her productivity works for her own destruction (underlined DS). This is so under the conditions of war, of the existing jurisprudence, of her isolation and poverty. (GKA 24: 346)
1.3. Haltung: Language and Class History
How did Brecht arrive at this central tool of his, Haltung? As usual, by productively refunctioning the German language as the concrete consciousness of both the upper and the plebeian classes. Also as usual, he went back to and built on the meanings stemming from before the caesura of the bourgeois or Romantic split of people into an “inner” and an “outer” image and life. He took from it the full bodily involvement and changed it by a melding with his peculiar variant of dynamics from below.
I shall proceed in this subsection by an abbreviated overview of the material from the great historical dictionary of German semantics by the Grimm Brothers (see a fuller account in Suvin “Haltung”). It shows that Haltung becomes a frequent term only in and after the Romantic period. Haltung is a sign of two fundamental changes: first, of growing demographic density in the budding capitalist economy and city life; second, of aristocratic need to insist on “proper” behaviour in all social classes and of subaltern German bourgeois fear of failing to do so. The main meaning of Haltung may be identified as “orientation toward a precise way of somebody’s behaving,” which always involves the body and a bearing toward other people. Only beginning with ca. 1848 Haltung is also applied to “inner” mental activity (cf. the Heyne ed. 1877 edition of the Grimms’ Dictionary, and even more so in the Duden dictionary of 1993).
In particular, within the meaning of Haltung as precise bodily bearing in a hierarchical interpersonal relation, the Grimms show it as positively evaluated in the meaning of strong, determined, worthy behaviour (festes, energisches, würdiges Verhalten), for example “eine Frau von Haltung”; it also borrows connotations from physical and moral solidity: “Gesimse, die wenig Haltung haben,” “eine Neigung die ohne Haltung...ist” (both from Kant).
What is most important here: the dominant semantics was a discourse originating in the ruling class, whose own stance is from above downward and requires from subordinates the stance from below upwards—in both cases formalized as a stiff vertical: “[er] blieb Bedienter in Wort, Gebärde, Haltung” (Immermann, Münchhausen); Brecht too uses “servile bearing” (lakaienhafte Haltung) for subaltern intellectuals and for clerics (GKA 21: 428). This is often found when Haltung is taken absolutely (and thus without adjective), as strong, determined, dignified—or obversely servile—self-discipline; it is then cognate to two significant lexemes: Fassung and Beherrschtheit, taking hold or controlling as a vector uniting social pressure and personal acquiescence (which is echoed in Max Weber’s and Brecht’s Einverständniss, consenting). Most suggestive for these clearly moral and political evaluations is eine militärisch stramme Haltung, “a military upright bearing” (a metonymy for rigid behaviour). It inserted the body personal into the body politic, just as did widely used stock phrases such as “die Haltung verlieren, oder sich Haltung zu geben”, “etwas mit Haltung aufnehmen.”3 Brecht knew this all-pervasive original meaning very well before refunctioning it, and used it first in a Strindbergian movie scenario of his from 1921 (GKA 19: 106) and also at the end of 1926, in the sense of “taking hold of oneself” in poem 7 from the “Lesebuch für Städtebewohner”: “Sie brauchen jetzt keine Haltung mehr zu bewahren/ Es ist niemand mehr da, der Ihnen zusieht” (GKA 11: 1963).
From Aristotle’s heksis and Cicero’s habitus on, Haltung always “stands” or mediates between potentiality and action (as well as between nature and nurture, necessity and choice, thus malleability and teachability). This diachronic tradition is in Brecht synchronically renewed by means of materials and insights from the early writings of Marx (alone or with Engels) with their orientation on praxis. The classical formulations are in the Theses on Feuerbach: “Praxis is a sensual human activity” uniting subject and object (#1) and mediating between the “changing of conditions and people changing themselves” (#3); the human subject “is the ensemble of social relationships” and not “an abstract—isolated—human individual” (#6); last not least for the participation of the observer in the observed, “the standpoint” of the “practico-critical” materialism is “social humanity” (#1 & 10) (MEW 3: 5-7). And in the first section of The German Ideology: “Consciousness can only be conscious being, and the being of people is their real life process” (26). To the contrary, in the later Engels “praxis” is rarely used or substituted by references to applied science and technology (for example in his Dialectics of Nature, MEW 20: 393). Furthermore, in Engels’s influential formulation, people are supposed “to draw their moral views in the final instance” from the economic relationships in which they live (Anti-Dühring, MEW 20: 87).
The Marxian orientation on practice is quite compatible with possibly secondary but not unimportant confluences of Brecht with US pragmatism and behaviorism, primarily Watson (and US movies); with translations of Chinese philosophy, primarily of Mo Ti, Lao Tse, and Confucius, and the impact of Chinese and Japanese dramaturgy4; and with early bourgeois philosophy, primarily of Descartes and Bacon. All the above were assiduously studied by Brecht from the end of the 1920s on, with much reliance on Korsch and on translations of Lenin (Brecht praised the Haltungen of Ford, Einstein, and Lenin and planned to write “Die Haltungen Lenins,” GKA 21: 383 and 26: 319). One could perhaps illustrate Brecht’s position as being synchronically in the middle of a square on whose angles were the German semantic tradition, Marx, Lenin, and pragmatism and diachronically an updating of Eaast Asian collectivism.
1.4. A Conclusion
If one is now to inquire into the reason and meaning of Brecht’s redefining the semantics of Haltung and allotting to this “bearing” a central role in his work and approach to the world, my thesis would be the following: Haltung is Brecht’s semantic micro-unit of praxis for the active subject. In conscious opposition to several important social usages, Haltung has simultaneously three functions: 1/ a refusal of the bourgeois