The anti-individualistic function of Haltung is of a piece with the dismantling of the “individual” or the monolithic Self as center of universe. This is a central theme of Brecht’s, foregrounded in his work from Man is Man and Mahagonny to The Good Person of Setzuan: “the destruction, explosion, atomisation of the individual psyche is a fact.” What remains is, however, not at all a Nothing—”lack of nucleus does not mean lack of substance, we have thus a new structure in front of us, which has to be determined in new ways” (GKA 26: 476)—but subjects capable of action or agency as Marxian “ensembles of social relationships.” All of Brecht’s figures are confronted with situations of choice, all are bipolar agents (saying yes and no), much akin to the “typified masks” (Charaktermasken) from Marx’s 18th Brumaire with flexibly allegorical behaviours and orientations. Possibly the two most important types are the true intellectual or the “Thinker”: Keuner, Me-ti, Azdak, and the ambiguously perverted variant of Johanna Dark and Galileo; and the motherly one: Wlassowa, Kattrin, Courage (fully perverted case), Shen Te, Grusche.
Thus, Brecht was constantly preoccupied with Haltung as a practical and cognitive tool that ensures the naming—and bestowal of meaning—of a subject’s body-orientation. As could be seen also from the little Me-Ti story cited at the beginning, the foregrounded materiality of the movements and postures is not only a sign for the orientation of the thinking but also its almost magical induction and guarantee. In other words: the sensual Being-Thus (So-Sein) in a given changeable situation is the guarantee that the acting subject in an always already concrete existence will avoid, by means of her enjoyment and critical evaluating, being sacrificed to fetishized abstractions—for example, “the future,” “the struggle”—but will instead assume a fertile, sensual, and therefore unshakable orientation toward them. The best presentation of this stance may be found in Brecht’s probably most optimistic text, the Caucasian Chalk Circle, where a brief Saturnalian interregnum suspending class power allows Azdak to help himself—for example to drink and sex—and to help as well the concrete seeds of the future, Grusche and the Noble Child (cf. Suvin To Brecht, chap. 6). Brecht’s fascination with helpers—the “motherly” women, but also Azdak or the sage teacher figures—who take practical measures to meld the difficult today with a productive tomorrow, gives a face to and embodies this preoccupation.
For these reasons, Haltung proved similar to some other attempts on the Left to fuse theory and everyday practice. Most similar to Brecht are Benjamin’s use of the same term, first independent of and then in dialogue with Brecht, Gramsci’s notion of “philosophy of practice,” and Bloch’s notions of “upright posture” (aufrechter Gang) combined with orientation toward a horizon. Lukács’s use of standpoint (Standpunkt) in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein is characteristically more abstract but has even so allowed highly interesting reinterpretations by materialist feminists (cf. Jaggar Feminist and Hartsock) and “theologians of liberation” as “the privileged standpoint of the women” respectively “of the poor” (cf. on both Jameson). There are also parallels to Bakhtin, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, as well to Bourdieu’s “habitus.”
2. Approaching Brecht and Agency
2.0. Introduction
Here would be the place for a theory about agency (and dramaturgic agents) in Brecht. This would test what light the “stance hypothesis” could throw on some crucial practices in Brecht’s opus, understandable also as epistemological concepts, such as personality. I cannot develop it at all adequately in this essay, but I shall put forward one main thesis and a few sub-theses as corollaries.
Thesis: Brecht’s understanding of agency strongly privileges personality (Subject) as opposed to character (the Cartesian Self). From this follow some corollaries, such as:
1/ The downgrading of heroism and upgrading of comedy.
2/ While character is disembodied (a laicization of soul), personality is indivisible from body.
3/ While character is a dogmatic or ideological apriori, a mononuclear interiority, and only rational (or better, only conceptually established), personality is a bipolar spread of possibilities permeated by an ensemble of relationships and reposing on a union of reason and emotion, senses and sensorium.
My stark opposition character-personality may be an imperfect instrument, as all Manichean or “digital” dichotomies. As my final table in 3.3 may also indicate, Brechtian productivity is a strange mixture of ostracism and cannibalism, that is denegation as cutting off and supersession by subsumption. However, for all its limitations, I believe this approach is here mandatory precisely in order to clearly refuse fruitless (dogmatic, undialectical) dichotomies between emotion and reason, character and type, distance and nearness, etc., that the individualist Self brings and that Brecht’s whole work rebels against.
2.1. Defining Terms
I am here simplifying, streamlining, and sometimes contaminating Jean-Pierre Vernant’s and Paul Ricoeur’s approaches to individuation (Colloque de Royaumont “Sur l’individu,” 1985). They distinguish three notions, which can in French be elegantly called “l’individu stricto sensu,” “le sujet,” and “le soi” (or “le moi”). The first is a not further divisible physical token of any logical type, and especially of a biological species; I have failed to find for it a better term than the French individual, though perhaps we could call it a particular. At any rate, this sense must be sharply distinguished from the ideologized bourgeois sense of individual as Self (the third notion here—which is in fact reached by a deliberate confusion of this first notion with this one). It designates any Something (this cat, piece of bread or province) by three principal means: definite description, proper name or indicator (pronoun, adverb, etc.). The second is a human—and I would argue often an animal—”individual” communicating in her own name, expressing himself “in the first person” with traits that differentiate her from others of the same logical type-token and biological species-variety-race (etc.)—most importantly, from an ethnic, class or gender group. To the individuation of the first term this adds identification, and I shall call it the Subject. For a Subject, the pronoun “I” is no longer a shifter, an itinerant marker applicable to any speaker, but it is anchored in a fixed stance or bearing; this makes dialogue possible, where—however—the anchoring is reversible, “I” can be understood as “thou” and viceversa (cf. Ricoeur 62). Finally, the Self (ipse, Selbst) is constituted by the practices and stances “which confer upon the subject a dimension of interiority..., which constitute him from within as...a singular individual whose authentic nature resides wholly in the secret of his inner life, at the heart of an intimacy to which nobody, outside of herself, can accede...” (Vernant 24; cf. Suvin, “Polity”).
To ground this a bit in terms of agential theory and literary genres: the biography and the epic would correspond to a particular human—usually a famous, type: the warrior, the statesman, the Amazon. The autobiography or the pre-bourgeois lyric correspond to the Subject, which can perhaps be deciphered as a type seen from within (for example, the poet, the lover, the hermit). Vernant remarks that in Hellenic lyrics the first-person subject gives his own sensibility the status of “a model, a literary topos...[so that] what is felt individually as interior emotion...acquires a kind of objective reality” (30-31). Only the genres of confession, beginning with Augustine of Hippo, the intimate memoir, and the profoundly changed post-Renaissance lyric and prose epic (that is, the novel) would correspond to the Self, the interiorized character seen simultaneously from inside and outside, as public and private, therefore stereometrically or “in the round.” No doubt, all kinds of grey zones, precursors, and anachronisms must be conceded to this scheme if it is to work. Nonetheless, it seems to be at least getting at a very significant, perhaps central set of distinctions. In this optic the best Modernist practice, most clearly in Brecht, is playing off against individualism and its agential interiority the medieval, Antiquity or Asian featuring of Subjects as types rather than a Self as character (more in Suvin “How Can,”