target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_8f47f8a8-9805-59b1-a3c3-b29be3018315">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 and individualistic concepts of an internalized and atomic character (Charakterkopf, Seelenkäse); 2/ a revaluation of the Right-wing and militaristic-cum-servile stress on Strammhalten, that is, statics and hierarchy; 3/ an alternative to the faceless “economics as last instance of all behaviour” in orthodox “Historical Materialism” from Engels through Kautsky to Stalin. As such a witty alternative, Haltung mediates between two uses of “intervening thinking”: in practical relationships of people to each other and in systematic cognition about people (Menschenkunde).
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
