Incomplete ...

Design, Entwurf, Entwerfen

RELATED TERMS: Dasein; Technology, Writing, Design; Libidinal Economy – Part 1;

Before-After-Thought

In James Joyce’s terms, thrownness, or living in the wake, is expressed as,

“from the night we are and feel and fade with to the yesterselves we tread to turnupon” (FW473. I0-11, quoted by Heath,1984).

Design Projection

In relation to the potential of design practices, what is proposed here, through a consideration of the German word entwurf as it is used in Heidegger^[1] and subsequent writers, is that:

first, designing can ‘throw open’, through inquiry;

second, designing can ‘throw-ahead’ as projection;

third, (completed) designs can continue to throw ahead and cast backwards through material and semiotic persistence and adaptation; and

fourth, designing and designs can ‘un-throw’ or ‘throw off’ what has already been thrown or, in other words, designing and designs can ‘over-throw’ and/or ‘re-throw’, through re-interpretation, re-making and re-contextualisation.

In short, designing and designs can ‘project’ in a process of prolonged retrojective-projective un-making, re-making and un-re-making [within a horizon of worlding (as) ending the world (as) affirmative engaging with worldlessness-designlessness].

In the words of Gary Shteyngart (2022), who sees the comedic potential of this condition of ‘being thrown’ or ‘thrownness’,

“We are all small individuals kicked ass-first on to the stage of history, given terrible lines and worse costumes…”

Design and the Question of Technology

RELATED TERMS: Iconic Designs and Iconic Designers; Design (as) Art (as) Philosophy

Design differs from art, as discussed in Iconic Designs and Iconic Designers and
Design (as) Art (as) Philosophy (pending posting), even though the boundaries between them are no longer strict and admit a certain hybridity. Design also differs from technology, although it bears some relation to τέχνη [techne] and ποίησις [poiesis]. One starting point for understanding the conditionality of the design-technology distinction is Heidegger’s essay, Die Frage nach der Technik [The Question of Technik; The Question of Technology; The Question of Technique].

τέχνη [techne] and ποίησις [poiesis]

Thomas Sheehan (2015: 276-277) points out that in Die Frage nach der Technik, Heidegger employs three terms: das Technische, die Technik, and das Wesen der Technik. By das Technische, he seems to mean modern-day manufacturing machinery. This raises the question of how das Technische differs from die Technik. For example, does die Technik refer to ‘technology’?

In his texts, Heidegger seems to join together two major senses of technology: firstly, as a means to an end, as in the machines which are the means for generating products; and, secondly, as a human activity, which includes both the skill to carry out production and the skilled productive activity itself. If that were the case, the word ‘technology’ would cover everything, from the skills, programmes, instruments and processes to the products of production, held together in an ‘economy’ of technology, as Foucault might put it (Sheehan, 2015).

Despite this, Sheehan considers that It is more likely that Heidegger’s Technik is the modern incarnation of Aristotle’s τέχνη [techne], which refers to a knowing-how-to, rather than to the products of such know-how. This remains the case even if those products are machines producing even more machines. For Aristotle, Technik is an ‘intellectual virtue’ in the order of praxis, specifically the ‘habitual’ practical cognition that creates the programmes and manages the machines. Therefore, Sheehan reserves the word ‘technology’ solely for the machines and translates Technik by ‘technik’ broadly construed as practical know-how. In short, τέχνη [techne] is techno-thinking conjoined with ποίησις [poiesis] as techno-doing.

Therefore, Sheehan contends, the subject matter that Heidegger bears down on in his lecture is τέχνη (techne), understood as a way of disclosing things, specifically in its contemporary form. It is not all the technological stuff (das Technische) or the programmes and machines that churn it out (die modern Technologie).

Heidegger traces the current mode of disclosure back to Aristotle’s notion of τέχνη, [techne] understood as the human capacity to bring things into meaningful presence by making, producing or constructing them. For Aristotle, τέχνη, [techne] is contrasted with ϕύσις [phusis], whereby natural things emerge of and by themselves.

Heidegger declares that, whether in Aristotelian τέχνη or in its modern version as technik, what he is talking about is ἀληϑεύειν, the human disclosure of things by bringing them into their ἀλήϑεια [aletheia], their pre-theoretical intelligible availability. This is achieved by working on them, shaping and transforming them into something that they were not before, not by thinking or speaking about them. Thus, for Sheehan, much of what Heidegger says about technik is heavily indebted to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics VI, specifically to its doctrine of the intellectual virtues.

Technology and Technique

Michael Eldred, in examining the same Heidegger essay, Die Frage nach der Technik, argues that it harbours a fatal ambiguity between ‘technology’ and ‘technique’. This ambiguity, Eldred further contends, arises from Heidegger’s inheritance of an ambiguity at the heart of Aristotle’s metaphysical concept of power.

References

Eldred, M. (2013) Technology, technique, interplay: Questioning die Frage nach der Technik, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. IEEE, 32(2), pp. 13–21. doi: 10.1109/MTS.2013.2259322.

Hainge, G., Nooy, J. D. E. and Hanna, B. E. (2011) Tekhnè, Technique, Technologie, Australian Journal of French Studies, 48(2), pp. 121–128. doi: 10.3828/AJFS.48.2.121.

Heidegger, M. (2006) Technique and the turn. The Question Concerning Technique [unpublished manuscript], Translated by R. Berkowitz and P. Nonet. Academia.edu. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/2083179/The_Question_Concerning_Technik_by_Martin_Heidegger (Accessed: 5 June 2024).

Sheehan, T. (2015) Making sense of Heidegger: a paradigm shift. London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield.

Design and Theory: Total Design, Total Theory

RELATED TERMS: Gesamtkunstwerk

To say that design defines humanity is not quite the same as saying ‘Dasein is design’. In a material culture approach, humanity is shaped by its objects. As many of those objects are designed, it might be argued that humanity is shaped by its designs. However, many of those objects-as-designs, are themselves shaped by the practices in which they serve both instrumental and symbolic roles (‘functions’). A central thesis of Colomina and Wigley (2016) is that it is ‘design’ itself that defines humanity. Whatever the precise relation, or the degree of (mutual) determination, it would seem that design and humanity are inseparable.

A question that might arise is: how does the philosophy and theory of design presented in the web pages of Incomplete … differ from the view of design presented under the rubric of ‘total design’?

To say that design pervades the world is not to say that the world is a ‘total design’, analogous to a ‘total work of art’, and that design is ‘one great cognate whole’, in the words of Walter Gropius. In other words, to acknowledge the pervasiveness of designed artefacts, services and systems is not to say that the world is a designed totality, every aspect of which is designed as a singular, cohered, unitary design.

Entanglement

RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Agonism and Design; Incompletion

“I prefer to think of myself as being inside a tangled knot; tangled knots fascinate me. It’s necessary to recount the tangle of existence, both as it concerns individual lives and the life of generations. Searching to unravel things is useful, but literature is made out of tangles.”
Elena Ferranta, cited in Schappell and Ferrante (2015)

Following Ferrante’s lead, it is contended here that designs exist as parts of tangled knots, which they do not seek simply to untangle but to entangle otherwise. In that sense, designs are made out of tangles.

Quantum entanglement

Quantum entanglement was named ‘spooky action at a distance’ by Albert Einstein. It describes the phenomenon of two spatially separated particles influencing each other, even when the distances are large. The entanglement observed at the sub-atomic level in physics labs lasts only a tiny fraction of a second.

As Dean Radin (2007: 606) explains, the most useful mathematics used in quantum theory was wave mechanics. The interesting thing about waves is that they are not precisely located in the way that we regard an object as being specifically located here or there. A wave is spread out in both space and time. The theory predicted that if two particles interacted with each other then, according to the equations used to describe this interaction, the two separate particles would become a single, more complex particle-system. Contrary to common sense, the two particles could no longer be regarded as being completely separate. One consequence of this prediction is that if you perturb one of the two particles after they interacted, then the other particle would respond, regardless of how far apart the two particles were. This makes no sense from a classical physics point of view as we do not often experience the world in that “nonlocal” or interconnected way.

It took a further 30 years before physicist John Bell developed a way of testing this interconnection or entanglement prediction to see if nonlocal connections really did exist. Starting in the early 1970s and continuing until the present time, many laboratory demonstrations of entanglement have taken place. They first demonstrated the phenomenon at the level of photons and electrons and later in larger systems of atoms and molecules. Physicists continue to look for entanglement in larger objects because, in principle, any physical or energetic object, at any size, can become entangled. Once entanglement has occurred, the particles might appear to go their separate ways, but they are actually not quite so separate. They maintain connections that transcend time and space.

Radin, along with other scientists, poses the question of what if the concept of quantum entanglement, which we know exists in elementary particles, extended up through the domains of chemistry, biology and psychology, emerging into the realm of human experience? Could entanglement be useful as a metaphor for explaining some human experiences? Furthermore, what if this idea was more than a metaphor: what if the fabric of reality really was all quantum, all the time?

Extending the notion of entanglement to the mind, Radin (2007: 607) comments,

“What the entangled minds idea suggests is that the universe is not really located outside yourself, because if everything is truly entangled, then there is no clear distinction between inside and outside. Everything arises out of a single, holistic medium.”
Radin (2007: 607)

Intra-active entanglement

A distinct line of thinking about entanglement can be found in the work of Karen Barad (2007). Her notion of entanglement refers to a thoroughly relational account of ontology in which entities never preexist as discrete, atomic individuals with determinate boundaries that subsequently combine or interact with other preexisting individuals. Rather, as the quantum experiments that prompt this account demonstrate, not even atoms are “atomic” entities prior to their measurement or observation, but emerge as either particles or waves only intra-actively, that is, as part of mutually exclusive techno-scientific practices and discourses.

Following Barad, Denise Ferreira da Silva says she prefers the term ‘deep implicancies’ over ‘entanglement. because for Ferreira da Silva entanglement is still informed by the possibility of separation, of disentanglement or a return to a moment before the knot was made. In their film, ‘4 Waters: Deep Implicancy’, Ferreira Da Silva and Arjuna Neumann take implicancy to stand for entangled forms of responsibility that keep the operations of extraction, disposession, segregation, externalisation and optimisation in process.

Entanglement with the more-than-human world

O’Gorman and Gaynor (2020: 727) note that, since archives are teeming with multispecies exchanges, it is important to practice the “arts of noticing” and attentiveness to the entanglements of the more-than-human world in examining such kinds of historical sources. More-than-human histories which take seriously the notion of co-constitution require the abandonment of our commitment, however residual it may be, to the conceptual division between human and nonhuman, society and environment and instead narrate the multi-species and multi-natural entanglements present in all historical processes (O’Gorman and Gaynor, 2020: 728) .

Multi-species entanglement

For Donna Haraway (2008: 106), one of the implications of recognising the outrageousness of human exceptionalism requires working on behalf of the moral entanglements of human beings and other organisms in ways that one judges, without guarantees, to be good, that is, that appear to deserve a future. She seeks to imagine (2008: 273) ongoing animal–human lives that are attentive to complex histories of animal–human entanglements, fully contemporary and committed to a future of multispecies natural-cultural flourishing in both wild and domestic domains.

Communitarian entanglements

Arturo Escobar (2018: 177-178) writes that the Mexican sociologist Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar (2012) has proposed the concept of entramados comunitarios (communitarian entanglements) which she opposes to coalitions of transnational corporations. These are two contrasting modes of the organization of the social. By communitarian entanglements Gutierrez Aguilar means, as translated by Escobar, “the multiplicity of human worlds that populate and engender the world under diverse norms of respect, collaboration, dignity, love, and reciprocity, that are not completely subjected to the logic of capital accumulation even if often under attack and overwhelmed by it”

Terrestrial bias

The term ‘entanglement’ suggests something that can be knotted, like a rope or a vine. It remains a compelling metaphor in environmental humanities research. However, entanglement has a noticeably ‘terrestrial’ bias, as brought to attention by Melody Jue (2020), when used in the context of diffuse substances like water, sound-waves or gases. Understanding such diffuse substances may require a more liquid metaphor, such as ‘saturation’ (Jue and Ruiz, eds, 2021).

Implications for design practices

Forlano (2017: 17) observes that the hybrid figure of the posthuman, as well as related concepts such as post-humanism, the non-human, the multispecies, the anthropocene, the more-than-human, the transhuman and the decentring of the human, greatly expands our understandings of the multiple agencies, dependencies, entanglements and relations that make up our world. The consideration of humanity’s role in environmental and socio-technical changes, and the ways these changes shape humans and the world, makes it possible for us to reflect on the implications of these hybridised notions for epistemology, ontology and ethics. As we develop our understandings of human and non-human knowledge and ways of being in the world, we will also develop corresponding design methods, frameworks and practices that better address the challenges we face as a planetary species.

References

Davies, B. (2021) Entanglement in the world’s becoming and the doing of new materialist inquiry. London, UK: Routledge.

Escobar, A. (2018) Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Forlano, L. (2017) Posthumanism and design, She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. Elsevier, 3(1), pp. 16–29. doi: 10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001.

Gamble, C. N. and Hanan, J. S. (2016) Figures of entanglement: special issue introduction, Review of Communication, 16 (4), pp. 265–280. doi: 10.1080/15358593.2016.1221992

Gutierrez Aguilar, R. (2012) Pistas reflexivas para orientarnos en una turbulenta .poca de peligro. In Palabras para tejernos, resistir y transformar en la época que estamos viviendo, by Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar, Raul Zibechi, Natalia Sierra, Pablo Davalos, Pablo Mamani, Oscar Olivera, Hector Mondragón, Vilma Almendra, Emmanuel Rozental, 9–34. Oaxaca, Mexico: Pez en el Arbol.

Haraway, D. J. (2008) When species meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Jue, M. (2020) Wild blue media: thinking through seawater. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Jue, M. and Ruiz, R. (eds) (2021) Saturation: an elemental politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

O’Gorman, E. and Gaynor, A. (2020) More-Than-Human Histories, Environmental History, 25(4), pp. 711–735. doi: 10.1093/envhis/emaa027

Radin, D. (2007) Consciousness and Our Entangled Reality, Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 3 (6), pp. 604–612. doi: 10.1016/j.explore.2007.09.005

Schappell, E. and Ferrante, E. (2015). The Mysterious, anonymous author Elena Ferrante on the conclusion of her Neapolitan novels. Vanity Fair, 27 August. Available from http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/elena-ferrante-interview-the-story-of-the-lost-child [Accessed 30 August 2015].

Thiele, K. (2017) Entanglement, in Bunz, M., Kaiser, B. M., and Thiele, K. (eds) Symptoms of the planetary condition: a critical vocabulary. Luneburg, DE: Meson Press, pp. 43–48.

Design, Narratives, Futures

RELATED TERMS: Design, Narratives, Pasts

Henry Mance (2021) mentions two conflicting narratives by means of which we may project our possible futures: the continuation of an historical trend providing material and socio-political improvements; and the difficulties ahead suggested by the evidence of climate science and by ongoing geopolitical tensions.

Narratives are one way to manage the complexity of and our entanglement in the situations in which we find ourselves. Narratives reduce the number of decisions to be made, paths to be taken. Otherwise, faced with too many choices, we may be paralysed by indecision, as Mance points out, citing the work of psychologist Barry Schwartz.

What criteria do we bring to bear on any specific decision? The role of design practices here in guiding decisions, by providing narratives (pathways) and axiological hierarchies, is crucial.

References

Mance, H. (2021) The End of convenience might not be a bad thing. Financial Times Weekend, 16 October 2021, p.16.

Walking

RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Derive; Enaction Paradigm – Cognitive Science

“Only thoughts which come from walking have any value.”
(Nietzsche, 1998: 9)

Nietzsche, in the above epithet, is arguing against the over-valuation of a sedentary life, as does, in another context, Arendt argue against the valuing of the contemplative life over and above the active life. While thoughts which come through sedentary contemplation are not dismissed as having no value, nevertheless, the emphasis here is on the moving body as the generator of thinking and meaning. The body, moving through and interacting with an environment thick with material signs of many valences, is the focus of attention. There is no simple body-mind duality here. The body is in the midst of a mutable, multi-dimensional cognitive enactment involving several orders of intelligence, from the bio-semiotic to the digital semiotic through the semiosis of language and culture.

Rebecca Solnit (2001) comments that, “thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.”

She continues, walking “strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals”.

Walking and Speaking

Michel de Certeau (1988: 97-99) argues that the act of walking has the same relationship to the urban system as the speech act has to language or to the statement uttered. Walking has, de Certeau contends, a threefold ‘enunciative’ function.

Firstly, it is an act of appropriation of the topographical system by the pedestrian. It articulates or carves a ‘my space’ from the midst of the common, communal or shared space. In that sense, it stakes a temporary claim for an ‘inappropriable’, in Agamben’s terms. Agamben (2016) suggests that the body, language and landscape (place) are inappropriable in as far as they do and do not belong to me.

Secondly, walking is a spatial acting-out of the place, a realisation or actualisation of it as place.

Thirdly, walking implies relations among differentiated positions. Movements serve as a mode of addressing other pedestrians, initiating a dialogic ‘contract’ with them to which their movements respond.

The pedestrian act of walking, considered as analogous to the speech act, has, according to de Certeau, three characteristics that distinguish it from the spatial system: the present; the discrete; and the phatic.

Firstly, while a spatial order organises an ensemble of possibilities or affordances, that is, directions in which one can move, and interdictions, that is, obstacles which prevent movement in particular directions, the walker actualises some of these possibilities. The walker makes such possibilities exist and emerge. However, the walker also may move these possibilities around and invent others, transforming or abandoning certain spatial elements. The walker makes a selection, actualising only a few of the possibilities offered by the constructed spatial order but also increasing the number of possibilities and prohibitions, by, for example, creating shortcuts and detours or by forbidding themselves to take certain paths.

Secondly, in acting thus, the walker creates discreteness by making choices among the signifiers of the spatial ‘language’ or by displacing them through the use made of them. The walker condemns certain places to inertia or disappearance while composing others with spatial choices that are unusual, rare, accidental or illegitimate.

Thirdly, in this framework of enunciation, the walker constitutes, in relation to their position, a near and a far, a here and a there, as well as, it might be added, a now and a then. This location, a here-now in relation to a there-then, implied by walking and indicative of a temporary appropriation of space by an ‘I’, also introduces an other (‘you’ or ‘they’) in relation to this ‘I’. Thereby, a conjunctive and disjunctive articulation of places is established. Such places are sustained by movements considered as phatic communication, a series of ‘hellos’, ‘well wells’ and ‘uh huhs’ that initiate, maintain or interrupt contact.

Walking and Pedagogy

For a discussion of the relationship between walking, embodiment and pedagogic practice, see Jarow (2002: 23), who notes that, “the scholastic traditions inherited from Descartes, and from humanistic disciplines trying to prove their worth by imitating the natural sciences, do not favor embodiment. Mind is to be developed and sharpened; a reasonably healthy body is needed to carry the mind on its way, but the two shall rarely if ever … meet.”

Jarow describes how he used his ‘peripatetic experiments’ walking through the Vassar College campus to bring to attention the ways in which an engagement with the terrain and the environment can deepen our understanding and experience, in this case, of Buddhist traditions. He comments, “The teacher and the text pale before the panorama of nature. There is no need to sit, study, and memorize concepts here; for they are being coded into the body.”

The relevance for design, particularly of environmental design, is clear. Designs work with graphic, linguistic, embodied and environmental codes as part of the processes of hypomnesis, as both memory and cognition.

References

Agamben, G. (2016) The Inappropriable, in Kotsko, A. (tran.) The Use of bodies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 80–94.

De Certeau, M. (1988) Walking in the city, in Rendell, S. (tran.) The Practice of everyday life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 91–110.

Jarow, E. H. R. (2002) ‘The peripatetic class: Buddhist traditions and myths of pedagogy’, Religion & Education, 29 (1), pp. 23–30. doi: 10.1080/15507394.2002.10012290

Nietzsche, F. W. (1998) Twilight of the idols, or How to philosophize with a hammer. Translated by D. Large. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Solnit, R. (2001) Wanderlust: a history of walking. London, UK: Penguin Books.

Additional Reading

O’Mara, S. (2019) In praise of walking: The New science of how we walk and why it’s good for us. London, UK: Bodley Head.

Techne

RELATED TERMS:

David Roochnik (2007: xi) states that techne, variously translated as skill, art, craft, expertise, profession, science, knowledge, technical knowledge, is not only a crucial term in the Platonic dialogues but has also been crucial in the development of Western culture itself. We currently use descendants of the term to discuss the technologies with which we live, the technocrats who rule our institutions, the technical expertise which we admire and the ever more high-tech to which we aspire.

Our lives are pervaded by the works of techne, by much of which we are awed because of its power, speed and intelligence. Furthermore, it is through works of techne that we often project our future planetary existence.

References

Roochnik, D. (2007) Of art and wisdom: Plato’s understanding of techne. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Decision and Design

RELATED TERMS:

‘Every decision you make is a design decision’

Jean-Luc Nancy, in critically rearticulating the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt, that is, Schmitt’s conception of the theologicopolitical, argues that, in terms of “becoming-secular”, the necessity of decision … is the impossibility of assigning a Subject of law and the State that would not be first of all an existent in action. [an actant, in the sense being developed in Incomplete …]

Nancy argues that the process in question is not that of becoming secular but rather “becoming-worldly.”

“Decision is existence as such, and existence, inasmuch as it does not take place for one alone or for two but for many, decides itself as a certain in of the in-common. Which one? Decision consists precisely in that we have to decide on it, in and for our world, and thus, first of all, to decide on the “we,” on who “we” are, on how we can say “we” and can call ourselves we.” (Nancy, 1997: 93)

Dasein is design.

References

Nancy, J.-L. (1997) The Sense of the world. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Digital Network Technologies

RELATED TERMS: Metaverse

Ben Thompson, a technology commentator, suggests that there have been three epochs in the evolution of the networked world in which we currently live (Naughton, 2021). Each is defined by its core technology and ‘killer app’. The first epoch was that of the personal computer (PC), beginning in August 1981. Its core technology was the computer’s open architecture and the MS-DOS operating system, later reconfigured as Windows. The killer pp was the spreadsheet.

The second epoch was that of the internet which began with the Netscape initial public offering in August 1995. The core technology was the web browser and the search engine was the killer app. The dominant use came to be social networking, with Facebook capturing the dominant market share.

The third epoch is that of mobility, beginning in January 2007 when Apple announced the iPhone, launching the the smartphone revolution. The core technology is a duopoly shared between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android system. The killer app is the so-called sharing economy, or, more properly the data-gathering economy, and the dominant communications medium is messaging.

John Naughton (2021) speculates what the fourth epoch might be. The most obvious candidates, he suggests, are metaverses, conceived as massive virtual reality environments, cryptography in the sense of blockchain technology and quantum computing. The latter two, cryptography and quantum computing, Naughton proposes, might be at odds with one another since quantum computing would undermine the security offered by cryptography.

Reference

Naughton, J. (2021) PC, internet, smartphine: what’s the next big technological epoch? The Observer, 12 September, p.23.

Epic Theatre – Brecht

Theatrical devices may be of great value when considering the impacts, or rather the actantiality, of designs, whatever their character. In this context, it is well worth looking at the aims and techniques of Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’.

The Aristotelian model of tragic theatre remains a strong influence over dramatic construction in Western theatrical traditions. It is a model with which Bertolt Brecht takes issue [1]. The questions that Brecht poses for tragic theatre are important for design practice because he makes explicit an emphasis on how drama can provoke critical thinking in the audience rather than simply please the audience; he re-thinks the role of emotional responses and intellectual responses to dramas, and questions the role of ‘empathy’, all of which are important concerns for design. Furthermore, he raises the issue of the social and historical contextualisation of human suffering, rather than assuming its inevitable and universal character.

Brecht argues that Aristotelian dramatic practices lead the audience to conclude that human suffering is an inescapable or inevitable part of the human condition. He proposes, in its stead, ‘epic theatre’, although towards the end of his career he came to prefer the name ‘dialectical theatre’ to describe the kind of theatre that he had developed earlier in his career. Epic or dialectical theatre presents human suffering as something that can be changed through the social transformation of political institutions. This is the first major distinction that Brecht makes between tragic or Aristotelian theatre and epic theatre.

The second distinction Brecht makes is to question the audience’s identification with the drama’s protagonist, as the basis from which the audience then takes on the protagonist’s emotional states. Thus, Brecht’s epic theatre, through its staging practices, seeks to put into question the empathic and sympathic relations between protagonist and audience, so that the audience neither feels with the character nor feels for the character. For Brecht, such empathic and sympathic responses or shared feelings prevent critical reflection on the social dimension of tragedy.

In order to block empathic and sympathic responses, Brecht’s epic theatre employed alienation effects, Verfremdungseffekt, so that a critical mode of engagement with the protagonist and his or her predicament is encouraged. Brechtian performance techniques also sought to prevent the actor from engaging empthically with the character that he or she is playing [2].

In Brecht’s characterisation, Aristotelian drama creates a central protagonist whose thoughts and feelings serve as the focal point and guide the action of the drama, although it has to be said that nowhere does Aristotle claim to have as an aim an exact congruence of feelings between the tragic protagonist and the audience.

Brecht’s objections to the Aristotelian model are summarised as follows by Curran (2001: 172). First, plots that represent the protagonist’s error as central to his or her misfortune do not permit the playwright to write a play that is socially critical. The focus is solely on the representation of misfortune arising from individual error, rather than the fault-lines in the social and political structure that makes for needless misfortune. Brecht contends that to facilitate a critical perspective on the social relations presented in the drama, the drama should go beyond revealing the thoughts and feelings of the protagonist to consider the larger social network in which the protagonist operates.

Second, dramatic practices that feature empathy along with some kind of affinity with the tragic protagonist and a shared feeling as a result of this connection, impede the adoption of a critical perspective on the social dimension of the character’s situation, by not enabling the audience to move from the individual perspective to the social perspective.

Third, Aristotelian tragic theatre uses a mode of engagement that gives the audience pleasure but does not provide instruction or genuine learning.

However, nothing in Aristotelian aesthetic practices is inconsistent with going beyond the dramatic focus on immediate familial relationships and loss to reflect on the wider social dimension of the drama. Nevertheless, the practices of Aristotelian drama do not support this kind of critical reflection in the audience without being supplemented by dramatic devices that prompt this sort of wider consideration of the play’s significance.

Brecht understood that effective drama can never instruct by forcing specific conclusions on the audience, and he recognised that critical engagement is something that playwrights can encourage or enable through the use of techniques that challenge the audience to rethink the basic assumptions he or she uses to make sense of the drama.

Thus, if the aim is to see how tragedy can function as a social criticism, the practices of the Aristotelian aesthetic framework need to be supplemented by Brecht’s recommendations, i.e. those useful dramatic devices that can reveal the relationship between the individual protagonist and the social environment in which he or she acts.

Notes

[1] Martin Esslin (1984) points out that, rather than Aristotle directly, it was Goethe’s and Schiller’s 1797 essay, “On Epic and Dramatic Poetry” (Schiller and Goethe, 2001, 1797) that was Brecht’s target. It was because he knew that Goethe and Schiller had based their theory on Aristotle’s Poetics, that Brecht called what he was critical of Aristotelian theatre. Through a critique of Goethe and Schiller, Brecht sought to overturn the Aristotelian concept of drama, the drama of catharsis by terror and pity, the drama of spectator identification with the actors, the drama of illusion, which tries to create magical effects by conjuring up events which are represented as totally present, while palpably they are not.

It was against this Goethean and Schillerian formulation of the theory that Brecht offered his counter-theory. Esslin summarises Goethe and Schiller’s position in the following terms:

“Goethe and Schiller said that the epic poet presents the event as totally past, while the dramatic poet presents it as totally present. The epic poet relates what has happened in calm contemplation. The actor, on the other hand, is in exactly the opposite position: he represents himself as a definite individual; he wants the spectators to participate in his action, to feel the sufferings of his soul and of his body with him, share his embarrassments and forget their own personalities for the sake of his. The spectator must not be allowed to rise to thoughtful contemplation; he must passionately follow the action; his imagination is completely silenced.”

Brecht considered such a theatre to be a fraud. Ever the rationalist, Brecht demanded a theatre of critical thoughtfulness, a theatre that aims to prevent the identification of the audience with the characters; nor can it allow the identification of the actor with the character.

In this way, the study of (abstract, universal) human nature is replaced by a study of (concrete, particular) human, social relations.

[2] At the time when Brecht was developing his concept of epic theatre, melodrama, realism and naturalism were popular as forms of theatre. In one very obvious respect, Brecht’s epic theatre was a reaction against the naturalistic approach pioneered by Constantin Stanislavski. Like Stanislavski, Brecht disliked the shallow spectacle, manipulative plots, and heightened emotion of melodrama. However, where Stanislavski attempted to engender real human behaviour in acting through his system and to absorb the audience completely in the fictional world of the play, Brecht thought that Stanislavski’s methodology merely produced escapism. Brecht’s social and political focus led him to distinguish his approach from that of surrealism and also the Theatre of Cruelty developed in the writings and dramaturgy of Antonin Artaud, who sought to affect audiences viscerally, psychologically, physically, and irrationally (Escenastur, 2011).

References

Benjamin, W. (1999). The Author as producer. In: Jennings, M.W., Eiland, H., and Smith, G., eds. Walter Benjamin: selected writings. Volume 2. Part 2, 1931-1934. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Brecht, B. et al. (2013). Affect, effect, Bertolt Brecht. nonsite.org [online journal], issue 10. Available from http://nonsite.org/issues/issue-10-affect-effect-bertolt-brecht [Accessed 24 March 2016].

Brecht, B. (1978). The Street scene: a basic model for an epic theatre. In: Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. London, UK: Methuen Drama, 121–129.

Brecht, B. (1978). Brecht on theatre, edited by J. Willett. London, UK: Methuen Drama.

Brecht, B. (1961). On Chinese acting. Tulane Drama Review, 6 (1), 130–136.

Curran, A. (2001). Brecht’s criticisms of Aristotle’s aesthetics of tragedy. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59 (2), 167–184. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/432222 [Accessed 25 June 2016].

Escenastur (2011). Epic theatre. Escenastur.com [Website]. Available from http://www.escenastur.com/theatre/epic-theatre.html [Accessed 9 July 2016].

Schiller, F. and Goethe, W. (2001, 1797). On epic and dramatic poetry. Schiller Institute. Available from http://www.schillerinstitute.org/transl/schil_epic_dram.html [Accessed 11 July 2016].