COLLABORATIVE WORK, COLLECTIVE PRAXIS

Thinking through reading introduces deferral, one has to take a risk of saying something in the place where nothing has been said. Brecht’s cultural absence acts as a presence in our ongoing research, while the collaborative way of developing the project assumes possibility of extension without certainty and a commitment beyond singular authorship. By adopting a form of rehearsal as a motif and articulation of the process, we are attempting to engage the text and to reflect on it simultaneously. Such an approach could also be seen as unmasking, displaying a capacity of destabilizing the reflection itself. Part of our interest is in mapping the reception of Brecht in any practice touched by radical desires.

History often appears to us only as text but not as consciousness, not as living condition. How do we deal with Brecht’s presence in the present, if we lack the traces which inform our current thinking? Is the act of returning, a sign or a desire to re-activate the lost traces?
To create the fantasy of historical traces is to look in the archive, and attempt to bring speech back to the text. While the material rests in the archives it remains mute, and therefore it is incapable of having an effect upon the social.
The research helps with making the connections, between platforms for resistance and exercise of power, and also recovers connections to specific locations within the city where such activities were possible and where people congregated. It redraws the outlines for the missing memory of the event i.e. one year of Brecht’s exile in Stockholm.

One way to recover an idea is to find an appropriate image, to make something visible and available through its material presence. However the purpose of our project is not to display Brecht, but to embody the idea of “Brecht”. For the moment we have given the project a working title Learning by heart. We recognise that Brecht´s method was never to repeat a text but to re-enact it and re-use it as raw material. One way of empowering such a method in the present is by working with (and embodying) historical examples of resistance in their multitude.

EXILE
We see exile in a wider sense as a state of suspension, as exile of ideas not just a person. This leads to the question of protection. Brecht fled Nazi Germany seeking protection for himself and his ideas in Scandinavia.
But what kind of ideas are under threat now? How do we protect and re-engage them with a sense of public imagination? Exile as a condition heightens one’s sense of external relations with others. The sustainability of one’s commitments and ideas emerges through exploring the local scene, finding allies, nurturing friendships, arguing through ideas, enabling actions, pursuing joint projects .The acknowledgment of reciprocity is fundamental to all creative effort. Not at the expense of individuality but as a sign of confidence and enrichment. But this happens not without its own risks of failure. Exposing the processes and mechanisms, trying out the roles and conditions of social engagement, insisting on the unfinished and experimental, is always troubling and not very easily packaged and marketed.

EMBLEM
… Brecht is also “Brecht”: that is, the place of collective work as such, as though the individuality we ascribed to some period before history, with its unique qualities and obsessions, had been transcended almost at once into a collaborative subject – one which certainly seemed to have a distinctive style (the one we now call “Brechtian”) but was no longer personal in a bourgeois or individualistic sense. How Brecht pillaged the playbooks of the past and other cultures we know ell, and are probably not unduly shocked: the more layers of human time, the more people of all ages who left their traces in the artifact, the richer and the better. But even today collaborative practice arouses scandal: what about the private property of the signature, and did not Brecht exploit the people working with him (now called “Brecht”)…. FJ p10

This precisely reflects our strategy of retracing Brecht’s legacy in exile,
investigating a method through adopting and expanding the method. This missing cultural inheritance is for our project a raw material. But how do we recover freshness from an emblematic presence, or shall we say an emblematic absence, of “Brecht” as part of the cultural currency now? Our project is to invite historical analysis without prejudicing the outcome.

BREAKING UP
For if the logic of the work’s production lies in analysis – in the literal sense – of the Greek term, ana-leuin, to break up – it is all one whether the ultimate ideal consists in that least common denominator of a kind of silence which stands in Beckett play for aesthetic purity… JF p45

{…} as I want to retain the connection between Brecht’s ‘usefulness’ for us today and a whole range of possible activities into which it might be expected to energize us. {…} This amounts to saying that ‘the idea of ‘Brecht’ is as important as his individual texts; {…} I believe that we can still live and move in this idea; and that it is preeminently one which helps us to dissolve the multiple paralyses in which we are all now historically seized, {…} the notion of enablement is still not a bad one for the release of new energies we have in mind here; FJ p29

In the 1960s so many people came to realize that in a truly revolutionary collective experience what comes into being is not a faceless and anonymous crowd or ‘mass’ but, rather, a new level of being – what Deleuze, following Eisenstein calls, Dividual – in which individuality is not effaced but completed by collectivity. It is an experience that has now slowly been forgotten, its traces systematically effaced by the return of desperate individualisms of all kinds.
So it is that the properly utopian features of Brecht’s collective work, and of collective and collaborative work of all kinds, are occulted and repudiated; yet this is one of the most exciting features of this work in general, and one of the unique sources of excitement it has in store for us – the promise of an example of a utopian cooperation {….} It is a lesson whose Brechtian pleasures will surely return in future generations, however unfashionable it may feel to contemporaries in the current age of the market. FJ p 10

The individuality which is not effaced but completed by collectivity appeals to us as artists.
Our process is one of interrogation, a term which seems appropriate to all research. Supporting a practice based in research , signals and encourages others to value collaboration as a mode of production as well as a way of being in the world. All aspects of the project, from negotiations between the artists and Index, fundraising, to producing the project would promote collaborative effort and lead to a truly joint authorship. This might be a step further from the time of turning Brecht into an emblem, our desire would be to make and re-make collaboration itself into such emblem.

RE-ENACTMENT
The well-made production is one from which the traces of its rehearsals have been removed (as from successfully reified commodity the traces of production itself have been made to disappear): Brecht opens up this surface, and allows us to see back down into the alternative gestures and postures of the actors trying out their roles: {…} FJ p 11-12

But it is also a symbolic re-enactment of multiple hesitations, and alternative possibilities within interpretation itself (…). This is not undecideability exactly, this interpretative hesitation: it does not spill out into the formless; on the other hand, it incites the spectator to form further thoughts and test them against each other and against the initial event or happening which is their pretext. FJ p73

This implies freshness of experience and recovery of perception, the techniques themselves have a symbolic meaning and are not simply means to an end. It’s precisely this attention to how process, any process is constituted and constituent, what are the conditions that allow for its reproduction, what are the needs of overturning any status quo?
We also want to give recognition to the figure of the amateur as one possessing a different kind of knowledge, accumulated through a different process, not necessarily acquired through academic channels. Can we make a connection to the amateur theatre, to a grassroots movement, the origin of acting as well as activism, a shared root, to act upon the social, action requiring a clear act…A question of sharing and generosity, promoting a relation of reciprocity.

Brecht’s legacy lies in our capacity to act out our own possible and virtual actions, his use of a one-time (and thus apparently unchangeable, but only apparently unchangeable) spectacle to energize a public into a sense of multiple possibilities. FJ p47

What history has solidified into an illusion of stability and substantiality can now be dissolved again, and reconstructed, replaced, improved, ‘umfunktioniert’.
FJ p47

We share a strong conviction in a need for enquiry and not just a blind attachment to change. Since enquiry allows to reconsider one’s own habits and prejudices. This is precisely what our role as artists falls into, artists not alienated by the old division between production and consumption, since it is our practices that redefine that divide and re-make its relevance. Can this be achieved through the politics of participation?

All quotations from Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method, Verso, London 1998