Receding into Illusion

The idea of Alienation, derived from the Russian formalists and relating Brecht to Eisenstein, is more than an effect or technique. It may even be an illusion. But if it is to be distinguished from Marx's alienation of labor, it remains inseparable from the politics of modernism which, as it becomes embarrassed by the autonomous object of art, eventually turns to the composition of the audience. The movement of this enterprise has been from determining who's there to what, no matter who, the audience makes of the occasion by learning to speak themselves and determining who they are. The technique of Alienation has to do with the method of the actor but, in theory at least, the actor behaves like an audience so that the audience becomes the actor, though its performance is not completed inside the theater itself. This is not at all a participatory project in the sense of actor and audience becoming one, and I shall return to the condition of separation, which is the disturbing basis of the technique. In either case for both actor and audience the A-effect depends not only on particular function but on a precise kind of work, which is to that extent not alienated, though it is by no means the end of the problem. As we can see from the constant labor of redefining practice in theory and referring it back to the theater, Brecht was very much aware that the effect has, like the demystifying powers of modernism itself, a remarkable capacity for receding into illusion. Here it is important to emphasize the double meaning of illusion that, in theater or ideology, may be elided or overlooked: illusion as appearance and, in the appearance of a truth, fidelity to a defect of value. As one rereads Brecht's essays, it is apparent that he was philosophically

Aesthetics · Alienation · Art · Cognitive psychology · Illusion · Political science · Communication · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology