One of Brecht's most important essays in a production-based aesthetics remains (to the best of my knowledge) untranslated into English apart from a few pages in Willett's Brecht on Theatre (Brecht 1964: 17-51). The essay is 'Der Dreigroschenprozess', or 'The Threepenny Lawsuit' (Brecht, 1967: 139-209). It will not be translated here: in part because of its length, in part because an essay by Brecht is a very expensive commodity in the international publishing market (this is particularly ironical given that the essay is centrally concerned with the category of intellectual private property, and that Brecht was himself accused in court of having plagiarized 'The Threepenny Opera from translations of Gay and Villon). What I offer instead is something like a compte rendu of the essay, in which—to resort to the category of legal ownership again—the words and the work of selection and condensation are 'mine' except for passages of direct translation; but these words have the intertextually complex status of free indirect discourse.
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In the winter of 1930 Brecht and his collaborators took to court the company which had produced a film of Brecht's play The Threepenny Opera and which had engaged Brecht's services in the preparation of the screenplay. The details of the contractual disagreement are complicated and technical, but the gist of it is that, contrary to the usual terms of employment of authors and scriptwriters, Brecht had insisted on having chief responsibility for the preparation of the script and on a final power of veto over it. On receiving a draft of the screenplay the company had taken fright and tried to buy off Brecht and his collaborators. An alternative script was prepared. At this point—and with the film, directed by G.W. Pabst, already completed—Brecht began his 'sociological experiment'.
There is a certain amount of (quite characteristic) ambiguity and an even larger amount of ex post facto rationalization in Brecht's account of his motives in initiating the trial and, more crucially, in coming to a settlement with the film company after the case had been lost. Certainly some of Brecht's comrades on the left had their doubts ('Doesn't everybody know who's going to come off second best? And indeed, everybody did know'—p.183). But the court case did
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achieve the goal of forcing into the open the question of intellectual private property in cinematic protection—a question which tended to undermine the whole basis of a bourgeois aesthetics grounded in the concept of authorship. The case was widely reported in the press, and this publicity, we could say, was the first part of the experiment, the object of which was to display as clearly as possible the contradictions between bourgeois ideology (both aesthetic and legal) and bourgeois practice. But it is the second stage of the experiment which has retained its interest, and which I shall discuss in more detail. Here Brecht takes comments on the case made by lawyers, judges and journalists and treats them as a kind of ethnographic raw material. From them he derives a number of propositions which constitute the ideological frame within which the categories of film, art, and law are commonly understood; and these categories he then subjects to an intensive marxist analysis.
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1. "Art has no need of the film."
All honour to the writer who refuses as a matter of principle to let his works be filmed... He has the choice, either to obey the dictates of his free artistic conscience and refuse to allow the filming of his work, or else, if he wants the material rewards, then he must be content once and for all with that... (Dr Frankfurter, the lawyer representing the film company) (156).
This proposition draws a line between art, which is 'clean', and film, which is 'dirty', commercial, technical. It accepts, in a fairly cynical manner, that cinematic production will be aesthetically and morally worthless; and it uses these arguments to warn off those, like Brecht, who feel that their participation in the making of a film should give them some degree of control over it. The effect of this is
to deprive us in advance of the equipment we need for our work, because increasingly this kind of production will displace the present one; we will be forced to speak through increasingly complex media, to express what we have to say with increasingly inadequate means (156).
This is so because the old forms of communication don't remain unchanged by the newly emerging forms, and don't simply coexist with them. After the advent of film both the reading and the writing of narratives is something different. This amounts to a 'technification of literary production', and it is irreversible. The novelist, for example, who has no need of technical equipment, will nevertheless be aware of and wish to imitate the new representational possibilities opened up by film. This may mean, as much as anything else, adopting a less 'artistic', more 'instrumental' attitude to writing. Indeed it may be the case that novelists or dramatists will work more 'filmically' than the producers of film, since, although they are partly less dependent on the means of production, the state of their art is nevertheless bound up with that of film, and the means of cinematic
production are thoroughly capitalist in form (157). In relation to the novel, film undermines the possibility of an expressive relation to an author. What it gives instead, at least potentially, is 'useable information about human actions in detail' (157). In relation to drama, film provides a model of a non-psychological construction of character.
But it is not only in indirect ways that literature can draw upon film:
with the decisive extension of its social functions resulting from the transformation of art into an educational discipline, the means of representation must be multiplied or frequently changed... The film apparatus can be extremely useful in overcoming the old untechnical, anti-technical, 'spiritual' art which is bound up with religion. The socialization of these means of production is a matter of life and death for art.
To maintain the line of demarcation between 'art' and the mass media means forcing art into a historical dead end, a place with only very marginal links to the production process; and this in turn means a surrender of control over artistic production:
The loss of the means of production by the producer means the proletarianization of the producer; like the manual labourer the intellectual has here only his naked labour power to stake in the production process: but his labour power is himself; he is nothing outside it, and just like the manual labourer he increasingly has need of the means of production (since production becomes ever more 'technical') in order to make the most of his labour power: here too the awful vicious circle of exploitation has set in (158-9) .
What Brecht is insisting on is the inseparability of all branches of artistic production. The conventional view is that 'authentic' art is quite untouched by the new communications media (radio, film, book club) and, in continuing to use the old technologies (the printed book sold on the open market, the stage, etc.) is somehow outside the sphere of modern industry. According to this view, 'authentic' works of art become commodities only when they are delivered to the new apparatuses. But
in reality, of course, the whole of art without any exception falls into the new situation; it is as a whole and not in splintered-off parts that it has to come to terms with it; as a whole it is or is not commodified. Transformation in time leaves nothing untouched, but always encompasses the whole ( 159) .
2. "Film needs art."
A revival of the sound-film by means of genuinely literary scripts would be a real gain (Kolnische Zeitung) .
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In my opinion this attitude on the part of the producers and their staff is thoroughly unproductive. 'They don't need to understand anything about art, but they must be capable of calculating its economic value and, simply on grounds of practical expediency, behave like a progressive industrialist who entrusts certain jobs to true artists (Frankfurter Zeitung) ( 160) .
Both the film industry and the press are agreed in defining art as a luxury, providing pleasure rather than knowledge. In this sense film is in the same market, and needs to draw upon the experience of 'artists'. Within the industry this role falls to the director: someone who is technically ignorant and indeed doesn't know much about art, but knows what he likes (G.W. Pabst, who directed Die Dreigroschenoper, was a liberal who ended up making propaganda films for Hitler; Brecht clearly loathed him). The director 'has the reputation of a tasteful arranger, he "knows a bit about art"! As though one could understand anything about art without under standing something about reality'—reality here meaning the industry and its commercial and technical organization (der Apparat) as much as the film's thematic material (der Stoff) (161). The consequence of this attitude is an impoverishment of film's potential insofar as it takes for granted that its task is to produce the social phenomenon 'art', and indeed 'art' in its old, conventional forms. The scientific application of film (in medicine, biology, or statistics, for example) might have been a more profitable route towards the analysis of the contradictions of human behaviour. In its present form film is caught up in a crisis of representation, for
less than ever can a simple 'reproduction of reality ' say anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp factory or the AEG works reveals almost nothing about these institutions. The actual reality has slid to the level of social function. The reification of human relations, as in the factory, means that these relations are no longer immediately accessible. So it does in fact become a matter of 'constructing something, something 'artistic 'composed'. There is in fact a need for art. But the old conception of art as a product of 'experience' likewise becomes invalid. For even if we represent only that part of reality that can be experienced, this is still meaningless. Reality has long since been unavailable as a totality to experience. A representation of the dark associations, the inchoate feelings which it produces is not a representation of the real. You shall no longer know the fruits by their taste (161-2) .
What is needed is a functional definition of art; and only if art is redefined in terms of its ability to produce a knowledge of the real can it be of any use to film.
3. "Public taste can be improved."
Whilst every well-run company today knows that quality products raise profits, and so hires specialists to supply it with this quality, second-rate firms tend to despise expert assistance and take pride in playing the arbiter of taste. The film distributors, for example, take on functions which they are notoriously ill-equipped to carry out ... they claim a thorough familiarity with the needs of the public, and on the basis of this supposed knowledge influence the whole production of films. There would not be the slightest objection to these amateurish ambitions if they produced great successes ... but experience shows that the distributors, thinking it is in their commercial interest to determine the kind and quality of films, in fact work against their commercial interest and fall from one error into another (Frankfurter Zeitung) (162).
When the newspapers occasionally try to get down to brass tacks and talk about film as a business—the business of pumping determinate quantities of entertainment into a huge, amorphous and unimaginable public—they quickly stumble over 'the last absolute barrier to all progress, called public taste' (163). For the Phillip Adamses of 1930 there is no doubt about the growing and reactionary influence of the buyers on the form of the product. They are represented by the buying agencies, the provincial organizers of the market; and their chief sin is to have trodden on the turf of the philosophers of the press. Whereas the columnists think the organization of the world is a question of taste, the businessmen—who have just as little under standing of it—take public taste to be the true expression of the real needs of the cinema-going masses. Questions of taste are determined empirically; and with thcir sharpened in stincts and their material reliance on the correctness of their analyses these people act as if the roots of taste lay in the social and economic sit uation of the masses, as though the buyers bought corrcctly, as though the product was what was required by the buycr's situation, and as though taste could be changed not by lectures on acsthctics or thc facik pap of the critics but only by real and deep-seated changes in the situa tion (164).
Intellectuals are fighting in the dark as long as they are restricted to criticizing symptoms in a purely conceptual world. This is not only ignorance but arrogance:
rhe struggle of progressive intellectuals against the influence of com mercial interests is based on the proposition that the masses don't know their own interests as well as the intellectuals do. But the masses have interests which are political rather than aesthetic- at no time was Schillcr's proposal that political education should be made a mattcr of aesthetics so obviously pointless as today ( 165).
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Frow
In demanding that the whole capitalist apparatus of cinema, includ ing the film intellectuals supervising the investment of capital, should become an educational institution, these 'progressive intel lectuals' are in effect inciting the employees of the film industry to sabotage. Hence the moral indignation they tend to provoke; it was on the grounds of 'propriety' that the producers of the film ~he ~hrcepenny Opcra refused to endanger the capital 'entrusted' to them.
Any attempt to free films of their 'bad taste' will only weaken them: because 'the bad taste of the masses is more deeply rooted in reality than the good taste of the intellectuals' (165). Public taste will be improved, not through better films but only through a change in social relations.
4. "Film iz a commodity."
Brecht's Sociological Expcrimcnt
tion to anothcr; it links all things togcthcr, just as it dcliucrs all mcn (in thc form of commoditics) to all mcn. 1t is thc process of communica tion itself (167-8).
We are confronted, then, with two incorrect propositions:
1. rhc ('bad ') commodity charactcr of thc film will bc abolishcd by
2. ~hc artistic character of thc other forms of art is not affected by
the ('bad') proccss in film (168).
5. "Film is in the service of lelsure."
...Accordingly it cannot bc said that thcre is no reason for treating the author of a film script worsc or othcrwisc than the author of a stage play... 'rhc formcr k thc manufacturcr of a mass commodity which will bc cxhibitcd throughout the world Because of this, and bccause of thc commcrcial risks cntailcd, a grcatcr commcrcial rcsponsibility falls upon him; thc financial cxpcnditurc inDolvcd is also to bc cvaluatcd diffcrcntly... But in other rcspccts as wcll thc whok situation of thc film manufacturcr trying to producc a commcrcial product is diffcrent. His product has a long Icad timc and is much morc dcpcndcnt on thc timcs, on public tastc, on thc topicality of thc matcrial, and on compcti tion on thc world markct than is thc thcatrc produccr in his own city ~Judgement of the Supreme Court; cf. No.13) (166-7).
Everyone agrees that film, even at its most artistic, is a commodity. For some, however, this commodity form is accidental, and it is the task of art to raise film from its fallen state. Others locate the dif ference between film and art in the fact that the essence of film is con stituted by its commodity character. And everyone laments this fact, for 'no-one, apparently, can imagine that this manner of being put into circulation could be favourable for a work of art' (167). Nevertheless, with a gesture of 'heroic realism', people face up to reality and manage to live with the fact that films are exhibited for profit. 'There remain works of art of other kinds which are not commodities, or so little so that their commodity character hardly touches them' (167). But then from irony Brecht modulates into the rhetorical plenitude of an almost biblical high marxism (one remem bers the epic versification of the Communist Manifcsto):
Only if you closc your cycs to thc monstrous forcc of ~hat rcvolu~ionary proccss which swccps all thc things of this world into commodity circulafion, without any cxtcption and without any rcstraint, could you supposc that works of art of any kind could bc cxcludcd For thc lccper mcaninR of thc proccss consists in Icaving no thing without rcla
~he producers could not act any differently. A film is such a huge com mercial undertaking and represents such an amount of enterprise, capi tal end labour that it must not be placed in danger by primadonna moods, ignorance of the special requirements of film or even, as in the case of Brecht, the desire to impose a particular ideological line (Dr Frankfurter, representing the film company) (168).
The concept of reproduction—elaborated here in a way that an ticipates the work of Althusser and Bourdieu, and perhaps with some thing of their functionalist simplification—is the tool Brecht uses to grasp the social function of film. It is used as well to situate the social function of bourgeois aesthetics:
As long as the social function of film is not critically analysed, evcry film criticism is only a criticism of symptonts and itself has a symp tomatic charactcr. It cxhausts itself in questions of taste and thus re mains completely caught in class-given prejudices. It theorizcs taste not as commodity or as the weapon of a particular class but as an absolutc (anyonc can attain what anyonc can buy, even if not everyone can in fact buy it) (168).
Vithin a class taste is productive in forging a unified 'life-style'.
the contradiction, characteristic of thc capitalist mode of production, bctween work and leisure divides all spiritual activities into those which serve work and those which serve leisure, and makes of the latter a systcm for thc reproduction of labour power. Leisurc must con tain nothing of what work contains. Leisure is devoted to non production in the interest of production ( 169) .
Under these conditions a unified 'life-style' cannot be created. This is not because art is swept into the sphere of production, but rather because this happens incompletely and art is used to build an island of 'non-production'. 'Whoever has bought their ticket is transformed in front of the screen into an idler and an exploiter lAusbeuter~. Plun der IBeute~ has been invested in them, and they become a victim of imploitation IEinbeutun,g ' (169).
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6. "The human element mu~t play a role In film."
The human ekment must be intensif ed (The Director) .
As far as the story is concerned it may even be exceptionally silly if; as is almost always the case today, the silliness or sentimentality of its imaginative framework is embedded in a plausibk and authentically realistic visual and mimic use of imaginatiue detail through which the human triumphs in a hundred individual moments over the primitiDe improbability of the overall structure (Thomas Mann) (69) .
In arguing for the ideological status of the concept of the 'human' (and of the traditional aesthetic categories which accompany it) Brecht does two things. First, he claims that film makes use of exter nal action rather than introspective psychology. Second, he argues that this corresponds to the effects of capitalism's large-scale organi zation and automatization of needs. Capitalism
destroys whole stretches of ideology by concentrating solely on 'external ' actions, dissolving everything into process, giving up the hero as the focus of history, man as the measure of all things, and thereby shatter ing the introspective psychology of the bourgeois novel ( 171 ) .
The exteriority of film is thus in tune with the inner dynamic of capitalism (this is a straightforwardly historicist judgement); and be cause of this it corresponds to two further progressive contemporary ideologies. The first is the aesthetics of non-aristotelian drama, which is directly applicable to film (and could indeed be said to derive from it). The second is behavioural psychology, which 'is a consequence of the need of commodity production to acquire methods of influencing consumers and is thus an active, progressive and revolutionary psychology par excelknce' (172). As so often with Brecht, one is not quite sure where dialectics stops and irony begins.
7. "A film mu~t be the work of a collective."
I can imagine that it must be very meaningful for the participants, art ists as well as producers, to enter into consultation on the question of the formation of a colkctive and how it will work (Reichsfilmblatt) (172).
This proposition is, says Brecht, on the face of it progressive: the collective nature of film production points the way towards new socialist forms of artistic production. If the collective had, for exam ple—like the team Brecht gathered around him—specific didactic objectives, it would of itself form an organic body. But in practice the film collective is a false collective, dominated by the representatives of finance and predicated upon a division rather than a sharing of knowledge and technical skills. A collective can work effectively only if it is capable of forming collectives out of the 'public' (173).
8 "A film can be regre~ive in term- of content and yet
formally progreuive."
The film is essentially the art-form in which the weight of the artistic means imposes the greatest constraints on the creative spiriL The spirit is not the master of the cinematic means of expression; they always con stitute a clumsy, complicated, and exorbitantly expensive tool (Reichsfilmblatt) . The "~hreepenny Opera" brings us an unprecedented wealth of con summate technique. But howeDer much this technical excelknce delights us we are nevertheless bothered by the feeling that the subject matter does not live up to it (DerJungdeutsche) . What remains is certainly uneven, but it is a grandiose cinematic spectack, executed with such technical skill that the substance almost disappears(8 Uhr—Abendblatt). An exhilarating sensation, regardkss of what it is supposed to mean (Filmkurier) . Here again what is at issue is the 'technical' (the German ~echnik covers a range from 'technique' to 'technology'). Starting from Marx's maxim that form is valid only insofar as it is the form of its content, Brecht argues that intelkctuals haDe an uncertain attitude towards technol~y; its rough but powerful intervention into spiritual affairs fills them with a mix ture of contempt and admiration; they make d fetish of it (l 75) . The technical is thus artificially isolated and given the glamour of the other functions it could (ideally, in a different world) fulfil.
9. "Political cen~or~hip i~ to be rejected on arti~tlc
ground~."
Censorship is the index of that real political pedagogy of which film is the site and which 'progressive' intellectuals would be so glad to replace with an aesthetic education (176). This censorship is directed at the petit-bourgeois consumers of film, and it can be ex plained without recourse to the wishes of the 'high' bourgeoisie as a sort of class schizophrenia, the invocation of a class super-ego (177). When the intellectuals fight for the abolition of censorship they don't mean that anything whatsoever should be shown: a representation of the act of birth, for example, would be excluded on artistic grounds, whereas the censor excludes it on political grounds. That is,
thcy are asking that thc class struggk should bc suspcndcd for artistic rcasons. In tcrms of tastc an abyss scparatcs thcm from thc mass of cincma-gocrs (in tcrms of tastc thcy are thc idcologucs of thc bourgcoisic); in tcrms of political undcrstanding, an abyss scparatcs thcm from thc bourgcoisic (thcy fail to undcrstand thc fact of thcir paid dcpcndcncc) (178).
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Almost by definition (it would seem) the intellectud~naware of their own class interests. And the 'education' that w ould give them this awareness would have to do with the politics of the aesthetic:
'rhcy would havc to dcmand a political art not for artistic but for political rcasons. Argumcnts drawn from acsthctics are nogood against a political ccnsorship. Rathcr than criticizing the mcrcly symptomatic taste of consumers of art thcy would at kast havc to bc capable of criti cally grasping thc cultural politics of thcsc pcoplc's—and th~ir own - situation. For thcy thcmsclvcs have great difficulty in raising them selves out of this petit-bourgcois class for which film is principally produccd, the only class in which thc concept of 'man ' is stillfirmly es tablishcd (man is th~ petit-bo~rgeoisJ, and the only class which be cause of its situation thinks in fundamentally rcactionary terms (178) .
But the deliberate restriction of freedom of thought—the deliberate submission to a political and cultural discipline—is not, says Brecht the good party-man, in and of itself reactionary. What the intellectuals, belonging to a dispersed collection of individuals rather than a mass, understand by freedom of thought is a freedom without consequences; whereas
- anyonc who really bclongs to a mass knows that hc can advancc no ft~r
thcr than thc mass is capablc of following. Our intcllcctuals, who ad
vancc only by scparating themsclvcs of J; cach onc for himsclf; from thc
mass, are intcrcstcd not in progrcss but only in thcir own advanccmcnt
(179).
The general laws governing the masses of our time (laws which are 'poorly researched') are not extrapolations from the patterns of indi vidual thought. And thought in the next stage of development after capitalism will not have the form of freedom determined by the laws of capitalist competition. I t will have another form.
10. "A work of art i8 the e~cpres~lon of a per~ona1ity."
A work of art is a living crcation, and its crcator is thoroughly justificd in not allowing it to bc dcformcd (Dr Frankfurter, the film compa ny's lawyer).
Film abolishes the categories of individual authorship and organic form and the causal connection between them. The Thrccpcnny Opcra could quite well, says Brecht, have been translated into a Threepenny Film if its political thrust had been used as the basis of the adaptation. Everything else—plot, background, characters—could have been freely changed. In the event the film company declined to split the work up in such a way as to preserve its social function within new technological conditions; but 'nevertheless there did of course come about a splitting up of the work, in accordance with commercial considerations' (180). In order to reach the market the text must be broken down into its elements, which then tend to come separately onto the market.
Brccht's Sociological Expcrimcnt
13 AYSt 7. CulturalStudi~s, 2:1 (1984)
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~
row
Brccht's SociologicaI Expcrimcnt
This process is schematized in Figure a, which Brecht calls a model of the work's 'deconstruction' (Abbauproduktion). It 'is a model of the decomposition of the literary product, of the unity of creator and work, meaning and story and so on' (180). What is sold on the market, for example, is the 'author's' name, regardless of who wrote the screenplay or how many people were involved; the author's radi cal reputation can be used even in the absence of radical political content; the material can be given another form, or the form another material; verbal and visual form can appear separately; and the story can be carried by other characters, or the characters inserted into another story. This dismantling of the work of art is something like the cannibalization of a broken-down car for spare parts:
What we are seeing is the ineluctable and therefore socially acceptable dkcline of thc individualistic work of art. It can no longer reach the market as a unity; the dynamic tension of its contradictory unity must be destroyed Art is a form of human communication and therefore dependent on the factors that determinc human communication in gcncraL These factors revolutionize thc old concept ( 181 ) .
Brecht then lists some of the consequences of this, together with judi cial and practical evidence:
1. A work of art is a fiction which, oncc constructcd, immediatcly
takcs on thc form of a commodity and appcars on the market
scparatcd from its maker and in a form that will sell on that
markct. (a. 3'udicial ruling that thc author must allow cven thosc
changcs which impair its effcct, sincc the signature of anothcr
pcrson—thc scriptwritcr—is appcndcd to it. b. Authors likc
Hcinrich Mann, Doblin or Hauptmann makc no claim to havc a
say in thc production of thc scrccnplay).
2. A work of art can bc rcduccd to thc invcntion of a story in accor
dancc with the nccds of thc market. ~hcrc is no firmly fixed
mcaning immancnt to it. (Practice offilm companies, uncontested
by authors).
3. A work of art can bc divided into parts, somc of which can be dis
pcnscd with. It can be mechanically divided, that is, according to
commcrcial rcguircments or those of thc ccnsors. (~udicial ruling
that thc author must kt thc company dccidc which parts of thc
manuscript it docsn't want to usc).
4. Languagc is of no importancc, and can bc scparatcd from acting,
which i$ (Thc court didn't bother to reply to our complaints
about changcs in the text) ( 181 ) .
The film does nevertheless appear on the market as a unity. The deconstructive model can be read not just from the top down but also from the bottom up, as a model of how a commercially viable work of art must be built. 'The process of deconstruction is accordingly also a process of production' (182).
11. UThe contradiction~ of capitali~m are old hat."
I haven't reproduced in this article the long excerpts from the press coverage of the trial that Brecht quotes in the introduction to his essay. In this section he comments on their ideological unity, des pite the variety of sources they are derived from; each contains the possibility of all the others. But this unity is a unity of contradiction: it is characteristic of petit-bourgeois journalism to hold at least two opinions on any subject: one set drawn from the realm of bourgeois ideals and proclaiming the importance of the individual, justice, freedom, and so on; and the other, which undermines the first but leaves it alive, drawn from reality. This contradiction is inherent in bourgeois hegemony, and it produces a sharp conceptual distinction between 'idealism' on the one hand and 'rationality' on the other; the two can never coincide.
This conceptual structure is also shared by many of Brecht's friends on the left, who didn't see the point of a quixotic battle against a powerful corporation on its own terrain. Everybody knew in advance that justice was going to be on the side of capital. But the question Brecht asks is what political usefulness this awareness has. The fact of the matter is that
it's not sufficicnt just to know that capitalism is increasingly incapa ble of handling its own affairs, as long as it is still capabk of keeping thc masses of thc pcopk in disarray; it's also not enough just to pro claim this, bccausc this knowledge of its own brcakdown consoles rathcr than disturbs it. It must be made to break down, continuously. Capitalism will not dic, but has to bc kilkd (l 83-4) .
The danger is that a kind of saturation with the class struggle tends to become established:
the class struggle then often seems like a natural category, and the ac tions of individuals and groups seem, even to them, to be determined in advance by the class struggle—whereby a dangerous passivity sets in. rhe class struggle is no longer a matter of human beings, but hurnan beings are a ma tter of the class struggle ( 184) .
Many writers on the left come to see the world through the cracks in the barricades, and the barricades 'hide the enemy from them, pro tecting the enemy more than them' (184). The division of the world into two camps is naturalized, 'industry is cvnical and the courts are unjust just as trees are green, and industry is more rational in being cynical then we are in attacking it for that' (184). So literary fashion, following the laws of the commodity and of capitalist competition, gets bored with the same old material, the same old contradictions. An injustice that lasts for years becomes regularized and invisible; it is 'old hat'.
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12. "The right~ of the Ind~vldual mu~t be protected."
Sourcc: civil codc.
At the centre of the court case is the question of private intellectual property (a category Brecht is more concerned to provoke than to defend). In the court's judgement the author's right to demand altera tions in the screenplay is limited by the fact that responsibility for the final text is assigned to one or more scriptwriters. However, in signing a contract which gave him a right of 'co-determination' (Mitbcstimmungsrccht- a right of participation and veto), Brecht had expressly contested the film company's aesthetic competence. He was thus compelled to recognize instead the aesthetic competence of a judge. The judge's decision—arrived at intuitively, without seeing the film—was that the scriptwriters, a pair of hacks, had 'preserved Brecht's style', that is, committed a successful act of forgery. Brecht's conclusion: 'there is no justice outside the sphere of production, be cause there is no law outside this sphere' (185). And this is in part a result of the fact that the mode of production of film makes the role of the individual unrecognizable.
13. UImmaterlal rlght~ must be protected".
The conjunction of film, commodity production and law in Brecht's analysis is in no way mechanical; it finds its justification in the fact that the social relations of artistic production—and this in cludes both determinate economic and contractual relations and the basic aesthetic categories around which these relations and functions are organized—are systematically and ongoingly codified by the law. Hence its etknographic value. The continuous nature of legal codification is important, because it indicates not only the constant adjustment of juridico-aesthetic categories to changing social conditions, but also the constant possibility of contradiction between different stages or levels of ideology and between ideology and social practice.
In this section Brecht analyses a decision of the State Supreme Court in Berlin in an action brought by a scriptwriter against a film company which had acquired the rights to a screenplay but failed to produce a film from it. The plaintiff's argument to the court that an obligation to produce a film existed was based, in the absence of a specific precedent or a customary trade practice, on a comparison with publishing law. There, the obligation to publication and distribution
rcsts on thc notion that thc publisher is only a mcans for authors to communicatc thcir spiritual productions to thc public at largc. Pay mcnts and royaltics do not as a ruk rcprescnt thc author's main goal; his cfforts are directcd in thc first instancc to thc transmission of the work to thc gcncral public. 'rhcrc is no good rcason why thc author of a film script should bc trcatcd worsc than thc authors of othcr spiritual
Brccht's Sociological Expcrimcnt
productions ~hc incrcascd costs of thcfilm manufacturcr in compari sonwiththoscofthepublishcrcouldnotplayadccisivcrolc(187).
Similarly, there is a valid comparison to be made with the contractual law governing theatrical performance; the structural differences be tween theatre and film cannot be the basis for a difference in legal status.
These arguments for the assignment of an author-function to film were rejected by the court on the ground that the analogy with pub lishing contracts and contracts for theatrical performance was not valid; 'changed economic relations should immediately give cause for a particularly cautious examination of the legal exigencies and the appropriate application of legal principles from apparently more or less closely related areas' (188). Specifically, the court ruled that contracts covering book publication deal with a form of reproduction of an original text which 'on the one hand is carried out basically without any individual intellectual participation on the part of the publisher, but more in a mechanical form; and on the other hand is restricted to the same artistic domain' (188). The fact that translations, for example, involve an intellectual rather than a me chanical execution is not relevant, since what is decisive is that they remain in the same area (literature) and adhere with great exactness to the original text. And 'it is further characteristic that the publisher publishes as a commodity greater or smaller quantities of the multip ly reproduced faithful copies of the original text' (188).
A different set of relations obtains for the stage production contract, where no multiple reproduction is involved, and where the form of distribution—in most cases the contract covers only a single theatre—negates any commodity character. No translation of the work into another aesthetic domain is involved, and 'the director is here only an assistant to the dramatist' (189), and so exercises no creative rights. Things are slightly different in the case of ballet, pantomime, etc., where verbal language must be translated into ges tural language, but here too there is a limit on the diffusion of the text and there is no commodity circulation.
The case is different again for contracts governing film production. Films are based on an original text, but this text is not what is reproduced and distributed. Moreover, film involves a change of medium from verbal to visual representation (the judge ment was given in 1923, before the advent of sound). But
there is simultancously a shift into another acsthetic domain as thc dramatic mime is transposcd into a pictorial form. If this happens by means of photography, that is, by relatively mcchanical mcans, it is neverthckss not as though a stagcd balkt or pantomime werc mcrcly being mcchanically photographed Film has its own laws, which are not just of an optical nature but dctcrmine thc esscncc and thc contcnt of what is rcprcscnted 'rhc cssencc of film is thc breaking down of thc
page 18
Frow ~ Brecht's Sociological Expcrimcnt
dramatic proccss into individual imagcs produccd by thc supprcssion of thc word and by a condcnsahon into short, discrctc visual sccncs whosc sequcncc, conncction, organization and Dcrisimilitudk are containcd only in embryo in thc original scrccnplay (189) .
It is because of the specificity of film language that the director, rather than having the status of the author's assistant, has a large measure of creative responsibility: 'what the film contains is not, as in the case of the book, the spiritual product of the author of the origi nal text, but his and the director's joint work' (190). The aesthetic concept of authorship, that is, directly involves the legal category of property. The judgement then continues with the passages quoted at the beginning of section 4, concerning the different degrees of com mercial responsibility to be assigned to dramatists and scriptwriters and the high degree of financial risk involved in production for the film market. It concludes by rejecting the plaintiff's case.
In his commentary on this document Brecht singles out for atten tion its unflinching materialism and its dialectical presentation of the relation between technology and authorship. Under the new condi tions of production the writer
must bc rcgardcd as a part of the apparatus. But this apparatus also in cludcs the distribution and promotional agcncics. rhc opposition bc twccn author and production-tcchnology is diakctically dissolvcd and at thc samc time thc fact that tcchnology is a componcnt of thc markct is charactcristically strcsscd ~hc author is swcpt into thc tcchnical proccss, and this is considcrcd in tcrms of commodity production (192).
A capitalist mode of aesthetic production, involving both the applica tion of technical resources and an organized system of production and distribution, destroys the old oppositions of the creative to the mechanical, the artistic to the commercial, the authentic to the inauthentic.
It destroys at the same time the ideological categories which had sustained these dichotomies and which had been integral to an earlier stage of bourgeois hegemony—categories like that of an absolute, innate and suprahistorical natural justice. But not completely: even in decay, and even in complete contradiction to normal capitalist practice, these categories continue to lead a ghostly life, sustained by their complex interrelation in an ideological system rather than by direct use value (although 'by the cradle and the coffin of every ideol ogy sits praxis' 1193J). In the case of Brecht's action against the film company, for example, in which he had taken at face value a particu lar bourgeois ideology (the protection of intellectual private property), what had emerged in the place of this ideology was a new set of categories which are in contradiction, not to normal capitalist practice but only to the old categories. Does this mean, Brecht asks, that they give up the old categories?
TheygiDc thcm up practically, but not idcologically. rhcy rcmovc thcir idcologics in practicc from circulation and kccp thcm 'in rcscrvc' But thc jokc is that thcy can neithcr cxcrcisc thcir practicc whcn thcy givc thcir idcolog)~ uh nor whcn thcy translatc it into dccds (193/4).
In the same movement in which the opposition of the material to the immaterial is dissolved it is ideologically strengthened. Brecht tells the story of an architect who claimed that a hotel had allowed anoth er architect to spoil a facade of his design:
hc claimcd thc facadk as his intclkctual propcrty, and his claim was conccdcd But how was justicc to bc donc? Obviously not by tcaring thc ncw facadc down again. So thc architcct would havc to bc compcnsatcd for thc damagc donc to him. But this idcal damagc would havc to bc provcd as a matcr~al damagc. Not bcing ablc to do this, thc man rc ccivcd no compcnsation. Neverthcless justice was done, and now as then it is impermissibk to make off with someone ekc's spiritual property. Immaterial claims are rccognizcd and—immatcrially satis ficd (195).
14. ~The courtz mu~t ~ecure the conditlon~ of pro
duction".
In this final section Brecht speaks of the increasing integration into the production process of all other spheres of life:
Of dccisivc importancc, bccausc it rcvolutionizcs all bchaviour and all idkas, is thc rok playcd by production, or rathcr: thc constantgrowth of this rok. Law, freedom, character have all become functions of produetion, and thusvariabkquantities Outsideofthegeneralprodue tion process even an act of knowing is no longer possibk. One must pro duce in order to know, and produeing means standing within the pro duction process Even the place of the revolutionary and the revolution is the production process A simpk and too littk eonsickred exampk: the astonishingly slight rok played by the unemployed for the revolution. But this supernumerary rok will beeome a kading rok as soon as unemployment becomes a serious threat to produetion (195).
Brecht's central example of the dominant role of production is the 'machinery of justice' which 'functions as a part of the general machinery of production' (195-6). In Brecht's action against the film company the judge took as his standard the normal output of film stu dios and considered only the extent to which individual agents sup ported or hindered production; the attempt to produce a different kind of film counted as hindering. Legal contracts were strictly subor dinated to their role in the production process, and any contractual claim by ~he author to a say in determining what kind of film was to be produced was treated as proof of sabotage. The film company was held 'not to the contracts it made but to those that it should have made' (197). But this very subservience of law to production renders it increasingly problematical:
page 20
Frow
in ordcr to bc thc rcadib prcdictabk factor nccessary for financial cal culation thc law must bccomc cnormousb primitiDc. rhc morc dynamic and complicakd cconomic lifc bccomcs, thc morc static and primitivc is thc law. But prcciscly bccausc of this it oncc again bccomcs incakulablc (198).
In a concluding section (and a set of methodological observations) the various strands of the preceding analysis are drawn together. The aim of the analysis has been, Brecht says, to indicate that many of the propositions are in a certain sense progressive, although they may give rise to regressive results. This is so in part because such tenden cies may have a number of different outcomes, or because they are traversed by other tendencies: 'in the sphere of practice we have before us an extremely complex field of contradictory tendencies and representations' (198). The analysis has both derived certain pro positons from practice and in turn submitted them to it, since, as Brecht had earlier argued, they can only be understood within the context of the huge ideological complex which constitutes a culture, and culture can only be judged 'if this complex is observed and made accessible to observation in its praxis, at work, in full operation, con stantly produced by reality and constant!y producing it' (139). Behind many of these propositions lies
thc notion of art as a sacrosanct phcnomcnon which is dircctb fcd by thc human but is also abk to dispcnsc with it; an indcpendknt phc nomcnon which is of thc ordcr of thc social but can also prcvail against socicty, and which can and must manifcst itsclf at all timcs and placcs, making usc of its social cnvironmcnt onb as a mcdium ( 199) .
Art in this sense survives its creators and even its consumers. It is reputed to be of great social use, but
pcoplc tend to avoid specifying this use, bccause one of art's outstanding attributcs is supposet to be a ccrtain uselessncss; or then again peoplc say that its usefulness consists in the fact that there is something in it which evades common usage and is loved disintcrestcdly. To bc ablc to lovcsomethingdisinterestedly is theflowerof the human spirit (200).
Artistic activity is the manifestation of an innate human desire for self-expression, a primal urge. To define art in this way may be tau tological but this doesn't seem to worry anyone. The only real prob lem is that such a definition bears increasingly little relation to reality. But just because of this, Brecht argues, there is no reason for this conception 'to be internally decomposed, broken up by means of its own concepts': rather,
it would be bettcr to cnsure that this happcns through thc action of rcality, not just by waiting paticntly but by provoking rcality in thc form of cxpcrimcnts and by making thc proccss morc visibk by hasten ing it and concentrating it. And we should kt new conccpts flow in
Brecht's SociologicaI Experiment
freely, incrcasc the intellcctual matcrial, for much harm is donc by too tenderly prcscrving old conccptual matcrial that no longcr has an adc quatcgrasp on rcality (200-201).
The determinant characteristic of art now is that it is made for sale on the market; and this fact radically alters the way we have to think about it. Traditional conceptions of art display, for example—except at the most extreme and therefore inconsequential level of generalization, where 'man' is defined as the tool-making animal—a certain hostility to any instrumental apparatus lAPParatfeindlichkcit~ (207). It may therefore be the case that
if the concept of art is no longer tenable for thc thing that arises when a work of art is transformcd into a commodity, thcn we will havc to carefully and prudently but without fear dispense witk this concept, if we don 't wish to liquidate the function of the thing itsclf; becausc it must pass through this stagc, without looking back. ~his is not an op tional digression from the true path. What happens to it here will change it absolutely, erase its past, to such an extent that when thc old concept is again takcn up—as it will be, why not?—it will no longer rccall thc thing that it oncc dcsignatcd Thc stagc of thc com modity will givc up its prcscnt spccificity, but it will havc invcstcd thc work of art with quik a diffcrcnt spccificity (201) .
The conceptualization of commodity production as a stage IPhasc~ makes it clear that Brecht is thinking in terms of a teleological dialec tic in which the 'bad side' of history is the way forward, not in itself but in the possibilities it offers of being opened out into its opposite. Revolutionary practice is at once the intensification and the transfor mation of capitalism. It is in this sense that
thc rccasting of spiritual valucs into commoditics ... is a progrcssivc pro ccss with which onc can only concur, providcd that progrcss is thought as a proccss, not an achicvcd statc, and thcrcfore that the stage of thc commodity is sccn as a stagc that can bc ovcrcome by furthcr progrcss (20 1 -204) .
The new technical resources which are destroying, amongst other things, the ideology of 'the human' and which seem to be entirely in the service of profit 'will, once they get into the right hands, be capa ble of quite different things. It is our task to help them get into the right hands' (204). Bourgeois aesthetics has become riddled with con tradictions (for example, between an ideology of the expressive func tion of the author and the practical untenability of such an ideology). In its practice capitalism is always perfectly consistent; but
if it is consistent in practice, thcn it is inconsistcnt in idcology. What cvcr it docs that is useful it does for itself; but because of this it is not just for itself that it is useful. And things thcn come to the point where thc only hindrancc to thc progrcss of capitalism is capitalism itsclf (204) .
page 22
Appendi~
The contradictory accommodation of legal doctrine to the catego ries of author and intellectual property is analysed in very similar terms, but with primary reference to the French legal system, by Edelman ( 1979) . In France, property rights were initially not allowed in respect of photography, which was defined as a mechanical repro duction rather than an act of creative consciousness; Edelman cites a judgement of 1861 which rules that 'this industry cannot be assimilat ed to the art of the painter or the sketcher who creates compositions and subjects with the sole resources of his imagination, or again, the artist who, following his personal feeling, interprets the view-points which nature offers him and which constitute a property in his name' (47; this judgement is also discussed by Bourdieu et al, 1965: 295). After the general industrialization of photography and, subsequently, cinema, the possibility of authorship came to be recognized; the key criterion employed to establish rights of author ship and property was that a photograph manifest the 'imprint of a personality' (51). Film, however, posed the massive and potentially revolutionary problem of a collcctivcsubject of creation; and this prob lem was resolved by recognizing the produccr (that is, capital) as the sole creative subject, the sole 'author' of a film (this is also the case in Australian law) Directors, writers, cameramen and so on were defined as merely the assistants of this subject, and therefore as being replaceable and interchangeable Through a series of court cases, the struggle waged by the authors for their "rights" as intellectual crea tors brought into the open the combination of intclkctual protuction and industrial production. It brought about the "appearance" of a collective subject caught up "in the process of technique, considered as a pro cess of commodity production" (Brecht), and whose moral interests are in the last instance subordinated to the maximum profit of the film product (56). Because of the overriding need to establish proper ty rights in relation to film, 'the cinema work has its "author", cvcn if thc author is not a subject but a proccss ', the legal decisions spell out very explicitly that 'thc truc crcativc subjcct is capital '(57) .
Bourdieu, P et al (1965) Un art moytn: essai s~r l~s usages so~iaux d~ la
photographi~, Paris Minuit
Brecht, B (1964) Br~h~ on ~h~atr~, trans J Willett, New York Hill and
Wang
.... (1967) 'Der Dreigroschenprozess', S~hrift~n ~.ur Lit~ratur und Kunst I
Glsammelt~ Wcrkl 18, Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp
Edelman, B. (1979) Own~rship of th~ Image: El~mcnts for a Marxist '7heory of
Law, trans E Kingdom, London Routledge and Kegan Paul
My thanks to Horst Ruthrof for help with the German text
John Frow teaches at Murdoch University
New: 16 September, 1997 | Now: 13 November, 2019