David Phillips

Brecht Reading – Thoughts

March 22nd, 2010

This is a quote I wish to ponder more in the coming weeks when reflecting on my Narrative Lab final.

The nature of culture has actually changed in the past century, due to perhaps a thousand things, but information technology and size of population.  There is less faith in concentration or reflection and much more faith in distribution and speed.  It’s not an age for producing myth.  We don’t want collective symbols. we want distributed information.  The idea of gathering people together to observe and contemplate shared values, that core idea, is weak now, I think.  So we we need to rediscover the idea of community and it will probably be discovered outside the market, which I think is all about distribution.
-Erik Ehn, NPR, 2005

Indeed, we do “need to find our fire again.  Our ability to collectively share.”  I have always loved creating stories, myths and worlds that never existed.  But there is much more commercial emphasis on very quick myths, something that they can throw together with narrative, meta-narrative and then slap a logo on it.  This was inevitable, perhaps with corporate reappropriation of art as it has done for ages.

Brecht: A Short Organum on Theatre

11
In establishing the extent o which wean be satisfied by representations from so many different periods – something that an hardly have been possible to the children of those vigorous periods themselves – are we not at et same time creating the suspicion that we have failed todiscover the special pleasures, the proper entertainment of our own time?
…12…We grasp the old works by a comparatively new method – empathy – on which they rely little.

Theatre has changed throughout the times to reflect the needs of that particular era.  Brecht mentions that the representations presented in Aristotle’s era are considerably different from Shakespeares.  Not just the play itself, but the performance style, it’s representation of humanity.
My question, which may be answered any minute, is what does that say about our generation?  We a generation devoid of new myths.  We have rehashes, reboots, reimaginings, and retellings of the same material over and over again.  Reruns and DVD sales of yesteryears. Nostalgia, dismembering our capacity to look forward, but drag on our newly conceived notion of yesteryear.  Our myths are our childhood myths.  Transformers, Smurfs, Clash of the Titans, Bourne Identity.  These are all from our past, not from our present.  One could state it is our present shrouded in the guise of our past, and to that I would say we didn’t hear the myth the first time.  We did not learn from our stories the first time.  We did not heed our gods the first time.  So, the flood of reruns will run for 40 and 40 until they have awaited our memory newly cleansed.

20 But science and art meet on this ground, that both are there to make men’s life easier, the one setting out to maintain, the other to entertain us.  In the age to come art will create entertainment from that new productivity which can so greatly improve our maintenance, and in itself, if only it is left unshackled, may prove to be the greatest pleasure of them all.

my last favorite quote:

the alienation that is necessary to all understanding. When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.- Brecht on Alienation

Posted in Narrative Lab | No Comments »