Black Bucket Essays
Volume 1, Issue 3
“Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology…we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
- Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes
Nicole Herbert
Is it better to take part in a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the external environment . . . Or, on the other hand, is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world?
- Antonio Gramsci[1]
Žižek’s quote raises questions about how and why the world appears as normal and contains implications for the social potential of art. If ideology is no longer experienced as ideology and masks our unfreedom, is there some potential to counter these normalizing tendencies of ideology? Looking back to the ideas of Antonio Gramsci will situate ideology within the context of the everyday and analyzing the aesthetic strategies of Bertold Brecht will provide an option for deconditioning habitual perceptions.
In Gramsci’s view, ideology is a more conscious creation for its producers and a more unconscious one for its consumers (Freeden: 20). He also believed that everyone is a philosopher insofar as they engage in practical activity. Gramsci brought philosophy down to earth and considered how ideology exists in cultural practices. He examined the way that ideology functions at the level of tangible habits in the everyday world. From these ideas, he suggested making critical existing activity. Gramsci’s ideas provide a framework for seeing art making as being a part of a cultural apparatus, which can either reinforce or resist the ideological system of which it is a part.
In keeping with this idea of the social potential for art, Brecht delineates specific strategies for creating a theatre whose goal has been “to emigrate from the merely enjoyable” (Brecht: 179). These methods are discussed under the umbrella of Epic Theatre, in which an “interruption in action . . . constantly counteracts an illusion in the audience” (Benjamin: 235). Brecht developed this disruption, defined as alienation, with the audience in mind. Brecht describes an alienation effect as something that allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time this subject seems unfamiliar (Brecht: 179).
It is within this idea of looking at something again and becoming more responsible for perceptions that the social significance of Brecht’s alienation devices becomes more apparent. In the process of alienating or interrupting what is known, he is striving to “free socially-conditioned phenomena from the stamp of familiarity which protects them against our grasp today” (Brecht: 192). This liberation facilitates a conversion from “general passive acceptance to a . . . state of suspicious inquiry” (Brecht: 192).
By developing this questioning attitude, individuals can begin to critically re-examine what they have accepted or taken for granted about the world. As such, the alienation effects on stage, which are directed at stimulating the spectator’s reason, create the potential for change off stage. Perhaps further cultivating this potential for change can help us to articulate our unfreedom and re-experience our relationship to ideology as ideology?
Bibliography:
Brecht, Bertold. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.
Benjamin, Walter. Reflections, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1978.
Freeden, Michael. Ideology: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Gramsci, Antonio. The Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers: 1971.
[1] Quoted in Gramsci, Antonio. The Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers: 1971 (333).
Volume 1, Issue 3
“Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology…we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
- Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes
Nicole Herbert
Is it better to take part in a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the external environment . . . Or, on the other hand, is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world?
- Antonio Gramsci[1]
Žižek’s quote raises questions about how and why the world appears as normal and contains implications for the social potential of art. If ideology is no longer experienced as ideology and masks our unfreedom, is there some potential to counter these normalizing tendencies of ideology? Looking back to the ideas of Antonio Gramsci will situate ideology within the context of the everyday and analyzing the aesthetic strategies of Bertold Brecht will provide an option for deconditioning habitual perceptions.
In Gramsci’s view, ideology is a more conscious creation for its producers and a more unconscious one for its consumers (Freeden: 20). He also believed that everyone is a philosopher insofar as they engage in practical activity. Gramsci brought philosophy down to earth and considered how ideology exists in cultural practices. He examined the way that ideology functions at the level of tangible habits in the everyday world. From these ideas, he suggested making critical existing activity. Gramsci’s ideas provide a framework for seeing art making as being a part of a cultural apparatus, which can either reinforce or resist the ideological system of which it is a part.
In keeping with this idea of the social potential for art, Brecht delineates specific strategies for creating a theatre whose goal has been “to emigrate from the merely enjoyable” (Brecht: 179). These methods are discussed under the umbrella of Epic Theatre, in which an “interruption in action . . . constantly counteracts an illusion in the audience” (Benjamin: 235). Brecht developed this disruption, defined as alienation, with the audience in mind. Brecht describes an alienation effect as something that allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time this subject seems unfamiliar (Brecht: 179).
It is within this idea of looking at something again and becoming more responsible for perceptions that the social significance of Brecht’s alienation devices becomes more apparent. In the process of alienating or interrupting what is known, he is striving to “free socially-conditioned phenomena from the stamp of familiarity which protects them against our grasp today” (Brecht: 192). This liberation facilitates a conversion from “general passive acceptance to a . . . state of suspicious inquiry” (Brecht: 192).
By developing this questioning attitude, individuals can begin to critically re-examine what they have accepted or taken for granted about the world. As such, the alienation effects on stage, which are directed at stimulating the spectator’s reason, create the potential for change off stage. Perhaps further cultivating this potential for change can help us to articulate our unfreedom and re-experience our relationship to ideology as ideology?
Bibliography:
Brecht, Bertold. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.
Benjamin, Walter. Reflections, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1978.
Freeden, Michael. Ideology: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Gramsci, Antonio. The Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers: 1971.
[1] Quoted in Gramsci, Antonio. The Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers: 1971 (333).
