The tone and tenor alternate throughout the book, ranging from outright condemnation to anguished lament. Images of victims are legion, as Brecht\u2019s sympathies obviously lie with the proletariat\u200a\u2014\u200asoldiers, workers, and civilians.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps the first thing to recognize is that the phrase \u201cto take a position\u201d actually belongs to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin claimed that the most effective tool for creating proletarian alienation and promoting social change was the avant-garde technique known as montage, a procedure that \u201cinterrupts the context into which it is inserted.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Walter Benjamin, \u201cThe Author as Producer,\u201d in Understanding Brecht<\/em>, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), 99.<\/span> In his 1934 essay \u201cThe Author as Producer,\u201d Benjamin enthusiastically aligns Brecht\u2019s epic theatre with the most advanced modernist techniques, such as John Heartfield\u2019s photomontages and Soviet film and radio: \u201cIt brings the action to a standstill in mid-course and thereby compels the spectator to take up a position towards the action, and the actor to take up a position<\/em> towards his part.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Ibid., 100 (emphasis added).<\/span> Brecht\u2019s epic theatre departed from the function of traditional theatre as a benign form of entertainment. At its most successful, montage marked a distinct shift for the audience from passive spectator to active participant. Based on this principle, Brecht\u2019s epic theatre was an exemplary mode of disruption. Simply taking sides was not enough. With its capacity to \u201cinterrupt\u201d spectators out of their complacency, montage contained the revolution\u00adary potential to provoke change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Brecht\u2019s call for a \u201cnon-Aristotelian\u201d form of epic theatre, with its attendant issues of estrangement and alienation, is well known.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method<\/em> (London, New York: Verso, 1998).<\/span> Didi-Huberman, however, approaches Brecht\u2019s key theoretical concepts with an eye to accentuating the logic of montage that he detects at work in Kriegsfibel<\/em>. He is interested in the \u201cshock\u201d effect of the montage created by the juxtaposition between image and text. This collision, as opposed to imitating reality, results in the construction of something entirely new. The photo-epigrams force an interruption in representation by the media of the events of the war: \u201cLe montage rend \u00e9quivoque, improbable voire impossible, toute autorit\u00e9 de message ou de programme. C\u2019est que, dans un montage de ce type, les \u00e9l\u00e9ments\u200a\u2014\u200aimages et textes\u200a\u2014\u200aprennent position au lieu de se constituer en discours et de prendre parti\u201d (The montage makes any authority of message or program equivocal, improbable, even impossible. That is because, in a montage of this type, the elements\u200a\u2014\u200aimages and texts\u200a\u2014\u200atake a position rather than being constructed into discourse and taking a side).7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Didi-Huberman, Quand les images prennent position<\/em>, 118.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nSteve McQueen<\/strong>
Queen and Country<\/em> (detail), 2007.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & the family of Lance Corporal Benjamin Hyde
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\nBrecht\u2019s photo-epigrams act as singular disruptions to the framework of popular media. Take, for example, photo-epigram number 47, which shows an American soldier standing with his back to the camera and holding a gun. Beyond him is a beach, littered with bodies. The caption reads, \u201cAn American soldier stands over a dying Jap who he has just been forced to shoot. The Jap had been hiding in the landing barge, shooting at US troops.\u201d Originally published in LIFE <\/em>magazine, the image of an American soldier having just shot the \u201cJap\u201d conveyed a certain moral authority over the enemy, thereby legitimizing the participation in the war to an American audience. Brecht\u2019s epigram reads,
And with their blood they were to colour red<\/em>
A shore that neither owned. I hear it said<\/em>
That they were forced to kill each other. True.<\/em>
My only question is: who forced them to?<\/em>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Brecht, War Primer<\/em>, Photo-epigram 47.<\/span>
The juxtaposition between image and text is startling. Brecht forces the spectator to reread the image beyond the intended original context and reconsider the normative framework of American popular media during the 1940s. Moreover, the moral authority of the image begins to break down as Brecht relocates spectatorial empathy from the war hero to possible murderer. The American soldier\u2019s actions can no longer be rationalized, as the spectator\u2019s sense of narcissistic certainty is eroded. The montage destabilizes the authority claimed by the news image. Instead of simply taking sides, Brecht is intervening, taking a position.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nI want to turn to examine the contemporary relevancy of Brecht\u2019s criticism. Polemically, we might ask, Can montage hope to maintain a political or ethical function, to facilitate taking a stand? In Didi-Huberman\u2019s view, the answer is an emphatic yes\u200a\u2014\u200awhen montage is deployed as a tool of knowledge. After a generation of postmodernism\u2019s \u201cdepthlessness\u201d and \u201ca consequent weakening of historicity,\u201d as famously described by Fredric Jameson,9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism<\/em> (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 6.<\/span> taking a position is a resolute counter-manoeuvre. By evoking the Benjamin\u200a\u2014\u200aBrecht nexus, Didi-Huberman revitalizes an early strain of Marxist theory dedicated to combatting notions of artistic withdrawal and disengagement. For Didi-Huberman, the potential of montage is not restricted to the historical avant-garde but may be deployed as a tool for rethinking knowledge itself. To take a position is inextricably linked to interrogating existing knowledge and mass-media structures. It is to make the image a question of knowledge, and not illusion (\u201cC\u2019est faire de l\u2019image une question de connaissance et non d\u2019illusion\u201d).10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Didi-Huberman, Quand les images prennent position<\/em>, 67.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his discussion of British artist and director Steve McQueen in Sur le fil<\/em>, Didi-Huberman demonstrates the contemporary urgency of taking a position.11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Georges Didi-Huberman, Sur le fil<\/em> (Paris: Les \u00c9ditions de Minuit, 2013).<\/span> We might say that the spectre of Western Marxism returns to haunt the contemporary. Brecht\u2019s Kriegsfibel<\/em> assumed a position, disrupting the complacency of the spectator through the juxtaposition of image and text. Fast-forward to 2003 and Britain\u2019s highly contested involvement in President George W. Bush\u2019s \u201cwar on terror.\u201d The Imperial War Museum selected McQueen to visit Iraq as the official war artist. The situation in Basra, however, was extremely unstable, and McQueen was confined with the British troops in the \u201csafe zone\u201d for the duration of the six-day trip. He was faced with the vexing question of how to best represent the war if filming was out of the question. How to produce a work beyond the sanitized experience of an embedded war artist? As Benjamin had intuited, traditional modes of representation as illusion are ill equipped for penetrating the spectator\u2019s stupor. What was needed was an interruption, something capable of piercing the veil of homogenized official war images and forcing the spectator to think anew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\nSteve McQueen<\/strong>
Queen and Country<\/em>, 2007\u20132009, installation view, Manchester Central Library, 2007.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nAs a response to the dangerous conditions, McQueen began composing a new commemorative project, Queen and Country<\/em> (2007\u201309), seeking to give representation to the British service members who had died serving in Iraq. McQueen wrote to 115 families, requesting their assistance with the project by providing him with and allowing him to use an image of their son or daughter.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - For the background to McQueen\u2019s status as an official war artist, see David Evans. \u201cWar Artist: Steve McQueen and Postproduction Art,\u201d Afterimage <\/em>35, no. 2 (2007): 17\u200a\u2013\u200a20; Herbert Martin, \u201cPost War,\u201d Artforum International <\/em>45, no. 9 (2007): 57\u200a\u2013\u200a58.<\/span> Ninety-eight families responded positively. These images were subsequently made into sheets of postage stamps, a series of tiny commemorative portraits of the individual soldiers. The stamps were subsequently displayed in a large oak cabinet. By electing to portray the dead soldiers, Didi-Huberman argues, McQueen\u2019s gesture is a disruption of the sovereign representations of power traditionally embodied by stamps.13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Didi-Huberman, Sur le fil<\/em>, 58\u200a\u2013\u200a59.<\/span> What are we to learn from McQueen\u2019s very Brechtian intervention? He was not simply taking sides in the highly controversial commitment of British forces to the war in Iraq. To take a position is more than delivering an argument. Instead, his nuanced gesture was epistemological, designed to displace existing knowledge structures. By electing to choose the humble postage stamp as his preferred medium, he disturbed the normalized flow of carefully managed information that neutralizes the soldier\u2019s individuality. In Brechtian terms, we might say that McQueen\u2019s gesture is the creation of knowledge through making strange (Verfremdungseffekte<\/em>). Like the juxtaposition between images and text in Kriegsfibel<\/em>, the stamps interrupt spectators and jolt them out of their complacency, penetrating existing circuits of knowledge. McQueen forced a disruption in the Ministry of Defence\u2019s careful orchestration of images in the war on terror. By taking a stand, he gave representation to a caesura in visibility produced by institutionalized censorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is one final historical parallel worth considering here. Kriegsfibel<\/em> was completed in 1944\u201345, but it took almost ten years for it to be published in the format imagined by Brecht.14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - On this point, see Didi-Huberman, Quand les images prennent position<\/em>, 31\u200a\u2013\u200a32.<\/span> McQueen submitted the commemorative portraits to the Royal Mail to be issued as official stamps, but the concept was rejected by both the Ministry of Defence and the post office. In a bittersweet paradox, Queen and Country<\/em> was eventually purchased by the Imperial War Museum, neutralizing McQueen\u2019s gesture and its critical capacity to intervene. Queen and Country <\/em>remains unrealized\u200a\u2014\u200ait will be truly complete only when the U.K. postal service issues the stamps officially and they can begin circulating freely, as tiny pieces of Brechtian montage. <\/p>\n
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