Understanding Brecht

Benjamin, Walter. (1973). Anna Bostock (Trans.). London, UK: NLB. (first published in 1966 by Surhkamp Verlag)

In the introduction, Stanley Mitchell traces the literary partnership of the revolutionary socialist movement between Brecht and Benjamin. Among others, Mitchell highlights the use of montage found in Brecht that connects the two. To Benjamin, Mitchell maintains, montage is a tool to connect dissimilars in a way to 'shock' people into new recognitions and understandings and 'dislocate' them in modern industrial life. (vii-xix)

The Author as Producer (85-104)
(This address was delivered at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, on 27 April 1934.)
In his criticism of modern literacy, Benjamin asserts that writers should possess political correctness as well as progressive literary techniques. His perspective is clearer in another article, Conversations with Brecht, in the same book.

[T]he attainment of technical progress in literature eventually changes the function of art forms (hence also of the intellectual means of production) and is therefore a criterion for judging the revolutionary function of literary works. (p.106)

In this vein, he regards the Soviet press as a revolutionary place for literarization of living condition, where readers gain access to authorship as an expert.

Benjamin criticizes two literary bourgeois left intelligentsia movements, Activism and New Objectivity that function as a counter-revolutionary mechanism, despite their intention, because the writers do not build solidarity with proletariat as a producer, but only in the mind. Herein Benjamin brings in Brecht, who coined the phrase 'functional transformation' to emphasize a progressive intelligentsia who literates production means and participate actively in the class struggle. In echoing Brecht's notion of the use of production apparatus in the direction of Socialism, Benjamin criticizes that New Objectivity merely supplies production apparatus with a vision of change:

The characteristic feature of this literature is the way it transforms. political struggle so that it ceases to be a compelling motive for decision and becomes an object of comfortable contemplation; it ceases to be a means of production and becomes an article of consumption. (p. 96-97)

[Here what Benjamin means by production becomes clearer. I think it is to trigger political actions among the people and let them become collaborators. His demand to progressive writers is not trivial. He repetitively mentions that commitment is necessary but not sufficient and urges writers to turn readers or spectators turn into collaborators by means of utilizing improved appartus in their work.

In other words, his products must possess an organizing function besides and before their character as finished works...The crucial point, therefore, is that a writer's production must have the character of a model: it must be able to instruct other writers in their porduciton and, secondly, it must be able to place an imporved apparatus at their disposal. This apparatus will be the better, the more consumers it beings in contact with the produciton process--in short. the more readers or spectatirs it turns into collaborators. (p. 98)

Benjamin exemplifies Brecht's epic theatre, a technique used against creating an illusion among the audience by interrupting actions. In other words, epic theatre uncovers the conditions of our life by interrupting the dramatic processes so that the audience, distantiated from what is performed on the stage, can recongnize them as real with astonishment, not as in the theatre of naturalism.

The purpose of epic theatre is to construct out of the smallest elements of behavior what Aristotelian drama calls 'action'...It sets out, not so much to fill the audience with feelings--albeit possibly feelings of revolt--as to alienate the audience in a lasting manner, through thought, from the conditions in which it lives. (pp. 100-101)

Conversations with Brecht (105-121)