What do you think?
Rate this book
Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology
In a world flooded with information, images, and sounds - where the distinction between real and simulated becomes increasingly blurred - one of the most pressing concerns of the theatre is how to subvert the stock responses of an audience and make the well-known fresh and meaningful again. Situating the practice of theatrical estrangement firmly in its social and political contexts, Theatre of Estrangement looks at how this concern has manifested itself in Russian and German avant-garde theatre. Silvija Jestrovic traces the concept of estrangement from its early formulation in the Russian Formalist School of Literary Criticism embodied in the experiments of the Russian avant-garde, to its so-called apotheosis in the theory and practice of Bertolt Brecht. Drawing from a variety of sources - theatrical performances, dramatic works, visual art, film, political events, biographical data - she demonstrates that theatrical estrangement is not only an abstract theoretical postulate, but also a practical artistic strategy shaped by the cultural and historical climate. In the historical avant-garde, Jestrovic argues, estrangement became a way of thinking, a means of comprehending the world, and even a lifestyle. Yet, devices of making the familiar strange are destined to erode in one historical and cultural context and become rediscovered in another to rejuvenate stale art forms and open the door to a fresh and more critical perception of reality. Theatre of Estrangement attempts to make that rediscovery.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2006
24 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 6, 2011
For some time I have wanted to find a book that gives a more indepth historical foundation for an aesthetics of reception. In this book from 2006, playwright and drama scholar Silvija Jestrovic analyzes the theories of defamiliarization that defined much of the early 20th Century avant-garde arts, specifically that of theatre. At the center of the book is a thorough analysis and comparison between the ideas of Russian literary critic and poet Viktor Shklovsky and the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Both figures are seen as the authors of the modernist notion of defamiliarization; Shklovsky with his theory of "ostranenie" and Brecht with his theory of theatrical distancing, or "Verfremdung."
Early in the book, Jestrovic outlines how the two terms "ostranenie" and "Verfremdung" both signify the same notion of estrangement. In both the Russian and the German, the sense is of a process, a becoming or even a procedure over that of a quality or principle. In other words, for Shklovsky and Brecht, the role of art is to make the familiar strange and thus call our attention to that which we hardly notice due to its habitualization. Neither are interested in the strange in itself or in uncovering the strangeness of life. Rather, they are concerned with how art calls our attention to the mundane allowing us to experience it anew. For this reason, Jestrovic argues, defamiliarization is ultimately an aesthetics of reception. After all, the familiar is different depending on the context and the experience of estrangement occurs within reception and not within the object in and of itself. Thus, both Shklovksy and Brecht shift the focus of the aesthetic from the production of the object to the production of its reception. Hence, theatre becomes a privileged site of those aesthetic concerns because of the dual importance of the text and its dramaturgy.
From here Jestrovic spends the majority of her book outlining how Shklovksy and Brecht go their separate ways in articulating the specifics of that aesthetic of reception. Here I found Jestrovic's book to be a incredible value even while often frustrated by the positions taken by the author. According to Jestrovic, Shklovsky comes closest to a phenomenological approach to the aesthetic; interested in how estrangement prolongs one's perception of an object. Part of that extenuation is the pairing of perception and the perception of perception. Thus, what "ostranenie" defamiliarizes is the habitualization of perception itself.
Jestrovic convincingly argues how Shklovsky's aesthetic is inherently political as a practice versus the notion of a political principle. As a practice, "ostranenie" demands a deep analysis of context in order to correctly ascertain that which has been habitualized and requires estrangement. For Jestrovic this fact explains how formalism became the basis of a Marxist sociology of poetics even as those same critics would fault formalism as a-political. She deftly shows how just as Russian avant-garde poetics made formalist analysis possible through the former's estrangement of language, so too did formalism make historical analysis possible by clarifying the very object of interrogation.
When Jestrovic turns to Brecht things become a bit more complicated. For Brecht, defamiliarization also had a political function; one that enabled the viewer to interrogate a represented situation that had been problematized by the play. Employing a range of techniques borrowed from Meyerhold, Beijing Opera, and literary strategies of montage, Brecht's thinking about estrangement developed over time from an early formalist metatheatre, to a didactic theatre of teaching dialectics to his later plays that endeavored to perform dialectics.
However, since defamiliarization is itself already a political practice, Brecht's attempts to communicate a political message truncates the estrangement method and, in Jestrovic's words, turn the method into a political principle. Over and again Jestrovic demonstrates her criticism of Brecht as manipulating the audience to arrive at a correct political analysis and thus undermining an aesthetics of reception at the service of a didactics. Adorno makes an appearance with his famous claim that Beckett and not Brecht is the most radical form of theatre because of the way it destabilizes the reference of the external world causing the viewer to question the very performativity of everyday life rather than Brecht's attempt to deliver Marxist orthodoxy.
To call Jestrovic's criticism of Brecht uncharitable is to miss the point. Early on Jestrovic determines to read her two artists against the grain of conventional wisdom. Thus, she attempts to establish Shklovsky's revolutionary credentials both in historical and practical terms. Brecht, however, she determines to assess on the basis of his aesthetics and not on the basis of the ideological claims he makes for his work. While this may seem reasonable, the effect of such an approach is to deny herself the capacity to critique Brecht on the basis of political practice. In other words, her critique of Brecht is at the level of the image of an analysis, thus because he is committed to delivering such an image, she dismisses him as manipulative. However, if she had extended the critique of practice from Shklovsky to Brecht she may have arrived at a much more sophisticated assessment.
During her chapter devoted to Brecht she describes the playwrights methodology for preparing his actors. The methodology involves a procedure of collective interrogation of tensions between the actor's concrete lived situation and the characters they were assigned to perform but for whom possessed no identification. The procedure is rigorous and involves complex dialectical engagements with critiquing the actions taken by the characters in the play. In the end, the actors arrive at a collectively authored analysis. It is that analysis that then gets delivered to the audience as a resolved political position and NOT as a procedure involving the audience in their own collective authorship of an analysis. Consequently, the politics of Brecht's theatre exists as a practice only for the actors and not for the audience -- the aesthetics of reception thus are truncated at this limit as Brecht struggles to figure out how the audience transitions from passive spectator to authoring agent. One could accuse Brecht of being too committed to the theatre to realize that the aesthetics of reception extend beyond the theatre to the theatricalization of life itself.
Jestrovic offers a useful account of how the early Russian avant-garde pursued exactly that form of theatricalizing everyday life through their early street spectacles. But again, since Jestrovic is interested in the image and not the practice (except when it comes to asserting Shklovsky's radical credentials) we get no analysis of the actual procedures used in those spectacles but only the image they produce -- an image that would have a tragic resemblance to the totalitarian spectacles of Stalin and Hitler. Jestrovic is careful to avoid the conservative argument that the trajectory of the avant-garde leads to authoritarianism -- citing the persecution of Russian avant-garde artists by Stalin's regime.
By failing to distinguish a political analysis from collective political action (even the collective action of producing an analysis), Jestrovic has little capacity to critique Brecht on either aesthetic or ideological terms. As a result, she comes down on the side of a form of defamiliarization whose politics is limited to changing perceptions of the world, rejecting as manipulative a politics of changing the world itself. Rather than presuming Shklovsky and Brecht represent an opposition, the more useful inquiry would ask what is the mechanism by which the performance of an estranged perception of the world transposes to the performance of estranged world? We begin to get a sense of what that mechanism, or interval to use a term from Vertov, might be in Jestrovic's account of Brecht's procedure of "not . . . but". The implications of that transposition, however, far exceed the disciplinarity of theatre and its familiar status in the autonomous arts under capitalism. Jestrovic would not be the first historian or theorist to fault the revolutionary avant-garde for daring to go too far in its aspirations to change the world but failing to go far enough in contributing a significant theory to a specific artistic medium. I remain suspicious when that "critique" is conditioned by a desire to interrogate aesthetics apart from political practice when political practice always entails an aesthetics and aesthetics is always an embodiment of a political practice.
Early in the book, Jestrovic outlines how the two terms "ostranenie" and "Verfremdung" both signify the same notion of estrangement. In both the Russian and the German, the sense is of a process, a becoming or even a procedure over that of a quality or principle. In other words, for Shklovsky and Brecht, the role of art is to make the familiar strange and thus call our attention to that which we hardly notice due to its habitualization. Neither are interested in the strange in itself or in uncovering the strangeness of life. Rather, they are concerned with how art calls our attention to the mundane allowing us to experience it anew. For this reason, Jestrovic argues, defamiliarization is ultimately an aesthetics of reception. After all, the familiar is different depending on the context and the experience of estrangement occurs within reception and not within the object in and of itself. Thus, both Shklovksy and Brecht shift the focus of the aesthetic from the production of the object to the production of its reception. Hence, theatre becomes a privileged site of those aesthetic concerns because of the dual importance of the text and its dramaturgy.
From here Jestrovic spends the majority of her book outlining how Shklovksy and Brecht go their separate ways in articulating the specifics of that aesthetic of reception. Here I found Jestrovic's book to be a incredible value even while often frustrated by the positions taken by the author. According to Jestrovic, Shklovsky comes closest to a phenomenological approach to the aesthetic; interested in how estrangement prolongs one's perception of an object. Part of that extenuation is the pairing of perception and the perception of perception. Thus, what "ostranenie" defamiliarizes is the habitualization of perception itself.
Jestrovic convincingly argues how Shklovsky's aesthetic is inherently political as a practice versus the notion of a political principle. As a practice, "ostranenie" demands a deep analysis of context in order to correctly ascertain that which has been habitualized and requires estrangement. For Jestrovic this fact explains how formalism became the basis of a Marxist sociology of poetics even as those same critics would fault formalism as a-political. She deftly shows how just as Russian avant-garde poetics made formalist analysis possible through the former's estrangement of language, so too did formalism make historical analysis possible by clarifying the very object of interrogation.
When Jestrovic turns to Brecht things become a bit more complicated. For Brecht, defamiliarization also had a political function; one that enabled the viewer to interrogate a represented situation that had been problematized by the play. Employing a range of techniques borrowed from Meyerhold, Beijing Opera, and literary strategies of montage, Brecht's thinking about estrangement developed over time from an early formalist metatheatre, to a didactic theatre of teaching dialectics to his later plays that endeavored to perform dialectics.
However, since defamiliarization is itself already a political practice, Brecht's attempts to communicate a political message truncates the estrangement method and, in Jestrovic's words, turn the method into a political principle. Over and again Jestrovic demonstrates her criticism of Brecht as manipulating the audience to arrive at a correct political analysis and thus undermining an aesthetics of reception at the service of a didactics. Adorno makes an appearance with his famous claim that Beckett and not Brecht is the most radical form of theatre because of the way it destabilizes the reference of the external world causing the viewer to question the very performativity of everyday life rather than Brecht's attempt to deliver Marxist orthodoxy.
To call Jestrovic's criticism of Brecht uncharitable is to miss the point. Early on Jestrovic determines to read her two artists against the grain of conventional wisdom. Thus, she attempts to establish Shklovsky's revolutionary credentials both in historical and practical terms. Brecht, however, she determines to assess on the basis of his aesthetics and not on the basis of the ideological claims he makes for his work. While this may seem reasonable, the effect of such an approach is to deny herself the capacity to critique Brecht on the basis of political practice. In other words, her critique of Brecht is at the level of the image of an analysis, thus because he is committed to delivering such an image, she dismisses him as manipulative. However, if she had extended the critique of practice from Shklovsky to Brecht she may have arrived at a much more sophisticated assessment.
During her chapter devoted to Brecht she describes the playwrights methodology for preparing his actors. The methodology involves a procedure of collective interrogation of tensions between the actor's concrete lived situation and the characters they were assigned to perform but for whom possessed no identification. The procedure is rigorous and involves complex dialectical engagements with critiquing the actions taken by the characters in the play. In the end, the actors arrive at a collectively authored analysis. It is that analysis that then gets delivered to the audience as a resolved political position and NOT as a procedure involving the audience in their own collective authorship of an analysis. Consequently, the politics of Brecht's theatre exists as a practice only for the actors and not for the audience -- the aesthetics of reception thus are truncated at this limit as Brecht struggles to figure out how the audience transitions from passive spectator to authoring agent. One could accuse Brecht of being too committed to the theatre to realize that the aesthetics of reception extend beyond the theatre to the theatricalization of life itself.
Jestrovic offers a useful account of how the early Russian avant-garde pursued exactly that form of theatricalizing everyday life through their early street spectacles. But again, since Jestrovic is interested in the image and not the practice (except when it comes to asserting Shklovsky's radical credentials) we get no analysis of the actual procedures used in those spectacles but only the image they produce -- an image that would have a tragic resemblance to the totalitarian spectacles of Stalin and Hitler. Jestrovic is careful to avoid the conservative argument that the trajectory of the avant-garde leads to authoritarianism -- citing the persecution of Russian avant-garde artists by Stalin's regime.
By failing to distinguish a political analysis from collective political action (even the collective action of producing an analysis), Jestrovic has little capacity to critique Brecht on either aesthetic or ideological terms. As a result, she comes down on the side of a form of defamiliarization whose politics is limited to changing perceptions of the world, rejecting as manipulative a politics of changing the world itself. Rather than presuming Shklovsky and Brecht represent an opposition, the more useful inquiry would ask what is the mechanism by which the performance of an estranged perception of the world transposes to the performance of estranged world? We begin to get a sense of what that mechanism, or interval to use a term from Vertov, might be in Jestrovic's account of Brecht's procedure of "not . . . but". The implications of that transposition, however, far exceed the disciplinarity of theatre and its familiar status in the autonomous arts under capitalism. Jestrovic would not be the first historian or theorist to fault the revolutionary avant-garde for daring to go too far in its aspirations to change the world but failing to go far enough in contributing a significant theory to a specific artistic medium. I remain suspicious when that "critique" is conditioned by a desire to interrogate aesthetics apart from political practice when political practice always entails an aesthetics and aesthetics is always an embodiment of a political practice.
Displaying 1 of 1 review