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The Donkey, the Apparatus, and a Politics of History by Philip Glahn

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July 24, 1934On a horizontal beam supporting the roof of Brecht’s study, there is a painted inscription: “The truth is concrete.” On a window ledge stands a little wooden donkey that can nod its head. Brecht has hung a little notice around its neck with the words: “I, too, must understand it.”

—Walter Benjamin Notes from Svendborg

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To think history through technology is to think technology as history, as a productive apparatus of technical, social, and aesthetic dimensions. Technology is at once tool, labor, and occasion. It is the material narrative of liberation, of progress, of catastrophe, one that is continuously propelled by its own myths and promises to move beyond binaries of good and bad, utopian and dystopian. As history, technology articulates the problem of reason, itself a question of expediency, individuation, and assimilation, and, as Devin Fore has recently elaborated, the possibility of a reconstruction of the economy of labor as multiple, layered acts of aesthetic, intellectual, physical, and sensory making. The gap that opens up between the subject and the outside through the use of technological devices—the delay, the mediation that allows for the experience of the self as both product and producer of world, across all times—this sensation, this being, is history. As such, technology is the prosthesis of history, or rather, making is a prosthetic act: a potentially—dare one call it—proletarian project of transformation, one which understands and applies history as constructed, determined, and thus malleable.

If read through the biographic lens of artistic idiosyncracy, Walter Benjamin’s recollection of Brecht’s Svendborg study gives a disparagingly simplistic account of

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the playwright’s politics of history: a vulgar Marxist materialism and dogmatic idea of pedagogical agency. But Benjamin’s almost allegorical description, as well as Brecht’s aesthetic practice, tell a more nuanced story of related, intertwined devices: the truth is concrete precisely as an image on a physical structure, a beam that supports the house. That the sign around the donkey’s neck refers to itself (the sign) as much as it points to its maker as “understanding”, is less the act of bestowing pre-conceived knowledge than the struggle over the mediation of different experiences. The donkey is not the regrettable idiot in need of saving, but a beast of burden marked by its stubbornness and wit. While the horse is broken in, saddled, and obediently directed by reins and spur, the donkey is an unreliable companion, mediating between an apparently spontaneous and volatile imposition of self-willed refusal and a self-less, other-directed, quasi-mechanical toil.

Brecht’s practice never relied on or implied a proletariat in the traditional, singular sense, just like his notion of subjectivity was never marked by individuation, separation, or containment. The audience and constituency of his work were more proletarian than proletariat: a shifting, evolving, living structure of attributes and attitudes, an ongoing negotiation between

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truths and experiences, and their consequent transformative incongruities. In 1934, in Svendborg, Brecht was in exile, with no coherent or ideal addressee for his plays and essays and poems, the German proletariat then anything but the revolutionary subject of history. The donkey is the proletarian in all its multiplicity, with its many roles and identities existing simultaneously; he resists capitalism’s imperative to individuate, contain, limit. He opposes; yet is a conscious subject of (and is subject to) the forces of exploitation and alienation. His cleverness and stubbornness are evidence of his productive refusal to be assimilated according to categorical delineations of self and other, present and absent, given and possible.

According to Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s 1981 History and Obstinacy, German folktales—unlike other European mythological traditions—do not focus on morals of behavioral consistency and emotional stability (the very foundation of bourgeois subjectivity), but deal with the problem of negotiating the boundaries between being an encultured, independent subject and a mute, natural object. Animals easily slip into human roles and humans exhibit animalistic traits; cleverness and cunning are often deferred to wolves, cats, and rabbits; violence is the resort of those

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humans who need to be assured of being (with)in reason and rationality—which are constituted by the construct of a whole and coherent self, even if a situation, or experience, insists otherwise. Reason is the lore of which these stories tell. At stake is not resolution (be this or be that), but rather the ability to critically distinguish between interiority and exteriority, and how to internalize their specific historical attributes to form a proper self. Technology, for Negt and Kluge, is intrinsic to this relationality:

it is the physical and cognitive prosthesis used by humans to progressively engage with the world. Technology originates in a certain anthropological lack or deficiency: unlike other animals who are defined by mechanisms of competition and survival,

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humans have exteriorized thought and action into “cultural artifacts that range from alphabetic writing to industrial factories.”1 Yet technology is not just the tool, it also manifests the relationality itself: it is the very constellation of truth (as concrete image and material reality), device (as exteriorization), and self (as social subject and object). History is the quality of this shifting constellation at a specific moment.

But whenever history is presented or perceived as unhistorical, as expropriated, as static, through nostalgias and utopias, then technology becomes an apparatus in Giorgio Agamben’s sense: “… a pure activity of governance devoid of any foundation in being.”2 Brecht was fascinated with the antidote to this situation, the counter-apparatus: technology that is aware of history’s contingency and determinability, and used as a social means of knowledge production. When writing in 1932 about the necessity to turn the radio into an apparatus of communication (a tool which, according to him, was merely “one-sided where it ought to be two-”), he was not solely advocating increased correspondence between people, but rather demanding that technology constitute a relationality between subject and object, between self and environment.3 As Kluge argues, this process of relationality is always violent, rather than natural or

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inherent. It never allows for the self to be at rest, to be autonomous, to be whole; but it is at its most violent in those moments when the work done onto and by the self ceases to be proletarian, hence when it ceases to be the site of both affirmative and ungovernable production of attributes, recoiling instead into an unambiguous shell of forced stability. The counter-apparatus elaborates technology through a proletarian intelligence, figured here by the donkey: it retools the economy of making and assembling that reaches beyond the container, beyond the synthesis that is the bourgeois, individuated self.

Leu and Tiven both present various accounts and propositions of technology as history prosthesis, as extension and making of self(s). Among and between the various projects is a weaving of different moments and possibilities of perception and knowledge production, of familiarity and defamiliarization. The donkey figures predominantly, often literally: in some instances, it is embodied by proximate figures, personas, and objects, at times a culmination of seemingly disparate projections and experiences, forcibly bundled to cohere, to make sense; at other times their playful, strategic extension and variation. Leu extends historical time, slows down, provides a knowledge of history through history. His investigation into Cold War ideology, the 1941 animators’ strike, and Walt Disney’s

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Pinocchio articulates an enduring desire of the capitalist apparatus to produce self-containing forms of subjectivity. In Disney’s 1940 film based on Carlo Collodi’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), children who won’t or can’t comply with social “human” behavioral norms are turned into donkeys: they are brought to “Pleasure Island” where, encouraged to partake in as much “pandemonium” and “bedlam” as possible, their transformation from human into animal is completed, and results in a lifetime of servitude in the circus and salt mines.

The donkey is the negation of the reasonable, the compliance with “how life is,” and each transgression, each marginalized, repressed trait—asocial, vulgar, violent, attributes reserved for the institutions of humanist society—is punishable by the modern subject’s greatest fear: reification, the non-being of the soulless thing. Within Leu’s project, this demonization of the non-

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bourgeois self is underlined by Disney’s own attempts to pugnaciously quell strikes among his staff and artists, and his subsequent denouncement of former animators as Bolsheviks and Communist agitators. The truth is palpable as images projected onto striking entertainment workers as much as their labor playfully animates ideologies of proper social conduct. No surprise then, as Leu points out, that beyond concerns for job security and workplace exploitation the ungovernable artists sought a transformation of their craft: comics and cartoons were to depict differently (rather than treat differences in an equalizing, subsuming style), to rely less on formalist and realist concerns, to show things less as among the de-fault-line of how they “are” and a fantastic “what they’re not,” but a more complex montage of the visible and invisible that determine the experience of the everyday, the concrete possibilities that arise of seeing them together, in reciprocal relation.

Brecht had also made himself the subject of such multiple, determined layers of overlapping attributes and assumptions, of vying voices and impulses. Summoned to appear in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee the playwright never lied when asked about his party affiliations (none) or the revolutionary tenor of his works (throughout). In a cunning display of

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proletarian intelligence, Brecht reconstructs the ambiguous notion of truth under capitalist ideology, of speaking outside of history, out of context, as an ultimately depoliticized act. He narrates and performs authorship as a plural endeavor, accusing the translation of his work into English of presenting a different pursuit of artistic truth, and presents fascism as the de facto originator of his revolutionary writing. The truth is theater manifested, myth lived, and Brecht displays it as such.

This possibility of aesthetics as agency, as the rearticulation of history from a different moment, a different vantage point, finds its correlate in Tiven’s practice. His works offer a similar “profanation,” to use Agamben’s term: the possibility to ascertain, to experience more closely that which is otherwise fleeting, seemingly known, given. Yet there seems to be the suggestion that the historical constellation, the technological relationality between truth, apparatus, and experience provides a knowledge of, or a sensibility to, the limits rather than the potentials of progressive transformation. The donkey appears as a digital animation before a green and thus technically interchangeable background. His cargo are explosives and he is sent to a nearby city, presumably to carry out a deadly mission. The bearer of catastrophe and terror trots along but

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never gets anywhere, the ground under his feet lacks traction, the environment never manifests. What the donkey does, for whom, and why; how the motives for his deployment relate to assumptions about the so-called nature of the beast; and the bucolic quality of the device against the ostensibly inherent, primitive barbarism of its proprietors, are all suspended in looped, high-tech, virtual repetition. Knowledge of the first device (donkey) is availed through the second (animation), the symbolic isolation of the former finds a collaborator in the latter, affirming the ideological ties between order, reason, chaos, and terror. Tiven juxtaposes another prosthetic extension of the frantically rationalized desire for omnipotent control. Footage of bionic, robotic birds tell of the ever-modern yearning to make machines that mimic nature, an almost disarmingly honest display to naturalize the instruments that account for the retardation of our collective human physical, cognitive, emotional and psychological being. This bird never leaves the ground, pathetically flapping its wings, causing its engineers a good deal of embarrassment. But the strangely dark humor that accompanies these pictures, be it those of the estranged donkey or the Icarian automaton, resides not so much with the farcical inability to perfect mechanical mimicry, but in the uneasy shrinking of the distance between what the bionic bird

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(ultimately) sees and knows and what we see and know: the ever-greater proximity and resemblance of human and machine in the production and utilization of information and knowledge; the loss of distance, the conflation and collapse of history and technology, the inability to discern the relationality between truth, device, and self.

Leu and Tiven each forge their own cognitive, affective constellation, a complex relation between different moments and historical potentials, not as utopia versus dystopia, nor, as many a contemporary argument charts it, a shift from industrial to information fabrication (where the former was abundant in possibilities of resistance due to the schisms between the material and ideological, the real and ideal, knowledge and experience; and the latter is doomed to a conflation between human and machine, a world of integrated commodities). Instead, there is a proposed urgency to understand that the continuity of prosthetic production was always determinedly multiple in exteriority and subjectivity, including the making of ideas and images and identities—and of the proletarian as the struggle over ownership of this extended notion of production: not a class, but an active, powerful agency, and alliances of attributes and attitudes in an evolving historical, technological constellation.

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Endnotes:1. Devin Fore, “Introduction”, in Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, History and Obstinacy, New York, Zone Books (2014), page 282. Giorgio Agamben, ‘What Is an Apparatus?’And Other Essays, Stanford University Press,2009, page 113. Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication”, Bjitter des Hessischen Landestheaters Darmstadt, No. 16, July 1932