Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 215 Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction Jack Davis Truman State University Abstract: This article explores the utility of Bertolt Brecht’s thought for the “postnatural” turn in the humanities as exemplified in the work of Timothy Morton. Brecht’s theory and praxis aim at unsettling “natural” concepts and ways of life, exposing them as historically and socially determined and therefore contingent. In a similar way, Morton and other theorists of the posthuman turn argue that “nature” is an ideological description of an interwoven totality of human and nonhuman actors so interconnected as to be indistinguishable. Furthermore, both Morton and Brecht borrow from Eastern thought to inform their theories: Morton from Buddhism, Brecht from Taoism� However, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that Brecht and Morton part ways when it comes to the question of contradiction. While Morton describes a differential network of interrelated actors coexisting in a “mesh” without center, Brecht insists on antagonism within difference. It is the emphasis on contradiction — and not merely difference as such — that distinguishes Brecht’s dialectical anti-naturalism from Morton’s “ecology without nature�” Keywords: mesh, Verfremdung, dialectic, Hollywoodelegien, humankind, naturalism A cursory reading of Bertolt Brecht’s writing would suggest that his stance towards the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world is clear� In numerous poems and dramatic situations, he pits heroic workers or other human agents against the forces of a recalcitrant nature, sometimes in the name of material or technological progress, other times as part of a vain struggle for survival which they are doomed to lose. For example, in The Flight over the Ocean the heroic pilot must confront and overcome the personified antago- 216 Jack Davis nists of “the Fog” and “the Snowstorm.” In The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the two farming collectives in the frame story decide to flood the valley to plant fruit trees; little thought is given to the ecological impact of this action. Other times, nature is a primal force that threatens humanity: the primeval forests in The Ballad of Cortez’s Men which strangle the eponymous figures, or the winds that Baal predicts will herald the age of human extinction (Knopf 12; Kleinschmidt 9). The nonhuman natural world appears as a force external and other to human beings, a force which must either be conquered or acceded to (Kleinschmidt 7). Ecology, as in the famous “conversation about trees” in “An die Nachgeborenen,” seems at best a distraction from the “real” issues, and at worst a threat to human prospering� We see in these examples the first way in which Brecht’s texts form an “ecological archive”: as documents of the twentieth-century conquest of nature celebrated by a Marxism in keeping with the spirit of the real existing socialism of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, with ecological results qualitatively no different from the ravages of capitalism. Seen from this first perspective, Brecht would seem to have little to offer the present ecological crisis. Furthermore, given recent scholarship which argues for the necessity of new epistemological and ontological frameworks which explicitly call into question the two categories Brecht was most concerned with (humans and nature), it would seem that Brecht’s thought is unfit for the age of catastrophic climate change. This article is occasioned, however, by the tantalizing similarities between several key concepts in Brecht’s thought and the theoretical framework on ecology developed by Timothy Morton. In a series of books including Ecology without Nature, The Ecological Thought, Hyperobjects and Humankind, Morton has argued for the need to fundamentally rethink the categories we use to conceptualize the natural world. Morton’s work follows much other recent writing on ecology that explicitly posits itself as “post-” or “anti-”natural in claiming that the term “nature” is an ideological screen that obscures and occludes other views on ecology. According to Morton and other writers in the “post-natural” vein (most notably Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway), nature and culture are inextricably interwoven to the extent that they are indistinguishable� 1 Indeed, Morton argues through-out his work since Ecology without Nature that not only is the border between nature and culture undecidable, but that insisting on this border is actually pernicious to the goals of true ecology� 2 Therefore, Morton argues that the most pressing issue for contemporary ecology is the need to do away with the concept of “nature” entirely and replace it with superior concepts and metaphors for thinking the “ecological thought”: the interconnection of all Being, human and nonhuman� 3 It is in Morton’s discourse of “denaturalization” that a comparison between his writing Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 217 and that of Brecht presents itself. Brecht’s theory and practice of historicization, gestus and Verfremdung, focused as they are at unsettling seemingly natural positions and ways of seeing in order to make historical and material contingencies visible, appear at least somewhat compatible with much recent ecological theory that troubles the nature/ culture distinction, including Morton’s. Morton espouses an “ecology without nature,” while Brecht’s dramatic theory aims at disclosing the ideological dimension of supposedly “natural” relations� Morton’s early writing on ecology launched a critique of “ecomimesis” (the attempt to “render” an environment through text), while Brecht’s early polemics inveighed against the attempt to create a sense of “milieu” in the theater of Naturalism (see discussion below). Furthermore, both Brecht and Morton propose what at first seem to be similar solutions to the aesthetic impasses they identify: ways of seeing the everyday world in a new, “strange” light. For Brecht, this means deploying the Verfremdungseffekt to highlight social relations; for Morton, it means encountering nonhumans as “strange strangers” within an infinite “mesh” of beings associated only through difference (Morton, Ecological Thought 28, 38). There are further resonances between Brecht and Morton’s thought. Both appropriate eastern philosophy in their critiques of the natural. It is well known that Chinese theater had a profound impact on Brecht’s theorization of the Verfremdungseffekt. Not only that, Brecht also had an acute interest in the “flow” of Taoism, which he conceived of as an eternal flux that exposes the transitoriness of all naturalized concepts, destroying and destabilizing all concretions. 4 Morton in turn relies on Buddhist thought as an antidote to “nature,” using it to inform his concept of the “mesh” (Morton, Ecological Thought 39). But what are the actual commonalities between Brecht and Morton’s thought? Are their particular strains of “anti-naturalism” actually compatible at all? It is the aim of this article to articulate the differences in such a way as to highlight both the utility of Brecht’s work and its potential as an alternative to Morton’s in addressing the challenge of global climate change� The crux of my juxtaposition will be Morton’s concept of the “strange stranger,” that is, the nonhuman “person” whom we meet in the “mesh” (Morton, Ecological Thought 38—39). Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s reading of Brecht, I will contrast this with the dialectic that Brecht develops in his writings on nature and the natural world, which informs his deployment of the principle of contradiction as a distinct kind of difference. I will then briefly tie this Brechtian method of “contradiction” to the work of Andreas Malm, who argues that the need for a concept of nature in the age of global warming is more important now than ever before. His concept of “historicized nature,” and his praise of 218 Jack Davis polarization and call for a return to “binary thinking,” strongly resonate with Brecht’s thought (Malm 185—88). Several authors in the burgeoning “second wave” 5 of ecocriticism in German Studies have engaged with Morton’s thought in readings of German literature (Groves; Schaumann and Sullivan). Others have contextualized or critiqued it within the field of German-language culture and philosophy including Niklas Luhmann and the Frankfurt School (Wilke; Müller; Bergthaller). This article adds to these emerging conversations on Morton in a German-language context by connecting them to scholarship on Brecht from before the “post- (or non-) human turn” in the humanities. Multiple scholars of Brecht have either theorized the concept of “nature” in his work or examined his writing and thought from an ecocritical perspective (Arendt; Heukenkamp; Irrlitz; Knopf; Kleinschmidt; Müller and Kindt; Powell). Furthermore, the “use value” of Brecht’s work for the ecological crisis has also not been neglected. To my knowledge, scholar and founder of Epic West theater R.G. Davis’s work represents the first attempt at applying Brecht’s thought to contemporary environmental problems� 6 Jost Hermand’s recent reassessment of Brecht’s work, Die aufhaltsame Wirkungslosigkeit eines Klassikers, also gives Brecht’s relationship to nature a central place. The first chapter of Hermand’s study makes a similar argument to the one put forward by R.G. Davis: Brecht’s thinking is valuable precisely for its tendency to simplify and reduce complexity while thinking through issues of ecology and economics (Hermand 14—30). This article represents a link between these two existing bodies of scholarship: one concerning nature writing in Brecht, and the other encompassing multiple attempts at conceptualizing an ecology without or beyond nature. Morton’s pathbreaking book Ecology without Nature is a reckoning with the practice of “ecomimesis” in nature writing and a demonstration of its deleterious effects for the cause of ecology. Ecomimesis, according to Morton, is a process by which nature writers seek to embed the reader in an environment through a series of rhetorical techniques (4). These techniques include, for example, the description of ambient sound and the use of paratactic lists of events occurring at the place of composition, often used to place the reader at the scene of writing (32). Ecomimesis, according to Morton, is a strategy of nature writing that seeks to evoke the place of its composition, while simultaneously suggesting that the reality of this place is “(1) […] solid, veridical, and totally independent (notably of the writing process itself) and (2) it would be better for the reader to experience it directly rather than just read about it […]” (30—31). “Strong” ecomimesis “purports to evoke the here and now of writing,” while “weak” ecomimesis is in effect whenever writing attempts to invoke an envi- Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 219 ronment (32—33). Put simply, “[e]comimesis is an authenticating device” (33). The problem with ecomimesis is that the more it seeks to embed the reader in a natural environment, the more that environment recedes into the “background” becoming something “over there” just out of reach of the writing (or reading subject). Ecomimesis promotes a type of false consciousness that sets human beings apart from nature and therefore unable to truly conceive of their intimate connectedness to it� What is the solution Morton proposes to the impasse that he identifies in ecological art and thought characterized by ecomimesis? A destruction of the idea of nature, and with it, the idea of place� In The Ecological Thought, which Morton calls a “prequel” to his book Ecology without Nature, he revisits the former book’s titular phrase, sketching out some of the implications for the radicality of an “ecology without nature”: Why ‘ecology without nature’? ‘Nature’ fails to serve ecology well. I shall sometimes use a capital N to highlight its ‘unnatural’ qualities, namely (but not limited to), hierarchy, authority, harmony, purity, neutrality, and mystery� Ecology can do without a concept of a something, a thing of some kind, ‘over yonder,’ called Nature. Yet thinking, including ecological thinking, has set up ‘Nature’ as a reified thing in the distance, under the sidewalk, on the other side where the grass is always greener, preferably in the mountains, in the wild. (Ecological Thought 3) The first consequence is this one: the destruction of the concept of nature robs us of the backdrop against which human thought can construct itself� The Ecological Thought is an attempt to understand the implications of what it would mean to think “truly” ecologically, that is, without this backdrop� Losing “nature” means losing the ontological anchor that guarantees humanity’s place in the ecosystem, and even the universe. We are left within a centerless web of being. “Thinking interdependence involves thinking difference,” Morton writes, “[t]his means confronting the fact that all beings are related to each other negatively and differentially, in an open system without center or edge” (39). As a way of understanding this “open system without center or edge,” Morton introduces the metaphor of the “mesh,” a concept which borrows from both Buddhism and post-structural linguistics� Like language, “[t]he mesh is also made of negative difference, which means it doesn’t contain positive, really existing (independent, solid) things. This should be an utterly mind-blowing idea, so don’t worry if you’re having trouble imagining it” he reassures his readers (39). As in the post-structural view of language, where in the absence of a master signifier to anchor them the other signifiers in a system float free in infinite play, within the natureless mesh there is no way to orient the human subject: 220 Jack Davis Consider Indra’s net, used in Buddhist scripture to describe interdependence: ‘At every connection in this infinite net hangs a magnificently polished and infinitely faceted jewel, which reflects in each of its facets all the facets of every other jewel in the net� Since the net itself, the number of jewels, and the facets of every jewel are infinite, the number of reflections is infinite as well.’ (39) The other beings that we meet in this mesh, according to Morton, are “strange strangers” (38). The redoubled alienation in the phrase indicates for Morton that the “strange stranger” is so foreign that it upends our conceptual and ethical categories such as “parasite” and “host”: In symbiosis, it’s unclear which is the top symbiont […]. Am I simply a vehicle for the numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me? Who is the host and who is the parasite? There is no longer a privileged “center” of ecology: There is no being in the “middle”—what would “middle” mean anyway? The most important? How can one being be more important than another? This creates problems for environmental ethics, which risks oversimplifying things to coerce people to act. (38) For Morton this radical decentering means that “[…] the ethics of the ecological thought is to regard beings as people even when they aren’t people” (8). Morton’s most recent book at the time of this writing, Humankind, is an expansion of the idea of thinking about “beings” as “people,” i�e�, collapsing the idea of the human and the nonhuman� It repeats not only the sentiment from The Ecological Thought in the quote above, but also some of the actual words themselves, verbatim� 7 The importance of nature and the natural world, especially in Brecht’s early poetry, has been a central focus for many scholars� 8 While not the only scholar to write on Brecht and nature, Ursula Heukenkamp has offered a succinct and convincing systemization of Brecht’s thought on nature, identifying three key moments in its development� According to Heukenkamp, Brecht begins with the attitude characteristic of his generation, which saw nature as ancient and unchanging (Heukenkamp 12). Paradigmatic for this stance is the passage in “Vom armen B.B.” depicting the “pissing” fir trees and their “vermin,” the birds (12). This intentional disdain for nature is combined with images — also in the early poetry — of the power of primal nature, which reclaims the humans unlucky enough to have tested themselves against it. The salient example here — picked up by Jan Knopf in his biography of Brecht as well — is The Ballad of Cortez’s Men, which imagines the conquistador and his retinue being strangled by limbs (Knopf 12). 9 This is a timeless, eternal and ahistorical nature which, as Sebastian Kleinschmidt indicates, is contrasted with the decadence of human society (9). Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 221 For Heukenkamp, the second phase of Brecht’s relationship to nature is exemplified by Der Ozeanflug� In this play and in other works from this time, people take a collective stance towards nature, with the goal of making it productive� In this concrete case, the pilot must confront and overcome the personified antagonists of “the Fog” and “the Snowstorm.” Heukenkamp observes that in Der Ozeanflug, the act of flying is seen as labor, and conquering nature is paradoxically connected to the overcoming of alienated labor (21). According to Heukenkamp, the figure of the pilot (who was explicitly tied to Charles Lindbergh in Brecht’s early drafts), is the first of three key “Forscher” figures used by Brecht in search of a model of unalienated labor. The other two are Galileo Galilei (from Leben des Galilei) and Tschaganak Bersijew (from the poem “Erziehung der Hirse”). “Erziehung der Hirse,” according to Heukenkamp, represents a “Gegenentwurf” to Galilei, and ultimately a reconciliation with nature for Brecht. In the figure of the illiterate farmer Bersijew, who invents a new method for growing millet, Brecht finds a model for a new harmony untainted by the romantic “return to nature” he disdained in his early work� Heukenkamp writes: “Die idealisierte Naturbeziehung soll ein Dreiecksverhältnis sein, in dem tätige Menschen, Natur und Gesellschaft miteinander korrespondieren” (25). In this analysis, an ecological lifestyle will be achieved once human relations are in some sense “renaturalized” in that they become “more human” once more (i.e., no longer characterized by “inhuman coldness”). This is a dialectical view on the human relationship to nature, where a new harmony is obtained only after a passage through alienation. 10 In summary, Brecht’s critique of nature does not appear to be a critique of the concept of nature itself, but rather of undialectical representations of nature and their implications for human relations and thought. The trajectory of Brecht’s thinking about the natural world leads him from a vision of nature as primal and unchanging, through a celebration of humankind’s ability to manipulate and conquer nature, towards a sort of latent ecological awareness� While Heukenkamp, Knopf and others convincingly trace the development of the aesthetics of nature in Brecht’s work, especially (though not exclusively) in his poetry, their considerations are largely concerned with the content of Brecht’s literary works, not the form of his language or the place of “nature” (in a sense that encompasses more than the natural world) in his thought more generally� 11 Morton’s critique of nature writing does not focus merely on writing that has ecology, or even “nature” as its object, but rather on the formal procedure of “ecomimesis,” that is to say, the way in which prose attempts to render an environment. In a similar vein — as I have suggested above — Brecht’s writings which are relevant to his “ecological archive” do not concern only the places in which he explicitly engages with nature or the natural world, but 222 Jack Davis extend to formal and aesthetic concerns as well. Often, these concerns (like Morton’s criticism of all writing that evokes an environment) have little to do with the representation of the natural world as such. For example, Brecht’s approach to ecology can also be read alongside his early critiques of Naturalism in the theater. The context of Brecht’s criticism of Naturalism is his tracing of the development of what he terms a dialectical form of dramatic writing. This writing begins with a critique of the bourgeois tendency to mistake culture for nature, a kind of definition which does in fact recall Morton’s intervention: Because artists, partly influenced by bourgeois Impressionist painting, had treated ‘natural objects’ undialectically, not seeing them as being in flux and capable of independent action but as parts of ‘Nature,’ as dead things, they had channeled the vitality into the atmosphere, into the effect ‘between’ the (base) words. This meant that instead of knowledge they had conveyed—‘experiences,’ in such a way that ‘Nature’ became an object of enjoyment […] and in a sense they ended up with a crude cannibalistic drama! (Brecht, Brecht on Theatre 53) While these polemics preserve “nature” as a category, they nevertheless identify the evocation of “milieu” as an ideological screen — in a similar way to Morton’s critique of ecomimesis 12 : This style was termed Naturalism, because it portrayed human nature naturally, that is to say, directly just the way it was (phonetically). The ‘human’ factor played an important role here: it ‘unified’ everyone (this sort of unification was all that was necessary). And the idea of ‘milieu as fate’ inspired compassion; the emotion that ‘one’ feels when one cannot do anything to help but does at least suffer vicariously. Milieu was treated as a natural phenomenon, immutable and inescapable. (53) Even if Brecht preserves the concept of “nature” he criticizes sharply the naturalization of “milieu,” i.e., environment. Notably, this naturalization is achieved through sonic (in Brecht’s terms, “phonetic”) means: the use of dialect that vouches for the authenticity of the social milieu being portrayed on stage. This may in fact remind us of Morton’s critique of “ecomimesis,” which is not solely concerned with writing about nature, but rather any kind of writing that seeks to evoke an “environment” and place the reader in it� 13 The linguistic evocation of sound, especially in its ambient form, is in Morton’s analysis one of the key components of ecomimesis. Naturalist theater, in its attempts to conjure milieu “phonetically,” (though not through what the words signify but rather through the dialectal inflection of the signifiers themselves) engages in a strictly formal ecomimetic practice, regardless of the actual content of the play in question. 14 Taking these formal considerations even further, we can see that even when the content of Brecht’s writing concerns the confrontation between the human Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 223 and the natural worlds, it is often highly “anti-ecomimetic.” For example, in the Hollywoodelegien (1942), Brecht’s terse lines sketch intimate connections between nature, culture and commerce. The bones of prospectors panning for gold in canyons are juxtaposed with oil rigs on the coast, which in turn power (economically or otherwise) the industry built by the sons of these unfortunate men: Am Meer stehen die Öltürme. In den Schluchten Bleichen die Gebeine der Goldwäscher. Ihre Söhne Haben die Traumfabriken von Hollywood gebaut� Die vier Städte Sind erfüllt von dem Ölgeruch Der Filme. (Brecht, Die Gedichte 283) There are a number of relationships set up here: the men’s corpses have been left to rot in the open like carrion, suggesting both the bestiality of human relations under capitalism and the animal (that is to say, physical) nature of human beings� Indeed, when we consider the fact that the oil being extracted by the rigs on the coast is itself made up of organic material compressed over geologic time, we are left with the impression that the bones of the dead gold prospectors will themselves become fodder for the machine of capital in the distant future� Furthermore, the “oil smell of film” is multivalent, calling to mind the status of film as an industry (like the oil industry), and thereby connecting cultural and economic production, but also the physical medium of the film stock itself. Celluloid and triacetate (two substances used in film stock at this time) are not derived from petroleum, but rather from cellulose — a natural product like oil. The oily smell of the film fills the cities, suggesting an omnipresent, inescapable web of interrelations between nature and culture: what Morton and other theorists might refer to as an “ecology without nature” in the Anthropocene� Capitalism has rendered the natural paradise of Southern California a hellscape� In the Hollywoodelegien, we are dealing with nature poetry that is at odds with the “ecomimesis” in Ecology without Nature. While there is an attempt to evoke an environment — that of Southern California — there is no attempt to place the reader at the site of the poem’s composition, the “as I write” gesture that Morton identifies as being particularly prominent in nature writing that displays characteristics of “ecomimesis.” Indeed, we can say that the way in which Brecht’s poetic practice appears to overlap with Morton’s theory, as presented in this early work, is not coincidental, insofar as Marxist thought underlies much of Brecht’s writing. As Timo Müller argues, in Ecology without Nature, Morton develops a method somewhat akin to Theodor Adorno’s in order to “[…] emphasize the dialectical reciprocity of all environmental experience […]. While classical ecocriticism tends to situate the work of art in relation to an idealized, 224 Jack Davis nonalienated nature, […] an aesthetics of ambience considers the work in its reciprocity with natural and cultural environments alike” (Müller 98). 15 This partial affinity with Brecht’s dialectical method falls away, however, when we delve further into Morton’s later work. These brief reflections on the formal procedures underlying Brecht’s poetic practice in the Hollywoodelegien may be connected to broader observations made by Fredric Jameson in Brecht and Method. Jameson points out that nature in Brecht (especially in the poetry) often appears as drained of color (“fahl”) or isolated (as in the single lonely cloud in “Erinnerung an die Marie A.”), while artificial structures seem imbued with life: the cities are a “jungle” as the translation of the famous play has it; the more accurate “thicket” still proves the same point. This is largely the same point that Heukenkamp makes about Brecht’s generational disdain for the natural world that is expressed in the first phase of his aesthetics of the natural. However, Jameson connects Brecht’s language itself, specifically its dependence on the definite article, to the impoverishment of nature, arguing that it highlights the isolation of the object in Brecht’s poetry, especially when applied to natural objects: the tree, the branch, the leaf ( Jameson 134). The formal procedure by which individual objects are isolated through the use of the definite article is a fundamentally anti-organic procedure which proliferates difference. However — and this point is key to understanding one of the fundamental distinctions between Brecht’s anti-naturalism and Morton’s — this procedure does not lead to the kind of celebration of difference as such which we might associate with post-structuralism, or, in the case of Morton, the post-human “mesh.” While Brecht plays with many of the same ideas of heterogeneity, multiplicity and difference that concern (for example) Deleuze, these qualities are not simply celebrated in and of themselves, they crystalize into something more. Jameson writes: […] it is […] crucial to understand that for Brecht, these qualities which we have been enumerating — dissonance, Trennung, distance, separation, surcharge, multiplicity and so on — also have a meaning [emphasis mine]� And it is a meaning rather distinct from that of non-identity or heterogeneity, which are the current terms of ideological celebration, even though it includes those and draws them into its own allegorical centrality. For that meaning is contradiction [emphasis mine], and a Brechtian method is not fully realized if we have not begun to understand how the merely distinct and differentiated is gradually to be drawn into contradiction itself, or rewritten as contradiction, unveiled and disclosed as contradiction; or, finally, like a role one studies, acted and acted out in the form of sheer contradiction as such. (76) The Brechtian principle of contradiction identified by Jameson is necessarily related to Brecht’s Marxism and its materialist dialectics. It is also, of course, Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 225 specifically connected to the notion of class struggle, the symptom of the central contradiction that traverses the social fabric according to Marx. Therefore, I will turn briefly to Morton’s Humankind, in which he explicitly confronts Marxist thought, attempting to subject it to a post-human turn so that nonhumans (i.e., “nonhuman people” in his parlance) can be included in its project of liberation. As he puts it in the opening line of the book: “A specter is haunting the specter of communism: the specter of the nonhuman” (1). For Morton, extending solidarity to nonhumans also means questioning the ontological distinctions between humans and nonhumans (and indeed, between life and death): The more we think ecological beings — a human, a tree, an ecosystem, a cloud — the more we find ourselves obliged to think them not as alive or dead, but as spectral. The more we think them, the more we discover that such beings are not solidly “real” nor completely “unreal”—in this sense, too, ecological beings are spectral. Since the difference between life and non-life is neither thin nor rigid, we discover that biology and evolution theory are actually telling us that we coexist with and as ghosts, specters, zombies, undead beings and other ambiguous entities, in a thick, fuzzy middle region excluded from traditional Western logic. (55) The upshot of Morton’s argument is not explicitly that humans are things, but rather that nonhumans are also “people.” This is both a revision and an expansion of the concept of the “strange stranger” laid out in The Ecological Thought� This concept may not actually be so foreign to us. After all, we all like to think of our pets as “people.” But what is largely — though not completely — absent in this book and other places in Morton’s writing is any sense of antagonism between humans and nonhuman “persons�” In Humankind, we find Morton refining his idea of the “mesh” and introducing the term “implosive holism,” a concept in which the whole is less than the sum of its parts, an infinite regress of “objects” that make up each individual being. Morton’s preferred metaphor for describing these objects is “rocking,” a movement that recalls the German Romantics’ favored term “Schweben,” but does not seem to involve actual conflict, just the “shimmering” between two positions (175). Where antagonistic relations between humans and nonhuman “strangers” are concerned, Morton remains largely ambivalent: The logic of the neighbor or of the stranger is the logic of the symbiotic real, not the logic of friend and enemy� Sovereignty and exception and decision are not capable of operating with the symbiotic real in mind, because they are based on the logic of exclusion� Stranger-logic means that the whole that is the biosphere is subscendent: it is tattered and jagged, it has pieces missing, it’s less than the sum of its parts. It 226 Jack Davis might then be the case that there can be no totality to rule them all, and that if this is only what communism means, we cannot think communism without metaphysical universalisms concerning the human� If, however, it is possible to imagine a host of communisms then we will be able to include nonhumans in communist thought� Interdependence (the basic fact of ecology) means that one lifeform is always excluded from a group: caring for rabbits means not caring for rabbit predators� Communisms can only be contingent, fragile and playful. (163) While the inherent conflict between rabbits and their predators seems to imply that a new ecology must draw battle lines, this front still remains undefined, and indeed perhaps undefinable in a completely non-anthropocentric ontology. In the final section of Humankind, Morton does offer the beginnings of a theorization of violence, but one without victims and perpetrators. This is the further exposition of the theory of “rocking” as an antidote to the binary distinction between activity and passivity: A new theory of action would alter how we think violence, which would be equivalent to a deep shift in notions of solidarity. Violence, in the new theory of action, would belong not to the greater explosive whole but to the fragile contingency (of whatever size). There would be a host of micro-violences (even though they might be ever so large), rather than a pantheon of macro-violences. (179) But what of those “macro-violences” (or host of “micro-violences”) which demonstrate a clear contradiction between the interests of humans and nonhuman “strangers”? The ultimate example of this ecological antagonism might be mosquitos. The WHO estimates there are 400,000 annual deaths from malaria alone, 16 a fact that has prompted some scientists to entertain the possibility of completely eradicating mosquitos. 17 In the antagonism between mosquitos and humans we can also see the antagonism between the denaturalizing tendencies of both Morton and Brecht. In Brecht’s writing, antagonistic relationships become political (and, in this case, ecological) litmus tests used to clarify, not problematize relationships. From difference arises contradiction as lines of conflict become visible. It happens that one particularly clear example of this process in Brecht is also a dramatization of the human-mosquito relation: the poem “The carpet weavers of Kuyan-Bulak,” the second in the cycle “Stories from the Revolution.” This poem tells the story of carpet weavers from a small town in the south of Turkestan who wish to honor Lenin� It is a time of contagion: Fever is going around: the train station Is filled with the buzzing of thick clouds of mosquitos that rise from the swamp behind the old camel burial ground Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 227 The train that visits this plague-stricken station also brings news that comrade Lenin is to be honored soon. The carpet weavers take up a collection for a bust of the late leader. But one of them, a Red Army soldier Stepa Gamaleew, noticing the way that the weavers’ hands tremble with fever as he collects their money, suggests that they honor Lenin instead by buying petroleum and dumping it in the swap behind the camel cemetery to kill the mosquitos. The carpet weavers agree: On the day of the ceremony, they carried their dented buckets, filled with the black petroleum one after the other out to the swamp and poured them in (Brecht, Die Gedichte 141; translation mine). The workers then install a plaque at the train station, commemorating their action in Lenin’s memory. Here, we have what seems to be yet another example of the heroic Marxism of Der Ozeanflug� It is in the principle of contradiction, however, where the two later stages in Brecht’s approach to nature — the heroic Marxist conquest of nature, and the “go-with-the-flow” Taoist conception — begin to show a commonality. As it happens, Brecht’s Tao-inspired “flow” does not entirely resist the questions posed by post-nature authors like Morton, Haraway and Bennett who wish to decenter humans and human agency� 18 One particular passage of Me-ti: Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things 19 takes up the question of the agency (or to be more precise, the life) of inanimate matter directly. The passage in question is one of several titled On the Flow of Things, and it crystallizes the difference between the (dialectical) contradiction posited by Brecht, and the glorification of the erasure of borders and celebration of difference as such in the above-mentioned discourses of post-nature. Me-ti begins with an observation: And I saw that nothing was completely dead, not even the deceased. The dead stones breathe. They change and are the cause of changes. Even the moon, said to be dead, moves� It casts light, although extraneous, on the earth and determines the trajectory of falling bodies and causes the sea water to ebb and flow. (55) However, this is not enough for Me-ti to conclude that one should speak of the moon as “alive”: “Yet, I saw, it is in a certain way dead; if, namely, you accounted for everything in which it lives, it is too little or is not relevant, and so it has on the whole to be called dead” (55). Me-ti gives a reason: For if we did not do that, if we did not call it dead, we would lose a designation, the very word dead and the possibility to name something we really can see� But since, 228 Jack Davis as we also saw, it is not dead, we must simply think both things of it and treat it like something that is both dead and not dead, though actually more dead […]. (55) Me-ti’s conclusion is dialectical in the sense that it preserves the original contradiction within a new perspectival frame� 20 It does not, however, erase the distinction between the moon and living things� It allows for the fact that the moon may in some sense be “alive,” while insisting that referring to it as “alive” would be to lose an important conceptual category� It shows, in other words, a tension or contradiction between the terms “living” and “dead” without insisting on the “undecidability” of this relationship, as we have seen in the passages from Morton above. Brecht offers contradiction as an alternative to both the neo-vitalist materiality of Bennett and the “implosive holism” of infinite difference posited by Morton. Like Morton, he offers a vision of beings and Being as ultimately characterized by difference. But for Brecht, some differences are more different from each other than others� The importance of Brecht’s writing as an archive of the ecological is obviously not to be found in his praise of an ecologically destructive variant of Marxism (even if this does not characterize all of his oeuvre). However, Brecht’s thought, in its willingness to draw lines, to posit and outline contradictions between the needs of the “strange strangers” (represented for, example, by the mosquitos) and the human beings who suffer from the parasites these strange nonhuman persons carry, may actually ultimately be better suited to a new ecological politics� In a time of rapidly increasing global temperatures our task is not to pour oil on the swap, but to keep the oil in the ground. This requires a dialectical view akin to Me-ti’s: it is not that there are not numerous causes and actors at work in the event called “global warming,” but certain concrete actors are more responsible for the extraction of fossil fuels than others. This means not positing a web of relations with no center, but placing responsibility where it is due� 21 As Brecht famously wrote in the Kriegsfibel under a photograph of a woman in the rubble of a destroyed house in Berlin: Such nicht mehr, Frau: du wirst sie nicht mehr finden! Doch auch das Schicksal, Frau, beschuldige nicht! Die dunklen Mächte, Frau, die dich da schinden, Sie haben Name, Anschrift und Gesicht. (172) 22 The position I have outlined here strongly resonates with Andreas Malm’s recent polemic against the philosophical trends which radically contest the concept of “nature” as distinct from “culture,” The Progress of this Storm. Nature and Society in a Warming World. In this book, Malm breaks down post-natural ecological theory into three categories: “constructivism,” “hybridism,” and the “new Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 229 materialism.” The constructivist argument, familiar from the “cultural turn” in the humanities, insists that “nature” is an effect of discourse, a way of talking about something that has no actual correspondence to the world “out there�” Hybridism, whose main representatives are Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, insists that human agency ceases the moment that it meets resistance from nonhuman objects or animals. Finally, there are the “new materialisms,” represented by the thought of Quentin Meillassoux and others. Morton’s thought does not fall neatly into any of Malm’s categories, but rather has elements of all three. Malm’s description of the potential role of theory in a situation which cries out for praxis helps crystalize the potential importance of Brecht’s work as an “ecological archive.” Addressing the election of Trump, Malm insists that now is the time for action on climate change, stating that while theory is not central to this call, it nevertheless has an important role to play: “some theories might make the situation clearer while others might muddy it� Action remains best served by conceptual maps that mark out the colliding forces with some accuracy, not by blurry charts and foggy thinking […]. Theory can be part of the problem” (16). In its push to clarify relationships, to map the “names and addresses” of responsible parties, Brecht’s theory is a potential part of the solution. Notes 1 According to Haraway, the division between the human and the nonhuman is the result of “[…] the culturally normal fantasy of human exceptionalism. This is the premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies” (11). See also Latour (who Haraway explicitly draws on), especially the section “The End of Nature” (25). Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things is another example of this influential line of thought. 2 See, for example, Morton, Ecological Thought: “This ghostly Nature inhibited the growth of the ecological thought” (5); “In the name of ecology, we must scrutinize Nature with all the suspicion a modern person can muster. Let the buyer beware” (7). 3 “[…] the ecological thought is interconnectedness in the fullest and deepest sense” (Morton, Ecological Thought 7). 4 See Jameson’s discussion of Me-ti (117). 5 The “second wave” designation comes from Helga Braunbeck (119). 6 He writes: “[…] I have always assumed that I could turn Brecht’s thinking patterns — not necessarily his work — towards a useful aesthetic for ecology […]” (51). It is through reading R.G. Davis’s work that I discovered the poem “The carpet weavers of Kuyan-Bulak honor Lenin,” which provides a 230 Jack Davis central example for my argument. A further recent attempt to use Brecht and ecology together comes from director Sam Williams (see “Trading Brass with Brecht: Towards an Ecorealist Theatre”). 7 “In symbiosis, it’s unclear which is the top symbiont, and the relationship between the beings is jagged, incomplete� Am I simply a vehicle for the numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me? Who is the host and who is the parasite? ” (Humankind 1). 8 Hans-Harald Müller and Tom Kindt state the importance of nature for Brecht’s early lyric plainly: “‘Natur’ ist der für Brechts Frühwerk entscheidende Grundbegriff” (41). In a similar vein, Jan Knopf begins his biography of Brecht with a discussion of the famous “black forests” in “Vom armen B�B�,” connecting them to the “cool forests” of Alaska in the later Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (9—10). See also Christine Arendt’s Natur und Liebe in der frühen Lyrik Brechts� 9 Knopf’s biography traces Brecht’s relationship to nature and its reflection in his writing during his exile in multiple countries and climates. For example, in Finland (383—84), California (390—91), and Switzerland (474—75). 10 This reading may strike us as a bit too harmonious to be truly “dialectical.” Malm’s critique of Jason Moore’s Capitalism and the Web of Life applies here as well, insofar as this interpretation of Brecht’s poem also seems to support “a view of dialectics as a method not so much for articulating antagonism as for achieving holism [italics in original]” (Malm 182). 11 Larson Powell deviates in an interesting way from this reading, demonstrating the relationship between Brecht’s exile poetry and natural law (178—226). 12 In the text “Dialectical Dramatic Writing” from 1930/ 31, we find the following description of Naturalist drama: “A crude and shallow realism, which never revealed any deeper contexts and which was therefore at its most excruciating when it aimed at tragic effects, because it was not (as it believed) portraying nature, which is an eternal and immutable human category” (Brecht on Theatre 52; emphasis mine). 13 There are numerous other contexts in which Brecht discusses “naturalness,” for example, when discussing acting. He often defends his theater against charges that it is in some way “unnatural.” For example, in “Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting,” we read: “The V-effect does not in any way demand an unnatural way of acting� It has nothing whatever to do with ordinary stylization. On the contrary, triggering a V-effect absolutely depends on lightness and naturalness of performance” (Brecht on Theatre 154—55). 14 Brecht’s critique of the phonetics of the Naturalist stage suggests the tantalizing possibility that the “ecological archive” of Brecht’s thought might also be approached in terms of Jacob Smith’s “eco-sonic media,” detailed in Two against Nature? Brecht, Morton and Contradiction 231 his book of the same name (Smith). Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for pointing this out� 15 “Ambience” in this context refers to a concept that encompasses “ecomimesis” but also goes beyond it (Morton, Ecology without Nature 34). 16 http: / / www.who.int/ mediacentre/ factsheets/ fs387/ en/ . Accessed 1 April 2019. 17 https: / / www.wpr.org/ shows/ mosquitoes-must-die-1. Accessed 1 April 2019. 18 In Humankind, Morton explicitly distances himself from the theory of distributed agency, but in the context of arguing against the binary distinction between “active” and “passive” (180). 19 Brecht worked on Me-ti from 1934 to 1955 (Me-ti. Interventions 10). The English-language translation of this text appeared only in 2016� 20 Cf., once again, Müller (98). 21 Hannes Bergthaller, in critiquing Morton and other theorists of the post-human from the perspective of Luhmann’s systems theory, points out a similar contradiction: “Humans are not singular, we are told — and yet, they are singularly responsible for the ecological crisis. The ecological embeddedness of human beings puts their self-sovereignty radically into question — and yet, it is presumed that they are able to refashion society in accordance with ecological insights” (121). 22 Thanks to Carl Gelderloos for making this connection. Works Cited Arendt, Christine� Natur und Liebe in der frühen Lyrik Brechts. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Bergthaller, Hannes. “Beyond Ecological Crisis: Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems�” Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture. Ed. Gabriele Dürbeck et al. Lanham: Lexington Books,-2017. 119—32. Braunbeck, Helga. “Review Essay: Recent German Ecocriticism in Interdisciplinary Context�” Monatshefte 111.1 (2019): 117—35. Brecht, Bertolt� Brecht on Theatre. Ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn. Trans. Jack Davis et al. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. —. Die Gedichte. Ed. Jan Knopf. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. —. Kriegsfibel� Bertolt Brecht. Werke. Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe. Ed. Jan Knopf. Vol. 12. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. —. Me-ti. Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things� Trans� Antony Tatlow� London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016� Davis, Ron G. “Brecht/ Science/ Ecology.”-Drive b: Brecht 100. Ed. Marc Silberman. Berlin: Theater der Zeit/ International Brecht Society, 1997. 80—83. 232 Jack Davis Groves, Jason. “Writing after Nature: A Sebaldian Ecopoetics.” German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene. Ed. Caroline Schaumann and Heather Sullivan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 267—92. Haraway, Donna� When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Hermand, Jost. Die aufhaltsame Wirkungslosigkeit eines Klassikers. Brecht-Studien. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2018. Heukenkamp, Ursula� “Brechts Ästhetik der Natur�” Das Angesicht der Erde: Brechts Ästhetik der Natur. Brecht-Tage 2008. Ed. Sebastian Kleinschmidt. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2009. 10—27. Irrlitz, Gerd. “Ästhetische Naturanschauung und philosophischer Naturbegriff bei Brecht�” Das Angesicht der Erde: Brechts Ästhetik der Natur. Brecht-Tage 2008. Ed� Sebastian Kleinschmidt. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2009. 28—86. Jameson, Fredric. Brecht and Method� London and New York: Verso, 1998� Kleinschmidt, Sebastian� “Vorwort�” Das Angesicht der Erde: Brechts Ästhetik der Natur. Brecht-Tage 2008. Ed. Sebastian Kleinschmidt. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2009. 7—9. Knopf, Jan. Bertolt Brecht - Lebenskunst in finsteren Zeiten: Biografie. Munich: Carl Hanser, 2012� Latour, Bruno� Politics of Nature. How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy� Trans� Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Malm, Andreas. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World� London and New York: Verso, 2018� Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life. Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital� London and New York: Verso, 2015� Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. —. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. —. Humankind� London and New York: Verso, 2018� Müller, Hans-Harald, and Tom Kindt. Brechts frühe Lyrik - Brecht, Gott, die Natur und die Liebe. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002. Müller, Timo. “Ecocriticism and the Frankfurt School.” Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture. Ed. Gabriele Dürbeck et al. Lanham: Lexington Books,-2017. 91—100. Powell, Larson.-The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin. Rochester: Camden House, 2008. Schaumann, Caroline, and Heather Sullivan. “Introduction: Dirty Nature: Grit, Grime, and Genre in the Anthropocene.” Colloquia Germanica 44.2 (2011): 105—09. Smith, Jacob. Eco-Sonic Media. Oakland: U of California P, 2015. Wilke, Sabine. “Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene: An Ethics and Poetics for a New Geological Age.” Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond. Ed. Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 296—312. Williams, Sam. “Trading Brass with Brecht: Towards an Ecorealist Theatre.” ecibs: Communications of the International Brecht Society 2 (2017): n. pag.