Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflict and Commons in the Politics of Truth, reviewed by Ghalya Saadawi

Abstract

In 1934, facing German Nationalist Socialism and in keeping with his profound communist commitments on the fringes of the Third International, Bertolt Brecht developed a concise, minor method within a broader literary and political arsenal in the struggle of communism against fascism. It was, of course, closely connected to his legacy as Marxist revealer of apparatuses and demystifier of ideological aesthetic forms. Brecht prefaces his short piece ‘On Restoring the Truth’ (2017: 137), where this method is developed, with a warning and a call. In dark times where falsities are uttered and believed, ‘where deception and errors are encouraged’, a thinker is summoned to replace what he [sic] hears and reads, sentence by sentence, with the true version of those same sentences until he cannot but be in line with the truth. Such a critical counter-reading entails setting up selected phrases – in this instance, speeches by Goering and Hess that embody the language games used by the Nazi establishment to naturalize its claims and extermination techniques – in two aligned columns with a parallel, corrective column reading ‘restoration of the truth’. Because ‘context often gives sentences an illusion of correctness’, the process of deduction from phrase to phrase can be correct, but the sentences themselves are incorrect. Brecht therefore refines a montage predicated on picking out, filtering and placing correct sentences next to deceptions and manipulations (p. 137). By inverting the method of montaged lies used by the Nazis, the thinker learns to read the truth. Crucially, for Brecht, ‘the thinker does not act like this simply in order to establish that deception and errors are being perpetrated’; rather, it is a labour ‘to master the nature of the deception and of the errors’ (p. 137). Truth and knowledge are not identical.