Distancing effect

, featuring a large scene-setting caption Polen ("Poland") above the stage The distancing effect, also translated as alienation effect ( or V-Effekt), is a concept in performing arts credited to German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht first used the term in his essay "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" published in 1936¹, in which he described it as performing "in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious". These remarks find their precedent in an essay largely devoted to the theory of Brecht's "epic theater", "The Author as Producer," written by Walter Benjamin in 1934. This way of formulating the technique would have been familiar to Brecht from his conversations with Benjamin before he met the Russian playwrights Viktor Shklovsky or Sergei Tretyakov (to whom he later attributed the coinage), insofar as Benjamin wrote the essay with the intention of showing it to Brecht when they roomed together at Brecht's cabin in Denmark during their mutual exile in the summer of 1934. In all likelihood Brecht conceals Benjamin's participation in this process due to concerns about the SS at first, and then later on account of his own concerns about the Stasi.…

, featuring a large scene-setting caption Polen ("Poland") above the stage]] The distancing effect, also translated as alienation effect ( or V-Effekt), is a concept in performing arts credited to German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht first used the term in his essay "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" published in 1936, in which he described it as performing "in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious". These remarks find their precedent in an essay largely devoted to the theory of Brecht's "epic theater", "The Author as Producer," written by Walter Benjamin in 1934. This way of formulating the technique would have been familiar to Brecht from his conversations with Benjamin before he met the Russian playwrights Viktor Shklovsky or Sergei Tretyakov (to whom he later attributed the coinage), insofar as Benjamin wrote the essay with the intention of showing it to Brecht when they roomed together at Brecht's cabin in Denmark during their mutual exile in the summer of 1934. In all likelihood Brecht conceals Benjamin's participation in this process due to concerns about the SS at first, and then later on account of his own concerns about the Stasi. In this article Benjamin speaks of the central formulas: "Epic theater must not develop actions but represent conditions." The use of montage and musical intermissions between action pierces the illusion of the audience's identity with the action, rather than heightening it. Benjamin compares the montage technique to the way that radio programs are broken up by advertisements. "[Epic theater] sets out not to fill the audience with feelings as to alienate the audience in a lasting manner, through thought, from the conditions in which it lives. [This is accomplished by making the audience laugh]." Epic theater was conceived of as a politically revolutionary form, but when the technique of distancing, estrangement or alienation is adapted to post-revolutionary television shows and other forms we can see it at work in theatrical forms such as the sitcom (where characters are flattened to heighten the relatability of the situation), satirical news or anti-comedy which adopts degraded formats (bad VHS film stock etc.) to heighten comedic effect as in Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and other works in the same genre that are themselves precursor forms of the non-linear and drama-independent internet meme humor of Gen-Z. Even the appropriation of the (initially) revolutionary intentions of the distancing effect for the purposes of profitable enterprises, early remarked by Hannah Arendt, has now been assigned its own technical term: repressive desublimation. ==See also== Mooreeffoc Theatre of the Absurd Metafiction ==References== ==Further reading== Jameson, Fredric. Brecht and Method. London and New York: Verso, 1998. (10). (13). Min Tian, The Poetics of Difference and Displacement: Twentieth-Century Chinese-Western Intercultural Theatre. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. Robinson, Douglas. Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Squiers, Anthony. An Introduction to the Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht: Revolution and Aesthetics. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2014. . Willett, John, ed. and trans. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. London: Methuen, 1964. . New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. .

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