Staatstheater Augsburg – Dietmar Dath: Don’t look at the knife

Brecht, in whose birthplace Augsburg her piece is premiered, wrote: »A photography of the Kruppwers or the AEG almost does not result in anything about these institutes. The real reality has slipped into the functional. ”Reality in working life and economic relationships could be grasped artistically almost 100 years ago. With their text, they try to bring artificial intelligence into the theater with their text in the new millennium and madness. Can that work?

You could never photograph a promise or a lie, not paint, draw or punch in stone. But you could always imitate them as a game, satirical or realistic, as a criticism or initially as a representation by an acting ensemble. This allows an audience an overview that the individuals themselves, if they participate in such behaviors in working life and the behavioral disorders that create this can not get into private life due to a lack of distance. Brecht’s statement says that the instruments are not crucial with which alienation is organized, but the unconscious of the people who are not theirs, as a deadly daily parody of progress through the ever equal. This truth is always forgotten, from the steam engine to the assembly line and the first computers to networking and to AI.

If you take Brecht’s sentence very precisely, he actually says that the overview, criticism or satire for the theater is not impossible, but are much easier to access this art form than, for example, for a mere incorporation symbol with a smelly slogan (idiot -University German for “online meme”). The more crazy, what people do to each other, and the more consistently it is limited and coordinated by apparatus, like what happens on a stage, the more it screams for theater. I just couldn’t endure this shouting idle anymore, I just gave in. Above all because Augsburg, the director and the people who play with him are even more suitable than the fabric (“Latest forms of exploitation”), the topic (“Several different false possibilities, on the latest forms to react to exploitation «) or even me.

Brecht occurs – initially masked – also as a figure in her piece. What kind of voice that tries to make yourself heard-between technocrats from the business universe, esoteric worldview and new old fascism?

One of the creepy truths about the figures is that their actions and leave in the respective social function – there is not simply “The Denunzanta”, “the fellow runner”, “the driver”, “the striking strike experts”, they are mixtures; In the end, even the fascist is unsettled, namely from its success. But the surplus is not purely psychological. Something about the social functions itself has a leak, a mistake. So asks: Are these not too complicated people for the theater? You have to ask the theater, and I thought, we ask Brecht, he knows the problems.

So first I looked in the theory that he left in the workbooks and made dialogues from what was in theory. That was nothing; Everything sounded neither helpful nor at least stimulating, offensive, something. It sounded like today, from the seminar somewhere. And the crazy solution: the more I did not let the theoretical writings, but from the works of art by Brecht, the more it looked as if he really talks to my characters. Those who say something. Whether you are able to hear that at all: this is part of your difficulties, not a very smaller.

So the viewer may be able to do the figures for a temporary timeoffithetionsTrying out space: Doesn’t the fascist sometimes sound like myself in the piece, or do I catch my nod when the esoteric – perhaps for the wrong reason – rejects the incorrectly furnished work? Can you catapult the Brecht ‘teaching in the present?

It is more likely to be an ancient pigeon than a catapult. Something slowed down that many have learned in Netflix as a lightning version: Ah yes, the one or me is like me – well, then see what the figure is happening now. So: Identification is immediately slowed down, loaded and at the same time required, because otherwise you cannot literally follow. One could say that instead of a story, the evil game prefers to tell how a few people try to first invent the prerequisites of a story with morality, namely the still moral, mannerable person. And what she prevents it and how heroically build her building fascinating crap, etc.

Another step aside, from the form to the motif: What is artificial intelligence behind the magic word? And where does your criticism come about?

Today only certain artificial neural networks are considered to AI, many other approaches to machine modeling of thinking are pushed off. The artificial neuronal networks are trained in people’s work results. Then you represent the networks as if they were subjects. The people whose work is presented are made invisible. It is a kind of cooperation between people, disguised as a cooperation between people and machines. My criticism does not need it at all, I just take Marx’s that still keeps: “All our inventing and all our progress seem to be going out that they equip material forces with mental life and humble human life into a material strength.” That dates from the middle of the 19th century. Shambling that people have come up with so much new since then and none of it is new if you make it next to this diagnosis, neither assembly line nor nuclear power or AI.

In the distant past, there was something like a left -wing technology optimism. Is there still room for this today? Or do we have to wait until Elon Musk is expropriated and the self-managed Tesla works pay uniform wages?

A good friend says: Pessimism is submission, optimism is idiocy. The struggles will still be called “industrial fights” if they are supposed to run into any kind of emancipation instead of senseless wars for pitiful remains, even with 90 percent unemployment. Don’t look at the knife in the hand of the class enemy, look at his movements.

»Our hope today is the crisis«says Brecht, who apparently had a feeling for the right level of optimism like pessimism.

Very good – but vice versa: the crisis of the left today is that she is a bit too happy to look for hope and is a little too happy if she finds any little reason for hope anywhere. Instead of practicing themselves in virtues such as persistence, illusion, determination, determination, etc. and relying on it to surprise yourself and the opponent with actions, for which you do not have to be motivated with hope.

Premiere: February 22nd
Further performances: February 25, March 2 and 21.

www.staatstheater-augsburg.de