ogyofthe society.Onanempirical level, the workingclass is subjectedto the dominant
ideology and its practices (such as alcoholism, escapism, petit-bourgeois mentality) and
therefore cannot constitutethe revolutionary class as such, but onlyanempiricalentity.
But the famous utterance that calls for the subject of change does not call upon an already
formed political entity.The subject that is alreadypresent will have to be formedduring the
political process of subjectivisation.²³The sharedgoal ofTretyakov’soperative literatureand Brecht’snotion ofUm-
funktionierung (functional transformation) accordingtoBenjamin was to
“make the literary[or in this case, filmic] products accessible to an immediately
social,and thereforematerialist,analysis.”With theauthor or director function-
ing asaproducer of new meaningsand new situations, montage, the quintessen-
tial modernist technique, could finallybeusedto provide“the dialectical start-
ing point from which the unfruitful antithesis of form and content can be
surpassed”and, in so doing,“achievethe correct determination of the relation
between tendencyand quality.”²⁴Benjamin’sreading ofTretyakov in“TheAu-
thor as Producer”providesauseful model for thinking beyond the conceptual
binaries–montageversus continuity,shockversus suture,modernismversus re-
alism–that divided theWeimarleft and continue to trouble the scholarlyassess-
ment of formallyinnovative and politically engagedart from the period. In fact,
strategies of rupture and immersion bothhavealegitimate place in Brecht’sdef-
inition ofrealism as“showing up the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of
the dominators”and his insistenceon“writingfrom the standpoint of the
class which has prepared the broadest solutions for the most pressingproblems
afflicting human society.”²⁵The difference between continuityediting and ana-
lyticalediting (ormontage) opens upaspace for the articulation of alternatives
to class society preciselybyatonce reproducingthe public-privatedivide and
revealing it asamajor obstacle to classmobilization.The relationship between
reality and fiction and their different claims on the real within the diegesis define
the terms under which the operative methodcan be applied to the“facts”of Ber-
lin’sworking-class life and communist activism.
The culturaland artistic practices deployedinthe name of operativity estab-
lished even the conditions under which proletarian dreams can survive in con-
temporary formsand modalities–most recentlyinthe“reimagining,retracing,
Gal Kirn,“KuhleWampe,Politics of Montage,De-montage of Politics?,”Film-Philosophy11.1
(June2007): 42.
Benjamin,“TheAuthor as Producer,”770.
BertoltBrecht,“The Popular and the Realistic,”inBrechtonTheatre: TheDevelopment of an
Aesthetic,ed. and trans.John Willett (London: Methuen, 1992),109.
332 Chapter 18