There is a thing we do now, in the dark, that the people who built the dark did not foresee. At the moment the film asks the most of us, when the face fills the frame and the score thins out and something in the chest begins to shift its weight, we reach sideways for the phone and look up how old she was when it was shot. We tell ourselves this is curiosity. It is not curiosity. It is a hand thrown out to break a fall. We have found that we can be interested in a thing from a distance of about two feet and never be touched by it, and we have come to call this being discerning.

The technique has a birth certificate. Bertolt Brecht, watching Mei Lanfang perform in Moscow in 1935, saw an actor who did not pretend the audience was absent, who showed a character rather than dissolved into one, and wrote it up the following year as the alienation effect, the Verfremdungseffekt, a phrase he most likely refracted from the Russian formalists through his friend Sergei Tretyakov, who had taken from Viktor Shklovsky the idea that art exists to make the stone stony again by making it strange. Brecht militarised the idea. In the Short Organum for the Theatre of 1948 he set out what he wanted from a stage: the lamps hanging in plain view, the songs cutting across the scene, the placards announcing the outcome so that suspense could not do its narcotic work, the actor quoting his part in the third person at rehearsal so that he might never quite vanish into it. All of it served one end. An audience that has been swallowed by a story accepts the world of that story as given, as weather, as the way men simply are; an audience held slightly outside it can see that everything on the stage was made by somebody and can therefore be unmade. He was writing against Aristotle, against the purge of pity and terror that leaves you cleansed and unchanged, and further back against Plato's complaint in the tenth book of the Republic that we weep in the theatre for sorrows we would be ashamed to weep for in the street. Brecht was in exile when he worked this out. He had watched a continent be absorbed.

And the thing failed in his own hands, which is the fact I cannot get past. Mother Courage and Her Children was built as a demonstration: here is a woman who lives off the war and loses all three children to it and learns nothing, and you are to watch her with your eyes open and refuse her the dignity of tragedy. Audiences wept for her. By his own account in the notes he kept around the 1949 Berlin production, Brecht was dismayed enough to go back into the text and harden her, sharpen the haggling, foreclose the sympathy. They wept anyway. Helene Weigel, playing Courage, gave the silent scream that people who saw it could not afterwards stop describing, a mouth open and no sound in it, and the effect on a Berlin audience four years after the ruins was not cool analysis. So we have the inventor of critical distance producing, at the height of his powers, the least distant theatrical image of the century. Was that a defeat of his method, or was it the moment his method told the truth about itself?

Hold that, because the stranger half of the story is what happened next, which is that he won completely and the victory arrived empty. Nobody now is absorbed in anything. The making-of arrives before the made thing. The actor tours the studios explaining what the role cost her psychologically. The budget is public, the box office is public, the recommendation engine's workings are discussed by people who have never written a line of code. Every song has a producer's commentary, every scandal a thread explaining the machinery of the scandal, every advertisement a second-order joke acknowledging that it is an advertisement and that you are too clever for it. The lamps are in view. The placards have gone up. The gap between the performer and the performance is not merely visible, it is the primary content. Brecht's stagecraft has become the ambient grammar of the screen, and the political consequence he staked everything on has not appeared. We know precisely how we are being worked on and we go on being worked on, punctually, daily, with a connoisseur's appreciation of the craftsmanship.

Peter Sloterdijk gave this its name in 1983: enlightened false consciousness, a knowing that has been thoroughly inoculated against acting on what it knows. His cynic is not the ignorant man of ideology critique but the well-informed one, unhappy, functional, entirely current. Which suggests something that Brecht, for all his brilliance, may have got backwards. He assumed that the audience was held in place by illusion and that puncturing the illusion would release them into judgement. But distance is not a stance towards power. Distance is a stance towards feeling. You can hold the whole world at arm's length and still pay the rent, still take the shift, still click. Knowingness is cheap; it costs nothing to see through a thing. Being moved is expensive, because a thing that moves you has purchase on you, and purchase is the beginning of obligation.

So what exactly did we lose when we learned never to be taken in? Iris Murdoch, in The Sovereignty of Good in 1970, describes standing at a window in a state of resentful self-absorption, and then a kestrel appears, and in the moment of watching the bird the brooding self is simply gone. She called it unselfing and thought it was the whole of moral life: not that we reason our way to the good but that we become, for a moment, capable of seeing something that is not us. Simone Weil, writing to Joë Bousquet in 1942, put it more severely: attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Both of them are describing precisely the condition Brecht wanted to prevent, the self loosened, the critical posture dropped, the whole being given over to an object. Brecht feared that an audience lost in the play would be lost to itself. Murdoch's claim is that being lost to yourself is the only way anything real gets in.

I do not think this settles anything, because his fear was not neurotic. He wrote those sentences as a refugee. He had seen what a crowd absorbed in a spectacle would do; the same year he sat in that Moscow theatre, the cameras were being wheeled around Nuremberg. Absorption is how the worst of it works. The rally, the flag, the score swelling under the footage: all of them dissolve the individual into the image, and Leni Riefenstahl understood the technique at least as well as Brecht did. So the question was never absorption against distance. It is what we are absorbed into, and whether there exists a form of surrender that does not flatter the one who surrenders, that leaves you less comfortable rather than more.

Heidegger noticed, in 1927, that the hammer is invisible while it works and becomes glaringly present the instant it breaks. The alienation effect is a manufactured breakage, a hammer snapped on purpose so that we will finally look at it. Fine, as an experiment, for an evening. But a world in which every tool is permanently broken is a world you cannot build in, and the name for the condition of finding everything conspicuously unreal, oneself included, is not enlightenment; the clinicians call it derealisation, and nobody who has it describes it as freedom. We have arranged a culture in which the seams of everything are showing, at all times, including the seams of our own sincerity, and we did not get the revolution. We got an audience that cannot cry at a funeral without noticing that funerals are a genre.

The irony sitting in the middle of all this is that Brecht himself was not cold. Read To Those Born After, written around 1939: the man who wanted your tears confiscated in the stalls sets down that a conversation about trees is almost a crime because it implies a silence about so many horrors, that even the hatred of squalor distorts the features, that even anger against injustice makes the voice grow harsh, and then asks the generations to come to remember him with forbearance. That is not a strategist's document. That is a man who has been holding himself at a critical distance from his own life for twenty years and is asking, at the end, to be met without one.

And the most famous demand for change in modern European poetry arrives by the opposite route entirely. Rilke, in 1908, stands in front of a mutilated Greek torso with no head, no eyes, and reports that there is no part of the stone that does not see him, and the poem ends: you must change your life. Total absorption, no critical gap whatsoever, complete surrender to an object that cannot argue back, and out of it comes the imperative Brecht built a whole theatre to produce and could not reliably produce even once. Godard knew this. In Vivre sa vie, in 1962, the most self-conscious film of a self-conscious decade, with its chapter headings and its actress turning to look straight down the lens, the moral centre is a girl in a cinema, weeping at Falconetti's face in Dreyer's silent Joan, taken in utterly, undefended.

What I want to know is whether that can be chosen. Whether there is a discipline of consented absorption, a way of putting the commentary track down deliberately, as an adult, knowing exactly how the thing in front of us was made and giving ourselves to it regardless, the way you can know everything about the chemistry of grief and still be wrecked by it. We are, all of us, expert now at not being had. We are considerably worse at being undone, and I am no longer sure we can love anyone without it, since a person held at a critical distance is only a set of techniques observed. The house lights in us have been up for a long while now. Who is it that turns them down, and what would we have to trust before we let them?