Brecht: Kleines Organon für das Theater (1948/49)

1. Brecht: KleinesOrganonfür das Theater(1948/49)

2. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Kritik der Urteilskraft(1790) • Seeks to distinguish pleasure in aesthetic objects from other pleasures (e.g. in luxury items) • For Kant: pleasure in the aesthetic is disinterested (‘interesselosesWohlgefallen’) • Beautiful is what pleases generally without knowledge, i.e. knowledge and praxis are not part of art, the beautiful and the aesthetic.

3. Kantian concept of the Aesthetic • Aesthetic pleasure is distinct from other pleasures (e.g. in luxury objects) • Aesthetic pleasure is ‘disinterested’ (i.e. ‘for itself’, not subject to desire, not usable for something else, not part of instrumentality) • Aesthetic has utopian moment: Foundation of universal community of free subjects (the statement ‘X is beautiful’ is implicitly agreeable to everyone) • Pleasure in the aesthetic is thus both utopian and ideological (deceives itself about socio-economic basis of pleasure – bourgeois wealth, real exclusion of non-educated vs. ideal inclusion of everyone) • Kantian aesthetic demarcates aesthetic pleasure from praxis (life) and knowledge (ends) • Implicit critique of commodification of life and subjecting everything to an end. • Implicit claim of equality of all in age of Feudalism

4. Separation of art from life • ‘As long as art does not insist on being treated as knowledge, and thus excludes itself from praxis, it is tolerated by social praxis in the same way as pleasure.’ • Max Horkheimer, Theodor W.Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Stanford, 2002 (first 1947), p. 25

5. KleinesOrganonfür das Theater(1948-49) • Re-functioning/Critique of bourgeois (Kantian) aesthetics • Dialectic re-positioning of Brecht vis-à-vis his earlier theoretical writings and praxis • Dialectic relationship between playwriting and formulation of theatre theory (plays to produce theory/theory to produce plays)

6. ‘Let us therefore cause general dismay by revoking our decision to emigrate from the realm of the merely enjoyable, and even more general dismay by announcing our decision to take lodging there. Let us treat the theatre as a place of entertainment, as it proper in an aesthetic discussion and try to discover which type of entertainment suits us best.’ (BoT, 180)

7. ‘[…] we have failed to discover the special pleasures, the proper entertainment of our own time?’ (§ 11, BoT, 182) • ‘The contradiction between learning and enjoyment must be clearly grasped and its significance understood – in a period where knowledge is acquires in order to be resold for the highest price, […] Only once productivity has been set free can learning be transformed into enjoyment and vice versa.’ • Additions to Short Organum, § 3, BoT, 276.

8. 7: Historicisation of idea of pleasure • § 9: Implicit critique of illusionism • § 12/13: Historicisation of concept of empathy as resulting in inaccuracy restricting pleasure – re-introduction of Brechtian concept of pedagogics • § 17-19: critique of bourgeois property relations and Capitalism as obscuring real relations between people – society appearing as ‘second nature’: ‘The same attitude as men once showed in face of unpredictable natural catastrophes they now adopt towards their own undertakings’ (BoT, 185) – cf. Hl. Johanna: ‘das Unglückkommtwie der Regen’.

9. § 20: lifting of separation between art & science (& thus social praxis) • § 20-22: Introduction of idea of critical attitude as pleasurable and identifying critique with productivity • § 23: dialectic feeding back of praxis into theory: theatre making productivity its theme. • § 25: converting dialectics (‘our great productive method’) into theatre enables enjoyment of ethic of the age springing from productivity. • § 26-29: re-articulation of critique of ‘culinary theatre’ from ‘Notes on Mahagonny’ (1928): ‘They look at the stage as if in a trance’ • ‘The one important point for the spectators in these houses is that they should be able to swap a contradictory world for a consistent one, one that they scarcely know for one of which they can dream.’

10. § 35: re-introduction of critique of emotions as consumption • § 36: re-introduction of critique of empathy as identity-constructive & claim of historical relativity • § 39-45: re-introduction of idea contradictory nature of social being as stage representation, spectator as making ‘hypothetical adjustments’ and Verfremdungseffekt. Critique of idea of ‘human experience’ and perpetual change/contradiction as basic principle: ‘It regards nothing as existing except in so far as it changes, in other words is in disharmony with itself.’ - § 58: ‘For the smallest social unit is not the single person but two people.’

11. § 50: re-introduction of concept of narrative theatre and narrating actor (c.f. Notes on Mahagonny) • § 52: open-endedness and experimental character of theatre & life as fundamental pedagogic purpose. Preliminarity of theatre: ‘Altogether this is a way of treating society as if all its actions were performed as experiments’. • § 61 ff: introduction of theory of the gest (Gestus) • § 67: re-formulation of idea of separation of the elements: ‘The individual episodes have been knotted together in such a way that the knots are easily noticed.’ • § 76: staging is ‘handing over a finished article’, but one in which decisions made during process of production remain visible.