Brecht: Kleines Organon für
das Theater (1948/49)
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 (‘interesseloses
Wohlgefallen’)
• Beautiful is what pleases generally without knowledge, i.e. knowledge
and praxis are not part of art, the beautiful and the aesthetic.
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 noneducated 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
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
Kleines Organon für 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)
• ‘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)
• ‘[…] 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.
• § 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 Unglück kommt
wie der Regen’.
• § 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.’
• § 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.’
• § 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.