Theodor W. Adorno and Bertolt Brecht: this is how the story commonly goes. The former is repulsed by the unconcerned activism and the vulgar Marxism of the latter; the latter is rejecting the former along with the other Frankfurt School theorists for their ‘stilted, abstract language, their elitism, … their wrong-headedness’ (Lyon, 1980: 260).1 Gene Ray then sums up their relation to one another: ‘Bertolt Brecht and Theodor W. Adorno stand for opposing modes and stances within an artistic modernism oriented toward radical social transformation’ (2010: 1). He closely follows Susan Buck-Morss, who observed before him: ‘Brecht opted for the proletariat, claiming that the artist had to ally himself with the worker’s cause … Adorno insisted that the criterion for art could not be its political effect on the audience’ (1977: 34). Adorno’s 1962 essay ‘Commitment’ usually figures as the document of their adversity.2
This perspective is shaped first and foremost by politics. In 1967, when students took their unease to the streets, ridiculing Adorno’s reticence to endorse political action, the German journal Merkur published an article by Helmut Heissenbüttel on Adorno’s role as editor of Walter Benjamin. Heissenbüttel accused Adorno of having erased all traces of Brecht’s materialism and activist politics from Benjamin’s writings. Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem and many others participated in the controversy. Adorno and Brecht were viewed exclusively through their friendship with Walter Benjamin and through the lens of Adorno and Benjamin’s correspondence. Benjamin, conceding fault as well as defending his position when Adorno criticized his closeness to Brecht’s materialism, seemed to have been caught between the two and so made their relationship appear fundamentally antagonistic.
Buck-Morss’ book The Origin of Negative Dialectics (1977), setting the tone for decades to come in North America, is highly critical of this reading. She thoroughly theorizes Adorno’s correspondence with Benjamin, reclaiming for intellectual history what the German debate perceived only as politics. Yet in doing so, she also reproduces and even deepens the constellation of adversity; in fact, she inscribes it into the very origin of negative dialectics (hence the book’s title). What the correspondence suggests to her, is a precise time of inception for Adorno’s philosophical stance that coincides with the beginning of his friendship to Benjamin: their conversations in Frankfurt and Königstein in 1928 and 1929. These encounters marked nothing less than Adorno’s ‘conversion’ (Buck-Morss, 1977: 23), she writes.3 Adorno’s letters, accordingly, seek to ensure Benjamin’s faithfulness with regard to this origin.4 Buck-Morss names Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl, Georg Lukács and Arnold Schönberg as influences preparing or following this conversion, yet throughout presupposes Brecht as a hostile factor.
These letters, however, need historicization. Far more than speaking of Adorno’s rejection of Brecht, they tell the story of diaspora and political isolation. In such contexts, origins come into existence retroactively. Made the basis for an intellectual history at large, Adorno’s own relationship with Brecht falls out of sight. They were part of the same intellectual circles between 1929 and 1932 and particularly close during their exile in Los Angeles.5 More importantly, the scope and frequency of Adorno’s engagement with Brecht is widely ignored. The lens of his correspondence with Benjamin brings only a fraction of it into view. Adorno discussed Brecht’s work continuously between 1928 and 1969, in many academic lectures, in public talks, in journal articles and in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory (which he considered to be his magna opera).6 Brecht’s ‘appearances’ in the Aesthetic Theory alone, as Karla Schulz notes (1998: 314), rival those of Adorno’s acknowledged favourites Franz Kafka, Arnold Schönberg and Samuel Beckett.7
This chapter foregrounds some of these discussions, but also Adorno’s conceptual engagement with Brecht at places where it is less obvious, and thereby also reassess the Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht triangle. As Burkhardt Lindner remarked – without following up on this insight – an adversarial topology ‘is not the only one possible’ (1971: 34). The beginning of their relationship, I maintain, was marked by intellectual communion, as Adorno’s early reviews of Brecht’s works suggest. While both Benjamin and Brecht went in directions that Adorno could not endorse, Benjamin was far more receptive to Adorno’s criticism, not least because they shared a philosophical perspective. There are no existing letters between Adorno and Brecht, but Adorno’s interventions in Benjamin’s work can be seen as also addressing Brecht. While Adorno hoped to rescue Benjamin, or, in his own words, defend him against himself (2015: 455), Brecht, more out of reach, became an opponent. Yet with dialectical contradiction at work, I claim, Adorno was determined, backhandedly, more by such opposition than by approaches in resonance with his own.8
Two years after Weimar’s hyperinflation, in a society still steeped in misery, Bertolt Brecht and his collaborators turned to a new dramatic subject: the economy, and financial speculation in particular. In the years to come, they produced a great number of dramatic texts meant not only to faithfully record the economic situation at hand, but also to expose its causes. Some remained fragments, such as Jae Fleischhacker in Chikago (1925–9) or The Breadshop (1926–8), others became defining for Weimar culture, for example Threepenny Opera (1928) or Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930). These plays tell the story of Brecht’s struggle with representation, while also providing a genealogy of Brecht’s theatre. It was common practice for Brecht to reflect on questions of form in his journal, public discussions and essays, and, throughout his life, in his poems. One of these poems, part of the Jae Fleischhacker project, is entitled This Babylonian Confusion (Brecht, 1976: 124–5). Written in 1926, Brecht used it to work through problems he had encountered in trying to adapt – with Jae Fleischhacker – Frank Norris’ 1903 realist novel The Pit for the stage. The novel tells the story of cornering the wheat market through the lens of a speculator’s private affairs. Brecht’s poem not only discusses Norris’ realism, but also performs the course of action that his theatre took in the late 1920s in order to fulfil its self-appointed task: staging the irrationality of capitalism.9 It reads as Brecht’s aesthetic programme:
…
The other day I wanted
To tell you cunningly
The story of a wheat speculator in the city of
Chicago. In the middle of what I was saying
My voice suddenly failed me
For I had
Grown aware all at once what an effort
It would cost me to tell
That story to the not yet born
But who will be born and will live
In ages quite different from ours
And, lucky devils, will simply not be able to grasp
What a wheat speculator is
Of the kind we know.
So I began to explain it to them. And mentally
I heard myself speaking for seven years
But I met with
Nothing but a silent shaking of heads from
All my unborn listeners.
Then I knew that I was
Telling them about something
That a human being cannot understand
…
If ‘cunning’ narration refers to traditional, realistic storytelling – linear progression, going through twists and turns to arrive at a happy end – then this strategy fails in the poem. Its story is disrupted in favour of commentaries providing explanations on everything taken for granted in a narrative that follows the rules of representational realism: What is speculation? What is profit? How are prices determined? What are the consequences? And so on. The lyrical ‘I’ hears himself speaking for seven years. The explaining never ends, because its subject is society’s functioning, and this totality only comes into view to the degree that the cunning narration disintegrates. This does not mean that the text remains fragmentary. It is kept together by a metanarrative: the story of the failure of storytelling, which is itself told cunningly (‘the other day I wanted’, ‘suddenly’, ‘I had grown aware’). More importantly, this story has a happy ending. The lyrical ‘I’ comes to own the perspective of its imaginary audience.10 And it is this perspective that turns out to have been the cause for the disruption of the storytelling all along when the original addressee is revealed as liberated humanity.
Theodor W. Adorno might not have known Brecht’s poem, but his Minima Moralia (1951) famously ends on a note that calls upon philosophy to practice what the poem achieves:
The only philosophy which can responsibly be practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption … all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange [verfremdet] the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices … as it will appear in the messianic light. (Adorno, 2005: 247)11
After all, he saw the poem’s aesthetic procedure at work in Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny. In particular his first review,12 comparing Mahagonny to the novels of his favourite author Franz Kafka, anticipated the Minima Moralia entry verbatim:
The city of Mahagonny is a representation of the social world … projected from the bird’s eye view of an already liberated society … Just as in Kafka’s novels the commonplace bourgeois world appears absurd and displaced in that it is viewed from the hidden perspective of redemption. (Adorno, 1994: 588)
To be more precise, his review reads as if he had set himself the task to trace the play’s realization of the programme laid out in This Babylonian Confusion. Mahagonny tells the story of Jim Mahoney, who arrives in the city of Mahagonny, which was founded to provide a home for the dissatisfied of all continents. Everything is permitted in Mahagonny, except to be without money. The story, Adorno emphasizes, is told against the backdrop of an emphatic notion of humanity – a life in bliss and freedom – which, as in the poem, is not spelled out. Present circumstances are ‘projected onto the untouched white surface of things as they should be’ (Adorno, 1994: 588). The story has to measure up against this tacit norm; accordingly, it disintegrates while bringing a totality into view: ‘capitalism’ or ‘the anarchy of commodity production’, in Adorno’s words (589). The lyrical ‘I’ of Mahagonny is a child, ‘an oblique infantile perspective’, Adorno remarks (589). The story comes across as ‘a fairy tale’ and the lack of explanation – overcompensated for in This Babylonian Confusion by seven years of speaking – translates in Mahagonny into cuts, jumps and absurdities, generating ‘crass horror’, something that Marxist analysis cannot hope to achieve in the same way, Adorno holds.
Such observations also disclose why Brecht’s work was of such interest to Adorno, and why his response to Brecht’s work was so enthusiastic in the late 1920s. Threepenny Opera and, in particular, Mahagonny spoke, on the one hand, to Adorno’s encounter with Lukács’ Marxism in 1928.13 The two works visualize, so to speak, the main concern of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, which Adorno came to share: commodification or the unfettered mediation of all social relations by exchange value. Mahagonny, Adorno asserts elsewhere with a view to its depiction of love, forces ‘the reification of interpersonal relationships’ into striking pictures (Adorno, 1994: 589). On the other hand, Mahagonny seems to have offered itself to Adorno as a contemporary successor to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel [mourning play], which he also discovered in 1928. He adopts Benjamin’s model of the artwork’s form as revelator of societal contradiction and, passing through the aesthetic construction’s inherent tensions, conflicts and contradictions, understands Mahagonny as performing a genuinely immanent critique, aiming at the disclosure of an era’s constitution.14 The review works through core themes of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel. Adorno prominently discusses the figure of the sovereign (the founders of Mahagonny), emphasizing, like Benjamin, the intimate connection between violence and law. Jim Mahoney becomes an equivalent to the Trauerspiel’s figure of the schemer as he manipulates the city’s course. Like Benjamin’s Baroque drama, Mahagonny knows no hero and is not a tragedy (Adorno, 1994: 590). Most importantly, Adorno turns his attention recurrently to Mahagonny’s fragmented form, an aspect that is also key in Benjamin’s analysis.
Yet Adorno, through his reading of Brecht, does not simply update the Trauerspiel. He turns all of Benjamin’s stories into stories of becoming: ‘the power of what is coming’, he writes, ‘shows itself … in the construction of the present’ [transl. changed] (Adorno, 1994: 588). ‘Construction’ can be read as ‘in process’, as happening in front of the observers’ eyes. The schemer and the sovereign, far from being custodians of a world in continuous decomposition, reappear as characters driving all development. Mahagonny’s focus is on the founding of sovereignty and Jim Mahoney drives society’s latent anarchy to the fore, both uncovering and realizing it (589). Mahagonny’s story, which comes to life through ‘a child’s eye’, emerges in a fragmented and distorted form. ‘(T)he debris … is constructively clipped together’ (591) by montage as it runs up against ideas of bliss and freedom. In this way, the present circumstances reveal their own falseness against ‘the untouched white surface of things as they should be’. And although Mahagonny ‘does not present … a positive standard’, Adorno asserts, the idea of a classless society ‘shimmers through … as unclear as a movie projection over which another has been superimposed’ (588).15 In other words: as the verso of the false.
It is in this crucial point – the conception of aesthetic truth – that Adorno sides with Brecht or employs Brecht against Benjamin. Transcendence in Mahagonny is the effect of a negative, thin as air, whereas in Benjamin’s mourning play it is part of the tension that creates the genre’s form and the era’s condition: a transcendence confined to immanence. Benjamin’s mourning play shows the true state of things: ‘the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape (1998: 166).16 Mahagonny, by contrast, shows ‘the grimace of reality’ (1994: 589). The state of things is the false one: the commodity mediated totality. The artwork’s critical thrust in Adorno’s interpretation is negative. Mahagonny makes the present negatable [negierbar]. Adorno reconfigures all of Benjamin’s concepts for the space defined by Brecht’s aesthetic procedure, thereby moving towards a negative aesthetics, negativity through immanence.
Ultimately, his interest was in this procedure and not in the epic theatre, still a new concept at the time. ‘Simply referring to epic theatre doesn’t tell us much about Mahagonny’, Adorno writes. Instead, he associates Brecht’s work with surrealism: ‘Mahagonny is the first surrealistic opera’ (591).17 Theatre proper disappears in a two-fold abstraction. Surrealism, unlike epic theatre, is not confined to a specific medium. It is a cultural movement encompassing many forms of artistic expressions and, in the form of surrealism, Mahagonny becomes a ‘fractured and intellectual procedure … sorely needed’ (GS 19: 363).
Adorno’s inaugural lecture ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ dates from the same time as his reviews of Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny. Susan Buck-Morss argues that it not only assembles all the themes of his later philosophy, but also bears the imprint of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel throughout (1977: 23). It has often been noted, for example, that Adorno’s ‘constellation’ in ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ is modelled after Benjamin’s ‘configuration’ in the ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ to his Trauerspiel book (see Müller-Doohm, 2006: 91; Snow, 1977: 115). However, Adorno debates using the term constellation in the course of his lecture, but finally settles on a concept from Brecht’s theatre: Versuchsanordnung [experimental setting], a ‘less astrological and more scientific and up-to-date word’ (GS 20: 572).18
How did Brecht come into play here? The ‘official’ occasion was perhaps a collaboration between Adorno, Brecht and Benjamin. Around 1930, Brecht and Benjamin were planning ‘to smash Heidegger’ (Wizisla, 2004: 77–8). They recruited Adorno for a critique of Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] to be published in their journal, Krise und Kritik. The journal project fell through, yet the collaboration materialized, albeit in a different form.19 Adorno’s ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ and Benjamin’s ‘What is Epic Theatre?’, both written at the same time (early 1931), take a strong anti-Heidegger stance.20 An understanding of Brecht’s work as a method offered an ideal antidote to Heidegger’s ontological understanding of alienation [Entfremdung]: the question of being could be replaced by the question of society. Heidegger’s assertion that an un-alienated state could be accessed directly and through an individual’s affective and subjective anticipation of death could be challenged by the idea that any critique would have to pass through the exposure of the prevailing representational systems (science, arts, political discourse and so on). Most importantly, Brecht’s exploration of societal totality suggests the possibility of politics.
Not surprisingly then, the similarities between Adorno’s lecture and Benjamin’s essay (originally written for the Frankfurter Zeitung, but not published at the time) are striking: Benjamin turns Brecht against the aesthetic programme of naturalism and Adorno turns him against the sciences’ assertion of generating truth. Both centrally employ the term Versuchsanordnung for these tasks.
‘The naturalistic stage’, Benjamin writes, ‘is entirely illusionistic. Its own awareness that it is theatre cannot fertilize it … it must repress this awareness so as to pursue undistracted its aim of portraying the real’ (1998a: 4). Epic theatre then, because it ‘derives a lively and productive consciousness from the fact that it is theatre’, can break naturalistic action down into its elements and rearrange them ‘as though it were setting up an experiment [Versuchsanordnung]’ (1998a: 4). The spectator is thereby defamiliarized. Philosophy’s assignment, Adorno holds, is likewise the creation of distance or de-familiarization. Its starting point is the questions and answers commonly provided by the sciences. Philosophy has to make scientific findings lose their meaning and break them down into parts to be reorganized: ‘Philosophy must thus arrange those elements that it receives from the sciences … by changing experimental settings [Versuchsanordnungen]’ (GS 20: 572).
The Versuchsanordnung of epic theatre, Benjamin claims, is concerned with ‘uncovering conditions’. The audience can recognize the ‘devastations of our social order’ (1998a: 4). Adorno’s Versuchsanordnung permits the identification of possible causes of social devastation: once the logic of the sciences has lost its authority, entirely different questions arise: why is it possible to ask the questions that the sciences ask in the first place? What can become the subject of such questioning? Philosophy ‘plays’ with the elements ‘until they form a figure that is readable as an answer, while at the same time the question disappears’ (GS 20: 572). Such an answer is, for example, the emergence of ‘the historical figure of commodity’ (575). Or, in Foucauldian terms, the sciences’ regime of truth becomes apparent. Yet in this all-decisive point – the conception of truth – Adorno again parts company with Benjamin and goes with Brecht. For Benjamin, the idea of a thinking that intervenes [eingreifendes Denken], thinking that compels the audience to take an ‘actionable’ political position, became central around 1930.21 To that effect, epic theatre, he claims, makes the spectators discover the truth about bourgeois society (it ‘reveals’ and ‘uncovers’). Defamiliarization, in his essay, relies on the deliberate employment of theatrical means. They become tools for truth production. Adorno, by contrast, insists on methodological distance. The ‘figure’ that offers an answer by displaying the state of commodification, he maintained, is only ‘constructed’ by the question (575). Adorno’s defamiliarization targets its subject in its entirety, for example, the totality of the scientific world. It creates a polemical (hostile) distance to all that exists through the perspective of a (big) question. The question thus – modelled after Heidegger’s question of being – obtains a function comparable to the emphatic notion of humanity in Mahagonny. And as in Mahagonny the story disintegrates, the logic of science loses its grasp in ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’. The figure constructed from the resulting fragments does not uncover truth, but, as in Mahagonny, truth can ‘shimmer through’. In other words, what becomes an experience is the mere possibility of transcendence; truth exists as the reverse of the false (truth cannot reside in the false).22 The proximity of Adorno’s lecture to Mahagonny is palpable throughout and the theme of commodication runs as a common thread through them. Already at the beginning, Adorno turns what he saw as Brecht and Weill’s surrealism into an assignment for philosophical inquiry: ‘only polemically does reality present itself … as total reality, whereas it allows for hope only in traces and debris’ (555).23 Brecht’s early work, practising an immanent and negative critique in artistic form, evidently provided a model for ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’. Benjamin relies on a different Brecht: the Brecht of the learning play.
Around 1930, Brecht and his collaborators created a type of theatre that did away with the separation between audience and stage: the Lehrstück, or learning play.24 The first two of these plays, Lindbergh’s Flight and The Baden-Baden Lessonon Consent share a passage, or rather a poem, that frames them and, I would like to suggest, can be read, along the lines of This Babylonian Confusion, as an aesthetic programme again. Like in This Babylonian Confusion, in the Lindbergh poem too the present comes into view from the perspective of the future and is turned into the past:
At the time, when humanity
Began to know itself
We fashioned carriages
Of iron, wood and glass
(…)
Ages long all things fell in downward direction
(…)
Only we, we have found the secret.
Near the end of the second Millennium as we reckon time
Our artless invention took wing
Pointing out the possible
Without letting us forget:
(…)
The yet-to-be-attained.
(Brecht, 1997: 23)
The difference between the Lindbergh passage and the 1926 poem This Babylonian Confusion is nevertheless significant. The perspective of the future in This Babylonian Confusion is tentative and generated out of the present. As Adorno observed in Mahagonny, it is ‘the precise projection of present-day circumstances onto the untouched white surface of things as they should be’ (Adorno, 1994: 588). In Lindbergh’s Flight, by contrast, the future is projected back onto the present, which becomes a distant point on the linear timeline of progress. The future generation has taken the floor; they look back from ‘near the end of the second Millennium’. Lindbergh’s 1927 flight in the play is ritually repeated. The play’s story is a progress report. The dialectical figure at work here is not determinate negation, made possible by ‘the bird’s eye view of a truly liberated society’, but negation of negation. The present turned past is to be evaluated according to its contribution to the state of liberation supposedly achieved. Whereas in Mahagonny or This Babylonian Confusion the audience or reader is distanced as the ‘cunning story’ falls to pieces, Lindbergh’s flight succeeds and distance is collapsed, not only in interpretation, but also de facto as the audience is encouraged to act the story out.
Adorno responded twice to Brecht’s post-1930 programme: In Dissonances (1956), he associates Lindbergh’s Flight with the repressiveness of popular sing-alongs, commenting:25
The affirmation of activity as such is dubious. It transfers to the realm of art a drilled-in work ethics of incessant, relentless effort, completely failing to recognize that art … is in its essence antithetical to the business of self-preservation. (GS 14: 81)
A few years later, in his lectures on Aesthetic Theory (1959), Adorno is more forgiving:
And after having criticized the position of blind activity so sharply, I would like to also stress, for the sake of justice, its moment of truth: namely that its relation to the artwork is not that of passive acceptance … insofar as artistic experience consists of a certain form of ‘doing’, namely an active following along [Mitvollzug]. (Adorno, 2009: 189)
Neither his aggressive attack nor his hesitant appreciation tells the entire story. First, although there are many testimonies to Adorno’s post-1933 hostility to epic theatre, I hold that while he turned against the theatre proper and its ‘practicism’, he largely preserved Brecht’s programme. More precisely, Adorno accepted but refunctioned the (new) terminology of epic theatre, applying Brecht’s own strategy – refunctioning26 – to Brecht himself.27 Brecht coined the term in the late 1920s in the context of his attempt to make use of existing art forms and institutions, such as the opera, for pedagogical purposes. Art’s culinary objectives would thus be backhandedly subverted or replaced. Along these lines, Adorno refunctioned Brecht’s post-1933 aesthetic programme for a continuation of the Mahagonny project: immanent and negative critique. Kafka’s novels provided the frame for this.
Second, ‘the moment of truth’ that Adorno discerned in Brecht’s call for action does not mark a change of mind, but, as I will show, points to an even more radical coping strategy: sublation [Aufhebung]. From the perspective of Adorno’s emerging magnum opus, Aesthetic Theory, sublation simultaneously achieved the preservation and destruction of Brecht’s aesthetic programme and Brecht’s epic theatre finally received Adorno’s recognition: it was historicized.
In Mahagonny, Adorno recognized, ‘just as in Kafka’s novels … the bourgeois world appears absurd’ (Adorno, 1994: 388, 114). Elsewhere he noted: ‘The absurdity of class privilege is demonstrated (very much like it is in Kafka)’ (289). However, when in 1934 Benjamin applies Brecht’s terminology to an analysis of Kafka’s work, Adorno objects strongly: ‘the only thing about the work that strikes me as alien to the material is the adoption of categories drawn from epic theatre’ (Adorno and Benjamin, 1999: 70). He criticizes the employment of the term Versuchsanordnung – central to his own thinking only three years earlier – and argues that ‘the very form of Kafka’s art stands in the most extreme antithesis to the form of theatrical art’ (1999: 70). Surprisingly, Adorno’s own substantial essay on Kafka – written over a period of 11 years, from 1942 to 1953 – not only uses Versuchsanordnung again, but also a large number of other epic theatre terms: distancing and Verfremdung; Gestus; epic and the episodic. Furthermore, a scene reminiscent of Brecht’s ‘Street scene, a basic model for epic theatre’, is key to his interpretation (Brecht, 2014a: 176).28 This can be read, I hold, as an attempt to replace Brecht with Kafka and make him redundant.29 Yet by reading Kafka through Brecht’s terminology – for which there was no obvious need, especially given that Brecht’s theatre had become the ‘antithesis’ of Kafka’s novels – Adorno in the end preserved and reclaimed Brecht for the project of a negative critique against what he must have seen as the positivity of the Lehrstück aesthetic.
With the learning play, Adorno remarks in Aesthetic Theory, Brecht reacted to the ineffectiveness of his theatre, wanting to enforce the political impact that his plays could not achieve (1997a: 361). Lindbergh’s Flight encourages the audience to repeat the ocean flight by speaking and singing the play’s lines. The power of the collective that resides in technology and in an enthusiastic global audience is supposed to materialize on stage. Participants should experience the future in the present, a future that appeared to be blocked by the way humankind’s productive forces are put to work in capitalism.30
In his Kafka-essay, Adorno formulates a pointed rejection of this conception: ‘To believe in progress is to believe that there has not yet been any’ (Adorno, 1997: 256). Accordingly, he seeks to disrupt the chain of effects envisioned by Brecht’s work: the move from political insight, enabled by the play, to action. In his interpretation of Kafka, the recipient is arrested by the encounter with the artwork. Art, again, can become an ‘antithesis … to the business of self-preservation’ (GS 14: 81). It does not induce ‘physical’ activity. How then do core themes of epic theatre play out under such premises? In the following, I focus on three instances of Adorno’s refunctioning of Brecht’s theatre: Gestus, narrative mode and art’s ‘real-life models’.
Gestus in Brecht, as Benjamin points out in ‘What is Epic Theatre?’ (1998a [1931]),31 fragments the cunning narration of representational realism, the stories of individual failings and triumphs, by foregrounding the social and universal [allgemeine] dimension of individual behaviour. Gestus can be understood as the undoing of expression. Expressions absorb all social circumstances. These disappear in favour of those apparently natural individual emotions on which traditional realism draws. Such expressions are the point of departure of Gestus. Gestus performs externalization. In other words, through Gestus the societal circumstances that produce expressions become visible again and change conceivable: ‘the human being is the object of investigation’, Brecht writes in 1930, ‘human beings both changeable and able to change things’ [transl. changed] (Brecht, 2014: 65). Thus in Gestus, an understanding of the formative power of social forces coincides with the recognition of revolutionary potential – ultimately the emphasis of many of Brecht’s post-1931 works. Social relations, by definition, stand in for the possibility of progress.
In his discussion of Kafka, Adorno reverses this direction. Kafka becomes like Brecht, a critic of capitalism. ‘Kafka unmasks monopoly capitalism’ [transl. changed] (1997: 256). His Gestus also disrupts: ‘Form which is constituted through time as the unity of inner meaning is not possible for him’, (264) and Adorno – as if reminding Brecht of what he used to practice – sees such disruption as targeting ‘the second Babylonian confusion’ (248). Hence, as in This Babylonian Confusion, the problem is a need to rupture language or narration, ‘the configuration of which should be truth’, and so reveal its untruth (248). Kafka’s Gestus also does this by bringing to bear upon that language ‘a universal (ein Allgemeines) which has been repressed by sound common sense’ (248). Yet whereas in Brecht this universal is human relations on which a better future can be built, Adorno observes that Kafka’s force ‘is one of demolition [Abbau] … The flight through man and beyond into the non-human – that is Kafka’s epic course’ (251). The terminal point is ‘the bare material existence’ (251), which paralyses every activity: ‘The social origin of the individual ultimately reveals itself as the power to annihilate him’ (252). It is only through the systematic work of demolition, not though building, that Kafka drafts the image of a better society: ‘the wounds with which society brands the individual are seen as ciphers of the social untruth, as the negative of truth’ (251).
The narrative mode that brings the Gestus (the universal within the individual) to the fore, in Brecht’s as well as in Adorno’s reading of Kafka, is one of re-presentation. As Brecht puts it, the presentation has to be ostentatious, the showing must be shown and what is presented is thus ‘something prepared’ (BFA 15: 166). Lindbergh’s Flight is set up as report; the instructions Brecht gives elsewhere to his actors turn those actors into reporters of how human beings proceed:
This is the exercise: before you show how
Someone commits betrayal, or is seized by jealousy
Or concludes a deal you look
at the audience as if to say:
Now pay attention … this is how he does it. (BFA 15: 166)
Those who report are in a sovereign position: their material or their past is at their command and they help the audience understand the possibility for change. In Adorno’s Kafka interpretation, no space is opened for sovereign command. Kafka’s recipients are not activated or empowered, rather, the universal exerts authority over them: re-presentation turns into re-cognition: ‘The permanent déjà vu’ (1997: 251). The recipients take notice of the mode of reporting itself; they become aware that the presented has already been ‘prepared’. There is activity nevertheless: the activity of interpretation [Deutung] (255) by which they can hope to liberate themselves from such re-cognition:32
where have I seen that before?’; the déjà vu is declared permanent. Through the power with which Kafka commands interpretation [Deutung], he establishes [transl. changed] aesthetic distance … His texts are designed not to sustain a constant distance … but rather to agitate his [the reader’s, M.R.] feelings to a point where he fears that the narrative will shoot towards him like a locomotive … Such aggressive physical proximity undermines the reader’s habit of identifying himself with the figures in the novel. (245)
What Lehrstück and Schaustück only achieve separately33 – absorption of the audience on the one hand and distancing on the other – happens in Adorno’s reading of Kafka in one go: aggressive closeness is the effect. This interplay holds readers back instead of activating them. It fixates their attention on the actual artwork, on which Brecht, according to Adorno, turned his back too quickly in favour of politics. For Brecht the problem does not seem to be interpretation, but a lack of a determination to act.
Which insight can be gained by Deutung? That action has already failed. What seemed a promising intervention reproduces what it had hoped to overcome. The effects of social integration become palpable: ‘Power must acknowledge itself as that which it is’, Adorno remarks (269).
Finally, Brecht discusses the various functions of epic theatre by means of a ‘natural’ setting: a car crash. Adorno too resorts to a traffic accident for the sake of illustration. Brecht’s street scene shows the witnesses of a crash involved in the reconstruction of the event. Their report is geared towards a useful account allowing for a further or a different course of action:
One essential element of the street scene must also be present in the theatre scene, if this is to qualify as epic: the demonstration should have a socially practical relevance. Whether our street demonstrator is out to show that one attitude on the part of driver or pedestrian makes an accident inevitable where another would not, or whether he is demonstrating with a view to clarifying the question of guilt, his demonstration has a practical purpose. (Brecht, 2014a: 177–8, emphasis in the original)
Adorno’s street scene reads as follows:
[U]ncounted witnesses come forward, proclaiming themselves acquaintances, as though the entire community had gathered to observe the moment when the powerful bus smashed into the flimsy taxicab. The permanent déjà vu is the déjà vu of all. (1997: 251)
Whereas Brecht’s scenario envisions the future avoidance of catastrophe, in Adorno’s street scene the catastrophe seemed to have been anticipated – as if the entire community had assembled to witness an accident to come. Nothing could have been avoided or been done better in the future. Brecht’s epic theatre ultimately envisions collective action to remedy social wrongs. Collectivism is clearly also in Adorno’s purview: ‘Perhaps the hidden aim of his art as a whole is the manageability, technification, collectivization of the déjà vu’ (251). Yet in Adorno’s street scene, the collective forms itself through an awareness that action is impossible. Adorno’s reimagining of Brecht within a Kafkaesque frame foreclosed an (unmediated) turn towards politics.
To the point: Brecht for Adorno is at once object of critique and source of ideas. By virtue of Brecht’s own concepts, Adorno develops a politico-aesthetic refutation of Brecht’s position: progress and useful actions are turned into stasis and vain attempts. But this refutation is, at the same time, comparable to his treatment of Benjamin, a defence of Brecht against himself. Deliberate or not, Adorno ‘repatriates’ Brecht’s concepts and restores what he must have seen as their original intention.
The recipient imagined in Adorno’s Kafka-essay is simultaneously distanced from and absorbed by the work of art. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory theorizes these moments, makes them defining for any aesthetic experience, and Brecht’s concepts return in full force within that contemplative realm that constitutes the aesthetic experience. In this work, Adorno concedes Brecht’s influence. ‘Concession’ is not used loosely here, but precisely names his speech act. Adorno’s 1959/1960 lectures on aesthetic theory propose Brecht’s Verfremdung as an aesthetic category that captures the task of any art form:
The world’s alienation can be rendered by a work of art only – and I think Brecht recognized something very important here, at least as a theorist – by not presenting the familiar … as the familiar. Art’s task is indeed the Verfremdung of the familiar, putting it into a perspective … which is the perspective of its essence. (Adorno, 2009: 127)
In addition to Verfremdung, the assertion that the familiar has to be put into a perspective that permits recognition of the subject’s real state of being is a central element of Brecht’s aesthetic. De-familiarization, Adorno specifies in Aesthetic Theory, generates a distance typical for genuine aesthetic experience, which:
affects the subjective comportment, in that it severs primitive identifications and puts the recipient qua empirical psychological person out of action … Subjectively, art requires self-exteriorization; this is what was meant by Brecht’s critique of empathic aesthetics. (Adorno, 1997a: 243)
In this context, Adorno repeatedly, like Brecht famously before him, employs the term ‘culinary’ for art that does not aim at distancing its recipients, as well as for aesthetic theory that does not foreground the distance effect.34 Distance then comes with a demand to decipher, now rephrased ‘as a certain form of “doing” which is an active following along’ (2009: 189). Again, Adorno grants Brecht a fundamental insight: recognition of the recipient’s activity. This was, after all, already the moment of truth his lectures on aesthetics had identified in the Lehrstück programme: the roles of spectators and actors intersect, a continuous and close interplay of thinking and acting generates truth. ‘Brecht’s postulate of a thinking comportment’, Adorno remarks in Aesthetic Theory, ‘converges, strangely enough, with the objective discernment that autonomous artworks presuppose in the viewer, listener, or reader as being adequate to them’ (1997a: 242; italics added). It must have appeared ‘strange’ to Adorno that his understanding of aesthetic experience, so deeply rooted in individual contemplation, overlapped with Brecht’s focus on collective practice. He must have felt haunted and perhaps because of that he quickly qualified his observation: ‘His didactic style, however, is intolerant of the ambiguity in which thought originates: It is authoritarian’ (242).
This distinction, however, misses the point. Adorno glosses over the fact that equivocation, as much as unambiguity, is not the subject of ‘thinking comportment’, but its effect – the result of actively following along [Mitvollzug]. In order to yield such effects, ‘authoritarian’ demands have to be met. Important works of art ‘presuppose’ (242) something from the recipients. Not each artwork can, like Kafka’s novels, sustain their attention by staging a déjà vu in permanence. Thus it is no coincidence that another of Brecht’s terms, of Lehrstück provenance, found its way into Adorno’s discussion: discipline. The recipient, who ‘refuses to obey their [the artworks, M.R.] discipline … is alien to art’ (Adorno, 1997a: 355). Or, elsewhere, ‘Whoever refuses to reenact the work under the discipline it imposes falls under the empty gaze cast by a painting or poem’ (120).35
What then became of the original target of his intervention – art’s supposed capacity to incite political action – the moment in Brecht’s aesthetic to which Adorno objected most? ‘The aesthetic shudder pulls the subject back to itself’ [transl. changed] (1997a: 269). Elsewhere Adorno describes: ‘this shock is the moment in which recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work … [T]he possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangible’ (1997a: 244). Has art’s incitement simply changed direction? Not pushing the subject from truth or insight to collective action anymore, but commencing from the action’s cancellation and pushing it toward truth? (In both cases, subjects ‘disappear’ and ‘forget themselves’, it could be argued).
Once Adorno generalized his insights from the Kafka-essay, Brecht’s entire programme found itself interiorized, seemingly to Adorno’s surprise. What remains of Brecht himself is history: he was the playwright and the poet who came closest to the idea of avant-garde (GS 20: 553); he was part of that aesthetic undercurrent running ‘from Sturm and Drang and the young Goethe to Büchner and to some of Hauptmann’s works up to Wedekind and expressionism’ (GS 11: 79). Beckett has inherited his position and Brecht’s claim to politics has long been compensated. It sounds almost like praise when Adorno asserts: ‘Brecht’s cult of practicality became an aesthetic constituent of his works’ (1997a: 242–3).
These are the premises that both Brecht and Adorno made the baseline of their thinking and acting: art does the work of critique; it is political through its form; it ages quickly. The work of art has, as Adorno put it, a temporal nucleus. Accordingly, Brecht continuously revised his plays, correcting them on the spot according to the material demands on site, rewriting them according to varying political circumstances. His work is perhaps best described as constitutively unfinished, even his so-called masterworks were provisional accomplishments. They are set up to fail.36 Whereas Brecht sought to incorporate the flow of time in his theatrical praxis, Adorno sought to do justice to time by making aesthetic categories contingent on an artwork’s ever-changing form: his aesthetic categories are meant to fail too, namely in view of the individual works and any understanding of art has to take this failure as its point of departure. And precisely because Brecht surrendered so radically to time without giving up on form, his work had to become exemplary for Adorno. Yet theatre, more than any other art form, also exposes itself as it intervenes on site. It becomes vulnerable to abuse or blindly reproduces what it acts against.37 Theatre is practice in a radical sense and remains practice even when it rationalizes its proceedings and develops its own aesthetic concepts as it goes along. It seems to be not least this conflict – a deep mistrust of mere practice on the one hand and an appreciation of art that is ‘timely’ on the other – that drives Adorno’s engagement with Brecht.38 Adorno’s reviews of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and Threepenny Opera say nothing about the staging. The Aesthetic Theory discusses novels, poems, compositions and paintings. Adorno talks about readers, listeners and beholders, but neither about the stage nor the spectator.39 Nonetheless, Adorno does not ignore Brecht’s theatre; ultimately, his aesthetic categories become its shelter.40
1. Brecht, planning a satire on the infectivity and corruption of intellectuals, the so-called Tui-novel, wrote in his work journal on 10 October 1943 ‘Adorno here. This Frankfurt Institute is a true treasure chest for the “Tui-novel”’ (BFA 17: 177), see Erdmut Wizisila (2011: 206) for a discussion of the Tui-novel concept.
2. Since the 2000s, this narrative has become increasingly subjected to scrutiny. Sean Carney, for example, calls Adorno’s negative dialectic ‘a useful supplement of Brecht’s dialectics’ (2005: 157). Ulrich Plass (2010) juxtaposes Brecht’s Hollywood Elegien and Adorno’s Minima Moralia, arguing persuasively that both employ similar representational strategies. Astrid Oesmann (2005) explores ‘mimesis’ and ‘natural history’ [Naturgeschichte] as the common ground of Adorno’s, Benjamin’s and Brecht’s theorizing, and speaks of a ‘surprisingly broad kinship’ between Adorno and Brecht (2005: 8).
3. Buck-Morss insists that ‘from 1928 on virtually everything that Adorno wrote bore the imprint of Benjamin’s language’ (1977: 21).
4. The letters’ language is persuasive: Adorno admits his great unease with Brecht’s role in Benjamin’s intellectual life and appeals to Benjamin recurrently to remain faithful to the ‘motifs of our philosophical friendship’ (Adorno and Benjamin, 1999: 108).
5. Adorno reported more than once to his parents: ‘(t)he only people who we see quite often are the Brechts, with whom we get along especially well’ (Adorno, 2003: 126).
6. Although some discussions of Brecht are brief, they often drive Adorno’s argument. Others are lengthy: in a letter to Slatan Dudow, Adorno analyses the relation between epic theatre and film (1937); in a lecture on Aesthetic Theory he focuses on Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung (1959); his lectures on Moral Philosophy (2010a: 2012) discuss Saint Joan of the Stockyards and The Good Person of Szechuan and a talk for Radio Bremen offers an elaborate reflection on Brecht’s On Five Difficulties When Writing the Truth (GS 17: 253).
7. Adorno used Brecht in yet another way: he let Brecht speak for him. He began arguments with ‘as Brecht used to say’, some of his articles were prefaced by a Brecht quotation and he dedicated Negative Dialectic to Max Horkheimer with a line from Brecht’s poem The lovers (which first appeared in Mahagonny). Brecht’s work was also simply enjoyable reading for Theodor and Gretel Adorno. Gretel Adorno once asked Benjamin to please send Brecht’s latest pornographic poems (1999: 274).
8. It should be noted that Adorno continually discussed Brecht against the backdrop of Kant’s and Hegel’s aesthetic, whose basic premises he shared. He was also attracted to Brecht’s theatre because it offered him material for Kant’s and Hegel’s remediation. Kant’s understanding of art as procuring disinterested delight, for example, informed Adorno’s turn against Brecht’s ‘utilitarianism’. The distance between recipient and artwork implied in such an understanding is reconceived by Adorno as Brecht’s distance. Hegel’s focus on artistic form and his concept of the artwork as an immanently mediating ‘construct’ is at the heart of his early praise and later criticism of Brecht. These aspects cannot be addressed within the scope of this paper.
9. A discussion of this poem along similar lines, but in a different context, can be found in Matthias Rothe (2016).
10. In his Introduction to Dialectics (1958), Adorno formulated such a point of view as follows: ‘you could almost say that something like a human being does not yet exist. When applying the concept “human being” to an existing individual’, Adorno continued, ‘one immediately recognizes the difference. Namely that the individual in an emphatic sense … does not yet live up to the concept human being’ (Adorno, 2010: 103). All translations by the author unless otherwise noted.
11. Adorno’s emphasis on the necessity of the construction of perspectives is reminiscent of Brecht’s critique of realism in ‘The Threepenny Trial’ (1931), which Adorno quotes elsewhere (GS 11: 147): ‘A simple “representation of reality” says less about reality than ever before … so, there is in fact “something to build up”, something “artificial”, “contrived”’ (Brecht, 2004: 117).
12. Adorno’s reviews of Mahagonny and Threepenny were unreservedly enthusiastic. He wrote five reviews in total. In the last review, published in 1932, Adorno observed that Mahagonny not only maintained its pertinence, but – ‘despite the general hunger for being au courant’ – had gotten better with Brecht’s revisions (GS 19: 363). Discussing Mahagonny and the Threepenny Opera at some length for the journal of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research in 1932, he called Brecht and Weill’s work ‘admirable’ and the music ‘today the only music of genuine social-polemic impact’ (Adorno, 2002: 407). The Schönberg school, of which Adorno had been a member, only came in second. He ended up recommending Brecht and Weill’s ‘fractured and intellectual procedure aesthetic’ methods as a model for all contemporary art (Adorno, GS 19: 363), and illustrating how serious he was about using Mahagonny as a model, Adorno began to compose his own opera in Mahagonny style in 1932, The Treasures of Indian Joe (Schultz, 1998).
13. After Adorno saw Mahagonny, he repeatedly called Threepenny Opera an accessory to Mahagonny. His review of Threepenny Opera (1929) ended as his first Mahagonny review began – with an emphasis on its redemptive perspective: ‘The successful interpretation of what is past, becomes … a signal for the future, which is visible because the old can now be interpreted’ (Adorno, 1990: 133).
14. Aesthetic form and its relation to society had been Adorno’s obsession since his earliest concert reviews in 1921. At that time, he still conceived of form as convention, a given constraint that the artist needed to manipulate. In the mid 1920s, Adorno began to speak of the construction of form, reducing such rhetorical conventions to the material of departure. Again informed by Lukács’ Theory of the Novel and German idealism, Adorno understood construction as a process of mediation between particular social ‘content’ and existing conventions or forms. Constructing or generating forms came to parallel society’s mediation between the particular and the general, for example between individual inclinations and interests and societal institutions (Buck-Morss, 1977: 44–5). I thank Richard Leppert for helping me through Adorno’s music reviews; see also Richard Leppert’s detailed comments on Adorno’s writing on music in Adorno (2002).
15. Adorno recurrently employs technical terms from film for his analysis: projection, screen, montage and so on. In a letter to Slatan Dudow from 1937, he also claims that epic theatre borrowed a lot of its techniques from film (Adorno, 2003a: 534–5).
16. Benjamin’s project should be understood in the frame of his attempt to rethink Kant’s ‘impoverished’ concept of experience. He understands the Trauerspiel as a specific form of experience and employs Kant’s vocabulary throughout, speaking of allegorical intuitions and concepts, identifying antinomies and so on. Within the project of a Kantian critique, a true state of affairs can be revealed, but it cannot be exposed as the false state. Benjamin’s famous ‘The false appearance of totality is extinguished’ (Benjamin, 1998: 176) privileges experience against metaphysics.
17. See also Adorno’s talk on Wedekind from 1932. Brecht and the surrealist Wedekind, he stated, ‘let the underworld of mere material speak’ (Adorno, 1992: 278).
18. In a letter to Benjamin from 1934, Adorno defined Versuchsanordnung as one of the ‘categories drawn from epic theatre’ (Adorno and Benjamin, 1999: 70). Benjamin introduced the term ‘configuration’ with astrological metaphors: ‘Ideas are to objects as constellations are to the stars’ (1998: 34).
19. In January 1931, Adorno wrote to Siegfried Kracauer: ‘I originally thought to publish the critique of Heidegger in Ihring, Brecht and Benjamin’s journal Krise und Kritik, yet after Benjamin and Brecht have distanced themselves from the project, I have my doubts’ (Adorno and Kracauer, 2008: 258).
20. Benjamin’s essay employs the language of life philosophy: epic theatre accomplishes ‘the damming of the stream of real life’; ‘Epic theatre makes life spurt up high from the bed of time and, for an instant, hover iridescent in empty space. Then it puts it back to bed’ (Benjamin, 1998a: 13). It is through incessant disruption, ‘when its [life’s, M.R.] flow comes to a standstill’ (13), that social conditions are revealed. Any attempt at realignment with life would have to pass through political action. Adorno opened ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ with Heidegger. Heidegger exemplified for him the crisis of German Idealism and he returned to Heidegger via Husserl’s phenomenology to discuss his failure at length (more than four printed pages).
21. Wizisla (2004: 139) shows that Brecht’s famous concept of ‘eingreifendes Denken’ developed in the context of Brecht and Benjamin’s discussion of their journal project.
22. Adorno develops, not least through his engagement with Brecht, a radically negative conception of truth. Owen Hulatt (2011: 76) summarizes it as follows: ‘Adorno identifies the true as nothing over and above the negation of the pre-given … this is not to deny that this negation will be informative – the negation of the pre-given (be it sensory, philosophical or cultural) will result in the pre-given being unpacked, and display the full complexities of those grounds which gave rise to its falsity’.
23. Adorno’s 1962 ‘Commitment’ essay calls Brecht’s Mahagonny procedure ‘polemical Verfremdung’ (GS 11: 426). Brecht did not use the term before 1936. ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ then adopts only the first part of the phrase (polemical) and Minima Moralia finally makes the second its own: ‘Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange [verfremdet] the world’ (Adorno, 2005: 247). Adorno’s debt to Brecht appears in these appropriations in miniature, so to speak.
24. Brecht’s play fragment Fatzer (1926–9) is widely seen as a decisive moment in the development of the Lehrstück. Brecht’s struggle with the material of Fatzer led him, on the one hand, to demand the story’s completion from the audience. On the other hand, he came to own the story’s ‘incompletability’, writing and rewriting it. Both moments, the audience’s involvement and the story’s continuous revision, become defining features of the learning play.
25. Adorno took issue in particular with a slogan projected on stage during the performance: ‘Doing is better than feeling’.
26. Umfunktionieren is commonly translated as ‘repurposing’. I have decided to stay closer to the German in order to preserve the idea of a technical or mechanical procedure.
27. Adorno employed the idea of refunctioning in many other contexts as well. In an essay on music pedagogy, for example, he demanded ‘to make reification apparent in its consequences and to dialectically liberate from it the elements of a good rationality, which might help to refunction reification one day’ (GS 18: 809); see also Plass (2010: 69).
28. It is very likely that Adorno knew this text, given that they saw each other frequently and also discussed theatre while living in Los Angeles (Wizisla, 2011: 206).
29. There are other indications of Adorno’s intention to ‘replace’ Brecht: he discussed the genealogy of Kafka’s critical programme, focusing on two aspects that are widely recognized as seminal to Brecht’s aesthetic – expressionism and detective novels.
30. Brecht subscribed to what Dirk Braunstein called, with Adorno, ‘the metaphysics of productive forces’. Capitalism’s main contradiction is located in the antagonism of productive forces and productive relations; the latter are seen as inhibiting the former, which are perceived as the bringer of progress (Braunstein, 2011: 382–3).
31. Nikolaus Müller-Schöll (2002: 139–84) convincingly argues that Benjamin’s concept of Gestus retroactively shaped Brecht’s own use of Gestus, which Brecht had employed only loosely until then.
32. Deutung is insufficiently translated as ‘interpretation’; it implies a greater distance to the material and already resonates with a Gestus of showing. I am indebted to Ulrich Plass for this insight.
33. Schaustück refers to Brecht’s more traditional plays of the late 1930s. It is worth noting that Brecht was dissatisfied with them. He wrote in his journal that it will be necessary to reconnect them to the highest standard of epic theatre once achieved in the late 1920s by Fatzer and The Breadshop (BFA 6: 433).
34. ‘Aesthetics that does not move within the perspective of truth fails its task; usually it is culinary’ (1997a: 242).
35. Adorno seems to defend himself against a ‘dangerous proximity’ to Brecht: ‘If the discipline exerted or buttressed by artworks becomes their own lawfulness, they forfeit their crudely authoritarian character vis-a-vis human beings’ (Adorno, 1997a: 202). It can be objected that what appears as the works’ proper laws as well as the corresponding habits of reception are the outcome of a cultural apparatus that subjects individuals to a far more extensive training.
36. In a poem from 1929, On the construction of long-lasting works, Brecht wrote: ‘Those destined to be accomplished / Display gaps / The long lasting / Continuously collapse / Those planned big / Are incomplete’ (BFA 14: 35).
37. ‘Much of Brechtian epic theatre’, Adorno claimed, was refunctioned ‘for the collectivism of the Hitler dictatorship’ (1975: 250). In the addendum to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer insisted: ‘epic theatre is the response to the art of the masses, mass art’s switching consciousness of itself’; the procedure of montage praised in Mahagonny, despite all disruptions, comes to resemble the filmic technique of non-resistance’ (GS 3: 312).
38. Adorno wholeheartedly dismissed works that, ‘subservient to the idol of security, hollow out their temporal nucleus and, inwardly vacuous, fall victim to time: the curse of neoclassicism’ (Adorno, 1997a: 177). Instead demanded ‘that artworks immolate themselves through their temporal nucleus, devote their own life to the instant of the appearance of truth, and tracelessly vanish’ (177).
39. For example when reflecting on aesthetic experience, Adorno spoke of ‘the objective discernment that autonomous artworks presuppose in the viewer (Betrachter), listener, or reader’ (1997a: 359).
40. Beckett’s work has a decisive advantage over Brecht: nothing changes from text to stage. Beckett’s stage directions are binding.
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