Dialectics and the Brechtian Tradition

Abstract

‘Dialectics’ is a contested term, and this article engages with its interpretation by a foundational figure in the history of performing dialectics, Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s ideas on dialectics run through his writings, but here the investigation focuses on the fragmentary book that was never published in his lifetime, Me-ti, or The Book of Twists and Turns. This analysis reveals how Brecht related his dialectical worldview to questions of realism in the theatre through his construction of the ‘Great Method’, his term for a politicized inquiry into the nature of reality. The open, heterogeneous and pragmatic theoretical approach to dialectics is then compared with Brecht’s theatre practice at the Berliner Ensemble, the company he co-founded in 1949. The discrepancies identified between the two inform the article’s final section, in which a post-Brechtian theatre is considered as offering fitting responses to Brecht’s dialectical impasse.

Notes

1 All translations from the German are mine unless otherwise acknowledged.

2 See Giles 2012 for a discussion of Brecht’s concept of realism in the context of the Marxist thought of his times.

3 It is worth drawing the reader’s attention to the revised and updated translations of Brecht now available in the different English volumes cited in the references section. The volumes also offer much material previously unavailable to readers of English.

4 This important work is due to be published in English translation for the first time in 2017. As there is no current agreed title for the work, I have chosen mine from a translation made elsewhere (Müller 1980: 43).

5 Brecht explicitly used the term in his appendices to the ‘Short Organon’.

6 See Barnett 2011 for arguments that attest to Brecht’s commitment to a more open application of dialectics.