Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments- Brecht and Adorno on Representing Capitalism

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/156920610X533306

Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 3–24 brill.nl/hima

Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments:Brecht and Adorno on Representing Capitalism

Gene RayGeneva University of Art and Design

[email protected]

AbstractBertolt Brecht and Theodor W. Adorno stand for opposing modes and stances within an artistic modernism oriented toward radical social transformation. In his 1962 essay ‘Commitment’, Adorno advanced a biting critique of Brecht’s work and artistic position. Adorno’s arguments have often been dismissed but, surprisingly, are seldom closely engaged with. This paper assesses these two approaches that have been so central to twentieth-century debates in aesthetics: Brecht’s dialectical realism and Adorno’s sublime or dissonant modernism. It provides what still has been missing: a close reading and immanent critique of Adorno’s case against Brecht. And it clarifies one methodological blind spot of Adorno’s formalist conceptualisation of autonomy: he fails to provide the detailed analysis of context that his own dialectical method immanently calls for. The paper shows how and why Brecht’s dialectical realism holds up under Adorno’s attack, and draws conclusions for contemporary artistic practice.

KeywordsTheodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Marxist aesthetics, realism, modernism, the sublime, political theatre

In twentieth-century debates over the intersections of art and radical politics, Bertolt Brecht and Theodor W. Adorno stand for opposing productive modes and stances within artistic modernism.1 Brecht’s works were aimed at stimulating processes of radical learning, within specific contexts of social struggle. He based his practice on the possibility of re-functioning and radicalising institutions and reception-situations. In this, he took art’s relative autonomy for granted, but refused to fetishise that autonomy or let it become reified into an impassable separation from life. Adorno, in contrast, made the categorical separation from life the basis of art’s political truth-content. In its

1. I thank Steve Corcoran, Steve Edwards, Anna Papaeti and Dmitry Vilensky for their helpful responses to drafts of this essay, which revises Ray 2010.

4 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 3–24

structural position in society, art is contradictory: artworks are relatively autonomous, but, at the same time, are ‘social facts’ bearing the marks of the dominant social ‘outside’.2 Paradoxically, only by insisting on their formal non-identity with this ‘outside’ can artworks ‘stand firm’ against the misery of the given.3

Adorno’s critique of Brecht, developed most fully in the 1962 radio-talk and essay ‘Engagement’, is notorious enough.4 Its conclusions are difficult to swallow: Brecht ends up as an apologist for Stalinist terror and the false reconciliations of ‘really-existing socialism’, and his works are pronounced politically ‘untrue’.5 These damning judgements are more often dismissed than seriously confronted; perhaps surprisingly, they still have not been convincingly answered with the care and rigour they demand.6 That is unfortunate, because the confrontation of these two positions clarifies issues and problems that remain centrally relevant to politicised art and to the urgent project of leftist renewal. This is especially true with regard to the problem of artistically representing capitalist social reality.

This essay reconstructs Brecht’s and Adorno’s positions, in order to clarify what is at stake in the confrontation between them. It aims to provide what has so far been missing: a detailed immanent critique of Adorno’s case against Brecht. The argument I unfold here proceeds in three parts. In the first, I characterise Brecht’s committed approach to representing social reality as ‘dialectical realism’.7 In the second, I reread Adorno’s critique of Brecht, and, in the third, I consider Adorno’s counter-models. My conclusions are, first, that Adorno’s critique fails to demonstrate the political ‘untruth’ of Brecht’s work. As will be shown, Adorno does not provide the close attention to context that his own method immanently requires; consequently, he fails to take into account the shifting conjuncture of struggle that gives Brecht’s work its

2. ‘Art’s double character as both autonomous and fait social announces itself unfailingly from the zone of its autonomy.’ Adorno 1997, p. 5, and 1998a, p. 16. In this and subsequent citations from Adorno, Brecht and Max Horkheimer, I have modified the published English translation.

3. The argument is formulated concisely in the opening paragraph of Adorno 1997, pp. 1–2, and 1998a, pp. 9–11; ‘standing firm [Standhalten]’ is thereafter a codeword by which Adorno invokes this argument, for example in Adorno 1997, p. 40, and Adorno 1998a, p. 66.

4. Adorno 1992a and 1998b. ‘Commitment’ is the standard translation of the essay’s title (‘Engagement’ in the original). I use both here, treating them as a semantic pair and opting for the one that resonates most estrangingly in any given sentence.

5. Adorno 1992a, p. 84, and 1998b, p. 419.6. The ad hominem aspect of Adorno’s attack on Brecht is easily dismissed; the critique of

Brecht’s works is more serious. Jameson 1998 can be read as a general answer to Adorno, but Jameson does not provide any close engagement with the substance of Adorno’s arguments.

7. Brecht uses the phrase ‘the new dialectical realism’ in an important letter to Eric Bentley, written from Santa Monica in August 1946, reprinted in Brecht 1990, p. 412.

G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 3–24 5

political force. Second, Adorno’s discussion of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and Arnold Schoenberg in this connection does not convincingly establish a generalised political truth-effect for their works, and therefore does not establish them as counter-models to Brecht. In any case, the truth-effect Adorno claims for Beckett is not one that is oriented toward a radical political practice aiming at a passage out of capitalism. Brecht’s works have their weaknesses, and Adorno has incisively exposed some of them. But Brecht’s dialectical realism is open and provisional enough to turn the specific defects of particular works into productive discussion and debate. As a model of committed paedagogical-artistic practice, it holds up to Adorno’s categorical attack.

I. Brecht’s dialectical realism

There are many roads to Athens.– B. Brecht

Brecht’s representations of capitalism are often rough sketches or snapshots of the background-processes against which radical learning takes place. Arguably, the learning process itself is almost always the main object represented. Capitalism – including fascism, one of its exceptional state- and régime-forms – appears as ‘the immense pressure of misery forcing the exploited to think’.8 In discovering the social causes of their misery, they discover themselves, as changed, changing and changeable humanity. Seeing the world opened up to time and history in this way, Brecht was sure, inspires the exploited to think for themselves and fight back.

As Fredric Jameson rightly points out, critical approaches to Brecht need to periodise his production carefully, and situate each theatre-piece and other forms of writing within the context of struggles and social convulsions in which he worked.9 Minimally, we can distinguish between Germany before the Nazi-takeover, the stations of exile through the period of fascism and war, and the years at the Berliner Ensemble after his return to a divided Germany. Within this rough division, moreover, every work and collaboration takes form as a specific intervention into a specific social force-field.

8. Brecht 1967a, p. 1051, and 1992, p. 83.9. Jameson 1998, p. 17. The ten ‘monadic chronologies’ that Jameson proposes are stimulating

and do justice to the complex ‘historical layering of “Brecht” as such’. They are more than we need here, however, to minimally establish the practice and model of ‘dialectical realism’ – the actual object, that is, which confronts Adorno’s modernism.


Notably, the great experiments of committed didactic theatre and film were produced in the three or four years just prior to 1933, a period of acute social misery and urgent partisan struggle. In addition to the crisis in Germany itself, where massive unemployment and the split in the German Left were effectively exploited by the Nazis and their backers, there was the additional problem, new and difficult, of evaluating developments in the Soviet Union under Stalin – namely the pressures of ‘socialism in one country’ within a capitalist global order, the persecution of the old Bolsheviks in opposition, and the emergence, from 1929 on, of a leadership-cult enforced by terror. In the stresses of these few years, Brecht and Hanns Eisler collaborated on The Measures Taken and The Mother, the two most important of the learning-plays, and Kuhle Wampe, the film with Slatan Dudow; from these years as well came Saint Joan of the Stockyards, the collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann that is, arguably, Brecht’s most direct representation of capitalism as a nexus of forces and processes.

Brecht’s theoretical production has to be periodised and situated in the same way. The major treatments of epic or ‘non-Aristotelian theatre’, developed in the pre-Nazi German period in the wake of The Threepenny Opera, show Brecht opening his way to a fully committed and politicised theatre. The encounter with Mei Lan-Fang, Sergei Tretiakov and others in Moscow in 1935, combined with the loss of his own apparatus and public, spurs the development of Verfremdung, or ‘estrangement’, as an organising artistic category, from 1936 on, as well as his reconsideration of the relation between critical thinking, feelings and pleasure in the Work Journals and Messingkauf Dialogues. These would be worked out more formally in the Short Organon for Theatre, written in Zurich in 1948, just before his return to Germany, and would become the working programme for the Berliner Ensemble. The retorts to Georg Lukács and others over the meaning of realism, which Brecht chose to hold back from publication, were worked up from the insecurities of exile in Denmark on the eve of war in 1938, well after Zhdanovist socialist realism had become official Comintern-doctrine. Around this same time, Brecht learned that Tretiakov and Carola Neher, among others close to his own artistic positions, had been accused and ‘disappeared’ in Stalin’s purges.

But, having registered the differences in these moments, I now work back in the other direction, and go from the particular back to the general. For, beyond the shifts in emphasis and focus, some abiding and properly Brechtian artistic principles are derivable. These can be brought together under the sign of ‘realism’, in the precise and flexible sense in which Brecht developed this category. For reasons I now make clear, ‘dialectical’ is the best term with which to qualify Brecht’s notion.


In the polemics over realism, Brecht had to defend his earlier innovations against charges of formalism and against a rigid and restricted conception of realism based on models from the bourgeois tradition. His strategy, then, was to broaden the category by demolishing simplistic separations of form and content and by exposing the narrowness and rigidity of criteria derived exclusively from particular historical forms – in this case, from the bourgeois novels favoured by Lukács. Brecht writes:

Keeping before our eyes the people who are struggling and transforming reality, we must not cling to ‘tried’ rules for story-telling, venerable precedents from literature, eternal aesthetic laws. We must not abstract the one and only realism from certain existing works, but shall use all means, old and new, tried and untried, deriving from art and deriving from other sources, in order to put reality into peoples’ hands as something to be mastered.10

Since there are many ways to represent reality as material to be mastered, as a nexus to be grasped and changed, it is important, Brecht goes on, to encourage artists to explore all means available in seeking effective combinations of form and content:

For time flows on, and if it did not it would bode ill for those who do not sit at golden tables. Methods exhaust themselves, stimuli fail. New problems surface and call for new means. Reality changes; to represent it, the mode of representation must change as well. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes out of the old, but that is just what makes it new.11

In contrast to official versions of socialist realism, then, the realism Brecht calls for is precise in aim, but flexible, even experimental, in means and method. It aims at representations of reality that are workable, operable, practicable – helpfully applicable to transformative practice and permanently open to correction and revision.

What makes them workable is that they are de-reifying: they show society, not as a static and naturalised fate or second nature, but as a field of forces and processes in motion, unfolding in time, subject to development. The individual appears in such representations not just as a psychological subject, but also as a nexus or ensemble of social relations that are historical and therefore changeable. The name for this mode of radical thinking, this critical stance or Haltung oriented toward transformative practice, is, of course, dialectics.

10. Brecht 1967g, p. 325, and 1992, p. 109.11. Brecht 1967g, p. 327, and 1992, p. 110.


Brecht’s flexible realism is dialectical, in this radical, Marxist sense. The first test of dialectical realism is whether or not, in context, it produces this effect of de-reification or estrangement. Verfremdung is, then, the general category for all the diverse artistic techniques for producing this effect, which, in turn, becomes a moment in a larger process of radical learning. These artistic principles – what I now call dialectical realism – can be actualised today, provided that artists mark the distance between Brecht’s time and our own and aim their interventions at the struggles and crises that constitute the contemporary conjuncture.

II. Re-reading Adorno’s ‘Commitment’

Better no more art at all than Socialist Realism.– T.W. Adorno

In ‘Engagement’, Adorno makes two kinds of arguments against Brecht. The first is structural or categorical: it unfolds from Adorno’s analysis of art’s double character. Art’s autonomy, or difference from life, is what constitutes it in the first place; art cannot renounce this autonomy without at the same time undoing itself as art. The second kind of argument is immanent: Adorno makes specific criticisms of Brecht’s works based on Brecht’s own political criteria. ‘If one takes Brecht at his word and makes politics the criterion of his engaged theatre’, Adorno concludes, ‘then by this criterion his theatre proves to be untrue [unwahr].’12

How are the two kinds of arguments articulated? The mediating pivot that joins them is an implicit distinction between artistic and theoretical representations. Artistic representations are assessed as aesthetic instances of non-identity, but theoretical representations have to meet the rigours of a different kind of testing. Brecht chose to be governed by the criteria of committed theory rather than those of autonomous art; in effect, he turned Marxist theory into his formal artistic principle. For Adorno, adequate theoretical representations of social reality have to dig out the ‘essence’ of social processes – that is, their deepest logic and tendencies, what Marx called their ‘law of motion or movement’.13 Adorno invokes Hegel to make this

12. Adorno 1992a, p. 84, and 1998b, p. 419.13. It is the ‘ultimate aim’ of his ‘Critique of Political Economy’, Marx writes famously in the

1867 preface, ‘to reveal the economic law of motion [Bewegungsgesetz] of modern society’. Marx 1977, p. 92.


point. ‘Hegel’s Logic taught that essence must appear’, he notes.14 In other words, essence must take concrete, determinate form in time and place. To represent the social essence in a form other than the one in which it actually appears in history is to represent something different. If, in order to construct a memorable parable, amusing satire or effective piece of agitation, a committed writer or artist attempts to slip essence into a different form, Adorno concludes, then this is a falsifying representation that is politically untrue, even if it is produced in the name of a true cause. Why? Because the process of aesthetic reduction short-circuits the chain of mediations that joins essence and the social facts that are its specific appearance-form.15 Brecht wants to foster critical spectatorship, but the imperatives of partisan struggle lead him to render reality as something less complex and threatening than it is. The theory that submits to such imperatives ends by teaching submission. For Adorno, this is most clear when Brecht ‘glorifies the Party without mediations’16 or degrades himself as a ‘eulogist of agreement’.17 Ultimately, this is not just Brecht’s failure, Adorno argues; it is a structural problem with all committed art that renounces its autonomy in order to instrumentalise itself politically. Art can only do poorly what theory already does better, and dishonesty about this becomes political untruth. Art that accepts its autonomous status only has to answer to local aesthetic criteria and earns the medal of political truth by insisting on its difference from praxis and real life. But, because Brecht’s art is bad theory, Adorno contends, especially given Brecht’s position, it therefore fails as art as well. Adorno’s specific criticisms of Brecht’s works are underwritten by the structural-categorical argument, but try to demonstrate it through an immanent immersion in particular works: by showing how particular works fail as theory and recoil into dishonesty and untruth, Adorno also aims to show the impossibility of art merging with theory under the sign of commitment.

This is the gist of Adorno’s critique of Brecht. It can be tested by directing critical questions toward any of its three levels: the structural argument, the specific criticisms, or the notion of theory on which the whole case turns.

14. ‘Das Wesen erscheinen muß.’ Adorno 1992a, pp. 84–5, and 1998b, p. 419. The dialectical point, from the ‘Doctrine of Essence’, is that essence must appear as something other than itself; that is, as a dialectical unity with a determinate appearance-form. Adorno is citing Hegel 1969, p. 479.

15. ‘The process of aesthetic reduction [Brecht] undertakes for the sake of political truth cuts truth off and leads it on a parade. Truth requires countless mediations, which Brecht disdains.’ Adorno 1992a, p. 82, and 1998b, p. 416.

16. Adorno 1992a, p. 82, and 1998b, p. 415.17. Adorno 1992a, p. 86, and 1998b, p. 421. Adorno alludes here to The Measures Taken.


i) The structural-categorical argument

I accept the premise of Adorno’s structural argument, but not the proof he derives from it. Art under capitalism does have this double character: both relatively autonomous and social fact. Politically, art is this contradiction produced from an extracted social surplus: it exists only by sharing in the general social guilt, and yet bears a radical promise of happiness that stubbornly exceeds its saturation by exchange-value. Art is relatively autonomous, because every artwork, despite its autonomy, remains a specific appearance of the social essence; the master-logics of capitalist processes always leave scars traceable in the dialectic of form and content. Moreover, art is relatively autonomous because, despite the autonomy of specific artworks, the production and reception of art as a whole has affirmative and stabilising social functions: the compensatory virtual utopia of art captures and neutralises rebellious energies, fostering resignation, accommodationism and conformity in real life.18 And, because the reception of art, even leaving ownership-issues aside, still presumes a privileged access to leisure-time, education and dominant class-culture, it also functions as a system of social distinctions that supports class-society.19 For all these reasons, it is appropriate to speak of the capitalist art-system, as well as culture-industry – although Adorno does not go this far. The crux is this: within these institutionalised social functions, there is still enough relative autonomy for an artwork to assume a critical stance, even a radically critical stance. But, and here is where I part from Adorno, such a stance actualises itself in the form of an intervention in specific moments and situations. The critical force and political truth-content of a work can only appear and have effects within the openings and constraints of specific contexts or conjunctures. This Adorno tends not to admit. From art’s contradictory double character, he concludes that artists either accept autonomy as such, or reject it full stop. Any compromise of autonomy at all becomes equivalent to total surrender. This does not follow, and the example of Brecht suffices to demonstrate why. Whatever Brecht may have said, in practice he never gave up an operative relative autonomy; there was never any absolute renunciation of autonomy. Thus, the categorical argument on its own is not a serious disqualification of Brecht’s art. I will develop this point below.

18. Marcuse 1968 established the terms of this functionalist dialectic.19. This is the aspect analysed in Bourdieu 1984.


ii) What form of theory?

Before addressing some of Adorno’s specific criticisms, I want to question the conception of theory Adorno invokes against Brecht. Is he here invoking radical-critical theory, as Max Horkheimer elaborated it in his programmatic 1937 essay, or is it, in fact, something more like that ‘traditional theory’ – bourgeois or liberal theory – which Horkheimer rejected? Traditional theory sees its task narrowly as the production of knowledge in a form that is neutral with regard to social conflict. Accordingly, it enforces a strict separation of facts and values. Critical theory, in contrast, has understood that in a class-society constituted by relations of exploitation and domination, pure knowledge is an illusion. All theory is committed, knowingly or not.20

Adorno certainly took over this Frankfurt-Institute position and, we know, polemicised energetically against the ‘positivist’ heirs of Max Weber. But, here, he forgets that commitment to the real struggle to change the world is precisely what differentiates a radical-dialectical critical theory from affirmative (or non-critical) and liberal (or non-radical) forms of theory. Frankfurt critical theory positioned itself outside party-discipline, but this was not in order to avoid the struggle for classless society. And Horkheimer makes this point unmistakably in his 1937 essay – just as the Moscow Trials were beginning and in the year after the new Soviet Constitution had cynically declared socialism to be an accomplished fact. After duly noting the tensions inherent in a critical theory that mirrors neither the existing consciousness of the exploited nor the slogans and policies of their party-vanguard, Horkheimer nevertheless makes clear that it is the practical orientation toward ‘the struggle for the future’ that sets it apart from theory as a reified, ideological category: ‘[The critical theorist’s] profession is the struggle to which his thinking belongs, not the thinking that considers itself independent and separable from that

20. See Horkheimer 2002a. The role and responsibility of science expressed in Galileo’s great mea culpa speech (Scene 14 in the post-Hiroshima versions: Brecht 1967d, pp. 1339–41, and Brecht 1994, pp. 107–9) draws very near to the position Horkheimer marks out in 1937: committed, but outside church- (read: market- and party-) discipline. Arguably, Brecht’s formulations of this problematic in the Short Organon are less radical in its critique of science. There, Brecht having resumed the battle for a ‘theatre worthy of the scientific age’, the techno-domination of nature inherent in the bourgeois-scientific project goes uncriticised. However, Brecht’s enlistment there of Galileo, Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer for ‘an aesthetics of the exact sciences’ that makes room for the beauty and pleasure of experimental research is blown up, perhaps intentionally, by the explosive naming of Hiroshima in Section 16, several pages on. Brecht 1967c, pp. 668–9, and 1992, p. 184.


struggle.’21 This struggle is imposed on theory by the social antagonisms structured into productive relations under capitalism.22

I quote Horkheimer’s own words, underscoring their repetition of the term ‘struggle’, because this is precisely what Adorno loses sight of – or disavows, in the psychoanalytical sense – in his 1962 essay.23 Although he is criticising works written for a real and shifting conjuncture of struggle, he elides the concrete situations to which Brecht’s works respond. The slippage comes in the move from the empirical defects of Brecht’s representations to their ostensible political ‘untruth’. ‘Truth’ and ‘untruth’ – social and political Wahrheit and Unwahrheit in the Marxist-Hegelian sense in which Adorno used these terms – are relational categories, actually situational evaluations made with regard to the aim of global emancipation, classless society, what Adorno packed into the codeword ‘reconciliation’.24 Whatever really or potentially contributes to the process of realising classless society is true, in this sense; whatever blocks, sets back or endangers this process is untrue.25

But, given the ruses of reason and ironies of history, assessing truth-content is difficult work. And the reversals and paradoxes of the revolutionary process, experienced as the dilemmas of disciplined militant praxis, surely constitute one of Brecht’s abiding themes. ‘Who fights for communism’, as the control-choir in The Measures Taken puts it, must ‘speak the truth and not speak the truth’, as the struggle demands.26 If a falsified or weaponised representation contributes effectively to the revolutionary process, because it answers to an urgent need in a context of struggle, then, false or not, it becomes politically true. What needs might these be? All that contributes to morale and sustains a

21. Horkheimer 2002a, p. 270, and 2002b, p. 216. Or, again, Horkheimer 2002a, p. 272, and 2002b, p. 219: ‘The theory that in contrast drives on the transformation of the social whole has for now the effect of intensifying the struggle to which it is bound.’

22. Disputes over the politics of the Frankfurt Institute at other moments (or the degree of its commitment to a Marxist or Marxian critique of capitalism, and so on) need not bog us down here. At this critical moment of 1937, ‘struggle’ means ‘class-struggle’, and Horkheimer’s positioning of Frankfurt critical theory commits it to the side of the working class. Frankfurt-antifascism is not liberal.

23. I register the gap between 1937 and 1962 in passing; a full accounting of it, which would require analysis of the Cold-War and West-German contexts, is beyond what I can do here, but would obviously bear on the question of Adorno’s own commitments.

24. To be strict, reconciliation for Adorno would go beyond classless society, as usually conceived, for it would also have to include the liberation of ‘nature’, internal and external. However, this supplement is interpreted, it certainly includes the passage out of capitalism that classless society entails.

25. Hereafter, when ‘truth’ and ‘untruth’ (and its cognates) appear in italics, it is to indicate this special usage and underscores its difference from others based on an allegedly ‘value-neutral’ correspondence-theory of truth.

26. Brecht 1967e, p. 638, and 2001a, p. 13.


struggle through difficult moments, for example – all that inspires tenacity and resilience, and staves off resignation and despair. Are we, then, slipping into the abyss of apologetics for terror? We are, at least, in waters deep and murky, and any evaluation in this direction is instantly contestable. Still, the paradox holds: sometimes, doing bad contributes to the good, while sometimes doing good leads to the bad. Or, in the form we are considering: artful lies and fictions can sometimes serve the truth. It does depend on the situation. About these kinds of problems, to paraphrase Marx, clarity only begins post festum.

iii) The level of specific criticisms

If we grant this, then an artwork’s truth-content can be evaluated only on the basis of a rigorous, detailed analysis of its context and effects. Adorno does not provide this kind of analysis. Let us take his criticisms of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. They are, on first reading, well and cogently made. As a representation of German fascism, Brecht’s satire of Hitler is indeed problematic. ‘In place of a conspiracy of the highly placed and powerful’, Adorno writes,

we have a silly gangster organisation, the Cauliflower Trust. The true horror of fascism is conjured away; it is no longer something incubated in the concentration of social power, but is accidental, like misfortunes and crimes.27

In other words, Ui misses rather than clarifies the essence of fascism as a product of capitalist social logics. In so far as it re-packages this essence in a form that makes it unrecognisable, Brecht’s comic parable is a falsifying representation. Moreover, the strategy of satire and humour Brecht uses to deflate Hitler and ridicule the Nazi-leaders only trivialises both the social forces backing the Nazis and the enormous powers of violence and terror gathering behind the social contradictions of Weimar. But let us accept these points. Must we then also accept Adorno’s summary judgement, that Ui is politically untrue? No, for this evaluation does not necessarily follow.

Brecht and his collaborator Margarete Steffin completed Ui in Finland in April of 1941, but it was never staged or published in his lifetime – a fact Adorno fails even to acknowledge in his 1962 critique. In early 1941, Hitler’s war-machine was everywhere triumphant. Its eventual defeat could in no way be taken for granted, then, as it could be after the belated entry of the Americans and turning of Stalingrad in early 1943. In this light, Ui is not so easily dismissed. Arguably, in that dark moment, this satire might have contributed something. However, had Ui been written and staged ten years

27. Adorno 1992a, p. 83, and 1998b, p. 417.


earlier, in 1931, then Adorno’s criticisms would carry more weight. At that moment, a representation of fascism that is falsifying in the ways Adorno pointed out would also have been politically untrue, for the underestimation of the Nazis and lack of clarity about the social forces behind them could have had catastrophic consequences for praxis: precisely this kind of confusion contributed to the Nazis’ rise to power. A sober and accurate estimation of fascism would have clarified the urgent need for a united front between Communists and Social Democrats to bridge the split in the German Left. Obviously, no single artistic representation can be held responsible for the poverty and defects of political consciousness at that crucial moment. But, possibly, if enough eyes had been opened, the Nazi-takeover might have been averted.

However, to go beyond such an assertion and actually demonstrate the political untruth of a given representation, it would be necessary to establish a minimally accurate baseline against which the representation in question could be assessed. Then it would be necessary to demonstrate how the defects of this representation actually damaged the antifascist struggle in the moments of a specific and unfolding situation. This Adorno does not try to do. With good reason: to do so would itself require a feat of historical representation. For what constitutes the essence of both German fascism and fascism per se is still a hotly debated question – especially since it touches upon the relation between fascism and capitalism and the role of anti-Semitism. And, even within the tradition of critical Marxism, divergent theories of fascism are continuously being revised and corrected in light of ongoing research.28 But, let us take it a few steps further. Assuming we can confidently establish what social forces and processes combined to produce particular forms of fascism, we would still need to mark the difference between our reflected retrospection and the efforts of those who had to grasp fascism from within that moment of struggle and crisis. Representations produced under such pressures can only be adequate in the most provisional way; to treat them as definitive would itself be a falsifying distortion. Retrospective evaluations of Brecht’s works would require a detailed discussion of both the actual social reality that forms the context of those works and the representations of that reality available at the time.

Strategy entails representations that interpret reality. For the working class on the defensive, the struggle against the Nazis was above all a strategic problem of alliances.29 A practical unification of working-class parties and

28. A moment in this process is documented in Dobowski and Wallimann (eds.) 1989.29. As has been amply demonstrated in autopsies of the Left’s strategic failures during those

years. See, for example, Poulantzas 1979 and Claudin 1975. Of the analyses of fascism produced


organisations should therefore have been the priority. If we accept that a united front between the Social Democrats of the SPD and Communists of the KPD would have been the necessary, not to say sufficient, condition of blocking the Nazis, then we would have a criterion: representations of fascism that foreclosed the possibility of a united front, after events had clarified the urgent need for it, would be both false and untrue. But the exact point at which this urgency became clear, or should have become clear, would be difficult to establish. It could probably be shown that the official position of the Third International from 1928 until 1935 was both false and untrue in precisely this way. Moreover, certain defects of the Comintern-position could probably be tracked back to the strategic realignments compelled by the Stalinist doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’. The strict subordination of the parties to the imperatives of Soviet foreign policy certainly distorted political analysis and strategy during these years,30 and it is there, in those distortions, where the false can be seen to become the untrue, in Adorno’s sense.

But we cannot implicate Brecht in this, by simply identifying his representations with official Stalinist ones – at least, not without much more evidence and argumentation than Adorno provides. Adorno seems to assume, on the basis of The Measures Taken, that Brecht glorified the Party blindly and uncritically, and that there is no distance at all between his positions and representations and the Party’s. Adorno certainly does not demonstrate this, and I doubt that it could be demonstrated, even for works produced in the early 1930s, when Brecht was closest to the KPD. When we immerse in the particulars, as Adorno insists we do, and work to dig out the truth and untruth entangled in the social flow of time, then the rigours of empirical testing cut both ways. What has been clarified is that each of Brecht’s anti-Nazi works – from Roundheads and Peakheads, nearing completion just as the Nazis came to power, to Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, written in 1937, Ui of 1941, and Schweyk in the Second World War, written mainly in 1943 – each has to be evaluated carefully in light of unfolding events and the urgent effort to comprehend them. They need, that is, to be assessed as specific interventions in specific situations.

on the Left from within that moment, Trotsky 1971 is probably the most incisive treatment of these fatal missteps and faulty interpretations. Without doubt, it would have been extremely difficult to overcome the historical mistrust and hostility between the SPD and KPD. Nevertheless, that, and no less, is what the conjuncture objectively demanded.

30. As Claudin 1975 documents copiously. Obviously, this is not to imply that SPD-analyses and responses to Nazism were any less disastrous.


‘A Fairytale of Horror’

Roundheads and Peakheads, begun in 1931, would have been a better choice than Ui for Adorno’s critical attentions. A stage-manuscript of this horror-parable was circulating by the end of 1932. When he left Germany the day after the Reichstag burned, Brecht took with him the proofs of a revised version subtitled Rich and Empire Go Gladly Together. In exile, he revised it again, with Steffin and Eisler; versions in Russian and English were published in Moscow in 1936 and 1937, and a German edition was brought out in London by the Malik Verlag in 1938.31 It was first staged, with Eisler’s music, in Copenhagen in 1936. Unlike Ui, then, the genesis of Roundheads and Peakheads reaches back before the Nazi-takeover and, as a representation of fascism, presumably bears more directly the traces of class-struggle in its pre-1933 conjuncture.

The epic parable focuses on the Nazi-displacement of class-antagonism into race-antagonism. This displacement consists of a recoding that invests ideological meanings in arbitrary physical attributes, destroying solidarities and producing realignments among groups in class-struggle. The shape of the head becomes the marker of standing in the new régime; those with the wrong head-shape, purportedly evidence of foreign origins and an abject spirit, will be dispossessed and exterminated. The work depicts the susceptibility of the impoverished peasantry and Mittelstand – the petty-bourgeois shop-owners, small producers and salaried employees – to this ideology. The Pachtherren, the estate-owners, give Iberin-Hitler dictatorial powers because he alone can repress the rebellious renters and crush their communist Sickle League; at the same time, they think they can manage and exploit Iberin’s racial turn. Roundheads and Peakheads began as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. The Verfremdungseffekt of the parable derives, in large part, from the combination of a feudal setting and elevated poetic diction with contemporary scenes and language: in the streets of the old city, Iberin’s Huas or SS talk in Nazi-jargon and Umgangssprache. However, the feudal setting is also a source of the main defects of the work. The altered balance of social forces and state-crisis that conditioned the Nazi-takeover is inadequately represented. The Junker estate-owners are depicted, but they were only one class making up the dominant power-bloc in Weimar – the other, the grande bourgeoisie, is absent. And with it, so is the master-logic of capital-accumulation. The antagonism between rural landlords and tenants cannot simply stand in for that between

31. Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe, oder Reich und Reich gesellt sich gern: Ein Greuelmärchen. For the German, I have used the London Malik version reprinted in Brecht 1967f; for the English, I have preferred N. Goold-Verschoyle’s 1937 translation, reprinted in Brecht 1966.


capital and waged labour. The sickle is there, but the hammer is missing; the workers and their unions and parties are absent. As a result, the real political problem of the German Left and the working-class movement at that moment – how to overcome the SPD/KPD split and form a united front – cannot emerge.32 This is, indeed, a serious fault of the work in its conjuncture, and I doubt that allowances for the distantiations of the parable-form would succeed in extricating it from this criticism.

In light of Adorno’s battery of arguments concerning the exigencies imposed on art ‘after Auschwitz’, an additional defect must be registered. At the beginning of the work, Brecht effectively fingers the genocidal threat of Nazi ‘blood-and-soil’ ideology. In Scene Two, an Iberin militiaman reads it aloud from a newspaper: ‘Iberin says expressly that his single aim is: extermination of the Peakheads, wherever they are nesting!’33 By the end, however, this racist aspect has become a discardable, merely opportunistic factor. The Peakhead-landlords are able to restore themselves to power, and the class-antagonism is now projected outward in a war of expansion. In retrospect, at least, this reflects a fatal underestimation of the Nazi-investment in anti-Semitism. To sum up, my reading does not so much prove the political untruth of Roundheads and Peakheads as it shows how far truth and untruth remain entangled in it. The critical task is to do the untangling, not to issue a crude retrospective condemnation of the playwright.

Adorno’s critique of Brecht: conclusions

All this points to a problem in the critical method Adorno develops from his structural analysis of art’s double character. Any artwork that takes a critical stance against capitalism necessarily does so from a position of at least relative autonomy vis-à-vis the dominant social totality: otherwise, such a stance would not be possible at all. But, because Adorno does not admit that radically committed art under capitalism entails an operative relative autonomy rather than an utter renunciation of all autonomy, he relieves himself of the need to investigate context and conjuncture in a more than abstract and passing way.

32. When it does finally appear, in the peat-bog soldiers, episode of Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, added to the work in 1945 (Scene 4 in Brecht 1967b, and 2009), it is, of course, too late. There the retrospective lesson is: the united front that went unmade in the streets and factories was realised impotently in the concentration-camps – under the gaze of the SS.

33. ‘Ausrottung der Spitzköpfe, wo immer sie nisten!’ Brecht 1966, p. 186, and 1967f, p. 929. Tom Kuhn’s rendering (‘To flush out the Ziks, wherever they’re hiding!’) misses the strongly dehumanising resonance of the German. ‘Wipe out’ comes closer to the sense of ausrottung, but in combination with nesting [nisten], we have the rhetoric of pest-control, right out of Hitler’s speeches. Kuhn’s translation is in Brecht 2001b, p. 20.


If the social ‘outside’ always shows up within artistic form, as its ‘polemical a priori’,34 then this structural constant cannot by itself be the basis for differentiation and assessment. This alone should point us back to the ‘outside’, to specific effects in actual reception-situations, but Adorno declines to make this move. He supports his conception of dissonant modernism with a formalist tendency to discount context. But this tendency leads him to treat representations as if each one were definitive – meant to stand for all time, rather than to intervene in specific situations. If there is a ‘use by’ date, Adorno does not notice. In the case of his critique of Brecht, this tendency becomes a destructive avoidance. To conclude: dialectical immersion in particular works entails a simultaneous immersion in the social contexts for which they were produced. The dialectical point, to which Adorno should be held, is that works do not stand alone: the work is the work together with its context. Evaluations of the quality of Brecht’s representations and the net-balance of their truth-content cannot simply be carried out categorically. Nor do specific criticisms alone suffice to render a summary judgement, without seriously taking into account the real context of struggle. If this is right, then Adorno has failed to back up his judgement of Brecht in anything like an adequate way.

III. Of the radical sublime

Not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he wins.– W. Benjamin

The essay ‘Engagement’ is also one of the places where Adorno revisits his 1951 assertion that ‘after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’.35 Elaborating this claim, he advances Samuel Beckett as the artistic counter-model to Jean-Paul Sartre and Brecht. Without getting into all the issues and problems opened up by this ‘after-Auschwitz’ formula, I at least need to insist that Adorno is pointing here to the catastrophic character of capitalist modernity as a whole. The catastrophe is the whole dialectic of enlightenment and domination – as it has unfolded and continues to unfold in the late-capitalist era of culture-industry and administered integrations. To Adorno’s Auschwitz, we need to add Hiroshima.36 These two events are the ‘test-pieces’ which

34. Adorno 1992a, p. 77, and 1998b, p. 410. Or again, Adorno 1992a, p. 92, and 1998b, p. 428: ‘The effect-complex [Wirkungszusammenhang] is not the principle that governs autonomous art; this principle is in their very structure [ihr Gefüge bei sich selbst].’

35. Adorno 1976, p. 31, and 1992b, p. 34.36. This paragraph and the one that follows summarise a case I argue more fully in Ray 2005


confirm that the catastrophe is not somewhere in the future, still to be avoided, but has already taken place – and is continuing, in the sense that the global social process that produced them continues to churn on. More specifically, they demonstrate what administered state-violence is now materially capable of. All this confirms that social reality, unfolding as history, has killed off the myth of automatic progress. The future of humanity in any form, let alone emancipated ones, is from now on open to doubt, and can no longer be taken for granted. And this has consequences for the representation of social reality.

Crucially, these genocidal techno-administrative powers were developed in a specific global conjuncture of class-struggle: they are products of defeats suffered by the exploited, and from now on are aimed at the exploited, as the weapons of state-terror. It does not follow that the revolutionary process is dead or that humanity will never reach classless society. But it does mean that, on the side of the exploited, the political and cultural forms of class-struggle have to process and reflect these new realities. The old postures, images and marching music that asserted the advent of classless society as imminent, inevitable or otherwise automatic have been falsified by history, in a very precise sense. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are two events of qualitative genocidal violence that cannot be folded back into any redemptive narrative of progress. The potentials they announce enter history as irredeemable moments that explode toxically in every direction. Revolutionary theory and practice now must take this into account: the qualitative event that arrives to reorder everything is not necessarily progressive. The Novum, or radically new, now appears as the ambiguous Angelus novus – the machine-angel or angel of history that announces either a leap toward emancipation or else an absolute ruination more terrible than any momentary defeat.37 Which one, none can

and 2009a. The critical conjunction of Auschwitz and Hiroshima remains controversial – indeed, taboo – in some academic circles, but, in these texts, I show why they must be grasped together: in different ways, each realises a qualitatively new power of genocidal violence. Together, both transformations of quantity into quality are the material basis of a new logic of global-systemic enforcement.

37. I use Novum here, as well as the more usual ‘event’, to invoke the use of this term in Jameson 1998, pp. 125, 127 and 175–8. Adorno brings in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angelus novus, the machine angel’ at the end of 1992a, p. 94, and 1998b, p. 430. Jameson, fine as his book on Brecht is, elides the catastrophe exactly at this point. What Benjamin and Adorno clarify for us is that welcoming the new as such, as Brecht perhaps wished to, is now a dubious risk, for its arrival may be the straight gate to self-rescue or utter obliteration; after 1945, it has objectively changed from a symbol of political truth and progress to a problem and enigma. This change is strongly intimated, though not elaborated, at the end of Brecht’s post-Hiroshima Galileo (Brecht 1967d and 1994).


know beforehand. Now, any representation of contemporary social reality must also comprehend these products and meanings of capitalist modernity.38

For Adorno, the catastrophe of capitalist modernity in this larger sense can only be evoked in art indirectly, through the oblique dissonance of negative representations. Beckett’s Endgame becomes for him the main model. This, I have argued at length elsewhere, is Adorno’s rewriting of the sublime.39 Sublime representations do not have to be empirically accurate renderings of social processes. They merely have to stand firm in their autonomous difference from the given, Adorno claims, and they will function as formal mirrors of the social ‘outside’, whether they want to or not. Perhaps. And, perhaps, as Luke White has argued cogently, a work like Damien Hirst’s infamous platinum-and-diamond skull is a sublime representation of capitalism along these lines.40 Perhaps we can even, with enough ingenuity and goodwill, get from there to the critique of capitalism – as we would need to, if we would set free the political truth locked up in the sublime. But, in general, it is clear that sublime representations of the social given – and especially those evoking the catastrophic aspect of social relations and processes – are not likely to inspire a struggle-oriented political practice. The sublime hits and overwhelms us, but nothing more or specific necessarily follows from this hit. If there is a likely political response to an enjoyable encounter with the semblance of terror, then it is probably resignation or prudent quietude. If sublime hits are linked to a radically critical receptive process – it is by no means certain that they will be, but if they are – then representations of this kind may help us by grounding our critical reflections bodily, in the feelings and sinews, as it were. Where this happens, it means that sublime feelings have been successfully translated into critical consciousness.

38. Thus, it is no longer enough merely to represent capitalism per se, as if Auschwitz and Hiroshima had not taken place, for these events clarify tendencies and potentials that belong to the essence of capitalism as it has actually developed in time. We need to follow up seriously on Thompson 1980 and Kovel 1983: weapons of mass-destruction have to be grasped not as things, but as social processes. My point has been that, as potentially terminal leaps in the powers of enforcement, these processes in turn change the state-form and the modes of capitalist social control. The so-called war on terror, with its politics of fear and emergency, is the contemporary appearance-form of these processes that have become tendencies. There remains much work to be done in thinking through the enforcement-functions of state-terror, grounded in the fatal merger of science, state and war-machine. I make a beginning in Ray 2009b. And this problem of genocidal powers of enforcement is, of course, now converging with another fruit of the techno-domination of nature: processes of ecocide and climate-change that threaten biospheric collapse.

39. Ray 2005 and 2009a.40. White 2009.


This is how Adorno thought we might respond to Beckett: an aesthetic experience that, triggering and passing through emphatic anxiety, gives bodily support to a radical stance against all forms of false reconciliation. This seems to be the only kind of hit or effect [Wirkung] Adorno was willing to endorse. Here is the passage where he makes the case for this sublime way of representing post-Auschwitz capitalism. The paradox, that for the impulse of committed art to be fulfilled, art has to give up all commitment to the world, is, he writes:

based on an extremely simple experience [Erfahrung]: Kafka’s prose and Beckett’s plays and his truly monstrous novel, The Unnamable, produce an effect [Wirkung] in comparison to which official works of committed art look like child’s play; they arouse the anxiety [Angst] that existentialism only talks about. In taking apart illusion, they explode art from inside, whereas proclaimed commitment subjugates art from outside, and therefore in a merely illusory way. Their implacability compels the change in behaviour that committed works merely demand. Anyone over whom Kafka’s wheels have passed has lost all sense of peace with the world, as well the possibility of being satisfied with the judgement that the world is going badly: the moment of confirmation within the resigned observation of evil’s superior power has been eaten away.41

Such an experience actualises, at the level of form, the Verfremdungseffekt that Brecht tried to install at the level of content or message. Maybe. This is, first of all, Adorno’s testimony about his own responses; the rest is extrapolation dressed in categories. Let us assume these responses really can be generalised. But, in that case, what really is the politics of all these Beckett and Kafka readers? How many battalions are they? Will their labour produce ‘four moons’ to light the night-sky? My crude point is that the stance that appreciates standing firm against false reconciliation is different from the stance seeking a practice to restart a blocked revolutionary process. Or, in a more contemporary idiom: these are different subjectivities. It is the latter stance or subjectivity that dialectical realism on the Brechtian model would today aim to support and foster. Not to say that the sublime is therefore worthless and should be thrown away. We can have our Brecht and read our Beckett too. It is only Adorno’s strident insistence on posing a choice between two ‘irreconcilable’ positions that justifies some sarcasm.

41. Adorno 1992a, p. 90, and 1998b, p. 426.


IV. Conclusion

If a problem can be clarified, the solutions are emerging. – Anonymous paraphrase of a Marxian classic

Adorno’s case against Brecht, then, comes down to this: art must not try to do what theory already does better, and, in any case, preaching to the converted does not win anyone for the revolution. For the reasons given, Adorno’s preference for the sublime anxieties of uncommitted art should not scare us away from Brecht or contemporary forms of dialectical realism. If it is ‘the immense pressure of misery’ itself that forces us to think, what we think still needs to pass through our reflections and representations. Any artistic representation of social reality that provokes or fosters radical learning is a contribution to emancipation. In certain contexts, and given an adequate critical reception, sublime works and images may have this effect. Committed works of dialectical realism are likely to be more helpful. We cannot expect that any single representation, however ambitious and monumental, will give us the essence of social appearance with exhaustive perfection, as Alexander Kluge’s nine-and-a-half hour gloss on Eisenstein’s unmade film of Capital should remind us.42 Such totalising finality is in any case antithetical to Brecht’s conception of an open, flexible and provisional dialectical realism. But, if the pressures of crisis and war, mega-slums and absolute poverty, climate-change and ecological degradation lead us to try again to organise a passage beyond the master-logic of capital-accumulation, then we will need artistic as well as theoretical representations of social reality. The more representations the better, then, so long as they are dialectical – so long as they dissolve social facts into processes and the logics driving them. This kind of radical realism will always contribute to that Great Learning by which alone we can make our collective leap.

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Documents

Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments- Brecht and Adorno on Representing Capitalism