(BBA 112/57 and 66, ca. 1930, in Steinweg Lehrstück 21)
A final but omnipresent aspect, which too can here only be suggested, is Brecht’s dialectical stress not simply on critique but on outright negativity, such as would be usually considered “bad” or indeed dangerous and horrifying. Any “positive” action is meaningful—rather than automatic and unfree—only as a choice out of a spread of stillborn possibilities: for example, “To consent means also: not to consent”; or, faced with a teaching, one can adore it or despise it (BBA 529/14 and BBA 112/69, both ca. 1930, in Steinweg Lehrstück 24 and 19). But more than logic is at stake here. At stake is, first, the dialectical sublation of the asocial element. From the figure of Baal on, Brecht was obsessed by sensual and other values inherent in anti-social behaviour. In the already cited “Theory of Pedagogies” he allots it a central role in the development of the post-revolutionary state or community: “The State can best correct human asocial instincts, since they arise out of fear and ignorance, by extorting them from each in an as far as possible perfect form, almost impossible to attain for the individual. This is the basis of the idea of using theatrical playing in pedagogies.” (GKA 21: 398, underlined by DS) And further, in the Lehrstück “an educational effect may be expected from an (as magnificent as possible) reproduction of asocial acts and bearings” (GKA 22.1: 351). While it is possible that Brecht was here building on the Soviet experiences in educating the huge numbers of besprizornye, the post-Civil-War nomadic orphaned children sometimes treated by playing out a kind of psychodrama, and while he was—more remotely—perhaps also trying to socialize Freud’s return of the repressed (cf. Steinweg Lehrstück 138 and 142), the central impulse at work here is not clear though obviously of supreme importance for Brecht’s thought and work.
What is finally at stake in Brecht’s “pedagogy” is the full socialization of the community. Using his frequent image of a roaring river, what should happen is not only a channelling of the deviant energies but also a redrawing of the rationalistic norms for channels or riverbeds. To anticipate my next section on productivity: “Not all human productivity is included in the always limited present production.... Very sharp ears for the productive element are needed. It is a masterpiece to keep it from destruction, that is, to keep it from destroying and to keep it from being destroyed.” (GKA 22.1: 132) In fact, Brecht finally concluded that there was no such thing as asocial people or instincts in themselves, only asocial roles or functions, such as that of the private possessors of the means of production (AJ, GKA 26: 331).
1.2. The Haltung of Producing (Productivity, Creativity)
The Nazi victory deprived Brecht of any chances for teaching with help of an organized societal network. Furthermore, it interacted with Stalinism to take off the historical agenda Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s ideas about, and early Soviet experiments with, self-management and a gradual elimination of State apparatus. In the new situation Brecht abandoned the project of Pädagogium but not the underlying impulse at organized learning of a method that centers on bearing. The method and bearing to be learned, it turned out, was one of a productive critique, or of a critical productivity.
My thesis in this section is that in the Marxist tradition, beginning with Marx himself, there are two largely incompatible but intimately associated meanings of “production”: the economistic one, taken from Adam Smith and other bourgeois political economists, and the anti-alienating or creative meaning which is part of Marx’s central utopian critique, taken from a revolutionary fusion of Enlightenment and Romanticism; and furthermore, that Brecht largely and very originally moved from the first to the second meaning. These two meanings may be associated with Marx’s central opposition between exchange-value and use-value, in which the inherent limit of capitalism is precisely restriction of production of use-values by exchange-value and, as its obverse, the growth of productive forces at the expense of the “main force of production, the human being itself” (Marx, Grundrisse, discussed further in Suvin “Living Labour,” 437-52; cf. Harvey 2, 105, and passim). In these circumstances, as already the young Hegel had noted, “The value of labour decreases in the same proportion as the productivity of labour increases” (239). Marx’s examples for production in the first sense are all quantifiable productions founded on capital and produced for profit. In this case, “our production is not a production of man for man as man, that is it is not a social production. As person, none among us has a relationship of pleasure to the other’s product.” (Marx 459) Most interestingly, his examples for qualitative production in the second sense, not reducible to profit, are actors producing a play, piano players producing not only music but also “our musical ear,” and the madman producing delusions (ibidem 109). Artistic production is indeed (together with scientific production) taken as a paradigm for such non-alienated production of use-values.
Brecht has his share of “vulgar economist” references to production (and of course this economism is not so vulgar when applied to situations of poverty and low productivity). His defence of Stalin was, for all strong reservations, based on the great surge of production in the USSR (cf. GKA 18: 108, 139, and passim), just as his objections to capitalism were based on its being “no more able to further the production of life’s necessities in the form of free competition” but of having to resort to “production of instruments of destruction” (GKA 18: 146-47)—of, in effect, making for death rather than life. However, some usages from the 1930s already show an ambiguity or passage between this meaning and production in the wider sense of productivity meaning any creativity. This turning seems marked by compromise terms such as “productive behaviour” (GKA 18: 152, and cf. the Me-ti story On the Productivity of Individuals, GKA 18: 138).
While the term “pedagogy” is abandoned by Brecht by the mid-1930s, references to creative production become especially frequent from 1940 on, as testified by Brecht’s journal. Non-Aristotelian theatre, always tied to an “evaluative Haltung” (GKA 21: 440-42), is now defined as “simply [one with] a spectator who produces the world,” and as using for the basis of its emotions, alongside curiosity and helpfulness, “human productivity, the noblest of them all” (AJ, GKA 26: 439 and 441-42). “Learning” is now equivalent to “mental producing” (GKA 22.1: 63). The key passage, which explicitly identifies production as non-economistic productivity, seems to be a notation from March 7, 1941:
The great error which has prevented me from making the little Lehrstück of The Evil, Asocial Baal was my definition of socialism as a great order. It is, on the contrary, much more practical to define it as a great production. Production is, of course, to be taken in the widest sense, and the struggle goes for the full unfettering of everybody’s productivity. The products may be bread, lamps, hats, pieces of music, chess moves, irrigation, complexion, character, plays, etc. (AJ, GKA 26: 468)
The concept of an all-sided deployment of productivity is amplified in a note of 1949. In a characteristic move, this begins with a counterproposal to (or, ambiguously, amplification of—at any rate in a supersession of) Lenin’s famous dictum that communists deduce their morality from their struggle, which was shared by Brecht as late as 1931 in The Measures Taken; and it ends by punning on the theatrical sense of sich produzieren, “showing off” and/or “producing itself”:
If one wishes to deduce all morality from productivity and one sees the highest thing in a huge exfoliation of everybody’s productivity, one must take care to lift the interdict from mere existence, indeed from the resistance against being used. I love: I make the beloved productive; I repair a car: I make the drivers drive; I sing: I ennoble the hearing of the hearer, etc. etc. But then society has to have the ability to use everything, it must possess such a “capital” of what has already been produced, such a plenty of offers, that the individual’s production becomes as if a superfluous, so to speak unexpected thing. If productivity is the highest thing, then strikes must still be honoured. (In the esthetic domain it is already so. The asocial element also pleases; it is taken as sufficient that it “produces itself.”) (AJ, GKA 27: 305)