"Different kinds of clarity"

science, sense, and utilitarian realism in Bertolt Brecht

pp. 131-161

in: Geoffrey A. Baker, The aesthetics of clarity and confusion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

This chapter gauges the extent to which Bertolt Brecht's experimentations with the form and appropriate content of a political theater are also legible as shifting views of knowledge, our ability to communicate it, and its role in engaging an audience. These shifting views situate Brecht's revolutionary theorizations of the theater as continuations of the core disagreement between Nietzsche and the naturalists. Brecht recognizes the need for clarity, but he avers that there are "different kinds of clarity," some of which include a clarity wrought from an audience's deliberate reflections on the problem of opacity. While Brecht's ongoing rewritings of his plays move increasingly toward greater realistic precision, his aesthetic writings emphasize simultaneously the metatheatrical and alienating possibilities of performance toward an informing of his audience.