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Brecht and Method
The legacy of Bertolt Brecht is much contested, whether by those who wish to forget or to vilify his politics, but his stature as the outstanding political playwright and poet of the twentieth century is unforgettably established in this major critical work. Fredric Jameson elegantly dissects the intricate connections between Brecht's drama and politics, demonstrating the way these combined to shape a unique and powerful influence on a profoundly troubled epoch.
Jameson sees Brecht's method as a multi-layered process of reflection and self-reflection, reference and self-reference, which tears open a gap for individuals to situate themselves historically, to think about themselves in the third person, and to use that self-projection in history as a basis for judgment. Emphasizing the themes of separation, distance, multiplicity, choice and contradiction in Brecht's entire corpus, Jameson's study engages in a dialogue with a cryptic work, unpublished in Brecht's lifetime, entitled Me-ti; Book of Twists and Turns. Jameson sees this text as key to understanding Brecht's critical reflections on dialectics and his orientally informed fascination with flow and flux, change and the non-eternal.
For Jameson, Brecht is not prescriptive but performative. His plays do not provide answers but attempt to show people how to perform the act of thinking, how to begin to search for answers themselves. Brecht represents the ceaselessness of transformation while at the same time alienating it, interrupting it, making it comprehensible by making it strange. And thereby, in breaking it up by analysis, the possibility emerges of its reconstitution under a new law.
Jameson sees Brecht's method as a multi-layered process of reflection and self-reflection, reference and self-reference, which tears open a gap for individuals to situate themselves historically, to think about themselves in the third person, and to use that self-projection in history as a basis for judgment. Emphasizing the themes of separation, distance, multiplicity, choice and contradiction in Brecht's entire corpus, Jameson's study engages in a dialogue with a cryptic work, unpublished in Brecht's lifetime, entitled Me-ti; Book of Twists and Turns. Jameson sees this text as key to understanding Brecht's critical reflections on dialectics and his orientally informed fascination with flow and flux, change and the non-eternal.
For Jameson, Brecht is not prescriptive but performative. His plays do not provide answers but attempt to show people how to perform the act of thinking, how to begin to search for answers themselves. Brecht represents the ceaselessness of transformation while at the same time alienating it, interrupting it, making it comprehensible by making it strange. And thereby, in breaking it up by analysis, the possibility emerges of its reconstitution under a new law.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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About the author
Fredric Jameson
168 books683 followersFredric Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 19, 2012
Having just finished reading in sequence Barbara Ransky's biography of Ella Baker and Susan Bickford's proposal (from 1996) for a notion of political listening, I found my thoughts returning to an earlier inquiry into the radical aesthetics of Viktor Shklovsky and Brecht - namely, Silvija Jestrovic's intriguing study, Theatre of Estrangement. From Bickford's discussion of an "auditory gestalt" to a notion of listening that disrupts empathy and makes solidarity possible, I found myself consistently harkening back to Brecht's notions of estrangement as a dialectical process. To help think through these links further, I decided to sit down and spend time with Jameson's Brecht and Method.
Broadly speaking, Jameson makes a number of claims for Brecht particularly in the present after the age of Brecht (namely, the '50s to the '80s) is very much behind us. For one, Jameson argues, the exhaustion with Brecht, the reason he has fallen from fashion in radical art and politics stems from his otherwise unnamed ubiquity. Why take up a study of Brecht when his ideas have in fact achieved a level of banality. After all, as Jameson argues, there would be no poststructuralism, no cultural studies, no postmodernism without Brecht.
Then why study Brecht at all? Is there anything new to say about Brecht? Here is where Jameson wishes to argue that Brecht is less about a toolkit of aesthetic devices than a political theory embedded in a political practice. That is to say, while Brecht has been all but absorbed by contemporary thought, that thought has less successfully taken up Brecht's challenge about praxis. It is a critique one could make of postmodernism in general where that hackneyed term has nearly universally come to signify a periodic style rather than a relationship to political struggle through tactics and strategies.
So what is the politics of Brecht's method? Responding to this question requires Jameson to tackle headfirst the Brechtian devices from estrangement effect, gestus (i.e. epic), separation and distanciation, to his use of the Great Method, aka dialetics. Jameson provides an account of Brecht's use of estrangement distinct from the Russian Formalists and other modernist avant-garde gestures. Where the Russians sought to make perception new by estranging how we perceive the world, or by estranging things of the world, Brecht sought to interrupt the very operations of identification and empathy that drive most forms of bourgeois art. But here, Brecht went one step further. Synthesizing the various tendencies of estrangement, Brecht politicized the concept by bringing into question that which petite bourgeois ideology renders as natural. Brecht estranges the natural order of things by demonstrating how they are produced through human action and thought. In other words, what petite bourgeois ideology claims to be nature is in fact history. And as history, it can then be changed or even caused to whither away through human action and struggle. If this notion of a denaturalized nature sounds familiar, then we recognize it as the primary aim of Roland Barthes's work in texts like, Mythologies. In fact, for Jameson, it is through Barthes (with a far amount of Sartre) that Brecht eventually shapes the poststructuralst project. And this, for Jameson, is Brecht's political method.
For most of the book, Jameson carries this claim forward by exploring the different aspects of Brecht's poetics and dramaturgy. His discussion of learning plays is particularly useful in excavating those texts not merely as cultural objects but as disruptions in Brecht's own complicity towards creating "theatre" or, what Brecht called disparagingly of bourgeois drama, culinary art. The learning plays defer the problem of audience by creating a dialectical process in the form of an endless rehearsal, a "master class," where participants alternate performing the different characters, debate the underlying political themes, and develop a critical analysis of the class politics that the play re-enacts.
However even at his most culinary, such as the later spectacles of Galileo, etc. Brecht continues to operate under a notion that role of the play is to divide the audience. Whereas most liberal and even left art seeks to conjure up a singular audience through some sort of unified call to action, Brecht sought to cleave the audience to compel the audience itself to re-enact class antagonism. Here Jameson's analysis of Brecht becomes the most clear in articulating a kind of political method. In fact, Jameson argues that we still today have not yet fully realized the demands for a new aesthetics proposed by Brecht's use of process and dialectics. In terms of the latter, Jameson clarifies that for Brecht, dialectics and contradiction are not a structural essence that the work of art seeks to excavate -- a flip side to the same modernist coin that attempts to recover some authentic essence of art or experience. Rather, the role of art is to produce contradiction and to put positions into a dialectical process. In other words, productivity itself, as Jameson argues, is not about progress but about praxis.
Much of Jameson's text is enormously useful -- particularly in countering many of the conservative tendencies found in most commentators on Brecht -- Jestrovic included. By identifying a Brechtian political method, Jameson is estranging the whole field of Brechtian scholarship. That said, reading Brecht and Method does require an enormous amount of patience. Jameson will first and foremost always remain a literary scholar and secondary a political theorist. What he will never accomplish is a praxis. This fact is demonstrated over and again through Jameson's claims. For example, in the very moment that he argues for Brecht's political practice, he then attempts to instanciate that fact in Brecht's influence on poststructuralist theory. Is this really what Jameson means by politics? What of the estrangement strategies used by anticolonial movements, the civil rights movement, or the feminist movement? Is Brecht so ubiquitous today or is Brecht really just a specific name (a signature) for a way in which political struggle occurs?
At one point Jameson equates estrangement with the bourgeois revolution against religion. It's a curious -- and nearly reactionary observation given the historic role of those very movements who estranged the bourgeoisie from their own enlightenment claims (e.g. the Haitian uprising). Is estrangement really a bourgeois invention? The answer is only in the affirmative if we think in the very structural terms that Jameson claims Brecht eschews for a more productive and process-based notion of "the Great Method." Thus Jameson steps into his own trap of limiting a discussion of Brechtian method to a Eurological framework. For this, we would need to estrange Brecht himself through an encounter with the non-occidental not as source text but as protagonist.
Broadly speaking, Jameson makes a number of claims for Brecht particularly in the present after the age of Brecht (namely, the '50s to the '80s) is very much behind us. For one, Jameson argues, the exhaustion with Brecht, the reason he has fallen from fashion in radical art and politics stems from his otherwise unnamed ubiquity. Why take up a study of Brecht when his ideas have in fact achieved a level of banality. After all, as Jameson argues, there would be no poststructuralism, no cultural studies, no postmodernism without Brecht.
Then why study Brecht at all? Is there anything new to say about Brecht? Here is where Jameson wishes to argue that Brecht is less about a toolkit of aesthetic devices than a political theory embedded in a political practice. That is to say, while Brecht has been all but absorbed by contemporary thought, that thought has less successfully taken up Brecht's challenge about praxis. It is a critique one could make of postmodernism in general where that hackneyed term has nearly universally come to signify a periodic style rather than a relationship to political struggle through tactics and strategies.
So what is the politics of Brecht's method? Responding to this question requires Jameson to tackle headfirst the Brechtian devices from estrangement effect, gestus (i.e. epic), separation and distanciation, to his use of the Great Method, aka dialetics. Jameson provides an account of Brecht's use of estrangement distinct from the Russian Formalists and other modernist avant-garde gestures. Where the Russians sought to make perception new by estranging how we perceive the world, or by estranging things of the world, Brecht sought to interrupt the very operations of identification and empathy that drive most forms of bourgeois art. But here, Brecht went one step further. Synthesizing the various tendencies of estrangement, Brecht politicized the concept by bringing into question that which petite bourgeois ideology renders as natural. Brecht estranges the natural order of things by demonstrating how they are produced through human action and thought. In other words, what petite bourgeois ideology claims to be nature is in fact history. And as history, it can then be changed or even caused to whither away through human action and struggle. If this notion of a denaturalized nature sounds familiar, then we recognize it as the primary aim of Roland Barthes's work in texts like, Mythologies. In fact, for Jameson, it is through Barthes (with a far amount of Sartre) that Brecht eventually shapes the poststructuralst project. And this, for Jameson, is Brecht's political method.
For most of the book, Jameson carries this claim forward by exploring the different aspects of Brecht's poetics and dramaturgy. His discussion of learning plays is particularly useful in excavating those texts not merely as cultural objects but as disruptions in Brecht's own complicity towards creating "theatre" or, what Brecht called disparagingly of bourgeois drama, culinary art. The learning plays defer the problem of audience by creating a dialectical process in the form of an endless rehearsal, a "master class," where participants alternate performing the different characters, debate the underlying political themes, and develop a critical analysis of the class politics that the play re-enacts.
However even at his most culinary, such as the later spectacles of Galileo, etc. Brecht continues to operate under a notion that role of the play is to divide the audience. Whereas most liberal and even left art seeks to conjure up a singular audience through some sort of unified call to action, Brecht sought to cleave the audience to compel the audience itself to re-enact class antagonism. Here Jameson's analysis of Brecht becomes the most clear in articulating a kind of political method. In fact, Jameson argues that we still today have not yet fully realized the demands for a new aesthetics proposed by Brecht's use of process and dialectics. In terms of the latter, Jameson clarifies that for Brecht, dialectics and contradiction are not a structural essence that the work of art seeks to excavate -- a flip side to the same modernist coin that attempts to recover some authentic essence of art or experience. Rather, the role of art is to produce contradiction and to put positions into a dialectical process. In other words, productivity itself, as Jameson argues, is not about progress but about praxis.
Much of Jameson's text is enormously useful -- particularly in countering many of the conservative tendencies found in most commentators on Brecht -- Jestrovic included. By identifying a Brechtian political method, Jameson is estranging the whole field of Brechtian scholarship. That said, reading Brecht and Method does require an enormous amount of patience. Jameson will first and foremost always remain a literary scholar and secondary a political theorist. What he will never accomplish is a praxis. This fact is demonstrated over and again through Jameson's claims. For example, in the very moment that he argues for Brecht's political practice, he then attempts to instanciate that fact in Brecht's influence on poststructuralist theory. Is this really what Jameson means by politics? What of the estrangement strategies used by anticolonial movements, the civil rights movement, or the feminist movement? Is Brecht so ubiquitous today or is Brecht really just a specific name (a signature) for a way in which political struggle occurs?
At one point Jameson equates estrangement with the bourgeois revolution against religion. It's a curious -- and nearly reactionary observation given the historic role of those very movements who estranged the bourgeoisie from their own enlightenment claims (e.g. the Haitian uprising). Is estrangement really a bourgeois invention? The answer is only in the affirmative if we think in the very structural terms that Jameson claims Brecht eschews for a more productive and process-based notion of "the Great Method." Thus Jameson steps into his own trap of limiting a discussion of Brechtian method to a Eurological framework. For this, we would need to estrange Brecht himself through an encounter with the non-occidental not as source text but as protagonist.
May 6, 2024
This is the best book-length study I have read about ostrananie and "alienation effect." The style is relaxed, funny, and sympathetic to Brecht and not his Stalinist masters (or those Stalinists who thought they were his masters).
Excerpt:
If the catastrophes of the peasant world could open up a brief golden age, here they can
only lead to disaster; and even success is the prelude to more disaster. What Brecht now has to learn is the secret of this temporality, rather than the psychology of those who are submitted to it. This is his account of his efforts:
"A kind of occupational accident helped me out. For a certain play I needed Chicago’s wheat exchange as background. I thought I would be able to acquire the necessary information quickly by making a few enquiries of specialists and practitioners. It happened otherwise. No one, neither well-known writers on economics nor business people — I traveled from Berlin to Vienna after a broker who had worked all his life at the Chicago exchange — no one could explain the processes of the wheat exchange to me adequately.
"I won the impression that these processes were simply inexplicable, i.e. not to be grasped by reason, i.e. unreasonable. The way the world’s wheat was distributed was simply incomprehensible. From every point of view except that of a handful of speculators this grain market was one big swamp.!"
Excerpt:
If the catastrophes of the peasant world could open up a brief golden age, here they can
only lead to disaster; and even success is the prelude to more disaster. What Brecht now has to learn is the secret of this temporality, rather than the psychology of those who are submitted to it. This is his account of his efforts:
"A kind of occupational accident helped me out. For a certain play I needed Chicago’s wheat exchange as background. I thought I would be able to acquire the necessary information quickly by making a few enquiries of specialists and practitioners. It happened otherwise. No one, neither well-known writers on economics nor business people — I traveled from Berlin to Vienna after a broker who had worked all his life at the Chicago exchange — no one could explain the processes of the wheat exchange to me adequately.
"I won the impression that these processes were simply inexplicable, i.e. not to be grasped by reason, i.e. unreasonable. The way the world’s wheat was distributed was simply incomprehensible. From every point of view except that of a handful of speculators this grain market was one big swamp.!"
November 20, 2020
A few years ago I read an essay by Terry Eagleton about Frederic Jameson. It was full of praise and I remember Eagleton especially raved about Jameson’s writing style, but he did end on some doubts, such as the lack of humour in Jameson and, more damningly, that Jameson never seemed “wise”. Without being totally sure what Eagleton meant, I agree. Jameson might be brilliant, provocative and inspiring, but I’m always left wondering what it is all for. Here he writes about Brecht’s Method, often he writes about Form – there are insights, intriguement, but I’m not sure if we find out why Brecht is important. But maybe that’s just taken for granted. And if I was asked to explain Jameson’s argument I wouldn’t know where to start. That is probably just my failure, it’s a rich text that keeps us on our toes and my attention probably wandered now and again. But I wonder if it is also Jameson’s method: he circles his subject, but never quite gets close enough to give Brecht a hug. And, of course, his serpentine sentences circle their subjects. Maybe by nature Jameson is an essayist and what we have is a series of essays where each reinforces the interest of the others, without actually building an argument – maybe we have a series of insights and suggestions, rather than an analysis. And there isn’t that much in Brecht and Method that I would call textual analysis. But the book is full of insights, a rapid suggestiveness of ideas. And maybe I should reread Brecht and Method, just in case there is a centre and I’ve overlooked it.
July 24, 2013
When I picked up a book whose title makes fun of Gadamer and tries to create a respectable ancestor for Roland Barthes, I didn't expect to read about the Dao and upāya.
But I ended up reading about the Dao and upāya.
I am new to Brechtology, so in reading this book, while some of the parts were difficult to get through, I still had a good time just passively enjoying the ride. I liked reading about and from Brecht's unpublished Mo-ti: Book of Twists and Turns, delightful parables and dialogues involving modern-day dialecticians disguised as Chinese philosophers. I liked FJ's analysis of the capitalist and the peasant, two creatures who Brecht loves but are never really thought to be antagonists in any direct sense. I liked his meditations on particular Brechtian terms of art: V-effects, epic theater, gestus, casus, contradiction... etc. etc. I liked his readings of Galileo and science.
Finally, usefulness. I like usefulness most of all. That's how FJ begins.
I have not read a play by Brecht that does not have something useful to say about "religion." But I have not read many. Maybe you can think of one?
But I ended up reading about the Dao and upāya.
I am new to Brechtology, so in reading this book, while some of the parts were difficult to get through, I still had a good time just passively enjoying the ride. I liked reading about and from Brecht's unpublished Mo-ti: Book of Twists and Turns, delightful parables and dialogues involving modern-day dialecticians disguised as Chinese philosophers. I liked FJ's analysis of the capitalist and the peasant, two creatures who Brecht loves but are never really thought to be antagonists in any direct sense. I liked his meditations on particular Brechtian terms of art: V-effects, epic theater, gestus, casus, contradiction... etc. etc. I liked his readings of Galileo and science.
Finally, usefulness. I like usefulness most of all. That's how FJ begins.
I have not read a play by Brecht that does not have something useful to say about "religion." But I have not read many. Maybe you can think of one?
April 3, 2025
This book is very good if you think reading Jameson is a great treat, like I do:
So, should we decide to keep the word 'method', let us then fabulate it a bit, and absorb it into a language, thought, and narrative practice that can lend it a specifically Brechtian resonance and distinctiveness. We will therefore now unmask it, not as method in general, but as the 'Great Method' [i.e. dialectic], that doctrine taught by the legendary Me-ti [from [book:Bertolt Brecht's Me-ti: Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things|26246801] ] in some alternate prehistory to our own. Indeed, Brecht's [no longer] untranslated Book of Changes clearly imposes itself on our discussions here; and just as Gramsci's euphemism for it—the 'philosophy of praxis'—modifies that Marxian 'dialectic' he wished to smuggle past his fascist censors, so also the Brechtian Great Method stages that same traditional dialectic in a rather different way, disclosing its metaphysical or pre-Socratic dimensions ('in der Grossen Methode ist die Ruhe nur ein Grenzfall des Streits' - 'in the Great Method, rest is only a special case of strife' - XVIII, 184) very differently from Stalin's dialectical materialism, and offering Marxism its own uniquely non-Western—or at least, non-bourgeois—philosophy—in the form of a kind of Marxian Tao: "Me-ti said: it is advantageous, not merely to think according to the great Method but to live according to the great Method as well. Not to be identical with oneself, to embrace and intensify crises, to turn small changes into great ones and so forth one need not only observe such phenomena, one can also act them out. One can live with greater or fewer mediations, in more numerous or less numerous relationships. One can aim at or strive for a more durable transformation of one's consciousness by modifying one's social being. One can help to make the institutions of the state more contradictory and thereby more capable of development."
August 4, 2024
Gripping at times and impenetrable at others, Jameson’s book is surprisingly accessible to readers who are unfamiliar with Brecht. Between his biting elucidation of major Brechtian strategies to delicately crafted paragraphs that populate almost every chapter, this was a captivating read that argues for Brecht’s relevance in the now and pulls one further into Brecht’s dramaturgy (even if I did not understand it in whole).
July 1, 2022
Acho que é o pior Jameson que eu li - levei mais de um mês pra encarar as últimas doze páginas, por algum motivo. Quase dá pra imaginar o jovem Freddie, inexplicavelmente já com sua barbichinha babaca, montado em cima de uma bicicleta e gritando "Olha, mãe!, olha!, sem as mãos!" (ou, sei lá, "olha, mãe, Hegel e Deleuze de ponta-cabeça atravessados pela interpelação althusseriana etc.").
December 24, 2021
Just read Brecht because I swear this is needlessly confusing... Or have an in-depth knowledge of Brecht and every other philosopher of the 20th century. The points are good, the writing is actually undecipherable.
February 11, 2019
Jameson never an accessible writer but always an intriguing one. A rich and thorough tour of Brecht's work and its wider literary, cultural and critical theory significance.
October 2, 2025
Supposedly Jameson was asked to contribute a chapter for a book on Brecht. He went away to write it and found he couldn't stop--you can tell. Still the GOAT though; this would be anyone else's best book
July 29, 2017
you won't fully appreciate this well-written study on Bertolt Brecht without a minimum initiation into the works of the great German poet, playwright, and revolutionary writer. Erudite and bursting with insights on the minutiae of Brecht's formal techniques, Fredric Jameson proves himself to be the ever perceptive literary critic in this book. Particularly love his riff about Brecht's underlying Maoism. And yet his overall argument that Brecht has no doctrine to teach (not even a Marxist one) but his formal technique veers towards a formalism that eschews the unity of form and content in Brecht's works. In fact, Brecht's is of a thoroughly Marxist bent. He may not be spoonfeeding the ABCs of Communism to his audience in most of his oevrue, and yet his method (alienation effect, didacticism, gestus, dialectics) operates in such a way as to make Marxist truths about exploitative social relations under capitalism, the underlying class contradictions, and the need for communist revolution more visible.
September 4, 2013
obscure.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews