I’m going to be putting these last two sequences together — the literary treatment of crime, and the battle for realism in modernism in the plastic arts — now, and just want to leave this post as a kind of (verbose, sorry) epigraph.
It is hard to determine just what the author of Galileo or The Good Woman of Setzuan himself meant, let alone broach the question of the objectivity of these works, which does not coincide with the subjective intention. The allergy to nuanced expression, Brecht's preference for a linguistic quality that may have been the result of his misunderstanding of positivist protocol sentences, [my emphasis —rk] is itself a form of expression that is eloquent only as determinate negation of that expression. Just as art cannot be, and never was, a language of pure feeling, nor a language of the affirmation of the soul, neither is it for art to pursue the results of ordinary knowledge, as for instance in the form of social documentaries that are to function as down payments on empirical research yet to be done. The space between discursive barbarism and poetic euphemism that remains to artworks is scarcely larger than the point of indifference into which Beckett burrowed. — Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
Adorno was all wound up about Brecht, about everything he said and did, his theatrical practise and his theory, his political work, his influence on critics and audiences. Adorno’s writing about Brecht eventually reaches a tone of intense alarm, as if he were screaming to be let out of a closet he simultaneously prays is impenetrable, as the revolutionary politics rams the door.
Brecht needed [for Mother Courage] those wild old‑fashioned times… as an image of the present day, for he himself well knew that the society of his own time could no longer be grasped directly in terms of human beings and things. Thus the construction of society leads him astray, first to a false construction of society and then to events that are not dramatically motivated. Political flaws become artistic flaws, and vice versa. But the less works have to proclaim something they cannot fully believe themselves, the more internally consistent they become, and the less they need a surplus of what they say over what they are. Furthermore, the truly interested parties in all camps still no doubt survive war quite well, even today.
Such aporias are reproduced even in the literary fiber, the Brechtian tone. However little doubt there is about the tone and its unmistakable quality—things on which the mature Brecht may have have placed little value—the tone is poisoned by the falseness of its politics. Because the cause he championed is not, as he long believed, merely an imperfect socialism but a tyranny in which the blind irrationality of social forces returns, with Brecht's assistance as a eulogist of complicity, his lyrical voice has to make itself gravelly to do the job better, and it grates. The rough‑and‑tumble adolescent masculinity of the young Brecht already betrays the false courage of the intellectual who, out of despair about violence, shortsightedly goes over to a violent praxis of which he has every reason to be afraid. The wild roaring of The Measures Taken outshouts the disaster that occurred, a disaster it feverishly tries to depict as salvation. Even the best part of Brecht is infected by the deceptive aspect of his commitment. The language bears witness to the extent of the divergence between the poetic subject and what it proclaims. In order to bridge the gap, Brecht's language affects the speech of the oppressed. But the doctrine it champions requires the language of the intellectual. Its unpretentiousness and simplicity are a fiction. The fiction is revealed as much by the marks of exaggeration as by the stylized recourse to outmoded or provincial forms of expression. Not infrequently it is overly familiar; ears that have preserved their sensitivity cannot help hearing that someone is trying to talk them into something. It is arrogant and almost contemptuous toward the victims to talk like them, as though one were one of them. One may play at anything, but not at being a member of the proletariat. What weighs heaviest against commitment in art is that even good intentions sound a false note when they are noticeable; they do so all the more when they disguise themselves because of that. There is some of this even in the later Brecht, in the linguistic gesture of wisdom, the fiction of the old peasant saturated with epic experience as the poetic subject. No one in any country of the world has this kind of down‑to‑earth, south German "muzhik" experience any more. The ponderous tone becomes a propaganda technique that is designed to make it seem that life is lived properly once the Red Army takes over. Because there is truly nothing in which that humanity, which is palmed off as having already been realized, can be demonstrated, Brecht's tone makes itself an echo of archaic social relationships that are irrevocably in the past. The late Brecht was not all so far from the officially approved version of humanness. A Western journalist might well praise the Caucasian Chalk Circle as a Song of Songs about motherliness, and who is not moved when the splendid young woman is held up as an example to the lady who is plagued by migraines. Baudelaire, who dedicated his work to the person who formulated the phrase l'art pour I'art, was less suited for such a catharsis. Even ambitious and virtuoso poems like "The Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao Te Ching" are marred by the theatrics of utter simplicity. Those whom Brecht considers classics denounced the idiocy of rural life, the stunted consciousness of those who are oppressed and in poverty. For him, as for the existential ontologist, this idiocy becomes ancient truth. His whole oeuvre is a Sisyphean endeavor to somehow reconcile his highly cultivated and differentiated taste with the boorish heteronomous demands he took on in desperation. —Adorno, ‘Commitment’
I’ll get to the charges themselves, the assertions here, eventually. (Note the woke manoeuvres.) The point I want to make now is that Adorno insists the fate of humanity and civilization is at stake in Brecht’s art praxis. Something Brecht surely also wished to believe, but calmly, with a sense of purpose.
In contrast, Brecht couldn’t have cared less what Adorno said. He didn’t think it mattered a whit, didn’t think anyone else would care, didn’t think it could affect the course of human affairs. Just so.
But now the classic fit Larouchies and left Larouchoids are at work creating an illusion of the all importance of Adorno’s texts nobody really reads. They have been shifted from evidence, symptom, hothouse flower to root, cause, secret mover. He has become a familiar folklore figure, whose toxic mind (or curative in his admirers’ view) disseminating itself in somewhat cagey, obscure texts possesses the power to transform humanity and change the course of History.