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)
Obversely, to produce oneself is also to show off, as in the conclusion of the Short Organum: “The spectator should produce himself in this theatre in the easiest way: for the easiest mode of existence is in art” (GKA 23: 97).
Around 1954, planning a series of songs for a play on the Chinese God of Happiness, Brecht noted: “The highest happiness is called productivity” (BBA 204/71, in Tatlow 546). When first thinking of this cycle of songs, he had also noted it should be an entirely materialist work, “praising ‘the good life’ (in both senses). Eating, drinking, dwelling, sleeping, loving, working, thinking, the great pleasures.” (AJ, GKA 27: 159). Though he probably didn’t know the works of young Marx, the parallel to Marx’s “Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, opining, perceiving, willing, being active, loving” (MEW Ergänzungsband I.: 539), is striking.
A whole Brechtian theory of personality could be reconstructed around the axis of productivity; for example, “indignation, this socially highly productive affect” (AJ, GKA 27: 140). I shall therefore insert a discussion of some main points about Brecht’s notion of agency and character before I get to emotions as such.
As can be seen in the above diary note, in a rare series of exceptions to the interdict he had put on himself in the mid-1920s against writing about erotics (which he never observed in poems), Brecht identified love as a paradigm of productivity: “Love is the art of producing something with the capacities of another person. To this purpose one needs regard and affection from the other person.” (GKA 18: 40—see on this theme Haffad). Here are some further Me-ti and Keuner stories with this horizon (the first story was probably stimulated by the anecdote about Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein):
When Mr K. Loved Somebody
“What do you do,” Mr K. was asked, “when you love somebody?” “I make a design of that person,” said Mr K., “and I take care that it turns out similar.” “What? The design?” “No,” said Mr K., “the person.” (GKA 18: 24)
Kin-jeh on Love
I speak not of carnal joys, although there would be much to say about them, nor of being in love, of which there is less to say. With these two phenomena the world would get along, but love must be examined separately, as it is a production. It changes the lover and the beloved, whether in good or bad ways. Already from the outside, lovers appear as producers, and of a high order at that. They show passion and unstoppability, they are soft without being weak, they are always looking for friendly deeds which they may do (in the end accomplished not only for the beloved). They build their love and bestow upon it something historical, as if they reckoned upon the writing of a history. For them the difference between no mistake and only one mistake, a difference which the world can safely ignore, is immense. If their love makes of them something out of the ordinary, they have only themselves to thank; if they fail, they may excuse themselves almost as little with the faults of the beloved as the leader of the people with the faults of the people. The obligations which they take on are obligations against themselves; the severity in relation to the violations of obligation which they muster up is unparallelled. It is the nature of love, as of other huge productions, that the lovers take many things earnestly which others would treat lightly, the smallest touches, the most unnoticeable half-tones. The best succeed in bringing their love into full harmony with other productions; then their friendliness becomes universal, their inventiveness is of use to many, and they support all that is productive. (GKA 18: 175-76)
Love, critical productivity, and the making of images memorably intertwine in these texts (cf. also the “Lai-tu” stories, GW 12: 583-85, and the texts Lovers Make Images of One Another and On the Drawing Up of Effigies, GKA 18: 61 and 20: 168-70). Their dynamic and personalized images, verified by integral bodily contacts, are the symmetrical obverse of those systematically all-encompassing “images of the world” forbidden by Brecht’s pedagogy as unproductive.
This approach may also throw a new light on Brecht’s well-known predilection for female, and especially for maternal figures. The maternal ones (die Mütterlichen)—as Grushe is called at the end of The Caucasian Chalk Circle—love the children productively: not simply, nor even primarily, as their biological bearers but as their social enablers and nurturers. This is largely why Shen Te loves Sun, in The Good Person of Setzuan: she sees in him the potential aviator furthering human communication. A truly productive love is not privatizing: the lovers who “are always looking for friendly deeds which they may do” in the end accomplish them “not only for the beloved.” Love and motherhood are equally revolutionary within an unjust society, just as they converge in the call for a utopian future of friendliness when people will be helpers to people. Grushe takes up little Michael because she had just avowed her love to Simon; Shen Te’s necessity (and misery) in resorting to her alter ego Shui Ta to defend her unborn child is the strongest intrinsic critique and condemnation of capitalism à la Setzuan, and so is Mother Courage’s necessity to deny her dead son in the long war of Germany (there is little or no fathering in Brecht’s work). Erotics in a wider, diffuse and sublimated sense, are strong and omnipresent in Brecht’s plays, but in the sexual sense rather rare. The male relationships in his early plays cannot in my opinion be interpreted as sexual, and thus neither as homosexual. However, after an initial tinkering with the whore as businesswoman, his plays somewhat shamefacedly slighted erotics. If female figures are still clearly privileged in them, it is because they stand for the ultimate alienation of the subject under capitalism, “precisely because [women] can be physically reduced to a commodity,” as well as for “what [Brecht] saw as ‘productive’ or ‘unproductive’ responses to socio-political situations” (Nussbaum 229 and 231)—for example Grushe or Kattrin vs. Natella or Courage. Negative
