The Aesthetics of Learning: Bertolt Brecht’s Die Ausnahme und die Regel (The Exception and the Rule)

What we must learn above all is consent.Many say yes, and yet there is no consent.Many are not asked, and manyConsent to wrong things. Therefore:What we must learn above all is consent.

—Bertolt Brecht (He Who Says Yes, 63; He Who Says No, 73)

Brecht’s oeuvre offers a promising site for exploring the processes of “learning through the arts,” as well as for “the art of learning.” The Lehrstücke (learning plays) and the Fatzer fragments, the Messingkauf materials and plays like Man is Man and Life of Galileo (just to mention a few prominent examples from Brecht’s vast oeuvre) present self-reflexive situations of learning while simultaneously highlighting the conceptual basis for such pedagogical and meta-pedagogical activities. Brecht’s dramatic writings often show situations of interrogation and acquisition of knowledge while at the same time exposing their own aesthetic practices as a method for gaining new knowledge about what “needs” to be “learned,” as well as about the process of learning itself—in short, they can teach us how to learn. The short scene in the beginning of Life of Galileo where the eponymous scientist-hero, Brecht’s own alter ego, demonstrates to Andrea, the son of Galileo’s housekeeper, that the earth circles around the sun and not the sun around the earth as the Church teaches, is an excellent example of this multidimensional form of learning.

The Epic Theatre—and this is no doubt also the case in the Lehrstücke, as Brecht repeated several times, particularly in “Kleines Organon für das Theater” (A Short Organum for the Theatre) from 1948—is simultaneously both scientific and pedagogical. Learning and pedagogy are for Brecht also a form of interaction with the world that is revolutionary, both in the sense of contemplating a particular phenomenon from constantly changing perspectives moving “around” it, but also by changing the world itself through revolutionary social change, which as Brecht’s Galileo also argues, is based on the new forms of knowledge he propagates for. In order to achieve this dual goal, not only the world as we know it, but also the activity of learning itself—in this case, from and through the theatre, as well as the pedagogies of studying theatre—must also be constantly investigated and radically critiqued and restructured.

In what follows, I shall address in particular the notion of an aesthetics of learning, beginning by examining the logical structures of the dramatic situations in some of Brecht’s Lehrstücke, in particular Die Ausnahme und die Regel (The Exception and the Rule), written during 1930–31 and published in 1937.¹ My aim is to analyze the dramatic “method” of this and also, to a more limited extent, Brecht’s other Lehrstücke, focusing in particular on the principles of logic and causality applied in these plays, following the ideas that Walter Benjamin presented in his 1921 essay “Critique of Violence.”² However, I will not attempt to distinguish all the particular details between Brecht’s notion of Epic Theatre and the Lehrstück (the genre of the “learning play,” as opposed to the individual plays), which partly overlap, but are also quite different in many important respects.

One of the important differences, however, is the inclusion of a Chorus in the Lehrstücke, as in the identical opening sections of the two short learning plays, He Who Says Yes and He Who Says No, quoted at the beginning of this essay, arguing that the activity of learning is based on the difficulty of and even resistance to initial assumptions, except the assumption that this is what we must eventually learn: “What we must learn above all is consent. / Many say yes, and yet there is no consent. / Many are not asked, and many / Consent to wrong things. Therefore: / What we must learn above all is consent.” As we shall see, one of the crucial issues that Brecht confronts in the Lehrstücke is how to construct a statement that can serve as the universal point of...