the audience–something that Brecht accepts, albeit in a qualified way.
For that can’t be all there is to it: one of the truths contained in Marxism–
at least this is clearly Brecht’s take on it–is that the governing ideas
must be generated by the workers themselves. In other words, the plays
can’t just be a matter of telling the workers what they ought to think.
Thus, a second feature of Marxist‘science’was the necessity of worker-
guided action. Brecht sees his plays as helping to bring that about.^50
‘Science’, then, was a matter of communicating certain truths and aiding
certain kinds of actions. Aiding such actions meant not merely dictating
facts to an audience (although there is no doubt that Brecht was willing to
do so when he thought it necessary), but also asking the right kinds of
questions to the right kinds of people–namely, the workers. Looking
back to the distinctions made earlier in the chapter, Brecht clearly con-
ceives of his plays as mixtures of statements, questions and commands.
What is more, his focus on who the spectators are reflects a version of the
concern with theatre as‘access’, which we discussed above. After all, on
Brecht’s account, it’s the workers who will come to take control; thus,
getting access to a theatre full of worker-spectators gives the playwright
an important kind of access. (One might wonder, as many did, why one
had to exhort workers to achieve what was scientifically inevitable. This
was a common problem–if not a theoretically unsolvable one–for many
socialist thinkers of this era.)
Although I have tried to pull apart some of the notions that are wrap-
ped up in the concept of a theatre for the‘scientific age’, it is important
to see that, for Brecht, they very muchfit together. It’s not, that is, that
he was confusing natural science and speculative political philosophy, or
trying to pass one off as the other; it’s that, as far as he was concerned,
they were intimately connected.^51 The workersfind themselves in a new
position relative to their capitalist employers, precisely because of the tech-
nological advances of the new era. Thus, in making plays more technologi-
cally advanced, Brecht brings before the workers the same technology that
makes possible their liberation. (In doing so, he also takes himself to be
counteracting a capitalist necessity – namely, to keep all matters of
importance hidden from the workers.) Marxism, on his account, just was
turning an appropriately scientific eye to the effects of modern technolo-
gical development. His view, like those of many Marxist (and Hegelian)
art theorists, is that art in some sense reflects the developmental stage of a
society. What was true about Shakespearean England (in terms of its
sociopolitical structure) is not true about Weimar Germany; thus, one
would expect the art, including the theatre, to be different. If art has the
function of communicating the truth about relations between people (as
Brecht suggests it does) and those relations are characterised by new
technology, then it isn’t unreasonable for theatre to make use of that
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