Diversity and psychological health issues at the workplace are pressing issues in today’s organizations. However, research linking the two fields is scant. To bridge this gap, drawing from team faultline research, social categorization theory, and the job-demands resources model, we propose that perceiving one’s team as fragmented into subgroups increases strain. We further argue that this relationship is mediated by task conflict and relationship conflict and that it is moderated by psychological empowerment and task interdependence. Multilevel structural equation models on (...) a two-wave sample consisting of 536 participants from 107 work teams across various industries and work contexts partially supported the hypotheses: Task conflict did indeed mediate the positive relationships between perceived subgroups and emotional exhaustion while relationship conflict did not; effects on stress symptoms were absent. Moreover, contrary to our expectations, neither empowerment, nor task interdependence moderated the mediation. Results indicate that team diversity can constitute a job demand that can affect psychological health. Focusing on the mediating role of task conflict, we offer a preliminary process model to guide future research at the crossroads of diversity and psychological health at work. (shrink)

We investigate the relationship between subgroup splits, subjectively perceived subgroups, and team identification and emotional exhaustion. Based on the job demands-resources model and on self-categorization theory, we propose that faultline strength and perceived subgroups negatively affect emotional exhaustion, mediated by team identification. We further propose that subgroup identification moderates the mediation such that subgroup identification compensates low levels of team identification. We tested our hypotheses with a two-wave questionnaire study in a sample of 105 participants from 48 teams from various (...) contexts. We found an effect of perceived subgroups on emotional exhaustion mediated by team identification, but no direct or indirect effect of faultline strength on emotional exhaustion. We also could not find that subgroup identification moderates the effect of team identification on emotional exhaustion. We discuss the need for further research on the link of subgroup splits in work teams and the rise of psychological health issues and derive that measures to prevent burnout should primarily focus on avoiding or reducing subgroup perception whereas affecting the actual demographic composition of work team should be of lower priority. (shrink)

El texto presenta una articulación de las reflexiones de Rosa Luxemburg en torno a la tarea de ilustración de las masas (Aufklärungsarbeit) y de las de Bertolt Brecht a propósito del efecto de distanciamiento (Verfremdungseffekt) en su propuesta de teatro épico. La contribución pone el énfasis en tres ejes: (1) el lugar central que ocupa el pensamiento crítico de las masas; (2) el tipo de vínculo entre individuo y sociedad que se deduce de sus propuestas y (3) la no (...) previsibilidad de los efectos de tales procesos. El análisis de sus textos a la luz de estas tres dimensiones pone sobre la mesa la continuidad entre sus ideas y la relevancia que ambas firmas otorgan a los procesos históricos de democratización y de formación de una ciudadanía políticamente activa; dos aspectos que son, en su obra, a la vez el ímpetu y el horizonte de la revolución socialista. (shrink)

During his period of exile in Scandinavia, Bertolt Brecht wrote “I don’t think the traditional form of theatre means anything any longer. Its significance is purely historic; it can illuminate the way in which earlier ages regarded human relationships […] [but] a modern spectator can’t learn anything from them”. To create a modern theatre fit for a modern audience, Brecht holds that not only would the content of plays have to change, but the experience of theatrical spectatorship itself. To (...) fully capture how Brecht’s work differs from that of previous playwrights, a close analysis of spectatorial experience and perception is required. In this paper, I compare the aesthetic techniques used in Brecht’s epic theatre to the genetic phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Reading Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt through a Husserlian lens, I argue that Brecht mobilizes phenomenological methodology in order to suspend the audience’s preconceived notions of theatre and to cultivate self-conscious, critically aware, and socially motivated spectatorship. Just as Husserl describes phenomenology as a presuppositionless science, so too does Brecht offer epic theatre as a way to free “[…] socially-conditioned phenomena from the stamp of familiarity”. (shrink)

Describes the life and influence of B. Brecht. Offers useful explanations of several key concepts Brecht employed, and revised over his career, including: gestus, Verfremdung, and Verfremdungseffekt.

Bertolt Brecht’s poem “A Worker’s Speech to a Doctor” is frequently cited as a means to raise awareness among health workers of the health effects of living and working conditions. Less cited is his Call to Arms trilogy of poems, which calls for class-based action to transform the capitalist economic system that sickens and kills so many. In this article, we show how “A Worker’s Speech to a Doctor,” with its plea for empathy for the ill, contrasts with the (...) more activist and often militant tone of the Call to Arms trilogy: “Call to a Sick Communist,” “The Sick Communist’s Answer to the Comrades,” and “Call to the Doctors and Nurses.” We also show that, while “A Worker’s Speech to a Doctor” has been applied in the training of health workers, its accusatorial tone towards health workers’ complicity in the system the poem is critiquing risks alienating such workers. In contrast, the Call to Arms trilogy seeks common ground, inviting these same workers into the broader political and social fight against injustice. While we contend that the description of the sick worker as a “Communist” risks estranging these health workers, our analysis of the Call to Arms poems nevertheless indicates that their use can contribute to moving health workers’ educational discourse beyond a laudable but fleeting elicitation of empathy for the ill towards a structural critique and deeper systemic understanding in order to prompt action by health workers to reform or even replace the capitalist economic system that sickens and kills so many. (shrink)

Este texto compreende uma proposta educativa baseadano processo didático para o teatro desenvolvido pelo dramaturgo e teóricoalemão Bertolt Brecht, que tenta através do uso da peça A vida de Galileu, uma das mais importantes do autor, desenvolvercom alunos de Ensino Médio um processo semelhante ao desenvolvido por Brechtpara servir aos atores. Acrescenta-se a isso a ação da reflexão filosóficausada para pensar os temas discutidos na peça como o advento do conhecimentocientífico e as consequências deste para a formação do novo (...) homem, um homemregido agora pelas vias do pensamento racional. (shrink)

Summary The aim of this paper is to compare Brechtian theory concerning empathy in theatre and recent studies showing the biological basis of empathy. First of all, a brief summary about the concept of empathy is provided, with particular attention to empathy in Brechtian theatre. Then, a paragraph is dedicated to explain how empathy and emotional involvement are linked to neurobiological mechanisms and body state. In the end, an analysis of the Verfremdungseffekte in the Threepenny Opera is traced to understand (...) how recent studies contradict Brechtian theory as far as empathy is concerned. (shrink)

Nicht erst durch sein antibürgerliches Engagement verdient sich Brecht den Namen eines politischen Schriftstellers, sondern vor allem dadurch, dass die höchst kommunikative Sprache seiner Dichtung aktiv ins Bewusstsein eingreift. Im vorliegenden Buch wird gezeigt, wie die semantische Wirkung der sich im Gestischen festbeissenden Brechtschen Bilder durch strukturalistische und sprachwissenschaftliche Forschungsmethoden voll erfasst werden kann. Sich auf ein Drittes beziehend, bewirken Metaphern und Symbole im aktionsfördernden Kontext, verallgemeinernd und anschaulich zugleich, tiefgründig politische Klärung.

Taken together, the commentaries by Sigrid Merx and Tom Paulus suggest a remarkable dialectical relationship with regard to our article “Performing Phenomenology: Negotiating Presence in Intermedial Theatre”. On the one side a lack of elaborated political consciousness is being detected, while on the other side an alleged surplus of political consciousness is being criticized. Although apparently contradictory, these reactions seem to originate in the same ideological stress: both are somehow haunted by the legacy of Bertolt Brecht and the ideology (...) of the image implicit in critical theory. We argue that the tension between illusion and deconstruction indeed is crucial to the history of the mediatized image, but that it should be taken to a deeper level where it not only remains unsolved but where it forms the heart of the experience. The user knows very well that she is being fooled and, moreover, generously lets herself being fooled. We historicize this fundamental ambivalence with a short excursion in pre-cinematic, pre-Brechtian times. Throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth century, periodic shifts between illusion and its suspension indicates the emergence of what we, in the digital era, might refer to as a ‘meta-realism’, an imagery that incorporates its own critique inside itself. If this analysis holds true, we eventually have to reformulate the stakes of deconstruction and push critical theory beyond its own borders. (shrink)

This essay seeks to illuminate the motives behind Alfred Kurella's damning review of Bertold Brecht's Lehrstück The Measures Taken. This review of 1931 is commonly regarded as having turned the official marxist literary critique against Brecht, straining the relations between the playwright and the nomenklatura for the years that followed. Yet, a closer examination of Alfred Kurella's biography reveals that his review of The Measures Taken has much less to do with Bertold Brecht or with marxist cultural politics, than with (...) the serious political difficulties its author was facing at the time. (shrink)

Bertolt Brecht and Theodor W. Adorno stand for opposing modes and stances within an artistic modernism oriented toward radical social transformation. In his 1962 essay ‘Commitment’, Adorno advanced a biting critique of Brecht’s work and artistic position. Adorno’s arguments have often been dismissed but, surprisingly, are seldom closely engaged with. This paper assesses these two approaches that have been so central to twentieth-century debates in aesthetics: Brecht’s dialectical realism and Adorno’s sublime or dissonant modernism. It provides what still has (...) been missing: a close reading and immanent critique of Adorno’s case against Brecht. And it clarifies one methodological blind spot of Adorno’s formalist conceptualisation of autonomy: he fails to provide the detailed analysis of context that his own dialectical method immanently calls for. The paper shows how and why Brecht’s dialectical realism holds up under Adorno’s attack, and draws conclusions for contemporary artistic practice. (shrink)

This article explores the world of theatre from within and beyond the stage and brings together Roland Barthes as a critic and Samuel Beckett as a playwright via a third character, the Romanian-born playwright Eugène Ionesco, who anathematized the former and admired the latter. The article starts from Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which defined Beckett’s and Ionesco’s art, pointing out that whilst Esslin showed why their works produced ‘bewilderment’ in England and the US, he ignored the (...) Paris debates of the 1950s to early 1960s. It then covers the intricate history of Barthes’s polemical articles on avant-garde theatre and focuses on Barthes hailing Bertolt Brecht as an innovator who redefined theatre as belonging to a community. The next section engages with Beckett’s and Ionesco’s ideas on staging and their relation to Brecht and the Brechtians. The epilogue proposes a reading of Ionesco’s satirical play Improvisation or the Shepherd’s Chameleon (1955), which features Barthes and two other representatives of nouvelle critique as characters. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s conception of the art of acting, and his views on the new actor’s conduct towards their craft, as a pedagogical model for Brechts’ broader view on how we should live our lives. Drawing on his key writings – most importantly, his famous street scene essay – I will show that Brecht’s conception of the theory-practice connection in his approach to actor training/acting bears some deeper insight into Brecht’s conception of the (...) art of living a flourishing life. The new actor is called to develop a conduct of careful observation and imitation of human action, one that is marked by the pleasure and lightness of exploring the contradictory workings of the social world. By placing the actor’s craft at the heart of his educational philosophy, Brecht invites us (the audience) into the theatre as a pedagogical space. Here, not unlike Brecht’s actors, we are summoned to hone our ability to boldly engage with a complex world of human actions and ideas. Brecht maintains that there resides an intellectual as well as sensual delight in being challenged to not simply accept theatre’s presentations as ‘truth’; instead, we are to learn to ‘weigh up’, ‘test’, and ‘improvise’ joyfully with theatre’s proposed ideas and practices—so that we may find out if they serve, or hinder, the creation of a larger flourishing life (beyond the theatre): a life in which we can move together, pleasurably. (shrink)

Bertolt Brecht is internationally known as one of the most influential dramatists, directors, and theater theorists of the twentieth century and also, within German culture, as one of its most innovative modern poets and prose stylists. Whereas Brecht’s contributions to a Marxist aesthetics of drama, theater, poetry, and prose are widely acknowledged, he is less well known as a major thinker on ethical issues, mostly because of his materialist orientation, which conflicts with ethical traditions rooted in metaphysics. Against these (...) traditions, Brecht envisioned an “ethics for the satisfaction of needs”1 and claimed that “material needs as ethical, ethical ones as material, this is not grasped.”2 This.. (shrink)

Brecht’s Life of Galileo provides elements for elaborating what I call “a theory of the encounter of practices”. The concept of the encounter pushes back against teleological theories that predestine modern science to operate as an instrument of domination. I argue that Life of Galileo stages the missed encounters in modernity between science, politics, and art at the same time as it foregrounds the emancipatory power of science. I trace the encounter of practices from the play’s opening scenes – highlighting (...) what I call Galileo’s “double life”. Then, I turn to the most important scene of the play, Scene 10, in which political and artistic practices repurpose Galileo’s novel inventions for their emancipatory desires. In the virtual potentialities of this encounter, that is, despite the missed encounter between Galileo and “the people”, Brecht’s Life of Galileo continues to be fruitful for theorizing the emancipatory power of science. (shrink)

Dying is easy; comedy is hard. Comedy is sovereign. I begin with an excerpt from Bertolt Brecht’s Fugitive Conversations. Ziffel, a physicist, is chatting with the worker Kalle: For humor, I always think of the philosopher Hegel.... He had the makings of one of the greatest humorists among the philosophers.... I read his book The Great Logic once, when I had rheumatism and couldn’t move. It’s one of the greatest humorous works of world literature. It treats of the way (...) of life of concepts, those slippery, unstable, irresponsible existences; how they abuse one another and fight with knives and then sit down together to supper as though nothing had happened.... They can live... (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno—philosopher, cultural critic, sociologist, and music theorist—was one of the most important German intellectuals of the twentieth century. This concise, readable life is the first attempt to look at his philosophical and literary work in its essential political context. Central to Adorno’s intellectual development were his musical training, his father’s Jewish roots, and the rise of National Socialism in Germany, which forced him to emigrate to the United States. While in exile, he and Max Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of (...) Enlightenment, a bold attempt to illuminate the dark side of modernity, and on his own Adorno wrote a series of connected essays on the “culture industry”—his indictment of mass culture. A co-founder of the famous Frankfurt School, Adorno returned to head it after the war, assuming a key role in the intellectual life of postwar West Germany until his untimely death in 1969. Ja;ger’s biography sheds new light on many aspects of Adorno’s life and writings and on his relationships with such figures as Paul Celan, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin. (shrink)

Brechts Sonettsammlung Studien entstand als Reaktion auf die sogenannte Expressionismusdebatte, die in der Exilzeitschrift Das Wort (1937/38) ausgetragen wurde. Es geht darin um die produktive Nutzung des klassischen Erbes der Weltliteratur. Während die theoretischen Schriften Brechts über diese Debatte in der Forschung viel Beachtung fanden, wurden die Studien bisher marginalisiert. Die Autorin legt erstmalig eine Gesamtdarstellung der Studien vor. Im Zentrum stehen die Bezüge zur Expressionismusdebatte, die sich, wie in der Arbeit gezeigt wird, nicht auf eine «Brecht-Lukács-Debatte» reduzieren läßt. Darüber (...) hinaus werden die Studien editionsgeschichtlich, gattungsästhetisch und im Gesamtzusammenhang des Sonett-Werkes Brechts untersucht. (shrink)

Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term “show trials” suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era’s great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages? In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich (...) archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions. (shrink)

Beginning with a discussion of adaptations of François Jullien’s understanding of ‘potential born of disposition’ and ‘silent transformation’ in two recent analyses of capitalist contemporaneity (by Bennett and Dufourmantelle), this essay argues that as a philosophical tool, ‘China’ bears within it a rich and underanalysed genealogy that reframes critical theory’s approach to nature and its objects in a new geopolitical context. The remainder of the essay then unpacks the intellectual history and textual philology of one earlier and pivotal moment of (...) critical theory’s entanglement with ‘China’: Walter Benjamin’s transformation of ‘non-action’, or wu wei, into a complex for thinking through possibilities of what he might, with Jullien, call not-being in debt to Being. (shrink)

Can one reject copyright law and be a qualified observer of its dispositives? This question was taken up by Bertolt Brecht in an intriguing essay concerning the litigation surrounding the film adaptation ofThe Threepenny Opera(1928). Brecht here develops an experimental observation around the nature of film adaptation and cultural production in copyright. While an experimental approach to law was in itself a subversive gesture, the specific legal process enabled him to expose the paradoxical ways in which the copyright system (...) worked. (shrink)

The article is intended to show that bertolt brecht absorbed foreign materials, In this case chinese philosophy, And transformed them into new intellectual experiences and visions which were strictly his own. The author examines the thought of five chinese philosophers, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Mencius and chuang-Tzu and mo-Tzu, With whom brecht became familiar. Since chinese philosophers are essentially social philosophers, Brecht read them in order to find guidance in his search for a political and social theory which was to become (...) the basis of his literary work. The study of chinese philosophy led brecht to modify his marxism in a way which amounts to a reinvention of it. (shrink)

Although the self is distinct from identity, this essay offers some insight into how identity is maintained—in the processes by which a self is formed, and through the actual content of the schemata that compose the self-concept. The author explains how in the 1920s utopian representations of a “new man” indicate the blank space where an aesthetic for the self can appear long before a theory of choice and commitment can exist in reality. Far from being a dramaturgical plan of (...) action, such utopian representations disorient the elements of discourse in order to prepare the way for the appearance of something inconceivable or inexpressible within this discourse. The theatricality produced in this oppositional public sphere—like that of Max Reinhardt, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Toller, and later by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus—can thus be read as expressions of unfulfilled desire resisting the limitations of the present system and breaking beyond with self-defined narratives not yet realized in our everyday lives. (shrink)

RESUMO O artigo reflete sobre a pesquisa em andamento da autora, na linha de processos educacionais em artes cênicas, investigada pela via do Teatro em Comunidades, eixo específico abraçado pelo campo da Pedagogia do Teatro e fundamentado pela obra dos mestres contemporâneos Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal e Paulo Freire. O ponto de tensão desta discussão é o questionamento acerca da possibilidade de investigar a prática do Teatro em Comunidades como capaz de contribuir para construção de uma sistematização de procedimentos (...) pedagógicos teatrais em Educação Não Formal dirigida à formação de artistas e educadores, analisando de maneira crítico-reflexiva os resultados do estudo teórico-prático com enfoque em duas noções-chave: o gestus social e a dialogicidade. O estudo está sendo desenvolvido com jovens, professores e artistas da comunidade sede do município de Seabra, Bahia. Ao tecer considerações sobre a pesquisa de campo em andamento, conclui-se que um estudo desta natureza é relevante por conduzir a formação de artistas e educadores por um território de prática artística teatral que contribui para a edificação de um conhecimento consolidado a partir da ação coletiva, da experimentação prática e elaboração reflexiva pelo estudo das relações sociais. (shrink)

In the 1930s, the playwright Bertolt Brecht had a marked impact on Walter Benjamin’s life and thinking. Brecht’s epic theatre inspired Benjamin to write several texts in which the philosopher explores the concept of the “quotable gesture”. This article aims to offer an interpretation of the quotable gesture as a methodological tool for the critique of the modern alienation of tradition and the crisis of thinking. Drawing on selected essays, I analyse the principle of gestural citation as a critical-hermeneutical (...) principle in which common pre-understanding is to be suspended in favour of particular attention towards the phenomenal and to one’s own thinking. (shrink)

This article is an account of a lecture-performance presentation held in the context of “Contradictions as a Method,” an international Bertolt Brecht symposium that took place in November 2019 at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. As three speakers engaged with theatre in different ways, we were inspired by the dialogical structure of Brecht’s play Buying Brass and staged a similarly structured conversation. This conversation imitated and transposed the form in which thespians and the philosopher meet in Brecht’s (...) original text. However, we decided not to perform characters from the play, but to speak from our own professional perspectives. Consequently, we focused on the current problems in theatre that we have met within our professional engagement, not specific problems mentioned in the original play. Yet, during the rehearsals, it came to light that there were many overlaps between the themes and characters of Brecht’s Buying Brass and the discussion of our live conversations. Therefore, we decided to use explicit references to some parts of the original Buying Brass play in our staged lecture-performance. (shrink)