ABSTRACT
Brecht’s aesthetic is a poetics of reification, borrowing alienation from the social and returning it in estranged form, as a Verfremdungseffekt. Yet the elevation of culture to the position of second nature implies that within late capitalism we increasingly lose the ability to think dialectically: postmodernism occludes the human ability to grasp contradictory tensions. A similarly Hegelian reading of The Measures Taken refuses a reading that attends to the vulgar mechanical necessity of the Young Comrade’s death for the sake of Communism’s long-term goals. Such crude determinism, with its ends-justifies-means logic, would reduce the play to an instance of the tragic ideology, but one ironically repulsive to a bourgeois consciousness because of the assertion that communism, rather than middle-class society, is the necessary end for which life must be sacrificed. This tragic truth is embodied in the form of The Measures Taken, in the fact that the Three Agitators are the Young Comrade.
