Bertolt Brecht

In this course

Brecht's theory of estrangement effects and epic theatre—techniques designed to interrupt bourgeois identification and reveal ideological construction—becomes a model in this course for understanding how AI systems and digital interfaces similarly mediate our experience of reality and shape political consciousness. His Marxist insistence that aesthetic form is never neutral but always serves particular social relations offers a framework for analyzing how contemporary machine learning architectures embed power structures and reproduce ideology. The readings appear to invoke Brecht's antitheatrical techniques as a precedent for thinking about how to create critical distance from automated systems that otherwise present themselves as transparent, inevitable, or natural.

Background

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known as Bertolt Brecht and Bert Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, Brecht wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt.

Mentioned in 1 reading