The politics of ideology in Brecht's Galileo

Louis Althusser (1918-90) was one of the foremost Marxist theorists in the Western world, and advocated an especially orthodox version of Marxism that was always close to the Communist Party line. He regarded Bertolt Brecht as one of the great Marxist-revolutionary playwrights of the 20th Century, who used the theater to oppose the capitalist system and bourgeois ideology. In the 2ns section, the paper will examine how Althusser insisted on a 'straight' version of Marxism, uncontaminated by middle class idealism, pragmatism or humanism and centered on class struggle. Like Brecht, he imagined that the education system, cultural life, the theater and the arts would always be one major arena of revolutionary struggle against the dominant ideology of capitalism. The 3rd section will consider Althusser's views on Brecht as a revolutionary playwright, and how classical and dramatic types of theater merely uphold the dominant ideologies of society or resolved social conflicts in a sentimentalized and idealized way through the actions of a hero, while comedy and the theater of the absurd mocked all this without offering any hope of real change. Brecht's version of the theater, however, grounded in the historical science of Marxism, did offer a subversive and oppositional reading of capitalist ideologies, and in plays like the Life of Galileo, even denied the existence of a hero or a fictionalized solution to social problems.

In the 4th section on Brecht's Galileo, Marxism and Galileo as a Bourgeois Antihero, the paper will discuss how Brecht's Galileo was in fact a prototype of an early modern bourgeois opportunist and entrepreneur, sensing a new world of limitless possibilities. He knew that his new scientific discoveries were deeply threatening to the old feudal order, including the Catholic Church and the aristocracy, particularly if the lower orders began asking questions about society and the dominant ideologies that they could not answer. Galileo's New Science had removed earth from the center of the universe and relegated to the periphery, where it has remained ever since. It opened up the possibility that other earths and other civilizations existed out in space and time, while seeming to negate the idea that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. Galileo could not even locate God or heaven in his telescope, which was deeply distressing to the church authorities and even to his own friends and associates. In the end though, when threatened with torture and death, he recanted his views and deferred to the traditional authorities rather than risking martyrdom or attempting to lead some type of revolutionary movement. Brecht's Galileo was highly egotistical and self-absorbed, hedonistic and concerned with enhancing his own pleasure and avoiding pain. He manages to survive under house arrest, but also comes to loathe himself for betraying and undermining his own scientific principles, leaving the ruling elites in control of the New Science.

2. Althusser on the Arts, Culture and Bourgeois Ideology

In "Marxism and Humanism" (1963) and "Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus" (1969), Althusser described ideology as a system of myths, images and ideas playing a political and economic role in society. Far from being a set of abstract academic theories, ideology constituted "our 'lived relationship to historical reality, our 'world' itself" as represented in popular culture. Althusser also insisted that Marxism (historical materialism) was a science rather than an ideology, and that it provided real knowledge about society. On the other hand, ideologies had a certain function under capitalism or any other social system that was not rationally chosen by individuals or even necessarily a conscious and rational part of their thought and personalities. Images from films, advertisements and television, for example, were part of everyday life and showed models of clothing, lifestyles, bodies and homes that became part of popular culture even though they may have had very little to do with the real world as most people experienced it. Marxist science demonstrated that "in reality, our lives are determined in every respect by the capitalist system of production relations in which we live."

For Marxists, the function of the state and the state apparatus is to maintain the ruling class in power. Althusser wrote that the Repressive State Apparatus was the coercive side of the state that used the courts, military, prisons and police to protect capitalist interests, while the Ideological State Apparatus, including religion, political parties, the education system and media, existed to mold minds and personalities, manufacture consent, and manipulate and propagandize the masses. Ruling class ideologies will always dominate culture, education, politics and the media, but like Antonio Gramsci, Althusser regarded arts, culture and the education system as arenas of class struggle in which oppositional and resistance ideologies can also be expressed.

Marxist theorists like Gramsci and Althusser were naturally most concerned with culture, ideology and social relations under urban, industrial capitalism during the 20th Century, which did not yet exist during the time of Galileo. Indeed, the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation and Scientific Revolution all took place at the dawn of capitalism during the early modern period, when banking and manufacturing were still relatively small scale and nation states were only beginning to come into existence. All of these states were governed by absolute monarchs allied with state-supported churches, although early liberals and radicals who represented the emerging bourgeoisie were beginning to challenge these in England, Holland and other northern European nations. For them, the New Science of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton served as a progressive force with which they allied against the reactionary institutions of the old regime like the Catholic Church. Before capitalism and the modern nation state existed, the dominant force in culture, religion and ideology was the church. For this reason "ideological struggle in the pre-capitalist world was conducted primarily at the level of religious and theological discourse" by the educated elites. All this took place before the bourgeoisie held political power anywhere, given that the state was controlled by monarchs, aristocrats and bishops. Althusser thought that under modern capitalism the education system had become the primary focus of class struggle, but no such mass education system existed yet in the 17th Century, when Galileo was threatened with death by the Inquisition and church authorities.

Althusser also regarded Sigmund Freud as an original theorist, comparable to Galileo in the physical sciences and Marx in historical materialism. They had led the way in opening up new continents of knowledge that we developed further after their lifetimes. Like Jacques Lacan, he rejected efforts to blend Freudian theory with humanism, behaviorism, pragmatism or existentialism, all of which he regarded as bourgeois ideologies. This had also occurred with Marxism and Althusser intervened in an attempt to return it to its pure form as advocated by Marx. In his essay "The Humanist Controversy," he argued that the battle of science against ideology would be long lasting and possibly endless, and Marxism always had to be guarded against bourgeois ideologies.

History is based on class struggle, and a permanent conflict between Marxist science and myths and ideologies like humanism. He regarded himself as being actively and constantly engaged in "the class struggle in theory" and asserted that Marx could never have been a humanist without being regressive or even turning Marxism into some kind of middle class religion rather than the science of society. In rejecting all Hegelian, existentialist and idealist admixtures in Marxism, Althusser was often parodied by his critics as a vulgar Marxist who was too attached to the Soviet Communist Party line in politics. He denied that individuals were conscious "authors or subjects of social processes" or even that most of them were conscious at all.

Although his theory of aesthetics was never well-developed, Althusser did not believe that all art was ideology in a purely vulgar manner. In fact, he had difficulty explaining exactly what its relationship was with ideology, except that it was very complex. Nor did he claim that art was a form of knowledge in the scientific (Marxist) sense although it offered "something which alludes to reality." Ideology was a part of all human activities and lived experience, and art, literature and the theater could describe these experiences, as well as class and ideological conflicts. He used the term "interpolation" to refer to the act of presenting the self to the world, as on stage or a television program, and of being recognized by others -- usually to conform to the dominant ideology and societal expectations. Althusser's main goal was to overthrow capitalism and bourgeois ideology, and he believed that avant-garde theater was part of this overall class struggle. Modern bourgeois ideology centered on the supposedly free individual making rational choices and decisions, although to be sure this hardly existed at all in Galileo's era -- not even as a pretense. Under capitalism, this ideology of the omnipotent individual "being free and master of itself, the center and first mover of the world" was also an illusion. In "A Letter on Art" (1966), Althusser reaffirmed that art can break with all ideological suppositions and move in the direction of scientific (Marxist) truth.

3. Brecht and Althusser

Brecht was one of Althusser's primary examples of a revolutionary Marxist playwright, using the theater to challenge bogus capitalist ideology, particularly in the Life of Galileo. In addition, they both argued that the theater in capitalist society was simply another commodity for consumption, along with movies, television and radio, but subversive and oppositional tendencies were also possible. Classical theater was authoritarian and never questioned the dominant ideological assumptions of society but rather confirmed them. In dramatic (and melodramatic) theater, the death or sacrifice of the hero resolved all conflicts and contradictions in society in a "fictional, ideal manner." In comedy and the theater of the absurd of Ionesco, dominant ideological assumptions are overturned and even shown to be ridiculous, right up to the destruction of the theater and the audience. Yet for Ionesco, absurdity was "a state of nature, the original and essential human condition," and cannot be changed by revolution or Marxist political action.

For Althusser, Thomas Beckett and Brecht represented a fourth kind of theater that he called dialectical and realistic, presenting history without heroes or easy, idealized resolutions of conflicts. In these plays, human beings are not really in control of their circumstances or social world, and may not even comprehend the forces that actually shape their lives. In "On Brecht and Marx" (1968), Althusser again proclaimed Brecht as a theatrical revolutionary on the same level that Marx was a political and philosophical revolutionary in that "both recognize the objective, historical existence of the field for which they seek to intervene." Like all great art and literary work, they were furthest from the dominant ideological assumptions of the time and attempt to "shatter myths and smash the idols to whom we bow down." Great works are art are therefore progressive rather than reactionary or bourgeois.

Althusser and Brecht described ideology as partially theatrical and the audience in a dialectical relationship with the play. . They were not supposed to be mere passive observers seeking entertainment and escape, but to actively question the social, political and economic conditions portrayed on stage. Since ideology was a "manifestation of state power in which everyone plays a part he or she had no input in creating" they might be able to understand characters in the play who are in a similar situation. In Brecht's plays, the actors were also involved in a collective effort with the director and playwright in bringing the drama to the stage, and Galileo was revised repeatedly in 1938-45 before finally being presented in the United States by the great British actor-director Charles Laughton. Brecht's plays did not even have heroes in the classical sense, nor did they have neat resolutions or conclusions.

Bertolt Brecht was one of the leading playwrights of the Weimar Republic but went into exile immediately after the Nazis came to power in 1933 and spent most of the war years in the United States. He returned to Europe in 1947 after being called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and settled in East Germany two years later. There he encountered a Stalinist regime "which brooked even less opposition that the Catholic Church had done in medieval and Renaissance times." In private, he opposed the Soviet suppression of the working class rebellion in 1953, but remained in East Berlin until his death from a heart attack three years later. In the end, like Louis Althusser, he had chosen the side of 'actually existing socialism' (i.e. The Soviet Union) in the Cold War, despite certain personal misgivings about the true nature of that system, and even accepted the Stalin Peace Prize in Moscow a year before his death. Brecht wrote the Life of Galileo while he was in exile from Nazi Germany, although he did not intend it to be as openly Communist or Marxist like his work in the 1920s and early-1930s. He made less use of choruses to preach to the audience compared to his earlier plays and downplayed the overtly Marxist elements, since the play was originally written during the Popular Front era and Communists were under instructions to make common alliances with liberal and social democratic parties.

4. Brecht's Life of Galileo

In the 1938-39 version of the play, Galileo is not absolutely hostile to the ruling elites in the Church and the aristocracy, although Brecht does show them to be corrupt and cynical, and expresses "sharp compassion with the miseries of the poor." Galileo as a character was clever rather than heroic, "refusing to become a martyr by submitting to torture, but cunningly continuing his scientific work which the Church condemned." In his 1945-47 version with Charles Laughton, written with Hiroshima, Nagasaki and other recent catastrophes in mind, Brecht's vision became more pessimistic and his views of science more negative. In this play, Galileo as an old man admits that he feared being tortured and burned at the stake by the Inquisition, and no plan at all except to save his own life. All the Church authorities had to do was show him the instruments of torture and he acquiesced, although he also thought himself "unworthy to shake the hand of a fellow scientist, feeling he has betrayed the cause of science." Brecht expressed some concern that this type of timid and deferential Galileo was not exactly the right type of message to send to audiences given the events of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly to Germans who already had far too much experience acquiescing to unjust authority. Furthermore, in this case Brecht was not really going justice to the nuclear scientists in the U.S. like J. Robert Oppenheimer, who did make a major effort to internationalize the control of nuclear weapons after 1945 only to find themselves rejected by the rulers of the U.S. And the Soviet Union. To be sure, the real power remained in the hands of military and political elites, and those scientists who questioned the wisdom of these weapons, such as Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakharov, were suppressed.

4.1 Marxism in Relation to Brecht's Galileo

Brecht's Galileo is a character defined by myths and illusions right from the start, when the audience learns that he did not even invent the telescope but only copied it from a traveller returning from Amsterdam. In fact, no one knows who really invented this new device or even if this was the work of a single individual or many working over a long period. Galileo acts like a proto-capitalist and sells the new invention as his own, and is also portrayed as "greedy, a glutton and an epicure" who can hardly think at all unless he is at least half-drunk. Charles Laughton portrayed him as a man of gargantuan hedonism whose "appetite for knowledge has to be shown as part of his appetite for all things." Far from being a hero in the classical or dramatic sense, Brecht's Galileo is repugnant on many levels, and also turns out to be a coward, who renounces the New Science out of fear of being tortured and burned by the Inquisition. Cunning, unscrupulous and cowardly, Galileo is a man who gulps down food and wine and has "an insatiable desire for more life, more experience, more pleasure." He lacks a center or any kind of fixed moral and political principles, and is a kind of early modern consumer motivated by thoroughly bourgeois self-interest. In the end, he betrays even his own scientific principles of rigid honesty in order to save his own life, and therefore undermines himself.

In the first scene as the play opens in Padua in 1609, Galileo is washing himself with his shirt off, in an age when most people hardly bathed at all, but even in this respect he is the harbinger of a the modern era. He tells the young Andrea that although even the kings and princes are certain that the earth is the center of the universe he will prove them all wrong. They were living in an age of discovery when ships no longer clung to the shore but "sped straight across the seas." No longer would the people be satisfied with answers found in old books but would demand answers for themselves. Since he needs money for his research and the university is stingy with his salary, Galileo proves that he can also be a bourgeois entrepreneur, selling the new telescopes that he heard were already being produced in Holland. In Scene 2, he sells these to the government of Venice with the false claim that they were the result of "seventeen years of patient research." Galileo is not embarrassed when a ship from Holland unloads thousands of telescopes, even though he has promised the Venetians "exclusive rights" to the invention, and merely says that the one he made for them is twice as good as the Dutch version. Besides, as he tells the curator of university museum in Scene 3, "I needed the money," although the curator notes that "you have destroyed my faith in a lot of things." Many others make similar comments to Galileo throughout the play, including his prospective son-in-law, although Galileo is so self-absorbed that he seems oblivious to all this until the end. He is far more interested in the mountains and craters on the moon, which no one in history had ever seen before, and imagined that thousands of other earths existed somewhere in space. Here again, he was actually surprised when the leaders of the Catholic Church moved quickly to cut off all such questions and speculation, for which they simply had no answers.

Galileo manages to destroy the faith of his friend Sagredo in Scene 3, who asks him repeatedly where God is in his new cosmology and warning that he will be burned at the stake if he does not have the proper answers. He has already found that Jupiter has moons that no one has ever seen before, and is more inclined to believe that Martians and moon men exist than God, which would also be the view of Brecht and Althusser. To Sagredo's persistent questions about where God and heaven are, Galileo gives the strictly modern answer "I believe in reason." He also writes a highly servile and deferential letter to the Medici ruler of Florence -- a nine-year-old boy at that time -- promising to name the moons of Jupiter after his family. Once more in this instance, Galileo shows himself to be highly amoral and mercenary about self-promotion to anyone with power and wealth, explaining only that "I need my comforts." Upon his arrival in Florence, however, he discovers that two Scholastic professors are already there, and have accused him of fraud by painting the moons of Jupiter on the lenses of the telescope. This upset the boy ruler of Florence greatly, who wonders what happened to 'his' moons, while the two professors refuse to even look through the telescope despite repeated pleas by Galileo. They have already read in the works of Aristotle that the ideas of Copernicus are impossible and can 'prove' it mathematically and theoretically, and have no interests in experiments or theoretical verification. Even more than the leaders of the Catholic Church, they represent for Brecht and Althusser the ancient and feudal mentality that had contempt for new technology and experiment science as little better than servile labor.

When even the papal astronomer confirms Galileo's discoveries in 1616 (Scene 4), the church leaders are unpleasantly surprised. They had literally been laughing at him up to that moment because his ideas about the movement of the earth seemed to defy common sense, not to mention the Bible. In the Old Testament, after all, the sun was described as moving around the earth, and for Galileo to question scripture was heresy -- punishable by death. One cardinal is so upset by this news that he appears to be having a heart attack, given that Galileo had now transferred humanity to the "outskirts" of the universe with the earth as just one "non-descript star" among many. Why, the cardinal asks, would God even want to send his son to such an insignificant place that was not even at the center of Creation. Another cardinal, more suave than his colleague, comments that all Galileo wants to do is "prove that God made a few mistakes in astronomy" and that he would have to reinterpret what the Bible says.

Of course, once Galileo demanded the right to interpret or ignore scripture, the entire basis of the church's ideological power would crumble, just as it already had in many countries where the Protestant Reformation had taken hold. Galileo starts to become uncomfortable when the cardinals mention that he resembles another man they had burned at the stake not so long before, and even more so when they tell him that the Holy Office had condemned his views as "foolish, absurd and heretical." His choice was now to recant or face torture and execution, which was all the more surprising to him because the cardinals had just been informed that all his theories were true. None of that mattered, since he was dealing with powerful institutions that were not interested in truth but defending their own ideologies and control over society. Their main concern was holding back the floodtide of modernity that threatened to wash them all away and to keep the lower orders under control, although they would also make selective use of the New Science for their own purposes.