Althusser, Brecht, and the Bourgeois Antihero in Life of Galileo

Introduction

Louis Althusser (1918–90) was one of the foremost Marxist theorists in the Western world, and advocated an especially orthodox version of Marxism that remained consistently close to the Communist Party line. He regarded Bertolt Brecht as one of the great Marxist-revolutionary playwrights of the twentieth century, who used the theater to oppose the capitalist system and bourgeois ideology.

This paper begins by examining 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 argued that the education system, cultural life, the theater, and the arts would always constitute one major arena of revolutionary struggle against the dominant ideology of capitalism. The paper then considers Althusser's views on Brecht as a revolutionary playwright and how classical and dramatic forms of theater merely uphold the dominant ideologies of society, or resolve social conflicts in a sentimentalized and idealized way through the actions of a hero, while comedy and the theater of the absurd mock all this without offering any hope of real change. Brecht's version of the theater, however, grounded in the historical science of Marxism, offers a subversive and oppositional reading of capitalist ideologies. In plays like the Life of Galileo, it even denies the existence of a hero or a fictionalized solution to social problems.

The final section discusses how Brecht's Galileo is in fact a prototype of an early modern bourgeois opportunist and entrepreneur, sensing a new world of limitless possibilities. He knew that his 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 those institutions could not answer. Galileo's New Science had removed the earth from the center of the universe and relegated it 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 through his telescope, which was deeply distressing to church authorities and even to his own friends and associates. In the end, when threatened with torture and death, he recanted his views and deferred to the traditional authorities rather than risking martyrdom or attempting to lead any kind of revolutionary movement. Brecht's Galileo is highly egotistical and self-absorbed, hedonistic, and concerned above all with enhancing his own pleasure and avoiding pain. He manages to survive under house arrest, but also comes to loathe himself for betraying his own scientific principles and leaving the ruling elites in control of the New Science.

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. Ideologies, on the other hand, 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 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, using 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 the 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 twentieth century, conditions that did not yet exist during the time of Galileo. 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 representing the emerging bourgeoisie were beginning to challenge these arrangements 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, including 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 seventeenth 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 were developed further after their lifetimes. Like Jacques Lacan, Althusser 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 that Marxism always had to be guarded against bourgeois ideologies.

History, for Althusser, is based on class struggle and a permanent conflict between Marxist science and myths and ideologies such as 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 critics as a vulgar Marxist too attached to the Soviet Communist Party line. 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 sense. He had difficulty explaining exactly what art's relationship to ideology was, 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 "interpellation" to refer to the act of presenting the self to the world — as on stage or in a television program — and of being recognized by others, usually in ways that conform to 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 this hardly existed even as a pretense in Galileo's era. Under capitalism, this ideology of the omnipotent individual "being free and master of itself, the center and first mover of the world" was equally 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.

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. Both argued that the theater in capitalist society was simply another commodity for consumption, along with movies, television, and radio, but that subversive and oppositional tendencies were also possible within it. 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 — as in Ionesco — dominant ideological assumptions are overturned and 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, Samuel Beckett and Brecht represented a fourth kind of theater that he called dialectical and realistic, presenting history without heroes or easy, idealized resolutions of conflict. 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 proclaimed Brecht 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, their creations were furthest from the dominant ideological assumptions of the time and attempted to "shatter myths and smash the idols to whom we bow down." Great works of art are therefore progressive rather than reactionary or bourgeois.

Althusser and Brecht described ideology as partially theatrical and conceived of the audience as being in a dialectical relationship with the play. Audiences were not supposed to be mere passive observers seeking entertainment and escape, but were meant 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," audiences might be able to understand characters in the play who find themselves 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. Galileo was revised repeatedly between 1938 and 1945 before finally being presented in the United States by the great British actor-director Charles Laughton. Brecht's plays did not have heroes in the classical sense, nor did they offer 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, spending 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 than 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" — that is, 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 in exile from Nazi Germany, though he did not intend it to be as openly Communist or Marxist as 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, when Communists were under instructions to form broad alliances with liberal and social democratic parties.

Conclusion

Brecht's Galileo is a moral failure, a betrayer, and not only an antihero but perhaps even the Antichrist for the modern age. His purely selfish desires and egotistical drives equip the enemies of humanity with new weapons and technologies to enslave, coerce, and exterminate the masses. People absorb the lesson that because the sun no longer revolves around the earth, "nobody need in future rotate around anybody, nobody needs to offer service or allegiance, and each individual can live entirely selfishly." Far from creating a new heaven and earth, Galileo's science has paradoxically sown the seeds for future militarism and totalitarianism, as well as capitalist exploitation and anarchy.

Galileo becomes the prototype for the citizenry of this brave new world, and the play demonstrates with "great imagination the alternating self-condemnation and self-reassertion of all who live under a stifling regime" such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Brecht portrays the Little Monk in a more sympathetic light: the Monk agrees that Galileo's theories are correct but worries that they will rob his parents of their religion and turn them into atheists — a fear evidently shared by the Catholic Church as well. Their lives are already harsh and miserable and are not likely to improve once they are "deprived of the rich comforts of religion." Nor are the ruling elites who control the New Science eager to use it to better the lot of the masses; they seek only to extend their own wealth and power.

Galileo was far removed from the ideal revolutionary hero that Brecht and Althusser would have preferred. He comes across instead as one of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian calculators, always trying to determine ways to maximize his own pleasure and avoid pain. In other words, he was the very essence of the bourgeois ideology and culture that both men wished to overthrow — but never did.

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