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social concerns the moulding of the spectators into better people, whatever that means. In short, Stanislavski's artistic and private life, and his entire Weltanschauung were all deeply apolitical. Stanislavski's practical work with actors and on performances was admirably suited to his broad aesthetic objectives. Furthermore, the key elements of his system were discovered to have a sound basis in the principles that have crystallized through experiments in the social psychology and psychophysiology of emotions. Elements of an emotional episode sequence presented in this paper closely correspond to elements of a Stanislavskian beat or unit. Each time a Stanislavskian actor rehearses a unit, or executes it on the stage, he is subject to psychological principles described above. So long as empathy and an uplifting experience occur, it is irrelevant, from Stanislavski's point of view, whether or not something like catharsis takes place, whether or not the spectators (who have, for example, seen a naturalistic portrayal of indignant workers in a play break machinery) angrily do it themselves the next day, and what the further psychological and behavioral consequences of such violent actions might be. Brecht. The fact that Stanislavski's aesthetics were well served by his system, and that the system was perhaps as useful as it was because it inadvertently capitalized on sound principles of human emotion and cognition, does not, of course, in any sense preclude the viability and appeal of entirely different approaches to the theater. Brecht's was such approach, innovative and highly effective, quite apart from pontifications about the Verfremdungseffekte as conduits for political messages. There is no doubt that Brecht's techniques the practical realization of V-effekte in acting style, staging, blocking, lighting, and sets have created an enduring theater revolution that has been influential beyond the Berliner Ensemble, beyond the staging of his own plays, and beyond the work of playwrights and directors sympathetic to his politics. Kenneth Tynan's adjectives light, relaxed, ascetically spare . . . cool for the 1949 Berlin production of Mother Courage69 apply just as well to some of Brecht-inspired stagings of, for instance, Thornton Wilder's plays. Frugality and a degree of abstractness of the means of expression, the unemotional, detached stance, and brilliantly lit visual images of striking contrast and simplicity This content downloaded from 207.46.13.53 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 04:27:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 234 Comparative Drama are all remarkably appealing to post-modernist audiencesJO Analytic plays and performances lacking in thrills and throatgripping emotions can be beautiful theater; the fact that actors in this type of theater do not use the techniques anchored in the principles that are part of the emotional-episode model is immaterial from the purely aesthetic viewpoint. What are, however, the implications, of the psychological findings presented in this paper for Brecht's use of the theater for political ends? It could be argued that all of Brecht's notions about the epic theater and V-effekte were, in fact, entirely aesthetic and that he did not seriously entertain the hope that their application would lead to political education and social action. Yet he phrased his adamant opposition to theater in political terms with such consistency that is forced to think that he sincerely believed the spectators' empathy and cathartic experiences to lead inexorably to hypnotic stupor and thus to be inimical to the learning of political messages and to social action outside the theater. Therefore, in the light of the empirical evidence presented here, Brecht made a grave error if his objectives were indeed primarily political. The data suggest that the observation of aggressive activities (for strikes and other types of resistance to authority often of necessity border on the violent) leads to an increase rather than a decrease in subsequent aggression. Furthermore, this anti-catharsis effect is likely to be more pronounced when there is strong identification and empathy with the people (e.g., actors) whose behavior on the stage is later imitated. There is simply no evidence for Aristotelian catharsis that Brecht presumably so feared and because of which (allegedly) he so militantly sought to replace the illusionist theater by the epic. Precisely because the V-effekte tends to decrease the actors' emotional experiences and the spectators' identification and empathy (as we have seen from the data supporting the emotionepisode model), Brecht was more likely to fail politically by relying on such effects. And the failure would be augmented by the calm narrative form and the restrained plots that have their setting in alien, pseudo-exotic locales. Epic theater and the V-effekte are likely to lead to social inaction rather than to bogus, non-existent Aristotelian catharsis. Thus is led to the paradoxical conclusion that if Brecht wanted political results he should perhaps have given the This content downloaded from 207.46.13.53 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 04:27:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Vladimir J. Konecni 235 V-effekte in staging and acting as a gift to largely apolitical writers with abstract, absurdist, or metaphysical concerns (e.g., Ionesco or Beckett) while himself adopting the Stanislavski system for his actors, naturalism for his staging, and fiery revolutionary materials with clear-cut, large-scale (including violent) actions for his themes. The failure to do so was precisely the ground on which he was criticized by the Soviet and East German cultural commissars. He was useful to them for his Communist views and defection from the West as a cold-war propaganda tool but was distrusted for not depicting on the stage, realistically and emotionally, the violent smashing of Capitalism. That Johanna in St. Joan of the Stockyards {Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthofe) and the Young Comrade in The Measures Taken {Die Massnahme) frustrated, even inadvertently, the revolutionary goals by not condoning violence, and that the failure of the Paris Commune of 1871 was so vividly depicted in The Days of the Commune {Die Tage der Commune), failed to provide successful agit-prop in the commissars' eyes (and they were right! ).7l One is tempted to agree with Ionesco's conclusion: one now notices that all the solutions offered by the ideological theatre, Brechtian or other, were false solutions.72 And wonders if the aesthetic aspects of Brecht's work could have been further refined had he known about the likely anti-catharsis effects of the theater and had he not wasted his creative energies on even the half-hearted agit-prop attempts like Die Mutter and various Lehrstucke.
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