Towards a Productive Aesthetics: History and Now-Time in Blake and Brecht

This thesis is a comparison of the theory and practice of aesthetic politics in key works of Bertolt Brecht and William Blake. I argue that there are two separate temporal moments that define Brechts and Blakes political aesthetics. The first moment is defined by a more direct engagement with the nowness and relative newness of their capitalist social world. Capitalist social relations bring out in each of the two a more directly engaging oppositional aesthetics. Given capitalisms desire to create a form of experience that not only makes sense for its subjects own subjugation, while while also attempting to negate any possible alterative to itself, Brecht and Blake develop a political aesthetics that exposes and undercuts these dominant forms of experience. Using Walter Benjamin, I argue that Brecht and Blake posit an oppositional aesthetics of the now which takes seriously capitalisms desires and successes in refashioning experience, but provides a means of both understanding this experience while counterposing and making desirable an oppositional form of existence. This political aesthetic response is grounded in contemporary social relations and responds using this as a framework of reference. The second moment under discussion examines the role of history and historical representation in Brecht and Blake. The central focus is how Brecht and Blake continue the responsive project referenced in the first two chapters by making use of history in aesthetic-political interventions in the present. I argue that they engage historical tropes and use history against the grain in the Jetztzeit (Now-Time), as Benjamin notes. Both repurpose history as a means to produce historical recoveries, making failures or losses in the past open for radical productive possibilities in the present. In this way forms of inherited experience or preconceived truths are placed in a space of contestation. Historical representation is another opportunity to cleave open an oppositional aesthetics and unsettle that which capitalism wishes to make silent.