known in Russian catechisms as formalism

Cultural conservatives who demand that a work of art should say something, join forces with their political opponents against atelic, hermetic works of art.

[...] Committed art in the proper sense is not intended to generate ameliorative measures, legislative acts or practical institutions--like earlier propagandist plays against syphilis, duels, abortion laws or borstals--but to work at the level of fundamental attitudes. For Sartre its task is to awaken the free choice of the agent which makes authentic existence possible at all, as opposed to the neutrality of the spectator. But what gives commitment its aesthetic advantage over tendentiousness also renders the content to which the artist commits himself inherently ambiguous. [...]

[...] This is why the buffoonery of fascism, evoked by Chaplin as well, was at the same time also its ultimate horror. If this is suppressed, and a few sorry exploiters of greengrocers are mocked, where key positions of economic power are actually at issue, the attack misfires. The Great Dictator loses all satirical force and becomes obscene when a Jewish girl can hit a line of storm-troopers on the head with a pan without being torn to pieces. For the sake of political commitment, political reality is trivialized: which then reduces the political effect.

the economic transactions presented as the machinations rapacious traders are not merely puerile [...] they are also unintelligible by the criteria of even the most primitive economic logic

Tacit acceptance of the claim that one half of the world no longer contains antagonisms is supplemented by jests at everything that belies the official theodicy of the other half

Aporia of this sort multiply until they affect the Brechtian tone itself, the very fibre of his poetic art

When Brecht became a panegyrist of its harmony, his lyric voice had to swallow chalk, and it started to grate.

the adherents of a philosophy which has since degenerated into a mere ideological sport, fulminate in pre-1933 fashion against artistic distortion

it converts its own malediction into a theodicy