S. grasped the diversity and complexity of social life and knew how to represent it without getting entangled. All his productions make sense.
— Bertolt Brecht, 1952 
“Contradictions are our hope!” Brecht wrote at the beginning of his account of the lawsuit he was involved in over a film of Threepenny Opera.
Brecht was introduced to Marxism in the late 20s by his friend Karl Korsch, who was an anti-Stalinist . Not surprisingly, then, the principle of contradiction appears in a variety of contexts in Brecht’s writing on theater.
Concerning the actor’s work, Brecht wrote of the contradiction between acting and experience, or demonstration and empathy. The “uninstructed,” he wrote, supposes that only one or the other is present in the actors work. “In reality it is a matter of two mutually hostile processes which fuse in the actor’s work; his performance is not just composed of a bit of the one and a bit of the other. His particular effectiveness comes from the tussle and tension of the two opposites, and also from their depth.
Stanislavski, too, highlighted two distinct components:
On the stage there cannot be, under any circumstances, action which is directed immediately at the arousing of a feeling for its own sake. To ignore this rule results only in the most disgusting artificiality. When you are choosing some bit of action leave feeling and spiritual content alone. Never seek to be jealous, or to make love, or to suffer, for its own sake. All such feelings are the result of something that has gone before. Of the thing that goes before you should think as hard as you can. As for the result, it will produce itself.
In Marxism, contradiction usually refers to opposing social forces, such as occurs when different social classes have different goals. In a famous essay Mao Zedong asserted that all movement and life is a result of contradiction. He also suggested that contradiction did not necessarily imply antagonism, as for example in China in 1911 when upper and lower classes both opposed the monarchy.
Recent research has examined how social class affects individual behavior. For example, younger and older people from working-class backgrounds are less likely to become involved in politics than people from middle-class backgrounds ; young people from working-class backgrounds are more likely to become sexually active early; social class has also shown statistical relationships to smoking, church attendance, and scores on standardized tests.
Brecht wrote several pages about the contradictions in Caucasian Chalk Circle. The main contradictions he described pertained, not surprisingly, to the main character, Grusha, and the character Azdak (the town clerk who becomes a judge by popular acclaim):
The more Grusha does to save the child’s life, the more she endangers her own; her productivity tends to her own destruction. That is how things are, given the conditions of war, the law as it is, and her isolation and poverty.
Brecht characterizes Azdak as “the disappointed man who is not going to cause disappointment to others.”
Brecht also lists a number of “Other contradictions” pertaining to a variety of characters:
The petitioners prostrate themselves before the governor as he goes to Easter Mass. Beaten back by the Ironshirts, they fight wildly among themselves for a place in the front row. The same peasant who overcharges Grusha for his milk is then kindly enough to help her pick up the child. He isn’t mean; he’s poor. The architects make utterly servile obeisance to the governor’s ADC [aide de camp?], but one of them has to watch the other two to see how they do it. They are not just natural arse-creepers; they need the job.
© H.Clark Kee, 2009