Antony Tatlow 
 
 
discourse of my analyses, moving from more abstract speculation to 
the presentation of specific evidence from Brecht's writing and thought.

     First of all I want to look at some problems in Western critical theory

in relation to his work, then at critical positions which narrow its 
capacity, then to show how it is wider than many suppose or condone, 
and finally to suggest how this broadening of perspective is related to 
the globalization of theory, to the paradigm change that is the title of
my 
paper. 
     For some time now the critical ground has been shifting. A 
catchphrase in the West is that these movements, their general 
direction, are indecipherable. That there is a crisis in theory is an 
unremarkable assumption. Here the Chinese word for crisis, weiji, is 
suggestive, since it combines the signs for "danger" and "opportunity".
I 
would want to connect this with something Manfred Wekwerth said 
recently, one of Brecht's assistant directors and now risen to dignity 
and office as President of the Academy of Arts of the German 
Democratic Republic: "We have been changing the world for some time.

Perhaps we should now begin to interpret it again." His Western 
European counterparts cannot agree on how this should be done. 
    Wekwerth's observation, with its provocative reversal of Marx's 
celebrated Feuerbach thesis, can be usefully attuned not merely to a 
fashionable change of tone but to a much more radical reconceiving of 
the paradigms that control our responses. Any analysis of 
danger/opportunity must be adequate to the interrelationships between 
the so-called Three Worlds, as between Eastern and Western cultures, 
and here Brecht's work offers a persuasive, and perhaps still 
unparalleled, opportunity to think about these dangers. Obviously this 
has to be argued, and it is equally obvious that I cannot give enough 
detailed evidence today. 
    But I make two assumptions: that the coalition of disciplines known 
as "cultural studies" and focused by the term "critical theory",
with its 
deconstructing study of language and metaphor, has moved to a central 
position and not just for the humanities, and secondly that the Brecht 
which interests me is not the Brecht I encounter in so many books. 
    With this shift in the disciplines, the hard have turned soft and the

soft have hardened. The discipline of history is now hard put to define 
its categories; the rug has been tugged from under the discipline of 
philosophy; and even economists admit their graphs are fantasies of 
exactitude resting upon unexamined metaphors. I quote from the 
Journal of Economic Literature: 
 
       Economics is adrift in metaphors ... they are taken literally 
       because they happen to be in the language of mathematics. 
       To say that markets can be represented by supply and 
       demand curves is no less a metaphor than to say that the 
       west wind is 'the breath of autumn's being.' Modern 
       economics is... metaphor run wild." (Quoted in R. Kuttner': 
       "On the state of Economics." Dialoge 3, 1986, p. 70.) 
 
 
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