The concept of estrangement—sometimes also translated as “alienation effect”—comes from Bertolt Brecht’s modernist essay of Marxist aesthetics titled “A Short Organum for the Theatre” (1948). In this essay, Brecht offers a manifesto-like description of what theater must be in order to be properly political. Brecht urges his reader to depart from “Aristotelian” conventions of mimesis, empathy, and realistic narrative. Such representational techniques, he warns, present “the structures of society (represented on the stage) as incapable of being influenced by society (in the auditorium).” This is because realist aesthetics facilitate individualized complacency for Brecht–when watching a film or play, members of the collective audience (or society) are isolated by the activity of their “private imaginations.” As a result, spectators become preoccupied with the events of the narrative and the feeling of identification, rather than questioning the contours of reality they are presented with.
Rejecting realist aesthetics and passive consumption, Brecht argues that art should disrupt our sense of reality and inspire collective action. Art, he contends, should produce a critical attitude rather than an empathetic one. He demands that the spectator not fall into the story-world presented on stage, but rather be awakened as she actively makes sense (meaning and perception) of disrupted “reality.” Brecht develops his method of estrangement in the service of such awakening. According to the project of estrangement, works of art should pry open a sort of gap between “reality” and representation, thus revealing all reality as (ideological) representation. This may be achieved formally through the use of vacant expression, vague gestures, awkward embodiments of emotion (whether melodramatic or detached), arbitrary and contingent plot, unnatural scenery, and poor acting. Presented with such disruptive aesthetics, viewers are denied the resolve and comfort of leisurely consumption; they are prompted to feel closed out by reality or struggle for a place within it, actively world-building in the process. Ultimately, for Brecht, the semi-autonomous space of the stage (and art more generally) serves as a key place to practice our revolutionary, world-building power.
Several Marxist investments run through Brecht’s formal aesthetics. The theoretical practice of estrangement intentionally mirrors and re-doubles the constituent alienation faced by the working classes, both by alienating the viewers during the spectatorial experience, and by showing the viewers images of their own alienation. As a result, Brechtian spectatorship becomes an active process of dis-identification rather than interpellation into dominant power systems. It is in this active dis-identification–rather than empathy or identification–that art finds a politics “fit for the times” of post-WWII capitalism.