Adorno’s artists embody moments in the history of form as lived unities of contradiction

Evidence

For Adorno, therefore, the names of the artists stand as so many moments in the history of the form, as so many lived unities between situation and invention, between contradiction and that determinate resolution from which new contradictions spring. A whole vision of the movement of modern history is built implicitly into the lens through which we watch the progression of music from Beethoven to Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In particular, these two final figures illustrate what is for Adorno an exemplary, archetypal opposition, standing as the twin symbolic possibilities of twentieth-century creation—as the very prototypes, indeed, above and beyond art itself, of the alternatives remaining to thought and action in a henceforth totalitarian universe. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 60

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core Frankfurt-School method the reader is tracking: mediation of artist-as-lens onto history, and Schoenberg/Stravinsky as twin archetypes — connects forward to Jameson’s own modernism studies and to Benjamin’s dialectical images. — connects to: Adorno read the naive poet Mörike as a knowing virtuoso of a dying sublimity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2223; Adorno read poems as historical records of society’s contradictions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2221; Art works expose social contradictions through their internal formal tensions — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 19 (+1 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The compressed claim that a whole vision of modern history is built into the lens through which music is watched — that artistic form is itself a socio-historical optic, not just content — is a load-bearing dialectical proposition worth long reflection.

Broader Connections

• Art works expose social contradictions through their internal formal tensions #expands (0.85) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 19
• Adorno read poems as historical records of society’s contradictions #expands (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2221
• Art and theory were partners in Adorno’s thought serving mimesis and reason jointly #expands (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2743