Bourgeois ascendancy turned novelty from by-product into an end pursued for its own sake
Evidence
IT HAS often been pointed out that the increasing tempo of artistic change since Romanticism and the conquest of power by the middle classes involves a modification of the functional value of the new within the artistic process. Novelty is now felt to be not a relatively secondary and natural by-product, but rather an end to be pursued in its own right. Now knowledge of the innovations of the past furnishes a new kind of stimulus for the construction of the individual works themselves, so that technical revolutions such as that of Schoenberg must henceforth be read on two levels: not only as one more moment in that gradual and autonomous evolution of material which has characterized the whole history of music, but also, and above all, as an object lesson in a peculiarly modern phenomenon: the attempt to think your way, through sheer formal invention, into the very future of history itself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 61
Categorization
- XREF: The commodity-driven shift of the new toward an autonomous end anticipates Jameson’s later analysis of pastiche and the culture of late capitalism; also connects to Benjamin’s aura and shock in modernity. — connects to: Capital reabsorbed modernism’s cult of the new as commodity novelty — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 62; Objectification becomes bourgeois rationalization when objectivity remains unfree. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 267; Amusement becomes an ideal that displaces the higher things it mimics (+7 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: Schoenberg as ‘thinking your way through sheer formal invention into the future of history itself’ — formal innovation as anticipatory historical cognition — is a dense, paradigm-shifting formulation.
Broader Connections
- Capital reabsorbed modernism’s cult of the new as commodity novelty
#corroborates(0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 62 - Amusement becomes an ideal that displaces the higher things it mimics
#expands(0.78) - Under spectacle capitalism, appearing replaced having as the commodity exchanged
#expands(0.75) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 304 - Commodity exchange reduces difference to identity through endless novelty
#expands(0.74) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 548 - Capitalist accumulation obeys law-like principles yet produces only illusory novelty
#qualifies(0.73) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 2145 - Objectification becomes bourgeois rationalization when objectivity remains unfree.
#contradicts(0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 267