Emancipated motifs reject relational justification and become pure instantaneous expression

Evidence

Now, therefore, the part has become the whole, and the themes become the music itself, which is over when they are over; so that the works shrink alarmingly and the revolutionary piano pieces that make up Opus 23 last only a few seconds apiece, each contained in a scant page of sheet music. (And in this context, the next step would seem to be single notes, and then silence: thus Webern may be seen as the logical completion of this tendency in early Schoenberg.) Hence the term expressionism, for where the motifs involved no longer find a formal justification within the larger relational system of the work itself they are obliged to be somehow self-justifying: pure expression, as autonomous and intelligible as a cry, an instant bounded by the limits of the mind’s capacity to hold a single thought together. Such a situation places new stress on both listener and composer alike: for each of these works reinvents all of music within itself, like a speech each sentence of which would involve the simultaneous recreation of a new grammar to govern it. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 72

Categorization

• XREF: Jameson’s account of expressionism as the loss of relational form connects to Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music and to the modernist aesthetic of the fragment discussed in later Jameson chapters. — connects to: Absolute particulars gain rigidity precisely by being relational moments — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1061; Relation is an ongoing process without presupposable prime elements or origin — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 868

Broader Connections

• Absolute particulars gain rigidity precisely by being relational moments #complicates (0.82) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1061