Freedom from tonality dialectically generates its own stricter new law

Evidence

Yet atonality, however much it may testify to the loss of rational control in modern society, at the same time carries within itself the elements of a new kind of control, the requirements of a new order as yet still only latent in the historical moment. … For ultimately the only logical solution is that of not repeating a given note until all of the other eleven notes of the scale have first been touched on, and with this the twelve-tone “row” is born and replaces tonality. Henceforth, each work shall be composed not in a key but “in” a particular and unique row, or arrangement of all twelve notes of the scale, devised for it alone, so that in a sense the twelve-tone work is “nothing more” than an immense theme and variations with the individual row as theme, a repetition over and over again of the same series of twelve notes, but this time in either the horizontal or the vertical dimension. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 76

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the twelve-tone row’s dialectical genesis: freedom’s negation becomes a new order.
• XREF: Classic Adorno/Marcuse dialectic of liberation generating new repression — the very move Jameson inherits from the Frankfurt School. — connects to: Beethoven’s sonata form reenacts tonality as a self-evident, self-confirming law; Dialectics works by letting an opponent’s standpoint move itself to contradiction — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 766; Letting-go of one-sidedness is itself the renunciation that began the dialectic — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1089

Broader Connections

• Beethoven’s sonata form reenacts tonality as a self-evident, self-confirming law #contradicts (0.85)
• Dialectics works by letting an opponent’s standpoint move itself to contradiction #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 766
• Letting-go of one-sidedness is itself the renunciation that began the dialectic #qualifies (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1089