Historical novelty is generated from the contradictions of a specific situation, not from freedom.

Evidence

For Wagner, however, the problem is that of setting up a relationship between leitmotifs which cannot be varied in the old sense, for it is now the leitmotif rather than the basic key of the composition which is the element of permanence. … In order to devise a constructional principle capable of dealing with the archaic and cumbersome phenomenon of static repetition, Wagner finds himself obliged to invent something which bears in itself the seeds of the most advanced and progressive of future musical techniques. … Yet at the same time this new chromaticism points, even beyond atonality, toward the future resystematization of the twelve-tone row, and may thus serve as an object lesson in the way in which the historically new is generated out of the contradictions of a particular situation and moment, and as an illustration of the function, in dialectical analyses, of such terms as progressive and regressive, by means of which elements of a given complex are distinguished only in order to reidentify them the more surely in their inseparability and to make possible a differential perception of the place of a given moment in the historical continuum. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 57

Categorization

• XREF: This is the essence of Adorno’s dialectical method — the micro-level study of a cultural artifact (Wagner’s leitmotifs) as a compressed model of socio-economic history. Also evokes Lukács’s totality and Jameson’s own insistence that the new emerges from contradictions. — connects to: The historical novel reveals contradictions of content becoming contradictions of form — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 695; Historical conjunctures are overdetermined accumulations of heterogeneous contradictions; Mechanical causality cannot account for qualitative change or historical novelty. (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The progressive/regressive double-move — distinguishing elements only to reidentify them in their inseparability — is the crux of dialectical analysis and resists any one-sentence summary.

Broader Connections

• Historical conjunctures are overdetermined accumulations of heterogeneous contradictions #corroborates (0.85)
• Revolutionary conjunctures arise from accumulated overdetermined contradictions, not the economy alone #corroborates (0.82) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 534
• History changes only through historical means, not eternal truths #corroborates (0.78) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 261
• Mechanical causality cannot account for qualitative change or historical novelty. #expands (0.75)
• Historical forces are determinate but not predetermined, allowing contingency without closed determinism. #qualifies (0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1198
• Marx saw historical development as contradictory rather than unilinear #corroborates (0.72)