Subjectivity can fuse with objective form without blotting it out

Evidence

Standing between these two extremes, the Beethoven melody represents a short-lived synthesis of the functional and the expressive: lengthy and articulate, it presents the appearance of autonomy while being at the same time shrewdly disposed and preformed with a view to the various developments, polyphonic or variational, which it is about to undergo. Reciprocally, the various subvoices of the development are still relatively independent and intrinsically meaningful, which cannot be said for those of late Romanticism; and they have something individual and personal about them which distinguishes them from their rather schematic and mechanical equivalents in earlier music. Thus subjectivity and the personal inform the score down to its smallest elements, but do so by working through the objective, suffusing and vivifying it, rather than by blotting it out and smothering it with the overwhelming harmonic and coloristic bias of later music. And what is true of the part holds, as we have already seen above, for the form as a whole, for the sonata as a short-lived possibility of meaningful organization on a large scale, in which the mind is momentarily able to glimpse a concrete totality, completely present at every instant of its unfolding. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 96

Categorization

• XREF: Directly in the Adorno lineage — this is essentially Adorno’s philosophy of music (Beethoven’s sonata form as the dialectical reconciliation of subject and object, functional and expressive). Jameson is transposing Adorno’s account of Beethoven into his own dialectical critical method. — connects to: Subjectivity is asymmetrically dependent on objectivity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2543; Pure subjectivity pushed to its limit flips into a new objectivity and total order; Subjectivity and objectivity form a dialectical unity in knowledge — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 83 (+3 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that subjectivity ‘works through’ the objective rather than blotting it out, and that the sonata form affords a ‘concrete totality completely present at every instant of its unfolding,’ is a dense dialectical proposition that resists quick summary and repays sustained meditation.

Broader Connections

• Being a partial subject need not reduce one to a passive object #corroborates (0.78)
• Subjectivity and objectivity form a dialectical unity in knowledge #corroborates (0.75) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 83
• Objective category overlap can diverge sharply from individuals’ subjective perceptions #exemplifies (0.73) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 523
• New forms of collectivity are separable from the exploitative data relations that coinhabit them #corroborates (0.72) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 642