The Scream’s absent sound becomes visible vibration on a painted surface

Evidence

Returning now for one last moment to Munch’s painting, it seems evident that The Scream subtly but elaborately disconnects its own aesthetic of expression, all the while remaining imprisoned within it. Its gestural content already underscores its own failure, since the realm of the sonorous, the cry, the raw vibrations of the human throat, are incompatible with its medium (something underscored within the work by the homunculus’s lack of ears). Yet the absent scream returns, as it were, in a dialectic of loops and spirals, circling ever more closely toward that even more absent experience of atrocious solitude and anxiety which the scream was itself to “express.” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 66

Categorization

• XREF: The monotization/expression problem is key to defining modernism’s expressive aesthetic that postmodernism then abandons — useful contrast for the reader’s parody-vs-pastiche axis. — connects to: Silence takes its meaning from surrounding sound — Schafer, Murray R, The Soundscape- Our Sonic Environment…, 864
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Silence takes its meaning from surrounding sound — Schafer, Murray R, The Soundscape- Our Sonic Environment…, 864