The violin’s tone embodies the Cartesian lyric subject and its suppression marks postindividualism

Evidence

In it, for instance, as in the larger world of business and industry, we find a tiny history of inventions and machines, what might be called the engineering dimension of musical history: that of the instruments themselves, which stand in the same ambiguous relationship of cause and effect to the development of the works and forms as do their technological equivalents (the steam engine) in the world of history at large (the industrial revolution). They arrive on the scene with a kind of symbolic fitness: “it is not for nothing that the newly soulful tone of the violin counts among the great innovations of the age of Descartes.” Throughout its long ascendancy, indeed, the violin preserves this close identification with the emergence of individual subjectivity on the stage of philosophical thought. It remains a privileged medium for the expression of the emotions and demands of the lyrical subject, and the violin concerto, much like the Bildungsroman, stands as the vehicle for individual lyric heroics, while in other forms the massed orchestral strings conventionally represent the welling up of subjective feeling and of protest against the necessities of the objective universe. By the same token, when composers begin to suppress the singing violin tone and to orchestrate without strings or to transform the stringed instrument into a plucked, almost percussive device (as in the “ugly” pizzicati, the strummings and “weird” falsetto effects of Schoenberg), what happens to the violin is to be taken as a sign of the determination to express what crushes the individual, to pass from the sentimentalization of individual distress to a new, postindividualistic framework. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 52

Categorization

• XREF: The violin-as-Cartesian-subject and Schoenberg’s pizzicati as postindividualistic directly mirrors Adorno’s thesis on the regression of listening and the crisis of the subject; also connects to the Bildungsroman parallel Jameson draws from Lukács. — connects to: Music communicates emotion and shared cultural symbolism rather than propositional content; Linguistic thoughts can be heard as sounds rather than meanings — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 221; Colonial order and the Cartesian mind both rest on a spectator facing a world-show — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 547 (+4 more)
• SEED: An essay on instrumentality as ideology: how a change in musical instrument technology (steam engine to violin to saxophone) charts the history of the bourgeois subject — usable as a model for reading technology change in other domains.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move from ‘preconscious instrument to conscious subject, then to its dissolution’ — violin as the sound-trace of individual subjectivity culminating in Schoenberg’s crushing of it — is a dense, layered dialectical reading that resists one-line summary.

Broader Connections

• Colonial order and the Cartesian mind both rest on a spectator facing a world-show #expands (0.80) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 547
• Foucault traces the subversion of the Cartesian subject to Modernist literature and philosophy #expands (0.80) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 287
• Music communicates emotion and shared cultural symbolism rather than propositional content #corroborates (0.75)
• Linguistic thoughts can be heard as sounds rather than meanings #corroborates (0.72) — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 221
• 1970s reference theory rejected the self-present Cartesian subject avant la lettre. #corroborates (0.70)