Vienna’s aesthetic formalism and logical positivism derived from its material-economic lag behind high capitalism.

Evidence

It is hardly an accident that mathematical techniques in music as well as logical positivism originated in Vienna. The fondness for number games is as peculiar to the Viennese mind as the game of chess in the coffee house. There are social reasons for it. All the while intellectually productive forces in Austria were rising to the technical level characteristic of high capitalism, material forces lagged behind. The resultant unused capacity for figures became the symbolic fulfillment of the Viennese intellectual. If he wanted to take part in the actual process of material production, he had to look for a position in Imperial Germany. If he stayed home, he became a doctor or a lawyer or clung to number games as a mirage of financial power. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 39

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly instantiates the ‘sacrifice/compensation’ style of causal explanation — intellectually parallel to the symbolic-fulfillment mechanism in the reader’s ‘On Sacrifice’ piece.
• CANDY: A compact, vivid anecdote: Viennese coffee-house chess and number-games as compensation for a stalled material economy.
• XREF: connects to: Capitalism’s material system is interwoven with cultural reproduction — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 122; Vienna’s cultural flowering emerged from the crisis of a weak liberal bourgeoisie — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 206; Postmodernism cannot be understood apart from late capitalism’s economic structure — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 374 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Capitalism’s material system is interwoven with cultural reproduction #expands (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 122
• Vienna’s cultural flowering emerged from the crisis of a weak liberal bourgeoisie #complicates (0.80) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 206
• In late capitalism the economic base generates its cultural superstructures directly #corroborates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 32
• Postmodernism cannot be understood apart from late capitalism’s economic structure #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 374