The isolation of the individual, attempting to imagine the unimaginable and experience that which lies outside the behaviors of socially-constructed convention in search of love, compassion and impossible union, is at the center of the work of the New Expressionist dramatists. From the final plays of Beckett to the contemporary work of Rudkin, Barker, Kane and Rabey, characters wrestle with the movement of the Isolate through a community which renders them abject, and in most cases these same characters embrace their abject status in search not of joy or death, but, through these, knowledge — a knowledge acquired through bodied experience rather than abstract theorizing. Some postmodernist stances deny subjectivity; New Expressionism explores its rebirth.

The writings of Theodor Adorno consider these artists and their art as obliged to confront and uncompromisingly resist, with both form and content, the totalizing administered world. In the immediate wake of the Second World War, he completed the three books that are central to his project: Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947, with Max Horkheimer), Minima Moralia (1951), and the book from which the below reading is drawn, Philosophy of New Music (1949). In his discussion of Schoenberg’s Expressionist-period works, Adorno considers a “dialectic of loneliness” which reflects acknowledgement of the changed status of the subject in the administered collective world.

From Philosophy of New Music, translated, edited and with an introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006:

Logically, Nietzsche affirmed aesthetic conventions and his ultima ratio was ironic play with forms whose substantiality had vanished. What refused such play was to him suspect as plebeian and protestant: Much of his polemic against Wagner was shaped by this perception. But only with Schoenberg did music accept Nietzsche’s challenge. Schoenberg’s compositions are the first in which nothing can actually be different from what it is: They are at once deposition and construction. In them there is no remainder of convention, which guarantees the freedom of play. Schoenberg’s stance is as polemical toward play as toward semblance. He turns as sharply against the musicasters of the Neue Sachlichkeit and its like-minded collective as against the romantic ornament. In epigrammatic formulation of both he has written: “Music should not decorate, it should be true,” and “art originates not in ‘can,’ but in ‘must.’” With the negation of semblance and play, music tends toward knowledge.

This knowledge, however, is founded on the expressive content of music itself. What radical music knows is the untransfigured suffering of men whose powerlessness has so increased that it no longer permits semblance and play. The instinctual conflicts — about whose sexual genesis Schoenberg leaves no doubt — have acquired a force in depositional music that prohibits it from mollifying them comfortingly. In the expression of anxiety as “forebodings,” the music of Schoenberg’s expressionist phase bears witness to this powerlessness. (36-37) …

Loneliness as Style. Toward the end, at one of its most daring moments, Erwartung contains a musical quotation that accompanies the words “thousands of people march past.” Schoenberg borrowed the phrase from an earlier tonal song whose theme and counterpoint are embedded with the greatest artistry in the freely moving vocal texture without breaching the atonality. The song, “Am Wegrand,” is one of the Acht Lieder (Eight Songs), opus 6, all of which are based on Jugendstil poetry. … They define the intersection of Jugendstil and expressionism, just as the music — in spite of its Brahmsian pianism — convulses tonality by the autonomous chromatic auxiliary tones and contrapuntal collisions. The poem reads:

Thousands of people march past,
The one for whom I long, He is not among them!
Restless glances fly past
And ask the one in haste,
Whether it is he …
But they ask and ask in vain.
No one answers:
“Here I am. Be still.”
Longing fills the realms of life,
Left empty by fulfillment,
And so I stand at the edge of the road,
While the crowd flows past,
Until — blinded by the burning sun –
My tired eyes close.

Here, then, is the formula of loneliness as a style: It is a collective loneliness, that of city dwellers who know nothing of one another. The gesture of the lonely individual finds common measure. Thus it can be quoted, for the expressionist exposes loneliness as universal. He quotes even where nothing is literally quoted: The passage “Beloved, beloved, morning is coming” does not deny the “Hark, beloved” of the second act of Tristan. Just as it does in research, the quotation presents authority. The anxiety of the lonely man, who quotes, seeks to gain a footing with the established powers. In expressionist depositions, anxiety has been emancipated from the bourgeois taboo on expression. And once emancipated, nothing prevents it from devoting itself to the stronger party. The position of the absolute monad in art is both resistance to spurious socialization and a willingness to endure even worse. (40-41)