Atonality registers the breakdown of extended form by refusing the self-sufficient masterpiece.

Evidence

It is this breakdown of extended form in general to which the expressionistic music of Schoenberg is a memorial: a reaction against the idea of the completed work of art, a refusal of the very possibility of the self-sufficient masterpiece existing in and for itself. … The shattering of the tonal framework frees the individual notes themselves from whatever had previously given them meaning; for the note, essentially a neutral and nonsignifying element like the phoneme in speech, derived its functional value as an intention—whether as consonance or dissonance, continuation in a given key or modulation toward some new one—from the overall system itself. So in tonality the mind held a kind of musical past and future together, whereas in the new atonal universe the note exists only insofar as it is part and parcel of a musical statement in the present. The new form must remain almost physically in touch with all of its components at any given moment: atonality is a kind of musical nominalism. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 71

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson defines ‘Spiel’ as the leisurely internal development of themes within autonomous musical time, and characterizes atonality as ‘musical nominalism’ — notes becoming like linguistic phonemes with meaning only from the system itself.
• XREF: The phoneme analogy and the idea that tonality held ‘past and future together’ in the suspended present resonates with Benjamin’s messianic/now-time and with Jameson’s later work on the postmodern ‘present.’ Also echoes Lukács on the lost totality.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to ‘On Sacrifice’ via the Schoenberg ‘memorial’ framing — the refusal of the completed work as a memorial to the death of extended form, paralleling sacrificial remembrance of what is lost.