Wagner marks the moment dissonance stopped serving tonal order and became autonomous protest.

Evidence

For where in the past dissonance had existed only in order to confirm and ratify more strongly the positive tonal order on which it depended, now its character as “self-glorifying subjectivity” and as protest “against the social instance and its normative laws” tends to become an end in itself. “All energy is now invested in dissonance; by comparison the individual resolutions become ever thinner, mere optional decor or restorative asseveration. Tension becomes the fundamental organizing principle to the degree that the negation of the negation, the utter canceling out of the debt of each dissonance, is as in some gigantic credit system indefinitely postponed.” — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 65

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music and Marcuse’s later theory of repressive desublimation, which Jameson explicitly flags.
• SEED: The ‘gigantic credit system’ metaphor — indefinitely postponed resolution of musical tension — could anchor an essay on how deferred gratification/credit structures appear in aesthetic form.