"Form is the negation, the mastery of disorder, violence, suffering, even when it presents disorder, violence, suffering. This triumph of art is achieved by subjecting the content to the aesthetic order, which is autonomous in its exigencies. [...] The content is thereby transformed: it obtains a meaning (sense) which transcends the elements of the content, and this transcending order is the appearance of the beautiful as the truth of art."
Example - the tragedy of Oedipus, wherein evil is subordinated to poetic justice.
"With this restoration of order, the Form indeed achieves a catharsis - the terror and the pleasure of reality are purified. But the achievement is illusionary, false, fictitious: it remains within the dimension of art, a work of art; in reality, fear and frustration go on unabated (as they do, after the brief catharsis, in the psyche). This is perhaps the most telling expression of the contradiction, the self-defeat, built into art: the pacifying conquest of matter, the transfiguration of the object remain unreal - just as the revolution in perception remains unreal."
Herbert Marcuse, “The New Sensibility” An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 43-44.
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