whatever is not fonned hic et nunc, of the incompletely fonned, the raw.

Dissonance
is the technical tenn for the reception through art of what aesthetics as
well
as naIvete calls ugly. Whatever it may be, the ugly must constitute, or be
able to
constitute, an element of art; a work by the Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz
bears the
title The Aesthetics of the U gly. l Archaic art and then traditional art,
especially
since the fauns and sileni of Hellenism, abound in the portrayal of
subjects that
were considered ugly. In modern art the weight of this element increased
to such a
degree that a new quality emerged. According to traditional aesthetics ,
the ugly is
that element that opposes the work's ruling law of fonn; it is integrated
by that
fonnal law and thereby confinns it, along with the power of subjective
freedom in
the artworK vis-a-vis the subject matter. This subject matter would
indeed become
beautiful in a higher sense through its function in the pictorial
composition, for
instance, or by its participation in the production of a dynamic
equilibrium; for,
according to a Hegelian topos, beauty is the result not of a simple
equilibrium per
se, but rather of the tension that results. Harmony that, as a mere result,
denies the
tensions that have entered into it, becomes something disturbing, false,
and effectively
dissonant. The harmonistic view of the ugly was voided in modern art,
and
something qualitatively new emerged. The anatomical horror in
Rimbaud and
Benn, the physically revolting and repellent in Beckett, the scatological
traits of
many contemporary dramas, have nothing in common with the rustic
uncouthness
of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Anal pleasure, and the pride of
art at
facilely being able to integrate it, abdicate; powerlessly the law of fonn
capitulates
to ugliness. That is how completely dynamic the category of the ugly is,
and
necessarily its counterimage, the category of the beautiful, is no less so.
Both
mock definitional fixation such as is imagined by that aesthetic whose
nonns are,
however indirectly, oriented by these categories. The statement that a
devastated
industrial landscape or a face defonned by a painting is just plain ugly
may answer
spontaneously to the phenomenon but lacks the self-evidence it assumes.
The impression of the ugliness of technology and industrial landscapes
cannot be
adequately explained in fonnal tenns, and aesthetically well-integrated
functional
fonns, in Adolf Loos' s sense, would probably leave the impression of
ugliness
unchanged. The impression of ugliness stems from the principle of
violence and
destruction. The aims posited are unreconciled with what nature,
however mediated
it may be, wants to say on its own. In technique, violence toward nature
is not
reflected through artistic portrayal, but it is immediately apparent. It
could be
transfonned only by a reorientation of technical forces of production that
would
direct these forces not only according to desired aims but equally
according to the
nature that is to be technically fonned. After the abolition of scarcity , the
liberation
of the forces of production could extend into other dimensions than
exclusively
that of the quantitative growth of production. There are intimations