Autonomy in Post-war Art, Quasi-heroic and Casual

Abstract

Autonomy has been a key term in the academic, anti-modernist culture wars of the past few decades, beginning with Marxist-inspired critiques of the view that art ought to transcend base material and political interests, and culminating in poststructuralist negations of the apparent illusion of subjective autonomy underpinning traditional understandings of aesthetic experience. At the same time, through much of the twentieth century there has been a series of attacks on the autonomy of art launched by avant-garde artists opposed to the idea that art was possessed of internal, self-generating structures and conventions that distinguished it clearly from everyday objects and phenomena. We have now reached a point, however, where the post-modern, or avantgarde, or neo-avantgarde critiques of autonomy have lost much of their edge whether this autonomy pertains to definitions of the art work, the subjectivity of the artist fashioning the work, or that of the viewer immersed in contemplating it. No longer does the prospect of escaping from some relatively autonomous arena of art into a radically heteronymous world of the everyday seem particularly radical or exciting. The trajectory is well travelled, and the normative imperatives of aesthetic autonomy too feeble for any great excitement to be generated by transgressing them. Nor is it nowadays much more than a formulaic exercise for a critic or scholar to imagine freeing him or herself from some bourgeois ideal of autonomous, self-determining subjectivity, a theoretical-critical exercise that enjoyed its high point in the academic world of the 80s and early 90s. These circumstances are a potentially fruitful context in which to revisit inherited notions of aesthetic autonomy and to examine the ethical imperatives that made it such a key issue in artistic debate of the post-war period.1 Adorno is arguably the post-war thinker who has offered the fullest and most resonant analysis of the problematics of autonomy, as these manifested themselves in art and understanding aesthetic experience over the past half century. The section on art and society in his book Aesthetic Theory, the final drafting of which he was working on at the time of his death in 1969, condensed his thinking on the complex status of modern art in a formulation that still seems remarkably incisive some four decades later. According to Adorno, the condition of any significant work of modern art is radically split between the promise of autonomy and its existence as social fact.2 A significant work of art work simultaneously resists incorporation within the fabric of the culture from which it emerges, and itself is part of that very fabric. In making this point, Adorno is not seeking to moderate modernist claims for art's autonomy by arguing that art should be seen as having a partial or relative autonomy. Rather he sees art's situation as radically paradoxical; as, on the one hand, figuring a possibility of autonomy denied by the administered world of modern capitalism and, on the other, as being immersed within a reality where sustained claims for subjective autonomy are only hollow illusions, or symptoms of an endemic social alienation and fragmentation. The perspective on issues of artistic autonomy developed in this article also owes a lot to Jacques Ranciere's recent revisiting of them in his writing on 'the aesthetic revolution and its outcomes',3 particularly in his recent book, The Partitioning of the Sensible (Le partage du sensible): Aesthetics and Politics. By