Reviewed by: Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism by Nicholas Brown Peter Hitchcock Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism Durham: Duke, 2019, 232 pp. The cover of Nicholas Brown's latest book, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism, features an image of Viktoria Binschtok's artwork "Chanel" (2016), a handmade rendering of a Chanel No. 5 perfume box. Brown's cultural theory offers a metacommentary on a work of art that is already a metacommentary on the commodity aesthetics of advertising. There are lots of ways to disrupt the baleful entanglements of art and commodity culture although, as we know, many a strident intervention has participated in the marketization of its own standpoint (fill in as many blanks as you wish). There is an inexorability to capitalist contamination—for Walter Benjamin this is part of its cultic utility, a point made, coincidentally, in an essay of 1921 (the year Chanel No. 5 was launched). But Brown's fabulous critique is less interested in the familiar strategy of tracking the pitfalls of virtuous withdrawals from all taint of market sensibilities (in this religion, it cannot be a commodity if I have withheld my labor power) and is more focused on the social being of contemporary art, simultaneously paratactic and stunningly perspectival. This still requires significant ground-clearing on art's relationship to the commodity of course, and Brown approaches this with both technical and stylistic gusto. Leigh-Claire La Berge, whose own work on art and the commodity is exemplary, has suggested Brown's work is part of a larger tendency to position art in terms of economics rather than politics, in order to distinguish the nature of aesthetic provocation in actually existing capitalism. Actually, going to Brown's earlier essay and clearly the conceptual basis for this book, "The Work of Art in the Age of Labor's Real Subsumption to Capital" (2012)—Benjamin's aura once more—the dialectics of real subsumption prohibit such super-separation. Indeed, it is worth reminding ourselves, as Brown does here, that autonomy does not mean the rarified air of absolute distinction but is a means to critique forms of relation through and around art, which can both distance the political and mediate its understanding under specific conditions (art, and again in Benjaminian fashion, as an "instrument of magic"). This is not the relative autonomy once invoked by Althusserianism, nor does it spring from the workerism of Italian Autonomia, although [End Page 372] one does not need to purge either from Marxist genealogy (especially around concepts of ideology). What then, does Brown mean by "autonomy" and why is its rearticulation vital to contemporary cultural discourse? Acknowledging that the "resistance within" argument common to modernism works now only as a historical or anachronistic oddity, Brown suggests art is autonomous in its freedom from rationalizing autonomy. It can even be, and here Brown's prose becomes purposefully purple, "historicist": "Such a historicism is null as historicism, since what it does not produce is precisely anything like history. But it is practically bursting with excitement at being allowed to apply its galvanic fluid to the great gallery of dead forms …" (19). Yet even this level of pastiche assumes a new level of conformity, one more style in the advertising panoply of capital (see Lily-Rose Depp getting meta-meta in Chanel No. 5's holiday ad, 2019). As an alternative, "After postmodernism, autonomy cannot be assumed, even by works produced for a restricted field. It must instead be asserted" (22). For those who suspect that the cake here might be had and eaten too, the material conditions of art remain dialectical, which is to say that the assertion does not pivot necessarily on the consciousness of the artist alone, nor even on the passionate prose of the critic. Yet, if there is a problem with Brown's insistence that the autonomy at stake is riven by "immanent purposiveness" it is the sense that that is being adjudicated, after all, in perhaps a more normative fashion. To put it another way, the brilliant distinction that Brown draws that the correlative for the UK show "The Office" is not is its...