Theorem 4: Autonomy

Is there, then, no ‘aesthetic regime of art’ – to use Jacques Rancière’s now established phrase? Well, there is no strictly Kantian one; although there appears to be a Schillerian one. However, this Schillerian regime is not strictly aesthetic, in either of Kant’s two main senses (‘of sensibility’ and pertaining to a ‘critique of taste’), since Schiller’s aesthetics involves the application to Kant’s transcendental analysis of aesthetic judgement-power of a principle from Kant’s philosophy of pure practical reason: namely, what in his 1788 Critique of Practical Reason, Kant called ‘Theorem 4’: autonomy of the will. Theorem 4 is the source of all productivity and all problems of autonomy in this tradition. This was an application that took place, precisely, in order to solve the problem for Kantianism that it cannot account for the beauty of art, other than by abstracting from, or negating, the artefactual, art-status of the art work. It is here, historically, in Schiller’s early (1793) Kallias Letters (his letters to Gottfried Körner, ‘Concerning Beauty’) that ‘autonomy’ first became philosophically associated with the work of art. The autonomy of the art work is thus, in this German tradition, philosophically mortgaged to Kant’s practical, as opposed to his aesthetic, philosophy. This genealogy poses a political problem for nearly all accounts of autonomous art, Adorno’s included; as it does also (albeit in a more subterranean, disavowed manner) for supposedly quite different accounts of the autonomy of politics – the supposedly Spinozist politics of Autonomia, in particular. (Where is the theorization of autonomy in Autonomia?) For this genealogy rests upon the myth of a purely rational determination of the will, the inapplicability of which was to be mitigated by Schiller via the aesthetic mediations of the play and form drives. The residue of this history appears within the Autonomia tradition of political autonomy in its dependence on a Kantian negative freedom of autonomy from . . . autonomy from economics, capital, the state, the party, and ultimately, perhaps, the social itself. Refusal – exodus – escape.

But what, then, of the aesthetic tradition: the historical manifestation of the Schillerian ‘aesthetic regime of art’? Two things may be said about this. First, there is, certainly, historically, a Kantian self-understanding of the Schillerian ‘aesthetic regime of art’ – an ‘aesthetic ideology’ as it has been called. In its conventional form, it runs from ‘art for art’s sake’ (in early nineteenth-century France), through aestheticism (in late nineteenth-century England), formalism (in late nineteenth-century Germany and early twentieth-century England and Russia) and formalist modernism (in mid-twentieth-century USA). Second, however, insofar as this ‘aesthetic regime’ exists as the practical enactment of a philosophical misunderstanding, it is not the same thing as the ‘regime of autonomous modern art’, or indeed, even the basis of the autonomy of the particular ‘aesthetic’ art that it theorizes. For once ‘purposiveness without a purpose’ becomes the purpose of art, as it did in ‘art for art’s sake’ (as proposed by Benjamin Constant as early as 1804), such art’s beauty is no longer ‘free’, on Kant’s own terms – no longer actually ‘without a purpose’. This is its dialectical dilemma.

Conceptualization of art’s autonomy, or of autonomous art, must be sought elsewhere. The second most widespread misconception concerns self-referentiality.

Third common misconception (this one is more tricky, and also more ‘living’): freedom of the artist.

However, finally, this does not mean that art is free from social determinations.

So, if the autonomy of art is not best conceived as any of these four things – aesthetic autonomy, self-referentially, mere expression of the autonomy of the artist, or freedom from social determination – how is it best conceived?

But what are the ‘autonomous determinations’, enabled by this social form? At this point, we need to refer back to Schiller’s taking up of Kant’s philosophy of practical reason into his attempt to supplement Kant’s aesthetic with an ‘objective’ concept of beauty.

The first half of ‘Theorem 4’ of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason reads as follows: ‘Autonomy of the will is the sole principle of all moral laws and of duties in keeping with them; heteronomy of choice, on the other hand . . . is instead opposed to the principle of obligation and to the morality of the will [that is, to all universality, PO] . . . the sole principle of morality consists in independence from all matter of the law (namely from a desired object) and at the same time in the determination of choice through the mere form of giving universal law that a maxim must be capable of. That independence, however, is freedom in the negative sense, whereas this lawgiving of its own on the part of pure and, as such, practical reason is freedom in the positive sense. Thus, the moral law expresses nothing other than the autonomy of pure practical reason, that is, freedom.’3

This is not the autonomy of ‘the subject’, but the autonomy of ‘pure practical reason’ itself, or the autonomy of pure reason in its practical deployment, as Kant describes it, transcendentally. The subject’s relation to the causality of this freedom, whose act it is, is problematic.

In the Kallias Letters, Schiller transposes this problematic from the domain of practice to the domain of the appearance of objects, viewing objects from the standpoint of pure practical reason – what he calls the ‘adaption’ or imitation’ of ‘the form of practical reason’. ‘The analogy of an appearance with the form of pure will or freedom’, he writes ‘is beauty (in its most general sense). Beauty is thus nothing less than freedom in appearance’, or ‘autonomy in appearance’.4 (Freedom and autonomy are synonymous in this tradition.) Beauty, then, for Schiller is the appearance of the free or ‘autonomous’ determination of form. Autonomous art – which gets its first philosophical definition here – is an art that so appears. This is what Adorno is repeating when he refers to the autonomous work of art as exhibiting a self-legislating ‘law of form’. It does not mean that the art work actually is ‘autonomous’, in some positive ontological sense, but that it appears to be so: it has the capacity to produce this illusion. Or, to put it another way, the work of art is autonomous to the extent to which it can generate the appearance or illusion of autonomy. As Peter Bürger argued, 40 years ago now, autonomy operates at two discrete levels: both as a set of institutional conditions; and as the achievement of an individual work, in each individual instance (this involves, but is not reducible to, the individuating moment of the aesthetic aspect). Certain social conditions (the market and art institutions) help make this possible, and can also hinder or negate it, but they can only facilitate what appears as a self-legislation immanent to the work.

Adorno’s argument is that the appearance of self-legislating form positions the work critically in relation to the demand for social functionality – including its own functional aspects, which it must somehow internally ‘resist’ or counter, in order to achieve autonomy (meaning the illusion of autonomy); thereby allowing it to figure freedom. This is the ‘truth’ of art, in this tradition: the figuring of freedom, or what Adorno refers to as a free praxis. In this respect, autonomous art is not part of an ‘aesthetic regime of art’, it is part of a ‘supra-aesthetic artistic regime of truth’ (of which ‘aesthetic art’ is one restricted and historically passing variant). From this point of view, the historical development of modern art is a development in the social forms and dynamics of the dialectics of autonomy and dependence that constitute this supra-aesthetic artistic regime of truth. Politics is inscribed within the structure of this dialectic in three main ways.

First, as I have said, the political meaning of autonomous art resides in its image of freedom: the pre-figuration of a free praxis, or praxis in a free society. As such, it is taken to be a criticism of the existing state of unfreedom: hence, the work of art, any work of art, ‘criticizes society by merely existing’, Adorno somewhat hyperbolically claimed (or at least, a work that has achieved autonomy).5 This is a politics of form – an affirmation of freedom as self-legislating form; not a ‘distribution of the sensible’.

Second, the political meaning of the dialectical unity of autonomy and dependence within the work is as a model of reconciliation. The unity of the work functions as a ‘promise of happiness’ by offering a model of reconciliation, a non-coercive identity, via the ‘belonging together’ of the one and the many. In both cases, the political meaning inherent in art is pre-figurative, and hence ‘imaginary’. Yet it is also, thereby, in danger of being affirmative, in the bad, Marcusean sense – affirmative of the society in which such pre-figuration is possible – and hence socially functional. This complicates the critical criteria for the achievement of autonomy.6 Furthermore, subsequent to the recognition of the socially affirmative function of autonomous art (in the early twentieth century) and the subsequent so-called failure of both the historical avant-garde’s and institutional critique’s assault upon the institution of autonomy, there is an additional critical requirement for the achievement of autonomy. Under these conditions, autonomous art critically requires an element of anti-art – the contradictory incorporation of an un-integrated, dependent element, for which collage and the readymade are the historical models – but ‘politics’ is another way – in order to mark (that is, to render self-conscious) the illusory character of the autonomy of the work of art by staging its connection, indexically, to the world.

This points to a third way in which politics appears within the dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy within the work: namely, as the major mode of heteronomy as external determination, necessity or constraint: politics is one form of dependence – either within autonomous art (as a subordinate aspect) or as a type of dependent art, political art, which itself still has a (subordinate) autonomous aspect. However, when a political art (a dependent, non-autonomous art) is taken out of its practical political context, by historical change or geographical displacement, and ceases to function politically, autonomous (formal) aspects come to the fore, and the character of the work changes. This is what happens when, for example, classically, works of Soviet Constructivism and Productivism are displayed within Western art institutions as part of the history of the artistic avant-garde. Here, politics appears as an external condition that is nonetheless incorporated into the work as one of its conditions, remaining partly heteronomous, but nonetheless thereby, in its very anti-formalism, becoming form-determining in a new way, and hence ‘autonomous’, at a structural level.

As a paradigm of a dependent element, politics is thus one paradigmatic, if paradoxical, way of rendered art critically autonomous, that is, of maintaining its autonomy in a political sense. (This is one way of reading Thomas Hirschhorn’s or Andrea Fraser’s work.) However, this critical function, internal to autonomous art, only operates so long as the anti-art (dependent) element in question resists incorporation into the art institution’s conception of art. Once it is incorporated, the originally anti-art element will itself become affirmative of ‘art’ – and hence art’s affirmative function – contradicting its initial critical function. (This is another way of reading Thomas Hirschhorn’s or Andrea Fraser’s work.)

In this regard, autonomous and dependent elements of the work of art do indeed turn into their opposites: dependent becomes autonomous; autonomous becomes dependent. This is why a dialectical thought is still needed to grasp these dynamics. This is a great strength of Adorno’s position: despite his personal artistic preferences, his position refuses the red herring of having simply to choose between monolithically conceived blocs of ‘autonomous art’ and anti-institutional ‘avant-garde activism’. First, because the relationship is structurally dialectical; and second, because the institution changes in response to this dialectic. Contra Bürger, the issue is thus not anti-art-institutionalism, as such, but socially alternative modes of the institutionalization of art (which was the problematic of the productive phase of the Soviet experience, for example, in the first place).

This leads me to the limits of this conception of autonomous art: namely, its basis in the analogical application of Kant’s concept of autonomy: autonomy of the will in its ‘positive’ guise as self-determining universal form.

Now, Adorno’s is not a ‘straight’ Kantianism, to be sure, but a certain kind of Marxian one. He is a Marxian Kantian. He thinks that the development of capitalism has destroyed/demobilized collective subject formation, leaving a retreat to individual freedom the sole remaining progressive option. But this does not get around the conceptual issue that for him the work of art images the political freedom of the ideal liberal individual: this is its ‘enigmatic’, subject-like, singular object status. Despite the historical argument, the political limitation remains the result of a conceptual limitation. The question is: Is this a limitation of Adorno’s thought, or, an inherent limitation on the critical functioning of autonomous art in capitalist societies? On the Schillerian argument that both Adorno and Rancière appear to accept, autonomy appears most adequately, albeit only analogically, in the art work, because it cannot appear in the world, directly, in practice itself – since freedom in the form of pure practical reason is alienated from life. Those who believe the contrary, however, that freedom does appear directly politically in a movement (Autonomia and post-Autonomia political movements, for example), believe that it can do so only through withdrawal (‘exodus’) from the existing form of the capitalistic form of the social. And they think this relationship, politically, primarily negatively (although they rarely acknowledge this fact): freedom as negative freedom – autonomy from . . . economic determinations, capital, the state, the party, etcetera – as the social condition of positive freedom; despite the latter’s usually ontological construal. Yet, in an ironic mimesis of the autonomous work of art, such autonomy from – or separation from – prevailing forms of social practice makes the exercise of any such positive freedom impotent; impotence famously being the price of autonomous art’s criticality. Political autonomy, in the Autonomia tradition, is thus not so much the negation of the autonomy of the work of art as its ironic political mimesis. It is thus critically redeemable primarily only as art – an art more strictly autonomous than the political art the heteronomy of which it aims to radicalize. Such is the dialectics of activism and art in the politics of Autonomia.

To put it more formally: Theorem 4, Kant’s concept of autonomy, cannot be true of art (analogically) and politics (directly) at the same time. It is in the historical contradiction between art and politics that the truth of autonomy lies.