Re-imagining Autonomy in the time of Debt: From Adorno to Castoriadis

Tom Trevatt
Goldsmiths
June 2017
t.trevatt@gold.ac.uk

DRAFT – DO NOT CITE

In a letter to Walter Benjamin from 1936, Theodor Adorno attempts to defend

autonomous art from the claim that it is, as Benjamin had asserted, “counter-
revolutionary”. (Adorno, 2007: 121) Today, these counter-revolutionary
tendencies of what might be thought of as autonomous art seem more prevalent.
When we consider, for example, the work that appeared in the most recent
Berlin Biennale, where the infra-thin difference between art and commodity was
nominally absent, it seems that art has entirely adopted the commodity form, to
the point where not only does the work look like a commodity, but operates as
one as well.

In his response to Benjamin and his later work, Adorno suggests that the
autonomous side of the artwork is inherently dialectical, an assertion he repeats
in Aesthetic Theory when he determines artworks to have an intrinsic processual
quality, they, as he suggests, ‘go over into their other’ (Adorno, 1997: 232) The
autonomy of art, for Adorno, works through the dialectical relation it has with
society, not, as he notes, an existence purely separate or divorced from society.
Preciesly here, the “other” orf Adorno’s formulation is, as we know, the
commodity form – this is a Marxist analysis after all. It is this dialectical, or
processual, nature of the artwork that allows it to be at one and the same time
apart from and a part of the society from which it arises. Furthermore, this
capacity to stand apart from society (whilst also being a part of it), is, according
to Adorno, what facilitates its negative or critical role in relation to that society.
This is a familiar story about the autonomy of art, but one that I think warrants
re-imagining, as, I suggest, contemporary art has decisively forgotten the lessons
of this story. Furthermore, as we shall explore, from the very beginning,
autonomy has been associated with a conception of freedom as “freedom from”,
or negative freedom. Isaiah Berlin’s famous, but perhaps flawed, distinction
between positive and negative freedom here is useful and we shall return to
them, but what I want to remember is that from the very beginning autonomy
was conceived as an assertion of art’s removal from, or difference to, the
commodity form. In this paper I take up this assertion. Suggesting, that if we only
perceive autonomy in these terms, we can only ever understand it as appealing
to a type of freedom we find in liberalism. As such, to eviscerate liberal
conceptions of freedom from the world of art, we must reconceive of autonomy
from a different perspective.

In a recent essay in the Marxist journal Mediations, Jackson Petsche lays out a
defence of Adornian autonomy, suggesting that with the advent of post-
modernity, the individual subject has lost the ability to differentiate the form of
art from the commodity form, justification in Petsche’s mind to rehabilitate
Adornian conceptions of autonomy (Petsche: 2013). Modernity’s capacity to
produce the artwork as “other” to the commodity has disappeared, and aesthetic
production today has been integrated into commodity production more
generally. Drawing on Jameson, Petsche argues that with the dominance of
culture in everyday life, the specificity of the aesthetic has been lost altogether.
Autonomy is understood as the opposite of the commodity form, but an
opposition that appears almost identical to it. According to Adorno, art can never
be truly autonomous, but it must adopt its status in order to criticise society.
However, as the oppositional or alienating effects of the avant garde have
become commodified, marketised and sold back to us, Petsche’s question then, is
can art still oppose society by merely existing? Is art still capable of being
autonomous? Does, in fact, there still exist this antinomy between art and the
commodity?

Where art, or the aesthetic experience, can no longer be differentiated from the
commodity form, or the experience of shopping, there is no space of
contemplation within which to form a coherent critical distance from society.
Petsche draws on Marcuse to understand the power of art to create political or
critical change, but, importantly, through a change in consciousness not social
relations. Art’s negation of established reality would establish an almost
intangible shift in consciousness that would be inherently socially productive.
Thus, political transformation is linked, through the sensuous aesthetic
experience, to the internal world created in subjective experience, something
that Marcuse sees as an antagonist force in capitalist society. Subjective, inner
experience becomes not just a liberation for Marcuse, but the site from which the
political must embark – the ability to step outside capitalist social relations, to
differentiate the commodity form from the aesthetic form, and to escape the grip
of capital. According to Marcuse, ‘this escape from reality led to an experience
which could (and did) become a powerful force invalidating the actual prevailing
bourgeois values, namely by shifting the locus of the individual’s realization from
the domain of the performance principle and the profit motive to that of the
inner resources of the human being: passion, imagination, conscience’ (Marcuse
cf. Petsche, 2013: 152). Or as Adorno suggests (following Kant), the
functionlessness of art is its social function – this is what delineates it from
society, which, seemingly has instrumentalised functionality. In this sense,
autonomy is the production of an individualised space away from the prevailing
conditions, but how do we understand this space in a hyper-commodified world,
where the artwork and the commodity appear as one?

However, of course, the world thus described is an anachronism, hyper-

commodification, whilst still being prevalent, is not the predominant mode of
governmental logic. This paper will pose the problem of autonomy within a
particular reading of contemporary society, pointing out how it differs from the
conditions under which Adorno was writing, specifically understanding these
conditions as marked by financial capitalism’s inherent disciplinary measures. In
contradistinction from today, Adorno’s assertion of art’s autonomy from the
commodity form appeared at a time when consumer capitalism was at an all
time high. Given the dominance of global markets by value drawn from financial
transactions and the exploitation of indebtedness, today is marked a remarkably
different set of conditions. What does it mean, for example, to discuss autonomy
from the commodity form, when the production and sale of commodities looks
radically different today. When we understand the derivatives market itself to be
somewhere in the region of twenty times the size of global GDP – that is, the
value of all the “productive” industries of the world combined – the commodity
takes on a very different meaning and function. When we talk about capitalism
today, we are discussing a significantly different phenomenon than during the
1960s.

When returning to discussions of autonomy in relation to contemporary, not

modernist, art, then, why do we still see this art-commodity relation at play? For
example, Stewart Martin’s essay, “The Absolute Artwork Meets the Absolute
Commodity” from 2007 is a case in point. Discussing examples such as Warhol,
Judd and Morris, Martin is concerned with the antinomy between the artwork
and the commodity form. Commodities, here, appear in their modernist mode –
bluntly stated, items we buy from shops, or that make up the fabric of our daily
lives; Brillo boxes, strip lighting and so on. Martin does little to progress a
conception of the commodity from an item that is bought and sold within fairly
simple market forms, to a more complex understanding of how the commodity
operates in the financial markets. In Martin’s terms, following both Marx and
Jameson, high, or late capitalism is exemplified by the dominance of
commodification and the prominence of art for art sake. As we saw in Adorno,
these two are clearly related phenomena, not just historically, but conceptually.
As such, commodification and autonomous art become both the condition and
limit point of each other. However, this dialectical relation is never complicated
by the realisation that the commodity today operates predominantly within a
significantly different register – namely, as an underlying commodity from which
to draw value through asset trading and the futures market. Noticeably, as Coslor
and Velthuis note, art is increasingly being included in this scheme of extraction
as it gets utilised as an underlying asset [ref]. Predominantly, it has been argued,
this is dependent on the autonomy of the artwork; artworks that have
indeterminate, or little (perhaps, just the right amount of), social or political
content tend to sell better at the auction house. While I don’t have time to
investigate this today, I wanted to frame this discussion in these terms. When
Lazaratto tells us that debt has infused every element of our lives and Velthuis
and Coslor track the recent financialisation of art, we need to account for the
debt relation when we discuss art’s relation to social structures. Some authors
have begun to do this, Max Haiven, for example is committed to a project to re-
understand the relation between art and finance capital, as is Suhail Malik, who’s
recent work in both art theoretical and finance capital fields attests to this, the
Brussels based artists Vermeir & Heiremans understand their role as artists in
relation to the financialised commodity in complex ways, and of course, Jameson
himself is prescient with his essay “Culture and Finance Capital”.

So, why might we be interested in autonomy today? Certainly in the art world
these arguments have been played out in multiple, complex ways ad infinitum.
However, we might argue, the way we understand autonomy in art helps
construct our conceptions of human autonomy. If there exists a recursivity
between culture and politics, how culture develops and institutes concepts
affects how they bind into a political context, then how a central concept such as
autonomy operates is of utmost importance here. Autonomy is conceptually
multifarious, understood in multiple ways that aren’t always congruent. Indeed,
we attenuate an understanding of autonomy through the political concepts of
freedom and liberty as found in the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Erich Fromm and
others. If a conceptualisation of autonomy plays out into political contexts it
takes up disciplinary and normative functions, determining our concepts,
behaviours and habits – a theory of autonomy in art, complements a theorisation
of power’s relation to freedom. Hence, an insistence on a return to this idea.

Autonomy is a concept that comes in and out of fashion, but it still appears in
public art discourse; a quick search on the e-flux website, for example, turns up
numerous hits. One of these is an exhibition listing from 2009, Radical Autonomy
at The Grand café in Saint Nazare, France, where the concept of autonomy is
framed as one where ‘art could be a sanctuary for futility, obscurity, insight,
ambivalence, joy and unease’ (http://www.e-
flux.com/announcements/37629/radical-autonomy/). Or the write up for an
exhibition, Exercises in Autonomy, at Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, 2016, which, as the
curator explains, explores practices that ‘could potentially become helpful in the
process of acquiring autonomy from technocratic state organizations and an
economy based on uneven capital accumulation and predatory exploitation of
natural resources’ (http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/50989/exercises-
in-autonomy/). These conceptions are not outliers, the colloquial
understandings that are produced within contemporary art discourse of
autonomy think it generally as an exercise in escape or creation of sanctuary.
The popularity of ideas such as Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone has
seeped into art’s understandings of autonomy (as an aside, the founder of the
Burning Man festival cites TAZ as an inspiration – the Burning Manisation of
contemporary art?). The Adornian dialectic is all but lost here – autonomy is not
seen as inherently dialectically related to society, but a mode of dislocation from
society. This understanding of autonomy is inherent, I would argue, in
contemporary art discourse at multiple levels, where art is seen as constructive
of “spaces” of distance from anything that the interlocutor doesn’t happen to like
about society. What does it mean, for example, to create autonomy from
‘predatory exploitation of natural resources’, as the previous curator suggests art
can? Here, art isn’t even afforded a critical role, merely the capacity to assert its
difference from extractive techno-ideologies. The suggestion that art’s role has
been reduced to an escapism, or at best a site of imagination is deeply
problematic – as Marcuse asserted, autonomy in art was the creation of a site of
imagination and freedom. Articulated as such, art then becomes a refuge away
from the problems of the world, not a site from which to pose a challenge to, a
critique, or rational analysis of that world. This is dangerous inasmuch as it
conditions us to think of art conservatively as the ratification of capitalist realist
relations. But furthermore, autonomy becomes a privileged site that promotes
disinterested rather than the interested engagement of people who’s lives are
affected by the conditions they find themselves in. Thus, we see art being a
refuge for an appalling lack of diversity as privileged subjects are assumed to be
more capable of speaking, precisely because of their autonomy from the
conditions that they speak about. Autonomy in this form promotes a form of left-
paternalism in art that is deeply suspicious, not only because it privileges the
voices of those who are already powerful over those who are without power,
occluding those less privileged, but because it occludes the structural conditions
that make this possible. Autonomy is given as the alibi for left-paternalistic
accounts of struggle without affording those within that struggle the means to
escape it. Precisely, the claim of objectivity rests on the presupposition of
freedom from conditions that would be seen to compromise that objectivity –
conflicts of interest. Hence, why so often we require white mediators to narrate
the struggles of people of colour – their supposed disassociation affords them a
superior position. (with thanks to Nine Yamamoto for this point).

As Brian Holmes suggests, in an anti-art move, this is a story we know well, he

says: ‘(t)he crucial insight of what were formerly called the “avant-gardes” is that
an image of emancipation provides only a contemplative respite from
exploitation, hierarchy and conflict. The energies devoted to the creation of a
privileged object could be better spent on reshaping the everyday environment’
(Holmes in Sholette and Ressler, 2013: 166). But of course the point here is that
these privileged objects have shaped our environment. It’s just that they have
done so in ways that are undesirable for someone who cares about universal
freedom

So, how do we rehabilitate autonomy, if this is even desirable at all? In the work
of Cornelius Castoriadis, the idea of autonomy links directly to the Greek origins
of the word – auto, meaning self and nomos meaning law. Autonomy then,
specifically means the creation or institution of one’s own laws, as he suggests, if
we want to be free, we have to make our own nomos (Castoriadis, 1991: 162).
However, autonomous societies – ones entirely governed by their own laws and
norms rarely exist – according to Castoriadis ‘almost always, almost everywhere
societies have lived in a state of instituted hetereonomy. An essential constituent
of this state is the instituted representation of the extrasocial source of the
nomos’ (162) Which is to say, society is almost always constituted by laws and
norms that are adjudicated from sites relatively external to it. While he doesn’t
discuss autonomy in art, there are formations that can be mapped across to art
here. As Andy Hamilton asserts, following Adorno, ‘autonomy is normally taken
to mean that art is governed by its own rules and laws, and that artistic value
makes no reference to social or political value’ (Hamilton: 251). Of course, this is
not the formulation that we find in art’s understanding of autonomy today, but
the seed of this self-legislation exists in Adorno. It seems important then to
return to this conception of autonomy if we are to rehabilitate it. What I take
from Castoriadis is the idea that autonomy is not the absence of laws or norms –
not the escape from them into a lawless realm – but the creative act of institution
that ‘ushers in a new type of society and a new type of individuals’ (Castoriadis:
163). Here is Castoriadis:

Autonomy does not consist in acting according to a law discovered in an

immutable Reason and given once and for all. It is the unlimited self-
questioning about the law and its foundations as well as the capacity, in
light of this interrogation, to make, to do and to institute (therefore also, to
say). Autonomy is the reflective activity of a reason creating itself in an
endless movement, both as individual and social reason (164)

This continual movement of self-creation at a social and individual level

articulates just what is at stake here. Instead of understanding autonomy as the
retreat into a privileged zone, safe guarded from the laws and norms of society,
or free from the struggles of that society, we can re-imagine it as a dialectically
creative passage between registers and scales that works to institute laws and
norms. Art, then, to rehabilitate autonomy would understand its creative role in
this process of institution. Despite Petsche’s insistence that Adorno held radical
negativity as the safeguard against art’s potential utopic tendencies, art today
has reneged on that Adornian promise. Not least because negativity has become
commodified, but also because criticality has apparently, according Bruno
Latour, run out of steam [ref]. Whatever our understanding of criticality we must
agree, at least partially, with Castoriadis’ claim that when autonomy is
considered as a process of self-legislative construction, then ‘politics is a project
of autonomy’ (169). He continues ‘politics is the reflective and lucid collective
activity that aims at the overall institution of society’ (169). Politics thus
understood is a deliberate activity that works towards common ends through
common means, not through the privileging of one particular subject, instead it
is a collective instituting of laws and norms. Art, then, can partake in this
continual movement of collective instituting, once it re-understands the political
project of autonomy in this Castoriadian frame.

This formulation, as Castoriadis asserts, seems unusual ‘only to those who

believe in thunderlike freedom and in the free-floating, being-for-itself
disconnected from everything, including its own history’ (173). This evisceration
of the liberal conception of freedom that asserts a delinked methodological
individualism, also proposes a strong counter to the contemporary insistence on
individualised, subjectivised aesthetic experience. Where art thinks autonomy
as a para-tactical, atelic escapism – which is to say the creation of spatially and
temporally delimited zones somehow outside, or alongside, the prevalent
conditions, that adhere to the non-strategic production of local horizons – we
must rethink autonomy as the creation of reflexive, synthetic complex counter
hegemonies that are capable of instituting common, or universal freedoms. This
should always be conceived of as an ongoing project, rather than the abaility to
achieve a utopian “state of freedom”, as Angela Davis asserts in the title of one of
her books, Freedom is a Struggle.