Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy 9781472545312, 9781441196521

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Notes on Contributors Paul Crowther is Professor of Philosophy at NUI Galway. His research interests are philosophy of art, dialectical logic and metaphysics, Kant and Hegel’s aesthetics, and Cassirer. His publications include The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant-Garde (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) (Stanford University Press, 2009). Gordon Finlayson is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex, as well as Director of the Centre of Social and Political Thought. His research centres on Critical Theory, including figures like Adorno, Habermas and Agamben. His publications include Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political with Fabian Freyenhagen (Routledge, 2011) and ‘On Not Being Silent in the Darkness: Adorno’s Singular Apophaticism’, Harvard Theological Review (2012). Jason Gaiger is a Fellow of St Edmund Hall and Head of the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art at the University of Oxford. His publications include Aesthetics and Painting (Continuum, 2008), an English edition of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Sculpture (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and, as co-editor, Art in Theory: 1648–1815 (Blackwell/Wiley, 2000) and Art in Theory: 1815–1900 (Blackwell/Wiley, 1998). Casey Haskins is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purchase College, State University of New York. His research covers philosophy of art, philosophy of religion and Kant, among other topics. His publications include ‘Paradoxes of Autonomy; or, Why Won’t the Problem of Artistic Justification Go Away?’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2000) and ‘The Disunity of Aesthetics: A Reply to J. G. A. Pocock’, Common Knowledge (2005). Owen Hulatt is a Teaching Fellow at the University of York. His research specializes in Adorno’s aesthetics and epistemology, together with Husserl’s phenomenology, Marxist materialism, Critical Theory, and theories of recognition. He is currently preparing a monograph on Adorno’s theory of philosophical and aesthetic truth.



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Peter Lamarque is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York. He specializes in analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of language. His publications include Work and Object (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Truth, Fiction, and Literature with Stein Haugom Olsen (Clarendon Press, 1994). Annelies Monseré is currently studying for a Ph.D. at the University of Ghent. Her research centres around meta-aesthetics, and is concerned in particular to clarify the standards theories of art must meet in order to be adequate. Her publications include ‘Non-Western Art and the Concept of Art: Can Cluster Theories of Art Account for the Universality of Art?’ Estetika (2012). Matthew Rampley is Professor of Art History at the University of Birmingham, as well as Head of the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music. His research interests include the theory and criticism of contemporary art, as well as the art and architecture of central Europe from 1860 to the present. His publications include Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and The Vienna School of Art History. Scholarship and the Politics of Empire, 1847–1918 (Penn State University Press, 2013). Robert Stecker is Professor of Philosophy at Central Michigan University. His publications include ‘Ethics and Aesthetics’ in The Routledge Companion to Ethics (Routledge, 2010), Aesthetics Today: A Reader (with Ted Gracyk) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech, and the Law (Blackwell, 2003), and Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: An Introduction (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). Richard Stopford is a postdoctoral researcher at Durham University. His Ph.D. focused on Adorno’s aesthetics, and the interaction of this aspect of Adorno’s thought with key issues in epistemology and metaphysics. He has contributed to the forthcoming Routledge guide to Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and his publications include ‘A Critical Assessment of the Role of the Imagination in Kant’s Exposition of the Sublime’, Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics (2007).

Preface In assembling this collection I was very fortunate to have the encouragement and advice of Peter Lamarque, who supported this project from the beginning with his characteristic generosity of spirit. I would like to thank him for his advice and time, which were invaluable. I would also like to thank James Clarke for his help and guidance in negotiating the difficulties which editing a collection always generates. Both Peter Lamarque and Filippo Contesi looked over earlier drafts of the introduction, and what clarity it has is at least partially owing to them. The flaws, of course, remain my own. I also thank Max Paddison for commenting on an earlier draft of my chapter. I am grateful for the assistance of the staff at Continuum, in particular Rachel Eisenhauer and Colleen Coalter, without whose forbearance this book would not have been produced. Finally, my wife Lauren has supported me in more ways than I can name, and with more patience and love than I can convey. I remain happily in her debt. Owen Hulatt York, UK February 2013

Introduction

The history of the study of art, like the history of art itself, has been a history of the emergence of implicit problems. This volume examines two central problems which have emerged in this history: that of aesthetic autonomy and that of artistic autonomy. In the second half of this introduction I will give a brief overview of the essential structure of the philosophical debate. First, however, it is helpful to trace the history behind the consideration of aesthetic and artistic autonomy. The history of the philosophy of art is simultaneously a history of the practice of art itself. As is well known, art as a fully autonomous practice, free of subservience to extra-artistic social functions, is a relatively late development. The extrication of art from cultic, religious and state functions was a fitful, uneven process and the theory of art, itself an exploration of this gradually emerging practice, was similarly late in coming to a full self-consciousness of art’s apparent capacity to bear intrinsic value divorced from social function. The eighteenth century represents the period in which aesthetics and the philosophy of art, as we presently understand these disciplines, emerged. The emergence of these disciplines may be understood as the emergence of two questions, both of which served to delineate and open entirely fresh philosophical space. The emergence of aesthetics, in the modern sense, was coeval with the emergence of the question of the constitution of aesthetic judgements; should judgements of aesthetic quality be understood as purely autonomous (predicated only on the quality and organization of ‘aesthetic properties’), or intermixed with heteronomous non-aesthetic properties and standards? The emergence of the philosophy of art, in the modern sense, was coeval with the emergence of the question of the constitution of artistic practice; can decisions made by artists be understood as driven solely by autonomous aesthetic choices, or is artistic practice determined by extra-aesthetic standards and concerns? Prior to this point, the philosophical appreciation of art rested on two relatively uncontested assumptions. The first of these was the heteronomy of aesthetic judgements. As may be seen as late as medieval aesthetics, the reception of an artwork, the judgement of its value, was predicated on a

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judgement of the artwork’s fitness to perform a given function. These functions varied by period and by culture, being most often the representation of, or education towards, state or religious values. And so, although the question had yet to be posed, there was in essence an implicit commitment to the heteronomy of aesthetic judgements. Artworks were simply bound up with and expressive of other structures of value; the modern idea that artworks might come to inhabit a structure of sui generis value was scarcely in play at this point. Similarly, the theory of the practice and status of the artist had yet to fully emerge in the familiar shape of modern discussion. As one might expect, given that art is essentially a form of making which has only recently in modernity become disentangled from extrinsic functions, artists, and the nature of artistic practice, were perennially understood on the model of the craftsman. (The very earliest accounts of artistic practice we have, as, for example, in Plato’s Republic and the Torah, reflect this; just as do the very late pre-modern accounts given in medieval aesthetics). Like other craftsmen, artists were held to have extrinsic goals which they were required to fulfil (be that moral instruction, giving praise to the glory of God, or whatever). While these goals were assuredly extrinsic and not up for debate, the artist was accorded respect as a craftsman able to comprehend the best fashion of satisfying this goal (which, as in the examples given, often represented a vague end state which admitted of many approaches). In this thin sense, the artist was assumed to have complete autonomy – while his ends were not autonomously artistic (as it were), the artistic process was held to be a transparent procedure entirely under the command of the artist himself.1 The surety of these notions jointly came under attack in the eighteenth century. As is always the case with the history of ideas this development can be traced to a number of sources, but for our present purposes we can see the central figures in the persons of Baumgarten on the one hand, and Hegel on the other. Baumgarten’s work, more clearly than Hegel’s, may be seen as a codification of a diffuse intellectual trend rather than as a product of a wholly original thinker. Baumgarten serves as a convenient figure, however, as he did much to set the framework of the question of aesthetic autonomy. (The contemporary use of the term ‘aesthetic’ is itself owed to Baumgarten’s work). Interceding in the then fashionable study of what was known as the ‘critique of taste’, Baumgarten proposed a codified set of rules which were held to dictate how one should correctly produce a judgement of taste concerning both natural and artistic beauty. (This notion of set rules would later come under scrutiny from Kant, although he retained the general commitment to the cogency of the

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concept of taste). What is significant about Baumgarten’s codified collection of rules is that they prescribe correct conduct with regard to aesthetic properties only. In other words, a judgement of taste no longer extended to consider the extra-aesthetic function of an artwork; it considered only the aesthetic properties of an artwork. Baumgarten represents the transition from an unconsidered acceptance of aesthetic heteronomy to a new philosophical culture insistent on aesthetic autonomy. However, this does not represent merely the exchange of one presupposition for another. Rather, the new theory of aesthetic autonomy served to introduce a genuinely new debate, which has served to determine the course of all the work on aesthetics that would follow. Theories of aesthetic autonomy are defined against theories of aesthetic heteronomy and vice versa; and the proliferation of aesthetic theories (autonomism, moralism, immoralism, etc.) exists solely due to the introduction of this question. While Baumgarten introduced a transition from presuppositions of heteronomy to theories of autonomy, Hegel (coming much later in the eighteenth century) also served to explode presuppositions concerning artistic practice, although the resultant transition moved in the opposite direction. While Hegel’s overall philosophy of art betrays a clear debt to other figures of the same period (most notably Kant and Schiller), in his theory of art Hegel himself serves to introduce a fresh question into the study of art. In brief, Hegel asserted that the history of art and art forms is not driven by the decisions of artists (or rather, not merely). The history of art is in fact reflective of developments in a subtending form of consciousness which is taking shape through history (which Hegel called Geist or ‘spirit’). This form of consciousness had an internal logic and dynamic which served to drive the development of all human endeavour (including art, philosophy and the like). The upshot of this argument is that apparently autonomous spheres (like that of art) are in fact determined and shaped by processes external to them. As a consequence, Hegel’s account entails that in fact artistic autonomy does not exist. The development of modern out of classical art is not understood as deriving from the decisions of artists, or innovations internal to art – rather, this development reflects, and is shaped by, the developments taking place in the extra-aesthetic Geist. As in the case of Baumgarten, it is not so much the specifics of Hegel’s account but rather the structure of the question which he introduced – contention over the possibility of heteronomous determination of artistic practice – which is so important. Hegel served conclusively to undermine the ‘craftsman’ view of the

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artist, which was already beginning to seem anachronistic in light of the artistic practice taking place under the influence of Romanticism. Hegel’s innovative account is grounded in a number of exotic notions which did not survive outside of his own philosophy. The core idea, however, has been enduringly influential. This idea is one of constitution. Hegel does not argue that artists seek intentionally to reflect extra-aesthetic developments. Their artistic practice is, unbeknownst to them, constituted by extra-aesthetic influences and, as a result, comes to reflect these extra-aesthetic developments. It is this model of concealed constitution which has been so enduringly influential. This influence has largely spread through Marx. Marx inverted Hegel’s dialectic, seeing history as driven not by a metaphysically exotic Geist, but rather by material relations of exchange. Marx’s material inversion allowed for the multiplication of structurally identical accounts which replaced ‘human spirit’ with ‘relations of production’. A great deal of Marxist aesthetics explores the putative constitution relation which obtains between relations of exchange, production and the labour of the artist. Much of modern aesthetics may be understood as taking place in the logical space which was opened up by the emergence of these two fundamental questions. These two questions also, ultimately, came to largely define the two main traditions in the philosophy of art – the analytic and (for want of a better term) the continental. I will now explore the specific features of the debates over aesthetic and artistic autonomy in more detail, and also look at how the two competing traditions understand these questions.

1 This volume looks at the philosophy of aesthetic judgements (accounts of what is involved in the judgement of an artwork’s quality) and theories of artistic practice (accounts of what is involved in the creation of an artwork). It is a matter of history that the analytic aesthetic tradition has traditionally contested the former in the main, the better to solidify its position on the latter, while the continental tradition has traditionally expended more energy on contesting the latter, the better to formulate intricate theories of the former. These two opposing approaches do reveal some of the contrasting strengths of the two traditions, as well as the complexity of the issue under consideration.

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Aesthetic autonomy In investigating aesthetic autonomy, we are investigating the extent to which the subject’s judgement of an artwork is either sui generis (addressing itself and being sensitive to nothing but ‘aesthetic value’) or, by contrast, at least partially constituted by sensitivity to other kinds of value. As should be apparent by its focus on questions of aesthetic judgement and – by extension – aesthetic experience, the consideration of aesthetic autonomy is a jointly descriptive and prescriptive endeavour. What we are after is (1) an explanation of the preconditions of an aesthetic judgement and, deriving from this, (2) an account of that which should and should not figure in an aesthetic judgement. The multiple positions which one can take on the correct nature of this descriptive and prescriptive analysis split neatly around the question of whether these aesthetic judgements – and experiences – are autonomous (addressed solely to aesthetic properties) or heteronomous (aesthetic experience and judgement being produced by other properties – such as moral or cognitive – alongside aesthetic properties). The decision one makes on this issue is of the greatest significance, redounding to the nature of the discipline of aesthetics itself. If one decides – as many do – that aesthetic judgements are bound up with heteronomous material, then the very boundaries of the discipline of aesthetics itself begin to become more porous, and interdisciplinary collaboration becomes more urgent. For example, the decision that aesthetic judgements are partly prescribed by historical contexts in turn entails the necessity of acquiring detailed historical knowledge concerning the context of great artworks, in order to preserve proper appreciation of the canon. And hence, art history acquires an integral role in the appreciation of art. Similarly, if aesthetic value comes to be entwined with cognitive complexity, truth or moral content, then we will require accounts deriving from theories of cognition, epistemology or moral philosophy in order to complete our account of aesthetic judgement. In every case it becomes necessary to supplement the account of aesthetic appreciation by means of providing further theoretic support for art appreciation’s putative reliance on extra-aesthetic content. The question of autonomy, then, also becomes a question of disciplinary independence. It is in accord with this general feature of problems of autonomy (which we will also see when looking at artistic autonomy) that this collection has been intentionally organized along broadly interdisciplinary lines. In line with what we saw earlier about the characteristic inflections of analytic and continental aesthetics, this question of aesthetic autonomy is

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largely considered in this collection by analytic aestheticians, and those drawn from other traditions who hew more closely to the analytic treatment of these concerns.

Artistic autonomy In investigating artistic autonomy, we are attempting to arrive at a descriptive account of the constitution of the artist’s practice and – by extension – of the constitution of the artwork itself. The prescriptive element of this kind of account is comparatively far more subdued. As was delineated earlier, this kind of investigation is far newer than that into aesthetic autonomy. Just as before, the question of the autonomy of the artist has ramifications for the integrity of the disciplinary distinctions involved. In viewing the artist as autonomous, we are asserting that the artist’s activity is not determined by any extra-aesthetic influence. The aesthetic processes that are involved in creating the artwork are self-constituting and do not depend upon or necessarily reflect extra-aesthetic processes (e.g. economic, cultural or political processes). The artist, then, conducts his work solely in accord with the aesthetic principles and impulses which he feels are appropriate. Interestingly, this view has a significant impact on one’s theory of the aesthetic content of an artwork. With the possible exception of music and extreme examples of non-figurative visual art, artworks are ineluctably bound up with the non-artistic. An artwork’s formal properties can only be constructed through the importation of heteronomous content as organizing principles (as, for example, in the dependence of Anna Karenina on historical detail and facts concerning moral psychology; in the dependence of Brahms’ German Requiem on the Luther Bible, etc.). In this sense, there is (what it is tempting to call) an ineluctable dependence of art on heteronomy. If one opts for a theory of artistic autonomy, this dependence must be allowed for, but explained in such a way that this constitutive dependence of artistic autonomy on heteronomy either does not thereby introduce heteronomous content into the artwork, or this heteronomous content is incorporated without thereby becoming relevant to the aesthetic status of the artwork. The former option is really quite extreme, and consists in claiming that the imported content is reworked by the artwork such that it becomes indistinguishable from its autonomous formal properties. This position is best represented by A. C. Bradley’s theory of poetry, wherein form and content are held to be unified; or the radical formalism of Adorno’s global theory of art in Aesthetic Theory. Although these two examples of course differ, the important common factor is that the artwork’s

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reliance on non-aesthetic content becomes an occasion for the artwork’s absorption and retranslation of this content. While the artist may, say, appear to trace the course of a moral argument (as Zola does in Germinal, for example) this is mere appearance; it is the upshot of aesthetic decisions taken by an artist following the relevant aesthetic features of his work. The apparent moral content, while discernible, did not influence the course of the artwork’s creation qua moral content; but rather only through whatever aesthetic properties it may possess. This strategy, then, concedes the artwork’s dependence on the extra-aesthetic, but imputes to aesthetic creation the ability to transform extraaesthetic content such that it becomes solely aesthetic content. The second option is far more familiar. This consists in accepting that the artwork (as a matter of contingency) can import or reflect certain heteronomous contents. For example, a novel may serve as an accurate record of the moral mores of its time; as a means of moral enlightenment; or as an instantiation of certain political arguments. In this view, then, the artwork is in fact a composite of autonomous and heteronomous contents. However, the heteronomous contents which may be discerned and enjoyed by the onlooker are held to be incidental and inessential. Thus, an assertion that artistic autonomy comes with a need for an account which shows the dependence of (most) kinds of art on heteronomy does not in fact lead to this heteronomy in any way constituting or determining the aesthetic content of the artwork. The alternative is to view the artist’s activity as heteronomous. In claiming that the artist’s creative work is heteronomous we do not of course claim that the artist’s work is heteronomous simpliciter – we do not claim that the artist’s work is not after all artistic but in fact reducible to some other practice. Rather, in positing artistic work as heteronomous, we claim that the artist’s work is, in an important fashion, constituted or determined by heteronomous influences or processes. A paradigmatic example of such a position is found in the Abbildungstheorie employed by some Marxist aestheticians (most notably in the work of Louis Althusser or Georg Lukács). This Abbildungstheorie (or ‘reflection theory’) holds that the nature of the artwork is determined by the socio-historical context in which the artist’s activity is taking place. As such, the artist is incapable of acting autonomously – his artistic decisions, and the horizon of the possible decisions which he can entertain, are preformed due to the influence of external processes. As one would expect, this theory of artistic heteronomy has consequences for one’s theory of the nature of artworks. As we saw when examining artistic autonomy, the artwork ineluctably contains

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non-aesthetic content which the viewer can discern (moral content; historical content, etc.). As one would expect, if a theory of artistic autonomy is able to accommodate the presence of non-aesthetic content, so too is a theory of artistic heteronomy. In this respect, the theory of artistic heteronomy entails no great theoretical difference from that of artistic autonomy. In both cases, the presence of non-aesthetic content is conceded and, in both cases, the presence of content of this specific kind (e.g. the historical details which one can choose to glean from a story) is held to be not strictly relevant to the aesthetic properties of the artwork. The interest and innovation of the artistic heteronomy account comes when looking at artistic heteronomy’s theory of the constitution of aesthetic properties themselves. One can say that for a believer in artistic autonomy, the aesthetic properties are self-constituting, which is to say that the investigation of the artwork’s aesthetic nature is arrested at the surface or, as it were, technical level. In enquiring into the aesthetic constitution of, say, the visual or musical arts, the explanation and description of the aesthetic level of achievement will be ultimately arrested with statements about the constitution of these aesthetic properties: the proficiency of the recapitulation in a given sonata; the execution of perspective in a given artwork. (The outlier position comes with accounts which, in cases of interpretive ambiguity, appeal to the artist’s intentions in order to better fix their account of the aesthetic properties; as when one might be unsure if a play is tragic or comic). For the most part, then, aesthetic analysis remains firmly arrested within the artwork itself. On the one hand, the hermeneutic content of the artwork is held to be determined solely by the artwork itself, and the tradition within which it is situated. The artwork signifies and portrays by virtue of its apparent properties, and the network of signifying conventions in which it is situated. On the other, the artist’s decisions in constructing the artwork are held to represent, at the very worst, his own aesthetic intentions and, at the very best, the artist’s pure engagement with the formal demands of his material. This transparency of the artist’s action, and the hermeneutic scope of his work, is undermined by the theory of artistic heteronomy. The theory of artistic heteronomy holds that the artist’s activity is in fact constituted and determined by extra-aesthetic processes. The paradigmatic example of this approach is the psychological style of analysis pioneered by Freud (as, for instance, in his analysis of Michelangelo’s statue of Moses) or the Marxist style of analysis touched on earlier. In either case, the core claim is that the artist’s activity and, by extension, the artist’s creative decisions are intrinsically determined by extra-aesthetic influences and processes. For example, a familiar trope of

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Marxist analysis concerns the dependence of artistic production on a division of labour which is capable of exempting him from the demands of menial labour. Understood in this fashion, as a basic claim about the determining preconditions for artistic endeavour, this theory is of limited interest, and most likely trivially true. However, this aspect of the theory of artistic heteronomy is rarely, if ever, found without a further commitment to the consequences of this determination of artistic procedures for aesthetic properties themselves. The consequence of this heteronomous determination, it is claimed, is an expansion of the hermeneutic scope of the aesthetic properties. The aesthetic properties of an artwork no longer merely signify aesthetic content, but are themselves held to intrinsically bear extra-aesthetic content. In essence, the purely formal or purely aesthetic properties of an artwork are held to be reflective of or even – in some varieties of theories of artistic heteronomy – critical of the extra-aesthetic. The earliest and most influential theory of note in this vein was Hegel’s. Hegel, for example, held that the ongoing increase in abstraction which took place in art’s movement from early cultic art, to Greek sculpture, to the artwork of ‘romantic’ modernity did not merely reflect developments in the aesthetic itself, but in fact was driven by the development of human ‘Geist’. As such, the aesthetic properties of romantic artworks testify not merely to the decisions of the artist, but also intrinsically provide information about a subtending heteronomous narrative which determined that artwork. A great many of the ‘continental’ accounts of artistic heteronomy expend much of the complexity of their accounts on investigating this relation between aesthetic content and the extra-aesthetic.2 Accordingly, this conception of artistic heteronomy usually entails a commitment to theories of aesthetic heteronomy. Contemplation and judgement of aesthetic properties come to have an intrinsic dependence on the heteronomous content embedded in the aesthetic properties – in turn, the nature of an aesthetic judgement can become expanded, and become judgement not merely of art, but also of the heteronomous content embedded in the artwork itself. The most beguiling consequence of this approach has been the attempt to understand the artwork as in fact a site for political action, or social critique (paradigmatic examples being found in the work of Georg Lukács, Jacques Rancière, Raymond Williams and Walter Benjamin).

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2 It is clear that the analytic and continental traditions split reasonably neatly in tandem with the two investigations into aesthetic and artistic autonomy, respectively. It is also clear that each tradition has had undeniable success in confining their attention to each of these two spheres. However, there is a strong dependence relationship between these two spheres. Much of the analytic debate (regardless of its position on aesthetic autonomy) takes for granted the idea that artistic autonomy obtains. This is a risky strategy, as the continental tradition provides a number of strong reasons for believing that in fact artistic autonomy is problematic. By contrast, the continental tradition has been seen to be too eager to reduce the artwork to an epiphenomenon or mere signifier of extra-aesthetic processes which are held to be of real interest. Freudian (more recently, perhaps, Lacanian) and broadly Marxist accounts have been undeniably guilty of this elision of the aesthetic in favour of forcing the artwork to conform to broader theoretic commitments. As a result, while continental theories have found qualified success in embedding artistic practices in broader contexts, and tracing the bleeding through of extra-aesthetic values, forms and priorities into the aesthetic, this has been accompanied by a reduced aptitude for making fine-grained analyses of various kinds of aesthetic phenomena. (For example, it is notable that even Adorno, one of the most complex and accomplished aestheticians of the continental tradition, often remained content with making assertions about art simpliciter, with not nearly enough attention being paid to the important kinds of differences between the various aesthetic media.) This distinction between the ‘traditions’ should not cause us to question what the future relationship between the traditions should be, but should rather cause us to question the very existence of these traditions at all. Aesthetics is perhaps uniquely placed in philosophy (most likely along with ethics) in that the ultimate arbiter of the success of an aesthetic theory is immediately available to the experienced observer – namely, fidelity to the object of discussion. While continental philosophy has a tendency to telescope its perspective outside of the artwork and to pay exhaustive attention to the context and history of the artwork, and the analytic tradition has a tendency to confine itself to finegrained questions internal to aesthetic experiences and judgements themselves, it is clear that an exhaustive, and internally coherent, account of the artwork must broach both of these perspectives. As such, it is the hope of this collection

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(and its editor) to emphasize neither analytic nor continental approaches to the artwork, but merely to emphasize the artwork itself.

Notes 1

2

This is admittedly complicated in the case of religious artistic practice, especially in the medieval era, where the notion of being an impersonal conduit for God’s action is introduced (a notion, oddly, that reappears later in modified, secular form in the Romantic movement). The most significant living proponent of this approach must be Jacques Rancière, who combines both a broadly psychologistic model (as found in The Aesthetic Unconscious) with a more Hegelian attempt to see the internal logic of artistic practice as reflecting, and intervening in, deeper features of the social constitution of the visible (as found in The Politics of Aesthetics).

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Indifferent to Intentions: The Autonomy of Artistic Meaning1 Paul Crowther

Preface I work in an idiom of post-analytic phenomenology that seeks to overcome the great tribal division between analytic philosophy and the continental tradition. This involves a critical overcoming of the limitations of both. For example, rather than focusing on how we talk about art (as in analytic aesthetics), a post-analytic phenomenology prefers to describe the character of the art object itself – as a made or assembled sensuously significant artefact – and to consider the complex cognitive basis of such artifice (both in its own right and in terms of the observer’s aesthetic experiences of it). An approach such as this takes the great traditions of artistic making in both Western and non-Western cultures as its paradigm. There is a place for Western conceptualism within this, but as a marginal rather than a central factor. The analytic tradition in contrast reverses this relation. It attempts to wag the body of art by its tail. However, where my approach does intersect with analytic aesthetics is in its insistence upon clear and rigorous structures of argument and consideration of potential counter-arguments and examples. A great deal of continental aesthetics rests on asserting rather than arguing obscure ideas, and often takes obscurity to be tantamount to profundity. It should be emphasized that the division I am working to overcome has grown even greater as my career has developed. Nowadays, the two tribes scarcely acknowledge one another as philosophers, let alone critically engage with one another. Sad, of course, but the search for truth must go on, irrespective of tribal taboos…

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Introduction The idea of art having autonomy of meaning is not fashionable. In the field of literary and art historical studies, for example, there is a considerable emphasis on how meaning is bound up with a work’s relation to those intentions and social conditions which informed the original circumstances of its production. And even if – as in some recent postmodern thought² – the intelligibility of specific artistic intentions is queried, the artwork’s capacity to express its producer’s broader attitude to power, race, class and gender relations has become an article of faith for feminist and postcolonial theory. These contextualist approaches find a broad parallel in the institutional and related definitions of art propounded by Danto, Dickie and Levinson (among others). For such thinkers, the decisive factor in constituting art is not the making of an artefact, but the way in which an artefact (or relevant state of affairs) directs us towards the creator’s intentions or theory concerning its artistic status or function. On these terms meaning is necessarily tied to what the artist intends, or to cultural issues contemporary with its creation, or to related factors which members of the art world take to be posited by the work. The original circumstances of production are paramount. In this chapter, I will not undertake a sustained refutation of this emphasis.3 Rather, I want to open up an alternative approach which rethinks artistic meaning by emphasizing the normative theory of art. This approach holds that art has distinctive and intrinsically valuable properties which are mediated by a works’ position in the relevant tradition of artistic making.4 On the basis of this, we can posit an autonomous dimension of artistic meaning and value, which is, in logical terms, indifferent to empirical knowledge or historical theory concerning the artist’s original intentions and attitudes. One must stress that ‘autonomy’ in this context does not amount to the ‘ahistorical’. Indeed, the theory proposed is one which assigns the most decisive importance to the work’s phenomenal structure interpreted in relation to the diachronic history of the artifactual practice of which it is an instance. The emphasis here is on the way in which the historical distinctiveness of an artist’s treatment of his or her medium is conceptually connected to the autonomously significant artistic meaning which can be the outcome of such a treatment. This approach embodies a creator- rather than a consumer-based conception of art.



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To establish these claims I will, in Part one, adapt and generalize a conceptual schema first formulated by Erwin Panofsky. After a lengthy development of its implications for art and the aesthetic, I will, in Part two, consider and dismiss some putative objections to these implications. In Part three, I will take my approach much further by analysing some specific ways in which the artwork can generate autonomous meaning.

Part one To recognize an artefact is to locate it in terms of some code governing its human function. These usually involve function in a strict sense, i.e. ‘this is (or is probably) used for that’. Art, however, represents a problem, since it is a function of various intersecting codes pertaining to the particular media involved, and to how these media are interpreted. Even more problematic is that it transcends mundane criteria of functionality. In non-Western cultures especially, a major importance is assigned to the formative dimension of art. This centres on the process of making, as well as the end product; and on an audience involvement which involves complex patterns of participation rather than the consumer-orientated notions of ‘reading’ and ‘consumption of meaning’ which characterize recent Western stereotypes of art interpretation.5 However, there is one area that can be focused on in a way which (eventually) takes us beyond this Western stereotype. It takes as its premiss the fact that, in the broadest terms, art represents.6 That is to say the artwork embodies semantic codes and is thence to be interpreted as referring to things other than to itself. (This is even true of ‘self-referential’ work, insofar as the recognition of self-referentiality logically presupposes contrasts with other works.) There are three major aspects to the semantics of representation. In what follows, I shall loosely adopt and refine a schema originally devised by Erwin Panofsky in relation to the visual arts.7 The most basic element in this schema I shall call the protosymbolic.8 It has two constitutive aspects. The first is determined by reference to kinds of subject matter, syntactically related to one another. For example, one could not describe something as a picture, poem or story unless one could say in principle what kind of general state of affairs the picture is ‘of ’, or the poem or story is nominally ‘about’.

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The second basic aspect concerns the formal structure of a work. One would not have comprehended a work in its perceptual or imaginatively intended entirety without experience of the specific ways in which parts of its phenomenal fabric relate to other parts, and to the whole. In music, of course, key systems (or the absence of them) involve a kind of merging of syntactic and formal elements. To understand these two aspects of the protosymbolic is to acquire the most basic competence in relation to an artefactual code. Once one has acquired such a competence, the representation is basically intelligible without reference to external context. In the case of the next element in the Panofskian schema – namely the iconographic aspects of a code – matters are very different. Iconography addresses what are (in strict logical, if not existential and historical terms) secondary meanings – the ‘symbolic’ dimension in its most familiar sense. Specifically, the iconographical aspect of a work consists in making the protosymbolic dimension more specific. Instead of centring on the kind of thing being represented, it gravitates, rather, around the more particular individuals or culturally specific states of affairs to which the artist is intentionally alluding. These can, of course, be real items, persons or situations (or ones which previously existed), or ones derived from myth or fiction or the imagination. There is, indeed, a further aspect to this, inso far as such elements can also serve as allegories or metaphors for more general meanings. Whichever inflection of the iconographical we address, there is one decisive condition which governs such meaning, namely that it can only be interpreted on the basis of factors external to the basic protosymbolic level of the code. One needs, for example, an understanding of the literary or broader cultural sources being drawn on; or a knowledge of the artist’s biography or of the causal context in which the work was produced, and, indeed, the audience it was directed towards. One needs, in other words, a knowledge of immediate synchronic historical circumstances surrounding the work’s production. In cultures where historical awareness has to some degree institutionalized itself (e.g. through figuring as an object of academic study) a third level of reference – which Panofsky calls the iconological – has to be considered. In such cultures, past representations always manifest themselves as historical, i.e. as different from those which are produced under present conditions. This difference is enabled by the fact that artists in such cultures, consciously or not, absorb broader influences from their historical epoch, and manifest this in the style and content of the representations they produce. The upshot is that



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their works can be related to broader patterns of production, value and belief, which were current at the time of their creation. Recent feminist and postcolonialist emphases on representation’s embodiment of attitudes to power, class, race and gender direct one’s attention to this. So does the once fashionable Marxist notion of ideology. These are both specific inflections of the more global notion of iconology. On these terms, then, to interpret a representation as a representation involves a basic competence in the code (i.e. protosymbolic meaning), and (according to the more specific nature of the representation or interpretational intentions), a knowledge of the iconographic and iconological dimensions of meaning. The question arises, then, of how these factors relate to our aesthetic engagement with art. A first important point is that since in addressing an aesthetic object qua aesthetic object, attention is directed towards its status as a sensuous or (in the case of literature) imaginatively intended particular, we are thereby involved with it at the level of formal qualities – one aspect of what I have called the protosymbolic. More surprisingly, there is also a necessary involvement with the other protosymbolic factor mentioned earlier, namely the work’s embodiment of a semantic/syntactic code. The two factors are often separated from one another by formalist theorists, but there is a good case to be made for their complementarity. This is because in order to recognize the distinctively artistic version of aesthetic form (or artistic meaning in the fullest sense) it is logically presupposed that such form is recognized to be the product of human artifice. The semantic/syntactic aspect is one aspect in this recognitional strategy, and may indeed be a key element in formal structure itself.9 There is also a further vital dimension to the recognition of artifice in the aesthetic context, for while the two protosymbolic factors are necessary conditions of art they are not sufficient. As I have argued at great length elsewhere,10 in order to move from mere representation to art requires that the work is original – in the sense of being innovatory or exemplary. Such features logically presuppose reference to a horizon of diachronic and comparative history. In practice, such a context is provided by knowledge of traditions of making (using both ‘tradition’ and ‘making’ very broadly). Reference to these enables what is distinctive about an artist’s treatment of form to be recognized and appreciated. It follows, accordingly, that a historical dimension is a constitutive element of artistic meaning in the fullest sense.

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It is vitally important to be clear about the scope of this historical mediation. For what it does not necessarily entail is reference to synchronic questions of iconography and iconology, i.e. the role played by the immediate historical circumstances in which a work was produced and received. Knowledge of such circumstances and specific biographical facts about the artist’s life may enhance our enjoyment, but equally so they may inhibit it. We may, for example, become preoccupied solely by its historical interest, or by its ramifications in terms of present political interests. The point is that reference to the sphere of the work’s immediate context (and the artist’s ‘intentions’) is a contingent matter vis-à-vis responses to distinctively artistic meaning. Arguments such as this are greeted with wide-eyed horror by many contemporary cultural and literary theorists and art historians. The idea that art can have a significance beyond its immediate context and the narrow political obsessions of ‘Theory’ is dismissed as a hangover of white, male, middle-class, Eurocentric heterosexual patriarchy. I have dealt with specious objections of this kind (and will continue to do so) elsewhere.11 Suffice it to say that an approach such as mine, in effect, addresses the very possibility of cultural transmission and continuity. For even when cultures clash violently, there is frequently an interest in and absorption of, the values and techniques of the other. At the heart of this is the fact that stripped from their immediate context of origin, artistically significant artefacts have a deep-seated intrinsic fascination. In fact this removal of the original context is of positive significance, since it introduces a cultural distance which enables one to appropriate the artefact on one’s own terms. And this is the irony; the fact that the work is viewed in this way means that there is a kind of sharing – a fundamental compatibility between producer and interpreter – at a more human level. It is on this intention-indifferent basis that one may regard the aesthetic experience of art as relatively disinterested. True, one must take account of all aspects of its protosymbolic dimension, and the mediation of tradition, but the fact that one need not take account of the iconographical aspects of the work introduces an important element of freedom into our cognitive engagement with it. Indeed, it is precisely art’s capacity (qua diachronically mediated aesthetic object) to be meaningful beyond its original contexts of production which gives it the generality requisite for a more autonomous level of significance.



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Part two The view I am presenting here invites some obvious philosophical questions. The first of these concerns the notion of tradition. In the most literal sense this involves relating a practice and its products to the ways in which these have been done in the past. In the case of art, this again can involve reference to iconographical strategies (i.e. specific kinds of narrow referential function) but in relation to aesthetic considerations it does not have to. Often, indeed, the original iconographical context of a work will simply have been swept away by the passage of time. What cannot be swept away, however (unless a work is destroyed), is its protosymbolic aspect, i.e. the level of kinds of subject matter, and formal structure. This means, of course, that in relating a work to the comparative context of tradition, stylistic considerations are paramount. The decisive factors are not the particular synchronic conditions of a work’s immediate historical production and reception, but rather its relations of protosymbolic sameness to and difference from other works at the diachronic level of the medium’s phenomenal articulation. The function of tradition, in other words, is to mediate the reception of the work at a relatively autonomous and aesthetic level of historicity. (I shall return to some of these points below.) A second possible objection to my position arises from an important set of counter-examples. If we consider, say, John Martin’s Last Judgement paintings, or Eliot’s The Waste Land or Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, we are dealing with works which are (in the former case) standardly exhibited, or (in the latter cases) published, with detailed accompanying texts clarifying the iconographical dimension of the works in question. The implication is that in the absence of such iconographical back-up the works are simply unintelligible. This is not true. The power of these artworks consists in the relation between their ‘making strange’ of the traditions of landscape, poetry and the novel, respectively, and the changing historical patterns of human experience. From the internal resources of the works themselves viewed in the context of diachronic tradition, it is possible to discern specific strategies of meaning. Reference to iconographic intentions and allusions may enhance our appreciation of this, but it is not demanded as a presupposition of such appreciation. A third putative objection to my position concerns further ‘problematic’ individual cases. Suppose for example, that an archaeologist excavates a simple stone monolith that is, to all intents and purposes, perceptually indistinguishable from a work of 1960s American minimal art. In this case does not

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the ability to regard both as art, and distinguish them from one another, require very detailed iconographical analysis? Well, in the first instance, investigation of the respective work’s phenomenal fabric would reveal one to be the product of carving, and the other to have been mechanically formed. On the basis of this one could relate the archaic artefact to the tradition of a carving per se, and speculate upon its referential content – as a memorial or whatever. In the case of the minimal work, we would regard this as one of a set of marginal cases. The very fact that it seems odd and in need of iconographical back-up (in contrast to the vast majority of works) in order to be claimed as art, of itself points to its marginal status. This should not surprise us, since any definition of art – if is to be a definition and not merely a set of stipulations – must allow for such boundary cases. Each case of this sort must be considered on its own merits. A final and much more serious objection to my position is as follows. The specifically artistic version of aesthetic disinterestedness outlined above is one which is based on indifference to iconographical and iconological issues. Yet, at the same time, I want to argue that such disinterestedness actually facilitates a sharing of vision – an aesthetic empathy between producer and recipient. But it may be argued that this is an empty relation. For what makes an individual’s vision of the world real and substantial is surely the network of actual beliefs, attitudes, ideas and intentions, of which this vision is a function. Hence, it may seem that one can only make sense of a work embodying an artist’s ‘vision’ if we can relate it to the depth of iconographical and iconological factors which are implied therein. Indeed, (the argument may continue) ‘vision’ in any viable philosophical sense is not a wholly private matter. It is a function of complex sets of relationships between an individual and his or her immediate social environment. Again, therefore, in denying the importance of iconography and iconology vis-à-vis aesthetic responses to art, am I not severing the very factors which bind it to the expression of socially mediated vision? I will now offer a detailed response to this question, which will also illuminate the autonomous dimension of artistic meaning, in more specific terms.



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Part three First, a work’s capacity to express anything is based on both main aspects of the protosymbolic dimension – the semantic/syntactic code, and formal structure. Depending on how broadly one interprets ‘formal’, another element could be added – the expressive per se. In Western culture at least, certain formal configurations, hinging on colour, shape and gesture (or in literature and music, narrative and developmental structures and resolutions), have specific ranges of emotional association. There may be some natural element in these associations, but substantially they are conventions of interpretation which are part of our general cultural stock. They are thus bound up with the protosymbolic level of meaning. However, expression is also used in an iconographical sense when we talk of intentions, beliefs, attitudes etc. which a producer explicitly wishes to communicate to his or her audience. (There is also scope for an iconological notion of expression insofar as a producer unconsciously expresses broader social attitudes permeating the society in which he or she lives.) To reflect on how these interrelate, let us consider a hypothetical example. Suppose an artist paints a work entitled Pastoral Idyll. It consists of a highly picturesque landscape, populated by idealized figures dressed in Roman attire, deep in conversation. Let us suppose also that the work is profoundly optimistic in terms of its formal and associative ambience. In protosymbolic terms the work is happy; a kind of celebration of the abundance of being. However, let us now suppose that on finishing the work the artist commited suicide, and leaves behind a note. The note details his sense of outsiderliness and ennui with the art world, society and existence per se. It turns out, indeed, that the idealized figures are specific images of his one-time friends who have now formed a ruling cabal from which he has been pointedly excluded. Viewed in these iconographical terms, the work now appears as an expression of the deepest unhappiness and alienation. Now, in terms of its immediate reception, the work causes great controversy. It is taken to be a profound critique of art, society and everything. It is a savagely ironic indictment. Does this mean, therefore, that this iconographic dimension of expression should be taken as paramount? The answer to this question depends on one’s position on the issue of socio-political reductionism. At the heart of many strains of Marxist, feminist and poststructuralist thought is a reduction of representation to a vehicle for competition with, and domination of, others. On these terms, representation is

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fundamentally an expression of iconographical and iconological ideas, beliefs and attitudes. The means of expression – the nature of the handling of the medium itself – is itself significant only as a signifying element in the discourse of power relations which surrounds it.12 Such a distorted analysis is actually at odds with both the deeper historicity and concrete specificity of the medium itself. In this respect let us consider the Pastoral Idyll outlined above. Whatever the artist specifically intends, the work is, in protosymbolic terms, a happy-looking one. Indeed, every artist knows (whether he or she has it explicitly in mind or not) that the material artwork has a strong chance of outliving its creator. This means that the work will – however weakly or strongly – address a history other than that entailed by the immediate circumstances of its production and reception. It will be assessed by diachronic tradition. No work can remain absolutely tied to its context of origin in a way that is wholly neutral to such tradition. Even a work of architecture, for example, can have its original physical context destroyed through the erection of new edifices around it. And here is the contradiction of the iconography of expression. If a work comes into being with highly specific intentions aimed at making specific ‘points’ in relation to the society which surrounds it, history in its diachronic sense will subvert this intention. For the work cannot go into the future with an umbilical link to this original context. The original intended expression will be submerged and lost, and the work will be viewed primarily in terms of its protosymbolic aspects, and its contribution to diachronic tradition. The original meaning will inflate in the circumstances of its immediate reception, and then become the narrow province of art historians and their special purposes. It will become a cultural fossil. The one way of defeating this is if the nature of the particular expression is such that it can become an exemplar for future creators, i.e. offer new possibilities of practice at the code’s protosymbolic level. Ironic works – such as our hypothetical example – have little chance of this, since irony of that kind is specifically tied to its original context. My point is, then, that in any culture where tradition is not simply a moribund repetition of the past, iconographical expression will be submerged by a more fundamental diachronic historicity of continuity or innovation within the medium. It is this factor which enables the aesthetic dimension of a work’s phenomenal structure to take on a distinctively artistic character. This brings us to a second crucial point, namely the concrete demands and



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effects of working in a specific artistic medium. Again, here is an example. In recent years, the life and work of the poet Philip Larkin has occasioned a great deal of controversy in the English-speaking world through the publication of his letters. These show Larkin to have been racist, xenophobic, sexist, selfish and politically incorrect to the highest degree. From this it is inferred that, given the personality who produced it, the worth of Larkin’s poetic achievement itself must now be called into question. This consumerist view assumes that the artwork simply reflects the biographical substance of the person who produced it, and disguises political incorrectness. However, we must recall that to master an artistic medium is a case of acquiring a basic protosymbolic code entailing semantic, syntactic and formal relations, and expressive associations. This means that before one can express any particular intentions, one must subject oneself to the public demands of the code. The collective vocabulary of the medium logically precedes both its private and culturally specific uses. It also means that this matrix of private and social meaning can be transformed by being articulated in terms of a publicy accessible code. Hence, when we investigate Larkin’s poems we find that the narrow partialities which structured his actual existence become something different in the poems. Frailty, frustration, isolation and longing are expressed in a form which allows them to be explored and reappropriated in terms of the reader’s own existential context; Larkin is not wholly immersed in the prejudices of a damaged life. Rather, by making experience into poems, he distances it from actual events so as to manifest – in a way which engages both understanding and imagination – the fallibilities of human existence per se. Through the formative power of the medium he expresses something of the autonomous at the level of the sensible particular, and this emerges not through the correspondence of the poems with his life, but through their relation to human experience in general – as mediated by our diachronic knowledge of other works in the tradition of poetry. It is this autonomous and comparative normative context (over and above narrow iconographical and iconological issues) that, in fact, determines the general social significance of art. It is often noted, for example, that art can have a socially prophetic character. In this respect, much of Rachmaninov’s early music seems to forebode the collapse of Tsarist Russia and the old order. Given, say, the time of the Third Piano Concerto’s composition (around 1909), this is hardly surprising in view of the turmoil surrounding Russian political life at the time.

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However, the central significance of Rachmaninov’s music is that it adapts his personal forebodings to the protosymbolic dimension of the medium. Regret, turmoil and longing for what has gone before are established in a virtuoso, heavily chromatic pianistic idiom, which elaborates and embellishes poignant thematic material. We are not simply taken by the ‘Russianness’ of it all. Rather, the ‘folk’ character of Rachmaninov’s themes make the Russian aspect emblematic of the inevitable decline of all socio-political orders, and, indeed, the passage towards death in general. Consider also a work such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This work, like Blake’s poetry, expresses a profound pessimism concerning the effects of technological advance on human society. It exploits stereotypes of the early nineteenth-century scientist, and adopts the then fashionable format of the gothic novel. However, it also distinguishes itself from other such novels. This is not just because of its specific predictive potency in anticipating the destructive effects of technology on human values. Rather, its distinction is a function of the way in which it traces a product of human artifice turning back to destroy its creator. From this central theme, a whole host of other factors of equal significance (such as the nature of hubris) emerge. Shelley, in other words, creates a particular narrative, which distils the preoccupations of the early nineteenthcentury intelligentsia into something of more autonomous significance – a recurrent pattern of human behaviour and destiny. My point is, then, that iconographical expression in art gives voice only to the social preoccupations of its immediate circumstances of production and reception. The significance of the work is thus tied to factors primarily external to the work itself. It is dependent on them. However, in all patterns of personal and social existence there are general aspects to particular experience. Human beings do not exist in states of personal or cultural solipsism. As embodied subjects, they share similar structural possibilities vis-à-vis the scope and limits of experience. From stone age to postmodern, there are similar existential strategies – such as plot and deceit; similar modes of feeling – such as love and jealousy; and similar needs – such as the demand for recognition from others. All this, of course, is in addition to common factors based on physical embodiment and the human form. To be initiated into a practice of representation per se is to engage with this general level of experience. An autonomous dimension is always inherent in the form of what I have termed the protosymbolic. To recognize the kinds of things which a work represents is to be related to forms which have enduring



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possibilities of meaning. Some artists are able to realize these possibilities through stylistic distinctiveness in their treatment of protosymbolic form. They literally change our experience of these meanings through perceptually and/or imaginatively illuminating their existential scope and conditions of application in new ways. Through this they become distinctively artistic expressions of historically recurrent possibilities of experience. Such distinctiveness can only be achieved in relation to a comparative horizon of diachronic history based on traditions of making. If a work’s stylistic achievement is such as to develop the logical scope of the medium, this entails that it offers new possibilities for experiencing the world. A privileged position in relation to a medium’s tradition is testimony to an artwork’s autonomous significance. It is at this normative level of artistic meaning, indeed, that we find enduring critical and social meaning in an aesthetically enhanced form. Given these arguments, there is one final point to be considered. The theory of art presented here centres on a complex theory of the aesthetic object mediated by diachronic history. But where does this leave us in relation to artworks which strive to reject or subvert the aesthetic status of art? What I have in mind here is that realm of ‘conceptual art’ deriving originally from Duchamp’s ‘unassisted ready-mades’, and which remains a dominant feature of the contemporary art world. In this respect, it should be emphasized (as I have shown at great length elsewhere)13 that many visual conceptual artworks actually have a quite specific range of connotational meanings which allow them to be understood as, in effect, representational images. In fact, it is possible to indicate a logical test that allows a distinction to be made between visual conceptual art and items or configurations which merely serve to illustrate some idea or theory. The criterion is twofold. On the one hand, if the work is to be visual art, we must look for some necessary relation between its specific visual properties qua visual, and the connoted meanings which it sets up; on the other hand, this relation must not be one which is paraphraseable, i.e. it must be one which can only be fully articulated through direct perceptual acquaintance with the work itself, rather than through mere discriptions of it. These points at least indicate how even the problematic Duchampian tradition might be adapted to a normative approach;14 but the vital notion here is ‘adapted’. Conceptual works are not paradigms of art. The great problem of aesthetics in the analytical tradition is that since the late twentieth century it has often treated such works as if they were paradigmatic.

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This strategy, indeed, is the basis of the institutional definitions of art and their variants. What is regarded as fundamental in such approaches is, in effect, the idea about art which the artist wishes to convey. The object or text is significant not in terms of its phenomenal or imaginatively intended particularity, but rather in terms of the more general idea about art to which it points. This means that iconography and iconology is paramount. Art is not made, it is designated on the basis of a specific intention or attitude (or sets thereof) on the artist or art world’s part. In my preceding analyses I have argued that intentions of this sort – bound up with the specific historical circumstances surrounding a work’s production – are, in logical terms, irrelevant to its status as art. Hence, if a work (of the conceptual sort) can only be interpreted as an expression of intention or attitude, it has absolutely no entitlement to be regarded as art. Rather, it is at best an ironic or obscure kind of meta-theoretical or critical activity which is parasitic upon art proper. Seen in this light, therefore, it is clear that in defining art institutionally so as to ratify conceptual ‘art’, the institutional theorists are using as paradigm cases items which in many cases are not artworks. This is not just a philosophical mistake, it is a cultural disaster. In this discussion, I have emphasized the autonomous dimension of art over and above the specific intentions surrounding its immediate production and reception. This critical autonomy has a cultural as well as a logical dimension. For while it is sometimes remarked that the tie-in between art and the aesthetic reflects Western cultural prejudice, it is one nevertheless which is able to give an intelligible and viable account of transcultural continuity between modes of representation – from prehistoric to abstract art, from African masks to Navajo sand ‘painting’. This may, of course, smack of ‘cultural imperialism’ to the politically simplistic, but it is nothing as compared to the cultural imperialism of the institutional definitions and modes of postmodern critical reductionism. In the former case, art is redefined so as to constellate around the narrow preoccupations and theories of a marginal strand of twentieth-century Western practitioners. In terms of the latter, feminist and postcolonialist claims that the canon of art and the aesthetic are suspect (through excluding or marginalizing the experience of women and non-Western groups) turn out to be culturally specific to the point – ironically enough – of tacit racism. Their assumption is that representation is only intelligible in terms of reflecting or concealing the ‘experience’ of social, gender or racial groups. Its function is to provide



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information and narrative for socially persuasive ends. This reduces art to a model based on the means/end instrumental reason of Western consumerism. It represses or marginalizes the formative dimension of art. This formative dimension is fundamental to non-Western art,15 and, on the approach which I have taken, is decisive for the proper understanding of Western art also. It is, of course, true that the concept of art is a Western concept; but my point is that what it conceptualizes has the potential to transcend cultural confines.16 Many representational practices will occur in forms of social life which do not separate artistic meaning from ritual or communicative function. If, however, they are separated out on the basis of a logical development of the medium in question, then this separation is not just another culturally specific gesture. We are, rather, identifying objectively new ways in which representation can change human experience of the world. If such potential is realized, we have the basis of a claim to autonomous artistic meaning. And even if a culture does not perform such a separation – and has no concept of ‘art’– this still leaves the possibility that its established representational practices open up avenues of experience which other idioms do not. Its practices have a potentially autonomous significance whether or not the culture in question chooses to make something of this potential. The decisive factor here is not culturally specific patterns of social use and consumption, but rather the comparative significance of what has been made vis-a-vis the kind of representation in question. My overriding argument, then, is that all human practices exist in the dimension of both particular empirical histories and intentions, and a more general history which defines kinds, continuities, and creative differences in relation to such practices. In defining art, we should see this latter diachronic and normative dimension as a fundamental structure. It is the basis of artistic meaning’s autonomy. To argue otherwise, and to see art as defined by synchronic historical intentions and social attitudes, is to erase those very structures and effects which are the reason why the arts have a history in the first place. It is, indeed, to degrade artistic meaning on the basis of narrow Western academic consumerism.

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Notes 1 The literature on the relevance of the artist’s intentions is, of course, vast. William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe K. Beardsley’s discussions of it in The Verbal Icon; Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (University of Kentucky Press, 1954) remain of classic status. Other worthwhile approaches include Joseph Margolis’ Art and Philosophy; Conceptual Issues in Aesthetics (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), pp. 165–89; Colin Lyas’ ‘Anything Goes; The Intentional Fallacy Revisited’, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 23, 1983, pp. 291–305; and Gary Iseminger’s edited collection Intention and Interpretation (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992). Recent discussion has tended to focus on the relation between ‘active’ and ‘hypothetical’ ‘intentionalism’. See, for example, Saam Trivedi’s ‘An Epistemic Dilemma for Actual Intentionalism’, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 41, 2001, pp. 192–206. My own position – for reasons which will be made clear – is that no variety of ‘intentionalism’ is conceptually connected to artistic meaning or to its evaluation. At best, hypotheses as to an artist’s intentions, or knowledge concerning them, can (occasionally) enhance our aesthetic or intellectual pleasure. 2 For a useful summary of the relevant views see Keith Moxey’s The Practice of Persuasion; Paradoxes and Power in Art History (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001). 3 I offer this in Chapter 1 of my book Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 4 For more on this issue see Chapter 1 of Defining Art, and Chapter 4 of my book The Transhistorical Image; Philosophizing Art and its History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 5 See, for example, W. J. T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For an example of the complexity of audience involvement in non-Western art see Susan M. Vogel’s Baule: African Art/Western Eyes (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1997). 6 There is a sense of ‘representation’ which is too broad, namely when used in relation to any signifying practice. The sense in which I will use it is in the case of signifying practices whose phenomenal or imaginatively intended particularity has a conceptual connection to their meaning. This encompasses the abstract and figurative visual arts, literature, music and dance. As to the question of what the more ambiguous idioms among these ‘represent’, I have discussed such issues in relation to abstract and conceptual art in Chapters 6 and 7 (respectively) of my Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). I would also argue that music represents qualities of gesture and emotion in a conventionalized way, although the admissibility of this interpretation and its more exact character are controversial. I discuss this at length in Chapter 7 of Defining Art, pp. 163–204.



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7 Panofsky’s major discussion of this is in Meaning and the Visual Arts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), pp. 53–67. 8 Panofsky’s own term is ‘pre-iconographic’ or ‘primary or natural subject-matter’. I have preferred the term ‘protosymbolic’ so as to bring out its relevance for all artefacts which are representational in the sense outlined in note 6. In this respect, the semantic/syntactic dimension of music is a complex issue. But there is at least a prima facie case that configurations within tonal and non-Western scale systems carry culturally well-established emotional and/or gestural connotations which give them protosymbolic semantic and syntactic intelligibility. 9 One might, for example, make a distinction between infrastructural and superstructural formal qualities, where the former consists of relations between the basic phenomenal or imaginatively intended elements of a work (e.g. the sounds and rhythms of language, or the colours and shapes of a painting), while the latter involves relations between elements or groups of representational ‘content’ (e.g. the way in which characters in a literary plot or in a painted landscape ‘balance’ one another within the respective works). For more on this distinction see my Art and Embodiment; From Aesthetics to Self-consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 19–20. 10 See, for example, Chapter 1 of Defining Art, and more detailed expositions in both The Transhistorical Image and Art and Embodiment. 11 See my paper ‘From Visual Culture to Visual Art; The Normative Shift’, Journal of Contemporary Thought, No. 17, 2003, pp. 17–26. 12 A major example of this is the work of Griselda Pollock. See, for example, her book Vision and Difference; Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988). For a more interesting approach which considers artistic intention in relation to medium-based considerations, see Steven W. Dykstra’s ‘The Artist’s Intentions and the Intentional Fallacy in Fine Arts Conservation’, Journal of the American Institute for Conservation,Vol. 3, No. 3, 1996, pp. 197–218. 13 I show this in Chapters 9 and 10 of my The Language of Twentieth-century Art; A Conceptual History (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1997), and in Chapter 5 of The Transhistorical Image. 14 For an alternative way of doing this (based on Kant’s aesthetics) see Thierry de Duve’s Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996). 15 For a defence of this view see Chapter 2 of Defining Art. 16 There is, indeed, a strong argument to be made for the claim that the extraordinary range of practical and ritual uses which representation can serve is enabled by its intrinsic aesthetic power. Hence the artistic dimension is at least implicit in the practices of those cultures which do use the concept ‘art’. I justify this claim in Defining Art.

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References Crowther, Paul (1993) Art and Embodiment; From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —(1997) The Language of Twentieth-century Art; A Conceptual History. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. —(2002) The Transhistorical Image; Philosophizing Art and its History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(2003) ‘From Visual Culture to Visual Art; The Normative Shift’. Journal of Contemporary Thought, No. 17. —(2007) Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(2009) Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. de Duve, Thierry (1996) Kant After Duchamp. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Dykstra, Steven W. (1996) ‘The Artist’s Intentions and the Intentional Fallacy in Fine Arts Conservation’. Journal of the American Institute for Conservation,Vol. 3, No. 3. Iseminger, Gary (1992) edited collection Intention and Interpretation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lyas, Colin (1983) ‘Anything Goes; The Intentional Fallacy Revisited’. British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 23. Margolis, Joseph (1980) Art and Philosophy; Conceptual Issues in Aesthetics. Brighton: Harvester Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994) Picture Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Moxey, Keith (2001) The Practice of Persuasion; Paradoxes and Power in Art History. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Panofsky, Erwin (1993) Meaning and the Visual Arts. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pollock, Griselda (1988) Vision and Difference; Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art. London: Routledge. Trivedi, Saam (2001) ‘An Epistemic Dilemma for Actual Intentionalism’. British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 41. Vogel, Susan M. (1997) Baule: African Art/Western Eyes. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Wimsatt Jr., William K. and Beardsley, Monroe K. (1954) The Verbal Icon; Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. University of Kentucky Press.

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Aesthetic Autonomy and Artistic Heteronomy Robert Stecker

Preface This chapter is about the nature of and the relation between aesthetic value and artistic value. Some people think they have a common nature, that there is really just one value but two ways to refer to it. Others think that they are different values and have to explain how they are to be distinguished. My view is that they are different values. I distinguish them by claiming that aesthetic value is independent and underived from other values – is autonomous in one sense that I distinguish, while artistic value is derived from and depends on other values – that it is constituted, as it were, by these other values. It is heteronomous. These claims are advanced within a debate within recent analytic aesthetics (philosophy of art) over this very issue. All of the alternatives and counterarguments I consider come from recent work in this tradition. Those who think that there is just one value here approach this claim from two very different perspectives. Some believe that aesthetic value is to be defined in whatever way we define artistic value. First find out what artistic value is; then you will know what aesthetic value is. Others think the reverse. This can lead to very different results. Some who think that artistic value is basic make artistic/aesthetic value heteronomous. Some who think that aesthetic value is basic make aesthetic/artistic value autonomous. Another way to think about my issue is to ask: How should we evaluate art and how does aesthetic evaluation fit into that? Looked at this way, my issue is hardly confined to recent analytic aesthetics. It has been around since people have been thinking about art. Plato thought a lot about it. He was aware of ‘the lovers of sights and sound’ who evaluated art objects by how pleasing they are to the senses, roughly by their aesthetic value in contemporary terminology.

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He thought this was far from the most important criteria for evaluating them. For Plato, artistic value is heteronomous in my jargon. The issue recurs in the eighteenth century (not for first time), a period much friendlier to aesthetic value but still divided about its relation to artistic value. Even Kant does not think art is to be appreciated as pure beauty, but rather as a species of dependent beauty. Thus, though my discussion of the issue is anchored in contemporary analytic philosophy of art, I believe the issue is addressed very widely in aesthetics across many traditions. To assert that a value is autonomous is to claim that it is independent of something, but there is more than one way to spell out autonomy, depending on the derivation of the independence. Here are two ways in which the idea of autonomy can be spelled out. On one, a value is autonomous if it is intrinsic or valued for its own sake. Heteronomous value, on this conception, has a source outside itself. One way of having such a source is being instrumentally valuable: valuable for some other good it enables. This is perhaps the best known way of drawing the autonomy/heteronomy distinction, at least with respect to values. However, there is another way. On this other conception, a value is autonomous if it is not defined by, derived from, or is a function of, other values or by its possession by a special kind of object. Thus, for example, pluralists about non-moral value make this kind of value heteronomous by deriving it from other more basic goods such as hedonic value, cognitive value, aesthetic value and so on, even if all of these values that collectively constitute non-moral value are intrinsic. The value of various artefacts is derived from the function of the kind of artefact in question – being a good carving knife is derived from the function of carving knives. In this chapter, I am concerned with autonomy and heteronomy in the second sense. My concern is the relationship between aesthetic value and artistic value, and my thesis is that, in the relevant sense, aesthetic value is autonomous – an independent and underived kind of value – and artistic value is heteronomous – a value derived from the interaction of other, more basic values. This issue has been brought to the fore by some recent debates about the nature of these values. I will be less concerned here to give a positive argument for my thesis than to oppose two alternative views that have recently been put forward. One is that artistic value is the more basic notion and aesthetic value is to be understood in terms of artistic value. The second view is that there is no coherent, non-trivial notion of non-aesthetic artistic value. A consequence of such views is that whatever status aesthetic value has (autonomous or heteronomous),



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artistic value would have the same status, since both views identify artistic and aesthetic value, though for quite different reasons. I will begin by explaining my own conception of these values according to which aesthetic value is autonomous in the relevant sense and artistic value heteronomous. I will then examine the arguments for the alternative views and show that they are unpersuasive.

The underived character of aesthetic value Aesthetic value is first and foremost the value of a type of experience. Think about certain types of perceptual experience. We can look at a mountain range just to see if we are driving in the right direction (if we are going west, there should be mountains in front of us). Or we can look at the range to enjoy the appearance it happens to present at the moment. Or we can do both. The first perceptual experience is not aesthetic, while both the second and third are. In the first case, one attends to the mountains just for the sake of getting a piece of information. In the second case, one attends to the appearance of the mountains for its own sake or for the sake of the very experience of taking in their appearance. We may or may not in the end find that experience positively valuable, but if we do, the experience has positive aesthetic value. The same is true in the third case, even though we don’t attend to the mountains just for the sake of the experience of enjoying their appearance. We do attend to them for that reason, and in the appropriate way, even though this may be less foregrounded than in the second case. That is sufficient for potentially aesthetically valuable experience. Purity of purpose, pure disinterestedness, is not required. As far as I can see, the aesthetic value of experiences is subjective. Experiences have positive aesthetic value only if one enjoys them or finds them valuable in themselves for some other reason. That, however, is not sufficient for an experience to be aesthetically valuable. It must also be focused on an object, and in particular on some properties of the object within a specified range. I have tried to indicate the range in a rough way by referring (following Levinson)1 to the forms, qualities and meanings possessed by the object. However, experiences are not the only things that have aesthetic value. The objects of those experiences have aesthetic value too. I am inclined to spell out the aesthetic value of the objects of aesthetic experience in terms of the aesthetic value of a subclass of the experiences of those objects, namely experiences derived from an adequate and proper reception of the object. What

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such a reception amounts to varies depending on the object. If the object is the momentary phenomenal appearance of a mountain range, then the most minimal criterion of adequacy requires that one recognizes that one is perceiving a mountain range and that one’s ascription of a phenomenal appearance is capable of receiving a fair degree of intersubjective agreement. More generally, if aesthetic experience is focused on forms, qualities and meanings of objects, then the aesthetic value of an object is measured by the value of the experiences of those who correctly perceive and/or believe that the object has those forms, qualities and meanings. This is a quick outline of my conception of aesthetic value. The main point I want to make about it here is that this value is independent from other values and of the type of object experienced. This is what I mean by the underived character of aesthetic value. To make this even clearer, let me underline a few points. First, although my initial example referred to the momentary appearance of a mountain range, aesthetic experience is not confined to momentary phenomenal appearances, perceptual experiences or experiences of nature. The objects of aesthetic experience are to be found virtually everywhere: in nature, artefacts, art, science, mathematics, etc. Often we are interested in more permanent perceptible features of a painting, artefact or landscape rather than momentary appearances. Sometimes the experience is imaginative rather than perceptual as when we engage with literary fiction, and sometimes the object of experience is an abstract structural property as when we admire the elegance of a proof. Second, establishing the underived character of aesthetic value does not depend on the specifics of my own account of it. There are other approaches to aesthetic value that still maintain its underived character. For example, Jerrold Levinson has a more stringent condition for aesthetic experience, and hence what has aesthetic value. Levinson requires that, to have aesthetic experience, one must not only attend to forms, qualities and meanings for their own sakes, but also to the way all such things emerge from a particular set of low-level perceptual features.2 But this in no way affects the underived nature of aesthetic value because aesthetic value is still independent of other kinds of value as well as of the type of object experienced. This conclusion is not surprising since our two views are close cousins. What is more interesting is that this underived character survives significant departures from the type of view which Levinson and I endorse. For example, Noël Carroll claims that aesthetic experience is experience which has any of the following objects: form, aesthetic properties,



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expressive properties, the interaction of any of these, and the relation of any of the preceding items with our response to a work.3 Note that Carroll defines aesthetic experience primarily in terms of certain properties that are its object or content. There is no requirement that the experience is sought out or valued for its own sake. In fact, Carroll is sceptical that aesthetic experience is so valued. He believes that aesthetic value is a kind of instrumental value. This view is committed to denying that aesthetic value has one kind of autonomy – the kind that is derived from the value being intrinsic or valued in itself. But on Carroll’s view, aesthetic value is still autonomous in the sense that I am most concerned with. Aesthetic value is not defined in terms of the values it is an instrument for attaining or in terms of a special type of object.4 Rather it is defined in terms of properties appreciated, but no one type of object (art, nature, etc.) is privileged in providing it. Hence, in the relevant sense, aesthetic value has an underived character on Carroll’s analysis.

The derived character of artistic value In contrast with aesthetic value, artistic value has, on my view, a derived character. Like non-moral value on a pluralist conception, artistic value is a function of and derived from a plurality of more basic values, including, but not confined to, aesthetic value. Artworks are also valued as artworks for their cognitive value, ethical value, art historical value, interpretation-centred value, and in other ways as well. To understand the artistic value of particular works requires understanding what the artist who makes the work is intending to do in it – what functions it is intended to fulfil or what it is intended to achieve. Such intentions are not sui generis; they arise within artistic traditions or practices. But the values such practices support are capable of evolving or even radically changing. That there is such a thing as artistic value thus conceived has become a widely held view. Such a view is motivated by the rejection of the simple identification of artistic value with aesthetic value. There are two main reasons for rejecting this identification. The first and simplest derives from the appearance of anti-aesthetic art (originally simply called ‘anti-art’), beginning with Dada, developing further in conceptual art, performance art and other avant-garde movements. These works were originally made to challenge a variety of assumptions about art, and later to redirect the focus of art from matters aesthetic to ideas of various kinds. It would be over-simplistic to claim that no works made

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within these movements have aesthetic value, but the thought is either: some of these works completely lack aesthetic interest yet are valuable as art, or, more modestly, some of these works have such modest aesthetic interest that their aesthetic value cannot account for their value as art. Something else must be involved. Consider, for example, Sherri Levine’ photographs of Walker Evans’ photographs. In a way they do have aesthetic value since they inherit the aesthetic value of the object photographed. But that can hardly explain their value as art. I have argued elsewhere that the value of the photographs is primarily cognitive. They refocus our attention to properties, including aesthetic properties, but also social and art historical ones, that their subjects have as photographs.5 Levine’s photographs also have art-historical value in marking an important stage in the development of appropriated art, which also contributes to its value as art. From the premises that some artworks lack aesthetic value or lack sufficient aesthetic value to explain their value as art, and that they have significant value as art, it follows that there is non-aesthetic artistic value. The second argument does not appeal to avant-garde works specifically. It derives from a strong sense that many people – philosophers, artists and critics – came to have that traditional aesthetic theory of the kind that was magisterially expressed in Beardsley’s Aesthetics was inadequate to account for the value they found or intended to create in art. It does not do justice to the variety of ways we engage with artworks and with art’s engagement with the world. Noël Carroll’s ‘Art and Interaction’ is an example of a fairly early article in this vein.6 In this piece, Carroll does not appeal to art’s ability to teach us something about the actual world, or the ethical properties of artworks that he wrote about in later essays. Rather, he focuses on other non-aesthetic properties of artworks that we value in interacting with them as artworks. Carroll points out that people enjoy the challenge of finding hidden meanings, latent structures and important connections with other artworks. Thus art is valued as an object of interpretation, it has art-historical value as well as cognitive value and ethical value. Further, that valuing artworks in these ways is an unremarkable way of responding to them as art is evident in the practice of critics and audiences. The aesthetic value of works does not wholly account for these responses. Hence artworks must have value as art that goes beyond their aesthetic value. Hence, there is non-aesthetic artistic value. So far I have argued that aesthetic value is autonomous in the sense of being underived from other values and uncentred in a special kind of object. I have also argued that, in contrast, artistic value is derived from other values. I now turn to two ways of challenging these conclusions. One argues that aesthetic



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value is heteronomous; it has just the derived character I have attributed to artistic value. The second is to argue that artistic value is autonomous because it is identical to aesthetic value conceived autonomously.

Aesthetic value as artistic value I first consider a challenge to the idea that aesthetic value is autonomous in the sense of having an underived character. Berys Gaut claims that aesthetic value is co-extensive with artistic value. According to him, to fix the aesthetic value of an artwork is just to identify its value as ‘art qua art.’ Aesthetic properties are those that are constitutive of the value of artworks qua artworks.7 The aesthetic value of non-art objects is the value derived from the presence of those same properties that are constitutive of artistic value when they occur in artworks. Since Gaut thinks of artistic value in the same pluralistic way that I do, on his view, both artistic value and aesthetic value are heteronomous in the sense relevant to this chapter. Gaut has two arguments for his view. The main positive argument begins with the premise, derived from examining Sibley’s list of aesthetic properties, that all the terms used to designate these properties are evaluative terms. But not all evaluative terms are aesthetic. We need a way of sifting these out. Gaut notes that all the terms on the list are used by art critics to evaluate artworks. He points out that this may have come about as a result of a method Sibley used: combing through critical writing and collecting terms from them as a kind of database for philosophical reflection. He suggests that Sibley’s list was constrained by the critical vocabulary of his day but more recent critical schools have greatly expanded this vocabulary to include, among other things, ethical and cognitive features of works. We should identify the aesthetic not by Sibley’s conclusions but by using Sibley’s method. If we do that, we reach the conclusion that an aesthetic term is any that figures evaluatively in art-critical discourse. Gaut’s positive argument, then, is: 1. Aesthetic terms are evaluative. 2. What distinguishes aesthetic terms from other evaluative terms is that they are used by art critics to evaluate artworks. 3. Therefore all terms used by art critics to evaluate artworks are aesthetic terms.

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From there Gaut argues that: 4. Critics evaluate art qua art rather than qua investment, etc. 5. Therefore aesthetic terms are used to evaluate art qua art. 6. Therefore aesthetic value of an artwork is its value as art qua art. 7. And aesthetic properties are those that give a work its value as art. Is this a good argument? To decide, I focus on 1–3. Premise 1 is by no means obvious. Many hold that not all aesthetic terms are evaluative. Consider terms that refer to expressive properties of works like the term ‘sad’. One can recognize that a work has the expressive quality of sadness, but that in itself will not lead one to evaluate it positively or negatively. That depends not only on other features of work, but on the way it is sad – conventionally, mildly, intensely, in a uniquely original way, etc. Sadness per se, though recognized by almost everyone as an aesthetic property, is by itself neutral. Second, the truth of premise 2 depends on how we should understand it. Is it saying that aesthetic terms are among the terms used by critics to evaluate artworks qua artworks? Then it would be true, at least for the evaluative aesthetic terms, but 3 would not follow since it is left open that there are other non-aesthetic terms that critics also use. Or does it say that aesthetic terms are the only terms used by critics to evaluate artwork qua artworks? Then 3 would follow, but 2 itself now becomes much more questionable. In fact, if we apply the sorts of arguments used by Gaut to reject other conceptions of the aesthetic (see below), we can also reject this claim because what common usage suggests about the extension of the term ‘aesthetic’ is such that when critics evaluate works using ethical, political or cognitive criteria, they are not evaluating works aesthetically. This includes what is said by those adherents to the more recent schools of criticism mentioned by Gaut. Though they do evaluate works using ethical, etc. criteria, they quite vociferously reject an aesthetic conception of artistic value claiming it cannot accommodate the very valuable features they find important. Against this, all that Gaut has to offer is an appeal to Sibley’s purported method of gathering aesthetic terms, but such an appeal is inadequate on several grounds. First, even if we take Sibley’s method as the definitive one, the mere fact that he collected data in the way he did tells us nothing about what he did with it, much less that he would use it as Gaut does. But, second, why take this one method, being used at one moment in the long tradition of aesthetic inquiry as the definitive one? Thus I conclude that Gaut has not given us a persuasive positive argument in favour of his conception of the aesthetic.



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Gaut’s other argument for his approach is negative. It looks at some attempt to explicate the concept of the aesthetic in terms of a special attitude, a special kind of value, or a special feature shared by all aesthetic properties. For each specific proposal considered, Gaut points to ways in which it is inadequate to the actual extension of the term ‘aesthetic’: each proposal ascribes aesthetic value where there is none or denies that it exists where it in fact does, or both at once. I won’t examine all of the proposals that Gaut rejects but instead ask whether his criticisms are effective against my view of the aesthetic endorsed above: an experience is aesthetic if and only if it is the experience of attending in a discriminating manner to forms, qualities or meaningful features of things, attending to these for their own sake or for the sake of this very experience. Aesthetic value is the value of such experiences and of those objects that have the capacity to provide them. While Gaut does not explicitly discuss this view, we can discern from some of his comments two main criticisms he may offer. First, Gaut would argue that it counts experiences as aesthetic when in fact they are not. Second, he would claim that objects of aesthetic experiences need not be attended to in the way specified. The first objection claims that my proposal inappropriately designates some experiences as aesthetic. Consider an experience where I run my tongue along the roof of my mouth, attending to the qualities of the roof discernible from the tactual sensation in my tongue and do so for the sake of this very experience (hence, not just to discover if I have a lesion on the roof of my mouth).8 Or suppose I listen to a lecture, attend discerningly to its form, quality and meaning and do so for the sake of the ensuing experience of the lecture. Gaut is sceptical that these are aesthetic experiences, but they seem to be counted as such by my proposal. Why should we reject the claim that these experiences are aesthetic? Well, the first does not have an object outside my body and relies on tactual experience rather than visual or auditory experience. Traditionally, aesthetic experience has been thought to focus on objects outside one’s own body and, though here the tradition is less unified, on visual and auditory (or imaginative) experience. The case of the lecture is at worst an atypical example of what has traditionally counted as aesthetic experience – visual and/or auditory experience of something outside myself – because traditional examples focused on nature, art or other artefacts. But its being atypical should not count against it. I suppose there is room for reasonable debate about the first experience, though I am in favour of also counting it as aesthetic.9 In its favour, it may be said that it simply extends what has traditionally counted as aesthetic experience to other senses and objects. That seems a reasonable extension of the tradition.

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Notice that Gaut’s proposal also counts experiences or properties as aesthetic that traditionally are not counted as such; for example, ethical properties of artworks (such as the property of endorsing a certain attitude towards sexual sadism) as long as they are relevant to a work’s artistic value. This is a more radical revision in the tradition rather than a proposed extension of it. So it is hard to see how Gaut can reasonably put forward his first objection. The second objection is to the idea that, for the experience to be aesthetic, one has to attend to the object of the experience or the experience itself, for its own sake. In reply Gaut asserts that someone (Sally) might attend to the very same properties in an object simply to do well in an exam and not at all for its own sake. However, since Sally attends to the very same properties, she has the same experience as Bill who attends to those properties for their own sake. But if Sally and Bill have the same experience, and Bill’s experience is aesthetic, so is Sally’s. Therefore, attending to an object or the experience of it for its own sake cannot be required for aesthetic experience.10 The main reason to object to this argument lies in its criterion of the same experience. Does attending to the same properties guarantee that it is the same experience? Note that we are not talking about numerical identity here. Obviously Sally and Bill have numerically different experiences. What kind of identity are we talking about? One possibility is type identity. However, the same thing can belong to different types. Thus Sally’s experience and Bill’s experience may belong to the same type if the type in question is picked by properties experienced. Suppose that both experience that the object in question is balanced. They both have balanced-object experiences. But the type we are interested in is the type aesthetic experience. Does it follow from the fact that they experience the same properties in an object that both experiences belong to that type? The issue was whether the type – aesthetic experience – is marked by the property of being an experience had for its own sake. Bill’s experience has this property but Sally’s does not. Just pointing out that both Bill’s and Sally’s experiences belong to the type, Same Property Experience, does not settle the issue in a non-question-begging way. All that we know so far is that their experience has something in common but also something not in common. This does not tell us whether the latter – the difference between the two experiences – is crucial to an experience being aesthetic. For all we know thus far, it may be crucial. Hence pointing out that both Bill and Sally experience the same properties does not settle whether they both have aesthetic experiences. Now consider qualitative identity. If Sally’s and Bill’s experiences are qualitatively identical, it could be argued that if one is an aesthetic experience, so is



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the other without begging the question. Why? If two experiences are qualitatively identical, they have the same phenomenology, and it could be plausibly maintained that if one experience is aesthetic and another of the same object has the same phenomenology, it is aesthetic as well. (This is not to say that all aesthetic experiences have a common phenomenology. They don’t. It is plausible though that what gives aesthetic value to an individual experience lies in its phenomenology. So if another experience of the same object has the same phenomenology it should have the same aesthetic value, and hence also be an aesthetic experience.) But does taking in the same properties of an object guarantee that the experiences of it are qualitatively identical? I think not. That depends on their phenomenology, and two experiences that involve taking in the same properties in an object can have very different phenomenologies. Suppose Bill is seeing a mountain range for the first time, taking in certain properties of it: the dramatic shape of the mountains, the variety of vivid colour on the mountainsides, etc. His experience is intensely pleasurable. Suppose Sally is seeing the same mountain range and noticing the same properties but she has seen them many times before. She feels bored. Her experience has a different phenomenology than Bill’s even though they take in the same properties. So it does not follow from the fact that they perceive the same properties that Sally’s and Bill’s experiences are qualitatively identical. It also does not follow that they are both aesthetic. So I conclude that it is not the case that whenever Sally and Bill take in the same properties in an object, if Bill is having an aesthetic experience, so is Sally. Therefore, Gaut’s second objection to my proposal is also not convincing. I conclude that Gaut has not shown that aesthetic value should be equated with artistic value. However, is there a good reason to prefer the concept of aesthetic value endorsed here to the one he proposes? Yes, there is. Traditionally (i.e. from the eighteenth century onward), aesthetic value has been tied to a type of valuable experience but not to one particular source of experience such as art or nature. Traditionally, it has also been distinguished from ethical and cognitive value. Since we have been given no good reason to abandon this tradition, we should conclude that Gaut opts too quickly for the reductive conception of the aesthetic he ultimately proposes. Rather it is the value of a certain kind of experience and of the items that are providers of this experience.

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Artistic value as aesthetic value The second challenge to the view defended here argues that artistic value is not heteronomous. The central claim is that it is identical to aesthetic value (identity claim). Thus, if aesthetic value is autonomous, so is artistic value. Here I focus on defences of the identity claim and not on whether aesthetic value is autonomous, which we have already discussed above. Several authors have attempted to defend the identity claim and deny that there is a cogent notion of non-aesthetic artistic value. I begin with challenges to the coherence of the latter idea before turning to positive arguments for the identity claim. In order to defend the idea of non-aesthetic artistic value, it has to be distinguished from value which artworks possess that is just not relevant to evaluating them as art. Artworks possess many such values: economic value, sentimental value, propaganda value, to name a few. If there is no way to distinguish non-aesthetic values relevant to evaluating artworks as art from other adventitious values, we are just left with the trivial idea that artworks can be valued in non-aesthetic ways. This falls well short of the idea that artistic value has a non-aesthetic aspect.11 Call this the trivialization strategy. There are two ways of meeting this objection. First, we can deny that one has to be able to define non-aesthetic artistic value, i.e. to give definitive criteria for deciding when a value contributes to artistic merit and when it doesn’t. Such definitions or criteria are always controversial in philosophy, and some think they are just not available. Rather, what we need are solid arguments to think there is non-aesthetic artistic value, and clear examples of such value. Both have been given above. Of course, if we can find criteria we can answer the objection in a way that is satisfactory to everyone. So here is a proposal for doing just that: does one need to understand the work to appreciate its being valuable in that way? If so, it is an artistic value. If not, it is not. To make this test clearer, one needs to say something about the sort of understanding I have in mind and how it is distinguished from other things that can be meant by understanding. Understanding derives primarily from interpreting artworks and in particular, in my view, interpreting them for work meaning. This is a matter of discovering what an artist does in a work, usually, though not always, as the result of intending to do just that.12 However, I don’t want to confine the relevant sense of understanding to one view about interpretation. There are alternative views about work meaning as well as views



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about interpretation that eliminate reference to work meaning altogether. For example, there are views that make the central aim of interpretation appreciation of a work.13 Even after leaving open the exact nature of interpretation relevant to understanding a work, there are still many other things that could be meant by understanding which are excluded by this account. For example, for any property a work has, there is some explanation that allows us to understand why it has the property. But to define understanding an artwork in this way would not help us to distinguish a special class of properties responsible for artistic value, since it covers all properties which artworks possess. Whereas the sense of understanding I have indicated very briefly is specifically related to the appreciation of artworks and, hence, a plausible route to discovering their value in art. Let us now see how applying the test works in practice. If an artwork has cognitive or ethical value that is part of its artistic value, one needs to understand the work to appreciate this value. That is, it is not enough to know that a work has an ethically controversial subject matter (say incest) to form a judgement about its artistic value. One has to learn what sort of exploration of its subject matter it provides, what attitudes towards this topic it manifests, what it requires its audience to imagine and to feel, before one can assess this value. That is what an appreciative understanding of a work allows. On the other hand, such understanding is not required to appreciate adventitious valuable properties of artworks. This is obvious for the ability of a painting to cover a hole in the wall, but it is also true of value derived from more complex social phenomena such as appreciating the financial value of a painting. To do this one needs primarily to know the price similar paintings have garnered at auction or other sales. One can certainly go deeper by asking for an explanation why some works are financially more valuable than others at a given time, and this may require knowledge of some artistic qualities such as the style of the work or the artistic movement with which it is associated, or even the quality which critics consider it to have. But this nearly always falls well short of the understanding that a full-fledged interpretation provides, and in any case, the connection between financial value and such qualities is always contingently based on the demand for works with such qualities and the available supply. Financial value varies while those qualities remain constant, which shows that, no matter how well we understand a work, that will never be sufficient to gauge financial value.14 A second strategy for denying that there is non-aesthetic artistic value is the art form strategy. This strategy argues that there are no artistic achievements, only pictorial, musical or literary achievements. Hence we cannot derive

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a notion of artistic value via a concept of artistic achievement. In addition, artworks are never appreciated under the category: ‘artwork’, but under more specific art form or art genre categories. Hence we cannot derive a notion of artistic value via a notion of artwork as an appreciative category. This means that we don’t appreciate objects as artworks and we don’t discover artistic achievements in understanding artists’ projects. If this is so, it would undercut the arguments and the test for artistic value given above. However, this strategy is flawed, for two separate reasons. First, sometimes, a guiding category in appreciating an artwork is, in fact, the category of art. This is often true with avant-garde works. When we first encounter items like readymades, we want to know, not why they are ready-mades, or even what value they have as ready-mades, but why they are art and what value they have as art. This is understandable because when ready-mades first appeared, they were a novel art category and, in getting our bearings with regard to them, it is useful to wonder how they could be bearers of characteristically artistic value or how they could be related to other things we regard as art. Do they have aesthetic value despite claims to the contrary? Are they bearers of a kind of cognitive value that artworks of various kinds are good at delivering, such as making us feel the force of certain questions? However, an artwork need not belong to a novel form for it to directly raise question about its artistic value. When we encounter photographs of photographs in an art world context, we don’t wonder why these are photographs, but we may wonder why they are art and what value they may have as art. This value may not be pictorial. It may or may not be peculiar to photographs, but it needs to be something we can recognize to be of artistic value. So we can appreciate objects as artworks per se and we can recognize characteristically artistic achievements. Second, the idea that we primarily value objects typed as painting or as music, not objects typed as art, is not quite right, or is at least misleading. This is because there are paintings typed as art and paintings not typed as art, and we value these in different, though overlapping ways. There are products of commercial art, graphic design, illustration, etc. that are certainly paintings (and other graphic works), but they are not members of the art form painting. This is not just true for paintings. Wherever there is an art form there is a broader category, call it a medium. Members of the medium are valued in different ways depending on whether they also belong to the relevant art form or not. However, all members of a medium can be evaluated aesthetically. So there must be other artistic values that explain the different ways we value different members of a medium. I believe art historical values, which are not peculiar to



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any one art form, are particularly significant here. The more important point, though, is that in valuing something as a member of an art form, typing it as art is just as important as typing it as a painting. It is the joint typing that allows us to value it appropriately. In addition, if we make cross-categorial comparative evaluations of artworks, we are not evaluating them solely as belonging in a category. We don’t just lump together the great art from diverse categories; we rank them, or we argue, for instance, that the best folk tune cannot be as good as the best symphony.15 Finally, even if we accepted this strategy, it would just lead us to the same issue at the level of individual art forms that we have been discussing at the level of art. How are they valued as paintings, as works of music or as poetry? Is it only for their aesthetic value or is it for a plurality of values? Suppose we say, as we should, for a plurality of values. Since we are talking here about art forms and not the larger class of media to which each art form belongs, one may certainly be led to wonder whether it is something about being an art form that is responsible for their having heteronomous value. If it is, the art form strategy loses any leverage it might have been thought to provide against non-aesthetic artistic value. I now turn to a positive argument for the identity claim. The basic idea is that it is (1) the function of art or the art world (i.e. the practise or institution of art as a whole) to design and make artefacts that are intended for aesthetic appreciation (i.e intended to be experienced in such a way that we value the experience for itself), and that if this is so, (2) the chief product of this practice – artworks – are good as artworks to the extent that they fulfil this function. No doubt artworks can be valuable in other ways and it may even be true that some of these other ways may constrain the degree to which we can aesthetically value individual works. For example, deeply immoral works may present barriers to valuing the experience of them for their own sake, but this does not mean that any of these other values are artistic ones. It just means that there is a certain amount of interaction or bleeding between non-artistic values that artworks possess and artistic value. Hence artistic value is identical to aesthetic value.16 Among the questions raised by these claims, one is especially pressing. Why suppose (1) that making artefacts designed for aesthetic appreciation is the function of art or the art world? Gary Iseminger has offered one of the most carefully argued defences of this claim. It goes like this: 1. If an artefact is better at doing something it was designed and made to do than other artifacts and it is better at doing this than doing anything else, then that is its function.

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2. Institutions and practices are just as much artefacts as humanly produced objects. 3. The art world is designed for the purpose of creating artefacts intended to be aesthetically appreciated, and it is better at doing this than other institutions. 4. It is also better at fulfilling this function than at fulfilling any other. 5. Therefore, the function of art is to design and make artefacts intended for aesthetic appreciation.17 Though clearly and carefully stated, all of the premises of this argument (but especially 1–3) are open to question. Not all would accept the definition of function in the first premise.18 It is by no means obvious that institutions and practices always come into existence by design or that they are artefacts. Some are designed like the government of the United States, but it is far less clear that this is so for others such as many religions (e.g. Judaism). Premise 3 seems particularly problematic for the complex and sprawling set of artistic practices that have persisted and evolved over thousands of years. (Iseminger thinks that the art world is only hundreds of years old because the concept of fine art emerged in the eighteenth century. He thinks this makes his thesis more plausible, but this can be doubted because art practices and functions over the past 300 years display all of the diversity cited below.) However, there is a simpler, and more telling criticism of this argument. The first premise states a sufficient condition for something being a function of an artefact. It becomes very implausible if it is reformulated to state a condition that is also necessary. (Things that fulfil their function badly can still have those things as functions.) Hence the conclusion of the argument, that there is such a thing as the function of art (the art world), just does not follow. Furthermore, it is implausible. It is implausible that something so long-lived that combines so many smaller individual sub-practices would have a single function. Art aims to conceptualize aspects of the world and our experience of them, to communicate important information in accessible ways, to bring people together, to explore esoteric ideas, to shock people out of comfortable ways of thinking, to represent reality faithfully, to create alternative imaginary worlds. If one thinks about art very abstractly, its aesthetic function may stand out, and this may indeed suggest that it has special importance, but it is hardly art’s only function. Some artworks are not designed to fulfil this function well, for others it plays a subsidiary role, and in some it is completely absent. So it is implausible that fulfilling the aesthetic function well is the only way for artworks to be good as



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art. This was, in fact, the moral of the arguments we looked at earlier (in the section ‘The derived character of artistic value’).

Conclusion In this chapter, I have explored three possibilities. One is that aesthetic value is not derived from other, more basic values but artistic value is. If so, aesthetic value is autonomous in one sense of the term and artistic value is heteronomous in that sense. It would also follow that aesthetic value and artistic value are distinct (if overlapping) values. Another possibility is that aesthetic value and artistic value are both heteronomous because artistic value is heteronomous, and aesthetic value is identical to artistic value. A third possibility is that aesthetic value and artistic value are both autonomous because aesthetic value is autonomous, and artistic value is identical to aesthetic value. I have tried to defeat arguments for the second and third possibilities and give some reasons in favour of the first.

Notes 1 Jerrold Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 3–24. 2 Levinson, Pleasures, p. 6. 3 Noël Carroll, ‘Aesthetic Experience Revisited’, British Journal Of Aesthetics, Vol. 42, 2002, pp. 145–68. 4 Carroll’s account of aesthetic experience begins with a definition of the aesthetic experience of a work of art, but there is no question that he wants to extend it to other aesthetic experiences including the experience of nature. Carroll describes these other aesthetic experiences as ‘analogous’ to the aesthetic experience of art, indicating by this that they are not ‘aesthetic’ in exactly the same sense or that they don’t belong to a single kind of experience. This is because he defines aesthetic experience in terms of its objects, and the objects of the aesthetic experience of art are somewhat different from the objects of the aesthetic experience of nature. 5 Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), pp. 233–4. 6 Noël Carroll, ‘Art and Interaction’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 45, 1986, pp. 57–68. 7 Berys Gaut, Art, Emotion and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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8 This example is borrowed from Sherri Irvin, ‘On Scratching an Itch’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 66, 2008, pp. 25–35. 9 For an argument against counting such experiences as aesthetic see Glen Parsons and Allen Carlson, Functional Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 10 A similar argument is also found in Carroll, ‘Aesthetic Experience Revisited’. 11 This point is pressed in Dominic Lopes, ‘The Myth of (Non-aesthetic) Artistic Value’, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 61, 2011, pp. 518–36. 12 I have set out this concept of work meaning most fully in Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech and the Law (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 13 See Peter Lamarque, ‘Appreciation and Literary Interpretation’, in Is there a Single Right Interpretation, edited by Michael Krausz (College Park: Penn State Press, 2002), pp. 285–306, and Stephen Davies, ‘Author’s Intentions, Literary Interpretations, and Literary Value’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 46, 2006, pp. 223–47. 14 See my ‘Artistic Value Defended’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (forthcoming) for a fuller treatment of this test for artistic value. 15 Alan Goldman argues that we make such comparisons in Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). 16 Authors sympathetic with this approach include Gary Iseminger, The Aesthetic Function of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004) and Nick Zangwill, Aesthetic Creation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Others who would argue for a similar conclusion, but not via an notion of the function of art (the art world), are Malcom Budd, Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, Music (London: The Penguin Press), 1995, Richard Lind, ‘The Aesthetic Essence of Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, 1992, pp. 117–29 and James Shelley, ‘The Problem of Non-perceptual Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 43, 2002, pp. 363–78. A similar conclusion for literature via considerations about the practice (institution) of literature has been argued by Peter Lamarque and Stein Olsen in Truth, Fiction and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 255–6, and has been frequently reaffirmed by Lamarque, most recently in The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009). 17 Iseminger, The Aesthetic Function of Art, pp. 95–120. 18 See Parsons and Carlson, Functional Beauty, pp. 206–9.



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References Budd, Malcom (1995) Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry Music. London: The Penguin Press. Carroll, Noël (2002) ‘Aesthetic Experience Revisited’. British Journal Of Aesthetics, vol. 42. —(1986) ‘Art and Interaction’. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 45. Davies, Stephen (2006) ‘Author’s Intentions, Literary Interpretations, and Literary Value’. British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 46. Gaut, Berys (2007) Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldman, Alan (1995) Aesthetic Value. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Irvin, Sherri (2008) ‘On Scratching an Itch’. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 66. Iseminger, Gary (2004) The Aesthetic Function of Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lamarque, Peter (2009) The Philosophy of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. —(2002) ‘Appreciation and Literary Interpretation’, in Is there a Single Right Interpretation, edited by Michael Krausz. College Park: Penn State Press. Levinson, Jerrold (1996) The Pleasures of Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lind, Richard (1992) ‘The Aesthetic Essence of Art’. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 50. Lopes, Dominic (2011) ‘The Myth of (Non-aesthetic) Artistic Value’. The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 61. Parsons, Glen and Carlson, Allen (2008) Functional Beauty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shelley, James (2002) ‘The Problem of Non-perceptual Art’. British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 43. Stecker, Robert (2003) Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech and the Law. Oxford: Blackwell. —(2010) Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, 2nd edn. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Zangwill, Nick (2007) Aesthetic Creation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3

Historical Embeddedness and Artistic Autonomy Peter Lamarque

Preface The method of argument in this chapter may broadly be described as ‘analytic’, not in the sense that any one concept is submitted to analysis (conceptual analysis) but rather that a phenomenon, familiar in art history, is analysed so that it may be better understood and subject to theoretical explanation. The phenomenon in question is the change of status that many iconic or canonical works undergo as time passes, a change from their directly responding to, or acting on, contemporary events, to their being appreciated at a later period as works of art ‘for their own sake’ when the heat of the contemporary context has subsided. This is a change, it is argued, in how the work is valued, a change from what is loosely characterized as ‘pragmatic value’ to ‘artistic value’. This chapter is unusual for an exercise in analytic aesthetics in concentrating exclusively on a single example, in this case Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (Marat à son dernier soupir), 1793, and offering a detailed historical and art critical analysis of it. This painting, it is argued, is a paradigmatic example of the shift of value that is being explored (a shift that here can be tracked historically), although there is no suggestion that it is unique in this respect. It is important to address this historical and critical background to reinforce the philosophical claim that the very identity of a work rests partially on its conditions of origin. But it is equally important in showing that to value a work ‘for its own sake’, or autonomously, is not to commit to a radical formalism, as if the origins of a work play no role in how the work ‘appears’ in subsequent viewings. An explanation is offered of what it might be for a work to acquire a kind of ‘timeless’ interest even while retaining in its very fabric the ineliminable traces of its own history.

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I What intrigues me – and what I seek to explore – is how a work of art born out of a highly specific circumstance, full of the raw energy and emotion of the immediate particularities of the occasion, can transmute over time into an object of universal admiration, a timeless and canonical masterpiece. My test case, one I have used before, although not examined in detail, is Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Death of Marat (Marat à son dernier soupir).1 It strikes me that the painting follows a chronological pattern that is paradigmatic of – if not a hyperbolic instance of – the move that interests me, a move that very roughly at this stage might be characterized as that from embeddedness to autonomy. At its origin there could be no more politically or emotionally charged painting than this, as we shall see, but after a long period when it was entirely hidden from view it re-emerged with a quite different status and interest, now an icon of French neo-classicism. What is even more striking is that the transition between these states can be precisely dated – 21 January 1846, the date of Baudelaire’s famous review, 53 years after the painting first appeared: The divine Marat, one arm hanging out of the bath, its hand still loosely holding on to its last quill, and his chest pierced by the sacrilegious wound, has just breathed his last. On the green desk in front of him, his other hand still holds the treacherous letter: ‘Citizen, it is enough that I am really miserable to have a right to your benevolence.’ The bath water is red with blood, the paper is blood-stained; on the ground lies a large kitchen knife soaked in blood; on a wretched packing case, which constituted the working furniture for the tireless journalist we read: ‘À Marat, David’. All the details are historical and real, as in a novel by Balzac; the drama is there, alive in all its pitiful horror, and by a strange stroke of brilliance, which makes this David’s masterpiece and one of the great treasures of modern art, there is nothing trivial or ignoble about it. What is most astonishing in this exceptional poem is the fact that it is painted extremely quickly, and when one considers the beauty of its design, it is all the more bewildering. It is the bread of the strong and the triumph of the spiritual; as cruel as nature, this picture has the heady scent of idealism. What has become of that ugliness that Death has so swiftly erased with the tip of its wing? Marat can henceforth challenge Apollo; Death has kissed him with loving lips and he rests in the peace of his transformation. There is in this work something both tender and poignant, a soul hovers in the chilled air of this room, on these cold walls, around the cold and funereal bath. May we have your permission, politicians of all parties, even you, ferocious liberals of 1845,



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to give way to emotion before David’s masterpiece? This painting was a gift to a tearful nation, and our own tears are not dangerous.2

The crucial phrase is perhaps that last one: ‘our own tears are not dangerous’. Fifty years on the painting might still evoke tears but now the tears have changed – now they are no longer dangerous. Now, we might say, the tears are for the painting’s expressiveness; then they were for what the painting expressed. We will return to Baudelaire’s remarks in due course.

II Let us take a step back and remind ourselves briefly of the circumstances out of which the painting arose. They were highly charged indeed, centred on that stiflingly hot summer’s day, 13 July 1793, when the journalist and politician Jean-Paul Marat was murdered in his bath by 25-year-old Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathizer who passionately detested everything he and the Jacobins stood for. Marat had had a medical training in Paris and had even worked for about ten years as a doctor in England and Scotland. In the 1780s he came to ally himself more and more with revolutionary causes and in 1789 started publishing a news-sheet L’Ami du Peuple, depicting himself indeed as a ‘friend of the people’ intent on exposing conspiracies, traitors and plots. He was elected as a Paris deputy to the National Convention in September 1792 and sat alongside Danton, Robespierre and David, among others. Although it is not strictly accurate to associate Marat with the so-called Terror, the often arbitrary execution of large numbers of ‘enemies of the people’, which started in earnest in September 1793 after his death, nevertheless he was a supporter of extreme measures against anti-revolutionaries and freely used bloodthirsty rhetoric. Like Robespierre, he came to favour a life of self-imposed austerity, some aspects of which are captured in David’s painting. He also suffered from a debilitating skin disease that was particularly aggravated during that hot July, which explains why he spent so much time in a bath and why he had round his head a white cloth, like a turban, actually soaked in vinegar. In fact David, a personal friend, had visited him the day before the assassination and was shocked both by the austerity and by the aggravated skin condition: The day before Marat’s death, the Jacobins sent Maure and me to get news of him; I found him in a state which stunned me. Beside him was a wooden box on which there was an inkwell and paper, and with his hand out of the bath, he was writing his final thoughts for the deliverance of his people.3

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Note that even in this apparent statement of fact David has already begun the myth of the heroic martyr: the words ‘final thoughts for the deliverance of his people’ seem to imply an anticipation of death. They were indeed his final thoughts but there was no reason for Marat to have seen them that way. One intriguing aspect of the assassination is how the two central players, victim and perpetrator, Marat and his assassin Corday, invite equal measures of revulsion and admiration. After Marat’s death, the later fall of Robespierre and the revilement of the Terror and its supporters, much sympathy turned to Charlotte Corday for removing a man with blood on his hands. (There was even a contemporary cartoon depicting her trial by the English caricaturist James Gillray which already represents her as a heroine.) Whatever sympathy David manages to invest in Marat – the painting is about evoking sympathy (and ‘tears’) – and whatever high ideals of liberation Marat espoused, there is little doubt that he was responsible for cruelty and injustice. Charlotte Corday had lost friends to the excesses of the purges and at her trial stated that ‘I killed one man to save 100,000’. Although she clearly had a fanatical streak and after all she murdered a man in cold blood, in his house, she also claimed a concern, no doubt sincere, for the fate of France and saw Marat as a direct threat to the nation. A cult grew up round her and there are numerous portraits of her – as well as plays and poems – throughout the nineteenth century. Winston Churchill supposedly had a print of her in his study. One interesting fact about the Charlotte Corday cult is that it doesn’t seem to have affected – to any great extent – the regard with which David’s painting came to be held. David himself was in the thick of it, not just as a distant observer recording events, but as a politician at the heart of the Jacobin cause, a friend and ardent supporter of both Robespierre and Marat. He too was a deputy for Paris in the National Convention. In September 1793 he became a member of the notorious Committee of General Security, and later the Committee of Public Instruction, both of which were implicated in the Terror and the hunting down and execution of anti-revolutionaries. In January 1793 David had voted for the death of the King. Furthermore, he had produced a portrait, which for a long time became a companion piece to The Death of Marat, depicting Le Peletier, a former member of the nobility, who had been killed by one of the King’s guards for himself voting for the King’s death. David’s painting of Le Peletier has been destroyed but there were several contemporary copies of it. Although the subject matter is largely the same – the martyrdom of a hero of the Revolution – it is striking to note the contrast between the images and the style of the depiction. It seems highly unlikely that the Le Peletier painting would have attained the canonical



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status of the Marat. After Marat’s assassination David was put in charge of the funeral arrangements and also, almost immediately, commissioned to produce a painting commemorating the (new) fallen hero; one deputy, Audouin, implored David to ‘Return Marat to us whole again’. As Baudelaire noted, David worked extremely fast on the painting. The assassination had taken place on 13 July 1793. On 14 October he announced its completion to the National Convention. On 16 October he unveiled the painting to fellow artists outside the Louvre. An early response showed the impact it had: The expressed horror … permeates the whole canvas, which proves that the forceful and skilful touch of the artist would not have been sufficient in itself; it needed that ardent love of country that impassions the artist … it is difficult to look on it for any length of time, its effect is so powerful.4

David formally presented the painting to the Convention on 14 November, calling for Marat to be given the ‘honours of the Pantheon’. In May the following year, 1794, the Convention ordered that copies of it be made at the Gobelin factory under David’s supervision. What is the subsequent history of the painting? In brief it is this: after the execution of Robespierre in July 1794, David was imprisoned (where, incidentally, he painted his famous self-portrait). In February 1795 the Marat painting and that of Le Peletier were removed from public view and returned to David. Only in late October 1795, when a general amnesty was granted to those involved in the Terror, was David a free man and able to return to Paris. For the rest of David’s life the painting was hidden in his studio. He died on 29 December 1825. The painting re-emerged, briefly, and only to a select few, in 1826, when some of David’s works went on sale. In April 1826, the painting of Le Peletier was destroyed, in fact by members of Le Peletier’s family, who now supported the royalist cause. In 1835, the Marat was exhibited in London, again for a short time, and it seems to have outraged John Constable, no doubt among others. It was in 1846 after a small exhibition of works by David and Ingres, in France, that Baudelaire made his famous comments. In the second half of the nineteenth century there was a running dispute about which of two versions of the painting was the original, a matter which ended in court in 1889. The version deemed to be the original was finally bequeathed by David’s grandson’s widow to the Museum of Fine Art in Brussels, and in 1893, exactly one hundred years after its creation, it was placed on permanent view at that museum, where it remains to this day.

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The critical history of the painting’s reception is as varied as its physical history. Its reputation shifted, interestingly, along two dimensions: relating to attitudes to Marat and attitudes to the painting’s style. For a long time in the nineteenth century Marat was demonized as one of the architects of the Terror and a kind of moral monster, and when the painting surfaced during this period it was often reviled as much as its subject. But later, in some circles, Marat was rehabilitated as a revolutionary hero, as he was viewed, for example, by Engels in the 1880s, and indeed in the twentieth century in the Soviet Union. As for the style, the painting’s stark realism rooted in the eighteenth century classical revival has not always been in favour. The grand narrative historical canvases that were David’s trademark, such as the Oath of the Horatii, went right out of fashion at the end of the nineteenth century and perhaps have never returned to popularity since. However, there was something about the spareness and emotional directness of The Death of Marat that had a more lasting appeal. It appealed, for example, to modernists for whom minimalism was a stylistic virtue. Its dark themes and political undertones set it apart from the mass of neo-classical images and, for whatever other reasons, it came to acquire a remarkable canonical status in the history of Western art and is now one of the most familiar, widely recognized and admired paintings that the art world has ever known.

III It is important to tie down the question I want to address. My question is about artistic value but I am not asking what makes this a good painting. Nor am I asking why the painting has become so well liked. The former I take to be an art critical question, the latter perhaps a sociological one. My question concerns the shift as I see it from one kind of value to another that the painting has exemplified: its initial value – we might call it pragmatic value – as a celebration of a martyr of the French Revolution, an emotional tribute to an individual known to all who saw the painting; and another kind of value – we might call this, if only provisionally, artistic value – the value it has come to possess, perhaps after Baudelaire’s resonant endorsement, by those who care little about Marat the man, but who have found the image itself fascinating and compelling. My question is: what is the nature of this latter kind of value? I am happy to appropriate quite contentious terms to characterize this value – terms like ‘autonomy’, ‘for its own sake’, or ‘as art’ – but I recognize the need to justify



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and explain these terms. To speak of valuing a work of art for its own sake or as a work of art has acquired connotations of formalism or aestheticism which, I think rightly, arouse suspicion among art historians and philosophers alike. The principal objection is that to speak in this way of certain kinds of art, notably political art, of which Marat is such a striking example, is to miss the point entirely of the proper nature of the works and thus the nature of the values they embody. I want to give an account of valuing a work for its own sake that does not have that consequence. The first point that needs to be established, which I think can be done quite quickly, is that the value of the painting – in the sense of what it was valued for – has actually changed over time. This is not to say that some of the values found in the painting now – what I have called artistic values – were not present and recognized at its inception. They were of course and were certainly recognized by David himself. However, there can be no denying the paramount aim that underlay its initial creation and commission: to commemorate a hero of the Revolution, to evoke, as Baudelaire noted, the tears of contemporary viewers, to gain sympathy for a ‘friend of the people’, to immortalize the man Jean-Paul Marat. The painting was valued by those for whom it was painted for its remarkable success in realizing those aims. But after fifty years, when viewed by Baudelaire, and certainly after over 200 years when viewed by us, those values have largely dissipated. Few now value the painting for the emotions it stirs in them towards Jean-Paul Marat, just as few admire the painting for its glorification of a hero of the French Revolution. For those who knew about Marat and the Terror and bloodshed that he inspired it is likely that admiration and sympathy will fall more on his assassin, Charlotte Corday. One familiar account of the autonomy of a work, by way of explaining what makes it valuable for its own sake, gives primary focus to the work’s formal features, those features of composition or design or appearance that somehow come to the fore after the pragmatic values begin to fade. There is something right about this but also something misguided if wrongly understood. What is right is that clearly there must be features of the image presented in a painting which partially account for what makes it compelling as an object of attention. What is misguided is the thought that the appearance of a painting can be adequately characterized independently of the painting’s aims and any deeper significance it expresses. Consider a description of features of the painting’s composition: It is possible to read it as a set of two-dimensional rhythms. Despite the high relief suggested by the raking light, the picture has very little depth. It is almost

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Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy like a frieze. Both the box and the bath are severely rectilinear and are parallel with the edges of the picture. They provide a rigorous structure against which the curves and diagonals of the dying Marat are set. All these curves and diagonals suggest collapse; they are sloping and sagging downwards, as are the pen that Marat is holding and the scattered pieces of paper. The head has rolled over the farthest. … The rhythm of shapes does not conform to any traditional compositional pattern – such as that of the ‘Golden Section’ …. [David] seems instead to have chosen intervals that emphasise emptiness. The whole of the top half of the canvas is a dark, impenetrable space. The first object in the picture is Marat’s head, which is placed exactly halfway down. This is the principle [sic] focus of the picture. … [I]t contains a subtle spatial ambiguity. Looking at Marat’s head, we might imagine that we are on a level with it. It is exactly halfway up the picture, which is where one normally expects ‘eye level’ to be when looking at a picture unless some clear indication to the contrary is given within the picture itself. The head is turned towards us ‘flat on’, which would fit in with a central viewing point. Yet if we follow the diagonals of the edges of the box and the plank across the bath we see that they lead to a vanishing point high on the right side of the picture. They have been drawn as though we were looking down on the scene rather than directly at it, something we might expect to do if we were standing in a room and looking down on someone in a bath. The lean of the shoulders toward us disguises the discrepancy between the two spatial systems.5

For the critic who made these observations there are explanations at hand: This discrepancy … is deliberately planned to make us simultaneously look down on Marat and straight at him – to pity him yet respect him.

And on the prominence of Marat’s head: Although it is the focus of the picture, the face is also the hardest object to read. The tilt it is given cleverly performs two functions. It both indicates that Marat’s death is near and prevents us from observing his features properly. For Marat’s face was disfigured with the skin disease that caused him to spend so much time in the bath in which he was assassinated. David has managed to prevent us from reading the distorted nature of his hero’s features while avoiding an obvious idealisation that would have destroyed the picture’s sense of actuality.6

Consider finally some observations about colour: David has made colour strictly subordinate to form. Colour is used in this painting to articulate shapes, and it echoes them in its simplicity. There is in fact a very restricted use of colour. Whites and browns predominate, the white



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sheets echoing the paleness of the body, the dark brown of the background providing a murky obscurity beyond the event. The green of the cloth … gives a restful tone, as well as providing a background to throw the foreground wooden box into starker relief. This low-key series of tones makes the small touches of blood red all the more telling.7

Such remarks about the composition reveal something important about what exactly is meant by the appearance of a painting, how it looks. For how a painting looks is a function of what significance is assigned to elements in it. Thus facts about the perspective in a painting are only salient when seen as being in service of a purpose to be fulfilled, like the purpose of directing attention or establishing the viewer’s relation with the subject. One cannot look at a painting – at least a figurative painting, but probably all painting – simply as a design. In that sense radical formalism doesn’t work: that is, formalism which commends only bare features of colour and configuration. For unless features of a design are given differential weight or salience there could be no sense of coherence; but the assigning of salience to elements in a design already presupposes purposiveness; and purposiveness implies significance. So the curves and diagonals that slope and sag are only salient under the description of something ‘collapsing’, and a man dying. The ambiguous spatial systems acquire significance when seen as inviting attitudes of pity and respect. The low-key series of colour tones are effective because they highlight the redness of the blood. And so forth. The first element then of valuing a work for its own sake is indeed, as the formalists insist, to value its appearance, but, as we have seen, what is valued is its appearance-under-a-description. But more is needed to account for what makes an image compelling after its initial pragmatic purposes have dissipated. Two other obvious elements are brought into play, both connected to the descriptions under which the surface design acquires significance: these are the immediate subject of the painting, on the one hand, and any broader themes expressed through the subject, on the other. The subject of David’s painting, what it is about in some literal sense, is nicely captured by Baudelaire: The divine Marat, one arm hanging out of the bath, its hand still loosely holding on to its last quill, and his chest pierced by the sacrilegious wound, has just breathed his last. On the green desk in front of him, his other hand still holds the treacherous letter. … The bath water is red with blood, the paper is bloodstained; on the ground lies a large kitchen knife soaked in blood; on a wretched packing case, which constituted the working furniture for the tireless journalist we read: ‘À Marat, David’.

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Much of this detail is what fascinates us now, what gives the image its power. If we were to read the painting as a depiction of someone overcome by the heat of his bath we would find it less compelling, merely humorous perhaps. The subject details matter in our valuing the work as a work of art. Relatedly, so does the tone or atmosphere of the work. Baudelaire describes the mood as ‘tender and poignant’ and the atmosphere as cold: ‘a soul hovers in the chilled air of this room, on these cold walls, around the cold and funereal bath’. He writes too of its ‘pitiful horror’. These we might call expressive properties of the work. Baudelaire is wrong, however, to say that ‘all the details are historical and real’; it is important to recognize the deliberate distortions of fact. David has markedly simplified the scene; all decoration in the room has been removed, the dressing-gown that Marat had apparently draped over him is left out, Corday had not presented Marat with a letter (that is a fabrication), Corday herself is of course not present, even the knife is a different colour and style. David wanted to emphasize the austerity of the setting and the focus on Marat as a tireless journalist. It would be wrong to think of the painting as accurate reportage. It is equally a work of fiction, a product of the imagination. Like so much historical painting of the time it is an idealization, and the idealization is both in service of the original pragmatic function and part of the explanation for the painting’s more enduring appeal. We are responding to an artist’s vision of a scene, not directly to the scene itself. Furthermore, the painting suggests, through the manner in which its immediate subject matter is depicted, certain wider, more universal themes. Again Baudelaire hints at these: he speaks of ‘the triumph of the spiritual; … the heady scent of idealism’. The painting is about death and its transforming power. It is about martyrdom, about the transformation of a human into something super-human, something eternal. ‘Marat’, Baudelaire writes, ‘can henceforth challenge Apollo’, no doubt by becoming a god himself. Often remarked upon are the visual parallels between the depiction of Marat and traditional images of Christ descended from the cross. These themes of transformation, of martyrdom, of overcoming death, are deeply entrenched in Western art and no doubt in human psychology. No explanation of why the painting still resonates can fail to take such universal ideas into account. It is the potential to universalize the theme that perhaps accounts for the numerous appropriations of David’s image by other artists, notably Edvard Munch and Picasso (note how both include the assassin in the depiction).



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IV So now I hope we have enough to move towards a firmer grip on the idea of valuing a work for its own sake, long after any initial instrumental function has faded. At the heart of this idea is that of a work as it is in itself, which connects to the idea of its becoming an autonomous object of attention. No doubt complex issues of ontology lie behind this but we can side-step many of these if we focus on certain general principles. One is that a painting, as a work of art, cannot just be identical with a particular physical object, or indeed with a particular configuration of line and colour. Facts about where the object originated or how it came into existence are essential to determining that it is an object of a certain kind – a work of art – and that it is distinct from other objects that might be indiscernible from it in outward appearance. In this sense temporal embeddedness, the grounding of a work in a particular set of historical, political and personal circumstances, is integral to the work’s identity. If that very object had arisen in a different context, with different purposes behind its creation, then it would not be the same work. This is part of what is meant by saying that works of art are intentional objects.8 So what a work is in itself is partially determined by the historical conditions from which it arose, and these conditions are likely to include the initial purposes the work sought to achieve. It is not a mere contingent fact about David’s painting that it depicts Marat, the journalist and member of the National Convention, moments after his fatal stabbing, nor that the painting strives to immortalize him as a martyr of the French Revolution. To appreciate it fully is to appreciate it under such descriptions, just as to appreciate its compositional qualities is to appreciate them under the kinds of descriptions offered earlier. The painting is valued as a work of art for the manner in which it realizes or attempts to realize these aims. It might be objected that I have now completely abandoned the idea of an autonomous work of art. The work as I have characterized it, it might be said, is just not an autonomous, free-standing entity. If it is historically embedded then it cannot be autonomous. But the objector has failed to take into account the route to this conclusion: both its dependence on the idea of value, in particular that of valuing a work for its own sake, and its dependence on the ontological claim about what a work is, particularly the thought that, whatever else it is, a work is not just a mere thing with merely physical properties. Bear in mind also the fate of a great many works that fail to make the transition from pragmatic value to artistic value: those works that might shine brightly in their

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initial context and meet universal praise, only to fade into oblivion years later when the immediacy of the context has been lost. Such works do not achieve autonomy because they are never valued for their own sake, only for the contribution they make to their context of origin. Those works that survive beyond this context permanently retain elements of that context in their very identity, as we have seen, but they also transcend the context into something more timeless, something that resonates with viewers for whom the context itself might seem remote. Such has happened with David’s painting. A final word about a notion I have deliberately not yet mentioned, although it is one that is frequently invoked in this debate: the notion of disinterestedness. A standard account of what it is to view a work of art for its own sake is to say that the work is viewed disinterestedly, or is attended to with disinterested contemplation, or some such. I have been resisting any such account because I think it introduces unhelpful distractions, not least the idea of an aesthetic attitude. However, I do believe there is something right about it and something important. What is right is the idea that as time passes it is possible to take a more detached or dispassionate view of the subject depicted. This surely happens with the Marat. The intense passion of the originating context where literally lives were at stake in attitudes the painting aroused is simply not recoverable, far less desirable, 200 years later. We can admire it for its own sake without fear, without overwrought emotion, without taking sides. Indeed, I believe that the distance of time allows us to appreciate the work better, not less well, than David’s contemporaries. We can see, as it were, the art in the painting, not just the politics. It must be insisted, though, that to take a dispassionate view of a work is not to remove all emotion from it, since it is quite consistent with recognizing, even feeling, the work’s expressive power. I have sought, then, to give an account of artistic value and the autonomy of art without resorting to formalism and without setting in opposition the work itself and the context in which it originated. A work is tied to its context of origin, for that context partially determines its very identity conditions. To appreciate the work as it is in itself requires some knowledge of the context out of which it arose. The work bears that context as part of its very essence. Nevertheless, a work’s enduring interest can transcend the limited and immediate reaction the work may initially have aroused. The compelling nature of its appearanceunder-a-description, a residual fascination with its subject matter, and any universal themes it expresses and projects, can afford it an artistic value over and above its early pragmatic value. If in its initial incarnation it may be said



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to be acting on history, in its later universal incarnation it may be said to have assimilated history into the very fabric of its being.

Notes 1 See my ‘The Uselessness of Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 68, no. 3, 2010, pp. 205–14. 2 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Musée classique du Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle’, Le CorsaireSatan, 21 January 1846; translated in Jacques-Louis David’s Marat, (eds) William Vaughan and Helen Weston (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–2. 3 Quoted in Jacques-Louis David’s Marat, (eds) William Vaughan and Helen Weston, p. 4. 4 Quoted in Jacques-Louis David’s Marat, (eds) William Vaughan and Helen Weston, p. 13. 5 Vaughan and Weston, 2000, pp. 14–15. 6 Ibid., p. 14. 7 Ibid., p. 16. 8 These points of ontology are developed further in my book Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

References Baudelaire, Charles (1846) ‘Le Musée classique du Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle’, Le CorsaireSatan, 21 January; translated in Jacques-Louis David’s Marat (2000), (eds) William Vaughan and Helen Weston. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Lamarque, Peter (2010a) ‘The Uselessness of Art’. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 68, no. 3. —(2010b) Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vaughn, William and Weston, Helen (eds) (2000) Jacques-Louis David’s Marat. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

4

Value Conflict and the Autonomy of Art Jason Gaiger

Preface This chapter draws on distinctions developed in ethics and political philosophy to address a central topic in the philosophy of art. Part of the rationale for this, as I explain, is that the term ‘autonomy’ is a loan-word, originally employed in relation to moral and political considerations and only subsequently extended to characterize the sphere of art. The notion of value conflict has been widely discussed in recent years, not only by Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams, whose ideas I discuss in this paper, but also by other philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and David Wiggins. As far as I am aware, the recognition that there may be a genuine incompatibility of values has not been considered in relation to art practice, despite the prominence given to the contrasting, celebratory account of artistic pluralism defended by Arthur Danto. In challenging the assumptions underpinning this account, I hope to make a contribution both to our understanding of the concept of value and to our understanding of the distinctive character of contemporary art. A central difficulty here is the need to address problems at the level of generality required to make a contribution to philosophical debate while sustaining sufficiently detailed attention to specific art works and practices. One criterion of success is the achievement of genuine traction between the two. This chapter is concerned with the concept of autonomy as it has been applied to the sphere of art practice rather than with the autonomy of aesthetic judgement or aesthetic experience. The two uses of the term are clearly interrelated, and they may well have a common source, but there is much to be gained from addressing these issues separately, at least at the outset. While Kant’s distinction of aesthetic judgement from cognitive and practical forms of judgement in

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the first part of the Critique of the Power of Judgment is sometimes taken to provide the basis for a fully fledged account of the autonomy of art, it is clear that the term ‘autonomy’ carries a different range of meanings when it is used to characterize a wider structure of institutions and practices, many of which first emerged in the modern period. Here, perhaps, the employment of the term is closer to its original, political meaning of self-governance or self-determination. For the ancient Greeks, the claim to autonomia, literally the capacity to give the law to oneself, was used to assert the independence of a city-state from external political interference. In the early modern period the concept of autonomy was extended from political entities to persons or individuals as part of a process that has been characterized as the transition from an ‘obedience’ conception of morality to one based on the conception of self-legislation.1 Whereas the obedience conception holds that you should do what a certain authority tells you to do, such as what is written in the Bible or what is commanded by the ministers of the church or the state, the autonomy conception holds that agents are capable of acting for reasons they give themselves, from what we term moral or ethical considerations. For Kant, whose philosophy represents the culmination of this development, ‘The will is therefore not merely subject to the law, but is so subject that it must be considered as also making the law for itself ’.2 The claim that the will is the author of the law to which it submits captures the idea of responsiveness to reasons, our capacity to reason or deliberate about what we want to do and to set our own goals. Once we recognize that the concept of autonomy is a ‘loan word’, taken over from political and moral philosophy, the question arises whether it is too demanding for the purposes required. In ethics, a capacity for rational self-assessment is generally held to be necessary for autonomy, manifested, for example, in the reflective examination and ordering of one’s motivations for action, testing their internal consistency and their relation to reliable beliefs. But can we point to commensurable requirements in the sphere of art? In what sense might the practice of art be said to rest on principles that originate in the use of reason or self-given laws? One of the aims of this chapter, whose scope is limited to the visual arts, is to show that the concept of autonomy may be used to characterize certain features of art practice but that its blanket extension is potentially misleading. I begin by identifying two ways in which the domain of art might plausibly be described as autonomous before going on to consider full-blown claims for the autonomy of art put forward by leading proponents of modernism. What I shall term the ‘standard view’ holds that the concept of autonomy was central to avant-garde art practice and theory from the mid to



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late nineteenth century through until the 1960s – the period of the dominance of modernism – but that it was subject to sustained critique during the so-called crisis of modernism and subsequently rejected in favour of an irreducible diversity of heterogeneous art practices. By marking a distinction between ‘aesthetic autonomy’ and ‘social autonomy’ I show that it is possible to question the assumptions underpinning this account. I develop this argument with reference to Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated contrast between negative and positive freedom, which provides a useful means of clarifying the different commitments at stake in these two models. I conclude by examining the autonomy of art in relation to a conception of value pluralism that also has its roots in Berlin’s writings on liberty. In contrast to the relaxed or tolerant pluralism defended by proponents of the standard view, I argue that the autonomy of art can and does enter into opposition with other deeply held values such as social engagement and self-expression, and that we therefore need to recognize the possibility of genuine ‘conflicts of values’.3

I A painter who sets out to represent the biblical theme of the Last Supper is confronted with a specific compositional task. At least thirteen figures need to be accommodated within the picture, seated at a table, with due prominence given to the figure of Christ. The panel devoted to this subject in Giotto’s cycle of frescos in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, dating from c. 1305, provides one solution to this problem. Rather than being placed centrally, Christ is seated at the far left and his companions are arrayed on both sides of a table, whose long edge runs parallel to the lower edge of the panel. As Thomas Puttfarken has observed, within the overall economy of the cycle of frescos, in which the action takes place from left to right, the position of Christ both reinforces and is reinforced by the narrative direction of the sequence of paintings.4 His role as protagonist is also established by a more elaborate halo and by similarities to earlier depictions. However, a consequence of this arrangement is that five of the apostles are seated with their backs to the viewer, their facial expressions either partly or entirely obscured. A different approach is adopted by Fra Angelico in his fresco of The Last Supper for the Convent of San Marco in Florence, painted in 1442. Eight of the apostles are seated behind an L-shaped table, positioned to the left; the other four apostles are shown kneeling on the right, their seats at the near side of the table left empty. This allows the figure

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of Christ, who is depicted standing in front of the table, to be clearly distinguished, and none of the apostles are now seen from behind. However, this is achieved at the expense of a highly artificial arrangement that breaks the dinner party into separate groups. With these two examples in mind, we can view with fresh eyes what is undoubtedly the best-known depiction of the subject, Leonardo’s The Last Supper, painted for the dining-hall in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan in 1495 to 1497. The figure of Christ is given a prominent position at the centre of the composition and the balanced ordering of the apostles on either side allows our gaze to move from left to right or right to left in a meaningful sequence, taking in the different groupings of the figures and their expressions without interruption. What makes this possible, of course, is that all thirteen figures are seated on the same side of the table – a highly unusual, not to say impractical arrangement for a dinner party. The emphasis is on clarity and purposefully articulated visible order, as if the figures have been arranged for our contemplation, for what else might account for the fact that they are all placed on one side of the table where we can see them? By the time Tintoretto comes to paint his version of The Last Supper in the Scuole Grande di San Rocco in Venice in the 1570s, he does everything he can to disrupt the apparent normality of this mode of presentation. Not only does he abandon the planimetric alignment of the dinner table with the picture edge by turning it diagonally away from the viewer, he positions the figure of Christ at the short, near side so that he is now viewed from behind. Other figures and objects occupy the foreground, including a dog beating its tail, so that the viewer’s eye must first traverse multiple distractions. In place of the strict architectonic of Leonardo’s composition, Tintoretto courts wilful obscurity through the use of deep chiaroscuro and dramatic contrasts of scale, risking compositional instability for a heightened sense of vitality and drama. Here we have four paintings by four different artists, each of which provides a different solution to the compositional demands imposed by the theme of the Last Supper. By isolating these four paintings and considering them in the same historical order in which they were made, as I have done, it is tempting to see a later solution as a ‘response’ to an earlier one. This need not be understood as a strong, empirical claim, dependent on the artist actually having had the opportunity to view the work of his predecessor. For many of the critical historians of art – a term coined by Michael Podro to characterize the predominantly German tradition of philosophical aesthetics that laid the foundation for the modern discipline of art history – it was enough to identify a trajectory



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of development, which may perhaps only become visible retrospectively.5 This type of analysis, in which the work of one artist is compared to another, is in principle separable from knowledge about changing workshop practices or the examination of contemporary controversies over the interpretation of religious doctrine. In modern parlance, it has a strong formalist bias. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that for most art historians formal analysis is undertaken as part of a broader investigation of the social and cultural context in which artworks are produced. The tension between these two types of explanation, one of which emphasizes the context-bound character of art and the other its non-reducibility to the conditions of its emergence, cannot be resolved by isolating just one of the terms. Michael Podro’s remarks are worth quoting here: If a writer diminishes the sense of context in his concern for the irreducibility or autonomy of art, he moves towards formalism. If he diminishes the sense of irreducibility in order to keep a firm hand on extra-artistic facts, he runs the risk of treating art as if it were the trace or symptom of those other facts. … The two-sidedness of the nature of art is itself a central topic of critical history. When that history collapses into formalism that is a failure and not intrinsic to the enterprise.6

One might add that when art history collapses into contextualism, as is the case with much recent work in the discipline, that is also a failure, for the very reasons that Podro identifies. The second way in which the critical historians of art sought to identify an independent process of art-historical development is by tracing the evolution of a specific motif. This might be a decorative motif, such as the acanthus leaf, whose adaptation as an ornamental form in the hands of architects and artisans formed the basis of Alois Riegl’s first book, Stilfragen [Questions of form], or a particular subject or theme such as the Adoration of the Magi, the Death of Actaeon or indeed the Last Supper. Placing Andrea del Verrocchio’s painting of the Baptism of Christ of c. 1470, now in the Uffizi, Florence, alongside Andrea Sansovino’s carving of the same subject in 1502 for the Baptistery in Florence allows us to recognize the extent to which the later artist has adapted Verrocchio’s treatment of the subject to his use of different materials while also giving the figures greater monumentality and repose.7 The key point as far as we are concerned is that it is possible to analyse works of art in terms of their relation to other works of art, whether or not there is an ascertainable process of engagement or ‘influence’, as in the case of Sansovino. The identification of

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underlying patterns of development need not be teleological, and there is no sense in which one solution or variation is necessarily more successful artistically than another. The distinction between two different ‘roots of style’, one of which is social and cultural, and the other ‘specifically visual’, allows the art historian to investigate changes in the way a particular subject has been depicted through an investigation of the mode of representation itself.8 Such forms of analysis are not, of course, restricted to art of the early modern period. Charles Harrison noted a visual congruity between certain fully abstract paintings by the American artist Barnett Newman, whose characteristic method involves the deployment of vertical bands or ‘zips’ of colour, and works by earlier artists such as Cézanne and Degas in which the depiction of part of a wall or a door forms a broad stripe down one edge of the canvas. Harrison contends that ‘Both Cézanne and Degas used the device of a vertical band to position the spectator as someone who is not so much looking into the space of the picture as enclosed within its imagined world’.9 His point is that abstract painting both draws on and reconfigures the expectations established by figurative painting and that it needs to be understood in relation to that tradition. A less controversial example is provided by the work of the contemporary British artist Rachel Whiteread. Her practice of casting the spaces or voids underneath familiar objects stands in a complex relation to the three-dimensional work of the predominantly male generation of Minimalist artists that came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Although the procedures through which her work is made are very different, the informed viewer is expected to recognize the ways in which it refers back to the Minimalists’ preoccupation with modular order and industrial processes, and the decision to incorporate the work into the space of the viewer by placing it directly on the ground rather than on a plinth or a stand.

II The claim that the sphere of art is autonomous or self-determining, formulated in this restrictive sense, amounts to the claim that artworks cannot be fully explained through reference to the social context in which they are made: we also understand works of art in terms of their transformative relation to other works of art. Although some of the critical historians of art defended the stronger view that art has its own independent developmental history, the tracing of such internal or immanent relations between artworks is first



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hardened into a full-blown account of the autonomy of art by the proponents of modernism. By mapping the connections that supposedly led from the work of Manet and the Impressionists through to the emergence of fully abstract art, modernist theorists sought to identify an internal ‘logic of development’

Figure 4.1  Alfred H. Barr, The Development of Abstract Art, 1936, cover of Cubism and Abstract Art, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936, offset, printed in colour, 20 x 26 cm. (DIGITAL IMAGE © 2012 The Museum of Modern Art, New York/SCALA, Florence.)

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that could be used to justify many of the constituent features of avant-garde art practice. The best-known exponent of this view is Clement Greenberg but it was also defended – and institutionalized – by figures such as Alfred H. Barr, the inaugural director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is given compelling visual form in the diagram that Barr produced for the exhibition ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ at MOMA in 1936 (Figure 4.1), which maps the developmental relations between the major avant-garde movements against a timeline that culminates in the twin currents of non-geometrical and geometrical abstract art. What is missing from this diagram, of course, is reference to anything outside the realm of art. The tumultuous second decade of the twentieth century saw the emergence of Dadaism, Purism and Neoplasticism, as the diagram indicates, but the origin of these movements is traced back to earlier artistic movements without any reference to the great upheavals of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. The first person to develop a coherent set of objections to Barr’s approach, and by extension to many of the founding presuppositions of modernism, was the art historian Meyer Schapiro, whose essay ‘The Nature of Abstract Art’ was published just one year after the exhibition at MOMA. In a neat twist, Schapiro contends that Barr’s history of modern art is itself outside of history: Barr’s conception of abstract art remains essentially unhistorical. He gives us, it is true, the dates of every stage in the various movements, as if to enable us to plot a curve, or to follow the emergence of the art year by year, but no connection is drawn between the art and the conditions of the moment. He excludes as irrelevant to its history the nature of the society in which it arose. … The history of modern art is presented as an internal, immanent process among the artists.10

It is but a short step from here to a positive articulation of the opposing position: we should not examine the relations between artworks and art movements in isolation since art is embedded in, and inseparable from, the social and political context of its emergence. Schapiro contends, for example, that the hard-edged forms that characterize the work of Malevich in the crucial transitional years prior to the First World War are closely connected to the accelerating processes of urbanization and industrialization that were taking place in Russia, including the development of a distinctive machine aesthetic. Schapiro concludes that ‘the movement of abstract art … bears within itself at almost every point the mark of the changing material and psychological conditions surrounding modern



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culture’. On this view, the putative autonomy of art can never be fully realized, since it always remains inextricably linked to specific ‘values, methods and viewpoints’ that originate outside the realm of art itself.11 The distinctive feature of Greenberg’s presentation of the modernist position lies in his insistence that the pursuit of autonomy is central to the self-understanding of the avant-garde. He contends that the principal driving force behind the development of modern art lay in the avant-garde’s rejection of the anecdotal, sentimental and illustrative preoccupations of nineteenth-century academic art practice. The doctrine of l’art pour l’art provided a means of restoring the seriousness of art through a renewed focus on the specific resources and potentialities inherent in different artistic media. As early as 1939, in his first major essay, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Greenberg argued that: Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miró, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colours, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors.12

Greenberg’s contention that avant-garde artists turned their attention away from the subject matter of common experience and towards the medium in which they work allowed him to present abstract art not as a break with earlier forms of art but as a distillation of its central concerns. A year later, in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, he presented this idea with explicit reference to the concept of autonomy: The avant-garde … becomes the embodiment of art’s instinct of self-preservation. It is interested in, and feels itself responsible to, only the values of art. … This meant a new and greater emphasis upon form, and it also involved the assertion of the arts as independent vocations, disciplines and crafts, absolutely autonomous, and entitled to respect for their own sakes, and not merely as vessels of communication.13

Here we have a different conception of the autonomy of art, one that rests on the notion of purity. Greenberg links the independent development of painting and sculpture with a progressive withdrawal from representational content. The renunciation of effects that are supposedly borrowed from other media forms part of a process of self-definition that requires each of the arts to identify its own proper field of activity. In the case of painting, the two indispensable limiting conditions turn out to be the flatness of the two-dimensional support and the restrictions imposed by the framing edge. According to Greenberg, once

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we recognize that the ‘purely plastic or abstract qualities of the work of art are the only ones that count’, we can accept the absence of representational content as a necessary impoverishment, since it allows ‘the purely plastic, the proper, values of visual art [to] come to the fore’.14 In ‘Modernist Painting’, Greenberg explicitly draws on the authority of Kant to support his claim that the essence of modernism lies in self-criticism, including his notorious pronouncement that the purity of art provides the ‘guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence’.15 By the mid-twentieth century modernism had arguably established itself as the dominant discourse of art both in Europe and in North America. However, a series of challenges to its authority in the late 1950s and early 1960s brought about a wholesale reorientation of critical priorities among artists and critics. Among the manifold factors was the perceived exhaustion of the ‘logic of modernism’, which appeared to have nowhere to go following the experiments of post-painterly abstraction, identified with the work of figures such as Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. Artists were also wary of producing ‘recipe art’ that looked as if it had been made to order to meet the expectations of art theorists. A second powerful factor was the recognition that, for all its claims to sustain the critical radicalism of the avant-garde, modernist abstraction did not provide a means of directly addressing contemporary social and political concerns. The resulting conflict is succinctly captured in a statement by Philip Guston, who had achieved considerable success as one of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. Guston describes himself getting up in the morning, reading news reports about the war in Vietnam and the protests on the streets, and then going into the studio to work on his abstract paintings without being able to connect the two in any meaningful way: The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. … What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue.16

The return of figurative content in Guston’s work and his adoption of a lurid, cartoonish idiom clearly signalled his abandonment of the core tenets of modernism, which also came under attack from a variety of other quarters. To state the obvious, the idea that medium specificity can serve as a marker of quality has little purchase on a work such as Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram of 1955 to 1959, now in the Moderna Museet Stockholm, whose curators go to the trouble of listing its materials as ‘oil, fabric, paper, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber shoe heel, and tennis ball on canvas, with oil on Angora



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goat and rubber tire, on wooden platform, mounted on four casters’. Rosalind Krauss’s term the ‘expanded field of art’ has been adopted to describe the proliferation of art forms and practices that could no longer be accommodated within the traditional designations of painting and sculpture.17 This not only involved the emergence of new forms of art such as installation, video, performance and land art but, in some cases, a highly politicized address to issues ranging from property ownership to the construction of sexual identity. Those who welcome these developments point to the overcoming of the barrier between art and life and art’s re-engagement with wider social and political concerns. Those who criticize them point to the dissolution of art into ‘spectacle’, and the co-option of the avant-garde into the globalized art market and the international museum system. However, both camps accept the same basic picture in which the concept of autonomy is recognized as playing a leading role in art practice and theory from the mid-nineteenth century through to the crisis of modernism in the 1960s, but as then being displaced by a concerted attempt to close the gap between art and life, or rather, to bring them into a more troubling proximity.

III Among philosophers, Arthur Danto is probably the best-known exponent of this position. His analysis of ‘art after the end of art’ charts the historical demise of modernism, beginning with pop and conceptual art in the 1960s, and the subsequent emergence of a condition of ‘deep pluralism and total tolerance’ in which ‘Nothing is ruled out’.18 There are other things going on in Danto’s account, of course, and he is anything but a standard thinker, but his acceptance of this basic before-and-after model may be taken to represent a view that is widely held by artists and theorists working today. It is my belief that this view is open to challenge and that we need to find ways in which it can be corrected. As we shall see, it is not only historically inaccurate but can also be contested on philosophical grounds. It is perhaps useful to start by observing that Danto himself offers both a historical and a philosophical justification for his contention that the ‘deep structure’ of art history in the contemporary era is characterized by an ‘unprecedented pluralism’, which cannot, even in principle, admit to being described in terms of an autonomous or independent trajectory of development.19 He takes it to be an observable fact that ‘The objective structure of the art world has revealed itself, historically, now to be defined by a radical pluralism’.20 From

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this it follows that ‘the great master narratives which first defined traditional art, and then modernist art, have not only come to an end, but … contemporary art no longer allows itself to be represented by master narratives at all’.21 Danto’s philosophical justification is more complex, resting as it does on an unusual conjunction of historicism and essentialism. The historicist component consists in the claim that the correct understanding of the essence of art emerged historically: philosophical questions concerning the nature of art were formulated within the domain of art itself as the result of a lengthy process of collective self-inquiry and were answered by the acceptance – manifest in the work of Andy Warhol and others – that anything can be a work of art irrespective of its physical appearance. The essentialist component consists in the claim that there is an ‘essence’ of art to be discovered and that once this insight has been achieved it holds true of all art whatsoever. This quasi-Hegelian coming to philosophical self-consciousness about the nature of art consists in the realization that the concept of art is radically open. Danto maintains that ‘the concept of art must be consistent with everything that is art. It immediately follows that the definition entails no stylistic imperatives whatever. … In brief, essentialism in art entails pluralism, whether pluralism in fact is historically realised or not.’22 While the historical and philosophical components of Danto’s argument are not fully separable from one another, his contention that it is no longer possible to provide a progressive developmental history of art does not depend on particular – and presumably contingent – features of contemporary art practice, but on an achieved understanding of the essential determinants of what counts as a work of art. The thesis of the ‘end of art’ is, in Danto’s own words, ‘a story about stories’, fully compatible with his claim that art today shows ‘no sign whatever of internal exhaustion’.23 The dissolution of modernism in the 1960s does not simply mark the terminus of another period in the history of art but the end of art as a historical enterprise: since anything can be an artwork, there can no longer be a progressive narrative of the development of art. Danto’s account of this situation is cast in celebratory terms, and he suggests in a number of places that the ‘freedom from conflict’ characteristic of the contemporary art world might serve as a model for political freedom: To say that history is over is to say that there is no longer a pale of history for works of art to fall outside of. Everything is possible. Anything can be art. And, because the present situation is essentially unstructured, one can no longer fit a master narrative to it. … Rather, it inaugurates the greatest era of freedom art has ever known.24



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I shall return to this argument when I discuss Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty. For the moment, I simply want to point up the difference between Danto’s conception of what it is for art practice to be ‘free’ – construed primarily in terms of freedom from constraint – and the strong conception of freedom that is contained in the idea of autonomy, understood as the capacity to be self-determining or to give the law to oneself. Both positions give centrality to the concept of freedom, but it is defined in markedly different ways. First, however, I want to examine the historical weaknesses of the beforeand-after model to which Danto adheres. It goes without saying that he is obliged to offer an exceptionally broad-brush account of Western art history, but the identification of just two overarching narratives, each corresponding to a distinct ‘cultural whole’, is unduly reductive even by the requirements imposed by this form of writing. There is a curious naivety in Danto’s observation that prior to modernism ‘painters set about representing the world the way it presented itself, painting people and landscapes and historical events just as they would present themselves to the eye’.25 His contention that the period extending from 1300 through to the 1880s can be subsumed under ‘the first great story of art, namely Vasari’s, according to which art was the progressive conquest of visual appearances’ has the virtue of narrative simplicity but it is unable to account for just those ‘specifically visual’ features which the critical historians of art sought to elucidate.26 The differences between the four paintings of the Last Supper that we considered at the start of this chapter cannot be captured in terms of an increase in representational accuracy – fidelity to nature does not form an adequate basis for the analysis of pictorial style.27 Neither Vasari nor Gombrich, Danto’s other spokesperson for this first narrative, hold that the pursuit of ‘truth to appearances’ suffices on its own to characterize the diversity of Western art practice over a period of some 600 years. Similar problems attend Danto’s reconstruction of the narrative of modernism in terms of ever greater ‘philosophical adequacy’ or the coming to self-consciousness of art. As many critics have pointed out, the culmination of this narrative in the exhibition of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes in the Stable Gallery in New York in 1964, which plays such a pivotal role in Danto’s account, is difficult to reconcile with the fact that Marcel Duchamp produced his first unassisted ready-made, the Bottlerack, in 1914. The real problem with Danto’s argument, however, is that it depends on the very position it is designed to replace: the exclusionary model of art’s developmental history constructed by modernist art theorists. Once we give due prominence to those forms of art practice that were marginalized by

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modernism – including not only Duchamp and Dadaism, but also Surrealism, Russian Constructivism and the tradition of politically committed Realist art that was sustained both in the West and in the Eastern bloc – the contention that the present marks a radical break with the past becomes harder to substantiate. As Alex Potts has observed: Rather than positing a history in which a modernist privileging of aesthetic autonomy in the immediate post-war period gives way to a rejection of autonomy and an openness to heteronomy in neo-avant-garde and later in post-modern practices … understandings of artistic autonomy are best seen as constitutionally split and radically unstable throughout the period.28

In short, it is only by accepting the authority of the modernist narrative, with its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, that Danto can celebrate the ‘post-historical’ present as an era, which, for the first time, is free of such exclusions. The unravelling of this narrative has revealed a far greater diversity of artistic practices in the modern period and thus the possibility of alternative linkages and continuities within a more broadly conceived historical avantgarde. Whereas the standard view identifies a caesura or break in the 1960s, characterized by the abandonment of the concept of autonomy and the opening up of art to the heterogeneous domain of everyday life, this more complex picture allows us to recognize that the tension between autonomy and other countervailing impulses extends across both sides of this art-historical divide.

IV I began this chapter by observing that autonomy is a ‘loan word’, whose original deployment is to be found in the domain of political and moral philosophy. On this line of thought, the application of the concept of autonomy to the sphere of art is potentially misleading, especially when it is used to sustain the idea that art is fully independent of its social context or that the history of art can be characterized in terms of internal ‘laws of development’. The confusion arises, at least in part, from a conflation between two different uses of the term. As I have sought to show elsewhere, the concept of autonomy may be applied to art in two distinct but related ways.29 The first, which I term ‘social autonomy’, describes the emancipation of art from its historical dependence on the church, the state and the aristocracy. The establishment of art as a separate domain of human activity, with its own values and institutions, has been described by Max Weber



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and others as part of a process of ‘cultural rationalization’ in which science, morality and art are progressively differentiated to form discrete ‘value spheres’, each with its own internal history and learning processes. The older system of patronage, which allowed for more or less overt control of artistic production, was gradually replaced by the growth of an independent art market alongside other modern innovations such as the dedicated art museum, the gallery and dealer system, and professional art criticism. To claim that art is autonomous in this sense is to claim that it is no longer directly in the service of religion or morality and that artists are free to pursue their own chosen ends – albeit within the constraints imposed by the need to promote and sell their work in an increasingly competitive market. This should be distinguished from the separate and more controversial claim that the distinctive value of art resides, at least in part, in its independence from any practical purpose. The idea that the evaluation of art rests on exclusively aesthetic criteria and that the realm of art is separated from the everyday world of social and political praxis is closely tied to the concept of disintestestedness as this was articulated by Kant and other eighteenth-century philosophers. However, what I term ‘aesthetic autonomy’ goes beyond Kant’s distinction between different types of judgement and consists in the stronger, normative claim that the value of art is fully independent of extra-aesthetic concerns. In the hands of modernist art theorists this entailed a corresponding devaluation of any overt concern with ‘picturing’ the world and an emphasis on the achievement of specifically aesthetic ‘effects’ through the formal arrangement of the constituent elements of line, shape and colour. The significance of this distinction becomes clear once we recognize that the two positions are logically independent of one another. It is possible to accept that the domain of art has historically separated out into a discrete value sphere without holding that the value of art is independent of any cognitive, moral, social or political function it may be made to serve. Recognition of the social autonomy of art no more binds us to the distinctive conception of artistic value contained in the idea of aesthetic autonomy than it does to any other conception, including the opposing integrative point of view. How, then, might Berlin’s analysis of the ‘great contrast’ between the concepts of negative and positive freedom help us to cast further light on this distinction?30 Berlin defines negative liberty as the ‘absence of coercion’ or freedom from interference by others. I am free to the extent that I am not prevented from doing what I wish to do. On this conception, ‘The wider the area of non-interference the wider my freedom’.31 By contrast, the notion of positive liberty, or freedom

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to, characterizes the possibility of acting in such a way as to take control of one’s life and to realize one’s fundamental goals and purposes: The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside.32

Berlin elucidates the negative concept of freedom with reference to the work of classical English political philosophers, including Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Mill, but he also finds it at work in the writings of Constant and Tocqueville in France. In this context, it doesn’t seem implausible to draw a connection between the struggle to free art from subservience to the authority of the church or the state and the claim that ‘The defence of liberty consists in the “negative” goal of warding off interference’.33 More problematic, perhaps, is the identification of aesthetic autonomy with the idea of positive freedom, but here too, I think, useful comparisons may be drawn. Although Berlin recognizes that positive freedom has a valuable role to play in animating demands for social and political reform, much of his essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ – first presented as a lecture in 1958 – is given over to an analysis of the dangers inherent in the notion of self-mastery, especially when it is extended to the mastery of others in the name of some higher social ideal. He is deeply suspicious of ‘the positive doctrine of liberation by reason’, finding it ‘at the heart of many of the nationalist, Communist, authoritarian, and totalitarian creeds of our day’.34 Echoes of this position are to be found in more recent critiques of modernism, including that put forward by Danto, with particular emphasis placed on the supposedly ‘totalitarian’ implications of the idea that art has a progressive developmental history and that the achievement of aesthetic ‘purity’ is a marker of quality.35 It would seem, then, that if we go beyond recognition of the social autonomy of art, characterized in correspondingly minimal terms of non-interference or absence of coercion, and seek to offer a characterization of autonomy in terms of ‘positive freedom’, we run into insuperable difficulties. Most would agree that the account provided by modernist theorists such as Barr and Greenberg gets this wrong. To claim that art is ‘self-determining’ or that it has its own internal ‘laws of development’ leads to the problems we have identified. But Danto’s position is not satisfactory either. I have already observed that his celebratory



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account of artistic pluralism conflates merely negative freedom – freedom from external constraint – with positive freedom: the capacity to realize one’s own goals and purposes. We not only lose our grip on the original meaning of the concept of autonomy if we conceive of it exclusively in terms of negative freedom, we perhaps relinquish too much. The insight, articulated by the critical historians of art, that art is irreducible to the conditions of its emergence and that artworks also need to be understood in terms of their transformative relation to other works of art, also holds true for the contemporary era. The question, then, is whether it is possible to develop an account of the autonomy of art that does justice to this more moderate concept without falling into the problems that beset the modernist position. A clue that may help us to identify a solution to this problem is to be found in Danto’s claim that the ‘end of art’ is characterized by ‘a certain freedom from conflicts of the kind inescapable in the Age of Manifestos’.36 Although he identifies the Age of Manifestos with modernism, it is clear that he is referring to different conceptions of the nature and purpose of art or what we might term different conceptions of artistic value. Here, too, Berlin’s analysis of freedom in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is relevant, since the essay concludes with a defence of value pluralism that explicitly rules out the possibility of arriving at a ‘final solution’ in which ‘all the positive values in which men have believed must, in the end, be compatible’.37 For Berlin, the belief that we might eradicate the conflict of values, whatever form this takes, represents a spurious idealism: The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others. Indeed, it is because this is their situation that men place such immense value upon the freedom to choose.38

The value of freedom or liberty is itself in tension with other values such as equality, justice, happiness and public order. The central thought here is that the inability to resolve such conflicts satisfactorily need not arise from logical inconsistency or a failure in rational thinking. As Bernard Williams has observed, the literature ‘has typically tended to regard value-conflict … as a pathology of social and moral thought, and as something to be overcome’. 39 However, in some cases at least, ‘This is to misplace the source of the agent’s trouble, in suggesting that what is wrong is his thought about the moral situation, whereas what is wrong lies in his situation itself.’40 Sartre gives the example of someone who has to decide between staying at home to look after his mother and going

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off to fight with the resistance. The young man cannot pursue both courses of action and yet the value of caring for one’s parents and the value of defending one’s country appear to present equally binding alternatives.41 Williams argues that in cases of a ‘tragic’ conflict of values such as this, ‘an agent can justifiably think that whatever he does will be wrong: that there are conflicting moral requirements, and that neither of them succeeds in overriding or outweighing the other’.42 Conflicts in the realm of art rarely have this ‘tragic’ dimension – though there are plentiful examples of artists under oppressive regimes who have been forced to make difficult choices. Nonetheless, it seems to me that here, too, there is a plurality of values that can and do enter into opposition with each other, requiring a complex process of compromise and negotiation that is not always fully resolvable. I would like to propose that a commitment to aesthetic autonomy is best understood as a value, an important value no doubt, but not an unqualified one, since it is balanced and mitigated by other, competing values. Examples of such values might include social and political engagement – and hence much of what is normally considered under the heading of an openness to heteronomy – but there are also other values such as authenticity, spontaneity and self-expression that need to be taken into account. To produce a work of art is, implicitly or explicitly, to take a stand towards other works of art and to engage with the conventions and expectations that are generated by earlier art practice. Some contemporary artists continue to create works whose primary frame of reference is established by immanent problems of artistic form – here one might think, for example, of the large-scale abstract paintings produced by artists such as Sean Scully and Callum Innes, or works by Angela de la Cruz that explore the ambiguous territory between painting and sculpture. However, other artists use their practice to address a wide range of extra-aesthetic issues and concerns, tackling topics such as censorship, climate change, and racial and sexual discrimination. For these artists it is vital to find an appropriate means of connecting with the world, of bridging the gap between art and life, rather than remaining isolated within the sphere of art. However, if their work is to be successful as art rather than as mere agitation or propaganda, it has to sustain a meaningful connection with other artistic forms and practices, however radical or transformative this relationship may be. When the artist Ai Weiwei photographed himself dropping a 2,000-year-old piece of Han Dynasty pottery, he needed this to be understood not as an act of wanton vandalism but as an artistic engagement with the idea of creative destruction and the particular resonances this idea has acquired in modern-day



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China. The ‘aesthetic’ dimension of the work was secured in part by its presentation as a photographic triptych and the use of high-quality gelatin silver printing (Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995), but also by its relation to other works by the artist, including Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo (1994). Weiwei is perhaps unusual in the way he sustains this dual address to art and politics, engaging the one through the other even in apparently neutral works such as Sunflower Seeds, installed in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2010. This display of 100 million hand-crafted porcelain sculptures, whose sheer abundance ensures that they elude individual identification, was given political resonance by Weiwei’s oblique allusion to propaganda images from the Cultural Revolution in which the Chinese people were represented as sunflowers turned towards the figure of Chairman Mao depicted as the sun. However, even in the case of artists whose work lacks an explicitly political dimension, there remains a tension between aesthetic autonomy, understood in terms of an address to concerns that are internal to the practice of art, and the countervailing struggle to open art up to the world at large. Without the connection to the sphere of art, what would make Richard Long’s excursions through the English countryside different to those undertaken by any other individual, and how would we go about making sense of Fairy Tales (1995), a performance by Francis Alÿs, in which he allowed the unravelling blue thread of his jumper to trace a line behind him as he walked through the streets of Mexico City? This observation also holds true for artists associated with Nicolas Bourriaud’s conception of ‘relational aesthetics’ whose process-related practice does not depend on the production of a self-contained ‘work’ but involves various forms of audience participation.43 Although the artwork might consist in cooking a meal for gallery visitors (Rirkrit Tiravanija, Soup/No Soup, 2012) or blocking off the entrance to the Spanish pavilion at the Venice Biennale and only admitting those who hold a Spanish passport (Santiago Sierra, Palbra tapada, 2003), these interventions derive much of their meaning from their location within an art world context. It may seem that in employing Berlin’s analysis of value pluralism to characterize the sphere of art I have simply arrived, by other means, at the pluralistic concept of contemporary art that is defended by Danto. However, whereas Danto’s relaxed or tolerant pluralism identifies the post-historical present as ‘a period of quite perfect freedom’ in which ‘Everything is permitted’, the position I am defending here recognizes that value conflict is an intrinsic feature of contemporary art practice.44 It may be that in the domain of art certain conflicts of value first became pressing in their modern form as a result of the processes

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I have characterized in terms of the social autonomy of art. However, if I am right that artists must continue to negotiate the tension between art’s autonomy and its openness to wider social and political concerns, Danto’s claim that we live in an era in which all conflicts about the purpose and value of art have been resolved represents the recurrence of a ‘metaphysical chimera’. Here we might think of Berlin’s observation that the ‘notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution, in which all good things coexist’ is ‘not merely unattainable – that is a truism – but conceptually incoherent’.45 As with value conflict in other spheres, there is no single governing principle or priority rule that could be used to establish the priority of one value over another, nor can we arrive at a quantitative solution by reducing values to a common unit or measure such as ‘utility’. I am not claiming that such conflicts cannot be resolved in particular instances or that some things are forbidden – we do not need to dramatize the incompatibility of values.46 Nonetheless, the problems I have described are of real concern to artists working today. The unhinging of the concept of autonomy from its narrow identification with modernism allows us to recognize that it cannot simply be eliminated without loss.

Notes 1 See J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 4. 2 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Ak 4:431), translated by H. J. Paton, The Moral Law (London: Hutchinson, 1948), p. 93. Kant is discussing the third formulation of the supreme principle of morality, the so-called ‘Formula of Autonomy’. 3 I take this expression from Bernard Williams, ‘Conflicts of Values’, in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 71–82. 4 Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–1800 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 33. 5 Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1982), p. xv. 6 Podro, Critical Historians, p. xx. 7 See Heinrich Wölfflin, Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance [1899], trans. P. Murray and L. Murray (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1986), pp. 208–10.



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8 See Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art [1915], trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Press, 1950), pp. 1–13. 9 Charles Harrison, ‘Abstract Art: Reading Barnett Newman’s Eve’, in Frameworks for Modern Art, ed. Jason Gaiger (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 133. The paintings Harrison discusses are Paul Cézanne, Farmyard at Auvers, 1879–80 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and Edgar Degas, Dancer in her Dressing Room, c. 1878–9 (Reinhart Collection, Winterthur). 10 Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Nature of Abstract Art’, in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries. Selected Papers (New York: Braziller, 1979), pp. 187–8. 11 Schapiro, ‘The Nature of Abstract Art’, pp. 202 and 196. 12 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 1 (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 9. 13 Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, in The Collected Essays, vol. 1, p. 28. Cf. Greenberg’s observation: ‘I find that I have offered no other explanation for the present superiority of abstract art than its historical justification’ (p. 37). 14 Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, p. 34. 15 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, (ed.) John O’Brian, vol. 4 (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 86. Cf. Greenberg’s observation: ‘I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant. Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as, the first real Modernist’ (p. 85). 16 Cited in Robert Storr, Philip Guston (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), p. 53. 17 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, vol. 8, spring 1979, pp. 30–44. 18 Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. xiv. 19 Danto, After the End of Art, p. 147. 20 Danto, After the End of Art, p. xv. 21 Danto, After the End of Art, p. xiii. 22 Danto, After the End of Art, p. 197. According to Danto, ‘The concept of art, as essentialist, is timeless. But the extension of the term is historically indexed – it really is as if the essence reveals itself through history’ (p. 196). 23 Danto, After the End of Art, pp. 47 and 4. 24 Danto, After the End of Art, p. 114. Cf. Danto’s observation: ‘How wonderful it would be to believe that the pluralistic art world of the historical present is a harbinger of political things to come!’ (p. 37). 25 Danto, After the End of Art, p. 7.

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26 Danto, After the End of Art, p. 48. 27 I argue for this position in Jason Gaiger, Aesthetics and Painting (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 91–115. 28 Alex Potts, ‘Autonomy in Post-war Art, Quasi-Heroic and Casual’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 72, no. 1, 2004, p. 46. Potts draws on the work of Jacques Rancière, who also criticizes the standard view. See Jacques Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy’, New Left Review, vol. 14, March–April 2002, pp. 133–51. 29 Jason Gaiger, ‘Dismantling the Frame: Site-specific Art and Aesthetic Autonomy’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 69, no. 1, 2009, pp. 43–58. 30 Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Liberty, (ed.) Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 177. 31 Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, p. 170. 32 Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, p. 178. 33 Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, p. 174. 34 Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, pp. 190–1. 35 Cf. Danto’s observation that ‘the political analog of modernism in art was totalitarianism, with its ideas of racial purity and its agenda to drive out any perceived contaminant.’ Danto, After the End of Art, p. 70. 36 Danto, After the End of Art, p. 37. The ‘Age of Manifestos’ is, for Danto, another term for the era of modernism (see p. 29). 37 Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, p. 212. 38 Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’, pp. 213–14. 39 Williams, ‘Conflicts of Values’, p. 72. Williams concurs with Berlin in contending that ‘value-conflict is not necessarily pathological at all, but something necessarily involved in all human values, and to be taken as central by an adequate understanding of them’ (p. 72). 40 Williams, ‘Conflicts of Values’, pp. 74–5. 41 See Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme [1946] (Paris: Nagel, 1970), pp. 39–43. 42 Williams, ‘Conflicts of Values’, p. 74. 43 Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthétique relationelle (Dijon: Les presses du réel), 1998. 44 Danto, After the End of Art, p. 12. 45 Isaiah Berlin, ‘On the Pursuit of the Ideal’ [1988], in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, (ed.) Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). p. 13. 46 See Berlin, ‘On the Pursuit of the Ideal’, p. 18.



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References Berlin, Isaiah (1998) ‘On the Pursuit of the Ideal’ [1988] in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, (ed.) Henry Hardy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —(2002) ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ [1958], in Liberty, (ed.) Henry Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Bourriaud, Nicolas (1998) Esthétique relationelle, Dijon: Les presses du réel. Danto, Arthur C. (1997) After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gaiger, Jason (2008) Aesthetics and Painting, London and New York: Continuum. —(2009) ‘Dismantling the Frame: Site-specific Art and Aesthetic Autonomy’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 69, no. 1. Greenberg, Clement (1986a) ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, (ed.) John O’Brian, vol. 1. Chicago, IL, and London: The University of Chicago Press. —(1986b) ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, in The Collected Essays, vol. 1. —(1993) ‘Modernist Painting’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, (ed.) John O’Brian, vol. 4. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press. Harrison, Charles (2003) ‘Abstract Art: Reading Barnett Newman’s Eve’, in Frameworks for Modern Art, (ed.), Jason Gaiger, CT, New Haven and London. Kant, Immanuel (1948) Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Ak 4:431), translated by H. J. Paton, The Moral Law. London: Hutchinson. Krauss, Rosalind (1979) ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, vol. 8, spring. Podro, Michael (1982) The Critical Historians of Art. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Potts, Alex (2004) ‘Autonomy in Post-war Art, Quasi-Heroic and Casual’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 72, no. 1. Puttfarken, Thomas (2002) The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–1800. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Rancière, Jacques (2002) ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy’, New Left Review, vol. 14, March–April. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1970) L’Existentialisme est un humanisme [1946]. Paris: Nagel. Schneewind, J. B. (1998) The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schapiro, Meyer (1979) ‘The Nature of Abstract Art’ [1937], in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries. Selected Papers. New York: Braziller. Storr, Robert (1986) Philip Guston. New York: Abbeville Press. Williams, Bernard (1981) ‘Conflicts of Values’, in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Wölfflin, Heinrich (1986) Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance [1899], trans. P. Murray and L. Murray. Oxford: Phaidon Press. —(1950) Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art [1915], trans. M. D. Hottinger. New York: Dover Press.

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Aesthetic Autonomy and Identifying non-Western Art Annelies Monseré

Preface This chapter is mainly situated within the tradition of analytic aesthetics. It concerns the formalist conception of aesthetic autonomy as found in the writings of Clive Bell and Roger Fry. This conception of aesthetic autonomy should be clearly distinguished from other conceptions of aesthetic autonomy found in (neo-) Marxist traditions and often referred to as ‘artistic autonomy’. Although both conceptions are normative, the latter entails that the field of art should be autonomous and should not be instrumentalized by other fields of society, while the former conception claims that the essence of art and art’s value should be situated in the artwork’s aesthetic features only. Therefore, any cognitive, functional or moral features an artwork may have are seen as inessential to art-hood and artistic value. This chapter will reject the formalist notion of aesthetic autonomy. However, this in no way implies a rejection of artistic autonomy. More specifically, this chapter deals with the formalist identification of non-Western artefacts as art. Consequently, several debates come together, namely the debate on the identification of art, on the universality of art and on the role of aesthetics in theories of art. The issues addressed here are not only relevant to the theoretical debate within analytic aesthetics, but also to cultural studies, art history and the anthropology of art, since this paper sheds new light on concerns like the universality of art, cultural appropriation of non-Western artefacts and cultural exclusion.

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Introduction ‘Aesthetic autonomy’ has many different, yet related, meanings. The concept may entail the idea that the development of the aesthetic within the field of the arts is autonomous: that this development is not influenced by the course of history. Furthermore, the term may have a more normative significance: the realm of art coincides with the realm of the aesthetic and should not be influenced by extraaesthetic concerns like politics and morality. In this chapter, I will be concerned with what could be called ‘the formalist notion of aesthetic autonomy’ that is largely derivative of Clive Bell’s formalist theory of art.1 Accordingly, the idea of ‘aesthetic autonomy’ that will be addressed here minimally implies that (1) it is possible to identify and appreciate (some) artworks solely on the basis of aesthetic features, and that (2) these aesthetic features can be identified and judged as art-making features independently of any other features an artwork may have.2 Thus, aesthetic autonomy does not pertain to the idea that art has no instrumental value, such as cognitive, emotional, social, cultural or political value, but holds that these instrumental values are essential neither to art status nor to art appreciation. The formalist notion of aesthetic autonomy contributed much to the view that cultures besides the West have art and that we are capable of identifying these artworks. The inclusion of non-Western3 artefacts into the domain of art owes much to the view that art can and should be appreciated only on account of its formal properties. Neither historically preceding nor succeeding theories of art can easily include non-Western artefacts. Imitation theories, which argue that the essence of art is imitation, cannot account for the fact that realistic representation has not been a major concern in many non-Western artistic practices. Institutional and historical definitions define art in terms of the artefact’s relationship to certain institutional structures4 or to earlier uncontested artworks,5 to which much non-Western art is unrelated.6 However, non-Western artefacts do possess form, and this form may be judged aesthetically independently of other features these artefacts may exhibit. As such, the formalist notion of aesthetic autonomy seems very inclusive: both Western and non-Western artefacts are identified as art and are judged aesthetically side by side. Still, theories of art that imply this type of aesthetic autonomy (i.e. formalist theories) are by no means unproblematic: they include artefacts, including non-Western artefacts, in the domain of art on very narrow Western criteria, namely decontextualized form. As such, they ignore all other meanings, whether



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cultural, political or cognitive, the artefacts may have. Applied to non-Western artefacts, this theory reinforces cultural appropriation: these artefacts are identified and appreciated as art only insofar as they are stripped from their specific cultural significance and functions.7 The aim of this chapter is twofold. On the one hand, I will show that it is necessary to exclude aesthetic autonomy from the philosophical study of art. We cannot justly identify and appreciate art on account of aesthetic form only. It will be shown that this problem is still relevant since many accounts, some explicitly, but most implicitly, entail (some degree of) aesthetic autonomy. Yet, on the other hand, I will show that the ways in which aesthetic autonomy has been rejected have had unfortunate consequences. As the aesthetic autonomy thesis has been proven to be false, many have argued that there are no grounds to grant non-Western artefacts art-hood. Thus, the rejection of the formalist categorization of non-Western artefacts as art seems to necessarily imply that non-Western artefacts cannot belong to the category of ‘art’ tout court. Moreover, from the fact that aesthetic autonomy needs to be rejected, it seems to follow that there is no place for aesthetics whatsoever in theories of art. In other words, it is claimed that aesthetic properties cannot legitimately play a role in the identification of art. It will be shown that these consequences are unwarranted and do not necessarily need to follow from the rejection of aesthetic autonomy.

Formalist aesthetic autonomy From the outset, aesthetic autonomy should be distinguished from artistic autonomy. The latter concept, as understood in this chapter, entails that the realm of art is autonomous and, as such, should not be instrumentalized by other fields of society. While all notions of artistic autonomy entail that the domain of art is autonomous, a clear distinction needs to be made between what Casey Haskins calls ‘strict autonomism’ and ‘instrumental autonomism’. Strict autonomism presupposes that artistic value is necessarily a form of intrinsic (aesthetic) value, while instrumental autonomism states that the artistic value of an artwork can be intrinsic (aesthetic) as well as instrumental (such as cognitive and moral). The latter view on artistic autonomy may be situated in more Marxist traditions whereas the former is associated with formalism.8 Aesthetic autonomy, as it will be addressed here, goes hand in hand with strict autonomism, but not with instrumental autonomism. Hence, a rejection of aesthetic autonomy does not necessarily imply a rejection of artistic autonomy.9

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The formalist notion of aesthetic autonomy is largely derivative of Kant’s concept of ‘free beauty’. ‘Free beauty’ is beauty that does not presuppose a concept of what the object ought to be, nor the perfection of the object in accordance with it.10 ‘Dependent beauty’, on the other hand, presupposes the concept of the end that determines what the thing should be.11 Nick Zangwill clarifies the distinction as follows: ‘The dependent beauty of a thing is the beauty that it has as a thing with certain function. Since something has a function only if it has a certain kind of history, a thing has dependent beauty only if it has a certain history. By contrast, the free beauty of a thing is independent of its function’.12 Formalists have applied this idea of free beauty to art13 and are, as such, the main defenders of the idea that art has aesthetic autonomy.14 They suggest that the aesthetic features of art are autonomous and thus not informed by what the object is supposed to be: the domain of the arts is completely separated from the actual lives we lead.15 Thus, the aesthetic appreciation of art is wholly dependent on the artwork’s form and uninformed by moral and cognitive features the artwork may have. This type of aesthetic autonomy is to a large extent initiated by and well exemplified in the writings of Clive Bell and Roger Fry. The former (in)famously claimed: ‘In a work of art nothing is relevant but what contributes to formal significance. Therefore all informatory matter is irrelevant and should be eliminated.’16 According to Bell, this explains why great art remains stable and unobscure: the feelings it awakens are independent of time and place.17 In Bell’s view, aesthetic autonomy not only concerns the appreciation of art, but also art’s conception. The form, more specifically the form that engenders aesthetic emotions, of the artwork is not only the artwork’s only evaluative feature, but also its only essential feature: it is what all artworks universally share. Bell states: What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Santa Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cézanne? Only one answer seems possible – significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions.18

Formalism may be understood as a reaction against classical imitation theories of art that were still prominent at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both Fry and Bell underline that imitation cannot be the essence of art, otherwise it would be ‘surprising that the works of such arts are ever looked upon as more



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than curiosities, or ingenious toys.’19 Bell argues that representational content is not bad in itself, but strictly irrelevant for art appreciation and art status.20 Form, however, is what is shared by all artworks regardless of their medium, and is art’s unique function. Indeed, artworks may be concerned with religious, moral or political concerns and aims. Yet, many other things share these aims and generally do a better job.21 This chapter will argue that, however valuable formalism has been for the philosophy of art, it provides an indefensible standard for the appreciation and conception of art. Certainly, much art can be judged as free beauty: we can appreciate the artwork’s aesthetic surface without taking into account what the artwork is supposed to be. Nonetheless, it will be shown that this is not a legitimate way to judge art, as art is always made with an intention in a specific (art) historical context. To enjoy the work aesthetically as art requires that our appreciation is mediated by the belief that it is a real product of artifice.22 Identifying and appreciating art only on account of formal aesthetic properties has dire consequences for the categorization of artworks worldwide, as will be shown in the next section.

Aesthetic autonomy and non-Western art It cannot be ignored that formalism, and more specifically the idea of aesthetic autonomy to which formalists adhere, made possible the inclusion of non-Western artefacts within the domain of art. The idea of form, at least in principle, promised access to all kinds of art.23 Formalism explains why much of past art is still seen as worthwhile, despite the fact that the sentiments it expresses and the ideas it represents are now obsolete or refuted.24 Likewise, we can appreciate non-Western art because of its aesthetic form, although we do not adhere to the religions or lifestyles they represent or embody. Formalists affirm human universality with regard to art: their attempt to identify underlying universal features present in all or nearly all artistic forms presupposes ‘the existence of a fundamental human nature, a set of characteristics, including interests and desires, uniformly and cross-culturally present in the constitution of human persons’.25 Formalism is not only in theory inclusionary towards non-Western art traditions. Roger Fry as well as Clive Bell explicitly discuss the merits of these artistic traditions.26 Bell argues that ‘primitive’27 cultures have ‘created the finest works of art that we possess’.28 As these cultures are not concerned with representation

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or technical skill, they can fully focus on what is essential to art, namely form.29 In a similar vein, Roger Fry judged the artistic merits of ‘Negro sculpture’30 to be superior to those of Western sculpture. This superiority stems from the fact that their makers do not aim to attain representational accuracy and can concentrate entirely on the imaginative significance of their art.31 Therefore, formalism, at first sight, seems very inclusive: modern art and ‘primitive’ artefacts can be judged artistically side by side based on decontextualized formal similarity between them.32 Still, this approach is by no means unproblematic. First, formalism is a theory that may be seen as ‘propaganda for a particular artistic movement, dressed up as philosophical reflection’.33 Formalism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century when there was a tendency towards abstraction in painting and the theory tried to establish and defend the art-hood and artistic value of these paintings. Still, as noted above, formalism claimed to be universally applicable. It follows that the art-hood of non-Western artefacts is established on account of standards derived from modern art. Consequently, they are only granted art-hood in the light of modern art: non-Western artefacts are merely valuable as art when they are acquired and judged by Europeans. Bell’s and Fry’s celebration of primitive art in fact entails a re-encoding of the primitive as the modern and may be seen as a confirmation and a validation of the modern West’s dominance over the non-West.34 Second, as formalists see other features artworks may have, such as representation, emotional and religious content, as irrelevant for art status and art appreciation, all artworks, including non-Western art, are seen aesthetically only in the light of formal qualities. In this way, formalism appropriates non-Western art: it is included through denying any original meaning and exclusively focusing on a particular cultural interest, namely form.35 Third, formalism exhibits an ambiguous position regarding the meaning of the intentions of the art-maker for the artwork. On the one hand, it is claimed that the intention to create significant form is a necessary condition for art-hood.36 On the other hand, we need not care about the intentions of the makers as such, since to appreciate a work of art we only need to bring with us ‘a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space’.37 The idea that the intended primary function of art is exhibiting significant form cannot be right, as many of the greatest works of art were produced with different primary intentions.38 On the other hand, the claim that the intentions of the maker do not inform our appreciation of artworks is unjustified. Blocker, along with many others, has convincingly argued that ‘[i]f we are to understand an artifact of any sort,



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we must have some knowledge of the intentions of its maker’.39 Indeed, we can appreciate non-Western art ‘in our terms’, just as we can appreciate art as wallpaper and vice versa.40 However, Blocker rightly suggests that ‘We would enjoy the objects as we assimilate and expropriate them into our own cultural perspective, but we would not communicate or share our appreciation with the people who made and used them’.41 Therefore, taking an artwork for a merely aesthetic object is misperceiving it.42 Now, the question must be addressed whether this criticism is still relevant in the contemporary context of the philosophy of art. No one seems to defend a radical form of formalism (it can even be questioned if anyone ever did) and the rejection of aesthetic autonomy seems very ‘accepted’.43 However, I will argue that aesthetic autonomy is still present, whether openly or tacitly, in many leading theories and definitions of art.

Explicit and implicit manifestations of aesthetic autonomy Formalism, along with aesthetic autonomy, has been criticized from many different perspectives. Philosophers of art have mainly countered this theory because it cannot account for much avant-garde art, like conceptual art.44 Recently, however, philosophers of art have argued that avant-garde art has been too central in our thinking and philosophizing about art. Denis Dutton, for example, argues that we should not worry too much about the inclusion of avant-garde artworks as they are ‘an infinitesimally small class of cases’.45 In a similar vein, Nick Zangwill has maintained that the philosophy of art has granted a disproportionate amount of significance to such avant-garde artworks.46 Although he is unwilling to defend formalism in its radical form, Zangwill maintains that formalism has been unjustly maligned and that ‘it is an approach that is well placed to make sense of the value that we place on art’.47 Therefore, he develops and defends a position called ‘moderate formalism’.48 Zangwill argues that extreme formalism was rightly attacked for being exclusionary and reductionist, but maintains that a more moderate version of formalism is desirable, since ‘[d]eploying the notion of the aesthetic is essential if we are to understand art because it is essential if we are to explain our attitudes to art, and it is essential if we are to justify our attitudes to art’.49 He argues that there are artworks with formal, with non-formal and with both kinds of aesthetic properties.50 Unlike extreme formalists, he does not ignore the relevance of dependent beauty with regard to art. Still, he maintains that formal

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aesthetic properties take precedence over non-formal ones, and, more importantly, that there are artworks with only formal aesthetic properties.51 On the one hand, it may be argued that the claims of the moderate formalist are so modest that they are virtually trivial. Unlike Bell, Zangwill argues that formalism is a thesis about aesthetic properties of works of art and not about the conception of art.52 He adjusts Bell’s ‘infamous’ phrase, namely, ‘To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and color and a knowledge of three-dimensional space’,53 by deleting the ‘nothing but’. As such, Zangwill argues that to appreciate a work of art we need to bring with us a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space. This, he argues, is almost always true.54 Thus, moderate formalism may be read as a plea to not ignore formal features of an artwork. Although commendable in itself, this is not a very strong position. On the other hand, it has already been adequately argued that few aesthetic qualities in art are formal and many are representational or contextual.55 Zangwill’s claim that there are purely formal works of art is not at all unproblematic. The examples he gives are mature Mondrians and Islamic decoration.56 He puts Mondrian and Islamic decoration side by side on the base of formal properties. Again, it is possible to appreciate the free beauty of these artworks, but cultural meanings of both Western and non-Western artefacts are completely ignored. Neither Mondrian’s later work nor Islamic decoration can be seen as purely formal artworks; they acquire extra-aesthetic meanings that influence the aesthetic properties of the artwork through their place in history, the intentions of the maker, their religious function and so on. As such, moderate formalism does not avoid the pitfalls of extreme formalism; it just acknowledges that not all aesthetic properties are purely formal. More noteworthy, and more influential, are the approaches that seem to explicitly reject formalism and the formalist notion of aesthetic autonomy, but implicitly pay due to it. I will focus on two kinds of theories: anti-essentialist theories of art, and relational definitions of art. The latter allow that we cannot fully accommodate for non-Western art in relational definitions and claim we need disjunctive definitions whereby the second disjunct can account for non-Western art. Morris Weitz, Paul Ziff and other anti-essentialist philosophers introduced the idea that art cannot be defined, bearing in mind centuries of failed attempts at defining art and the diversity of artistic practice, but can only be identified.57 Two anti-essentialist identification theories are offered: the resemblance-toparadigm and the cluster theory of art. The former proposes that to identify



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art-hood one has to decide whether the artefact under consideration is similar to paradigmatic artworks.58 The latter starts from the idea that there are bundles of properties, none of which need be present but most of which are, when we describe things as works of art.59 The resemblance-to-paradigm account has been criticized for the reason that it is unclear what kind of resemblances are sufficient for identifying an artefact as art. What has not been fully addressed is that this problem has significant implications for the identification of non-Western artefacts as art. It should be noted that Weitz does not elaborate on non-Western art and focuses exclusively on avant-garde art.60 Still, it is easy to see how non-Western art could be included into the realm of art according to the resemblance-to-paradigm theory. Non-Western artworks may be seen as art because of formal similarities between them and Western paradigmatic artworks. Because these anti-essentialists leave unspecified what kinds of similarities are relevant, their theory entails an implicit defence of aesthetic autonomy with regard to non-Western art: the art-hood of artefacts can be identified through pure formal similarity with paradigmatic artworks. The cluster accounts developed by Berys Gaut and Denis Dutton, among others, face similar problems.61 They claim that the art-hood of an artefact can be identified when it meets some of the criteria that are included in their list of non-necessary but jointly sufficient criteria for art-hood. Both Gaut’s and Dutton’s lists include ‘formal properties’ as a criterion for art-hood.62 However, they do not specify which properties are applicable when and, consequently, do not pay due to the fact that the reason why something is an artwork in the twentieth century Western world is not necessarily a reason why something is art in other times and cultures. Thus, an artefact can be accorded art-hood for the historically wrong reasons. It follows that, again, non-Western art can be bestowed art-hood based on, amongst others, purely formal aesthetic properties. Stephen Davies proposes a relational definition of art.63 Nevertheless, he rightly argues that relational definitions cannot convincingly accommodate non-Western art, because many non-Western societies lack distinctively structured art institutions and a conscious art-historical background. In order to define non-western art, he invokes aesthetic properties such as beauty, grace, internal unity, tension, serenity, spikiness and so on.64 Two problems follow from this approach. First, it is unclear why non-Western art should be treated separately in a definition of art. It becomes plain that aesthetic features are invoked to define art, only when the relational theory proves inadequate. Non-Western art cannot be defined by the main definition, but Davies does not allow for the conclusion that the main definition must be amended in

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order to be able to accommodate a large part of the world’s artistic output. Second, his aesthetic account of non-Western art implies aesthetic autonomy. While he acknowledges that without appropriate knowledge of an artwork’s background we are in danger of not being able to identify the artwork that is there,65 it is noteworthy that Davies claims that we can recognize the artiness of non-Western artefacts through formal aesthetic properties without any background knowledge.66 Although it will be agreed that we can recognize the artiness of many non-Western artefacts, it does not follow that we can identify and appreciate these objects in a ‘right way’.67 Later on, Davies seems aware of this problem and correctly claims that in order to be identified as art, the aesthetic character of the artefact in question must be relevant to its main function.68 This plainly contradicts his claim that the aesthetic properties of these artworks are knowable to us without the appropriate knowledge of their background. Although Davies has convincingly shown that other relational definitions of art are inadequate and incomplete to the extent that they fail to account for non-Western art, his alternative is confused and implicitly pays due to the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy. Thus, aesthetic autonomy often (implicitly) plays a part in theories of art. Despite this, it has been widely and rigorously rejected with regard to art in general and, more specifically, with regard to non-Western art. As has been shown above, this rejection was necessary and legitimate. Still, it has had unfortunate consequences for the art status of non-Western artefacts and the place of aesthetics in the philosophy of art.

Implications of the rejection of aesthetic autonomy Rejecting the formalist categorization of non-Western artefacts as art has had two somewhat conflicting consequences. On the one hand, art historians, anthropologists and, to a lesser degree, philosophers have argued that since the formalist categorization of non-Western artefacts as art has to be rejected, there are no grounds to accord art-hood to artefacts from non-Western cultures. On the other hand, it has been suggested, mainly by philosophers, that since the formalist conception of art is false in general, aesthetics cannot play a part in the identification of art in general, whether it concerns Western or non-Western artefacts. As noted above, the formalist categorization of non-Western artefacts as art has been widely rejected because non-Western art-makers could not have



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intended to create ‘significant form’ and, consequently, because including non-Western artefacts on account of significant form equals appropriation. Anthropologist Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and philosopher Gene H. Blocker have rightly argued for this position. Blocker maintains that we cannot tell whether a non-Western artefact is an artwork by just looking at it, however aesthetically beautiful it may be.69 Kasfir suggests, in a similar vein, that non-Western artefacts are only seen as purely aesthetic objects when Westerners have recontextualized them as art by, inter alia, granting these objects a place in art museums.70 As such, they rightly reject the formalist categorization of non-Western artefacts as art and, accordingly, the formalist notion of aesthetic autonomy. Thus, it is granted that non-Western artefacts are purely aesthetic objects only through recontextualization. However, does it follow that non-Western artefacts are art only insofar as Westerners recontextualize them as art? Kasfir and Blocker both seem to defend not only the former, but also the latter suggestion. Blocker suggests that ‘artifacts of preindustrial, non-Western societies that have no concept of fine art can be judged to be artworks when they are culturally so designated by Europeans’.71 Similarly, Kasfir simply states: ‘That from an African perspective, these objects are not art in the current Western sense is too well known to discuss’.72 Thus, according to Blocker and Kasfir, these artefacts are not art from the outset, but only become art through Western interventions. However, what is ‘art in the current Western sense’? Art in the current Western sense seems to either entail a formalist conception of art-hood, where aesthetic form, distinterestedness and non-functionality are art’s essential features73 or a narrow institutional conception of art-hood, where art is simply what is exhibited in art galleries and musea.74 Both conceptions of art have been rigorously and convincingly rejected, not only with regard to non-Western art. The criticisms of formalism are already discussed above: neither Western nor non-Western artefacts should be identified and appreciated solely on the basis of formal aesthetic properties. Narrow institutional conceptions of art have been thoroughly criticized because many cultures lack these institutions and because, as David Davies put it, ‘we have reason to preserve the intuition that objects are exhibited in art galleries because they are art, and not vice versa’.75 It is noteworthy that Kasfir and Blocker implicitly adhere to a (moderate) formalist conception of art. Indeed, as Noël Carroll argued, even many philosophers who do not endorse this conception of art seem persuaded by arguments subtly based upon it.76 Blocker appears to suggest that in order to call an artefact art there must be non-functional aesthetic properties, since he argues that we cannot call artefacts art when they were produced solely for religious or other

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utilitarian purposes. Moreover, he adheres to the formalist idea that art is made with the intention to be enjoyed aesthetically.77 Yet, even the majority of artworks that are part of the Western history of high art are to be seen as primarily functional artefacts. Virtually no religious painting, for example, is or was made with the intention to be appreciated on the basis of pure formal properties. The aesthetic properties that these artefacts exhibit are created in view of the functionality of the artefact. This in no way challenges the fact that we rightly call these paintings ‘art’. Paul Crowther has defended, not entirely unlike formalists, the idea that the terms ‘art’ and ‘the aesthetic’ are Western concepts, but conceptualize something that is of transhistorical and transcultural significance.78 Yet, very much unlike formalists, he has shown that aesthetic experience does not consist of the felt effects arising from the contemplation of harmonies of line and colour and is, as such, not separated from any function the artwork might have.79 Function and aesthetic properties interact in both Western and non-Western artworks. The function of an artefact and its aesthetic features should not be seen as two separate aspects: the aesthetic power an artwork possesses enables the functions it aims to perform, like ritual potency and religious contemplation.80 It follows that we cannot aesthetically appreciate art apart from the intended functions the artwork has. Crowther concludes that ‘the varieties of the aesthetic make at least indirect connections with other fundamental areas of experience’.81 Therefore, the dichotomies craft/art and functionality/aesthetics do neither hold for non-Western nor for Western art. The formalist conception of art is false not only with regard to non-Western art, but with regard to all art traditions: no artefact can be categorized as art on this formalist account. Indeed, it not only fails to provide a ground to establish art-hood for non-Western artefacts, but also fails for Western artworks. Therefore, a rejection of the formalist categorization of non-Western art as art does not need to imply that non-Western cultures do not have art unless their artefacts are re-encoded by Westerners. In contrast, some philosophers have rightly acknowledged that the formalist conception of art is overall false and that it can never be used to accord art-hood to artefacts, whether they are Western or non-Western. Arthur Danto has convincingly argued that any theory of art must be able to deal with indiscernibles.82 A theory of art must be able to show why two indiscernible objects can have a different object status and why one is rightly categorized as art while the other is not. Jerrold Levinson has compellingly pointed out that any theory must allow for the historicity of art.83 A theory of art must acknowledge that what may be an artwork is historically conditioned. History makes possible



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new conceptions of art. As such, a conceptual work of art, for example, could not have been made 300 years ago. Formalist theories of art, as they have both persuasively shown, do not meet these requirements. Consequently, Danto and Levinson do not take any of the formalist arguments to be correct. They, however, take this to imply that the field of aesthetics in general should be clearly distinguished from the field of art: neither aesthetic properties nor aesthetic experience should play a role in the identification or definition of art.84 Danto claims that ‘the relationship of aesthetics to art was always external and contingent’.85 Levinson sees the historical fact that aesthetic features have played a major role in artistic practices as a historical coincidence. These features, then, are contingent and not necessary features for art-hood.86 It is noteworthy that they often seem to suggest that an aesthetic conception of art is the same as a formalist conception of art. Levinson rightly criticizes what he calls the ‘Exhibited Quality Theory’ of art. This theory states that art-hood is a matter of intrinsic exhibited qualities and its effects on perceivers.87 Indeed, as Levinson states, effects on perceivers cannot be used as a self-sufficient indication of art-hood, since the emergence of the right sort of effects is generally conditioned, more or less subtly, on our recognizing the object as an artwork – an intended act of communication or expression – and usually an artwork of a particular genre and art-historical situatedness.88

Danto, in a similar vein, states that contemporary art has made us aesthetically responsive to all kinds of artefacts, including non-Western art, but that this does not transform them into works of art. Accordingly, aesthetic qualities do not provide a basis for distinguishing art from non-art.89 Likewise, Noël Carroll states that by making aesthetic experience the essence of art, ‘the aesthetic theorist, in the same breath, separates art from every other end (moral, cognitive, political, religious, and so forth), since the aim of art is an experience disconnected from everything else’.90 Yet, these criticisms are applicable to formalist aesthetic theories of art but not to all aesthetic conceptions of art. The aesthetic theorist need not separate art from every other end, since he or she does not need to make a formalist kind of aesthetic experience the essential feature of art-hood. Aesthetic experience is not necessarily the appreciation of the aesthetic properties of an artefact cut off from any other function or meaning which the artefact may have. As shown above, the aesthetic and functional properties of an artwork are never separated in our aesthetic judgement. Therefore, rejecting aesthetic autonomy, along with a formalist

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conception of art and aesthetics, does not need to imply a rejection of the role of aesthetic features in the identification of art in general. The rejection of aesthetic autonomy has been necessary and welcome. Yet, the actual rejection shows how deep the formalist conception of art, along with its notion of aesthetic autonomy, is anchored in the analytical philosophy of art and our thinking about art in general. Formalism provided a basis for defining and identifying art universally. This basis has been proven to be false. On the one hand, it seemed to follow that since the formalist grounding of the universality of art is false, art is not a universal phenomenon. As such, the formalist conception of art is taken to be, whether consciously or unconsciously, the correct conception of art. As this conception cannot be applied to artefacts in other cultures, art turns out to be a Western concept with Western instantiations only. This conclusion is false, as the formalist conception of art is not even applicable to Western artworks. On the other hand, the overall rejection of aesthetic autonomy lead to the idea that aesthetic features in general have nothing to do with the categorization of artefacts as art. The influence of the formalist conception of art has been so powerful that the field of aesthetics has come to be fully identified with formalist aesthetics. However, this identification is also false: accounts of the aesthetic that take into account extra-aesthetic matters may be found throughout the history of philosophy. The idea of aesthetic autonomy has been so powerful that all aesthetic theories are seen and judged from this perspective. Although pure aesthetic properties are not what is shared between all artworks worldwide, aesthetic properties in a fuller sense, as studied from Kant to Crowther, may provide a more solid basis for categorizing art worldwide.

Conclusion This chapter has shown that the formalist conception of aesthetic autonomy has had a significant impact on the philosophy of art. What is noteworthy is that this conception made possible the inclusion of non-Western artefacts into the field of art. However, the formalist categorization of non-Western artefacts as art has had damaging consequences. It lead to the appropriation and misappreciation of these artefacts. Not unimportantly, I have emphasized that this problem is still relevant, as many theories of art, whether explicitly or implicitly, still support aesthetic autonomy with regard to the conception and appreciation of art. Nonetheless, the rejection of the formalist notion of



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aesthetic autonomy has also been problematic for the place of non-Western artefacts and of aesthetics in the philosophy of art. On the one hand, as the formalist categorization of non-Western artefacts as art has been proven false, it has been argued that there is no such thing as ‘non-Western art’ as such. On the other hand, formalism has been rejected completely, and consequently all references to aesthetic features with regard to the conception and identification of art have been eliminated. This chapter has argued that both consequences are unfortunate as well as unnecessary. In this way, I hope to have paved the way for developing a universal account of art where aesthetics can play a role in explaining this universality.91

Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6

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10

Throughout this chapter, when the term ‘aesthetic autonomy’ is used, I am referring to ‘the formalist notion of aesthetic autonomy’, unless explicitly noted otherwise. See Clive Bell, Art (London, 1913). I acknowledge that the term ‘non-Western’ is in itself problematic, as it defines the opposite of oneself as lack and deficiency. I will use the term nonetheless, as there are no satisfactory alternatives at hand. George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (New York: Cornell University Press, 1974). Jerrold Levinson, ‘Defining Art Historically’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 19, no. 3, 1979. In order to accommodate for non-Western art, they have to stretch their definitions almost beyond recognition. Levinson, for example, substantially broadens the meaning of intentionalism and historicism in his article in order to account for non-Western art. See ‘Extending Art Historically’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 51, no. 3, 1993, p. 422. This problem is by no means limited to non-Western artefacts. The majority of Western artworks are also appropriated by this kind of appreciation. Casey Haskins, ‘Kant and the Autonomy of Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 47, no. 1, 1989, p. 43. Therefore, the formalist protest against treating a work of art as a substitute for politics, morality or religion can be fully supported without accepting the formalist alternative as such. See Confer Bohdan Dziemidok, ‘Artistic Formalism: Its Achievements and Weaknesses’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 51, no. 2, 1993, p. 190. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, (ed.) Paul Guyer, The

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Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §16; 5:229. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §16; 5:230. Nick Zangwill, ‘Beauty’, in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, (ed.) Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 332. Whether or not Kant intended for artworks to be seen as instances of ‘free beauty’ is a hotly debated issue. It has been convincingly argued by Casey Haskins that Kant defended instrumental autonomism and, as such, should not be seen as a formalist. Others have, in a similar vein, shown convincingly that Kant saw art as an instance of ‘dependent beauty’. See e.g. Denis Dutton, ‘Kant and the Conditions of Artistic Beauty’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 34, no. 3, 1994; Paul Guyer, ‘Free and Adherent Beauty: A Modest Proposal’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 42, no. 4, 2002; Christopher Janaway, ‘Kant’s Aesthetics and the “Empty Cognitive Stock” ’, Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 189, 1997; Ruth Lorand, ‘Free and Dependent Beauty – A Puzzling Issue’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 29, no. 1, 1989; Nick McAdoo, ‘Kant and the Problem of Dependent Beauty’, Kant-Studien, vol. 93, no. 4, 2002; Robert Wicks, ‘Dependent Beauty as the Appreciation of Teleological Style’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 55, no. 4, 1997. Formalism has been adequately defined as ‘a theory according to which the value of a work of art qua artwork – its artistic value – is constituted exclusively (radical version) or primarily (moderate version) by its formal aspects. Its ‘meaning’ or its (conceptual, cognitive, material, etc.) ‘content’ has no important consequences for its value.’ Moreover, formalism entails a specific conception of an artwork: the formal structure is what truly constitutes a work of art. See Dziemidok, ‘Artistic Formalism: Its Achievements and Weaknesses’, p. 185. Clive Bell, ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’, in Art in Theory. 1900–2000. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, (ed.) Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Blackwell, 2003), p. 110; Roger Fry, Vision and Design (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1937), pp. 11–22. Bell, Art, p. 144. ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’, p. 110. Ibid., pp. 107–8. Fry, Vision and Design, p. 23. Bell, ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’, p. 109. Noël Carroll, ‘Formalism’, in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, (ed.) Berys and Lopes Gaut, and Dominic McIver (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 112–13. Paul Crowther, ‘Creativity and Originality in Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 31, no. 4, 1991, p. 302. David Summers, Real Spaces. World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon Press, 2003), p. 28.



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24 Carroll, ‘Formalism’, p. 114. 25 Denis Dutton, ‘Aesthetic Universals’, in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, (eds) Berys and Lopes Gaut and Dominic McIver (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 280. 26 Although Bell seems to claim that primitive art is of the highest artistic value, it should be noted that this appreciation is not unambiguous. In some passages Bell praises these artworks, but he also denies them full artistic status because they are not the products of individuals, but rather have been produced unselfconsciously. This has been pointed out by, among others, Thomas M. McLaughlin, ‘Clive Bell’s Aesthetic: Tradition and Singificant Form’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 35, no. 4 (1977), p. 436; Marianna Torgovnick, ‘Making Primitive Art High Art’, Poetics Today, vol. 10, no. 2, 1989, pp. 314–21. Roger Fry’s writings on non-Western art reveal a similar ambiguous position. For example, he claims: ‘we have the habit of thinking that the power to create expressive plastic form is one of the greatest of human achievements, and the names of great sculptors are handed down from generation to generation, so that it seems unfair to be forced to admit that certain nameless savages have possessed this power not only in a higher degree than we at this moment, but than we as a nation have ever possessed it’. Fry, Vision and Design, p. 100. 27 Bell used the term ‘primitive’ when the term was still considered unproblematic. 28 Bell, ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’, p. 109. 29 Ibid., p. 108. 30 Not unlike Bell’s usage of the term ‘primitive’, Fry used the term ‘Negro sculpture’ when it was still considered an acceptable term. 31 Fry, Vision and Design, pp. 88–9. 32 Peter Gyorgy, ‘Between and After Essentialism and Institutionalism’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 57, no. 4, 1999, p. 425. 33 Nick Zangwill, ‘Feasible Aesthetic Formalism’, Nous, vol. 33, no. 4, 1999, p. 615. 34 Torgovnick, ‘Making Primitive Art High Art’, p. 304. 35 Paul Crowther, ‘Cultural exclusion, Normativity, and the Definition of Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 61, no. 2, 2003, p. 122. 36 See Carroll, ‘Formalism’. 37 Bell, ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’, p. 109. 38 Carroll, ‘Formalism’, p. 114. 39 H. Gene Blocker, ‘Aesthetic Value in Cross-cultural, Multicultural Art Study’, Arts Education Policy Review, vol. 95, no. 2, 1993, p. 26; Daniel J. Crowley, ‘Aesthetic Judgment and Cultural Relativism’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 17, no. 2, 1958, p. 189. 40 See Graham McFee, ‘The Artistic and the Aesthetic’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 45, no. 4, 2005, p. 375. Graham McFee rightly argues that ‘one’s calling a

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Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy painting, say, gaudy amounts to something different when one recognizes that the painting is an artwork from what it amounts to when one mistook the gaudy object for, say, wallpaper’. Blocker, ‘Aesthetic Value in Cross-cultural, Multicultural Art Study’, p. 27. McFee, ‘The Artistic and the Aesthetic’, p. 376. Convincing criticisms of formalism may be found in, for example, Noël Carroll, ‘Les Culs-de-Sac of Enlightment Aesthetics: a Metaphilosophy of Art’, Metaphilosophy, vol. 40, no. 2, 2009; Crowther, ‘Cultural Exclusion, Normativity, and the Definition of Art’; Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1981); Jerrold Levinson, ‘A Refiner’s Fire, Reply to Sartwell and Kolak’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 48, no. 3, 1990; Glenn Parsons, ‘Moderate Formalism as a Theory of the Aesthetic’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 38, no. 3, 2004. Noël Carroll mentions found art as a counter-example to formalism and argues that ‘[i]nasmuch as these found objects are art, it cannot be the case that the exhibition of significant form is a necessary condition for art status.’ Carroll, ‘Formalism’, p. 115. Denis Dutton, ‘A Naturalist Definition of Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 64, no. 3, 2006, p. 368. Nick Zangwill, ‘Are There Counterexamples to Aesthetic Theories of Art?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 60, no. 2, 2002, p. 112. He even adds that ‘[t]he idea that the philosophy of art should turn on such trivial, tedious, and transitory artists as Claus Oldenburg or Robert Rauschenberg is surely laughable’. Nick Zangwill, ‘Feasible Aesthetic Formalism’, p. 624. Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Aesthetic Creation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Zangwill, Aesthetic Creation, p. 3. ‘In Defence of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism’, Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 201, 2000, p. 478. ‘Feasible Aesthetic Formalism, pp. 612–13. Ibid., p. 618. Bell, ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’, p. 109. ‘Feasible Aesthetic Formalism’, pp. 617–18. Parsons, ‘Moderate Formalism as a Theory of the Aesthetic’. Zangwill, ‘In Defence of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism, p. 482. Morris Weitz, ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 15, no. 1, 1956; Paul Ziff, ‘The Task of Defining a Work of Art’, The Philosophical Review, vol. 62, no. 1, 1953. Weitz, ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’, pp. 31–2. Ibid., p. 33.



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60 Ibid., p. 32. 61 Their theories are set out in the following articles: Dutton, ‘A Naturalist Definition of Art’; The Art Instinct. Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009); Berys Gaut, ‘ “Art” as a Cluster Concept’, in Theories of Art Today, (ed.) Noël Carroll (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); ‘The Cluster Account of Art Defended’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 45, no. 3, 2005. 62 Dutton, ‘A Naturalist Definition of Art’, pp. 369–71; Gaut, ‘ “Art” as a Cluster Concept’, p. 33. 63 Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. ix. 64 ‘First Art and Art’s Definition’, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 35, no. 1, 1997, p. 27. 65 Ibid. 66 ‘Non-Western Art and Art’s Definition’, in Theories of Art Today, (ed.) Noël Carroll (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p. 207. 67 I am not trying to establish that there is (only) one ‘right way’ to appreciate an artwork. What is meant here is that artworks should be appreciated in ways that are compatible with the ways in which they are or were appreciated in their original context. A ritual artefact, for example, is not appreciated in a right way when the ritual is not taken into consideration. Likewise, to take a Western example, Duchamp’s Fountain is not appreciated in a right way when we appreciate its formal properties and do not take into account its meaning within the history of the Western avant-garde. 68 ‘First Art and Art’s Definition’, p. 29. 69 Blocker, ‘Aesthetic Value in Cross-cultural, Multicultural Art Study’, p. 26; ibid. 70 Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, ‘African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow’, African Arts, vol. 25, no. 2, 1992. 71 Blocker, ‘Aesthetic Value in Cross-cultural, Multicultural Art Study’, p. 26. 72 Kasfir, ‘African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow’, p. 47. 73 Kasfir equals the modernist idiom of art with the notion of ‘pure form’. Ibid. The Western connoisseur projects aesthetic considerations into these non-Western artefacts and, as such, Kasfir notes that ‘the Western connoisseur is the essential missing factor that transform artefact into art’. See ibid., p. 44. Blocker also connects art-hood to non-functional aesthetic properties. See Blocker, ‘Aesthetic Value in Cross-cultural, Multicultural Art Study’, p. 27. 74 Kasfir argues: ‘why not define art as those objects which are displayed on museum walls?’ Kasfir, ‘African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow’, p. 47. It should be noted that the institutional definition of George Dickie is less narrow than Kasfir’s suggestion.

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75 David Davies, ‘On the Very Idea of “Outsider Art” ’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 49, no. 1, 2009, p. 27. 76 Carroll, ‘Les Culs-de-Sac of Enlightment Aesthetics: a Metaphilosophy of Art’, p. 168. 77 Blocker, ‘Aesthetic Value in Cross-cultural, Multicultural Art Study’, p. 27; ibid. 78 Paul Crowther, ‘Defining Art, Defending the Canon, Contesting Culture’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 44, no. 4, 2004, p. 368. 79 Ibid., p. 369. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., p. 370. 82 Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. 83 Ibid.; Arthur Coleman Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box. The Visual Arts in Post-historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Levinson, ‘Defining Art Historically’; ‘Refining Art Historically’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 47, no. 1, 1989; ‘A Refiner’s Fire, Reply to Sartwell and Kolak’; ‘Extending Art Historically’. 84 However, they do not claim that aesthetics cannot play a role in the appreciation of art, as they all adhere, in some way or another, to artistic pluralism. 85 Arthur Coleman Danto, ‘Embodied Meanings, Isotypes, and Aesthetical Ideas’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 65, no. 1, 2007, p. 128. 86 Jerrold Levinson, ‘The Irreducible Historicality of the Concept of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 42, no. 4, 2002, p. 375. 87 ‘A Refiner’s Fire, Reply to Sartwell and Kolak’, p. 232. 88 Ibid., p. 233. 89 Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box, p. 94. 90 Carroll, ‘Les Culs-de-Sac of Enlightment Aesthetics’, p. 168. 91 An older version of this paper was presented at the conference ‘Aesthetic Autonomy and Heteronomy’, York, UK, in February 2011. I would like to thank the audience of the conference for their fruitful remarks. I am also grateful to Bart Vandenabeele and Violi Sahaj for their helpful comments.

References Bell, Clive (1913) Art. London. —(2003) ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’, In Art in Theory. 1900–2000. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 107–10. Blocker, H. Gene (1993) ‘Aesthetic Value in Cross-cultural, Multicultural Art Study’, Arts Education Policy Review, vol. 95, no. 2, 1993, pp. 26–9.



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Carroll, Noël (2001) ‘Formalism’, in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, edited by Berys and Lopes Gaut and Dominic McIver. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 109–19. —(2009) ‘Les Culs-De-Sac of Enlightment Aesthetics: A Metaphilosophy of Art’, [in English], Metaphilosophy, vol. 40, no. 2, April, pp. 157–78. Crowley, Daniel J. (1958) ‘Aesthetic Judgment and Cultural Relativism’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 17, no. 2: 187–93. Crowther, Paul (1991) ‘Creativity and Originality in Art’, [in English], British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 31, no. 4: October, pp. 301–9. —(2003) ‘Cultural Exclusion, Normativity, and the Definition of Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 61, no. 2, spring, pp. 121–31. —(2004) ‘Defining Art, Defending the Canon, Contesting Culture’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 44, no. 4, October pp. 361–77. Danto, Arthur (1981) The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Danto, Arthur Coleman (1992) Beyond the Brillo Box. The Visual Arts in Post-historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. —(2007) ‘Embodied Meanings, Isotypes, and Aesthetical Ideas’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 65, no. 1, winter, pp. 121–9. Davies, David (2009) ‘On the Very Idea of “Outsider Art” ’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 49, no. 1, January, pp. 25–41. Davies, Stephen (1991) Definitions of Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —(1997) ‘First Art and Art’s Definition’, Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 35, no. 1, spring, pp 19–34. —(2000) ‘Non-Western Art and Art’s Definition’, in Theories of Art Today, edited by Noël Carroll, University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 199–216. Dickie, George (1974) Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dutton, Denis (2001) ‘Aesthetic Universals’, in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, edited by Berys and Lopes Gaut, and Dominic McIver. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 279–91 —(2009) The Art Instinct (2009) Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution. New York: Bloomsbury Press. —(1994) ‘Kant and the Conditions of Artistic Beauty’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 34, no. 3, July, pp. 226–41. —(2006) ‘A Naturalist Definition of Art’ [in English], Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 64, no. 3, pp. 367–77. Dziemidok, Bohdan (1993) ‘Artistic Formalism: Its Achievements and Weaknesses’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 51, no. 2, spring, pp. 185–93. Fry, Roger (1937) Vision and Design. Middlesex: Penguin. Gaut, Berys (2000) ‘ “Art” as a Cluster Concept’, in Theories of Art Today, edited by Noël Carroll. University of Wisconsin Press, ch. 2.

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—(2005) ‘The Cluster Account of Art Defended’ [in English], British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 45, no. 3, July, pp. 273–88. Guyer, Paul (2002) ‘Free and Adherent Beauty: A Modest Proposal’ [in English], British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 42, no. 4, October, pp. 357–66. Gyorgy, Peter (1999) ‘Between and after Essentialism and Institutionalism’ [in English], Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 57, no. 4, autumn, pp. 421–37. Haskins, Casey (1989) ‘Kant and the Autonomy of Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 47, no. 1, winter, pp. 43–54. Janaway, Christopher (1997) ‘Kant’s Aesthetics and the “Empty Cognitive Stock” ’, Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 189, October, pp. 459–76. Kant, Immanuel (2000) Critique of the Power of Judgment. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, edited by Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield (1992) ‘African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow’, African Arts, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 40–53 and 96–7. Levinson, Jerrold (1979) ‘Defining Art Historically’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 232–50. —(1993) ‘Extending Art Historically’. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 51, no. 3, summer, pp. 411–23. —(1989) ‘Refining Art Historically’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 47, no. 1, winter, pp. 21–33. —(1990) ‘A Refiner’s Fire, Reply to Sartwell and Kolak’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 48, no. 3, summer, pp. 231–5. —(2002) ‘The Irreducible Historicality of the Concept of Art’ [in English], British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 42, no. 4, October, pp. 367–79. Lorand, Ruth (1989) ‘Free and Dependent Beauty – a Puzzling Issue’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 29, no. 1, winter, pp. 32–40. McAdoo, Nick (2002) ‘Kant and the Problem of Dependent Beauty’, Kant-Studien, vol. 93, no. 4, pp. 444–52. McFee, Graham (2005) ‘The Artistic and the Aesthetic’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 45, no. 4, October, pp. 368–87. McLaughlin, Thomas M. (1997) ‘Clive Bell’s Aesthetic: Tradition and Significant Form’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 433–43. Parsons, Glenn (2004) ‘Moderate Formalism as a Theory of the Aesthetic’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 38, no. 3, autumn, pp. 19–35. Summers, David (2003) Real Spaces. World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. New York: Phaidon Press. Torgovnick, Marianna (1989) ‘Making Primitive Art High Art’, Poetics Today, vol. 10, no. 2, summer, pp. 299–328. Weitz, Morris (1956) ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 27–35.



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Wicks, Robert (1997) ‘Dependent Beauty as the Appreciation of Teleological Style’ [in English], Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 55, no. 4, autumn, pp. 387–400. Zangwill, Nick (1999) ‘Feasible Aesthetic Formalism’, [in English], Nous, vol. 33, no. 4, December, pp. 610–29. —(2000) ‘In Defence of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism’ [in English], Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 201, October, pp. 476–93. —(2001) The Metaphysics of Beauty, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —(2002) ‘Are There Counterexamples to Aesthetic Theories of Art?’ [in English], Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 60, no. 2, spring, pp. 111–18. —(2003) ‘Beauty’, in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, edited by Jerrold Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch. 18. —(2007) Aesthetic Creation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ziff, Paul (1953) ‘The Task of Defining a Work of Art’, The Philosophical Review, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 58–78.

6

The Myth of the Autonomy Fault Line in Aesthetics Casey Haskins

Preface This chapter’s critical target is a pattern of thought, recently influential in the aesthetic disciplines but apparently on the wane now, which I call the myth of the autonomy fault line. Its central idea is that the field of theorizing about art and culture is in a fundamental way divided between two irreconcilable paradigmatic stances. One stance affirms the autonomous and universal character of works of art and the experiences they afford; the other stance denies such autonomy and universality in the name of various kinds of extra-artistic causation and justification. This way of modelling our conversations about the arts has an easily graspable dualistic structure, but it is a myth in both a pejorative and a descriptive sense. First, its implication that the kinds of arguments about the arts that scholars in the aesthetic disciplines routinely now have are of two distinct kinds – together with the corollary that scholarly sensibilities themselves also fall under two neat headings – is, empirically speaking, simply false. There are strong twentieth-century traditions of aesthetic theorizing, including pragmatism and neo-Marxism, whose works provide welcome counter-examples to the myth’s implication that one is either for or against the idea of autonomy in some basic sense. In recent scholarship, moreover, philosophical aestheticians, art historians, critics and theorists of the literary and performing arts, and others, are eclectic and collaborative in their methods to a much greater degree now than a generation ago. Second, this pattern of thought projects a larger narrative – a mythic narrative – of the field of aesthetic theorizing as structured around a deep disagreement about the transcendent-orimmanent nature, and the redemptive role of art in modern cultural life. This

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narrative is in some ways both analogous to and historically descended from older mythic themes of conflict, transcendence and redemption in Western religious traditions. It also has roots in the more modern, and post-Kantian, philosophical tradition of representing the autonomous or heteronomous character of human agency as ensnared in a basic paradox whose prototype is Kant’s Third Antinomy of Pure Reason in the first Critique. The first part of this chapter supports the above points with examples of recent scholarship from a variety of aesthetic disciplines. I then offer some concluding thoughts, drawing again upon analogies between the fields of aesthetic and religious thought, about what a ‘successor story’ to the fault line myth might look like if aesthetic scholarship continues to move away from earlier assumptions about the field’s defining intellectual conflicts.

The politicization of ‘autonomy’ in aesthetics Humanists who still speak of art as an autonomous domain, free from nature, history and ideology, are Eurocentric elitists. Postmodern theorists who deny art’s autonomy and universality embrace an incoherent relativism that blinds them to true aesthetic value. Or so run two familiar stereotypes of cultural thinkers that, not so long ago, fuelled certain conversations – and refusals of conversation – within the unruly, disunified network of disciplines and counterdisciplines that the field of aesthetics has become.1 These opposed and idealized stances – one denying art’s autonomy and embracing its contextual embeddedness, the other affirming autonomy and denying or playing down contextualization – are each other’s dialectical mirror image. My general theme is the failure of the polarized picture of the aesthetic field that these twin stances support, judged in terms of this picture’s inability to capture the evolving, interactive complexity of our conversations about artistic and other cultural subjects. But the first step to appreciating the problem is to acknowledge how seductive this late twentieth-century mode of meta-­ disciplinary thinking may still be for anyone who prefers to just get on with their specialized work as a philosophical aesthetician, art historian, musicologist, film or literary theorist and so on without having to worry about what this practice implies about the coherence of cultural inquiry now. The seductiveness I mean is not unique to aesthetics. It haunts any complex field of normative debate, for example, about ethical, political or religious subjects, where dualistic modelling can make the larger conversation



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appear structurally simpler than it actually is. In the present case, the practice of dividing the aesthetic field into arguments, theories, theorizers, or even whole disciplines, which either affirm or deny some primordial image of art as an autonomous area of practice can have the effect of conferring a sense of easily graspable moral order – a dualistic order – upon an otherwise dauntingly complex field of arguments, doctrines, evidentiary methods, hermeneutic biases, ideological alignments and so on. This sense of reflective elegance may be further accompanied in practice by a heroic feeling that one needs to defend an embattled and true intuition (whichever one it is) about art’s contribution to civilized life against forces of politicized distortion. On the other hand – speaking of politicization – this model’s implications for art-theoretical practice are not exactly democratic. For it suggests that there are, in the end, just two clashing paradigmatic ways of thinking about art, corresponding to two clashing communities of theorizers: those that are for and those that are against art’s autonomy (in some sense of that term) and universality, and only one of which is right. If this is the case, attempts to exchange reasons in creative ways about the arts, their continuity or discontinuity with moral political, spiritual and biological life, about beauty, the sublime, the nature of interpretation, and many other subjects across party lines become beside the point. But the deeper problem with this picture of what shapes our conversations about the meaning, histories and further inferential connections of artworks to other areas of life today is that it is a myth – the myth, I call it, of the autonomy fault line in aesthetics. This is true in two general ways that correspond to two familiar senses of ‘myth.’ With an eye to the word’s most common usage, we may initially think of a myth as simply (1) a falsehood which may be uncritically taken as truth. In another equally familiar but more anthropologically descriptive usage, a myth is (2) an explanatory story of origin that articulates a sense of sacred order, in a broad sense of that phrase, for a cultural community. It is an anthropological truism that people in all cultures consciously or unconsciously organize their thought and practice in mythically informed ways, against the background of any number of more historically specific pressures, aims and conflicts. In some cultural settings a myth may take the form of (2a) a full explanatory story of origin which, while being either literally false or unfalsifiable, still functions to impart a sense of meaningful sacred order on to the collective experience of a culture. But in others, especially in the hyper-selfinterpretive environments of Western modernity and global postmodernity, with all of their rapidly evolving forms of cultural exchange, identity and critical

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reflection, it may appear simply as (2b) a fragmentary symbolic marker for such a story. In such cases, the marker’s full meaning may either be uncontroversially accessible to all within the culture; or its meaning may be subject to interpretive disagreement, leading eventually to further critical reflection within the culture about its relation to other myths or myth fragments, about its integration or lack of integration within the culture’s larger system of representational practices and so on. One needn’t yet embrace the above thesis about the autonomy fault line, though, to agree that the history of aesthetics is a teeming hotbed of myths and myth fragments of all kinds, and that not all of them sustain critical scrutiny now. For example, the politicized debates about the values of twentieth-century cultural modernism were full of ideas about the essences of art, beauty, and many other subjects that many came to dismiss, in effect as myths in sense (1). The myth of the autonomy fault line is one of many outgrowths from this reflexively and creatively anxious modern environment. But, together with its individual components, it also has rich mythic roots in the sense of, if not (2a), then at least (2b). This reflects such facts as that modern ideas about subjects like artistic and aesthetic autonomy, creativity and conflict over sacred values are all traceable to earlier themes of divine creation, conflict and resolution which hark back to Judaeo-Christian theology or yet more ancient sources.2 I can now restate my main thesis more precisely. The fault line image of aesthetic debate, with its portrayal of two clashing tribes or parties, the Autonomists and the Heteronomists, is a myth, particularly in senses (1) and (2b). Before I turn to my supporting examples, it will help to make a couple of my operating premises more explicit. One such premise, which is at least anecdotally supported by my examples, is that the fault line structure fuelled a kind of meta-aesthetic orthodoxy within many disciplinary quarters of the aesthetic field and their scholarly literatures a generation ago. This was when the words ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ were still fighting words for diverse conservative and progressive cultural thinkers, soon to be replaced by ‘humanism’ and ‘posthumanism’, which have now also largely lost their tribalizing powers. The aesthetic field today is still certainly no one’s picture of an ideal speech community. But neither does it quite fit the lurid vision of an anarchy of incommensurable vocabularies, differends, language games and so on that inspired earlier generation theorists of postmodernism and many of their humanist antagonists. Even if any prophesies about the field’s future deserve to be taken with a grain of salt, there are growing signs that this particular mythically fuelled orthodoxy is irreversibly, if not entirely, on



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the way out. The main such sign is that art-theoretical conversation across the disciplines is gradually moving beyond late twentieth-century anxieties about whether aesthetics is dead, or whether the distinction between fine and useful art is a transcendental necessity of mental life, or whether it is not necessary and is instead contingently freighted with bourgeois ideology. These developments suggest, in turn, that the older, more Manichean agonistic climate is gradually evolving into one which, while still balkanized enough along disciplinary lines, increasingly favours fresh debate and interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as a new interest in reconstructing older notions of art, beauty, the sublime, aesthetic experience and, last but not least, autonomy.3 Another of my premises is that although all of these notions are rich in mythic meanings, ‘autonomy’ has a complexity in this regard that the others do not. This complexity reflects the central roles that ‘autonomy’ has played, not only in various familiar controversies in aesthetics and criticism since Kant but also in deeper philosophical puzzles about ethics, mind, language and the nature of modernity, in the sense of ‘modernity’ that connotes a culture concerned, or obsessed, with interpreting itself in myriad areas, not least in self-reflexive modernist art and its theory and criticism.4 Given that history, together with the romantic parallels between artistic and divine creation noted above, it is not surprising that answers to questions about whether, or in what senses, art is autonomous would become as politically polarized by the end of the high modernist era as were questions about whether morality requires a religious foundation a century previously. Both kinds of question represent specific modern faces of the more general, and primally contentious, Western conversation concerning whether the world order generally is best understood as comprising one or two metaphysical realms or spaces. For this tradition of conversation, embracing a one-space picture is often a mark of the this-worldly metaphysical sensibility known broadly as naturalism; embracing a two-space picture is similarly associated with some variety of idealism, wherein life within the natural, sensuous domain is interpreted as an image of, or a stepping stone to, something metaphysically non-sensuous and higher. Within this context, just as we may think of ‘God’ as marking out a second logical space, distinct from that of ‘nature’, within which self-sufficient, transcendent and sacred activities occur, so may this also be said of ‘autonomy’, at least in its idealized aesthetic versions. In both the religious and aesthetic cases, then, one of the deeper sources of politicization is a breakdown of agreement over how or whether to represent some key part of the world order, with all its attendant sacred and profane dimensions (in broad senses of these

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phrases), as consisting of one mythic space – a space of reasons, or of causes, or of both – or two. Academics in certain fields (especially philosophy) traditionally operate from an armchair confidence that they have mapped out all the main options for rational thought about important subjects. But such confidence seems particularly questionable now regarding the evolving folk intuitions (as experimental philosophers say) of reflective people, within and without the academy, about the relationships of the arts to other parts of the world order. More than ever, aesthetic inquiries would benefit from an empirically accurate portrait of what people actually believe in this area. While no such portrait alone could provide a solution to aesthetic theory’s philosophically complex autonomy problematic, it could at least provide fresh insight into how the burden of proof should be distributed among those who hew to classically autonomizing, heteronomizing and compatibilist positions with respect to traditional questions about artistic justification and explanation. This kind of empirical intelligence is now, as we speak, re-energizing the once similarly repetitive debate about artistic autonomy’s equally contentious cousin in ethics, the idea of the freedom (or autonomy) of the will.5 While we await such study about aesthetics, what is at least clear is that there are multiple arenas of academic discussion alone where divisions of intuition and reasoned opinion about aesthetic and artistic autonomy have, with varying civility and in different kinds of detail, unfolded since the peak of Cold War-era debates surrounding the claims of cultural modernism. There is, for example, the almost suspiciously polite, senior common-room-like debate among analytic aestheticians about artistic justification, featuring positions with names like ‘autonomism’, ‘moralism’, and ‘ethicism’.6 There is a similarly collegial debate among more Continentally conversant writers about how Adorno’s seminal ideas on autonomy (see below) might be extended and reconstructed to account for various developments in the art world and in cultural politics generally. I am primarily interested here not in these but in a third, more primal, arena of politicized confrontation. In the atmosphere of late Cold War-era identity politics, its instances often seemed to have less in common with their more collegial relatives mentioned above than with the kinds of preaching-to-theconverted and cold-shouldering tactics which then also pervaded, at least in America, public discussions of other hermeneutically charged topics such as evolution and creationism. It is commonplace in such confrontations for each side to resist using the other side’s language as well as to ignore key details of their arguments. So for example, just as it has long been a common practice



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among secular writers about ethical or political issues to not bother including theological perspectives or to use the word ‘God’ in critical discussions of their subjects, one form of autonomy-denial among culturally progressive writers was simply to drop usage of words like ‘autonomy’ and ‘aesthetic’ while at the same time playing up the discussions of the cultural, historical, psychodynamic and ideological contexts of images, narratives, films, music or dance pieces, and so on. This rhetorical favour was then returned in the refusal of some humanistic writers to use the vocabularies of their attackers.7 Such ‘non-confrontational’ confrontations have characteristically occurred not within a single aesthetic discipline but between disciplines, or between a well-entrenched discipline, such as philosophy of art or philosophical aesthetics, and its various anti-or inter- or in-disciplinary counterparts, such as cultural studies.

‘You must choose’ The attraction of many scholars to this kind of non-confrontational game has little, in aesthetic as in religious cultural politics, to do with their erudition or sophistication. Consider, for example, these lines with which Harold Bloom frames the interpretive literary essays in his The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages: I feel quite alone these days in defending the autonomy of the aesthetic, but its best defense is reading King Lear and then seeing the play well performed. King Lear does not derive from a crisis in philosophy, nor can its power be explained away as a mystification somehow promoted by bourgeois institutions. It is a mark of the degeneracy of literary study that one is considered an eccentric for holding that the literary is not dependent upon the philosophical, and that the aesthetic is not reducible to ideology or metaphysics… . Either there [are] aesthetic values, or there are only the overdeterminations of race, class, and gender. You must choose, for if you believe that all value ascribed to poems or plays or novels and stories is only a mystification in the service of the ruling class, then why should you read at all rather than go forth to serve the desperate needs of the exploited classes? … If literary canons are the product only of class, racial, gender, and national interests, presumably the same should be true of all other aesthetic traditions, including music and the visual arts. Matisse and Stravinsky can then go down with Joyce and Proust as four more dead white European males. When the School of Resentment becomes as dominant among art historians and critics as it is among literary academics, will Matisse go unattended while we all flock to view the daubings of the Guerilla Girls?8

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Bloom expresses his convictions with admirable directness, and his position will be immediately familiar to humanistic readers. Aesthetic autonomy here appears as an attribute of artworks which gives them a certain inferential insulation from ‘the overdeterminations of race, class, and gender’. For Bloom, the battle between these stances is one in which no prisoners are taken. That there is an enemy – the ‘School of Resentment’, in his wry phrase – is clear, even though specific representatives of this school are not named. One might first attribute Bloom’s failure to give a philosophical defence of his stance to his being a literary historian and critic, or to the fact that The Western Canon is not a meta-critical treatise but a book of readings of canonical texts from Chaucer to Beckett. But this absence of direct argument for a stance within the autonomy problematic’s more primal version is hardly unique to Bloom. It reflects an open secret of modern aesthetics which is a fitting follow-up to Adorno’s adage that nothing about art goes without saying. This is that large claims about art, beauty and similar subjects (including ‘art is autonomous with respect to the overdeterminations of race, class, and gender’ and ‘art expresses/is caused by dynamics of race, class, and gender’) operate at such a level of generality as to be, for all intents and purposes, unfalsifiable. Such unfalsifiability is also a property of many large-scale religious convictions – a parallel Bloom himself may have in mind when he suggests that in the end, simply, ‘you must choose.’ To ponder the merits of the stances of autonomy and anti-autonomy is, it would seem, to be in a position like that of Kierkegaard’s knight faced with a proverbial choice between God and unbelief, or William James’s pragmatic believer faced with options among which she cannot avoid selecting even while all go ‘beyond the evidence’. But consider now the introduction to another book published in the same year as Bloom’s: Visual Culture: Images and Interpretation, edited by art historians Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey and Norman Bryson. The editors, all social art historians, write: We can no longer see, much less teach, transhistorical truths, timeless works of art, and unchanging critical criteria without a highly developed sense of irony about the grand narratives of the past… . [This book represents] a general tendency to move away from the history of art as a record of the creation of aesthetic masterpieces, which constitute the canon of artistic excellence in the West, towards a broader understanding of their cultural significance for the historical circumstances in which they were produced, as well as their potential meaning within the context of our own historical situation… . Instead of applying a Kantian aesthetic, according to which value is an intrinsic characteristic of the



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work of art, one capable of being perceived by all human beings regardless of their location in time and place… [the book’s contributors] betray an awareness that the aesthetic value of a work depends on the prevailing cultural conditions. They invest the work with value by means of their appreciation of its meaning both in the cultural horizon of its production and its reception… . Once it is recognized that there is nothing intrinsic about [aesthetic] value, that it depends on what a culture brings to the work rather than on what the culture finds in it, then it becomes necessary to find other means for defining what is a part of art history and what is not.9

The word ‘autonomy’ does not appear here, but the marks of Bloom’s bête noir are evident. One of its centre-pieces is a scepticism towards the traditional veneration of ‘aesthetic masterpieces, which constitute the canon of artistic excellence in the West’. And although the authors do invoke a notion of aesthetic value, they tie it to a conception of ‘prevailing cultural conditions’ which sounds close enough to Bloom’s overdeterminations of race, class and gender. But despite being in these ways at dialectical loggerheads, both views share some striking structural similarities. Like Bloom, Holly, Moxey and Bryson say little about the specific arguments and identities of their opposition, beyond a broad reference to a ‘Kantian aesthetic’ and its general features. Also like Bloom, they believe that our culture is gripped by a fundamental disagreement about how to understand artistic values, and that it consists in a confrontation between two incommensurable perspectives. Although these writers don’t use the term ‘autonomy’ here, it seems clear that they would view claims about autonomy as corollaries of claims about ‘Kantian’ intrinsic transcultural aesthetic values (and vice versa). Consider now two further specimens of recent meta-aesthetic argument, drawn from Art History Versus Aesthetics, a collection of conversations among distinguished art historians and philosophers of art, organized around the following question: How might these disciplines today find common conversational ground, given their different methodological assumptions in addressing works of visual art? In ‘Aesthetics in Art History – and Vice-versa’, philosopher Paul Crowther argues that philosophical aesthetics and art history can authentically interact but only if their constituencies can agree that image-making possesses an intrinsic value and transhistorical significance for human beings – a kind of autonomy, in effect – which transcends the intellectual and political fashions of specific cultural and historical contexts. But it is just this point, he beieves, that is fundamentally rejected by many art historians and others who espouse ‘ “anti-foundationalist” cultural relativist’ approaches to their material, which draw strength from the environment of modern consumerism. The

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relativist/consumerist collusion is intellectually fuelled by ‘an unquestioning acceptance of the self-contradictory discourses of Foucault, Derrida, and the like’, which have in turn shaped ‘the dominant contextualist modes of recent art history’. For advocates of this approach to art history (Crowther mentions art historians Griselda Pollock, T.J. Clark, Norman Bryson and Keith Moxey as examples, although he does not discuss further details of their views), ‘Art per se is taken to amount to little more than ideas, theories, and their contexts of occurrence’. Such writers’ characteristic way of making the character of art as a fundamental mode of human making contingently dependent on historically fashionable modes of reception and theory is ‘tacitly racist to the profoundest degree’. In arguing along these lines, what such writers fail to appreciate is the explanatory primacy and transhistorically enduring nature of ‘the intrinsic significance of image-making’ – a fact of aesthetic life whose seminal analysis, in Crowther’s view, remains Kant’s theory of fine art and aesthetic ideas.10 In the opposite corner, here is Art History Versus Aesthetics contributor Keith Moxey, whom Crowther, in Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt,11 targets as a prime specimen of a contextualizing and relativizing art historian. (Crowther takes issue particularly with Moxey’s earlier The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox & Power in Art History.) In his contribution to Art History Versus Aesthetics entitled ‘Aesthetics is Dead: Long Live Aesthetics’, Moxey suggests, like Crowther, that the current methodological gulf between the two disciplines could in principle be traversed. But this can happen only on a condition which turns out to be the reverse of Crowther’s: namely that philosophical aesthetics would relinquish its traditional allegiance to a Kantianinspired vision of aesthetic judgement as unaffected by history or social circumstance. Moxey continues by expressing a scepticism, standard among socially minded art historians, about the ‘grand narratives’ underpinning much traditional writing in aesthetics and art history. Claiming that a reliance on such narratives denies ‘the infinite variety of human experience’, Moxey complains that none of the art historical or philosophical contributors to Art History Versus Aesthetics have fully acknowledged ‘the ways in which processes of postcolonial development or globalization impinge on the debate about the relation of aesthetics to art history’. Although Moxey is unforthcoming about who among recent philosophical aestheticians is remiss in postcolonial awareness, his implication is that this characterizes virtually the entire discipline. A tacit premise of his discussion is that not only are the arts themselves subject to the shifting contingencies of cultural and political history but so are debates about the arts – facts which tend to be marginalized or ignored by more abstractly



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philosophical discussions of what works of art, along with their characteristic modes of experience, valuation and so on, universally and essentially are. Moxey does, however, go on to locate one more specific source of philosophy of art’s historical difficulties in adequately acknowledging and analysing cultural difference: the universalizing impulse of Kantian aesthetics. Moxey locates an alternative to the Kantian tradition’s blindness to cultural differences in deconstructionist and Marxist approaches to cultural criticism (the traditions, as it happens, which Crowther (above) nominated as culprits in the postmodern-era collusion of consumerism and relativism). With such materials, future art historians and others might proceed not to reject the idea of aesthetic inquiry as such but to rethink or reconstruct it.12 These sketches scarcely capture the detail of Crowther’s and Moxey’s accounts of visual art, but we do not need detailed scrutiny to see that their dialectical collision is structurally of a piece with that in the accounts of Bloom and the Visual Culture writers. Further instances of this kind of collision are easily generated, since the pattern is in fact a staple of the critical literatures of all the arts.13 So what, stepping back, are this pattern’s general features? They include the following: 1. An identification of two paradigmatic options for theorizing art, one of which explicitly or implicitly attributes some version of autonomy to artworks and/or associated experiences and practices, the other of which denies this. 2. A characterization of these options as logically exclusive (the basis for the fault-line metaphor). 3. An unconditional valuation of one option over the other (which option that is will depend on further, more specific features of the arguer’s position, reflecting his or her further beliefs about art). 4. A tendency to characterize the rejected view and its supposed adherents in general terms which have the effect of equivocating between both. 5. An implication, perhaps only hinted at rather than stated, that the preferred option is superior to its rival because of what it implies about what the arts should do and how we should regard them in a healthy civilization (say, our global civilization now). 6. A failure to provide a suitably stance-neutral procedure, either conceptual or empirical, by which one of the options can be accepted and the other rejected in a way that doesn’t raise circularity problems vis a vis the stated premises of the preferred position.

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More on the epistemological implications of (6) below. But note, first, a further implication of (5) that is not explicit in the above formulation. This is that the two hypothetically clashing stances in this idealizing picture of the field of meta-aesthetic activity, while being about practices of aesthetic judgement, are themselves, broadly speaking, moral stances. Their dialectical conflict arises from the fact that each at least implicitly condemns the other as a view that should not be adopted if one cares about further, as yet unspecified, aspects of the health of civilization. Each stance to this extent bears the marks of what evolutionary moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls a ‘moral matrix’ – a constellation of beliefs about a normative subject which functions to bind believers together in a moral, religious or political community at the price of their being thereby blinded to a sympathetic assessment of the beliefs of other communities.14 Moral matrices encompass a wide spectrum of harmonizing or clashing stances regarding moral, aesthetic, political or religious subjects – in effect, sacred subjects. When a group’s members find their sacred objects or practices challenged by those of other groups, the result can be a kind of politicization that finds expression in the rhetoric of non-negotiable conflict. From this perspective, there is nothing surprising about how groupishly defensive and aggressive attitudes about art and its methods of inquiry inform the logic of the variants of the fault line stance we have been considering. Nor is it surprising that these attitudes may also, within a culture that treats artworks as sacred and possesses a legacy of mythic narratives of conflicts fought over non-negotiable values, become reified in ways that project a larger narrative of a seemingly unending conflict of necessarily opposed elements. It is tempting here to say, in a Freudian spirit, that the pleasures of narcissistically reified and rationalized group aggression may in the end resist even the most heroic efforts at sublimation in the name of more enlightened (and Enlightenment-inspired) democratic conversation. But this Enlightenment back story becomes yet more tangled when we consider one important sense in which it isn’t straightforwardly irrational to embrace such a conflict narrative in aesthetics or in other areas (like ethics) whose disputes over autonomy and heteronomy can take on such virulence. Indeed, what can make it difficult to argue with anyone who identifies with one or the other of such a conflict’s polarized intuitions is that the formal structure of the conflict has a way of blocking certain kinds of critical analysis. It does this by making both intuitions appear equally rational, even while it portrays them as irreconcilable. This Langian knot of classically rational and irrational elements is characteristic of a broader tradition of modern controversy about the very idea of autonomy, a



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tradition that precedes twentieth-century quarrels surrounding modernism and postmodernism.

A paradoxical source of meta-aesthetic conflict The tradition I refer to is central to the general history of modern philosophy, even though there remains to date little discussion of its relevance to the history of aesthetics. To illustrate, consider a familiar kind of disagreement between idealized autonomist and non-autonomist stances regarding the causal history of a canonical artwork – say, Manet’s Bar at the Folies Bergère. Is the Bar at the Folies Bergère, considered qua painting, a product primarily of (1) a special kind of aesthetic intentionality in the artist which is causally irreducible to facts about the social context of its composition, or is it primarily (2) a product of that context? In a question of this form, the competing hypotheses (1) and (2) are both sufficiently general as to consistently accommodate, under some interpretation, virtually any empirical fact about Bar at the Folies Bergère that may initially have seemed sufficient for the dialectical victory of one hypothesis over the other. To this extent, both hypotheses, while contradictory, would seem to command comparable rational support. (This remains true even if one complicates the question by, for example, further describing the painting as embodying meanings that call for interpretation.) It was essentially this paradoxical situation that Marx identified when he declared himself unable to reconcile the historically transcendent aspects of ancient Greek sculptures with their status as products of a historically specific set of social and material conditions. But this structure embodies an even deeper kind of paradox or antinomy that since Kant has been a staple of modern philosophy. It takes the form of two contradictory claims about the relationship between some specified domain (D) of events in the world, on the one hand, and a naturalistic, lawlike conception of the world’s order (O) on the other. The antinomy results from the simultaneous equal rationality and incompatibility of the claims that, respectively, D is and is not part of O. This is in fact the basic paradox of autonomous agency which informs the third Antinomy of Pure Reason in Kant’s first Critique. Kant originally formulated this antinomy with a view to illuminating the transcendental architectonic background for his theory of morality as revolving around the activity of the autonomous moral will, with its special exemption from inferential connections to more empirical worldly considerations of causality and justification,

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but it was essentially this paradoxical structure that also migrated into myriad contexts of nineteenth-century art-theoretical debate. And there, to make a longer story short – throughout the vicissitudes of the emerging nineteenth century confrontation between idealist and materialist paradigms of cultural production, and later of modernist and postmodernist styles of criticism in the twentieth century – it has remained, as a source of familiar confrontations like the above, just as its more familiar counterpart continues as a source of debate in ethics.15 As Kant, the German Romantics and Hegel were aware, antinomical situations like this have a way of masking the stalemate-like effects they impart on conscious rational argument’s impulses towards representational unity and completeness. And as subsequent philosophical history has repeatedly shown, quarrels possessing this kind of antinomical deep structure make it an exercise in futility to ask, short of redescribing the problematic itself, which of two classically competing positions is ‘right’. For there is a sense in which they are both right. Interpreted in Kantian terms, this antinomical stalemate reflects a transcendental feature of reason’s own self-interpretive activity. But a de-transcendentalized and more naturalistically historicizing interpretation is possible too, wherein the stalemate’s basis lies not in pure reason but in a deep but contingent fact about how modern philosophical culture continues in many ways to interpret itself. This historical perspective on the ascendancy of modern aesthetic theory’s central antinomical structure may be attractive to anyone who, in their traditional intuitions – to invoke another dualism that sometimes obscures more than it illuminates – favours naturalistic over idealistic models of intellectual change. In particular, it provides a naturalistically friendly framework for the further interpretation of two developments that I will describe only briefly here, but that played key roles in the evolution of intuitions about art’s explanatory and justificatory autonomy between the time of Marx and that of late twentiethcentury modernism. One such development, broadly, was that the antinomy’s autonomy-versus-heteronomy structure whose initial articulations arose within idealist (and specifically Kantian) discussions of mental life and moral agency, migrated into the arena of debates about the nature of art. And second, what thinkers on the earlier end of this development (like Marx himself) presumably experienced as routine cognitive dissonance between incompatible interpretations of a common subject generated a splitting dynamic in the larger arena of public debate. Here, the dialectically competing intuitions of early antinomically challenged aesthetic reasoners were, in effect, dispersed into two increasingly



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distinct and professionalized moral matrices, in Haidt’s sense. One matrix formed around the antinomy’s autonomizing ‘thesis’; the other around its heteronomizing ‘antithesis’.16 These sensibilities then became associated with traditions of theorizing, research programmes and communities of researchers. All of these, in keeping with the logic of the myth, then lined up on opposite sides of the autonomy/heteronomy fault line in a struggle that projected an appearance of rational insolubility; a struggle, moreover, whose only prospect of termination would be the proverbial conquest of one side by the other. Such developments have to date largely stayed off the radar of discussions in my own discipline of philosophical aesthetics. Why? One reason may be the discipline’s historical prejudice against accounts of philosophical problems which violate the sacred boundary between philosophical and empirical (or in Kant’s not always flattering idiom, ‘anthropological’) explanations of reason’s self-interpretive quandaries. Herein lies another area where a variant of fault line thinking has outlived its original usefulness for philosophy generally, namely in philosophy’s mythic sense of itself as an autonomous discipline. In the recent aesthetics literature, the internal tensions in this philosophical self-image are particularly apparent in discussions of why philosophical aestheticians and art historians often have such difficulty talking to one another.17 Might other social sciences shed further light on the deeper antinomical structure we have identified? Here, another suggestive line of thought may be found in Levi-Strauss’s seminal account of myth, as set forth in books like The Raw and the Cooked and The Savage Mind. When the worldview of a culture becomes overly burdened by dualistic patterns of thought, Levi-Strauss suggests, this can then generate paradoxes within that worldview. In response, the culture then invents stories which, while not resolving the paradox in its own terms, dissipate its force through redescription. These stories transpose otherwise conflicting ideas or perceptions which resist rational assimilation into stories about externalized conflicting entities in ways that reconfirm the culture’s challenged sense of order in their experience. All mythic stories ultimately, moreover, share a common deep theme: the passage of human experience from nature to culture – from the ‘raw’ to the ‘cooked.’18 From this perspective there is nothing particularly modern, or particularly civilized, about various controversies of modern Western philosophical and religious thought which deal with the dualities and paradoxes that have historically haunted our discussions of the human/nature divide. In particular, such dualisms as those between the flesh and spirit, mind and body, nature and freedom, useful art and fine art, and indeed autonomy and heteronomy,

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may now be interpreted as displaced responses to a more fundamental human question that all cultures struggle to answer throughout their histories and none ever manages to answer completely: How can we grasp the perennial mystery of our simultaneous embeddedness in and transcendence of the rawness of nature? Besides finding evident expression in many general themes of modern aesthetic thought – including its dialectics of autonomy and heteronomy19 – the mythmaking process also, for Levi-Strauss, exhibits other striking connections to art to which I cannot do justice here.20 Levi-Strauss’s examples of myths derive primarily from cultures for whom the primary mythic agencies are gods or anthropomorphized animals. But it is only a short displacing step from mythic stories of creation, conflict and resolution employing such agents to stories whose agents are tribes or groups, whether premodern or modern (or, in a fateful late Cold War story of mythic global conflict, supposedly clashing civilizations). Within this context, fault line thinking appears as but another variant on conflict motifs whose origins considerably pre-date the Manichaeanized visions of conflict that became prominent in Judaeo-Christian culture more than a millennium ago. It can set in for anyone who makes the fateful move from thinking (1) that their aesthetic culture is fully healthy only if its members look at pictures or read texts or listen to music in a certain interpretive way, and also thinking (2) that this health is threatened by anyone who denies such views, to the conclusion (3) that there is no point in conversing or critically exchanging reasons with the health threateners. The main problem with the move from (1) to (3) (besides its not being a valid inference) is its suggestion that there is something in principle wrong or pointless about conversing with someone whose views of a normatively charged subject like art differ markedly from one’s own. A fully democratized culture of aesthetic inquiry today, given its multidisciplinary nature, can flourish only to the extent that a critical conversation about, say, the interpretation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute might travel from musicology into philosophical aesthetics and on into psychoanalysis and back without undue methodological squabbling, or that Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills might inspire a conference panel with philosophers, art historians and scholars of gender studies, all of whom are genuinely looking forward to exchanging ideas with others who don’t speak the same language or use the same methods or have the same ideological beliefs as themselves, or that similarly detailed ‘aesthetic’ and ‘culturally functional’ descriptions of a twelfth-century Yoruba head sculpture may provide a forum within which practitioners of diverse aesthetic disciplines might collectively explore the advantages, in studying non-Western or Western cultural objects



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alike, of pooling aesthetic expertise in trading zone fashion rather than assuming a priori that some discipline-specific methods are relevant to understanding the objects in question ‘as art’ whereas others are not. It is just such prospects, though, that the fault line myth does not overly encourage.

Autonomy without the fault line I have thus far offered various philosophical, historical and anthropological reasons for rejecting the fault line mythology as a model for understanding the interrelations among the different kinds of aesthetic expertise now. A key theme in my critique is that a source of our susceptibility to fault line thinking is the way our all-too-human minds have been habituated, in certain historical contexts, to process paradoxes. But this discussion also suggests some more constructive morals. One starts to emerge with a consideration of how we are hardly required by reason alone (if there is such a thing) to frame our thoughts about art or about autonomy in this bipolar way. This point is borne out by the myriad writers about aesthetic subjects of the last century whose accounts of the autonomous or at least distinctive nature of art in fact avoided the restrictive pull of fault line thinking. One memorable twentieth-century fault line violator is John Dewey, whose Art as Experience offered a boldly naturalistic framework for reconstructing various dualisms, within and without aesthetic theorizing, that form the historical background of the field’s agonizing over autonomy. A key theme of Deweyan aesthetic reconstruction is continuity: continuity between the terms of dichotomies such as aesthetic and ordinary experience, fine versus useful art, means versus ends (or, as Dewey preferred to say, instrumental and final phases of experience, mind and body, and nature and culture). It is generally true that Dewey, like subsequent naturalistically and pragmatically inclined philosophers of art, rejected the entire infrastructure of idealist-inspired doctrines about the transcendental basis of rational thought and its inferential insulation from the empirical realities of social practice. He similarly rejects the presupposition that the fullest realizations of art, in the term’s most culturally normative sense, can occur only in an institutionally autonomous artworld. Art as Experience in fact charted a path between two impulses which go to the heart of the kinds of ontological and ideological conflicts that fault line thinking would mythologize. One impulse was to level, in the name of acknowledging the aesthetic dimensions of life generally, a raft of distinctions that confer upon fine art its claims

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both to transcend ordinary experience and to constitute a Weberian-like sphere of value. (Dewey called this the ‘compartmental conception of art’.) The other impulse was to preserve at least the general idea of art as a characteristic of special imaginatively and expressively intensified experiences whose phenomenologies we naturalistically redescribe away at our peril. In this sense, Dewey’s aesthetics – like subsequent pragmatist approaches generally – struck a reflective balance between art’s embeddedness in various cultural and natural contexts and its specialness that cuts across various received notions of autonomy and heteronomy. Another such violator is Theodor Adorno, whose Aesthetic Theory remained off the radar of many nineties-era analytic aestheticians and posthumanist cultural scholars but is getting the wider attention it deserves now. No short summary does justice to Adorno’s paratactically labyrinthine discussion of autonomy and heteronomy, but one of its larger themes has particular bearing on our question about alternatives to the either-or logic of fault line thinking. This is that in a modern world dominated by the instrumentalizing and commercializing tendencies of late capitalism, autonomistic and heteronomistic descriptions of artworks and their surrounding practices, far from representing incommensurable visions of their subjects, dialectically implicate one another in a specific way. Adorno reserves the term ‘autonomy’ for what he calls ‘advanced’ artworks – works which can provoke experiences in audiences that diverge not only from Enlightenment and Romantic-era conceptions of the beautiful and the sublime but also from earlier Marxist conceptions of an artwork’s capacity to reflect social reality or to incite inspiring revolutionary sentiments or to prophesize the future. The autonomous advanced work integrates classically autonomist and heteronomist modes of functioning by, paradoxically, abandoning or negating all thematizations of social matters (an instrumentalist theme) in favour of a radical reflexivity within the work itself (an autonomist theme which aligns with aesthetic modernism). Autonomous artworks thus embody what, from the standpoint of more traditional theories of autonomy and heteronomy, is a paradox. They are not only autonomous and heteronomous but also autonomous because they are heteronomous; that is, because they express their heteronomous conditioning in a particular selfreflexive way. And to this extent, they provide a provocative counter-example to the simpler, either-or concept of autonomy and heteronomy implicit in the logic of the fault line mythology.21 But one needn’t be a card-carrying Deweyan or Adornean to embrace the thought that we are obliged to regard artworks as autonomous and



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heteronomous at the same time, engaging both sides of the explanatory divide that fault line myth says we cannot and should not cross. This awkward but dialectically urgent conjunction is in fact a staple of virtually all twentiethcentury Marxist and pragmatist theories of art. In the last decade or so, variants on this conjunctive vision have become a staple of multidisciplinary forums in aesthetic methodology. For example, in the introduction to Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice, the volume’s editors, Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor – an art historian and two philosophers, respectively – sum up the late Cold War-era vogue for politically engaged critiques of traditional aesthetics (epitomized in books like Hal Foster’s 1983 anthology The Anti-Aesthetic) this way: At the heart of this debate lies the question of the autonomy of aesthetics. If there is an autonomous ‘aesthetic realm,’ does this mean that it is separate from social (and thus political) realms, or does its very autonomy provide the opportunity for resistance, dissent, and freedom, in short the opportunity for political action?

In a similar spirit, contributor Wolfgang Welsch advocates a ‘pluralistic reorganization of aesthetics beyond aesthetics’, attuned to how the proverbial art/life divide is best understood not as a division between two worlds but as a site of reciprocal influence and interaction within one historical world: Despite its claim to autonomy, art has always and deliberately reacted to aesthetic phenomena in its surroundings. In a world more aesthetically sparing, it demonstrated the Elysium of beauty. When the modern world tended to repress sensibility, art – heedful of its old bond with the sensuous – understood itself as the harbinger and savior of the sensuous (as with Henri Matisse and Jean Dubuffet) … Much contemporary art reacts to the ubiquity of media images in particular … . The border between art and extra-artistic reality should not simply be denied but the entanglements and transitions in between investigated. That is to say, aesthetics of art must consider the dual character of artistic and nonartistic aesthetics. This is why Adorno, who……defended the significance of art’s autonomy, also opposed the separation of art from reality. He was struck by ……[how] the perception of an order destroyed (by means of a perverted purposive rationality) can still arouse aesthetic yearning for the restoration of order. This implies that aesthetic experience is systematically understood when it is stripped of its references to extra-aesthetic reality and thus of the contrast that sustains it.22

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Welsch singles out Adorno, with his emphasis on the ‘dual character’ of art, as an exemplary negotiator of the kind of art/life divide that can encourage fault line thinking as a response. Like Adorno, Welsch sees modern culture’s need for art in terms of a dialectic between art’s autonomy and its connection to ‘extra-aesthetic reality’ which does not sit well with the demands of traditional systematizing theory. The reader may be thinking that this type of call for a more nuanced integration of autonomizing and heteronomizing intuitions, within or without an Adornean interpretation, is old news. But this is part of my point; for to the extent that it is old news, we now have a sufficient stock of counterexamples to the basic fault line idea to pronounce it, as a gesture towards the more systematic experimental-philosophy inquiry I envisioned earlier, a myth in sense (1). But having done that, what more might be said about its status as a myth in senses (2a) or (2b) – a myth, moreover, which, given my argument thus far, stands in need of being reconstructed if not simply replaced? A clue to how we might here proceed is suggested by Martin Jay’s rich essay, ‘Drifting into Dangerous Waters: The Separation of Aesthetic Experience from the Work of Art’, (appearing in another such interdisciplinary volume, Aesthetic Subjects). What Jay finds most problematic about the legacy of postmodernera theories of art and culture is their failure to take seriously our continuing modern need for a certain kind of imaginatively robust and historically selfaware experience (in the robust sense of the German term Erfahrung, often translated as ‘experience’) that is not flattened out by the forces of bureaucratization and commercialization. On this issue, Adorno and Dewey are equally important, both as theorists in their own right and as implicit critics of one another: Although Dewey hoped for the ultimate reconciliation of life and art, he also recognized that it had not yet happened. Therefore, the artwork as object set apart from subject represented a covert protest against the unfulfilled potential for integrated experience in the modern world. The possibility for genuine experience in that world, he paralleled Benjamin and Adorno in lamenting, was severely limited… . Dewey may perhaps have been a bit too quick to dissolve the distinction between esoteric fine art, the art of museums and concert halls, and life lived aesthetically… . As a result, despite its laudable intention to redress the balance lost by Kantian aesthetics, the pragmatist attempt to fashion a new notion of experience, including both subject and object in an equiprimordial interaction, may too easily produce the same outcome as that of the natural supernaturalist tradition: the indiscriminate leveling of the distinction between artwork and lifeworld through the projection of the qualities of the former



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onto the latter. To avoid such an outcome, a certain respect for the continued distinction between the two may be required, at least as long as the reintegration remains a desideratum rather than a real possibility…. . Honoring this difference does not mean fetishizing the elite object or ascetically denigrating any pleasure in the present, as some defenders of aesthetic experience fear. It entails instead a recognition of the fruitful constellation that keeps subjects and objects irreducible to each other, even if they cannot be stood in isolation… . Even if [works created by human intentionality] can no longer be understood as perfectly formed, organic wholes, an assumption that as laid to rest with modernism (and the demise of which was foreshadowed by the Romantic cult of the fragment), they nonetheless still possess some residue, perhaps solely in negative terms, of the utopian implications of that impulse. Not until the world is itself made by humans who can fashion their environment to realize such an outcome – a telos that may well be unattainable, and may even be itself a deeply problematic goal – can we forget the victims and praise the beautiful gesture that led to their demise. For the present, it is wiser to hold on to the irreducible constellation of objects and the experiences they engender that prevent us from collapsing one variant of experience into another. However porous the boundaries may be, however great the yearning for a fully integrated life, the differentiations of modernity – not only among value spheres, but within them as well – may have a validity that we sacrifice at our peril.23

Jay’s comments on the reconstruction of contemporary aesthetic methodology and art’s complex relationships to ‘integrated experience in the modern world’ invite a discussion whose importance for all cultural inquirers extends beyond my argument here. Of particular interest is his argument for retaining a socially and historically sensitive version of the idea of art as an autonomous realm – or value-sphere, in the Weberian sense – that allows artworks to be experienced as distinctive objects, possessing genuine otherness for subjects, in ways that are generative of new kinds of socio-politically aware meanings in the ‘lifeworld’. Jay’s plea for retaining the value-sphere motif falls importantly outside the boxes of both traditional modernist and traditional postmodernist argument. It is a dialectical gesture, insofar as Jay reaches his conclusion in the context of an argument that negates the earlier psychologically and apolitically purist visions of aesthetic disinterestedness and the art/life distinction levelling gesture implicit in a certain strand of Deweyan aesthetics.24 But it is equally a mythic gesture. For its backdrop is a fundamental mythic theme of social and political critiques since Romanticism: the idea of how modern experience, caught in the crucible of the complex encounters among Judaeo-Christian religion and rising modern science, secular society and industrialization, is an experience of

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homelessness, fragmentation and disenchantment. Modernity is, both despite and because of all its other advances, a mythically fallen condition, and the beginning of one redemptive route out of its various iron cages is our access to a space (or, in Jay’s Weberian sense, a sphere) of experiences, some aesthetically consoling and/or integrative, others more wilfully disruptive, that art provides. Jay is not suggesting that such a two-space picture of experience is a remedy for this condition, or even that modernity is literally a single condition that can be remedied. His point, rather, is that we do away with the distinction, with its promised possibilities of creative experiential difference and ‘otherness’ with respect to the rest of life at our peril, notwithstanding postmodern-era arguments that would reduce such an idea to a quaint residue of the Enlightenment project, a betrayal of the promise of naturalism, a failed modernist meta-narrative and so on. Some kind of normatively active autonomy remains, to this extent, an integral feature of modern and postmodern aesthetic life, notwithstanding its dialectical difficulties (and perhaps also, as one can imagine Adorno adding, because of those difficulties). Read simply as yet another plea for retaining the idea of artistic autonomy in the face of various postmodern-era pressures, Jay’s argument may at first seem but another variant on those of more traditionally humanistic writers, like Bloom and Crowther, who frame such autonomy’s defence using fault line language. But the fact that various writers converge on the general theme of our culture’s need for some regulative notion of artistic autonomy doesn’t entail their agreement about the role of this theme within a larger account of culturalpolitical life. And read dialectically in the post-Deweyan and –Adornean sense I have described, Jay’s plea for the retention of the mythic language of art as a sphere apart from the lifeworld makes another important point. In an age when nothing, as Adorno said, about art goes without saying, theorizing about aesthetic subjects is a practice that not only deals with the mythic themes of art but is itself also actively involved in myth-making. This last point in turn suggests a further clue to the kind of self-interpretive conversation that all of us with connections to the various aesthetic disciplines may want to have as the field moves away from an uncritical attachment to fault line thinking. To appreciate this clue, it helps to reread the above-mentioned modern fall-and-redemption motif in terms of the Levi-Straussian theme, mentioned earlier, that any culture is continually engaged in creating new stories that reflect its deepest difficulties in negotiating human/nature relationships and in revising old ones in the course of retelling them. In an important sense, the entire modern tradition of portraying art and aesthetic experience



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as autonomous, even given its dramatically differing variations, projects such a mythic story. The larger mythic story about autonomy to which I refer is common to all of the aesthetic disciplines. But its commonality may be initially hard to recognize, given a further fact about its historical development whose significance invites more discussion than is possible here. This is that what was originally, as of the Enlightenment, one more basic and unified modern aesthetic redemption narrative began, as of the nineteenth century, to split into what amounted to two subnarratives. One of them, rooted in the Idealist aesthetics of Kant and Schiller and then taking a right turn, so to speak, through the apolitical stands of l’art pour l’art and on into the apolitical formalisms and the hedged aesthetic idealism (epitomized in much if not all work in analytic aesthetics) of the twentieth century, stresses the powers of art as a source of experiences that are self-sufficiently pleasurable, and valuable to the individual. Here, aesthetic redemption is broadly cast as personal and apolitical. The other direction runs also at first from Kant through Schiller; but then it takes a left turn with Marx, generating a counter-tradition of materialist theories of art as a source of experiences that promote social change. Here, aesthetic redemption is political. This is obviously only a thumbnail sketch of a much more complex history. But my larger point, again, is that these subnarratives, which have historically been experienced as fundamentally antagonistic by many of their adherents, are really but split-off varieties of a larger, simpler, mythic narrative of art and the aesthetic as a redemptive presence in modern culture. Once the larger pattern is recognized, it is easy to see its outlines in the arguments of Bloom and the others discussed above. Not that the pattern, with its splitting-off dynamic, is itself unique to aesthetics. One sees it in all of the various orthodox and reform movements in Western and non-Western religions, a point to whose further implications I return below.

Heresy Where, then, does the above dialectic of aesthetic redemption subnarratives leave us in terms of the aesthetic field’s prospects for a new, or at least reconstructed mythology of itself? More exactly, what does it suggest about the prospects of our25 coming to share, and to creatively re-enact, a larger story of the special role of art and the aesthetic in today’s successor version of the disenchanted world to which assorted nineteenth-century romantic idealists

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and materialists, along with various twentieth-century figures mentioned above, were all responding? One possible form of such a successor story – I emphasize the word ‘form’ – would, first of all, preserve the idea of art as a sphere or space for the re-energizing and re-integrating encounter with otherness, as per Jay’s argument. That is, it would be a story in which some idea of autonomy, however schematic and subject to interpretive dispute, would continue to play a regulative role in how we think and talk about the practices we call the arts. In doing so, it would move dialectically beyond the problems that historically became fatal to the fault line mythology, as discussed in earlier sections. What more specific changes in theory and practice might such a creative re-enactment involve? The details of an answer to such a question are available to no one as yet, but a few aspects of the form of the question itself at least seem clear. It isn’t a transcendental question about the logic of ‘the concept of art’ of the sort that philosophers traditionally specialize in. Nor is it a question for which a good answer could be reductively interpreted as a veiled form of one or the other of the two clashing stances comprising the fault line myth. But another clue to the substance of a further answer has been part of our discussion all along. I refer, once again, to the complex analogy between aesthetic and religious thought and practice. I suggested earlier, with the religious analogy in mind, that the fault line model of our basic choices in art theory represents one kind of orthodoxy in contemporary aesthetics. If this orthodoxy is too restrictive to sustain a community of meta-aesthetic conversation across older disciplinary and methodological boundaries, perhaps some new kinds of heterodoxy and indeed – a related and, in this context, particularly relevant term – heresy are needed to inform this basic situation of choice. Some words from a recent book on the political histories of world religions, Religion and Globalization, co-authored by John L. Esposito, Darrell J. Fasching and Todd Lewis, are here to the point. Noting that the word ‘heretic’ comes from the Greek hairetikos (‘able to choose’), the co-authors remark: In our postmodern world, every religious person becomes a heretic, that is, one who is not just born into his or her identity but is forced to choose it, even if it is the identify offered by the circumstances of one’s birth… . Because of our awareness of both the relativity and the plurality of ways of viewing the world, we cannot avoid choosing. This is what we believe places us irrevocably in a postmodern situation, whether we affirm the situation or refuse to acknowledge it. In this sense the various fundamentalisms and orthodoxies that thrive



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today are just as much postmodern ‘heresies’ as some of the more innovative expressions of religions. This leads to the paradox that the absolutisms of fundamentalist religious movements that reject all postmodern relativism can assert themselves only by embracing a relativist stance of ‘choosing’ to be against the modern and postmodern… . In this world of ‘heretics’, all the world’s religions … have been forced to take account of the others. They have come face to face with their own particularism in a world of diverse faiths. Until postmodern trends set in, other people’s religions could be readily dismissed in a series of negative stereotypes. When people of diverse religions are neighbors, this option gets both more difficult and more dangerous… . The alternative is to develop a new understanding of the relation between world religions and global culture… . 26

The parallels between this situation of choice in religious stance and that in aesthetics, including the constitutive dialectical tensions within each (e.g. between stances that take themselves to be non-relativistic in various senses and others their adherents accuse of relativism) are obvious and many. We noticed earlier how in aesthetics the charge of ‘relativism’ has been used (as in Crowther’s argument against ‘ “anti-foundationalist” cultural relativists’) in an attempt to discredit certain traditions of research and interpretation by parties who fail to demonstrate the non-relative, if not also non-relativistic, character of their own position. The parallels increase if one factors in the romantic theme of poetry (and by implication other arts) as ‘spilt religion’ with its accompanying narrative of modern aesthetics as the migration of older theological impulses into a modern world gripped by tensions between secularism and disenchantment. In today’s world of unprecedented interaction among religious traditions, even the most traditional and conservative believers, unshaken in their faith in the reality of one or another kind of divine autonomy, are obliged to choose their stance in a way that underscores their common epistemological footing with religious progressives or even sceptics. So, too, with traditional and progressive aesthetic believers. Herein lies a larger context for Bloom’s Kierkegaardian-like remark that ‘you must choose’ whether to be a Knight of Autonomy or a Resenter. But to regard this as the basic choice within modern reflection on aesthetic subjects is to forget, as those who are susceptible to the spell of the fault line myth tend to do, that the parameters of choice encompass not only the bipolar options within the myth’s Manichaeanized space but that space as a whole, construed now as but one option among others. At this higher logical level, we are all heretics. The plot of this parallelism thickens when we reflect on the roles of

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archetypal mythic stories in the evolution of all religious traditions. Such stories, as also noted in Religion and Globalization, emphasize mythic themes like the human connectedness to nature, the harmonization of conflicting energies in culture and nature, the possibility of spiritual transcendence of worldly suffering and conflicts, and of a culminating final moment in history when the world’s deepest conflicts are finally resolved.27 Herein lies a rich basis for further reflection on the mythic sources of various currents of aesthetic theorizing in the second sense of ‘myth’ noted at the beginning. Given the above aesthetics/religion parallels, it seems clear that meta-aesthetic thought – challenged as it also is to ‘take account of the others’ – now needs to rewrite its basic background story for essentially the same reasons that modern religious thought does. Another religious scholar, Raimundo Panikkar, offers further language for the kind of dynamically integrative but not quite unifying stance needed for that field. He calls it ‘interpenetrationism’, namely the idea that religious thought today consists of a plurality of traditions, none of which is fully intelligible except viewed in relation to, and placed in mutually transforming dialogue with, the others.28 Interpenetration in this case is actually a form of evolving self-­organizing complexity – an aspect of diverse fields of cultural practice that is fatefully obscured, in aesthetic as in religious thought, by more simplistic images of such fields as static bipolar structures. Perhaps it is coincidental – and then perhaps not – that the most famous, and perhaps the first, early modern expression of the self-organizational theme may be found in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the most fought-over text (among other distinctions) in the ongoing modern interpretive debate about what aesthetic redemption can or should be.29 Might these themes of interpenetration and self-organizing complexity supply the elements of a new meta-aesthetic mythology, adequate for an age that faces new challenges to reconcile the evolving unity of the ideas we associate with art and the aesthetic with their variety? I am hardly the first to raise this kind of romantic question.30 It is a question that may need reiterating so long as our globally evolving intellectual culture retains the word ‘aesthetics’ to refer to an in some sense single but not classically unified area of thought and practice. Prophecy in this area is cheap and notoriously unreliable, but equally irresistible. My thought is that something like the above themes of interpenetration and self-organizing complexity should and will become part of any viable successor story following the present internal collapse of the fault line mythology. That mythology, I have argued, itself emerged out of an internal collision between two earlier aesthetic meta-narratives about autonomy, one political and the



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other apolitical, which forward-looking scholars in the aesthetic field’s present anti-anti-aesthetic dispensation are struggling to freshly re-integrate now. To the extent, moreover, that it is a kind of re-integration that such scholars (or anyone who thinks of the understanding and criticism of art in non-classical and disunificationist terms) seek, any successor story to the fault line myth will also, it turns out, bear the characteristics of another eminently romantic mythic theme, namely that of the ‘spiral return’.31 Other scenarios for the future of the aesthetic field are still of course possible. These include scenarios in which more and more of our present distinctions between what is and is not artistic, or aesthetic, or indeed autonomous, become semantically further localized or dissipated in the dynamics of twenty-firstcentury linguistic and cultural life. Whether my own favoured neo-romantic scenario or something like it comes to pass, it is only fitting that whatever new narrative structure succeeds the autonomy fault line myth will also itself presuppose a kind of autonomy. This is the autonomy of a culture and its members to make meta-aesthetic (as well as, for that matter, meta-religious) choices based not, or not only, on preferred fantasies of transcendental necessity or sacred spaces, but on pragmatic, cultural-political realities. That, at least, is one kind of autonomy, and one kind of heresy, that today’s mythically alive aesthetic field cannot do without.

Notes 1

Throughout this discussion I use ‘aesthetics’ in a broad sense that aligns with the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics’ definition of its subject as ‘critical reflection on art, culture, and nature’. I elaborate further on the idea of aesthetics as a network and various other themes pertaining to the dynamics of disciplinary unification and conflict in ‘Aesthetics as an Intellectual Network’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, autumn 2011. 2 A lucid commentary on this mythic history may be found in M. H. Abrams’s writings on the history of modern aesthetic thought – and romantic thought in particular – as an evolving secular repository of reconfigured Judaeo-Christian religious motifs. Abrams is particularly instructive on various ways in which modern notions of autonomous artistic creation and contemplation, along with ideas of artworks as self-sufficient objects, inherit attributes formerly borne more exclusively, for Western thinkers, by God. See e.g. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Trial and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973); also ‘What’s the Use of Theorizing About the Arts?’ in M. H. Abrams,

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Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy Doing Things With Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory (New York: Norton, 1989). See in particular such collaborative volumes as James Elkins, (ed.), Art History versus Aesthetics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006); Francis Halsall, Julia Janson and Tony O’Connor, (eds), Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Michael Berube, ed, The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Pamela R. Matthews and David McWhirter, (eds), Aesthetic Subjects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, (eds), Art History Aesthetics Visual Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). For further discussion of the movement, among posthumanistically inclined critics, away from the ‘anti-aesthetic’ atmosphere of the 1980s and 1990s, see Michael Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics Enacting the Demands of Art (Columbia University Press, 2012). I further discuss different theses in aesthetics associated with autonomy in ‘Autonomy: Historical Overview’, in Michael Kelly, (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd edn, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 forthcoming). For a suggestive account of the centrality of debates about different registers of autonomy – aesthetic, moral and political – to various self-interpretive crises that came, by the nineteenth century, to surround the nature of modern selfhood and community, see Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). See Eddy Nahmias et al., ‘Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions About Free Will and Moral Responsibility’, Philosophical Psychology, vol. 18, no. 5, October 2005. I discuss the autonomism/moralism (and, more broadly, the autonomism/ instrumentalism) dialectic more fully in ‘Paradoxes of Autonomy: Or, Why Won’t the Problem of Artistic Justification Go Away?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 58, 2000. For a brilliant discussion of how this kind of vocabulary-denying game has traditionally been played out in the cultural politics of religion, see Richard Rorty, ‘Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God’, in Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994), pp. 9–10, 487–92. The quoted paragraphs appear in the book’s preface and conclusion, respectively. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, eds, Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (Wesleyan University Press, 1994). The quoted lines come from the back cover and the editors’ Introduction, pp. xvi–xvii. Paul Crowther, ‘Aesthetics in Art History – and Vice-versa’, in Art History Versus



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Aesthetics, pp. 123–8. I draw most of the following two paragraphs in my text from Haskins (2011, pp. 301–2). Paul Crowther, Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Keith Moxey, ‘Aesthetics is Dead – Long Live Aesthetics’, in Art History Versus Aesthetics, pp. 166–72. For a fuller version of this argument, see Keith Moxey, The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox & Power in Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). I discuss film theory’s version of this collision in ‘The Disunity of Film Theory and the Disunity of Aesthetics’, in, , European Film Theory Temenuga Trifonova, (ed.) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008). Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012). For further discussion, see Haskins (2000). Kant never, in the Critique of Judgment or anywhere else, actually put forward an express thesis about artistic autonomy, as opposed to other, more specific theses about self-legislative mental activities related to aesthetic judgement. For more on this point, see Haskins (2011). One might also describe this splitting-off dynamic in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological idiom of the configurations of beliefs and habits of social interaction which comprise a ‘habitus’. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). On this specific professional disconnection see, again, Elkins (2006). For a thoughtful historical overview and critique of modern philosophy’s self-image as an autonomous, conceptual analysis-centred, empirically untainted, practice, with particular attention to how this self-image has informed the history of ethics, see Kwame Anthony Appiah’s discussion of the ‘Waterless Moat’ in Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), ch. 1. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (vol. I of Introduction to a Science of Mythology) (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); also The Savage Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966). These philosophical examples are mine, not Levi-Strauss’s, but it seems obvious that he would include them in a mythic analysis of modern philosophical thought which to my knowledge at least he never produced. For example, myth-making in all cultures is a collective creative process which Levi-Strauss likens to a form of artistic bricolage – an improvised creation using whatever materials happen to be to hand. Its products, he suggests, possess a thematic complexity analogous to that of musical works, and elicit an attitude akin to aesthetic contemplation. More generally, myths of all cultures, in the course of their evolution, exhibit organic interconnections that resemble those of the interconnections among artworks within and across styles, as discussed

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Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy by modern art historians. In a similar vein, Levi-Strauss’s observation that ‘mythology has no obvious practical function’ (The Raw and the Cooked, p. 10) suggests that it possesses an overall autonomy with respect to worldly purposes which replicates that of the arts according to a familiar idealist tradition – an autonomy, as he seems to hint sometimes, is itself in fact the original prototype of artist autonomy generally. This Adornean line of thought has inspired a variety of more recent critical and reconstructive responses whose details I cannot pursue here. A common theme in such discussions is how autonomy, rather than being a stably decontextualized property of certain special artefacts, is instead a specific way in which artworks function within the heteronomously colonized spaces of modern social, political and economic organization, including and especially the modern art world. See, for example, Jacques Ranciere, Aesthetics and its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009); J. M. Bernstein et al., Art and Aesthetics After Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Lambert Zuidervaart, Social Philosophy After Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012); Michael Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art (Columbia University Press, 2012). Wolfgang Welsch, ‘Aesthetics Beyond Aesthetics’, in Halsall et al., Rediscovering Aesthetics, pp. 185–6. Martin Jay, ‘Drifting into Dangerous Waters: The Separation of Aesthetic Experience from the Work of Art’, in Matthews and McWhirter, (eds) Aesthetic Subjects, pp. 21–3. For more on the views of Dewey, Benjamin, Adorno and others on ‘the unfulfilled potential for integrated experience in the modern world’, see Jay’s fine book Songs of Experience: Variations on an American and European Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Jay rightly observes that Dewey, in some of the more utopian moods in Art as Experience, seems poised to level the art/life distinction. But Dewey’s argument stops short of carrying out this life-aestheticizing gesture, which in some ways anticipates the anti-aesthetics gestures of first-generation postmodernist cultural critique, to the very end. He never lost sight of the need to dialectically balance the impulses: first, to view art (in the sense of fine art) as a special and in some sense autonomous practice, and second, to collapse art/life distinctions in the name of a liberation of modern culture from the bureaucratic manifestations of the kind of modern disenchantment that forms the background of Weber’s valuesphere model of modernity. I discuss this further in ‘Dewey’s Art as Experience: The Tension Between Aesthetics and Aestheticism’. Transactions of the C.S. Peirce Society, vol. 28, no. 2, spring 1992. When I say ‘our’ I refer, at least, to those of us who understand the dialectic of



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subnarratives described above, who have felt the pull of at least one of them, and who find neither of them satisfying. John L. Esposito, Darrell J. Fasching and Todd Lewis, Religion and Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Introduction. Esposito et al. call these the myths, respectively, of ‘nature’, ‘liberation’, ‘harmony’, and ‘history’. See Religion and Globalization, Introduction. Panikkar offers this meta-religious view as an alternative to three others whose implementation in practice makes them, he believes, prohibitive for the health of contemporary global culture: these are ‘exclusivism’ (our tradition is the only one that captures the truth about God, religion, spirituality, etc.), ‘inclusivism’ (our tradition is the only one that captures the whole truth, but some other less evolved traditions capture part of it), and ‘parallelism’ (there is more than one tradition whose doctrines, while presently incommensurable from the viewpoints of their practitioners, may exhibit some convergence or synthesis at a later stage of reflective history). Although this is a further discussion, each of these views has counterparts in meta-aesthetic thought also. Raimundo Panikkar, ‘Four Attitudes’, in Gary E. Kessler, (ed.), Philosophy of Religion: Toward a Global Perspective (Wadsworth Publishing, 1999). I further discuss the Critique of Judgment in this connection in Haskins (2011). See Friedrich Hölderlin, et al., ‘Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism’ (1796), reprinted in J. M. Bernstein, (ed.), Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a classic exposition of the spiral return motif, see Abrams (1973).

References Abrams, M. H. (1973) Natural Supernaturalism: Trial and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton. —(1989) ‘What’s the Use of Theorizing About the Arts?’, in Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory. New York: Norton. Appiah, K. A. (2008) Experiments in Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bernstein, J. M. et al. (2010) Art and Aesthetics After Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berube, M. (ed.) (2005) The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell. Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso. Bloom, H. (1994) The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Riverhead Books.

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Bourdieu, P. (1996) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bryson, N., Holly, M. A. and Moxey, K. (eds) (1994) Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Wesleyan University Press. Crowther, P. (2006) ‘Aesthetics in Art History – and Vice-versa’, in Elkins (ed.), Art History versus Aesthetics, pp. 123–8. —(2007) Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elkins, J. (ed.) (2006) Art History versus Aesthetics, Abingdon: Routledge. Esposito, J. L., Fasching, D. J. and Lewis, T. (2008) Religion and Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haidt, J. (2012) The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon. Halsall, F., Janson, J. and O’Connor, T. (eds) (2009) Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Haskins, C. (1992) ‘Dewey’s Art as Experience: The Tension Between Aesthetics and Aestheticism’, Transactions of the C.S. Peirce Society, vol. 28, no. 2, spring. —(2000) ‘Paradoxes of Autonomy: Or, Why Won’t the Problem of Artistic Justification Go Away?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 58. —(2008) ‘The Disunity of Film Theory and the Disunity of Aesthetics’, in T. Trifonova (ed.), European Film Theory. Abingdon: Routledge. Haskins, C. (2011) ‘Aesthetics as an Intellectual Network’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, autumn. Hölderlin, F. et al. (2003) ‘Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism’ (1796), reprinted in J. M. Bernstein (ed.), Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holly, M. A. and Moxey, K. (eds) (2002) Art History Aesthetics Visual Studies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. —(2001) Songs of Experience: Variations on an American and European Theme. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jay, M. (2003) ‘Drifting into Dangerous Waters: The Separation of Aesthetic Experience from the Work of Art’, in Matthews and McWhirter (eds), Aesthetic Subjects, pp. 21–3. Kelly, M. (2012) A Hunger for Aesthetics Enacting the Demands of Art. New York: Columbia University Press. —(ed.) (forthcoming) Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd edn, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levi-Strauss, C. (1966) The Savage Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. —(1969) The Raw and the Cooked. New York: Harper & Row. Matthews, P. R. and McWhirter, D. (eds) (2003) Aesthetic Subjects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.



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Moxey, K. (2001) The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox & Power in Art History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —(2006) ‘Aesthetics is Dead – Long Live Aesthetics’, in Elkins (ed.), Art History versus Aesthetics, pp. 166–72. Nahmias, E. et al. (2005) ‘Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions About Free Will and Moral Responsibility’, Philosophical Psychology, vol. 18, no. 5, October. Panikker, R. (1999) ‘Four Attitudes’, in G. E. Kessler (ed.), Philosophy of Religion: Toward a Global Perspective. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Pippin, R. B. (1999) Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell. Ranciere, J. (2009) Aesthetics and its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rorty, R. (2007) Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Welsch, W. (2009) ‘Aesthetics Beyond Aesthetics’, in Halsall et al., Rediscovering Aesthetics, pp. 185–6. Zuidervaart, L. (2007) Social Philosophy After Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

7

Beethoven, Adorno and the Dialectics of Freedom Gordon Finlayson

Preface Beethoven’s third Symphony – the Eroica – is often championed as an autonomous work, and is also taken to represent freedom. In this chapter I aim to throw some light on both claims: elucidating the sense in which Eroica is said to be an autonomous work of art, and at the same time what it means to say that it expresses freedom. In order to do this I focus on the relation between two dimensions of freedom – aesthetic autonomy and political freedom – as these are present in the form and the meaning of a work. My approach to this question is one of philosophically minded intellectual history. I do not offer a sideways-on, analytic account of what it is for a work of music to represent freedom, although that would be an interesting project. Rather, I attempt to answer the questions: (1) What makes this work an autonomous work?, and (2) In virtue of what it might represent or express freedom, in the light of ideas of art and politics that were circulating in the period in which the Eroica was written, roughly from the beginning of Weimar Classicism through to the end of German Idealism. I do so not just out of respect for the historical appropriateness of these ideas, but because such ideas can illuminate the relation between the aesthetic form and the meaning of the artwork, in a way that does justice to the particularity of the artwork. My account of aesthetic autonomy is reliant upon Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Adorno numbers among those who endorse the by now traditional intepretation that Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony expresses freedom. On my reading, though, Adorno’s traditional interpretation of the Eroica apparently clashes with some of his deepest ideas about art, namely that artworks (and their significance) are historical, and that what is particularly valuable about autonomous works of art

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– especially music – is that they comply with the prohibition on images, namely that they refuse to offer a picture of a reconciled society. In the final section of the chapter I address this difficulty. Beethoven’s symphonies are often held up as examples of autonomous artworks. Furthermore, it has often been argued that they represent freedom. In a recent article, Daniel Chua makes both claims. He writes:1 [T]he abstraction epitomized by his symphonic works should not only be understood as an aesthetic revolution but a political one. The music itself, by being itself, speaks of freedom. Drawing a blank is the very image of liberty. And this was precisely how Adorno heard the music. For him the internal laws of Beethoven’s compositions expound a liberty as ambitious as the philosophy of Kant or Hegel.2 He attaches to music’s abstraction the freedom that historians often attribute to the discourses of the politicians.3

Presumably the assumption is that the Eroica is a prime example of an autonomous work of art, and as such, it is peculiarly apt to represent or express freedom. Chua cites several versions of this judgement in different phases of the Eroica’s reception history, and attributes one such – quite correctly – to Adorno. In this chapter, I want to consider in more detail the merits of the thesis that the Eroica Symphony, qua autonomous artwork, promises freedom, and to reflect on its place within Adorno’s aesthetics of music. As it stands, the thesis opens up a number of difficult and intriguing questions. 1. What is meant by the autonomy of a work of art, and in particular, how is this term to be understood in reference to Beethoven’s third Symphony? 2. In virtue of which features can and does a work of art, in particular the Eroica Symphony, succeed in holding out an image of freedom? 3. What kind of freedom is thus foreshadowed or promised? 4. What is the relation between the autonomy of the work on the one side, and the freedom that it promises on the other? Until these questions are answered, the very idea that a piece of music by Beethoven promises freedom remains as opaque as it is intriguing.4 In the sections below, I put forward an interpretation of the thesis by answering the above questions in the light of ideas about art and politics that were in circulation during the historical period in question, namely the first six decades of the long nineteenth century, roughly from Weimar classicism



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to the end of German Idealism. This period spans the entire lifetimes of both Beethoven (1770–1827) and Hegel (1770–1831). In the final section, I briefly address some difficulties arising from Adorno’s endorsement of the thesis.

The autonomy of the work of art The thesis of the autonomy of art is complex and multifaceted.5 I will focus on the salient notions of autonomy as they apply to the works under consideration here.

I To begin with, art’s autonomy has a social and historical dimension. At a certain point in history, roughly by the mid-eighteenth century, art began to be released from its social functions, whether these were the context of the church or the court. This gradual change affects art both in the way it is produced and in the way it is attended to. Artists and composers become less dependent on patronage, and begin to sell their works on the open market like any other product. This broad development in the history of music goes hand in hand with a movement from private to public performance. As a consequence of these transformations music comes to be composed and played in order to be listened to, and appreciated and valued for its own sake, rather than as an accompaniment to religious worship or dance. This historical notion of autonomy is characteristic of the early bourgeois period in which Beethoven lived.6 There is another development which is closely associated with the ones mentioned above, which is the emergence of what later came to be called ‘absolute music’.7 At its simplest this is the idea, promoted most clearly by the German Romantics, that independent instrumental music composed for public performance at concerts is the highest form of music and, in the words of Carl Dahlhaus, it is the highest form of music because it ‘purely and clearly expresses the true nature of music by its very lack of concept, object, and purpose’.8 The emergence of so-called ‘absolute music’ is also, according to the Marxist theoretician Hans Eisler, ‘a specific development … intertwined with the rise of modern bourgeois society’.9 As a pure sound structure, stripped away from the human voice and the earthly reality of human feelings and affections, ‘absolute’ music, according to the Romantic theorists Wilhelm Henrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, formed an entirely separate world. Among the works of

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independent instrumental music that come to be dubbed ‘absolute’ Beethoven’s symphonies take pride of place. In particular, the Eroica, according to the Young Hegelian theorist A. B. Marx, marks the culmination of music history, as the work in which ‘musical art first steps independently – without connection to the poet’s word or the dramatists’s action – out of the play of form and uncertain impulses and feelings and into the brighter, more certain consciousness in which it comes of age’.10 The late nineteenth century saw the rise of movements which heralded the almost complete withdrawal of art from the public domain, especially the domain of consumption and exchange, in the name of artistic autonomy and purity, such as the movement which took for its name the phrase, ‘l’art pour l’art’ (first published and made popular by the French writer Théophile Gautier in the early 1830s). Eduard Hanslick’s manifesto of music’s autonomy and purity – The Beautiful in Music (1854) – is probably best understood in the context of this later development. According to Chua, ‘Hanslick purified music from all possible political contamination by distilling its essence to form. Music’s meaning became self-referential, separated from reality by its structural enclosures. This ideology came to dominate the history of twentieth-century music.’11 This later phase of the development of aesthetic autonomy, namely the programmatic self-withdrawal of art from the public domain in the interests of aesthetic purity, reached its musical heights in 1918 in Vienna, with Schoenberg’s Society for the Private Performance of Music. Although it would be anachronistic to conflate this notion of artistic autonomy (or this phase in its development) with the ideas of the autonomy of the artwork and absolute music as they are applied to Beethoven’s works of the early nineteenth-century, there are certain continuities between the two.

II One consequence of art’s social and historical autonomy manifests itself in the production of works of art, and in the kind of attention that autonomous works of art call for. In the process of their growing independence, works of art come to refer to, or to reflect upon, art itself, rather than, say, imitating nature or celebrating the divine. No doubt this general feature of works of art was always present, but it is intensified as art becomes a practice in its own right. A work of independent instrumental music, for example, is a reflection in music upon music. A composer composes with a view to and with knowledge of previous works, not just his or her own. Artworks, then, in becoming autonomous, (and



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in the case of music, in becoming ‘absolute’), become self-reflective, and it is this self-referentiality that renders them ‘pure’ or ‘formal’ or ‘objectless’. This aspect of the autonomy of artworks is also the key to their historicity. It is an important insight of Adorno’s that artworks are thoroughly historical, and that their becoming autonomous does not absolve them of their historicity. Artworks do not become transcendent as they become autonomous. Rather each musical work is, and may be understood as, a link in a chain of self-reflection which makes up the independent world of music. (Perhaps we should rather think of links in a web of compositions. Adorno, after all, has a rather unilinear and prescriptive conception of the development of music, according to which any return to traditional music, folk music or classicism is diagnosed as a kind of regression.) Inasmuch as he holds that art develops historically and that this historical development has an inner directedness, Adorno is thoroughly Hegelian. In Hegel the point holds for all the various products of spirit (or ‘mind’), science, technology, philosophy, politics or art. Each new generation of scientists or artists finds themselves situated in a world that is already the product of tradition.12 Each age must receive this tradition and rework it, transposing it to a new level. Adorno only really applies this thought consistently to art. As he writes in Aesthetic Theory, the artist’s materials are ‘historically and socially preformed’ and their historicity is inscribed in their form.13 One has to be careful in making a distinction between content and form, particularly when speaking about art, and even more so when talking about works of independent instrumental music. This is because works of music are essentially form. In Adorno’s aesthetics of music, what he calls music’s ‘material content’ consists itself of musical forms and techniques. Foremost among these are the sonata form and the tonal system, though as Max Paddison claims, one might equally count ‘genres, compositional techniques, tuning systems and styles of performance’ as forms.14 Let us focus here, as Adorno does, on the sonata form and the tonal system as the (formed) material content of classical music, which govern the internal structure of the music as well as the patterns of listening in the audience. The tonal system establishes certain determinate hierarchical relations between pitches, centred on a tonic (the key). Tonality constitutes relations of consonance or stability, between notes and dissonance (or instability). Dissonance creates interest and instability and calls for resolution, the return to stability, often to a tonic chord. One can understand the return from dissonance to consonance, and the return to the tonic as a kind of homecoming, which provides a release of tension and a reassuring sense of familiarity.

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What is known as sonata form is usually said to consist of three major parts – the exposition, the development and the recapitulation – which may be preceded by an introduction and followed by a coda.15 The exposition normally sets out the theme or themes of the piece in the tonic key and is often followed by a modulation to the dominant, and a second set of themes. After the repetition of the exposition comes the development, where the themes are fragmented and recombined in a way that often displays a greater degree of tonal, harmonic and rhythmic instability than the other sections. The end of the development often prepares the way for the recapitulation by moving to a tone that calls for resolution and signals the return to the tonic in the recapitulation, which restates the exposition (or an altered version of it) in the tonic key. One can understand the final transition to the initial theme in the recapitulation as a return to the familiar, a homecoming that has been prefigured and prepared for by the earlier sections. The sonata form thus provides a tightly integrated, more or less symmetrical structure that embraces and contains the dramatic development of the music, and that assigns each part (each note) its proper place in the whole. Symmetry resolves dramatic tension in the thematic development. Sonata form and the tonality system together grant numerous possibilities for a satisfying aesthetic experience, the gradual buildup of instability and tension followed by release and resolution. As Charles Rosen puts it, ‘Symmetry withheld and then finally granted is one of the basic satisfactions of 18th Century art.’16 They afford a set of possibilities for establishing a satisfying completeness to a whole piece of music such as a sonata, or single movement within a multi-movement work. They also pose the risk of degenerating into schemas, imposed on the music from without, that sound trite and predictable.17 The material content of music thus poses a set of formal problems for the composer to solve in the attempt to create a novel work. The main difficulty, as Adorno sees it, is to find a way of making the form arise spontaneously from the music itself, without it becoming noticeable as a framework, and falling prey to formalism in a pejorative sense. We can call these ‘form-content problems’: how to give form to content without externally imposing it. One problem is how to tightly integrate the details into the larger structure of the whole piece without absorbing them into the whole and eliminating their particularity. Adorno sometimes describes this in more philosophical terms as the problem of mediating the universal and the particular, such that individual details and phrases find their place in the whole, while yet being able to ‘crystallise as something genuinely individual and concrete’. Another is how to deduce the content from the form in a non-trivial way, for example, how to bring the whole to a satisfying completion



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without devices such as delay, repetition, crescendo and diminuendo in a trite and predictable way.18 Insofar as each work of musical art, qua autonomous, is a reflection in music on music, each work offers a new and unique solution to the problems posed by the material contents, and the uniqueness of that solution, embodied in its form, marks its place in the history of musical works.

Autonomy of the artwork and musical form We have seen that the autonomy of the artwork manifests itself in its form. This seems almost trivially true of a piece of absolute – independent instrumental – music, for as a pure structure in what else could the work’s autonomy show itself? For just this reason, it is not very informative to say that a work promises freedom in virtue of its form. We need a fuller description of the formal features in virtue of which the work is able to promise freedom. We can take our cue from Dahlhaus, who considers that beneath Hanslick’s conception of ‘absolute music’ as pure form is the much older ideal of an internally perfected whole that is manifest in nature, whose thoroughgoing purposiveness serves no external purpose. Dahlhaus locates this ideal in Karl Phillips Moritz’s treatise on the Visual Imitation of the Beautiful of 1788.19 The same aesthetic ideal may be found in various guises throughout Weimar classicism, particularly in Goethe’s work, where it carries over into aesthetics from his studies on botany, plant morphology and natural philosophy. It is also a central tenet of Kant’s concept of beauty as a whole that exhibits ‘purposiveness without purpose’ and from Kant onward it runs like a red thread through German Romanticism for example, in Schlegel and Novalis; and German Idealism, notably in Schelling and Hegel. Although these different thinkers conceive the status of the organic ideal in various different ways, they more or less agree about the structure of the organism. The organism is characterized by a reciprocity between part and whole, since the whole is made up of parts, and the part is constituted as a part (rather than a fragment) by virtue of sharing in the end of the whole.20 A similar reciprocity is present between means and ends. In an organism, in contrast to a mechanism, no element is a mere means to an external end. In both cases, the organic structure consists of relations of reciprocity and harmony that are opposed to those of hierarchy and subordination. What makes the ideal of organic form especially appropriate to an aesthetic of music, which is a dynamic art form, is that it is a dynamic ideal. The reception history of Beethoven’s symphonic work, from its early origins to the present, is

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redolent with the organic metaphor. E. T. A. Hoffman deploys the metaphor of the natural development of bud to blossom to capture the unfolding of Beethoven’s symphonic music into a coherent internally integrated whole. And in the early twentieth century the ideal of organic unity may be found in two very different schools of musicological analysis of the Eroica symphony, the motivic analysis of Fritz Cassirer, and the interpretation by Heinrich Schenker based on Wagner’s idea of artistic clairvoyance. More recent commentators such as Maynard Solomon still argue that Beethoven’s style exhibits ‘an organicity both of motion and structure which gives the symphony its sense of unfolding continuity and wholeness within a constant interplay of moods’.21 As we have just seen, there are two dimensions to the organic ideal: the ideal of an internal unity unfolding in time on the one hand and the internal relations of part and whole, and reciprocal unity of universal and particular on the other. Both features are developed in detail in Hegel’s dialectical philosophy. Famously in the Preface to the Phenomenology of spirit Hegel deploys the metaphor of the development from bud to blossom and fruit to describe the unfolding of the dialectic as ‘moments of an organic unity’ whose ‘mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole’.22 In the Science of Logic he develops the idea that the concept is a concrete universal, a view he expressed earlier in the Phenomenology in the lapidary and memorable sentence ‘the true is the whole’: the universal of the notion is not a mere sum of features common to several things, confronted by a particular which enjoys an existence of its own. It is, on the contrary, self-particularising or self-specifying, and with undimmed clearness finds itself at home in its antithesis.23

Because it combines these two dimensions, Adorno finds Hegel’s dialectic well suited to interpret Beethoven’s symphonies, elucidating their thematic development and moments of transition as well as explicating their successful resolutions to the structural problems inherent in the ‘musical material’. Thus Adorno maintains that the categories of Hegelian philosophy ‘can be applied without violence to every detail of a music that cannot possibly have been exposed to any “Hegelian” influence’.24 It is true that, as an aesthetic category, the ideal of the organism initially went hand in hand with the idea that art should imitate nature. Insofar as ‘organism’ is a natural, biological category, this aesthetic ideal implies the primacy of natural beauty, and hence threatens to compromise the idea of the autonomy of art, which is beholden to no external authority, natural or otherwise. However, in Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel the organic ideal is no longer



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construed as a biological category, nor is it tied to the thesis that art should imitate nature. In Kant’s critique of judgement, the idea of the organism (and of a natural purpose) is a regulative idea of reason that resists mechanical-causal explanation. In Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism the organic ideal is deployed to heal the division between nature and freedom, and is apt to this end because it captures not only the inner directedness and self-perfectibility of living beings such as plants, but also the capacity for self-determination of conscious human beings.25 In Hegel the organism is a logical category that inflects the underlying (internally dynamic or developmental) structure of his system. In other words, during the period in question, the organic ideal comes to stand as an ideal of free self-determination as such, which nature exhibits in an unconscious and inchoate form, but which is also present in the conscious, intentional products of human activity. To return to our question, Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony (along with other works of the Middle Period) is autonomous in the sense that it is a work of independent instrumental music that is designed to be attended to as an end in itself, and whose autonomy is embodied in the particular ways in which the possibilities of sonata form and tonality are mobilized in order to achieve the aesthetic ideal of organic wholeness and integrity that unfold across time. Within an organic whole the individual details are integrated into the overall structure in a way that allows them to retain their individuality. There is a reciprocity between means and end, and between part and whole. In short, Beethoven’s Eroica is apt to promise freedom because it fulfils the aesthetic ideal of organic wholeness, which is itself nothing less than a musical instantiation of free self-determination.

What kind of freedom? We have seen what it is that makes the Eroica Symphony apt to promise freedom. We now need to paint a fuller picture of the kind of freedom that this work expounds. In particular we want to know about the alleged social and political dimension of the freedom that is promised.

I I will begin by amplifying and further specifying Chua’s remark that the Eroica expounds ‘a liberty as ambitious as the philosophy of Kant or Hegel’. For there

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are various different notions of freedom in play in Kant and Hegel’s philosophies, and to understand the truth in this remark we need to know which are the salient ones. In Kant, several different conceptions of freedom are to be found, the relation between which is not always clear. In the first Critique Kant advances the idea of Noumenal Freedom or Transcendental Freedom, as the freedom of the transcendental subject to initiate causal sequences in the world of appearances. It presupposes that human agency is a first cause, or a self-causing cause. Kant claims that this transcendental idea is an ‘idea of reason’, which means that, although we can never have knowledge of freedom, we are entitled to think that human beings are transcendentally free; indeed, as moral beings we must believe it. On the face of it this notion of freedom, which is at bottom a metaphysical notion with epistemological ramifications, is remote from our concern here. In the Groundwork and the second Critique Kant introduces and defends the idea of freedom as moral autonomy. Moral freedom is the freedom of the subject to legislate to him or herself and to obey no other law than that which pure reason gives to itself. On this view the subject is truly free (morally autonomous) only where it acts not only in accordance with duty – understood as a requirement of pure reason on a being that is both rational and sensible – but for the sake of duty. At first sight, one may think that this second conception of freedom has no more relevance to our thesis than the first, but first sight is misleading. The idea that reason can be modelled on the idea of a self-legislating subject is intrinsically a political idea, even if in Kant it serves as a model of freedom that applies to the individual and is limited to the moral domain, with the consequence that its applicability to the contexts of aesthetics and politics is obscured. Nonetheless, the model rests on an implied analogy between the independent self-organization of the political association and the operation of reason. Just as the organization of the state is conceived of not as the reflection of a divinely ordained order, or of the natural order (with divine origins) as in Natural Law, but as a self-constituting unity of freely willing subjects, so reason can spontaneously generate ways of organizing itself which have no fundamental orientation to the contents of the world.26 There is a third concept of freedom in Kant that is also relevant to the thesis in question, which is ‘Mündigkeit’. The original pre-Kantian meaning of Mündigkeit is the ability to stand up for oneself. Mündigkeit stems from Middle Low German ‘Mund’, which means ‘Schutz’ or protector. The person who is mündig can protect himself and stands free of any ‘Vormund’ or guardian. In



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the Holy Roman Empire this term came to refer to the legal status of majority or adulthood. Famously, however, Kant gives the term a much more specific rationalist meaning, namely the ability to think for oneself, to use one’s own reason, and hence not to be beholden, at least in the public domain of letters and learning, to dogma or common opinion.27 Adorno later takes up and develops Kant’s idea of Mündigkeit. For Adorno it refers to the capacity to take a stand, to refuse to capitulate, adjust to or otherwise play along with institutional forms of heteronomy.28

II Hegel combines various different ideas of freedom into a unified theory. To cut a long story short, Hegel’s idea of freedom has three different levels. The first of these is subjective freedom. On Hegel’s view, an agent is subjectively free if and only if he or she finds subjective satisfaction in his or her actions and relationships (determinations of the will).29 The second aspect is objective freedom. An agent is objectively free when his or her determinations are prescribed by reason: they are determinations to which a fully rational agent would, in the circumstances, be committed.30 The third aspect is concrete freedom or the unity of subjective and objective freedom. On this view of freedom the fully free agent is free in both the first two senses, and is made such by virtue of his or her participation in the practices, customs and institutions of modern Sittlichkeit or ethical life into which he or she has been fully socialized. For Hegel it is a necessary condition of concrete freedom that the institutions and practices that make up the ethical life of the society in question are actual, which means that they are both intelligible and good, and that they can be recognized as such by the individuals who live in them. Importantly, freedom – on Hegel’s view of it – just like happiness for Aristotle and Plato, is a property of social wholes, as well as a property of the will of individual agents. Insofar as freedom is an actual ideal that pertains to a social whole, it is both concrete, in the etymological sense that it emerges from the unity of citizens having ‘grown together’, rather than arising from the aggregation of the negative freedom of individuals, and also – in Isaiah Berlin’s sense of the word – positive, insofar as it consists in a kind of collective self-rule. For Hegel, then, freedom in its fullest sense – concrete, positive, social freedom – is nothing less than a substantial ideal of civic unity embodied in the state, no less than in the free will of its citizens. Finally, Hegel insists, freedom comes to be in a process of self-actualization. The state, he claims, is ‘the actuality of concrete freedom’.31

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Actuality [Wirklichkeit], which is sometimes translated misleadingly as ‘reality’, is a technical term for Hegel which applies to a much narrower domain than that of existence. Hegel often refers to the latter as ‘lazy’ [träge] existence or ‘mere being’.32 Actuality is a superior order of reality because it continues to exist for good reason, while the latter does not.33 When Hegel writes in the Preface to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right that ‘the rational is the actual’ he is claiming that what is actual is in principle intelligible, and that it is demonstrably good. He is also claiming that qua actuality, the state is a realization of concrete, positive, social freedom that is the telos of an historical process of development, which is now complete and ready to be understood and affirmed as such. The answer to our third question, then, is that the Eroica Symphony promises an ideal of concrete and positive freedom that has come to be as the result of a historical process.

Aesthetic autonomy and political freedom Now we turn to our fourth question: What is the relation between the aesthetic autonomy of the artwork and the political freedom it promises? How do the formal features of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony in virtue of which it fulfils the organic-aesthetic ideal express, or promise, the ideal of concrete and positive freedom of the kind that is set forth in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right? Kant, in the second part of the Critique of Judgment, adverts to the analogy between the natural organism and ‘a certain kind of association’; namely the organized state or the body politic. For each member in such a whole should indeed be not merely a means, but also an end: and while each member contributes to making the whole possible, the idea of that whole should in turn determine the member’s position and function.34

For Schiller and for the early German Romantics the organism served both as an aesthetic and as a political ideal. That is, the ideal of aesthetic autonomy was understood to foreshadow an ideal model of political freedom. In a letter to Körner, Schiller writes: ‘The beautiful world is the happiest symbol of how the moral should be, and each beautiful natural being outside of me is a happy citizen who calls out to me: “Be free like me”.’35 The idea that natural beauty is a symbol of social and political freedom lies at the heart of Schiller’s ideas about the aesthetic state.36 The organic ideal may also be seen at work in the political



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thought of Novalis, who wrote that ‘the poetic state is the truly perfect state’. The poetic task of the spirit is to overcome the opposition between the caprice of nature and the force of artifice, and thereby transform the mechanism of the state into ‘a living, autonomous being’.37 As Carl Schmitt points out, ‘the idea that the state is an artwork, and should aspire to the organic ideal of beauty, is central to all romantic aesthetic-organistic political thought’.38 In fact there are at least two traditions of aesthetic-organistic political thought. Briefly put, Novalis, Schlegel and late Schelling represent a tradition of political conservatism that deploys the organic ideal to defend historically developed versions of traditional society against a ‘mechanistic’ (i.e. artificially fabricated (revolutionary)) republic.39 By contrast, Schiller, the young Schelling and Hegel deploy the organic ideal to promote a reformist, progressive notion of Republican civic unity against ‘mechanistically’ construed absolutist rule that was common in a Germany riven by Kleinstaaterei and only just beginning to emerge from feudalism. Which of these ideals is meant when Beethoven’s symphonies are said to express an ideal of political freedom? The answer is the second – the reformist, progressive ideal. I don’t rest this assertion on the evidence of Beethoven’s actual political views, which have been well described as ‘liberal, but not radical, enlightened’, and which incidentally are similar to Hegel’s, even in their assessments of Napoleon Bonaparte. Nor do I rest it on the evidence of Beethoven’s well-attested admiration for the work of Schiller, although both of these facts about Beethoven support my view. Rather, it is the music itself which points in that direction. The truth in the view that the Third Symphony exemplifies Beethoven’s heroic style, whether the hero in question is taken to be Bonaparte, or, as some have argued, Prometheus, rests on the fact that the symphony is audacious, ground-breaking and forward-looking.40 The organic ideal, qua aesthetic ideal, realized by the Third Symphony, then, prefigures the progressive Republican political ideal of an organic state, and this qualification should be added to the answer given above to our third question. All the features that characterized the aesthetic-organic ideal have their political analogues. In an aesthetic-organic whole each part shares in the end of the whole: it has no independent life or existence. In an organic state, each citizen shares in the constitution, understood not as a particular written document, but as the animating principle and way of life that is embodied in its institutions. No citizen has an isolated, dispersed, abstract, pre-political existence.41 In an aesthetic-organic whole nothing is a mere means to an external end, while in the organic state all individuals are both means that serve the whole, as well as ends

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in themselves.42 An aesthetic-organic whole unfolds across time and develops towards its end, just as the organic state comes to be as a result of a process of historical self-actualization. It is true that Hegel rejects the view propounded by Schiller and later Romantic thinkers, that the state is a work of art – or like one in all respects. Hegel argues that the state is not a product of mere nature, nor a contingent result of historical accident; nor is it the work of the intentional activity of a single agent. The state is, in his view, a product of spirit, that is, a product of the myriad effects of human rational activity, which is why he says at various points that in cultural and political modernity mankind stands on its head.43 For all that, he maintains that the state is actualized in the form of an organism.44 What allows Hegel to marry these apparently conflicting ideas – that the state is not a product of nature, but of reason, and that the state nevertheless has the form of an organism – is that in his theory ‘organism’ is a logical category, not a biological one. Hegel’s system, like the Hegelian logic that structures it, has the form of an organized whole, just as much as the political reality Hegel claims to have been actualized by spirit.

Adorno’s interpretation of Beethoven Now we have a good idea of what it is in virtue of which Beethoven’s Third Symphony is often said to promise freedom, and of what kind of freedom it promises. The key component is the organic ideal and the way in which it can be used to elucidate certain structural features of aesthetic wholes and political associations, as well as its compatibility with the ideal of a self-completing totality which develops or unfolds towards its end across time. Aesthetic and artistic autonomy manifests itself in the organic structure of the work, and it is this form that promises freedom as a social and political ideal. Thus this is the best way to understand what is correct about Chua’s statements that for Adorno, ‘the internal laws of Beethoven’s compositions expound a liberty as ambitious as the philosophy of Kant or Hegel’. That said, for Adorno this is only half of the story. There must be more to it than this, because the story thus far appears to be in tension, first with Adorno’s historicist conception of art, and second with Adorno’s negativism – the idea that art and philosophy stand equally under the ‘prohibition against graven images’. Adorno has a historical conception of aesthetic success. Earlier we saw that the Romantics thought of artworks as existing in a separate world. What Adorno



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adds to this is that this independent world of artworks is itself historical, in that each work of music, as reflection in music on music, is a link in an expanding historical web. The world of art is a historical world. At the same time, even if in one sense separate, the historical world of art is embedded in the wider social and historical world. Thus although Adorno agrees with the Romantics that works of art ‘detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world, as if this other world were an autonomous entity’, he sees that this implies neither that art has no social meaning, nor that its social meaning diminishes as its aesthetic self-preoccupation intensifies.45 On the contrary, Adorno claims, ‘even in the most extreme refusal of society, art is essentially social’,46 for artworks ‘bear what is opposed to them in themselves’ in both their ‘materials’ and their ‘procedures’.47 This is evident, to take a concrete example, in Baroque composers such as Couperin and Bach whose keyboard and orchestral suites, though intended to be listened to, were written as stylized dance forms, reflecting their origins in courtly life. Similarly, the cantata and the mass are religious in origin. Adorno takes this as evidence that all artworks are redolent with social meaning encrypted in their form. This explains why he thinks (like Hegel) that to understand a work of art through its form is also to understand the social and historical world that produced it. It also explains why Adorno insists that artworks are thoroughly historical, and that even the greatest and most authentic of them are susceptible ‘to age, go cold and die’.48 In spite of their autonomy, artworks are vulnerable to actual social and historical forces, which means that even the aesthetic-organic ideal and the criteria of aesthetic success that it imposes are historically bound and transient. In this manner, Adorno’s historicism shapes his rather traditional interpretation that the great works of Beethoven’s middle period could and did convey their utopian vision of a free society through the aesthetic harmony and organic wholeness of their form: Beethoven ‘spoke of the social emancipation of the subject, ultimately for the idea of a united society of autonomously active persons. In the esthetic picture of a league of free men he went beyond bourgeois society.’49 This utopian vision of a free society looked progressive relative to the political reality of the time; in that sense it transcends its time, yet it is not historically transcendent, since the ideal itself is time bound. Adorno understands the Eroica as an autonomous work of art of the early bourgeois period, which successfully promises freedom by realizing the organic ideal, but he does not see either of these ideals as timeless. Although they point to an unrealized social possibility, they are linked to the historical present. In

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this way, Adorno’s traditional interpretation of Beethoven remains more or less consistent with his historicist conception of the artwork. However, it does appear to contravene his aesthetic negativism. Adorno’s view is that during the period in question particular historical circumstances allowed aesthetic and philosophical ideas to develop far in advance of historical actuality. This was why ‘In Beethoven the category of totality still preserves a picture of the right society’.50 Adorno’s aesthetic negativism to be sure is also not a ahistorical prescription. Adorno, in contrast to Wilhelm von Lenz, refuses to hold up the Eroica as a transcendent aesthetic ideal, in virtue of the way in which it realizes the possibilities of sonata form and tonality in order to perfectly fulfil the demands of the aesthetic-organic ideal.51 Adorno’s claim is that just as the social world continually disappoints the organic ideal of a reconciled society, so the successful realization of the classical organic-aesthetic ideal itself degenerates into ideology.52 Bourgeois music was decorative, even in its greatest achievements. It made itself pleasant to people, not just directly to its listeners, but objectively, going far beyond them by virtue of its affirmation of the ideas of humanism. It was given notice to quit because it had degenerated into ideology, because its reflection of the world in a positive light, its call for a better world, became a lie which legitimated evil.53

Delight in organic wholeness of aesthetic form becomes a mere consolation, or substitute satisfaction for the absence of that happiness that would be available were the world to live up to art’s promise of freedom. Hence, the beautiful illusion of aesthetic wholeness is at once aesthetic semblance and ideological illusion.54 Later still, the organic-political ideal itself ‘goes cold’ and hardens into a reflection of an increasingly administered society in hock to the capitalist system of production and exchange. Interpreted from this perspective, in Adorno’s eyes the aesthetic-organic ideal ominously prefigures the rise of totalitarian society: the motive kernels, the particulars to which each movement is tied, are themselves identical with the universal; they are formulas of tonality, reduced to nothingness as things of their own and pre-shaped by the totality as much as the individual is in individualistic society.55

For Adorno, Beethoven’s genius is shown by his having brought this dialectical complexity to light in some of his late works, by working against the grain of sonata form and tonality in order to break free from the aesthetic-organic ideal.



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In his late string quartets, Adorno claims, Beethoven unconsciously discovered the ‘compulsion toward disintegration’ as he pushes the idea of integration to an extreme.56 Adorno notes that Beethoven’s late style is characterized by a tendency towards compression and suggestion rather than development, by the liberation of the individual phrase or ornament from the surrounding whole, and by the refusal of recapitulation.57 What this suggests is that Adorno views the great works of the Middle Period – most notably the Eroica – as both a pinnacle of musical achievement and a point of departure. Instead of resolving problems – ‘immanent aesthetic problems and the social ones’ – within the material content of art, artworks whose autonomy bids them take leave of the aesthetic-organic ideal rather pose the problems ‘such that the attempt to solve them must fail.’58 Instead of aiming for the successful realization of the organicaesthetic ideal, they set themselves up for necessary failure: ‘Art works of the highest rank are distinguished from the others not through their success – for in what have they succeeded? – but through the manner of their failure.’59 Adorno sums up the various features he thinks are characteristic of Beethoven’s later works as the ‘tendency toward the inorganic’.60 At this point, the comparison that Adorno is apt to make between Hegel and Beethoven is telling. Where in Beethoven tonality and sonata form become fractured and fragmented, Hegel’s philosophical dialectic, Adorno notes, continues to chart the course in which contradictions are sublated at higher levels of system complexity, and ultimately dissolved into the ether of the absolute idea. On this point, Adorno is as critical of Hegel as his contemporaries Karl Popper, and Isaiah Berlin. Beethoven, he claims, becomes ‘inorganic’, preserving truth by abandoning the organic ideal, at the point where Hegel becomes ‘ideological’ by cleaving to that ideal.61 Hegel gives to believe that concrete freedom, in which rational subjects are completely at home in the organic state that they comprehend and affirm, has been actualized, where Beethoven makes vivid both the beauty and the bankruptcy of the organic ideal. Adorno has more to say on the subject of freedom in Beethoven’s late works – at least those late works he considers to exhibit his late style. In brief, he considers that Beethoven’s late works enact freedom, in the way that they break free from convention and release individual details from their integration into the musical whole. This also has a political resonance. But the salient notion of freedom here is the Kantian notion of Mündigkeit that Adorno takes up and reworks in his own idiom. In the context of Adorno’s discussion of the late Beethoven, the aesthetic-organic ideal and the political-organic ideal of concrete, positive freedom are present only as the spectre of aesthetic, and by

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analogy social, integration, that autonomous individuals (who are free in the sense of having been successfully educated towards Mündigkeit) must needs criticize and resist.62 The moment for the realization of an ideal of concrete and positive freedom has been missed, and the task that remains for philosophy is to reflect on why that was, and on the possibilities for political praxis that remain.

Notes 1

Chua, 2012a, p. 5. Similar views may be found in Chua (2012b), which is the longer published version of Professor Chua’s address (2012a). 2 Adorno, 1998a, p. 43 (Chua’s note). 3 Adorno’s terminology for the heroic works is the ‘intensive type’ (Chua’s note). 4 Considerations such as Beethoven’s own liberal, but not radical, Republican politics may provide relevant information, but do not themselves answer such questions. 5 For a more extensive treatment of this issue see Zuidervaart 1990; Harding 1992. 6 Maynard Solomon notes that Beethoven was ‘a “free-lance” semi-feudal composer and virtuoso, moving toward relative independence from aristocratic patronage’ (Solomon 1977, pp. 65–6). 7 See e.g. Dahlhaus 1978; Chua 2006. 8 Dahlhaus 1978, p. 7. 9 Hans Eisler, ‘Musik und Politik’, cited in Dahlhaus 1978, p. 2. 10 Adolf Bernhard Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven, cited in Dahlhaus, 1978, p. 13. 11 Chua 2012a, p. 4. 12 ‘The content of this tradition is what the spiritual world has brought forth…. Deeds and actions presuppose a given material content to which they are directed, and which they do not simply increase by adding to the heap of material that is already there, but essentially work and transform it. What is inherited is thus received and succeeded to, and at the same time it is relegated to a stuff which is to be transformed by spirit. What is received is in this way altered, changed and enriched and at the same time preserved’ (Hegel 1994, pp. 6–9). 13 Adorno 1999, p. 344/GS 7 512. 14 Paddison 1991 p. 274. 15 ‘Sonata form’ is a historical and analytic category that is used to make sense of a certain style and tradition of classical music. It should not be hypostatized. Perhaps no piece of music perfectly exemplifies it. What I say about it relies heavily on Charles Rosen (1997 [1971], p. 49). 16 Ibid. 17 Adorno often points to the danger that inheres in the recapitulation: ‘The weak



18

19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28

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point of an autonomous form arising purely from the matter itself, stripped of every borrowing, was the recapitulation. With the recapitulation a deeply time-alien, spatially symmetrical, architectonic element enters into the temporal flow of music’ (Adorno 2008, p. 204). That said, without recapitulation (and repetition) there is no difference, and no possibility of development, and hence no sonata form and no satisfying aesthetic whole. Note how similar this is to the dilemma that Lukács diagnoses at the heart of what he calls ‘the Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought’, which characterize German philosophy from Kant onward. He also poses that dilemma as dialectic of form and content, and he also asserts that the successful resolution of that dialectic is a kind of freedom. ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ (Lukács 1990, pp. 117–23). Dahlhaus 1978, p. 28. This concept of the relation between part and whole stems ultimately from Aristotle’s notion of substance in the Metaphysics Z: 10 (1034b20–2). A related account may also be found in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, §64 & §65 (Kant 1987, pp. 248–54). Sipe 1998, pp. 68–74. Solomon 1977, p. 197, cited in Sipe 1998, p. 73. Hegel 1977, p. 2. Hegel 1986a, §163, pp. 311–12; see also Hegel 1977, p. 11. Adorno 1998a, p. 44. Ibid., p. 24: ‘Beethoven’s achievement lies in the fact that in his work … alone, the whole is never external to the particular but emerges solely from its movement.’ See Bowie 1993, p. 94. See Henrich 1992, p. 91. Kant 1978a, p. 53. Actually Kant has much more to say about Unmündigkeit, the capacity not to be able to think for oneself, than he does about Mündigkeit. In his ‘Anthropology’ Kant makes it clear that natural immaturity (minority) is only one example of a broader conception of Unmündigkeit. Women, even if adult and therefore not naturally immature, are always legally unmündig (Kant 1978b, pp. 521–2). Adorno speaks of the capacity ‘to hold fast to normativity … to the question of right and wrong’ on the one hand and simultaneously ‘to a critique of the fallibility of that authority which has the confidence to undertake such a self-criticism’ on the other (Adorno 1997, p. 250). In other words, Mündigkeit is the capacity to take a critical stand, but which is also conscious of its own fallibility, and modified by continual vigilant self-criticism. It is in this sense only that Adorno claims: ‘The single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is Mündigkeit, if I might use the Kantian expression: the power of self-determination, of not cooperating’ (Adorno 1988b, p. 195). Hegel 1991, p. 158. ‘The right of the subjective will is that whatever it is to

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31 32 33 34 35

36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44

45

Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy recognize as valid should be perceived by it as good.’ This is not equivalent with what Berlin calls negative freedom; however, it implies it, since the subject that is not negatively free to pursue his or her desires cannot find satisfaction in them. Hegel 1991, p. 49. ‘When I will what is rational, I act not as a particular individual, but in accordance with the concepts of ethics in general: in an ethical act I vindicate not myself but the thing. But the person who does something perverse gives the greatest prominence to his particularity. The rational is the high road which everyone follows and where no-one stands out from the rest.’ Hegel 1991, p. 282. On the relation between ‘Existenz’ and ‘Wirklichkeit’ see Hegel 1986a, p. 48. Hegel 1986b, p. 52. Kant 1987, p. 254; §65n. 39. Schiller, Letter to Körner (23 February 1793), cited in Chytry (1989). Although Schiller talks about the moral, he is not using the term in a narrow, modern sense, but in a broader sense encompassing ethics and politics. The phrase the ‘happy citizen’ makes this clear. ‘Schiller’s idea of the aesthetic state, on the model of the ancient Greeks, remained resolutely compatible with the small state and fully consonant with Weimar ideas on genuine organic culture, it eschewed explicit social and political radicalism in its image of the steady nurturing of the aesthetic individual, for whom the state embodied his or her own harmony writ large’ (Chytry 1989, p. 102). Novalis 1960, pp. 468, 282, 3f. Schmitt 1968, p. 127. This does not imply that Romanticism is itself conservative, but that there is a significant tradition of Romantic conservativism. See Floros 1978. See Fichte 1979, pp. 78–9. F. W. J. Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode des Akademischen Studiums (1803), cited in Anrich 1964, p. 19. Hegel 1977, p. 15. See also Hegel 1986a, p. 529: ‘As long as the sun has stood in the heavens and the planets have revolved around it, it had never been observed that man stands on his head – i.e. [that his existence is based] in thought – and that he constructs actuality in accordance with it. Anaxagoras was the first to say that the world is governed by νουσ but only now did people come to recognise that thought ought to govern spiritual reality. This was accordingly a glorious dawn.’ Hegel talks explicitly of the ‘organisation of the state’ and of the state as an ‘organism’ in §258, §269 and §271 of The Philosophy of Right Hegel 1991, pp. 279, 290 and 304. On the philosophical significance of this metaphor in Hegel see Wolff 2004; Sedgwick 2001. Adorno 1999, p. 2/GS7 10.

46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60

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Adorno 1999, p. 344/GS 7 512. Adorno 1999, p. 349/GS 7 519. Adorno 1999, p. 344; GS 7 512. Adorno 1999, p. 349/GS 7 519. Adorno 1999, p. 4; GS 7 14. Adorno 1998a, p. 47/ GS 14 420. Adorno 1976, p. 63/GS 14 246. See also Adorno GS 14 17. Contrast this with the fin-de-siècle optimism of Lenz, who regarded the Eroica Symphony of 1803 as the monument of the new era that elevated instrumental music as the very essence of music’s autonomy. ‘On your knees old world!…Before you stands the idea of the great Beethoven symphony. … Here is the end of one empire and the beginning of another. Here is the boundary of a century.’ Wilhelm von Lenz, Beethoven: Eine Kunststudie (Hamburg, 1855–60), 3:291, cited in Chua 2012a. See also Chua 2006, p. 235. Adorno 1998a, p. 17. Adorno 1992, p. 257. ‘Transposed to the philosophical plane, we might remind ourselves that the harmony between the interests of the individual and society in general which was preached by liberalism failed to materialise in reality. Through its consistent reliance on the universal, art tended to behave as if that harmony already existed; it thus became transformed into mere semblance vis-à-vis the society whose truth it was supposed to express’ (Adorno 2008, p. 204). Adorno 1998a, p. 43. Adorno 1999, p. 45; GS 7 73–4. Adorno 1998a, pp. 154–61. Adorno 1998a, p. 100. Adorno 1998a, p. 99. Adorno 1998a, p. 130. This remark is made apropos of the Six Bagatelles, op. 126. Peter E. Gordon concludes that Adorno infers from Beethoven’s late work the view that ‘any artwork as such – must exhibit the internal fragmentation … identified as a distinctive feature of late-style’ (Gordon, 2009, p. 92). This is to assume that Adorno’s theory of Beethoven’s late style constitutes a ahistorical aesthetic ideal that any artwork as such must meet. As we have seen, Adorno does not endorse such transcendent, ahistorical aesthetic ideals; hence Gordon’s view must be rejected. Adorno 1998a, p. 161. Adorno 1971.

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References Adorno, T. W. (1970–) Gesammelte Schriften, (ed.) R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (23 vols. Abbreviated to GS + volume and page number). —(1971) Erziehung zur Mündigkeit – Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmut Becker 1959 bis 1969, (ed.) Gerd Kadelbach. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —(1976) Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Seabury Press [GS 14]. —(1992) ‘Music and New Music’, in Quasi una Fantasia, trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso [GS 16]. —(1997) Probleme der Moral Philosophie, (ed.) T. Schröder. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. —(1998a) Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, (ed.) Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Cambridge: Polity Press. —(1998b) Critical Models, trans. H. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press. —(1999) Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. London: Athlone Press [GS 7]. —(2008) ‘Form in the New Music’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Music Analysis, vol. 27, nos 2–3, pp. 201–16. Anrich, E. (ed.) (1964) Die Idee der deutschen Universitat: die funf Grundschriften aus der Zeit ihrer Neubegrundung durch klassischen Idealismus und romantischen Realismus. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Aristotle (1996) The Politics and the Constitution of Athens, (ed.) Stephen Everson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berlin, I. (1969) Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowie, A. (1993 [1990]) Aesthetics and Subjectivity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chua, D. (2006) Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(2009) ‘Beethoven’s Other Humanism’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 571–645. —(2012a) ‘IneffaBeethoven’, unpublished manuscript which was the basis of Professor Chua’s Plenary Address to the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group, 2nd annual conference, Kings College London, 20 July. —(2012b) ‘The Promise of Nothing: The Dialectic of Freedom in Adorno’s Beethoven’, Beethoven Forum, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 13–36. Chytry, J. (1989) The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dahlhaus, C. (1978) The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Eisler, H. (1973) ‘Musik und Politik’, in Schriften 1924–1948, (ed.) Günter Mayer: Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik. Fichte, J. G. (1979) Grundlage des Naturrechts. Stuttgart: Felix Meier Verlag.



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Floros, C. (1978) Beethovens Eroica und Prometheus-Musik: Sujet-Studien: Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofenverlag. Gordon, P. E. (2009) ‘The Artwork beyond Itself: Adorno Beethoven and Late Style’, in The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory, (eds) Warren Beckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses and Elliot Neaman. New York: Berghahn Books. Harding, J. M. (1992) ‘Historical Dialectics and the Autonomy of Art in Adorno’s Aesthetische Theorie’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 52, no. 3, pp. 183–94. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(1986a) ‘Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I’, in Werke: Hegel in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 8, (eds) Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp. —(1986b) ‘Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte', in Werke: Hegel in zwanzig Bänden, vol 12, (eds) Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp. —(1986c) ‘Phenomologie des Geistes’, in Werke: Hegel in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 3, (eds) Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp. —(1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbett. Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press. —(1994) Ausgewählte Schriften und Manuskripte 6, (eds) P. Garniron and W. Jaeschke. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Henrich, D. (1992) Aesthetic Judgement and the Moral Image of the World: Studies in Kant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kant, I. (1978a) ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’, in Werkausgabe, vol. XI. —(1978b) ‘Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht’, in Werkausgabe, vol. XII. —(1987a) Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. —(1987b) Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianafolis: Hackett. Lukács, G. (1990), History and Class-consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin Press. Novalis (pseudonym for Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1960) Novalis, Schriften, vol. ii, (eds) Richard Samuel, Hans-Joachim Mähl and Gerhard Schulz. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag. Paddison, M. (1991) ‘The Language Character of Music: Some Motifs in Adorno’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 116, no. 2, pp. 267–79. Plato, Republic. Rosen, C. (1997 [1971]) The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. London: Faber and Faber. Schmitt, C. (1968) Politische Romantik. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot. Sedgwick, S. (2001) ‘The State as Organism: The Metaphysical Basis of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 39, no. S1, pp. 171–88.

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Sipe, T. (1998) Beethoven Eroica Symphony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solomon, M. (1977) Beethoven, New York: Schirmer Books. Wolff, M. (2004) ‘Hegel’s Organicist Theory of the State: On the Concept and Method of Hegel’s “Science of the State”’, in Hegel on Ethics and Politics, (eds) Robert B. Pippin and Otfried Höffe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 291–322. Zuidervaart, L. (1990) ‘The Social Significance of Autonomous Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 61–77.

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Critique through Autonomy: On Monads and Mediation in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Owen Hulatt

Preface Adorno’s aesthetics, in common with that of many post-Hegelian German aestheticians of his time, has as its central concern the thought that art is, in some fashion, a kind of cognition. Art does not merely present or resemble the world external to it; it is capable of interceding in that world, by providing a critical expression of the rational structures which govern that world. This idea, of art providing an expression of truths or critiques, is not unique to Adorno by any means; nor is it only found in ‘continental’ philosophy. What is unique, and uniquely problematic, is Adorno’s conjunction of this claim with the thought that art is entirely autonomous. Adorno has a radical conception of artistic and aesthetic autonomy, in which the creation and reception of art is purely governed by means of aesthetic properties, with no room for the intercession of other kinds of norms (e.g. moral or political norms). While Adorno has importantly unusual views on the interaction between form and content in art, nonetheless he understands the process of creating ‘authentic’ art to be entirely governed by formal demands and problematics. As a consequence, he claims, the artwork is ‘blind’ and incapable of intentionally mirroring or criticizing anything external to these autonomous aesthetic formal problematics. In this chapter, I try to consider how Adorno can reconcile this ‘hermetic’ autonomy – art’s refusal to take an intentional stance on the external world, or to incorporate normative content from that world – with the claim that art is simultaneously critical of the heteronomous content and normative structure of that world.

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I Central to Adorno’s theory of art is the assertion that art is entirely autonomous. Adorno understands this autonomy to consist in a complete freedom for the artwork – freedom from external determination; freedom from purposiveness – which withdraws the artwork entirely from the structure of the world external to it. While Adorno’s aesthetic theory is permeated with Kantian influence, Adorno nonetheless understands the autonomy of artwork to be historically produced: what Adorno means by the autonomy of art may well be a reference to the historical piling up of functions onto art and art beauty such that art, merely by the accumulation and variety of tasks and expectations that fall to it, comes to be autonomous […] Put differently, the autonomy of art signals the transfer of human autonomy (which is to say, freedom) from the human subject to the aesthetic artifact.1

This ‘piling up of functions’ across time represents the gradual acquisition by art of domain-specific functions which begin and terminate in art itself, without reference to external purposes of the kind which once defined its function (as in, for example, art’s early status as an adjunct to cultic or state purposes). While Adorno traces art’s genetic origins to these heteronomous practices, he nonetheless (in a Hegelian inflection) sees the history of art as giving rise to a kind of art which is free from direct historical determination. Art is, in the modern era, autonomous, and free from any overt social or historical function. This commitment to the autonomy of art is in itself unusual for a Marxist philosopher of Adorno’s time, writing in such close temporal (and personal) proximity to figures like Brecht, Benjamin and Lukács, all of whom sought to show art to be the production of a play of heteronomous forces. The appeal, of course, of positing art as produced by heteronomy is that it puts in place a clear method for the artwork to intercede in the heteronomy which produced it. If artworks are always already causally in touch with the heteronomous, this provides a clear causal link which may allow for the artwork to alter the structure of the heteronomous. This governing thought provided the basic structure for Benjamin’s writing on cinema and ‘auratic’ art, Brecht’s conception of dialectical theatre, and Lukács’ endorsement of literary Soviet Realism as the apotheosis of ‘committed’ art. Adorno pressed criticisms of all three of these positions. These criticisms shared two central premises. The first was that the theories failed in terms of



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fidelity to the artwork and aesthetic value; genuine (successful) art is autonomous, and any theory which seeks to valorize non-autonomous art can only end up endorsing bad art. The second is Adorno’s assertion that artworks with a direct causal or determinative link to heteronomy are in fact unable to intercede in heteronomy. It is in fact, he claims, only the autonomous artwork which is capable of such intercession, capable of providing a critique of the society which produced it.2 This bullish assertion by Adorno, that art is not only autonomous but socially critical through its autonomy, provides the most significant feature, and problem, of Adorno’s philosophy of art. Adorno in this respect presents a philosophical problem common to a great deal of post-Hegelian writing on art. Horowitz characterizes this problem thus: The epochal figures of post-Hegelian art-theory and theory[…] all structure their positions by trying to forge a compromise between, on the one hand, the internal dynamics of works of art whose internality, that is, whose autonomy from external determination, constitutes their inner artistic identity, and, on the other hand, the contexts within which that internality takes form.3

While Adorno presents a highly developed account of the historical grounds of artistic autonomy (in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Philosophy of Modern Music and Aesthetic Theory most notably), his theory nonetheless exacerbates the separation between the autonomy of art and its heteronomous context. The extremity of Adorno’s isolation of autonomy from heteronomy introduces problems distinctive to his account, not found in other post-Hegelian figures like Riegl, Panofsky et al.

II Two features of Adorno’s theory of autonomy serve to delineate the specific problems which must be solved in order for Adorno’s idea of social critique through autonomy to be sustainable. The first feature is Adorno’s idea of the artwork as a ‘windowless monad’: That artworks as windowless monads ‘represent’ what they themselves are not can scarcely be understood except in that their own dynamic, their immanent historicity as a dialectic of nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it.4

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This shows the central difficulty of Adorno’s position well. Adorno claims that the monadic artwork, although ‘windowless’ and refraining from ‘imitating’ the extra-aesthetic, nonetheless ‘resembles’ that which is external to it. Indeed, Adorno goes further in claiming that the dialectic internal to the artwork is ‘of the same essence’ as that obtaining in the world external to it. Adorno quite explicitly, however, has closed off any method of understanding how this resemblance could have come to be. Employing clearly Leibnizian language, Adorno claims that the artwork’s status as a ‘windowless monad’ closes it off from direct causal determination by the external world. This leaves us with the problem of comprehending what the grounds for the artwork’s resemblance of the external world (and its capability of critiquing this external world) consist in. The second feature, which will become important presently, is Adorno’s insistence that the artwork, in being created, is incapable of working with heteronomous material as heteronomous material. While artworks are certainly capable of employing heteronomous themes or content (for example, moral content in Anna Karenina; geographical content in Ulysses), the claim is that these heteronomous contents are not present to the artistic process of formation as heteronomous contents, but rather are reduced to formal, aesthetic properties: Object in art and object in empirical reality are entirely distinct. In art the object is the work produced by art, as much containing elements of empirical reality as displacing, dissolving, and reconstructing them according to the work’s own law. Only through such transformation […] does art give empirical reality its due.5

While it is undeniable that the artwork incorporates heteronomous content, this content is ‘dissolv[ed]’ and ‘reconstruct[ed]’. This dissolution and reconstruction prevents the imported heteronomous content from being present to the process of artistic formation as heteronomous content. It determines the creative process according to its aesthetic value only. As such, the artwork is immune to any determination or influence which could be communicated through the material it selects. Even in making use of socially germane material, the artwork’s constitutive processes remain blind to the social content embedded in this material, addressing themselves only to its formal properties. Thus, for the process of artistic production, there is no clear method for heteronomous content to determine, influence or show up in the completed artwork. The artwork closes off these kinds of influence precisely by not allowing the heteronomous material to enter into the creative process. These two features, taken together, delineate the governing problem of Adorno’s aesthetic theory; namely, that Adorno insists on the absolute autonomy



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and determinative isolation of the artwork, while simultaneously claiming that this very autonomy entails a reflection (and critique) of that which is heteronomous and external to the artwork itself.

III As this absolute autonomy of the artwork seems to preclude the appearance and manipulation of heteronomous content in the constitution of the artwork itself, one method of making sense of the artwork’s capability to provide social critique is to see this very absence of heteronomous content as itself a criticism of the extra-aesthetic sphere. Put differently, this reading amounts to claiming that the artwork, on Adorno’s conception, is socially critical by virtue of visibly rejecting, or standing apart from, its social context. For example, Horowitz claims: ‘Autonomous art criticizes society just by being there because the “there” where it is is no “proper” place.’6 The lack of propriety which art’s existence manifests is its failure to provide anything of use.7 The existence of an artefact, or field of human endeavour, which visibly fails to have instrumental worth, amounts, it is claimed, to a criticism of a society organized according to the demands of instrumental reason. Skees also takes up this theme, terming the autonomy of the artwork an ‘image of freedom’.8 This ‘image’ is achieved through the artwork’s providing an ‘example of freedom from external determination’.9 The line of thought exemplified by Skees and Horowitz is deeply problematic. As the artwork’s status as critique amounts to its failure to successfully provide anything germane to instrumental reason and social organization, two questions arise. The first is a worry over what serves to differentiate art from trash; all manner of phenomena fail to be useful – cigarette butts, for example – but it would seem odd to thereby term them critical. Critique has an object, and has a content, or argument. Failure to provide use seems too thin to fulfil this minimal condition. The second, related, problem is that this theory of art’s critical status does not seem to encompass the specificity of art’s status as critical. This is to say that Adorno’s analyses disclose a belief that the artwork is critical in a way specific to it.10 The theory of criticism through disutility seems too generic, as it can be satisfied by any number of objects or cultural practices. Zuidervaart points out that autonomy does not provide social critique merely by means of existing, but rather provides the preconditions for social criticism:

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This locating of autonomy in the object is crucial, in the sense it allows Adorno to argue that artworks can contain and foster social criticism. Adorno insists on the artwork’s autonomy in order to maintain a space for social critique in a society where oppositional forces are regularly coopted, ignored, or marginalized.11

In a move away from the line of thought found in Skees, here Zuidervaart is attempting to bind together the existence of autonomy with specific social criticism. Criticism, as an activity, presupposes the existence of a logical space which is hermeneutically and causally free from contamination by the field of its enquiry. In this sense, autonomy is a precondition for the exercise of critique. Perceiving this, Zuidervaart argues that the critical function of art’s autonomy cannot be identified with its mere existence; rather this autonomy is itself the foundation for that critical function. This being the case, we should expect a transition from a generic critique (as in Skees’ view, in which the generic existence of autonomy is held to be critical) to more particular, textured instantiations of criticism in art. If the autonomy of art is the precondition for criticism through art, then it must be the particular events in the artwork which testify to this critical function. As such, Adorno requires cogent examples of artworks exemplifying, through their aesthetic properties, social criticism.

IV A particularly striking example of Adorno’s attempt to see social criticism as manifested in the particular features of artworks is found in his work on Beethoven. Adorno claims that it is at the level of Beethoven’s movements that society comes to be instantiated and critiqued: At this point a precise analysis of the D major passage from the slow movement of the great String Quartet in F major [op. 59,1: third movement, bars 70ff.] must be given. In the formal sense this passage appears superfluous, since it comes after a quasi-retransition, after which the recapitulation is expected to follow immediately. But when the recapitulation fails to appear it is made clear that formal identity is insufficient, manifesting itself as true only at the moment when it, as the real, is opposed by the possible which lies outside identity. The D major theme is new: it is not reducible to the economy of motivic unity.12

Here Adorno begins to trace a critique of the ‘self-reproduction of society as a self-identical entity’ in Beethoven’s frustrating the principle of ‘logical identity’.13



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In the above extract, this critique of logical identity is found in the frustration of the relationship between ‘retransition’ and ‘recapitulation’. These two terms refer to structural features of sonatas; the retransition serves to complete the middle triad of a sonata (‘development’), which develops the themes and figures from the opening section (‘exposition’). On the completion of the development, represented by the close of the retransition, the recapitulation should follow, which serves to restate the thematic content of the exposition. The specific interest of the ‘D major passage’ which Adorno points to, then, is that it inserts into the interstices between the completion of the retransition and the beginning of the recapitulation a new theme which is not found in the exposition, nor derived from the development of that found in the exposition. The governing structure of the sonata form, then, is negated by virtue of a frustration of the immediate relationship between the development and recapitulation through Beethoven’s insertion of an unanticipated new theme. This refusal of conformity to pre-established musical form is understood by Adorno as not merely aesthetically innovative, but rather critical of the socio-epistemic principle of ‘logical identity’.14 Adorno also associates the critique of society with Beethoven’s employment of motives. Motivic composition conducts itself by means of short motive patterns which are repeatedly subjected to variation and, less commonly, wholesale repetition. These motive patterns may be constituted by patterns in melody, rhythmic cadence or harmonic relationships. In Beethoven’s employment of these motives, we once again see traced social criticism: The motive kernels, the particulars to which each movement is tied, are themselves identical with the universal; they are formulas of tonality, reduced to nothingness as things of their own and preshaped by the totality as much as the individual is in individualistic society. The developing variation, an image of social labour, is definite negation: from what has once been posited it ceaselessly brings forth the new and enhanced by destroying it in its immediacy, its quasi-natural form.15

Just as in the case of sonata form, we see that Beethoven’s compositional practice causes deterioration in the apparent seamless identity of the aesthetic materials and pre-given form. The immediacy of the aesthetic materials is destroyed by his work, and their consequent mediated form reveals the whole to be ‘no longer tenable’.16 Adorno posits Beethoven’s astringent relationship to pre-set forms as not merely aesthetic, but in fact reflective and critical of social states of affairs. In line with Zuidervaart’s account, we see social criticism manifested in aesthetic

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specificity in Adorno’s account of Beethoven, not merely in the generic disutility of Beethoven’s work.

V The example of Adorno’s work on Beethoven demonstrates that Adorno understands the artwork’s critique to be specific, and effected through the specificity of the artwork. However, this raises the problems of how such criticism is possible. If the autonomous artwork truly makes specific criticisms of states of affairs external to it, Zuidervaart’s account – and Adorno’s work with Beethoven – requires a method of relating the autonomy of the artwork to art’s extrinsic heteronomous context in order to make this criticism possible. We have seen Adorno’s insistence on the absolute autonomy and ‘windowlessness’ of the artwork; on an intuitive reading of autonomy, this would make the social criticism Adorno wants the artwork to exhibit impossible. Criticism requires contact between the object of the critique and the author of the critique. If one understands artistic autonomy to be simple isolation and withdrawal from heteronomy, such criticism is not possible. Horowitz gives good reason to revise our conception of the autonomy of the artwork, pointing out that the dependence of artistic autonomy on appearance disallows any isolation of this kind: [I]f autonomy in art is the work’s refusal to let anything outside itself determine its form, then the autonomous work is just the appearance of that refusal. […] But this of course entails that the work is bound irredeemably to what does not determine it; it is constrained to show what does not constrain it. [… I]t must must visibly negate something and can only appear as the negation of that thing.17

The autonomy of the artwork reveals itself through the negation of the heteronomous. Art is constitutively appearance; in order for autonomy to be discerned in an artwork – and hence for it to be relevant to the artwork’s aesthetic value – this autonomy must also display itself. However, as autonomy is in an important sense a lack, an absence of subjection to external determination, this autonomy can only manifest itself through the exhibition of this freedom. As Horowitz notes, this exhibition must be accomplished through the negation of the heteronomous. Moreover, this negation must, also, be made apparent. The autonomy of art, then, is dependent on a visible negation of extra-aesthetic, heteronomous material. Artistic autonomy has an intrinsic dependence on the heteronomous.



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By analysing the preconditions for the autonomy of art, and discerning its dependence on the visible negation of heteronomy, Horowitz furnishes us with a method of perceiving precisely how the existence of the autonomy of art is tied in with social criticism. On Zuidervaart’s reading, the existence of autonomy provided a logical space for criticism, which could or could not be taken up by artworks. Horowitz strengthens this account considerably, by pointing out that, insofar as any artwork is autonomous, it will ineluctably engage in the negation (and hence critique) of the extra-aesthetic. In order for Horowitz’s account to work, however, we need a way to make sense of how autonomy, in providing a visible negation of heteronomy, is able to come into contact with heteronomy. Returning to Adorno’s work with Beethoven, Adorno himself illustrates this difficulty: All these implications of Beethoven result from musical analysis without any daring analogies, but to social knowledge they prove as true as the inferences about society itself. Society recurs in great music: transfigured, criticized and reconciled.18

If this derivation of social content from recondite formal features of Beethoven’s composition is to be anything more than ‘daring analog[y]’, then Adorno stands in need of an account of how one can understand the coming into contact of autonomy and heteronomy. Adorno notes this problem and tries to solve it by mere assertion, claiming – without argument – that society does, in fact, show up in this artwork and is hence up for criticism through the autonomy of the artwork. This lack of argument on Adorno’s part has been the main bone of contention for the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus: [Adorno’s methods –] the formal – analytically individualizing and the sociologically generalizing procedure [are supported merely by] verbal analogies [which] perform the function of hiding a gap which [his] arguments could not close.19

Dahlhaus’ core point is that, without an account of the relationship of autonomy and heteronomy, Adorno’s work is precisely nothing more than a series of ‘daring analogies’. Dahlhaus’ challenge is of the utmost importance. Adorno’s conception of autonomy is one of complete causal and determinative independence, with no apparent method for heteronomy to enter. Indeed, Adorno thematizes this status of the artwork, variously terming it ‘hermetic’,20 ‘blind’21 or ‘windowless’.22 As such, while Horowitz’s conception of artistic autonomy as expressed through

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negation of heteronomy dovetails nicely with Adorno’s treatment of Beethoven, as we see the expression of criticism through aesthetic particulars as Horowitz’s account would lead us to expect, it remains problematic. The problem is just that Horowitz’s conception of autonomy does not seem fully compatible with Adorno’s conception of the autonomy of the artwork. If the artwork truly is ‘hermetic’ and, hence, sealed off from social content, it would appear that the potential for social criticism which autonomy represents could never be realized. As Horowitz notes, an isolated monad is not capable of executing the display of autonomy through negation.23 However, Adorno himself frequently refers to the artwork as an isolated monad in precisely this sense.24 This problematizes the application of Horowitz’s revised notion of autonomy to Adorno and, as Dahlhaus notes, also makes the kind of analysis Adorno carries out (as in the Beethoven case) appear merely analogical.

VI I do not think that Adorno properly perceived the depth of this problem. However, he was aware that the core feature of his account – the idea that aesthetic content could in some fashion reflect and critique socio-historical content – required some form of justification. In the course of writing the analyses of Beethoven excerpted earlier, Adorno provides a compressed response to this issue: The history of ideas, and thus the history of music, is an autarchic motivational context insofar as the social law, on the one hand, produces the formation of spheres screened off against each other, and on the other hand, as the law of totality, still comes to light in each sphere as the same law. […] It is in fitting together under their own law, as becoming, negating, confirming themselves and the whole without looking outward, that [Beethoven’s] movements come to resemble the world whose forces move them; they do not do it by imitating that world. In this respect Beethoven’s attitude on social objectivity is more that of philosophy – the Kantian, in some points, and the Hegelian in the decisive ones.25

While one cannot call this an argument, it does serve to delineate the rough contours of Adorno’s thought on this issue. The gap which presently troubles us – between what takes place in the autonomous artwork and in its heteronomous context – is closed, Adorno takes it, by the existence of a subtending ‘social law’. It is not, at present, important to identify what this social law will amount to.



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What is important is that despite the complete autonomy and autarchy which Adorno allots to the artwork (as being ‘screened off ’ against heteronomy), Adorno is nonetheless content to say that the artwork expresses (and hence, is related to or determined by) some deeper ‘social law’ which is also at work in society. This social law cannot affect the artwork through influencing the process by which the artwork is constructed; nor can it be communicated to the artwork by virtue of being imported as aesthetic content.26 What is needed is a method of understanding how this unifying ‘social law’ which underpins society, philosophy and art, is capable of ‘showing up’ in the artwork without thereby violating the autonomy of this artwork. Adorno is here working with a conception of mediation; a theory whereby processes are capable of mediating (and hence ‘showing up in’) processes and objects, without thereby influencing them (in the sense of addressing themselves to completed processes or objects as interaction partners), or being present as parts of those processes and objects. There is no settled definition of mediation across the various figures who employ it. Still less is there a settled account of Adorno’s employment of this term among commentators on his work. It will be necessary to work through a number of interpretations of Adorno’s employment of the term to lend it greater clarity.

VII To reiterate, what is required is a method of seeing heteronomy as showing up in the autonomous artwork without thereby seeing heteronomy as influencing, appealing to or being a part of these autonomous processes. Adorno’s notion of mediation, as Paddison notes,27 appears to be the only candidate. Skees, Paddison and Zuidervaart all offer theories of mediation which (despite the important structural similarities between Paddison and Zuidervaart’s accounts) differently construe the method by which heteronomy mediates autonomy, and the way in which heteronomy shows up in, and is thereby critiqued by, autonomous art. Skees attempts to provide a workable notion of mediation by appealing to the constitution of the medium in which artworks are constructed. Drawing exclusively on the example of lyric poetry, Skees argues that the medium in which the artwork is executed is intrinsically steeped in social content.28 As such, the formal treatment of the contents of this medium (language, to use Skees’ example of lyric poetry) will at the same time equate to manipulation of the social values which are embedded in these contents.

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The implication regarding Adorno’s claim about lyric poetry – and by extension every so-called ‘autonomous’ work of art – is that they all have, by their very ‘form’, social content.29

Skees’ account gives the rudiments which any theory of mediation must contain – namely, a theory of how the formal manipulation of aesthetic content (which is, after all, all that artistic creation is for Adorno) simultaneously addresses society, and a theory of how this social content can be present as formal, autonomous content. However, Skees’ account suffers as it asserts, rather than explains, these features. Skees articulates his account via lyric poetry and language. Language, as an explicitly social practice whose semantic content is always already embedded in social practices, seems to suggest an account whereby this sociality of the semantic practice in some manner imparts socio-historical content to linguistic content. However, for this very reason Skees’ chosen example is misleading. Adorno will need a central account that is equally capable of seeing social content as sedimented in music and visual art, two cases which cannot draw upon intuitive proximity to socio-historical content as linguistic semantic content has done. Skees’ account, then, suffers by relying on the specific structure of language in order to facilitate a general account. Moreover, this emphasis on language prevents Skees from providing an account of precisely how this sociohistoric content comes to be embedded in formal aesthetic properties. Skees has served to further delineate the broad contours and desiderata of the required theory of mediation, but does not provide the required argumentative detail.

VIII Zuidervaart moves to understand the gap between aesthetic and socio-historical content as filled in by the artist’s consciousness. The probable motivation to this move is clear. Mediation, after all, is not a physical process; it is the process whereby cultural phenomena and mental content come to influence, determine, and constitute one another. As such, it is constitutively an event which takes place in a consciousness, either at or below the intentional level. Building on this fact, Zuidervaart wants to understand the communication of formal and socio-historical content as being achieved in the consciousness of the artist during the creative process. Zuidervaart understands this process to be doubly constituted by the unconscious reactions of the artist, and the reflective



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scrutiny to which the artist subjects these reactions. Zuidervaart takes it that the artist’s ‘sociohistorical experiences, unconscious and unintentional […] enter artworks’ and the process of artistic creation ‘calls for unswerving faithfulness to such experiences’.30 As with Skees, there remains the underlying problem that this putative ‘entrance’ of socio-historical experience into the artwork is not explained, but merely asserted. There is, however, much of value in Zuidervaart’s account. Zuidervaart explains this fidelity to the artist’s unconscious as the artist’s ‘spontaneously register[ing] whatever is stale, provincial, outdated, unsuccessful, or problematic’.31 In other words, these unconscious socio-historical ‘experiences’ do not show up in artistic experience as experiences, but rather as formal and technical problems and intuitions. Zuidervaart is here helpfully mirroring Adorno’s own criterion of artistic production, which does not attend to subjective experiences at all, but rather merely follows the ‘immanent’ demands of technical material.32 Zuidervaart, then, in this aspect of his account, is correctly judging that although the theory of mediation will take place in consciousness, nonetheless artistic agency will have to be judged to belong to the artistic object itself, not to the artist. Huhn neatly brings out this revision of the traditional theory of artistic agency. Adorno entirely revokes the romanticist notion of entirely spontaneous artistic creation, instead tying in the artist’s creative process to receptivity to the intrinsic formal demands of aesthetic material. As Huhn brings out, this concept of a feeling for the intrinsic demands of form – or Formgefuhl – has important consequences for the socially critical potential of art. As art addresses itself exclusively to these formal demands, it becomes blind to the social context in which the artwork is embedded.33 As Adorno claims that the artwork is ‘blind’ and reduces all content (including subjective experience) to its own categories, the criticizer effecting the social criticism provided by the artwork must be identified with the artwork itself.34, 35 Huhn’s account further clarifies Zuidervaart’s move to see the socially critical potential of art as residing in consciousness. It becomes clear that, just as artworks criticize society by means of not explicitly dealing with society, so the consciousness’ function in artistic creation allows for social criticism without itself having any explicit consciousness of society. Rather, society will have to work through the consciousness, without thereby becoming present to the consciousness. This exacerbates Dahlhaus’ criticism – namely, that Adorno’s running together of social and aesthetic problematics appears without theoretic legitimation.

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Viewing the connection of social and formal problematics as being effected through an artistic consciousness which is constitutively incapable of having a conscious comportment towards society (as it concerns itself solely with technical and formal aesthetic properties) only widens the apparent gap between these two spheres.

IX Paddison clearly perceives this difficulty, and attempts to give further definition and clarity to the connection between formal and social content. The foregoing accounts have relied on some model of mediation – whether seeing artistic mediums as intrinsically mediated by society (Skees) or understanding aesthetic content as intrinsically mediated by social content (Zuidervaart) – but none have directly entered into the question of what the structure of this mediation amounts to. Paddison grasps this problem directly and moves to viewing mediation as in fact a species of constitution: The difficulty with Adorno’s conception of mediation, and at the same time its subtlety, is that the externality to which he points, the heteronomous social other apparently excluded by the blind autonomy of the work, is conceived as simultaneously constituting the material structure of the work itself.36

The great advantage of understanding mediation as constitution (as opposed to, for example, influence) is that constitution is capable of determining a given object or process without thereby having to be present to that object or process. As an example of what I mean, if we take physical synaptic processes to constitute mental phenomena, while these physical processes will have a determinative influence on the structure and content of these mental phenomena, the mental phenomena will be blind to the processes which constituted them. (Mental phenomena are not, outside of highly exceptional conditions, experiences of their synaptic grounds.) Seen in this light, constitution is a promising method of seeing artworks as constituted by and reflective of heteronomous conditions, without thereby intentionally addressing themselves to these conditions. Working with Paddison’s theory of constitution, it becomes clear that pre-set formal demands (such as the demands of genre, tonality and so on) can no longer be seen as demands internal to the autonomous aesthetic, but rather are demands which are constituted by extra-aesthetic determinants:



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The normative, universal level sees form as preformed, historically mediated material. Norms like genres, formal types […] are part of a historically mediated sedimentation of society.37

The binding forces which individual artworks need to work with (and resist), which manifest themselves in binding conventional medium- and genre-specific structures, are not merely aesthetic, but rather are a manifestation of social forces. This allows us to locate the negation of heteronomy which Horowitz claimed to be intrinsic to autonomy. It is in the individual artwork’s resistance to pre-established formal influence that the artwork visibly resists the social context in which it is created. The display of autonomy, then, may be understood as, at one level, the rejection and criticism of other artworks and pre-set forms. Paddison’s move to reading mediation as constitution also allows us to expand Skees’ attempt to see the artistic medium as bearing social content. Skees attempted to base his account primarily on an analysis of linguistic art, but was incapable of providing an argument to show that the case of language could be spread across to other artistic mediums and forms. Paddison, by contrast, is able to confidently assert that music, for example, is ‘language-like’.38 Paddison’s reading of mediation as constitution is able to take the kind of analysis Skees attempted with lyric poetry (seeing language as shot through with social content due to its semantic content being socially determined) and apply it to music. Reading mediation as constitution allows us to look not at a particular medium as being socially composed, but in fact aesthetic material simpliciter. (What Adorno terms ‘aesthetic materials’39 are simply those materials subject to the artistic processes of formation.) On the language model, it was a matter of ease to see how individual linguistic entities could be seen as having expanded hermeneutic content, referring not only to their literal meaning but to the social practices which produced and congealed in, as it were, that meaning. This was easy just because language is a constitutively practical, social medium, which emerges out of collective activities and values. The problem is that for non-linguistic mediums (like music and visual art), the medium appears to be largely constituted technically, without immediate determination by social practices. If, however, we see aesthetic content (of all its various kinds – visual, musical and so on) as constituted by socio-historical content, then the structure of the language model also becomes available for non-linguistic media. This allows Paddison to claim that music is ‘language-like’ insofar as, like linguistic entities, musical material bears hermeneutic content beyond its immediate context.

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Paddison’s account, while not exhaustive, provides the essential turning point for resolving the troubled relationship between artistic autonomy and social critique (and, by extension, the relationship between artistic heteronomy and autonomy). The way to close Dahlhaus’ criticism is to find a method of seeing autonomy as constituted by heteronomy. In the remainder of this chapter, I hope to further pursue this line of thought, build on the fundamental structure of Paddison’s response to Dahlhaus, and give a more detailed account of the constitution relation at issue.

X Adorno’s theory of artistic autonomy may be analysed in two component parts. Adorno treats the autonomy of the artwork as composed of (1) an autonomous process of artistic formation which produces the artwork by working with (2) autonomous aesthetic material. The artwork in being created presents what Adorno calls an ‘immanent lawfulness’ to the artist.40 The role of the artist is a form of submission to the lawfulness of the aesthetic material. While making further sense of this will depend on an exposition of precisely what is meant by the immanent lawfulness of aesthetic material, which I will deliver below, this account of artistic productivity will suffice to demonstrate the strength of the autonomy which Adorno imputes to it. Artistic creativity is achieved solely through fidelity to the ‘lawfulness’ of the material out of which the artwork in question is constructed. Considered from the perspective of its constitutive processes, the autonomy of the artwork is absolute. Artistic creation is structurally constituted such that any heteronomous influence (be it the artist’s intention, cultural influence or whatever) is shut out. The process of artistic formation is truly, as Adorno asserts, hermetically sealed, responding only to aesthetic material. Following on from Paddison’s approach, we must now find a method of seeing this absolute artistic autonomy as constituted by heteronomy. An account of this kind will need to see the characteristic structure of artistic production (its formal treatment of aesthetic material; its unifying these materials into a completed artwork) as being constituted by – and hence reflecting – some subtending heteronomous structure. Adorno provides this account in Aesthetic Theory, by means of seeing artistic production as a rational process. This allows Adorno to reapply his account from Dialectic of Enlightenment, wherein all instances of rationality are coloured and constituted by what Adorno and



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Horkheimer termed ‘enlightenment thinking’41 (which in Adorno’s own later work would become termed ‘identity thinking’ or simply ‘domination’). In Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno, working with Horkheimer, asserted that the history of human thought and sociality was underpinned by a drive towards self-preservation. This drive structures experience, by virtue of compelling the subsumption of all particulars under universals. This drive to control through conceptual subsumption (‘identity thinking’) simultaneously found expression in all spheres of human endeavour, leading to (for example) empiricism, intolerance of social difference, and autonomous art. All are expressions of a central intolerance for that which cannot be subsumed under universals and thereby controlled. Identity thinking, then, determines not only the structure of human thought, but also the structure of human behaviour. The epistemological and sociological are blended together and jointly determined in structure by identity thinking. Adorno’s position in Aesthetic Theory, drawing on this account from Dialectic of Enlightenment, is that the structure of aesthetic creation – the subsumption of aesthetic particulars under an aesthetic whole – is constituted by identity thinking. Adorno argues for this position somewhat obliquely, by asserting that the fundamental structure of identity thinking (man’s attempt to dominate his environment through the reduction of all particularity to correspondence to universals) is found also in artworks. This correspondence, Adorno claims, consists in the reductive relationship between the artist’s ‘procedures’ and the material subjected to these procedures. It is Adorno’s contention that, just as epistemological particulars are forcibly reduced to correspondence with universals, so too is the full nature of each particular aesthetic material forcibly ‘oppressed’42 into constituting an aesthetic whole. Adorno claims that the fundamental heteronomous trend of identity thinking gives rise to artistic practice and structures artistic procedures. The autonomy of artistic formation is embedded in ‘the actual movement of history in accord with the law of enlightenment [identity thinking]’.43 With this constitution relation in place, the hermeneutic gap which Dahlhaus identifies begins to close. The processes of artistic formation are constituted by identity thinking, and there is accordingly a pre-established harmony between the way in which artistic processes and socio-epistemic processes operate. While conceptual processes, and social structures consequent on these processes, subsume particulars under universals, artistic processes as an instantiation of the same process of identity thinking treat their particulars (aesthetic materials) in the same fashion, forcing them into subsumption under artistic processes.

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This being the case, the autonomy of the artwork (following the immanent demands of its own aesthetic materials and constitutive processes) is reflective of (without causal interaction with) the fundamental nature of the extraaesthetic sphere. We should understand the artistic processes as an oblique reflection of the rational and sociological processes obtaining externally to them. This reflection is oblique just because the processes of formation remain autonomous (i.e. do not for themselves consider anything extra-aesthetic) but, due to their autonomy’s being constituted by heteronomy, come, through autonomous activity, to recapitulate the structure of heteronomous spheres (rationality, and social organization consequent on this rationality). This examination, then, of the relationship between autonomy and heteronomy in the context of the constitutive processes of the artwork has begun to close the gap between the autonomy of the artwork and its socio-critical nature. Looking at the relationship between autonomy and heteronomy in the context of aesthetic materials will serve to further close this gap.

XI The artwork is, for Adorno, a formal process of formation in which the artistic processes follow the ‘immanent lawfulness’ of the selected aesthetic materials. Adorno posits the function of these aesthetic materials as not in fact reducible to their sensuous or emotive properties.44 They are not employed due to a contingent liking for their sensuous properties (i.e. timbre, hue or assonance), nor due to their conformity to a pre-established intention to instantiate a given emotional or political truth. Rather, these aesthetic materials present to the artist a set of formal demands. Aesthetic materials impose their own formal demands and have their own set of aesthetico-logical possibilities (i.e. that which they can and cannot be combined with, and so on). An example of the aesthetico-logical property of an aesthetic material x would be its employment entailing the impossibility of the employment of y, or, more plausibly, its employment opening up a large set of possibilities, and simultaneously closing off some other set. Although, as will be shown, these aesthetico-logical properties are socio-historically determined, an informative analogy might be harmonic relations in music. If one is committed to avoiding dissonance, the employment of a given note immediately excludes a large set of notes from being employed after it, as it stands in a relation of dissonance with these notes. This is an aesthetico-logical relation. As aesthetic materials are possessed



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of their own aesthetic logic, it is the artist’s role to follow and reconcile these formal demands: [O]pinion generally produces opinionated artworks that are, in a certain sense, rationalistic. Rather, the lyric poet’s desinvolture, his dispensation from the strictures of logic – which enter his sphere only as shadows – grants him the possibility of following the immanent lawfulness of his works.45

The first ‘logic’ referred to in the above extract refers not to aesthetico-logic, but rather to formal logic. It is the ‘immanent lawfulness’ of the work which represents what I call aesthetico-logical properties. ‘Opinionated’ artworks are not successful precisely because they lack the passivity, the desinvolture of the artist which allows him to follow the ‘immanent lawfulness’ of the aesthetic material. It is the ‘consistency of [… the artwork’s] elaboration’46 of these aesthetic materials which entails the truth of the artwork, rather than anything over and above the formal/aesthetico-logical constitution of the aesthetic materials: [A]esthetic form is the objective organization within each artwork of what appears as bindingly eloquent. It is the nonviolent synthesis of the diffuse that nevertheless preserves it as what it is in its divergences and contradictions, and for this reason form is actually an unfolding of truth.47

Aesthetic materials present themselves to the artistic processes not as non-aesthetic content to be subordinated to the formal demands of those processes (which is to say that aesthetic materials are never, for Adorno, heteronomous material that must be forcibly aestheticized). Rather, aesthetic materials are always already sets of aesthetico-logical demands, which it is the artist’s role to formally reconcile and reconfigure, in order to attain an authentic, unified artwork. It is difficult to comprehend what these purely aestheticological properties of aesthetic materials could amount to for Adorno. Once introduced into the nexus of the artwork, the aesthetic materials appear to be retranslated out of their sensuous and affective properties, and to become instead purely formal, in this aesthetico-logical sense.48 By virtue of being present to the artistic processes of formation merely as aesthetico-logical properties, the aesthetic materials retain their autonomy. The aesthetic materials are blind, and ensure the blindness of the artistic processes, in that they present themselves to the artistic processes without any reference or relevance to anything outside of the artwork. Rather, they are present solely as aesthetico-logical materials which are dominated and worked by the artistic processes of formation. This constitutes the autonomy of function of aesthetic

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materials – their function in the process of aesthetic construction is explicable purely in terms of aesthetic logic. Again, in order to further Paddison’s account, one must explore the manner in which heteronomy constitutes this autonomy of the function of aesthetic materials. The constitution of artistic processes of formation by heteronomy was explicable by understanding that autonomy as being an offshoot from (and contingent on) the heteronomous historical force known as ‘identity thinking’. In this case, however, this will not work. Aesthetic materials are the subject matter of the artistic processes, with which those processes are confronted. Rather, what is required is a method of positing the aesthetico-logical properties of the aesthetic materials as determined by the extra-aesthetic. That Adorno takes these aesthetic-logical properties to be determined by extra-aesthetic content is not in doubt: [Aesthetic m]aterials and objects are as historically and socially preformed as are their methods; they are definitively transformed by what transpires in the works.49

This constitution relation amounts to a kind of translation. Adorno claims that social phenomena are translated into the formal properties of aesthetic materials through the pre-formation of aesthetic materials. As such, heteronomous content is present to the artistic processes of formation in the guise of formal content. Once again, Adorno’s argument for this notion, and explanation of the mechanism by which it operates, is lacking. In what remains of this chapter, I hope to demonstrate that if we take this mechanism (of social content constituting the formal properties of aesthetic materials) to exist, then Adorno’s idea of social criticism being accomplished through autonomy succeeds.

XII We have Adorno’s two constitution relations which obtain between artistic processes of formation, and aesthetic material, and their heteronomous contexts. In each case the operation of autonomy comes to reflect, without interacting with or intentionally addressing, heteronomy. In the case of artistic formation, this is achieved by the constitutive processes of the artwork being synchronized to identity thinking. As was detailed in section 10 above, identity thinking constitutes the structure of artistic formation, rationality and human culture. As



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such, art as a process of creation is synchronized to (and hence illustrative of) the socio-epistemic structures which obtain externally to it. Socio-epistemological structure is communicated directly to the artwork, then, while socio-historical content is obliquely communicated to the formal aesthetico-logical properties of aesthetic materials. Internal contradictions in socio-epistemic structures show up as contradictions internal to the formal problematics presented by the aesthetic materials: ‘What is socially untrue, flawed, and ideological is communicated to the structure of artworks as flawed, indeterminate and inadequate.’50 The artwork is composed of a collection of processes which mirror those which constitute rationality and social structures; these processes address formal problematics (embedded in aesthetic material) which are generated by contradictions in these socio-epistemic structures. If it is the case that socio-epistemic contradictions give rise to, or entail, aesthetic contradictions in completed artworks without a method of reading the former out of the latter, then Adorno’s account is a failure. If the constitution relationship becomes hermeneutically asymmetric, with socio-epistemic contradictions giving rise to hermeneutically unrelated aesthetic formal problems, Dahlhaus’ explanatory gap retains its force. While we have an account of how socio-epistemological content is translated into autonomous formal problematics, what we now require is an account of how this translation can be reversed. In other words, of how formal aesthetic problematics can become visible – and thus socially critical – displays of social problematics. To solve this problem, we need only return to Paddison’s modification of Skees’ account. Aesthetic materials are language-like, in that their hermeneutic content always points beyond their formal domain, and incorporates the social practices and contents which have congealed in them. While aesthetic materials are for the artistic processes of formation reduced to mere collections of formal aesthetico-logical demands, this reduction does not take place for the art-appreciator (i.e. the individual who perceives and comprehends the completed artwork). The artwork’s manipulation of formal problematics is, at the same time, manipulation of material which has intrinsic social reference for the art-appreciator. The blind artistic processes of formation inadvertently constitute social critiques, just because the formal constitution of an aesthetic contradiction will, at the same time, bear socially germane meaning in the completed artwork for the recipient of that artwork. Having been worked by the processes of artistic formation, the aesthetic materials are now configured so as to display the socio-epistemic contradictions embedded in them which

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were present to the processes of artistic formation as merely formal contradictions. Moreover, Horowitz’s account has been borne out – while the processes of artistic formation do not, from their perspective, interact with the heteronomous, they nonetheless visibly display autonomy through negation of the heteronomous. This visibility is achieved through the dual hermeneutic status of aesthetic materials, which are merely formal and aesthetic-logical to the processes of artistic formation, but which are both socio-epistemically germane and formal to the art-appreciator. While aesthetic materials are purely formal from the perspective of the processes of art creation, then, they nonetheless retain their dual hermeneutic status (as both aesthetically and socially meaningful) for the recipient of the artwork. This provides the required method of legitimating Adorno’s transition from aesthetic to socio-epistemic problematics, as the artwork’s display of formal aesthetic content will always already be simultaneously laden with socioepistemic meaning.

Conclusion In closing, I would like to note that while this serves to bring greater definition to the shape Adorno’s response must take to problems of the kind raised by Dahlhaus, there remain significant explanatory shortfalls in Adorno’s account. These shortfalls concern the method by which social content comes to be crystallized in aesthetic materials, and the method by which identity thinking is capable of determining the structure of such a recondite collection of intellectual spheres (social structuration, philosophy, art, etc.). While the latter worry may be addressed in full by reconsidering Adorno’s materialist theory of cognition (Deborah Cook’s Adorno on Nature has achieved much in this direction), the former appears significantly more intractable.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Huhn 1997, p. 243. Adorno 2004, p. 191. Horowitz 1997, p. 261. Adorno 2004, p. 6. Ibid., p. 335.

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Horowitz 1997, p. 264. Adorno 2004, p. 321 – ‘[Art congeals] into an entity unto itself – rather than obeying existing social norms and thus proving itself to be “socially useful”.’ 8 Skees 2011, p. 932. 9 Ibid. 10 Adorno 2004, p. 122. 11 Zuidervaart 1999, p. 161. 12 Adorno 1998, p. 14. 13 Ibid. 14 For more explanation of the dual social and epistemological role played by ‘identity thinking’ in Adorno’s thought, see section 10 below. 15 Adorno 1998, pp. 43–4. 16 Adorno 1998, p. 14. 17 Horowitz 1997, p. 274; emphasis added. 18 Adorno 1998, p. 44. 19 Dahlhaus 1987, p. 244; cited in Paddison 2002, p. 223. 20 Cf. Adorno 2004, pp. 135, 191, 32. 21 Cf. ibid., pp. 149, 237. 22 Cf. ibid., pp. 6, 54, 271. 23 Horowitz 1997, pp. 273–4; emphasis added. 24 Cf. Adorno 2004, pp. 73, 237, 271. 25 Adorno 1998, p. 43. 26 Cf. Adorno 2004, p. 335. 27 Paddison 2002, p. 224. 28 Skees 2011, p. 925. 29 Ibid., p. 926. 30 Zuidervaart 1993, p. 114. 31 Ibid., p. 116. 32 Adorno 2004, p. 48 – ‘The real source of the risk taken by all artworks, however, is not located in their level of contingency but rather in the fact that each one must follow the whippoorwill of objectivity immanent to it, without any guarantee that the productive forces – the spirit of the artist and his procedures – will be equal to that objectivity’. 33 Huhn 1997, pp. 255–6. 34 Ibid., p. 248. 35 While Zuidervaart agrees with Huhn’s analysis of Adorno’s theory of aesthetic agency, Zuidervaart goes on to couple this aspect of his account with the claim that the artist must combine formal ability with recognition of ‘sociohistorical contradictions’ on the artist’s part which will entail a ‘social position’ on the artwork’s part (Zuidervaart 1993, p. 116). This is flatly incompatible with Adorno’s

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49 50

Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy theory of artistic agency (cf. Huhn 1997, p. 243) and artistic intention (Adorno 2004, p. 197). Paddison 2002, p. 223. Ibid., p. 224. Ibid., p. 225. Adorno 2004, p. 201. Ibid., p. 72. Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, p. 23. Adorno 2004, p. 65. Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., pp. 120–1. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 189. I do not have time to enter into this, but I should like to note that this explains Adorno’s assertion that form and content are not separable or unified, but rather dialectically interrelated (Adorno 2004, p. 194). The formal properties of aesthetic materials, and hence the resultant artwork, are nothing but the content of the aesthetic materials, appearing as form in the aesthetic nexus. Adorno 2004, p. 117. Ibid., p. 363.

References Adorno, Theodor (1998) Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, (ed.) Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Cambridge: Polity Press. —W. (2004) Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London and New York: Continuum. Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, (ed.) Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dahlhaus, Carl (1987) Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. by Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, Nigel and Andrew Rubin (eds) (2002) Adorno: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Horowitz, Gregg M. (1997) ‘Art History and Autonomy’, in The Semblance of Subjectivity, (eds) Huhn and Zuidervaart, pp. 259–86. Huhn, Tom (1997) ‘Kant, Adorno, and the Social Opacity of the Aesthetic’, in The Semblance of Subjectivity, (eds) Huhn and Zuidervaart, pp. 237–58.



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Huhn, Tom and Lambert Zuidervaart (eds) (1997) The Semblance of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Paddison, Max (2002) ‘Immanent Critique or Musical Stocktaking? Adorno and the Problem of Musical Analysis’, in Adorno: A Critical Reader, (eds) Gibson and Rubin, pp. 209–33. Skees, Murray W. (2011) ‘Kant, Adorno, and the Work of Art’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, October, 915–33. Zuidervaart, Lambert (1993) Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. —(1999) ‘Autonomy, Negativity, and Illusory Transgression: Menke’s Deconstruction of Adorno’s Aesthetics’, Philosophy Today, SPEP Supplement, 154–68.

9

The Transcendental Economy of Aesthetic Autonomy Richard Stopford

Preface I have approached the complex issue of aesthetic autonomy through the lens of Adorno’s analysis of Kant. Specifically, my focus rests upon scattered remarks he makes about Kantian subjectivity in the idiom of economics. The recasting of key elements in Kant’s thinking in economic terms seems intended to reveal aspects of the theory which may otherwise remain obscured. Furthermore, it becomes apparent that these remarks convey some of what Adorno sees as the ‘truth-content’ of Kant’s work. That is, they help us to see how Kant’s philosophy reflects important features of the socio-historical environment within which Kant was working. In this piece, these remarks are drawn together and developed to provide the basis for a more systematic, ‘economic’ treatment of this aspect of Kant’s view. The analysis is divided into three parts. I consider what Adorno means by the truthcontent of Kant’s philosophy. From that I turn to the economic account proper which is then divided into two further sections. First, I consider the ‘transcendental economy’ of Kantian subjectivity and its autonomy; I then use this analysis to situate the ‘transcendental economics’ of this subject’s aesthetic experience and its autonomy. Adorno’s view appears to be as follows. Kant has reified a particular sociohistorical configuration of bourgeois subjectivity in the form of a transcendentally necessary account of human subjectivity as such. Here, reification suggests a sort of fixity which denies the vitality and particularity of the entity in question. Second, despite failing to account for the dynamic and fluid nature of human subjectivity, this particular reification is a function of the developing bourgeois world and a capitalist division of labour.

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These points inflect the view of aesthetic experience and autonomy. Kant’s aesthetics brings clear advances to the discipline, yet, for Adorno, his theory of aesthetic experience is wedded to heteronomous commitments concerning the transcendental conception of subjectivity as such. These commitments inhibit the critical aspects of aesthetic experience and are unable to provide an appropriate basis for engaging with autonomous artworks which are, according to him, dialectical in character. My account is the basis for a speculative interpretation of a small number of remarks by Adorno. It is provocative and reflects controversial aspects of his thinking. Nevertheless, it presents a unique and arresting picture of one of the most influential theories in aesthetics. In particular, the account suggests that the very attempt to wrest ourselves from mundane concerns in our appreciation of art is itself an expression of just those influences.

Introduction In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno provides an extensive critique of Kantian aesthetics.1 He focuses on the four moments of the analytic of the beautiful – in particular on the first and second moments; he also considers Kant’s theory of the sublime, particularly the dynamic sublime; and also, Kant’s account of natural beauty.2 In this analysis, he couches a number of remarks within the rhetoric of economics. This analysis rarely pertains to actual economic phenomena; rather, it is used to refer to other, non-economic phenomena relevant to aesthetic analysis such as the structure of the subject and of aesthetic experience. Hence the use of economic language is a device for recasting and reconsidering aesthetic phenomena from a fresh and revealing angle. These economic comments continue a line of thinking present in his analysis of Kant’s theory of subjectivity in the Critique of Pure Reason3 and suggests critical links across different areas of Kant’s philosophy. Adorno’s comments fit within a tradition of materialist critique which is concerned to resituate theories in the socio-historical conditions from which they have emerged – as opposed to more abstract philosophies which deliberately consider theories and phenomena apart from any socio-historical conditions. He uses this critical model to suggest problematic social commitments concealed beneath the surface of rarified cognitive and aesthetic philosophy. Unfortunately, his comments are scattered and do not form a systematic treatment. In this chapter a more systematic treatment will be developed,



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working towards an economic analysis of aesthetic phenomena and demonstrating key links to his critique of cognition in the first Critique. It becomes apparent that these economic comments revolve around the structure and consequences of transcendental argument and are relevant primarily to the idea of freedom, or autonomy, in aesthetic experience. Hence this account is referred to here as the ‘transcendental economy of aesthetic autonomy’. The aims of this chapter are threefold. First, to help understand an important component of Adorno’s aesthetics of autonomy from an original perspective. Second, to provide a point of critical departure for analysing Kant’s aesthetics to reveal aspects of Kant’s thinking which are perhaps overlooked in contemporary Kantian scholarship. Finally, a meta-philosophical concern of Adorno’s is considered. While a philosophy may be wrong about its analysis of a particular phenomenon – and Adorno, as we will see, heavily criticizes Kant’s view of the subject, its autonomy and the form of aesthetic experience it engenders – Adorno claims that it may nonetheless be a valid expression of a socio-historical way of thinking. Therefore, a theory may falsify the object of analysis but do so in a way which reveals something true about the world. In that sense, a philosophy may still tell us something true even if we do not hold the theory as such to be true.4

Kant’s transcendentalism and truth-content In this section we will set up Adorno’s general critical orientation to Kant’s philosophy, to transcendental thinking and to the ‘truth-content’ of this thinking. We see that such concerns focus attention on Kant’s theory of autonomy. Adorno’s key point is that Kant’s theory of the subject, of its autonomy and of its aesthetic experiences may not achieve the transcendental necessity Kant aims for. However, Kant’s ambition, the method, the theoretical goals and the content of the theory itself all tell us something true about the socio-historical moment in which they were produced. This is because, for Adorno, Kant’s philosophy is mediated by the socio-historical context of its production – Enlightenment, and particularly bourgeois, beliefs, aims and method suffuse and motivate the work. Against this meta-philosophical background, the focus and importance of the transcendental economics of aesthetic autonomy may be properly elucidated. Adorno criticizes the ostensible purity of Kant’s separation of transcendental entities from their material basis.5 A prime example is the Kantian generation of the transcendental self, emancipated from its material conditions:

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The delusion that the transcendental subject is the Archimedean fixed point from which the world can be lifted out of its hinges – this delusion, purely in itself, is indeed hard to overcome altogether by subjective analysis. For contained in this delusion, and not to be extracted from the forms of cognitive mediation, is the truth that society comes before the individual consciousness and before all its experience.6

It is not always clear what Adorno is referring to when talking about the ‘transcendental subject’; here it will be considered as a reified self consisting in modally necessary features of subjectivity, arrived at through transcendental argument.7 This transcendental subject is contrasted, by Adorno, with the empirical subject which he seems to understand as that about human subjectivity which appears to the subject spatio-temporally.8 With those distinctions in mind, we see him resist the Kantian view that any features of subjectivity can be transcendentally abstracted from their material conditions and taken as necessary, universal features of any human subjectivity regardless of changes in the material conditions of empirical subjectivity. Yet, Adorno acknowledges that the relationship between the empirical self and transcendental aspects of human subjectivity poses a real, yet ineliminable, problem for philosophy.9 Hence it is not surprising that Kant should find this relationship problematic and attempt a resolution. Nevertheless, Adorno considers Kant’s treatment of this problem a true expression, as it were, of bourgeois, Enlightenment philosophy; and at least to this extent we can consider Kant’s philosophy to have truth-content. Adorno believes that Kantian subjectivity and autonomy is an expression of a particular modality of subjectivity and autonomy commensurable with the emergence of the bourgeois subject during the Enlightenment. He denies universal, ahistorical validity to this subject, but, as I have suggested, he thinks there is some truth to the idea in other respects:10 As the extreme borderline case of ideology, the transcendental subject comes close to truth. The transcendental generality is no mere narcissist self-exaltation of the I, not the hubris of an autonomy of the I. Its reality lies in the domination that prevails and perpetuates itself by means of the principle of equivalence. The process of abstraction – which philosophy transfigures, and which it ascribes to the knowing subject alone – is taking place in the factual barter society.11

Notice that the kind of truth conveyed through the transcendental subject is couched in economic terms and according to economic phenomena. What is true about this subjectivity is that it both reflects, internally, a principle of



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equivalence which emerges as an important feature of capitalist socio-political relations, and is the sort of subject required for those relations to operate effectively. Whether or not Adorno is correct to argue this is moot for this chapter. The intention here is to develop Adorno’s analysis; and we see that he applies the same sort of thinking to the notion of autonomy. Again, for Adorno, Kant’s view of autonomy is commensurable with the developing socio-political and economic arrangements found in burgeoning capitalism: That there must be freedom is the supreme iniuria committed by the lawmaking autonomous subject. The substance of its own freedom – of the identity which has annexed all nonidentity – is as one with the ‘must,’ with the law, with absolute dominion. This is the spark that kindles the pathos of Kant. He construes even freedom as a special case of causality. To him, it is the ‘constant laws’ that matter. His timid bourgeois detestation of anarchy matches his proud bourgeois antipathy against tutelage. Here, too, society intrudes all the way into his most formal reflections. Formality in itself is a bourgeois trait: on the one hand, it frees the individual from the confining definitions of what has come to be just so, not otherwise, while on the other hand it has nothing to set against things as they are, nothing to base itself upon except dominion, which has been raised to the rank of a pure principle.12

There are many controversial claims in this passage; to justify them would take us beyond my purposes here. What is important is that for Adorno there is an intersection between Kant’s transcendental view of freedom and subjectivity, and the socio-historical structures from which such views have emerged. Insofar as they emerge and reflect a particular historical situation, they have ‘truth-content’ even if, for Adorno, they at the same time falsify, in some way, the phenomena they are attempting to explain. Despite Kant’s attempt to philosophize to general, formal principles with the minimal metaphysical and empirical assumptions, Adorno holds that his philosophy is nevertheless socio-historically mediated. That is, even in his most formal moments – when elucidating a priori the necessary conditions of experience, which are seemingly removed and insulated from the contingencies of the empirical world – the empirical world still inflects, motivates and suffuses the philosophy. The attempt to transcendentally separate subjectivity and freedom from their bases in empirical reality is itself indicative of bourgeois consciousness. Our economic analysis will help us to see how this is the case. It is well known that the architectonic structure of Kant’s view of transcendental subjectivity is key to his philosophical project; that there is a view of

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autonomy which is also derived transcendentally and which has import and application across Kant’s philosophy.13 The specific application of transcendental thinking to various aspects of subjective agency – cognition and aesthetic experience, for example – reveals important aspects of transcendental autonomy and provides a point of departure for determining the ‘truth-content’ of Kant’s philosophy. Furthermore, given the architectonic structure, we are able to move across applications of transcendental reasoning, from the cognitive to the aesthetic, in a way in which analysis of one reveals important aspects of the other. This being the case, we will now turn to such an analysis, beginning with cognition and moving then to aesthetics, examining both through the lens of Adorno’s economic rhetoric.

Sketch of the transcendental economy of Kantian subjectivity and cognition It is clear that Adorno sees Kant as having great insight into human subjectivity but holds that Kant falters when he reifies the structures of the subject and its relationship to the world. It is in the moments of reification where Kant ultimately comes to favour a particular form of subjectivity, which Adorno sees as a bourgeois form of subjectivity.14 That is, a form which is amenable to bourgeois socio-historical relations and which results in suppression of the mediatedness of the transcendental and empirical realms. In Adorno’s lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he says the following: The distinction between thinking and receptivity, sense impressions, is precisely that we do something, we activate ourselves. Because analysis shifts the entire weight of the dynamic, the dynamic character of reality, onto the side of the subject, our world becomes increasingly the product of labour; we might say it becomes congealed labour. And the livelier the subject becomes, the deader the world becomes.15

This is a dense and revealing passage. The first claim is reasonably clear. He is referring to the important Kantian notion that cognition requires both the receptivity of sensibility and the spontaneity of the understanding; we need not dwell on this well-known claim here. What is important is the interpretive spin provided by Adorno in the following claim. He suggests that Kantian perception and cognition is a form of production, a labour, and that the product is reality. The subject, in its cognitive agency, is a producer par excellence.



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How to interpret this second claim is the key to this analysis. The first possible interpretation, which should be dismissed, is that Adorno is attributing to Kant some form of strong ontological idealism; that is, some form of the view that we ‘produce a reality’ in the sense that reality is nothing other the product of our mind. This would be to ascribe to Kant a view that he clearly did not hold. Fortunately this is not Adorno’s claim.16 Rather, we should interpret this idea charitably, as a hermeneutic point about the role of cognition. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno makes it clear that his emphasis is on the relative importance given to the subject and the object in a cognitive act within a theory of knowledge. His argument is that in Kant’s transcendental philosophy the subject is reified through the universal features of transcendental subjectivity and, given the fact that this subject determines the limits of objectively valid empirical reality,17 the limits of subjective cognition become the limits of objective reality.18 Not only does Adorno worry that this falsifies the irreducible particularity of the objects of empirical experience, it also fails to account for the dynamic interaction between the subject and object through which both are constitutively transformed. This is a very complex notion. However, the key idea is that objects are not simply as they appear to us, and that we cannot consider epistemology as satisfactory if it merely seeks to secure knowledge of appearances. The socio-historical mediation of objects means that empirical entities are constituted and changing in ways not captured in their appearance. Such a view suggests a theory of knowledge that cannot be accomodated within a transcendental epistemology. What is important for our purposes here is the notion that the reification of the subject in the form of transcendental subjectivity results in the division of subjectivity into the concrete empirical subject and an abstract self.19 Life becomes polarized, wholly abstract and wholly concrete, although it would be only in the tension between them. The two poles are equally reified, and what is left of the spontaneous subject, the pure apperception, ceases to be a subject; in the hypostatized logicity of a Kantian cogito, detached from any living I, it is covered by the all-controlling rigidity.20

In turn, this division is put to specific philosophical work: to produce a stable fundament and territory within which the subject may control and determine both herself and the empirical world which appears to her. This division is directly relevant to understanding Adorno’s contention that Kantian cognition results in a ‘congealed labour’. Given other random remarks which we will be discussing in due course, we are entitled to take Adorno’s thought somewhat

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literally: cognition is a form of labour. How then could we translate this Marxian influence into the Kantian architectonic of the subject? Taking such a notion seriously, it would appear that we derive a division of labour between the empirical self and transcendental selves mentioned above. The transcendental self provides and guarantees the means of production which the empirical self operates to produce a cognitive product from which we can accrue some form of profit. Given Kant’s account of the cognizing subject in the first critique, this profit may be best understood in three parts: first, the objective validity of reality as it appears to us; second, the assurance that cognitive distinctions we make of the world really carve the empirical world at the joints and hence produce entities properly amenable to acquisition and control; third, the acquisition of space and time as something owned, transcendentally speaking, by the subject. Such a view is confirmed by the following passage: The essence of the transcendental subject ever since the Critique of Pure Reason has been functionality, the pure activity that occurs in the achievements of individual subjects and surpasses them at the same time. It is a projection of freely suspended labor on the pure subject as its origin. In further restricting the subject’s functionality by calling it empty and void without a fitting material, Kant undauntedly noted that social labor is a labor on something; his more consistent idealistic successors did not hesitate to eliminate this. Yet the generality of the transcendental subject is that of the functional context of society, of a whole that coalesces from individual spontaneities and qualities, delimits them in turn by the levelling barter principle, and virtually deletes them as helplessly dependent on the whole. The universal domination of mankind by the exchange value – a domination which a priori keeps the subjects from being subjects and degrades subjectivity itself to a mere object – makes an untruth of the general principle that claims to establish the subject’s predominance. The surplus of the transcendental subject is the deficit of the utterly reduced empirical subject.21

It was noted earlier that Adorno’s view of mediation and truth-content suggests that Kantian subjectivity, while aiming at a universal subjectivity, is an expression of a notion of subjectivity appropriate to a particular socio-historical moment and therefore is indexed to that moment – albeit a particular moment which believes universal subjectivity to be a possible and desirable entity. Adorno’s recasting of Kantian subjectivity in the above quotation in the mode of particular (i.e. non-universal) forms of economic structures which are then transcendentally determined as universals emphasizes the historical mediation of Kantian philosophy. The mediated claim Adorno is interested in making is that this labour theory of subjectivity parallels the labour structure developing



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within burgeoning capitalism with the bourgeois entrepreneur sublimated within the very structure of subjectivity. He notes in the above passage that Kant, in the form of the noumenal basis for empirical reality, sets a transcendental limit to the scope and territory of human control of the objective world – this is to be lauded as a real bulwark against the total hegemony of the subject. Nevertheless, Adorno clearly worries that within the objectively valid domain of human control, reality is dominated by the abstract, transcendental subject. A key feature of that subjective dominance is the reduction of the objects of empirical experience to that which is captured in their conceptual representations. The individual, empirical subject is similarly reduced in this division of labour to a worker, designated for operating the transcendental machinery of cognition, the products of which – objectively valid, empirical judgements – are typically alienated as mass-produced commodities available for internal and social exchange. The structure of the Kantian subject is as an efficient machine designed to extract maximum surplus value from its prescribed property – the phenomenal world. It is the transcendental subject which guarantees the basis from which objective reality may be validly and efficiently processed in cognition; the empirical subject, effectively the worker in this division of labour, is thoroughly undermined within this model of cognition – just as the particularity of the object being cognized is undermined. We should also note that Adorno calls this cognitive labour ‘congealed’. How should we understand this metaphor and what is its import for the idea? To congeal is to move from a liquid or fluid state into a hardened state. There seem to be two ideas that Adorno has in mind here: one is that when cognizing a particular phenomenon to form a determinative judgement, we reify the phenomenon in order to produce a fixed, objectively valid, determinate cognition; second, if reality were to remain fluid, Kant’s transcendental reasoning would not be able to fix universal features of the human mind. We require the world to be ‘fixed’, in this reified sense, in order to be able to draw fixed conclusions about the conditions for that reality and about ourselves. What Kant is then prepared to sacrifice is both a fluid notion of empirical reality and a fluidity in our cognitive relation to that reality in favour of a hardened, reified reality. Such a view enables us to draw transcendental conclusions about the structure of subjectivity which are equally reified. The fact that Adorno explicitly refers to Kantian subjectivity as bourgeois – both as a piece of bourgeois philosophy and also a universal exemplar of the idealized bourgeois entrepreneur22 – indicates the socio-historical truth-content of Kantian philosophy.

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Objectively valid judgements are formed through the necessary application of cognitive technology to guarantee a mechanistic process of reality production. These judgements form a real-world capital which may be used to generate further objectively valid ‘pieces’ of knowledge about the world; they are also the basis upon which we are entitled to control the world insofar as the way we think about the world just is the way the empirical world is. The product of our cognitive labour not only determines reality; it would also appear to produce knowledge with clear opportunity for capital growth. Yet the value which may be derived from these processes relies on their complete systematic determination. Nowhere is this processual fixity more evident than in the case of the imagination. In Kant’s model of cognition, which we are here recasting in economic terms, the processes of the imagination are themselves dominated by the ends of the productive process. Imaginative freedom is anathema to profitable production on the basis of its inappropriateness for producing determinate results: the quantitative inefficiency of unrestricted processings and also the potential qualitative diversity of our imaginings are unruly cognitions, ripe for generating productive inefficiency.23 To safeguard against such productive lapses, the imagination in Kantian cognition is placed under strict process guidelines: the imagination packages atomistic appearances, according to the prescribed rules for efficient production, ready for conceptual processing.24 The Kantian model of cognition has, built into its streamlined transcendental structure, the minimal necessary processes and technology required to produce objectively valid knowledge. A defining characteristic of determinative cognition is the intense interest the subject takes in the object. In Kantian terms, this interest takes a number of forms. Foreshadowing his aesthetic analysis, the interest may be understood by the conceptual determination of a sensible representation as such-and-such a kind of thing, i.e. we take an interest in what sort of thing the object is, an interest made explicit by conceptualization itself. Economically inflected, the interest also takes the form of interest qua profit. Knowing what sort of thing an object is and being entitled to think of that object as such a kind of thing enables the cognizer to bring the object into the complex web of empirical judgements. Once conceptually assimilated in this way the object may then be mined as an epistemic resource, which transforms the singular object, in all its obstinate, inefficient particularity, into a generalized form about which many generalized judgements may be made. Hence we take an interest in what the object is and our interests are served by generalizing over the particular through conceptual assimilation. This is the proper means for the efficient mining of profit from



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any one particular judgement. The object must be unambiguously determined as ready for its assimilation into the exchange character of conceptual analysis within which the surplus value of the cognition may be realized. As Adorno says, the primary aim of identity thinking is to produce a model of cognition within which the empirical object may be identified with its conceptual determination. This reaches its apotheosis in the Kantian transcendental model whereby the general concept operates as the thing-in-itself.25 As much as Adorno criticizes Kant for this form of ‘identity-thinking’ – briefly, promoting the general concept of the particular as sufficient for the representation of the particular – he does laud Kant for placing some form of limit on this sufficiency. We will return to this below when considering aesthetic experience. The preceding analysis helps structure a more unified account from a few scattered remarks about the nature of Kantian cognition as if it were an economy. We can now use this analysis to reconsider aspects of Adorno’s critique of aesthetic autonomy and its relation to the architectonic of Kantian subjectivity in general.

A transcendental economy of aesthetic autonomy Just as we found that the resituating of the Kantian account of cognition in economic terms revealed interesting ways to consider the truth-content of Kant’s theory of the subject, the same is true when recasting aesthetic experience in economic terms. Adorno argues that while Kant discovered key insights for a genuinely modern aesthetics, his theory is unable to properly account for the objective autonomy of artworks. Critical light may be cast on these ideas through the outlining of aesthetic autonomy within economic terms. We are told in the the ‘analytic of the beautiful’ that the formal character of the objects of experience are purposive, and that form is normally assimilated within the processes of conceptual determination in objectively valid judgements.26 In the case of aesthetic experience, that purpose is treated ‘purposelessly’:27 the imagination does not determine the manifold presentation according the concept of the object but ‘plays’ with the form of the object.28 That is, the imagination is freed from its objective role in the labour process of cognition and is, effectively, granted leisure time. The free play of the imagination and the understanding affords the subject an alternative mode of experience whereby it is able to take pleasure just in the productive processing possibilities of its own cognitive technology. As the mind plays with the form

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of representation, the subject of an aesthetic experience of the beautiful allows its faculties free reign to multiply the representational content of any particular experience. Crucially, the subject experiences a pleasure from the play of its faculties. It is not obvious, however, why this should be the case. Kant’s thought seems to be that there is a pleasure which we can take in the ‘over-sufficiency’ of our cognitive resources for processing appearances. There is also a pleasure which we can take in the multiple productions of that technology in the experience of the beautiful.29 In short, aesthetic experience, while disinterested, is a moment of self-enjoyment hooked on to the external world only as a foil for our own further self-regard. It is only indirectly that the object can be pleasurable as a source of such appearances and it is not pleasurable in virtue of what it is in itself. Adorno notes the complex dialectic of interest in Kantian aesthetic experience which is suppressed beneath the transcendental account of disinterestedness. There is a twofold satisfaction in aesthetic experience: the self-satisfaction taken in the unlimited potential of human subjectivity and the taboo pleasure taken in the object which facilitates this experience. For the more art is dominated throughout by subjectivity and must show itself to be irreconcilable with everything pre-established, the more that subjective reason – the formal principle itself – becomes the canon of aesthetics. This formal principle, obedient to subjective lawfulness regardless of what is other to it, and unshaken by its other, continues to give pleasure: In it subjectivity, unconscious of itself, enjoys the feeling of power.30

Hence it is through the aesthetic mode of experience that the limitations placed on determinative judgement are loosened such that the subject is able to enjoy the infinite capabilities and opportunities afforded to it by its own technological resources. For the bourgeois subject, aesthetic experience is literally the reward at the end of the day for a hard day’s cognitive labour and for which no more capital investment in technology is required. While the entrepreneur sets his or her resources to work for the generation of capital gain, they are precluded from taking a satisfaction in their own cognitive resources and the activity of those resources. Clearly bourgeois aesthetic experience takes on a very different tenor when recast within this economic rhetoric. It is quite clear why the artwork, the foil for the potentially infinite play of the mind, should be such a prized possession for the bourgeois subject. It is the ideal commodity – a source of unlimited profit, in the form of unmediated



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personal pleasure. Furthermore, this pleasure, while stimulated by the external object and its form, is nevertheless properly situated entirely within the subject and is a product of the lawful structure of cognition in general – the object of aesthetic experience is necessary only indirectly. Aesthetic experience carries with it the semblance of freedom, the total emancipation of the subject from empirical scarcity which is founded upon the transcendental resources of the human subject. However, it is built into the structure of aesthetic experience that the subject must defer interest in its own self-satisfaction, and in the object of its satisfaction, unless it is to risk submerging aesthetic experience back into the real-world pressures of the real-world interests from which Kant has so diligently extricated it – precisely so that immediate pleasure can be maximized. The price, as it were, of aesthetic experience of the beautiful is that the subject must relinquish its desire to quantify and qualify, that is, rationalize, its profit in that moment. This tension between interest and disinterest, which emerges out of the structure of aesthetic experience and from the bourgeois goals of aesthetic theory, is a key concern for Adorno. He consistently lauds the disinterestedness of Kantian aesthetic experience as undeniably the first crucial step in an advanced theory of art. Indeed, it provides a block to precisely the sort of reduction of art to a mere means for enjoyment.31 Disinterestedness also directs the pleasure taken in artworks away from a purely sensuous pleasure which signals the shift towards a model of aesthetic appreciation appropriate to autonomous artworks. Adorno also sees in disinterestedness the first step away from certain forms of ‘profit’ in the experience of artworks: The viewer enters into a contract with the artwork so that it will speak. Those who brag of having ‘got’ something from an artwork transfer in philistine fashion the relation of possession to what is strictly foreign to it; they extend the comportment of unbroken self-preservation, subordinating beauty to that interest that beauty, according to Kant’s ever valid insight, transcends.32

Kant’s advancement of aesthetics beyond taste is a key step in the development of a truly Enlightened theory appropriate to the development of autonomous art. Yet we should note: not seeking to ‘get something out of ’ aesthetic experience during an aesthetic experience does not entail that we never look to get something out of it. Indeed, Adorno argues that Kant defers, rather than abolishes profit from aesthetic experience, in order to amplify the profit accrued.

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With this qualification in mind, Kant nevertheless holds that the pleasure felt in aesthetic experience of the beautiful is not a sensuous pleasure. While Adorno wishes to retain such insights, there are two ways in which he wishes to subject these notions to immanent critique – to release the dialectical processes which become reified in Kant’s thinking. First, the freedom of the subject in aesthetic experience and production is an attenuated ‘freedom under law’.33 In other words, the flights of fancy of the artist must be brought under determinate technique and purpose in order that an object be created, let alone a beautiful object. Yet, for Adorno, the heteronomy of this law, under which art is created and experienced, results in a theory which fails to properly understand that autonomous artworks create and obey their own laws of form; it misses the fact that artworks need to be engaged with according to their own laws of form.34 In short, the theory of aesthetic freedom is too subjective in Kant’s philosophy and lacks the limits it should find in the objective selfgovernance of the autonomous artwork. The limits of subjective freedom and the objective freedom of the artwork are of crucial importance to Adorno’s own account of the autonomy of artworks. He considers their objective form as a sedimentation of socio-historical material;35 he argues that the artwork contains truth-content as a result of the coordination of this material;36 and in light of this objective truth-content, the artwork comes to be a fulcrum for a praxis of resistance to the givenness of a particular moment of socio-historical reality.37 These are bold claims, but they are not our focus here in Adorno’s critique of Kant’s account of aesthetic experience. Yet they are essential to note for a fully developed Adornian account of aesthetic autonomy and for understanding the importance of the dialectical critique that Adorno mounts against Kant. Second, in line with the overly subjective character of freedom under law, disinterestedness is shorn of all its dialectical entanglement with interest. Adorno argues that the separation of disinterest and interest is neither possible nor desirable in a theory of aesthetic experience. The freedom of the subject which this theoretical separation aims towards indicates a broader Enlightenment goal which is a key thematic issue in Adorno’s work with Horkheimer. Kant makes aesthetic experience as much a freedom from the body as a form of freedom for the subject as such – indeed, there is a logical grouping of the subject, as such, with the transcendental self. Both are then set apart from the bodily, empirical self. For Adorno then, Kant’s account of aesthetic experience is in line with the general Enlightenment project for the domination of external, and internal,



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nature. His theory of the freedom of aesthetic experience brings to mind Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of Odysseus as the prototypical bourgeois subject strapped to the mast such that he can hear the Sirens’ song without succumbing to it.38 Through the mediation of the self under its own rational law, the subject is able to maximize profits from its own body, its artefacts and from nature itself. This is only possible, however, through the diremption of the self followed by the suppression of the empirical self in favour of the transcendental subject. Adorno puts this idea in visceral terms: For Kant, aesthetics becomes paradoxically a castrated hedonism, desire without desire. An equal injustice is done both to artistic experience, in which liking is by no means the whole of it but plays a subordinate role, and to sensual interest, the suppressed and unsatisfied needs that resonate in their aesthetic negation and make artworks more than empty patterns.39

The experience of art becomes exemplary of the bourgeois maxim that controlling our desires will pay dividends. Considerations of interest, while admitted, are not given any proper theoretical room by Kant. The reason for such exclusion is that Kant’s very aim is to separate interest from aesthetic experience and to keep it excluded. His transcendental arguments enable him to make the separation and then assert that separation as necessary. Once separated, he has the distance required to reassert the hegemony of subjective freedom and control over its own restricted domain of interest within which it may help itself to the rewards of aesthetic experience. Indeed, it becomes an unmediated idealization of the profit that the bourgeois subject would wish to accrue from finite material goods. Adorno resists this separation and idealization through his dialectical account of disinterest. While disinterest acts as a valid and necessary limit on subjective domination over the object in the aesthetic experience, disinterestedness cannot be reified and used as a buffer to demark a zone of experience within which the subject has total control and can, in due course, claim interest. Adorno conducts his immanent critique of Kantian transcendentalism by reinvigorating the dialectical forces which Kant has reified through transcendental argument. Adorno argues that the transcendental construction of the faculties of experience in the first critique as insulated from change falsifies the dialectical, mediated nature of subjectivity. A properly dialectical account of the self entails, for Adorno, that the interest the subject takes in the objects of aesthetic experience cannot be transcendentally separated from the subject’s disinterest. The most obvious expression of such interest is a materially

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economic one: desire, excluded from the moment of aesthetic experience, is expressed and reinvested in the form of possession of those very objects which it purports to be disinterested in. The bourgeois investment in the timeless work of art – a source of increasing capital based on the plenipotentiary of aesthetic experience which the artwork represents – is a falsification of the reality of autonomous artworks. The bourgeois owners of artworks believe themselves to be in possession of artworks just because they have the rights to the material entity in question. This fixed relation to the object, determined through material possession, is only possible if the object, qua art, and subjects are fixed and reified (e.g. as they are in Kant’s aesthetics). This fixity means that the moment of financial investment will be sufficient to secure ownership as long as the object is possessed. However, if heteronomous socio-historical political, economic and cultural forces play a constitutive role in determining an object as an artwork, then what counts as a real artwork will change accordingly; such changes entail that ownership is no guarantee that what is in one’s possession is still an artwork in the way it was at the moment of purchase. As socio-historical changes take place, so might the existence conditions of artworks.40 Kant could not account for this notion, nor even conceive of its possibility, because aesthetic experience is tied to appearance and the transcendental operations of the subject, neither of which change in the relevant sense. For its part, the artwork cannot help but become little more than a cipher for the stimulation of experience and is denied the resources to resist subjective aesthetic experience. The idea then that the artwork could resist aesthetic experience and even cease to be an artwork while its material form remains is anathema to Kantian aesthetics. Indeed, this idea threatens to undo the reified construction of Kantian aesthetics of the beautiful and of fine art. As a fantasy of its own freedom and domination over the subjective realm and all that falls within that realm, the bourgeois subject believes its own experience transcends the empirical conditions of scarcity and social change. In addition, the idea that the object, the artwork, could slip away from the subject despite the latter’s right to the object as a piece of property, is unthinkable to Kant. Adorno’s position suggests the opposite: that the transcendental separation of the aesthetic from the empirical world is a function of bourgeois philosophy and its truth is indexed to this function. This transcendental separation is not true in and of itself.



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Conclusions In this chapter a sketch of Kantian aesthetic experience has been presented through the lens of a materialist critique. This account was developed on the basis of a number of scattered ‘economic’ remarks made by Adorno and by using other aspects of his philosophy to recast Adorno’s critique in an economic idiom. We find that the economic remarks are closely related to revealing the ‘truth-content’ of Kant’s philosophy. That Kant’s philosophy tells us something true about the world even while it putatively fails in its philosophical ambitions is an insight that Adorno holds throughout his work on Kant. In this way, Kant’s account of the subject has a truth-content which may be explored using the resources developed above. What we have found in the analysis of the autonomy of aesthetic experience in Kantian aesthetics is a model of production, consumption and value which fits alongside the model provided for objectively valid empirical cognition. Furthermore, it suggests the complex psychical investment that the bourgeois subject has in artworks. Aesthetic experience becomes a quite unique and potent mode of experience for any subjects able to free themselves from the contingencies of their material desires in a particular moment. It transpires that the interest suppressed in the first moment of the analytic of the beautiful returns as a means for a deeper rationalization of pleasure and interest. In this chapter I have not attempted to justify Adorno’s critique of Kant, although the hermeneutic analysis offered here could provide reasons for such a justification. Furthermore, given the complexity of both Kant and Adorno’s thinking, such an account is undoubtedly incomplete and would require further development. However, inasmuch as the Kantian view of aesthetic experience persists, implicitly and explicitly in our aesthetic theories, the above analysis should raise some concerns for the pursuit of a non-dialectical account of aesthetic autonomy of that kind. It also suggests the complex importance of socio-historical phenomena for a theory of aesthetic autonomy.

Notes 1 2

Sincere thanks to Owen Hulatt for his insightful editorial suggestions. They were greatly appreciated and have made a valuable contribution to this chapter. Cf. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ch. 4, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, 1997 (henceforth AT). London: Continuum.

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3 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (henceforth CPR), translated by Werner Pluhar, 1996 (Indiana: Hackett Publishing); Kant’s Critique of Judgement (henceforth CJ), translated by Werner Pluhar, 1996 (Indiana: Hackett Publishing). 4 Cf. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Rodney Livingston (henceforth KCPR), (Cambridge, Polity Press), pp. 32 and 137. 5 This indicates a general concern about the scope and justification of transcendental argument. See also: ‘But philosophy was in error when it supposed that it could simply cut the umbilical cord, thus separating the abstractions from the things from which they were being abstracted’ (KCPR: 153). Inasmuch as transcendental arguments aim at producing fixed conditions which may then be considered apart from that which they supply conditions for, Adorno is sceptical of transcendental argument. This is a vexed issue in Kantian scholarship. Stroud (1968, pp. 255–6) and Cassam (1987, pp. 377–8) attack the warrant of transcendental argument. Pereboom (1990, p. 41) argues for a deflationary view of transcendental arguing as not a priori rationalist but genetic and epistemically humble. 6 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton, 2006 (henceforth ND), Routledge: Abingdon, p. 181. (See also KCPR: 203) 7 ND, pp. 13–14. 8 Ibid., p. 122. 9 Ibid., pp. 18, 148. 10 John McCumber (2006: 283) argues that our faculties do in fact have histories for Kant: ‘Unearthing the Wonder: A “Post-Kantian” Paradigm in Kant’s Critique of Judgment’ in Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, (ed.) R. Kukla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 11 ND, p. 178. 12 ND, pp. 250–1. 13 To follow this architectonic structure of subjective autonomy consider Kant’s treatment of the difference between noumena and phenomena, CPR: B307–11; the application of transcendental idealism to the Antinomy of Causation, CPR: B567–9; the moral autonomy of human subjectivity, 42 and 63 (Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Mary Gregor, 1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); the mediated freedom of the subject in aesthetic experience, CJ: 306–7. 14 See ND, pp. 189–91, 370, 374–5. On the background of the concept of reification, see Lukács (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 83–110; Jay, (1984) Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 109–11. Reification may also refer to ‘natural’ entities. 15 KCPR, p. 115.

16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40

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CPR: B274–83. See CPR: B44 of the Transcendental Aesthetic. ND, p. 91. The reification of apperception is a deeply divisive issue in Kantian scholarship. Stephen Priest (1987) ‘Subjectivity and Objectivity in Kant and Hegel’, in Hegel’s Critique of Kant, ed. Stephen Priest (Oxford: Oxford University Press); and Ameriks (2000) Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 281–3. Both argue against Hegel’s putative reification of apperception which may have influenced Adorno here. ND, p. 91. ND, p. 178. See KCPR: 6. See Fiona Hughes (2007) for a more moderate analysis of the same idea, §4.III.i. Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). See CPR: A115–117. ND, p. 148. CJ: §11: 221. CJ: §15: 228. CJ: §9: 217. See Douglas Burnham (2004) Kant’s Philosophies of Judgement (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 174. AT, pp. 62–3. AT, p. 349. AT, pp. 345–6. See also AT p. 392. See e.g. CJ: §50. See Lambert Zuidevaart’s excellent commentary on Adorno’s aesthetics and his theory of the the objective autonomy of artworks qua form: 2.1 and 5.1 ( 1991); and Paddison (1993, p. 98). AT, p. 6. AT, p. 338. AT, p. 14. Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford University Press: Stanford, California, pp. 25–7. AT, p. 14. Implicit here is the Hegelian idea that ‘art’ may cease to exist. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. vol. 1., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 91–105. Adorno’s understanding of this notion is of course more materialist and less idealist: the conditions for art are not indexed to Geist in the Hegelian sense but in fragmented socio-historical conditions.

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References Adorno, T. (1997) Aesthetic Theory, ch. 4, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor (henceforth AT). London: Continuum. —(2001) Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Rodney Livingston (henceforth KCPR). Cambridge: Polity Press. —(2006) Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton. Routledge: Abindon. Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford University Press: Stanford, California. Ameriks, K. (2000) Kant and the Fate of Autonomy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 281–3. Burnham, D. (2004) Kant’s Philosophies of Judgement. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 174. Cassam, Q. (1987) ‘Transcendental Arguments, Transcendental Synthesis and Transcendental Idealism, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 149. Hegel, G. W. F. (1998) Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford. Oxford University Press, pp. 91–105. Hughes, F. (2007) Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jay, M. (1984) Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kant, I. (1996) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner Pluhar (henceforth CPR). Indiana: Hackett Publishing. —(1987) Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner Pluhar (1996) (henceforth, CJ). Indiana: Hackett Publishing. —(1991) Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Mary Gregor (1991). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lukács, G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 83–110. McCumber, J. (2006) ‘Unearthing the Wonder: A “Post-Kantian” Paradigm in Kant’s Critique of Judgment,’ in Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, (ed.) R. Kukla. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paddison, M. (1993) Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 98. Pereboom, D. (1990) ‘Kant on Justification in Transcendental Philosophy’, Synthese, vol. 85, No. 1. Priest, S. (1987) ‘Subjectivity and Objectivity in Kant and Hegel’, in Hegel’s Critique of Kant, (ed.) Stephen Priest. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stroud, B. (1968) ‘Transcendental Arguments’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 65, No. 9. Cassam: 377 – 8 (1987) ‘Transcendental Arguments, Transcendental Synthesis and Transcendental Idealism’. Zuidevaart, L. (1991) Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Social Theory and the Autonomy of Art: The Case of Niklas Luhmann Matthew Rampley

Preface This contribution emerges out of a concern with models of historical agency and transformation in art. The theories that have become dominant in the past 30 or so years have tended to emphasize the pre-eminent role of large-scale structures over individual agents. Heirs to a Hegelian view of history as structured in periods, influential thinkers such as Michel Foucault or Pierre Bourdieu have tended to see cultural change consisting of dramatic (but unexplained) shifts from one macro-social structure (for Foucault it is epistemic regimes, for Bourdieu it is cultural fields) to another. The individual operates within such bounded fields, but seems to play little role in effecting the transition from one to another. I was drawn to the work of Niklas Luhmann, the topic of this chapter, because he inverts this relation, regarding such structures and systems as produced by the innumerable daily transactions and activities of social life. Luhmann develops this idea without resorting to outmoded and problematic notions of the autonomous human subject. Through time, individual actions (or communications) that have little significance in themselves, can have larger historical effects through the tiny variations and possibilities of change which they create. This contribution explores in particular Luhmann’s account of art as a social system, which is likewise based on this model.

Introduction It is commonly assumed that the very idea of art as an autonomous domain of cultural practice stands opposed to the basic tenets of sociological enquiry. As Austin Harrington observes, ‘Art tends to revolt against materialistic

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explanations of life while sociology tends to exult in exposing the singular and unique as socially constructed and reproduced.’1 Such generalizing statements have to be treated with caution, yet since the inception of sociology as a distinct discipline in the late nineteenth century, social theorists have repeatedly sought to undercut ideas of aesthetic autonomy by reference to the social bases of art. Analyses have ranged from emphasis on the wider social milieu within which art is produced – and here one might also include the tradition of the social history of art – to critique of the social and political constitution of the aesthetic itself. Most famously, Pierre Bourdieu’s work on taste in 1960s France foregrounded the role of aesthetic preference as an instrument of social differentiation while, subsequently, Terry Eagleton argued for the crucial importance of the political disenfranchisement of the bourgeoisie for the formation of aesthetics and the notion of the creative imagination.2 The autonomy of the aesthetic has recently been defended by thinkers such as Gérard Genette, who has stressed once more the centrality of ‘aesthetic attention’ to the experience of art, but this stance is intrinsically opposed to the logic of sociological enquiry, the basic premise of which is that art and aesthetic experience are socially produced and mediated.3 This binary opposition is, of course, a simplification. Some 20 years ago Janet Wolff, recognizing that ‘art has its own specificity’, concluded the revised edition of her study Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art with the assertion that ‘the very formulation of the problem as an opposition between two approaches and two disciplines turns out to be misleading … aesthetics cannot be unaffected by sociology – nor sociology dismissive of the aesthetic’.4 In her acknowledgement of the complex relation between the sociality and autonomy of art Wolff was alluding to a philosophical tradition that reached its culmination in the work of Adorno, for whom the specificity of the aesthetic was intimately connected with its sociality. As Adorno noted, art’s ‘autonomy, its growing independence from society, was a function of the bourgeois consciousness of freedom that was itself bound up with the social structure’.5 The vertiginous logic involved in this tradition of thought is summed up succinctly in Adorno’s formulation that ‘art becomes social by its opposition to society and it occupies this position only as autonomous art’.6 Adorno’s reading had been criticized by numerous authors for its allegiance to a high modernist aesthetics. For Peter Bürger, for instance, Adorno seemed to give little acknowledgement to the avant-garde practices that call the category of art itself into question.7 My aim is not to engage in this debate so much as to point to it as an indication of the fact that social theory and the idea of autonomous art are not as opposed as may be often supposed. If we follow Natalie



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Heinich’s point about the nature of sociological enquiry, even the approach of Bourdieu is not as antithetical to ideas of autonomy as his claims about taste suggest since, as Heinich argues, Bourdieu’s idea of the literary or artistic field, developed at length in The Rules of Art, is ‘inseparable from that of “autonomy” or, rather, ‘autonomization,” which … makes it possible to take account of the distance of a given activity from ordinary life’.8 Hence, Bourdieu’s exposition of the structure of the literary field of late nineteenth-century France, for all its attention to the relation between literature and heteronomous demands – principally the market – traces out the internal logic and structure of possible positions within a defined matrix.9 For Heinich, what is definitive of the sociology of art (in contrast to the social history of art) is its focus on the notion of ‘art like a society’; in other words, the examination of the social interactions, evaluations, institutions and representations that comprise art worlds.10 The best-known example of this kind of enquiry remains Becker’s Art Worlds, but in the remainder of this chapter I consider a rather less familiar case: the sociological analyses of Niklas Luhmann.11 Although a major figure in sociology in Germany, whose theoretical work has had a significant impact on literary studies and, increasingly, the history of art, his ideas have made few inroads into Anglo-American aesthetics or art theory. This is of especial pertinence for the present discussion, since the question of artistic autonomy is a central preoccupation in his writings.

Luhmann, sociology and social systems Luhmann is perhaps the most prominent representative of the project of constructing a sociological method on the basis of systems theory. The idea of extending the study of physical and biological systems to the analysis of social phenomena has long been outlined by systems theorists; in the 1950s Norbert Wiener argued for the importance of cybernetics and the model of feedback loops to the understanding of social and political processes, while later Ludwig von Bertalanffy outlined a general systems theory that he saw as equally relevant for the social sciences.12 For all the importance they attached to the paradigm of systems theory, these examples lacked theoretical sophistication and specificity; it was not clear from their writings what difference the application of systems theory would make or indeed what it even meant to talk of a social system. Luhmann differs on this point, since in a research and publication career spanning 40 years, he articulated a rigorous theory of social systems in

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general as well as undertaking analyses of specific social systems, including art, on which he wrote a book-length study together with numerous articles.13 Informed by the sociological theory of Talcott Parsons, but with the addition of an eclectic range of intellectual sources ranging from Edmund Husserl to Gregory Bateson, the biologists Umberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and the logician George Spencer-Brown, Luhmann formulated a theory of social systems that drew on central tropes of systems theory but which, crucially, linked them to classical sociological debates over the nature of modernization. At the centre of Luhmann’s work are the two interconnected issues of the basis of social systems and the relation of system and environment. As a social theory, it was driven by a critical attitude towards the sociological tradition, which, Luhmann argued, was unable to relinquish a problematic attachment to the individual subject and intersubjective relations as the foundation of society. Instead, Luhmann’s particular reading of systems theory saw social systems as founded in communication. The provocative nature of this position, which Luhmann expounded in a series of volumes that appeared in the early 1970s, was apparent in an exchange with Jürgen Habermas, published in 1971 as Social Theory or Social Technology – What does Systems Research Achieve?14 Although communication is a key term for both thinkers, Luhmann’s position stood completely at odds with Habermas’ theory of communicative rationality, inasmuch as his anti-humanist stance explicitly ruled out the notions of speech community that would be of central importance for Habermas and, indeed, saw conscious subjectivity (the ‘psychic system’) and society as distinct systems. On the one hand, he argued that ‘psychic and social systems have evolved together. At any time the one kind of system is the necessary environment of the other. … Persons cannot emerge and continue to exist without social systems, nor can social systems without persons.’15 Yet, on the other, he stressed that the psychic system ‘lies outside all social systems’.16 Consciousness is operatively closed to other psychic systems, and hence society is built up out of the communicative system between individual psychic systems. On this account the psychic system does not relate to other psychic systems, but rather to their communications. As one sympathetic commentator has noted, ‘Individuals, seen as separate entities, are socially meaningless. One does not locate society inside individuals but between them.’17 Consequently, communicative acts develop an autonomous logic. To cite Luhmann: ‘communications can only be produced in a recursive relation to other communications, thus only within a network.’18 As a social theorist, Luhmann was concerned with how this model, drawn from general systems theory, could account for that central sociological question: the meaning of modernity. In this regard there are important parallels



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with Habermas, since both regard differentiation as its definitive characteristic, and both saw its first important symptom in Kant’s division of theoretical, practical and aesthetic rationality. For Luhmann this was described in terms of the emergence of distinct, incommensurable communicative systems. On this point, however, the two thinkers also diverged, since Habermas held to the utopian possibility of a reintegrated life world, whereas Luhmann viewed this as an impossibility. Underpinning this conclusion is a basic anti-realist epistemology; for Luhmann knowledge is only ever discourse- or system-specific, which means that there can be no life world that somehow stands outside of or above the various subsystems of modern society. To explain Luhmann’s reasoning would necessitate examining broader philosophical issues in his work that cannot be addressed fully here. In brief, however, his argument was based on the premise that the world is both indeterminate and also immeasurably complex; systems reduce its complexity by selecting elements that can be brought into relation with each other and by establishing principles of selection and communication. A system thereby marks out a boundary between itself and everything else; it marks out a space, and distinguishes between a marked space and the ‘unmarked’ space of its environment. As Luhmann noted, ‘boundaries … presuppose the reality of a beyond’, but the character of this ‘beyond’ is indeterminate.19 As Luhmann noted in his debate with Habermas, ‘from the point of view of the system, the “beyond” remains unspecified’, since it is simply defined as that which is left over after a boundary has been drawn.20 The attempt to view the world outside of the boundaries of any system would consequently involve insoluble contradictions, since, ‘in order to observe the world one would have to indicate the world as distinguished from something else: one would have to presuppose a metaworld containing the world and its other’.21 According to this argument, the world in toto is unobservable because there is no point from which it could be observed alongside and in distinction to its meta-world. On Luhmann’s terms, Habermas’s life world is just such a meta-world. The issue of the relation between a system and its environment is a crucial one for systems theory; it follows from the above that systems draw their boundaries from within and are autopoietic (self-maintaining and reproducing). In his early writings of the 1960s and 1970s Luhmann was less concerned with the differentiation of society into separate subsystems and more with the general operation of society as a communicative system. Here the central term was ‘meaning’, and communication functioned as a way of structuring expectations and of coping with the problem of ‘double contingency’. By this he meant the fact that

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All experience and action relating to other individuals is doubly contingent inasmuch as it depends not only on me but also on the other, whom I, as the alter ego, have to conceive of as just as free and capricious as I am. My expectations addressed to another will only be fulfilled if he and I create the right preconditions … the expectability (Erwartbarkeit) of expectations is an indispensable requirement of all meaningfully guided social interaction.22

Social systems thus frame communication and reduce contingency, a position that reveals the influence of Talcott Parsons’ emphasis on social stability, maintenance and reproduction. In the mid–1980s, however, Luhmann moved away from this legacy, examining the ways in which contingency was built into the operation of social systems, with an emphasis on communication as an ephemeral event. Accordingly, he now argued that the operations of a social system should be seen as ‘nothing more than events. They cannot persist, nor can they be altered. They emerge and vanish in the same instant, taking no more time than is needed to fulfil the function of an element.’23 Moreover, a social system ‘has no reality except at the level of elemental events. It rests, one might say, on the ongoing dissolution of its elements, on the transitory nature of its communications, on an all-pervasive entropy.’24 In contrast, therefore, to social theories that emphasize the role of institutions or structures that frame individual social acts or communications, Luhmann insisted both on the primacy of communicative events as the basic elements of social systems and, in addition, reinforced the sense of precariousness of any individual system.25 Communication can always fail, communicative acts can always meet with indifference or opposition, with a concomitant entropic collapse of the system. Luhmann also formulated a more expansive notion of social communication that articulated the difference between separate social systems. His early writings focused particularly on law and politics as social systems, but he subsequently applied the theory of social systems to a wide range of phenomena and institutions, including the economy, education, science, religion, love and, most important for present purposes, art.26 The emergence of these subsystems signals the shift from the stratified society of the pre-modern era to the functionally differentiated society of modernity. The term ‘function’ is defined semantically. Specifically: ‘A function is nothing other than a focus for comparison. It marks a problem … in such a way that multiple solutions can be compared and that the problem remains open for further selections and substitutions.’27 In this sense, the idea of functional differentiation is a theory of multiple rationalities; as Luhmann states, a function ‘relates what is given, whether that be states or events, to perspectives on



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problems and seeks comprehensibly to enable a problem to be solved in one way or another … it serves as a connecting thread to questions about other possibilities’.28 Social systems thus operate around semantically defined ‘problems’ which, Luhmann argued, are based on binary codes or ‘guiding differences’ that serve to draw an internally generated boundary between a system and its environment, and create a structure of expectations that binds past, present and future operations of the system.

Art as an autonomous social system Like the law, the economy, politics or science, therefore, art constitutes a specific social system of modernity. Luhmann traced its origins to the Renaissance although it only fully emerged in the late eighteenth century. The key question is therefore how art differentiates itself from other systems. Where law is guided by the code legal/illegal and the economy by the code payment/non-payment, the art system is guided by the binary opposition beautiful/ugly. Yet, as Luhmann notes, the deficiencies of this were readily apparent; the designation can apply equally to objects outside of the art system (individuals, for example) and in addition it conflates the general semantic differentiation of the system with ‘descriptively comprehensible features of individual works’.29 Hence, this was displaced by other oppositions, including that of beauty and sublimity, or interesting and uninteresting (of particular significance for Romantic aesthetics) or originality and derivativeness, and, most recently, art and non-art. Such variation in the guiding difference would appear to undermine the very idea of an autonomous system, since its identity comes across as unstable, but Luhmann stressed the need to distinguish between the positive/negative code values of a specific system and its social function. Although the legal system is guided by the binary code of legality/illegality, its function is not to be legal nor, he argued, is it the function of the art system to produce beautiful or interesting objects, even if these values have at various times been the guiding difference of its coding. Rather, ‘the function of art can be traced to problems of meaningful communication’.30 The system is thus oriented around the problem of the relationship between communication and perception, which, under normal circumstances, belong to differentiated systems. Hence ‘The function of art would thus consist in integrating what is in principle incommunicable – namely, perception – into the communication network.’31 Luhmann reiterated this position in unambiguous terms on numerous occasions; the work of art,

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he argued, is employed exclusively for communication – although he emphasized the constant danger of its failure, both because it participates in the risks involved in all communication, and also because ‘art communicates by using perceptions contrary to their primary purpose’.32 Before examining his account further, it is worth noting that in setting the basic problem of the art system in this way, Luhmann explicitly avoided casting it as an aesthetic problem, arguing that aesthetics had obfuscated what he regarded as the basic problem that drove the formation of the art system.33 Art is an autopoietic, autonomous system, but despite its autonomy Luhmann argued that it fulfilled a specific social function that no other system could, namely to address the constitutive paradox of society: the communication of the incommunicable. This manifests itself in a variety of ways. Most immediately it was evident in the way in which art disturbs perception, since under normal conditions perception operates on the basis of an economy of vision: ‘omitting things from view. Seeing is overlooking.’34 Art thus directs perception towards the overlooked: ‘once we are warned we start paying attention.’35 As such, art ‘aims at disrupting automization and delaying understanding’.36 These comments, with their parallels to Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement (‘ostranenie’), would appear to valorize a specific notion of artistic practice, and this is in keeping with Luhmann’s view of art as a specifically modern system, but he explored examples that extended beyond the limits of modernist and avant-garde art.37 He argued that some of the most prominent instances of the preoccupation with communication could be found in the Romantic philosophy of the symbol, or the aestheticization of the self, from the Georgian dandy to the aesthete.38 The Romantic fascination with the Doppelgänger could also be read in the same light, since here, the informed reader could infer that the author had split himself into two different personae that communicate with one another. … Under such conditions one could exploit the dissolution of identity in order to represent both the difficulties and the failure of the ego’s self-reflection as a problem of communication.39

Luhmann further expands his analysis of the social function of art through attention to its role in thematizing contingency. Specifically, he argued that modernity was marked by the emergence of second-order observation.40 In other words, social systems were as concerned with observing their own operations (self-reference), as with observing the putative external world (hetero-reference). The world/environment is thus no longer taken as a given,



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but is recognized as produced by the system, and the question thereby arises as to how the system draws such a distinction between itself and the world. As Luhmann concluded, everything could be otherwise, and ‘All forms … must persist against the challenge that they could be different’.41 Particular significance accrues in this context to art’s creation of fictional worlds. In this context fiction is not simply a matter of ‘adding something to a monocontextual world’ in an act of ‘self-assertion’ on the part of the artist.42 Rather, fiction draws attention to what might still be done or attended to; everything could be other than it is, and the fictional draws attention to what is excluded. In particular, Luhmann claimed, the imaginary world of art offers a position from which something else can be determined as reality. … Without such markings of difference the world would simply be the way it is. Only when a reality ‘out there’ is distinguished from fictional reality can one observe one side from the perspective of the other.43

Art’s fictional reality creates a ‘double of reality from which reality can be observed … whether in an idealizing, critical or affirmative manner’, and it is this that underlies art’s ability to act as a critical practice, that permits reality to come into focus as a site of, for example, oppression, suffering or disharmony.44 Luhmann was generally critical of the use of normative judgements in social theory; his final work, Society as a Social System, contained a denunciation of the tradition of critical theory, which, he alleged, was blinded by its adherence to predetermined political and ethical commitments. However, in his account of art he alluded to an ethical imperative, arguing that if it is not to be ‘empty selfassertion’, art ‘has to be able to demonstrate its difference from reality and the benefits that can be achieved from it’.45 There is a tension here, however, since, on the other hand, as he argued in his critique of Dada and anti-art, art cannot help but demonstrate such difference, even when it seeks to cancel it, suggesting a redundancy to his assertion. Given the emphasis on communication, it is tempting to compare Luhmann’s account with Arthur Danto’s notion of the art world.46 This is certainly how he has been read by Gerhard Plumpe, one of the leading exponents of systems theory in aesthetics and literary studies; ‘the social reality of art is not to be sought in works,’ Plumpe notes, ‘but in aesthetic communication. The reality of art in modern society is not based on the fact that there are things with the quasi-ontological property of being art, but rather on the fact that there is a differentiated, continuable and institutionally supported communicative convention, for all its disparate qualities, which codes all contributions assigned to it as “aesthetic”.’47 Certainly, Luhmann regarded

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art theory, history and criticism as communications of the art system, in which they offered second-order or self-observations of the system. However, to focus solely on this would overlook his emphasis on works of art. In keeping with Luhmann’s characterization of the art system as oriented around the relation between perception and communication, so, too, ‘art realizes itself in the realm of perceptible objects’.48 As Elena Esposito has formulated it, ‘art communication functions through the creation of a particular kind of object’; moreover, ‘These objects are not, like the apparatuses of science, means in the service of other ends, but are rather immediately bound up with the function of the system.’49 This may be observed in relation to Luhmann’s comments on contingency, since the creation of fictional worlds occurs not only in the production of literary narratives but also in the creation of forms. It is particularly evident in the shift of artistic function away from the provision of support for the values and norms of stratified pre-modern society. To cite Luhmann: Modern art … cannot be adequately described as supporting the normative pretensions of religion or political power, nor does it progress towards ever more excellent works, spurred on by perpetual self-criticism. Art makes visible possibilities of order that would otherwise remain invisible. It alters the conditions of visibility/invisibility in the world by keeping invisibility constant and making visibility subject to variation. In short, art generates forms that would never exist without it.50

Art objects function as elements in the art system in a number of ways, starting with the emergence of the system itself. One prominent focus of interest for Luhmann was the ‘pre-adaptive advances’ that provided the preconditions for the emergence of a functionally autonomous system. Ornament is perhaps the first and most fundamental. In general terms the autonomous operation of the art system derives from ‘the fact that the artwork demands decisions concerning what fits (is beautiful) or does not fit (is ugly) for which there is no external orientation’.51 This was anticipated in the logic of ornament. As Luhmann states: A habitual pattern cries out, so to speak, for variation. A small alteration yields consequences; it requires further elaboration and supplementation, or else it must be eliminated as inappropriate – and this happens repeatedly in numerous attempts that might succeed or fail, establish a tradition or perish.52

Even before the emergence of the concept of art, ornament demands a process of recursive self-observation oriented around the question ‘how do I go on?’ that cannot be answered by reference to the environment. Luhmann also considered the role of ‘style’ as a means of structuring the art system and giving its operations stability.53 Specifically, it addressed the problem



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of how diverse works of art relate to each other as events in a recursive network, since ‘singularities resist classification and therefore cannot be understood and observed as art’.54 In other words, through its classificatory operations, style determines whether an artwork affirms the continuity of the system’s operations (following the style already laid down) or a systemic variation (deviating from previous styles) of greater or lesser significance. Style implies reflection on ‘how’ art objects are made, and therefore comprises a second-order observation of the system, foregrounding once more the role of contingency. It is worth noting here that style is not simply a post-hoc classificatory judgement by the art historian, but an active force in the operation of the system. As such, Luhmann introduced an important divergence from the tradition of historiographic writing on style – from Wölfflin to Schapiro – that saw style as an involuntary feature of art (the art-historical unconscious, as it were) that was visible only to the external observer. Instead, Luhmann regarded style as a product of art’s self-observation, an idea that has been recently explored by Whitney Davis in terms of the notion of ‘stylisticality’.55

Critical observations Luhmann constructed a theory of art central to which is the idea of art as an autopoietic and therefore autonomous social system. This was in keeping with his general assertion that ‘a communicative system is an autopoietic system that produces and reproduces everything that functions as a unit for the system … [it] not only specifies its elements … it even specifies its structures. Whatever cannot be communicated cannot contribute anything to it.’56 With his emphasis on artistic autonomy and the central role of the opposition beauty/ugliness as its guiding difference, as well as his apparent disregard for the materiality of artworks, there is much that would appear to make Luhmann vulnerable to a range of theoretical and empirical criticisms. Most immediately Luhmann’s theory would seem to have been overtaken by the history of art itself, and in particular the avant-garde tradition of the ready-made and, more recently, the rise of institutional critique as a form of art practice. Hence, even aside from any particular political or theoretical commitments, it was recognized long ago that the legacy of Duchamp spelled the end of art theory, as understood in the aesthetic tradition since Kant.57 However, Luhmann is not quite so easily dismissed by this criticism as might be surmised. Indeed, he addresses directly the tradition of anti-art, arguing that

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it is less radical than its exponents have maintained. First, he argued that the Duchampian gesture, far from undermining the autonomy of art, represents a re-entry of the distinction between art and its environment into the art system. Specifically, inasmuch as it is a system that draws the boundary separating it from the environment, so the system is the unity of itself and its environment (which Luhmann regarded as the constitutive paradox of all systems); the self-observation of all modern systems is the unity of self-reference and heteroreference. Consequently, the self-negation of art merely represents a particularly complex form of self-description of the art system. Indeed, ‘negation is a positive operation (here of communication) which depends on a meaning recursively secured within an actually existing autopoietic system. Self-negation is therefore possible only when the system that executes the negation operates autopoietically.’58 The self-negation of art thus takes the paradoxical form of works of art and, contrary to Danto’s response to the philosophical conundrum presented by Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, Luhmann argued that ready-mades reveal their status as works of art precisely because ‘no ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing’.59 Thus the ready-mades, or the random happenings of fluxus, argues Luhmann, were only socially possible as operations of the art system: ‘Any attempts of this sort presuppose the autonomy of art. … This is true even when autonomy is practised as a renunciation of autonomy.’60 Comparisons can be drawn with recent analyses of the fate of institutional critique. As Andrea Fraser, one of the leading exponents of institutional critique in artistic practice, has recognized, institutional critique has itself become institutionalized, an accepted part of the contemporary art world that is promoted and sponsored by art galleries keen to demonstrate their progressive selfcritical art world credentials.61 A politically committed analysis might read this phenomenon as an instance of institutional recuperation, facilitated, too, by the ease of commodification of such artworks – even performances such as those of Fraser herself. Luhmann, in contrast, regarded it as founded in the logic of the art system. Indeed, in keeping with his wider criticism of what he sees as the entanglement of traditional social theory in normative commitment, he distances himself from any theory that interpreted such hetero-reference as negation. This included Adorno, whose aesthetic Luhmann explicitly singled out for criticism. The question of the relation of self-reference to hetero-reference has underpinned a number of other empirical and historical analyses. In his discussion of Realism in late nineteenth-century Germany, Gerhard Plumpe has observed how authors such as Adolf Horwicz, Theodor Fontane and Gottfried Keller



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emphasized the importance of transfiguration (‘Verklärung’) in literary representations, so as to maintain a commitment to the idea of aesthetic autonomy while recognizing the presence of the external social and natural world.62 A fundamental aspect, therefore, of the systems-theoretical account of art developed by Luhmann is adherence to the idea of art as an autonomous social system. Yet while Luhmann might, in this context, seem to share Adorno’s commitment to art, he was sharply critical, as we have seen, of the latter’s view of art as a negative epistemology. Indeed, Luhmann avoided becoming entangled in the disputes over the relation of modernism to mass culture, and his position with regard to the question of negation makes clear the extent of his distance from both Adorno and Bürger. The latter regarded the avant-garde as defined by its negation of the category of bourgeois art, while Adorno was perhaps the most sophisticated representative of a philosophical tradition that held to what Chistoph Menke has termed the ‘sovereignty of art’.63 From the perspective of Luhmann, both positions become caught up in the paradoxes of the art system, in which critique and negation are forms of art’s self-observation. The failure of Dada or Soviet Constructivism, for example, to effect a sublation of art and popular culture reflects this, as does the fact that both were easily transformed into aesthetic spectacle. In the case of Dada, this could be seen in Tristan Tzara’s move to the magazine Littérature in 1921 and his eventual embrace of Surrealism, whereas Constructivism degenerated into an aesthetic style in the hands of, for example, Naum Gabo or Ben Nicholson. The retrieval of Duchamp in the 1960s – implicit in Warhol, explicit in Bruce Nauman’s Self-Portrait as Fountain (1966) and culminating in the explosion of critical writing on him in the past 25 or so years – merely confirms the extent to which Dada has come to figure in the self-observation of the art system and its construction of connections between its past and present.64 The issue of Luhmann’s response to the concept of negation as an assertion of aesthetic autonomy touches on more theoretical issues to do with communication. Not only Adorno but also a subsequent tradition of commentators has made negation, the refusal of meaning and the cultivation of ambiguity as central to the emergence of modernism. Most notably, for instance, T. J. Clark saw the indeterminacy in Manet’s Olympia, apparent in the difficulty contemporaries had in even being able to establish what kind of a painting it was, as indicative of this phenomenon, as was the broader Impressionist confusion of signifiers of place and social class in images of the environs of Paris.65 Later, Clark came to interpret such refusal of determinate meaning as a defining feature of modernism – outlined at the moment of its demise.66

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This reading, which has proven hugely influential, stands in direct opposition to Luhmann, and would seem to present significant difficulties for a theory positing communication as the basis of the artistic system. How would Luhmann’s model accommodate a practice, central to which was the refusal to communicate? As with the larger issue of the avant-garde negation of art as a category, however, so here, too, aesthetic negation would be viewed by Luhmann as itself a form of communication, since ‘communication through art is not concerned with automating understanding. Rather it is inherently ambiguous.’67 This is structurally linked to what Luhmann argued was the social function of art, namely negotiating the communicability of the incommunicable. Indeed, Luhmann argues that even the refusal to communicate is an operation of the art system, most particularly given that the modernist practices foregrounded by Clark and others are clearly interpreted as socially meaningful and significant. Yet, paradoxically, as with attempts at the negation of art, it is only as operations of the art system that they become so. It may therefore seem that some fairly obvious preliminary criticisms of Luhmann fail to hit their mark. Others, however, are less easily dismissed. As a social theory of art, Luhmann’s account of art, although centred on its nature as a result of the functional differentiation of modern society, nonetheless strains credibility in its insistence on art’s autonomy. This is especially the case given his studied distance from the modernist aesthetic and critical tradition. His view of the evolution of the art system (the history of art) as driven by a self-generated logic (its operations, and its observations on its own operations) seems like a throwback to the formalist art histories of the nineteenth centuries of authors such as Alois Riegl or Alfred Haddon.68 In part this impression can be corrected by reference to Luhmann’s concept of interpenetration (which he later developed into that of ‘structural coupling’). By this he maintained his emphasis on the closed, autopoietic nature of social systems while acknowledging that they nevertheless could impinge upon each other’s operations. As Luhmann noted, interpenetration takes place when two systems ‘enable each other by introducing their own already-constituted complexity into each other’.69 Hence perception and the psychic system (consciousness) are structurally coupled, the psychic and social systems have co-evolved, and interpenetration is a characteristic of the relation between the numerous social systems, such as law, politics, the economy, and art. Nevertheless, ‘the system’s … autonomy is not called into question’, since ‘interpenetrating systems converge in individual elements – that is, they use the same ones – but they give each of them a different selectivity and connectivity, different pasts and futures’.70



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As an example of such interpenetration Luhmann examined the relation between art and the market. Traditional patterns of patronage (which were themselves symptoms of the stratified nature of pre-modern society) gave way to remote patronage exercised through mediators (connoisseurs, dealers) in which ‘market yields became a symbolic equivalent of an artist’s reputation’.71 Indeed, such market values ‘replaced oral recommendations … they substituted for the tedious personal negotiations with a patron, which always included irrational values such as aristocratic generosity and symbols of the artist’s reputation’.72 Financial speculation in artworks grew, with increasing discrepancies between the market prices of different works; yet, he argues, this was driven by the dynamics of the market (i.e. it was an operation of the economic system) rather than by questions of artistic quality. Indeed, contrary to the general view that the marketization of art contributed to its loss of autonomy (or that claims to autonomy were a primarily defensive reaction to this externally generated threat) Luhmann argued that it was precisely this coupling with the market that drove the autonomy of art further. Specifically, the heightened stakes involved in the emergence of art as a commodity, including the proliferation of copies and forgeries, and the attendant risks involved in investment in art, produced the need for experts who were able to distinguish between genuine and fake works, to make qualitative judgements about works of art, or to identify works by masters (as opposed to those by lesser artists). Hence, ‘the patron no longer defined himself by social rank and aristocratic generosity but based himself instead on his expertise, that is, on function-specific capabilities’.73 The financial insecurities produced by the art market were then internalized (or, in Luhmann’s terminology, there was a re-entry of a specific relation between the art system and the economic system into the art system) by the art world through, for example, the loosening of art criticism from adherence to ‘unconditionally correct criteria’. In the late eighteenth century, the notion of self-disciplining (autonomous) genius replaced universally binding public models of taste. Through such artistic recoding of economic operations, therefore, the art system maintained its autonomy. At first sight this argument may seem persuasive, and it may be deployed to explain, perhaps, the curious economics of the art market and the aestheticized relations between buyers, dealers and artists.74 Where an orthodox sociological account might refer to these as ideologized forms of economic transaction, Luhmann’s systems theory simply sees them as re-coded operations. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals serious limitations. First, implicit in Luhmann’s account is the view of the commodification of art as a post hoc phenomenon, in which artworks are produced, critical judgements

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made, and then the works in question are subjected to the vagaries of the art market. In this way he can maintain the idea of artworks being produced as elements of the autopoiesis of the art system, their primary reference point being other artworks to which they are communicative responses. In other words, he relies on the view that while artworks may have become commodities, this transformation occurs subsequent to their functioning as operations of the art system and is thus external to art itself. It may be argued, however, that while this might have been the case at an early stage in the commodification process, the demands of the market have long since become intrinsic to the logic and structure of art. Indeed, this was central to the critique of kitsch and the culture industry by Adorno or Clement Greenberg. While the transgressive attitudes of the avant-garde may be seen as an aesthetically coded internalization of the financial risk of the market that nevertheless maintained the autonomy of the art system, theorists such as Adorno and Greenberg insisted that its repetitive, formulaic and easily recognizable and comprehensible output bore the direct stamp of marketing strategies. Artworks were produced in order to be commodities; they did not incidentally become commodities after fulfilling their communicative role as art. Second, although Luhmann recognized interpenetration as a recurrent and, at times, necessary phenomenon, he nevertheless repeatedly emphasized the internal values (the so-called eigen-values) of each social system. Yet as Erkki Sevänen has pointed out, this leads to some improbable consequences.75 Art critics who passed moral or political judgements on art would be deemed to be playing no role in the art system. Sevänen argues for a looser definition of system, but if we take Luhmann at his word this would undermine the conceptual and methodological foundations of his theory (what would it then mean to talk of an autopoietic system?). More importantly, though, as Luhmann progressively strips out different kinds of evaluations from the art system its operations become ever more empty. He recognized that the guiding difference of beauty/ugliness was seen as untenable even in the early nineteenth century, and stresses that while aesthetic judgements continue to appear in the art system, they are simply ways of operationalizing the code of the art system, which ultimately amounts to a positive or negative evaluation: ‘If one wants to hold on to the semantics of the beautiful, then it might best be understood as a summarizing judgement about what fits/does not fit.’76 In other words, whether the work is successful or not. This, however, is obviously an empty formulation, for it does not outline how such an evaluation is made. Luhmann tries to avoid



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this conclusion by arguing that as a constantly self-reproducing system, a central aspect of art is the relation between astonishment (i.e. variety, novelty) and recognition (i.e. familiarity, repetition of the old), but this hardly circumvents the problem, since Kant had already pointed to the insufficiency of originality alone as a criterion, and Luhmann would have to spell out the terms in which certain kinds of novelty were valorized positively or negatively. In respect of what is the fictitious world of an artwork valued as fitting, in respect of what its novelty deemed relevant (rather than trivial)? Unless we are to endorse the formalist criticism of a Clive Bell, we are inevitably compelled to draw on moral, political and other values when making such judgements, precisely the kind of operation that Luhmann would regard as having no place in the art system. There is a third weakness in Luhmann’s theory and it relates to his theory of communication. Luhmann rightly dismisses any notion of communication as the simple transmission of data, emphasizing instead the role of surplus. Specifically, The phenomenon of meaning appears as a surplus of references to other possibilities of experience and action. … The totality of the references presented by a meaningfully intended object offers more to hand than can in fact be actualized at any moment. Thus the form of meaning, through its referential structure, forces the next step, to selection.77

Moreover, where there is no surplus of possibilities, one cannot speak of meaning – since meaning is the ‘difference between what is actual at any moment and a horizon of possibilities’.78 As a result, social systems are conceptualized as mechanisms for processing difference and the surplus possibilities. It is, moreover, the specific selections made that determine the way in which social systems evolve, a model that emphasizes the crucial role of micro-social communications in the formation of social structures and systems. What Luhmann fails to account for, however, is how and why certain selections are made over others, and it is at this level that a social theorist of a different kind might highlight the importance of ‘extrinsic’ factors. There is moreover no theoretical resource in Luhmann’s overall thinking that might examine this while maintaining the idea of systemic autonomy; the concept of interpenetration is concerned with larger scale issues, yet it is precisely the political – and other forms of – mediation of individual communicative operations that would be central to a critique of the idea of aesthetic autonomy. As with the question of judgement, so here, too, Luhmann arrives at an empty formula that requires some kind of supplement to render it serviceable as a tool of concrete analysis.

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It may be argued that Luhmann ends up being reduced to the position of spectator, observing, in a quasi-positivistic manner, the operations of the art system, without being able to explain why certain selections are made over others, why the system moves in one specific direction rather than another, simply noting that it does. Luhmann’s theory thus lacks explanatory power when it comes to specific instances, and can often result in little more than a redescription of agreed historical or art-historical accounts.79

Conclusion Such criticisms might suggest that Luhmann’s theory of artistic autonomy is so problematic as to render its entire theoretical basis questionable. Undoubtedly, important issues are left unresolved, but at the same time his work indicates why artistic autonomy is not so easily dismissed, without falling back on to the notion of aesthetic experience. Indeed, in his emphasis on contingency and the idea that art makes visible possibilities of order that would otherwise remain invisible, Luhmann raises new analytical possibilities regarding the specificity of art. He also provides an ingenious explanation as to why anti-art, from Duchamp’s Fountain to the institutional critiques of the present, not only failed, but, more importantly, achieved the inverse of what it attempted: cementing the place of art within its particular area of social and institutional legitimation. His ideas still occupy a marginal position in the Anglophone world; this is undoubtedly linked to the influence of the normative tradition of Critical Theory, to which he was explicitly opposed. This analysis of his account of artistic autonomy hopefully indicates why his work merits greater critical attention.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5

Austin Harrington, Art and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 9. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1963), trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Gérard Genette, The Aesthetic Relation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Janet Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 115. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 225.



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6 Ibid. 7 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984). 8 Natalie Heinich, ‘Sociologies of Art: With and Against Art History’, in Matthew Rampley et al. (eds), Art History and Visual Studies in Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 193. 9 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, trans. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 49. 10 Heinich, ‘Sociologies of Art’, p. 190. See Heinich, Ce que l’art fait à la sociologie (Paris: Minuit, 1998); Etre artiste: Les transformations du statut des peintres et des sculpteurs (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996). 11 Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982). 12 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston, MA: Riverside Press, 1950); Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory (New York: George Brazillier, 1968). 13 Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva Knodt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Luhmann’s shorter essays (untranslated) are published as Schriften zu Kunst und Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008). 14 Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforschung? (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971). Other important early texts by Luhmann, cited extensively by Habermas, are Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968) and Soziologische Aufklärung (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1970). 15 Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. Eva Knodt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 59. 16 Ibid., p. 265. 17 Daniel Lee, ‘The Society of Society: The Grand Finale of Niklas Luhmann’, Sociological Theory, vol. 18 (2000), p. 322. 18 Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), pp. 82–3. 19 Luhmann, Social Systems, p. 28. 20 Luhmann and Habermas, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie, p. 73. 21 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 57. 22 Luhmann and Habermas, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie, pp. 63–4. 23 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 49. 24 Ibid. 25 Luhmann, Social Systems, p. 49. 26 See, for example, Luhmann, Liebe als Passion (1982) translated as Love as Passion. The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge:

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Polity Press, 2012); Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988); Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990); Das Recht der Gesellschaft (1993) translated as Law as a Social System, trans. Klaus Ziegert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Die Religion der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002). 27 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 138. 28 Luhmann, Social Systems, p. 53. 29 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 191. 30 Ibid., p. 139. 31 Ibid., p. 141. 32 Ibid., p. 22. 33 ‘So long as the doctrine of the beautiful was called aesthetics, the distinction between perception and communication could not come into view’ (Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 15). 34 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 22. 35 Ibid., p. 23. 36 Ibid., p. 25. 37 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), in David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London: Longman, 1988), pp. 16–30. 38 Luhmann, ‘Weltkunst’, p. 7. 39 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 287. 40 Luhmann made this the central theme of investigation in Observations on Modernity, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 41 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 92. 42 Luhmann, ‘Weltkunst’, pp. 13–14. 43 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 142. 44 Ibid., p. 143. 45 Luhmann, ‘Weltkunst’, p. 14. 46 As Danto famously stated, ‘To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art’ (Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 61 (1964), p. 580. 47 Gerhard Plumpe, Ästhetische Kommunikation der Moderne 2: Von Nietzsche bis zur Gegenwart (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993) p. 8. 48 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 143. 49 Elena Esposito, ‘Code und Form’, in Jürgen Fohrmann and Harro Müller (eds), Systemtheorie der Literatur (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1996), pp. 62–3. 50 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 96. 51 Ibid., p. 227. 52 Ibid. 53 On style in Luhmann see Holger Dainat and Hans-Martin Kruckis, ‘Kunst,



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Werk, Stil, Evolution. Zu Luhmanns Stil-Begriff ’, in Fohrmann and Müller (eds), Systemtheorie der Literatur, pp. 159–72. 54 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 209. 55 Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 56 Luhmann, ‘Was ist Kommunikation?’, in Luhmann, Aufsätze und Reden (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001), p. 101. 57 See Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory (London: Macmillan, 1986). 58 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 192. 59 Ibid., p. 145. 60 Ibid., p. 194. 61 Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’, in John C. Welchman (ed.), Institutional Critique and After (Zürich: Ringier, 2006), pp. 123–36. 62 Gerhard Plumpe, ‘Einleitung’ and ‘Das Reale und die Kunst. Ästhetische Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Edward McInnes and Plumpe (eds), Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, Bd.6: Bürgerlicher Realismus und Gründerzeit 1848–1890 (Munich: Hanser, 1996), pp. 17–83 and 242–307. 63 See Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art. Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Solomon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 64 On the return of Duchamp see Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (eds), The Duchamp Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 65 T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). 66 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea. Episodes from a History of Modernism (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 67 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 40. 68 See e.g. Alois Riegl, Problems of Style. Foundations for a History of Ornament (1893) trans. E. Kain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Alfred Haddon, Evolution in Art, as Illustrated by the Life Histories of Designs (London: Walter Scott, 1895). 69 Luhmann, Social Systems, p. 213. 70 Ibid., p. 215. 71 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 163. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., p. 164. 74 On the contemporary art market see Isabelle Graw, High Price. Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (New York: Sternberg Press, 2010). 75 Erkki, Sevänen, ‘Art as an Autopoietic Sub-system of Modern Society:

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A Critical Analysis of the Concepts of Art and Autopoietic Systems in Luhmann’s Late Production’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 18, no. 1 (2001), pp. 75–103. 76 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, p. 193. 77 Luhmann, Social Systems, p. 60. 78 Ibid., p. 65. 79 This is also the case with many accounts of art that explicitly draw on Luhmann, and which reiterate the tenets of systems theory without offering new readings. See e.g. David Krieger, Kommunikationssystem Kunst (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1997); or, more recently, Sabine Kampmann, Künstler sein: Systemtheoretische Beobachtungen von Autorschaft: Christian Boltanski, Eva & Adele, Pipilotti Rist, Markus Lüpertz ((Munich: Fink, 2006).

References Adorno, Theodor (1997) Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Becker, Howard (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bertalanffy, Ludwig von (1968) General Systems Theory. New York: George Brazillier. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1963), trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —(1993) The Field of Cultural Production, trans. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bürger, Peter (1984) Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Burgin, Victor (1986) The End of Art Theory. London: Macmillan. Buskirk, Martha and Mignon Nixon (eds) (1996) The Duchamp Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, T. J. (1985) The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. London: Thames and Hudson. —(1999) Farewell to an Idea. Episodes from a History of Modernism. London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dainat, Holger and Hans-Martin Kruckis (1996) ‘Kunst, Werk, Stil, Evolution. Zu Luhmanns Stil-Begriff ’, in J. Fohrmann and H. Müller (eds), Systemtheorie der Literatur. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Danto, Arthur (1964) ‘The Artworld’, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 61. Davis, Whitney (2011) A General Theory of Visual Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eagleton, Terry (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell. Erkki, Sevänen (2001) Art as an Autopoietic Sub-system of Modern Society: A Critical



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Analysis of the Concepts of Art and Autopoietic Systems in Luhmann’s Late Production’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 18, no. 1. Esposito, Elena (1996) ‘Code und Form’, in J. Fohrmann and H. Müller (eds), Systemtheorie der Literatur. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Fraser, Andrea (2006) ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’, in J. C. Welchman (ed.), Institutional Critique and After. Zürich: Ringier. Genette, Gérard (1999) The Aesthetic Relation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Graw, Isabelle (2010) High Price. Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture. New York: Sternberg Press. Habermas, Jürgen and Niklas Luhmann (1971) Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Harrington, Austin (2004) Art and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heinich, Natalie (2011) ‘Sociologies of Art: With and Against Art History’, in Matthew Rampley et al. (eds), Art History and Visual Studies in Europe. Leiden: Brill. —(1996) Etre artiste: Les transformations du statut des peintres et des sculpteurs. Paris: Klincksieck. —(1998) Ce que l’art fait à la sociologie. Paris: Minuit. Kampmann, Sabine (2006) Künstler sein: Systemtheoretische Beobachtungen von Autorschaft: Christian Boltanski, Eva & Adele, Pipilotti Rist, Markus Lüpertz. Munich: Fink. Krieger, David (1997) Kommunikationssystem Kunst, Vienna: Passagen Verlag. Lee, Daniel (2000) ‘The Society of Society: The Grand Finale of Niklas Luhmann’, Sociological Theory, vol. 18. Luhmann, Niklas (1968) Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —(1970) Soziologische Aufklärung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. —(1990) Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —(1995) Social Systems, trans. Eva Knodt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —(1998) Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —(1998) Observations on Modernity, trans. William Whobrey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —(2000) Art as a Social System, trans. Eva Knodt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —(2001) ‘Was ist Kommunikation?’, in Luhmann, Aufsätze und Reden. Stuttgart: Reclam. —(2002) Die Religion der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —(2008) Schriften zu Kunst und Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —(2008) Das Recht der Gesellschaft (1993) translated as Law as a Social System, trans. Klaus Ziegert. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(2012) Liebe als Passion (1982) translated as Love as Passion. The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Baines and Doris L. Jones. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Menke, Christoph (1999) The Sovereignty of Art. Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Solomon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Plumpe, Gerhard (1993) Ästhetische Kommunikation der Moderne 2: Von Nietzsche bis zur Gegenwart. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. —(1996) ‘Einleitung’ and ‘Das Reale und die Kunst. Ästhetische Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Edward McInnes and Plumpe (eds), Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, Bd.6: Bürgerlicher Realismus und Gründerzeit 1848–1890. Munich: Hanser. Shklovsky, Viktor (1988) ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), in David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London: Longman, pp. 16–30. Wiener, Norbert (1950) The Human Use of Human Beings. Boston, MA: Riverside Press. Wolff, Janet (1993) Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art. London: Macmillan.

Index of Names Adorno, Theodor 6, 10, 118, 120, 130–4, 142n. 23, 147, 148, 149, 151–2, 154, 157, 160–3, 164nn. 3, 17, 165nn. 24, 28, 167n. 54, 171–92, 193nn. 7, 14, 32, 35, 194n. 48, 197–205, 207–13, 214n. 5, 215nn. 19, 34, 218, 228, 229, 232 Althusser, Louis 7 Alÿs, Francis 83 Aristotle 157

Chua, Daniel 148, 150, 155, 160 Churchill, Winston 54 Clark, T. J. 122, 229, 230 Constable, John 55 Constant, Benjamin 80 Cook, Deborah 192 Corday, Charlotte 53, 54, 57, 60 Couperin, François 161 Crowther, Paul 100, 102, 121–3, 134, 137 de la Cruz, Angela 82

Bach, Johann Sebastian 161 Barr, Alfred H. 71–2, 80 Bateson, Gregory 220 Baudelaire, Charles 52, 53, 55–7, 59, 60 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 2–3 Beardsley, Monroe K. 36 Becker, Howard S. 219 Beethoven, Ludwig van 147–50, 153–5, 158–63, 176–80 Bell, Clive 89, 90–4, 96, 105n. 26, 233 Benjamin, Walter 9, 132, 172 Berlin, Isiah 65, 67, 77, 79–81, 83, 84, 157, 163 von Bertalanffy, Ludwig 219 Blake, William 24 Blocker, Gene H. 94–5, 99 Bloom, Harold 119–21, 123, 134, 135, 137 Bonaparte, Napoleon 159 Bourdieu, Pierre 141n. 16, 217–19 Bourriaud, Nicolas 83 Bradley, A. C. 6 Brahms, Johannes 6 Brancusi, Constantin 73 Braque, Georges 73 Brecht, Bertoldt 172 Bryson, Norman 120–2 Bürger, Peter 218, 229

Dahlhaus, Carl 149, 153, 179, 180, 183, 186, 187, 191–2 Danto, Arthur 14, 65, 75–8, 80, 81, 83–4, 100–1, 225, 228 David, Jacques-Louis 51–62 Davies, David 99 Davies, Stephen 97–8 Davis, Whitney 227 Degas, Edgar 70 Derrida, Jacques 122 Dewey, John 129, 130, 132–4, 142nn. 23, 24 Dickie, George 14 Dubuffet, Jean 131 Duchamp, Marcel 25, 77–8, 107n. 67, 227–9, 234 Dutton, Denis 95, 97

Carroll, Noël 34–6, 47n. 4, 99, 101 Cassirer, Fritz 154 Cézanne, Paul 70, 73, 92

Eagleton, Terry 218 Eisler, Hans 149 Eliot, T. S. 19 Engels, Friedrich 56 Esposito, Elena 226 Esposito, John L. 136 Evans, Walker 36 Fasching, Darrell J. 136 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 154 Fontane, Theodor 228 Foster, Hal 131 Foucault, Michel 122, 217

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Fra Angelico 67 Fraser, Andrea 228 Freud, Sigmund 8, 10, 124 Fry, Roger 89, 92–4, 105nn. 26, 30 Gabo, Naum 229 Gaut, Berys 37–41, 97 Gautier, Théophile 150 Genette, Gérard 218 Gillray, James 54 Giotto 67, 92 Gombrich, Ernst 77 Greenberg, Clement 72–4, 80, 232 Guston, Philip 74 Habermas, Jürgen 220–1 Haddon, Alfred 230 Haidt, Jonathan 124, 127 Halsall, Francis 131 Hanslick, Eduard 150, 153 Harrington, Austin 217 Harrison, Charles 70 Haskins, Casey 91, 104n. 13 Hegel, G. W. F 2–4, 9, 76, 126, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153–61, 163, 171, 172, 173, 180, 217 Heinich, Natalie 219 Hobbes, Thomas 80 Hoffman, E. T. A. 154 Holly, Michael Ann 120–1 Horkheimer, Max 187, 210–11 Horowitz, Gregg 173, 175, 178–80, 185, 192 Horwicz, Adolf 228 Huhn, Tom 183 Hume, David 80 Husserl, Edmund 220 Innes, Callum 82 Iseminger, Gary 45–6 James, William 120 Jansen, Julia 131 Jay, Martin 132–4, 136 Joyce, James 19, 119, 174 Kandinsky, Wassily 73 Kant, Immanuel 2–3, 32, 65–6, 74, 79, 92, 102, 104n. 13, 114, 117, 122,

125–7, 135, 138, 148, 153–8, 160, 165n. 27, 197–213, 214nn. 10, 13, 221, 227, 233 Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield 99, 107n. 73 Keller, Gottfried 228 Kierkegaard, Søren 120, 137 Krauss, Rosalind 75 Larkin, Philip 23 Le Peletier, Louis-Michel 54–5 von Lenz, Wilhelm 162 Levine, Sherri 36 Levinson, Jerrold 14, 33, 34, 100–1 Levi-Strauss, Claude 127–8, 134, 141nn. 19, 20 Lewis, Todd 136 Locke, John 80 Long, Richard 83 Luhmann, Niklas 217, 219, 220–34 Lukács, Georg 7, 9, 165n. 18, 172 Malevich, Kazimir 72 Manet, Édouard 71, 125, 229 Martin, John 19 Marx, A. B. 150 Marx, Karl 4, 125, 126, 135 Matisse, Henri 73, 119, 131 Maturana, Umberto 220 Menke, Christoph 229 Michelangelo 8 Mill, John Stuart 80 Miró, Joan 73 Mondrian, Piet 73, 96 Mortiz, Karl Phillips 153 Moxey, Keith 120–3 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 128 Munch, Edvard 60 Nagel, Thomas 65 Nauman, Bruce 229 Newman, Barnett 70 Nicholson, Ben 229 Noland, Kenneth 74 Novalis 153, 159 O’Connor, Tony 131 Olitski, Jules 74 Paddison, Max 151, 181, 184–6, 190–1



Index of Names

Panikkar, Raimundo 138, 143n. 28 Panofsky, Erwin 15–16, 29nn. 7, 8, 173 Parsons, Talcott 220, 222 Picasso, Pablo 60, 73 Plato 2, 31–2, 157 Plumpe, Gerhard 225, 228 Podro, Michael 68–9 Pollock, Griselda 122 Popper, Karl 163 Potts, Alex 78 Proust, Marcel 119 Puttfarken, Thomas 67 Rachmaninov, Sergei 23, 24 Rancière, Jacques 9, 11n. 2 Rauschenberg, Robert 74–5 Riegl, Alois 69, 173, 230 Robespierre, Maximilien 53–5 Rosen, Charles 152 Sansovino, Andrea 69 Sarte, Jean-Paul 81 Schapiro, Meyer 72, 227 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 153–5, 159 Schenker, Heinrich 154 Schiller, Friedrich 3, 135, 154, 158–60 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich 153, 159 Schmitt, Carl 159 Schoenberg, Arnold 150 Scully, Sean 82 Sevänen, Erkki 232 Shelley, Mary 24 Sherman, Cindy 128 Shklovsky, Viktor 224 Sibley, Frank 37–8

Sierra, Santiago 83 Skees, Murray W. 175–6, 181–5, 191 Solomon, Maynard 154 Spencer-Brown, George 220 Tieck, Ludwig 149 Tintoretto 68 Tiravanija, Rirkrit 83 de Tocqueville, Alexis 80 Tzara, Tristan 229 Varela, Francisco 220 Vasari, Giorgio 77 del Verrocchio, Andrea 69 da Vinci, Leonardo 68 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Henrich 149 Wagner, Richard 154 Warhol, Andy 76–7, 228–9 Weber, Max 78, 130, 133–4 Weiner, Norbert 219 Weitz, Morris 96–7 Weiwei, Ai 82–3 Welsch, Wolfgang 131–2 Whiteread, Rachel 70 Wiggins, David 65 Williams, Bernard 65, 81–2, 86n. 39 Williams, Raymond 9 Wolff, Janet 218 Wölfflin, Heinrich 227 Zangwill, Nick 92, 95–6 Ziff, Paul 96 Zola, Émile 7 Zuidervaart, Lambert 175–9, 181–4, 193n. 35

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