Genealogies of Autonomy

Last year, I was invited by the French art history journal Perspective to contribute to a thematic issue on autonomy. The journal suggested that my contribution take the form a conversation with another scholar or artist. I immediately thought of Marina—who, to my delight, accepted. We discussed the general framework when we met in Paris in June 2023, though the actual conversation took place by email during that fall and into January 2024. As stimulating as our exchange was, we barely managed to send one email per week between the two of us. Marina was dealing with serious health issues while trying to settle into her new environment in Vienna, where she was teaching at the University of Applied Arts; I was descending into a state of burnout that I’m still trying to emerge from. By the time the final French copy was being prepared, neither of us had any energy left to dot the i’s.

In hindsight, I regret that we did not try address the problem of autonomy from a more explicitly autotheoretical perspective, reflecting on our condition(s). There are other omissions, of course. We always saw this as part of an ongoing conversation, not as anything definitive—but I wish we had engaged more fully with the dehumanization of Palestinians through the neocolonial racialization of autonomy, which legitimizes a scenario in which the forces of civilization and autonomous reason, coded as white, can legitimately wipe off the face of the earth those represented as a barbaric brown mass.

After her passing, the French journal dedicated the issue to Marina but failed to make the English text available online. I’m grateful that e-flux journal is now publishing it, with a new selection of images as a visual complement and counterpoint. Many thanks are due to Maxime Boidy; Marine Kisiel and Mathieu Léglise, who originally commissioned the piece (with Matthew Gillman taking care of the copyedit); and to Andreas Petrossiants at e-flux journal.

—Sven Lütticken

***

Sven Lütticken: The autonomy of art has been put on the agenda once again in response to developments in cultural policy and political discourse. In France, there is concern about the instrumentalization of art in the context of “cultural capitalism” or the “creative industries,” as well as for purposes of urban development (aka gentrification). In Sweden, there are far-right attacks on art funding, which is presented as having followed a leftist or “woke” agenda—attacks that come from self-proclaimed defenders of the “freedom of art.” This in turn signals that what is known in Sweden as the “arm’s-length principle” (that the government does not interfere directly in the programming of publicly funded art institutions) is under siege. Gustav Strandberg, Kim West, and Josefine Wikström have examined this situation in a brilliant publication that makes the case for a critical conception of the autonomy of art.1

Both the French and Swedish situations need to be seen, of course, as part of the European tableau. One can also think of Germany, where artists and institutions are being penalized if they refuse to sign onto the one and only state-approved definition of anti-Semitism.2 Between institutions (museums, galleries) and a certain type of public discourse (driven by newspapers, magazines), what is known as the autonomy of art is historically specific—and clearly in both decline and crisis. From my local, Dutch vantage point, the discussions in those countries can elicit a certain sense of déjà vu. I see directly the risk of a shrinking theoretical, social, and artistic horizon. We do need to defend the residual remains of the autonomy of art within the collapsing edifice of late liberal society, although we do need to keep in mind (a) that this autonomy was always partial, grounded in heteronomous social and economic conditions, and involved many compromises, blind spots, and exclusions; and (b) that there is no way back and the crisis will only intensify, albeit unevenly.

What was of crucial importance to me in editing the Art and Autonomy reader was not to stop with a historical narrative about “the autonomy of art” and a diagnosis of its current condition, but to problematize and develop the concept of autonomy more fully and fundamentally—using the context of art 3 In a sense, my concern is more with autonomy “in the vicinity of art,” to invoke Robert Smithson.4 A similar agenda seems to inform Janet Sarbanes’s Letters to the Autonomy Project and Noah Bremer’s Paths to Autonomy.5 After all, there are practices of autonomy, in various social and political conceptions, that have also been adopted in the cultural sphere and used precisely to challenge modernist conceptions of “the autonomy of art,” whether along the lines laid out by Clement Greenberg or by Jürgen Habermas in his 1980 lecture on modernity as an incomplete project.6

So one question that I keep asking myself (and am asking you) is how we can prevent tactical defenses of the autonomy of art—which we know always to have been relative and compromised—from relapsing into modernist habits under neoliberal conditions that are fast becoming neofascist conditions.

Marina Vishmidt: Thanks for setting the ground for this question of autonomy so clearly, especially without reducing the term’s conceptual complexity or the differentiated histories and local exigencies that, as you outline below, attend its reemergence in critical discourse right now.

I suppose that, like you, I would be interested in situating the timeliness of art’s autonomy as a critical concept in these situations—predominantly those, in various European countries, of a perceived and intensifying squeeze on the availability and legitimacy of public arts funding where, for a long time, its institutions have been relatively stable (albeit subject to significant torsion from the general climate of neoliberal governance in which they subsist). Given the idea of autonomy “in the vicinity of art” that you cite, it gives me a sense of artistic autonomy providing a view on, or a path toward, conceptions and projects of political and social autonomy—for which artistic autonomy has always been a symptomatic placeholder, compensation, or displacement in capitalist modernity, ever since Kant’s formulation thereof in the third Critique. That is to say, German idealist philosophy furnishes the template for prevailing notions of art’s autonomy—outlining boundaries between what is a space of freedom and independence (reason, taste, sensibility) and what is a space of constraint and dependence (politics, economics). The Adornian iteration captures this and (perhaps in so doing) also embodies its opacity: art is both autonomous and a social fact.7 The social existence of art is to be autonomous in its principle, yet this social existence is subtended by heteronomy through and through; this kind of double consciousness might also characterize the existence of academia, or other spaces of inquiry and experimentation, that are supposed to be autotelic yet have no economic independence whatsoever. This has always been the limit to a materialist approach to autonomy and the unpicking of its genealogy. Thinking back to Reproducing Autonomy, my 2016 book with Kerstin Stakemeier, we were keen to articulate this de facto survival of the autonomy of art as a disavowed but unkillable enabling condition behind the institution of art (a kind of psychic-legislative complex, in Andrea Fraser’s idiom, reenacting Kant’s idea of boundaries as a symptom of critique’s institutionalization by artists), joined with the idea of political autonomy (specifically workers’ autonomy) in Italian operaismo and how that eventually developed, in the feminist current, into the centrality of social reproduction and reproductive labor.8 In other words, we were keen to recognize reproductive labor as the condition of possibility of both political and artistic autonomy. Bringing this into the conversation may just serve to indicate how many registers, meanings, and debates can be evoked through this vocabulary of “autonomy,” which I suppose is my own way of ground-clearance with relation to that vocabulary.

Just to recap, we have established that there is a vocabulary being invoked in response to certain real-world developments—those that tend towards eliminating the “self-legislation” or self-governance of artistic production, mediation, exhibition, and education (the threat to the arm’s-length principle, as also seen in the Arts Council England)—and which thus has a tactical dimension; we have also established that it is important to analyze artistic autonomy by way of its vicinity to the political kind (however the latter is understood or practiced) and also whatever politics are already implicit in and/or displaced by the more orthodox, “independent” iteration of that autonomy; and, finally, there is what can we say about a “crisis of autonomy,” with autonomy now no longer being menaced by neoliberal economism alone but by a different kind of totalizing force that we can refer to as “neofascism.”

SL: “Ground-clearance” is a good term for what we are engaged in and what quite a few people seem to be doing. If (as you stated above) we say that “artistic autonomy has always been a symptomatic placeholder, compensation, or displacement in capitalist modernity,” then the classic avant-garde reaction amounted to a radical negation that was perhaps all too abstract: we remove the placeholder (burn down the museum, etc.) in order to realize autonomy properly, at the social level. The artist, as a specialist within the modern division of labor, had to disappear in order for the homo ludens to triumph over homo faber.9 It is intriguing that Peter Bürger published his classic (if schematic) account of the avant-garde’s attempted negations of modernism’s aesthetic ideology and institutions at a moment when both of these projects had met with a certain dialectical sublation in the form of institutional critique.10 In a sense, historical institutional critique replaced grand negations with patient (or impatient) immanent critique; one can think of Hans Haacke’s projects of the 1970s, some of which proved quite controversial due to the way in which they “desublimated” the art institution, revealing its financial and political dependencies. Precisely by engaging with art as a deeply compromised fait social, it attempted to salvage something of the project of autonomy—perhaps even the project of the autonomy of art specifically.

We have ourselves both been involved in various forms of institutional critique. This is probably not the place for drawing up elaborate genealogical charts, but if I look at more recent developments, I see two overlapping tendencies. The first tendency draws on operaismo, autonomia, and feminism—and, increasingly, on post- and decolonial theory—in foregrounding labor in ways that go against and beyond the masculinist workerism that marked, for example, parts of the Art Workers’ Coalition. Here your work with Kerstin on reproductive labor and social reproduction is exemplary. With the focus on artistic, cognitive, reproductive, and affective labor, and a concomitant emphasis on precarity, the fait social is politicized in ways that appear to trouble any rearguard defense (in the manner of Habermas) of art as an autonomous social sphere; it also shows the limitations of any account of the work of art (following Adorno) as revolving around the formal articulation of the very tension between autonomy and heteronomy. What happens is that the art world here comes into view as yet another sector of neoliberal capitalism, albeit a sector with specific features and a potential for critical work on its very conditions.

The second tendency I would identify with a tactical appropriation and functionalization of both art institutions and a certain conception of art’s autonomy. Some institutional critique has been attacked for ultimately falling into the trap of a “loyal,” embedded critique, albeit with much anguish; one can think here of Gerald Raunig’s comments about Andrea Fraser and her statement that we are “trapped in our field.”11 Though one should not reduce Fraser’s engagement with the art field to this striking outburst, some recent practices and projects clearly opt for a more tactical use of the infrastructures of art. A whole range could be mentioned here: from ruangrupa appropriating the infrastructure of Documenta as a resource to be “commoned” within a certain network, to artists like Jonas Staal or Tania Bruguera who, through their collaborations with art institutions, enable projects and organizations that work with migrants, various local groups, and even liberation movements from the Global South. This kind of approach is distinct from the tactical defense of art and its relative autonomy in the face of neoliberal cutbacks and neofascist incursions; however, it may ultimately depend in part on the success of such defenses, for the tactical uses of art’s infrastructures obviously require that those exist.

One may wonder whether defenses of the arm’s-length principle and of art as a relatively autonomous sphere or field are not sometimes mounted by people who know better and who will themselves into a kind of fetishistic disavowal: I know fully well that this autonomy is deeply problematic, but its market-driven or ideologically motivated abrogation would nonetheless be a disaster. We need to defend autonomy, even if it is under a kind of false flag, so that we can then continue to tactically use and abuse it; critique and challenge its dependency on precarious—gendered and racialized—labor; and attempt to common institutions and practice autonomy otherwise.

MV: I am interested in what you say here about the necessity of a certain kind of fetishistic disavowal of the autonomy of the institution of art which continues to rely on it, in order to tactically mobilize it for certain “post-autonomous” ends. Could we call it an “immanent disavowal,” after the immanence of institutional critique you so precisely delineate above? The tactical use of art’s spaces, resources, and legitimacies—its “infrastructure”—strikes me as a more overt and thus symptomatic illustration of art’s predicament in general at a time when, by and large, no one in the art and art-adjacent worlds believes in either aesthetic or capitalist ideology but nonetheless find so much of their own activity conditioned by such ideologies’ real-world persistence. The examples you provide of the second tendency in institutional critique, of tactical mobilization, illustrate this well. Here one could also think of projects that draw on the critical and logistical resources of the institution of art to propose (and sometimes enact) economies or models of social production that function more along lines of solidarity or conviviality than profit, ranging from the innocuous (Kathrin Böhm, Superflex) to the difficult (WochenKlausur) to the lamentable (Renzo Martens).

I am reading Boris Arvatov at the moment and hence thinking of his affirmation of social and artistic autonomy’s inextricability—in the sense that a society that has overcome the social relations of capital has also overcome the alienation of art. Art, in such a circumstance, has become integrated into a thoroughly socialized process of life construction, thus realizing itself as a productive force where the division between the practical and spiritual, the useful and useless, has ceased to apply, along with all other binaries of value-formed social life.12 This is an origin point for a familiar narrative of the sublation and realization of art, early Soviet productivism, with many of its blind and blurry spots. What does emerge quite clearly, in terms of informing current attempts to revisit autonomy, is that claiming a space of independence and under-determination from the economic or from the state’s (ir)rationality is tactical. At the same time, this often involves exchanging such a claim for another one: how to effect a more thoroughgoing transformation of social life and productive relations, one that would render autonomy specifically for art or culture redundant. In other words, recognizing the partiality of such a claim to be an artifact of commodified and alienated social relations—for which the space of art has always been used as a safety valve for utopian energies otherwise inadmissible in the reproduction of such relations. In this contribution, however, I wanted to really focus on a dimension of autonomy that registers less often in these discussions: the politics and language of bodily autonomy that have gained ground lately, amidst the disastrous landscape of neofascist crackdowns on people’s capacity to make decisions around fertility and gender—such as the wave of anti-trans legislation in the US; the downfall of Roe v. Wade and therewith US abortion protections; and the patriarchal backlash that is core to all neofascist political expression around the world—which tend to be trivialized as “culture wars.” This can be seen in the growth of artistic practices that take up art’s representational tools to render the affective experience of non-normative bodies and socialities, those made precarious by conditional cultural acceptance even as political violence escalates—a contradiction that is perhaps most evident in conditions for non-binary and trans folks. Some examples that come to mind are the poetic trans-pessimist video games of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley or the minimalist disability aesthetics of Carolyn Lazard and Park McArthur, focusing on “access” as a redefinition of autonomy, one that centers social solidarity over individual freedom (or, rather, outlines their entanglement). Bodily autonomy seems to be a precondition—one that we might have forgotten or relaxed vigilance around—for participation in any activity other than survival or social/biological reproduction, including projects that further political, social, or artistic autonomy.

Alaa Abu Asad, still from Wild Plants of Palestine, 2018.

People already disadvantaged by the relations of class, gender, and racialization have always had to negotiate a “lesser” status vis-à-vis all these types of autonomy; still, it is increasingly clear just how crucial abrogating certain groups’ capacity for bodily autonomy has become to political projects of reactionary autonomy (as one could tentatively call it). These include ethnonationalism; Christian or other faith-based nationalisms; and all of the difference-eradicating military and legislative projects that prop up atavistic power verticals—dampened in prior neoliberal eras or hyper-asserting themselves where they have never gone away—be they in theocratic or authoritarian states such as Russia, Poland, Hungary, India, or (as an exemplar of both trajectories) the US. Right now I am struggling to link the deteriorating prospects for bodily autonomy in the West and North (acknowledging that they were never exactly great in many other regions of the world)—noting that this is as much an outcome of crushing working conditions and labor politics as it is of far-right legislative backlashes—back to the concerning realities of dwindling artistic autonomy at the institutional level with which we started out. You might make, for example, an inevitably loose connection between phobic social control and a crackdown on anything which does not tend to profit maximization—the crisis tendencies of a capitalist social order now accelerating rapidly toward the planet’s destruction for the (powerless) majority of its inhabitants.

But this is much too general, I think, and only gestures toward something without yet having an analysis. Given that I have raised the question, it seems a little unfair to ask you to pick it up, but you might have some good ideas on how to make this connection. I think it does resonate with the first tendency you outlined above, namely art’s politicization as an aspect of social reproduction, but I am still stumped on how to think about bodily autonomy as a more specific politics than of a crisis of social reproduction … Of course, there are plenty of art practices we can mention that develop critical and embodied approaches to the question of bodily autonomy, both historical feminist and queer practices as well as contemporary ones. I guess, as always, I am trying to think about how to substantiate the link at a systemic level.

This set of questions will also be a departure point for my next collaborative text with Kerstin. If we come to understand binary gender as a specific historical formation—one that, as authors like Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and Keguro Macharia have argued, is not least a colonial invention—its universality dissolves.13 Heterosexuality comes into view as an aesthetic as much as a political form, one that has manifestly disintegrated in recent decades, given that, through massive cuts to social welfare and the economization of gendered and feminized labor, the social security its individual adaptation promised has increasingly ceased to exist. Attempts to retain this form are a keystone of the “reactionary autonomy” that strives to recast contemporary emancipatory struggles (spanning the continuum from social to ecological) as the oppression of the elites over ordinary working people. Autonomy here is equivalent to “taking back control” of conditions that are increasingly unlivable but will not improve through the staging of ever more authoritarian hunger games.14

SL: “Reactionary autonomy” is precisely the dominant and increasingly hegemonic context under which we are trying to show that other conceptions and practices of autonomy are possible—and desirable. The other day, I came across an article in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, according to which the term “autonomous” was being used in rather telling ways among those who rant about the Covid state of emergency, the World Economic Forum, the Deep State, and suchlike. In other words, we are talking about the conspiracist milieu fostered by a far right trying to muddy the waters and rebrand itself. This tactic is known in Germany as “Querfront,” or “diagonalism.” In the German context, but not only there, I am more familiar with “sovereignty” as a notion being bandied around in those milieus; in Holland, by contrast, it seems both sovereignty and autonomy are in use, with the people and groups in question rejecting the state (and especially taxation) as illegitimate in ways that are reminiscent of the German Reichsbürger movement.

All of this suggests to me that reactionary autonomy is precisely sovereignty in Foucault’s sense of “the right of royal command,” having been “democratized” as the right of white male command.15 I experienced this in a very physical sense during various lockdowns in Holland, where I realized that this “liberal” country is in fact a country of Trumpists: How dare the state, or society, or anyone, ask me to cover my face with a “face diaper.” It’s my goddamn right to infect and kill people if not doing so would inconvenience me! Why can the concept of autonomy be so easily assimilated to the kind of fascist contemporary body politic, and body politics, that seeks to deprive many of their bodily autonomy? The original sin of the Enlightenment conception of autonomy was its close connection with property, with possession. At times explicit in the text and other times relegated to the subtext, property was the prerequisite for being counted as a person or an autonomous subject; and, in a kind of circular reasoning, not having the right to own property put you in a heteronomous position, either by being dependent (as a woman, for instance) or by being property yourself (as a slave). There are historical documents from the Enlightenment era and the French Revolution that are absolutely fascinating in that they show these questions being negotiated—such as the minutes of the 1797 Dutch constituent assembly, which was based on the French model.16

In the twentieth century, specifically in the postwar or Cold War context, Habermas did much to normalize the liberal Enlightenment conception of autonomy even in nominally left-wing circles. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, his account of the “bourgeois public sphere” is a staggering exercise in idealization and elision; it is like reading a biography of Charles Manson that focuses on his talent as a musician while leaving out that unpleasant murder business.17 Achille Mbembe, in his essay on necropolitics, takes aim at “late modern political criticism” à la Habermas and the account of “politics [as] the exercise of reason in the public sphere,” which “amounts to the exercise of freedom, a key element for individual autonomy.” This normative liberal account, Mbembe rightly argues, leaves out the obverse of “the struggle for autonomy”: the necropolitical destruction of (dehumanized) human bodies and populations.18

Returning to the problem of linking “deteriorating prospects for bodily autonomy in the West and North” with the “dwindling artistic autonomy at the institutional level with which we started out,” perhaps this is a challenge precisely because the two questions are so profoundly imbricated that it takes a lot of space to do justice to the matter. This brings me back to the point that “autonomous art,” while it needs to be defended tactically as providing an infrastructure for certain practices, is not itself the solution, or part of the solution—since its existence depends on that liberal democracy that is collapsing under its irresolvable contradictions and founding occlusions. Autonomous art is not the solution but part of the problem—the problem that we must, for the moment, tarry over and work with precisely to define and practice other forms of autonomy.

As you rightly say, the culture wars are hardly some mere superstructural distraction from the “real” issues. As with historical fascism, we are talking about an understanding of culture that is explicitly bio- and necropolitical. Various bodies—racialized bodies, gendered bodies—are in the line of fire, at times in very literal ways. Of course, as part of Querfront politics, lines can get blurred strategically—for instance when misogyny or anti-Semitism forge transversal alliances you would not necessarily expect. Sometimes you read statistics that leave you speechless: “In the UK, 52% of boys aged 16 to 17 have a positive view of [Andrew] Tate,” the manosphere influencer under criminal investigation.19 While one should not take such numbers at face value, it seems pretty clear that a staggering number of kids are mainlining misogyny and, of course, this has real-world effects.

While tit-for-tat on ex-Twitter or TikTok can no doubt be gratifying, I do not think that out-trolling professional culture warriors will really do much in the end. This is why I find that taking the culture wars seriously requires precisely a switch from a reactive to a more proactive mode, using a variety of infrastructures (all of them compromised and imperfect) to foster fundamentally different narratives and practices—ways of worldmaking, if you will. These include critical journalism, party and grassroots politics, art and education—as well as the very platforms that facilitate the culture wars for their own ends. Each of these contexts presents specific challenges and limitations. For instance, if I look at the ever-more-lopsided gender ratio in my classes in Amsterdam, from which straight cis boys have all but disappeared, I feel as though Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate have already won a crucial battle …

Jumana Manna, A Magical Substance Flows Into Me, 2016, HD video, 66 min. Courtesy of the artist.

MV: Perhaps the material and ideological kinship between autonomy and property cannot be reiterated often enough, even if counter-histories and counter-projects of the politics of autonomy often consist precisely of evading or blocking the rule of property—as with maroon communities in the Caribbean; a number of anti-state social formations that writers like James C. Scott, Pierre Clastres, and David Graeber and David Wengrow have discussed; or indeed any number of communalist experiments over the past several hundred years (as ambiguous as such a generalized invocation of “intentional communities” of very different political leanings must be).20 When it comes to challenges to bodily autonomy—which are of course fundamentally about race and class, as those exposed to the violence of austere and patriarchal states are not just “all women” but specifically feminized people with already few options—the economic grounds of an effective ability to exercise autonomy over your life could not be more transparent. Access to private property and its various proxies (income, assets) is absolutely coextensive with whether society has deemed you to be entitled to treat your body as your own property, or whether it’s theirs. This is already a nightmarish either-or, one indexed by the reproductive-justice movement’s shift in emphasis to “reproductive rights” from “my body, my choice,” while also pointing to the fact that this autonomy has a very racialized past and present. Likewise, as you pointedly underline, what is different about the current moment is the extent to which libertarian and antiestablishment discourses, previously associated with oppositional projects of autonomy, are used to reposition and prop up authoritarian efforts that would merely enhance the autonomy of those who are already empowered by the supremacist defaults of global capitalist societies. Undoubtedly, as in cases like anti-trans persecution, this plays out at the basest level, as a call to “think of the women and children,” pandering to the old dog whistle of “freedom” paired with phobic biopolitics (think “Moms for Liberty”). A lot of these tendencies also seem like a rehash of culture-war perennials in the emphasis on deviance, race panic, and communism, certainly in the US, but which US-based social media platforms have now smeared, around the world, across disparate contexts of political “polarization” (itself a dubious concept, misdirecting from the misdirection that phenomenon embodies). This is also, certainly, just on the other side of the macho misogyny you describe, the cynical consolidation of decrepit gender and racial norms as part of a larger campaign to lock in a domination which was never seriously threatened politically or economically—only culturally delegitimated, and even that within very narrow limits.

This might be worth exploring further, no doubt. The now-trite postulation that politics are derivative of culture, or “downstream” of it, marks an anxiety that a certain hegemony (of vicious and open racism, for example) over “structures of feeling” has been lost.21 As far as I can determine, apart from a few weird moments of troll-led fascist expansion into the “leftist cultural bubble” in 2016–18, it is not coming back—not that this has made the reactionary backlash any less trenchant or politically dangerous since then, as the pandemic scrambling you discuss above goes to show, and which Naomi Klein has recently described as the “mirror world.”22 (Fans of a certain media franchise might instead identify that situation of sinister unmooring as the “upside-down.”) Insofar as art and its academic discourses, such as art history and theory, are situated within these conditions and strive to adopt a critical or analytical relationship to them, it becomes quite evident that their “situated knowledges” (to borrow a term from Donna Haraway) do not provide the resources to defend a strong concept of autonomy—whether as independence from these conditions or as an anti-systemic leverage against them—because the collective, institutional, and material dimensions to asserting such an autonomy are simply not present except in small and specific circumstances. Rather, we could speak of certain situated knowledges of strategic interdependence, as with the “lumbung” praxis that found a global stage at Documenta 15 (2022) yet still encountered very hard barriers to the mediation of those approaches in a Western institutional context. What we can say with confidence is that, with a few exceptions, contemporary art is not taking on responsibility for building autonomous infrastructures of social reproduction; its development of methodological, cognitive, and aesthetic routes toward realigning worldview or experience is already significant.

Here we could usefully revisit the ideas around mimesis as set out, in noncontiguous ways, by Adorno and Benjamin, especially given the grievous ecological trajectory sprung from the political dead ends of zombie neoliberalism or turbo-authoritarianism in which we seem to be stuck. By this, I would suggest looking at how ideas around mimesis develop affinity between the human and nonhuman world based on resemblance between the non-similar, rather than an identification that leads to exploitation. Given the imbrication of many contemporary art practices not only with activism but with scientific and academic apparatuses that are often sustained by substantial amounts of public and private capital, it is less than ever the case that “autonomy” can be defined as independence or even framed as desirable. This brings me back to the notion of autonomy as being able to “choose your dependencies,” as in the German feminist-autonomist slogan you cited in your presentation in Paris at the beginning of this summer.23

However, such an acknowledgement of (inter)dependency can also be seen as a form of depressive realism / cruel optimism over something that is often reified as “complexity” or, even less insightfully, as “complicity.” This often equates critique with the politically dubious, elevated distance of the ostensibly white, male, bourgeois subject—one that disavows barriers to systemic critique faced by those locked in the marginality that a hyper-exploitative economic regime bestows upon any who do not play along. Thus, some conclude that negativity toward the dominant state of affairs reflects a position of privilege, and end up blithely defending a form of hustle culture—whatever elaborate grids of discourse occlude it, especially in the space of artistic practice. From yet another angle, I feel like a much more elaborated set of ideas and affects around “refusal,” “speculation,” and “pessimism,” often coming from Black aesthetics—as well as the renewed prominence of labor and class; identity politics among a younger generation; and the urgency of political ecology movements—has somewhat drained the self-evidence from many of the aforementioned positions, which were very prominent in the mid-2010s, although the conditions that informed them have, if anything, deteriorated even more. Given the developments that we are witnessing right now, a lot of the ruling-class masks have come off—that is, the ones that pandered to a certain liberal common sense now invidiously caricatured as “woke” by the flailing right. In the current political climate, neither your average plutocrat nor cultural administrator is ready to tolerate the “autonomy” of cultural and educational institutions, whether in the vein of pluralism or partisanship, even when a genocide is unfolding before our eyes. (And forget about enjoining historical and geopolitical context.) This makes it ever more clear that autonomy’s philosophical aesthetics should be approached in a spirit of genealogical-critical inquiry but also contested—not just discursively, as it has been for years, but also practically. To take just one example, the publishing project Diversity of Aesthetics has been pursuing this by looking at how “aesthetics” can become a “tactics” (as in the old activist idiom of “diversity of tactics”)—that is, how presupposing the autonomy of art and its institutions can be deployed to realize, in various forms, art’s antagonistic and emancipatory latencies.24 All of this to say that the genealogy as well as the institutional reflex of autonomy might still have traction precisely as a set of tactics at a juncture where this autonomy, as a holding pattern, becomes inoperative—when not even the conventional stratifications of class, money, and ideology can shield the space of art from direct and indirect political repression.

SL: I appreciate the materialist realism of your comments on the systemic failings of contemporary art vis-à-vis building autonomous infrastructures of social reproduction—which would be infrastructures against reactionary autonomy. As ever, the task remains to be attentive (hopefully without kidding oneself) to the potentialities that may lie dormant in what Sartre famously termed the practico-inert.25 As you mention, there are some small-scale cases that are worth taking seriously, for all their limitations, alongside tactical and strategic appropriations of larger infrastructures.

One may wonder whether forms of immanent critique have not actually strengthened the investment in problematic institutional infrastructures. The logic of flight (via Deleuze, Guattari, and the autonomists) has meanwhile offered important impulses, counteracting institutional critique’s veritable Stockholm Syndrome through, for instance, Raunig’s insistence that flight or exodus should not be conceived as a form of escapism but rather as “betraying the rules of the game.”26 This can take the form of an immanent desertion, as with “undercommoning” an institution (such as the corporatized university) that is deemed beyond reform. Meanwhile, the mostly American discourse and (to some extent) practice of Institutional Liberation revolves around “treating institutions as forms to be seized and connected into a counterpower infrastructure.”27 But in a sense we see the return of a familiar problem: you cannot socialize a single company while the rest of the world remains capitalist. At the very least, you would need a kind of archipelago of “liberated” institutions that manage to generate a degree of real autonomy by forming a support network, developing strategies and tactics, and producing a form of counter-publicness. The recent firing of Artforum’s editor-in-chief for having published an open letter deemed too pro-Palestinian by powerful art-market actors shows what we are up against. The odds are almost hilariously stacked against us. Perhaps this is the moment to unearth an old German Sponti movement slogan: Wir haben keine Chance, also nutzen wir sie (“We don’t have a chance, so let’s use it”).

Even more generally, I wonder if we have even begun to draw theoretical and practical conclusions from what theorists of postmodernism such as Jameson postulated:

The dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life—from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself—can be said to have become “cultural” in some original and yet untheorized sense.28

This suggests to me that “contemporary art” in the institutional sense has its affordances (sorry for the term) but also its limitations when it comes to aesthetic practice in an exploded field of culture. Ultimately, reactionary autonomy in its artistic variant also needs to be rejected as defensive neo-modernist retrenchment. We need to think and enact an archipelago of collaborations, alliances, and coalitions across the boundaries of those “autonomous” spheres or fields described by Weber and Habermas.

I will end by referencing a recent essay by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, What I Do Not Yet Recognize, Now at This Very Moment, published as a brochure by the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. Sadr Haghighian’s text uses this very particular institutional infrastructure—and more generally the aesthetic and theoretical room to maneuver that art can still offer—to reflect on her own belated coming to terms with an anti-racist demonstration in 2006 triggered by the National Socialist Underground’s killings in Germany. Failing to see the images of the protest and sense their importance, Sadr Haghighian acknowledges that she “participated in a process of rendering the images invisible.”29 The artist, who would later be part of the people’s tribunal NSU Komplex auflösen and a member of the Society of Friends of Halit (which commissioned Forensic Architecture to reconstruct the NSU’s murder of Halit Yozgat in Kassel), emphasizes the importance of “[abandoning] the anesthetized order of the White Ignorance Contract” and of sensitizing oneself.30

This sensitizing also involves opposing hegemonic images—such as those produced and distributed by the little sovereigns of reactionary autonomy—with counter-images that seek to make “another reality imaginable and perceptible.”31 Such a practice of auto-sensitization, which is transindividual and operates through encounters and collaborations, is as aesthetic as it is political. It is often all but imperceptible, obscured by the spectacle of the culture wars. With its delays, false starts, and unexpected breakthroughs, with its loyalty to obstacles and moments of opacity, this practice suggests that another autonomy may still be possible.