THE SOVEREIGN

SELF
AESTHETIC
AUTONOMY

FROM THE
ENLIGHTENMENT
TO THE

AVANT-GARDE
GRANT
H. KESTER
THE SOVEREIGN
SELF
 THE

TO THE AVANT-
 SOVEREIGN
SELF

AESTHETIC
AUTONOMY

FROM THE
ENLIGHTENMENT

GARDE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Durham and London 2023

GRANT 
H. KESTER
© 2023 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by A. Mattson Gallagher
Typeset in Untitled Serif and Helvetica Rounded LT Std
by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kester, Grant H., author.
Title: The sovereign self : aesthetic autonomy from the
Enlightenment to the avant-garde / Grant H. Kester.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2023. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022045551 (print)
LCCN 2022045552 (ebook)
ISBN 9781478020424 (paperback)
ISBN 9781478019961 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781478024552 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Art—Philosophy. | Art criticism. | Autonomy
(Psychology) in art. | Subjectivity in art. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—
History—20th century. | Art, Modern—Political aspects. | Art and
society—History—20th century. | BISAC: ART / Criticism & Theory |
ART / History / Contemporary (1945–)
Classification: LCC N7476 .K47 2023 (print) | LCC N7476 (ebook) |
DDC 701—dc23/eng/20230216
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045551
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045552
The creation of this book coincided with the early years
of my son’s life, and it was inspired in many ways by
the complex labor involved in helping his unique spirit
negotiate the tension between autonomy and dialogical
interdependence that defines the human condition. I would
like to dedicate this book to Elliott, and to Samira, whose
wisdom and compassion are my constant guide. I also
want to extend my gratitude to Ken Wissoker, who re-
mained committed to this book, and its vision, despite
formidable obstacles.
CONTENTS 1 Introduction

I. FROM BEAUTY
TO DISSENSUS

1
19 Freedom and
Sovereignty

2
48 Communism
and the
Aesthetic State
 II. NEGATION AND III. AUTONOMY
PERFORMATIVITY SINCE THE 1980S

3 5
85 From Vanguard 145 The Rise of the
to Avant-Garde Neo-Avant-Garde

4 6
108 Activism and 180 The Hirschhorn
Autonomy Monument
in the 1960s Autonomy as Brand
and Alibi

212 Conclusion
Aesthetics beyond
Semblance

219 Notes
243 Works Cited
259 Index
INTRODUCTION

With the political artist things are very different indeed. For him Man is at once the ma-
terial on which he works and the goal towards which he strives.
—Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The concept of autonomy has emerged over the past fifteen years as a key
locus of debate and theorization in contemporary art. In 2010, a consortium
of European cultural institutions convened the Autonomy Project, an ambi-
tious, two-year-long series of symposia, summer schools, and publications
that featured many of the leading thinkers in the contemporary art world
(Tania Bruguera, Boris Groys, Thomas Hirschhorn, Peter Osborne, Jacques
Rancière, Hito Steyerl, etc.).¹ As the organizers acknowledge, the concept
of autonomy has traditionally been associated with the outmoded image of
the “isolated artist” laboring in their studio and “unaffected by the socio-
political world.”² However, as they also note, autonomy has acquired a
growing relevance in recent years as con
contemporary art has been increasingly
instrumentalized by both the market and the demands of neoliberal cultural
institutions. The return to autonomy thus represents an attempt to discover
new ways in which art might “reenergize” its emancipatory potential.³ Critic
Sven Lütticken, in an essay for the Autonomy Project newspaper, advocates
a new “performative autonomy,” in which artists turn “performances back
into acts” through their individual decision to refuse complicity with the neo-
liberal order.⁴ And artist Thomas Hirschhorn, during one of the symposia,
boldly declared that “art must be something completely autonomous . . . and
autonomous could be another word for the Absolute or for Beauty.”⁵ Autonomy
also plays a central role in the work of Jacques Rancière, who has argued
that the paradigm of aesthetic autonomy developed by philosopher Fried-
rich Schiller provides the crucial analytic frame necessary to understand the
unique forms of insight generated by contemporary artistic practice.⁶ This
same desire is evident in the recent revival of interest in Frankfurt School
theorist Theodor Adorno, whose writing on aesthetic autonomy, according
to John Roberts, still possesses “exemplary dialectical value.”⁷ And Nicholas
Brown, in Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism, defines
the work of art as a “self-legislating” entity that can only preserve its critical
power through its recursive “intervention” in the “institution of art” itself.
Art that seeks “to confront capitalism directly,” beyond the protective en-
closure of the art world, as Brown writes, “turns instead into a consumable
sign of opposition.”⁸
These examples suggest the wide-ranging influence that the concept of
autonomy continues to exercise in contemporary art theory and practice.
Autonomy is consistently understood in terms of the relationship between
the work of art and the surrounding social and political world, which serves
as either the target of the artwork’s transgressive criticality or the engine
of its inevitable appropriation. Thus, autonomy is associated with the de-
fensive segregation of the artwork from an environment that is seen as
fraught with both risk and transformative potential. While this research
has shed important light on the complex relationship between aesthetic
and political meaning in contemporary art, it has also been character-
ized by a central aporia. Thus, no matter how much the conventions of
autonomy might be probed, expanded, or revised, the conviction remains
that autonomy as such is the only possible form that art’s relationship to
the social and political world might take. The essential task in the current
moment is simply to recover the lapsed potential of aesthetic autonomy,
even as its underlying ontological structure remains unquestioned. It is this
underlying structure—the division between interior and exterior, purity

2 INTRODUCTION
NTRODUCTION
and impurity, authentic criticality and degraded complicity—that will be
my concern here. It is, as I discuss in this book, a discursive structure that
has remained remarkably consistent over the past two centuries. There is
a great deal at stake in the recent turn to autonomy, as we seek to under-
stand the nature and potential of both historical and contemporary art. It
has, as well, significant implications for our understanding of cultural poli-
tics more generally. My goal in this book is to offer an alternative geneal-
ogy of the aesthetic that can help clarify those stakes, and also point to an
often-subterranean tradition of artistic production that allows us to think
the aesthetic beyond autonomy.
I use the term “aesthetic” in two related ways in this book. First, I use it
to refer to the knowledge that is produced through the interaction between
cognitive self-reflection and our sensory experience of the external world.
I also use the “aesthetic” to refer to the specific ways in which this form of
knowledge is constructed in philosophical and theoretical discourse, which
is concerned with the potential emergence of a harmonious social order that
might challenge the fragmenting forces of modernity. As I argue, aesthetic
experience became a key site of speculative engagement during the Enlight-
enment because it promised to disclose a crucial human capacity to reconcile
the individual self with a larger social body during a period of growing po-
litical uncertainty. In each context the aesthetic carries a utopian potential.
There is, of course, a complex interrelationship between these two usages,
as individual philosophers sought to mobilize the concept of the aesthetic
on behalf of a specific emancipatory project (enlightenment or revolution).
However, in many of the cases I examine here, the discursive staging of
aesthetic knowledge was structured through an explicit hierarchy in which
emancipation can only be secured through a process in which physical or
sensual experience is subordinated to mental or cognitive supervision. In a
key historical transposition, this same epistemological opposition is often
projected onto entire classes of people (the proletariat, women, colonized
subjects) who are seen as incapable of self-regulation. My own understand-
ing of aesthetic knowledge follows a different trajectory. Here the discourse
of the aesthetic does not seek to subordinate one of these terms to the other,
but attends, instead, to their dialogical interdependence. I provide examples
of forms of cultural and theoretical production that illustrate this alternative
understanding at various points in this book. My primary focus, however,
will be on what I will identify as the dominant interpretation of the aesthetic
in the European tradition, which understands the cognitive as exercising a
regulatory control over the physical in the formation of aesthetic knowledge.

INTRODUCTION 3
 At the center of the concept of aesthetic autonomy stands the sovereign
personality of the artist, which is understood to transcend the complex,
dialectical tensions that accompany the work of art itself on its perilous
journey from the isolated studio to the social and political world beyond its
doors. Thus, while the integrity of the artwork as a vehicle of emancipatory
insight might occasionally be called into question, the authority of the artist
as the originary source of this insight is never in doubt. Here the “internal”
cognitive space of artistic creativity is essentially pure and uncorrupt, and
the mechanisms of complicity or instrumentalization associated with the
“external” world only accrue to the artwork after it has left the benign con-
sciousness of the artist. As a result, we find a wide-ranging normalization of
conventional forms of authorship throughout many of these debates, from
Rancière’s valorization of a canon of white, male auteurs (in Aisthesis alone
he discusses Whitman, Emerson, Balzac, Mallarmé, Ibsen, Rodin, Chaplin,
Stieglitz, Vertov, and Agee), to Thomas Hirschhorn’s insistence on his own
untrammeled “form giving” authority as an artist, to critic Claire Bishop’s
conviction that the autonomous “authorship” exercised by the contemporary
artist is the very precondition for “provocative art and thinking.”⁹
The belief that the utopian potential of aesthetic experience can only be
fully expressed through conventional forms of authorial sovereignty has re-
mained a central tenet of the modernist tradition for the past two hundred
years. And certainly, art today faces a unique set of forces that threaten to
diminish its transformative and transgressive power. However, before we
rush to embrace autonomy once again, I would argue that we need a clearer
understanding of its multivalent nature and of its constraints as well as its
potential. In this book I will explore the complex history of artistic subjectiv-
ity and the principle of autonomy that it exemplifies. As I will suggest, the
modern artistic self, which first takes coherent shape in the Enlightenment,
is the ur-form for a whole series of subsequent institutional and discursive
enclosures that are understood to be uniquely free from the forms of ideo-
logical domination that constrain all other modes of cultural production.
Moreover, as I will also argue, the question of aesthetic autonomy has rami-
fications that extend well beyond art to a larger constellation of issues as-
sociated with the nature of political transformation, including the complex
imbrication of the artistic avant-garde and the revolutionary vanguard, and
forms of anticolonial resistance that challenge the Eurocentric concept of
“Man” on which the aesthetic itself so often depends. In order to explore
these issues, I will be examining the evolving discourse of aesthetic auton-
omy over a long historical arc, from its origins in Enlightenment aesthetic

4 INTRODUCTION
NTRODUCTION
philosophy, through the initial emergence of avant-garde art movements
in the nineteenth century, to its more contemporary manifestation in what
critic Hal Foster has termed a “neo-avant-garde,” beginning in the 1970s.

Autonomy and the Avant-Garde

The emergence of the modern avant-garde is associated with the transi-

tion to an aesthetic paradigm based on a concept of critical negation rather
than redemptive beauty. This principle of negation would be embodied in the
personality of the avant-garde artist, whose unique expressive freedom,
manifested in an ongoing assault on normative social values, became the
primary vehicle for preserving a form of autonomous criticality that was
assumed to be otherwise absent in society due to the rise of an increasingly
hegemonic system of political domination. We typically view the avant-garde
as a repudiation of the concept of aesthetic transcendence that was central
to the Enlightenment aesthetic. It was, of course, precisely the principle of
autonomy, and the artist’s defensive separation from the chaotic social and
political world, that avant-garde artists sought to overturn by challenging
conventional notions of beauty and distanced aesthetic contemplation with
provocative images of expiring stonebreakers and working-class barmaids.
In fact, as I will argue here, there is a complex interconnection between the
Enlightenment notion of aesthetic autonomy and the forms of radical nega-
tion that are typical of the avant-garde tradition. Thus, while the epistemo-
logical modality of the avant-garde will shift (from a concern with the virtual
reconciliation of self and other in the experience of beauty to the strategic
denial of this reconciliation through some form of cognitive assault), the
underlying discursive structure of aesthetic autonomy (which governs the
roles assigned to the artist, the viewer, and the work of art within a broader
social network) remains largely unchanged.
The concept of the avant-garde has remained central to our understanding
of modern art for more than a century and a half. While it has taken varying
forms over the years, it has consistently emerged in conjunction with calls to
revitalize art’s lapsed political potential. This is evident in a number of more
recent publications, including Marc James Léger’s Brave New Avant-Garde,
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen’s After the Great Refusal: Essays on Contemporary
Art, and John Roberts’s Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde.¹⁰ This
Art
resurgence has been paralleled by various efforts in the realm of critical the-
ory to resuscitate Leninism and the concept of a political vanguard.¹¹ Slavoj
Žižek has even argued that the global hegemony of neoliberal capitalism will

INTRODUCTION 5
only be arrested with the emergence of a new Leninist “master,” willing to
take a decisive “leap” into the void through an unsparing commitment to
revolutionary political violence.¹² The parallel here with the rhetoric of ar-
tistic experimentation (one thinks of Yves Klein’s Leap into the Unknown
of 1960) is symptomatic. In fact, Alain Badiou identifies Lenin and Marcel
Duchamp as twin exemplars of a new form of revolutionary thought unique
to the twentieth century.¹³ As Badiou’s example suggests, the avant-garde
artist and the vanguard leader have always been intimately linked. They
share a common rhetorical orientation and a common set of beliefs about
social change, violence, and the decisive role played by revolutionary and
artistic elites.
In Badiou we encounter the symptomatic correlation between avant-garde
art and revolutionary theory as radically autonomous modes of expression
that bear a privileged relationship to political emancipation. In this view,
the totalizing ideological control exercised by contemporary capitalism
necessitates a complete break with all existing systems of thought. Philos-
opher Daniel Bensaïd has reflected on Badiou’s particular fascination with
the concept of an absolute sovereignty: “Emerging out of nothing, the sov-
ereign subject, like evental truth, provides its own norm. It is represented
only by itself. Hence the worrying refusal of relations and alliances, of con-
frontations and contradictions. Badiou invariably prefers an absolute con-
figuration over one that is relative: the absolute sovereignty of truth and
the subject, which begins, in desolate solitude, where the turmoil of public
opinion ends. [Peter] Hallward rightly sees in this philosophy of politics an
‘absolutist logic’ that leaves little space for multiple subjectivities, shuns the
democratic experience, and condemns the sophist to a sort of exile.”¹⁴ As we
will see, the “desolate solitude” of the sovereign self that refuses “relations
and alliances” and “provides its own norms” is evident in the traditions of
both the artistic avant-garde and the political vanguard.
The resurgence of the vanguard/avant-garde matrix must be understood
in the context of the perceived inevitability of contemporary neoliberal-
ism. Faced with the ongoing failure of Marxist political discourse to cata-
lyze broad public opposition to capitalism, there is an active search among
left intellectuals for new or rearticulated forms of anticapitalist ideology
that can both explain this resistance and provide the foundation for a more
compelling political narrative. Renewed interest in the avant-garde is also
linked to the growing monetization of con contemporary art and, in particu-
lar, its formalization as a financial instrument (including the emergence of
investment funds linked to its market per performance).¹⁵ While modern art

6 INTRODUCTION
NTRODUCTION
has often been integrated with the market, the remarkable expansion of
this interdependence over the past two decades has put increasing pressure
on the ideological rationales that are typically employed to legitimate art’s
critical or oppositional role within contemporary society. In the past, con-
temporary art was considered among the riskiest sectors of the art market
due to the unpredictability of the long-term value accrued by a given work
through the slow and uncertain processes of historical validation. However,
with the dramatically increased levels of capital available for investment, the
pressure to rapidly monetize this work and to accelerate, or simply bypass,
the conventional mechanisms of critical and art historical evaluation has
been irresistible. In this context, contemporary art, far from challenging the
imperatives of bourgeois capitalism, has emerged as one of the single most
reliable sites of capital investment.¹⁶ We might say, then, that the avant-
garde, or some version of it, is a necessary corollary to the dramatically
expanded market for contemporary art, providing the frisson of transgres-
sion necessary to keep the “brand,” as New York art dealer David Zwirner
describes it, fresh and exciting to wealthy consumers who prefer high-yield
investments that carry a whiff of cordite.¹⁷ Notwithstanding the cynicism of
the art-world nomenklatura, the desire for a renewed concept of the avant-
garde, like the desire for a “reenergized” notion of autonomy, also reflects
a genuine interest among critics and artists in understanding the complex
interconnection between political resistance and cultural production today.
As a result, ongoing efforts to develop a coherent theory of avant-garde art
can reveal a great deal to us about contemporary artistic production more
generally and, in particular, about the potential for any form of art that can
resist the overwhelming appropriative powers of the market.
Here I will be approaching the avant-garde as both a discursive system
(defined by a specific model of political change and subjectivity, and a set
of interrelated cognitive mechanisms) and as a performative matrix involv-
ing the deployment of objects and actors with assigned roles, in which these
mechanisms are acted out. The dispositif of the avant-garde is organized
around a dual structure. On the one hand, it is defined by an outwardly ori-
ented gesture of pure negation, directed against the reified structures of daily
life. On the other hand, this gesture is incubated within the consciousness
of an artist who is impervious to any “external” influence or determination.
Here autonomy is produced through the conjunction of a unique, autopoi-
etic creative activity (art) that sets itself decisively apart from other forms
of knowledge production, and a specific form of subjectivity, embodied in
the artistic personality, which is endowed with unique forms of cognition

INTRODUCTION 7
and agency.¹⁸ The autonomy of the artistic personality is founded on their
capacity to transcend systematic forms of social domination and semantic
convention to which others unconsciously submit. As I noted above, this en-
tails a process through which forms of either critical or habitual conscious-
ness are spatialized, via metaphors of “inside” and “outside.” The artist is
understood as existing outside a given hegemonic system and is therefore
able to reveal the hidden structural determinants of individual experience
to those who remain trapped within that same system. While the artist
possesses a unique rhetorical power over the consciousness of others, this
capacity remains unilateral rather than reciprocal, as any external deter-
mination of the artist’s own subjectivity (to be constrained or acted on by
others) would entail an unacceptable violation of their creative freedom.
How did this defensive, immunological model of the self originate? And
what are the political and aesthetic consequences of identifying emancipa-
tory thought so fully with a form of consciousness that seeks to “abstract
itself from all particularity,” as Badiou writes?¹⁹

Overview and Chapter Summaries

Given the breadth of this study, it will necessarily sacrifice a great deal of his-
torical specificity. I hope to compensate for this loss by providing some sense
of the continuity of aesthetic autonomy as a broader discursive system that is
integral to the experience of modernity. This continuity can be traced through
three distinct but interrelated phases. In the first phase, autonomy emerges in
conjunction with a European bourgeoisie eager to assert its political indepen-
dence from existing forms of absolutist rule. In the second phase, autonomy
reemerges in vanguard artistic and political discourse during the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries to ensure the integrity and purity of revolution-
ary struggle against what was seen as an irredeemably corrupt capitalist
system. And in the final phase, autonomy in contemporary art practice seeks to
preserve a mnemonic trace of a now moribund revolutionary consciousness
for some future moment of political transformation. As this outline suggests,
aesthetic autonomy bears a complex and shifting relationship to concepts of
resistance and emancipation across the past two centuries.
While a significant part of this study will be devoted to a historical analysis
of aesthetic theory and artistic subjectivity, it is also concerned with issues
that remain central to artistic practice to the present day. I will contend that
many of the core evaluative tensions that define con contemporary art (the rela-
tionship between art and adjacent areas of cultural production, the capacity

8 INTRODUCTION
NTRODUCTION
of the artwork to convey some form of meaningful social or political critique,
and the institutional complicity, or independence, of the art world itself) are
rooted in the discursive system of modern aesthetic autonomy. My inquiry
is centered on the particular forms of subjectivity and consciousness mobi-
lized by the experience of modern art, and through the personality of the
modern artist. As I discuss below, modern art will define itself in opposition
to the instrumentalizing forms of identity associated with the rise of capital-
ism, in which the world is reduced to a set of resources to be exploited and
consumed. At the same time, in seeking to challenge the appropriative au-
tonomy of the bourgeois self, we will find artists claiming a form of creative
subjectivity that makes its own demands for absolute sovereignty. Thus, the
untrammeled freedom enjoyed by the artist is necessary precisely because
they possess a unique capacity to transcend the ideological constraints of
the existing capitalist system and envision its utopic reinvention.
In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller pro-
vides one of the most cogent early diagnoses of European society in thrall to
the “economic self-interest” inculcated by the rise of the market system.²⁰
As a result of this dehumanizing system, “whole classes of men uphold their
capacities only in part,” as Schiller writes, “while the rest of their faculties
scarcely show a germ of activity.”²¹ Schiller’s prescience is notable. Even
in the context of the rudimentary forms of modernization evident in late
eighteenth-century Germany, he was able to detect the tectonic shifts that
would transform Europe during the coming century as society was increas-
ingly driven by utilitarian calculations of profit and loss. Moreover, Schiller
helps us recognize the damaging effects that this transformation will have
on human interrelationships as we come to view others not as our equals
deserving respect and compassion, but rather as a kind of raw material. In
the state of crisis that defines modern life, as Schiller writes, “every man
seeks for nothing more than to save his wretched property from the gen-
eral destruction, as it were from some great conflagration.”²² Echoes of this
original critique will resonate throughout the history of modern art. Thus
André Breton, writing more than a century later, will contend that “wher-
ever Western civilization is dominant, all human contact has disappeared,
except contact from which money can be made.”²³ For Schiller, the solu-
tion to this crisis entails a comprehensive reinvention of the human self,
which will be accomplished by our therapeutic exposure to beautiful works
of art. Through this process of “aesthetic education,” we will move from a
predatory form of subjectivity to one in which we experience, and feel, our
underlying kinship with other selves.

INTRODUCTION 9
 If modern political life is defined by the struggle over how the individual
relates to the social in the face of incipient capitalism, the philosophical dis-
course of the aesthetic is concerned with how we come to both feel and think
this relationship, and how we come to imagine new forms of connection to
other selves, capable of transcending this banal, materialistic enclosure.
The concept of the aesthetic, I will argue, provides us with a unique vantage
point from which to identify, and challenge, the deleterious effects of mod-
ern capitalism on the human personality. In this respect it shares certain
essential features with evolving forms of Marxist theory in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. In the following chapters I will trace the relation-
ship between these two discursive systems: between artistic production and
political action, between the artistic avant-garde and the political vanguard,
and between the realms of aesthetic philosophy and Marxist theory. We
encounter formative critiques of the capitalist system, and its associated
modes of bourgeois selfhood, in both the modern avant-garde and in Marxist
theory. Each of these traditions, as we shall see, also seeks to transcend this
system, whether through the incremental reformation of individual viewers
or through the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system. And each
is defined by the desire to usher in a new social order in which self-interest
would be replaced by a noninstrumentalizing openness to others. What
unique forms of subjectivity and critical knowledge are generated across
these two domains? And what are the key points of disjunction, displace-
ment, and differentiation between them?
There is a rich intellectual tradition devoted to the relationship between
avant-garde art and revolutionary transformation in the areas of aesthetic
philosophy and critical theory.²⁴ Fredric Jameson’s The Political Uncon-
scious helped to inaugurate a renewed interest in these questions during the
1980s. In his book Jameson argued that modernist literary texts constitute
“a revolt against . . . reification and a symbolic act which involves a whole
Utopian compensation for increasing dehumanization on the level of daily
life.”²⁵ This emancipatory potential is not openly thematized at the level of
literary content. Rather, it is carried in the complex formal structures of
the works themselves, in a manner that is often inaccessible to the average
reader. It requires, then, the intervention of the critic to reveal this “political
unconscious” and to bring it into our conscious awareness through a process
of ideological “decipherment.” There are a number of themes here that will
be important for my subsequent analysis of the avant-garde, including the
compensatory relationship between artistic production and revolutionary
change, the central role played by formal mediation in preserving the art-

10 INTRODUCTION
NTRODUCTION
work’s political meaning, and the underlying bifurcation between the reader
and the critic. Jameson’s book exemplifies a diverse body of scholarship in
which the literary text, or the physical artwork, expresses a form of revolu-
tionary political consciousness that cannot yet be realized through practical
action. This perception will be evident in a number of thinkers discussed
in the following study, especially in the work of Theodor Adorno. This re-
mains a valuable and illuminating tradition. However, I will offer a some-
what different path through this familiar terrain. In particular, while I will
occasionally discuss specific works of art, my primary concern is not with
the artwork qua object and its associated hermeneutic conventions. Rather,
I am interested in tracing what I term the “social architecture” of the aes-
thetic. By social architecture I refer to the ways in which the concept of the
aesthetic has been constituted historically around a set of a priori subject
positions (of artist and viewer, movement and public), defined by specific
forms of cognitive agency and interpretive competence. In this sense I am
less concerned with the ontology of the work of art than I am with the ontol-
ogy of the artist. I will be concerned, as well, with the relationship between
artistic production and the forms of revolutionary praxis that, in Jameson’s
account, it symbolically preserves.
These questions will bring us once again to the concept of autonomy,
which plays a central role in the traditions of both Marxist and aesthetic
thought. As we know, aesthetic discourse during the Enlightenment under-
goes a fundamental reorientation. Rather than art serving to provide a form
of moral instruction (docere et delectare in Horace’s maxim), the work of
art will become entirely autonomous and “complete in itself,” as Karl Moritz
contends. In this view, art’s significance does not derive from its practical
effect on the world, or the viewer, but from the fact that art as such has no
outwardly directed purpose at all.²⁶ Here the “utility” of the instructive art-
work becomes a surrogate expression of the relentless utilitarianism of the
nascent bourgeoisie.²⁷ In this capacity the autonomous artwork comes to
symbolize a condition of individual freedom that mirrors the aspirations of
the modern political subject, finally freed from external coercion by god and
king. By the same token, it comes to symbolize a resistance to the means–
end rationality of the capitalist system that is gradually displacing these
sacral authorities. Of course, as we see in Schiller, the autonomous work of
art does seek to “instruct.” It simply approaches this task through a differ-
ent set of cognitive protocols, entailing the transformation of the under
underlying
structures of human consciousness. Thus, it is precisely by abjuring any
ostensibly “external” validation that the autonomous work of art gains the

INTRODUCTION 11
capacity to awaken in the viewer an intuition of our fundamental connec-
tion to other selves (through a prefigurative sensus communis, which can
overcome the rampant self-interest promulgated by the market system).
In the following chapters I will explore the translation of this paradigm
of aesthetic autonomy into the mid-nineteenth century, where it will be
renewed in the radical sovereignty of the avant-garde artist. “I alone,” as
Courbet claimed, “have the power to represent and translate in an original
way both my personality and my society.”²⁸ Here the expressive freedom
of the avant-garde artist serves to anticipate the utopian forms of selfhood
that will one day be universally available, when society is finally liberated
from capitalist domination. We encounter a variant expression of this form
of autonomous subjectivity in the personality of the vanguard leader who
sustains the as-yet unrealized insurrectional potential of the masses in the
form of revolutionary theory, while possessing a singular ability to penetrate
the veils of ideological mystification that otherwise confound the benumbed
victims of capitalist exploitation. These are, of course, highly complex, in-
ternally differentiated discursive systems; it will be the work of the coming
chapters to more fully describe their tangled interrelationship. However,
they are united at a broader level by a similar structure. In each case, in
the figure of the avant-garde artist and the vanguard revolutionary, we en-
counter a spatial paradigm defined by an enclosed domain of contemplative
purity, and an “external” world of corruption and political disorder from
which this reflective consciousness must remain fundamentally separate
and over which it is destined to exercise a transcendent cognitive mastery.
To be autonomous means to be self-governing or to give oneself norms.
But norms are, by definition, shared social constructs. How, then, does the
autonomous subject engage in the consensual creation of norms rather than
simply imposing their self-generated values onto others? Here we encoun-
ter a characteristic tension between autonomy as marking the individual’s
freedom from external coercion and a form of autonomy that enables that
same individual’s sovereignty over other selves. In the first part of the book, I
explore the tension between autonomy as freedom and autonomy as mastery
through the work of Kant, Schiller, and Hegel, exploring the crucial linkage
between the autonomous concept of the self developed in the Enlightenment
and the ontology of European colonialism. I then explore the ways in which
this tension is both challenged and reinforced in the emergence of a concept
of the aesthetic, outlining a composite model of aesthetic autonomy in which
the actual moment of reconciliation (of self and other) that is prefigured in
the aesthetic encounter is both deferred, until a future moment of utopian

12 INTRODUCTION
NTRODUCTION
social emancipation, and displaced into the formal and representational
matrix of the artwork. In this view, any attempt to transform the existing
social order now will be premature, as evidenced by the revolutionary Terror
in France (a sign for Schiller and Hegel of humanity’s political immaturity).
Next, I will outline a four-part structure that describes the key features of
aesthetic autonomy as a discursive system. This structure is carried through
the book as a touchstone to gauge the ways in which aesthetic autonomy
is both sustained, and transformed, over time. I then explore the relation-
ship between the Enlightenment concept of aesthetic autonomy and the
new modes of autonomy that emerged in the nineteenth century through
the rapprochement between vanguard politics and avant-garde art. Rather
than seeing the avant-garde discourse that emerges at this time as a repu-
diation of the Enlightenment aesthetic, I examine the underlying continu-
ities between the two discursive traditions. These are organized around the
central value assigned to art, and the artistic persona, as the vessels for an
entirely unique form of critical and prefigurative insight. Here the anticipa-
tory reconciliation of self and other evoked by the experience of beauty is
replaced by a deliberate undermining of transcendence, in the avant-garde
assault on the viewer’s consciousness, even as the sovereignty of art and the
artistic persona remains paramount. The perceived cognitive incapacity of
the public, evident in Schiller’s critique of the French Revolution, finds its
corollary in the perception that the proletariat is incapable of revolutionary
transformation and requires the oversight of a vanguard party.
In the second part of the book I examine the reciprocal influence between
Bolshevism and avant-garde artistic production during the early twentieth
century. In particular, I focus on the diffraction patterns that are produced
in the overlap between the avant-garde artist and the revolutionary theo-
rist. Each of these figures claims a transcendent power to comprehend
the complex totality of capitalist domination and cultural production, and
each can be seen as modifying, and carrying forward, certain key features
associated with the discourse of autonomy outlined in the first section. In
particular, they reflect the symptomatic tension between autonomy as free-
dom from constraint by the world that exists beyond the domain of the self,
and autonomy as sovereignty over that same external world, which is at
the core of philosophical aesthetics. Precisely in order to precipitate a new
political order capable of nurturing a genuine form of social harmony, the
po
vanguard leader takes on a merciless and unilateral authority, seeking to
destroy an existing system of government through unrestrained vio violence and
revolutionary terror. The modern avant-
avant-garde is structured around a similar

INTRODUCTION 13
disjunction. Here the artist, in seeking to challenge a bourgeois culture
defined by the arrogant mastery of the natural world and other human selves,
nonetheless takes on an appropriative relationship to the individual viewer,
whose subordinated consciousness will be subjected to a violent, transfor-
mative assault. In this manner the prefigurative dimension of the artist’s
expressive freedom reveals its necessarily instrumentalizing corollary, evi-
dent in Schiller’s description of the “political artist,” who takes humanity
as a passive “material” onto which to impose his redemptive will.²⁹ We find
this paradigm reiterated in Maxim Gorky’s poignant observation in 1917 that
“the working class is for Lenin what iron ore is for a metal worker.”³⁰ The
discourse of the avant-garde will thus normalize a form of sovereign author-
ity (in assigning to the artist, or revolutionary theorist, certain exemplary
modes of transformative agency and self-actualization), while simulta-
neously gesturing beyond sovereignty to a mode of being in which the very
“self ” that is naturalized in the avant-garde personality is called into ques-
tion. I link these traditions with a revised concept of aesthetic autonomy in
the work of Theodor Adorno during the 1960s and contrast his approach
with an alternative aesthetic paradigm developed by C. L. R. James, rooted
in the experience of anticolonial resistance and the complex imbrication
of race and class. I then outline a series of projects, from the “Prolekult”
movement and the struggle for Indian independence during the 1920s and
1930s, to artistic practices developed in conjunction with new social move-
ments during the 1960s, that exemplify this alternative paradigm.
In the third part of the book, I explore the interconnection between
Adorno’s aesthetic and the concept of a neo-avant-garde that was introduced
during the 1990s, associated with the academic art criticism published in
the journal October. Critics such as Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh came
to identify the forms of conceptual and minimalist art that emerged in the
1960s and 1970s as a displaced expression of the radical energies created
by the Russian Revolution of 1917 (after which the journal is indirectly
named). This paradigm will be subsequently renewed in the work of critic
and historian John Roberts, who develops a concept of aesthetic autonomy
for the contemporary moment inspired by the legacy of Adorno. As Roberts
argues, art demonstrates its authenticity by refusing any direct contact with
processes of social or political change and focusing its critical powers instead
on the reified institutional and ideological structures of the art world itself.
I then examine the practical expression of this neo-avant-garde paradigm
in the work of Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, focusing on his acclaimed

14 INTRODUCTION
NTRODUCTION
Gramsci Monument, which was staged at a New York City public housing
project in the summer of 2013. Here many of the core themes associated
with an avant-garde paradigm of aesthetic autonomy take on exemplary
physical and institutional form. In Gramsci Monument, Hirschhorn sought
to effect a utopian transcendence of class and racial difference, even while
employing the lives and daily interactions of the public housing residents as
a compositional material intended for consumption by an international art
world defined precisely by class and racial privilege. In the conclusion I re-
flect on the implications the discourse of avant-garde aesthetic autonomy has
for our understanding of the potentials and the constraints of contemporary
art more generally.
As I suggested above, contemporary efforts to revive a concept of aes-
thetic autonomy are motivated by the fear that art’s unique, critical potential
is in danger of being subsumed by the inexorable appropriative powers of
neoliberal capitalism. This sense of impending crisis is, of course, entirely
familiar. Art’s emancipatory potential has always been at risk, from the
market, from the vicissitudes of popular culture, and from the instrumental
demands of social and political change. In fact, we might say that the very
function of the modern avant-garde is to symbolically enact an embattled
and (and ultimately futile) resistance against the implacable forces of ide-
ological domination. Alana Jelinek captures this mythos in her insistence
that “Art is not political action. Art is not education. Art does not exist to
make the world a better place. Art disrupts and resists the status quo, and
if it fails in this prime objective it only serves to deaden a disenfranchised
society further.”³¹ Of course, art must fail; it cannot avoid failure because
the task assigned to it in the avant-garde tradition (to “disrupt” the status
quo) is impossibly abstract. The fragility of art’s emancipatory potential is
not an unfortunate side effect. It is, rather, essential to the ontology of art
itself; to evoke some absolute and inviolable form of resistance that cannot
be realized in the current moment. The meaning of art, in these terms, never
lies in the forms of criticality that it can generate here and now but rather,
in its meta-performativity over time, acting out an incipient radicality, its
inevitable co-option, and its eventual rebirth, which are seen as symbolizing
an irrepressible human desire for utopian change. This entails, in turn, the
necessary autonomy of art itself from the very social mechanisms necessary
to produce the change it claims to embody (“political action,” “education”).
In this manner, autonomy understood as a capacity for critical distance from
the ideological norms on which po political
iti al domination depends is collapsed

INTRODUCTION 15
into the institutionalized separation of artistic production from the world in
which those norms are generated. This is the slender thread that links the
aesthetic paradigm introduced in the Enlightenment with the most recent
manifestation of neo-avant-garde artistic practice. My goal in this study is
to understand how a paradigm of aesthetic autonomy that originated more
than two centuries ago continues to exercise such a decisive influence on the
ways in which we envision the potential of art today.

16 INTRODUCTION
NTRODUCTION
NOTES

Introduction

1 See https://theautonomyproject.org/, accessed June 22, 2022. The Autonomy

Project was launched on April 19, 2010, and featured a series of seminars and
two summer schools, as well as a “newspaper” publication, all available online.
Supporters included the Dutch Art Institute, the Grizedale Art Centre, John
Moores University, Lectoraat Kunst en Publiek Ruimte, Platform Moderne
Kunst, the University of Hildesheim, and the Van Abbemuseum. The events
were organized by John Byrne ( John Moores University), Steven ten Thije (Van
Abbemuseum), and Clare Butcher (independent curator).
2 See https://theautonomyproject.org/.
3 See https://theautonomyproject.org/autonomy_symposium.
4 Lütticken, “Three Autonomies and More,” 38.
5 Ahlers, “The Puzzling Spectrum,” 45.
6 Rancière, “Aesthetic Revolution.”
7 Roberts, Revolutionary Time, 54.
8 Brown, Autonomy, 37, 180.
 9 Rancière, Aisthesis; Hirschhorn, “Tribute to Form,” 52; Bishop, “Another
Turn,” 22.
10 Léger, Brave New Avant-Garde; Rasmussen, After the Great Refusal; Roberts,
Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde.
11 See, for example, Budgen et al., Lenin Reloaded.
12 Žižek, “Repeating Lenin.”
13 Badiou, “Destruction, Negation, and Subtraction.”
14 Bensaïd, Think Again, 105.
15 See, for example, the benchmark Mei Moses Index, accessed June 22, 2022,
https://www.sothebys.com/en/the-sothebys-mei-moses-indices. Total sales of
contemporary art were almost $3 billion in 2022.
16 Burgos and Ismail, “New York Apartments Top Gold.”
17 Paumgarten, “Dealer’s Hand,” 78.
18 The term “autopoiesis” was introduced by the Chilean biologists Humberto
Maturana and Francisco Varela in 1972 to describe self-regulating natural sys-
tems. See Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis.
19 Badiou, “Fifteen Theses.”
20 See Schulte-Sasse et al., Theory as Practice, 153.
21 Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 33.
22 Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 27.
23 Rosemont, What Is Surrealism?, 76.
24 Bernstein, The Fate of Art; Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics; Bennett, Prag-
matist Aesthetics; Bertram, Art as Human Practice.
25 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 42.
26 See Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic, 49–50.
27 For a detailed discussion of the “ontological rehabilitation” of the arts in the
German Enlightenment, see Buchenau, The Founding of Aesthetics.
28 Courbet, Letters of Gustave Courbet, 116.
29 Here we encounter the characteristic slippage in Schiller’s account between the
artist, operating in the realm of semblance, imposing their will on passive com-
positional material, and the “statesman artist,” who works in the realm of the
actual but ultimately depends on the same instrumentalizing orientation. See
Redfield, “Aesthetics, Sovereignty, Biopower.”
30 Gorky, Untimely Thoughts, 89.
31 Jelinek, This Is Not Art, frontispiece.

1. Freedom and Sovereignty

1 Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 4–8.

2 Macpherson, Political
Po Theory of Possessive Individualism.
o, Evolution of Rights, 53.
3 Shapiro,

220 NOTES
OTES TO INTRODUCTION