Allonomy: autonomy and after

The era of autonomous art is over. Because, as Terry Flaxton put it in a recent email, media arts, electronic arts specifically, disappear when the electricity is turned off. Thus demonstrating the dependence of art on its power supply, as also on the power industry, on the financial system for paying the bills, as well as the drives, networks and screens it requires, and software – which even if original to the work is built on the traditions and units of code and their implementation.

This implies promptly that a poem ca not 'contain in itself the reasons why it is so and not otherwise' (Coleridge) since it must be written on top of the infrastructure of a language and orthography that the poet rarely originates (and if they do, in concrete poetry, risks losing comprehension, meaning or evocation other than of the poetic tradition or autonomy for autonomy's sake – a theme to be pursued later.

Similarly with all traditional art media: they require stages, galleries and concert venues; norms of inscription (notations, repertoires of gesture and motion) and a legacy of materials (instruments and tools, pigments, foundries). No wonder that art, now proven by new media to have no autonomy, instead embraces (critically or in celebration) its status as ideological or discursive vehicle of the social and historical apparatus that produces it.

True: art may still be useless. Giving up on beauty, communication or social function only deprives it of use. It does not remove it from exchange value. Having no use-value aligns it all the more closely with the society that shapes it when its only remaining use is to be exchanged. Alternatively it does have uses – as pleasure, as meaningful, as intellectual exercise – which then destroys the uselessness argument again, and once more emphasises art's dependent status.

This is not in itself a Bad Thing. Aesthetic practices that embrace their sociality can do things that may not otherwise be possible. For example, they have a habit of outliving not only their creators but the social order that birthed them, to the point that their pleasures no longer express for an audience today the matter they conveyed at their first appearance. The Eroica for one may still express the Absolute, as Adorno believed, but today scarcely evokes the fire and fury of Bonapartism or its tragedy.

A second potential then hoves into view: that the artwork is of value to the extent that it strives for autonomy and fails. If it did not fail, it would be fully incomprehensible; if it did not strive for freedom, it would be no different than any entertainment (which explains why so much content in the culture pages of our great organs is so entertaining). But because it strives and cracks in the attempt, it can show both the lineaments of the apparatus it is trying to escape and the possibility of there existing an alternate apparatus, even if the artwork can't realise it. This hypothesis is a slight revision of Adorno's ultimately pessimistic aesthetic theory (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#4).

Outliving the context of their production, artworks do not become autonomous but, as migrants, they become alien and to that extent alienated – alien to themselves and alienated in themselves. Only separated from the conditions of their generation can they become trophies of an aesthetic regime that requires them to be emblems of a freedom that does not exist. Separation form the conjuncture of their birth is often traumatic, the loot of Empire, or the prison songs that become beautiful only when they are removed from the chain gang. The 'immortality' of the Bard or of Bach is only an assurance that mortality is everlasting, that the dignity, even the presence, of the past can always be looted by the present, and thatb whatever we might leave of ourselves in the world after we leave it and lock the door behind us, will be the property of a culture that praises above all individuals, and individuals above justice, but if founded on theft, now in the form of unpayable debt – the very soul, the anima that animates rapacious cyborg capital. Formal autonomy as ascribed to art is the aesthetic form of debt. We can understand this through the continuing appeal of sacred music to atheist ears: God was, as doubt is, the Lord who giveth and taketh away, whose ways are unfathomable, and who is, as Kant says of the sublime, that then which there is no greater.

After autonomy, ecocritique. Why would art be autonomous where there is no human autonomy? The un-freedom of art is a blessing because it creates the possibility of cultural practices whose allegiance is not to human freedom but the liberation of the three phyla: human, natural and technical. Their interdependence means that there can no longer be freedom for any without freedom for all – for everything. Ecocritical as it cannot help but be, media art has a purpose that autonomous art lacks: to speak truly of the three phyla. Trueness, to coin a phrase (Wahrheit rather than Truth)becomes possible for an art that declares its dependence. Allonomy. Where self and selfishness are transcended, another law is possible, beyond the self-rule that lies etymologically under the word 'autonomy'.

The life of a work that survives the conditions of its making, the archival life as Giovanna Fossati calls it, the perpetual work of remaking of the work undertaken by humans, natural processes and technical reproductions and maintenance, is the site of truths, beauties and good things. This is why it is possible to experience something different, estranged from the lockdown boundaries, reading a Hardy poem up here over St Kilda, on a website set in Times over a weird purple background, on the screen of a MacBook Pro, squinting into the autumn sun. This ultra-specific encounter cannot be exchanged because it is not reproducible. Whatever use it has is single-use only. Its value lies less in what Hardy meant or I understand than in the intersecting networks of economies, technologies and ecologies that draw him and me to this meeting and then pass on, subtly but permanently altered.