The meaning of “autonomy”

“Autonomy” is a powerfully resonant concept in a variety of contexts. In aesthetic theory it refers to a quality specific to art: its capacity to create meanings through its formal properties, and to generate ways of encountering the world that are distinct from other forms of social experience. Artistic autonomy implies that the creation and the judgment of artistic texts require a sensibility and an imagination separate from other sorts of knowledge or practice. In modernism, and in critical responses to modernism, to see artistic experience as separate from, and potentially superior to, other ways of experiencing the world involves focussing on the material and formal properties of the art object. It is the formal autonomy of the artwork that is emphasized for example in A.C. Bradley's Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909) and Clive Bell's Art (1914). Critical discussion of modernist literary texts has been powerfully shaped by this idea of aesthetic autonomy, which continues to be important for many critics of modernism.

However, fascination with “autonomy” as the defining nature of artistic objects and aesthetic experience has been contested by critics who see it as denying to art its relation to historical and social experience. Perhaps the most polemical criticism is Peter Bürger's theoretical and critical study, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). Bürger argues that modern understanding of artistic “autonomy” is historically limited and historically limiting.