The Fear of Heteronomy

摘要

Addressing recent attempts to articulate the social dimensions of the aesthetic within accounts of contemporary art, this article considers how the type of understanding generated has, contrary to the socially pertinent claims ostensibly being proposed, demonstrated an ongoing distrust and fear of heteronomy. It is argued that far from offering a corrective to asocial notions of autonomy, such perspectives on the debates over 'art and politics' do not even deliver an adequate conception of 'social autonomy', but instead contain, and thereby neutralise, the very heteronomous forces to which they appeal to enliven the discourse of contemporary practice. The essay tracks how this privileging of autonomy can be found in Jacques Rancire's discussions of the avant-garde, and suggests that this approach circumscribes an aporia whose dynamics are one-sidedly weighted and which evacuates content from heteronomy's moments of transitivity.