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What Is Autonomy?
Florian Cramer, Creating 010, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences
28-5-2015
Introduction
Some of you might have asked themselves: Why a lecture on “autonomy” - especially when
I’m not a fine art but a design student? This brings us to our first problem: In no other
countries in the world except the Netherlands and Flanders, fine art is called “autonoom”.
And in the way I just phrased this sentence, I created a second problem: Flanders is actually
not a country, but a part of Belgium. Yet, as we know, a considerable of its population
actually does consider Flanders a country and thus wants autonomy.
We are confronted with issues of autonomy in the media every day: The Brexit is a plea for
the UK’s autonomy from the EU, in a country - by the way - that historically hardly any
experience of giving up parts of sovereignty for a larger political entity while this is a
normal experience for continental Europe. If the Brexit should happen, there is a chance
that Scotland would strive for national independence, which would be: political autonomy.
We have a war over autonomy in the Ukraine; which includes a partial question of whether
the Eastern part of the country should be conversely autonomous from the Ukraine as a
whole. ISIS is a campaign for autonomy, of an Islamist califate. In the USA, Donald Trump
campaigns for “America first”, demanding among others to end existing international free
trade agreements. At the same time, as a conservative, he campaigns against liberal
abortion rights - which have been a central issue of autonomy for feminism, concerning the
autonomy of women to decide about their own bodies. [Barbara Kruger, Your Body is a
Battleground]
In America, Google and Tesla conduct the first field tests for automatically driving cars -
since they do not require human drivers, at least ideally, they are called “autonomous cars”.
These examples show that autonomy is not only a thing of the past, but also very much of
the present. They also show that autonomy is an issue at stake, a question rather than an
answer. It is in a process of redefinition and reinvention in the 21st century. In my lecture, I
will try to cover as many aspects and issues of autonomy as possible, but not in order to
give you definite answers, but in order to lay out the questions that concern autonomy
today.
Crisis of 2008 & 2011: mars der beschaving
Our preliminary conclusion thus could be: there are several concepts of autonomy in
various fields. Art is only one of them. But since the invention of the concept, the autonomy
of art might never have been as contested as today. To talk more specifically about the
Netherlands: the autonomy of art has been exposed as fragile, and been contested as such,
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since 2011 when Dutch governmental cultural politics changed and shook the fundaments
of the Dutch contemporary art system.
In the same year, there was a large-scale demonstration in the Netherlands, the “March of
Civilization” (“mars der beschaving”). Through this showdown between the VVD party and
the protesters, the issue of art and its autonomy was narrowed down to one between the
political right and political left, and one between business logic and humanism. It seems as
if in the Netherlands, we are still stuck with this dualism - in this lecture, I will attempt to
cut through this and broaden our perspective on autonomy.
The severe budget cuts of the first Rutte cabinet exposed two things:
• Art was economically not autonomous, but dependent on public funding. By the way,
this did not only apply to contemporary visual art (“autonoom beeldende kunst”), but
to large parts of Dutch design which was indirectly dependent on cultural funding - for
example, all experimental graphic and media designers whose clients were, and are,
mostly art institutes. And to architects and designers who could realize their most
daring and adventurous projects for clients from the cultural sector. Nevertheless, this
brings us to the question how something could be called autonomous that is
economically not self-sufficient.
• In that sense, you could argue that Rutte and Zijlstra were just good liberal politicians
who brought back the Dutch concept of art’s autonomy to its Dutch liberal origins -
about which I will talk in a couple of minutes. Instead, however, the Rutte cabinet
created a new complex and expensive institutional bureaucracy and funding system for
the creative industries, which seems outright absurd: If creative industries are really
an industry, then they are commercial and need neither public support, nor public
planning. As a result, in 2016, we ended up with two parallel cultural systems: art and
creative industries, both of them now having a distinct Dutch flavor, even to the extent
where one could argue that “Creative Industries” in Netherlands now means something
rather different from the rest of the world.
In that sense, we have neither real “autonomy” nor real “industries”. This begs a more
fundamental, even philosophical question: Is there such a thing as autonomy at all?
Considering that all beings and all things in the world exist in vital interdependence, as part
of connected systems, isn’t “autonomy” a romantic illusion?
Politics
If go back to the root of the word, then “autonomy” first of all relates to politics: The Greek
work “nomos” means “law” or “norm”, “auto” means “self”. Therefore, “auto-nomos” refers
to something that gives itself its own law, or that follows its own law.
We mostly know the law as something that isn’t individual, but written by the state: In that
sense, radical claims for autonomy will always clash with the legal authority of the state in
power. However, autonomy may not be absolute, but relative: In that sense, we have
relative autonomy wherever state law leaves areas undefined, or just defines a framework.
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A good example are house rules, whether at a bar, club, shop, your own home or a school
like this one: Within the parameters of state law, we have the right to create our own rules
for a particular space, for example that visitors of a restaurant may not bring their own food
and drinks, that visitors of your home have to take their shoes off, that visitors of a church
have to be silent, or that visitors of a squatted house may not utter sexist or racist
statements even if they fall under the freedom of speech of state law.
In all of these examples, we can recall numerous historical conflicts between individuals or
communities on the one side and state authority on the other: the fight between catholic
church and secular powers, popes and kings over power in the Middle Ages - a fight that
still continues between fundamentalist homeschooling Christians and state authorities
today. The fight between radical Islam and secular authority over law and political rule, the
law of the Sharia versus secular law. Or, in the Netherlands as well, churches providing
shelter to asylum seekers whom the state wants to detain. Or the fights of squatters against
the police, which are fights for the degrees of relative autonomy.
The definition of a totalitarian political system is that leaves absolutely no room for
autonomy, not even miniscule amounts of relative autonomy. George Orwell’s 1984, with
the “telescreen” as its all-pervasive medium of propaganda and surveillance, remains the
most precise scenario of such totalitarianism, no matter what its ideological (or religious)
facade.
Free will
Therefore, the issue of “autonomy” is intrinsically linked to that of free will. Or, to be more,
precise: to the question of how free will can translate into law, or at least into rules and
policies that are commonly accepted within a larger rule of law. - I.e.: we create house rules
for this school, they allow the school to kick out people if necessary, and these rules are
formulated in a legally waterproof way - so that the person who got kicked out cannot go to
the police and to a court and sue him- or herself back into this building, if necessary, by
police force (i.e. police agents escorting him into the school). If you think that this is an
unrealistic scenario, just think of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s where
black people sued themselves into schools, and needed to be escorted by the police, based
on the general rule of law that rendered certain house rules illegal; think of civil rights
activist Rosa Parks who did not accept the house rules of a public transport company that
assigned different seats to black and white people.
[Rosa Parks]
In other words, the conflict between Rosa Parks and the bus company can be read as a
conflict over multiple instances of autonomy: Rosa Parks’ autonomy to choose whatever
seat she wants and not be discriminated because of the color of her skin; the bus company’s
autonomy to create its own house rules (which could also be the assignment of 1st and 2nd
class seats like in trains); and, in conflict with these two claims for autonomy, the
sovereignty of the state that has to enforce its law. In the case of the United States, the
situation was even more complicated through the collision of state law and federal law. The
Southern States in the 1960s had the Jim Crow laws that commanded racial segregation and