malcolmquinn.com

What are the social ends of aesthetic autonomy? In this paper, I will pursue this question as it pertains to contemporary art, through an analysis of Friedrich Schiller's model of aesthetic autonomy, as set out in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). My account includes discussion of speech, truth and temporality in Schiller's model of aesthetic autonomy, as this relates to the possibilities of ‘ autonomy speech ' in contemporary art. I focus particularly on Schiller's account of aesthetic education as producing a denatured, intangible space in which social subjects encounter each other solely as the malleable figures of a Spieltrieb, that is, as an object of free play. This is not a leisure activity or a virtual space beyond quotidian concerns, but the surest route through which autonomous subjects can assume a social and collective character without being subsumed within forms of general will. For Schiller, the route to political emancipation is achieved by cutting into the social bond to produce a domain of radical artifice. I will also show how Habermas's account of Schiller and a recent attempt to revive a waning debate on aesthetic autonomy on Habermasian lines, miss what is most valuable in Schillerian analysis of the social condition of aesthetics. I argue that Schiller's non-philosophical account of aesthetics and the Spieltrieb can be adequately approached using Lacanian models of the social bond.