Autonomy

Abstract

In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Walter Pater asks if “modern art” can “represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom?” I discuss how the notions of both subjective and aesthetic autonomy that Pater refers to here have gotten a bad rap for the past century or so for helping facilitate the liberal, capitalist, and imperialist projects of the nineteenth century. I then argue, however, that the version of autonomy described in the writings of Pater and other Victorian aesthetes and decadents is actually quite different from the bourgeois, Enlightenment notion of sovereign subjectivity that has been rightfully critiqued by postmodernists and poststructuralists. I end by suggesting that aestheticist and decadent versions of autonomy, which affirm humanity's capacity to unmake and remake ourselves and our society via the aesthetic, might serve as a resource for countering the racist Western myth Sylvia Wynter refers to as “biocentricity”: the notion that humankind,and thus the hierarchies that justify the uneven distributions of power, is wholly and intractably in thrall to natural laws beyond our control.