Synopsis
‘To Autonomise’ asks how making’s current plight might engage with the modern arts’ legacy. The schism between the creator’s approach to making’s task and audience response (‘aesthesis’) to it and its upshots (gests) focuses a consideration of making’s response to its predicament. It places particular emphasis on making’s need to cut itself away from the commonsense knowledges at work in everyday life.
As Agamben proposes in ‘The Man without Content’, making’s vital interest is to situate itself elsewhere to that of its audiences. This discussion explores some of the implications of pursuing this vital interest for both making and responses (especially written) to it.
The role of the machinery of mass representation in fixing the terms of such relations is considered. Making is challenged to hold to its being-beyond-reason while having to recognise its own appropriation by the agents of representation as its now founding condition.
Under this hybridity the possibility and meaning of ‘originality’ is at stake and performing turns around questions of ‘tactics’. ‘Allegoresis’ is introduced.
The textual ‘voices’ of Blanchot, Duchamp, Derrida/Stiegler, Prynne, and Kafka also contribute to this foray into autonomy.