Naturally, the cultural workers themselves have repeatedly pointed out the partially ideological contents of this specific conception of autonomy. It is ideological mainly with regard to the delusion it creates: its purpose is to substantiate the freedom the middle class is attributing to itself, while in the reality of its day-to-day routines the bourgeois society has long lost this freedom. Because cultural work is the manifestation of an inner or social necessity rather than of an economic or class agenda, it is able to uphold the illusion that somewhere within society (with developed capitalism and the all-pervading commodity form as its transaction basis) something exists which is not just another commodity. The autonomy it conveys is a privilege that is granted almost exclusively to cultural workers who in turn have to make it real by putting their hearts and souls into it which turns them into protagonists of an idea that remains unrealisable in the everyday lives of the middle class. So the (relative) autonomy of productions in the cultural sphere is in itself heteronomous because it depends on ideological images and an audience who wants to see it realised at least in the cultural sector. An audience spending money on avant-garde art precisely because the art is not available for purchase in the way the bourgeois subject is.
Cultural autonomy thus implies a dialectic that needs to be further unfurled, sometimes even beyond the limits of our resilience. For in spite of its ideological meaning for the self-delusion of the bourgeois society it contains a shimmer of utopia, a foretaste of a non-alienated, self-determined life. It is comprised of the non-compliance (even if only symbolically simulated) with framework conditions whose violation only avant-garde art is able to get away with (as a manifestation of its status). Because this is exactly what the art is expected to do.
In spite of the material conditions under which the majority of cultural work is currently taking place, the entailed promise that a different life is if not possible then at least imaginable, is the incentive keeping those who still do cultural work in spite of adverse circumstances, at it. If and where we work in the cultural sector, we do it against the horizon of a promise of freedom which shall never be surrendered.
And because this freedom can only exist in advanced art, we shall also never surrender avant-garde art. Only in this symbolic way we are able to overcome our hopelessness and our enslavement to the maxims of valorisation and hegemony which blatantly confront us in everything else we do.
Because we are aware of or are at least anticipating this, we will remain committed to the cultural sector and it doesn’t matter what the work conditions are and how high a price we have to pay in our private lives. For this is the way to gain the maximum possible personal autonomy provided by the society we live in.
Günther Friesinger ( 2013): Why we do cultural work in spite of it all…. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 02 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/why-we-do-cultural-work-in-spite-of-it-all/
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