Autonomy, a word, a concept to reflect on, a fundamental human right and one of the principles of bioethics, a tangible concept and with a force so real that it creates a broad social consensus impact on our contemporary society. (John.M. Last, 2007). Autonomy is a compound word that derives from the two Greek words 'Auto' and 'Nomos'. 'Self' is the 'Self' and 'Nomos' is the 'Law' so the word by definition means self-governed. However, to attempt to understand the true meaning of Autonomy we must first understand its antinomy, Heteronomy, another compound Greek word deriving from 'Hetero', 'Other' and 'Nomos', the 'Law' which describes the situation in which you are governed by forces beyond your control. (T. Honderich, 2005). Adorno presents a detailed discussion of the autonomy of art. This essay will attempt to highlight and articulate the impact of autonomous art, through understanding the autonomous theories of Theodor Adorno and Cornelius Castoriadis. We will attempt to analyze Steve Paxton's autonomous art with respect to and contrast with my personal views as a critical observer and artistic practitioner, as my artistic endeavors are focused on pursuing autonomous art through the form of contact improvisation and free movement. For Adorno, autonomous art has an immediate message for a social construct but no direct social function. Remarkably a social function of having no function. This is what Theodor Adorno called Autonomous Art. Creating something without a purpose or function is the “subconsciously” directed “purpose” of autonomous Art. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Adorno argues that both works of art and artists should free themselves from the capitalist system and the art market, free from the capitalist culture of normality. However, through his analyses, there is a dialectical relationship between autonomy and commodification. In a more complex and philosophical approach, his position involves two functions that have no function, the social one and the aesthetic one and these two create a dialectic, supporting each other, autonomy and commodification cannot exist without the thesis and l 'antitheses that create this dialectical synthesis. (Andy Hamilton.p.251, (2009). But is autonomy an important concept worthy of research and investigation in both academia and the contemporary art world? Did autonomous art arise at the same time and as a response to the capitalism, therefore the paradoxical relationship Art is freedom and creation and not a construct of the capitalist system In an era in which, from a purely visual perspective, “art was easily absorbed by neighboring disciplines such as design, fashion, architecture or advertising for economic, political or social purposes, artists emerged with "Radical Autonomy" reminding us that "art could, and should be, a sanctuary for futility, darkness, intuition, l 'ambivalence, joy and discomfort" (E-flux.com, 2018). Theodor W. Adorno illustrated the 'economic deduction' (vol.7:331) of the cultural industry in 1983 in a complex psychological way: “since the commodity is always composed of exchange values ​​and use values, so now they are pure use values, the illusion of which must be preserved. Cultural goods, in an entirely capitalist society, are replaced by pure exchange value, which precisely in how much exchange value deceptively assumes the function of use value. Through this quid pro quo the specific fetish character of music is constituted: the direct effects on exchange value create the appearance of immediacy, which is at the same time denied by the relationship with the object, the latter based on the abstractness of the value ofexchange. All the 'psychological' derivative, every pseudo-fulfilment (Ersarzbefrieddigung) depends on this social substitution”. (vol. 14:24-5) This statement will provide the guidelines from which this essay will attempt to explore how contemporary art has misunderstood Adorno, examining the ways in which autonomous art can function ethically by understanding the theories of Adorno, Castoriadis and many other theorists. The category of autonomy, as it has been developed in critical theory since Marx, radicalizes the ideal of the Enlightenment. The dignified exit from the “self-induced immaturity” famously invoked by Kant presupposes access to culture and the time necessary to appropriate it – in short, a privileged social position and existence (Immanuel Kant, pp. 54-5 ( 1991).art has a correlation with human autonomy. Therefore, this could be understood in several ways. Through the political concepts of freedom and freedom, we can understand the importance of autonomy in art today which summarizes and refers to a broader social impact on how we might behave. and create position through concepts and habits Timothy Snyder states in his book “On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” that “Life is political not because the world cares. of how you feel, but why the world reacts to what you. The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will take place in the future. our words and our gestures, or their absence, they matter a lot” (Snyder, (2017)]. In the next paragraphs the essay will reflect on the importance of the word autonomy for Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis was a Greek-French philosopher, social critic and psychoanalyst who influenced, through his writings on autonomy and social institutions, many academics and activists. He was a professional, immersed in the idea of ​​autonomy and we can see that the word Autonomy appears in his work from its early stages as early as 1949. Castoriadis questioned and practiced autonomy in his work and daily life. He imagined a different society and posed a question: "how is it possible to reconcile the autonomy of individuals with the existence of real social laws and with the existence of a State, with the meaning of that mechanism as we know it today while maintaining a sort of of power? (Vibrating,2014) Art for many artists has a direct relationship with social issues and society. Castoriadis stated that the content of socialism is radical autonomy. Aiming to break down those who predominate and take the reins of productivity that creates antagonism with those who practice these directions as their exercise. Cornelius Castoriadis looks at the 'Nomos' of autonomy to understand it as self-government and aims at the radical transformation of society. Perhaps Castoriadis, as well as Adorno, have been misunderstood by various groups of people such as anarchists who read the word Autonomy differently. I read it as “hating the world, then opposing it” through faulty praxis in an underdeveloped and immature way of viewing the development of autonomy. Looking behind the words Castoriadis sees his perceptiveness of the word Autonomy analyzed and put into practice through his life. For many, this seems like a revolutionary fantasy, but I believe that the way Castoriadis has oriented his understanding of this transformation can be well understood through the self-manifestation of how laws and norms are created for an individual. Furthermore, a compulsion between the collective and the individual, which involves the establishment of law as the norm but not by the hetero, must be formed and reformed collectively. Autonomy must coexist with praxis and emancipation, a personal construct, onetheory that becomes a direct goal. Cornelius Castoriadis had supported organization several times, arguing that people need to commit themselves to organizing how to operate and not simply follow the orders of heteronomous and hierarchical figures (N. Et1,1984). The social conditions to which individuals have adapted are based on individual empowerment. However, if individuals begin to create, structure and follow their own laws, the possibility of generalizing autonomy shifts away from individual empowerment to a collective one. Autonomy then becomes a revolutionary concept since its nature becomes the overcoming of antagonistic relationships in a collective and inclusive manner. If self-realization becomes society's first priority, then at the same time people will be happy and will be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor to achieve and maintain their dignity and freedom. Currently this is a life led by a few, artists, intellectuals and wealthy amateurs, but the logic of autonomy imposes the need to overcome given social constraints and take responsibility for injustices, the excluded and change. the form of domination hardwired and structured into our everyday capitalist normality. For Isaiah Berlin, there are two types of freedom, negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom, freedom from education, coercion, prevention and construction. If others prevent me from doing what I might otherwise do, I am to that extent unfree; and if this area is restricted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can say that I am forced, or, perhaps, enslaved [...] You seek freedom and political freedom only if you are told to achieve a goal by other hierarchical figures human (Isaiah Berlin, (1959). In Ben Lewis's documentary, we can see that even in the arts there are artists who create works according to the instructions of "established" galleries for the sake of "filling" the space, receiving recognition and success which was prefabricated while apparently having achieved a goal by a hierarchical figure (The Contemporary Art Bubble, 2009). Positive freedom according to Berlin is free to act be master of my own destiny. “I would like my life and my decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of any kind, subject, not object; they influence me, so to speak, from the outside. I wish to be someone, not nobody; an agent - to decide, not to be decided, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of performing a human role, that is, of conceiving personal goals and policies and realizing them" (Berlin, 1991). I can definitely see a relationship between Berlin's Positive Freedom and Castoriadis' orientation on Autonomy. Berlin's way of seeing freedom could exist with the sense of how Castoriadis sees Autonomy that is more self-institutional, to be "free" and "autonomous". one must understand that one cannot exist without the other, which leads to more dialectical thinking that connects to Adorno's point of view. Adorno's critique of dialectical thinking in relation to aesthetics in art can demonstrate how art is political by nature through the practice and aesthetics of art. When this is connected to the theories and theorists examined in this essay, we can continue to explore the basic idea of ​​this Adornian dialectical theory. Quoting Adorno “Art can only be understood through its laws of motion, not according to a set of invariants. It is defined by its relationship to what it is not. The specifically artistic in art must concretely derive from its ownother; only this would satisfy the needs of a materialist-dialectical aesthetic. Art acquires from: its law of movement is its law of form. It exists only in relation to its other; it is the process that occurs with its other” (BRUNS, 2008 p.233). In fact, as JM Bernstein says, the purpose of dialectical thinking is not to resolve contradictions but to experience them in a reflective way (Bernstein, JM (2001). Theodor W Adorno had a fundamental theory of his aesthetics and this is form. But form does not it is never a concept in itself, indeed it has its others, experiential and somehow ponderous, due to the subjectivity of the artist and obviously Adorno was a dialectical and not analytical thinker, he did not want to expose concepts but put them into play in movement and then nothing will seem expect from what is not. (BRUNS,2008) The experiential therefore has an immediate connection with the individual and therefore with the social. Most art forms are very experiential when they thrive on the autonomous need to react in normality capitalist and to be guided by oneself through autonomous processes. Andre Lepecki mentioned in his book that “McKenzie analyzed how the constitutive ambiguity of the word performance emerged in the twentieth century, in two fields: what he called organizational performance with l implementation of “efficiencies” at the state, institutional, corporate and industrial levels. environment and what he called “cultural performances” denoting those that “foreground” and resist dominant norms of social control” (Lepecki, 2016). In this regard, following this essay I will try to briefly analyze my personal opinion on why dance focuses on Steve's Paxton Contact Improvisation has a privileged critical position of analysis and resistance with respect to capitalism and neoliberal rationality and subjectivity. Steve Paxton is a pioneer, a dancer with a background in martial arts who later became a member of several modern dance companies in New York in the 1960s, collaborating with the revolutionary choreographer Merce Cunningham and his partner John Cage. Steve Paxton was a pioneer not because he participated with the Avant-garde artists but because of his courage to free himself from the rationalities of dance and the hierarchical figures of heteronomous groups, freeing himself from the specificity of movements that were created by another figure. so that the dancers can illustrate each practice of the Hetero. Paxton created Contact Improvisation at a time when capitalist society and the commodification of art were thriving. It challenged the assumptions of dance and opened up new possibilities for the art form, asking what types of movement could be considered dance and how dances are made. “Contact Improvisation is an open exploration of the kinesthetic possibilities of bodies moving through contact. Sometimes wild and athletic, sometimes quiet and meditative, it is a form open to all bodies and curious minds” from the announcement of Ray Chung's workshop, London, 2009. (Contactquarterly.com, 2018) The philosophy that goes beyond contact improvisation goes against the usual dance company placement. Modern and postmodern dance is already much more inclusive. In modern dance, dancers have been viewed and used more equally than in traditional ballet institutions. Even so, contact improvisation has gone much further in balancing the partnership between dancers and loosening the teacher-student relationship. This is partly why Paxton has been considered an anarchist, even though he would prefer to call himself an individualist. The emphasis on the viewer's private, self-reflexive experience shifted the context of avant-garde art from idealized time and space, aesthetic conventions, and transcendenceto exploring one's personal and immediate relationship with literal and direct experiences and interactions. This sensitivity has allowed us to explore phenomena such as how our sense of self shifts across time and space and how our immediate experience of the world helps shape how we see ourselves in the world (Paxton, S. , & Mazzaglia, R. 2013). Steve initially followed his interest in becoming more aware of the possibilities and boundaries of the body even simply by standing. Miranda Tufnell mentioned in her book that improvisation practices were used as a source of original material and as perception training (Dance Books, 1993'). “From 1967 and for the years following contact improvisation, Paxton asked his students to do what was commonly known as the “little dance”, also described as “finding that limit beyond which one can no longer relax without falling” to due to a “supportive effort that constantly occurs in the body”. While standing, the dancers did not perform, but rather watched their “body perform its function.” “Our body is not in space like things; inhabits or haunts a space. It applies to space like a hand to an instrument; and when we desire to move we do not move the body as we move an object. We transport it without tools as if by magic, because it is ours and because through it we have direct access to space. For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret effective movements, those most deeply tied to the humoral infrastructure, help shape our perception of things” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). It is these acts that profoundly affect our unconscious and the energetic composition of our bodies that create change. But they are made invisible by the success-focused ways of our rational mind, reflected in patriarchy, whiteness, ableism, and so on. When we forget that our experience is not in the mind but in the body, we start to think that the way forward is to fill our brain with information, but we neglect to pay attention to our deeper unconscious patterns. Contact improvisation appears to be a development of Paxton's previous experiences. interest in pedestrian movement. Paxton also insists on the need for “peripheral vision” and peripheral attention to coexist both in one's own dance and in the immediate understanding of the partner's potential for leverage, movement and support. On the one hand, in contact improvisation awareness develops from within and is always directed inwards; on the other hand, the dancer must be connected with the space between himself and his partner. He must realize who else is moving in the space, without inhibiting his actions and reactions (Paxton. ,2011). This mental state requires attention that derives not so much from sight but from other senses, such as the tactile sense (which allows the dancer to feel pressure and touch), balance, the perception of gravity and spatial orientation. Dancers are in fact taught to "see through the body" and "listen through the skin". For example, even when the dancer is off the ground, they may be able to feel the ground through their partner's body. . By working on these principles, contact improvisation becomes a tool to change and extend ordinary habits and towards a redefinition of the self. Through the causal relationship between the two interacting bodies and the emergence of sensory reactions, sweating and blushing, embarrassment and ease, reluctance and availability. The supportive and trusting attitude of Contact Improvisation encourages our impulses in its participants.