132 OTT PUUMEISTER The autonomy of the aesthetic function Ott Puumeister Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu Jakobi St. 2, 51014 Tartu, Estonia e-mail: ott.puumeister@gmail.com ... when art ceases to be non-art it is no longer art either. Jacques Rancière In “What Is Poetry?”, a text from the early 1930s, Roman Jakobson takes a rather defensive stand in response to certain critics and “detractors”: “Neither Tynjanov nor Mukařovský nor Šklovskij nor I – none of us has ever proclaimed the self-sufciency of art. [...] What we stand for is not the separatism of art but the autonomy of the aesthetic function” (Jakobson 1981a[1933–1934]: 749–750). In 1921, Jakobson (quoted in Erlich 1973: 628) had defned the “subject of literary scholarship” as “literariness” (‘lit- eraturnost’) and not “literature in its totality”. A subject of a new literary scholarship, a new discipline had to be given its proper object, which in turn had to be defned on a previously unstudied foundation, independent of the infuence of naïve psychological-historical views on literary production. At the centre of the following paper is exactly this ‘autonomy of the aes- thetic function’, which had to found the new literary discourse. It has as its aim to investigate the concept of the aesthetic function in its twofold char- acter, as it reveals itself mainly in the works of Roman Jakobson and Juri Lotman. What do I mean by the twofold character of the aesthetic function? Put simply, the latter acts both 1) as a concrete and empirically delineated object of analysis and 2) as a philosophical concept striving to demarcate the realm of art from other areas of society and culture. Tese two aspects of the aesthetic function cannot be peacefully integrated: as soon as empirical principles for the study of concrete aesthetic forms have been put into place, the aesthetic function as a philosophical concept slips away from the grasp of these principles and says that the aesthetic cannot be reduced to certain historical forms. It is this tension that is my main interest.