This indicates the condition, with reference to an individual or a social sphere of activities, of being governed by one’s own (or the group’s own) laws. These “laws” are not necessarily explicit regulations, but rather definite regularities or tendencies. The autonomy of the field of literature or art is the result of a long process, begun during the Renaissance, undone during the (neo-)Classical period, but resumed at the beginning of the 19th century. This particular autonomy is expressed in a refusal to place art or literature at the service of political or even moral necessity, and by the demand that the essence of all artistic practice be regarded in terms of a linguistic labor.

Pascal Durand proposes by means of this concept to designate the properly social norms to which the rituals of literary life correspond, as well as, and most especially, the formal operations of literature itself. The “sense of the formal” associated with Mallarmé points up the ability of the poet to become conscious in reflection and to make aesthetic use of specific social constraints to which poetry is subject in accordance with its “autonomy”.

This designates in Bourdieu’s sociology a strong adhesion (but which is not the result of deliberation) on the part of a social agent to the values and regularities of his sphere of activity.

Process whereby a subject takes into account his own procedures in thought or action. In the realm of poetic language, reflexivity refers to a poem’s mentioning its own formal operations.