ABSTRACT
The avant-garde has been, from the start, a vital coefficient of bourgeois culture. The cultural history of the bourgeoisie is the history of its gradual and painful adjustment to this conscience—an adjustment that made the bourgeoisie, despite its own worst inclinations, the moral and aesthetic beneficiary of the avant-garde's heroic labors. As for the avant-garde itself, its own history is anything but a singleminded tale of revolt against bourgeois values. The classic statement of the avant-garde view of tradition is to be found in T. S. Eliot's essay on "Tradition and the Individual Talent," published in 1919. The aesthetic principle upheld in this essay thus placed tradition at the very center of artistic consciousness, in an intimate, symbiotic relation to the innovative function in art. Eliot's conception of tradition—tradition as it was reconceived by the avant-garde—was not the "tradition" of the official custodians of bourgeois culture.
