ABSTRACT
The importance of Bourdieus theory is best understood in contrast to more familiar accounts of modernism. The Rules of Art belongs to a tradition of dialectical accounts of the aesthetic. Bourdieu emphasizes the paradoxical character of the pursuit of autonomy, which, he claims, is more realist than the realists. To understand autonomy in relation to this social microcosm is to diverge from Adorno and the many subsequent accounts of modernism that interpret it as reflecting or encoding a knowledge of the totality of modernity. Autonomy is, instead, a choice in relation to the available cultural alternatives: in Bourdieus account of Baudelaire and Flaubert, the choice to pursue autonomy is a double refusal, of both a respectable bourgeois art and a politicized, realist social art. The sense in which modernism remains contemporary is this: the literary field continues to be organized by ongoing struggles over autonomy in relation to changing internal and external forces.
