Barthes’s war on the bourgeois targeted cultural studies’ own populist constituency.

Evidence

By ”bourgeoisie,” Barthes generally means the petite-bourgeoisie: the lower-middle and middle-middle class fractions. He does not mean the haute-bourgeoisie of the literary elite, the high-culture class in opposition to which postmodern cultural studies is positioned. In terms of class politics, Barthes is denouncing, even waging war against, one of cultural studies’ prime constituencies: the ”ordinary” consumers of popular culture, the nonor anti-elite classes invoked by populism. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 216

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the anti-populism of modernist high-cultural contempt the book already traced through Marcuse. — connects to: Barthes held that proletarian culture never exists, only bourgeois ideology — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 231; Barthes subordinated political critique to structural-linguistic semiological demonstration — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 248