Barthes held that proletarian culture never exists, only bourgeois ideology

Evidence

Barthes argues that all culture, except the avant-gardes, which themselves depend on the bourgeoisie, is bourgeois culture: ”in a bourgeois culture, there is neither proletarian culture nor proletarian morality, there is no proletarian art; ideologically, all that is not bourgeois is obliged to borrow from the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois ideology can therefore spread over everything and in so doing lose its name without risk … there are revolts against bourgeois ideology. This is what one generally calls the avant-garde” (139). — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 231

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precisely captures how Barthes defined avant-garde — as revolt from within bourgeois culture.
• XREF: connects to: Barthes’s war on the bourgeois targeted cultural studies’ own populist constituency. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 216; Postmodern theory holds that no one escapes culture’s ideological constructions — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 228; Ideology existed only from the bourgeois period onward — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2366

Broader Connections

• Ideology existed only from the bourgeois period onward #complicates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2366