“True, there are revolts against bourgeois ideology. This is what one generally calls the avant-garde. But these revolts are socially limited, they remain open to salvage. First, because they come from a small section of the bourgeoisie itself, from a minority group of artists and intellectuals, without public other than the class which they contest, and who remain dependent on its money in order to express themselves. Then, these revolts always get their inspiration from a very strongly made distinction between the ethically and the politically bourgeois: what the avant-garde contests is the bourgeois in art or morals–the shopkeeper, the Philistine, as in the heyday of Romanticism; but as for political contestation, there is none. What the avant-garde does not tolerate about the bourgeoisie is its language, not its status.”

(Roland Barthes: ‘Mythologies’, translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, New York, 1984)