Many readers have been burning with curiosity – well, a couple of readers have been mildly interested – to know what is meant by the phrase “Barthesian mytheme”. According to Mark Kaplan at Charlotte Street, bruschetta is “little more than a Barthesian mytheme”. It may be rather less than one – we are not told.

While I promised to explain the phrase in this post, I now find that it would be unnecessary, nay, inappropriate to do so. This is because you all know already what it means. To claim otherwise is to be a class traitor.

Kaplan’s original piece on bruschetta as Barthesian mytheme drew a chorus of mockery at Harry’s Place, not least from Old Peculier (yours truly), whose heckle: “Barthesian mytheme? By ‘eck, we never ‘ad those in Bolton when I were a lass,” is singled out for particular opprobrium by “K-Punk”. Warning - his website looks like a duff blackboard:

Readers outside the UK might like to take a read through these 'comments' to get a sense of the intellectual climate here. I thought Badiou's description on Friday of the attacks on Derrida after his death as 'Texan' was a little cheap, partly because it is surely Britain which is the world capital of proud anti-intellectualism. Contra Chirac, here's nothing inherently 'Anglo-Saxon' about neo-liberalism (just as there is nothing inherently 'European' about Statist protectionism); if there is an Anglo-Saxon sensibility, though, it is manifest in the disdain for theory, an empiricist distrust of any discourse not conducted in the language of 'plain speaking common-sense'.

What marks this out as definitively petit-bourgeois is not the ignorance itself, but the will to ignorance. Of course, Mark's piece is perfectly clear; almost certainly the sneerocrats are well aware of the meaning of a 'Barthesian mytheme'. The point, though, is they have to pretend that they don't. The comment, 'By 'eck we never 'ad those in Bolton when I were a lass' is especially revealing. The - parodied but identified-with voice is that of a working class Other, the Other who does not know. It is this - defiantly ignorant - Other who is the figure to whom anti-intellectual derision must appeal. Needless to say, this Other is the product of anti-intellectual discourse, the fantasy figure around which it is structured.

The ruling class project - in pop cultural terms, you can see it at work in Mclaren's treatment of John Lydon in the 70s, and in Endemol's manipulated image of the working class as drunk idiots on Big Brother now - has always been to flatten out the working class into thoughtless, bovine zombies, whose uneducated 'authenticity' and 'honesty' are to be both feared and revered. Yes, anti-intellectualism is to be found in those members of the working class complicit in their own oppression, but the only class interests it serves are those of the bourgeoisie.

That’s me told. I’m a fully paid-up member of the sneerocracy.

It is just as well that “K-Punk” has no time for “plain speaking common sense”, since precious little of it is to be found on his website.

Is pantology a Barthesian mytheme? You know the answer to that.