About Roland Bothes

I was recently wittering about how our (my?) concerns regarding authenticity have shifted from the analogue to the digital and accidentally came up with the notion of a ones-and-zeroes semiotician called Roland Bothes. Well, I couldn’t let that lie so I turned to ChatGPT (which would have given Barthes endless pleasure since in French it sounds like “Chat, j’ai pété”, or “Cat, I farted”) in an attempt to find out how it would deal with the sort of questions upon which Barthes himself chewed. (For the uninitiated, in Barthes’ most celebrated book, Mythologies, he considered to be familiar aspects of French culture and attempted to deduce not what they were but what they represented, what they meant.) 

Thus, in his chapter on steak-frites, Barthes declares that: 

...steak is in France a basic element, nationalized even more than socialized. It figures in all the surroundings of alimentary life: flat, edged with yellow, like the sole of a shoe, in cheap restaurants; thick and juicy in the bistros which specialize in it; cubic, with the core all moist throughout beneath a light charred crust, in haute cuisine. It is a part of all the rhythms, that of the comfortable bourgeois meal and that of the bachelor's bohemian snack. It is a food at once expeditious and dense, it effects the best possible ratio between economy and efficacy, between mythology and its multifarious ways of being consumed. 

Whereas. when I asked the farting cat what steak-frites represents, the best it could manage was:

French and Belgian bistro culture: It's a staple of traditional cafés, brasseries, and bistros, especially in France and Belgium.

Simplicity and quality: The dish is built from only a few components, so the quality of the meat, cooking technique, and fries are emphasized.

Comfort food with elegance: Steak-frites is considered both approachable and refined—suitable for a casual meal but also common in more upscale restaurants.

A culinary classic: It has become one of the most recognizable dishes associated with French-speaking European cuisine, much as fish and chips are associated with Britain.

All well and good, but ultimately it’s a French bistro dish that represents French bistro dishes. Hardly incisive. Hey, I guess most people asking questions about food will want to know about food, what it tastes like rather than its role in a universe of signification. So I suppose if I went for an area where semiotics was intrinsically bound up with the subject I might find something more interesting. OK, then, flatulent feline:

What does “Roland Barthes” represent? 

And this is what it came up with:

Roland Barthes refers to Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist, philosopher, and critic who had a major influence on literary studies, cultural studies, semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), and post-structuralist thought.

If you're asking what Roland Barthes "represents" in intellectual history, he is most closely associated with:

1. Semiotics (the study of signs and meaning) — Barthes analyzed how everyday objects, images, advertisements, fashion, and media communicate cultural meanings beyond their literal function.
2. The idea of "myth" in modern culture — In his book Mythologies, he argued that societies turn cultural values and ideologies into things that appear "natural" or self-evident. For example, an advertisement may sell not just a product but ideas about success, beauty, or patriotism.
3. Structuralism and post-structuralism — Barthes helped develop structuralist approaches to literature and culture, then later moved toward ideas that influenced post-structuralist thought.
4. "The Death of the Author" — In one of his most famous essays, Barthes argued that the meaning of a text should not be determined solely by what its author intended. Instead, meaning is created through the reader's interpretation and the cultural context of reading.

In a single sentence, Barthes represents the idea that culture is a system of signs and meanings that can be decoded, revealing the hidden assumptions and power structures behind everyday life.

Well, that’s a pretty efficient summary of the ideas expressed in Barthes’ major works, but in his own terms it misses the whole bloody point, doesn’t it? Just as steak-frites is about far more than an embodiment of French bistro cuisine, let alone meat and potatoes, Barthes is bigger than his semiotics. He represents Paris, the postmodern, cigarettes, being more fun than Adorno, Gilbert Adair, tequila-fuelled arguments in student flats at 3 in the morning, that Eng Lit undergraduate with kohl-rimmed eyes you were trying and failing to impress, being a bloody smartarse, doing a masters in cultural studies, still grinding on with this blog after two decades. AI knows all about Barthes and utterly fails to understand him. “Roland Barthes refers to Roland Barthes” indeed. Shades of Gradgrind.

Facts notwithstanding, ChatGPT also leaves out the best reality nugget of all, that Barthes died after being run over by a laundry van, following a long lunch with François Mitterand. (What does Mitterand represent? Best not to ask, I suspect.) And that of course wasn’t even Mitterand’s most memorable meal.

About the structural monotonists

Sometimes it’s hard to quantify what precisely got lost as the golden age of blogging was superseded by the implacable progress of social media. It’s the overall tone more than anything; maybe I’m being wilfully nostalgic, but I remember zingy one-liners, only occasionally interrupted by gruff thuggishness (for which there was usually an apology the following morning). In these grimly polarised days, it’s the other way round as we have to mudlark the gems from the black goop of the culture war.

So it’s nice to acknowledge a leading light of the old school, the artist formerly known as Patroclus, who was sighing the other day about a client’s complaint that AI is baffled by a paragraph that contains more than three sentences and spurns any ideas contained there. OK, so she said it on Facebook, but for a fleeting moment it didn’t feel like Facebook.

About Gianni Infantino

It’s funny to think that in the early years of this blog, when I discussed authenticity, it was usually in strictly analogue terms, about fake Asias and fake Europes, fake beaches, Ernie Wise’s fake hair (which was in fact a fake of a fake). It’s almost as if Barthes and Baudrillard had been sent as decoys, so we wouldn’t notice that the real fakery was creeping up on us in the forms of ones and zeroes and then suddenly your job’s been handed to a bot. (Placeholder: an AI semiologist called Roland Bothes?)

In related news, for reasons of ethics and taste and lack of emotional bandwidth, I probably won’t be watching the World Cup, which finally shudders into effect in the next few days. But the whole shebang will doubtless offer much material over which bedroom postmodernists can stroke their chins. Barney Ronay has started early: 

This is Gianni Infantino’s world now, a man who carries with him at all times that oddly alluring sense of complete conviction in his own inauthenticity...

About whiteness and purity

Matt Chorley of the BBC has made a mistake. Referring to Nigel Farage’s response to the killing of Henry Nowak, Chorley said that the Reform leader used the phrase “white cold rage”. In fact, he’d said “pure cold rage”. The journalist subsequently apologised, explaining that he’d misremembered.

Well, any inaccuracy in reporting needs to be acknowledged but I’m not clear why this one in particular warrants an apology. For a start, the original phrase was clearly figurative. Rage is neither cold, nor pure. Neither, for that matter, is it white. I do understand that in the current febrile atmosphere, words that might have racial connotations should be treated with caution, but if “white” is a dangerous adjective then surely so is “pure”. Both might be used, together or separately, in the furtherance of racial hygiene and similarly bonkers eugenicist notions, for example. So Farage appears to be aggrieved not by the suggestion that he used a potentially inflammatory adjective, but that he used a different potentially inflammatory adjective from the potentially inflammatory adjective that he did use.

Of course, a few months ago accusations resurfaced that Farage might have used rather more robust language in his adolescence, although apparently that was “tongue-in-cheek schoolboy banter” so that’s OK then.

PS: In a deeply morbid way, I now really want to hear Farage’s Desert Island Discs. Although I doubt if they’d approach the, um, purity of his political idol’s selection.

Not about Christopher Plummer but maybe about Stevie Wonder

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, in my opinion one of the greatest novels of the 20th or any other century, the narrator, the pianist Ryder, is unreliable but we never really find out why. Is he dreaming or hallucinating or maybe just dying? Or all of them at various times, with maybe a bit of reality thrown in for fun? Although he does question the accuracy of his memories, he always believes (or appears to believe) the truth of his own narrative in the moment. Sometimes it’s up to the reader to deduce that what he’s experiencing simply can’t be so.

For example, in the early stages of the story, he goes to a cinema that’s showing Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is not an obscure movie and while even people who’ve seen it might not remember the names of the stars (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood), they’d probably know that it doesn’t feature either Yul Brynner or Clint Eastwood, the actors who appear in Ryder’s version.

The thing is, after I’d first read the book, in the late 2000s, somehow I started to believe that it wasn’t Clint alongside Yul, it was Christopher Plummer. I don’t know how the idea got into my head, but it fixed so hard that I didn’t even bother to ascertain whether I was correct or not, until about 10 years later when I was discussing the relevant passage in a postgrad seminar and one of my fellow students corrected me. I’d got the wrongness wrong. (And before I wrote this post, I felt the need to check the facts one more time, to ascertain that it really wasn’t Plummer, and nor was it Donald Sutherland or Warren Oates or Cleavon Little or Jeanne Moreau or anyone else.)

Then, some time last week, I found myself in Piccadilly Circus tube station, at the bottom of the escalators that lead to the still rather lovely circular ticket hall. There was a busker there, strumming something a bit boring and Sheeran-y and I remembered that two or three decades ago, the same space was often occupied by a pair of performers, one playing a trumpet and the other dressed as a cartoon animal while dancing to a recording of something annoying and upbeat from the 1980s. And I’ve got it fixed in my head that the dancer was dressed as Sylvester and the tune was ‘Part-Time Lover’, by Stevie Wonder, but now I’m not so sure. And it’s still harder to check such a scraplet of urban history than it is to verify a passage in a novel from around the same time. Maybe it was Wile E. Coyote and ‘Two Hearts’, by Phil Collins. Or possibly Dogtanian and ‘Walk of Life’, by Dire Straits. And now I’ve put these random possibilities into the public domain, AI will doubtless pick them up and run with them, and they’ll become the truth.

On the journey to Piccadilly, I was reading Dr. No, by my new favorite author, Percival Everett. Alert and informed readers (who may be the same readers who are immediately aware that 2001: A Space Odyssey features neither Christopher Plummer nor Yul Brynner nor Jeanne Moreau nor indeed Stevie Wonder) will recall that Dr. No  is also the title of a book by Ian Fleming. (Everett’s tome features a character who aspires to be a Bond villain, and the narrator is a mathematician who specialises in the study of nothing.) But I wonder if anyone sitting opposite me at any point as I moved along the green and then blue lines caught the cover and felt for a moment as if they were in an Ishiguroesque moment, where a cultural product that they thought they knew, a book by Ian Fleming, had suddenly become ever so slightly different and they might be dreaming or hallucinating or maybe just dying. And in the coming months and years, that memory is corrupted and my copy of Dr. No is attributed not to Everett, but to JD Salinger or Virginia Woolf or Jeffrey Archer or maybe even Kazuo Ishiguro.

PS: From Dr. No, not the Fleming one:

I hardly ever remembered my dreams, which seemed right and fair as I rarely recalled my waking life during sleep.

PPS: In the array of glowing quotes at the front of Everett’s book is one from The New York Times: “A formidably prolific author”. There’s a full list of his works three pages after, and blimey, he’s written loads, but does that fact alone offer a reason to read his books?

About a teacher

I’ve been very lucky with teachers. Chris Brooks, who taught me about Blake and Dickens. Campbell MacKay, who taught me about Beckett and Stoppard. John O’Brien, who taught me that bizarre song, ‘The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling’. (He also taught me about the Congress of Vienna and the Spanish Civil War, but it’s the song that stuck.)

All long gone, of course. And a few days ago, another joined them when I learned that Professor Peter Thomson of the University of Exeter had died. He was a devotee of Brecht and Shakespeare, a mischievous iconoclast and a very kind man. I’ve read several heartfelt tributes already, from people who knew him far more deeply than I did, and there will be many more.

The thing is, he shouldn’t by rights have been my teacher, because he was in the drama department and I was doing single honours English. But I was lucky enough in my final year to get a place on an interdisciplinary course that he ran, although “interdisciplinary” barely covers the weird, wriggly beast. It was called The Secret Lives of the Victorians and combined elements of art, history, politics and psychoanalysis, with a dose of drama thrown in for fun. We looked at some of the odder figures of 19th-century Britain, such as the secularist-turned-Theosophist Annie Besant and the Bedlam artist Richard Dadd, and pondered the sexuality of the Marquess of Queensberry. The Pre-Raphaelites also featured heavily. I have vague memories of dressing up as Oscar Wilde and doing a ventriloquist act with a Margaret Thatcher (Victorian values!) squeaky dog toy. Peter had a healthy contempt for the Gradgrindian metrics of academic assessment and at the end he gave everyone exactly the same mark.

His course reinforced my instinct that context, especially social and historical context, is vital to understanding and fully appreciating any media and in retrospect had a big impact on much of my later work (especially the Radiohead book) and, more recently, my own teaching. I’d been in touch with Peter occasionally over the years, but now I really wish I’d told him how important his teaching was to me. So, next best thing, I’m telling you instead. But without the squeaky Margaret Thatcher.

Richard Dadd, Come Unto These Yellow Sands (1842)

PS: Peter’s obit in the Guardian.

About Dada

Yesterday I had a spare half-hour in class after prepositions and obligations and stuff and asked the students whether we are entering a post-literate age and, if so, who or what is to blame and a charming 18-year-old Slovakian suggested that the whole thing started not with smartphones and ChatGPT but with Dada because that’s when all the typographical rules fell apart and I didn’t buy it for a moment but it was magnificent and sometimes I bloody love my job.

About the best novels

I am not in the least surprised that the Guardian’s ragebaity list of 100 best novels failed to include my own favourite, Vile Bodies. I am, however, a bit peeved that Waugh wasn’t even granted a seat alongside John Updike and Nancy Mitford and Martin Amis and Angela Carter and John le Carre in the roll call of omissions. Oh, and for the record, I bloody hate Middlemarch, which won.

Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth.