About June 2016: And then Brexit

Brexit was the inevitability that nobody (including a number of its high-profile supporters, apparently) saw coming. I was out of the country for most of the run-up so maybe my excuse for missing the surge of contrarian fuck-you that propelled the Leave vote over the line is more plausible than that of those who were supposedly leading the campaign to stay. But I was in London on polling day itself and awoke to the news the following morning that, as I put it at the time: 

...my country, the land of Shakespeare and Churchill and Bez out of the Happy Mondays, is regressing into a 1950s-style suburban dystopia where people run away in terror at the sight of subtitled movies, and are turned to feral rage by the merest sniff of balsamic vinegar. 

I was sad, but not yet angry. What changed that was the contribution of someone who hadn’t voted to leave but clearly thought leaving was a very good idea (even if “clearly”, “thought” and “idea” are concepts that don’t exactly settle easily on him.)

Donald Trump, at that time best known for cosplaying a successful businessman on a reality TV show, arrived in Scotland and tweeted that everyone was delighted after they “took their country back” despite the fact that those north of the border had voted two-to-one to remain. For many people, not just Scots, this explosion of idiocy (mild compared to his later episodes, granted, but we had no idea) just added to the sense of hurt. And we took to Twitter, because in those days that’s what Twitter was for. And I called him a “witless fucking cocksplat”.

And then it all kicked off, to be honest. I was lumped in with something apparently called Scottish Twitter, which was nice because they were even ruder, calling him among other things a “knuckle-brained fart lozenge”, a “degenerate corned beef face syrup wearing wankstain” and a “hamster heedit bampot”. And, for the first and only time in my life I went properly viral and David Tennant read out my tweet on American telly and it was all lovely and Brexit was still a thing but, hey, at at least Trump wasn’t going to become President, was he? I mean, the world couldn’t go *that* mad.

PS: AI airbrushes me from history once again...

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.