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…