The Writings of Roland Barthes 125The three S’s: Sociology,
semiology, structuralism
Modern democratic society has made fashion into a sort of cross-
subsidising organism, destined to establish an automatic equilibrium
between the demand for singularity and the right for all to have it.
roLanD BarThES in ‘Dandyism and Fashion’
There is far more to the relationship between semiology and
structuralism than merely historical conjuncture. Both borrow heavily
from Saussurianism. Both mobilize the key human paradox that
social and human phenomena, in the manner in which they act as
‘communicators’ between humans, combine the arbitrariness of form
with the rigour of context. Indeed, it seems to us now that structuralist
theory obscured semiology throughout the 1960s through the debates
(especially with marxism) around the notion of human agency. It was
only when structuralism was perceived as compromised by the events
of may 1968 in France that semiology could re-emerge, albeit with
the new name of ‘semiotics’. Though still using Saussurian differential
philosophy after may 1968, semiotics was a far more corrosive form of
social research than semiology or structuralism, keen to distance itself
from any technocratic or positivist uses ascribed to structuralism, and
‘terroristic’ in its application to Western thought, be it in the hands of a
Derrida or a Lacan. Semiotics emerged then out of post-structuralism.
however, as the name ‘post-structuralism’ suggests, there were elements
of structuralism maintained within it and it is simplistic to suggest that
post-structuralism simply swept away its structuralist forerunner. By the
same token, it is dangerous to subsume semiology within structuralism.
on the one hand, it is premature to consider Barthes’s deployment of
semiology in Mythologies as ‘structuralist’. on the other hand, it would
be churlish to divorce semiology and structuralism. In this section, we
will look then at how semiology competed with structuralism in Barthes’s
writing on fashion, but also how within this competition small signs of
the later post-structuralist practices could be seen emerging well before
the seismic epistemological and political changes of may 1968.
Semiology came before structuralism in Barthes’s work. In fact
Barthes’s ‘structuralist’ phase did not really start properly until his work