The Writings of Roland Barthes 133of each ‘text’ and not necessarily an ‘intentional’ or ‘conscious’ mode.
nor should this be considered, Granger hinted, a ‘comprehensive’
analysis (as opposed to a ‘causal’ one), but as an attempt to lay bare the
‘abstract structuration’ of the manifesto, and not a ‘direct transposition
of lived experience or of lived connections’: semiology’s originality then
for Granger (and for Barthes) lay in its epistemological ability to ‘structure
the object’, one which semiology borrows from language, a ‘specifically
human phenomenon’ (134–5).
In the early preface to The Fashion System, Barthes showed himself
to be equally dialectical in his view of totality. It is worth remembering
that in 1963 ‘totality’ did not yet hold any of the (Stalinized) ‘totalitarian’
connotations that critical marxism and postmodernism have striven
since to underline. Barthes uses totality (Carter 2003: 144, 147) but
performs a critique of it at the same time, especially in relation to
origins. The archetypes of fashion forms—military, sport, work, leisure
(see Chapter 18 of The Fashion System)—can ‘explain’ fashion forms,
a diachronic approach can provide an ‘etymology’ of clothing styles,
but they say very little about how fashion recombines them in any one
fashion period. Combination and the language of presentation—the
synchronic if you like—are as much a motor of form as ‘origins’. In
other words, Barthes seemed to be asking what was the relationship
between totality (however provisional) and ‘combination’? Surely totality
was itself constantly changing, in flux. one example would be Barthes’s
four archetypes of clothing—military, sport, work and leisure—which
see themselves augmented by events; hippies ‘invent’ another, fifth,
archetype: the ethnic (or rustic/atavistic).
Indeed, Barthes was not at all insulated from a totalizing
methodology. he referred regularly to the fact that men’s fashion in
the West is, fundamentally, archetypically, derivative of (English) Quaker
fashion. Barthes is quite clearly adopting the spirit of vladimir Propp’s
analysis of the folk tale (2000 [1928])—in which, despite appearances,
the forms (or the structures) that the world’s folk tales took numbered
barely more than seven in total—and then applying this to clothing
in fashion.^17 Thus for Barthes, fashion and clothing are a ‘poor’ form
of human culture, but which have three key ‘enriching’ possibilities:
the combination of clothes items with its (almost) infinite number of
possibilities; the detail—however small—which can radically inflect a
style; and the language—written and/or visual representation—of the