The Writings of Roland Barthes 137recent attempts to see demystification as common interests in Barthes’s
and Lefebvre’s earlier work (Kelly 2000), Lefebvre is a general critic of
structuralism, and as we can see in the 1966 round-table discussion,
there are flashes in the argument of what Carter calls the ‘endogeny’
debate, the extent to which history interferes with changes in fashion
forms (2003: 160–1), to which we will return in a moment. Lefebvre
comes to see structuralism in particular as a technocratic mode of
analysis mobilized by capitalism (and a fast-expanding one in 1960s
France) to reorganize French industry. It is no surprise then that Lefebvre
becomes a key player in the may 1968 rejection of technocracy, whilst
Barthes is mildly taunted by the Paris students in revolt for being a
‘Structure’ that does not ‘take to the streets’ (Calvet 1994: Chapter 8).
So Lefebvre criticized structuralism at its macro, sociopolitical level
and he also looked critically at its micro, semiological levels. Long
before may 1968, Lefebvre’s work on language had been quick to pick
up on Barthes’s work on semiology and his attempt to apply language
to clothing. Even though Lefebvre has time for Barthes’s work—Barthes
is the only structuralist that he engages with, as Elden points out—he
regretted that Barthes ‘dismisses sociology on behalf of semiology’
(quoted in Elden 2003: 113). The debate hinges on whether Barthes
accepts that, like language, clothing has a ‘double articulation’: for,
argues Lefebvre, ‘there are elementary items of clothing (underwear,
trousers or skirt, jacket or shirt, etc. perhaps liable to be classified by
pertinent aspects, like phonemes would be) and meaningful ensembles
(perhaps equivalent to morphemes)’ (64). Lefebvre’s point is that in
considering clothing as ‘syntactic’ rather than ‘lexical’, Barthes was
avoiding the question of double articulation. Indeed, in the early preface
to The Fashion System (Chapter 7 here), Barthes does not take a
position on double articulation; nor does he seem to in Elements of
Semiology, merely describing it in neutral terms. For Lefebvre, the
double articulation is the main element which divides the scientific
linguistic community (martinet, mounin), from the semiological tendency
involving a more artistic and literary view of language in which he
includes Barthes, Jakobson, but also Trubetskoy and Lévi-Strauss, and
for whom the science of language is a meta-language.^23 In other words,
for Lefebvre, in not insisting upon a double articulation in language—in
which language is both morphological and phonological, though these
levels are distinctly separate—Barthes (et al.) cannot claim a scientific