The Writings of Roland Barthes 153tendencies is rarely disturbed by historical events. In fact, like economic
history, cultural history marches to a different drummer’ (31).
11 The influence of ‘detail’ in the theatre is central to Barthes’s subsequent
work on fashion; see for example the use of detail in his 1960 preface
to roger Pic’s photographs of the Berliner Ensemble (Barthes 1993a:
893–94), in which Barthes suggests that the tiniest clothing detail—a
half-opened neck of a shirt for example—becomes a cipher of the human
body’s ‘vulnerability’, and therefore of humanity’s ‘tenderness’ central to
Brechtian theatre.
12 See ‘The Illuminated Body’ section and the ‘drag’ example in Sade,
Fourier, Loyola (1977a: 128).
13 and Barthes’s sensitivity to fashion photography, and to what it does and
does not do, is evident as early as 1959 (see chapter 2 here, note 15).
14 Jobling (1999) attempts to recontextualize and criticize what he calls
Barthes’s ‘logocentric anti-postmodern’ concentration on written fashion.
By contrast, Jobling aims to show a ‘complementarity’ between written
and visual (re)presentation of fashion in the photograph, by suggesting
that a decoding reading of both fashion photograph and caption must
be operated ‘in tandem’ (91), neither privileging nor relegating either text
or image. Thus, rather glibly, he describes Barthes’s view of the writing
of the photograph as sitting somewhere in between ‘anchorage and
relay’, in which the former suggests a ‘harmonious narrative structure’
and the latter a ‘conflictual tension’. But Jobling offers no thoughts on the
deeply complex interaction of image/text that Barthes analyses in ‘The
Photographic message’. Firstly, it is worth underlining that, given Barthes’s
fascination with the interface of word and image (especially photographs),
it seems odd to take Barthes’s division of word from image in fashion at
face value (as Jobling does, 72–74), or as set in stone. Surely the division
is a methodological and procedural one; and maybe Barthes’s main
point is to underline not so much the paucity of fashion (photography) as
a system (though, undoubtedly, he is suggesting this), but of its written
form; for Barthes concedes that the image ‘freezes an endless number of
possibilities [whereas] words determine a single certainty’ (Barthes 1985a:
13, 14, 119). This comment implies that the writing of photography can
be so much richer than that found in the captioning or ‘ekphrasis’ (i.e.
interpretation/description of ‘absent’ images) found in fashion magazines.
15 Despite Barthes’s 1962 article on Lévi-Strauss, ‘Sociology and socio-logic’
(Barthes 1987), implicitly linked to Durkheim in the early preface to The
Fashion System; see also Carter 2003: 152.
16 ‘“Blue is in Fashion This year”’ displays the earliest version of the
semiologist’s example of the traffic light, which reappears in The Fashion
System (1985a: 3.3–3.5, 29–33) and also in Elements of Semiology
before it.