The Writings of Roland Barthes 15523 as Lavers (146–47) points out, double articulation was soundly rejected
also by semiologists such as umberto Eco and Christian metz in their
work on the image.
24 althusser was another structuralist wary of analogical and generalist
thought (see Suchting 2004: 39); see also Barthes’s own definition
(2003: 157).
25 one noteworthy ‘solution’ to the history/structure, or change/order, debate
is to be found in evolutionary biology, where Stephen Jay Gould’s notion
of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ allows organisms to mix formal stability with
sudden seismic changes in form, across both very long and minutely short
periods of time (Jay Gould 2002: especially chapter 9).
26 The shifters that Barthes uses himself—‘voilà’ (here), ‘voyez’ (look) and
other shifter commands in his own writing—are underlined by Butor (1974:
380–1). mallarmé is a key referent for Lecercle (1989: 61 ff.) who notices
deep similarities in Barthes’s and mallarmé’s use not only of the quote but
also of the ‘shifter’.
27 Though ready-to-wear manufacture had existed in France for a century,
practised by France’s Jewish community, it was decimated by the nazi
deportations (Steele 1998: 281).
28 only for madsen, a sympathetic biographer of Chanel, to remind us that
Courrèges’s company was 50 per cent owned by L’oréal, ‘a sign of the
times’ that Chanel was able to avoid (ibid.).
29 Butor calls Barthes’s 1967 piece on Chanel and Courrèges an
‘indispensable complement’ to The Fashion System (396), and he
imagines the pleasure for Barthes of being invited into the women’s
‘citadelle’ (ibid.). Butor even considers The Fashion System as a pseudo-
Ph.D. thesis, because all of the quotes from the various women’s
magazines are not listed (as is the case in its forerunner, chapter 4 here).
Butor also points out that the citations often involve English words, making
the whole corpus into a kind of ‘foreign’ language, redolent no doubt of
the influence of British styles in 1960s France.
30 Interestingly it is the Surrealist Pierre reverdy that Chanel claims is the
greatest of poets, and certainly not Cocteau who, she insists, was far
from original (madsen 1990: 301). This is something that Barthes does not
mention in his literary roll-call.
31 Indeed, as Calvet argues (1973: 79–80, 96), it was written fashion, or the
literature of fashion, which allowed Barthes to move on to literature proper
and analyse it semiologically. In fact, in Calvet’s view, Barthes had come to
a bit of a dead end in the early 1960s, unable to get close to how literature
actually works; and it was precisely the decision to work on written,
verbalized fashion that would inspire his work on Flaubert in 1967 and
then on Balzac in 1968–69.