70 The Language of Fashion
(which of course do not have a monopoly on totality any more than it
does). In other words, the pertinence principle appears inevitable from
the moment when we refuse to conflate, in absolute terms, language
and the real and when we see that the link which unites the one to
the other is one of validity and not one of truth. The application of
pertinence then has nothing to do with scientistic ‘rigour’ (with carefully
delimiting the object in order to study it in all ‘modesty’ and ‘objectivity’),
but corresponds rather to a reaction against a certain positivism in the
social sciences, when they refuse to recognize in their analyses of the
real the distant nature of their own language, no matter how ‘banal’.
Furthermore (and this is its second advantage) the pertinence
principle, though a guide for focused work on a very specific object,
allows for a better knowledge of the whole set of processes of
meaning. Certainly these processes are now well elucidated in terms
of articulated language.^11 But what about the other systems, made up
of objects whose original existence is not that of signification, but to
which the social human being (that belonging precisely to sociology)
gives new meanings? What happens within a collection of objects,
when humans decide to give it the task of transmitting meaning? how
does the collection become system (outside which there could be no
communication)? how does meaning come to humans? This question,
which defines semiology, needs two replies, one intensive, the other
extensive. With regard to the former, we need on the one hand to tackle
once and for all that very structure of an object that is independent of
language, and it is contemporariness itself which requires this: these
days there is a constant use made of the concepts of meaning which
are applied to all sorts of objects and phenomena; be it concessions
to fashion in vocabulary, or recourse to a new word which is aimed at
replacing nominally the old determinist schema, there is nothing today,
from the cinema to the machine, which is not deemed ‘language’.
however, calling these phenomena ‘language’ is still to remain purely
at the level of metaphor; for what makes something language is not
the expression of a certain immateriality by a certain materiality but the
existence of a differential system of discontinuous units; this is to the
extent that, for each of the phenomena considered, no one has been
able to establish an exhaustive system and thus the concepts of meaning
and of language remain hypothetical or metaphorical; so, by engaging
in the setting up of a semantic system for an object like clothing, we