76 The Language of Fashion
the real, has perhaps led to a nominalism which was never defensible.
So there would be fears that this series of failures might compromise
the semiological project itself in the eyes of those who come into
contact with this work, if we did not think that in the social sciences
there was no definitive method (because the notion of result is itself
illusory, evanescent) and that the capacity of a system to go wrong is as
important as its capacity to work: therefore semiology will happily defer
to a new system;^30 all it needs is for the latter to be able to take shape
within the former—albeit clumsily.
Notes
1 Published in [VWA] 25 (spring), 1998 [1963?], ‘Le Cabinet des
manuscrits’, 7–28.
2 The word Fashion will be written with a capital to distinguish (clothing)
Fashion from fashion in general (in the sense of vogue, or obsession: fad
not fashion).
3 System: a collection of elements coordinated between each other. (Littré
[dictionary].)
4 Lacan, and his reticence to Σ. See Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire
[Editors’ note: presumably this is a reference to Lacan’s suspicion of
assigning a signified, as discussed in Laplanche/Leclaire’s ‘L’inconscient’
in Les Temps Modernes 183, July 1961, 81–129, see also Barthes’s
Elements of Semiology, 49].
5 Post-face to Mythologies [Editors’ note: presumably Barthes is thinking
of his reservations concerning semiological analysis as set out in ‘myth
Today’].
6 ‘any description is acceptable on condition that it be coherent, that is to
say that it be made from a determinate point of view. once the viewpoint
has been adopted, certain traits, known as pertinent, are to be isolated;
the others, not pertinent, have to be discarded’, andré martinet, Eléments
de linguistique générale, Paris, armand Colin, 1960, p. 38 [trans. Elizabeth
Palmer, Elements of General Linguistics, London, Faber and Faber, 1964, p.
40; see also Elements of Semiology, 95, translated as ‘principle of relevance’].
7 For the moment we hold to the normal meaning of the term; for a more
precise meaning, in opposition to the semiological, cf. infra.
8 The idea that clothing signifies can be only a working hypothesis for the
moment which will be justified later, cf. infra chapter 2. [Editors’ note:
Barthes is referring here to a putative chapter 2 of The Fashion System;