The Writings of Roland Barthes 129(but not leave untainted) the semiological project. This also leads us
to suggest that Calvet’s justification for inverting his analysis of The
Fashion System and Elements of Semiology (1973: 115)—based on
his theory that The Fashion System was basically all set up and ready
to run before Barthes published Elements of Semiology in 1964—was
perhaps a little hasty, in that it does not allow for a slow gestation of
the method and theories of The Fashion System across the whole ten-
year period 1957–67 (it also suggests that the early preface to The
Fashion System could be considered as a first stab at the Elements of
Semiology). That said, Calvet’s suggestion that The Fashion System was
done and dusted before Elements of Semiology was published in 1964
is actually felicitous in that it allows us to see how important the work on
clothing history between 1957 to 1959 actually was for his subsequent
semiological analyses. Thus Barthes appears in the early preface to be
highly sensitive to the dangers of turning semiology into a sociology,
that is of making semiology into a critique of ideology; and thereby he
was pre-empting (but unfortunately for him this pre-empting remained
unpublished) the critiques of mounin, of Prieto, of molino, of martinet,
and displaying a sensitivity which is turned into a virtue in the foreword
to The Fashion System. In promoting linguistics over semiology Barthes
was now clearly adopting a structuralist point of view. at the same time
however, he was slightly embarrassed by the scientism and the naivety
of believing that one could simply apply semiology, without any problem,
as a meta-language, to fashion, to the city, to food. This was to be an
important post-structuralist critique of structuralism’s scientism that
was to come to the fore in the turmoil of may 1968, and a critique that
allowed semiology to then become semiotics, a much more fluid, less
rigid application of Saussurian linguistics to social phenomena, which
would dominate in the 1970s.
It was not just semiology and structuralism doing battle behind the
scenes in the 1960s, but also semiology and sociology. Barthesian
semiology was looking not just at clothing, but also food, suggesting that
both of these objects displayed a central, fundamentally sociological,
opposition in that they both ‘classify their signifieds in virtue of the crucial
cultural opposition between work and leisure’ (moriarty 1991: 80). For
moriarty this points to an overlap between semiology and sociology;
but we can now see from the early preface to The Fashion System
(Chapter 7 here) that Barthes was keen to distinguish semiology sharply