136 The Language of Fashion
and that the marxist anthropologist maurice Godelier has tried to show
that even marx was a structuralist in his analysis of Capital (in Lane
1970: 340–58), the subtitle for this section of our essay is perhaps far
too simplistic as a suggestion. as one critic has put it, ‘structuralism
is atemporal rather than strictly ahistorical’ (Lane 1970: 17). This is
important in our assessment of Barthesian fashion theory. Indeed, the
history/structure tension was already being discussed by Barthes in
the 1950s (see Chapters 1 and 2 here, and Stafford 1998: Chapter 2),
with reverberations in the debate between histoire événementielle
(the history of events) and histoire de longue durée which the Annales
group, especially the work of Braudel, was instigating at the same
time. Barthes was very aware in 1963 that the historical critique of
structuralism came predominantly from marxism (1972: 214) and
during the 1960s other theorists such as henri Lefebvre took up the
history/structure debate in some detail.
In his 1966 critique of Lévi-Strauss, Lefebvre considered that the
history/structure debate stretched back as far as the disagreement in
ancient Greece between Eleatists (‘systemic’ thinkers) and heraclitans
(‘fluxists’), and was an important one for both hegel and marx. Lefebvre
saw structuralism—or ‘panstructuralism’ in which he included Foucault’s
rejection of ‘historicity’ in favour of ‘archaeology’—as a ‘new Eleatism’.^22
Lefebvre’s main argument was that structuralism discussed and used
the notion of ‘dimensions’, but importantly not that of ‘levels’; and, said
Lefebvre (1975: 83), ‘levels’ only ever appeared once in Lévi-Strauss’s
work, in the latter’s critique of the idea that synchrony and diachrony
are separate (see Chapter 7 here, note 18). But this was only part of
Lefebvre’s critique of structuralism.
The joust between Barthes and Lefebvre in the 1966 round-table
discussion alongside Jean Duvignaud (Chapter 8 here) represents a
typical debate of the time on the semiological and structuralist methods
then in vogue. Lefebvre is keen to assert a historical—some might say
‘historicist’—dimension to the study of fashion forms, a view indicative
of a wider debate on the Left at this time, in which ‘Structure’ and
‘history’ were seen as mutually exclusive. For a historical materialist
such as Lefebvre, it was not so much ‘system’ that was anathema in the
semiological and structuralist form of reasoning, but the evacuation of
human agency, of materialist (or class) realities and of the historical and
systemic provenance of state and class power. Furthermore, despite