[An Early Preface to] The Fashion System 69Whilst accepting to coexist with other pertinences, semiology
(for that is the particular pertinence under discussion here) does not
aim to be a partial form of analysis; in its own way it tends towards
a certain norm of totality. on the one hand, it tries to include the
largest section possible of the real in its description; although by being
systematic it cannot be exhaustive, because every system is in its
way total, it nevertheless tends ceaselessly to recover a real which is
called something different by other pertinences; for example, aesthetic
notions like taste or elegance can have their semiological equivalent.
on the other hand, it always forces itself to highlight the points in its
own system where it uses other pertinences and it actively recognizes
the points of crossover and defection in its object of study; whilst
working on meaning, it is part of its project to indicate, for example,
where meaning ends and where economy, art and the psyche begin.
Furthermore, though we have not allowed ourselves to step outside
semantic pertinence and as a consequence we should not expect
to discover any ‘idea’ on the philosophy of clothes in this research,
we have nevertheless been constantly mindful to point out, as we go
along, that there are moments in semiological analysis when we could
insert and develop analyses that work with a different pertinence: the
semiology of Fashion necessarily contains a certain number of ‘doors’
leading, for example, to a sociology or a psychology of clothing; and
whilst we have stopped ourselves going through these doors, we have
made sure that they are pointed out—in the same way that phonology,
though constituting a closed pertinence, recognizes the (physical) reality
of those articulated sounds that it studies only from the point of view
of meaning. are we talking about an epistemological liberalism here?
not exactly: neither totalizing, nor partial, semiology can handle this
contradiction quite naturally, in that it is nothing but a language, merely
a particular way of talking about Fashion clothing. on the one hand,
semiology sees itself as a complete language, sufficiently wide so as
to be coherent (so it is not an analysis of little bits), but on the other it
is happy for other languages to work on the same object (so it is not
a dogmatic analysis); this double attitude in fact depends on the idea
that Science is never completely the pure real nor pure language.^10 as
language, semiological pertinence has to be exhaustive (inasmuch as
every system is exhaustive); but as the real, the object that it focuses
on escapes from it at a certain moment to go towards other languages