3: Fashion, or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code

The Frivolity of the Déjà Vu

The astonishing privilege accorded to fashion is due to a unanimous and definitive resolve. The acceleration of the simple play of signifiers in fashion becomes striking, to the point of enchanting us -- the enchantment and vertigo of the loss of every system of reference. In this sense, it is the completed form of political economy, the cycle wherein the linearity of the commodity comes to be abolished.

There is no longer any determinacy internal to the signs of fashion, hence they become free to commute and permutate without limit. At the term of this unprecedented enfranchisement, they obey, as if logically, a mad and meticulous recurrence. This applies to fashion as regards clothes, the body and objects -- the sphere of `light' signs. In the sphere of `heavy' signs -- politics, morals, economics, science, culture, sexuality -- the principle of commutation nowhere plays with the same abandon. We could classify these diverse domains according to a decreasing order of `simulation', but it remains the case that every sphere tends, unequally but simultaneously, to merge with models of simulation, of differential and indifferent play, the structural play of value. In this sense, we could say that they are all haunted by fashion, since this can be understood as both the most superficial play and as the most profound social form -- the inexorable investment of every domain by the code.

In fashion, as in the code, signifieds come unthreaded [se défiler], and the parades of the signifier [les défilés du signifiant] no longer lead anywhere. The signifier/signified distinction is erased, as in sexual difference (H.-P. Jeudy, `Le signifiant est hermaphrodite' [in La mort du sens: l'idéologie des mots, Tours/Paris: Marne, 1973]), where gender becomes so many distinctive oppositions, and something like an immense fetishism, bound up with an intense pleasure [jouissance] [43] and an exceptional desolation, takes hold -- a pure and fascinating manipulation coupled with the despair of radical indeterminacy. Fundamentally, fashion imposes upon us the rupture of an imaginary order: that of referential Reason in all its guises, and if we are able to enjoy [jouir] the dismantling or stripping of reason [démantèlement de la raison], enjoy the liquidation of meaning (particularly at the level of our body -- hence the affinity of clothing and fashion), enjoy this endless finality of fashion, we also suffer profoundly
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from the corruption of rationality it implies, as reason crumbles under the blow of the pure and simple alternation of signs.

There is vehement resistance in the face of the collapse of all sectors into the sphere of commodities, and a still more vehement resistance concerning their collapse into the sphere of fashion. This is because it is in this latter sphere that the liquidation of values is at its most radical. Under the sign of the commodity, all labour is exchanged and loses its specificity -- under the sign of fashion, the signs of leisure and labour are exchanged. Under the sign of the commodity, culture is bought and sold -- under the sign of fashion, all cultures play like simulacra in total promiscuity. Under the sign of the commodity, love becomes prostitution -- under the sign of fashion it is the object-relation itself that disappears, blown to pieces by a cool and unconstrained sexuality. Under the sign of the commodity, time is accumulated like money -- under the sign of fashion it is exhausted and discontinued in entangled cycles.

Today, every principle of identity is affected by fashion, precisely because of its potential to revert all forms to non-origin and recurrence. Fashion is always rétro, but always on the basis of the abolition of the passé (the past): the spectral death and resurrection of forms. Its proper actuality (its `up-to-dateness', its `relevance') is not a reference to the present, but an immediate and total recycling. Paradoxically, fashion is the inactual (the `out-of-date', the `irrelevant'). It always presupposes a dead time of forms, a kind of abstraction whereby they become, as if safe from time, effective signs which, as if by a twist of time, will return to haunt the present of their inactuality with all the charm of `returning' as opposed to `becoming' structures. The aesthetic of renewal: fashion draws triviality from the death and modernity of the déjà vu. This is the despair that nothing lasts, and the complementary enjoyment of knowing that, beyond this death, every form has always the chance of a second existence, which is never innocent since fashion consumes the world and the real in advance: it is the weight of all the dead labour of signs bearing on living signification -- within a magnificent forgetting, a fantastic ignorance [méconnaissance]. But let's not forget that the fascination exerted by industrial machinery and technics is also due to its being dead labour watching over living labour, all the while devouring it. Our bedazzled misconstrual [méconnaissance] is proportionate to the progressive hold of the dead over the living. Dead labour alone is as strange and as perfect as the déjà vu. The enjoyment of fashion is therefore the enjoyment of a spectral and cyclical world of bygone forms endlessly revived as effective signs. As König says, it is as though fashion were eaten away by a suicidal desire which is fulfilled at the moment when fashion attains its apogee. This is true, but it is a question of a contemplative desire for death, bound to the spectacle of the incessant abolition of forms. What I mean is that the desire for death is itself recycled within fashion, emptying it of every subversive phantasm and involving it, along with everything else, in fashion's innocuous revolutions.

Having purged these phantasms which, in the depths of the imaginary,
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add the bewitchment and charm of a previous life to repetition, fashion dances vertiginously over the surface, on pure actuality. Does fashion recover the innocence that Nietzsche noted in the Greeks: `They knew how to live ... to stop ... at the surface, the fold, the skin, to believe in forms, tones, words. ... Those Greeks were superficial -- out of profundity' (The Gay Science, Preface, 2nd edition, 1886 [tr. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1974], p. 38)? Fashion is only a simulation of the innocence of becoming, the cycle of appearances is just its recycling. That the development of fashion is contemporary with that of the museum proves this. Paradoxically, the museum's demand for an eternal inscription of forms and for a pure actuality function simultaneously in our culture. This is because in modernity both are governed by the status of the sign.

Whereas styles mutually exclude each other, the museum is defined by the virtual co-existence of all styles, by their promiscuity within a single cultural super-institution, or, in other words, the commensurability of their values under the sign of the great gold-standard of culture. Fashion does the same thing in accordance with its cycle: it commutes all signs and causes an absolute play amongst them. The temporality of works in the museum is `perfect', it is perfection and the past: it is the highly specific state of what has been and is never actual. But neither is fashion ever actual: it speculates on the recurrence of forms on the basis of their death and their stockpiling, like signs, in an a-temporal reserve. Fashion cobbles together, from one year to the next, what `has been', exercising an enormous combinatory freedom. Hence its effect of `instantaneous' perfection, just like the museum's perfection, but the forms of fashion are ephemeral. Conversely, there is a contemporary look to the museum, which causes the works to play amongst themselves like values in a set. Fashion and the museum are contemporary, complicitous. Together they are the opposite of all previous cultures, made of inequivalent signs and incompatible styles.

The `Structure' of Fashion

Fashion exists only within the framework of modernity, that is to say, in a schema of rupture, progress and innovation. In any cultural context at all, the ancient and the `modern' alternate in terms of their signification. For us however, since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, there exists only an historical and polemical structure of change and crisis. It seems that modernity sets up a linear time of technical progress, production and history, and, simultaneously, a cyclical time of fashion. This only seems to be a contradiction, since in fact modernity is never a radical rupture. Tradition is no longer the pre-eminence of the old over the new: it
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is unaware of either -- modernity itself invents them both at once, at a single stroke, it is always and at the same time `neo-' and `rétro-', modern and anachronistic. The dialectic of rupture very quickly becomes the dynamics of the amalgam and recycling. In politics, in technics, in art and in culture it is defined by the exchange rate that the system can tolerate without alteration to its fundamental order. Consequently fashion doesn't contradict any of this: it very clearly and simultaneously announces the myth of change, maintaining it as the supreme value in the most everyday aspects, and as the structural law of change: since it is produced through the play of models and distinctive oppositions, and is therefore an order which gives no precedence to the code of the tradition. For binary logic is the essence of modernity, and it impels infinite differentiation and the `dialectical' effects of rupture. Modernity is not the transmutation but the commutation of all values, their combination and their ambiguity. Modernity is a code, and fashion is its emblem.

This perspective allows us to trace only the limits of fashion, in order to conquer the two simultaneous prejudices which consist:

1. in extending its field up to the limits of anthropology, indeed of animal behaviour;

2. in restricting, on the other hand, its actual sphere to dress and external signs.

Fashion has nothing to do with the ritual order (nor a fortiori with animal finery), for the good reason that it knows neither the equivalence/ alternation of the old and the new, nor the systems of distinctive oppositions, nor the models with their serial and combinatory diffraction. On the other hand, fashion is at the core of modernity, extending even into science and revolution, because the entire order of modernity, from sex to the media, from art to politics, is infiltrated by this logic. The very appearance of fashion bears the closest resemblance to ritual -- fashion as spectacle, as festival, as squandering -- it doesn't even affirm their differences: since it is precisely the aesthetic perspective that allows us to assimilate fashion to the ceremonial (just as it is precisely the concept of festival that allows us to assimilate certain contemporary processes to primitive structures). The aesthetic perspective is itself a concern of modernity (of a play of distinctive oppositions -- utility/gratuity, etc.), one which we project onto archaic structures so as to be better able to annex them under our analogies. Spectacle is our fashion, an intensified and reduplicated sociality enjoying itself aesthetically, the drama of change in place of change. In the primitive order, the ostentation of signs never has this `aesthetic' effect. In the same way, our festival is an `aesthetics' of transgression, which is not the primitive exchange in which it pleases us to find the reflection or the model of our festivals -- to rewrite the `aesthetics' of potlach is an ethnocentric rewriting.

It is as necessary to distinguish fashion from the ritual order as it is to radicalise the analysis of fashion within our own system. The minimal,
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superficial definition of fashion restricts itself to saying: `Within language, the element subject to fashion is not the signification of discourse, but its mimetic support, that is, its rhythm, its tonality, its articulation ... in gesture ... This is equally true of intellectual fashions: existentialism or structuralism -- it is the vocabulary and not the inquiry that is taken on' (Edmond Radar, Diogène [50, Summer, 1965]). Thus a deep structure, invulnerable to fashion, is preserved. Consequently it is in the very production of meaning [sens], in the most `objective' structures, that it must be sought, in the sense that these latter also comply with the play of simulation and combinatory innovation. Even dress and the body grow deeper: now it is the body itself, its identity, its sex, its status, which has become the material of fashion -- dress is only a particular case of this. Certainly scientific and cultural popularisations provide fertile soil for the `effects' of fashion. However, along with the `originality' of their procedures, science and culture themselves must be interrogated, to see if they are subject to the `structure' of fashion. If indeed popularisation is possible -- which is not the case in any other culture (the facsimile, the digest, the counterfeit, the simulation, the increased circulation of simplified material, is unthinkable at the level of ritual speech, of the sacred text or gesture) -- it is because there is, at the very source of innovation in these matters, a manipulation of analytic models, of simple elements and stable oppositions which renders both levels, the `original' and the `popularisation', fundamentally homogeneous, and the distinction between the two purely tactical and moral. Hence Radar does not see that, beyond discourse's `gestures', the very meaning [sens] of discourse falls beneath the blow of fashion as soon as in an entirely self-referential cultural field, concepts are engendered and made to correspond to each other through pure specularity. It may be the same for scientific hypotheses. Nor does psychoanalysis avoid the fate of fashion in the very core of its theoretical and clinical practice. It too goes through the stage of institutional reproduction, developing whatever simulation models it had in its basic concepts. If formerly there was a work of the unconscious, and therefore a determination of psychoanalysis by means of its object, today this has quietly become the determination of the unconscious by means of psychoanalysis itself. Henceforth psychoanalysis reproduces the unconscious, while simultaneously taking itself as its reference (signifying itself as fashion, as the mode). So the unconscious returns to its old habits, as it is generally required to do, and psychoanalysis takes on social force, just as the code does, and is followed by an extraordinary complexification of theories of the unconscious, all commutable and basically indifferent.

Fashion has its society: dreams, phantasms, fashionable psychoses, scientific theories, fashionable schools of linguistics, not to mention art and politics -- but this is only small change. Fashion haunts the model disciplines more profoundly, indeed to the extent that they have successfully made their axioms autonomous for their greater glory, and have moved into an aesthetic, almost a play-acting stage where, as in certain mathematical
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formulae, only the perfect specularity of the analytic models counts for anything.

The Flotation of Signs

Contemporary with political economy and like the market, fashion is a universal form. In fashion, all signs are exchanged just as, on the market, all products come into play as equivalents. It is the only universalisable sign system, which therefore takes possession of all the others, just as the market eliminates all other modes of exchange. So if in the sphere of fashion no general equivalent can be located, it is because from the outset fashion is situated in an even more formal abstraction than political economy, at a stage when there is not even any need for a perceptible general equivalent (gold or money) because there remains only the form of general equivalence, and that is fashion itself. Or even: a general equivalent is necessary for the quantitative exchange of value, whereas models are required for the exchange of differences. Models are this kind of general equivalent diffracted throughout the matrices which govern the differentiated fields of fashion. They are shifters, effectors, dispatchers, the media of fashion, and through them fashion is indefinitely reproduced. There is fashion from the moment that a form is no longer produced according to its own determinations, but from the model itself -- that is to say, that it is never produced, but always and immediately reproduced. The model itself has become the only system of reference.

Fashion is not a drifting of signs -- it is their flotation, in the sense in which monetary signs are floated today. This flotation in the economic order is recent: it requires that `primitive accumulation' be everywhere finished, that an entire cycle of dead labour be completed (behind money, the whole economic order will enter into this general relativity). Now this process has been managed for a long time within the order of signs where primitive accumulation is indeed anterior, if not always already given, and fashion expresses the already acheived stage of an accelerated and limitless circulation of a fluid and recurrent combinatory of signs, which is equivalent to the instantaneous and mobile equilibrium of floating monies. All cultures, all sign systems, are exchanged and combined in fashion, they contaminate each other, bind ephemeral equilibria, where the machinery breaks down, where there is nowhere any meaning [sens]. Fashion is the pure speculative stage in the order of signs. There is no more constraint of either coherence or reference than there is permanent equality in the conversion of gold into floating monies -- this indeterminacy implies the characteristic dimension of the cycle and recurrence in fashion (and no doubt soon in economy), whereas determinacy (of signs or of production) implies a linear and continuous order. Hence the fate of the economic begins to emerge in the form of fashion, which is further down the route of general commutations than money and the economy.
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The `Pulsion' [44] of Fashion

Were the attempt made to explain fashion by saying that it serves as a vehicle for the unconscious and desire, it would mean nothing if desire itself was `in fashion'. In fact there is a `pulsion' of fashion which hasn't got a great deal to do with the individual unconscious -- something so violent that no prohibition has ever exhausted it, a desire to have done with meaning [sens] and to be submerged in pure signs, moving towards a raw, immediate sociality. In relation to mediated, economic, etc., social processes, fashion retains something of a radical sociality, not at the level of the psychical exchange of contents, but at the immediate level of the distribution of signs. As La Bruyère has already said:

Curiosity is not a taste for the good or the beautiful, but for the rare, for what one has and others have not. It is not an affection for the perfect, but for what is current, for the fashionable. It is not an amusement, but a passion, sometimes so violent that it only yields to love and ambition through the modesty of its object. (`De la Mode 2' [in J. Benda (ed.), Oeuvres Complètes, Paris: Gallimard, 1951], p. 386)

For La Bruyère, the passion for fashion connects the passion for collecting with the object-passion: tulips, birds, engravings by Callot. In fact fashion draws nearer to the collection (in those terms) by means of subtle detours, `each of which', for Oscar Wilde, `gives man a security which not even religion has given him'.

Paying tribute to it, he finds salvation in fashion [faire son salut dans la mode]. A passion for collecting, passion for signs, passion for the cycle (the collection is also a cycle); one line of fashion put into circulation and distributed at dizzying speeds across the entire social body, sealing its integration and taking in all identifications (as the line in collection unifies the subject in one and the same infinitely repeated cyclic process).

This force, this enjoyment, takes root in the sign of fashion itself. The semiurgy of fashion rebels against the functionalism of the economic sphere. Against the ethics of production [45] stands the aesthetics of manipulation, of the reduplication and convergence of the single mirror of the model: `Without content, it [fashion] then becomes the spectacle human beings grant themselves of their power to make the insignificant signify' (Barthes, The Fashion System [tr. Mathew Ward and Richard Howard, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983], p. 288). The charm and fascination of fashion derives from this: the decree it proclaims with no other justification but itself. The arbitrary is enjoyed like an election, like class solidarity holding fast to the discrimination of the sign. It is in this way that it diverges radically from the economic while also being its crowning achievement. In relation to the pitiless finality of production and the market, which, however, it also stages, fashion is a festival. It epitomises everything that the regime of economic abstraction censures. It inverts every categorical imperative.

In this sense, it is spontaneously contagious, whereas economic calculation isolates people from one another. Disinvesting signs of all value, it
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becomes passion again -- passion for the artificial. It is the utter absurdity, the formal futility of the sign of fashion, the perfection of a system where nothing is any longer exchanged against the real, it is the arbitrariness of this sign at the same time as its absolute coherence, constrained to a total relativity with other signs, that makes for its contagious virulence and, at the same time, its collective enjoyment. Beyond the rational and the irrational, beyond the beautiful and the ugly, the useful and the useless, it is this immorality in relation to all criteria, the frivolity which at times gives fashion its subversive force (in totalitarian; puritan or archaic contexts), which always, in contradistinction to the economic, makes it a total social fact -- for which reason we are obliged to revive, as Mauss did for exchange, a total approach.

Fashion, like language, is aimed from the outset at the social (the dandy, in his provocative solitude, is the a contrario proof of this). But, as opposed to language, which aims for meaning [sens] and effaces itself before it, fashion aims for a theatrical sociality, and delights in itself. At a stroke, it becomes an intense site from which no-one is excluded -- the mirror of a certain desire for its own image. In contradistinction to language, which aims at communication, fashion plays at it, turning it into the goal-less stake of a signification without a message. Hence its aesthetic pleasure, which has nothing to do with beauty or ugliness. Is it then a sort of festival, an increasing excess of communication?

It is especially fashion in dress, playing over the signs of the body, that appears `festive', through its aspect of `wasteful consumption', of `potlach'. Again this is especially true of haute couture. This is what allows Vogue to make this tasty profession of faith:

What is more anachronistic, more dream-laden than a sailing ship? Haute couture. It discourages the economist, takes up a stance contrary to productivity techniques, it is an affront to democratisation. With superb languor, a maximum number of highly qualified people produce a minimum number of models of complex cut, which will be repeated, again with the same languor, twenty times in the best of cases, or not at all in the worst .... Perhaps two million dresses. `But why this debauchery of effort?' you say. `Why not?' answer the creators, the craftsmen, the workers and the four thousand clients, all possessed by the same passion for seeking perfection. Couturiers are the last adventurers of the modern world. They cultivate the acte gratuit .... `Why haute couture?' a few detractors may think. `Why champagne?' Again: `Neither practice nor logic can justify the extravagant adventure of clothes. Superfluous and therefore necessary, the world is once more the province of religion.'

Potlach, religion, indeed the ritual enchantment of expression, like that of costume and animal dances: everything is good for exalting fashion against the economic, like a transgression into a play-act sociality.

We know, however, that advertising too wants a `feast of consumption', the media a `feast of information', the markets a `feast of production', etc. The art market and horse races can also be taken for potlach -- `Why not?' asks Vogue. We would like to see a functional squandering everywhere so as to bring about symbolic destruction. Because of the extent to which the
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economic, shackled to the functional, has imposed its principle of utility, anything which exceeds it quickly takes on the air of play and futility. It is hard to acknowledge that the law of value extends well beyond the economic, and that its true task today is the jurisdiction of all models. Wherever there are models, there is an imposition of the law of value, repression by signs and the repression of signs by themselves. This is why there is a radical difference between the symbolic ritual and the signs of fashion. In primitive cultures signs openly circulate over the entire range of `things', there has not yet been any `precipitation' of a signified, nor therefore of a reason or a truth of the sign. The real -- the most beautiful of our connotations -- does not exist. The sign has no `underworld', it has no unconscious (which is both the last and the most subtle of connotations and rationalisations). Signs are exchanged without phantasms, with no hallucination of reality.

Hence they have nothing in common with the modern sign whose paradox Barthes has defined: `The overwhelming tendency is to convert the perceptible into a signifier, towards ever more organised, closed systems. Simultaneously and in equal proportion, the sign and its systematic nature is disguised as such, it is rationalised, referred to a reason, to an agency in the world, to a substance, to a function' (cf. The Fashion System, p. 285). With simulation, signs merely disguise the real and the system of reference as a sartorial supersign. The real is dead, long live the realistic sign! This paradox of the modern sign induces a radical split between it and the magical or ritual sign, the same one as is exchanged in the mask, the tattoo or the feast.

Even if fashion is an enchantment, it remains the enchantment of the commodity, and, still further, the enchantment of simulation, the code and the law.

Sex Refashioned

There is nothing less certain than that sexuality invests dress, make-up, etc. -- or rather it is a modified sexuality that comes into play at the level of fashion. If the condemnation of fashion takes on this puritan violence, it is not aimed at sex. The taboo bears on futility, on the passion for futility and the artificial which is perhaps more fundamental than the sexual drives. In our culture, tethered as it is to the principle of utility, futility plays the role of transgression and violence, and fashion is condemned for having within it the force of the pure sign which signifies nothing. Its sexual provocation is secondary with regard to this principle which denies the grounds of our culture.

Of course, the same taboo is also brought to bear on `futile' and non- reproductive sexuality, but there is a danger in crystallising on sex, a danger that puritan tactics, which aim to change the stakes to sexuality, may be prolonged -- whereas it is at the level of the reality principle itself, of
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the referential principle in which the unconscious and sexuality still participate, that fashion confrontationally sets up its pure play of differences. To place sexuality at the forefront of this history is once again to neutralise the symbolic by means of sex and the unconscious. It is according to this same logic that the analysis of fashion has traditionally been reduced to that of dress, since it allows the sexual metaphor the greatest play. Consequences of this diversion: the game is reduced to a perspective of sexual `liberation', which is quite simply achieved in a `liberation' of dress. And a new cycle of fashion begins again.

Fashion is certainly the most efficient neutraliser of sexuality (one never touches a woman in make-up -- see `The Body, or The Mass Grave of Signs' below) -- precisely because it is a passion which is not complicitous, but in competition with sex (and, as La Bruyère has already noted, fashion is victorious over sex). Therefore the passion for fashion, in all its ambiguity, will come to play on the body confused with sex.

Fashion grows deeper as it `stages' the body, as the body becomes the medium of fashion. [46] Formerly the repressed sanctuary, the repression rendering it undecodable, from now on it too is invested. The play of dress is effaced before the play of the body, which itself is effaced before the play of models. [47] All at once dress loses the ceremonial character (which it still had up until the eighteenth century) bound up with the usage of signs qua signs. Eaten away by the body's signifieds, by this `transpearence' of the body as sexuality and nature, dress loses the fantastic exuberance it has had since the primitive societies. It loses its force as pure disguise, it is neutralised by the necessity that it must signify the body, it becomes a reason.

The body too is neutralised in this operation however. It too loses the power of disguise that it used to have in tattooing and costume. It no longer plays with anything save its proper truth, which is also its borderline: its nudity. In costumery, the signs of the body, mixed openly with the signs of the not-body, play. Thereafter, costume becomes dress, and the body becomes nature. Another game is set up -- the opposition of dress and the body -- designation and censure (the same fracture as between the signifier and the signified, the same play of displacement and allusion). Fashion strictly speaking begins with this partition of the body, repressed and signified in an allusive way -- it also puts an end to all this in the simulation of nudity, in nudity as the model of the simulation of the body. For the Indian, the whole body is a face, that is, a promise and a symbolic act, as opposed to nudity, which is only sexual instrumentality.

This new reality of the body as hidden sex is from the outset merged with woman's body. The concealed body is feminine (not biologically of course; rather mythologically). The conjunction of fashion and woman, since the bourgeois, puritan era, reveals therefore a double indexation: that of fashion on a hidden body, that of woman on a repressed sex. This conjunction did not exist (or not so much) until the eighteenth century (and not at all, of course, in ceremonial societies) -- and for us today it is
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beginning to disappear. As for us, when the destiny of a hidden sex and the forbidden truth of the body arises, when fashion itself neutralises the opposition between the body and dress, then the affinity of woman and fashion progressively diminishes [48] -- fashion is generalised and becomes less and less the exclusive property of one Sex or of one age. Be wary, for it is a matter neither of progress nor of liberation. The same logic still applies, and if fashion is generalised and leaves the privileged medium of woman so as to be open to all, the prohibition placed on the body is also generalised in a more subtle form than puritan repression: in the form of general desexualisation. For it was only under repression that the body had strong sexual potential: it then appeared as a captivating demand. Abandoned to the signs of fashion, the body is sexually disenchanted, it becomes a mannequin, a term whose lack of sexual discrimination suits its meaning well. [49] The mannequin is sex in its entirety, but sex without qualities. Fashion is its sex. Or rather, it is in fashion that sex is lost as difference but is generalised as reference (as simulation). Nothing is sexed any longer, everything is sexualised. The masculine and the feminine themselves rediscover, having once lost their particularity, the chance of an unlimited second existence. Hence, in our culture alone, sexuality impregnates all signification, and this is because signs have, for their part, invested the entire sexual sphere.

In this way the current paradox becomes clear: we simultaneously witness the `emancipation' of woman and a fresh upsurge of fashion. This is because fashion has only to do with the feminine, and not with women. Society in its entirety is becoming feminine to the extent that discrimination against women is coming to an end (as it is for madmen, children, etc., being the normal consequence of the logic of exclusion). Hence prendre son pied, at once `to find one's feet', and a familiar French expression of the female orgasm [jouissance], has now become generalised, while simultaneously, of course, destabilising its signification. We must also note however, that woman can only be `liberated' and `emancipated' as `force of pleasure' and `force of fashion', exactly as the proletariat is only ever liberated as the `labour force'. The above illusion is radical. The historical definition of the feminine is formed on the basis of the destiny of the body and sex bound up with fashion. The historical liberation of the feminine can only be the realisation of this destiny writ large (which immediately becomes the liberation of the whole world, without however losing its discriminatory character). At the same moment that woman accesses a universal labour modelled on the proletariat, the whole world also accesses the emancipation of sex and fashion, modelled on women. We can immediately, and clearly, see that fashion is a labour, to which it becomes necessary to accord equal historical importance to `material' labour. It is also of capital importance (which by the same token becomes part of capital!) to produce commodities in accordance with the market, and to produce the body in accordance with the rules of sex and fashion. The division of labour won't settle where we think, or rather there is no
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division of labour at all: the production of the body, the production of death, the production of signs and the production of commodities -- these are only modalities of one and the same system. Doubtless it is even worse in fashion: for if the worker is divided from himself under the signs of exploitation and of the reality principle, woman is divided from herself and her body under the signs of beauty and the pleasure principle!

The Insubvertible

History says, or so the story goes, that the critique of fashion (O. Burgelin) was a product of conservative thinking in the nineteenth century, but that today, with the advent of socialism, this critique has been revived by the left. The one went with religion and the other with revolution. Fashion corrupts morals, fashion abolishes the class struggle. Although this critique of fashion may have passed over to the left, it does not necessarily signify an historical reversal: perhaps it signifies that with regard to morality and morals, the left has quite simply taken over from the right, and that, in the name of the revolution, it has adopted the moral order and its classic prejudices. Ever since the principle of revolution entered into morals, quite a categorical imperative, the whole political order, even the left, has become a moral order.

Fashion is immoral, this is what's in question, and all power (or all those who dream of it) necessarily hates it. There was a time when immorality was recognised, from Machiavelli to Stendhal, and when somebody like Mandeville could show, in the eighteenth century, that a society could only be revolutionized through its vices, that it is its immorality that gives it its dynamism. Fashion still holds to this immorality: it knows nothing of value-systems, nor of criteria of judgement: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, the rational/irrational -- it plays within and beyond these, it acts therefore as the subversion of all order, including revolutionary rationality. It is power's hell, the hell of the relativity of all signs which all power is forced to crush in order to maintain its own signs. Thus fashion is taken on by contemporary youth, as a resistance to every imperative, a resistance without an ideology, without objectives.

On the other hand, there is no possible subversion of fashion since it has no system of reference to contradict (it is its own system of reference). We cannot escape fashion (since fashion itself makes the refusal of fashion into a fashion feature -- blue-jeans are an historical example of this). While it is true that one can always escape the reality principle of the content, one can never escape the reality principle of the code. Even while rebelling against the content, one more and more closely obeys the logic of the code. Why so? It is the diktat of `modernity'. Fashion leaves no room for revolution except to go back over the very genesis of the sign that constitutes it. Furthermore, the alternative to fashion does not lie in a `liberty' or in some kind of step beyond towards a truth of the world and systems of
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reference. It lies in a deconstruction of both the form of the sign of fashion and the principle of signification itself, just as the alternative to political economy can only lie in the deconstruction of the commodity/form and the principle of production itself.

3: Fashion, or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code

Note from page [87]: 1. [I have translated the French noun jouissance and the verb jouir, whose admixture of libidinal and political economy is well known in contemporary French theory, variously according to context. In the main I have translated it as `enjoyment'; sometimes as `intense pleasure', with the French following in brackets. -- tr.]

Note from page 93: 2. [Pulsion is the French translation of Freud's Trieb, which the Standard Edition translates as `instinct', a move which for many reasons has been found inadequate. The current translation is `drive', which I have sometimes used for reasons of euphony. The French pulsion, however, seems preferable since it confers a less mechanistically dominated energetics than does `drive'. These are the only options used throughout the present text. -- tr.]

Note from page 93: 3. But we have seen that the economic today conforms with the same indeterminacy, ethics drops out in aid of a `finality without end' of production whereby it rejoins the vertiginous futility of fashion. We may say then of production what Barthes says of fashion: `The system then abandons the meaning yet does so without giving up any of the spectacle of signification' [The Fashion System, p. 288, J. B's emphasis].

Note from page 96: 4. The three modalities of the `body of fashion' cited by Barthes (cf. The Fashion System, pp. 258-9):
1. It is a pure form, with no attributes of its own, tautologically defined by dress.
2. Or: every year we decree that a certain body (a certain type of body) is in fashion.
This is another way of making the two coincide. 3. We develop dress in such a way that it transforms the real body and makes it signify the ideal body of fashion.
These modalities more or less correspond to the historical evolution of the status of the model: from the initial, but non-professional model (the high-society woman) to the professional mannequin whose body also plays the role of a sexual model up until the latest (current) phase where everybody has become a mannequin -- each is called, summoned to invest their bodies with the rules of the game of fashion -- the whole world is an `agent' of fashion, just as the whole world becomes a productive agent. General effusion of fashion to all and sundry and at every level of signification.
It is also possible to tie these phases of fashion in with the phases of the successive concentration of capital, with the structuration of the economic sphere of fashion (variation of fixed capital, of the organic composition of capital, the speed of the rotation of commodities, of finance capital and industrial capital -- cf. Utopie, Oct. 1971, no. 4). However, the analytic principle of this interaction of the economic and signs is never clear. More than in the direct relation with the economic, it is in a sort of movement homologous to the extension of the market that the historical extension of the sphere of fashion can be seen:
1. In the beginning fashion is concerned only with scattered details, minimal variations, supported by marginal categories, in a system which remains essentially homogeneous and traditional (just as in the first phase of political economy only the surplus of a yield is exchanged, which in other circumstances is largely exhausted in consumption within the group -- a very weak section of the free labour force and the salariat). Fashion then is what is outside culture, outside the group, the foreigner, it is the city-dweller to the country-dweller, etc.
2. Fashion progressively and virtually integrates all the signs of culture, and regulates the exchange of signs, just as in a second phase all material production is virtually integrated by political economy. Both systems anterior to production and exchange are effaced in the universal dimension of the market. All cultures come to play within fashion's universality. In this phase fashion's reference is the dominant cultural class, which administers the distinctive values of fashion.
3. Fashion is diffused everywhere and quite simply becomes the way of life [le mode de vie]. It invests every sphere which had so far escaped it. The whole world supports and reproduces it. It recuperates its own negativity (the fact of not being in fashion), it becomes its own signified (like production at the stage of reproduction). In a certain way, however, it is also its end.

Note from page 96: 5. For it is not true that a dress or a supple body stocking which lets the body `play' `frees' something or other: in the order of signs, this is a supplementary adulteration. To denude structures is not to return to the zero degree of truth, it is to wrap them in a new signification which gets added to all the others. So it will be the beginning of a new cycle of forms. So much for the cycle of formal innovation, so much for the logic of fashion, and no-one can do anything about it. To `liberate' structures (of the body, the unconscious, the functional truth of the object in design, etc.) still amounts to clearing the way for the universalisation of the system of fashion (it is the only universalisable system, the only one that can control the circulation of every sign, including contradictory ones). A bourgeois revolution in the system of forms, with the appearance of a bourgeois political revolution; this too clears the way for the universalisation of the system of the market.

Note from page 97: 6. There are of course other, social and historical, reasons for this affinity: woman's (or youths') marginality or her social relegation. But this is no different: social repression and a malefic sexual aura are always brought together under the same categories.

Note from page 97: 7. [The French mannequin signifies a masculine, a feminine and a neuter; a man with no strength of character who is easily led, a woman employed by a large couturier to present models wearing its new collection, and an imitation human. Its gender is masculine (le mannequin). -- tr.]