Clothing Degree Zero: A Late Reading of Barthes’ Fashion ‘System’

Abstract

Drawing upon Roland Barthes’ posthumously published notebooks from his 1974 trip to China, in which he remarks upon the ‘complete absence of fashion. Clothing degree zero’, this article offers a ‘late’ reading of Barthes’ interest in fashion, suggested here as a form of writing. In reference to the late works, specifically Barthes’ penultimate lecture course on the Neutral and Travels in China, supplemented by François Jullien’s comments on Barthes’ trip to China (regarding the use of the term ‘blandness’), as well as mention of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Chung Kuo-Cina (which Barthes viewed with ‘methodological’ interest), it is possible to draw together a reading of fashion as a neutral form. As a final step, reflection is given to Susan Buck-Morss’ reading of ‘history as passing’, as discontinuous moments (whereby fashion is symptomatic of such transformations). Barthes’ writerly mode – which works upon incidental details (also found in the work of Antonioni) – is revealed to be a pertinent method.

Keywords

Roland Barthes blandness Chinese philosophy fashion François Jullien Neutral

This article gives specific consideration to Roland Barthes’ posthumously published diary written during his visit to China in the mid-1970s. A striking phrase in the diary, as will be noted below, regards the ‘zero degree’ of Chinese clothing. This can be taken as a somewhat sarcastic remark as Barthes refers to a ‘complete absence of fashion’ (indeed, the Mao regime at that time was highly restrictive, even regimented in what people could wear, to the point that gender was supposedly elided through a uniformity of dress). Equally, however, we know the term ‘zero degree’ has real significance for Barthes.

In his first book, Writing Degree Zero, published in the early 1950s, he presents writing as that which can outplay the strictures of language and style; he makes direct reference to neutral, colourless writing of noted novelists such as Camus and Robbe-Grillet. According to Barthes’s thesis, zero degree writing quickly becomes its own genre, so filling it with the very connotations that had otherwise been dispersed. In the years following, Barthes’ focus turns resolutely to semiology and the language of the ‘zero degree’ is somewhat forgotten. However, as will be considered here, the related notion of the ‘neutral’ is present in The Fashion System (Barthes, 1990), and more generally the arbitrary nature of the sign always bears a certain ‘emptiness’ that Barthes returns to more fully in his later writing. It is evident, for example, in his ‘fantasy’ of a free circulation of signs when writing on Japan (Barthes, 1982). And significantly, only a few years after travelling to China, at the end of his career, he returns explicitly to the phrase ‘zero degree’ in The Neutral, drawing a direct line to his first book: ‘I took the word “Neutral” insofar as its referent inside me is a stubborn affect (in fact, ever since Writing Degree Zero)’ (2005: 8).

In the case of this article, the subject matter is the visual domain of fashion (though the discourse of fashion is never out of sight), which raises some interesting questions about how the site/sight of meaning can be understood in structuralist terms. What emerges is a certain methodology that comes from speaking through fashion (and other ‘incidents’ of the everyday). In contrast to Barthes’ well-known critiques of the everyday in Mythologies (and numerous other early essays), his later writings – in trying to outplay the doxa that semiotic analysis became – develop a much more fragmentary and fleeting style. His interest in the haiku form is pertinent, for example, as is his interest in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film-making, whom Barthes refers to directly when suggesting how to write about China. A crucial problem for Barthes is that his view of China is heavily regulated and ‘dulled’ by government chaperons. Yet, arguably, it is from the asides in his diary, which very often are brief remarks upon clothing, fashion and accessories, that we witness China (of the 1970s). This form of writing in turn becomes a key to understanding Barthes’ interest in fashion, or rather the fashioning of things, of everyday life.

There is some slippage between ‘clothing’ and ‘fashion’ in this article, partly due to the different incidences that occur in Barthes’ texts. However, it is more the verb ‘to fashion’ that is important, which suggests processes and structures that occur at all levels in turning clothing into articulations of meaning. The point here is that fashion does not need to refer necessarily to commercial ‘high fashion’ or to the latest styles and decoration. Instead, fashion refers to the entering into of systems of meaning specific to clothing and dress. In Barthes’ early text on fashion this process is largely referring to commercial fashions and, crucially, produced through language (a level that he argues is manageable for a research project). Nonetheless, he acknowledges the level of image and materiality too, which become pertinent in the account given here, whereby items of clothing can be understood to allow meaning to be circulated. And, for Barthes, the briefness of the image (whether a picture, a garment or a jotting in his diary) opens up the possibility for greater movement within the structures of signification, or even – as in the operation of the Neutral – to get outside of these structures, or at least to expand them radically. In China this becomes a ‘quiet’ strategy for Barthes, even if ultimately it is a failed project. Importantly, then, this article is not so much about fashion or fashion theory, rather it is concerned with Barthes’ reading through fashion. Crucially, this is different to the more general idea of thinking critically on the subject of fashion. When Rocamora and Smelik (2016: 2), for example, refer to ‘thinking through fashion’, they see it as an exercise in broadening the discourse, ‘to critically engage with a vast array of theories and concepts, often from thinkers who … have not themselves written about fashion’. Notably, Barthes is one of the thinkers they reference. By contrast, the idea here of Barthes thinking through fashion is to refer to his direct use of fashion, his making fashion operative as a means to allow us to think. Equally, the argument here is not about what he thought or saw in China per se. By all accounts China did literally bore and frustrate him, but from today’s vantage point, and in looking across his thoughts on the Neutral, we can gain an understanding of his way of working – so, not unlike the student’s ‘working out’ alongside the erroneous answer to an exam question, we still find important aspects of method.

Given the political context of Barthes’ visit to China in the Mao era, which he ‘neutralizes’ to some degree at a personal level, through his own gaze attendant upon fleeting imagery and asides, this article makes one final, albeit speculative step to consider how the form of fashion might lead us to view larger political narratives. Reference is made to Susan Buck-Morss’ (1994) heuristic essay on reading history as structural discontinuity. There is a certain tension in moving from the everyday to a larger political narrative, analogous to the difficulty of resolving both quantum and classical physics. The smallest units do not necessarily add up against a larger picture, and vice versa. Nonetheless, we find that Barthes’ writerly mode works upon incidental details (also found in the work of the film-maker Michelangelo Antonioni), which can become operative in a critical understanding of the larger political conditions. In this vein, the small, incidental details of clothing and fashion in Barthes’ diary offer an alternative form of viewership, and which, understood through the Neutral, suggests his more expansive reading of fashion; of the ‘real (or visual) system of fashion that Barthes was all too aware of in his early work, but which he limited to the written system for the sake of practicalities' (Barthes, 1990: x).

Travels in China – A ‘Late’ Reading

In 1974 – albeit reluctantly and somewhat controversially – Roland Barthes joined a delegation from the Tel Quel group on a three week visit to China. The tightly controlled itinerary was not to Barthes’ liking and he returned with little positive to say, summed up in a short publication for Le Monde, ‘Well, And China?’ (Barthes, 1986)¹ – a text that was widely criticized for its political ambiguity. Over 30 years later, his private notebooks were posthumously published, appearing in English as Travels in China (Barthes, 2013a). What Barthes liked about travel were not the obvious tourist sites, but, as Samoyault (2017: 265) notes, ‘more the way people lived there, everyday objects, the way in which bodies moved through space’. She goes on to write:

His ethnographic gaze was captured by small differences rather than by the remains of former greatness or the obvious characteristics of the modern society. His travelling companions on the trip to China noticed this. He stayed in the bus when they were being taken on a tour down the sacred avenue of the Ming tombs, but took a close interest in hairstyles, clothes, the way children were looked after. For example, he immediately decided how nice it would be to have a Mao suit made for him. (Samoyault, 2017: 265)

The Mao suit was indeed a running joke for the group, with Barthes’ suggestion being the group all wear them on return to Paris. The ability for fashion to function like a language, at a mythological level, was evidently on his mind, and says something about Barthes’ preoccupations on ‘reading’ French culture as much as China’s. However, there are numerous and subtle references to clothing in his notebooks, which arguably offer the reader a great deal more interest than the critical commentaries and frustrations that have been more widely remarked upon (Knight, 1997; Badmington, 2016; O’Meara, 2016; Stafford, 2016). Only days into the visit, while in Beijing, Barthes pens the following enigmatic lines, which implicitly mark the entire visit:

Haircuts are coded.

What an impression! The complete absence of fashion. Clothing degree zero. No elegance, or choice.

Flirtation is foreclosed.

Another fetish-object: the (electrified) loudspeaker held by a woman schoolteacher.

(Barthes, 2013a: 9)

Barthes’ ability to pick up on small details (his way of entering into sign systems as both consumer and critic) underlines this article’s ‘late’ reading of Barthes’ interest in fashion. It is late in the literal sense that it comes late in the day. As an exemplar of structural analysis, The Fashion System (1990) was originally published in French in 1967 (and translated in 1983), so relatively late in Barthes’ career, or at least leading up to the pivotal year of 1968 and the general turn towards poststructuralism (S/Z, for example, was published in 1973). In reflecting on the fashion book in its foreword, Barthes notes: ‘This venture … is already dated’. Indeed, he suggests through the course of writing the book he has changed. ‘Does this mean,’ he goes on to ask, ‘that at the time of publishing this work – belatedly – he cannot acknowledge it as his own? Not at all … but beyond a literal response, what is proposed here is already a certain history of semiology’ (Barthes, 1990: ix). One of the dilemmas of The Fashion System, which Barthes pre-empts in his foreword, is that the study is based solely on the ‘written system’ of fashion (e.g. what is said about fashion, how it is described and labelled) rather than what he refers to as the ‘real (or visual) system’ of fashion. This makes the book more a study in semiology than in fashion per se, and one of the reasons why today it is perhaps left out of most fashion textbooks.² Yet, a late return to Barthes’ text is instructive for several reasons. It is pertinent, in the light of his late work (of the 1970s), to take Barthes seriously when he notes that his fashion book’s ‘slightly naïve window’ gives us the opportunity not of ‘the certainties of a doctrine’, but rather ‘the beliefs, the temptations, and the trials of an apprenticeship’. It might be read, then, as an opening up, even as an ‘open text’. Indeed, running through this book are more pressing questions than we might typically gain from reading about fashion. He asks: ‘Why does Fashion utter clothing so abundantly? Why does it interpose, between the object and its user, such a luxury of words (not to mention images), such a network of meaning?’ (1990: xi).

The reading offered here, which goes beyond this one text of Barthes’, seeks to apply the limit case of ‘clothing degree zero’, which, as already noted, leads to a ‘neutral’ reading. As a means to ‘supplement’ our understanding of this latter term, reference will be made to François Jullien’s (2007: 28–9) philosophical account of the term ‘blandness’, which, as a device, acts as a synonym of the Neutral. It is important to acknowledge that Jullien’s project is very different to Barthes’. He is not engaged in the debates around structuralism, but rather as a sinologist and philosopher concerned with systems of thought across cultures, he is closer to an anthropological tradition. Nonetheless, his deconstructive approach to operationalize what lies in-between ‘betweenness’ has useful parallels to Barthes’ account of the Neutral. There is also the specific connection to the word ‘bland’, which Barthes used controversially in summing up his thoughts on China. Jullien is mindful not to ignore the ideological criticisms that surround Barthes’ choice of word, but, as will be noted later, he considers there to be ‘something else’ of importance that is revealed in this way, which in itself is arguably the traces of the Neutral. Importantly, the supplementary reference to Jullien’s comments on Barthes’ trip to China, specifically regarding the use of the term ‘blandness’, will help us to draw together a reading of fashion as form.

Fashion and …

The Fashion System (1990), while exemplary for its structuralist analysis of consumer culture, is also laborious, described by one scholar as ‘the most boring book ever written about fashion’ (Moeran, 2004: 36). Barthes himself refers to fashion as a ‘fake’ lexicon (1990: 209). However, his interest in clothing and fashion extends beyond this one volume, with key preparatory essays collected in The Language of Fashion (Barthes, 2013b). The underlying semiotic propositions remain the same, but we see how a critical reading of fashion and clothing occupied a good deal of Barthes’ time. He shows how the discourse of fashion is ‘structural’, i.e. that fashion, specifically the interchange of garments, in terms of colours, length, and combinations, etc., has (like language itself) no absolute meaning. Instead we consider how fashions are combined and structured (according to a system or set of choices). Barthes identifies three interrelated levels or structures. ‘There are for any particular object (a dress, a tailored suit, a belt),’ he writes, ‘three different structures, one technological [real], another iconic [image], the third verbal [language]’ (Barthes, 1990: 5). Crucially there is no fixed starting point, but rather each reinforces the other, or rather one can carry the other. As with Mythologies, we can consider different orders of signification, where the one makes the other seem ‘natural’ or given.

From the real to the image, from the real to language, and from the image to language … for the first translation, from the technological garment to the iconic garment, the principal shifter is the sewing pattern, whose design analytically reproduces the stages of the garment’s manufacture; to which should be added the processes, graphic or photographic, indented to reveal the technical substratum, of a look or an affect: accentuation of a movement, enlargement of a detail, angle of vision. For the second translation, from the technological garment to the written garment, the basic shifter is what might be called the sewing program or formula: it is generally a text quite apart from the literature of fashion; its goal is to outline not what is but what is going to be done; the sewing program, moreover, is not given in the same kind of writing as the fashion commentary; it contains almost no nouns or adjectives, but mostly verbs and measurements. (Barthes, 1990: 6)

The ‘real’ is defined by certain technical understandings of the making of clothing, but these designs are then taken up by a visual language of clothing, which is equally technological (through graphic and photographic means). Between these different levels, ‘language’ is quite different to the language we associate with the description of fashion. Fashion is made of different levels of significance, but crucially, the notion of fashion applied to clothing is not necessarily definable. It cannot be pointed out in any direct, indexical sense – yet nonetheless it is concrete, material. The materiality of fashion is of course complex as it equally involves immateriality, whereby things (items of clothing, etc.) are given meaning through structures of visual rhetoric. The length of a hemline has real dimension, but it is the relation to other lengths (past or present) that sets possibilities of meaning. And however we might see clothing as fashion, it is the surrounding discourse of fashion that plays an anchoring role. Barthes explains that the speech of fashion is a language to express these garments, but does not constitute an ‘origin’:

We might be tempted to include within the basic shifter all fashion terms of clearly technological origin (a seam, a cut), and to consider them so many translators from the real to the spoken; but this would ignore the fact that the value of a word is not found in its origin but in its place in the language system; once these terms pass into a descriptive structure, they are simultaneously detached from the origin (what has been, at some point, sewn, cut) and their goal (to contribute to an assemblage, to stand out in an ensemble); in them the creative act is not perceptible, they no longer belong to the technological structure and we cannot consider them as shifters. (Barthes, 1990: 6–7, emphasis in original)

The ‘origin’ of the garment, the ‘real’, is detached from its goal or outcome as fashion. For example, the Chinese cheongsam is based on a specific technical design. It is also an object in fashion magazines or shows, through which it can deliver messages derived from the ‘original’ cheongsam (pattern) and its adaptation. The photographed or videoed dress no longer shows us the patterns or design drawings or the nature of handmade buttons, but rather presents as a ‘language’ of the garment that is based upon not the garment in itself, but its system of signification. The garment is between things and words; rather, it becomes itself a system of meanings and connections. In this respect, Barthes refers not just to the linguistic system but also the ‘vestimentary’ system (Barthes, 1990).

In thinking through this so-called ‘vestimentary’ system we can seek to better understand fashion and its meanings by working through its various iterations, combinations and also by showing how styles can be re-cited at different times and for different purposes. It is a flexible system, but one which has specific weightings, causing some meanings to be emphasized and sustained. Yet there is no essential meaning that cannot be changed, or at least modified. A good example is Chairman Mao’s iconic Sun Yat-Sen suit jacket, which has been able to shift from its original explicitly political context to the consumer, postmodern context of the present-day. This piece of clothing is strongly associated with Mao’s modernity. As Chairman of the Communist Party, he popularized the jacket with neutral colours and simple lines as a (purportedly genderless) symbol of the proletariat.³ Today, the Mao jacket is worn with much less frequency and if anything has been appropriated by high-end designers. It is no longer symbolic of the proletariat, but rather is ironically symbolic. Presidents Xi, Putin and Obama, for example, were seen together each dressed in a Mao-style suit, but certainly without the connotations of a proletariat ‘look’. Perhaps the most striking example is Hilary Clinton, who wore a high-end designed Mao suit during her presidential campaign in 2016. The shift in gender in this case is another reminder of the flexibility of the legibility of fashions. None of these political figures can be associated with the older ideologies of the proletariat, and yet the ‘look’ of this suit undeniably retains something of its provenance. Both formerly and now in the present, the suit is worn as a symbol of political freedom, yet with an evident sliding meaning. In Mao’s period, freedom comes from being the same (from removing hierarchy, being free together), while in its present-day iterations the suit displays a sense of freedom through individual style and wealth. Clinton, for example, looks striking – she is her ‘own woman’ – although, equally, there was a lot of bad press suggesting it was a means of being seen as masculine, and even as an ‘evil’ dictator (Pruden, 2016). (We can consider here the various historical discontinuities of politics and fashion; a topic reprised at the close of this article.)

The three-part structure of clothing (real, image, language) exacerbates the arbitrary nature of fashion. A significant dilemma of such compounded arbitrariness is that fashion is most readily understood against its context – tailor-made for eliciting a second-order of signification, for being made meaningful elsewhere, outside of itself. It is in this sense we can understand Faiers’ (2015) remark that dress history is ‘encountered, investigated and understood as one half of an equation’. The ‘use of the ubiquitous and,’ he notes, ‘has become a dominant feature of the landscape of dress history, and indeed dress studies and fashion theory’ (2015: 15). Faiers makes reference to Flaubert’s two copy-clerks, Bouvard and Pécuchet, whose endless quest to understand a field of knowledge always only led to a realization of the limitations of a field and the need to extend out to another. This is in effect the perpetual dilemma for fashion. Borrowing from W.J.T. Mitchell’s (1995) account of interdisciplinarity in terms of the ‘indiscipline’ – as a break, where practices come into question – Faiers is keen for fashion and dress history to be more open, ‘to embrace indeterminacy and fluctuation’ (2015: 18). The argument advanced here, however – to pursue a certain ‘clothing degree zero’ – speculates upon a theoretical basis of fashion as form, and understood as a method of critique. There is definite agreement with Faiers in trying to move on from fashion as merely one-half of an equation, but rather than perhaps ameliorating the fickleness of fashion, the point is to make this the critical resource of fashion.

Incidents of Fashion

To take the ‘arbitrariness’ of fashion further we can return now to the site of ‘zero degree’ clothing in Barthes’ China notebooks. The trip to China is generally regarded in hindsight as folly (O’Meara, 2016; Samoyault, 2017: 361). In the notebooks, Barthes complains of the restrictions placed upon the group by the official guides. They are prevented from seeing ‘everyday life’, and instead they are taken to numerous factories and institutional venues where they listen to carefully prepared accounts of the activities on view and of the country’s wider progress. These highly orchestrated, ideological presentations bore Barthes. He refers to the ideological statements as ‘bricks’ – not even ‘myth’ or the doxa as such, but blatant political rhetoric. To borrow the language of Barthes’ final book, Camera Lucida (1981), we might suggest these are manufactured renderings of the studium. Nonetheless, peppered throughout the notebooks are incidents of the punctum too. The choice of the word ‘incident’ is purposeful here. In his later writings, as he attempts to delineate a ‘writerly’ mode – to write for a form of open readership – Barthes is increasingly drawn to the incidental, with his sustained interest in the haiku a clear example. As Manghani (2020) and Lübecker (2009) have considered, Barthes favours the incidental over the event; the ‘image’ (as in the haiku) over narrative: ‘The incident is a minimal occurrence: “the minimum required to write something” … It lies before this crystallization of “meaning” that Barthes believes will lead to wars of interpretation; nowhere is the incident better expressed than in the Haiku’ (Lübecker, 2009: 125–6).

Travels in China (Barthes, 2013a) is full of the incidental. Set against the dull, planned ‘events’ of the prescribed programme, Barthes’ ‘eye’ catches all manner of occurrences. These are rarely expanded or developed, but in their brevity the observations often yield insights and/or problematics. The aforementioned ‘clothing degree zero’ remark is a case in point. It sets up in just a few lines a whole potential thesis. Circling around this enigmatic reference point are all number of intriguing and often quite humorous lines. Taking a plane to Shanghai, for example, Barthes remarks:

Brand new Boeing. Several caps in fake American style. The hostesses: the khaki outfits, the hair in plaits or bunches, no smiles: the opposite of western simpering. (Barthes, 2013a: 20)

At a naval dockyard, he observes:

Very young welder. White outfit. Little round dark glasses. Pink neck over the outfit. Blue ribbon on the green wicker hat. (p. 24)

In several places he refers to the ‘differences’ in uniformity:

Uniform clothes? Of course. And yet, what differences, however subtle! Grey or black jackets: functionaries, cadres, etc. Blue jackets, workers etc. (p. 27)

… the absolute uniformity of clothes. The reading of the social dimension is turned upside down. Uniform isn’t uniformity. (p. 57)

It’s only children who have individualized clothes, with anarchic colours. (p. 122)

His keen eye for detail is also evident at a music recital:

The musician has a pair of velvet trousers and an old-style jacket, albeit in gabardine (Mandarin style) … you can see the ancient origin of the Mao collar. […] The girls are delightful, in spite of the drab colours. Short jacket, short trousers, plaits, Chinese shoes. (p. 66)

And his playfulness is evident in the following remark:

The fashion for yellow umbrellas – Quite ridiculous! – If everyone had one (in France), it would make the rain less depressing. (p. 78)

We might take each of these quotes as candid ‘photographs’ or rushes of film in the style of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Chung Kuo-Cina (1972). Barthes acknowledges this film not only made him want to visit China, but also provides a methodological approach. Reflecting on his notes, he writes: ‘if I were to publish them as they are, it would be exactly a piece of Antonioni’ (2013a: 16). As O’Meara (2016) shows in her comparison of Antonioni and Barthes, the former’s visit was as much tightly controlled by the Communist Party officials. Despite which, at the editing stage, he ‘tries to find the interstices of the official itinerary and subject-matter he was expected to film by focusing on the individual and incidental’ (p. 271). Subsequently, Antonioni’s film is banned by the authorities, considered to be a ‘vicious’ distortion of the country. In very similar ways to Barthes’ ‘incidental’ notes on life in China (not least the aforementioned vignettes of clothing and objects), Antonioni’s framing is directly at odds with the ‘Maoist aesthetic’, which Sontag argued refrained from close-ups and required subject matter to be ‘photographed straight on, centered, and in its entirety’ (1979: 172). Yet, as O’Meara points out, Barthes stops a long way short of publishing a similarly critical work. Instead, in the short Le Monde article, ‘Well, And China?’ (1986), he appears to retreat. He takes up an ambiguous position, in which he describes China as merely ‘bland’ and ‘peaceful’.

There is not the space here to discuss this matter in more detail (and certainly the politics of this period warrant far greater consideration and nuance), but as O’Meara (2016: 267) suggests, this ‘muffling of criticism is in part due to the self-censorship implied by Barthes’s enmeshing of his public persona, as well as his private friendships, with the Tel Quel project’. He suggests they came back with ‘nothing’, writing in a key passage:

We leave behind us then the turbulence of symbols, we approach a vast land, very old and very new, where meaning is so discrete to the point of being rare. From that moment on, a new field opens up, one of delicacy, or, better yet (I’ll take a chance with this word, even though I may take it back later): blandness. (Barthes, 1986: 117)

Going now against the grain of most commentaries on Barthes’ Le Monde text, which, as noted, was criticized for its ambiguity, there is arguably a critical resource in this term of ‘blandness’ (as will be developed in reference to Jullien further below). Underlying Barthes’ reading of China are two key questions: ‘When faced with a dominant discourse, how do I frame my own discourse? What freedom do I have in doing so, given the “obligatory rubrics” of language itself?’ (O’Meara, 2016: 278). O’Meara points out these are the very same questions that ‘return in much more detail’ in Barthes’ final lecture course, notably in The Neutral (2005). She also suggestively remarks upon the ‘silent’ indebtedness of Antonioni’s film in Barthes’ Le Monde article:

the text’s curious focus on China’s ‘fadeur’ or ‘blandness’, its absence of colour (‘China is not coloured in’ …) may even be a deliberate echo of the Peking Daily’s critique of Antonioni’s palette: ‘The use of light and colour in the film is likewise with malicious intent. It is shot mainly in a grey, dim light and chilling tones. [...] Streets in Peking are painted in a dreary colour.’ (2016: 274–5)

It is to this ‘lens’ of the Neutral (and blandness) that we can now turn, which converts Barthes’ apparent disaffection with China into something more nuanced and ‘open’, and which in turn allows for a reading of fashion as form, a zero degree, which we can – albeit speculatively – take further to suggest how the temporality (and discontinuity) of fashion might enable a certain reading of history.

Neutral / Bland

Towards the end of his career, Barthes turned directly to the question of the ‘neutral’, which he defines ‘as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather … everything that baffles the paradigm’ (Barthes, 2005: 6). If we consider a certain ‘neutrality’ of fashion, it is by no means to suggest anything banal or insipid. Rather, Barthes’ interest in the Neutral radically expands his understanding of signification, breaking away from binary oppositions to instead pay attention to more fluid gradients or intensities of difference and exchange. This remains for him a structuralist project, but one which is infinitely richer in ‘tones’; it is, in effect, to get at the immense lexicon suggested in The Fashion System. As evidenced in the lecture course on the Neutral, Barthes is heavily influenced by Asian philosophies, including a keen interest in Taoism. In this respect, further insight can be made with reference to the more recent work of François Jullien, and in particular his book In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics (2007). Caveats aside, in terms of the different intellectual projects of Barthes and Jullien, a point to make is that term of ‘blandness’ works in many ways as a synonym of Barthes’ Neutral (though, as will be discussed below, it allows for a certain ‘concreteness’ too).

In accounting for traditional Chinese aesthetics, Jullien notes a contrast between flavour and blandness. An ink painting, he suggests, is bland, but not in the sense of dull, or boring. Rather the opposite. There is a plenitude (a many), and a sense of all being equal – all elements are mutually together. He writes: ‘nothing here strives to incite or seduce; nothing aims to fix the gaze or compel the attention. […] The Chinese critics traditionally characterize this in the one word: dan, the “bland”’ (Jullien, 2007: 37). Blandness in the Chinese tradition, according to Jullien’s interpretation, ‘characterizes the real in a way that is complete, positive and natural’ (p. 45). In this account, flavour ‘constitutes a limitation, for it excludes all other becoming. It will never be anything more than that particular flavor, the given flavor, compartmentalized in and restricted by its insuperable particularity’. By contrast, he writes, ‘when no flavor is named, the value of savoring it is all the more intense for being impossible to categorize; and so it overflows the banks of its contingency and opens itself to transformation’ (Jullien, 2007: 42). It is this ‘value of savoring’ (of enjoying, appreciating) that is significant, for example, with the cheongsam within a broader ‘landscape’ of fashion. The tendency in dress history (Ling, 2007; Finnane, 2008; Tsui, 2013) is frequently to draw out particular garments as distinct ‘flavours’, but which, following Jullien’s logic, ‘excludes all other becoming’. What is of more interest is how clothing actually operates in a ‘flavourless’ manner, in that space in which there are greater transformations and possibilities. This is the zone of the neutral, and arguably the very matter of fashion in itself, as an ever-changing set of codes and possibilities. Barthes’ reference to the yellow umbrella, for example, is a seemingly simple yet effective opening up of a wider appreciation.

We can return at this point to Barthes’ The Fashion System, which, as we already know, shows how fashion (as a discourse) signifies itself; that it alters items of clothing by making them seem natural, to be signified as definite elements within an overall lexicon. Barthes describes this discourse as ‘a veil of images, of reasons, of meanings; a mediating substance of an aperitive order’ (Barthes, 1990: xi). Rather than focus on these structured, ‘veiled’ outcomes (how the systems gets ‘weighted’, or ‘flavoured’), the point is to stay with the movement of the system (the aperitive, its opening or openness); to appreciate the ‘lightness’ of fashion, so as to understand what passes as it changes and adapts (which is the reason fashion is attracted to other sets of interests, as with the aforementioned trope of ‘Fashion and …’).

While Barthes’ The Fashion System is a resolutely structuralist text, he had already started to move on in thinking and approach. As Samoyault notes:

the texts and questions that now occupied him were quite different. Structuralism still seemed a good method (preferable to hermeneutics), but his interest in dissemination and the plurality of meaning led his research in other directions. (2017: 306)

His ‘great revolution of this period’ was his shift

from writing to reading, which brought to an end the subversion of the codes of academic textual interpretation applied to the classics and suggested that meaning was now infinitely dispersed, in all directions. (p. 307)

The shift to ‘reading’ needs to be understood as much a form of ‘writing’: that as we read, we write (albeit conceptually, virtually); it is a productive reading, but which is more ambiguous as to who is actually writing (the ‘subject’ begins to be un-made). Samoyault characterizes his shift in thinking in terms of a deepening interest in ‘absence’, in the ideas of networks of meaning that led Barthes to foreground ‘apparently elastic notions as dispersion, the remainder, the leftover’ (2017: 307). As he famously notes in ‘The Death of the Author’ (Barthes, 1977: 142–8), we never know who speaks,

for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. (1977: 142)

Of note is Barthes’ growing fascination with Asian philosophies and culture around this time, which begins to influence his work significantly, both implicitly and explicitly (Samoyault, 2017: 306–7). Barthes finds ‘another form of absence in the empty subject of Classical Chinese thought’. Importantly, it is an absence not in a negative sense, but with a positive charge (as we might consider the significance, for example, of the spaces, the pauses, in Japanese flower arranging). This has a significant impact on ideas of power and subjectivity. By engaging in the reading of various Asian texts, Barthes comes to contrast the

wishing to grasp or wishing to impress of the full subject, the master of the spoken word (the person who takes the floor or grabs the microphone in big public meetings), with the Zen master – a model to which Barthes sought increasingly to conform … – who sets up the idea of a not-wishing-to-grasp inspired by Lao Tsu: ‘He does not exhibit himself and will impose himself.’ (Samoyault, 2017: 308, emphasis in the original)

A philosophy of humility is difficult to place. It does not assert itself, it does not seek to establish itself. Methodologically this poses problems, but it raises an altogether different kind of reading – a neutral reading. In The Fashion System, Barthes already refers to a neutralization at the ‘heart’ of fashion. It ‘incessantly torments its body of signifiers’ to render ‘every Fashion lexicon illusory’ (Barthes, 1990: 209). His attempt to deconstruct or escape from binary configurations has ethical, philosophical, and aesthetic implications. In the opening of Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu gives a pithy account of the neutral, of a multiplicity in all things:

The Tao that can be told of

Is not the Absolute Tao;

The Names that can be given

Are not Absolute Names.

- Tao-Te-Ching (translated by Lin Yutang)

This neat formulation encapsulates the overarching dilemma for Barthes in The Neutral – i.e. where he can point to figures of the neutral he is effectively only giving names to it, not locating it in an ’absolute’ way. Rather we understand the Neutral only – in a fashion – through glimpses, its accessories, its incidents.

As Jullien (2007: 28) remarks, while in China (unlike with his account of Japan), Barthes does not ‘evince any interest in discovering other signs, or another hermeneutic; rather, he seems to have found pleasure in noting a lack of signs, in observing the suspension (his emphasis) of our sensual avidity’. It is the use of the word ‘bland’ that particularly interests Jullien:

[Barthes] makes it clear that he preferred this word to other, more common words, even as he withdraws it in advance, pronouncing it temporary. Barthes is tempted by an inversion of the sign (a positive blandness) but does not dare – or cannot? – follow it through to its logical end. (2007: 28–9)

Jullien is mindful not to ignore the ideological criticisms that surround Barthes’ ‘bland’ account of China, but suggests this is a secondary discourse that covers over ‘something else that, because it is felt, is quite accurate’. At this point, Jullien presents a comparison between Hegel and Confucius – the articulation of which is important to consider the philosophical ‘status’ of the term ‘blandness’.

For Hegel, Confucius’ work can be ‘summed up as a collection of moral doctrines or “insipid” prescriptions’ (which, he suggests, would have been better not to have been translated!): ‘One finds there neither theoretical definitions nor logically developed arguments; there is no systematic development of a branch of knowledge, only a succession of brief anecdotes, lapidary responses, and human-interest stories’ (Jullien, 2007: 29–30). By contrast, a sympathetic reading of Confucius is that critical ideas emerge through a more holistic, lived reading; that ideas extend through the ‘whole’ of one’s thought, and which can emerge as much when one is at play as at work. Jullien refers, for example, to the ‘Master’s open, relaxed manner’ and to ‘perfect modesty’, whereby ‘the Master does not hesitate to let the talents of others shine forth’. This, for Jullien, marks a key point of difference: ‘Isn’t what had been judged “insipid” from a speculative stand-point (that is, the Hegelian standpoint),’ he writes, ‘revealed as the most savory?’ (2007: 33). He turns Hegel on his head, whereby what first might have seemed ‘bland (and therefore unworthy of our extended consideration) can give rise to the richest variations and the farthest-reaching applications’ (p. 33). The merit of the bland, for Jullien, then, is in ‘not being fixed within the confines of a particular definition (and in thus being able to metamorphose without end)’ (p. 23). From a western point of view, Jullien argues that ‘to value the flavorless rather than the flavorful … runs counter to our most spontaneous judgment’ (p. 27), whereas in Chinese culture it is given a positive value: ‘As the Chinese have always said, if “all men are able to discriminate among differing flavors,” the blandness of the “Mean” (or the “Dao”) is “what is most difficult to appreciate”. But it is precisely this that lends itself to infinite appreciation’ (p. 24). Thus, the ‘bland’ (as with the Neutral) is far from a notion of the insipid. Instead, it can be deployed to represent ‘all things in-between’ the otherwise fixed values we typically contend with and trade in. One might argue fashioning, as a verb, as process, is always of the ‘bland’. It is always a means of continual discrimination ‘among differing flavours’, which can nonetheless get fixed (temporarily) as ‘fashion’, depending on the system in which these elements circulate. Yet fashion in this sense is not what we literally wear in a lived sense, day to day. It is our everyday negotiations of fashion (as Barthes observes in China as much as anywhere else) that are of the order of the ‘bland’.

More generally the ‘bland’ (recounted by Jullien, as we find too with Barthes’ account of the neutral) is a reminder that ‘meaning can never again be conceived as closed and fixed but remains open and accessible’ (Jullien, 2007: 33); or, again, to use Barthes’ phrase, it is of the ‘aperitive order’ (1990: xi). We are told, then, it is wise

to train oneself in this art of reading: an approach that allows for an infusion of meaning, a far cry from the imperious enumerations of (demonstrative) discourse and all its unrelenting classifications and distinctions. (Jullien, 2007: 33)

Furthermore, underlying Jullien’s account is an important adherence to the ‘concrete’:

The motif of the bland distances us from theory but does not, at the other extreme, commit us to mysticism […] with the bland, we remain in the realm of perceived experience, even if it situates us at the very limit of perception, where it becomes most tenuous. The bland is concrete, even if it is discreet. (2007: 33)

Importantly, then, in amongst the ‘demonstrative’ discourse – the ideological ‘bricks’ – that Barthes (and likewise Antonioni) endures at the behest of his Communist Party hosts, he persists in an ‘art of reading’, with a ‘method’ of the incidental (as a mode of writing or viewing).

Fashion as (Historical) Form

If we accept Barthes’ view of fashion as eminently ‘neutral’, and in working on from Jullien’s critique of Hegel, we can now make one final step, which is to link the concrete yet openness of fashion to a speculative account of history, as explored by Susan Buck-Morss (1994, 2002). In her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe (2002), she presents an account of capitalism and socialism as being less binary (less flavoured) than might be expected. Setting apart the explicit political rhetoric, she highlights how both political forms were equally concerned with industrial modernization. This was the ‘driving ideological form’ common to both. Her argument is drawn out explicitly in an earlier publication, where she makes a deliberate and interesting connection to reading ‘history’ in relation to the form of fashion (Buck-Morss, 1994). Her starting point is the seemingly unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War, she notes, represented a ‘monstrous accumulation of power, with unimaginable destructive force at its disposal’, yet somehow this dismantled itself ‘from within and seemingly without agency’ (p. 11). She is at pains not to deny a genuine opposition movement, but essentially the suggestion is that the ‘Cold War system imploded. Without war, without revolution, without cultural renaissance, it simply came to an end’ (p. 11). This leads her to argue, heuristically, for a way of understanding history in terms of fashion. Without wishing to ‘trivialize the utopian impulse, the desire for universal freedom and social justice that lies at the heart of what we have long called history’, her argument is that:

the temporal notion of transiency, fading, and loss that lies at the fundament of fashion is today a more faithful ally of this impulse. Fashion, with its insistent focus on material existence, may prove to be a matter of the utmost consequence, while the Hegelian notion of history, wherein surface events are interpreted as having a deep and rational meaning, would appear fickle and arbitrary in comparison. (1994: 11)

The specific connection she makes is with structural Marxism, and in particular a reading of Étienne Balibar (Althusser and Balibar, 2009: 223–345). Balibar’s contribution is to break from Marx’s historical narration based on class struggle, and instead to describe a method of ‘periodization’, to write according to epochs of economic structure, which reveal historical discontinuity. ‘These discontinuities,’ Buck-Morss explains, ‘do not announce themselves directly. They occur beneath the surface of that chronological sequence of political events with which historical narratives are traditionally preoccupied’. The method then requires locating the ‘right break’, i.e. ‘the one that makes the structural changes in history legible – or perhaps better said, makes them legible as history’ (1994: 6). From this, and crucially for our purposes, in referring specifically to fashion, Buck-Morss makes the claim ‘that fashion is symptomatic of such transformations. Structural discontinuity becomes manifest when the specific way the economic base is articulated within the ideological and state apparatuses is experienced as being out of date’ (1994: 12).

We might think, for example, how garments such as the Mao suit, the cheongsam, and of course the global penetration of western luxury designs ‘occur beneath the surface’ of the chronological sequence of the political; that they give us a means of locating the ‘right break’, or at least align with significant breaks in history – not least when we see their use anachronistically. In other words, these garments, when read as significant ‘breaks’, are instances of ‘legibility’, and indeed a form of ‘writing’ history in that they continually return and refigure. For Buck-Morss, her interest is in reading both capitalist and socialist production relations as less distinct than we typically argue, whereby, she suggests, we have to examine the economy in both an abstract and real sense. However, it is in the latter ‘real’ sense that she sees the value of thinking through fashion. ‘Structuralism examines the mode of production as a theoretical abstraction,’ she explains, ‘whereas fashion is concerned with the concrete things of the world’ (Buck-Morss, 1994: 15). Fashion, then, can be viewed as an existential concept:

… the temporality of which is not that of history as causal explanation. Fashion is a way of experiencing history, not as a causal continuum but as discontinuity, not as sequence but as fading. If it is a hermeneutical tool for making evident certain discontinuities or shifts within the structure that are themselves imperceptible, it tells us only that such a shift is happening, not what will be the result. But the philosophical defence of the concept of fashion is that it has its origin in precisely that industrial mode of production to which it is analytically applied. We are not dealing here with parallel but non-contiguous ‘objects’ of inquiry, one synchronic and one diachronic, as structuralism commonly argues. Fashion is the product of industry in a sense that is structural and historical, both at once. (Buck-Morss, 1994: 15, emphasis in the original)

The temporality of fashion seemingly gives us access less to a grand history than an experiencing of history. In other words, fashion cannot explain an overarching narrative, but it can ‘show’ history in its making and passing. Indeed, it is as much the discarding of fashion that is significant:

the incessant piling up of goods, a new erotics of change (Benjamin calls this the ‘puzzling need for new sensations’), and a relentless dismissal of the ‘outmoded’. In the nineteenth century, fashion was seized upon by commercial interests as a marketing strategy. But fashion was never merely that. It was the temporal effect, both structurally and historically, of the convergence between capitalist social relations and industrial production forms. Indigenous to the new mode of production, it became emblematic of its temporality, imbricated within the discourse of history to the point that to be ‘advanced’ (as a country, a culture, a military force) meant, simply and clearly, having the latest things. (Buck-Morss, 1994: 15)⁴

Coda

To repeat, Buck-Morss’ claim is that fashion is symptomatic of historical transformations: ‘Structural discontinuity becomes manifest when the specific way the economic base is articulated within the ideological and state apparatuses is experienced as being out of date’ (Buck-Morss, 1994: 12). In other words, as we look backwards (at what has already happened), we see changes that otherwise we could not have seen from within. This ‘looking back’ is a form of viewership that is endemic to fashion, which is always circulating, updating. There is a ‘structural discontinuity’, then, in both fashion and history, which means we need to attend to its conditions at all times, to find a ‘language’ that is more expansive (so not merely beholden to dominant narratives). Such expansiveness, it is suggested here, is a ‘neutral’ point of view, to take Barthes’ term, or one of ‘blandness’, to take that of Jullien. As the latter writes, blandness ‘pays little heed to the borders our various disciplines like to draw among themselves. As the embodiment of neutrality, the bland lies at the point of origin of all things possible and so links them’ (Jullien, 2004: 24). Neutral fashion – or clothing degree zero – is to challenge preconceived ideas; it is to argue for other kinds of meanings that are ‘lived’ in amongst the more dominant narratives. Similarly, the term ‘bland’ is to suggest of all flavours (the otherwise flavourless, or undesignated amongst the usual set flavours), for which we do not have terms. All experiences that are hard to define as distinct flavours to be kept open – allowed to be savoured – in order that we can ask of a richer set of experiences. In this sense we can understand Buck-Morss (1994: 15) when she suggests: ‘Fashion is a way of experiencing history, not as a causal continuum but as discontinuity, not as sequence but as fading.’

With the obvious caveats in place (that Barthes deliberately held back from a public critique of China), his reference to China’s blandness retains critical purchase, especially when viewed through the ‘incidents’ of the notebooks. And crucially, in deliberately looking to Barthes’ wider writings (not least the later work), we can begin to understand his fashion ‘system’ in an expanded sense, beyond the mere title of The Fashion System. Already that book harbours an open ‘system’ of fashion. But it is not until the later writing – his turn to the writerly – in which he places more emphasis upon ‘touches’, ‘incidents’ and punctum, that we begin to see a ‘method’ for thinking through fashion, and in a way that opens out to a wider historical critique. The publication of the China notebooks provides us with a pertinent example; a ‘concrete’ example of how ‘clothing degree zero’ might be made operative. Yet, it remains speculative. Given that Barthes never gave his permission to publish the notes, ‘this “semi-text” – or “avant-texte” (or fore-text) to give its critical-genetic name – is not really a “text” in the same way we might describe “Well, And China?”’ (Stafford, 2016: 289). As much as a ‘late’ reading, then, we might suggest this article poses a future reading. Of course, we can only ever ponder what Barthes might have made of China today. In his Le Monde article he refers to a ‘turbulence of symbols’ and of approaching ‘a vast land, very old and very new’ (Barthes, 1986: 117). These phrases are as apt today, and primed for a new ‘value of savouring’, opening to ‘transformation’ (Julien, 2007: 42). Such pondered incidents, however, can now only be for others to follow.

Footnotes

Notes

ORCID iD

Feng Jie

Feng Jie is Associate Professor at Southwest University of China. Her doctoral thesis, Uniformities of Fashion: A Critical Reading of Women’s Clothing in Altermodern China, was completed at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK. She is a member of council for the Contemporary Urban Aesthetics Research Institute of China as well as the founder of the company Zero Degree, and as part of which, Director of the Neutral Institute.

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special issue on ‘Neutral Life/Late Barthes’, edited by Sunil Manghani.

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