Linguaggio e vestito: Roland Barthes e Charles Peirce

Abstract

Roland Barthes proposed to apply Saussure's theory of language to dressing. Barthes's approach worked well enough when considering clothes as expressions or significants but some problem emerged if one attempted to study their meaning. Barthes himself and others researchers noticed that, though dressing is quite easy to describe as a syntactic system, when coming to semantic units and their relationships, there is a strong evidence of a general lack of meaning. The notion of phatic communication was defined by Roman Jakobson but he found the concept in Bronislaw Malinowski. Malinowski seemed a bit inconsistent when he wrote that the meaning of phatic communication is irrelevant, yet phatic communication is one of "the bedrock aspects of man's nature in society". This implies that communication can be very important regardless of its meaning. How can this be? Malinowski referred to language "as a mode of action", and we will take this pragmatic hint as a link to Charles Peirce. In Peirce, in fact, we find no reflection on dressing. Only in a paragraph from an essay written in 1901, we have the description of an abductive inquiry performed on a person by means of her dress and countenance. The excerpt is coherent with Peirce's theory: dressing elements, and body traits as well, are signs that produce interpretants. In such an interpretive frame, the mass of phatic communication produced by self-presentation behaviour, including dressing, can be explained as semantically negligible but socially important