The Neutral

Definition

The Neutral (le neutre) is Roland Barthes' late category for that which escapes or wears out the paradigm — the site of meaning that neither asserts nor negates, "neuter" in the grammatical sense of ne-utrum, neither-one-nor-the-other. In this wiki, the category enters through Yoka & Paschalidis (eds., 2015), whose Introduction reports Vergopoulos's chapter claiming Barthes' "neutral" for the everyday: the everyday as a category that "passes with the semiotic to go beyond the semiotic" — the ordinary as what evades the signifying order rather than (or before) producing counter-meanings within it. Vergopoulos is also reported as inverting the experiential formula — the everyday as social experience of time and space rather than "the time [and] space of experience" — an itinerary leading to Poirier's advice to stop searching for the meaning of things and instead appreciate their "physical gravity: to palpate them, to taste them, to feel them."

Key Thinkers

• Roland Barthes — origin of the category (no author page yet; see log.md PAGE NEEDED). In the volume's framing, his Mythologies founds the semiotics of the everyday as "semioclasm," while the "neutral" names the beyond of that demystifying semiology.
• Lia Yoka & Gregory Paschalidis — report and frame Vergopoulos's claim of the "neutral" for the everyday.
• Vergopoulos (chapter author; name partially garbled in the OCR scan) — claims the "neutral" for the everyday as the category that "passes with the semiotic to go beyond the semiotic."

Related Concepts

• Semiotics — the "neutral" is claimed with and beyond the semiotic: the everyday as what slips the paradigm.
• Everyday Life — the "neutral" is one answer to what the everyday is: neither spectacle's sign nor resistance's counter-sign, but insignificance itself (cf. the chapter title "Everyday is 'Insignificant'").
• Theories of the Everyday — the "neutral" would sit near Berger & Luckmann's descriptive "paramount reality" and Blanchot's "non-event," but claims a Barthesian pedigree the others lack.
• Strategy and Tactic — de Certeau's tactics produce counter-meanings on the terrain of the other; the "neutral" suggests an everyday that evades the terrain altogether.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday (Yoka & Paschalidis eds. 2015) — Vergopoulos's chapter (via the Introduction): the everyday claims Barthes' "neutral"; everyday as social experience of time and space; Poirier's palpable things.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the concept's second, structural sense via Baudrillard's masses: "that of the neutral, that is to say neither one nor the other (ne-uter)" (SSM, 5–6, quoted in Butler p. 131) — not Barthes's wearying of the paradigm but the mass's undecidability between conformity and defiance, which the survey's circular question-and-answer can never pin down: "it is a silence which refuses to be spoken in its name" (SSM, 32–3, quoted p. 133). Where Barthes neutralizes from within the semiotic, Butler's mass is the paradigm's failed closure. See the-masses, simulation-hyperreality.
• source-notes/marinic-2018-internal-disconnect-portman

Open Questions

• How does Barthes' "neutral" relate to his earlier "semioclasm" — is the "neutral" the positive completion of demystification, or its suspension?
• Is the "neutral" of the everyday compatible with Lefebvre's claim that the everyday is the site of alienation and struggle — or does claiming the "neutral" quietly exit the critical politics of everyday-life theory?
• Does the everyday's alleged beyond-of-the-semiotic survive Eco's counter-claim that the everyday is a semiotic battlefield ("semiological guerilla warfare")?