Observing Neutrality, circa 1800

Heiß mich nicht reden, heiß mich schweigen

—Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (MA 5:357)

For his seminar held at the Collège de France during the spring semester of 1978, Roland Barthes offered his students a series of fragments collected under the title “The Figures of the Neutral.”¹ What he wanted to provide was a dictionary, “not of definitions but of twinklings (scintillations)” (Barthes 10). It was to be a loose collection, reflecting the fact that the neutral appears in a number of widely differing contexts and also embodies a particular kind of resistance with regard to choice or “paradigmatic structures”—a resistance that could, he writes, also be understood as “the refusal to dogmatize” (Barthes 10). The twenty-three seminar sessions were devoted to topics whose connection to the neutral is at times relatively obvious (“the androgyne,” “tact,” etc.) and at times less so (“the adjective,” “affirmation,” etc.). Barthes’s selection frees the neutral from any thematic rigidity and allows it to “twinkle” in unexpected places. By making neutrality an open and prolonged topic of discussion, he also opens the door for ironic play with one of neutrality’s main taboos: the production of speech itself. Such discussions might, at best, strive for impartiality, but as we will see with regard to neutrality, once the first word has been uttered, one can no longer hope to remain neutral where the neutral is concerned.

The discussion of neutrality in the following pages will take its cues from Barthes, who has an approach to neutrality that moves lightly between different disciplinary contexts—Barthes mentions in his lecture notes that he takes the word “neutral” “for a series of walks along a certain number of readings”—and that is committed to a certain structural definition of the neutral as “that which outplays the paradigm” (Barthes 6). In the present article, as well, there is an attempt to balance between discursive mobility and structural contour. Here, the focus is narrower: both as regards the historical parameters, lingering in the decades around 1800, and in terms of choosing case studies where the problem of the neutral is directly addressed in terms of human relations and in scientific contexts. On the one hand, neutrality is used to indicate a certain mode of being around others, one defined by a kind of absence, as will be shown in more detail below. On the other hand, the concept of neutrality also plays an important role in the developing science of chemistry, where the term “neutral salt” was (and still is) used to describe a product that emerges from certain combinations of acids and bases—a product that, however, has the qualities of neither an acid nor a base. I will begin by considering the theoretical positions associated with these two modes of neutrality, with reference to examples drawn from scientific, literary, and philosophical sources and with an eye for unexpected affinities between them. In each case, we will see that neutrality is accompanied by formal expectations; that is, it carries with it certain transferrable structural features. Rather than resist this rigidity, as the nimbleness of Barthes’s approach might tempt us to do, I will instead attempt to navigate a middle (though certainly not neutral) position, such that a close attention to the particular features of each kind of neutrality—one based on human and the other on chemical interactions—will, in fact, allow for a kind of mutual illumination. With that goal in mind, the general discussion of neutrality in the first part of the article will, in the second part, be complemented by three case studies where these two modes of neutrality appear in unexpected proximity to one another. We will see how they rely upon each other in surprising ways, and we will also witness their limits, as shown through the emergence and decline of chemical neutrality as a metaphor and figure of thought beyond the field of chemistry.

Defining Neutrality

The word “neutral” comes from the Latin neutrum, which is itself a composite of ne + utrum, or “not either”: the essence of the neutral is to negate. It makes early appearances in...