… qualitas is less transcendent (the fiat landing sovereignly onto things), more vehement, more “gutsy”: qualitas rises out of things like a force, the imprint of the name coming from within like a potent ink becoming visible.
This is from The Neutral by Roland Barthes (1978). This book is a taken from Barthes’s written notes to the course that he gave at the Collège de France over thirteen weeks from February to June of 1978:
Color
… In [Barthes's book] the Fashion System, the signifying opposition doesn’t pass between such and such color but massively between the colorful and the colorless: colorless here meaning not “transparent” but precisely: unmarked color, “neutral,” indistinct color: whence the paradox: black and white are on the same side (that of the marked colors) and what comes to oppose them is gray (the muffled, the faded, etc.): colors follow a semantic principle of organization (marked/unmarked).
→ Thus we see that in the end the ultimate opposition, the one that both fascinates and is the most difficult to think about to the extent that it self-destructs in its very statement is that between distinction and indistinction, and this is what is at stake in the Neutral, the reason the Neutral is difficult, provocative, scandalous: because it implies a thought of the indistinct, the temptation of the ultimate (or of the ur) paradigm: that of the distinct and the indistinct.
The Adjective
… when languages (with articles) want to express the Neutral insofar as it bears on a substance, they don’t use the substantive but the adjective, which they disadjectivize by means of an article in the neutral; … [for example "the true," "the beautiful," etc.]
… in order to deconstruct the subject/predicate paradigm, language has recourse to a hybrid grammatical entity, the substantivized adjective … → the Neutral wallows in a (as much as possible) nonpredicable form; in short, the Neutral would be exactly that: the nonpredicable.
Hence we might possibly stretch the object “adjective” out to substantives, if they are theorized by the speaker as kinds of absolute and nonpredicable qualities (Boehme’s qualitas).
… Boehme’s vision of qualitas is less transcendent (the fiat landing sovereignly onto things), more vehement, more “gutsy”: qualitas rises out of things like a force, the imprint of the name coming from within like a potent ink becoming visible.
… he believes in “true” etymology. Thus qualität < quelle, spring, surging force, soaring fountain …, but < quaal, suffering, torture: “In each quality there is an element of anger, of suffering and furor, since each quality suffers from its isolation, its limitation and tries to overflow, to be united with other qualities.” → Dynamic, loving battle of the qualities among themselves and of the two sides, the good and the bad, of a single quality:
The hot — light: good, sweet, joyful; ardor: burns, devours, destroys.
The cold — freshness: good; furious and incensed form: freezing, which gels.
A structural, paradigmatic game is thus set between qualities that’s to say, two opposed qualities + one quality that combines them, reconciles them …
… Thus, in Boehme: acrid/sweet → bitter.
The acrid: this is not a sensuous quality = power of abstraction, of coagulation, of condensation. Gives birth to hardness and cold. Like salt = salinity.
The sweet: victory over the acrid. Quality of water that dilutes and attenuates salt. Without sweetness, all bodies as though petrified, in an absolute hardness = bodies in which life would be impossible. Principle of fluidity.
The bitter: trembling, penetrating. A tendency to raise itself up. Interpenetrating movement of the acrid and the sweet.
… What type of thought of the Neutral is implied in such a system? = reflects the ambivalence alleged at the outset:
1. = thought of things as nonpredicable, since the object fades away to the profit of the quality: world of qualities, not of qualified, predicated substances. It’s thus the thought of a certain Neutral.
2. But this Neutral remains conflictual, sensitive to the struggle of angry forces that stand against each other: the overcoming of the conflictual doesn’t occur through suspension, abstention, abolition of the paradigm, but through invention of a third term: complex term and not zero, neutral term.
… I will still have to deal with some aspects of the conflictual energy, of the “anger” that defines the Boehmian quality: for I always receive the adjective badly, as an aggression, and I do so in all cases, no matter which value is attributed to it by the figure under which it is addressed to me.
… I (like everyone) sometimes hear myself qualified (as a writer) with intentionally depreciative adjectives: accusation of “preciousness,” of “theoretical coquetry,” of muffling, etc.
… The adjectiveal interpellation throws me back like a ball (a stake) into the vertigo of reciprocal images: by adjectivizing me as “precious,” the other puts himself in a paradigm, he adjectivizes himself as “plain,” “direct,” “frank,” “virile”; and to this paradigm (I-bad/he-good) there responds the symmetrical and reversed paradigm: I can adjectivize myself not as precious but as subtle-delicate and henceforth adjectivize him as hick, crude, stubborn, victim of the virility lure → formally both value paradigms have entered some kind of deal, “work” like a turnstile: ego +/alter – , in which ego and alter oscillate according to the source of the utterance → endless walk, two-termed dialectic, vertigo without respite, because the turning excludes respite, suspension, the Neutral. I am caught in the weariness of the paradigm.
[ ... ]
… without the lure, without the adjective, nothing would happen. Of course, an adjective always imprisons (the other, myself), that’s even the definition of the adjective: to predicate is to affirm, thus to confine [affirmer, donc enfermer]. But at the same time to evacuate adjectives from language would be to pasteurize to the point of destruction, it’s funereal.
… We can prefer lure to mourning, or at least we can recognize that there is a time for the lure, a time for the adjective. Perhaps the Neutral is that: to accept the predicate as nothing more than a moment: a time.
My most recent previous post from Barthes’s book is here.
-Julie
