Points of Presence , an experimental drone documentary made by Adam Fish, Bradley Garrett and Oliver Case (2017), surveys the underwater labor practices required for maintaining wireless internet cables. Null Island (2017), by Australian artist Luke Munn, exploits acts of formal manipulation, in the tradition of Cory Arcangel, to make tangible the imperceptible operations of global positioning systems. The Green Book of South Carolina is an online travel guide designed to retrieve African-American histories imperiled by erasure and amnesia. Ellie Beaudry’s three-panel video short Past, Present, Future Bund (2017) charts the daily fluctuation of air pollution in Shanghai. What these disparate projects have in common is that they were all shown at the Invisible Geographies exhibition curated by Dale Hudson and Claudia Pederson under the auspices of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival at Ithaca College in 2018. Showcasing 20 new media works created by artists, scientists, coders, historians and activists, the exhibition centers on what the curators term “unmarked and unmapped relationships,” associations that “may have been written but have subsequently been erased, obscured, or made illegible.” 1 The exposition foregrounds a range of themes that is vital to this book. What its eleven essays comprise is not so much a comprehensive and systematic history and/or philosophy of invisibility as a cultural concept, as a set of nascent and stimulating explorations of what we maintain is a conspicuously under-explored phenomenon in contemporary visual culture. Extending across a wide spectrum of knowledge forms and scientific inquiries, the question of invisibility cannot be fully articulated from any specific discourse or field. In this, it evokes Mieke Bal’s notion of a ‘travelling concept .’ 2 Also salient are the ways in which the invisible suggests intricate entanglements with concepts that are in themselves multi-faceted and malleable, such as representation , aesthetics , technology, identity and politics. The scholars gathered together in this anthology hail from a number of disciplines—art history, media studies, literature, cultural studies and philosophy—bringing a variety of theoretical positions and contexts to bear on the subject in question.
Invisibility means the absence of visibility. Absence, in turn, is tied to experience rather than to objects. The experience of absence is real and is in no way diminished by the fact that the thing that generated the feeling of absence in the first place is gone. Perhaps this marks our point of departure: that invisibility, right from the start, must necessarily be a question of relationality. This book is thus not about invisibility cloaks or magical potions. It is not about invisibility as a discrete and self-contained state. On the contrary, our subject matter is invisibility as the flipside of the visible, as its inextricable counterpart. The visible produces the invisible, in the sense that for something to be optically discernible to us within any given temporal frame, something else has to recede from observability. In his working notes for the manuscript left uncompleted at the time of his death, Maurice Merleau-Ponty considers four different ‘layers,’ as he calls them, of the meaning of the notion of invisibility: (1) the Cogito; (2) tactility unaccompanied by the visual sense; (3) that which remains concealed and is potentially visible; and finally (4) that which does not qualify as a thing, what he describes as “the existentials of the visible, its dimensions, its non-figurative inner framework.” 3 Merleau-Ponty’s theorization of invisibility is useful as a signpost for our own inquiries, but we would also like to seize the opportunity to make a couple of conceptual incisions into the semiotic fabric of invisibility. In order better to grasp the somewhat equivocal and abstract phenomenon of invisibility, we propose to delineate what we see as its key areas of significance. We suggest that the subject of invisibility might be approached through the prisms of aesthetics , representation , technology and politics. These are overarching structures that subsume a whole range of other themes involving the invisible in some way or another, such as narratives and languages of invisibility, invisibility and identity (race, gender, class), illegibility, the transcendent, the politics of the secret, invisibility and the digital (metadata , management of information, surveillance), invisibility in relation to activism and social movements (Anonymous ), the notion of strategic invisibility, invisibility and contemporary warfare, invisibility vis-à-vis the “distribution of the sensible” and the question of who is given visibility and who is relegated to invisibility, to name some of the issues bearing upon our subject. 4 As the chapters in this book make clear, two nodes of inquiry seem to recur throughout: an interest in the epistemological potential of the relation between invisibility and visibility, and the question of whether there can be a materiality of the invisible.
In the realm of fiction, the notion of the invisible has been associated with scientific experimentation, as in H.G. Wells’s novella The Invisible Man (1897), and with the experience of being rendered unnoticeable through systemic racism, as in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Invisibility has also been powerfully aligned with the realm of the imaginary, as in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), in which Marco Polo the explorer narrates his knowledge about 55 invented cities to the emperor Kublai Khan. While Wells’s and Ellison’s works dramatize cultural desires for, respectively, invisibility and visibility, Calvino’s novel accentuates the invisibility of the imaginary, perhaps to imply that that which can exist is not limited to empirical reality as defined by positivist principles. As W.J.T. Mitchell observes in his much-cited essay “What is an Image?”, in which he distinguishes between graphic, optical, perceptual, mental and verbal images in a Wittgensteinian family tree, it is hard to put mental and physical images in the same category: “[w]e certainly can’t do it by cutting open someone’s head to compare mental pictures with the ones on our walls,” he dryly remarks. 5 Returning to the subject in What Do Pictures Want? he suggests a basic distinction between ‘picture’ and ‘image,’ where the former is a physical manifestation of the latter, which reappears as a figure or a motif across material cultures and historical time. 6
This book’s chapters address invisibility both as a fact and as a trope that constitutes how we see, or do not see, both pictures and images, to stick with Mitchell’s terminology. For all its simplicity, the dichotomy nevertheless reflects the central contradictions of the relationships between what we think of as visible and invisible. In aesthetic terms, the invisible can appear to linger at the threshold of utterance, as what is said not explicitly, but perhaps implicitly; hence the expression ‘to read between the lines,’ which points to the existence of something the reader f...