Brief Histories of Invisibility

Posted on August 7, 2019 by youandwhosearmy?

What follows is a transcript of my response to Andrew Culp’s presentation of research
from
his forthcoming book, Indiscernibility: The Politics of the Unseen
(currently under contract with University of Minnesota Press)

I would like to begin by contrasting Andrew’s project with the following passage from Jacques Rancière’s On the Shores of Politics as a way of grasping the discrepancy between the two aspects of socio-political power. Rancière writes,

Police intervention in public
space is less about interpellating demonstrators than it is about
dispersing them. The police are not the law that interpellates the
individual (the “hey, you there” of Louis Althusser) unless we confuse
the law with religious subjection. The police are above all a certitude
about what is there, or rather, about what is not there: “Move along,
there’s nothing to see.” The police say there is nothing to see, nothing
happening, nothing to be done but to keep moving, circulating; they say
that the space of circulation is nothing but the space of circulation.
Politics consists in transforming that space of circulation into the
space of the manifestation of a subject: be it the people, workers,
citizens. It consists in refiguring that space, what there is to do
there, what there is to see, or to name. It is a dispute about the
division of what is perceptible to the senses. (On the Shores of Politics, 242)

Now, just because invisibility studies is said to be an examination
of the ‘wars of appearance’ it does not mean that we can discount this
analysis of police power put forward by Rancière. Despite the fact that
this image of policing as making sure there is nothing to see, that
‘nothing appears,’ is not the image of power emphasized by invisibility
studies, the point held in common by Andrew and Rancière alike is that,
at the very least, public space or the spaces where someone or something
might appear, is first and foremost a space of contestation, that is to
say, a space of struggle. However, what notions of invisibility allow
us to grasp that is seemingly left out of Rancière’s account is
precisely the fact that social and political power has a vested
interest in rendering visible/seeable/sayable that which is deemed
transgressive, criminal, and militant. For as Claudia Rankine helpfully
points out in her remark regarding racist discourse:

Not long ago you are in a room
where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language
hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the
address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being
addressable…For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was
to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler’s
remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in
the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended
to exploit all the ways that you are present. (Rankine, Citizen)

What is more, this rendering of ourselves as something more than
simply visible, as something hypervisible, does not simply pertain to
language games. 

In their 2015 text, Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South,
Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford show how the maintenance of white
supremacy and its attendant socio-economic form of plantation society
also had a vested interested in rendering visible the particular threat
posed by the runaway slave. And when undertaking an analysis of the
nature and function of the maroon communities that occupied an estimated
1,500-2,000 square miles adjacent to the eastern North
Carolina-Virginia border, Shirley and Stafford underscore the fact that
the purpose of maroon communities was not simply to encourage slaves and
others to runaway and flee. Rather, the purpose of maroon society was
the establishment of a territory that would make possible the attack,
and hopefully the abolition, of plantation society as a whole: 

Forced to flee above-ground life
as debt fugitives, runaway slaves or refugees from the brutal wars waged
on Indians, the maroons established a permanent way of life in the
swamp waging a long-term, unceasing guerilla war against plantation
society in the form of arson, cattle rustling, crop theft, encouraging
slave escapes, and coordinating insurrections throughout the area. (Dixie Be Damned, 20)

Thus we can say, with respect to the function of the State and the
police, ensuring the reproduction of a society predicated on disparities
along economic, gendered, and racial lines gives rise to a form of
socio-political power that functions by making all of its subjects,
citizens, or otherwise, visible and thus accounted for. And here we can
return to the passage from Rancière. For what is at work in the policing
mantra of ‘there’s nothing to see here’ is precisely the result of
becoming visible to the state; and moreover, it is by rendering
citizens/subjects visible and identifiable that the police and the state
are able to ensure that no refusal or insurrection of any kind is
realized in contested public space.

Now, to avoid historical equivocation it would seem that the idea of
invisibility studies isn’t to argue for invisibility as a
transhistorical category of theorizing. Rather, the point is to
demonstrate how rendering visible certain subjects via certain easily
identifiable character traits (skin color, gender expression, clothing,
accent, and so on) is always a latent or virtual possibility regarding
the expression of social and political power. Therefore, invisibility as
a response to a power that singles us out based on personal attributes
assumes a dominant role in given historical moments – and not only in
the context of slavery as we have mentioned but also in the context of
anti-colonial guerilla wars, or during the ‘red years’ defined by the
activity of post-operaismo and the Red Brigades in Italy, or even
perhaps today, when the ongoing cycle of struggles against capital and
resurgent far-right are undertaken in a context where laws such as the
‘Unmasking Antifa Act,’ proposed by Republican Congressman Dan Donovan
of New York are put forward as actual pieces of legislation. All of this
to say, given certain historical and material conditions, invisibility
becomes a mode throughout which anti-capitalist struggle is waged.

That said, we would be remiss to simply treat the notion of
invisibility as another determinate judgement regarding a certain state
of affairs or as a more adequate descriptor of the world. In other
words, if the idea of invisibility is developed in response to the
current impasse or impotence of the promise held out by Critique
(understood in the sense given to it by the Frankfurt School as
demystification of appearances in order to reveal their structural
essence which is taken to be the inherent politicizing or radicalizing
aspect of marxist theorizing) then invisibility belongs to the order of
Thought  as well as to the domain of historical analysis. And if this is
so, then the proposal of invisibility studies brings us back to what
was at stake in the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach (i.e. invisibility is not
simply a means of interpreting but of transforming the world). So to
conclude, I will simply offer up a series of questions that will
hopefully clarify what is at stake in this proposal for the founding of
invisibility studies as the less illustrious and estranged cousin of
critical governmentality studies: 

(i) What role might invisibility as a
concept play given the present state of Theory broadly construed? And
what seemingly foreclosed futures might this notion help explicate or
develop in a manner that is antagonistic to the current forces and
relations of production? 

(ii) Is the notion of invisibility akin to the schizophrenic as conceptual personae of Deleuze and Guattari – whereby a material social relation is taken as the grounds for the development of a concept that doesn’t simply reconstruct the present state of things but orients us towards both the actual and virtual futures generated by capitalist society?

taken from here

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