The in/visible

InvisibleCover1.jpg

Edited by Clare Birchall

Introduction

‘Light is too corruptible, too shifting and inconstant to form the basis of the relationship to the self and to the All.’ (Irigaray, 1974: 148)

‘Incredible how you can see right through me.’ (Queen, ‘Invisible Man’)

Given that the essence of the invisible lies in our inability to see it, the large number of cultural attempts to represent and mobilise it as metaphor presents an irony. The use of invisibility as a fictive trope dates back at least to the legend of Gyges, discussed in Plato's Republic written around 360 BC. Gyges discovers a ring that makes him invisible and helps him to brutally win a kingdom. Ancient etymology indicates that the name of Hades, Greek god of the underworld, means ‘invisible’ and his helmet enabled him to realise this state (Roman & Roman, 2009: 182). More recently, H.G. Wells warned of its dangers, exploring the suspicion and havoc invisibility can wreak (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb3n0g2NenI&feature=related); Queen have sung about its appeal (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65why7alD3Y); and Harry Potter dons an invisibility cloak to vanquish dark forces in the first book. In philosophy, at least for Merleau-Ponty and Derrida in different ways, the possibility of perception relies on the difference between the visible and invisible (see Reynolds, 2004). After Adam Smith, economists refer to the ‘invisible hand’ of the market: indicating a supposedly self-regulating entity. In terms of identity politics the invisible is used as a marker of the marginalised and voiceless – unrecognised by the state or society and without power, they are effectively invisible. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, for example, begins: ‘I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me’ (1952: 1). As a result of all this cultural activity around the invisible, the strangeness, the absence, the alterity that attracts us to, and encourages us to find ways to represent invisibility through existing paradigms, is undoubtedly domesticated.

The trope of invisibility clearly has creative, political, epistemological and cultural force. But invisibility is not just a cultural trope: it is a physical state from which these other uses borrow meaning. Invisible matter is that which neither reflects nor absorbs light. It is a state that assumes its full resonance in relation to a human viewer: invisibility is nothing more than that which lies outside the visible spectrum (although we will need to consider the role of technology in the enhancement of vision and detection). In this respect, invisibility is not a positive property of the matter observed, but a limitation in, or manipulation of, the observer’s visual apparatus. Such a description works just as well at the metaphorical level - whether we are referring to cultural limitations, as with Ellison’s white folk, or psychological limitations in which the psyche refuses to face certain events or truths - as it does in reference to the physiological limitations of the human eye.

Of course, it is not the case that we have the physical state of invisibility as a scientific object on the one hand and cultural attempts to represent it on the other. Science, too, seeks ways to represent that which is invisible. It is highly concerned with how to make invisible matter visible (or at least visible enough for us to secure proof of existence). In this joint concern, both science and culture (if we can even separate these realms at all) mediate our understanding of the invisible. Language is one apparatus used to bring the invisible into what we can only metaphorically refer to as the ‘line of vision’, whether this be the trick of creative representation, access to God through religious texts and images, consciousness raising of marginalised human experience through written testimony, or the writing up of scientific experiments. Some phenomena require ways of ‘seeing’ which are less about visibility than cognition. Take ‘dark matter’, for example – a term Fritz Zwicky came up with in the 1930s to refer to the missing mass of galaxies – which can only be hailed by mathematical calculation. These calculations estimate the non-baryonic mass present given the gravitational influence on the motion of gas and stars in galaxies and galaxies within clusters. More http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/The_in/visible/introduction

Invisible Web

Dirk Lewandowski & Philipp Mayr - Exploring the Academic Invisible Web

Original Article 'Exploring the Academic Invisible Web'

Jayant Madhavan, Loredana Afanasiev, Lyublena Antova & Alon Halevy

‘Harnessing the Deep Web: Present and Future’

Makeuseof

'10 Search Engines to Explore the Deep Web'

Black Holes

Ted Jacobson and Thomas P. Sotiriou

‘Might Black Holes Reveal their Inner Secrets?’

Alberto Sesana, Jonathan Gair, Emanuele Berti, Marta Volonteri

‘Reconstructing the Massive Black Hole Cosmic History through Gravitational Waves’