Sunday 24 April 2011

Sketch for a theory of invisibility


As hopeless prisoners of ourselves, cruelly predisposed to a sensory faith, we are never able to not hear the tree crash but know of its sound. Aliens to the event, it ceases to matter. The question of the acoustic residue of a crashing tree becomes replaced by another: did the tree ever fall?


As cohabitants in the house of ego, that merciless housewife of apparent unity, we only care for the status of the tree insofar as it effects the immediacy of our being. The question is once more supplanted: does the tree exist?


To some, it may; to I, it does not - other issues are at hand. But I do not question the realist; I am prepared to concede that it exists, but is invisible.


To be visible is:

1. to influence the nature of the field of vision.

2. to register upon the perceptive apparatus of the observer.

3. to be mediated.


The degree of visibility/invisibility is correlative to the degree of obse

rvation.


This is the ontological condition of being visible.


The tree in question, its existence and its acoustic qualities, bear no significance, for these questions only come into being once the tree has been deemed visible. Until then, it is invisible and immaterial.


Thus, to be invisible is:

1. to not influence the nature of the field of vision.

2. to fail to register upon the perceptive apparatus of the observer.

3. to be isolated.


Invisibility is a matter of negation.


On attaining invisibility


One cannot decide to be invisible, it can only occur through the co-operation with perceptive beings, and their ability to not perceive.


The insignificance of the object leads to its failure to be observed, thus to be insignificant is to increase chance of invisibility.


Insignificance is the inability to affect the environment, it is stasis manifest in suspension; a perimeter that connects to nothing.


Invisibility is the visual non-manifestation of the force of neglect.


The invisible lacks substance; it lacks the impetus with which to become visible. The invisible thus secures its own sustained invisibility.


To be invisible is to not be: to not be is to not be invisible: the condition of double negation.


The invisible non-being's sustained non-being is assured. This is the one and only attribute of the invisible - endlessness.


End.