CRITICAL HORIZONS

https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2023.2286865

Invisibility: From Discrimination to Resistance

Emmanuel Alloa
Department of Philosophy, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The paper takes heed of the fact that, when evaluating normative Exclusion; inclusion; visibility;
issues through the semantics of visibility and invisibility, a transfer recognition; transparency;
takes place from optical to political semantics which is not indeterminacy
without consequences. The paper attempts a typology of the
extremely diverse functions (in)visibility takes in current
discourses, moving from the characterization of situations of
discrimination to that of the resistance to it. In a first step, it
analyses the affirmative uses of the notion of political
visibilisation, whether of individuals, groups or concerns, that
fashion themselves as targeted answers to discrimination. In a
second step, it looks at the politics of invisibilisation, stealth, and
opaqueness, claiming emancipatory and critical potential in
resisting the limelight of public space. Specifically, it assesses
whether the traditional connect of politicization and public
visibility still holds true in all cases. In a third part, the paper
suggests a possible reorganization of the polarity of visibility and
invisibility as one that runs along the continuum between
determinacy and indeterminacy, indicating its effects for patterns
of discrimination as well as for practices of resistance.

And some are in the darkness

And the others in the light
But you only see those in the light
Those in the darkness you don’t see.
Bertolt Brecht, The Ballad of Mack the Knife

The dialectics of visibility and invisibility, which Bertolt Brecht catches so aptly in the
Ballad of Mack the Knife, is often invoked in contemporary political discourses when
it comes to describe mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Although this applicability
of optical semantics to social and political phenomena goes mostly unquestioned today, it
is in fact a development of recent date. While the awareness of what exclusion means is
persistently to be found since early modern times, its characterization in terms of invisi-
bility is a fairly new phenomenon, and definitely much younger than many would think.
If we are ready to follow Hannah Arendt, it is only lately that exclusion came to be seen as

CONTACT Emmanuel Alloa Emmanuel.alloa@unifr.ch Department of Philosophy, University of Fribourg, Avenue

de l’Europe 20, Fribourg CH-1700, Switzerland
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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2 E. ALLOA

also consisting of a deprivation of social visibility. The misery of social invisibility is illus-
trated by the words of John Adams, the Second President of the United States: “[The poor
man] is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is only not seen […]. To be wholly
overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable”.1 But such statements remain the exception
rather than the rule. According to Arendt, the feeling of injustice Adams expresses,
amounts to “the conviction that darkness rather than want is the curse of poverty, is
extremely rare in the literature of the modern age”.2
The sense that social exclusion has primarily to do with invisibilising particular indi-
viduals, groups, or experiences would thus mark a late insight that supersedes earlier
anthropological or purely material definitions of precariousness. Arendt herself associ-
ates the motif of social invisibility with figures such as the post-1945 stateless subject,
the Jewish pariah and the immigrant, placing them within her broad phenomenology
of the political space of appearance. The politically invisible do not appear on the
stage of communal appearance and are thus deprived of the possibility of making them-
selves heard and seen in social interactions, quite apart from the fact that they are denied
participation in shaping a common political project. Whatever one’s opinion on Arendt’s
historical diagnosis, and whatever one’s assessment of her own forays into a theory of
political appearance – after all, in the ill-famed Little Rock article she seems to frontally
contradict her own thesis when claiming that the African American population is extre-
mely visible in the United States3 – no one would seriously contest that the conceptual
pair of visibility and invisibility is claiming an increasingly prominent role in the political
vocabulary of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.4
In what follows, I would like to give a few more examples of this notable conjuncture,
but above all I would like to try to find out the reasons for it. The paper is organized as
follows: In a first part, I analyse some affirmative uses of the notion of political visibility
and political visibilisation, which fashion themselves as targeted answers to discrimi-
nation. In a second part, I observe the countermovement to it, which assumes emanci-
patory and critical potential in resisting the limelight of public space. In a third part, I
offer a heuristic explanation of how one might make sense of the dialectics of visibility
and invisibility, by relating them to two different understandings of discrimination
and of resistance.

Against Discrimination: Politics of Visibility

Within current political discourses, visibility is brought into the field in quite different
ways. In my opinion, however, three major areas can be identified: (1) the visibility of
individuals, (2) the visibility of groups, and (3) the visibility of concerns.

Visibility of Individuals
Ralph Waldo Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, published in 1952, is centred around a main
male character. At the very beginning of the novel, the protagonist introduces himself to
the reader: “I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might
even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse
to see me”.5 The novel’s hero, who remains nameless throughout the book, successively
describes the various levels of social invisibility. Unlike the Invisible Man of H.G. Wells’
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 3

novel of the same title, who had the magical ability to make his body transparent so that
everyone would see through him, Ralph Ellison’s literary persona is about an individual
who is actively overlooked by the majority. Refusing to pay attention to someone, treat-
ing them as air and not giving them a glance, is not an epistemic, but rather a moral inat-
tention that may have severe consequences for the individual. Being invisibilised means
to be bereft of a face and of a voice, to be deprived of a “right to look”. By being consist-
ently treated as if he were staff or, at best, fungible labour, the individual undergoes the
experience of systematic disregard and degradation. One can very well be in the same
physical space and yet be left out; one can be excluded without ever having been
outside. To be recognized as an individual – and thus as a person endowed with an intrin-
sic value – accordingly presupposes a form of social visibility, which in the more recent
discussion was decisively emphasized by Axel Honneth. (In fact, in his book Invisibility,
Honneth even makes Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man the literary starting point for his
reflections on denied recognition.6)
We might recall at this stage that in such a grammar of recognition, not only individ-
uals can struggle for being recognized by virtue of their status as human persons, but also
groups, and first and foremost minorities of all kinds, who struggle for the recognition of
their identity. At this point, we already witness a transition from the first type of invisi-
bility to the second: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, it becomes clear in the course of the
novel, is not ostracized primarily because of personal characteristics, but because of his
skin colour – he is African American – and thus by virtue of belonging to a particular
group identity persistently excluded from the (white) majority and its privileges.

Visibility of Groups
The struggle against invisibility is not restricted to individuals, but also involves groups.
The history of political struggles can almost be told as a history of minority groups that
first had to step out of the shadow into which a certain ruling social order had relegated
them. In each case, it is a matter of asserting a particularity – a linguistic affiliation, a reli-
gious community, a sexual identity, or the like – and voicing the claim for its existence.
Acting visibly as a group is itself fraught with risk, as the demand for recognition can
easily tip over into stigmatization and persecution. The call to strike for illegal migrant
workers in the US has to contend with the problem that while a strike might highlight
how essential their contribution is to the informal US low-wage sector, public partici-
pation in demonstrations also exposes the individuals to the spotlight of state authorities.
Similarly ambivalent cases are spectacular actions, such as the one that occurred at O-
Platz in Berlin in 2012, when a self-organized refugee movement occupied parts of
Kreuzberg’s Oranienplatz, effectively drawing attention to the precariousness of refugees,
with the visibility gained in the process also having a negative effect on some of those
involved.
One can never sufficiently stress that the grammar of recognition is based on an “as-p”
structure (recognition always means that subject S is recognized as p). For this matter,
recognition theories such as Honneth’s have a hard time accounting the intersectionality
that escapes such an attributive logic. Plenty of evidence suggest that members of min-
orities are generally exposed to multiple marginalization effects at once, and that dis-
crimination on the basis of one’s own skin colour or respective migration background
4 E. ALLOA

is often accompanied by limited educational or professional opportunities. When

fighting for an (inevitably partial) group identity, some group members experience
this as a reduction to this one identity, without possible transversal affiliations to other
minorities.
Minority, moreover, does not necessarily mean numerical marginalization; rather, the
term is defined by specific positions of power (the South African apartheid regime pro-
vides a telling example here, or that of the cultural elites, who like to perceive themselves
as marginal groups of a society, while their real influence on social processes by no means
correlates to their numerical strength). Strictly speaking, there are no minorities per se –
only minorisations. To make the picture even more complex, one should include bell
hooks’ account of how race and class do not always overlap: she particularly insists on
how in United States, an invisibilisation has been happening of the pauperized “white
trash”, who draw contempt from both African American communities and the white
upper-class.7
The storybook example of a politics of visibility of a particular social group is of course
found in Karl Marx, namely in his analysis of the class struggle. In Marx’s analysis, the
existence and distinctiveness of the proletariat is consistently obscured, leading, as the
Eighteenth Brumaire puts it, to the subdivision and “parcelling” of its individuals.8
Only when the proletariat appears as a class in its own right can it become aware of
its own existence and change the ruling hierarchies of power. A similar case could be
made for the notion of the Gramscian “subaltern” taken up by postcolonial studies.
Older examples would be the secessio plebis in the Roman Republic, when Plebeians
stopped working and moved out of the city, developing a consciousness of their own
social power.9 Whether it is Marx’s proletariat, the subalterns of postcolonial studies,
or the Roman plebs, making visible is in each case linked to the promise of emancipation.
Anonymity, as Adorno would say, goes hand in hand with unconsciousness, and only
those who appear in public in their own name and with an unveiled face can claim
social existence for themselves.

Visibility of Concerns
In the struggle to escape invisibility, it is not only individuals and collectives that are
affected; the rhetoric of visibility is also frequently employed today when it comes to pol-
itical issues and concerns of a general nature. The aim is to make visible conditions and
procedures that are usually hidden from the public eye. Through the work of NGOs,
investigative journalism and disclosure platforms, conditions and processes progressively
emerge that have hardly ever made it onto the agenda of political debate. These include
the discrepancies between public discourse and actual practice by states or companies,
the uncovering of tax havens or the disclosure of black sites, i.e. the secret prisons that
the US government operates together with some allies. More generally, it is about rene-
gotiating what there is to be negotiated in the first place, and how. Or, in Judith Butler’s
words, a questioning of those “boundaries that constitute what will and will not appear
within public life, the limits of a publicly acknowledged field of appearance”.10 Here, too,
a trope familiar from feminist criticism makes itself felt. The second wave of feminism
was ignited not least by the rigid division between what is considered public and what
is considered private. This difference, according to the critique, is the result of political
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 5

negotiation processes in which those affected themselves were never or hardly involved,
and whose fundamental revisability is obscured.
Among the theorists who have made the politics of visibility an essential part of their
argumentative repertoire we find Jacques Rancière, with his decisive reflection on the
partitioning of what can be said and perceived in a given order. The partitioning of
the sensible “defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a
common language, etc”.11 While, according to Rancière, the so-called “police order”
(la police) is responsible for ensuring that certain activities and ways of being will be
visible and others won’t, politics (la politique) is then defined as the “tireless act” of
making the expression devalued as noise valid within a certain dominant order, and
thus that gap between the promise of equality and an actual inequality to be made
visible.12 Those who have no part in shaping this political order and who, because of
their invisibility, do not appear in the overall account, Rancière also calls la part des
sans-part, “the part of those who have no part”.13 For Rancière, the arts have a special
role to play here, but so do political demonstrations, both of which equally demonstrate
something that has not been seen in this form before. Art demonstrates insofar as it shows
what a different structure of action and perception can consist of, similar to the political
demonstration, which “makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard
a discourse where once there was only place for noise”.14
The real question that arises for Rancière – as well as for others in these debates – is
whether and to what extent an egalitarian, anti-political politics can ultimately establish a
world in which every utterance always already becomes perceptible and significant, or
whether the redistributions of the sensible do not always generate their respective
blind spots as well. It is striking how tight-lipped Rancière is with respect to this issue.
Adorno once aptly observed in this regard that “[t]he omnipotence of repression and
its invisibility are the same thing”.15 Is it enough then to make repression visible in
order to terminate it once for all, or does this simply mean that repression shifts to
other, less perceptible domains? Orthodox Marxism believed that it would be enough
to overcome the repression against the marginalized class and to bring the Proletariat
to power to overcome repression altogether. twentieth century disabused us about
such high hopes. In terms of a theory of political visibility, it would be helpful to spell
out the automatic new invisibilisations that the spotlight on certain wrongs inevitably
bring in its train. It must be conceded that while Rancière has a great deal to say
about the inventions and foundations of order, he is largely silent about the kind of
ordering principles and their consequences that such orders entail.
After this quick overview of the three chief forms of discriminatory invisibility, I shall
move on to the second part, where I’d like to take a closer look at the various ways in
which invisibility is heralded as a means of resistance and is reclaimed either as a political
strategy today or as a civil right.

Invisibility as Resistance
Numerous counterarguments have been recently made against excessive visibility restric-
tions and against the notion that the space of the political is coextensive with the space of
visible appearance. There has been extensive talk of the need for a politics of invisibility,
obscurity and opaqueness. However, since very different things are meant by such
6 E. ALLOA

buzzwords, it is first necessary to sort out a worthy concept. I have tried to list and sys-
tematize some of the central pro-invisibility arguments that can be found in current
debates. This time, in my tripartite division person, group, concern, I start with the
latter and work my way in the opposite direction.

Invisibility as Normalization
Insofar as political concerns are concerned, the argument of invisibility as normalization
is often heard. After a phase of initial activism during which a topic has been successfully
placed on the political agenda, it can also make sense for strategic reasons for the topic to
receive less attention in the public discussion. Political concerns share a common feature
with object design: when a certain product has successfully established itself, it doesn’t
need specific advertisement any longer and eventually becomes a natural ingredient of
the everyday perceptual environment. Among the repeatedly mentioned examples of
invisibility as normalization is the growing inconspicuousness of sexual identities that
deviate from cisgendered norms.
However, as Pierre Bourdieu argued, such normalization is not without consequences.
Whereas at the beginning of the gay movement it was primarily a matter of highlighting
the significance of the homosexual minority visible within society – for example via
events such as Christopher Street Day or Gay Pride – or specific institutions such as
civil partnerships available only to same-sex couples, towards the end of the twentieth
century a tendency towards normalization can be observed: The struggles for equal treat-
ment under the law are becoming increasingly important, for example in the form of
unrestricted access to marriage of adoption rights. The fact that the focus here is shifting
from emancipative to participatory demands is nevertheless not without consequences
for the potential for subversion. A politics interested in legal equality and in broader
social participation could be accused – and Bourdieu had already signalled this – of
again subordinating itself to those heterosexual norms that the emancipatory movement
of the beginnings would have completely rejected.
Everything takes place as if the homosexuals who have had to fight to move from invisibility
to visibility, to cease to be excluded and made invisible, sought to become invisible again,
and in a sense neutered and neutralized by submission to the dominant norm.16

What Bourdieu formulated here early on, in 1998, is all the more relevant at the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century. In France, for example, one of the historically most pro-
gressive countries in terms of civil rights, opposition to gay marriage came not only from
Catholic-conservative circles; even among progressive intellectuals there was no unre-
served support. The argument was based not least on Bourdieu’s point that the
opening of marriage to same-sex couples was ambivalent from a normative point of
view, because it expressed the desire of a minority to conform to the prevailing majori-
tarian order. I won’t enter the many levels of this debate here. Suffice it to pick out one
aspect, namely the use of the semantics of visibility and invisibility. Bourdieu’s reflections
on the tension between emancipation and participation that supposedly all minorities
face would thus lead to the following conclusion: A strategy of emancipation is linked
to a politics of making visible, while a strategy of participation is in turn linked to a poli-
tics of invisibilisation and neutralization.
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 7

If we now move from the level of concerns to the level of groups and individuals, we
find a number of strategies that work equally well for both collective and individual levels.

Invisibility as Resistance to Identification

In the light of increasingly advanced surveillance regimes, invasive tracking, and auto-
mated profiling, all of which participate in creating the phantom image of a transpar-
ent citizen, there are growing calls for a right to invisibility. On the one hand, this
right is linked to classical demands for privacy, and thus domains of life that would
be withdrawn from evaluation by others, but on the other to demands for a right
to opacity, which would be less directed at any firmly circumscribed private sphere,
but rather fundamentally question the compulsory clarification to which subjects
increasingly find themselves exposed. Here we can recall the poet and philosopher
Edouard Glissant, who already spoke of a “right to opacity” in the need for “margin-
alized peoples who today confront the ideal of transparent universality” to become
secretive and invent creative ways of defending their diversity.17 But against the
many misunderstandings this phrase stirred, and which has been taken to mean the
need to defend a specific non-white identity, Glissant himself clarified in 1990 that
opacity is not about defending some form of safe-haven for the non-European, but
more fundamentally about a resistance to the tyranny of being fully consistent with
oneself.18
In terms of the as-p structure of recognition, this invisibility also means that individ-
uals or groups no longer have to define themselves exclusively by a particular identity as
which they then want to be recognized. The so-called “strategic essentialism” that was
seen as necessary in a certain critical phase can now be abandoned.
The same is true for a number of activist forms in physical as well as digital space.
Against increasingly advanced forms of personal recognition, ranging from facial recog-
nition to gang profiling, invisibility is supposed to pave the way for new forms of critique.
Admittedly, this critically questions a whole series of assumptions about democratic-
liberal participation, not least the traditional idea that political courage consists in pro-
fessing one’s opinion and taking responsibility for one’s beliefs.

Invisibility as Risk Reduction for Political Activism

Up until late twentieth century, a consensus existed around the idea that the existence of
a public sphere where citizens had to speak in their own name would benefit the general
political culture. Speech and action would be politically irrelevant, Hannah Arendt states,
if it can’t be related to a person: “without a name, a ‘who’ attached to it, it is meaning-
less”.19 As it were, political agency requires self-disclosure: this ultimately Kantian idea
of the public voicing of one’s thought has also been echoed in empirical sociology, for
example by Albert O. Hirschman, who attempted to demonstrate which conditions
must be fulfilled for the probability of political engagement to increase. Whether in
engagement and disenchantment or in exodus and dissent, Hirschman argues that resist-
ance cannot be achieved by retreating into the private sphere, but only through the public
manifestation of dissent.20
8 E. ALLOA

Geoffroy de Lagasnerie has taken up this point, stating that our modern unconscious,
as fashioned by the structures operative in liberal democracies and in political philos-
ophy, has tightly linked the political and the public. In his book The Art of Revolt, he
argues that the cases of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning
brought to light the ambivalence of some self-evident political “truths”, not least the dis-
course-ethical assumption that criticism and accountability, as well as publicity and visi-
bility, go hand in hand. The biographical price paid by the three whistle-blowers
mentioned above has been enormous, and so it is appropriate to ask whether the work
of anonymous disclosure platforms, hacktivists or groups such as Anonymous might
not pave a different way here, in which new forms of political critique become possible.
Lagasnerie’s argument is that the demand for more political participation is being met in
a completely different way here, namely by drastically lowering the inhibition threshold
for political participation.
The practice of anonymity enables one to act politically without constituting oneself as an
identifiable subject. Anonymous subjects are not subjects who appear. On the contrary,
they dissolve as public subjects and organize their own invisibility. […] The speaking
subject does not publicly answer for his or her actions or speech. The “author” of the
discourse or action fades away. No place can be assigned to him or her. She or he
remains hidden, invisible, and, in consequence, does not come into contact with other
subjects. Nothing is visible, or public, except for the acts of mobilization themselves
and their effects.21

Instead of considering the struggle for visibility and recognition as the sine qua non of
any political action, this strain of political thinking calls for a turn towards a kind of
“becoming imperceptible”, as Deleuze and Guattari might say. Other notable examples
in this group would be the Tiqqun collective, which later became The Invisible Commit-
tee (Le comité invisible). The slogan last used by The Invisible Committee is rather
straightforward: The coming uprising consists not in occupying the streets, but in with-
drawal from public space; “let’s disappear”, is one of the core slogans in the pamphlet To
Our Friends.22 It would be a mistake, however, to equate this with escapist behaviour,
tantamount to a withdrawal from the social world into remote rural areas. In fact, the
Invisible Committee (just as its predecessor group Tiqqun) insists on disappearance as
a technique of war. Haze, as Tiqqun says, has always been the “preferred vector of
revolt”.23 Whether in the form of smoke grenades or through cloaking techniques in
digital space, the fog of war is avowedly aimed at escaping the demands of transparency,
the imperative of unambiguity, and having to make oneself known. Against the form of
critique that consists in denying social movements any justification because they do not
know how to present their catalogue of demands unambiguously, haze is virtually cele-
brated, both as a form of resistance – what dissolves into thin air cannot be taken into
police custody – and as a tactic of dissemination: the haze is supposed to serve both dis-
simulation and dissemination. Linked to this is a critique of all screens onto which the
fiction of representation is projected: “Becoming opaque like fog is to recognize that
one doesn’t represent anything, that one is not identifiable. […] It’s to resist every
struggle for recognition with all one’s strength”.24
If being perceived is already a first step towards capture, invisibility thus becomes a
new political asset, ranging from stealth tactics to a new aesthetics of imperceptibility.
It must be said, however, that such a move has not gone unchallenged, as this new
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 9

invisibility not only increases protection for whistle-blowers, but also opens the door
to all sorts of Internet trolling, the spread of fake news, and the expansion of the
darknet.

Invisibility of the Person as a Defence of the Power of the Better Argument

Regarding the issue of invisibility, another argument has also been invoked repeatedly,
namely that anonymity may lead to an increase in the quality of the content of the argu-
ment. The point is to say that anonymity allows readers and recipients to concentrate on
the content of the statement and less on the person making the statement. Paradoxical as
it may sound, defenders of invisibility such as Lagasnerie revisit a motif popularized by
Jürgen Habermas here, namely the “unforced force of the better argument”.25 But in
essence, the connection between anonymity and content is already emphasized by Karl
Marx, who did not sign his own name to the articles he published in the Rheinische
Zeitung. The reason for this was not so much, as is sometimes wrongly assumed, the
fear of prosecution under the press law alone, but rather the conviction that namelessness
is conducive to factual argumentation. In an editorial of 15 January 1843 (Marx had been
editor-in-chief since October of the previous year), it is stated that:
In that I follow the conviction that anonymity belongs to the essence of the press, which
transforms a newspaper from a collection point of many individual opinions into an
organ of a single mind. A name separates an article from other articles as firmly as the
body of a person separates him from other individuals, thus thoroughly doing away with
the article’s intention to be only a supplementary member. Finally, anonymity makes not
only the speaker himself, but also the audience more unbiased and free, in that it looks
not at the man who speaks, but at the thing he says, in that, undisturbed by the empirical
person, it makes the spiritual personality alone the yardstick of its judgment.26

Marx adds to this another argument that is particularly telling in light of current public
denunciations in the media and any naming and shaming procedures:
Just as I keep silent about my name, so I will name the details of officials and municipalities
only when they are printed as documents in bookshops are attracted, or when the mention
of the name is quite harmless. It is my conviction that the press must denounce conditions,
but not persons, unless a public evil could not be assessed in any other way, or unless pub-
licity already dominates the whole public life, and has thereby made the German concept of
denunciation disappear.27

Thus, dispensing with the name (whether the name of the author of a text or the name of
the person incriminated by a public textual statement), is intended to steer the excessive
focus on persons toward a more factual focus. Anonymity, pseudonymity, and imperson-
ality are believed to foster more discursive equality and more argumentative debate. Con-
versely, turning away from the person (the invisibility of the individual) increases
attention on the issue at stake (the visibility of the concern), which in turn further acti-
vates the dialectic of visibility and invisibility.

Conclusion: The Two Senses of Resistance

The semantics of visibility/invisibility undoubtedly has momentum today when it comes
to describing mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The outcome of the previous
10 E. ALLOA

attempts to categorize the use of these terms in current debates allows for some remarks,
before moving to a conceptual proposal.
The first remark is a negative one: visibility and invisibility cannot be unambiguously
linked with either inclusion or exclusion, but depending on the context, they can come to
refer to very different, even antagonistic things. In some cases, invisibility describes a
state of discrimination, in others, the strategy against it, and analogously, visibility can
refer to a promise of emancipation in some cases while in others, it is the name for a stig-
matizing standstill.
The second remark is an invitation to semantic caution: when using (non-)visibility as a
synonym for (non-)acknowledgment, an epistemic category is swapped for a perceptual one,
often depriving it from its corporeal-sensorial implications. Just as the transfer of semantics
taken from medical vocabulary to so-called social pathologies should be treated with
caution – we might think of the rampant use of terms such as “trauma” – the use of
sensory-corporeal descriptions to social, legal, and political institutions should call for
more circumspection, let alone the reduction of the “perceptual” to the merely
“optical”. Notably, such a replacement tends to efface the fact that while inclusion
might be a potentially infinite act, visibilisation is not: seeing something means not
seeing something else; every perception is selective. If we saw everything at once, we
would see nothing in particular. Masking out is, as it were, a constitutive part of the
process of perception: it is precisely because we do not see everything at once that we
may seem something in particular. Accordingly, the field of objects is already divided
into foreground and background on a perceptual level; in order for something to
come to the fore, other things must recede. Now, this selective ordering function,
which produces figurative units and allows something to emerge from them as something,
stands and falls with the hierarchisations that are carried out in connection with it: mean-
ingful units emerge where something is delimited in front of a background that is pre-
viously defined as neutral; the standing out owes itself to a highlighting. In other
words: every percipere is an excipere, to be perceiving is tantamount to excerpting.
Remembering these basic coordinates of any phenomenology of perception might
prove useful in assessing the implications of the mechanisms of admittance and rejection,
of involvement and disqualification in the normative realm. A society in which every-
thing and everyone were visible would be as terrifying (and impossible) as a society
where everything and everyone were invisible. Negotiating the boundaries between
what should and should not be of public relevance is one of the most constant iterations
in political struggles, and makes the boundaries historically moving lines. The inclusion
of those (persons, groups, concerns) who have not previously been included comes at the
cost of fixing identities and positions. In that sense, it is indeed a “structural contradic-
tion” that discriminated subjects face, forcing them to “oscillate between invisibilisation
and exhibition, between the suppression and the celebration of difference”.28 In the wake
of conditions that nullify or impair social and political opportunities, those left
uncounted may choose to engage in a fight for inclusion that is not, however, bereft of
risk.
As an alternative to the semantics of visibility and invisibility, which due to its discur-
sive polysemy only imperfectly helps us to grasp the nature of political struggles against
discrimination today, I would like – by way of conclusion – to suggest another option for
framing the polarity. To do so, I need to first recall the etymological meaning of
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 11

discrimination. Discrimination often comes to describe the normative patterns through

which individuals (and concerns) are treated unequally and is often associated with nega-
tive classifications or labels that discredit them discursively and socially. Yet, not every
discrimination dismisses or marginalizes a subject into invisibility, as the phenomenon
of stigmatization demonstrates. Stigma, in its literal meaning, designates a physical,
highly visible mark of disgrace directly written onto the body, thereby locating discrimi-
nation at the very centre of social attention.29 Given that the Latin verb discriminare
encompasses actions of distinguishing, differentiating, and sifting or setting apart, it
would be spurious to locate discrimination (or the fight against it) either fully on the
side of visibility or invisibility. Rather, two different modes of resisting discrimination
can be disentangled.
When categorizing the fight against discrimination in terms of “resistance”, the
concept of resistance unfolds its inner dividedness that needs to be accounted for. When-
ever resistance to discrimination takes the form of a demand for recognition, visibility is
roped in as an act of affirmation; resistance is then tantamount to a determinate, circum-
scribed claim. In order to be included, someone (or something) needs to be recognized as
part of a given order, with the recurrent grammar of recognition of an S claiming to be
recognized in its specificity, as an S recognized as p. Claiming visibility is tantamount to
raising an awareness for an S not yet counted, which should be counted as Sp, effectively
preventing members of a social group to develop an indifference to difference. Such
active resistance to discrimination could lead either to the recognition of previously
rejected positions as equal to those already counted, or to the reshaping of the order
of visibility itself by pointing out which identities and positions could not previously
be included and therefore need to be qualified differently.
This active mode doesn’t exhaust all the possibilities of resistance, however: another
mode consists in refusing the logic of becoming determinate, and in evading categoris-
ations and classifications. In addition to active resistance to discrimination, which leads
to a demand for visible recognition, there is a passive resistance that consists in becom-
ing invisible for the existing diagrams of recognition and control. While the former
submits to a logic of determinacy, the latter follows a logic of indeterminacy. In refusing
profiling and categorization, in refusing to being tied to all the (physical, discursive,
digital) traces we leave that would turn us into transparent, glassy individuals, this
type of resistance entrusts itself to the powers of withdrawal. Against existential
metrics, against the thorough quantification of our lives, the possibility of evading
fixed and definitive attribution requires non-evaluative spaces for alternative processes
of subjectivation.30
A comprehensive theory of political visibility and invisibility that aims to do justice to
the diversity of current political practices must take this ambivalence into account, with
visibility circumscribing a realm where empowerment and surveillance coexist, and
invisibility a realm encompassing both discriminatory marginalization and the subtrac-
tion from (economic, political, technological) coercion. Politics, then, could either push
for more definiteness (with its implications of specificity, recognition, accountability, but
also of stigmatization, entrenchment, enclosure), or for more indeterminacy (with its
implications of non-recognition, marginalization, and demotion, but inversely also the
possibility of affirming ambiguity, decorrelation, and openness). In a society increasingly
rallied around the ideal of transparency,31 a politics of indeterminacy may gradually
12 E. ALLOA

become just as important. Some are in the darkness, Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera
tells us, and others are in the light; but you only see those in the light, those in the dark-
ness you don’t see. A century after Brecht wrote these verses, we might reconsider them,
as they might not comprise exclusively bad news.

Notes
1. Adams, “Discourses on Davila,” 239.
2. Arendt, On Revolution, 69.
3. Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” 47: “In all parts of the country, in the East and North
with its host of nationalities no less than in the more homogeneous South, the Negroes stand
out because of their ‘visibility’. They are not the only ‘visible minority’, but they are the most
visible one. In this respect, they somewhat resemble new immigrants who invariably consti-
tute the most ‘audible’ of all minorities and therefore are always the most likely to arouse
xenophobic sentiments. But while audibility is a temporary phenomenon, rarely persisting
beyond one generation, the Negroes’ visibility is unalterable and permanent. This is not a
trivial matter. In the public realm, where nothing counts that cannot make itself seen and
heard, visibility and audibility are of prime importance”.
4. For a good overview, see: Brighenti, Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research.
5. Ellison, Invisible Man, 3.
6. Honneth, Unsichtbarkeit.
7. bell hooks, “White Poverty. The Politics of Invisibility”.
8. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852],” 185–88.
9. Rancière has repeatedly referred to this case, e.g. in Rancière, “Introducing Disagreement,”
4.
10. Butler, Precarious Life, XVIII.
11. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 8.
12. Rancière, Disagreement, 89.
13. Ibid., 30.
14. Ibid., 30.
15. Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory [1942],” 97.
16. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 121.
17. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 2.
18. Glissant, “For Opacity”.
19. Arendt, “Labor, Work, Action [1964],” 305.
20. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.
21. De Lagasnerie, The Art of Revolt, 62.
22. Comité invisible, To Our Friends.
23. Tiqqun (Collective), The Cybernetic Hypothesis, 159.
24. Ibid., 161.
25. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 306.
26. Marx, “Rechtfertigung Des † †-Korrespondenten von Der Mosel,” 173–74 (my translation).
27. Ibid., 174.
28. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 121.
29. On this logic more broadly, the still topical analysis by Goffman, Stigma. Notes on the Man-
agement of Spoiled Identity.
30. Alloa, “Transparency, Privacy Commons and Civil Inattention”.
31. Alloa, This Obscure Thing Called Transparency.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 13

Notes on Contributor
Emmanuel Alloa is professor of philosophy at the University of Fribourg, where he holds the Chair
for Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art. He is the author of various book and numerous articles at the
intersection of contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, media theory and social philosophy. He cur-
rently serves as President of the German Society of Aesthetics (DGÄ). His books in English include
Resistance of the Sensible World: An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty (Fordham UP 2017) and
Looking Through Images. A Phenomenology of Visual Media (Columbia UP 2021).

ORCID
Emmanuel Alloa http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1919-5074

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