Abstract

This chapter delineates the concept of invisibility and its various permutations, and provides an overview of its multiple meanings that are explored in subsequent chapters. Guided by an understanding of invisibility as a designation for “unmarked and unmapped relationships,” the chapter notes how the phenomenon is largely inseparable from the concepts of representation, aesthetics technology and politics. With reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s classic posthumous work The Visible and the Invisible, the authors argue that invisibility impinges crucially on a wide range of contemporary topics, from secrecy and digital technologies to warfare, activism and identity politics. Deeply ingrained simultaneously in our human faculties and in our ever-transforming cultural and technological manifestations of invisibility, every invocation of the invisible ultimately has the potential to a broadened understanding of what vision is, and what it might become.