Visible and Invisible

Part of my 3rd Dissertation Chapter:

Remediating the Archive

Our idea of what is secret and powerful often depends on what we can see. As our technologies change, our ability to see more changes, and our notion of the unseen shifts to smaller and smaller scales or depths. Technologies that magnify develop alongside our efforts to display what we see; a history of technologies and representation is too large a topic to be covered here, but I will briefly compare early reactions to photography to our perception of digital reproductions. Conservative reactions to digital textuality are skeptical of the usefulness of computing tools and their claims of revolutionary potentiality, which mirror early reactions to photography. Folsom writes of how critics disparaged photography because of its “relentless appetite for details, for every speck that appeared in the field of vision” and how it “insisted on flaws and extraneous matter that a painter would have edited out of the scene to create beauty. But beauty, Whitman said, democratic beauty, was fullness, not exclusion, and required an eye for completeness, not a discriminating eye” (1575). Here, Folsom moves from a critical view of elaborate detail as excessive, to excessiveness as required for democratic beauty. That is, ornateness becomes inseparable from the communal—or, in the buzzword of digital humanities and new media—from access. Naomi Schor discusses how prior to the twentieth century, photography astounded people by its ability to render details that were difficult or impossible to see with the naked eye or that were otherwise ignored (47). As a medium, photography prompted people to notice what they had previously deemed invisible; invisibility could mean two things, both important to the following discussion—that the invisible was important because of its invisibility—secret and mysterious—or, that the invisible was disregarded (pun intended) because it was impossible to see.