Visible/Invisible

Definition

The visible/invisible dialectic, in Smith's chapter, is the structure by which space is constituted from what shows and what withholds. Its warrant is Heidegger, via Marion: Heidegger "legitimates the possibility of a phenomenology of the unapparent in general," and "Heidegger's terminology of 'showing itself' 'from itself' is the announcement of subtle revelation. With all that is visible, there must be other things that remain invisible. Invisibility maintains potential, excitement, and expectation of our oneiric sensibility. The hidden becomes an equally valid phenomenal experience, as is the revealed. We understand that if something is hidden, it must have the potential to reveal itself and vice versa. Expectation, therefore, preempts revelation."

The concept's second move converts this into a spatial thesis of absence. If "adumbrations [reveal] and alternating by hiding aspects of an object" (see adumbration), then absence is the inverse of presence — and not a lack: "Absence, then, is not nothingness or emptiness, but a place of portent, a space available for action, and a space which exists of and for itself. In interior architecture, space is definable yet exists as the presence of absence." Design is the redistribution of this presence: "Architects and designers make choices in design about spatiality: open space, closed space, surface space, material space, furniture space, object space, sound space, time space, or light and shadow space, for example. Everything which is introduced or removed reconfigures and redefines spatiality." Spatial configuration itself "determines how objects reveal themselves to be present and absent in relation to each other and to ourselves."

The concept's negative ground is Lingis's (via Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible): "The world is not a 'lake of nothingness' but a place to be explored and discovered in its depths and differences" — the invisible is not void but depth.

Key Thinkers

• Ross T. Smith — the concept's spatial statement: "the presence of absence"; absence as "a place of portent, a space available for action"; expectation preempting revelation; the spatiality-choices list (open, closed, surface, material, furniture, object, sound, time, light-and-shadow space).
• Martin Heidegger — the ontological source: "showing itself" "from itself"; the legitimation of "a phenomenology of the unapparent in general" (via Marion's The Visible and the Revealed, 2008).
• Jean-Luc Marion — the mediation (see log): the reading of Heidegger that gives the unapparent its phenomenological standing.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the late ontology behind Smith's section: The Visible and the Invisible (Lingis's translator's preface supplies the "lake of nothingness" negation); the visible/invisible as the flesh's structure.
• Susan Hedges — the cognate interior register (see waiting-room): the emptied room where "absence becomes the room's principle feature" — the invisible held architecturally.

Related Concepts

• Subtle Revelation — the attitude that traverses the dialectic: revelation's announcement is Heidegger's "showing itself from itself."
• Adumbration — the perceptual mechanism: facets that alternate "by hiding aspects of an object," presence and absence in each perception.
• Presence — the metaphysical cousin: where Derrida's presence is deconstructed as an effect of différance, Smith's presence is built out of absence ("space… exists as the presence of absence") — absence constitutive rather than derivative.
• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the paired boundary-dialectic: Smith's visible/invisible is the perceptual form of the same structure (Calvino's eyelids: "we cannot know which is inside and which is outside").
• The Waiting Room — the room-type of portent: Hedges's space of "absence," "expectation," and held time — absence as the room's program.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Design studio through the subtle revelations of phenomenology (Smith 2018) — the concept's source: the Heidegger/Marion warrant; "Invisibility maintains potential, excitement, and expectation of our oneiric sensibility"; "Expectation, therefore, preempts revelation"; the absence-thesis ("a place of portent, a space available for action"); "space is definable yet exists as the presence of absence"; the spatiality list; Lingis's "lake of nothingness."

Open Questions

• Smith's absence is productive ("a space available for action"), unlike the Derridean trace where absence undoes presence (see trace). Is the "presence of absence" a third position between the metaphysics of presence and its deconstruction — absence as material rather than as lapse? What would the wiki's deconstruction cluster make of a designer who claims to build absence?
• "Expectation, therefore, preempts revelation" — the hidden is experienced in advance of showing. Benjamin's third temporal type (via Hedges) is "he who waits. He takes in the time and renders it up in altered form – that of expectation." Is expectation then an architectural program (the room designed as pre-revelation), and is Smith's absence-room Hedges's waiting room under another name?
• The chapter's spatiality list mixes registers ("sound space, time space, or light and shadow space") — some are conventional (closed/open), some are non-visual media. If interior architecture's design choices are choices among "spaces" of sound, time, and shadow, is the discipline's real object the distribution of the invisible — and does that make the invisible, not the room, interior architecture's material?