Conclusion of The Invisible Subject

V. Conclusion

In Lee’s Native Speaker, Herny Park did not become invisible due to his being Korean, he first became invisible because of his speaking Korean. In Auster’s City of Glass, Quinn becomes invisible through ceasing social contact with others. Both, in contrast to the pre-Ellison tradition of invisibility, reinforce the new motif of invisibility. Invisibility is the point where power does not become maximized, but is instead minimized, where the violence done to an individual’s agency is at its greatest extreme. Only when Quinn abandons all social relations, all economic holdings, everything that Foucault would call the micro-physics of power, does invisibility become possible. This invisibility is only possible, however, through the decrease in public knowledge about oneself—the lack of self-representation; the allowance of public knowledge to dominate the interior space, just as “Glimmer & Co.” became Henry’s title for the company in actuality. It is through speaking Korean that Henry becomes invisible, but the violence done to him is more dramatic to him than it is to the other Korean-Americans because he is an English-speaking man. He internalizes his invisibility only when he does not represent himself. Only when the individual is incapable of engaging with others, and seeing them too as individuals, do they become invisible themselves—as is the case in Ellison, Lee, and Auster. And, through becoming invisible, their individual identity and agency disintegrate. The obliteration of identity is not limited to race. It is due to confronting the phenomenon of the individual in the multiplicity, of the man alone in the city. The city, a panopticon, gazes in on all—and it is because of this that Peter Stillman Sr. believed the only way to gain the language of man, the means to represent himself and give shape to the world, would be by raising a child without internalizing the panoptic gaze of the city, to become invisible. Yet, his quest was always in vain because to become invisible is not to gain the ultimate form of agency, but instead to lose it all and more. The texts of Auster and Lee do not offer an empirical judgment on the limits of human knowledge, or a conclusive definition of what exactly constitutes a man’s identity. Each demonstrates, however, how language constantly breaks down due to those very limits, allowing people in the city to not only allow others to reduce them to non-descript categories and see them as interchangeable with those categories, but can come to view themselves as those categories. With the breakages between what an author intends and a reader infers, those reductions easily become so prevalent they reduce category members to near-invisibility. Representing oneself through language allows the potential to be seen, and also can allow sight—to read others through engaging with them. Representations through language are the only way to become visible in the city and to constitute one’s own identity, and to imbue that identity with power, and not to be reduced to invisibility.