Particularly essential to both Maurice Marleau-Ponty’s “The Visible and the Invisible” and Susan Kozel’s “Closer: Performance, Technology, Phenomenology” is the concept of the invisible, or connective tissue. As Kozel explains in Chapters 5.1-5.4 of her book, connective tissue serves as an accurate representation of the invisible to which Marleau-Ponty refers as it fails to become visible in X-Rays yet serves an essential function in the workings of the body. According to Kozel, “it is useful to begin to think of connective tissue as a network, or as a set of networks, and to direct our awareness at the gaps or latencies within their fabric, seeing them as fluid and dynamic… networks are more than ways for us to maintain connection; they are ways for us to maintain distance, or to engender difference” (277). These gaps or latencies, then, can be viewed as the means by which this difference is enabled. The invisible can be found in these breaks and ultimately accounts for the interaction between parts of a being. For the body, this invisible is the connective tissue which holds the organs together while differentiating anatomical networks. However, for the individual the invisible could be considered the latitude which every human has to determine some degree of individuality.
Although we are all connected by this tissue to some degree, the fact that there are breaches allows for the type of performance of which Kozel speaks. According to Kozel, “Performance occurs in these interstitial spaces, both everyday performances and artistic performances” (279). Everyday performances could include those pertaining to the making of one’s identity, such as gender performance. The reality television show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” features biological males who dress in women’s clothing in order to win the title of “America’s next drag superstar.” The following clip from the celebrity gossip show “The Insider” features a promotion for the program.
As can be seen in the clip, the men readily perform the female gender through clothing, hair and makeup. In the show, these men must prove their ability to appear and act as women in a variety of challenges. One contestant is eliminated each week based on their failure to successfully complete a specific challenge which deals with their ability to conform to certain notions of womanhood. While bound by biology to their anatomical status as men, they need only to reconsider their styling in order to effectively read as women. By styling themselves in a way that is typically associated with women, these men are able to assume the everyday performance which occurs in the interstitial spaces of the invisible.
For Kozel, the ability to enact performances seems particularly essential to her understanding of the invisible. The networks created through connective tissue ultimately have “gaps and latencies” and, as such, leave room for difference. While humans may all be essentially similar in that most have the same organs and similar biological makeup, there are also differences allowed by the kind of theoretical connective tissue that Kozel discusses. It is in these invisible spaces between organs and within any given network that diversity is possible, if not actually produced.
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