Strategies of Invisibility (For Repressive Times)

LUIS OTHONIEL ROSA
COMMISSIONED AND EDITED BY WAI ARCHITECTURE THINK TANK
TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH BY FELIPE GUERRA ARJONA

WAI Architecture Think Tank: How to loudread anti-colonial strategies and manifestoes when silence is demanded from us? How can opacity allow us to bypass the algorithms of surveillance that collect everything in the data centers of this era of digitized doxxing and robotized policing? What are some of the strategies of anonymity necessary to challenge unforeseen (extra-)institutional scrutiny and persecution. We all recognize The Funambulist’s challenges to colonial narratives, but can a well-known publication also provide practical strategies for resistance against the backlash that follows anti-colonial work?

In this essay, “Strategies of Invisibility,” Luis Othoniel Rosa explores the radical potential of anonymity as both a survival tactic and a mode of subversion. If coloniality thrives on forced visibility—tracking, categorizing, and disciplining dissent—then opacity becomes a form of counter-power. Rosa examines two examples, the Pomaranczowa Alternatywa (Alternativa Naranja) made up of orange Smurfs in Poland, and the Clown Police during the Puerto Rican protests to explore how we might exploit the gaps in digital surveillance, corporate-state repression, tricking algorithms and slipping through the cracks of institutional control. This is not just about hiding, and not to be confused with the opportunistic cowardice displayed by architects, professors, and administrators in the face of historical injustice, but about reclaiming power in a world designed to strip it away. By refusing the demand for legibility, authorship, and individualized discourses of freedom, we open space for fugitive thought, collective action, and ungovernable solidarity.

Guest-editing this piece, we see it as an urgent intervention in The Funambulist’s ongoing project. The magazine has long provided the theoretical tools to dismantle oppressive systems; now, we must also share the tools to outmaneuver them. The essay is a provocation—a call to rethink how we move, communicate, and resist when the stakes are high, and the watchers are everywhere.

We live in an era when power is shifting its relation with words. We could say that Western power, in recent centuries, moves like a pendulum between liberal moments followed by fascist or proto-fascist moments. Both sides of that pendulum are deeply capitalist. In “liberal” periods, economic inequality grows so much that it generates massive popular resentment against the oligarchies. That is when fascism emerges as a “solution,” feeding on that popular resentment and channeling it into its characteristic racial, sexual, and class hatred. In our neoliberal present, the pendulum is swinging clearly; from the 1990s to the 2010s, we experienced a period of unprecedented wealth transfer from the working class to the oligarchies of the “1%,” perhaps the moment of greatest economic inequality in human history. Then, from the 2010s to the present, we see the emergence of global fascist movements that take advantage of this popular resentment over the impoverishment of the working class to fuel their hatred against migrants, women, and any racialized population that is convenient. As we are very well aware, both from historical records and from what we are experiencing right now, liberal institutions are completely incapable of stopping the advance of fascism. Fascism is immune to liberal courts, and Donald Trump is the perfect and irrefutable example of that immunity and impunity. But what interests us in this short essay is to think about how our strategies for confronting power through words, expression, and truth must be readjusted to these changing times in the era of capital.

In liberal times, we, the “ungovernable,” must write and express ourselves openly, with our first and last names, because in these moments of the historical pendulum, we will place power in a contradictory situation; they cannot suppress our expression without violating their own fiction of constitutionality and their principles of free speech. (It is not that they are so naive; liberals are sophisticated in their modes of controlling free expression, thanks to their ability to turn expression into an industry, a market, which is almost impossible to access if one is not part of their elite.) In fascist times, on the contrary, we, the “ungovernable,” cannot protect ourselves under the fiction of “free speech” or the “ivory tower” of academia, because, as previously mentioned, fascism is immune to the laws of liberal institutions and courts. Liberal law does not apply to fascists and does not work to stop their advance. In such times, we have to change strategies. Attacking power up front, by name, becomes less effective because the fiction of freedom of expression or academic or press autonomy means nothing to fascist elites. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad to see how white liberals in the United States are currently so surprised by the ease with which the Trump administration is crushing dissent, openly defying the courts, dismantling public education, and suppressing the free press. And at the center of this crushing persecution are the movements denouncing the genocide in Palestine. Denouncing the active genocide that the United States is funding in Palestine (with the support of both liberals and conservatives) is now a dangerous act in the United States that has often been an excuse enough for deportation, imprisonment, or loss of employment.

It is in this context that we want to present our proposal. Before explaining what we mean by “strategies of invisibility,” however, we would like to give two historical examples that we have written about in our books. We feel it is necessary to share, as one would tell a short story, these two examples of “strategies of invisibility” before briefly explaining our proposal.

The “Polish Smurfs” (Poland, 1980s) ///
We first learned about Pomarańczowa Alternatywa (Orange Alternative) through a very short text published in 2013 by Spanish philosopher Amador Fernández Savater during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, the 15-M movement in Spain, and the Arab Spring. It is worth quoting the succinct way in which the Spanish philosopher summarizes this first strategy of invisibility in these Polish Smurfs.

In the 1980s, confronting the Polish communist regime required a great deal of courage and ingenuity. Otherwise, one was likely to end up in prison for life or worse. The members of Pomarańczowa Alternatywa stood out for their creative use of absurdity and nonsense in their protests.

They began their journey by drawing dwarves on the paint stains that covered the anti-government graffiti on the walls. The dwarves, which were everywhere, soon became symbols of Polish dissent and came to life. Hundreds of people dressed as orange dwarves began to demonstrate in the streets, demanding things like the resignation of Gargamel (!).

Thus, by using allegories and metaphors, saying things without saying them, they managed to carry out dozens of protests without running the risk of being arrested, or at least without the regime’s authorities automatically becoming a laughing stock: or can you really continue to treat a police officer with respect after seeing them arrest a protester “for participating in an illegal gathering of dwarves”?

Through allegory, absurdity, and humor, the Polish Smurfs managed to protect their creators and activists from State repression, while at the same time reproducing themselves and spreading throughout the population. Nothing is more contagious than laughter. Anyone can be an Orange Smurf.

The “Police Clowns” (Puerto Rico, 2010s) ///
The 2010 student strike at the University of Puerto Rico seems to us to mark a turning point in the history of that country, a blatant colony of the United States that has been resisting said empire for more than 125 years. The University of Puerto Rico (perhaps the last truly public and economically accessible university in the entire United States) has a long history of struggle, strikes, and protests, but the 2010 strike was very different. The strike itself became a party and a space for artistic and political experimentation that forever changed the way people protest in Puerto Rico (and it was the key pedagogy for the famous festive and ungovernable protests of the summer of 2019). The student movement of the “Police Clowns” (or “Tactical Operations Unit of the Police Clowns”) was key to understanding these changes in the forms of protest. As police repression was so violent, and students and teachers were being attacked and arrested daily, a group of students and artists decided to dress up as police officers during the protests, but with clown noses and their faces covered. The police clowns always positioned themselves between the police and the students and recited citizens’ rights, filmed the atrocities committed by the police, and educated us in the arts of protest. They also educated the police themselves about the rights of protesters and served as a strange mirror for the police because, while ridiculing them for their repression and disrespecting them, they were often more effective than the police themselves in de-escalating the violence.

Through mockery, parody, and joy, the police clowns managed to protect the physical and even legal integrity of the strikers in the face of repression, while at the same time going viral on social media and in the mainstream media, denouncing the ridiculousness of the police force. Nothing disarms like parody. Every citizen who laughs at another video of the police clowns loses their fear of the oppressors.

Strategies of Invisibility ///
We have entered a terrifying period in human history in which fascism and genocide are offered as increasingly acceptable “solutions” to the major planetary problems we face, and which will continue to worsen (global warming and epidemic poverty, which in turn generate the largest human migrations on an increasingly overpopulated planet). And these “solutions” offered to us by the global oligarchy are accompanied by the most sophisticated and totalitarian technologies of control, repression, war, and manipulation of the truth. It is in light of this reality that I offer these two examples, small and absurd, but conceptually powerful, so that we may think not only about how to outsmart repression, but also how to turn resistance into a contagious party. To do this, however, we will need to abandon at least a couple of practices that are too deeply ingrained in both the traditional left and the communities of artists and intellectuals.

The first thing we will have to abandon in these strategies of invisibility is our fetish with authorship and names, our fascination with personality that individualizes collective knowledge. In the struggle of words against power, we will have to sacrifice our individual egos and become anonymous. Being anonymous in a global reality in which cyberspace individualizes everything (a cyberspace that consists of capturing individuals and selling them for consumption) is already a revolutionary act. It is now up to us to express ourselves in collectives and without names so that when repression comes, power will no longer be able to identify us, because we will be everywhere. The second thing we must abandon in these strategies of invisibility is the pedantry of the intellectual, the seriousness and solemnity, as shown by the clown cops and the Polish Smurfs. The hierarchization of modern knowledge that tells us, for example, that philosophy or science is a higher form of knowledge than cooking or caregiving is not only stupid but also ineffective against fascism. Revolutionary humor democratizes knowledge and puts it all on the same horizontal plane. And so it leads us to truths that are obvious yet foreign to our hierarchical society. For example, the idea that cooking knowledge is as important as, if not more important than, scientific or philosophical knowledge. In fact, they are all related and inseparable forms of knowledge. Cooking teaches us a lot about science and philosophy, and these disciplines also teach us to cook better.

Strategies of invisibility are, first and foremost, a way of defending ourselves, of protecting ourselves in the struggle, a kind of clandestinity of the word, a marronage of expression. But in practice, they become something much more powerful and revolutionary. Because as we become invisible, we rid ourselves of the very individualism that is at the heart of capitalism. Thus, strategies of invisibility could be a pedagogy that teaches us to move from resistance to revolution. The ultimate goal is to learn to think as collectives everywhere and no longer as lonely individuals.

(As I finish writing this short essay, I realize once again that nothing I say here is “my” idea and that everything expressed here could be better and more eloquently understood by studying the face mask or balaclava of that collective and anonymous character created by the indigenous Zapatistas in Chiapas in a revolution that has been ongoing for more than 30 years against the ordering of the world). ■