The New Politics of Visibility: Spaces, Actors, Practices and Technologies in The Visible

Not only does visibility matter to politics, but it is increasingly becoming an intrinsic constituent element and a crucial asset to it.

Accordingly, the challenge to the social science becomes that of understanding how the new institutional, urban and technological settings are reshaping the organisation of visible. This book brings together a team of distinguished scholars and researchers interested in employing, exploring and critiquing the analytical category and the practical stakes of visibility.

Ranging from urban public space to the new media and social media platforms, a vast terrain of inquiry is addressed here by joining together original theoretical elaboration and careful empirical studies. The result is a thoroughly interdisciplinary endeavour, conducted with passion and insight.

The New Politics of Visibility includes nine original chapters specifically commissioned for this collection. Contributions are interdisciplinary and address an array of topical areas in the newly emerging modes of governance and the novel social formations coming into existence. The transformations of urban space and the working of the new media form a core concern recurring through many of the essays, but is by no means the sole topic, as other essays address the politics of visibility in crucial cultural spheres including gender relations and professional life.

Audience will be academics, researchers, graduate and postgraduate students

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jul 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789385762

Book preview

The New Politics of Visibility

The New Politics of

Visibility

Spaces, Actors, Practices and

Technologies in the Visible

edited by

Andrea Mubi Brighenti

First published in the UK in 2022 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2022 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2022 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas

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Contents

List of Figures

Introduction: Issues in the Visible

Andrea Mubi Brighenti

1.The Political Geometries of Visibility: Ranks of Seeing in the Digital Age

Tali Hatuka

2.Coded Visions: Datafied Visibilities and the Production of Political Futures

Mikkel Flyverbom and Frederik Schade

3.Urban Information Environmentalism

Malcolm McCullough

4.Mediated Visibility and Recognition: A Taxonomy

João C. Magalhães and Jun Yu

5.The Democratization of Visibility Capital: Face in the Age of Its Automated Technical Reproducibility

Nathalie Heinich

6.Rewilding the City: Urban Life and Resistance across and beyond Visibility

AbdouMaliq Simone and Morten Nielsen

7.Strategies and Tactics of Visibility: The Micro-Politics of Vulnerable Migrant Groups during the Pandemic in Brussels

Mattias De Backer

8.Reframing Marginality in Trans Politics: Towards an Ethics of Differentiation

Caterina Nirta

9.Open Science as an Engine of Anxiety: How Scientists Promote and Defend the Visibility of Their Digital Selves, While Becoming Fatalistic about Academic Careers

Martin Reinhart

Notes on Contributors

Index

Figures

1.1The vertical and horizontal exposure in the digital age

1.2Geometries of visibility

1.3The ladder of visibility

6.1View of the construction site at the Maputo International Airport in Mozambique

7.1Hannes Couvreur, Unnamed, 2020

7.2Hannes Couvreur, Unnamed, 2020

Introduction:

Issues in the Visible

Andrea Mubi Brighenti

An interest in the analytical category of visibility might in part be due to the historical significance that a range of phenomena of public attention configured as ‘intervisibility of social actors’ (symmetrical, asymmetrical, linear, looping, complex or entangled that be) have acquired over the past three decades in technological, cultural and political terms. A general clarification of the relation between social life and ‘the visible’ is far from easy to attain, though, and it probably requires a global renewal of the social-scientific vocabulary at our disposal. With this volume, we invite researchers to proceed in this direction, starting precisely with attentive, fine-grained reconstructions of a number of key contemporary trends and features. Current challenges include, in particular, the technological transformations in the ways visibility is appraised, as well as the cultural changes in how its consequences are experienced. In response to a transformed historical context, the various uses of visibility deployed by social actors are changing accordingly. As a first approximation, then, visibility appears as a kind of ‘game’, where players try to achieve something jointly but also by pitting one against the other – a game, in other words, with politically high stakes.

With this collection, we seek to enhance the social-scientific understanding of the new politics of visibility in the making. To begin with, then, some of the working questions of this volume can be briefly spelt out: How does visibility intersect the domain of politics? How is visibility converted into the social geometry of credit and debit, recognition and control, appropriation and expropriation, solidarity and conflict? What do we mean exactly by the expression ‘politics of visibility’? And how do we specify what is new about the current configurations of visibility vis-à-vis those of other historical moments?

Classically, in the Western tradition, politics has been described as the domain of deliberate intervention aimed at managing social coexistence within a shared polity. Within this tradition, the domain of politics is regarded as revolving around issues and acts of representation, participation, discussion, negotiation, decision, rule-making, rule-enforcing, case of exception and so on. The dominant register of politics has long pertained to language and argumentative speech. The leading idea is that politics-as-talking is interrupted by violent action – conversely, as long as people keep conversing, it means they are not (yet) assaulting each other.¹ In such a ‘lexis-based’ or ‘rhetoric-based’ conception of politics, the latter is regarded as essentially intertwined with discourse, articulation of reasons and argumentation – even when it manifests itself as a bare-bones decision of exception.²

With respect to the canonical conception just outlined, inquiring into the relations between politics and visibility opens up an enlarged terrain for social research. The background for the present volume lies in regarding visibility as a thick, complex notion that encompasses aesthetic, moral and economic determinations. To begin with, we follow an Arendtian inspiration, insofar as Arendt first extended the domain of politics beyond the horizon of lexis and rhetoric, in order to account for the practical, spatial effects of presence, co-presence and mutual pressure political actors exercise upon one another in that peculiar shared space she called ‘the polls’. Such political space, which cannot be reduced to the domestic blueprint, is characterized by a condition of enhanced intervisibility and corresponds to the public realm. Following Arendt’s lead, we approach processes of becoming-visible and co-visible in public as quintessentially political in this sense.³ At the same time, today we need to extend the scope of the investigation towards the plurality of meanings possessed, and bestowed, by this form of public visibility. If, in Arendt’s theory, visibility essentially encapsulates the moment of freedom when citizens become co-present in the polity, Foucault explored how visibility has in modern times been strategically ‘weaponized’ as a resource for discipline, control and governance of individuals and populations. In Foucault, visibility is revealed as deeply imbued with relations of power – ‘a trap’, as he famously put it.⁴

The deliberate, strategic and governmental use of visibility refers to acts and procedures aimed at shaping the social environment where people and processes become visible and co-visible in view of fostering, or conversely inhibiting, specific behaviours and social dynamics by intervening upon the intervisibilities inherent in them. In the Foucaultian framework, the governance of conducts is obtained through the establishment of pre-arranged diagrams of visibility in both enclosed and open spaces, for both ‘policy’ and ‘police’ purposes. The outcome of visibility relations can thus be expressed in terms of power ratios: it instantiates the relation between majorities and minorities of all sorts, not so much in a strict political-electoral sense, but in the Gramscian broader sense of cultural hegemony. Relations of governance are then always mediated by the ways in which ideologies are able to craft and sustain a series of visibility narratives. Tracing from de Certeau, it becomes possible to analyse how an array of strategies and tactics are employed to shape and manipulate the intervisibilities of people, issues and events, giving rise to a wide range of processes of visibility production and handling. Once considered in conjunction with the tradition of rhythmanalysis, this insight illuminates the fact that processes of visibility are not simply spatial but deeply temporal and rhythmic – having to do with synchronizing actors and events while making social time compelling for perception and action.⁵

In general, visibility appears as something imbued with language, or more generally with semiosis (signification), while at the same time resisting full discursive articulation: on the one hand, visibility almost comes to coincide with the ‘readability’ of social processes and the possibility of making processes and subjects amenable to logical scrutiny and understanding; on the other hand, visibility constitutes an affective, ‘stingy’ phenomenon that continues to evade full formalization.⁶ In other words, ‘the visible’ represents a special social medium where sensibilities and proclivities are inscribed as the fabric and the texture of social life itself. Such sensibilities are not only personal and psychic but also extensively social and historical. The visible, in this sense, may constitute the veritable ‘element’ of social life, where blind materials and visible images blend.⁷ Rather than a parametrical ‘field’ or a logistic ‘system’, the visible is the messy mix where social-political existence at each instant – and with its distinctive temporality – unfolds. In other words, what is peculiar of the visible as ‘element of the social’ is that – as Derrida (1972: 138) once wrote of the pharmakon – it is, in itself, ‘undecidable’. It follows that the relation of the invisible to the visible is not a merely oppositional one. Far from being the opposite of the visible, the invisible increments the visible – and yet it does so in uncanny, unorthodox ways: by and large, we are haunted by the invisible as by something that is felt to be present but impossible to seize or master.⁸ The fact that the invisible is not the opposite but the always-present correlate of the visible depends on the very specificity of the visible as element, that is, its virtual nature – again, its being ‘element’, rather than ‘substance’, of social life.⁹

The visible, understood as a social ‘medium’, is by nature continuous, qualitative and heterogeneous; but social creatures do not cease to introduce discontinuities in it, in the form of quantitative and homogeneous ‘measurements’. Through acts of measurement and commensuration, we seek to position phenomena both within the visible and with respect to each other.¹⁰ All formations of visibility then presuppose or derive from acts and ways of ‘positioning’, whereby things and events are configured upon certain thresholds or at key discriminant points that function as bifurcation points.¹¹ Importantly, thresholds in the visible are part and parcel of the very social figurations that ensue from them. Concretely, this means that in many cases we operate upon things by operating upon their visibility: since we ‘make things with the visible’, no opposition between representation and practice can hold on this terrain. The visible is not super-added to social phenomena, it is not ‘superstructural’ but rather represents the degree-zero of the social. Hence, the pivotal role of measures: it is not only the ‘partitioning’ of the visible – that separating-cum-keeping together of the seen and the unseen, the presupposed and the to-be-proven – that matters but, more pointedly, its measurement, for it is measuring that makes things seizeable and operable upon. Measures – here widely understood as both commensuration apparatuses and operational tools – are the most important ‘decidability instruments’ introduced into the element of the visible.¹²

However, the ambivalences of visibility are not elided by measurements. On the contrary, as the chapters in this collection neatly illustrate in manifold ways, measures themselves become a crucially contested terrain: they are a battleground. Whilst grappling with relative and reciprocal visibilities, measures are taken into a number of surprising upturns: so, for instance, once the degree of ‘exposure’ is taken as the measure of the ‘success’ of a phenomenon, all sorts of ad-hoc manoeuvres can be deployed to guarantee success by securing better scores in the indices of exposure. That is also the moment when veritable détournements are used to ‘hack’ the phenomena and the trends in question. One perhaps minor and yet revealing example is the practice of flooding a social media hashtag so as to effectively hijack its message. This way, visibility becomes ‘territorial’, allowing for all sorts of manoeuvres, including occupation, defence, eviction, guerrilla and so on.¹³ One should not overlook how visibility as a social logic in some cases even dictates the measures to be taken. For a dramatic illustration, one may consider the staging of politically extreme and disruptive acts.¹⁴ This again illustrates how the social actors producing intervisibility relations seek to reshape these relations to obtain certain advantages, even while perfectly conscious that they are, on their turn, forever caught in those same configurations.

In short, it seems that the present time places us in a situation where visibility not only matters to politics but becomes an intrinsic constituent of it, as well as one crucial asset for carrying it out. Increasingly, contemporary politics is a politics of visibility through and through. As hinted above, the life of democracy appears as a life of debate, inquiry and experience¹⁵ – but also of display, celebration, accusation, suspicion, conspiracy-thinking, revelation and scandal.¹⁶ One cannot fail to notice how all these ‘political’ patterns involve visibility. In this vein, Plato was perhaps the first – in his dialogue Protagoras – to highlight the function of the unique medium of the visible in public life. Specifically, Plato indicated as one of the two essential prerequisites for political life the feeling of aidòs, namely ‘shame’ (the other being díke, justice). Clearly, shame implies a precise mechanism of self-restraint in intervisibility relations, and it is perhaps still true that those who cherish democracy should be quite concerned whenever politics becomes shameless. At both large scale – in the ‘big game’ of politics – and small scale – in the molecular existence of political relations infused in everyday life – the importance of the ethical theme of ‘shame’ running throughout Western culture reconfirms that the excesses and deficits of visibility, no less than the ways in which such excesses and deficits are appraised, measured, experienced and mobilized, carries a significance that can hardly be underestimated.

Naturally, visibility and its stakes are subject to historical and contextual variance. This volume invites us, in particular, to consider how the current transformations of visibility are extremely impactful at the intersection of ‘the urban’ and ‘the digital’ domains, which is where most of the chapters collected here sit in terms of content. Over the past couple of decades, a vast array of urban institutional and technological settings, arrangements and frameworks has been incessantly revolving around the organization and the contestation of the visible in terms of formations of intervisibility for interacting subjects.¹⁷ Both the physical urban process and the experience of urbanity have functioned as formidable articulators of visibility. Even at the most basic physical and material level, a number of urban spaces stand out as particularly sensitive in terms of visibility management: we are referring to public squares, multicultural neighbourhoods, urban interstices populated by marginal subjects, dilapidated or polluted sites, abandoned and redeveloping areas and so on. All these spaces, with their peculiar imagination and sensorium, constantly cater to public attention and, often, heated public debate, calling in question a list of issues ranging from police techniques, through developmental policies, to fundamental values, visions and choices for the urban future.

Concretely, the production of visibilities results from, and feeds back into, specific modes of social and spatial accessibility or lack thereof. Merely by virtue of visibility, some parts of the city and some actors in them appear to be either connected or disconnected from the rest of the polity – that is, placed either within its moral realm or outside of it; and, consequently, on either this side or that of the barricade in what is occasionally presented as a new civilizational war. This way, visibility concurs in shaping the spatial and moral qualities of urban places, their public ‘career’ as well as their role in a number of social conflicts and moral crusades. The local ‘atmospheres’ of charged and contested urban locales are conveyed through social-spatial sensible ‘landscapes’, whereby given distributions of visibility and correlative invisibility produce specific, enduring territorializations in trust and allegiances and correlatively in mistrust and disloyalty. In this sense, the dynamics of inscription and extraction of (either positive of negative) value from the urban domain follow from the intertwinement of visibility and territorialization. A classic case is provided by urban arts and the many types of legal and illegal expressive interventions in public. These are usually contradistinguished by a status of enhanced visibility: for instance, the ‘outrageous’ visibility of graffiti and street art affords ‘simultaneous’ assimilation and deviance, from the moment when strategies and acts of expulsion, capture and reinscription become entangled – a veritable ‘divergent synthesis’ of urban valorization performed through visibility.¹⁸

Once we add to this picture a consideration of the digital domain, it is possible to notice that the media and the new media constitute veritable prolongations of urban environments.¹⁹ The digital dimension is today fully interspersed with the urban realm, rather than being at any point opposed to it. The new media effectively encapsulate an urban logic: they are technical tools imbued with an urban operational mode, contributing to a further stage of that ‘urbanization of the territory’ first described by Foucault. This fact is elucidated compellingly by the notion of ‘ambient information’, whereby the Uexküllian Umwelt is translated into a complex of signs, each carrying informative potential to be detected and made relevant through correlation to other signs. In a sort of vindication of Tarde’s legacy, the rise of the digital layer of social life has created an unprecedented possibility to compute social events.²⁰ This way, the new media – including the algorithmically-sorted social media, digital service platforms, increasingly merged with artificial intelligence – widen the array of the technical ‘procedures of visibilization’ through which actors, facts, objects and events can be brought into the register of the visible. Since the procedures of visibilization are always specific and technologically bound, there is no neutral standpoint from which the ethical and political import of actions and processes so configured may be assessed.

New topologies are generated as soon as different types of spaces and landscapes of visibility – urban and digital – interact, with major implications for the temporal-rhythmic and affective constitution of social life. By and large, the new media are devised as tools for coordinating and governing events in space but also, at the experiential level, as tools for taming the excessiveness of the urban experience. Safety and pleasurableness are promised to the user but only in a new environment infused with sensing, recording, thinking and ultimately governing machines. Counter-intuitively, the very wealth of data circulating in the digital sphere not infrequently generates anxiety instead of comfort, fear instead of confidence, confusion instead of mastery. The contemporary landscapes of visibility appear to be dense with a type of interaction that cannot be reduced to either language or computing alone: in this context, the visible is all the more revealed as constituting not only one possible social asset but, perhaps, the crucial source and the medium of all things social.

Outline of the volume

The New Politics of Visibility comprises nine original chapters specifically commissioned for this collection. Contributions are interdisciplinary and address an array of topical areas in the newly emerging modes of governance and the novel social formations coming into existence. The transformations of urban space and the working of the new media form a core concern recurring through the majority of the chapters but are by no means the sole topic, as other chapters address more directly the politics of visibility in crucial cultural spheres, including gender relations and professional life. What contradistinguishes the contributions to this volume is the desire to work simultaneously on visibility as a social-scientific analytical category (yet to be fully theorized) and a number of practical stakes of visibility, historically and locally determined. This makes the chapters in this volume heterogeneous yet also intriguingly resonant with each other. Not improbably will the reader have the impression of being led to unknown places, just to find out one is in the same spot previously visited following the line of another chapter, albeit reached from a different trail. Such a multiplicity of intersecting perspectives is perhaps the most remarkable richness offered by the present volume.

Tali Hatuka opens the collection with a concise, wide-ranging analysis of the new geometries of social interaction and power where rising asymmetries of intervisibility are attested. Analysing four key visibility diagrams, Hatuka frames the geometries of visibility as ‘a new social hierarchy, based on levels of access to seeing and exposure’. This way, she highlights how the management of visibility lies at the root of a novel form of social hierarchy. In particular, Hatuka outlines a series of principles of seeing and being seen in the digital age: these principles give shape to four ranks, which the author terms ‘the blind’, ‘the selective’, ‘the multifocal’ and the ‘all-seeing’. Actors located in different ranks can diversely obtain, exploit, extract, manipulate or avoid visibility. Such a verticalization of intervisibilities comes with major consequences for the new political challenges of the present.

Digging into the processes of digitality, Mikkel Flyverbom and Frederik Schade speak of ‘coded vision’ to explain the current form of datafication of visibilities. The authors focus especially on future-oriented algorithmic governance tools, looking at what happens when the intervisibility of actors and actions is deployed as a distinct mode of anticipatory governance. The new governmental vision is ‘coded’ in the double sense of being digitally encoded and of encapsulating a number of encrypted assumptions about the values to be societally promoted. Such a structuring of visibilities is contradistinguished by being both proactive and performative: rather than simply seeking to capture an already-given social reality, coded vision becomes constitutive of it. Flyverbom and Schade argue that such dynamic becomes understandable once we attend the forms of labour and the socio-material entanglements that underpin the processes of datafication and algorithmic sorting: from this perspective, visibilities appear as central to the contemporary governance of human conduct. In this context, anticipatory visibility emerges as a powerful construct, whose problematic ethical and legal consequences, the authors claim, need to be unpacked and clarified. The cases discussed in the chapter include the techniques of predictive policing and the programmes to prevent religious radicalization, which expose the crux of anticipatory visibility.

In the third chapter, Malcolm McCullough makes a case for what he calls ‘urban information environmentalism’. Digital mobile media, McCullough remarks, give emphasis to remote connections over presence in the immediate environment. This comes to the detriment of attention to and awareness of the importance of the environment as a relevant social domain. In a perceptive discussion, McCullough invites us to rethink the situatedness of mobile media by widening the very notion of ‘ambient information’. This in a way amounts to de-exceptionalizing the new digital media as but one additional contributor to an already rich ‘ambient-ness’ that characterizes our living environments. In perspective, the argument advanced by McCullough suggests that, today, an enhanced sensibility to the surroundings may represent an important source of immunity against the excessiveness of digital saturation. Avoiding the type of saturation evoked by the digital mythology is, as the author notes, important to rescue the value of civility in a context where the latter is concretely imperilled by the dictates of technological ‘proceduralism’.

Chapter 4 illustrates the different ways in which visibility works across different media models. João Carlos Magalhães and Jun Yu propose a full-fledged taxonomy of mediated visibility, considering three main ‘regimes’: broadcast, networked and algorithmic. In practice, these ideal types coexist and interweave. Magalhães and Yu are interested in probing how different regimes impact upon the process of moral recognition of actors. These visibility regimes, the authors argue, can be matched with various recognition regimes. To do so, it is possible to distinguish the two vectors of each intervisibility experience: on the one hand, what the authors call ‘being viewed’, that is, the media contents circulated and made visible, on the other, ‘being read’, that is, the audiences each time made readable to those who organize the media. Magalhães and Yu discuss in particular algorithmic visibility as a rising paradigm that has been ushered in over the past decade. Rather than on visual ‘cones’ or networks, algorithmic visibility is best pictured as a series of loops, given that, in this regime, the two vectors of visibility appear as inescapably entangled: what is displayed is at each instant the result of how the users are ‘read’ by the algorithm and placed in a specific ‘history’ of previous behaviours, preferences and choices. This situation, the authors note, generates a paradoxical regime of recognition, which is predictably going to be a defining trait of the coming age.

Nathalie Heinich studies visibility as a form of social capital, with an interest towards the phenomenon of celebrity. Heinich’s chapter is a continuation of her major work De la visibilité (2012) and discusses celebrity as an accumulation of visibility and/as recognition, one that cements stark differences of resources between known and unknown subjects. If visibility ownership instates a form of aristocracy, since the 1990s networked visibilities promised a ‘democratization’ of visibility chances, whereby more actors could become visible in more dynamic ways. Heinich stresses, in particular, the momentous change that occurred with the multiplication of both production and circulation of images of the self (the ‘selfie’ age). Such an explosion of self-images has altered the role of conventional social mediators of visibility, whose breadth of power seems to have shrunk. This has come in conjunction with a shift from a visibility conferred by specific personal qualities or talents to a visibility that becomes increasingly ‘endogenous’, or self-propelling. Heinich, however, considers that the visibility capital is not directly convertible into other forms of capital: this means, in other words, that it represents a social capital only in a weakened sense – precisely, a ‘democratized’ capital, readily available to many, and thus inherently fragile as a badge of distinction. In conclusion, Heinich remarks, the temporality of the process of fame is also deeply transformed by the new processes of production and circulation in the direction of short-termism and ephemerality.

The rhythmical aspect of visibility also proves crucial once we dive into the urban dimension. In Chapter 6, AbdouMaliq Simone and Morten Nielsen explore contemporary urbanization on the ground as indissociable from a series of narratives that selectively make certain processes visible, concurrently obscuring others. In contrast to the formal urbanism of the North, the informal