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135 pages

English

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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

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

Sujets

Social Theory

Media Studies

Social Science

Sociologie, société et politique

Sociology

Technology and Culture

Index of urban studies articles

Cultural studies

Politics

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	29 juillet 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781789385762
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,4750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

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

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.

Copy editor: Newgen
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Picture by Maria Teneva @miteneva https://unsplash.com/photos/ag-iDbS3Oog
Production manager: Debora Nicosia
Typesetting: Newgen

Hardback ISBN 978-1-78938-574-8
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-575-5
ePub ISBN 978-1-78938-576-2

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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
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
1.1 The vertical and horizontal exposure in the digital age
1.2 Geometries of visibility
1.3 The ladder of visibility
6.1 View of the construction site at the Maputo International Airport in Mozambique
7.1 Hannes Couvreur, Unnamed , 2020
7.2 Hannes 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