Politics of Visibility

Based on fifteen months of ethnographic research conducted between 2010 and
2013, this article explores queer life-worlds through the Armenian notion of alternativ
space, spaces that create possibilities for practices, desires, ways of looking, and
being that differ from Armenian national values of propriety. Political-economic
reform has created anxieties regarding national propriety and the family’s ability
to exist in continuity with a moral past within postsocialist time-space. Intense
anxieties regarding the proper social reproduction of national propriety make
visible forms of difference from what is considered proper difficult. As such,
in/visible spaces in which these differences can be exhibited have emerged, merging
nonnormative sexual and gendered worlds with wider experiences of alterity that
disturb the nation’s social reproduction and continuity with the past. Although
alternativ spaces make difference possible, they also reproduce the nation’s norms
by containing that difference in interior queer life-worlds. I suggest, however, that
these spaces also have the potential of redefining Armenianness as they bring alterity
into the larger space of nation, queering Armenian futurity in ways that LGBT
visibility would not make possible.

In this paper I demonstrate how an attention to rural queerness offers a beneficial and necessary opportunity to examine queer subjectivies through the lens of space, place, and class. I highlight how individuals' claims to queerness can actually be embeddd within identifications with class and place. I demonstrate how identifications with place are illustrative of a broader coneption of rurality, an often-ignored yet immensely pervasive thread of identity, which, governed by familiarity, familial affiliation, and community participation, can actually provide rural queer individuals with a means of both acceptance and queer expression alternative to dominant models. I illustrate how rurality is not only absent from hegemonic urban conceptualizations of queer visibility, but is actually incompatible with the basic tenets of mainstream urban queer visibility politics. Rurality thus provides a compelling vehicle of critique and alternative envisioning for contemporary queer politics and subjectivities.

Scholars globally are increasingly required to account for the visibility and impact of their research, and visibility and impact are increasingly digitally-mediated through the platforms and practices associated with Web 2.0. Traditional prestige-based metrics of visibility (ISI/WoS Impact Factor) measure only scholar-to-scholar outputs like journals and books. In many African universities with nascent research cultures, legacies of colonialism and imperatives of national development, these measures present scholars with particular challenges. At the same time, in the North, moves towards Open Access, along with the potential of Web 2.0 technologies for increasing visibility of research, offer the potential for changes to traditional measures of assessing impact and visibility. Using a framework whereby the extent of change in research communication practices at all stages of the research process can be analysed, this paper reveals the pressures shaping African research communication practices and the visibility of research, using data from a case study at the University of Namibia.

The following paper explores the way transparency is used and applied, on a performative and symbolic level, as (1) a device for managing the establishment of sociocultural norms and values and (2) an expedient for understanding the boundaries between oneself and the other. A focus is given to the digital online and offline spaces, seen as places of visibility, circulation of information flows and open-data exchange. Drawing on cultural studies, semiotics and information studies, this interdisciplinary project aims to uncover values, rationales and theories behind the use and non-use of authenticity, truth and personality, in social decision-making and public participation. It will be taken account of the possible responsibilities connected to being transparent and visible, and it will be considered the social expectation for a perfect state, which a term like transparency is charged with, while trying to understand if a politics of total transparency is in opposition with democracy.

This essay approaches the multiple aspects of Bernini’s St. Teresa. 'The argument encompasses notions that are central to the contemporary study of Early Modern Rome, I particularly enjoyed Victoria's use of post-structural theory – such as Foucault – while also exploring early modern concepts and notions in depth – such as 'splendore' and 'concetto'.  Going from the need of visibility for the consolidation of power to the innovative rendering of an image to encourage its circulation and ubiquity. This is outstanding writing quality, written at a publishable level. ( Alice Marinelli, UCL)

The paper attempts to understand ways in which gender and racially defined communal ideologies worked simultaneously to produce Muslim women in colonial Bengal as invisible within nationalist historiography. It argues that the negative representations of Muslim women underpinned the construction of other identity categories in colonial Bengal, and highlights the participation of Hindu/Brahmo women writers in this process.

Historically rooted in cities, GLBT identities and communities
have been mapped onto a narrative of rural-to-urban migration.
Often represented as homophobic, rural space is valued insofar
as it is left behind. !is article posits rurality as an often-ignored
yet pervasive thread of identity, which is absent from hegemonic
conceptualizations of queer visibility. While urban queer visibil-
ity politics center on the di"erent-but-equal paradigm, I argue
that rural queer visibility politics involve a delicate balance of
queerness and localness, putting forth an approach of di"erent-
but-similar. !e construction of GLBT identities in non-urban
contexts may therefore complicate dominant conceptions of the
closet model.

How does the algorithmically mediated environment of social media restructure social action? This article combines social movement studies and science and technology studies to explore the role of social media in the organization, unfolding, and diffusion of contemporary protests. In particular, it examines how activists leverage the technical properties of social media to develop a joint narrative and a collective identity. To this end, it offers the notion of cloud protesting as a theoretical approach and framework for empirical analysis. Cloud protesting indicates a specific type of mobilization that is grounded on, modeled around, and enabled by social media platforms and mobile devices and the virtual universes they identify. The notion emphasizes both the productive mediation of social and mobile media and the importance of activists’ sense-making activities. It also acknowledges that social media set in motion a process that is sociotechnical in nature rather than merely sociological or communicative, and thus can be understood only by intersecting the material and the symbolic dimensions of contemporary digitally mediated collective action. The article shows how the specific materiality of social media intervenes in the actors’ meaning work by fostering four mechanisms—namely performance, interpellation, temporality, and reproducibility—which concur to create a “politics of visibility” that alters traditional identity dynamics. In addition, it exposes the connection between organizational patterns and the role of individuals, explaining how the politics of visibility is the result of a process that originates and ends within the individual—which ultimately creates individuals-in-the-group rather than groups.

This article develops a conceptual framework for understanding collective action in the age of social media, focusing on the role of collective identity and the process of its making. It is grounded on an interactionist approach that considers organized collective action as a social construct with communicative action at its core [Melucci, A. 1996. Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press]. It explains how micromobilization is mediated by social media, and argues that social media play a novel broker role in the activists' meaning construction processes. Social media impose precise material constraints on their social affordances, which have profound implications in both the symbolic production and organizational dynamics of social action. The materiality of social media deeply affects identity building, in two ways: firstly, it amplifies the ‘interactive and shared’ elements of collective identity (Melucci, 1996), and secondly, it sets in motion a politics of visibility characterized by individuality, performance, visibility, and juxtaposition. The politics of visibility, at the heart of what I call ‘cloud protesting’, exacerbates the centrality of the subjective and private experience of the individual in contemporary mobilizations, and has partially replaced the politics of identity typical of social movements. The politics of visibility creates individuals-in-the-group, whereby the ‘collective’ is experienced through the ‘individual’ and the group is the means of collective action, rather than its end.

Dieser Artikel entwickelt eine allgemeine Theorie der Transparenz. Er vergleicht die normativen Ansätze und die empirischen Forschungen zur Trans-parenz und führt sie zusammen. So legt der Beitrag systematisch die politische Rationalität der Transparenz frei, die das Soziale nach einem bestimmten Wahrnehmungs-, Denk-und Handlungsmuster ordnet; er zeigt historisch die Einsatzpunkte für gesellschaftliche Transparenzforderungen und evaluiert die Leistungen und nicht intendierten Effekte von Transparenzpraktiken.
Die zentrale These lautet, dass Transparenz funktional auf die Reduktion von Unsicherheit bezogen ist. Dafür implementiert sie Misstrauen mithilfe von Praktiken der Formalisierung und Standardisierung, um soziales Verhalten zu kontrollieren und reine Informationen zu produzieren. Symbolisch verschafft sie sich so einen Nimbus der Neutralität, verbunden mit dem Versprechen auf Bürgerpartizipation und Sicherheit.
Diese selbstgesteckten Ziele kann die Transparenz aber nicht erreichen. Am Beispiel der Implementation des New Public Managements seit den Staatskrisen der 1970er Jahre zeigt der Beitrag, dass Transparenz zwar ein wirkungsvolles institutionelles Setting zur Regulierung von Verhalten anbietet, gleichzeitig aber Misstrauen verstärkt und Expertenpartizipation fördert. Daher wird abschließend eine Alternative für den Umgang mit Unsicherheit und Korruption vorgestellt: der republikanische Ansatz kreativen Handelns.

Le défi que je lance consiste à établir quelques contours de la visibilité de cette Lisbonne invisible, pas seulement par le biais de la littérature – la proposition de Calvino – mais davantage à travers du cinéma-documentaire qui paraît délivrer les gens et les endroits de la ville de sa condition de fantômes, sous la splendeur d’une ville blanche de lumière cinématographique, mais aussi dans la pénombre nocturne de ses jardins, à l’heure de repos de beaucoup et de vigile de tant d’autres. Il ne s’agit donc pas de la recherche d’une visibilité scientifique qui cherche à définir la transparence de l’atmosphère, mais davantage de la visibilité de notre imagination combattant l’opacité de notre regard.

Cette contribution explique comment, avec des résidents d’un complexe de logements sociaux de Montréal et d’autres partenaires, nous avons tenté d’ajouter d’autres représentations de leurs réalités quotidiennes aux imageries, conceptions et stéréotypes véhiculés à leur propos dans des espaces médiatiques généralement occupés par des personnes expertes qui parlent sur et pour eux. Plus précisément, je détaille le premier de quatre volets d’une « infrastructure de visibilisation » co-développée ensemble entre 2008 et 2010 pendant ma recherche doctorale, volet qui s’est appuyé sur le digital storytelling. Pour se faire, je définis d’abord la visibilisation comme concept opératoire distinct de la visibilité qui peut potentiellement générer de la reconnaissance. Ensuite, je présente l’avènement et les particularités du digital storytelling de même que sa pertinence ethnographique. Finalement, j’illustre les manières avec lesquelles nous avons « travaillé » la visibilisation au sein d’une infrastructure où le digital storytelling est devenu autant un outil d’expression et de reconnaissance qu’une méthode et une posture de recherche.

Mots clés : Truchon, digital storytelling, visibilisation, reconnaissance, posture et méthode de recherche, décolonisation méthodologique, logements sociaux, Montréal.

In Israel/Palestine, as elsewhere, the personal and the political are deeply implicated. Addressing the interface of personal experience and the political context of structural inferiority, Ra’ef Zreik’s contribution on what he calls “the politics of seeing” offers a reflexive account of spatial experience in Haifa. One level of his essay is a reflexive description of the public sphere of Haifa in the late 1990s – a moment comprised of vivid scenes, tracing the nuances of identity dynamics in a mixed town. The collection of vignettes he builds upon include the spatial and phenomenological status of a neighborhood football pitch, the Jewish-Arab community center, a church, a mall, the seashore and a suspended bridge which cuts across a Palestinian neighborhood, shrinking space and time and memory.
A second theme in Zreik’s essay articulates the interplay of geography and history, seeing and remembering, public sphere and public time, home and homeland, individualism and nationalism, illustrating their embodiment in architecture and the politics of seeing in Haifa. Using a description of life in Haifa before 1948 and its depiction in historical accounts written by Palestinians and by Israelis, the essay demonstrates how tensions between what is seen and what is hidden, geography and history, the ‘me’ and the ‘us’ and, finally, time and space, convey a variety of transformations in the experience of Palestinians in Israel.

The concept of visibility has become a problematic one as hypervisibility gave rise to new forms of opacity that are formed not through secrecy but by its opposite, pan-visibility. Paradoxically, by amplifying visibility, media create new forms of invi-sibility. An analysis of visibility will provide us with a precise perspective how these processes occur. In this paper, we suggest three lines of empirical and theoretical investigation in the topic of visibility: a sociological (symbolic) axis; a collective (public-ness) axis; and a technological (media) axis. Since the social category of visibility is a central aspect of communication and media studies, we will be interrogating it through three distinct ways: visibility as a field whose symbolic determination results in the constitution of different regimes of visibility; visibility as a pivot-concept of publicness since it is this public quality that transforms proto-visibility into a full accomplished visibility; and, third, the transmu-tations and dangers stemmed from media's production of visibility. Each one of these principles highlights different concepts: in the field of visibility we need to address inter-visibilities; in public visibili-ties we need to address proto-visibilities in verge of becoming full-visibilities through the synchrony of collective attention; and in mediated visibility it is imperative to deal with super-visibility as an extreme effect of an intense modulation perpetrated by communication technologies.

The following paper explores the way transparency is used and applied, on a performative and symbolic level, as (1) a device for managing the establishment of sociocultural norms and values and (2) an expedient for understanding the boundaries between oneself and the other. A focus is given to the digital online and offline spaces, seen as places of visibility, circulation of information flows and open-data exchange. Drawing on cultural studies, semiotics and information studies, this interdisciplinary project aims to uncover values, rationales and theories behind the use and non-use of authenticity, truth and personality, in social decision-making and public participation. It will be taken account of the possible responsibilities connected to being transparent and visible, and it will be considered the social expectation for a perfect state, which a term like transparency is charged with, while trying to understand if a politics of total transparency is in opposition with democracy.

The paper attempts to understand ways in which gender and racially defined communal ideologies worked simultaneously to produce Muslim women in colonial Bengal as invisible within nationalist historiography. It argues that the negative representations of Muslim women underpinned the construction of other identity categories in colonial Bengal, and highlights the participation of Hindu/Brahmo women writers in this process.

This article further develops a critical geographical theory of structural violence. It does so by considering the ways people in Nanga-Eboko and Kribi, two communities in Cameroon, report feeling and experiencing structural violence along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. For people living within spaces (re)produced through structurally violent processes, projects, and extractions, a triad of intersecting experiences emerge: structural violence is felt as (i) tangible through the body (senses of loss, the belly, the body, and nourishment), or described through gendered narratives of hunger, illness, and the experiences of land dispossession; (ii) historically compounded, or characterized by a rootedness in the colonial and racist structures of the past alongside expectations that present-day structural violence threatens future generations; and (iii) spatially compounded, or experienced through a concurrent spatial overlapping (or compounding) as multiple forms of structural violence converge within the same landscapes and lifescapes, effecting displacement in-place. Each of these, felt simultaneously, has the effect of rendering structural violence acutely visible, tangible as it is in the restructurings of landscapes and lifescapes, despite discursive attempts to cloak, bury, and efface by powerful actors. Looking toward the narratives that people use to critique and engage with such violence provides conceptual tools for wider resistance practices against structural violence.

...

Este artículo contribuye al desarrollo de una teoría geográfica crítica de la violencia estructural, considerando las formas en que los pueblos en Nanga-Eboko y Kribi (dos comunidades camerunesas) dicen sentir y experimentar la violencia estructural a lo largo del oleoducto Chad-Camerún. Para los pueblos que viven dentro de espacios (re)producidos mediante procesos, proyectos y extracciones estructuralmente violentos surge una tríada de experiencias interrelacionadas; la violencia estructural se siente: a) tangible en el cuerpo (el estómago, el cuerpo y las náuseas), o descrita a través de narrativas de género sobre hambre, enfermedad y experiencias de saqueo de sus tierras; b) compuesta históricamente, o caracterizada por la importancia de las estructuras coloniales y racistas del pasado junto a la idea de que la violencia estructural actual amenaza a las generaciones futuras; y c) compuesta espacialmente, o experimentada a través de un solapamiento (o compuesto) espacial cuando se da la convergencia de múltiples formas de violencia estructural dentro de los mismos paisajes y escenarios de vida, constituyendo verdaderos desplazamiento in situ. Cada uno de estos sentimientos, que se sienten de manera simultánea, tiene el efecto de volver claramente visible la violencia estructural, que se hace tangible tal cual es en la restructuración de los paisajes y escenarios de vida a pesar de los intentos discursivos de ocultarlos, enterrarlos y eliminarlos de los poderosos. Analizar las narrativas que utiliza la gente para criticar y enfrentarse a esa violencia provee herramientas conceptuales para analizar prácticas de resistencia contra la violencia estructural.

This article challenges how the concepts of voluntary and involuntary transparency are understood in the digital age by focusing on the management of involuntary and voluntary disclosure. We tend to understand radical transparency through new forms of involuntary networked data dissemination, spread without the consent or knowledge of whoever held the data. This view conflates the politics of exclusion with crucial questions of compulsion. At the same time, radical transparency's promise to end secrecy has not materialized. Instead, the social-material relations underpinning digital disclosures suggest they function to reconfigure visibilities of control and recognition rather than reveal extant objects. Thus, the article introduces a typology of disclosure to better understand the involuntary and autonomous and inclusive and exclusionary dimensions of managing visibility in the digital era. It then explores two sets of empirical " radical disclosure " practices, made with purpose but without consent, to articulate how digital disclosures reconfigure visibility and set limits and opportunities in society. The article concludes with a suggestion toward ramifications for governance and autonomy.

A B S T R A C T This article examines the shifting semiotics and politics of visibility in Brazilian Candomblé activism in the late 2000s in the city of Salvador. It analyses how the use of publicly salient discourses and signs of peace and antiviolence activism by activists from the African dias-poric religion Candomblé reconfigured the religion's practitioners public image from that of politically passive practitioners of " black magic " and self-sacrificing " black mothers " to that of politically active peace and antiviolence activists. I argue that this transformation was effected by a realignment of the general public's chronotopic orientation toward the religion and its practitioners from a chronotope of concealment to one of political visibility. This shift in chronotopic orientation not only aligned Candomblé practitioners with the social persona of the politically engaged peace activist but also produced a new social per-sona of a religiously motivated " black mother of peace. "

There has been a lack of attention to the role of la sorcellerie (witchcraft) and the occult in geographical work on extraction, power and resistance, despite the ways in which these epistemologies inform conceptions of power, wealth and violence. In two towns along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline, epistemologies of la sorcellerie frame understandings and critiques of the invisible actors and processes that effect the pipeline's uneven distributions of violence, wealth and risk. Far from expunging the experience(s) of extraction by erasing the pipeline's visible traces on the landscape, the oil consortium's infrastructural and discursive erasures serve to situate the pipeline within a knowledge system that associates invisible actors and materials with evil, wrongdoing, suspicion and distrust. This article addresses (i) how the production of dispersed extractive landscapes reinforce epistemologies of witchcraft by alienating the people who live within them from networks of power in ways that provoke a mistrust and jealousy that is absorbed within families and communities and (ii) the socio-political significance of this epistemological structuring of the pipeline as a logic of resistance against hydrocarbon capitalism.

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The paper attempts to understand ways in which gender and racially defined communal ideologies worked simultaneously to produce Muslim women in colonial Bengal as invisible within nationalist historiography. It argues that the negative representations of Muslim women underpinned the construction of other identity categories in colonial Bengal, and highlights the participation of Hindu/Brahmo women writers in this process.

https://manastabalblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/la-forza-fisica-per-un-arte-femminista-globale/

[...] "La “visibilità” – usata certamente come arma e non nelle nostre mani – è perlopiù un dato istantaneo, circoscritto e decontestualizzante che ci viene continuamente proposto come piano di verifica dai sistemi di potere. È in questo senso – la visibilità come significante – che costituisce una trappola e che va secondo me nettamente rifiutata; perché è chiaro che l’accesso viene sempre consentito alla critica in modi e in termini che “automaticamente” (cioè attraverso una serie di “buone pratiche politicamente corrette” di apparente sostegno e riconoscimento) la indeboliscono. Slavorare per me vuol dire rifiutarmi di misurare l’efficacia o la forza espressiva in termini di visibilità, il che è diverso dal ricercare l’invisibilità o la marginalità, che equivarrebbe a lasciare il campo libero al potere senza opporre alcuna resistenza. Vuol dire intendere quello che in termini di visibilità è condannato all’irrilevanza, e sottolinearne la sproporzione." [...]

Paradoxical political developments in the ‘Global North’ – in particular the commercial, capitalist and legal embrace of sexual, gender and racial minorities and the rise of far-right nationalism, with its attendant visible and violent classism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism – ask for an urgent renegotiation of minoritarian politics of in__visibilities. Against this backdrop, the international and interdisciplinary conference Renegotiating Minoritarian In__Visibilities will investigate how minoritarian strategies in art and visual culture can undermine hegemonic regimes of representation and challenge the dominant patterns of visibility, assimilation and intelligibility. Considering close connections between academia, art critique/practice and activism, the societal relevance of the conference is grounded in its exploration of aesthetic strategies that counteract processes of discrimination and stereotyping due to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age and further categories of difference.
The three-day conference with its format variety (workshops, artist talk, lecture-performance, keynote lecture, short panel presentations, etc.) will take place on November 12-14, 2019 at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and the Institute for Art Education at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany. In addition, a kick-off event in the form of a performative presentation including a film screening will be offered on November 11, 2019 in the Margarete-Bieber-Saal.

The conference is organised by the Research Area Visual and Material Culture Studies (RA4) of the GCSC.

Organisation: Oliver Klaassen (Queer Art Studies, PhD student at the GCSC; Lecturer at various German universities); Cathérine Ludwig-Ockenfels (Early Modern History, PhD student at the GCSC); Jana Tiborra (Art Pedagogy, Research Assistant at the Institute for Art Pedagogy, JLU; PhD student at the GCSC); Katharina Wolf (Contemporary History, PhD student and Research Assistant at the GCSC).

Cooperation partners: Institut für Kunstpädagogik (IfK) / JLU Gießen; Sektion "Medien and Gender" des Zentrums für Medien und Interaktivität (ZMI) / JLU Gießen; Zentrale Frauen und Gleichtstellungsbeauftragte und Büro für Chancengleichheit / JLU Gießen Autonome AStA-Referate: Queer-Feministisches Frauenreferat und Bi*-Schwulen-Trans*-Queer-Referat / JLU Gießen; Gießener Hochschulgesellschaft: Gesellschaft von Freunden und Förderern der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen; Research Network in Queer Studies, Decolonial Feminisms and Cultural Transformation (QDFCT) / JLU Gießen; Büro für Frauen und Gleichberechtigung der Stadt Gießen; Aidshilfe Gießen e.V. im Hans Peter Hauschildhaus.

When corrupt elements of the Trinidad and Tobago Police Services were paid by an organized crime ring to execute a young man at my field site in 2011, they instead killed a young woman who had done nothing wrong besides borrowing the intended victim’s car. The police did not bother to notice that a female was driving the vehicle; they simply opened fire on the twenty-one year old woman. In the months following her death, those that were close to her insisted that she was “still around,” that “she ain’t rest yet,” and they vowed that she would not rest until some kind of justice was meted out to her murderers. One woman saw her, standing at the shop across from her house in a recurring dream, but more often her presence was felt in intimations rather than seen with the naked eye. The unerased entry under the dead woman’s name in her aunt’s cell phone or a turn in the breeze could provoke the observation that “she spirit roaming.”

Like breath, spirits seem to be an invisible other, whose existence often remains elusive to sight. At its etymological root, spirit signifies respiration, alluding to the idea that the breath of life could separate from its material vessels to have some kind of independent existence. In her opening post in this series on invisibility, Ali Kenner shows how the often subtle and invisible act of breathing becomes visible as on object of awareness, care, and study when it becomes acutely painful. The labored breathing of the asthmatic calls attention to the ways that breath mediates between material and immaterial worlds. Similarly, when death becomes particularly violent, sudden, or unjust, the threshold between spiritus and matter is brought into sharp focus or blurred as the dead can be less willing to rest well...

https://culanth.org/fieldsights/invisibilities-translation

This article further develops a critical geographical theory of structural violence. It does so by considering the ways people in Nanga-Eboko and Kribi, two communities in Cameroon, report feeling and experiencing structural violence along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. For people living within spaces (re)produced through structurally violent processes, projects, and extractions, a triad of intersecting experiences emerge: structural violence is felt as (i) tangible through the body (senses of loss, the belly, the body, and nourishment), or described through gendered narratives of hunger, illness, and the experiences of land dispossession; (ii) historically compounded, or characterized by a rootedness in the colonial and racist structures of the past alongside expectations that present-day structural violence threatens future generations; and (iii) spatially compounded, or experienced through a concurrent spatial overlapping (or compounding) as multiple forms of structural violence...

The smart city is often marketed and described as being predicated on flows of data and networks of information that make individual urban citizens ‘visible’ and ‘transparent’ through technological interfaces like the smartphone. This chapter takes as its starting point the urban imaginary produced by Soviet émigré Yevgeny Zamyatin, who prefigured the ‘transparent’ smart city in his 1921 novel We, the first book to be banned in the Soviet Union. This is contrasted to more contemporary notions of the smart city as presented in A Day Made of Glass, a 2011 short movie about smart glass, produced by Corning, a glass corporation. A Day Made of Glass was the first in a series of shorts that produced and performed the smart city as a frictionless environment of social and economic efficiency and harmony. The unifying and contextualising thread between the transparent dystopia in We and the flat, transparent utopia in A Day Made of Glass is Jacques Ellul’s work on the technological society ...

While digital platforms tend to be unproblematically presented as the infrastructure of the sharing economy-as matchmakers of supply and demand-, we argue that constituting the boundaries of infrastructures is political and performative, that is, it is implicated in ontological politics, with consequences for the distribution of responsibilities (Latour, 2003; Mol, 1999, 2013; Woolgar & Lezaun, 2013). Drawing on an empirical case study of Uber, including an analysis of court cases, we investigate the material-discursive production of digital platforms and their participation in the reconfiguring of the world (Barad, 2007), and we examine how the (in)visibility of the digital infrastructure is mobilized (Larkin, 2013) to this effect. We argue that the representation of Uber as a "digital platform", as "just the technological infrastructure" connecting car drivers with clients, is a political act that attempts to redefine social responsibilities, while obscuring important dimensions of the algorithmic infrastructure that regulates this socioeconomic practice. We also show how some of these (in)visibilities become exposed in court, and some of the boundaries reshaped, with implications for the constitution of objects, subjects and their responsibilities. Thus, while thinking infrastructures do play a role in regulating and shaping practice through algorithms, it could be otherwise. Thinking infrastructures relationally decentres digital platforms and encourages us to study them as part of ongoing and contested entanglements in practice.

The conference  “Renegotiating Minoritarian In_Visibilities” will explore the connections between strategies of becoming and making in_visible in art and visual culture and their potential for developing individual or collective political agencies. Following a critical stance toward power, domination, and ideology, the conference will shed light on those “minoritarian” strategies and forms of in_visibility which can undermine hegemonic regimes of representation and challenge the dominant patterns of visibility. The conference is scheduled for November 12 – 14, 2019, in Gießen (Germany). Deadline for your abstracts is April 10, 2019.

The concept of visibility has become a problematic one as hypervisibility gave rise to new forms of opacity that are formed not through secrecy but by its opposite, pan-visibility. Paradoxically, by amplifying visibility, media create new forms of invisibility. An analysis of visibility will provide us with a precise perspective how these processes occur. In this paper, we suggest three lines of empirical and theoretical investigation in the topic of visibility: a sociological (symbolic) axis; a collective (publicness) axis; and a technological (media) axis. Since the social category of visibility is a central aspect of communication and media studies, we will be interrogating it through three distinct ways: visibility as a field whose symbolic determination results in the constitution of different regimes of visibility; visibility as a pivot-concept of publicness since it is this public quality that transforms proto-visibility into a full accomplished visibility; and, third, the transmutations and dangers stemmed from media's production of visibility. Each one of these principles highlights different concepts: in the field of visibility we need to address inter-visibilities; in public visibilities we need to address proto-visibilities in verge of becoming full-visibilities through the synchrony of collective attention; and in mediated visibility it is imperative to deal with super-visibility as an extreme effect of an intense modulation perpetrated by communication technologies.

The smart city is often marketed and described as being predicated on flows of data and networks of information that make individual urban citizens ‘visible’ and ‘transparent’ through technological interfaces like the smartphone. This chapter takes as its starting point the urban imaginary produced by Soviet émigré Yevgeny Zamyatin, who prefigured the ‘transparent’ smart city in his 1921 novel We, the first book to be banned in the Soviet Union. This is contrasted to more contemporary notions of the smart city as presented in A Day Made of Glass, a 2011 short movie about smart glass, produced by Corning, a glass corporation. A Day Made of Glass was the first in a series of shorts that produced and performed the smart city as a frictionless environment of social and economic efficiency and harmony. The unifying and contextualising thread between the transparent dystopia in We and the flat, transparent utopia in A Day Made of Glass is Jacques Ellul’s work on the technological society and the society of technique. A focus on Ellul’s critique of technique helps to highlight the link between stark authoritarianism in We, and the subtle apolitical city in A Day Made of Glass, by underlining the authoritarianism embedded in the notion of the city/urban citizen-as-machine.

This paper discusses the concept of visibility and its effects in digital society. Based on the case of an online community art project in Vietnam, I will question how digital forms of life narrative can bring out issues of visibility, and what it means to individuals and communities.

In this paper, I examine the fetishisation of the database as determinant apparatus in constructing blind or random cultural hierarchies and relationships through a multiplier effect of surplus information (metadata) around cultural entities, demonstrating the rise of social capital and the effects of the attention economy on cultural production, the logic of which we see as the hollowing out of cultural content into the frame, and a ʻLouisQuatorzisationʼ of the subject.

I draw examples from contemporary artwork and film, including Roberto Rosselliniʼs 1966 made-for-television film, 'La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis Quatorze' (ʻThe Rise to Power of Louis XIVʼ), as a prism to analyse these effects.

This paper was delivered at Transmission: Hospitality conference in July 2010 at Sheffield Hallam University, UK.

""In his chapter “Iconspicuous Revolutions of 1989: Culture and Contingency in the Making of Political Icons,” Dominik Bartmański revisits the European icons of the euphoric year of 1989 and asks what constitutes a powerful iconic fact. Specifically, he explains why the fall of the Berlin Wall emerged as the icon of 1989 and has retained this symbolic status ever since.

The answer is not obvious. 1989 was full of epochal events and important figures busy making history. Especially the earlier, politically unprecedented changes in Hungary and Poland had opened up a revolutionary space in which such events like the fall of the wall became possible at all. And yet they have not attained the same lasting influence on the international collective imagination. To reconstruct this phenomenon is to tell a story about how the iconic can trump the political. By demonstrating what counts in public perception as “revolutionary,” “political signal,” and “beginning” and “end” of a social process, Bartmański shows the role that iconicity plays in constituting these key categories and thus in structuring our ability to notice, understand, and remember events. By "public perception" Bartmanski does not mean only the "lay audiences" but also the producers of the journalistic facts themselves. Indeed, all social groups are deeply enmeshed in and responsive to the background codings and symbolic imperatives of a given culture.  It is precisely the various aspects of iconic power that makes events amenable to wide appropriation and socially "resonant". It is their iconicity that turns them into “objective,” temporal markers of history.

Of course, the key question is: what constitutes "iconic power"? Is it purely arbitrary signification structure or something different? What accounts for the fact that some symbolic representations and performances stick and others don't?

To answer these questions the present paper offers an analytical framework that identifies several constituent elements of iconic power. It distinguishes (1) "iconic capital," i.e. the historical accretion of symbolic resources associated with a given entity, (2) "cultural congruity," i.e. the fit between a given entity's character and the genre of cultural performance it is supposed to represent, and (3) "remembrance patterns," i.e. commemorative practices.

Each element is a bundle of material forms and affordances ("surface") and discursive content ("depth"). Only when all the elements coalesce in a felicitous way can an iconic effect emerge. Bartmanski observes that although open-ended and contingent, this iconic process is not arbitrary but instead rooted in the specific meanings structures that make certain social outcomes more plausible than others. 

Performing the cultural reconstruction of 1989 along those lines provides a "thick" elaboration of two observations that function as epigrams for the present paper.

The first is theoretical and was made by Roland Barthes in his essay "Rhetoric of the Image": "In every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs."

The second was made by an anthropologist Daphne Berdahl who insisted that "among other things, the revolutions of 1989 were about visibility - making visible 'the people'."

Just like other chapters in this book, the present sociological interpretation of political symbols inevitably takes us beyond the surface of news pictures to the surfaces and depths of events, to singular bodies and powerful crowds, sights and sites, built structures, and symbolically constructed narratives. It is the new prism of iconicity through which the effects of shocking and euphoric events that seem deceptively simple and well known can be explained in full. """