Exploring the politics of visibility: Technology, digital representation, and the mediated workings of power

1.1 Visibility has always been political

Visibility gains its political character partly through the tacitly complicated relationship between perception and reality. Naturalizing the relationship between perception and reality is foundation of empiricism’s broader epistemological authority, and, as Merleau-Ponty shows, perception, and thus visibility, gains much of its power from an assumed empiricism. As he argues, human perception gives rise to forms of reason and rationality that offer a productive understanding of the world based on what can be observed, arguing that “The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence” (Merleau-Ponty 1946: 13). Such a claim relies upon a key dualism in Western thought: the difference between objective reality and human perception and representation of that reality. Perception’s claims to objectivity often go unquestioned, but, as I will argue, this assumption of neutrality and direct ontological correspondence to the real word belies complex relations of power which can in turn be effected by what is rendered visible and thus worthy of attention.

Whereas Merleau-Ponty complicates perception as a philosophical given, others have drawn attention to the manipulation of perception and visuality as a strategy of significant political consequence. As Benjamin writes, much of mass culture works as a type of perception-laden machine of ideological consequence, whose purpose is to maintain a dominant power structure that “makes it possible to set a goal for mass movement on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations” (Benjamin 2008 [1936]: 41). For Benjamin (2002), cultural production projects a form of false consciousness onto society at large through its access to the broader visual grammar and vocabulary. As Buck-Morss (1992) notes, Benjamin’s (2002) work, particularly The Arcades Project, provides a method for intuiting and perceiving the relations of power in the aesthetics of mass-produced culture, itself a project in training the reader to perceive the problems of modern class relations in the expressions of culture. Granted, Benjamin perceived capitalist power relations on the surfaces of French advertising and architecture, but as Buck-Morss notes, Benjamin understood power relations and the aesthetics of mass culture as simultaneously and dialectically constituting one another. Simply speaking, visible phenomena serve as evidence of social and political conditions, but also create the ideological realm where these relations are envisioned, expressed, and taught.

Berger attempted to popularize Benjamin’s thoughts on visibility and the relations of power, and in doing so, brought Benjamin’s work to bear more directly upon the production of mass media texts and images, further revealing the relations of power made accessible through acts of visibility. He notes, “If the new language of images were used differently, it would … confer a new kind of power. Within it, we could begin to define our experiences more precisely” (Berger 1972: 33). Because Berger finds a specific and historically constructed power relationship within the aesthetics of the visible, he traces a contemporary visual order in which “publicity is essentially eventless. It extends just as far as nothing is happening … Publicity, situated in a future continually deferred excludes the present and so eliminates all becoming, all development. Experience is impossible within it. All that happens, happens outside it” (Berger 1972: 153). Berger’s argument bridges the distance between Benjamin and later post-modernists like Baudrillard, as he envisions the way that the modern mass media create a simulacrum of capitalist consumption, where no other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism” (Baudrillard 1994: 153). It is here that the visible acts as an alternative to actual politics, as if representation displaces actual possibility.

For delineating a working politics of visibility, these disparate authors offer varying means for recognizing that social reality is deeply connected to the way that things are perceived, and that perception is tied to technologies and practices of seeing. As Jay (1994) rightly notes, a claim that images alienate individuals from reality retains a necessary rationalist split between reality and perception, and thus preserves an ideal of objectivity that locks social agents and individuals within a strictly structural system that makes no affordance for agency. Tagg (1993, 2009) has shown that as relations of institutional power and modes of visual representation reify and constitute one another, they create systems of meaning that grant individual acts of visuality their power, but also constrain the ways in which new representations may disrupt those structures. Visual representations, gathered in aggregate, kept in archives, and produced by trained technicians, produces an epistemic basis upon which the legitimacy of contemporary relationships of power rely. Visuality is productive because it is evidentiary. What is needed here is an understanding of not just how images reproduce relations of ideology and power, but how practices, techniques, and technologies of seeing and producing visuality situate individuals and objects within a visual regime whose practices embody and the exercise of power.

1.2 Apprehending the technologies and techniques that render things visible

By understanding visibility as inimically related to power, we can come to understand how subjects may, in Foucaultian terms, challenge power by apprehending the technologies and techniques of knowledge production, or in this case, visibility production (Rose 2001). Caspar and Moore’s (2009) work on the micropolitics exerted upon human bodies through regimes of visibility is useful in this regard in that it turns to visuality, as a technique of knowing something as foundational to the workings of power. As Foucault (1979) notes, power works through modes of knowledge and visibility as both a type of control and as a counter-point to that control, and thus capturing the apparatuses of visibility also opens up the possibility of affecting the relations of power that produce and are produced by modes of image production and techniques of seeing.

To return to the example of the smartphone camera, many of the strategic uses of smartphone cameras gain their power through acts of witnessing, itself a complicated practice within the history of visuality. As Peters argues, witnessing “has two faces: the passive one of seeing and the active one of saying,” and thus works by articulating an event or representation in terms of a collective morality at the heart of liberalism (Peters 2001: 709). Historicizing and theorizing the use of mobile phone cameras in the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against police violence, Richardson (2017) notes that activists engage a long history of black witnessing, using digital tools to call upon the power of a black public that has long been constituted through alternative modes of mediation and collective representation. To witness is to ultimately make an appeal, borne in truth, to a collective humanism, and to activate that humanism through technologies of documentation and networks of publicity (Allan and Dencik 2017; Zelizer 2010).

In the context of the smartphone camera, witnessing affords a strategy that mobilizes affective truths in the hope of spurring action. Yet, access to the political and legal institutions that can mobilize the action spurred by acts of witnessing is politically unequal, as are the broader wells of public sympathy acts of witnessing appeal to (Blaagaard et al. 2017). The growth of digital infrastructures has also increased the urgency with which individuals may draw attention to these inequities, where “citizen camera-witnessing derives its efficacy and moral force from the individual’s willingness to stand before the world and risk bodily injury to attest to the (alleged) truth” at a previously unconceivable scale (Anden-Papadopoulos 2014: 766). As the technologies of witnessing and publicity are tied closer to the human body through the smartphone camera, the challenge becomes finding ways to preserve the power of the human body to act as a referent capable of implicating broad regimes of global power and inequities, to strategically leverage subjective immediacy in ways that visualize the inequities of power with urgency (Kraidy 2016).

By anchoring its representational authority to the human body, witnessing, especially smartphone camera witnessing, bears the discursive and epistemic power of irrefutable evidence. But the notion of evidence is itself fluid, and shows how the power of witnessing may be stifled as representations interface with the institutions of law and politics. In the example of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, acts of digital representation offered both a political and ontological strategy rooted in using digital technologies to create a critical mass of documents circulating across political networks that served as evidence of both the movement’s political consequence and the structures of economic inequality the movement sought to grant visibility to and critique (Creech 2014). As Wark (2013) has argued, such practices extend from a long history of image spectacle production indebted to Debord (1967), who argued that contemporary relations of power could be made sensible and challenged if technologies of image production were deployed with the intent to make these nebulous relations visible.

Deleuze and Guattari (1983) also offer a means for further understanding visibility and visuality as a strategy for challenging power. The creation of visibility as a technique for perceiving the world and articulating consequential meaning is configured within a complex assemblage of relations that include human practices, shifting material realties, and the technological possibilities that make that reality perceptible. Each of these elements is fluid and shifting, affording different strategies at specific moments. For example, in Egypt during the Tahrir Square riots of 2011s Arab Spring, shifting modes of image and video capturing and distribution enabled by the Internet and smart phones helped produce a shifting politics of representation within Egypt that escaped state apparatuses of communication control, thus articulating these politics within a media system beyond the borders of Egypt, while within these networks of communication, the human body remained a potent signifier of both popular challenge and authoritarian domination (Kraidy 2016).

Furthermore, Guattari’s work (1992) offers a way of understanding how the intelligibility of mediated events exist within an assemblage of linguistic, political, technological, and psychological systems that gives form to the way events are understood, and in doing so, recovers potential consequentiality in acts of representation. He states that, “technological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of human subjectivity, not only within its memory and intelligence, but within its sensibility, affects and unconscious phantasms,” and in doing so link the semiotic reality of media-based representations to the material, political, and technological conditions that delimit those representations (1992: 4). It is at the level of the individual that these multiple practices converge, and in their complexity and convergence can be apprehended and made new in a way that affects the broader structures of meaning making.

Along these same lines, Latour (2004) offers a way to understand that strategies of perception and visibility exist contingent upon, but not determined by, shifts in technologies of knowledge production. Latour’s key move is to dissolve the distinction between idealized, transcendent reality and human modes of perception, instead arguing that the distinction between material reality and the ability to perceive that reality matters less than how the tension between reality and perception produces real political projects. Though in many ways beholden to liberal democratic praxis, Latour’s work attempts to account for the consequentiality of representation within systems of knowledge and power. Following Latour’s (2004) own schema of political consideration, assembly, and representation, as laid out in the Politics of Nature, communication and media practice become a realm of public meaning-making, where phenomena and events are constructed, made sense of, and taken into account. Yet, for something to start making sense, there must also be a system, grammar, ethic, or esthetic by which it can be understood and its potential consequentiality considered (Latour 2005).

The key precept here, though, is that changes in perception, i.e., changes in what is made visible, possess real ontological and political consequence precisely because the images we see no longer form a veneer over objective reality. Instead, they give new form and complexity to what seemed stable and determined precisely because they unsettle seemingly static understandings of certain phenomena. By understanding visibility as something that is produced through established practices of meaning making connected to broader relations of power, we can then recover the visible as a consequential object of study within media and cultural studies.

2.1 Media practice and the production of public knowledge

While an understanding of technological assemblages opens certain analytic possibilities, in order to understand how objects, issues, and phenomena are rendered broadly visible and consequential, it is important to consider how media practices act as a mode of public knowledge production, where rules and conventions create a discrete and bounded public sphere. Journalism is a useful example in this regard, because of its common role as a gatekeeping practice for the liberal democratic public sphere (Shoemaker and Vos 2009). It is a role that has relied on a claim to objectivity, in many ways rooted in late-nineteenth century empiricism (Schudson 1978). In fact, it is this very claim of objectivity as fundamental to the practice of democracy that has historically offered a fruitful site for contestation (Couldry 2000). Concerns about journalistic practice reveal a deeper, culturally situated assertion that the forms of knowledge produced by journalistic texts, practitioners, and institutions have political and epistemological ramifications deeply related to the way that liberal democratic power is conceived and exercised (Carlson 2017). If we are to understand how technologies produce new forms of visibility, we must also understand how the media practices they are embedded within have been able to claim epistemological authority in the first place.

Concerns about the production of true, objective, or neutral information have been a part of journalism’s professional configuration since at least 1915, when, Schudson (1978) asserts, objectivity was defined as a specific professional method that would enabled dispassionate individuals to produce more credible information. In contrast to claims of journalism’s neutrality, broader arguments about the public benefit of journalism have been a prevalent concern for the profession’s major practitioners, scholars, and critics since at least the early 1800s (Nadler 2016). Arguments about journalism’s role as a public institution often offer programmatic solutions for how professional values like objectivity, verifiability, accuracy, and transparency are embodied in professional practices, as most recently canonized in Kovach and Rosentiel’s Elements of Journalism (Kovach and Rosentiel 2001). These values, in their professional embodiment, offer guidelines for making visible phenomena legible within the routines of media representation, but also act as key sites for normative intervention and institutional vulnerability (Patterson 2013). For instance, across various historical moments, those invested in a normative model of a press devoted to the public interest voiced concerns about the impact that commercialization would have on the integrity of news production as the demands of the market caused individual reporters and editors to abandon principal values like independence and objectivity (Baldasty 1992).

Critiques that attempt to recover the values of the public good from the practice of journalism also serve to preserve its integrity as a key truth-producing discipline located within the larger relations of liberal democracy. For example, in their analysis of journalistic practices, Edy and Snidow argued that, “from a Foucauldian perspective, the institution of journalism is a set of social practices that produce and define knowledge and that legitimate ways of knowing about political and public life,” and by necessity thus “generates both dominant and subjugated knowledges” (Edy and Snidow 2011: 818). Journalism marks events as objects of legitimate consideration and gives a way for these events to enter into a larger range of governmental rationality and practice. Nolan’s (2003) understanding of journalism clearly lays out how it fits within other techniques of government and self-government within modern neoliberal societies:

Firstly, it constitutes one such “positive and interpretive discipline” in its own right, with characteristic (albeit multiple) modes of knowledge production and transmission, that provides an ongoing critical commentary that is widely recognized to be a highly influential element in the “dialogical self-critique” of liberal-democratic societies. Secondly, it also provides a mechanism through which various other disciplines and critical discourses enter into public dialogue and contestation. (Nolan 2003: 1371)

Journalism then, as one example of media practice, grants meaning to new phenomena and acts as a site of contestation where the politics of visibility operate. It provides the milieu through which societies, political institutions, and diverse groups of citizens come to understand themselves and, as such, offers a space where visibility can work to render certain phenomena and groups as politically consequential.

2.2 Communication and dissent

If technologies help render phenomena visible, and media practices help grant meaning, then projects of dissent and protest offer a way of understanding how those visibilities are made political. Downing’s exhaustive cataloging of media use among dissenting social movements offers an approach that considers how key forms of media-based dissent emerge among existing material and social relations. For instance, in the Iranian revolution of 1979, people shared cassette tapes with instructions, messages, and information, in order to coordinate a movement against the shah (Downing 2001: 34). Downing points out that in order for these cassette tapes to be utilized as effective tools for organizing social action, they had to move along existing social networks, organized by leaders who could determine what information and messages would most effectively mobilize followers. Here, a communications technology (the cassette tape) augmented existing practice in a way that allowed the movement to achieve mobility against the forms of power it attempted to resist. Since dissenting movements have access to the same grammars, aesthetics, ethics, and means of communication that preserve existing structures and relations of power, these tools can be used to articulate dissenting politics and appeal to an amorphous disaggregated mass of publicly held political will whose popular meaning is apprehended by existing media practices.

Still, the focus on possibility from within existing media systems may beget overly optimistic, if not utopian, formulations. For some, the possibilities that digital communications portend only hasten an inevitably progressive new reality (Kostakis 2011; Mousa 2010; Tkacz 2010; Ubayasiri 2010). Others reveal a distinct split between the possibilities of digital technologies and the political aims of various groups, often taking a view that power flows from the technology itself in a way that supersedes the political efficacy of dissenting groups or the various forms of power that dominant groups hold (Giroux 2011; Howley 2008).

To offer a more nuanced perspective, Kellner (2003) has coined the term ‘technopolitics’ to denote the strategic uses of technology to both engage in democratic politics by expanding the public sphere, as well as attempts by those in power to use communications technologies to limit the modes of communication and dissent while also attempting to produce and police the public activities of citizens. He is careful to note that “if revolution is to have a future in the contemporary era it must incorporate technopolitics as part of its strategy, conceiving of technopolitics, however, as an arm of struggle and not an end in and of itself” (2003: 190). It is no wonder then, given the deserved pessimism directed toward traditional media outlets by Kellner and others, that they in turn find democratic possibility within the seemingly limitless technological potential of new media technologies. From within technology, dissent represents a practical tension as individuals attempt to move beyond the bounds of state-restricted activity. As Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2010) succinctly note, “the possibilities of virtual play exceed its imperial manifestations.” To understand something as a form of possibility means to also take into serious consideration the way blossoming forms of organization and politics take as their fertilizer the multitudinous practices and modes of communication that already exist. As Wolfson (2014) shows, digital technologies have offered activists a field of productive restraints that, if navigated artfully, offer a means for challenging structures of power from networks that have not yet been fully captured by more technocratic projects. The production of visibility, then, is one such mode for navigating these structures, but as Tufecki (2017) notes, it is also subject to new and emerging constraints within technical structures.

Therefore, centering specific objects as the site of analysis allows researchers to illustrate how perceived possibilities are contingent and observed actions are constrained and strategic. To return to the example of the smartphone camera, the fact that the device masks sophisticated technological operations with a user-interface that naturalizes the production and distribution of images affords myriad representational strategies, depending upon context. By masking complex image production and distribution practices, the smartphone has allowed for certain strategies of image production to gain cultural power, as distilled in David’s claim that “camera phone videos also enable us to see that which was often intended to remain veiled or hidden” (David 2010: 97). Such statements, though, gain their sense of truth from the ways in which the seeming simplicity and ubiquity of the device afford broader strategies of collective image and truth production. This is the crux of the contemporary politics of visibility, in that the device operates as a site drawing attention to the ever-present tension between seemingly inert technologies and the structures of meaning, politics, and culture they are often celebrated for disrupting. By considering the device as an apparatus embedded in broader relations of power, and a site where these relations play out, scholars may begin to see how shifting strategies of visuality gain political and social consequence.