From Visuality to Visibility: Regime, Capital, Media

Abstract

Summary Visibility is a capacity to be seen by others directly or through images and can be defined as a total social fact, which includes different domains of collective life. As Italian sociologist Andrea Mubi Brighenti argues, visibility is a form of “visuality at large” and the visible entails more than the visual, more than the sensorially perceptible, which becomes clear when we consider the fact that the visual itself needs to be visibilised, and examine the ways in which this happens. In the last decades visibility in a social sphere and media was largely “capitalised”. According to French sociologist Nathalie Heinich, the visibility capitalis firmly entrenched within Western society, culture and media. Non-material capital of visibility differs from other non-material symbolical or cultural capitals in Bourdieusian sense. This new phenomenon includes all features of classical material capital. The capital of visibility is measurable, accumulated, transmissible, earning interest and convertible. It can be measured by number of fans, showing results in Google search, number of views in YouTube, number of followers in social media Instagram, Facebook or number of images in other mass media. The cult of celebrity, the aspiration for visibility, and widespread practices of seeing within contemporary visual culture touched on many important social, political, cultural and intellectual spheres. Celebrity culture that arose out of the cinema industry underwent significant transformations, penetrated into existing social structures, fields and institutions. Visibility deeply changes cultural and intellectual life, influences our values and attitudes. The regime of visibility transforms social stratification by creating celebrities as a new social category called media elite. These persons are isolated from their original environment and placed in a context with its own logic and rules. These issues will be analysed using examples from the sphere of creative and cultural industries.