From Visuality to Visibility: Regime, Capital, Media

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• visibility
• capital
• materialisation
• media
• celebrities
• politics
• post-soviet