Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to bring order to the messy phenomenology of the visibility and invisibility of social suffering.
First, the processes of invisibilization will be conceptualized. Due to the contingency of the social and the need to reduce complexity, there is always an inevitable invisibilization. Similar to Michel Foucault’s “order of discourse,” the order of the visible will be presented, especially with regard to social suffering. Second, a critical theory of invisibilization and perception will be developed, and the possibility that visibility itself can produce suffering will be discussed. Visibility can be a mechanism of oppression, and regimes of visibility can be part of mechanisms that only govern misery instead of attempting to overcome it.
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Notes
- 1.
A special case is the case in which we, as social researchers, take the position of the Third, that is, when the implicated actors are aware of being observed by us. When conducting social research in the field, we must be aware of the role that people attribute to us (e.g., as the moral judge, the ally or the mediator) because—as we have seen—this attribution influences their behaviour.
- 2.
In case you, the reader, are happy enough to be ignorant about what JCR and h index mean, JCR refers to the Journal Citation Report, where those journals are listed that are often used as quantification of quality measurement in academia. The h index is a way to try to measure the productivity and impact of an author, thus again quantifying the measurement of quality in academia.
- 3.
I am very grateful to Eva Klinkisch, who pointed out this possibility to me.
- 4.
This is the crux of Honneth’s counterargument to Nancy Fraser’s critique on “mere” recognition. Redistribution, that is, the reorganization of the material reality, is a form of recognition (see Fraser and Honneth 2003).
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Herzog, B. (2020). Invisibilization. In: Invisibilization of Suffering . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28448-0_2
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