Visibility and the Public

Abstract

This chapter considers three major areas of theorisation and research on the ‘public’ which are essential to us in terms of their relationship with visibility. First of all, visibility is one of the key aspects political philosophers have traditionally associated with the public sphere. Suffice it to say that Habermas’ (1989[1962]) original term for the public sphere is Öffentlichkeit, which directly refers to the features of openness and visibility of this type of social space. In the first part of this chapter, the literature on the public sphere developed by political philosophers ranging from Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas and Norberto Bobbio, to contemporary authors such as Craig Calhoun, Jeff Weintraub, Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner, is examined through the lens of a dense conception of visibility. By doing so, my aim is to reveal the structure of ‘visibility as publicity’ held by normative-proceduralist views of democracy. A second tradition I explore in this context is interaction sociology. Interaction sociologists, from Erving Goffman to Lynn Lofland, have devoted much attention to the notion of the public realm, understood as a regime of interaction and an arena for the intervisibility of actors. Their theorisation allows us to understand how reciprocal visibility creates the public realm by facilitating both social rituals and action coordination.