Andrea Mubi Brighenti

Visibility A Category for the Social Sciences

Can visibility be counted as a general category for the social sciences? The attempt to provide an answer to this question entails both describing actual phenomena of visibility, and defining the characteristics of visibility as a workable, unified category. This article analyses the relational, strategic and processual aspects of visibility as constituting a single field. The importance of this field is rooted in the deep epistemology of seeing present in our society, as well as in its ratio vis-a-vis the other human sensory dimensions and extensions. At the substantive level, the article addresses the question of the ambivalences of visibility and its effects, according to social places and subjects. Recognition and control are understood and explained as two opposing outcomes of visibility. It is argued that empowerment does not rest univocally either with visibility (as it is assumed by the tradition of recognition) or with invisibility (as it is assumed by the arcana imperii tradition).Can visibility be counted as a general category for the social sciences? The attempt to provide an answer to this question entails both describing actual phenomena of visibility, and defining the characteristics of visibility as a workable, unified category. This article analyses the relational, strategic and processual aspects of visibility as constituting a single field. The importance of this field is rooted in the deep epistemology of seeing present in our society, as well as in its ratio vis-a-vis the other human sensory dimensions and extensions. At the substantive level, the article addresses the question of the ambivalences of visibility and its effects, according to social places and subjects. Recognition and control are understood and explained as two opposing outcomes of visibility. It is argued that empowerment does not rest univocally either with visibility (as it is assumed by the tradition of recognition) or with invisibility (as it is assumed by the arcana imperii tradition).

At the Wall: Graffiti Writers, Urban Territoriality, and the Public Domain

The article is based on an ethnographic observation of a crew of graffiti writers in the northeast of Italy. Extending some considerations emerging from the case study, the article advances a reflection on the territorial dimension of graffiti writing in urban environments and the relationship between walls, social relationships and the public domain. This task entails understanding walls as artefacts that are subject to both strategic and tactical uses, as well as the relationship between walls and the public domain as a territorial configuration. In particular, graffiti writing is observed as an interstitial practice that creates its own specific way of using walls: it is a “longitudinal” rather than a “perpendicular” style, which transform the wall into a fragment of a “prolongable” series, a part of a continuing conversation.The article is based on an ethnographic observation of a crew of graffiti writers in the northeast of Italy. Extending some considerations emerging from the case study, the article advances a reflection on the territorial dimension of graffiti writing in urban environments and the relationship between walls, social relationships and the public domain. This task entails understanding walls as artefacts that are subject to both strategic and tactical uses, as well as the relationship between walls and the public domain as a territorial configuration. In particular, graffiti writing is observed as an interstitial practice that creates its own specific way of using walls: it is a “longitudinal” rather than a “perpendicular” style, which transform the wall into a fragment of a “prolongable” series, a part of a continuing conversation.

Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze on crowds and packs

A discussion of the works of Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze reveals some common insights into a social epistemology that rejects both methodological individualism and methodological holism. In this respect, the debate on crowds in the last quarter of the nineteenth century is particularly interesting because it is the historical context within which the individualist and holist epistemologies took shape. Arguably, that debate is still rich and inspiring today insofar as it can be said to open the problem field of the relationship between the individual and the group in social thought and sociological theory. Despite several differences, Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze converge on a concept that can be termed ‘multiplicity’. It includes phenomena like crowds and packs (or ‘sects’, in Tarde’s terminology) that are properly speaking neither subjects nor objects. The concept provides a prism that also has relevant consequences for an understanding of the processes of imitation and leadership.

An interview with Laurent Thévenot: On engagement, critique, commonality, and power:

Pragmatic sociology – as a distinct, new type of French social science – probably became best-known in the English-speaking world because of the major contribution On Justification: Economies of Worth, published in English in 2006, but already introduced in a number of articles in the European Journal of Social Theory in 1999, as well as through an earlier article by Nicolas Dodier in 1993. On Justification is, however, probably best understood as a ‘travail d’étape’ (Breviglieri et al., 2009: 8), an intermediate stage in a much larger and highly original social-theoretical enterprise. In this, however, the two authors of On Justification, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, took quite different directions in developing pragmatic sociology further, also as a consequence of their own earlier work. Before collaborating on On Justification, an important part of Thévenot’s work was on categorization and classification, in terms of making entities more general, and in a broader sense, on conventional forms in their relation to action coordination, in particular in the context of the study of labour and organizations (the ‘economy of conventional forms’). Much of his work since On Justification – which, in his own terms, constitutes an ‘attempt to put the perspective adopted in On Justification [a perspective viewed from the public, PB] upside down’ (Thévenot, 2009a: 40; translation PB) – draws on earlier insights while developing a rich, novel perspective on the analysis of social life. Recently, as documented most importantly in L’Action au Pluriel (Thévenot, 2006), as well as in a range of recent articles, Thévenot has explored the dimensions of social life ‘under the public’ as a condition to enlarge the scope of public critique

New Media and the Prolongations of Urban Environments

/ The article addresses the relationships between new media and public urban environments. It advances an anti-reductionist argument, which seeks to understand the material and the immaterial as two irreducible yet intertwined layers or levels of the social sphere. In order to do so, the notion of prolongation is proposed. This notion, together with those of territory and visibility, is explicitly designed to escape both reductionist monism (material as immaterial or vice versa) and dualism (material versus immaterial). The hypothesis is that the environments created and edited by the new media can be conceptualized and studied as specific visibility regimes of urban territoriality. The use of the concepts of territory, prolongation, and visibility also leads to deexceptionalizing the new media, insofar as new media are explained as a specific techno-social configuration, determined by a pattern of the same analytical variables that are at stake in the social sphere at large./ The article addresses the relationships between new media and public urban environments. It advances an anti-reductionist argument, which seeks to understand the material and the immaterial as two irreducible yet intertwined layers or levels of the social sphere. In order to do so, the notion of prolongation is proposed. This notion, together with those of territory and visibility, is explicitly designed to escape both reductionist monism (material as immaterial or vice versa) and dualism (material versus immaterial). The hypothesis is that the environments created and edited by the new media can be conceptualized and studied as specific visibility regimes of urban territoriality. The use of the concepts of territory, prolongation, and visibility also leads to deexceptionalizing the new media, insofar as new media are explained as a specific techno-social configuration, determined by a pattern of the same analytical variables that are at stake in the social sphere at large.

Politics between justification and defiance

The article discusses the status and role of politics — in its various facets — in the pragmatic sociology of critique. We focus on a number of different dimensions of politics — politics-as-justification, politics-as-distribution, politics-as-constitution, and politics-as-defiance — that can said to be of importance for a pragmatic sociology of critique, but that have not all been taken up equally in this approach. We situate pragmatic sociology in a tradition of thought that views politics as emerging in the settlement of disputes over differences without resorting to violence. However, we argue that pragmatic sociology tends to ignore questions of the constitution of politics, and suggest that one way of bringing the foundational aspect upfront is by conceptualizing and studying defiance, including forms of explicit (dissent) and implicit critique (resistance) of the existing order.

Visualising the riverbank

Drawing on ethnographic observation of a tract of urban riverbank in the city of Trento, in northern Italy, we attempt to link phenomenological observation of social interaction in public places with larger political concerns about contemporary urban public space. While agreeing with Low et al. (Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space & Cultural Diversity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005) that in order to foster public spaces it is necessary to accommodate the differences in the ways social classes and ethnic groups use and value urban sites, we also argue that one should be wary of planning hubris—which can occur in even ‘good-willed’ planning, and leads to the creation of domesticated and formalised, but also inherently restricted, spaces for encountering differences.

Revolution and Diavolution: What is the Difference?

Whereas revolution has often been viewed as contrary to organization, it in fact requires the overcoming of a present organization in the promise of achieving another superior organization. The article conducts a theoretical, rather than historical, reflection on the interplay among three concepts: organization, revolution, and diavolution. By exploring the modernist conception of revolution, the idea is advanced that the relationship can be framed as follows: organization is the katéchon of revolution, whereas revolution is the éschaton of organization. The last part of the article introduces and discusses the concept of diavolution as an attempt to overcome the dichotomy between the subjectivist and the structuralist view both at the theoretical and the practical level. Diavolution is a style of inhabiting organizations that differs from the revolutionary one; a style of resistance that, although much more elusive and difficult to capture, may prove to be at the same time more human.Whereas revolution has often been viewed as contrary to organization, it in fact requires the overcoming of a present organization in the promise of achieving another superior organization. The article conducts a theoretical, rather than historical, reflection on the interplay among three concepts: organization, revolution, and diavolution. By exploring the modernist conception of revolution, the idea is advanced that the relationship can be framed as follows: organization is the katechon of revolution, whereas revolution is the eschaton of organization. The last part of the article introduces and discusses the concept of diavolution as an attempt to overcome the dichotomy between the subjectivist and the structuralist view both at the theoretical and the practical level. Diavolution is a style of inhabiting organizations that differs from the revolutionary one; a style of resistance that, although much more elusive and difficult to capture, may prove to be at the same time more human.

City of unpleasant feelings. Stress, comfort and animosity in urban life

Abstract The image of the city as a stressful place is an evergreen topic. In this article we review the imagination of urban stress, starting from Simmel’s classic thesis that the modern city is an unavoidably psychic-stimulating environment potentially leading to stimuli overload. City dwellers are then supposed to counter stimuli overload with a series of adaptation strategies. However, the ways in which these phenomena can be conceptualised are varied. Historically, a shift of emphasis seems to have occurred from the classic conceptualisation of hyperaesthesia to the contemporary preoccupations with the design of comfortable atmospheres. Such atmospheres are, in fact, comfort bubbles. In the article, we tackle the aspirations and predicaments of such engineered atmospheres. In particular, we build on Sloterdijk’s argument that, ultimately, bubbles fail to do away with stress, whereas for Simmel stress anaesthetised urbanites, Sloterdijk has pointed out that, rather, comfort itself stresses them. To better tackle the magmatic stratum of dissatisfaction that seems so coessential to urban life, in the final part of the article we focus on the notion of animosity. We suggest to conceptualise it as a type of disquiet that cannot be reduced to established recognisable interaction formats.

Three presents : On the multi-temporality of territorial production and the gift from John Soane

Territoriality has primarily been seen as a spatial rather than temporal phenomenon. In this paper, we want to investigate how time functions in territorialising processes. In particular, we are attracted by the multi-temporality that is co-present in each process of territorialisation (i.e. processes in which time and space are used as means of measure, control and expression). The article is divided into two main parts. In the first part, we draw inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s book Logic of Sense, as well as from authors such as Simmel, Whitehead, Benjamin and Jesi, in order to articulate three different types of the present (Aion, Kronos and Chronos). In the second part, we move to a short case study of the collector John Soane and the establishment of his house-museum. The case is used to exemplify how these three presents can be used to discuss and temporal aspects of territorialisation in general, and the production of a specific sort of territory – the house-museum as a new building type in particular.