Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Issues concerning the visibility of social phenomena and social subjects are widespread in sociological research and theory. They emerge in areas ranging from gender studies to criminology, from media studies to political science. But because most of these studies tend to treat visibility as a local concept, rather than as a general sociological category, a single theory of visibility can hardly be said to exist. Despite the number of prominent social theorists as diverse as Benjamin, Foucault, Goffman, Habermas, McLuhan, Mead, and Taylor, who all have dealt with issues related to social visibility, a unified definition of this concept is not yet available. During the twentieth century, the philosophical research on the phenomenology of perception ( Merleau-Ponty 1962) and on the symbolic ( Langer 1957) gave important clues to understanding that the visible is not simply the visual . Anthropologists have further observed that the domain of physical perception is itself inextricably intermixed with cognition ( Howes 2003) . Nowadays social scientists accept that the theoretical stake in interpreting visibility includes, but is not limited to, analyzing figurative images, paintings, films, advertisements, and landscapes. A wider range of phenomena and mechanisms is at play in the field of visibility because this field lies at the intersection of the two domains of aesthetics ... log in or subscribe to read full text