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Javnost - The Public
Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture
ISSN: 1318-3222 (Print) 1854-8377 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjav20
Visibility and The Public Sphere: A Normative
Conceptualisation
Lincoln Dahlberg
To cite this article: Lincoln Dahlberg (2018): Visibility and The Public Sphere: A Normative
Conceptualisation, Javnost - The Public, DOI: 10.1080/13183222.2018.1418818
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2018.1418818
Published online: 31 Jan 2018.
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VISIBILITY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE:
A NORMATIVE CONCEPTUALISATION
Lincoln Dahlberg
The concept of visibility has been associated with the public sphere conception for a long
time. However, the public sphere has not been explicitly defined in terms of visibility. This
paper reconstructs from a range of relevant critical and poststructuralist theory a set of
public sphere conditions for which the concept of visibility, drawing upon a variety of its con-
notations, can be understood as central. The paper also suggests roles that communications
media, and particularly the new digital “social media,”can play in the conditions’realisation
and identifies some of the current impediments to the fulfilment of these roles.
KEYWORDS Habermas; publicity; public sphere; social media; visibility
Visibility and the Public Sphere
The concept of “visibility is one of the key aspects political philosophers [and sociol-
ogists and communications theorists] have traditionally associated with the public sphere”
(Brighenti 2010b, 7). And visibility is becoming increasingly important in conceiving the
public sphere with the rapid uptake of digital “social media”(Facebook, YouTube, Twitter,
etc.) given not only the increasing visual nature of such media—photos and videos becom-
ing ever more central—but also given the various ways in which such media enable differ-
ent individuals, groups and institutions, and associated ideas and discourses, to see and be
seen (or hear and be heard).
1
Visibility is particularly useful in helping to conceptualise the critical form of “publi-
city”that has been understood by Habermas, following Kant, to be the central activity con-
stitutive of the public sphere (Shapiro 1970, viii). This critical form refers, very simply put, to
the visibility (as in disclosure or opening) of norms and political power to scrutiny by all
affected persons, persons granted the freedom to form and make visible (as in express
and publish) their opinions through participation in rational public debate.
2
In fact, it
may now be best to refer to visibility in the place of publicity wherever possible
3
when con-
ceptualising the public sphere given that publicity is now rarely understood in the critical
sense defined above but is instead usually equated with public relations and marketing.
Visibility remains open to multiple connotations. As well as being able to refer to dis-
closure, openness and expression, visibility can readily reference a range of other closely
related, critical publicity advancing phenomena, including clarity, transparency, insight, illu-
mination, lucidity, recognition, intelligibility and understanding. Visibility can also be articu-
lated to describe publicity in the sense of public relations or marketing, although these
meanings have not suffocated the more critical meanings just listed. Moreover, visibility
can be associated with even more public sphere negating practices than strategic publicity,
such as surveillance by power, attention grabbing exhibitionism, propagation of
Javnost: The Public, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2018.1418818
© 2018 EURICOM
misinformation, and various forms of malicious exposure including those aimed at scandal,
scorn and humiliation.
Hence, visibility can be deployed, first, to help conceive the relation between the
public sphere and contemporary media communication; second, to emphasise and clarify
important aspects of “critical publicity”that might be obscured by reference directly to pub-
licity given the dominant association of publicity with the instrumental art of public
relations and marketing; and, third, to get at elements (e.g. recognition) important for con-
ceptualising the public sphere and for describing threats (e.g. surveillance) to actual public
sphere communication that are not captured by any understanding of publicity. Despite
these potential uses of visibility for theorising the public sphere, and the association that
philosophers and social theorists have made between the concepts (e.g. Brighenti
2010b), visibility has not been, to my knowledge, systematically deployed in defining
public sphere normative conditions. The question that needs to be asked then with
respect to this special issue’s focus on challenging ideas and conceptualisations to do
with the past, present and future of the public sphere and democracy is: for a democratic
public sphere, who, or what systems, should be able to see who and what under what con-
ditions (where, when and how much is seeing permitted). Or, in reverse, who and what
should be able to be seen by whom or by what systems and under what conditions? The
stipulation of who/what is to be able to see who/what under what conditions also
defines who/what should not see who/what under what conditions, i.e. it stipulates “invisi-
bility”conditions. And, we need to further ask, what forms should this seeing and being seen
take for a healthy public sphere? Moreover, it needs to be asked, in the interests of realising
the visibility required by answers to the previous questions, who should have control over
the shaping of visibility as well as invisibility?
In this short paper, I will go some way to answering these questions by quickly, due to
limited space, reconstructing or rearticulating a general and hypothetical (always reconstruct-
able) set of visibility-related normative public sphere conditions out of the central elements of
the various public sphere or public “space”specifications of both Habermasian/post-Haber-
masian critical theory (e.g. the work of Nancy Fraser) and poststructuralist theory (particularly
the work of discourse theorists, e.g. David Howarth, Oliver Marchart, and Chantel Mouffe).
These two traditions and their specifications are deployed here because of their centrality
to recent theorisations and contestations of public sphere norms. The various public
sphere specifications developing out of these traditions are largely in agreement with
respect to normative criteria for democratic communication, despite significant ontological
disagreements and multiple minor points of difference in specification. The most striking
ontological disagreement is between those (Habermasians) who embrace empirical contin-
gency and those (poststructuralists) committed to necessary contingency, a disagreement
that leads to different understandings of the status and derivation of normative ideals—prag-
matic reconstruction of immanent norms versus quasi-transcendental deduction of con-
ditions of possibility and observation of political logics.
4
This ontological disagreement, as
well as the minor points of difference in specification of democratic public spheres/spaces,
will be bracketed here as I work to articulate a generally acceptable, although never complete,
set of public sphere normative conditions for which visibility is central. I consider these “visi-
bility conditions”as insufficient and partial, first, because they only represent a sample of
possible public sphere criteria given that visibility, even with its multiple meanings, can
only capture some of what is meant by the public sphere, and, second, because the con-
ditions set out are not only empirically fallible and open to revision (following Habermasian
2LINCOLN DAHLBERG
logic) but also necessarily incomplete and open to rearticulation (following poststructuralist
logic). As I reconstruct the visibility-related public sphere conditions, I will also quickly
suggest, as the seed for future investigation, various roles that communications media, and
particularly social media, can play in the conditions’realisation and note some of the
current impediments to the fulfilment of these roles.
Public Sphere-Visibility Conditions
The starting point and first condition for the formation of any public sphere, and of
democracy itself, as argued in various ways by many critical and poststructuralist political
theorists (including Habermas, Mouffe, and Rancière), is the visibility—as in the exposure
to all those affected, followed by the realisation and recognition—of a dissensus: a division
or disagreement within a community of what is seen (understood and agreed) as the right
way to organise social life, including disagreement over the right terms and procedures of
dealing with disputes. This visibility of disagreement, and subsequently of exclusions (of
particular positions, claims, understandings and ways of seeing and speaking that block
consensus), is not just an existential condition of possibility for a public sphere. Rather, it
is a normative condition for any public sphere and of democracy itself: a democratic
society should, in contrast to non-democratic regimes (authoritarian, communitarian,
fascist, feudal, etc), not only recognise the empirical and necessary
5
existence of differences,
divisions and disagreements, but accommodate and indeed actively encourage their sur-
facing and expression, thus facilitating spaces of politics.
Communications media are central to the facilitation of such political spaces. Haber-
mas’(e.g. 2006) discussions of the important role of media for enabling the expression of
opposing positions are very familiar to readers of this journal. Others, including strong
critics of Habermas, agree about this centrality. Mouffe (2006, 974), for instance, argues
that the media’s role “should precisely be to contribute to the creation of agonistic
public spaces in which there is the possibility for dissensus to be expressed or different
alternatives to be put forward.”Liberal journalism has long embraced the ideal of
making societal disputes visible, although the actual setting forth of opposing positions
in established media publications and broadcasts has often been criticised for being
overly managed and, worse, for producing stylised versions of disagreement that obscure
some voices while normalising dominant discourses and power relations. The new social
media seem, at first glance, to offer the means for the disintermediation of disputation,
although there is also much concern that these media drive users into private echo
chambers that obscure dissenting views (e.g. Sunstein 2017).
A second condition of any public sphere conception with respect to visibility has to
do with how the visible disagreement is dealt with: in contrast to dealing with disagreement
by resorting to secret and strategic deal making or retreat into enclaves, or resort to antag-
onism, violence, or authoritarian rule, rupture should be dealt with via reasoned argumenta-
tion in which the reasoning and supporting information behind different positions is made
visible to all affected. This reasoned argumentation can take a range of forms depending on
those participating, including formal deliberation, informal storytelling, affective expression
and agonistic contestation (see, for example, the work of Habermas, Mouffe and Iris Marion
Young). The process of reasoning and interrogation leads not only to greater visibility
(clarity, understanding and even recognition) to participants of other positions but to
VISIBILITY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE 3
self-recognition. Self-recognition is a form of visibility where interlocutors come to more
clearly see their own positions, including the inherent limits and contradictions, thus
encouraging participants to revise (re-vision) their arguments, values, identities, etc.
Many media technologies promise support for such visibility of reasoning and infor-
mation with respect to societal disputes. And yet communications media, right up to the
present social media era, have not lived up to this promise, as verified by research published
in this and other journals. Most recently, optimism in the new social media facilitating
reasonable debate has faded with reports and evidence of the extensive and increasing inci-
dence on social media of information cascades, echo chambers, the spread of misinforma-
tion and fake news production by humans and bots, and various forms of harassment and
public shaming (Del Vicario et al. 2016; Kasra 2017; Schmidt et al. 2017).
Some of these communicative pathologies point to a lack of mutual recognition, which
is another important normative condition for which visibility takes centre stage: interlocutors
within argumentation should recognise the other as a subject who has equal right to see/hear
and be seen/heard, and is an equally worthy interlocutor or adversary to engage with. I will
incorporate this mutual or equal recognition requirement under a broader, and third, visi-
bility-related normative public sphere condition. This third normative condition is participa-
tory equality: all individuals affected by a dispute should have equal possibility to see and
be seen, hear and be heard, which entails equality of control over seeing and being seen,
or hearing and being heard, or visibility. Control over visibility, and not just having visibility,
is important for democracy as a social actor might be made a subject of visibility without
having a say over this visibility. As well as demanding mutual recognition, I interpret this par-
ticipatory equality condition as requiring socio-economic equality to the extent that all should
have equal access to the resources necessary to enable equal control over visibility.
With respect to social media, the claim that needs investigating here is that, in con-
trast to (and defined against) mass media and “Web 1.0,”social media provide users with
control over their visibility, resulting in the increasing equality of visibility as otherwise mar-
ginalised actors gain the means to visibility (e.g. Shirky 2011). But there is strong evidence,
particularly from political economy of communications research (e.g. Fuchs 2014) and soft-
ware/platform studies (e.g. Bucher 2012; Caplan and Boyd 2016), that social media in many
cases contributes to inequalities in (control over) visibility.
The previous two public sphere conditions are about relationships of visibility
between those individuals and groups affected by a dissensus. The next two conditions
involve visibility between publics and the “systems”of state administration, economic
organisation and other strategically driven institutions and their elites.
The fourth condition has been central to all understandings of the public sphere: it is
the visibility, as in exposure and revelation, of the practices and processes of powerful
actors—extending beyond governments to include corporations, NGOs and individuals in
positions of power—to the scrutiny of a critical public so as to (in liberal terms) render
them “accountable”and to (in more radically democratic terms) support their ongoing
interrogation, contestation and revision. This visibility has increasingly been performed
by governments through freedom of information acts and open government policies,
with distribution of information being advanced by digital media. Openness is also
forced on powerful institutions and individuals via “sousveillance”—the watching of the
top by the bottom, advanced by digital media technologies (Brighenti 2010a, 181–82). Sous-
veillance is, for example, undertaken by the use of digital photography and video, which is
now in the hands of the majority of citizens of the North and many in the South, to expose
4LINCOLN DAHLBERG
strategic operations, corruption, human rights abuses and so on (e.g. Witness.org). Sousveil-
lance is also enabled via digitally distributed leaks aimed at exposing publicly relevant
secret activities (e.g. Wikileaks), accompanied by cracking (breaking into computer
systems) that exploits the increasing reliance of powerful actors on digital systems.
But such practices of “critical publicity”are resisted by many of those being targeted. A
central means of resistance to critical scrutiny is the keeping of secrets, today enacted particu-
larly through redaction and high-security systems that employ the skills of the best (cyber)-
security experts. Here we should not just think of government but corporate secrecy,
including the secrecy of digital media corporations with respect to the codes and algorithms
controlling digital visibility. The extent of this secrecy is obscured through (ideological) per-
formances of openness, including the transparency claims and displays of corporations and
governments that carefully control the release of information as well as celebrate the infor-
mation age and digitally networked freedoms. Hence, what is needed above all for realising
this fourth requirement is the visibility of visibility management.
Afifth condition that I read as fundamental to any normative public sphere con-
ception in relation to visibility—one that is particularly emphasised by Habermas (e.g.
2006) and other critical media theorists (e.g. Golding and Murdoch), but that is often “for-
gotten”by more liberal deliberative democrats—demands the invisibility (or autonomy) of
public sphere constituting discourses (rhetoric and practices) from the coercive and instru-
mental forces of economic and administrative power. The realisation of this fifth condition
has always been hampered by both state and corporate ownership and control of com-
munications media. More recently, digital media has been thought to offer a means of
autonomy from these systems of instrumental-strategic control. However, digital media
are increasingly based upon, and the visibility of associated communication shaped and
exploited by, for-profit corporate platforms (Fuchs 2014). Digital media, particularly social
media, has at the same time enabled and extended state surveillance and control of
public communications (Fuchs 2014).
The sixth visibility-oriented public sphere condition turns to the exclusionary and unde-
mocratic moments of the other conditions. This sixth condition demands that any public
sphere conception must account not only for the impossibility of its own conditions being
fully achieved in practice but for the impossibility (if we are to follow poststructuralist
logic)
6
of theoretically defining a final or absolute set of public sphere normative conditions
in the first place. As such, any public sphere will be normatively and empirically constituted by
particular hegemonic
7
boundary drawing that determines what is legitimate and illegitimate
communication in both form and content, with associated exclusions of voices deemed ille-
gitimate, including voices that would have the opportunity of being heard if a fully demo-
cratic situation was attainable. This means that all public sphere conditions, including
those set out above, rely on exclusions that deny theoretical closure and empirical fulfilment.
In order to account for such impossibility and the resulting undemocratic exclusions,
any public sphere norm must require “counter-publics”(drawing here on the work of
Fraser, Asen and many others, including poststructuralist influenced political theorists like
Mouffe and Rancière
8
). A counter-public is “public,”in contrast to a consensual enclave, in
that it reflects the internal contestationary conditions of the public sphere (including the
visibility conditions discussed above). A counter-public is “counter,”first, in that its various
elements—claims, reasons, narratives, identities, etc—are antagonistically excluded as illegi-
timate, exclusion against (i.e. counter to) which the excluding public sphere can unify. A
counter-public is “counter,”second, in that its participants articulate counter-hegemonic
VISIBILITY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE 5
discourses, discourses constituted against the public sphere boundaries and discourses from
which they are excluded, counter-hegemonic discourses that are able, in time, to openly
contest and disrupt the boundaries of the exclusionary public sphere(s). What we have
here is a never-ending struggle for visibility in the sense of recognition. If the counter-
public discourse becomes recognised as legitimate, boundaries and exclusions (what is
visible/invisible) are re-set: the “sphere”of the public sphere concept points to the boundaries
that will always exist, even if they shift, between legitimate and illegitimate public communi-
cation. It is important to note that the invisibility (in the sense of non-recognition) of excluded
elements to exclusionary publics is, on the one hand, what the counter-publics are fighting
against but, on the other hand, is also what allows them to articulate their own discourses
and identities. In short, the sixth normative public sphere condition to be considered here
is the requirement for counter-visibility, a condition that follows from, and helps to realise,
the ideal of democracy as self-critical and self-revolutionising.
The development of these counter-publics, and thus of counter-visibility, can be
supported by a variety of communications media. Social media, in particular, promise
the means for the formation of any number of counter-publics, with the Black Lives
Matter movement’s use of social media in the US offering just one recent exemplar
(Jackson and Welles 2016). However, social media also encourage the formation of con-
sensual enclaves, especially as social media users are targeted with posts that they “like:”
dissensus and disagreement within the enclaves become invisible, not only unrecognisa-
ble but often hidden from view. As such, much social media communication simply con-
stitutes consensual spaces that reinforce particular positions and increase the
intractability of (obscured) social divisions. This problem—of enclaves undermining the
democratic potential of social media—is already being extensively studied in digital
media research (e.g. Schmidt et al. 2017) as well as discussed in the mass media (e.g.
Goodman 2017). However, solutions are not readily evident, particularly given that the
whole business model of these corporate media is based on reinforcing fragmentation
through filtering communication so as to show users what they like to see rather than
what might challenge their worldview.
The seventh and final public sphere-visibility condition that I wish to highlight is the
need for the public opinion constituted within public spheres to be seen—in the strong
sense of recognised and taken into account—by representatives of formal decision-making
bodies, in direct contrast to the “representative publicity”(in Habermasian terms) of political
leaders, as epitomised and dramatised by President Trump’s tweets. The goal of this public
opinion visibility is no less than the realisation of democracy: the control of government
rule making by the public. Such visibility relies on various methods and mediums, such as
the election of representatives, on and offline petitions, political reporting and street protests.
Habermas’(e.g. 1996,2006) work offers a useful starting point for future conceptualisations of
the relationship between this visibility condition and communications media.
Conclusion
In this short paper, I have asked what forms of visibility are needed to support a
healthy public sphere. To answer this question I have set out my particular and fallible
reading and reconstruction of the most salient visibility-oriented public sphere norma-
tive conditions, in the process clarifying the relationship between different forms of
6LINCOLN DAHLBERG
visibility and the public sphere. The challenge posed here for future public sphere
theory is to interrogate and further reconstruct or rearticulate the conditions with
respect to other theory, specific communications practices and particular empirical con-
texts (the work of this paper being limited to particular theoretical conceptualisations
drawing on Western contexts). Most fundamentally, the interrogation must ask if visi-
bility is in fact an adequate and useful concept to describe public sphere conditions,
including asking if the concept of visibility is overly general, and if it should, for the pur-
poses of enhancing the public sphere’sdefinitional clarity, be replaced by the use of
signifiers that more precisely refer to the variety of meanings that visibility has been
applied to in this paper (clarity, exposure, recognition, etc.). The ultimate goal, given
the “critical”foundation of the public sphere conception, is for the necessary but
never sufficient conditions to be deployed in the evaluation and guidance of practice,
including in the institution of practical programmes via technological code, user rules,
legal code and public policy.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
NOTES
1. I am here using visibility metaphorically, going beyond reference to the visual.
2. For more on the evolution of the concept of publicity as summarised here see Splichal
(2002).
3. It is not always possible to refer to visibility instead of publicity as the two concepts,
although overlapping in meaning, are not synonymous.
4. See Dahlberg (2013) for further discussion of the disagreement between Habermasian
deliberative democrats and poststructuralist discourse theorists about the ontological
grounding and derivation of public sphere conditions.
5. Following poststructuralist logic, difference is necessary, and not just an empirical fact, for
the constitution of any identity.
6. Following poststructuralist logic, the condition of possibility of identity is the exclusion of
an element as a constitutive outside, which also operates as the condition of its impossi-
bility due to the excluded element making fullness impossible, an impossibility that also
makes the contestation of identity possible.
7. “Hegemony”here indicates that power differentials can never be fully eliminated.
8. Mouffe (2006) talks of the need for counter-hegemonic spaces and discourses, while Ran-
cière (2004) theorises democratic politics as involving a challenge by excluded/invisible
voices to the boundaries of the sensible (visible).
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Lincoln Dahlberg (corresponding author) teaches and researches in the areas of media poli-
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dent scholar. Email: l.j.dahlberg@xtra/co.nz
8LINCOLN DAHLBERG
