Visions of public

How does a visual metaphor for understanding politics create knowledge about our agency and relationships to other people in politics? I think this can be seen in a couple of places – problems like Abu Ghraib being ‘brought to light,’ the projection of dialogue onto face-to-face interviews, and the use of the language of ‘transparency’ as a model for government accountability.

It says something about the type of ideal community for a political democracy. Perhaps linked to the idyllic local American community, our democracy seems to desire proximity – a ‘line of sight’ that offers not just visibility of institutions and individuals, but a quick referentiality that only local place can provide. There seems to be an undercurrent of direct, face-to-face dialogue in this metaphor that asks for a degree of time and equality generally inaccessible to most people.

Assumes that we really see who we see – that images don’t deceive and that we should believe our eyes unproblematically. Once something is ‘in the light,’ or ‘transparent,’ is there any reason to believe what we see is true? Not only can appearances deceive, but the meaning of visual acts can be changed, interpreted towards particular ends, etc. Meaning has to be created around the things we see, and so creating that meaning still remains something to be contested.

This metaphor obscures (oops) the means by which communication occurs. People primarily see the world through screens, not their eyes. A squared off telescope which points in directions we may never know – visualization is attached to a variety of tools which are controlled by a few people. There is a filter by which some things come to light – what we see should not obscure how. Just saying, writing, or doing an act outside of the private realm no longer makes that act truly public. A public must see a public act, and that requires, usually, a camera pointing at that act. Even when cameras exist and record, there is no guarantee that act then becomes a part of public discourse in a meaningful way. Systems of legitimization define how we ‘see’ political events in the public – visualization on the Internet receive some form of pop-culture truth status, but this knowledge means different things than something like the ‘newspaper of record’ s treatment of a story, and the truth status assigned to it. Visualization of events happens in a particular light, often with the effect of disqualifying certain see-ers. Until the light of particular truth claims gets shown on something, other forms of truth, contestations of a reality receive no treatment as valuable political insights. So, we must ask: to whom does something appear, and why does their viewing matter?

It says something about the nature of accountability. The mere appearance before a Kangaroo court of public opinion creates the illusion of accountability. Visualization – seeing, knowing an event - often doesn’t create accountability in a meaningful way because of the structure of public discourse operating as distraction and (dis)illusion, and the manipulation of meaning around a picture, or a ‘known’ event. There exists a false threshold between blindness/seeing within which we believe that visualization allows for an effective (democratic?) check on public figures, in all their spectatorial glory.

Duncan