Visibilities and Visual Discourses: Rethinking the Social With the Image

Remaining Challenges for Visual Studies

The last 20 years have seen a surge in scholarly interest beyond text into seeing and hearing as well as the artifacts and infrastructures which support and enable them across the humanities and the social sciences, establishing what is today called visual sociology. Anthropology long relied on the visual approach as evidence through its engagement with ethnographic film, but until the 1980s, it did not find much resonance in the wider social sciences. The renewed interest could be explained by the ubiquity of images brought on by the recent media transformation, but it is also driven by a recognition that much of social reality is not only normative, textual, or juridical, but visual and tactile, that it smells (Classen, Howes, & Synnott, 1994; Raab, 2001), tastes (Bourdieu, 1979; Hennion, 2007), and sounds (Pinch & Bijsterveld, 2011). Also, images are intimately involved in the generation of evidence, a task growing in importance in analyses of contemporary societies (cf. Bredekamp, 2007; Daston & Galison, 2007). When we speak of the visual in the following paragraphs, we include sound, tactility, and other sensibilities, which go along with the image.

What are still emerging, though, in this field are perspectives on visual sociology that address questions of power and discursivity in the relation to publics and democracy. These tentative developments point to the need for a concept of visibility as a structural layer of sociality or, in other words, an interpretive explanation of visibility as an element of social structure. This understanding of visibility would require the clarification of two issues: First, a clearer understanding of visual practices and the visibility of practices must be achieved. It does not suffice to study practices in fields explicitly defined by esthetic norms and modes of production. This social a priori of visuality in certain institutionalized or occupational fields—as interesting and relevant their findings might be—does not provide much in the way of a deeper understanding of the role of visualities across social practices. This is why the treatment of visuality in art history and the german-called “Image Sciences” (“Bildwissenschaft”) does not exhaust the issue for the social sciences. The question should be how the visual and requirements of visualizations become an aspect and a materiality within everyday, and more specialized forms of action not primarily oriented toward the production of pictures or visualizations. A second issue pertains to visibility as a mode of social ordering or in more traditional terms: structure. This would neither be a mode of ordering restricted to the visual representation of social stratification, nor to the habitus of image producers. Instead, the intersection of the visual with interactional, spatial, temporal types of orders should become clearer.

In contemporary knowledge societies, visualities, and other sensibilities are ubiquitous, and it is such global and local apparatuses of distribution of image and sound, which have in recent years become computable and are thus drawn into what is known in media studies as the “big data” phenomenon: the semi-automatic formation of data collections and and their effects on the formation of knowledge. At the same time, digitalization has enabled new esthetic practices driven by amateurs, from desktop publishing, blogging to web video, and has increased the visibility and reach of most visual practices. The amateur practices challenge the world view projected by governments and corporations (Traue & Schünzel, 2014), as could be seen in the velvet revolution (ending four decades of single party rule in the former Czechoslovakia), and in much earlier revolutionary movements working with photography and murals. This conflictual and situational context is by no means conclusive, and it is an empirical task to follow its traces and dialectics. As mentioned earlier, we propose that visibility must be treated as a social order sui generis. The agentic properties of visibility become apparent in the contemporary ubiquity of visual technologies and artifacts and more importantly, the relevance of visual “objectivations” (Knoblauch, 2017, p. 155ff.) in a diverse range of communicative processes. Ironically, the virtual, or non-visible but real, qualities of the visual are what enable visible artifacts to become agentic, and even these are dependent on the “viewer’s recognition” (Cambre, 2012) of these “congealed residues of performance and agency in object-form” (Gell, 1998). Today, the capacity to enact and judge visual displays has become a taken-for-granted factor in the structuration of social action: it has become a new “social category” (Heinich, 2012, p. 53ff.). It is not a coincidence that visual sociology has experienced a (modest) boom after the rise of digital technologies and the weakening of the traditional modern system of institutions. So how are we to grasp the social category of visibility?

Visual Discourses Beyond Foucault

Valuable methodological propositions can be gained from the work of Michel Foucault who, after beginning his career as an unorthodox historian of science, later moves closer to the Durkheimian position in analyzing the parallelism of social constraints and affordances through a Nietzschean reformulation of the concept of power. His methodological monograph, the archeology of discourse (Foucault, 1969) has inspired the body of research that is today discourse analysis. His well-known distinction between énonciation (engl. enunciation) and enoncé (engl. statement) can be applied to the analysis of visual phenomena. Enunciation denotes the practice of uttering something in a context (Benveniste, 1974), while the enoncé is—in the Foucault-Benvenistian tradition—the basic unit of discourse. The discourse as a totality of enoncés has its own symbolic and thingified materiality—terminology, epistemic objects, ways of speaking, and strategies in Foucault’s classic formulation (Foucault, 1969). To this would need to be added (at least) communication technologies, infrastructures, body techniques, and visualization techniques such as those presented in this special issue. This variable totality of the enoncé is the precondition for enunciations, which we understand as communicative actions. These generally reproduce, and in some (rarer) cases interrupt the discursive order. The reciprocal character of enoncé and communicative practices (énonciations) is very much present in Foucault’s work theoretically, but is not explored empirically in the ways usually expected in the social sciences. The lacking treatment of communicative practice has been addressed in recent theoretical and methodological publications which aim to reconcile Foucauldian discourse analysis with the tradition of Schutzian action theory (Schütz, 1932) and the sociology of knowledge (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), resulting in the SKAD approach (Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse) approach (Keller, 2005, 2011).

The totality of enoncés in a given milieu or society can be understood as a system of sayability (ger. Sagbarkeit): what is said within the bounds of this historically variable sayability is intelligible and legitimate. Other enunciations—or gestures for that matter—can be performed, but they easily appear out of bounds and are qualified within different discursive regimes as untrue (not within the bounds of permissible truth-values), i.e. as illegitimate, crazy, ineffective, dangerous, or delusional. Transferring this model of sayability onto the sensibility of the visual allows us to point to visibility (ger. Sichtbarkeit; Traue, 2013). The everyday term visibility has taken on a theoretical and methodological meaning, lending itself to a “visual discourse analysis” (Holert, 2008; Maasen, Mayerhauser, & Renggli, 2006; Meier, 2008; Renggli, 2007; Traue, 2013). With Foucault, we understand visibility to be a material condition that is not outside society (representation) and not inside the subject (competence, habitus), but which exerts its agency through working itself deeply into the fabric of social action.

Some authors refer to SKAD or similar approaches in their conceptualization of visual discourse analysis to emphasize the relevance of communicative practices for the transformation of regimes of visibility (Traue, 2013). The adoption of practice-oriented and phenomenological approaches points to the perception that the French model of discourse analyses cannot simply be extended to accommodate visuality. Foucault’s (1975) analysis of the panopticon, elaborated in contemporary surveillance studies, was a foray into the structural power of visibility, but it does not sufficiently cover the mutuality of the gaze (Simmel, 1908/2008), the varieties of visual self-presentation (Goffman, 1956), and the new visual technologies such as amateur video and presentation software (Knoblauch, 2013). But it is also the image itself, broadly understood, which rejects a parallelism with linguistic discourse, “there is a constant oscillation between the material and virtual of the image” understanding it “along the lines of the topological—as more knot-like, in that its surface both reveals and conceals itself . . . it oscillates ontologically (Cambre, 2016, pp. 85, 185). Thus, if we subscribe to a “complex and oscillating notion of the image as picture, metaphor, and imagination” (Engel, in this issue), the image can at the same time be a (material) picture, a metaphor connecting texts and places, and an imagination relating bodies and knowledge. It cannot be managed as easily as verbal enunciations can be regulated within the order of discourse. What needs to be taken into account, then, is the singularity and seriality of the image. Its double capacity to overdetermine cultural orders as well as to pierce the boundaries between surveilled systems of knowledge calls for a methodological double placement of the image: That is, both as an instance of discourse, and at the same time as a transgression of discourse.

Toward a Sociology “With the Image”

What does this theoretical proposition imply for methodology? In what terms of methods which promise to realize this desiderata? In French visual sociology, a distinction has become common which we find useful as a point of departure for this problem: that the visual can be addressed in either of two fashions, either as the study of the social through the image (“sociologie par l‘image”; Harper, 2000; Naville, 1966; Terrenoire, 1985; Van der Gucht, 2012) or as a sociology of the image (“sociologie de l‘image”; Goldmann, 1974; Moliner, 2008). The former originates either from a naturalistic approach of the visual or, at the opposite, from visual anthropology, but in both ways the image made by the researchers is seen as a medium of research, as a way of revealing the social by using optical instruments as tools for registering the social. The study of social practices, in this vein, requires and allows the researcher to approach its subject on a prediscursive level. This sociological image is then an appropriate means of gaining access to the workings and meanings of otherwise opaque social worlds. This understanding is closely tied to ethnographic approaches. The latter—sociology of the image—conceives images as wether a result or a witness of visual practices in social fields and subscribes to the study of the relation between the social and the way it is represented in the visual. In this branch of research, the visual is essentially seen as a symptom of sociality.

This bifurcation, however, limits the ability of the social sciences to address issues of the (audio)-visuality of knowledge, experience, and reality. The distinction can be expanded: looking closely at the second approach, it actually entails two ways of thinking the image: sociology of the image conceives of the image as a product and document of sociality. The latter understanding is often tied to the Panofskyan Tradition, in the German context in combination with Karl Mannheim’s “documentary method” (Bohnsack, 2008). The image is taken as a document, an indicator of a historical reality, which can come to be understood through an interpretation of the image. In a move often inspired by Bourdieu, social structurations such as habitus can be accessed methodically by means of distinguishing visual patterns, for example, in photography (Bourdieu, 1965). In the context of the study of visual culture, with its links to the British Cultural Studies School (cf. Mirzoeff, 1999) with Stuart Hall and in the Latin American vein, Nestor García Canclini, the study of the image pursues the image not simply as document, but as product of, and productive of, conflicting visualities and the trajectory of their conflict.

From each point of view, sociology through and of the image, the two perspectives are often criticized by one another for various shortcomings. It should be taken into account, however, that the spread of imaging technologies and competences make it necessary to turn toward the everyday practices of imaging, imagining and communicating through cameras, camera-phones, digital video, public screens, image archives, image platforms such as Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr, and YouTube, and the popularity of urban and rural amateur arts. A difference to these aforementioned approaches becomes apparent if we take into account a sociology with the image and its related sensualities.

Therefore, visual sociology entails a third possibility besides the two earlier mentioned. It consists of not only analyzing the image as a social product, but in studying the acts of producing the image that simultaneously produce society, as it is engaged in the image designed to reflect it. In this regard, it might be more appropriate to speak of a sociology with the image. With in the sense of entering into dialogue and argument with the image, all the while not attempting to understand the image on its own, but how image and senses and contexts are deployed reflexively in social arenas with their own specific microphysics of power (Blanc, 2012, 2013; Cambre, 2014; Knoblauch, 2013; Mirzoeff, 1999; Pequignot, 2008; Traue, 2013). Doing research with the image supposes that social reality thickens through various materialities, practices, and visibilities. In film and media studies, the study of the mediatic infrastructures has a long tradition, but is not very well connected to discussions in the social sciences and often eclectic in its theoretical orientation. Research in the tradition of discourse analysis has drawn from media and culture studies but has also made seminal contributions to this area of studies. Foucault studies inform this research through his proposition that everything that is said is dependent on what is sayable, and that the social processes in which the sayable shifts intersect with shifts in power relations (Foucault, 1975). Empirical research as well as methodological contributions has been conducted in the field of social media (Meier, 2008; Reichert, 2008; Traue & Schünzel, 2014), public relations (Maasen et al., 2006), advertising (Engel, 2009), colonialism (Mirzoeff, 2011), political activism (Cambre, 2014), and the use of imaging techniques in science and business communication (Knoblauch, 2013; Tuma, 2017). W.J.T. Mitchell operates in a similar fashion, without explicit references to French analyses of power (Mitchell, 2011). Thinking with the image opens our inquiry toward important questions central in current debates in the social and cultural sciences.

Of course, the image and the imaginary is only one way of world-making, of creating meaning, alongside with languages, classifications, mathematics, poetry, and others. As such, ways of “worlding,” visualities can become instruments of domination (Mirzoeff, 2011). The image is always already allied with—or one might say part of a network with—other forms of knowledge. This idea, however, that philosophy and the social sciences are competing with other producers of images and their interpretations is of interesting and important consequence.

If the image is part of an interdiscursive world of meaning, the idea of isolating the image from other modalities of meaning, its subtitles, its metadata, its introductions, the strategies it is part of—as it is often in fact practiced in empirical research—is a deeply flawed notion. Creating a specialized social study of images, we want to argue, easily leads to a methodological iconocentrism. This iconocentrism, often proudly announced as a rehabilitation of visuality and visual knowledge, is subject to similar essentialist limitations as the more logocentristic specializations. Just as conversation analysis insists on a limiting logocentrism in its exclusive focusing on “conversation” as a main mirror and source of social reality, a purely “visual sociology” locked into its specialized method protocols runs danger of entrenching itself in an equally limiting iconocentricity. The anti-theoretical bias of some visual research is another indicator of tendencies of epistemic closure.

The sociological twist in the consideration of what can be seen is less about the visual, hence about the eye and the exploitation of its evidence-spending capacities, but about visibility, hence the actions and materialities through which attention can be shared and focused onto something visible, just as language is not the problem of sociology, but rather the “sayable” (Foucault, 1969). A more visual sociology would in fact not deal with the visual, but with visibilities. Visibility consists of acts and technologies of showing, or pointing out, and their effects. The study of such visibilities will allow researchers to address a number of important issues of contemporary social, political, and economic life. To complicate matters further, we propose that visibilities alone will not suffice, rather we would also highlight the conditions “of becoming visible” (Shields, 2004) or the diverse visual processes by which the relationship between the visible and invisible situated within operations of power and governance take place, which Shields conceptualizes as visualicity.

Theoretical, Methodological and Empirical Issues

In the context of these considerations of visibility, a number of theoretical and methodological issues arise, which are addressed in the collection of papers: How does the distribution of knowledge change in the context of a general aesthetization (cf. Reckwitz, 2017) and informatization of “networked” societies? How do experts and amateurs compete or cooperate in the development of cultural skills such as visualization and illustration? This issue is above all an empirical question which calls for appropriate methods suited to the study of the mentioned shifts of communicative authority afforded by technologies of visualization. In the articles of this special issue, methodologies and applied methods that address these problems of approaching visibility are presented.

A second, and deeper question relates to the drawing of borders between nature and culture, between the social and the non-social, the human and non-human: Which individuals become included as subjects worth interpreting and understanding through the systematicity and singularity of visibility regimes? How are different dimensions of such borderings, such as social relations, time, space, and sign-systems drawn together in video-symbolic practices, establishing, reinforcing, or destabilizing such orderings? Several articles in this issue treat empirical fields exemplary for such boundary-making through visibility—such as in medicine, disability and communication, political activism, and science communication.

A third issue that needs to be raised is that of agency, the capacity to create such orderings through creating visibilities and legibilities: Is the power to visualize a site of agency itself, and what agencies are afforded by visual discourses? This theme runs through the contributions of the special issue and is discussed in depth in two dedicated methodological contributions.

A fourth group of problems addresses the issue of technological, cultural, and societal codevelopment: When do technologies, visual practices and cultures evolve conjointly, and when are they dominated by certain knowledge regimes or economic regimes? Which forms of subjectivation are advanced in regimes of the visible and sayable? This is a complex problem explicitly or implicitly discussed in this special issue, and also the area where most future research is needed.

A discourse analytical perspective on methods which comprehends the image as part and parcel of communicative action and technological construction (“sociology with the image”) allows the further exploration of these and other issues. We have collected papers in this special issue that address the question from different disciplinary perspectives and through different methodological approaches, which encompass visual discourse analysis, videography, visual ethnography, multimodal analysis, the analysis of artifacts and cultural analysis. We do not claim to present a single method of visual discourse analyses, but rather seek to approach the question of the discursivity of visibility from different methodological and disciplinary angles, as well as different cultural, and geographical locales and contexts.

The nine papers in this issue illustrate the diverse possibilities for analyzing this discursivity of images and of visuality as visibilities.

They address four areas of interest: The relation of materiality, visibility, and interpretive practice; the challenge visibility poses to scientific knowledge itself; the relations between mediality and visibility; and the transformation of politics through visual arguments and layering of visibility.

Methodological issues are addressed in two papers: In her piece “Queer Reading as Power Play,” Antke Engel engages the classical problem of ideology without falling into the common traps of seeking higher ground or totalizing it as a virtually inescapable condition. The approach for a discourse analysis of visual material she proposes, a “power-sensitive method of” reading images, seeks to “render methodologically productive relations of desiring implied or performed by the image.” Without assuming a privileged hermeneutic position for the interpreter, she proposes to engage in experimental practices with the image, teasing out its intended purposes, its conventional meanings as well as its unrealized potentials. This “interventionist reading of images” attends to visibility as a mode of reproducing and transforming social relations, which the researcher inevitably becomes engaged in. Engel’s approach provides suggestions how to confront and navigate these critical issues.

York Kautt addresses an unclarified problem in visual methodologies: how does visuality mediate materiality and meaning? He consequently identifies the “social complexity of visual design” as the central reference problem for a sociology of visual communication. To elaborate this problem, he draws together theories of materiality, visuality, design, systems theory, and the structure-agency debate. This impressive range of references serves to argue that visual phenomena are embedded in a number of social structures that condition forms of practice, and that these practices work back onto structural environments, albeit with certain “limitations for practices,” which he proposes to study more deeply. In his conclusion, an analytical model is proposed which relates artifacts, practices, and structural environments to each other. Also, the empirical complications this model may help clarify are explored. It is definitely a strength of this conceptual piece that the author remains theoretically parsimonious and thus leaves it up to the reader which methodical strategies to employ in considering the methodological considerations and propositions advanced in this article.

From Engel’s and Kautt’s deliberations, it becomes clear that the social sciences and humanities cannot simply incorporate “visual methods” into their methodological canon: they are part of the scientific field, which, as a whole, is drawn into an increasingly visualized world. This self-implication of scholarly thought is addressed in the three following papers.

Communicating scientific findings and communicating within the field of science are certainly two different matters. It is all the more convincing that in their comparative analysis, Rene Wilke and Miira Hill show that despite the fundamental practical differences between communication among scientists and recent public displays of sciences, there is a common thread: a deep epistemological commitment to visualization of scientific knowledge which bears a relation to the embodied practices of presentation. In their study of communicative actions in interdisciplinary “group talk” on one hand and the “science slams” addressing fellow scientists on the other, it becomes clear that both forms of scientific talk increasingly rely on presentation technologies. Methodologically, this observation presents a challenge, since they are actually confronted not only with talk, but also with embodied practices of presenting knowledge, with the visual material deployed to aid and support these presentations, and with the contextual norms in these different contexts. Through a videographic methodology triangulated with focused ethnography, they are able to unravel the interplay of visuality, performance, and argument, which condense into a novel visibility of science, as a result of presentational dispositifs and as a precondition for successful science communication.

Science Journalism is another discursive formation, which contributes to the visibilization of science through shaping the general public’s understanding of its proceedings and interests. Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska turns to the popularization of scientific knowledge from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). In her article, she presents a methodology of multimodal analysis for examining the textual and visual features of popular science publications—exemplified by a case study portraying the presentation of biomedical research in the online science journal newscientist.com. This strategy allows her to determine which scientific topics and findings are displayed as newsworthy, and how this newsworthiness is constructed through the interplay of textuality and visuality. The dominant discursive strategies of science journalism are succinctly traced as movements toward “humanization,” “domestication,” and/or “anesthetization.” Molek-Kozakowska interprets them as ideological investments and discusses the effects such “strategically enhanced visibility” can have on the (re)presentation of knowledge.

While the previous two articles focus on the communicative acts of live science presentation and the multimodal forms of plausibilization of science for laypeople, Monika Urban proposes an analysis of interdiscursive strategies and their powers of subjectivation. She expands classic interdiscourse theory by following the assumption that the determination of meaning is discourse immanent, that is “discursively created through fragile and reciprocally influencing societal formations” and enacted in “conflicts or tensions surrounding hegemonic negotiations” which lead to the legitimation of interventions and technologies. These tension-ridden and often conflictual meaning-making processes are examined through an analytic vocabulary adapted from interdiscourse theory and informed by the recent advances of Bildwissenschaften. The research questions derived from these theoretical and methodological interests—“What knowledge is made plausible through the digital visualization? Which forms of subjectivation are related to this knowledge?”—are applied to a case study on medical wearables and the interpretation of their digitalization of body data by users. The exemplary analysis shows that despite efforts to fix the meaning of health data, the horizon of interpretation of such data “remains at least partially open.”

While the visualized practices of the natural and human sciences may be assessed through interpretive and critical methodologies, there is an underlying issue that is more unsettling: the ongoing mediatization of our access to the world. The next two papers address this issue from two different angles: a discussion of cultural epistemology and of the mediatization of communication in the context of disabilities.

Focusing on the invisible aspects of wireless communication so essential to the functional aspects of two famous towers, the Eiffel Tower and the One World Trade Center, read together, Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel delve analytically into the works of French philosophers Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998) to develop a semiotic phenomenological framework to analyze the cultural, political, and greater social ambiguities regarding these symbols upholding an idea of modernity that seems to be crumbling around them. Beginning with Barthes’ provocative and unique method of observation, the authors then turn to Lyotard’s three-part typology: figure-image, figure-form, and figure-matrix, as methodological points of reference on which to layer different aspects of analysis for a more complex and context sensitive result. Their approach opens the possibility of allowing the objects to inform the models, and the models to then define the terminology as it is used.

Responding to the vital urgency of addressing questions of analysis and understanding across the fields of anthropology, human-computer interaction, and the humanities in a broad sense, Rebekah Cupitt, Per-Anders Forstorp and Ann Lantz directly take on the challenge of logocentric modes of thinking by producing a fine-grained analysis of a cross-cultural empirical case. By producing a thickly described analytic of an audio-visual interaction with deaf and hearing participants in a technologically mediated meeting, this paper explores the limits of methods in studying visual practices when situated in organizational and bilingual settings. The authors unequivocally prove that “there is no absolute visual form that accurately represents the phenomenon under investigation” and that embodied materiality absolutely must be taken into account for the meaningfulness of concepts in analysis to be productive.

A politics of visibility comes into view as a cause as well as an effect of these technological, epistemological, and methodological transformations related to the ongoing visibilization of everything. The last two papers in the issue directly address the problem of the political.

Anna Sanina carefully situates her analysis in current Russian contexts in “Who Are You Kidding?” to develop a visual discursive analysis centered on the key figure of irony as operationalized through online images published on weblogs and social media by a public that has rapidly developed its own vernacular iconographic conventions to display and comment on political culture. Using data from 56 interviews, she outlines how tracing the use of one trope through a multitude of representations, one can measure the political temperature of a given public. She indicates that what many might assume to be “slacktivism” (=slacker + activism, an allegedly ineffective form of low-intensity online activism) might also be the early stages of a later activism that is nurtured through finding like-minded individuals semi-covertly through online dialogue and humor. Here, deconstructing and contesting the realities of ironic signs can reveal which meanings are privileged and which are suppressed.

Finally, Maxime Boidy’s article aims to maintain the tension between the different dimensions of visibility. Whatever epistemic, ethical, or social action context, visibility deals with political issues. In this perspective, visual practices and knowledges appear bound to historical accounts of power. Moving between different regimes of visibilities in Foucault’s, Debord’s and Honneth’s theories, the author investigates how these struggles for visibilities are expressed in activist testimonies and visual tactics such as those used during the G8 summit of July 2001 in Genoa. The contribution of Maxime Boidy’s analysis consists precisely in putting these multiple dimensions of visibility into dialogue and tension to better understand their mutual implications.

The papers in this collection do not shy away from the complexity of the task, rather they engage fully, and carefully, in the nuanced, messy, and often contradictory details of working sociologically with the image. They refuse to relegate visuals to illustrative, or supporting roles in the larger social context and exemplify ways by which this might be achieved. By attending to both the material and virtual, the concrete and the ephemeral, and the shifting movements in between, this collection makes a contribution to visual methods that claims its place among canonical social scientific approaches. ² Despite a steady, if sometimes trickling stream of works, the visual dimensions of the social had remained undertheorized in the academic social sciences until the 1990s, with certain notable exceptions (Bourdieu 1965, 1995; Denzin, 1995; Goffman, 1979; Kracauer, 1947; Morin, 1956) and notably the work of scholars in the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) founded in 1982. However, through the rise of structuralism and the linguistic turn, the Western interest in texts and the linguistic semiotic dimension, already strong through sociology’s enlightenment heritage, became predominant. And yet it was over a 100 years ago, in 1900, that one of the earliest scholarly visions of the social through and by images methodologically had already been powerfully presented. At the world’s fair in Paris, W. E. B. Du Bois created a masterful exhibit ³ to refute a widely held belief: that Blacks were inferior to Whites. As the Exposition Report noted, “It is impossible to do justice to this exhibit in a few lines of descriptive matter. The material presented was not only of high scientific value, but was shown in the most graphic way” (volume 2, pp. 408-409). We hope, in this volume, to renew and reengage Du Bois’ visionary legacy.

Before you turn to the individual papers, we would like to briefly situate the prospects for visual methodologies, and especially the study of visibility, in the social sciences and humanities. Let us first turn to some of the obstacles we are facing.

As in the United States, “critical qualitative research is under assault” (Denzin, 2017) in Europe. Proponents of science-based research (SBR) are openly attempting to limit the ways sociality, culture, and technology should be studied (Saiani, 2018). One stark manifestation of this strategy in Germany is the rise of new professional associations which suggest that only a science-based view of the social and corresponding “analytical” methodologies which rely on the identification of causal mechanisms (Hedström/Bearman 2009) should be accepted as social science proper, and sometimes even suggest that appropriating big data analysis techniques is the major frontier for social research. One irony of this proposal is that big data analyses are inextricably linked to strategies of visualization (Reichert, 2018). One major misconception fuelling such methodological disputes, and that bears repeating here, is the failure to appreciate the extent to which statistical and quantitative approaches themselves rely on interpretation, (Baur, 2018).

Academic trends that deny the interpretativity of quantitative research set up a situation where approaches that cannot be reduced to numerical values are given lower value on a false hierarchy that prioritizes social “science” (as opposed to “social” science). We find it rather obvious that this point of view fails the epistemological standards of the social sciences established more than a 100 years ago. It participates in the latest series of Method Disputes (“Methodenstreit”) originating in the middle of the 19th century, when Johann Gustav Droysen and Wilhelm Dilthey proposed that the humanities (“Geisteswissenschaften”) have a distinct subject matter which sets them apart from the sciences (“Naturwissenschaften”): the meaningful and normative relation of living beings to their world and to themselves. This relation needs to be understood (“verstehen”), not explained (“erklären”). Max Weber proposed a combinatory resolution of the controversy for the methodology of the social sciences which has become an almost unanimous gold standard in methodological debates: they should explain history (and society) by creating understandings of those who suffer and make it. The Method Dispute has since then gone through a number of iterations (cf. Apel, 1990 for an overview) and culminated in the (mixed-methods) alliance of flexible postpositivists and constructivists against positivism (1970-1990) and the conflict between competing mixed-method, constructivist, and critical theory paradigms (1990-2005) as Teddlie and Tashakkori (2003) point out in their history of the Method Disputes since the 1970s.

Since 2005, this Dispute has been revived by conflicts between evidence-based methodologists, and the mixed-methods, interpretive, and critical theory schools (Denzin, 2017, p. 10). Visual methods – due to the hardly quantifiable nature of their data –clearly lean toward the interpretive side of Weber’s verstehen-erklären combination. Yet, developments in the sciences, in politics, culture, economics and a range of other fields cannot be explained without taking into account the visuality of communication and the visibilities of the social. This conflict is not neatly waged between quantitative and qualitative methodologies. For example, there is also a divisive tendency within qualitative research, which may be comprehended as preemptive self-defense within more established qualitative approaches against those seeking to expand the range of interpretation and explanation, a tendency that the editors of this special issue have been confronted with in the past. We believe such efforts to contain the current method dispute are not useful for the inter-paradigmatic criticism that a multiplicity of scholarship thrives on. In other words, neither should new approaches prosper by discarding established approaches that prove their worth, nor should established approaches attempt to shut down efforts to expand. However, an ongoing mutual critique is needed.

Another consideration involves the question of how current postpositivist quantitative scientism—which aspires to relegate visual analysis to art history or submit it to Big Data analysis—fail methodological standards? As we have argued with reference to Weber, social research aims to combine “verstehen” (interpretation) and “erklären” (explaining). The extensions of social science research to the visual and the question of visibility emphasize strategies of interpretation (“verstehen”), and engage researcher affect within the social worlds they inhabit. Images and the visibilities they institute are decisive in everyday meaning-making as well as in strategies and structures of power and domination.

Visual methodologies thus underscore the interdependence of explanation and interpretation. To reject such methodological innovations in a world in which power, domination, legitimacy, the distribution of life chances, and the forms of identities are shaped not only by words and numbers, but also—and increasingly so—by images would reinforce a scientistic impoverishment of research: An impoverishment that consists of an unjustifiable reliance on causal or correlative explanation (erklären) rendered insensitive to the ethical, affective, political, and moral aspects of societies. But emphasizing “verstehen” does not imply a neglect of explanation. We consider visibilities to be more than localized, contextual, and tied to subjective sense and taste. Visibilities also work on the level of the structural, historical, societal, and technological. Positioning, as we and the collection of authors in this special issue do, visibilities as social structures sui generis (cf. also Denzin, 1995; Heinich, 2012) helps us explore how they intersect with other structurating layers of societies. Thus, methods for the study of visibility must continue to be expanded and integrated into the social science lexicon. This is certainly not a new claim, but it must be renewed and expanded in a situation where media technologies, techniques of power, and the image have both melted into new dispositifs of domination, and have also opened new avenues for contention, reflexivity, and critique. The future of theorizing our object of inquiry—visibility—is challenged by the abovementioned scientistic polemics and critiques, but it can respond by expanding on the issues at hand. We identify the following further directions research can take:

We may seek to further our understandings of how everyday and scientific ways of knowing, being and acting are shaped by visibilities and, how the visible engages conceptual arguments on one level and social ontologies on another. This challenge entails more detailed studies of ‘visualizing technologies’ and forms of domination and resistance with and through the image. The visual is no longer only a physiological, sensual, and cultural mode of relating to the world; an algorithmic dimension has added to it through machine learning and the capacity of machines to process pictures. Digital visuality not only deals with pictures, but as a regime of visibility it also sustains images and thus informs social worlds and subjectivity. Big Data research techniques explain such technologies, but they provide little in the way of understanding their effects for feeling and meaning-making beings. This assumption should not preclude an interest in digital research methods (cf. Marres, 2017), which seek to trace the effects and workings of action and perception in the digital domain through analyzing digital data. New figurations of technological and material causality on one hand and interpretative processes on the other should spur our interest. One major challenge is the study of the intersections of visibility with other structures of the social: inequality, institutions, mobility, boundaries. This approach can be very useful in intersectional research and research inspired by it: while race, gender, and class intersect, they do so through different modalities of communication, practice, and representation. These research directions require researcher agility in moving beyond the lines defined by any postpositivist attitude and call upon the transgressive capacities of critical approaches. We hope the methodological and thematic plurality of the papers gathered in this special issue becomes a visibility in its own right and actively contributes to supporting the vigorous generative energy of a multiplicity of perspectives.