The Becoming-Transparent of Ideology: Steps towards a critical theory of transparency

Abstract

Conceived as unmediated access to information, transparency has become one of the most relevant key terms of our age. Usually associated with positive cultural values such as honesty, openness, and accountability, the conceptual metaphors that animate transparency can provide an aura of authenticity, serving as a signifier of neutrality. And yet, they can also serve to naturalise indistinctness, inconspicuousness, and invisibility. This semantic ambiguity makes transparency an exceedingly useful rhetorical device, one that is particularly useful for discourses seeking the legitimation of power—a seamless strategy that is able to regulate attention while producing a sense of objectivity and trust. A careful inspection of the conceptual genealogy of transparency during the 20th century suggests that the term has a deep and sustained ideological complicity with neoliberal hegemony. While on a discursive level transparency promises the abolition of unequal flows of information, on a conceptual level, however, it operates by translating structures of power into structures of feeling; informing our sensibilities without contesting our sense of epistemic autonomy. In this way, transparency is able to conflate economic logics with cultural values, naturalising chains of associations that are crucial for the legitimation of the neoliberal thought collective. The origins of this mechanism, however, run deep into the roots of Western thought. This thesis traces transparency's evolving semantic constellation through various historical junctures, including Heidegger's phenomenology, Modernist Aesthetics, early computer Science, and Hayek's critique of central planning; exposing it as a key operator in the revaluation of ideals, sensibilities, and modalities of perception that lie at the core of our contemporary economy of attention.