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Transparency: A Magic Concept of Modernity

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Transparency, Society and Subjectivity

Abstract

This introductory chapter gives an overview of the emergent field of Critical Transparency Studies. Moreover, it traces some genealogical lines of how, from the eighteenth century onwards, what was known in Antiquity as an optical and aesthetic phenomenon—diaphaneity—came to stand for central concerns in self-knowledge, morality and politics. Such an analysis of the historical semantics of transparency highlights the irreducible plurality of the phenomenon. Against tendencies of seeing transparency as a means of achieving self-coincidence, unicity and self-stability, the chapter sketches an alternative understanding of transparency as diaphaneity and fleshes out the dynamic, transversal and often conflictual nature of sense, making way for a more comprehensive understanding of the contradictions of social existence.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Julian Assange in Alex Gibney’s documentary movie We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (USA, 2013).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Emmanuel Alloa

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  1. Emmanuel Alloa
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Correspondence to Emmanuel Alloa .

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  1. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Emmanuel Alloa

  2. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Dieter Thomä

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Alloa, E. (2018). Transparency: A Magic Concept of Modernity. In: Alloa, E., Thomä, D. (eds) Transparency, Society and Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_3

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