Transparency

Transparency is one of the buzzwords of today’s political and organizational discourse. At heart an aesthetics of the becoming-visible, transparency is at once an injunction to communicate, as well as a moral imperative. It posits itself as the necessary but also sufficient condition of a number of mediatic and political virtues that are ardently pursued but rarely questioned. This special issue explores the notion of transparency using the tools of the Humanities, following three axes of critical inquiry. The first considers transparency as an epistemic scenography, a carefully crafted mise-en-scène that is supposed to guide us to the truth. The second considers transparency as a rhetorical device, aimed at effectively settling controversies, and establishing consensus. The third considers transparency as a media affordance, by which technical devices cultivate the illusion of a complete grasp of their representational objects and the signifying dispositifs involved. These three axes – transparency as truth, settler of controversies, and media affordance – are in practice regularly combined. The articles of this issue explore overlaps between these three lines of inquiry, and shed light on the ways transparency shapes multiple relationships to knowledge.