The Transparency Society by Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul books always have a high signal-to-noise ratio. His reasoning goes to the point, without wasting time on anecdotes or stories to illustrate the topic.
The Transparency Society is no exception. The author denounces transparency as a neoliberal dispositive and extracts the consequences from different perspectives. In the Transparency Society, transparency is enforced and a mean of control.
Bentham’s Panopticon
Byung-Chul Han compares in different moments the society of transparency to a modern version of Bentham’s panopticon. The panopticon is a prision designed so that the possibility of constant observation instills self-discipline into the prisoners.
This prison has a central watchtower surrounded by cells arranged in a circle, so the guard can see the prisoners while the prisoners cannot tell when they are being watched. This makes power “visible and unverifiable”: the authority is always present in principle, but its exact moment of observation is hidden. The metaphor is that people regulate their own behaviour when they think they might be watched at any time.
In Bentham’s original metaphor, the panopticon was meant to make prisoners behave well with fewer guards, because surveillance would be internalized as self-control. The digital panopticon, in contrast, is a system in which pervasive data collection and visibility produce a state of probable surveillance that shapes people’s behaviour because they can never be sure when they are being watched. More, they behave according to the expected standards and display themselves according to those standards.
Intolerance for truth
The Transparency Society is a society of positivity, where negative feelings are not tolerated. We lose the ability to handle suffering and pain, to give them form. In the reorganization of human psyche lead by the society of positivity, “even love flattens out into an arrangement of pleasant feelings and states of arousal without complexity or consequence.”
Also, the Transparency Society does not tolerate discerning the truth because it’s considered a negative force. The truth asserts itself by declaring all else false. Thus, the Transparency Society emphasizes information over thruth. Those seeking to understand what’s true are stigmatized. Information is created or distributed without consideration of the truth.
However, the accumulation of information by itself produces no truth because it lacks direction and sense. More information or communication do not eliminate the fundamental absence of clarity of the whole. More, it heightens the lack of clarity.
Self-transparency
Human existence is not transparent, even to itself. Complete self-transparency is impossible. However, compulsion for transparency reduces the human being to a functional element within a system.
The human soul requires realms where it can be at home without the gaze of the Other. It claims a certain impermeability. Total illumination would scorch it and cause a particular kind of spiritual burnout. Only machines are transparent. Eventfulness and freedom, which constitute life fundamentally, do not admit transparency.
Exhibition
In the Transparency Society, things become commodities. They must be displayed in order to be, because mere existence has no meaning.
The Transparency Society is a society of exhibition. In the age of social networks, human value equals only to its exhibition value. The human face becomes a commodity form, wiped out from all negativity. Becoming, aging, and dying are uncomfortable topics.
Exhibition value depends on beautiful looks and expected behaviors. Compulsive display produces the compulsion to achieve beauty and fitness. Role models are not models of virtues, they are role models of outer measures.
The absolutization of exhibition value leads to the tyranny of visibility. It is no longer possible to be as one looks. The problem lies not in the volume of pictures, but in the compulsion to become a picture, the compulsion to meet certain requirements to appear in the picture.
The tyranny of transparency suspects anything that does not submit to visibility.
Transparency and Asymmetry
Transparency requires symmetry, thus the Transparency Society tries to eliminate all asymmetrical relationships. This includes power, which is not necessarily negative and in many cases proves productive and generative. It provides leeway and free play for the political shaping of society.
Mystery and inaccessibility, the basis not only for desire but also for what’s sacred or holy, are abolished because they are not symmetrical. Similarly, in the Transparency Society the notion of beauty is subverted. The sublime—which surpasses the beautiful—is veiled and exceeds representation, it points to the work of its creator. Therefore, transparency does not understand the sublime, it only understands what can be productized and consumed.
Acceleration
The Transparency Society is a society of acceleration. Acceleration is valued for its own sake, without purpose or goal, both individually and socially.
Narratives and rituals are not susceptible to acceleration. They have they own temporality. Their value does not reside in brevity. They are not susceptible to operationalization, the accelerated circulation of information, communication, and production. Therefore, the society of transparency abolishes all rituals and ceremonies. It tries to push them into the private sphere, but in reality displaying them in public is not tolerated.
The Transparency Society only understands processes. A process has no narrative, therefore it’s incapable of reaching a conclusion. It just ends. While an itinerary is a path rich in significance and part of its value resides in the journey itself—the traveler herself is changed—a process is meant to be traversed as fast as possible. Processes are measured by efficiency.
Negativity, in the form of obstacle or transition, constitutes narrative tension. The compulsion for transparency dismantles all borders and thresholds. Space becomes transparent when it is smoothed, leveled, and emptied out. Transparent space is semantically impoverished. Meanings arise only at thresholds and in transitions, indeed, through obstacles. A child’s first experience of space is also a threshold experience. Thresholds and transitions are zones of mystery, uncertainty, transformation, death, and fear, but also of yearning, hope, and expectation. Their negativity constitutes the topology of passion.
Memory
For the Transparency Society, memory becomes mere accumulation of information. However, human memory is distinct from plain storage. Plain storage works additively and accumulates. It is expected that it always remains the same. Memories, in contrast, are in constant rearrangement and reinscription. Human memory is also about history and narrative, not just a collection of facts.
The requirement of total transparency easily leads to tyranny. Byung-Chul Han exemplifies this with Rousseau’s vehement opposition—intolerance—to the construction of a theatre in Geneva. For Rousseau, a theatre is about the “art of counterfeiting oneself, or putting on another character than one’s own, of appearing different than one is, of becoming passionate in cold blood, of saying what one does not think as naturally as if one really did think it, and, finally, of forgetting one’s own place by dint of taking another’s.”
Rousseau prefers small cities because in small cities “individuals, always in the public eye, are born censors of one another” and “the police can easily watch everyone”. Rousseau’s society of transparency is a society of total control and surveillance.
The Modern Panopticon
Thanks to technology, social media, and attention monetization, the “Roman with a transparent house” alluded by Rousseau does not need to have transparent walls. We provide the surveillance means by ourselves.
The goals of today’s transparency society has different goals, however:
The goal is not moral purification of the heart, but maximal profit, maximal attention. Utter illumination (Ausleuchtung) promises maximal gains.
The surveillance of today’s “aperspectival” panopticon of today is no longer centralized. The inhabitants of the digital panopticon think they are free, and network and communicate with each other extensively. It’s this hypercommunication what guarantees transparency. It proves more effective than the classical panopticon, because it illuminates everyone from everywhere.
The society of control achieves perfection when subjects bare themselves not through outer constraint but through self-generated need, that is, when the fear of having to abandon one’s private and intimate sphere yields to the need to put oneself on display without shame.
This is the dialectic of freedom under transparency: people are voluntary surrendering to the panoptical gaze. They collaborate by denuding and exhibiting themselves in social networks and similar spaces, which present themselves as spaces of freedom.
The requirement for absolute transparency makes trust unnecessary. More, it makes the need for trust suspicious, because, if there is transparency, why would we need to trust? Instead of trust, people are supposed to behave because everything about them is known.
In a society based on trust, no intrusive demand for transparency would surface. The society of transparency is a society of mistrust and suspicion; it relies on control because of vanishing confidence. Strident calls for transparency point to the simple fact that the moral foundation of society has grown faulty, that moral values such as honesty and uprightness are losing their meaning more and more.
The Transparency Society was first published in 2015. However, due to the progress and pervasiveness of technology, Byung-Chul Han’s critique and analysis are more relevant today than ever.