Seeing Through Transparency

Paul Doolan clearly sees transparency through philosophy.

- Paul Doolan

Chances are you're too young to remember Carly Simon's tune 'No Secrets' from her 1972 album No Secrets, in which she sings to her lover "We have no secrets, we tell each other everything." However, telling everything - all those past lovers, all those hidden fantasies - may not be the best recipe for a healthy relationship. The song's refrain ends, "Sometimes I wish... that I never knew, some of those secrets of yours." Perhaps we are in danger of discarding this wisdom, in a society where everything that is hidden is looked upon with suspicion, and transparency is hyped as a great virtue.

We are frequently assaulted by calls for transparency. A quick Google search on the need for transparency' delivers lists of reasons why more transparency is needed, especially in business, politics, and education. I am sure many readers recognise the boss calling for a process of transparency'. Yet philosophical inquiry will reveal that transparency intrudes upon privacy, kills spontaneity, and robs the individual of interiority. In the Age of Transparency, interiority, secrecy, and Hermetic hiddenness are forms of resistance.

Hypervisibility

Calls for 'transparency' betray an optical preference - a hidden assumption that the only knowledge that is worthwhile is knowledge for which the evidence can be seen. This can be summed up in the expression 'Seeing is believing'. Other ways of knowing become secondary. Walter Benjamin further pointed out that the Scientific Revolution of Copernicus and Galileo set us on a course leading to an "optical connection to the universe" (One Way Street and Other Writings, 1979, p.111). And we talk about 'eye-witnesses', even when the witnesses relate testimony that was only ever heard, never seen.