The Transparency Society

THE SOCIETY OF EXHIBITION Today visual communication occurs through infection, abreaction, or reflex. It lacks all aesthetic reflection. Its aestheticization is ultimately anesthetic. The judgment of taste expressed in “Like,” for example, requires no sustained contemplation. Images filled with exhibition value offer no complexity. They are unambiguous—that is, pornographic. They lack all brokenness, which would trigger physical or mental reflection. Complexity slows down communication. Anesthetic hypercommunication reduces complexity in order to accelerate itself. It is significantly faster than sensory communication. The senses are slow. They impede the accelerated circulation of information and communication. Thus, transparency comes with an absence of sense. The mass of information and communication derives from a horror vacui.

The society of transparency views all distance as negativity to be eliminated. Distance represents an obstacle to the acceleration of the flows of communication and capital. In keeping with its inner logic, the society of transparency eliminates every form of distance. Transparency ultimately proves to be “the total promiscuity of the look with what it sees,” namely “prostitution.” It requires that things and images radiate in perpetuity. The missing distance makes perception proceed by means of tactility and touch. Tactility refers to contact without physicality, “epidermal contiguity of eye and image,” just a breath away. Because distance is lacking, no aesthetic contemplation, no lingering, proves possible. Tactile perception is the end of the aesthetic distance of the gaze, indeed, the end of the gaze. Lack of distance is not proximity. If anything, it destroys it. Proximity is rich in space, whereas distancelessness annihilates space. A certain distance is inscribed within proximity. Therefore its dimensions are broad. In this sense, Heidegger speaks of a “pure nearness which sustains the distance [reine die Ferne aushaltende Nähe].” However, the “pain of the nearness of the distant” counts as negativity to be eliminated. Transparency re-moves [ent-fernt] everything into uniform de-distantiation that stands neither near nor far. THE SOCIETY OF INTIMACY Social media and personalized search engines set up, in the internet, a space of absolute closeness [Nahraum]; here the outside has been eliminated. One encounters only oneself and one’s own life. No negativity stands available to make change possible. This digital vicinity [Nachbarschaft] offers users only sectors of the world that please them. In this fashion, it dismantles the public sphere [Öffentlichkeit]—indeed, it dismantles public, critical consciousness—and it privatizes the world. The internet transforms into an intimate sphere or comfort zone. Proximity, from which all distance has been eliminated, is another form in which transparency finds expression. The tyranny of intimacy psychologizes and personalizes everything. Even politics cannot escape its grasp. Accordingly, politicians are no longer measured by their actions. Instead, general interest concerns their persons; this entails compulsive staging on their part. The loss of the public sphere leaves behind a void; intimate details and private matters pour into it. Publicizing a persona takes the place of the public sphere. In the process, the public sphere becomes an exhibition space. It grows more and more distant from the space of communal action.