Transparency, Interrupted

Abstract

Though far from new, the rhetoric of transparency is on the ascent in public and political life. It is cited as the answer to a vast array of social, political, financial and corporate problems. With the backing of a ‘movement’, transparency has assumed the position of an unassailable ‘good’. This article asks whether the value ascribed to transparency limits political thinking, particularly for the radical and socialist Left. What forms of politics, ethics, of being-in-common, might it be possible to think if we pay attention to secrecy rather than transparency?

The New Transparency: Police Violence in the Context of Ubiquitous Surveillance

“…This article historicizes contemporary accountability practices, with an extended case study of police accountability activism, showing the intellectual and practical connections from these practices to a political concept rooted in Enlightenment political thought. Transparency is also an unassailed and treasured concept, despite its being taken for granted (Birchall, 2011b;Han, 2012). By raising key features of the historical and ideological origins of the concept, the article suggests transparency's inextricable connections to a degraded form of democracy and harbors widely maligned presumptions about information, knowledge, and their connection to political action.…”

“…Surveillance adds strategic watching in order to produce that visibility, making available its objects to those agents of a defined regulatory scheme, often performed by or for those with comparatively greater power or authority than those being watched. Political transparency inverts the surveillant gaze, as governments and their agents are made visible to their publics, most often via selfdisclosure, and has its origins in practical development of Enlightenment ideals in the construction of modern democratic states (Birchall, 2011b). Hood (2006) claims transparency is "quasi-religious" in nature, not because it suggests the unmediated visibility of an omniscient god-though it certainly connotes this-but because it represents the pinnacle of righteousness in secular democracies.…”

“…Though early modern states abandoned Rousseau's insistence on direct, participatory republicanism, his desire for transparency by way of publicity was influential. For instance, Kant's adaptation of Rousseau argued that popular acceptance legitimates governance (Davis, 1991), and so political transparency came to be a means of achieving a properly representative government (Birchall, 2011b;Heald, 2006). Transparency was a means of reconciling the "vertical inequality" between law-makers and citizens (Machin, 2012).…”

“…Though transparency is widely believed to produce the possibility of accountability (Mulgan, 2003), and is therefore productive of popular power (Birchall, 2011b), this expectation is frustrated by the actual outcomes of documenting police violence. The very proliferation of such media speaks to the limitations of visibility as a protective power.…”

Open government ideologies in post-soviet countries

“…Secrecy might be needed in certain contexts and secrecy has also been a powerful strategy in relation to the state in different revolutionary movements (Birchall, 2012). The digital differentiation is another obvious problem regarding public participation in local decision processes.…”