Abstract
This chapter discusses the double meaning of transparency applied to subjectivity. On the one hand, transparency refers to invisibility, to a lack of subjectivity or even to psychosis. On the other hand, it refers to hypervisibility, to the exhibition of privacy, the horizon of which is indeed exhibitionism—let’s call it the Jennicam syndrome, as we will focus on one of the first lifecasters in the Internet history. We live in a media environment in which we have no choice but to swing constantly between our submission to an Orwellian Big Brother and our desire to be part of Big Brother, one of the first and most successful Reality TV shows. At the end, we might no longer know if Jenni was rather psychotic or perverse.
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Notes
- 1.
In her account Catherine Millet writes “avilissement maximum” (maximum degradation). Cf . Millet (2001: 118).
- 2.
Let’s zoom back to the Stalinist Big Brother as incarnated in one of its most terrifying versions in the Cambodia of the Khmers Rouges : it seems that in some “villages” (or death camps ?), the inhabitants were forced to hand over their excrements to the “organization” and were punished when there was not enough. Transparency (and at the same time de-subjectification, dehumanization) happen when Big Brother not only forbids the use of the pronoun “I,” as it was the case in Cambodia, but also controls your excrements. When human excrements become manure, humans become animals, that is, transparent (cf. Wolton 2015: 985–1042).
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Kaufmann, V. (2018). Transparency and Subjectivity: Remembering Jennifer Ringley. In: Alloa, E., Thomä, D. (eds) Transparency, Society and Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_15
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