Abstract
This chapter argues that in ‘modernity’, transparency is a mechanism through which we eviscerate politics of content and substance, replacing it with the policing of behaviors that constitute social conformity as a normative ideal. Such modernity sees its task as the proper regulation of the claims of the personal and also of the political on human identity. Can one derive a private self from a political act; and to what extent do the demands of the private sphere drive political action? Modernity resolves this dialectical tension by the privatization of ecology: the withdrawal from the political world itself to “cultiver son jardin.” The demand for transparency is complicit with the acceptance of a normative surveillance society, where “deviant” behavior must be eradicated.
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Notes
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The harvesting of such “big data” has itself also become an important political weapon. See, for example, Carole Cadwalladr’s (2017) exposé of Robert Mercer and the “Cambridge Analytica” organization. In this, Cadwalladr shows how “big data” is being used to manipulate behavior—and attitude or emotions—among voters. This is analyzed also in Thompson (2016: 21–22).
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Docherty, T. (2018). The Privatization of Human Interests or, How Transparency Breeds Conformity. In: Alloa, E., Thomä, D. (eds) Transparency, Society and Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_14
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