Abstract
Certain aspects of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the early days of his administration challenged a binary visual code that pits opacity against openness, as well as a teleological narrative that establishes transparency as the logical incarnation of Enlightenment ideals and an administrative norm today. Because of the ideological nature of contemporary transparency tools, an interruption of technocratic transparency in its data-driven form might not in all circumstances be a regressive move. While recognizing the risks inherent in a displacement of technocratic transparency by a figure like Trump, Birchall explores the possibility of utilizing the unsettled conditions of visibility, in which openness and obfuscation merge, to recalibrate and radicalize the politics of transparency.
I would like to thank Emmanuel Alloa and Dieter Thomä for their invitation to the University of St. Gallen and for their astute comments on a draft of this chapter.
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Notes
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In terms of European history, many histories of transparencies cite Anders Chydenius’s “Ordinance on Freedom of Writing and of the Press” (1766), instituting offentlighetsprincipen, the principle of publicity, into Swedish civic life, as the earliest example of a modern government committed to publicity.
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Mark Fenster elaborates: “[Trump’s ] hostility to criticism and apparent distaste for the First Amendment, his penchant for controlling information about himself, and his never having been subject to public transparency laws in his business career suggest that his administration will not be more compliant with the spirit or letter of open government laws than those that came before and may well be less so” (2017: 173).
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Birchall, C. (2018). Interrupting Transparency. In: Alloa, E., Thomä, D. (eds) Transparency, Society and Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_17
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