[NEW DEADLINE] Call for papers | RCL nº. 56 | Regimes of Transparency (Closed)

“And Hans Castorp saw, precisely what he must have expected, but what is hardly permitted to man to see, and what he never thought it would be vouchsafed him to see: he looked into his own grave.” It is in this mixture of enchantment and melancholia, an affect indistinguishable from pure fear, that the protagonist of The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924) contemplates the first X-ray images of the interior of his body. Thomas Mann thus defines, in little more than two pages, the ultimate, existential terms of a problem that haunts us today with a renewed sense of urgency: the problem of transparency. What happens to things when we illuminate their insides? What becomes of a man once the concreteness of his skeleton comes to the forefront? Does the “will to truth” that animates this regime of total visibility, its politics and its apparatus, lead only to such a reduction to bone? The essentialization of the inhuman – that is the adventure Hans Castorp embarks on once he discovers that life is but the envelope of death.

A century later, the universe of the techniques of transparency has greatly expanded beyond the medical office. Everything that exists and constitutes a “fact” can – and under certain political, legal or security imperatives, must – become visible. In this sense, however exhausted Foucault’s genealogical projects may be in some regards, we continue to inhabit the world of glass walls that was described to us in Surveillance and Punishment (1975): “In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them”. Transparency affirms itself, therefore, as an inalienable condition of the modern exercise of power. Of course, the moral and sensible life of human communities does not escape these mutations unscathed. For instance, the practice of bringing to the public arena “private, separated, lowly” matters no longer implies necessarily any gesture of subversive intents, such as the kind of revolutionary nakedness that Peter Sloterdijk (1983) identified as an integral part of the tradition of kynismós taken up by the bourgeois civilization. In direct opposition to the impersonal voyeurism of online pornography, today, the shameless figure of Diogenes, the man who employed insolent methods to tell the truth, seems to point us towards a different, heroic notion of “transparency”.

We owe philosopher Byung-Chul Han a thorough study on this subject: The Transparency Society (2012). Opening with a symptomatic quote from Peter Handke – “I live off what the others don't know about me” –, Han’s book traces a progressive disarticulation of negativity in favor of positivity in the social world, which results in the replacement of a society that can unravel the differences and distances between the I and the Other by an “inferno of the Same”, a society without gaps and empty spaces. Not content with simply condemning our post-privacy culture, Han investigates the ontological consequences of the current regime of transparency, that he defines as a “systemic coercion that involves all social processes and forces them to a profound change”. This transparent mode of being is shown to be incompatible with the incommensurability of an Event, the delay of meaning, the non-coincidence of alterity. It is easy to see how “the general verdict of the positive society” appears to be synthetized by the omnipresent Facebook “Like” button.

How can we envision the future of communication under such demands of transparency? Firstly, according to Byung-Chul Han, we witness a tendency towards hypercommunication, an aversion to secrecy and the unsaid. This was always a disposition privileged by cybernetics, as described in the writings of the anarchist collective Tiqqun (2001). There, one could already find a scathing critique of the ideology of direct democracy, supposedly “realized” through new electronic media. The citizens, now invited to “fully participate” in public matters, were actually consenting their integration in circuits of information, becoming hyper-communicative subjects devoid of substance: “each person was to become a fleshless envelope, the best possible conductor of social communication, the locus of an infinite feedback loop which is made to have no nodes.” The prosumer galaxy of Web 2.0 was thus anticipated and denounced in its euphemistic premises. But a more profound transformation seems, in any case, irreversible: the rise of “technological language”, famously theorized by Heidegger (1962). With the advent of cybernetics, language is efficiently converted to a transparent process of transmission of univocal signs, capable of producing calculated effects. To approach this informational turn, communication studies must now situate their object beyond anthropological understandings of behavior and subjectivity.

With this thematic issue, we wish to revisit these questions and many others regarding the problem of transparency in communication. The subject gained a renewed pertinence in the context of a global pandemic, with the development of new laws, techniques, and practices of visibility which, as we know, have raised multiple concerns. Two polemical examples: that of Agamben, who notoriously opposed the migration of academic work to digital platforms – for it constitutes another triumph of the “dictatorship of telematics”, he claims –, and the diametrically opposite position of Benjamin Bratton, who sees in the philosophical response to the pandemic an opportunity to conceive the “positive biopolitics” of a truly “planetary” society. It is with the purpose of welcoming such diverse contributions that we invite researchers to submit papers that deal with, but are not limited to, the following topics:

- The significance of the concept of “transparency” for Communication Studies

- Transparent interfaces and the mediation of immediacy

- Security policies, issues of privacy and Big Data society

- The (re)definition of private and public spheres of communication

- Autofiction and metafiction in literature

- Identity, alterity and the presentation of self in social media

- Semiotics of visibility and invisibility

- Corporate and political secrecy

- Modulatory power: Deleuzian studies on “control societies”

- Participatory democracy

- New media and the process of individuation

- The link between language, discourse and truth

- The emergence of new laws, techniques, and practices of visibility in the context of a global pandemic (COVID-19)

The articles can be written in English, French, or Portuguese. They must comply with the journal’s submission guidelines and will be evaluated by a double-blind peer review. All contributions must be sent through the OJS platform until February 28th, 2022, or further inquiries, contact the editors Maria Lucília Marcos (mlms@fcsh.unl.pt) and/or Diogo Ferreira (diogocstferreira@gmail.com).

Guidelines for submission and instructions for authors:

http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/rcl/index.php/rcl/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions