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This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the critique of contemporary ideology, offering an innovative genealogy of one of its most fundamental discursive manoeuvres: the ideological effacement of mediation. Providing a comprehensive historical revision of media (from the Greeks to the Internet), this book identifies several critical junctures at which the tension between visibility and invisibility has overlapped with conceptions of neutrality-a tension best incarnated in today's use of the word transparency. Then, it traces this term's evolving semantic constellation through a variety of intellectual discourses, exposing it as a key operator in the revaluation of ideals, sensibilities, and modalities of perception that lie at the core of our contemporary attention-based economy.
List of contents
1 Introduction: Is the World Turning More Transparent?.- 2 Defining Transparency.- 3 Ideology, Hegemony, Neoliberalism, and Critique.- 4 Discourse, Concepts, and Critique: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations.- 5 A Society of Transparency, an Economy of Attention.- 6 The Death and Resurrection of Transparency.- 7 Heidegger and Transparency: Between Truth and Attention.- 8 Transparency as Aesthetic Fetish: Planar Intensifications at the Bauhaus.- 9 Conclusion: Towards a Semantic Topology.
About the author
Jorge I. Valdovinos is Adjunct Professor for Media and Communications and holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Sydney, Australia
