Transparency An Introduction

This article ties together several themes that come out of the contributions to the focus: First, transparency as an ethical imperative, easily picked up by institutions and organizations but molded toward their own political, social and commercial strategies; second, transparency as inseparable from the forms of governmentality that deploy it, specifically so during the neoliberal era; third, the ideal (or promise) of transparency as embedded in media devices and their technical, semiotic, and rhetorical forms. The last section considers the impossibility and undesirability of achieving transparency and opens up avenues for reflection on the productive role of opacity.