The Transparency Society by Han Byung-Chul

​The transparency society is, as is often the case in Han’s other books, a society of positivity—it is a society of the inferno of the same that does not admit alterity and the Other. Transparency and truth are not identical; truth is a negative force that identifies the false, while the positivity of transparency expresses itself as hyperinformation and hypercommunication.
 
The transparency society is a society of exhibition, where objects are marked by their exhibition value (instead of use value or exchange value) instead of value inherent in the object itself. Such transparency is not “a medium of the beautiful” (p. 21), instead, Han remarks that it is pornographic. It is negativity that creates beauty and separates the erotic from the pornographic. Han explores this with Barthes’ concept of studium and punctum: studium concerns the “extended field of information” (p. 26), while punctum is a rupture in information, causing injury. Studium, like the pornographic, is smooth and unary, while punctum, like the erotic, is not transparent and is characterized by interruptions.
 
The transparency society is a society of evidence, which is hostile to play and pleasure. Ambivalence and a lack of information creates erotic tension, instead of perfect information. For Han, “transparency represents a condition of symmetry” (p. 18), which denies the generativity of power asymmetries for play and pleasure.
 
The transparency and smoothness of the society of positivity, characterized by hyperinformation, hyperactivity, and hypercommunication, leads to hyperacceleration, which is not directed at a goal, but is “pure movement” that is “obscene” because “it accelerates just for its own sake” (p. 29). Han contrasts hyperacceleration to narrative, to rituals, to processions, and ceremonies, which contain a rhythm and temporality that is un-accelerable and are a process of transition from here to there (i.e., a goal). The result of the society of transparency is a the “scattering and dissociation of temporality” and the loss of the “fragrance of time” (p. 32).
 
Subjects in the transparency society are under an injunction to authenticity, to lay the soul bare; under the ideology of intimacy, “social relations prove more real, genuine, credible, and authentic the more closely they approach the inner psychic needs of individuals” (p. 35). The ideology of intimacy is diffused and broadcasted in social media and the internet, where it dismantles the public sphere and turns it into an exhibition space. This is in contrast to the world of the eighteenth century, where the “public sphere resembled a stage” (p. 34) and, instead of intimacy, there was theatrical distance. Instead of exhibition, the public sphere was a stage for representation (“whereas the market is a site of exhibition”). Persons in the public sphere wore masks, creating distance, and allowing for play and ritual, whereas the society of intimacy is “a society of confession, laying bare, and the pornographic lack of distance” (p. 36).
 
Han examines the repercussions of the society of intimacy through Rousseau’s Confessions; for Han, Rousseau shows that the “morality of total transparency necessarily switches to tyranny” and becomes a “society of total control and surveillance” (p. 44). While Rousseau wrote about the sincerity of the heart, Han remarks that the goal of digital society is “not moral purification of the heart, but maximal profit, maximal attention” (p. 44).
 
This naturally leads Han to a discussion Bentham’s panopticon, characteristic of the disciplinary society. Contemporary transparency society is illuminated by an aperspective digital panopticon, where subjects are unaware of being under surveillance; instead of repression, there is exhibition and a liberating achievement society (see The Burnout Society). The freedom of the achievement subject to exploit itself is the basis of a society of control: “utter auto-illumination functions more efficiently than allo-illumination because it is attended by the sensation of freedom” (p. 48). As the transparency society expands and as the panopticon becomes total, individuals give themselves voluntarily to the form of control experienced as freedom.
 

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