Transparency and Critical Theory: The Becoming-Transparent of Ideology

by Jorge I. Valdovinos

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030955489
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	03/02/2022
Edition description:	1st ed. 2022
Pages:	422
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

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

Table 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.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Just about everyone affirms the importance of transparency, but you will hesitate about unthinkingly doing so after reading this book. Jorge Valdovinos moves between fields and disciplines with remarkable fluency to illuminate the ideological implications of transparency talk. If this is what post-disciplinary communication and media theory looks like, give me more. A brilliant piece of critical scholarship”

—Sean Phelan, Massey University, NZ