The Politics of Transparency

Abstract

This article investigates society’s increasing obsession with transparency through the medium of photography and WikiLeaks. It suggests that Julian Assange’s fixation on exposure as a means to reveal the truth about government systems is reflective of the processes of an ideology of publicity that also works in a society governed through the processes of the spectacle. In this investigation, Retort’s work, claiming that the spectacle hides the violence inherent in neoliberal militarism, is employed to support the ways in which WikiLeaks has become a spectacle in and of itself through its implication in processes of capitalism and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The paper also investigates the ways in which the increased desire for transparency has accorded itself with the right to visibility, which is ultimately linked to a desire for truth. Judith Butler’s theory of framing is explored to highlight the ways in which information cannot always be entirely contained by the frame (of reality and photography). Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography also becomes a departure point for elucidating the problematic tendency for those who attempt to reveal what is hidden to become too invested in the potentiality for truth in what is intentionally excluded from the field of visibility.