The Fly on a Pane of Glass: Paradoxes of Transparency

Abstract

Based on Nietzsche’s picture of the ‘fly on a pane of glass’, which refers to futile attempts to penetrate something that one only can see through, the chapter explores the origins of transparency as a scholarly term having its roots in the theology of scholasticism. As the author demonstrates, the idea of transparency implies a dream of new utopian conditions of individual and social visibility recurring also in current debates on mass surveillance, on the end of privacy as well as in demands for perfect clarity in all political, economic and public affairs. The chapter concludes that transparency claims and demands turn out to be an ideology: They contain an empty promise because achieving full transparency is not possible.