Transparency is seen as a universal remedy for many ills, but it often contributes to perpetuating them. Transparency is the “pharmakon” (considered both a remedy and a poison) of our time, even if it is almost never seen as such. The fact that transparency is now a consensus factor across the political spectrum speaks volumes about the anxieties of an era that considers itself post-ideological. It is significant that the media and technical colonization of our experiential space is leading, conversely, to an ever-increasing desire for immediacy.

As this research project demonstrates, the ideal of transparency goes hand in hand with a new social conformism that can also be characterized as a terror of authenticity. Faced with self-asserted neutrality towards ideology, the project will examine what appears to be, in fact, an ideology of neutrality and its effects, both at the collective and institutional level and at the individual level.