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Transparency is one of the buzzwords of today’s political and organizational discourse. At heart an aesthetics of the becoming-visible, transparency is at once an injunction to communicate, as well as a moral imperative. It posits itself as the necessary but also sufficient condition of a number of mediatic and political virtues that are ardently pursued but rarely questioned. This special issue explores the notion of transparency using the tools of the Humanities, following three axes of critical inquiry. The first considers transparency as an epistemic scenography, a carefully crafted mise-en-scène that is supposed to guide us to the truth. The second considers transparency as a rhetorical device, aimed at effectively settling controversies, and establishing consensus. The third considers transparency as a media affordance, by which technical devices cultivate the illusion of a complete grasp of their representational objects and the signifying dispositifs involved. These three axes – transparency as truth, settler of controversies, and media affordance – are in practice regularly combined, so we invite submissions that explore overlaps between the three lines of inquiry, and shed light on the ways transparency shapes multiple relationships to knowledge.

Focus Editors: Jeremy Hamers, Ingrid Mayeur, François Provenzano, Élise Schürgers, and Jan Teurlings

Jeremy Hamers, Ingrid Mayeur, François Provenzano, Elise Schürgers, and Jan Teurlings

Transparency: An Introduction

Markus Stauff

Contested Transparency: Media Escalation and Sports’ Spaces of Visibility

Jan Teurlings

Platform Transparency as Ways of Knowing the Audience: Data Analytics on YouTube

Artur de Matos Alves

The Emergence of an Apparatus of Transparency in Online Platforms (2010–2023)

Alexandre Goderniaux

The Truth Behind the Mask: Unveiling King Henry III and False Catholics Through Polemic Printed Texts (France, 1589)

Susan Hegeman

Looking through a Glass Onion: Transparency and Digital Media in the COVID Era

Gabriel Matthews

The Figure of the Mad: Transparency in Cole’s Open City and Fosse’s The Other Name

Toni Pape

The Aesthetics of Stealth: Imperceptibility as Aesthetic Practice and Rhetoric Strategy

François Provenzanoy

Below Transparency: What Betting Can Teach Us About Rationality

Jeremy Hamers

Beyond the Call for Transparency: YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm Reconsidered

Eyal Amiran

Gramsci after Proust: Futurity and Transformation in the Early Letters

Henry A. Giroux

Student Protests, Gaza and the New McCarthyism

Joseph Albernaz

Syncopations of Singularity: Between Derrida and Nancy

Gang Zhou

Shen Congwen, Faulkner, and a Hong Kong Story

Steyn Bergs

In Visibility: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Seeing Infrastructure

Ian Tan

The Pressure of Poetic Form: Global Image and the Limits of Synchronicity in Peter Sloterdijk’s and A. R. Ammons’s “Spheres”

Sajjad Gheytasi and Ali Salami

Memories of War: A Critical Examination of Historical Revisionism in The Sympathizer

David Huntington Seamans

Form’s Potential Face: Rethinking Authorship and Textual Agency

Jonathan Arac

Fredric Jameson: Way Back When

Christopher Breu

Jameson the Bricoleur? Or the Strange Systematicity of the Dialectic

Maria Elisa Cevasco

Criticism: A Political Issue

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

The Perpetual Impossibility of Theory: A Comment on Jameson’s Legacy

Simon During

Fredric Jameson’s Metaphysics of History

Peter Hitchcock

The Impossible Totality

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson

The Copy Game

Daniel T. O’Hara

On the Möbius Strip of Critical Revisionism with Fredric Jameson

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Hearing Our Contemporaries: Jameson’s Years of Theory and Criticism

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

We Are All Plagiarists: On the Politics of Academic Dishonesty

Peter Hitchcock

The Right to Copy

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson

The Copy Game

Sophia A. McClennen

Steal This Idea

Paul Allen Miller

Plagiarism: Who Owns My Language?

Nicole Simek

Plagiarism and the Succulence of Detection

Brian O’Keeffe

Lydia Goehr’s Red Book

Jeffrey J. Williams

Oil and Culture: An Interview with Imre Szeman

Jeffrey J. Williams

The Evolution of Academic Freedom: An Interview with John K. Wilson