Contested Transparencies, Social Movements And The Public Sphere: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives 3030239489, 9783030239480, 3030239497, 9783030239497

Table of contents :
Series Editors’ Preface......Page 6
Contents......Page 11
Notes on Contributors......Page 13
The Many Uses of the Concept of Transparency......Page 17
The Ambivalences of Transparency in the Literature on Transparency......Page 19
The Origins and Development of the Idea of Transparency in the Realm of the Political......Page 24
Conflict, Ideology and Social Movements......Page 30
Part I Transparency and Ideology: Semantic and Historical Aspects......Page 49
Chapter 2 Transparency’s Trap: Problems of an Unquestioned Norm......Page 50
Demands for Transparency......Page 52
Transparency’s Excess......Page 58
Transparent Subjects......Page 61
Chapter 3 The Fly on a Pane of Glass: Paradoxes of Transparency......Page 70
Chapter 4 Literature, Transparency, Ideology: Functions of Literature in Negotiating Transparency......Page 83
Literature and (In-)Transparency......Page 85
Literature and “Knowledge”......Page 86
Literature as a Medium of Confession and Anthropological (Self-)Reflection......Page 92
Metafiction and Other Strategies of Creating Transparency About the Process of Literary Production......Page 94
Further Questions......Page 100
Part II Transparency and the Public Sphere......Page 109
Chapter 5 Communication Among Strangers: Concepts of the Public Sphere in American Newspapers of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries......Page 110
The Significance of Newspapers for the Development of the Public......Page 111
The Colonial Press......Page 114
The Politicization of the Press in the Era of the American Revolution......Page 118
The Formation of Newspapers as Mass Media in the Early Republic......Page 122
Introduction......Page 132
Media Transparency: Normative Foundations and Practical Instruments......Page 135
Transparency in Media and Communication Studies......Page 137
Transparency Across Journalism Cultures: Research Results......Page 141
Transparency and Trust—A Contested Liaison......Page 143
Media Transparency from an Economic Perspective......Page 146
The Journalistic Value of Transparency—And Its Limitations......Page 148
Media Transparency in Practice: Examples......Page 149
Conclusion: Towards a More Interdisciplinary Model of Media Transparency......Page 150
Part III Transparency, State and Surveillance......Page 163
Chapter 7 Intelligence, Mistrust and Transparency: A Case Study of the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution......Page 164
The Culture of Mistrust Within the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution......Page 166
Public Mistrust of the BfV......Page 170
Radicalization Loops and Managing Mistrust......Page 174
Conclusion......Page 177
Introduction......Page 183
Transparency, Threat Perception and the Production of (Perceived) Security Knowledge......Page 185
Counter-Surveillance, Media Scandalization and Self-transparentization......Page 191
Autobiographical Self-transparentization and the Struggle for Rehabilitation......Page 196
Conclusion......Page 200
Part IV Transparency Conflicts and Social Movements......Page 207
Chapter 9 Promises of Transparency, Promises of Participation: On the Ambivalent Rhetoric of the Occupy-Movement......Page 208
Introduction......Page 220
Transparency Conflicts and the Political Role of Corporations......Page 222
Corporate Transparency Between Political Contestation, Discursive Power of MNCs and Marketization......Page 225
1. Collecting Information......Page 228
2. Translating Knowledge into the Corporate Form......Page 230
3. Transferring Knowledge into Policy Decisions......Page 232
4. Information as an Object of Private Transnational Legitimacy Politics......Page 234
Conclusion......Page 235
Chapter 11 The Role of Transparency in Urban Planning Processes......Page 242
Transparency in Planning Processes and Implementation......Page 243
Transparency as a Reaction to Conflicts and Protests Against Urban Planning......Page 244
Urban Governance, Participation and Protest as Enforcers of Transparency......Page 246
The Influence of Digitalization on the Transparency of Planning Processes......Page 249
Informality and Transparency......Page 251
Embedding Transparency in Planning Procedures......Page 253
Conclusion: Transparency as a Precondition for Openness......Page 255
Index......Page 261

Citation preview

Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives

Edited by Stefan Berger Dimitrij Owetschkin

Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements Series Editors Stefan Berger Institute for Social Movements Ruhr University Bochum Bochum, Germany Holger Nehring Contemporary European History University of Stirling Stirling, UK

Around the world, social movements have become legitimate, yet contested, actors in local, national and global politics and civil society, yet we still know relatively little about their longer histories and the trajectories of their development. This series seeks to promote innovative historical research on the history of social movements in the modern period since around 1750. We bring together conceptually-informed studies that analyse labour movements, new social movements and other forms of protest from early modernity to the present. We conceive of ‘social movements’ in the broadest possible sense, encompassing social formations that lie between formal organisations and mere protest events. We also offer a home for studies that systematically explore the political, social, economic and cultural conditions in which social movements can emerge. We are especially interested in transnational and global perspectives on the history of social movements, and in studies that engage critically and creatively with political, social and sociological theories in order to make historically grounded arguments about social movements. This new series seeks to offer innovative historical work on social movements, while also helping to historicise the concept of ‘social movement’. It hopes to revitalise the conversation between h ­ istorians and historical sociologists in analysing what Charles Tilly has called the ‘dynamics of contention’. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14580

Stefan Berger · Dimitrij Owetschkin Editors

Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives

Editors Stefan Berger Institute for Social Movements Ruhr University Bochum Bochum, Germany

Dimitrij Owetschkin Institute for Social Movements Ruhr University Bochum Bochum, Germany

Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements ISBN 978-3-030-23948-0 ISBN 978-3-030-23949-7  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23949-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Elizabeth Weatherfield/2mee This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editors’ Preface

Around the world, social movements have become legitimate, yet contested, actors in local, national and global politics and civil society, yet we still know relatively little about their longer histories and the trajectories of their development. Our series reacts to what can be described as a recent boom in the history of social movements. We can observe a development from the crisis of labour history in the 1980s to the boom in research on social movements in the 2000s. The rise of historical interests in the development of civil society and the role of strong civil societies as well as non-governmental organisations in stabilising democratically constituted polities has strengthened the interest in social movements as a constituent element of civil societies. In different parts of the world, social movements continue to have a strong influence on contemporary politics. In Latin America, trade unions, labour parties and various left-of-centre civil society organisations have succeeded in supporting left-of-centre governments. In Europe, peace movements, ecological movements and alliances intent on campaigning against poverty and racial discrimination and discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual orientation have been able to set important political agendas for decades. In other parts of the world, including Africa, India and South East Asia, social movements have played a significant role in various forms of community building and community politics. The contemporary political relevance of social movements has undoubtedly contributed to a growing historical interest in the topic. v

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Contemporary historians are not only beginning to historicise these relatively recent political developments; they are also trying to relate them to a longer history of social movements, including traditional labour organisations, such as working-class parties and trade unions. In the longue durée, we recognise that social movements are by no means a recent phenomenon and are not even an exclusively modern phenomenon, although we realise that the onset of modernity emanating from Europe and North America across the wider world from the eighteenth century onwards marks an important departure point for the development of civil societies and social movements. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the dominance of national history over all other forms of history writing led to a thorough nationalisation of the historical sciences. Hence social movements have been examined traditionally within the framework of the nation state. Only during the last two decades have historians begun to question the validity of such methodological nationalism and to explore the development of social movements in comparative, connective and transnational perspective taking into account processes of transfer, reception and adaptation. While our book series does not preclude work that is still being carried out within national frameworks (for, clearly, there is a place for such studies, given the historical importance of the nation state in history), it hopes to encourage comparative and transnational histories on social movements. At the same time as historians have begun to research the history of those movements, a range of social theorists, from Jürgen Habermas to Pierre Bourdieu and from Slavoj Žižek to Alain Badiou as well as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to Miguel Abensour, to name but a few, have attempted to provide philosophical-cum-theoretical frameworks in which to place and contextualise the development of social movements. History has arguably been the most empirical of all the social and human sciences, but it will be necessary for historians to explore further to what extent these social theories can be helpful in guiding and framing the empirical work of the historian in making sense of the historical development of social movements. Hence the current series is also hoping to make a contribution to the ongoing dialogue between social theory and the history of social movements. This series seeks to promote innovative historical research on the history of social movements in the modern period since around 1750. We bring together conceptually informed studies that analyse labour

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE  

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movements, new social movements and other forms of protest from early modernity to the present. With this series, we seek to revive, within the context of historiographical developments since the 1970s, a conversation between historians on the one hand and sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists on the other. Unlike most of the concepts and theories developed by social scientists, we do not see social movements as directly linked, a priori, to processes of social and cultural change and therefore do not adhere to a view that distinguishes between old (labour) and new (middle-class) social movements. Instead, we want to establish the concept ‘social movement’ as a heuristic device that allows historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to investigate social and political protests in novel settings. Our aim is to historicise notions of social and political activism in order to highlight different notions of political and social protest on both left and right. Hence, we conceive of ‘social movements’ in the broadest possible sense, encompassing social formations that lie between formal organisations and mere protest events. But we also include processes of social and cultural change more generally in our understanding of social movements: this goes back to nineteenth-century understandings of ‘social movement’ as processes of social and cultural change more generally. We also offer a home for studies that systematically explore the political, social, economic and cultural conditions in which social movements can emerge. We are especially interested in transnational and global perspectives on the history of social movements, and in studies that engage critically and creatively with political, social and sociological theories in order to make historically grounded arguments about social movements. In short, this series seeks to offer innovative historical work on social movements, while also helping to historicise the concept of ‘social movement’. It also hopes to revitalise the conversation between historians and historical sociologists in analysing what Charles Tilly has called the ‘dynamics of contention’. Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere, edited by Stefan Berger, one of the editors of our series, and Dimitrij Owetschkin is the most recent addition to our series. Its purpose is to provide a historical critique of the concept ‘transparency’. This concept has come to dominate most areas of public policy in the early twenty-first century. References to it can be found in theories of democracy and popular participation, in organisational sociology and economics as well as in

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the manifold ways in which governments, corporations, universities and other social and economic organisations communicate with their citizens, users or customers. In this context, transparency is often taken as a genuinely positive term, denoting as were openness, light and therefore enlightenment. Yet as many scholars of modern governmentality have pointed out, calls for transparency have also become tools of power and rule. We are so far lacking critical scholarship that historicises these developments of the relationship between social actors and the state in the making of modern government, specifically with regard to demands for more transparency. The field has been dominated by sociologists and political scientists who have used historical facts as a tool to develop theories rather than to contextualise the ways in which concepts of transparency have developed over time and have themselves been subject to historical change. Often, scholars using the concept have also followed explicit or implicit normative agendas. The editors’ innovative approach is to bring together historians, sociologists and political scientists working on the ways governments have sought to create and prevent transparency as well as how social movements have contested this relationship. The concept of ‘transparency’ engages one of the fundamental questions of historical scholarship in modernity: the relationship between states and citizens with regard to the public sphere. This perspective engages social movement scholarship in two significant ways. First, superficially, it seems that social movements are entirely in line with the agenda of creating ‘transparency’, telling truth to power and thus challenging governmental power. Second, social movements often bring issues that are normally hidden and secret into the public domain and thus open these topics up for political discussions. The contributions in this volume, ranging from the early modern period to the contemporary world, complicate this picture, however. They explore the ideological and semantic histories of the concept ‘transparency’, trace its complex relationship to the public sphere, examine the question of transparency and state surveillance and provide snapshots into conflicts over transparency. In doing so, they engage productively with historical semantics as well as approaches to the theory and history of knowledge. Thus, this volume emphasises the constantly contested nature of debates about transparency. It highlights that the enlightenment transparency promises has followed its own dialectic.

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This dialectic relationship also highlights that the link between the development of democracy and social movements has been far from straightforward. The form of ‘social movement’ and the objective of ‘transparency’ are not themselves sufficient to lead to a more inclusive, pluralistic, engaged and engaging society. Bochum, Germany Stirling, UK

Stefan Berger Holger Nehring

Contents

1

Contested Transparencies: An Introduction 1 Dimitrij Owetschkin and Stefan Berger

Part I Transparency and Ideology: Semantic and Historical Aspects 2

Transparency’s Trap: Problems of an Unquestioned Norm 35 Frieder Vogelmann

3

The Fly on a Pane of Glass: Paradoxes of Transparency 55 Manfred Schneider

4

Literature, Transparency, Ideology: Functions of Literature in Negotiating Transparency 69 Jens Martin Gurr

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Part II  Transparency and the Public Sphere 5

Communication Among Strangers: Concepts of the Public Sphere in American Newspapers of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries 97 Friedrich Jaeger

6

Journalism and Transparency: A Mass Communications Perspective 119 Susanne Fengler and Dominik Speck

Part III  Transparency, State and Surveillance 7

Intelligence, Mistrust and Transparency: A Case Study of the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution 153 Constantin Goschler

8

The ‘Traube Affair’: Transparency as a Legitimation and Action Strategy Between Security, Surveillance and Privacy 173 Christopher Kirchberg and Marcel Schmeer

Part IV  Transparency Conflicts and Social Movements 9

Promises of Transparency, Promises of Participation: On the Ambivalent Rhetoric of the Occupy-Movement 199 Martin Butler

10 The Dual Nature of Transparency: Corporatization and Democratization of Global Production Networks 211 Sabrina Zajak and Christian Scheper 11 The Role of Transparency in Urban Planning Processes 233 Jan Polívka and Christa Reicher Index 253

Notes on Contributors

Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He is also Executive Chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr and an Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK. His most recent publications include Marxist Historical Cultures and Social Movements During the Cold War. Case Studies from Germany, Italy and Other Western European States, edited with Christoph Cornelissen (2019), and an edited volume The Engaged Historian. Perspectives on the Intersections of Politics, Activism and the Historical Profession (2019). Martin Butler is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Oldenburg. His research areas include popular culture, particularly the history of political music as well as forms and figures of cultural mobility. His publications include Voices of the Down and Out: The Dust Bowl Migration and the Great Depression in the Songs of Woody Guthrie (2007), the co-edited volumes Sound Fabrics: Studies on the Intermedial and Institutional Dimensions of Popular Music (2009) and Precarious Alliances: Cultures of Participation in Print and Other Media (2015) as well as a co-edited special issue of Popular Music and Society (2015). Susanne Fengler is Professor of International Journalism and Director of the Erich Brost Institute for International Journalism at TU Dortmund University, Germany. She is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Austrian national public service broadcaster ORF. xiii

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Her research interests include issues of international journalism, media accountability and transparency, media and migration, economic theory of journalism and international media assistance. Constantin Goschler is Professor of Contemporary History and Dean of the Faculty of History at Ruhr University Bochum. His numerous books include Robbery and Restitution. The Conflict Over Jewish Property in Europe, edited with Martin Dean and Philipp Ther (2007), Schuld und Schulden. Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung für NS-Verfolgte seit 1945, (2nd edition 2008) and „Keine neue Gestapo“. Das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und die NS-Vergangenheit, with Michael Wala (2015). Jens Martin Gurr  has been Chair of British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen since 2007. His research interests include urban studies (urban literature, theories/ methods of interdisciplinary urban research, narrative models of urban complexity, scripts and travelling concepts in urban development), contemporary Anglophone fiction, and seventeenth- to nineteenth-century British literature. He is one of the founders and speakers of the competence field ‘Metropolitan Research’ of the University Alliance Ruhr and is President of the German Society for English Romanticism. Friedrich Jaeger  is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen (KWI). Up to 2017 he was Professor for Modern History at the University of Witten/Herdecke. He is Executive Editor of the Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit (2005–2012, English edition: Encyclopedia of Early Modern History, since 2016 to be published in 16 volumes). He published among others Amerikanischer Liberalismus und zivile Gesellschaft. Perspektiven sozialer Reform zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (2001) and edited together with Wolfgang Knöbl and Ute Schneider the Handbuch der Moderneforschung (2015). Christopher Kirchberg studied History and Social Sciences at Ruhr University in Bochum and University François Rabelais in Tours, France. He received his Master’s degree from Ruhr University where he has been working as a teaching and research assistant since 2016. Furthermore, he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Chair of Contemporary History in Bochum. Currently he is conducting a research project on Germany’s first water management association, the Emschergenossenschaft. His research interests include Intelligence History, history of National Socialism, history of (new) social movements and history of sports/soccer.

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Dimitrij Owetschkin is Permanent Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum. Previously, he was Research Associate and Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Movements and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen (KWI). His recent publications deal with the history of trade unions and social movements as well as religious and church history after the Second World War. Jan Polívka is Senior Researcher and head of Department for Spatial Planning and Urban Design at the ILS (Research Institute for Regional and Urban Development, Dortmund) as well as Professor for Sustainable Housing Development at the Faculty of Architecture, RWTH Aachen University, and associate at RHA REICHER HAASE ASSOCIATES GmbH. He conducts research and consulting in adaptivity and resilience of urban structures, housing (re)development, urban design quality and land use management. Christa Reicher is Professor and head of the Chair of Urban Design and the Institute for Urban Design and European Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture, RWTH Aachen University. From 2002 to 2018 she was Professor and Head of the Department of Urban Design and Urban Land Use Planning at the Faculty of Spatial Planning at TU Dortmund University. She is founder and director of RHA REICHER HAASE ASSOCIATES GmbH which is located in Aachen, Dortmund and Vianden (Luxembourg). Her book Städtebauliches Entwerfen (2012, 5th edition 2017) is translated into different languages. She conducts research and design strategies at different scale levels. Christian Scheper  is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Development and Peace, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. His research focuses on the politics of transnational governance, human rights, multinational corporations and global production networks. He holds an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Exeter, UK, and a doctorate in Political Science from the University of Kassel, Germany. Marcel Schmeer is a Ph.D. candidate in contemporary German history at Ruhr University Bochum where he is also working as a teaching and research assistant. He received his Master’s degree in History and Political Science from Ruhr University and studied also at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He spent 2019 as a visiting Ph.D. scholar at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York

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University, USA. His research focuses on the history of the West German police force and its relation to society. His further research interests include Intelligence and Security History as well as Organizational History. Manfred Schneider is Professor Emeritus of German literature, Aesthetics and Media at Ruhr University Bochum. He received his Ph.D. in 1971 and his habilitation in 1979 at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg. He was Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Essen, Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. His last books include Das Attentat. Kritik der paranoischen Vernunft (2010), Transparenztraum. Literatur, Politik, Medien und das Unmögliche (2013) and Medienrevolutionen. Die Reformation im 16. Jahrhundert und die Aufstände in den arabischen Ländern 2010/2011 (2014). Dominik Speck  is Research Associate at the Institute of Journalism and the Erich Brost Institute for International Journalism at TU Dortmund University, Germany. His research interests include international journalism, media transparency and accountability, media politics, public service media and political communication. He also works as a freelance journalist reporting on the media sector, e.g. for the German trade journal epd medien. Frieder Vogelmann is Visiting Professor for Critical Social Theory at the Goethe University Frankfurt. His most recent book is The Spell of Responsibility: Labor, Criminality, Philosophy (2017) on the history of responsibility. His research focuses on the concept of responsibility, political epistemology, the idea of critique in critical theory and Michel Foucault. Sabrina Zajak  is Professor for Globalization Conflicts, Social Movements and Labour at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum. Currently she leads the department Consent and Conflict at the German Center for Integration and Migration Research in Berlin. Her research focuses on issues of transnational movements and activism, trade unions and NGOs, globalisation, governance and global supply chains and as well as current struggles for social inclusion in Germany. She is a founding member of the Institute for Protest and Social Movement Research in Berlin.

CHAPTER 1

Contested Transparencies: An Introduction Dimitrij Owetschkin and Stefan Berger

The Many Uses of the Concept of Transparency Transparency belongs to those terms, concepts and ideas that have been all-present and powerful in contemporary public debates. In scientific discourse, across many disciplines, it appears to be a “key concept of the present”,1 that often acquires a “quasi-religious significance” and that is “mystic in essence”.2 Transparency appears alternatively as “one of the fundamentally distinctive traits of contemporary Western c­ulture”,3 or “defining principle of contemporary society”, or as “a takenfor-granted ideal and explanation of how society and its organizations must function”.4 This ubiquitous term that seems to have been referenced exponentially in recent years is in danger of being “overused” and “sometimes misused”.5 Demands for greater transparency can be found in politics, D. Owetschkin (*) · S. Berger  Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany e-mail: [email protected] S. Berger e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 S. Berger and D. Owetschkin (eds.), Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23949-7_1

1

2  D. OWETSCHKIN AND S. BERGER

administration, economy, the finance sector, in education, in the health service, in the sciences, in the churches and in sports. A range of social movements and their media have been in the forefront of such demands, although they have also been mainstreamed for many years now. Transparency International is arguably the most well-known NGO that has been founded with the explicit aim of pushing for more transparency at all levels of society. By now transparency is widely regarded as solution to a whole range of political, social, economic and cultural problems. In particular it is often seen as a cure-all against the abuse of political and economic power, including corruption, finance scandals, and company crises. It is quite generally perceived as “the vanguard of the open society”.6 At the same time, however, those worried about increasing social control and surveillance, power concentration in the hand of the few, and an erosion of democracy, trust, social cohesion, freedom and individuality have warned against the dangers of an all-transparent society, in which the individual would have no privacy left.7 While organizations and institutions, including the state, have to be made transparent in order to be democratically accountable, the individual has to be protected against being made transparent as a means of social control. Overall then, the concept of transparency is characterized by much ambiguity and complexity. Its contours are often opaque—it can be used in different contexts with diverse, even contradictory political intentions and meanings. And it can be applied to entirely different subjects and institutions. As “travelling keyword”8 and “magic concept”9 transparency is, at one and the same time, an expectation, a demand, a prescription, a value, a norm, an attitude, a perception and a principle. It can be applied to structures, functional procedures, achievements and the impact of organizations, actions and their consequences, but it can also be related to the inner self of the individual, relationships between human beings and the process of human cognition. It can also be directed towards the past: being transparent vis-à-vis the past can be a means of coming to terms with that past, of working through a problematic past, especially where it involves dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, wars and genocides.10 The term transparency tends to be used in strongly normative ways and is associated most frequently with information access, openness, disclosure and accountability, but also with clarity, predictability, fairness, public scrutiny or participation. Its opposites are most frequently “secrecy” and “concealment”.11 Moreover, the term has many other

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connotations,12 some of them—related to literary studies—are ­discussed by Jens Gurr in this volume (Chapter 4). The semantic contexts of its usage play an important role for the diverse meanings it can take. Relational concepts that are either complementary or contrasting determine its normative direction. Such diverse conceptual fields have given transparency very different meanings in diverse contextual debates, for example regarding openness and freedom, trust and acceptance, control and security or secrecy and privacy. In each of these contexts it is understood and interpreted differently. Hence, as a concept transparency appears to be a kind of Wittgensteinian “family resemblance concept”, where the manifold individual usages cannot be brought together under one umbrella concept, so that it can only be explored in its relations and overlaps with a whole bundle of other concepts with which it interacts.13 In a similar way transparency becomes a “floating signifier”, forever contested, bound to specific historical contexts and associated with a range of distinct political projects.14 Yet aside from its discursive opaqueness and its tendency to be part and parcel of “language games”,15 the concept of transparency is also related to practices that develop over time and are related to different societal contexts and actors. The subsequent contributions to this volume deal with both—discourses and practices surrounding transparency, and they do so by taking into account diverse disciplinary perspectives and historical contexts.

The Ambivalences of Transparency in the Literature on Transparency Research on transparency has been booming and expanding in line with the increasingly omnipresent discourses on transparency in the public sphere. Specific disciplinary perspectives often prevail, although a range of interdisciplinary handbooks, anthologies and edited collections have also become available in recent years.16 Yet, overall, each discipline has developed its own disciplinary understanding of transparency and each has put special emphasis on specific aspects and problems of transparency. Each has also developed its own methodological and theoretical arsenal with which to investigate transparency. The historical sciences have so far focussed on transparency as access to information and knowledge sharing, primarily discussing transparency in the context of semantic fields such as openness, public sphere,

4  D. OWETSCHKIN AND S. BERGER

publicity, secrecy and privacy.17 What has been revealed and what has been hidden are key aspects investigated by historians in relation to transparency. Research has examined the tensions between the state’s need for secrecy and the normative demands of democratic control and a democratic public sphere. What border has been drawn between what is public and what is private. Especially within the sub-field of media history, the history of the public sphere has played a major role in recent decades.18 Within the fields of intellectual and cultural history, the emergence and development of concepts of the public sphere19 and of ideas of transparency itself have also been investigated.20 The social sciences and economics have been more interested in the meaning of transparency for governance. This includes the relevance of transparency for the functioning of political systems, institutions and organizations. Transparency is here often closely related to ideas about the access to information. It becomes synonymous with the ability of an actor to access information about other actors or processes, institutions and organizations. In other words, transparency is seen as a mirror opposite of secrecy.21 Transparency is about the accessibility of information for citizens who are being helped through transparency to better understand and comprehend decision-making processes. Transparency helps their opinion formation regarding a wide diversity of political issues.22 It is also widely seen as a value that has become a human right—“the right to know”.23 Especially in the field of economics the “principal–agent model” has played an influential role in transparency studies.24 Here transparency is regarded as absence or reduction of information asymmetries between interacting subjects—defined as “sender” and “receiver”.25 Hence much research in economics, as well as in political sciences, focusses on functional aspects of transparency, such as how much transparency is necessary in order either to ensure the optimal performance, efficiency and acceptance of institutions or the mastering of communication between institutional and non-institutional actors. Any diversion from the right measure of transparency is interpreted as being dysfunctional with regard to the overall aim of performance optimization.26 How useful transparency is, depends vitally on the values and normative orders that are posited as desirable. It becomes an instrument with which it is possible to achieve a desirable norm, for example efficiency, prosperity, participation, trust or acceptance.27 Transparency itself then has no intrinsic value of its own. However, it may be more correct to perceive transparency as

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a value interrelated with a range of other values that have to be defined vis-à-vis transparency—in their specific chronological, spatial and social contexts.28 The disciplines of media, cultural and communication studies29 have chosen altogether different foci when it comes to the analysis of transparency. They talk most about mediation, modes of representation, metaphorical uses of transparency and the visuality of transparency.30 Transparency here is never a “given” but always “based on artificial representational and mediatic strategies”,31 out of which emerge deeprooted ambivalences. Its strong mediatization makes it not only a metaphor but also a myth—in the sense of a “foundational description of the world”, which creates meaning and orientation for all members of a particular community. Its mythical character endows transparency with its relative stability and its unquestioned, “taken-for-granted” status. Such a perspective is likely to perceive transparency as a self-maintaining system of communication which may well remain obscured and opaque but which nevertheless, despite all doubts and “conflicting evidence”, retains its normative values.32 Engagements with transparency that derive from a cultural studies angle have also emphasized its relationship to secrecy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Georg Simmel had already stressed the importance of the secret as “the concealment of realities carried out by negative or positive means”, or as “a transitional stage between being and nonbeing”, thereby opening up “the possibility of a, so to speak, second world next to the apparent one”.33 Simmel argued that “the use of the secret as a sociological technique” should be regarded as “one of the greatest achievements of humanity” without which many human goals and desires could not have been reached.34 In this perspective the secret has a special importance with regard to the sharing of knowledge— it becomes a power that provides order by drawing boundaries and it thereby structures the social world.35 What can be known is distinguished from what cannot be known. An unequal, asymmetrical sharing of knowledge leads to secret knowledge and a division between what is transparent and what remains intransparent. The latter divides not only individuals but also social groups and institutions. These borders are movable and constantly in the process of renegotiation. As such they are not absolute borders, but thresholds that divide different social spaces.36 Given the complex and fluid structure of secrecy, it makes sense to distinguish between three different forms of secrecy: first, secrecy as

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mystery (“mysterium”), secondly, secrecy as part of arcane knowledge (“arcanum”), and thirdly, secrecy as a “relation between the known and the unknown” (“secretum”).37 As “mysterium”, a secret is generally unknowable. Religious secrets, relating to God or the human soul, for example, can only be revealed. Transparency here amounts to a revelation. If, by contrast, a secret is part of arcane knowledge, mainly as state secret, then it can be known in theory, although it may be protected by barriers and hence withdrawn from communication. Ultimately, a secret as “secretum” refers not so much to hidden knowledge itself or the (im) possibility of its dissemination, but rather to the relationship between social exclusion and inclusion. Transparency here amounts to publicity or access to a public sphere in which barriers and exclusions fall. This is similar to the case of the “arcanum”.38 Knowing and not knowing, transparency and the lack of it are not rigid and mutually incompatible opposites. Rather they appear as “symbiotic” moments that depend on each other and complement one another. Transparency and secrecy can have similar or even the same functions and consequences, and they can overlap and merge with one another.39 Their mutual dependency leads to a situation where, if the border between what is secret and what is transparent moves, it does not necessary follow that either transparency or secrecy is diminished. Instead the spaces of secrecy and transparency are newly calibrated. If transparency increases, the space of what is secret might equally expand, so that the borders between the two are forever reproduced in different form.40 With regard to this, Simmel pointed to “the paradoxical idea that human affiliation would need a certain measure of secrecy under otherwise similar circumstances, that only its objects would change: while it would leave the one, it would grasp the other, and would acquire with this exchange an unchanged quantum”.41 How borders between transparency and secrecy are being shifted, depends on power relationships, degrees of contestation and conflict and a whole variety of societal processes of negotiation between different groups. As we can see from this brief review of different disciplinary approaches to the problem of transparency, research has emphasized and analysed very different aspects of transparency. This, in turn, makes the field of transparency research appear as fragmented. It would even seem that they do not refer to the same phenomenon, so that it may be more appropriate to speak of several “transparencies” that are not always compatible with each other. Cultural studies and philosophy tend rather to

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highlight more critical aspects of transparency. It is not by coincidence that Critical Transparency Studies have their home particularly among those disciplines.42 Elsewhere, by contrast, there is a positive normative bias in favour of transparency. Despite occasional hints that transparency needs to have limits and that a maximum amount of transparency might well be dysfunctional,43 the phenomenon itself is widely seen as an excellent strategy for optimizing performance, solving problems and preventing crises.44 Regardless of this positive normative bias, however, the results of much research on transparency time and again highlight its “dark sides”.45 A transparent society is one of total panoptical control, where conformity can be enforced and privacy can be reduced to almost nothing.46 Furthermore, the basic ambiguities of transparency are also emerging clearly from the literature, both at the level of discourse and practice. Thus we find transparency described as “Janus-faced”, “obfuscated”, “paradoxical” and “opaque”.47 The ambiguous character of transparency seems to be inherent in the concept of transparency itself and leads to “the many faces of transparency”,48 its blurring contours,49 and its “symbiotic” relationship to secrecy discussed above. Indeed, we can go back all the way to Aristotle to see that his concept of diaphaneity already included both the aspect of translucidity and that of generativity. The former underlined the permeable characteristics of the medium, i.e. its see-through nature, whereas the latter highlighted the productive characteristic to transform something into a visible object with the medium itself taking a step back and becoming “neutralized”.50 This Janus-faced character of transparency explains some areas of tension which were revealed in the subsequent development of the concept of transparency. It continued to vacillate between those two meanings in which a kind of ontological contradiction manifests.51 On the one hand, transparency appears as description of a state or a characteristic of an object, and on the other hand, it points to something that has not happened yet and that has either been demanded or is pursued.52 In this sense transparency is a normative ideal which, at the same time, becomes unachievable and unreachable.53 As Manfred Schneider argues in his contribution to this volume (Chapter 3), data are often confused with reality and media with the world, whereas the process of mediation itself remains opaque and hidden. At the practical level, we encounter, above all, non-intended consequences of transparency measures. One example of such consequences,

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as Martin Butler shows in his contribution (Chapter 9), is the transformation of rhetoric of transparency pursued by social movements into the legitimation of surveillance. Overall, a significant body of work on transparency has shown by now that the implementation of more transparency in the field of politics does not necessarily have the effect of producing a better, more open, democratic and efficient political process or government. The normative aim of more transparency is thus not achieved and may result in an increased lack of transparency resulting in a lack of trust, the reduction of participation and, something that Frieder Vogelmann shows in his contribution to this volume (Chapter 2), self-censorship. Several scholars have described the possible consequences of transparency as turning its original intentions on their head, or as being futile in terms of outcomes.54 Putting into practice measures of more transparency would not lead to a reduction of complexity (in systems-theory language), but to an increase in complexity which then demands more transparency resulting in ever greater complexities. This “complexity-transparency spiral” causes even more confusion and makes the interpretation of information riskier and more arbitrary—leading only to further calls for more transparency.55

The Origins and Development of the Idea of Transparency in the Realm of the Political The historical character of transparency and its embeddedness in a variety of specific societal contexts go a long way to explain the ambivalences of the concept and its many different meanings and interpretations. The term itself described something that was translucent, see-through and was most frequently related to the realm of the visual, but since the sixteenth century it became a broad metaphor used in many different contexts.56 Manfred Schneider, in his chapter in this volume, shows how the characteristic of being “diaphanous” was reserved to souls and celestial bodies, from the time of antiquity to the middle ages.57 The deep semantic origins of transparency thus lie in the field of theology. The term itself derives from the Latin “trans-parere” and means shining through or appearing translucent. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the term emerges in the English and French languages and is most frequently related to the rise of the natural sciences, in particular Newtonian optics.58 Very soon the term is transferred to the realm of ideas and thoughts, where it is used as synonymous with

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clarity, openness, lucidity and comprehensibility.59 From the ­eighteenth century onwards the term is increasingly transferred to the realm of politics, where it retains its links to truthfulness, comprehensibility and recognizability.60 It is used here in particular in relation to problems regarding the state’s and the ruler’s conformity with the law and the latter’s accountability, as well as the control of power more generally.61 Although these were hardly new phenomena and could be traced back to antiquity, they become part and parcel of comprehensive political theories, philosophies and anthropologies that are associated with the Enlightenments and the struggle of the third estate against the absolutist state, whose claims to arcane knowledge becomes questionable.62 Concepts and discourses of transparency come to the fore here, as they are useful for political demands to restrict arcane spaces and achieve more of a political say for a greater number of people. The emergence of social and political modernity63 is thus closely related to the rise of transparency as a concept. Political modernity is associated with the experience of instability, contingency and alienation due to the dissolution of an estates-based order and of traditional social ties of the individual, the increasing autonomy of the bourgeois subject, the secularization of thought, the new valuation of secular knowledge and the demise of tradition. Modern societies became increasingly functionally differentiated, as capitalism and emerging class conflicts characterized modernity and media and communication technologies allowed for the emergence of a strong public sphere. The experience of an acceleration of life associated with higher risks and a lack of long-term continuities led to identity problems and difficulties of individuals to find orientation in a rapidly changing society.64 Under such conditions, concepts of transparency were an important means to regain control by diminishing secrecy and securing access to information and knowledge. Transparency, in other words, reacted to modernity’s “need for compensation”65 and sought to minimize the insecurities associated with the transformation to modern times.66 The term transparency was, however, not as yet widely used in the eighteenth century. “Publicity” was the far more important term in the political discourses of the Enlightenment, and it remained dominant well into the nineteenth century.67 It was directly related to the rise of the public sphere, where a bourgeois public addressed political demands towards an absolutist state. Publicity was connected metaphorically to light and to seeing, whereas the lack of it was related to darkness and

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superstition. Publicity was associated with virtue, morality and truth and thus was invested with strong normative dimensions.68 For Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) publicity became a norm, a fundamental principle of the law with which politics and morality were to be united. It was the crucial criterion for the legitimacy of political action.69 In Kant’s philosophy publicity became an a priori principle of public law that was entirely in line with the Enlightenment’s desire for reason and progress to create a just political order. The free and public use of critical reason needed publicity as a major precondition of the Enlightenment, i.e. in Kant’s famous words, “the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority”.70 Where this principle was absent or restricted, Enlightenment thought and practice could not succeed. The prohibition of publicity thereby amounted to impeding “the progress of a people toward improvement”.71 In Kant’s thinking publicity was hence a human right of the citizen and at the same time the duty for its realization lay with state power. Kant’s notion of transparency was rooted in transcendental philosophy. Other key thinkers of transparency, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), stood in different intellectual traditions. Bentham was a utilitarian who was the first to relate the term of transparency to governance.72 Before him Rousseau referred to the “transparency” of hearts and souls in a metaphorical sense to describe immediate and truthful communication characteristic of authentic human relations that were free from deceit and pretence as well from duplicity and devious actions. In his—lost—state of nature, before the deforming influence of civilization, human beings were transparent.73 With regard to politics Rousseau, however, developed a different idea of transparency—one that emphasized the mutual control of citizens who could always see what the other was doing. His political ideal were small republican communities whose members all had intimate knowledge of each other. Dark and secret vices of its members would be revealed through transparency and at the same time the virtuous would appear as shining models of public service for all to see.74 All citizens, including those who held offices, would be constantly under scrutiny. According to Rousseau, they should “constantly feel under the public’s eyes”75 and their transparency would be a sign of their merit. Transparency was also the precondition for informed citizens to choose those who were to hold public office and pursue political careers. Once in office transparency was to ensure that the citizens were able to judge

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their conduct.76 Thus, a ubiquitous system of surveillance was the foundation for moral government.77 Bentham largely concurred with Rousseau when it came to the transparency of those holding public office, although he was not an advocate of direct democracy. The actions of office-holders were to be regarded as morally good if they followed his principle of utility, i.e. the principle of ensuring “greatest happiness of the greatest number”.78 Governments, just as individuals had to seek the maximization of pleasure and to avoid pain.79 Controlling rulers and making their actions “transparent”80 was, for Bentham, the ideal means to avoid misrule and “sinister” motives in politics.81 Transparency, according to Bentham, could, among other things, “constrain the members of the assembly to perform their duty”, “secure the confidence of the people, and their assent to the measures of the legislature”, “enable the governors to know the wishes of the governed” as well as “enable the electors to act from knowledge”.82 He favoured a kind of “public opinion tribunal” in which the people would sit as judges over their rulers.83 Such a tribunal could only do its work if every action of the ruler was completely transparent. The freedom of the press and access to information as well as the absence of all censorship were vital preconditions for this. A strong public sphere, based on the principle of transparency, became, for Bentham, a necessary and integral element of political rule. Altogether, Bentham’s concept rested upon an anthropologically grounded idea of the influencing and steering of human behaviour through visibility: “the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave”.84 This is, of course, also the idea behind Bentham’s famous panopticon, a circular prison-building in which all inmates could constantly be surveilled from one central place that was invisible to the inmates themselves.85 Constant surveillance would lead, so Bentham felt, to moral improvement, and his principle could be transferred also to factories, work-houses, mad-houses, hospitals or schools, in his words “any sort of establishment, in which persons of any description are to be kept under inspection”.86 Transparency as a principle of political order and an instrument to steer human behaviour was thus connected to transparency as an architectural feature that could be applied to all public buildings.87 Bentham’s “régime of publicity” was, above all, a “system of distrust”.88 It institutionalized distrust and anchored it in the midst of political order—something that is also discussed in Constantin Goschler’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 7).

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As we have argued, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were crucial decades in which ideas about publicity and transparency were universalized and invested with normative value. It was to legitimate state action, ensure virtuous government, and lead to an optimization of political decision-making. Through transparency politics would become more rational and the bourgeoisie would be legitimated to exercise political power. Transparency was the instrument with which demands for freedom of the press, freedom of expression and freedom of association could be rationalized. It was therefore a key political instrument for pushing through the interests of the bourgeoisie vis-à-vis the absolute state.89 In Enlightenment and liberal political thought, transparency had its limits—above all in the protection of the individuals and their private sphere from the state. Certain spaces had to be secret: the ballot, the private letter, the private abode and in law the right of an individual to remain silent in court—they all mark the limits of transparency and they did not stand in contrast to the above demands for transparency but they went hand in hand with them, as they were championed by the same political thinkers. Demanding transparency of the state was the other side of the coin demanding the protection of privacy of the individual.90 Widely regarded as one of the key “shibboleths” of the epoch,91 transparency was present in numerous theories of governance, even if the term “transparency” was not yet commonly used.92 Increasingly actors from within civil society, such as social movements, became the most important carriers of demands for more transparency. As Friedrich Jaeger’s contribution in this volume (Chapter 5) exemplifies, the development of media technology, of the press and of journalism had an important impact on those developments.93 Over the course of the nineteenth century, transparency became a normative ideal which was future-oriented, even if revolutions, such as the French revolution of 1789 or the central European revolutions of 1848/1849 went some way towards implementing those ideals in parliaments and law courts.94 The institutionalization of transparency and its entry into legal codes had to wait until after the Second World War, and even then, it had significant limitations. Freedom of information, as the “right to know”, became much more important.95 As early as December 1946 the UN declared the freedom of information as “a fundamental human right” and “the touchstone for all freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated”.96 Subsequently, laws to guarantee freedom of information

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were passed in Finland in 1951 and in the USA in 1966. Both laws guaranteed citizens the right to have access to information about actions by the state.97 Right to information campaigns continues to have enormous salience in a variety of countries struggling with corruption.98 From the 1960s onwards, a massive expansion of education across the western world as well as a revolutionary change in social norms and values contributed to making transparency a key political demand, as it chimed well with a general “culture of disclosure”.99 In environmental protection and the protection of the consumer but also in the protection of medical patients, transparency was perceived by many as being increasingly important in order to ensure more democratic practices, even if there remained many areas of society which were not affected by calls for transparency.100 In a country like West Germany, the beginning coming-to-terms with the National Socialist past gave rise to debates about the deficits of democratic culture and of the public sphere, which in turn brought powerful demands for greater transparency.101 This was markedly different from developments in France, where intellectuals began to develop a critique of the ethics of transparency from within the context of republican and revolutionary traditions in French history. They saw demands for transparency connected, above all, with eradicating individuality and difference in society and therefore they saw transparency as a false ideal—“philosophically violent and distortive, politically perilous, ethically misguided”.102 Such early critiques of the discourse of transparency, however, did not prevent the astonishing rise of transparency as one of the most discussed terms and demands during the 1970s and 1980s—at a time, when most western societies underwent major structural transformations that increased feelings of insecurity and contingency.103 The dominant neoliberalism and its commodification of all social relations as well as the “new spirit of capitalism”104 gave rise to more demands for transparency, which was now much more associated with optimizing, and making more efficient economic and social processes.105 If transparency now served neoliberal aims, it could equally retain a critical edge vis-à-vis unfettered forms of capitalism. Thus transparency was now presented as a remedy against corruption and a means to control corporate governance and financial markets. It was a key aim in reforms of the health, environmental, and governmental sector and it was hotly debated vis-à-vis data security. Debates around transparency became so all-pervasive that it seemed to some observers as though one

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was about to enter an “age of transparency”,106 in which the thing itself became the defining characteristic of social relations.107 If transparency has increasingly become the key demand with which the identified economic, social and political problems could be conquered, it also took on new meanings and normative dimensions as well as social practices. The contributions in this volume will discuss some of these changes, especially in relation to the public sphere, in which the media and social movements often played a prominent role.

Conflict, Ideology and Social Movements Drawing, moving and crossing borders between what is transparent and what remains intransparent in a variety of different sub-fields of society has frequently produced tensions and conflicts which, in turn, have been adapted by social movements seeking to challenge state power. Beginning during the period of the Enlightenment the close affinity of demands for greater transparency to calls for more power were rather obvious, particularly in demands for greater publicity and for a stronger public sphere as well as for more parliamentary government and the implementation of a more efficient bureaucracy. All these demands were made by a nascent bourgeoisie in their own interests against those of the aristocracy.108 It was supposed to allow them to take over government without revolution or, in Bentham’s words, “without a change in the form of the government”,109 and hence without the danger of allowing the lower social classes access to political power. Thus, transparency has been historically a form of bourgeois ideology justifying and legitimating bourgeois forms of governance or bourgeois claims and interests connected with power and domination. With regard to West Germany in the 1970s, such legitimating strategies are also exemplified by Christopher Kirchberg and Marcel Schmeer in their chapter (Chapter 8). Under the conditions of neoliberal market economies, transparency can be furthermore an instrument to evade state controls of the economy and of financial markets,110 or, as Christian Scheper and Sabrina Zajak show in this volume (Chapter 10), to maximize profits. Here demands for transparency and the disclosure of information can go hand in hand with hiding other information and contributing to intransparent practices.111 Whereas the “ideological drift”112 of transparency is widely recognized,113 the significance of social conflict and social movements for

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transparency discourses and practices is not being given enough attention.114 Hence this volume is urging social movement scholars to make use of the analysis of studies assembled here on media development and transparency, the state and transparency, civil society and transparency, communication strategies and civil society and the role of transnational networks in understanding transparency. Critical Transparency Studies have been turning their attention to processes of governance.115 It is, we argue, high time to pay attention also to social struggles and conflicts as a central dimension of ever stronger demands for greater transparency. Craig Calhoun has recently drawn attention to the early nineteenth-century roots of radical social movements, opening up the possibility of a deeper social movement history than the one that is usually practised by social movement studies.116 If we look to the labour movement of the nineteenth century as a broad social movement consisting of political parties, trade unions and cooperative movements, their activists were already powerfully formulating demands for transparency vis-à-vis states and employers. Demands for transparency went hand in hand with demands for democratizing politics and wider aspects of societies.117 In a situation in which most nineteenth-century states were far removed from realizing democratic ideals and practices, and in which the majority of people were excluded from their political rights as citizens, demands for transparency became a powerful political weapon. Even where liberal principles and parliamentary forms of government were at their most advanced, such as in Britain and the US, governance structures depended on a lack of transparency of decision-making which hid the relationship between the interests of the ruling classes and the exclusion of those who had neither sufficient property nor sufficient education to participate in the political process. Hence the labour movement demanded more transparency such as the public meeting of parliament and parliamentary committees as well as the transparency of connections of parliamentary deputies to economic or social interest groups.118 Within the labour movement itself demands for greater transparency became a central bone of contention between Social Democracy and Communism in the twentieth century. The debates between Karl Kautsky and V. I. Lenin, raging back well before the First World War but gaining in intensity after the Bolshevik revolution, underline to what extent democratic transparency became a key dividing line between the self-understandings of social democratic and communist labour movements. Lenin argued that in the revolution and during the building of

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communism, democratic structures would be counterproductive and only lead to the victory of the counter-revolution. Hence the avantgarde of the proletariat, the Communist Party and its leadership, needed to retain intransparent forms of government and conspiratorial means in order to achieve their revolutionary aims. Kautsky, on the other hand, was adamant that socialism could not exist without a maximum amount of democratic transparency.119 The pursuit of transparency by labour and radical movements found expression in the forms of investigative journalism practiced by the labour movement and radical press beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The aim was to make transparent the dubious political, social and cultural practices of the bourgeoisie and those in power and to reveal their hypocritical character, preaching one thing and doing another. To give just one example, the Social Democratic press in Germany revealed the homosexual practices of Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the head of the staunchly anti-socialist Krupp industrial dynasty. The Social Democrats contrasted the bourgeois morality, which condemned homosexuality with the bourgeois practice which abused young Italian boys and men while on vacation in Italy. While Social Democrats were prone to produce homophobic stereotypes in their desire to unmask double standards of bourgeois morality, the target was clear: the ruling economic elites who oppressed the German workers had to be dragged into the light for all to see that the emperor was (in this case quite literally) without clothes.120 Progressive social movements often depended on the media to re-enforce their own demands via strategies of making transparent what lay hidden. In the US the “muckrakers” pioneered attempts to bring into the open various political and social scandals in order to bring about change.121 Out of this milieu emerged Upton Sinclair who attempted through his novels to provide social criticism. Thus his novel on the meat-packing industry in Chicago has become a classic of making transparent to a wider public what lay hidden behind the closed doors of that industry.122 The international trade union press had a much smaller circulation than the novels of Sinclair, yet they employed similar strategies of making transparent the terrible working conditions in parts of the capitalist industry, to demand more protection of workers, better job safety and higher wages. Time and again trade unionists demanded greater transparency regarding the profits of companies and the pay of their executives. In Germany trade unionists regard transparency as an important tool for co-determination.123

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During the second half of the twentieth century, the “new social movements” employed similar strategies in order to reveal intransparent political processes hiding governance structures that were detrimental to the movements’ aims and objectives. Especially movements for more participatory democracy have often highlighted demands for greater transparency as the precondition for more accountable and less corrupt government.124 In Europe, social movement activists have been at the forefront of criticizing a lack of transparency in European governance structures.125 At the same time it has been pointed out that democratic practices mean different things in different parts of the world. Thus, the ballot box in western societies is the ultimate symbol of the right of the citizen to a secret vote, where in Mozambique, where people are more used to vote by a show of hands, the ballot box raises fears of intransparency and concealment.126 But transparency as such became a crucial slogan for social movements in Africa through the 1980s struggling for more democratic and accountable forms of government. In Benin, the social movements supporting democratization even chose “more transparency” as their key campaigning slogan for a while.127 These social movement practices circling around transparency have never been examined in detail so far, nor has the question been explored to what extent they could rely on accepted values of the freedom of the press and freedom of information in their pursuit of transparency.128 If the movements of the 1970s and 1980s produced their own newspapers, brochures and books, the movements that have emerged since the 1990s partake increasingly in the digital revolution and make use of the internet and digital media in order to make transparent what those in power allegedly want to hide.129 At the same time, the development of the media and media market was accompanied by debates on transparency related to journalism and the media itself. Some of these debates and recent international trends of media transparency are discussed by Susanne Fengler and Dominik Speck in this volume (Chapter 6). Yet, where the labour movement used transparency discourses as a means to an end, namely the defeat of capitalism and the building of socialism, anti-capitalism did no longer play a central role with many of the new social movements from the 1970s onwards. Even if Marxism undoubtedly was an important ingredient in those social movements,130 they replaced the class war with far more specific aims. Thus, for example, the peace movement of the early 1980s sought to defeat, above all, the dual-track decision of NATO. To this end, the movement had to make transparent the link between the powerful arms industry and

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politicians asking for more weapons allegedly to protect the West in the Cold War.131 To give another example, the women’s movement fought against an array of discriminations against women and to this end it needed to make transparent those practices of discrimination and show their links to patriarchal structures in contemporary society.132 Similar strategies of making transparent what was hidden was used by the environmental movement fighting the ongoing destruction of the natural environment and by the urban movements struggling against gentrification that pushed whole urban communities out of the spaces they had occupied often for a very long time.133 How transparency claims and protests have been affecting processes of urban planning, is analysed in Jan Polívka’s and Christa Reicher’s contribution (Chapter 11). Looking at the emergence of an open society Burkart and Leslie Holzner have given social movements and their ethical norms a crucial role in furthering more transparency in global governance structures.134 Social movements appear in the scholarly literature on global transnational democratization processes as key actors promoting transparency and accountability, i.e. democracy.135 Jan Nolin has recently made an attempt to theorize the emergence of what he has called “transparency movements”.136 Yet there are, to date, no detailed studies on how social movements used strategies of making transparent in order to further their aims, improve their discursive strategies and their practical actions. Hopefully this current volume will encourage more studies that go in this direction. It would be particularly important to study transnational transfers of practices of making transparent.137 Thus, the more thoroughly embedded transparency discourse and practices of making transparent in the US from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards,138 have been received in Europe with great interest after the end of the Second World War. The New Left was based on an intensive transatlantic dialogue that also brought many discourses and practices from the US to Europe. Furthermore it put strategies of making transparent on the agenda of European social movements.139 A more thorough analysis of the media of the New Left and of subsequent social movements would bring greater certainty on the workings of those mechanisms of making transparent. While research on social movements is legion and, indeed, difficult to keep track of,140 the strategies of those movements in relation to their media have only rarely been examined.141 We hope that this volume will encourage social movement scholars to go down this route.

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Within the context of the complex processes, contexts and approaches discussed above, the contributions to the volume seek to analyse the diverse facets and dimensions of transparency, public sphere and social movements, especially in terms of their interrelations and interdependencies. Addressing different perspectives on transparency, the volume comprises four sections. The contributions to the first section explore primarily the essential presuppositions, consequences and paradoxes of transparency as a concept, doctrine and ideology, from the perspective of philosophy and cultural history (Frieder Vogelmann, Manfred Schneider) or literary studies (Jens Gurr). The second section examines the historical and recent developments of the public sphere and media. The contributions here try, on the one hand, to historicize the present-day ideological concerns with transparency (Friedrich Jaeger) and, on the other hand, they draw attention to transparency and accountability within the media and journalism itself (Susanne Fengler and Dominik Speck). Section III focusses on the role of the state and secret services as an agent of surveillance (Constantin Goschler) as well as on transparency claims connected with their practices (Christopher Kirchberg and Marcel Schmeer). Ultimately, in the fourth section the conflicts over transparency and participation, their rhetoric and their ideological background in the field of social movements and corporate governance (Martin Butler; Sabrina Zajak and Christian Scheper) and urban planning (Jan Polívka and Christa Reicher) are highlighted. Throughout the volume on the whole, the ambiguities and ambivalences of transparency discourses and practices constitute an overarching theme which becomes manifest in many different forms, shaping a common horizon for an interdisciplinary engagement with the phenomenon of transparency past and present.

Notes



1. Nico Stehr and Cornelia Wallner, “Transparenz: Einleitung”, in Stephan A. Jansen, Eckhard Schröter, and Nico Stehr, eds., Transparenz. Multidisziplinäre Durchsichten durch Phänomene und Theorien des Undurchsichtigen (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2010), 9. 2.  Christopher Hood, “Transparency in Historical Perspective”, in Christopher Hood and David Heald, eds., Transparency: The Key to Better Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3. 3. Andrea Bianchi, “On Power and Illusion: The Concept of Transparency in International Law”, in Andrea Bianchi and Anne Peters, eds.,

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Transparency in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1. 4.  Lars Thøger Christensen and Joep Cornelissen, “Organizational Transparency as Myth and Metaphor”, European Journal of Social Theory 18, no. 2 (2015), 133 and 135. 5.  Jens Forssbaeck and Lars Oxelheim, “The Multifaceted Concept of Transparency”, in Jens Forssbaeck and Lars Oxelheim, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Economical and Institutional Transparency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3. 6. Burkart Holzner and Leslie Holzner, Transparency in Global Change: The Vanguard of the Open Society (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). 7.  See for some examples Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); Christina Garsten and Monica Lindh de Montoya, “Introduction: Examining the Policy of Transparency”, in Christina Garsten and Monica Lindh de Montoya, eds., Transparency in a New Global Order: Unveiling Organizational Visions (Cheltenham and Northampton: Elgar, 2008), 1–21. In the context of the emerging field of Surveillance Studies, see also Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon, eds., Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). 8.  Christina Garsten and Monica Lindh de Montoya, “In Retrospect: The Play of Shadows”, in Garsten and Lindh de Montoya, eds., Transparency in a New Global Order, 283. 9. Emmanuel Alloa, “Transparency: A Magic Concept of Modernity”, in Emmanuel Alloa and Dieter Thomä, eds., Transparency, Society and Subjectivity: Critical Perspectives (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 21–55; Sandrine Baume and Yannis Papadopoulos, “Transparency: From Bentham’s Inventory of Virtuous Effects to Contemporary Evidence-Based Scepticism”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 21, no. 2 (2018), 186–187. 10. See Holzner and Holzner, Transparency in Global Change, 282–329. 11. For some examples, see Hood, “Transparency in Historical Perspective”, 4–5; Forssbaeck and Oxelheim, “The Multifaceted Concept of Transparency”, 4–10; Ann Florini, “The End of Secrecy”, in Bernard I. Finel and Kristin M. Lord, eds., Power and Conflict in the Age of Transparency (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 13–14; Amitai Etzioni, “The Limits of Transparency”, in Alloa and Thomä, eds., Transparency, Society and Subjectivity, 180; and Roger Taylor and Tim Kelsey, Transparency and the Open Society: Practical Lessons for Effective Policy (Bristol: Policy Press, 2016), especially 55–72. 12. See also Alloa, “Transparency: A Magic Concept of Modernity”, 31–32.

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13. Hans Krause Hansen, Lars Thøger Christensen, and Mikkel Flyverbom, “Introduction: Logics of Transparency in Late Modernity: Paradoxes, Mediation and Governance”, European Journal of Social Theory 18, no. 2 (2015), 119. 14. Clare Birchall, “Transparency, Interrupted: Secrets of the Left”, Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011), 78. 15.  Hansen, Christensen and Flyverbom, “Introduction: Logics of Transparency in Late Modernity”, 119; Hans Krause Hansen, “Numerical Operations, Transparency Illusions and the Datafication of Government”, European Journal of Social Theory 18, no. 2 (2015), 206. 16. See Padideh Ala’i and Robert G. Vaughn, eds., Research Handbook on Transparency (Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2014); Garsten and Lindh de Montoya, eds., Transparency in a New Global Order; Jansen, Schröter, and Stehr, eds., Transparenz; Suzanne J. Piotrowski, ed., Transparency and Secrecy: A Reader Linking Literature and Contemporary Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). See also Forssbaeck and Oxelheim, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Economical and Institutional Transparency; Bianchi and Peters, eds., Transparency in International Law; Alloa and Thomä, eds., Transparency, Society and Subjectivity. 17. See for some examples Daniel Jütte, The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians and the Economy of Secrets, 1400–1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015); David Vincent, Privacy: A Short History (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2016); and Christian J. Emden and David Midgley, eds., Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012). 18.  For Germany, see Karl Christian Führer, Knut Hickethier, and Axel Schildt, “Öffentlichkeit – Medien – Geschichte. Konzepte der modernen Öffentlichkeit und Zugänge zu ihrer Erforschung”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 41 (2001), 1–38; Jörg Requate, “Öffentlichkeit und Medien als Gegenstände historischer Analyse”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 25 (1999), 5–32. 19. See Peter Uwe Hohendahl, ed., Öffentlichkeit: Geschichte eines kritischen Begriffs (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2000); Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992). 20.  See Manfred Schneider, Transparenztraum: Literatur, Politik, Medien und das Unmögliche (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013); Stefanos Geroulanos, Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017); and Thomas Docherty, Confessions: The Philosophy of Transparency (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012).

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21. For example Florini, “The End of Secrecy”. 22. Bernard I. Finel and Kristin M. Lord, “Introduction: Transparency and World Politics”, in Finel and Lord, eds., Power and Conflict in the Age of Transparency, 1–12; and Ann Florini, “Introduction: The Battle Over Transparency”, in Ann Florini, ed., The Right to Know: Transparency for an Open World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1–16. 23. Florini, ed., The Right to Know; Patrick Birkinshaw, “Transparency as a Human Right”, in Hood and Heald, eds., Transparency: The Key to Better Governance?, 47–57. See also Holzner and Holzner, Transparency in Global Change; and David Heald, “Transparency as an Instrumental Value”, in Hood and Heald, eds., Transparency: The Key to Better Governance?, 59–73. 24. Forssbaeck and Oxelheim, “The Multifaceted Concept of Transparency”; Andrea Prat, “The More Closely We Are Watched, the Better We Behave?”, in Hood and Heald, eds., Transparency: The Key to Better Governance?, 91–103. In political sciences, see also Nigel Bowles, James T. Hamilton, and David A. L. Levy, “Introduction”, in Nigel Bowles, James T. Hamilton, and David A. L. Levy, eds., Transparency in Politics and the Media: Accountability and Open Government (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014), xi–xxiii; Daniel Naurin, “Transparency, Publicity, Accountability: The Missing Links”, Swiss Political Science Review 12, no. 3 (2006), 90–98. 25. Forssbaeck and Oxelheim, “The Multifaceted Concept of Transparency”. 26. See for example Jenny de Fine Licht and Daniel Naurin, “Transparency”, in Christopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing, eds., Handbook on Theories of Governance (Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2017), 217–224; Forssbaeck and Oxelheim, “The Multifaceted Concept of Transparency”; Heald, “Transparency as an Instrumental Value”. See also Albert Breton et al., “Introduction”, in Albert Breton et al., eds., The Economics of Transparency in Politics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 1–8. 27.  Heald, “Transparency as an Instrumental Value”; Forssbaeck and Oxelheim, “The Multifaceted Concept of Transparency”, 10–11. 28. Christopher Hood, “Beyond Exchanging First Principles? Some Closing Comments”, in Hood and Heald, eds., Transparency: The Key to Better Governance?, 221–222; Forssbaeck and Oxelheim, “The Multifaceted Concept of Transparency”, 11–12. See also Heald, “Transparency as an Instrumental Value”. 29.  On transparency research in the area of media and communication studies, especially relating to journalism, see also Chapter 6 in this volume. 30. See Jan Teurlings and Markus Stauff, “Introduction: The Transparency Issue”, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 14, no. 1 (2014),

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3–10; Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel, eds., Invisibility Studies: Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015); and Ida Koivisto, “The Anatomy of Transparency. The Concept and Its Multifarious Implications”, EUI Working Paper MWP, 2016/09. 31. Teurlings and Stauff, “Introduction: The Transparency Issue”, 3. 32. Christensen and Cornelissen, “Organizational Transparency as Myth and Metaphor”, 137. 33. Georg Simmel, Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, trans. and ed. Anthony J. Blasi, Anton K. Jacobs, and Mathew Kanjirathinkal, Vol. 1 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 325, 338. 34. Simmel, Sociology, 325–326. 35. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, “Das Geheimnis und die Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation. Einführende Bemerkungen”, in Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, eds., Schleier und Schwelle. Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation V, Vol. 1: Geheimnis und Öffentlichkeit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1997), 8–9. 36. Assmann and Assmann, “Das Geheimnis und die Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation”, 8, 11. 37. See Eva Horn, “Logics of Political Secrecy”, Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011), 108–110; Eva Horn, The Secret War: Treason, Espionage and Modern Fiction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 85–88. 38.  Horn, “Logics of Political Secrecy”, 108–109; Horn, The Secret War, 85–86; and Assmann and Assmann, “Das Geheimnis und die Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation”, 9–10. 39.  Clare Birchall, “Introduction to ‘Secrecy and Transparency’: The Politics of Opacity and Openness”, Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011), 13; Hansen, Christensen, and Flyverbom, “Introduction: Logics of Transparency in Late Modernity”, 121. Reinhart Koselleck has already pointed to the dialectical relationship between secrecy, Enlightenment and the public sphere. See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), especially 62–97, see also 115– 116, 166–167. 40. Assmann and Assmann, “Das Geheimnis und die Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation”, 16; John W. P. Phillips, “Secrecy and Transparency. An Interview with Samuel Weber”, Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011), 160–161. 41. Simmel, Sociology, 329. 42.  See Clare Birchall, “‘Data.gov-in-a-box’: Delimiting Transparency”, European Journal of Social Theory 18, no. 2 (2015), 195–198; Alloa

24  D. OWETSCHKIN AND S. BERGER and Thomä, eds., Transparency, Society and Subjectivity. This approach is different from the homonymous ‘Critical Transparency Studies’, positioned in the context of Global Environmental Governance, which emphasizes particularly the conflict dimension of transparency. See Aarti Gupta and Michael Mason, eds., Transparency in Global Environmental Governance: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2014); Aarti Gupta and Michael Mason, “A Transparency Turn in Global Environmental Governance”, in Gupta and Mason, eds., Transparency in Global Environmental Governance, especially 8–12. 43. See for example Etzioni, “The Limits of Transparency”. 44. For a critical overview see Alloa, “Transparency: A Magic Concept of Modernity”, 28–31. 45.  Bianchi, “On Power and Illusion”, 3, 10–11, 19; Claus Leggewie, “Die dunklen Seiten der Transparenz und die Widersprüche der Transparenten”, Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 4 (2013), 65–70. See also Teurlings and Stauff, “Introduction: The Transparency Issue”, 6. 46. See for example Han, The Transparency Society; Docherty, Confessions; Thomas Docherty, “The Privatization of Human Interests or, How Transparency Breeds Conformity”, in Alloa and Thomä, eds., Transparency, Society and Subjectivity, 283–303; Schneider, Transparenztraum. 47. Dieter Mersch, “Obfuscated Transparency”, in Alloa and Thomä, eds., Transparency, Society and Subjectivity, especially 259, 261, 262; Mark Fenster, “The Opacity of Transparency”, Iowa Law Review 91 (2006), 893; Teurlings and Stauff, “Introduction: The Transparency Issue”, 4; and Hansen, Christensen, and Flyverbom, “Introduction: Logics of Transparency in Late Modernity”, 119–121. 48.  Robert G. Vaughn and Padideh Ala’i, “Introduction”, in Ala’i and Vaughn, eds., Research Handbook on Transparency, 1. 49. Bianchi, “On Power and Illusion”, 9. 50. Alloa, “Transparency: A Magic Concept of Modernity”, 35–37. 51. Alloa, “Transparency: A Magic Concept of Modernity”, 41. 52.  Teurlings and Stauff, “Introduction: The Transparency Issue”, 3; Vincent August, “Theorie und Praxis der Transparenz. Eine Zwischenbilanz”, Berliner Blätter, Special Issue 76 (2018), 134. 53.  Hansen, Christensen, and Flyverbom, “Introduction: Logics of Transparency in Late Modernity”, 121; Teurlings and Stauff, “Introduction: The Transparency Issue”, 4. 54.  See for some examples Amitai Etzioni, “Is Transparency the Best Disinfectant?”, Journal of Political Philosophy 18, no. 4 (2010), 389–404; Fenster, “The Opacity of Transparency”; Mark Fenster,

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“Transparency in Search of a Theory”, European Journal of Social Theory 18, no. 2 (2015), 150–167; Onora O’Neill, “Transparency and the Ethics of Communication”, in Hood and Heald, eds., Transparency: The Key to Better Governance?, 75–90; and August, “Theorie und Praxis der Transparenz”, 130, 139–143. See also Hood, “Beyond Exchanging First Principles?”, 218–220. 55.  Stephan A. Jansen, “Undurchsichtige Transparenz – ein Manifest der Latenz. Oder was wir aus Terrornetzwerken, von Geldautomatensprengungen und Bankenaufsicht lernen könnten”, in Jansen, Schröter, and Stehr, eds., Transparenz, 26–27. See also Vincent Rzepka, Die Ordnung der Transparenz. Jeremy Bentham und die Genealogie einer demokratischen Norm (Berlin: LIT, 2013), 118– 119, 123–124; Stehr and Wallner, “Transparenz: Einleitung”, 11; and August, “Theorie und Praxis der Transparenz”, 140–141. 56. On the etymology of transparency, see Alloa, “Transparency: A Magic Concept of Modernity”, 33–37; Manfred Schneider, “The Dream of Transparency: Aquinas, Rousseau, Sartre”, in Alloa and Thomä, eds., Transparency, Society and Subjectivity, 87–92; and Geroulanos, Transparency in Postwar France, 31–38. 57. See also Schneider, “The Dream of Transparency”, 88–90; Schneider, Transparenztraum, 11–12, 57–58. 58. Rzepka, Die Ordnung der Transparenz, 33–36. 59. Rzepka, Die Ordnung der Transparenz, 38. 60. On the relationship between optical and political transparency see also Theresa Levitt, The Shadow of Enlightenment: Optical and Political Transparency in France, 1789–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 61. Hood, “Transparency in Historical Perspective”, 5–6; Daniel J. Metcalfe, “The History of Government Transparency”, in Ala’i and Vaughn, eds., Research Handbook on Transparency, 248–249; and Holzner and Holzner, Transparency in Global Change, 15–18. 62.  See for example Bernhard W. Wegener, Der geheime Staat: Arkantradition und Informationsfreiheitsrecht (Göttingen: Morango, 2006), 120–138; Sandrine Baume, “Publicity and Transparency. The Itinerary of a Subtle Distinction”, in Alloa and Thomä, eds., Transparency, Society and Subjectivity, 214–215. Furthermore see Lucian Hölscher, Öffentlichkeit und Geheimnis. Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Entstehung der Öffentlichkeit in der frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), 128–135; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 52–54.

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63. See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 1990), 1–22. 64. See for example Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 263– 275; Gerard Delanty, “Modernity”, in George Ritzer, ed., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Vol. VI (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 3068– 3071; B. Valade, “Modernity”, in Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, eds-in-chief, International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 15 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001), 9939–9944; and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Moderne, Modernität”, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Klett, 1978), 93–131. 65. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 74. 66. See also Garsten and Lindh de Montoya, “Introduction: Examining the Policy of Transparency”, 1–2; Rzepka, Die Ordnung der Transparenz, 13–32; and August, “Theorie und Praxis der Transparenz”, 130–131. 67.  On the semantic differences between transparency and publicity see Baume, “Publicity and Transparency”; Baume and Papadopoulos, “Transparency”, 170–172. 68. See Wegener, Der geheime Staat, 122–138; Hölscher, Öffentlichkeit und Geheimnis, 127; and Assmann and Assmann, “Das Geheimnis und die Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation”, 13–14. 69. Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace. A Philosophical Project”, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. by Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 347–351. For a critical discussion of Kant’s concept, see also Mersch, “Obfuscated Transparency”, 259–265. 70. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, 17–18. 71. Immanuel Kant, “The Conflict of the Faculties”, in Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 305. 72. On Bentham, see Philip Schofield, Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 73. On Rousseau’s transparency see Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). See also Schneider, Transparenztraum, 99–124; Schneider, “The Dream of Transparency”, 92–97; and Greg Hill, Rousseau’s Theory of Human Association: Transparent and Opaque Communities (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

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74. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men”, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 114; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. with notes and introduction by Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 59. 75. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Considerations on the Government of Poland and on Its Projected Reformation”, in Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 238. 76. Rousseau, “Considerations on the Government of Poland and on Its Projected Reformation”, 238–239. 77. See Hill, Rousseau’s Theory of Human Association, 34–40. See also Rzepka, Die Ordnung der Transparenz, 45–47. 78.  See exemplarily Jeremy Bentham, “A Fragment on Government”, in Jeremy Bentham, A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government, ed. by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (London: The Athlone Press, 1977), 393. On the principle of utility in Bentham, see Schofield, Utility and Democracy, 28–50; on the relationship between “greatest happiness” and utility see also J. H. Burns, “Happiness and Utility: Jeremy Bentham’s Equation”, Utilitas 17, no. 1 (2015), 46–61. 79. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (London: The Athlone Press, 1970), especially 11–50. 80. Bentham used the terms ‘transparency’ or ‘transparent’ in different contexts. See, for some examples, Jeremy Bentham, “Panopticon or, The Inspection-House”, in Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. by John Bowring, Vol. 4 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 130 (“transparency of management”); Jeremy Bentham, “Outline of a Work Entitled Pauper Management Improved”, in Jeremy Bentham, Writings on Poor Laws, Vol. II, ed. by Michael Quinn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), 518 (“Principle of Publicity, or Transparent-management principle”); and Jeremy Bentham, Constitutional Code, Vol. I, ed. by F. Rosen and J. H. Burns (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 146 (“the greatest degree of transparency, and thence of simplicity”). 81. See for example Jeremy Bentham, “Securities against Misrule”, in Jeremy Bentham, Securities Against Misrule and Other Constitutional Writings for Tripoli and Greece, ed. by Philip Schofield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 23–111. On “sinister interest” in Bentham see also Schofield, Utility and Democracy, 109–136. 82. Jeremy Bentham, Political Tactics, ed. by Michael James, Cyprian Blamires, and Catherine Pease-Watkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 29–33. Benjamin Constant developed a similar justification for publicity

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in the French context. See Sandrine Baume, “Does Transparency Engender the Confidence of the Governed? A Contribution to Political Thought”, in Roberto Baranzini and François Allisson, eds., Economics and Other Branches: In the Shade of the Oak Tree—Essays in Honour of Pascal Bridel (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 428–429; Baume, “Publicity and Transparency”, 215. 83. See Bentham, Securities Against Misrule, 27–29, 54–73; Bentham, Constitutional Code, 35–39; and Jeremy Bentham, First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code, ed. by Philip Schofield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 56–59. 84. Jeremy Bentham, “Farming Defended”, in Jeremy Bentham, Writings on Poor Laws, Vol. I, ed. by Michael Quinn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 277. 85. See Bentham, “Panopticon or, the Inspection House”. 86. The quotation comes from the sub-title of Bentham,  “Panopticon or, the Inspection House”. 87. See for example Schofield, Utility and Democracy, 254–259; Rzepka, Die Ordnung der Transparenz, 106–107, 114; in a broader context also Deborah Asher Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 88. Bentham, Political Tactics, 37. 89. See for example Wegener, Der geheime Staat, 152; Rzepka, Die Ordnung der Transparenz, 122–123. 90. Wegener, Der geheime Staat, 192–196. See also Assmann and Assmann, “Das Geheimnis und die Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation”, 14; Horn, The Secret War, 90. 91. Hölscher, Öffentlichkeit und Geheimnis, 128. 92. Hood, “Transparency in Historical Perspective”, 11–18; Wegener, Der geheime Staat, 197–356. 93. See also Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 181–195. 94. Wegener, Der geheime Staat, 206–257; Hölscher, Öffentlichkeit und Geheimnis, 162–168; with regard to Netherlands Albert Meijer, “Government Transparency in Historical Perspective: From the Ancient Regime to Open Data in the Netherlands”, International Journal of Public Administration 38 (2015), 192–194. 95. Michael Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know. Politics and Culture of Transparency, 1945–1975 (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2015). 96. Cited in Birkinshaw, “Transparency as a Human Right”, 48. 97. See Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know, 28–63; Tero Erkkilä, Government Transparency: Impacts and Unintended Consequences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 4–9; Metcalfe, “The History of Government Transparency”, 253–255. For a detailed discussion

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of the US Freedom of Information Act see also David E. Pozen and Michael Schudson, eds., Troubling Transparency: The History and Future of Freedom of Information (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). The first freedom of information law in history was passed in Sweden in 1766. See Metcalfe, “The History of Government Transparency”, 248–249; Hood, “Transparency in Historical Perspective”, 8; and Wegener, Der geheime Staat, 299–303. 98. See for example India’s struggle for a right to information act, as analysed by Prashant Sharma, Democracy and Transparency in the Indian State: The Making of the Right to Information Act (London: Routledge, 2015). 99. For the United States, see Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know. 100. See Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know, 1–27 and passim. 101.  See Ulrich Herbert, ed., Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland: Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002). 102.  Stefanos Geroulanos, “Transparency, Humanism and the Politics of the Future Before and After May ’68”, in Alloa and Thomä, eds., Transparency, Society and Subjectivity, 157. For a detailed discussion see Geroulanos, Transparency in Postwar France. 103.  See for example Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Lutz Raphael, and Thomas Schlemmer, eds., Vorgeschichte der Gegenwart. Dimensionen des Strukturbruchs nach dem Boom (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016). See also Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 403–432. 104. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2005). 105.  See for example Erkkilä, Government Transparency, 3–4; Garsten and Lindh de Montoya, “Introduction: Examining the Policy of Transparency”, 2–3; Clare Birchall, “Radical Transparency?”, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 14, no. 1 (2014), 83–84; and Leopold Ringel, Transparenz als Ideal und Organisationsproblem: Eine Studie am Beispiel der Piratenpartei Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2017), 57, 61–62. 106. See exemplarily Finel and Lord, eds., Power and Conflict in the Age of Transparency. 107. See also a critical discussion of a “New TransparentoCene” in Alloa, “Transparency: A Magic Concept of Modernity”, 21–25. 108.  See for example Rzepka, Die Ordnung der Transparenz; Wegener, Der geheime Staat, 120–196. See also Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 109. Bentham, Securities Against Misrule, 25.

30  D. OWETSCHKIN AND S. BERGER 110.  See Etzioni, “Is Transparency the Best Disinfectant?”, 390–391; Birchall, “Radical Transparency?”, 83; and Garsten and Lindh de Montoya, “Introduction: Examining the Policy of Transparency”, 1–3. 111. See for example Birchall, “Introduction to ‘Secrecy and Transparency’”, 14–15; Garsten and Lindh de Montoya, “Introduction: Examining the Policy of Transparency”, 284, 286; and Hansen, Christensen, and Flyverbom, “Introduction: Logics of Transparency in Late Modernity”, 120. 112. Alloa, “Transparency: A Magic Concept of Modernity”, 44, referring to David Pozen. 113. See for example Birchall, “Radical Transparency?”, 83–84; Todd Sanders and Harry G. West, “Power Revealed and Concealed in the New World Order”, in Harry G. West and Todd Sanders, eds., Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 1–37; and Mazarine Pingeot, La dictature de la transparence (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2016). 114.  References to social movements in the research on transparency are few and far between. See for some examples Holzner and Hozner, Transparency in Global Change; Birchall, “Radical Transparency?”, especially 79, 81, 84, 85; Birchall, “Transparency, Interrupted”, 62. See also Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know. In the field of intellectual history of transparency in France after the Second World War, the context of the ‘New Left’ and of May ’68 plays also an important part. See Geroulanos, Transparency in Postwar France; Geroulanos, “Transparency, Humanism and the Politics of the Future Before and After May ’68”. 115.  See Gupta and Mason, eds., Transparency in Global Environmental Governance, and note 42. 116. Craig Calhoun, The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere and Early Nineteenth-century Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 117. See Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 118. Sean Scalmer, On the Stump: Campaign Oratory and Democracy in the United States, Britain and Australia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017); Jussi Kurunmäki, Jeppe Nevers, and Henk te Felde, eds., Democracy in Modern Europe: A Conceptual History (Oxford: Berghahn, 2018). 119. Moira Donald, Marxism and Revolution: Karl Kautsky and the Russian Marxists 1900–1924 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 120.  Dieter Richter, “Friedrich Alfred Krupp auf Capri”, in Michael Epkenhans and Ralf Stremmel, eds., Friedrich Alfred Krupp: ein Unternehmer im Kaiserreich (Munich, 2010), 166–174.

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121. Louis Filler, The Muckrakers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 122.  Rüdiger Graf, “Wahrheit im Dschungel von Literatur, Wissenschaft und Politik. Upton Sinclairs ‘The Jungle’ und die Reform der Lebensmittelkontrolle den USA der ‘Progressive Era’”, Historische Zeitschrift 301 (2015), 63–93. 123. Bernd Frick and Eric Lehmann, “Corporate Governance in Germany: Ownership, Codetermination and Firm Performance in a Stakeholder Economy”, in Howard Gospel and Andrew Pendleton, eds., Corporate Governance and Labour Management: An International Comparison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 122–147. 124. Ekim Arbatli and Dina Rosenberg, eds., Non-Western Social Movements and Participatory Democracy: Protest in the Age of Transnationalism (Cham: Springer, 2017). 125. Donatella della Porta, “Reinventing Europe: Social Movement Activists as Critical Europeanists”, in Simon Teune, ed., The Transnational Condition: Protest Dynamics in an Entangled Europe (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), 113–128. 126. Harry G. West, “‘Who Rules Us Now?’ Identity Tokens, Sorcery, and Other Metaphors in the 1994 Mozambican Elections”, in West and Sanders, eds., Transparency and Conspiracy, 92–124. 127. Gudrun Lachenmann, Social Movements and Civil Society in West Africa (Berlin: German Development Institute, 1992), 15. 128. Pozen and Schudson, eds., Troubling Transparency. 129. Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto, 2012). 130.  Stefan Berger and Christoph Cornelissen, eds., Marxist Historical Cultures and Social Movements During the Cold War: Case Studies from Germany, Italy and Other Western European States (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 131. Steve Breyman, Why Movements Matter: The West German Peace Movement and U.S. Arms Control Policy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). 132. Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 1999); for a contemporary perspective from the global south, also highlighting the need for transparency, see Valentine M. Moghadam, ed., From Patriarchy to Empowerment: Women’s Participation, Movements, and Rights in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007). 133.  Gupta and Mason, eds., Transparency in Global Environmental Governance; Philipp Reick, “Gentrification 1.0: Urban Transformations in Late-Nineteenth Century Berlin”, Urban Studies 55, no. 11 (2018), 2542–2558.

32  D. OWETSCHKIN AND S. BERGER 134. Holzner and Holzner, Transparency in Global Change. 135.  Jackie Smith, “Transnational Activism, Institutions, and Global Democratization”, in Nicola Piper and Anders Uhlin, eds., Transnational Activism in Asia: Problems of Power and Democracy (London: Routledge, 2004), 61–77. 136.  Jan Michael Nolin, “Defining Transparency Movements”, Journal of Documentation 74, no. 5 (2018), 1025–1041. 137.  On the importance of transnational activism see Stefan Berger and Sean Scalmer, eds., The Transnational Activist: Transformations and Comparisons from the Anglo World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 138. See Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know. 139. Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 140.  See for example David A. Snow et al., eds., The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 2nd edition (Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2019); Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring, eds., The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective: A Survey (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Conny Roggeband and Bert Klandermans, eds., Handbook of Social Movements Across Disciplines, 2nd edition (Cham: Springer, 2017); and Jürgen Mittag and Helke Stadtland, eds., Theoretische Ansätze und Konzepte der Forschung über soziale Bewegungen in der Geschichtswissenschaft (Essen: Klartext, 2014). 141.  Joshua D. Atkinson, Alternative Media and Politics of Resistance: A Communication Perspective (New York: Peter Lang, 2010).

PART I

Transparency and Ideology: Semantic and Historical Aspects

CHAPTER 2

Transparency’s Trap: Problems of an Unquestioned Norm Frieder Vogelmann

The public eye is greedy and insatiable.1 Day by day we are confronted with new projects and plans, by public agencies and private enterprises alike, to reveal ourselves: to enhance our visibility and thus their ability to see (through) us. And we obey docile, nay, eager, agreeing to new security programmes, filling out their forms and our profiles. For without our help, the current regime of visibility could not have come about.2 In this new “regime of visibility”,3 “transparency” is perhaps the most prominent imperative: a guiding ideal erected during the last forty years which is no longer merely considered beneficial for democracy, responsibility and trust4 but has become a value in itself, endowed with a “quasi-religious status”.5 And although some critical voices against the battle-cries for ever more transparency have been raised in the last years,6 the concept of transparency has still not been subjected to the critical scrutiny appropriate to its role in making us accept the current regime of visibility.

F. Vogelmann (*)  Faculty of Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 S. Berger and D. Owetschkin (eds.), Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23949-7_2

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In order to begin this task, we must focus specifically on those speech acts so very hard to resist and so very fundamental for transparency’s omnipresence: on demands for transparency. Let us therefore recall two general thoughts about the usage of concepts. The first is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s insight that concepts acquire their meaning by being used and that we act when we use them. We do something in using “transparency” and we use “transparency” because of what we want to do. Hence actions and concepts are connected because we act with them and thereby bestow them with meaning. Yet there is a second, slightly more controversial connection hinted at by Hans Blumenberg’s remark that a concept is a trap because it acts in the absence of the subject: “The trap acts for the hunter in the moment when he himself is absent but the prey is present”.7 Blumenberg complements the insight that we act by using concepts we act with the insight that it is not just us who act when using concepts but that those concepts act as well. They do something even if we are not present and they have their own intrinsic logic we need to be aware of. It is old news but too easily forgotten: Concepts lead us on to new paths, to unforeseen conclusions and more often than not they make us say what we did not mean. Transparency has become a concept so familiar that we hardly ever stop to consider the presuppositions and consequences of its usage— let alone its intrinsic logic. In order to find out what we do, when we demand transparency, and what the concept forces us to do, while and long after demanding transparency, I will start by analysing the action of demanding transparency. Such demands can be understood as actions aimed at other actions and thus, following Michel Foucault, as a specific way of exercising power. Whereas this gives us the first half of the rationality of demands for transparency, namely how we use transparency to do something, the second half is revealed by what transparency does with us.8 As I will demonstrate in the second step, the intrinsic logic of the concept of transparency is governed by a certain excess: Transparency’s own doing charges our actions with an excessive force that undermines transparency’s own conditions. Looking at both our action in using transparency and transparency’s action on us, I will explain in the third step why and in what way transparency’s excess and the instability to which it leads pose a problem to those subjected to demands for transparency.

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Demands for Transparency Let us start with some examples: 1. “Transparency Germany demands a change of rules. Representatives should declare conflicts of interests in each and every case […]. Additional income must be declared accurately”.9 2. “Whoever is helped by a third party must provide evidence in all areas of life that he rightfully gets financial help”.10 3. “[…] an identification of police officers by name and number is long overdue. Every single citizen has the right to conceal something from the public. For the state and its apparatuses, however, the control fanatics’ argument applies: Only if it has nothing to hide, it does not have to fear transparency”.11 4. “The IFG [Informationsfreiheitsgesetz, the German Freedom of Information Act; FV] primarily has the aim of making transparent all actions of the state. The instrument to achieve this is the transparency of administrative files. Hence transparency is the means and the end at the same time”.12 These four demands for transparency come from political contexts though we could easily add similar demands from economic (or other) contexts.13 In spite (or because?) of its prominence, transparency is rarely ever defined; yet Jeremy Bentham has conclusively summed up what we expect from the enforcement of demands for transparency: “I do really take it for an indisputable truth and a truth that is one of the corner-stones of political science – the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave”.14 Although addressed at the individual in this sentence, Bentham takes transparency to be a corner-stone for the organization of political institutions, too: In Political Tactics15 he demands unrestricted disclosure of all activity in political committees16 because this publicity would strengthen the citizens’ trust in the decisions taken there—an argument which is still popular today.17 In addition, Bentham unequivocally proclaims what he thinks of those who oppose demands for transparency: “The enemies of publicity may be collected into three classes: the malefactor, who seeks to escape the

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notice of the judge; the tyrant, who seeks to stifle public opinion, whilst he fears to hear its voice; the timid or indolent man, who complains of the general incapacity in order to screen his own”.18 Bentham’s version of the famous argument “who has nothing to hide will not fear transparency” (see also example 3 above) makes explicit how forcefully transparency is demanded: Whoever refuses a demand for transparency is a criminal, a tyrant or a cowardly loser. In order to analyse the rationality of demands for transparency, a simple formal representation of such demands proves to be helpful. The initiator A demands of the subject B to disclose something—the object X—to a public C, thereby allowing C to understand B’s actions with regards to X. The terms A, B and C in this schema refer to actors, be they single subjects, unorganized groups or institutions (more on this later). The term X is the object of transparency, that which is being disclosed and thereby made visible. In a concrete demand, X may be a transaction in a political committee as well as the justification for the actions of a singular subject. More abstractly, X usually refers to actions and their justifications (as in examples 1 and 2) or information (examples 3 and 4) which shall be disclosed to the public so that this public can judge X. It is not necessary that every term in this formal representation of demands for transparency refers to a distinct entity. Quite frequently, those demanding transparency are also those to that the object in question shall be disclosed (A and C refer to the same actor)—or they belong to the relevant group of people or the relevant institution (A is part of C). Also, the subject (B) and the object (X) of transparency might not be strictly separate, i.e. if somebody is called on to disclose his or her own actions and justifications. Here, we can already notice a general requirement for demands for transparency, namely the existence of a relationship between the subject and the object of transparency so that the visibility of X matters to B. Why would anyone demand transparency about X from B if it is known that this has no consequences for B? This remark alerts us to the fact that the rationality of demands for transparency is formed partly by the presuppositions of the four elements of a successful demand for transparency (the other part is formed by the implications of “transparency” that I will describe as transparency’s inherent logic in section II). Let us take the presuppositions of each element in turn. I. Starting with the initiator of a demand for transparency (A), we can clearly see that a successful demand results in the existence of specific

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power relations between actors A and B. Following Michel Foucault, I understand power to be an “action upon an action, on possible or actual future or present actions”.19 Power is not a thing anyone can own but exists only when exercised as a relation between actors. A demand for transparency is an attempt to establish a power relation between A and B: if successful, A acts on B’s action by forcing B to disclose X to a certain public C. Notice that nothing here implies that this must go against B’s will; contrary to Max Weber’s widespread definition, power is in play even if B immediately and emphatically agrees to fulfil the demand.20 Understood as a power relation, a successful demand for transparency has two implications for the actions of the subject of transparency (B). First, it is called on to do something in order to fulfil the demand, namely to disclose X. Thus the subject of transparency is requested to act concretely in the present. Yet, second, a successful demand for transparency also changes B’s future actions. I will come back to this in more detail later; for now it will be enough to note that the initiator of transparency (A) must have the appropriate means to establish the power relation of a demand for transparency. Hence the difference whether A and B are individuals or institutions can be decisive: If the initiator is a single individual who demands transparency from an institution (example 3) we find different constellations of power relations than if the initiator is itself an institution demanding (more) transparency from another institution—or from an individual (example 2). Obviously, we can find many more variations, as example 1 shows: Transparency International today is no longer simply a group of individuals; since forming in 1993, they have significantly altered the power relations and have become a rather powerful, if fragile organization. However, if we were to analyse a single, concrete demand for transparency, we would not only have to be attentive to who initiates the demand (A) and to whom it is addressed (B) but how the initiator enforces the demand (the mode of demanding transparency). It matters whether the demand for transparency is successfully established through law, through a voluntary commitment on part of the subject of transparency or through a technical apparatus that makes transparency simply a matter of fact. These differences are important because, on the one hand, different modes come with different assumptions and expectations of legitimacy, and because, on the other hand, how the power relation of a demand for transparency is exercised determines how the subject

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of transparency is addressed. In the three cases just mentioned, those subjected to a demand of transparency are addressed as legal persons, as subjects with certain interests or as physical bodies. Not the least important implication of these different modes of addressing the subject of transparency is that resistance to demands of transparency would have to take different forms accordingly. II. Even though the initiator of the demand for transparency will usually be among those to whom the object of transparency shall be disclosed, this is not necessarily so and thus we should analytically distinguish between the initiator A and the public C. I call the actor C the public of transparency for often (e.g. in all the examples above) it is indeed the public in the ordinary sense of the word to whom something is made visible. Yet it should be clear that the public of transparency could also consist of only a small number of persons—e.g. in a parliamentary committee of enquiry—or even of just one subject. The presupposition which the public of transparency must fulfil and which forms part of the rationality of demands for transparency is that the public must be able to judge the disclosed object X.21 A demand for transparency is unsuccessful because void of any consequences if the actions and justifications (or the information) which are disclosed cannot be evaluated and judged by the public. Precisely at this point, we find an interesting ambiguity. Should we consider a demand for transparency to be successful if the object in question is disclosed to a public who is unable to judge it, for reasons that have to with the public and not the object X? On the one hand, we have a good reason to claim success, for the direct aim of the demand for transparency—the visibility of X—has been achieved. On the other hand, we have an equally good reason to deny its success because the further aims of influencing the future action of the subject of transparency have been missed. These two conditions of felicity, as we might call them,22 correspond to the two ways in which demands for transparency aim to act on the actions of the subject of transparency (B). Both conditions of felicity might come apart, but the ambiguity thereby produced does not necessarily weaken the demands for transparency. On the contrary, the conjuncture of successfully disclosing X and unsuccessfully judging X can serve as a reason to demand more transparency, e.g. by claiming that disclosing X was not enough and that further material must be disclosed. III. A presupposition related to the subject of transparency (B) is that it conducts itself differently if it believes to be under surveillance than

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if it believes itself to be unobserved. Bentham’s remark quoted above— “the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave”—explicates this necessary presupposition of demands for transparency. Now, the formal representation of these demands led us to distinguish between the object (X) and the subject (B) of transparency because the subject that is required to disclose something must not be identical with the object to be disclosed. Hence, Bentham’s presupposition should be reformulated into the more general presupposition that there must be a relation between the subject and the object of transparency such that it matters to the former (B) if the latter (X) is disclosed to the public (C). This presupposition emphasizes the previously discussed second condition of felicity of demands for transparency. Understood as an attempt to establish a power relation, a demand for transparency is only partially successful if the conduct of the subject of transparency (B) is changed because B discloses X. The much more far-reaching influence upon B’s actions is B’s knowledge that the object of transparency (X) is visible to and will be judged by the public (C). A paradigmatic example is again given by Bentham, whose Panopticon is so efficient precisely because it forces the prisoner to be an accomplice of his imprisonment. Foucault highlights this aspect in his discussion of the Panopticon and draws the following conclusion: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection”.23 Yet the presupposition that knowing the object of transparency to be visible is enough for the subject of transparency to change its actions is not restricted to such extreme cases, for it is a general presupposition of every demand for transparency. The duty for political parties to disclose the donations it receives—to take a very different example—is guided by the same idea: If parties know that they have to make public what donations they received (in Germany, this is true only for donations above 50,000 EUR)24 they will have to be careful not to act too obviously in accordance with their donor’s interests—at least according to the spirit of this law. Its letters are satisfied regardless of the parties’ actions apart from disclosing the donations: an example of pressing the first but not the second condition of felicity of demands for transparency. IV. With regard to the object of transparency (X) we have already seen that it must stand in a relation to the subject of transparency (B) such

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that its disclosure matters to B. In most cases, X refers to some of B’s actions and their justifications, as in examples 1 and 2 above. Example 3 similarly aims, albeit indirectly, at the actions of those policemen to be made identifiable with names and/or numbers for their identification shall enable the individual attribution of (mis)conduct. In the same way, the information to be published under the German Freedom of Information Act (example 4) serves to make the administration’s actions visible and understandable. It should not be too surprising that the demands for transparency in all four examples aim at disclosing actions and their justifications, for the aim of successful demands of transparency is, after all, to act upon the actions of the subject of transparency. Thus in the rest of the paper, I will suppose that demands for transparency always aim at disclosing actions and their justifications. Yet there is another important presupposition: the actions and justifications that are the object of transparency must be “disclosable”. This includes two separable conditions: On the one hand, the actions and justifications must be such that they can be disclosed at all; some may require an antecedent procedure to make them disclosable or can only be disclosed via another entity—their effects or further information—from which they can be inferred.25 On the other hand, the actions and justifications must in turn be justifiable. If demands for transparency aim to disclose actions and their justifications to a public then unjustified actions—actions done on impulse for example—are in a strict sense not disclosable because the only reasons B could offer would be retrospective rationalizations. This reveals a Weberian form of rationalization driven by demands for transparency: Insofar as they disclose the reasons of the subject of transparency for its actions, they put the subject under justificatory pressure. In case of the object of transparency, this rationalization is formal: Whatever is disclosed must be rationally justifiable. Demanding from the subject of transparency to make its actions comprehensible necessarily entails the further demand to act rationally. Most interestingly, the material content of the rationality by which these justifications are judged is not explicated. According to which standards the public judges the disclosed object of transparency is completely dependent on that public. With this last remark, all presuppositions are accounted for and thus we can summarize the first half of the rationality of demands for transparency. Understood as attempts to establish power relations, demands for transparency have two conditions of fidelity: they are only fully

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successful if they make the subject of transparency (B) disclose the object of transparency (X) and if they change B’s future conduct because B knows that X is visible to the public of transparency (C). Thus, there must be a relation between X and B such that disclosing X to C matters for B, and C must be able to judge X once it is made visible. Finally, we have seen that demands for transparency enact a form of rationalization because B’s actions and justification come under justificatory pressure. Before we look closer at this process of formal and material rationalization, we first need to take into account the intrinsic logic of these demands and thus the second half of their rationality. Or with reference to Blumenberg’s insight above: what does the concept of transparency do that exceeds our doing with the concept of transparency?

Transparency’s Excess The metaphor the concept of transparency invokes is a useful starting point for inquiring into its intrinsic logic. Following the Oxford English Dictionary’s stipulation that transparency means “perviousness to light”, to make something transparent would mean to achieve this perviousness. Metaphorically, “transparency” refers us to the gaze which shall be able to penetrate the object of transparency. At which point would the transparency demanded be fully realized? If the object is so pellucid that nothing about it provides any obstacle to the gaze looking through it. That, however, would mean that the object of transparency has become invisible, for what is completely transparent has nothing left on which the gaze could linger: nothing to see, really. In perfection, transparency makes its objects disappear, and because all but perfection would mean the concept of transparency would have been realized imperfectly, lacking completion, the concept of transparency pushes toward this perfection, for its conditions of felicity demand it. This inherent tendency of transparency to let its object disappear hints at a certain instability within the concept that we can interpret from at least four different perspectives. The first one was just ­mentioned: Metaphorically speaking, transparency’s instability is located at the tipping point where the transparency of its objects turns into ­invisibility. Within the optical metaphor, the analytical distinction between the subject and the object of transparency is hard to uphold, yet if we move beyond metaphors, we see the instability encroach upon the subject of transparency because of the relation between them which is,

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as we saw early, necessary for any successful demand for transparency. In the attempt to realize a demand for transparency in fullness, we therefore find the same turn from transparency to invisibility with regard to the subject of transparency, yet its meaning changes accordingly if we drop the metaphorical language. The second perspective, which centres on the exercise of power through demand for transparency, demonstrates this clearly. If a demand for transparency aims to control the subject of transparency by disclosing its actions and their justifications,26 then the turning point where transparency becomes invisibility is a reversal of that power relation. Whoever becomes so transparent that he or she becomes invisible reverses the power relation: He or she is no longer seen but becomes “pure gaze”,27 and Jean Starobinski, in his book on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s yearning for transparency, rightly follows Rousseau in connecting this to the story about the Ring of Gyges told by Glaucon in Plato’s Republic. With the ability to become invisible, Gyges gains immense power: “He seduced the king’s wife, attacked the king with her help, killed him, and took over the kingdom”.28 The lesson is clear: Whoever is so transparent as to be invisible becomes all-powerful, for “[i]nvisibility converts the nullity of being into unlimited power”.29 For exactly this reason, Bentham spends so much attention on invisibility in his Panopticon Letters, both regarding the inmates who may never ever, at any moment, become invisible, and (even more so) regarding the inspector whose position within the power relations does not just depend on his uninhibited view of all the inmates but more fundamentally on his own invisibility.30 Transparency’s instability comes again into view from a perspective informed by action theory that focusses on the aspect that demands for transparency subject the disclosed reasons for actions to the public’s judgement. If the demand for transparency is successful and the subject of transparency begins to guide its own behaviour completely according to the public’s rationality, it ceases to be a self-determined subject and merely mechanically executes what is demanded of him or her. In this perspective, transparency’s instability reveals how the subject loses its autonomy and becomes the public’s puppet. There is a fourth perspective from which we again find the same instability: The rationality of demands for transparency necessarily presupposes a distinction between the private and the public because a demand for transparency can only be successful if it matters to the subject of transparency whether the object of transparency remains private or

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becomes publicly visible. Yet a successful demand for transparency undermines this distinction and forces an ongoing displacement of the border between the private and the public that attempts to enlarge the public. This is what transparency’s excess means. The intrinsic logic of the concept of transparency, the trajectory of the concept, once used in demands for transparency, follows on its own because of its conditions of felicity, is excessive: it finally undermines its own presuppositions, regardless under which perspective we analyse it. What shall be visible becomes invisible. Who shall be controlled becomes uncontrollable. What shall make the private public leaves nothing private to be made public. Polemical exaggeration, philosophical hyperbole? Perhaps—and yet not merely as hyperbolic and exaggerated as the small “Report on the Labour Market in the Summer of 2005”31 written by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Labour and with an introduction of Wolfgang Clement, then Federal Minister for Economic Affairs. Above its inconspicuous subtitle, the heading is much more pronounced: “Priority for the Decent – Against Abuse, ‘Rip-Off’ and Self-Service in the Welfare State”. While “Rip-Off” here is still safely contained in quotation marks, over the next few pages the colloquial phrase breaks free and becomes an ordinary verb—“to rip off”32—before turning into the name of a whole class of people on the last pages: “those who rip off”.33 Tough rhetorically fascinating for an official government document, I am less interested in the report’s rhetorical dynamic than in the demands for transparency and the suggested ways to enforce them. The report’s central claim has already been quoted as example two: “Whoever is helped by a third party must provide evidence in all areas of life that he rightfully gets financial help”.34 Therefore, one must verify that no spouse or partner exists who could pay instead, or rather that there is no person “who lives together with the employable person in need of assistance in such a way that according to a considered judgement one may stipulate the mutual will to take responsibility for one another and to stand by for each other”.35 True and tried means to achieve certainty are to count pants on the clothesline, to inspect the bedroom as well as the wardrobes and, lest somebody would forget, to check the “hollow in the matrimonial bed”.36 Furthermore, one must know at all times where the “employable person in need” spends his or her time. Hence, their mobility must be restricted by stipulating that any longer absence—“longer” in this case means whatever hinders him or her to respond to a letter at the next

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workday—needs to be granted by public administration and can only be granted if a proper application has been filed well in advance.37 Last but not least, one must see to it that the public is able to control what its money is spent on, so a duty to let the jobcentre review all bank statements of “employable persons in need” must be created.38 Transparency’s excessive inherent logic becomes visible in this small report as a rather natural and rational wish to draw the necessary implications from the social security statute book. Transparency’s excess results from taking care of all those small problems which arise for the jobcentre’s employees who are charged with the task of verifying the correct application of the social security law down to its fine print. Of course, this has not yet reached the tipping point at which the excessive intensification and expansion of the demands for transparency become unstable. The “Report on the Labour Market” is merely a small step on this path—although this small step certainly is a big deal for all affected.

Transparent Subjects Before explicating the intrinsic logic of transparency—the concept’s doing that Blumenberg emphasized—as an unstable excess, the analysis of the rationality of demands for transparency revealed the formal and material rationalization enacted by these demands. Now, how does the formal and material rationalization enacted by using “transparency” interact with the unstable excess towards which the concept pushes once used? The interaction affects mostly the subject of transparency, and its effects can best be accounted for with the notion of “self-censorship”. Like “censorship” in general, “self-censorship” is a concept with stark emotional and normative connotations. It is therefore helpful to recall some basic distinctions from the sober analysis of censorship—or rather: of the prohibition of censorship—in jurisprudence. The Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany states: Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures, and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.39

German jurisdiction since 1949 has followed a “classical” interpretation and refused all attempts to interpret the prohibition in a broader sense.40

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It distinguishes between prepublication censorship (“prior restraint”) and post-publication censorship and takes the Basic Law to prohibit only two forms of prepublication censorship: On the one hand a general prohibition of publication subject to the possibility of authorization, on the other hand a concrete prohibition of publication because of a screening process if the will to publish has not been enacted by the subject of the basic right.41

Whereas in the first case the prepublication censorship is a general censorship with only some exceptions, in the second case, prepublication censorship proceeds by deciding case by case whether to prohibit the publication of something. Following this second form of prepublication censorship, I use “self-censorship” to designate the process whereby an actor refrains from an action because he or she suspects, fears or knows for sure that he or she will not be able to justify the action with reasons or that his or her reasons have no place in the public’s “space of reasons”. To be clear about this point: We all engage to some extend in this kind of self-censorship and it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine a society without it—which means that self-censorship in this sense is not automatically wrong in a moral or ethical sense. Yet both forms of rationalization enacted by successful demands for transparency intensify this self-censorship. The formal rationalization connected to the object of transparency (X) adds to the pressure of refraining from certain actions: If the object of transparency is not disclosable because there are no justifications for it that could be publicly made, then the subject of whom transparency is demanded will usually abstain from the action or try to hide doing it from the public. Successful demands for transparency prevent the subject from hiding his or her action and therefore strengthen his or her self-censorship. The material rationalization results from demands for transparency only indirectly because the demands do not determine the rationality according to which the public judges the disclosed objects of transparency—demands for transparency merely facilitate these judgements. What reasons and actions satisfy the justificatory demands of the public depends on the public alone. The logic of self-censorship according to which the subject of whom transparency is demanded must review its actions before carrying them out must therefore mirror the public’s rationality; in a manner of speaking, this logic becomes an internalized representative of the public.

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If we finally including transparency’s excess into our analysis, some extraordinary implications of demands for transparency and their corresponding self-censorship become apparent. First of all this excess leads to an intensification of self-censorship because it pushes for a constant expansion of demands for transparency, both quantitative and qualitative. Transparency’s excess demands ever more spheres of action to be made transparent, often via the simple but effective argument that a certain object of transparency (X) could never be fully disclosed unless a further object Y, previously not included in the demands for transparency, is also disclosed. Of course, the expansion can also occur via the subject of transparency: If B is the subject of transparency, why not his or her colleagues, the staff he or she supervises or his or her boss? Demands for transparency can expand qualitatively by changing how they aim to disclose the object of transparency. If, for example, it heretofore had been sufficient to disclose all files related to a certain object, the next step might be to introduce a duty to publicly document all actions connected to these files. Additional duties for documentation are an effective means to intensify demands for transparency because they block strategies like the ones studied in Canadian administrations: In reaction to the Access of Information Act (valid since 1983), administrators stopped to create files or inserted only the bare minimum of information and started to exchange more and more information orally, so that they would not be included in the files.42 Whether qualitative or quantitative, the intensification of demands for transparency also intensifies the resulting self-censorship. As studies of the same Canadian administration show, the (fewer) messages written by the administrators are markedly more cautiously phrased, and a further study shows that dissenting opinions are less often voiced in discussions if the discussants know that their words are protocolled.43 However, transparency’s excess also causes serious problems because of the instability to which it leads. We can again use the four perspectives under which the excessive intrinsic logic of transparency was analysed above to see what transparency’s instability means for the corresponding self-censorship. Starting with the metaphor, transparency’s excess pushes towards ever more transparency until its object becomes invisible. For the self-censorship the loss of the object corresponds to the eradication of the self through censorship. In this sense, seen from point of view of action theory, the excess strengthens the heteronomy of the subject of transparency to the point where it ceases to be a subject acting

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autonomously. Transparency’s excess intensifies the self-censorship until its demands can only be met by complete conformity between the public’s rationality and the practical reason of the subject. In this excess we can see Rousseau’s dream of a volonté générale coming to life, a general will that dominates the wills of the individual citizens—and “[t]his means merely that [they] will be forced to be free”.44 Regarding the demarcation between the private and the public that is presupposed by demands for transparency and undermined by their excess, the instability has the effect on the self to permanently anticipate what might be demanded by the public. The power of the imagination that Bentham held in high regard when constructing his prison45 forces those affected into adopting a preemptive obedience of demands that become real only because they are already fulfilled: a dictatorship of the possible in the name of the public, more stable than any rule of the real. If the concept of transparency is indeed a trap, the mechanism of which my analysis has revealed, and if the rapid rise of our esteem for the concept together with the ever more frequent demands for transparency indicate that we are already entrapped—is an escape from the resulting excessive self-censorship possible? At first glance, the fourth and final perspective focussing on the power relation seems promising: Maybe the turn from perfect transparency to invisibility with the reversal of complete submission to omnipotence could be used as a subversive strategy? Maybe we could amplify transparency’s movement towards this tipping point, letting the demands for transparency collapse because of their own unstable excess? That would mean to submit to transparency and its excess, to completely comply in hope of enduring its demise. It would mean to submit to Bentham’s disciplinary betterment, to comply with the public until one merges with it and thus partakes in its power. It would mean to have confidence in Maximilien Robespierre’s moral principle, argued for in May 1793, that “the public is the pillar of virtue”46 and that this principle does not necessary lead into the public’s tyrannical rule. The price, however, to be paid for such a strategy, seems unacceptable, for a freedom won through complete submission under the public would belong to that “morality” that lead Robespierre only a year later to name terror an emanation of virtue.47 In light of this, we should rather become luddites, and the attempt to break out of transparency’s trap should rather take the form of sabotaging the mechanism that has been revealed here.

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Notes









1. This is a freely amended translation of my “Die Falle der Transparenz. Zur Problematik einer fraglosen Norm”, which appeared in Leon Hempel, Susanne Krasmann, and Ulrich Bröckling, eds., Sichtbarkeitsregime. Überwachung, Sicherheit und Privatheit im 21. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2011). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German are mine. 2. Who is this “we”? Are the most important changes in the regime of visibility not beyond “our” control, like those surveillance programmes Edward Snowden revealed? Yet at least in democracies like the USA, Great Britain or Germany, many must actively support the programmes and operations of the NSA, the GSHQ or the BND. Accusing the secret services of “undemocratic” actions, of cultivating a clandestine, “opaque” habitus and of being unaccountable to the parliamentary committees which are supposed to control them is of course easier than admitting that secret services are designed to do exactly that. So unless “we” are willing to dispute that those agencies operate in democracies, most of “us” will have a hard time explaining why they do not belong to this “we”. 3. The notion of a “regime of visibility”, loosely based on Jacques Rancière’s concept of the “partition of the perceptible”, designates the “social and technical arrangements that found and stabilize orders […] and that establish an order of observing and being observed, of showing and hiding”. See Leon Hempel, Susanne Krasmann, and Ulrich Bröckling, “Sichtbarkeitsregime: Eine Einführung”, in Hempel, Krasmann, and Bröckling, eds., Sichtbarkeitsregime, 8. See also Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 55. 4.  Christopher Hood charts the rapid career of “transparency”. See Christopher Hood, “Transparency in Historical Perspective”, in Christopher Hood and David Heald, eds., Transparency: The Key to Better Governance? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3–23. David Heald debates whether the concept should be understood as an instrumental or an ultimate value, see David Heald, “Transparency as an Instrumental Value”, in Hood and Heald, eds., Transparency, 59–73. Michael Power and Onora O’Neill question the assumption that transparency promotes trust. See Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), chapter 6; Onora O’Neill, A Question of Trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 5. Hood, “Transparency in Historical Perspective”, 3. 6. See for example the arguments by Birchall for the potential of “secrecy” for a radical left, the apodictic culture critique by Han or the critical

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history of “the dream of transparency” by Schneider: Clare Birchall, “Transparency, Interrupted: Secrets of the Left”, Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011), 60–84; Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); and Manfred Schneider, Transparenztraum. Literatur, Politik, Medien und das Unmögliche (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013). 7. Of course, Blumenberg develops his thought in a radical different direction, arguing that reason’s performance cannot be captured as conceptual activity alone. See Hans Blumenberg, Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007), 14. 8. By talking of a “rationality” of demands for transparency I mean the binding and consistent pattern of the usage of “transparency” in speech acts that demand transparency. The usage is consistent because the concept of “transparency” has necessary presuppositions and implications. This systematic is binding because it accounts for “transparency’s” conceptual content: If someone persistently takes other presuppositions and implications to be tied to “transparency”, he or she is either trying to change its conceptual content or mistakes its meaning. With these remarks, I loosely base my account of demands for transparency on an inferential theory of language as given by Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 9.  Transparency International: Nebeneinkünfte und Interessenskonflikte von Mitgliedern des Bundestages (2016), https://www.transparency. de/publikationen/detail/article/nebeneinkuenfte-und-interessenskonflikte-von-mitgliedern-des-bundestages/, last accessed 2 July 2019. 10. Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Arbeit, Vorrang für die Anständigen – Gegen Missbrauch, “Abzocke” und Selbstbedienung im Sozialstaat. Ein Report vom Arbeitsmarkt im August (Berlin: Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Arbeit, 2005), 24. 11. Gereon Asmuth, “Polizei braucht Überwachung [Kommentar]”, in taz, 12 September 2009. This echoes Rousseau’s demand that “no man in office to be allowed to walk incognito”. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Plan for Perpetual Peace, On the Government of Poland, and Other Writings on History and Politics. Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. II, trans. Christopher Kelly and Judith Bush (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2013), 212. See also Chapter 1 in this volume. 12. Michael Sitsen, Das Informationsfreiheitsgesetz des Bundes. Rechtsprobleme im Zusammenhang mit dem Anspruch auf Informationszugang nach dem IFG (Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovač, 2009), 41. 13. See for example the extensive review of “transparency” in organizational contexts by Arnold et al. who understand transparency to be a remedy to “ethical lapses in business”: Danny Arnold, Jennifer Dapko, Denise Linda Parris, and Richard Wade Arnold, “Exploring Transparency:

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A New Framework for Responsible Business Management”, Management Decision 54, no. 1 (2016), 223. More emphatically, Klenk and Hanke celebrate transparency as an important “factor for success for enterprises”. See Volker Klenk and Daniel J. Hanke, eds., Corporate Transparency – Wie Unternehmen im Glashaus-Zeitalter Wettbewerbsvorteile erzielen (Frankfurt: Frankfurter Allgemeine Buch, 2009). 14. Jeremy Bentham, Writings on the Poor Laws: The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Michael Quinn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 277. According to Hood, Bentham is the first author to use “transparency” in connection with political government. See Hood, “Transparency in Historical Perspective”, 9. See also Chapter 1 in this volume. 15. Jeremy Bentham, Political Tactics: The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 7.1, eds. Michael James, Cyprian Blamires, and Catherine PeaseWatkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 29–44. 16. Only those transactions are to remain “secret” the publicity of which would play into the hands of hostile powers. See Bentham, Political Tactics, 39. 17. See Sitsen, Das Informationsfreiheitsgesetz des Bundes, 41. 18. Bentham, Political Tactics, 30. 19. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, in Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. III (New York: The New Press, 1998), 340. 20. Ibid., 340–342. 21. See Ann Florini, “Does the Invisible Hand Need a Transparent Glove? The Politics of Transparency”, in Boris Plekovic and Josef Stiglitz, eds., Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economies 1999 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000), 166. 22.  See John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 14. 23. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 202. Bentham gives a detailed explanation how to produce this knowledge. See Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, trans. Miran Božovič (London: Verso, 1995), 103fn. 24. See Parteiengesetz, §25, paragraph 3. 25. Power’s argumentation how many aspects must be made “auditable” is comparable. See Power, The Audit Society, chapter 5. 26. See Bentham, Political Tactics, 29–37. 27. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 255. 28. See Plato, Republic, 359d–360d.



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29. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 255. 30. Therefore, Bentham devotes page after page to the exact positions of blinds and screens. See Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, Letter II, Letter IV and Postscript I, Section VII. 31.  Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Arbeit, Vorrang für die Anständigen. 32. Ibid., 9. 33. Ibid., 29. 34. Ibid., 24. 35. Sozialgesetzbuch II, §7, paragraph 3, no. 3c. 36.  Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Arbeit, Vorrang für die Anständigen, 4–6; see the comments in Sabine Berghahn, “Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit der Grenzüberschreitungen. Aktuelle Entwicklungen in der rechtlichen Regulierung des Privaten”, in Karin Jurczyk and Mechtild Oechsle, eds., Das Private neu denken. Erosionen, Ambivalenzen, Leistungen (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2008), 208–212. 37. See Sozialgesetzbuch III, §152, no. 2 and the “Order of Reachability” [Erreichbarkeits-Anordnung] in its version from 26 September 2008. 38.  See Sozialgesetzbuch I, §60, §66 and Sozialgesetzbuch X, §67 and, because it is exemplary, the decision by the Bundessozialgericht (the Federal Social Welfare Court) from 19 September 2008, number B 14 AS 45/07 R. 39. Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, §5, paragraph 1. 40. See Thomas Nessel, Das grundgesetzliche Zensurverbot (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2004), 49. 41. Ibid. 42. See Alasdair Roberts, “Dashed Expectations: Governmental Adaptation to Transparency Rules”, in Hood and Heald, eds., Transparency, 107–125; Alasdair Roberts, “Spin Control and Freedom of Information: Lessons for the United Kingdom from Canada”, Public Administration 83, no. 1 (2005), 1–23. 43.  See Ellen Meade and David Stasavage, “Publicity of Debate and the Incentive to Dissent. Evidence from the US Federal Reserve”, Economic Journal 118, no. 528 (2008), 695–717. 44.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Social Contract”, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Basic Political Writings (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 150. An administrative instruction given by the Provision Commission to the departments Rhône and Loire during the French Revolution—dated 26 Brumaire II (16 November 1793)—demonstrates how serious this demand was taken; fittingly, its closing admonition is formulated using the metaphor of the gaze: “We, who are the intermediaries between

54  F. VOGELMANN you and them [the National Convention; F.V.], we, who are authorized by them to watch over you, to instruct you, we swear to you that we will not for one moment avert our gaze from you, that we will unforbearingly use all power invested in us and that we will punish as treason anything that under different circumstances you might call laggardness, indulgence or negligence.” See Walter Markov and Albert Soboul, eds., Die Sansculotten von Paris: Dokumente zur Geschichte der Volksbewegung 1793–1794 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1957), document no. 52, 234. 45. Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, Letter VI. 46. Maximilien de Robespierre, Textes choisis. Tome deuxième (août 1792– juillet 1793), ed. Jean Poperen (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1957), 155. 47. Maximilien de Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, trans. John Howe, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2007), 115.

CHAPTER 3

The Fly on a Pane of Glass: Paradoxes of Transparency Manfred Schneider

The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which are closely associated with the names of Descartes. Kepler, Galileo, Leibniz and Newton, can be summed up in two contentions: firstly, the new science aimed to ground knowledge in empiricism and observation; secondly, it was keen to expand the field of experience that could be explored by human perception with the help of technical devices such as the telescope or the microscope. But the revolutionaries could not embark on these new journeys straight away; first, they had to circumvent the theological dogma formulated by Augustine, one of the Church Fathers, according to which scientific inquisitiveness was a reprehensible urge.1 Because it was inadmissible to peek into God’s secret chambers, they had to find a way to derive scientific interest and thirst for knowledge from the authority of the Bible itself. This was precisely what the statesman and theoretician of science Francis Bacon set out to do in his seminal book Of the Advancement of Learning, published in 1605, in which he laid down the principles of a M. Schneider (*)  Institute of German Studies, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 S. Berger and D. Owetschkin (eds.), Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23949-7_3

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new science founded on empiricism and experimentation. Reminding his readers that according to the Book of Revelation, “the globe, which seemeth to us a dark and shady body, is in the view of God as crystal”2 he concluded that the exploration of man and of all things was under a special obligation to adopt this perspective. The gaze of man ought to become the gaze of God, or in the words of Bacon: “It is the perfect law of inquiry of truth, that nothing be in the globe of matter, which should not be likewise in the globe of crystal or form; that is, that there be not anything in being and action which should not be drawn and collected into contemplation and doctrine”.3 This was in 1605, and since that time, the ‘crystallization’ of the world for the gaze of man has made decisive progress. Today, the arsenal of technological devices—which in Bacon’s time, besides navigational instruments for seafaring, comprised the first, rather weak telescopes and microscopes—includes huge telescopes looking into galaxies billions of light years away from the Earth, and gigantic particle accelerators that open up new pathways into the micro-worlds of elementary particles. But the data produced by these devices and systems has long propelled us beyond the optical threshold of God’s transparent world, since elementary particles cannot be made visible, but only calculated. The fact that the famous Higgs boson—which according to the currently valid Standard Model of particle physics generates the masses of quarks and leptons4—has been nicknamed the ‘God particle’ has caused alarm among bishops and other successors of Augustine. I would argue that this moniker is actually useful. For one, the function of the Higgs quantum field, which gives elementary particles their mass, can be compared to God’s biblical act of creation, to the extent that He also formed the Earth from chaos. Secondly, it means that we no longer have to explain the creation of the world by comparing it to the work of a watchmaker, who after winding up the cosmos leaned back to observe, with both delight and horror, the history of the world unwinding itself without being able to intervene. Accordingly, God as a field quantum is now busy everywhere, preventing disorderly and massless elementary particles from hurtling through the energy fields they themselves have created. We can free ourselves from the conception that God exists in a privileged observer modus, gazing from his celestial lookout into the transparent events of the macro- and microcosm. In fact, the word ‘transparency’ itself, which has been tremendously successful of late, was invented at the end of the Middle Ages to solve

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the paradoxical conception that God, angels and ghosts are simultaneously visible and immaterial. One of the first philosophers to coin the new term was the philosopher Burgundius of Pisa in his translation of the Greek treaty De natura hominis (1165) by Nemesios of Emesa.5 Burgundius put transparens for the Greek word διαϕανής which designs the properties of light and materials like air, water or glass, thereby making transparens the quality of a medium that cannot be seen, but has the ability to make light visible. However, Aristotle had already claimed in his extremely influential treatise De Anima (Περὶ ψυχῆς) that beyond these materials also the celestial bodies (ἐν τῷ ἀϊδίῳ τῷ ἄνω σώματι) had the quality of being transparent (διαϕανής). This idea aroused the interest of a large number of scholastic philosophers and theologians who commented on De anima and sought to bring the Aristotelian concept of ψυχή or anima in line with the Christian doctrine of the soul. Anca Vasiliu has delineated the linguistic emergence of the word ‘transparent’ in the scholastic discourse.6 Since this word was unknown in classical Latin, it is instructive to examine how this new term became so prominent in the scholastic discourse. The most important philosophical and theological mastermind of the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas, provides a preliminary answer in his Commentary on De Anima by Aristotle, which draws upon several translations and commentaries that had already discussed the Aristotelian treatise extensively. However, it is not a natural scientist’s interest in the physical nature of light which is as ‘primary matter’ a medieval theoretical construct like the ‘God particles’. These meditations of the nature of the transparent arise from the urgent theological interest in the nature of the illuminated blessed animae, i.e. the quality of the glorious souls in the paradise. They are transparent and they are light giving. The question is therefore: what is their very nature? Initially, in his Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, Aquinas states that “diaphanum autem est idem quod transparens” (the diaphane is the same as the transparent); following, he writes: For it is evident that neither air nor water nor anything of that sort is actually transparent unless it is luminous. Of itself the transparent is in potency to both light and darkness (the latter being a privation of light) as primary matter is in potency both to form and the privation of form. Now light is to the transparent as colour is to a body of definite dimensions: each is the act and form of that which receives it. And on this account, he says that light is the colour, as it were, of the transparent, in virtue of which the

58  M. SCHNEIDER transparent is made actually so by some light-giving body, such as fire, or anything else of that kind, or by a celestial body. For to be full of light and to communicate it is common to fire and to celestial bodies, just as to be diaphanous is common to air and water and the celestial bodies.7

In the last sentence, Thomas touches upon the very interest of this commentary. He has to answer the question: what are the celestial bodies made of, what is their physical nature? In the Supplements to his huge Summa Theologica Aquinas discusses this problem. He asks to what extent the transparent souls of the redeemed can be seen with the eyes of the unredeemed: “Utrum claritas claritas corporis gloriosi possit videri ab non glorioso oculo”.8 Thomas clarifies that the souls of the blessed can in fact be seen with the eyes of the unredeemed. They are as transparent as glass, and the soul rests within this glasslike medium as though it were made of gold. In this answer Thomas refers to the Father of the Church Gregor the Great: “Gregorius comparat corpora gloriosa auro et vitro; auro propter claritatem & vitro propter hoc quod translucebunt”.9 Thomas does not quote verbatim, since he replaces the word ‘transparere’ used by Gregorius in his commentary on Job by the word ‘translucere’. This erroneous quotation demonstrates why the scholars needed this neologism. The word ‘translucens’ does not denote the quality of something that is transparent. Light does translucere, it goes through something like glass. However, the glass being traversed by light is not ‘translucens’. So, the word transparens served scholasticism as a means of explaining the physical state that the blessed will assume after redemption. There is, first and foremost, the metaphysical promise: all that is transparent comes from the sphere of the Divine; both light and the souls that reflect it participate in its heavenly origin. This means: the historical trajectory of the concept of transparency and its (meta)physical promise presupposes the formidable theological work of scholasticism, which made it possible to imagine the state of the blessed or the unredeemed in the hereafter. But the scientific world represented by the great Bacon no longer wants to rely on the theological authority of the equally great Thomas. In the historic moment we are witnessing today, it has seized on the little word ‘transparency’ as eagerly as the medieval Church Fathers did, hoping to put its paradox-healing virtues to good use. Because the deeper our gaze appears to penetrate into the secrets of matter, things and power, the greater our desire to know more about them and to keep glimpsing behind the diaphragm of the next mystery.

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The “fly on a pane of glass” is Friedrich Nietzsche’s image for the foolish attempts to “penetrate through” a thing through which we can see.10 In terms of the contemporary world and its flourishing discourses on transparency, this means that we are confusing data with reality, and media with the world. Our fly brains lead us to believe that when we learn something about invisible processes or look into remote things thanks to data or figures, we are actually in them, similarly to God particles. But this foolishness deserves to be regarded with indulgence, since the flies of all eras and many a scientist of our day merely want to understand changed situations. These are our situations. Each technological invention that arms the eye with a new weapon, seems to bring us one step closer to the redeeming objective, which is to finally be able to listen to reality itself and make things, galaxies, elements, proteins, populations and brains reveal their secret effortlessly. Effortlessly! Because Bacon wanted to physically wrest nature’s secrets from her: “For like as a man’s disposition is never well known till he be crossed […] so the passages and variations of nature cannot appear so fully in the liberty of nature as in the trials and vexations of art”.11 It is therefore useful to see that these contemporaneous paradoxes perpetuate past flies’ misfortunes. My first example is the famous French writer Jean-Paul Sartre. From the very beginning of his writing, especially from L’Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness), the notion of transparency is crucial in Sartre’s philosophy. All aspects of his thoughts, philosophy, political theory, literature, society are in their set of problems and in their utopian dimension in touch with this idea of transparency. Sartre gave an interview in 1975, on occasion of his seventieth birthday—he was almost blind—to his friend Michel Contat, and expressed his expectation that one day objective and subjective life might be completely transparent, when no one might keep any more secrets from anyone: “I think transparency should always be substituted for what is secret, and I can quite well imagine the day when two men will no longer have secrets from each other, because no one will have any more secrets from anyone”.12 And, asked about what he thinks to be the chief obstacle to such transparency he answers: First of all, Evil. […] This Evil makes communicating all thoughts difficult, because I do not know to what extent the principles which the other uses to form his thoughts are the same as mine. […] A man’s existence must be entirely visible to his neighbour, whose own existence must in turn be entirely visible to him, in order for true social harmony to be

60  M. SCHNEIDER established. This cannot be realized today, but I think that it will be once there has been a change in the economic, cultural, and affective relations among men, beginning with the eradication of material scarcity, which, as I showed in Critique de la raison dialectique, is for me the root of the antagonisms among men, past and present.13

This vision of a future society wherein evil in terms of scarcity and acting will have disappeared and people will communicate transparently seems to be inspired by medieval philosophy. Sartre is definitely a Thomistic thinker, too. Not only does Sartre call to mind Thomas Aquinas’s communication of the blessed within his dreams of a transparent relationship between all men; even in his autobiographical narrative Les Mots Sartre alludes to the scholastic conception of the soul and its glassy shape: My thoughts swam around in my pretty glass globe, in my soul. Everyone could follow their play. Not a shadowy corner. Yet, without words, without shape and or consistency, diluted in that innocent transparency, a transparent certainty spoiled everything: I was an impostor.14

Becoming an impostor, even a transparent impostor, is the beginning of evil. This kind of evil consisted in one fundamental error, as Sartre puts it, “I confused things with their names: that amounts to believing”.15 Of course, it was the faith of others, but Sartre retained his faith, that there is a basic evil in society. In his three monographs on Baudelaire, Genet and Flaubert, Sartre constructs these biographies around one evil moment that turned the child (and the prospective poet) into a betrayer. Moreover, that fundamental change in their being is the first step on their path to becoming poets. To be a poet means to believe in words— not as transparent signs but as opaque sounds. So, it is evident that Sartre’s political dream of transparency (the fly’s error) is, of course, the dream of reestablishing a complete transparent language. In the first collection of critical essays, Situations I (1947), Sartre explains these linguistic ideas. He discusses the book Recherches sur la nature et la fonction du langage (1942) by Brice Parain. Sartre had been friend with Parain since 1934. First, Sartre sketches in a clearly Rousseauian perspective Parain’s biography. Parain was, like many of his fellow students, the son of a farmer and he came to the university as a brilliant but silent student. In secondary school, the taciturn Parain turned into an eloquent speaker who could talk and communicate about everything. Later, Sartre states, as theoretician of language Parain

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became alienated from language, as had many other poets. However, this is the result of Parain’s experience in society and politic. As a speaking man, it is possible to be expelled from the state of nature of words. What is the linguistic state of nature? It is the state of transparent words. Sartre claims that only as a part in a chain of expressions words are transparent and keep unheard and unseen. This unnoticed language carries in itself what Sartre calls the infra-silence: So Parain, though having given up his search for what I will call l’infra-silence, a silence that coincides with I don’t know which ‘state of nature’ and that would have existed before language, did not abandon the project to remain silent. The silence he reaches right now extends to the whole field of language. It is language itself, noise of murmurs, commands, calls. This time, it does not come from an impossible destruction of the words, but from their radical depreciation.16

Language, for Sartre, has these two sides: on the one hand, communication, transparency and reference to reality; and on the other, the (poetic, material) language turning words into things, objects, sounds. This idea of language is just the contrary of the traditional idea of poetry to be the original language, the transparent language of the paradise. For Sartre, poetic language belongs to the non-transparent world, to what he calls in Being and Nothingness “la part du diable”, the devil’s part, that is “a diversity of meaning that rank and contrast for just one sentence”.17 The devil’s part is, so to say, the dark side of language, or, coming back to our topic, the opaque and non-transparent mode of communication. Indeed, the devil is the lord of the flies. Finally, I would like to discuss the paradoxes of transparency—the fly’s astonishment at finding out that it isn’t a God particle that crosses everything—by looking at two topical examples. These concern two technologies that drive the crystallization of the world, two ideal conceptions of panvision that these techniques seem to turn into realities. Firstly, there is the urge to observe ourselves from the sky in a kind of real-time process and to capture evil with electronic eyes; secondly, there is the desire to capture what we think and feel. Breaking with Bacon’s torturous approach, some neuroscientists no longer want to listen to anything coming out of the mouths of their experimental subjects in the aporia of words, and instead prefer to read the écriture automatique, the automatic writing, of their brains.

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The most systematic approximation of God’s panvision is pursued by the US-American company DigitalGlobe with its orbital satellites scanning the entire world from high above. Satellite technology was initially an investment by states, armies and secret services for military purposes, but private companies were quick to harness this new technology to offer businesses and government agencies an all-round service: information, security, defence, disaster management and mapping. The penultimate step that will lead to the orbitalization of self-observation has already been taken; the final step will be the continual real-time scrutiny of ourselves. This epochal shift, which aimed to make satellite technology accessible not only to commerce, but also to entertainment and convenience applications, was made possible by the satellite QuickBird 2, which was put into orbit on October 2001 to look at our planet from an altitude of 450 kilometres. QuickBird 2, which has meanwhile decayed (that means burned upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere), circled the earth at a rate of 3–7 days per rotation depending on the latitude. Every image it took captured a 16.5-kilometre square surface of the Earth onto 128 gigabytes of memory. In September 2007 DigitalGlobe launched a new satellite named WorldView 1, which is currently still circling the globe in 1.2 days at an altitude of around 500 kilometres, each day photographing 750,000 square kilometres of the surface of the Earth. In November 2016 WorldView 4 took up its position as a technological eye of God. The new satellite features a telescope with a 3.6-foot-wide mirror, the heart of an imaging system provided by Harris Corp. that can resolve surface features as small as 31 centimetres across, or about one foot, from a distance of 383 miles.18 In the eyes of a satellite launched into the sky by private companies, the Earth is first and foremost a commercial space that must be filled as quickly as possible with sellable data. Looking down from the sky helps to sell houses and real estate, locate oil and gas reserves, control property. Yet DigitalGlobe promotes its services with a metaphysical promise: “Transparency for evolving global security”.19 How such a transparent world can be strategically exploited is illustrated by the US-American Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, which uses DigitalGlobe’s imagery to secure US interests in the Indo-Pacific, which are euphemistically subsumed under the term of ‘global security’:

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The Indo-Pacific region is host to some of the world’s most important shipping lanes, facilitates huge volumes of regional trade, and boasts abundant natural resources. Competing territorial claims, incidents between neighbouring countries, and increasing militarization, however, raise the possibility that an isolated event at sea could become a geopolitical catastrophe. This is all occurring against a backdrop of relative opaqueness.20

The claim that making the world visible to military eyes serves the general interests of humanity is grounded in the stubborn ideology of transparency. In contemporary literature, this trope has become a subject of derision and alarm alike. In his essayistic short story “The Time Scanner”, the Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder projects current technological utopias and ideologies hundred years into the future, imagining the installation of a time scanner at CERN in Geneva, where a proton accelerator is currently still looking for the God particle.21 The device imagined by Gaarder allows all ‘users’, as humans are now called, to choose any time in the history of the universe—from the Big Bang 16.4 billion years ago to the moment that has just elapsed—thanks to a history ‘search function’ and to observe it as filmed present time. At last it is possible to witness the sinking of the Titanic or to eavesdrop on JeanPaul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir having a coffee in 1952—or even to look at oneself scanning time! But while all of this still lies ahead of us, the technological premise for every word spoken on the planet to be recorded, for every malicious statement against global security to be intercepted, is already within reach. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, recently wrote that, “in 2029, you’ll be able to buy 11 petabytes (a very large number) for $100, in a single hard drive”. This, he calculated, would allow an immortal user to record “six hundred years of 24-hours-a-day, DVD-quality videos”.22 The fictive world of a huge Internet company in the US writer Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle derives directly from the present time. The company that gives the book its title is a kind of combination of Google, Facebook, YouTube and other social media services. Led by the so-called ‘Three Wise Men’, it provides users with a single account, identity, password and payment system.23 When the book’s main protagonist, Mae Holland, joins the company as an employee, she initially feels like she’s in heaven. As she admires the dazzling headquarters of the company,

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readers are immediately reminded of the transparent glass and steel constructions cultivated by modernity. The entrance hall is the size of a cathedral; walls are of glass; and even the floor on which Mae walks piously, is so transparent that it makes her head spin for a brief moment. The mantra of the Circle—“Secrets are lies. Sharing is caring. Privacy is theft”—suggests that transparency brings peace of mind. Thomas Aquinas could well be its CEO! The Circle also stands for monitoring the world, as virtually every corner of the globe is scanned by the company’s own cameras to add to the sum of knowledge about the world. One particular aspect in Eggers’s story that strikes a chord with contemporary readers concerns the processes of adaptation by which the employees and users of the Circle are turned into willing participants without so much as a hint of violence. This painless terror takes the shape of employees who are consumed by their own eagerness. Power no longer operates through violence and sanctions—as in the seminal novels of Samjatin, Orwell or Huxley—but by suggesting blissful participation. After a rapid rise through the ranks, Mae thus decides to “go transparent” herself by strapping a camera on her body that makes her observable online day and night. Her example is followed by a congresswoman who wants to promote the quasi-religious idea of transparency in society. By doing so, she sets off a chain reaction, to the effect that five weeks later more than 16,000 politicians are fitted with the 24/7 camera. Those who refuse to play the game expose themselves to suspicion: surely, they have something to hide. Shortly afterwards, critics denouncing the Circle’s monopoly or voicing reservations about its breach of privacy, are accused as criminals with links to al-Qaeda or arrested as presumed users of child pornography. For Mae, it all seems plausible, as the old symmetry of good and bad is restored—visibly and invisibly. All corners of the Circle, are pervaded by the earliest of transparency ideologies: all will end well—as in the celestial spheres of transparent spirits. This, then, is how the contemporary ideology of transparency reunites three separate conceptions, namely, the concept of the blessed and redeemed transparent body as discussed by scholastic philosophers; the motto of the science founded by Bacon with the aim to make the world and all things crystal-clear and transparent; and, finally, the immemorial belief that if human thought and intention could be extracted from the obscurity of the skull, all lies, and the evil rooted in them, could be eradicated from the world. This goal, it turns out, is pursued to this day by neurophysiologists who claim to observe thought itself with the help of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technology. In an interview with the

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Berliner Zeitung in 2007, the brain researcher John-Dylan Haynes stated that “In a few years’ time, we will be able to read from brain scans whether someone has, for instance, attended an al-Qaeda training camp or studied instructions on how to build a bomb”.24 The technology used to do this, fMRI, has been steadily developing for two decades, and purports to localize cognitive, emotional and even creative processes in the cortex through vague patterns of neuronal stimulation. The new word coined to describe this research, which attracts a lot of media attention, is ‘brain reading’. This is but one example for this ideology that wants to eradicate evil once and for all by looking into the crystal ball of the brain. The US company No Lie MRI, for instance, offers fMRI-based polygraph tests. On its website, neat images help to confuse readers regarding the criteria according to which truth and lies can be read from brain scans. The menu of its website lures government clients with the following service: “For developing countries where government corruption is a serious problem, accurate lie detection would be of tremendous benefit for rooting out corrupt individuals. This would enable trust to be placed in the governmental and economic systems of these countries, encourage greater foreign capital investments to be made, and thus spur modernization of these countries”.25 The brain behind the No Lie service is the neuroscientist Daniel Langleben of the University of Pennsylvania. The American public broadcaster NPR hailed him as a “pioneer in the lie-detection field”, adding that “Langleben might go down in history as the man who revolutionized lie detection”. The history of which he wants to write an important chapter started about fifteen years ago, and for the time being, Langleben and many of his colleagues look like they are fooling the world with empty promises, adding yet another meaning to the term ‘lie detection’. In a polemical essay on what he calls “neuromythology”, the neuroscientist Felix Hasler suggested the bosses of fMRI companies should be hooked up to their own devices and asked if they believed in their methods.26 The folly of lie detection feeds on the possibilities of fMRI technology to produce images using BOLD—for blood-oxygen-level-dependent— signals, i.e. measurements of the relative levels of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood. This formidable technology makes it possible to produce high-resolution scans of given body parts. Fundamentally, however, the No Lie assessments based on brain scans made during interrogations rely on the vague idea that lying requires more neuronal efforts, and hence oxygen, than telling the truth. But on the deceitful imagery produced by the lie scans, other neuronal activities that require oxygen can hardly be distinguished from, say, the stimuli linked to the answers.

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The ideology of transparency helps to sustain the delusions of scientists, but also of judges, business people and public officers, who are desperate for technological tools. Their needs have been driving the connivance of politics and science—a complicity even Kant bemoaned in his day. Kant also noted that only the philosophical faculty is not driven by the desire to rule: “The philosophical faculty can never lay aside its arms in the face of the danger that threatens the truth entrusted to its protection, because the higher faculties will never give up their desire to rule”.27 All these concepts of transparency, which believe they can read matter, the universe, the brain with the help of complex machines, appear obsessed with the West’s ancient Messianic longing to restore a medium-less, proto-paradisiacal world of innocence. This is the centuries-old conception that the complete illumination and ultimate transparency of the world can ban all power, and none more so than the power of false speech. It is the impossible dream to make the density, materiality, mediality and technicality, and hence the evil, of the world disappear.28 It is the dream of the fly on the window pane.

Notes





1. See H. Blumenberg, Der Prozess der theoretischen Neugierde, 4th edition (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988). 2. F. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin (London: Everyman’s Library, 1986). 3. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 188. 4. See G. Kane, “Mysteries of Mass”, Scientific American 1, no. 293 (2005), 40–48. 5. Nemesius de Emesa, De Natura Hominis. Traduction de Burgundio de Pise, eds. G. Verbeke and J. A. Moncho (Leiden: Brill, 1975); A. Vasiliu, Du diaphane: Image, milieu, lumière dans la pensée antique et médiévale (Paris: Vrin, 1997), 90. 6. A. Vasiliu, “Le mot et le verre. Une définition médiévale du diaphane”, Journal des Savants (1994), 135–162; Vasiliu, Du diaphane. 7. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, trans. K. Foster and S. Humphries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), 130. 8.  Thomas Aquinas, Corpus Thomisticum. S. Thomae de Aquino Opera Omnia, ed. E. Alarcón (Pamplona, 2000), Suppl. tertiae partis qu. LXXXV, art. I., www.corpusthomisticum.org, accessed 5 November 2017. 9. Aquinas, Corpus Thomisticum, Suppl. tertiae partis, art. I, ad sec.

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10. “Because we have reached the point of being able to see through a thing we believe that henceforth it can offer us no further resistance – and then we are surprised to find that we can see through it and yet cannot penetrate through it. This is the same kind of foolishness and surprise as that of the fly on a pane of glass.” F. Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day [1881], trans. J. M. Kennedy (Mineola: Dover, 2007), 320. 11. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 73. 12.  J.-P. Sartre, “Sartre at Seventy: An Interview with Michel Conta”, in P. Auster and L. Davis, trans., New York Review of Books (7 August, 1975), 12, accessed 6 November 2017. 13. Ibid., 13. 14. J.-P. Sartre, The Words: An Autobiography, trans. B. Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1964), 83. 15. Ibid., 209. 16. J.-P. Sartre, “Aller et retour”, in J.-P. Sartre, Situations I: Essais critiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 192, my translation. 17. J.-P. Sartre, L’Être et le Néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 600, my translation. 18.  W. Harwood, CBS News, 6 November, 2016, https://www.cbsnews. com/news/atlas-5-rocket-launches-commercial-imaging-satellite, accessed 7 November 2017. 19. See the company’s website at http://www.digitalglobe.com/industries/ defense-and-intelligence, accessed 6 November 2017. 20. See http://amti.csis.org/about, accessed 6 November 2017. 21.  See J. Gaarder, “Der Zeitscanner”, in J. Gaarder, Der seltene Vogel (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1997), 9–35. 22.  E. Schmidt, “Building the Digital Future”, http://www.americanacademy.de/de/home/webexclusive/articles/building-digital-future-eric-schmidt-executive-chairman-google-inc, accessed 6 November 2015. 23. D. Eggers, The Circle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). 24. “Der Gedankenleser”, in Berliner Zeitung, 24 March 2007, http://www. berliner-zeitung.de/archiv/der-psychologe-john-dylan-haynes-ueberdie-kunst--das-gehirn-beim-denken-zu-beobachten-der-gedankenleser,10810590,10465432.html, accessed 6 November 2017. 25. See www.noliemri.com/customers/Government.htm, accessed 6 November 2017. 26. See F. Hasler, Neuromythologie: Eine Streitschrift gegen die Deutungsmacht der Hirnforschung (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013). 27. I. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris, 1979), 55. 28. See M. Schneider, Transparenztraum: Literatur, Politik, Medien und das Unmögliche (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013).

CHAPTER 4

Literature, Transparency, Ideology: Functions of Literature in Negotiating Transparency Jens Martin Gurr

With the rise of transparency to the position of a “semantic global player”,1 notions and phenomena of transparency have also received more attention in literary studies.2 With Thomas Docherty’s Confessions: The Philosophy of Transparency and Manfred Schneider’s Transparenztraum, there have recently been two attempts at surveying the tradition of different literary and philosophical (but also psychological and architectural) notions of transparency since St. Augustine (in Docherty’s case) or Descartes (in Schneider’s case) as foreshadowing present-day discussions of transparency and at deriving from them perspectives on phenomena such as Google Earth, Wikileaks or the field of tension between transparency and total surveillance.3 However, given these largely presentist concerns, these contributions only evince a limited interest in a systematic literary analysis of the specific literary J. M. Gurr (*)  Department of Anglophone Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 S. Berger and D. Owetschkin (eds.), Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23949-7_4

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strategies of staging and (implicitly or explicitly) evaluating these phenomena or in situating them in contemporary discourses. Docherty’s remark—comprehensible only from a broadly presentist perspective—is representative here: “The other side of transparency is surveillance”.4 This observation can largely be generalized: There is little systematic research in literary studies on questions of transparency which could help to historicize present-day concerns with transparency in philosophical, sociological or political science debates while also doing justice to the specifically literary forms of staging and negotiating such concerns. Thus, apart from a number of contributions on individual authors5 the term transparency in literary studies until fairly recently was largely only used in research on various aspects of autobiographical writing and forms of confession, especially in the wake of Starobinski.6 What has also been widely discussed in research on literary life writing and practices of confession are Foucault’s reflections on transparency, with regard to the classic episteme in The Order of Things,7 as a characteristic of the clinical gaze in Birth of the Clinic.8 Moreover, a number of related phenomena have been considered in discussions of specific literary strategies, tendencies or schools or in discussions of the functions of literature, though frequently not under the heading of transparency. Rather, the rhetorical and stylistic ideal of perspicuitas or claritas, “evidence”, or Anschaulichkeit, for instance, need to be mentioned here. Moreover, texts in various periods have claimed ideas and ideals related to or implying transparency, such as ethos, honestas, “truthfulness”, “authenticity”, etc. It has to be stated, however, that there is little systematic work on questions of transparency in literary studies, work that would do as much justice to the specifically literary forms of staging and negotiating competing notions of transparency and intransparency as well as to the vogue of this dichotomy in current philosophical, sociological and political debates. Given this deficit, this essay will engage with functions of literature in negotiations of transparency by focusing on four selected fields. First, in a section on “Literature and (In-)Transparency”, the essay will briefly argue that the creation of transparency cannot be assumed as per se a function of literature, since literature can also serve to create and maintain intransparency. Secondly, in discussing “Literature and ‘Knowledge’”, the essay explores specifically literary forms of producing, storing and transmitting knowledge and thus of creating “transparency” especially under conditions of censorship. Third, literature will be considered as a privileged medium of self-exploration in a tradition of

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confessional literature ranging from St. Augustine’s Confessions to present-day forms of self-analysis in online media. Finally, the essay will discuss “transparency” in the process of literary creation and the laying bare of literary artifice in various meta-referential strategies in literary texts of virtually all periods, many of which can be shown to carry ideological implications.9 All in all, by considering the specifically literary strategies of creating (in-)transparency as well as the normative implications of both transparency and intransparency, I seek to understand the functions (Anglophone) literature may have and, in specific cases, has had in creating and negotiating (in-)transparency in various discursive formations in different periods. Without attempting anything like a historical survey, this essay will thus nonetheless historicize what may frequently seem purely or largely contemporary concerns with transparency.

Literature and (In-)Transparency The creation of transparency cannot be assumed as naturally a function of literature, for literature can just as well serve to create and maintain intransparency: “literary texts […] also mislead and mystify”.10 It is one of my central assumptions that literature (in the narrow sense of imaginative literature) is one of the few societal spheres of activity in which transparency is not per se ascribed any intrinsic value: Literary communication, I argue, at least in the anglophone post-industrial globalized capitalist present, accompanies and discusses the rise of transparency to its current centrality without necessarily supporting this ascendancy or taking sides in the debates surrounding it. It is precisely the combination of over- and underdetermination characteristic of literary texts, one might argue, that frequently works against the creation or emergence of transparency. This is not only the case for the poetics of intransparency, of hermeticism, of the arcane and opaque fostered in certain epochs and schools11 but also for the deliberate creation of intransparency as a mechanism of group formation and distinction in literary circles or in religious and ideological communities as well as in the organization of processes of inclusion and exclusion generally. In a related vein, literary theories since the nineteenth century at the latest even assume that linguistic and hermeneutic intransparency is a central characteristic of literary communication. As a case in point, Wellek and Warren noted in the mid-twentieth century that literary language, and especially “[p]oetic language organizes, tightens, the resources of everyday

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language, and sometimes even does violence to them, in an effort to force us into awareness and attention”.12 A high degree of complexity is clearly a hallmark of literary communication generally. Although the creation of transparency may be one of the aims of this specific form of communication, impenetrability, camouflage or obfuscation are just as often created or simulated. Literature as a societal field (in Bourdieu’s sense), as an act of communication (in Iser’s sense) or as the interplay of actors and networks (in Latour’s sense), one might pointedly argue, needs, reproduces and deepens intransparency in order to create forms, procedures and mechanism of generating transparency. It negotiates transparency as well as intransparency as the quality of a material, a person or a medium, of a concrete social or political situation or of an ontological, epistemological or spiritual problem.

Literature and “Knowledge” One of the central fields of research in literary studies with a direct bearing on notions of transparency is the inquiry into the “knowledge of literature”13 or into the strategies of producing knowledge in literature: What are the specific achievements of literature and of literary texts as a unique form of generating, storing, transmitting and mediating knowledge.14 It has been argued that literary texts represent knowledge—or create it in the first place—in ways fundamentally different from discursive, expository texts.15 Specific literary strategies thus become “devices for articulating truth”.16 This centrally concerns questions of genre and questions of literary modelling generally17: In which ways do literary (and, possibly more so, poetic) texts function differently from discursive texts18 or what are the specific cognitive achievements of narrative as opposed to, say, quantitative models of complex matters?19 As an obvious case, take literature as a medium of generating and mediating knowledge in the tradition of “muckraking” or of investigative literature generally: Which literary strategies can serve to generate transparency? What is the role of authorial ethos and “authenticity”, how do revelations in fictional vs. discursive form function and what is their potential impact? What about specifically literary formations of knowledge?20 As a particularly telling case of literature as a means of generating transparency, take the case of literary muckraking, exemplified most pointedly in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle on conditions in Chicago’s meat industry: The fact that this text—and this might

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be shown for other cases, too—had such an impact precisely because it describes grievances in fictional, non-discursive form, leads to the question of the specific functions of literary texts as a unique form of generating, storing and mediating knowledge—and of creating transparency. As a markedly different and arguably far more complex case, let us here very briefly consider Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) as a particularly telling example of how literary texts can contribute to the creation of transparency precisely by making use of what may initially seem highly intransparent—coded, devious, indirect—literary strategies, especially under conditions of censorship seeking to uphold intransparency.21 Focussing on Milton as a central figure in late seventeenth-century religious and political dissent, this section will explore the intricate interplay between political taboos, censorship and subversive literary strategies of creating transparency in the period after 1660. This context calls for a reconceptualization of the notion of “taboo” as not so much a ban on forbidden and socially repressed acts or practices—incest, cannibalism, certain sexual practices, irreligious behaviour—that violate societal and individual norms of decency and acceptability. Rather, a taboo can here quite literally be viewed as a ban on thought, a form of suppressing a set of political ideas and their utterance by means of censorship and other forms of political and legal repression in the wake of the “Clarendon Code”, the umbrella term given to restrictive post-1660 legislation. Thus, there was virtually a discursive taboo on republican thought after the traumatic experience of two decades of civil war, military dictatorship and political chaos. Throughout the Restoration, “[s]corched historical memories”22 of the 1640s and 1650s were used roundly to discredit republican thought. In trying to understand subversive strategies of political writing in this repressive climate after the Restoration, it is vital to bear in mind the central role of censorship, which meant that publications would either be scrutinized by the censor or had to be published illegally, without a licence.23 Thus, although there was inevitably much-unlicensed printing, a number of the period’s key texts such as Paradise Lost were in fact submitted for a licence. Given this ubiquity of the censor, texts of this period must, as Christopher Hill insisted, be read as “cryptograms to be decoded”.24 Hill, Keeble and others have therefore drawn attention to the extent to which subversive writing of the period had to rely on ambiguity, double entendre, multiple allegorical levels, oblique allusiveness, intertextual

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pointers, hints at anachronistic recontextualization and other means of encoding.25 Such strategies of evasion, of creating “transparency” by means of what may initially appear highly intransparent strategies of representation, are crucial in the negotiation of political taboos, and it is the use of such strategies in Paradise Lost that will be at least briefly discussed in this section. What is of particular interest here are the subversive and anti-monarchical tendencies of the epic, more precisely, the subversive strategies which allow Milton to use the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve and the conflict between God and Satan to voice revolutionary thoughts after 1660, when such thoughts were tabooed and suppressed by rigid censorship. How, in other words, does the text announce and carry out its transgressive manoeuvres? A number of topical references to the time of writing—part and parcel of the epic tradition—suggest that the subject matter may not be all that far removed from present or recent realities and thus point towards a topical reading.26 Moreover, a number of passages function as “bridges”, as it were, between the cosmic events on the literal level of the text and events on earth; they invite one to see heaven as a stand-in for earth and the war in heaven as a coded rendering of the recent English Civil War. In this vein, Raphael’s remark to Adam that the war in heaven, which “surmounts the reach / Of human sense”,27 must be described in earthly terms so as to make it comprehensible to humans, can be read as indicating a close connection between events on earth and in heaven. It suggests that Raphael’s description, rather than being a didacticized version of a super-human war in heaven, may indeed be a coded reference to an all-too-human and very recent war on earth: […] what if earth Be but the shadow of heav’n, and things therein Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?28

Similarly, Raphael refers to the war in heaven as an “[i]ntestine war”, that is, a bellum intestinum, a civil war—the topicality of this Latinism is hardly accidental.29 Raphael further points to the analogy between heaven and earth when he states “earth now / Seemed like to heaven”. In very similar terms, Satan, too, confirms the likeness: “O earth, how like to Heav’n”.30 Thus attuned to potentially subversive topical references and double entendres, the careful reader stumbles upon a number of jarring anachronisms, telling parallels and analogies to contemporary political

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developments and other suggestions of topical referentiality, all of which constitute further strategies of transgressing political taboos. Arguably the most astonishing and certainly the most controversial such strategy lies in the attribution of strong anti-monarchical sentiments to Satan. As Steven Jablonski and others have long demonstrated, Satan and his rebel angels are clearly republicans, who, in arguing against God’s supremacy and absolute rule in heaven, speak a language and use anti-monarchical arguments that must have reminded any contemporary reader of recent republican rhetoric against monarchy in England.31 Satan’s republicanism has even been shown to be remarkably close to Milton’s own. Thus, the historian Blair Worden has remarked on “how close is Satan’s republicanism, which is accorded its most ample documentation in Book V, to the language of [Milton’s] The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth early in 1660, the year when […] Milton is likely, during the succeeding months, to have written Book V”.32 It is important to point out that Satan’s republicanism must not be taken to imply a simplistic identification of Satan with Cromwell or of God with Charles I, suggestive as that constellation might be: Paradise Lost is not, after all, an épopée à clef. Satan is not only cast in the role of the indomitable republican; he also bears traits of the avarice and ambition of many revolutionary leaders and of the blasphemous speculations of some of the more radical sects who had divided and discredited the supporters of the revolutionary cause, just as the fallen angels also bear many royalist traits. This becomes clear in what is arguably the most condensed and one of the most seditious political passages of the entire epic, a description of Satan, who, even after the Fall, has not entirely lost his original splendour: […] his form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruined, and the excess Of glory obscured: As when the Sun new ris’n Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs.33

This, incidentally, is the only passage which the censor with his otherwise fortunately limited exegetical capacity apparently found objectionable

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in the process of licencing Paradise Lost for publication. The multilayered metaphorical intricacy of this passage combines many of the strategies discussed above: The comparison of Satan to the misty morning sun, by means of the established association of the sun as a symbol of royalty, identifies Satan with the monarch. On the other hand, the solar eclipse, by means of the same association, functions as an image presaging doom to the monarchy: The eclipsed sun “sheds […] disastrous twilight […] and with fear of change / Perplexes monarchs”. These notions are held together by the image of the rising sun as an established symbol of revolution. A further subversive strategy is surely the use of fairly precise political and religious key terms which occasionally sound curiously anachronistic in contexts such as the war in heaven or Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. What, for instance, are we to make of a passage such as the following in Michael’s prophecy to Adam about the future of mankind? […] one shall rise Of proud ambitious heart, who not content With fair equality, fraternal state, Will arrogate dominion undeserved Over his brethren, and quite dispossess Concord and law of nature from the earth […] From heaven claiming second sovereignty: And from rebellion shall derive his name, Though of rebellion others he accuse.34

Though such passages can always be given an “innocent” theological reading—in this case, the overt reference is to the Old Testament figure of Nimrod (Genesis 10.8–10)—they also function as pointers to a subversive subtext. It is hard not to read this passage in the light of Milton’s frequent pronouncements on the evils of monarchy in a number of his prose texts. Throughout his political writings from the 1640s to the eve of the Restoration in 1660, Milton had expressly stated that the very idea of kingship, the very idea of raising one human being above the others was contrary to the teachings of Christ himself. Thus, in his 1649 The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, there is a passage that is remarkably close to the thoughts expressed here: “[N]o Christian Prince […] would arrogate unreasonably above human condition, or derogate so

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basely from a whole Nation of men his Brethren”.35 However, in order to do justice to the complexity and allusiveness of Milton’s poetry both in this passage and elsewhere, it is necessary to point out that an entirely different reading is also possible: Given Milton’s repeated reference to Cromwell’s ambition, and given Cromwell’s constant invocation of divine authority (worthy of a Stuart monarch), the implication may also lead to Cromwell. In addition, the arrogation of dominion over one’s “brethren” is also resonant when taken to refer to a Puritan republican as ruling over his brethren equals.36 The predominant implication, however, is anti-monarchical, especially if we consider remarkably similar passages in a number of Milton’s previous prose works. If we also consider the anthropology developed in the relationship of Adam and Eve,37 Paradise Lost can also be read as an expression of Milton’s increasing exasperation at the lack of reason and understanding in the populace in the course of the revolution: the failure of the people in the English Revolution to handle liberty and to subject their passions to the control of reason is staged and exemplified in the account of the Fall of Adam and Eve. We can thus read Paradise Lost as a coded account of the failure of the English Revolution (the republican principles of which it clearly if covertly continues to uphold): Milton’s views on the failure of “the people” during the English Revolution is staged in Adam and Eve’s credulity and lack of reason and their ensuing Fall, while his scathing criticism of the revolutionary leaders is expressed in numerous disparaging references to Cromwell. However, even if the text as a whole as well as individual passages are remarkably double-edged, the predominant impression yielded by any sensitive decryption of these passages is one of strong republicanism. Achinstein goes so far as to state that “Milton’s literary mode in Paradise Lost may have been an allegory for king-killing politics”.38 With its multiplicity of ambiguities in individual passages, subtle intertextual ploys and oblique allusions, Paradise Lost thus displays an intriguingly complex arsenal of transgressive republican strategies of circumventing a taboo on republican radicalism enforced not least by censorship. However, it is also a highly devious, coded and—depending on the willingness and capacity to engage in a guided exercise in decryption—(in-)transparent means of generating transparency about the complex causes of the failure of the English Revolution.

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Literature as a Medium of Confession and Anthropological (Self-)Reflection A further field of research directly concerned with notions of transparency—if again frequently without reference to the term itself—is that of literature as “a guide to self-interpretation and self-understanding”.39 Thus, autobiographical texts in genre-specific ways function as instruments of self-recognition and thus serve to generate self-transparency. This is true, for instance, of the tradition of confessional writing all the way from Augustine’s Confessiones via seventeenth-century Puritan spiritual autobiographies, twentieth-century confessional poetry to contemporary web-based forms of self-exploration.40 What is also of interest here, however, is the entire tradition of literary explorations of the subject since Plato’s Phaedon, Timaios or Phaedros, or Prudentius’ Psychomachia: Thus, literary texts of all epochs have developed and negotiated views on human desires, drives and psychomachic conflicts which, informed by theological, political, anthropological or moral and philosophical interests and conceptions, have been highly context-specific and have variously claimed to create transparency about “human nature”.41 This might, for instance, be shown for English sentimentalism,42 which, in some of its forms, proclaimed the revelation of even the most conflicted and least decorous of motivations.43 One of the paradigmatic texts here is Laurence Sterne’s 1768 Sentimental Journey, influenced both by liberal Anglican positions and by French Materialism. Sterne’s somewhat self-indulgent narrator Yorick programmatically announces the descriptive and cognitive rather than prescriptive or moralizing interest of his account: “Such were my temptations. […] I write not to apologize for the weaknesses of my heart in this tour,—but to give an account of them”.44 Yorick’s far from theologico-moral orientation is readily apparent from a further programmatic statement that squares nicely with these observations: “I have a clearer idea of the elysean fields than I have of heaven”.45 This is the spirit which informs his relation of the many flirtatious encounters, and it is by a subtle and facetious tipping of the hat to several traditions of representing moral conflicts and gender relations that he further undermines the impression of sincere sentimentalism. Thus, his avowal that he has been “in love with one princess or another almost all my life”46 and that “if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another”47 ironically recalls the established views on the ennobling and morally elevating influence of

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love. But Yorick’s serial monogamy adds a jarring note; and his lighthearted claim that he would “do any thing in the world either for, or with any one” in these moods as long as “there is no sin in it”,48 is perfectly in tune with the rather self-indulgent benevolism induced by his amorous feelings: […] whilst this interregnum [between two amours] lasts, I always perceive my heart locked up – I can scarce find in it, to give Misery a sixpence; and therefore I always get out of it as fast as I can, and the moment I am re-kindled, I am all generosity and good will again.49

Yorick’s reflections on how further to engage with one of his amours given his vow of “eternal fidelity” to one Eliza before his departure from England plunge him into a veritable psychomachia, in which “Avarice”, “Caution”, “Cowardice”, “Discretion”, “Hypocrisy”, “Meanness” and “Pride”50 each make their mockingly unflattering appearance. It had ever, as I told the reader, been one of the singular blessings of my life, to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with some one; and my last flame happening to be blown out by a whiff of jealousy on the sudden turn of a corner, I had lighted it up afresh at the pure taper of Eliza but about three months before […] I had sworn to her eternal fidelity […].51

But Yorick’s facetious and lascivious way of talking about his relationship with Eliza severely undercuts the sincerity of his declaration. His diction mocks rather than affirms the importance of Eliza and his vow of fidelity to her. Yorick here dons the mask of Don Juan or Casanova, looking back on a chain of erotic affairs with one or the other “flame”.52 Unwilling to betray Eliza or to give up his philandering, he chances upon a daring resolution of his problem: – I will not go to Brussels, replied I, interrupting myself – but my imagination went on – […] Eternal fountain of happiness! said I, kneeling down upon the ground – be thou my witness – and every pure spirit which tastes it, be my witness also, That I would not travel to Brussels, unless Eliza went along with me, did the road lead me towards heaven.53

In this envisaged ménage à trois, the claims of Christian conduct or of sentimental commerce are mere hollow forms devoid of any binding significance. The moral opportunism is blatant and Sterne’s unorthodox

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parson himself too frequently shows a keen sense of his questionable motivations. As we have seen from his programmatic declaration—“I write not to apologize for the weaknesses of my heart in this tour, – but to give an account of them”54—the creation of transparency about his conflicted and partly more than questionable motivations and ultimately the impossibility of pure feelings is the very subject of Yorick’s travelogue—which, in the context of contemporary ideologically charged debates about “human nature” and its political ramifications, should be understood as eminently political in its implications. As I have also shown for Milton’s discussion of the Fall and its anthropological implications, this also applies for many other literary attempts at generating transparency about the self, the subject and about “human nature” generally.

Metafiction and Other Strategies of Creating Transparency About the Process of Literary Production Finally, I would like to engage with various forms of “romantic irony”, self-reference in epic theatre, metafictional strategies in literature of virtually all epochs and other—frequently anti-illusionist—literary strategies of creating (real or alleged) transparency about the process of literary production and about central issues in literary communication within the text itself.55 What is also relevant here is the interplay between transparency and intransparency as a result of various forms of self- and meta-reference.56 Thus, the foregrounding of literary procedures in highly metafictional texts of, say, US postmodernism or of recent experimental Anglophone fiction is frequently far from creating the impression of transparency in the reading process. Conversely, some highly self-referential, hermetic texts seemingly devoid of any external reference can— often precisely because of their self-referentiality—acquire new forms of referentiality and even become directly topical in a political sense, thus even creating transparency in ways comparable to documentary political literature of “revelation”. I would like to take my cue from a review of J. M. Coetzee’s 2005 novel Slow Man, in which Benjamin Markovits critically commented on the novel’s metafictional elements: “It’s hard to justify such heavy-handedness, especially since such devices have long since lost the power to shock and their power to amuse is following hard behind”.57 Taking this

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as an occasion to discuss some of the implications of metafiction for the notion of transparency, I ask: Why should such devices shock or amuse? Who, reading a novel with a more or less conventional first-person narrator, for instance, would accuse the author of using one, arguing that a first-person narrator fails to shock or amuse? Is it not time to regard such metalepses and other metafictional strategies as part and parcel of the arsenal of devices available to writers of fiction? Metafiction and other forms of self-reflexivity would thus be seen simply as a device allowing for a staging and enactment of some of the central issues at the heart of writing—the nature of fiction, the status of the writer, the ethics of fiction, the problems of writing in general—no more, no less. In his own acute critical pronouncements, J. M. Coetzee has long been paving the way for just such an understanding of—real or simulated—transparency about the fictitiousness of any given text. In an essay first published in 1976, he remarked that metafictional devices can never obliterate the narrative impetus: “[T]ranscendence of the illusionism of Realism is an illusionary hope [and] to get behind (aufheben) fiction by incorporating into fiction a critical consciousness of the procedures of fiction is only to climb another spiral of illusionistic Realism”.58 Almost 15 years later, in 1990, Coetzee commented in an interview: Anti-illusionism – displaying the tricks you are using instead of hiding them – is a common ploy of postmodernism. But in the end there is only so much mileage to be got out of the ploy. Anti-illusionism is, I suspect, only a marking of time, a phase of recuperation, in the history of the novel. The question is, what next?59

Another 15 years later—and now almost as long ago—the question “what next” was transparently if implicitly answered in Coetzee’s Slow Man. This is the story of sixty-year-old Paul Rayment, retired photographer, born Frenchman, who has spent most of his life in Australia. As he is cycling through Adelaide one day, he is hit by a car and has to have one leg amputated above the knee. He refuses a prosthesis and withdraws into gloomy seclusion in his flat. Rayment falls in love with his Croatian nurse Marijana, married mother of three, and—for mixed motives—offers to pay for her son Drago’s college fees. At some point, the 72-year-old Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello (also the eponymous writer protagonist of Coetzee’s previous novel) shows up on his doorstep, moves in with him and begins to interfere with his life.

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Here, several fictions of authorship—different ways in which the ontological relationship between Paul Rayment and Elizabeth Costello can be conceptualized—begin to overlap. The first possible way of understanding the relationship between Rayment and Elizabeth Costello is to assume that he died during the accident and that theirs is some sort of afterlife encounter. This suggestion, however, is hardly dominant in the novel and does not play a role in the understanding of metafictional strategies of Slow Man. More centrally, two varieties of possible relations between Costello and Rayment coexist side by side virtually throughout the text: Either she is a writer who plans to use his story for a book, which would make them characters existing on the same level of fictitiousness; or she is an author who has invented him as a character, which would make their encounter in the novel a classic case of metalepsis, the anti-illusionist blurring of ontological planes which jarringly reminds readers they are reading a novel. Thus, we are never quite sure whether Costello merely wants to use him as a figure in a novel she may write or whether she has in fact created him and is thus in a sense the author even of the text we are reading. Throughout the novel, it is frequently suggested that she is a writer who wants to use him for a book. In this vein, Costello frequently encourages Rayment to become a more interesting character for her: “Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That is what the classics teach us. Become a main character”.60 The way they interact in the course of the story thus constantly upholds the suggestion that both of them are “real” people and that, if there is a relationship of author and character at work here, then he is clearly a “real” person she aims to use for a novel. On the other hand, side by side with this fiction of a coexistence of the two, the text constantly blurs ontological levels and uncannily suggests that Rayment is a character she has invented and that she is in fact even the author of Slow Man. Some 80 pages into the text, Elizabeth Costello rings his doorbell, enters his flat and recites to him the beginning of the novel we are reading, the story of his accident: [She] begins to recite: ‘The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! He tells himself as he tumbles through the air, and so forth.’ She pauses and inspects his face, as if to measure the effect she is having.61

Of course, we know this is the beginning of the novel we are reading in which she and Rayment are characters; he does not know this is the

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beginning of the novel; he may only recognize the situation as having been his during the accident. When she then says “I asked myself, Why do I need this man? Why not let him be, coasting along peacefully on his bicycle?”, it appears again as though he is a character she has invented. It is even more strongly suggested that she writes him and that he is a figment of her imagination when she then tells him: “‘You came to me’, she says. ‘In certain respects I am not in command of what comes to me’”.62 She then makes herself at home in his apartment and constantly interferes in his life.63 In several instances, Rayment himself seems to be aware that he is Costello’s puppet. Once, when she has fallen asleep over her notebook, Rayment reads her notes about him playing a game of cards with the Jokić family—the game does not occur in the novel—and wonders: “Are they to be a family together after all […]? What else is Costello plotting in that busy head of hers? The scribbler sleeps, the character prowls around looking for things to occupy himself with”.64 The overall impression, however, is that these fictions are blurred and become indistinct. Does she write the story of his life in the sense that she follows him and turns the “real” Rayment into the character of a novel? Or is this an instance of a conflation of ontological levels and he is indeed merely a figment of her imagination? We never really know. As Rayment tells Costello about his life as a photographer, he suddenly interrupts himself and asks her: “But don’t you know all this? I thought you knew everything about me”. Her response contains one of the clearest statements of what Costello knows and does not know about Rayment: “You came to me with no history attached. A man with one leg and an unfortunate passion for his nurse, that was all. Your prior life was virgin territory”.65 In the following passage, which needs to be quoted at some length, all three fictions are alluded to: “What made you choose me? What gave you the idea you could make anything of me? Why do you stay with me? Speak!” […] “You were made for me Paul, as I was made for you. […] For me alone Paul Rayment was born and I for him. His is the power of leading, mine of following; his of acting, mine of writing. More?” […] “Now let me ask you straight out, Mrs. Costello: Are you real?” “Am I real? I eat, I sleep, I suffer, I go to the bathroom. I catch cold. Of course I am real. As real as you.” “Please be serious for once. Please answer me: Am I alive or am I dead? Did something happen to me on Magill Road that I have failed to grasp?” “And am

84  J. M. GURR I the shade assigned to welcome you to the afterlife – is that what you are asking? No, rest assured, a poor forked creature, that is all I am, no different from yourself”.66

What this blurring of different author fictions brings about in any case is a rather disillusioned and disillusioning understanding of the autonomy and discretionary power of an author over his or her creation.67 But the wilfulness and artificiality of narrative is here not only staged as an epistemological and ontological problem, but at least as much as an ethical issue: what about the human costs of writing fiction, what about the ethical status of the writer? The novel is thus blatantly—transparently—self-reflexive, but this self-reflexiveness is “normalized”. The trick Coetzee manages to pull off is to show that you can have your cake and eat it: Although the text is constantly transparent about its status as fiction at a double remove— we are never allowed to forget we are reading a novel, a novel, at that, in which Costello is introduced as the author writing the novel we are reading—we never lose interest in the story itself, its characters and their problems. To an unusual extent, the metafictional devices are integral to the thematic concerns of the novel. Moreover, metafiction of this kind frequently makes transparent the fiction of an anterior reality, of the “past” characters allegedly had before the opening of the story; metafiction thus draws attention to the fact— glossed over by all illusionist and even much anti-illusionist fiction— that characters only exist from the first to the last page of a text. Such strategies thus deliberately break with the illusionist claim “that stories pre-exist their telling, that the events of the story actually transpired and are therefore researchable, verifiable like the positivist’s truth”.68 Thus, one recurring strategy of metafictional anti-illusionism has been to draw attention to this convention—take, for instance, the narrator’s assertion in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) that Parson Adams “ate either a rabbit or a fowl, I could never with any tolerable certainty discover which”.69 By thus making transparent the narrative construction of their characters, objects and events, such texts “cast doubt on the central assumption of mimetic art – the notion of an antecedent reality on which the artistic text is supposedly modelled”.70 As far as the relationship between fiction and the extratextual world is concerned, Umberto Eco has noted that “in order to be impressed, disturbed, frightened, or touched by even the most impossible of

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[fictitious] worlds, we must rely upon our knowledge of the actual one”.71 Literature, metafictional and hermetic as it might be, cannot help being in some sense referential; it must necessarily bear some recognizable relation to the world of our experience. This notion of literature—even in the most radically postmodern kind—as necessarily a culturally embedded form centrally concerned with human experience might be formulated in terms of what Iser calls “the return of experiential reality in the text”.72 It is precisely the combination of reality and fictitiousness that accounts for the exploratory power of literature.73 Following from this, metafictional ploys do not at all have to be mere exercises in literary eloquence; rather they are “an important means [to an end], entirely consistent with an attitude of serious engagement” with the world.74 In other words, the text’s self-conscious way of playing with the signifier, the replacement of its attention to the signified, or the world, by its attention to itself must not be interpreted as a withdrawal, but as a deliberate attempt to create an imaginative site of intervention that redirects the attention to the world beyond the text.75 As William Gass put it, “such fictive truth simultaneously proposes and cancels itself, not to deny the autonomous reality of the world, but to salvage it from the formulations of language. The provisional nature of fictive language allows it both its imaginative freedom and its claim to truth”.76 Such a text thus playfully directs the readers’ attention to language and, in turn, to the question of meaning and the very impossibility of fixing it. In that sense and in spite of its alleged autonomy, it does represent the world, but, as Roland Barthes has it, it “represents it as a question – never, finally, as an answer”.77 Thus, metafiction, arguably by means of a complex interplay of transparency and intransparency, does not resort to a mimetic mode of representation, since this, to put it in Walsh’s words, “is not conceived of as the primary vehicle of [the text’s] engagement with the world”.78 At the very same time, however, it invites the reader to re-establish just this relationship between text and world, which is thus simultaneously weakened and strengthened.79 Metafiction generally, as Mark Currie has noted, almost inherently makes the reader an active participant in the process of the constitution of meaning. In order to do so, it frequently makes transparent not only the act of narration but also that of reading, incorporating into the text “a kind of surrogate author grappling with his ability as a storyteller and with the ability of words to communicate […] experience” as well as “a surrogate reader trying, as protagonist […]

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to make sense of events and to interpret [their] significance in a manner analogous to that of the external reader”.80 Metafiction thus “internalizes the relationship between authors and readers, fiction and criticism, art and life”81 and can thus be seen as a privileged vantage point from which to reflect on a number of further problems inherent to fiction in general: the relationship between literature and external reality, text and world, between perception and representation, between language and reality, between history and story, between text and reader. Metafiction thus becomes “cognitive fiction” in Joseph Tabbi’s sense,82 a prime form of appropriation and refiguration of the world. Thus, the seemingly antagonistic poles of self-referential hermeticism on the one hand and topical engagement on the other hand by no means have to be mutually exclusive, but are, in a truly Hegelian sense, aufgehoben (sublated) in the kind of—increasingly common—“normalized” metafiction I am concerned with here. Thus, literary strategies that appear to be geared towards maximizing self-referential hermeticism, opacity and hence intransparency, may precisely function as strategies of creating transparency about both the ontological status of texts in their relations with extratextual reality and about pertinent features of that reality.

Further Questions The kind of literary studies research on transparency I here propose should seek to understand more fully—theoretically as well as empirically—which functions literature can have and has had in the negotiation of (in-)transparency in specific situations and texts. What would also have to be further discussed is the function of different media and genres in the creation of transparency and intransparency (confessional writing, diaries, autobiography, blogs, etc.). The aim of such research should be a conceptual history of transparency and related notions from a literary studies perspective, but one that—with reference to the above outline of specifically literary forms of knowledge—is constantly informed by and related to the other relevant disciplines. Here, one would also have to ask to what extent discussions of (in-)transparency in literary studies merely adopt and adapt sociological, philosophical or political science usages and whether there are definitions, questions, usages and insights specific to literary studies that might be complementary to other disciplines.83

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Notes 1. Manfred Schneider, Transparenztraum: Literatur, Politik, Medien und das Unmögliche (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013), 1, my translation. 2. I am most grateful to Barbara Buchenau for many discussions on the conceptual issues raised here and to Linda Simonis for her helpful comments on a very early conceptual sketch of this paper. Parts of this essay reuse and develop further material from Jens Martin Gurr, The Human Soul as Battleground: Variations on Dualism and the Self in English Literature (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003); Jens Martin Gurr, “‘When Upstart Passions Catch the Government’: Political and Mental Hierarchies in Paradise Lost”, in Gurr The Human Soul as Battleground, 81–103; Jens Martin Gurr, “‘Such Were My Temptations’: The Impossibility of Pure Feelings and the Cognitive Achievement of the Sentimental Journey”, in Gurr The Human Soul as Battleground, 139–151; Jens Martin Gurr, “Functions of Intertextuality and Metafiction in J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man”, Anglistik 18, no. 1 (2007), 95–112; and Martin Butler and Jens Martin Gurr, “The Poetics and Politics of Metafiction: Reading Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium”, English Studies 89, no. 2 (2008), 195–209. 3. Thomas Docherty, Confessions: The Philosophy of Transparency (London: Bloomsbury, 2012); Schneider, Transparenztraum. 4. Docherty, Confessions, xi. 5.  See‚ for example‚ Stéphane Michaud, “Lyrik als Verdichtung und Transparenz: Zur Rezeption von Yves Bonnefoy und Michel Deguy in Deutschland”, Arcadia 46 (2011), 177–198; Dirk Niefanger, “Transparenz und Maske. Außenseiterkonzeptionen in Siegfried Kracauers erzählender Prosa”, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 38 (1994), 186–208. 6. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Plon, 1957); see also Ursula Geitner, Die Sprache der Verstellung: Studien zum rhetorischen und anthropologischen Wissen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992). 7. Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971 [1966]), 357 et passim. 8. Michel Foucault, Die Geburt der Klinik: Eine Archäologie des ärztlichen Blicks (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002). 9.  See also Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1984); Werner Wolf, ed., Metareference Across Media: Theory and Case Studies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009). 10. Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 103.

88  J. M. GURR 11. See Monika Schmitz-Emans, Uwe Lindemann, and Manfred Schmeling, eds., Poetiken: Autoren – Texte – Begriffe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001). 12. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (London: Penguin University Books, 1973), 24. 13. My italics, see Jochen Hörisch, Das Wissen der Literatur (Munich: Fink, 2007). 14.  See‚ for example‚ Winfried Fluck, Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans, 1790–1900 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997); Marion Gymnich and Ansgar Nünning, eds., Funktionen von Literatur: Theoretische Grundlagen und Modellinterpretationen (Trier: WVT, 2005); Felski, Uses of Literature; and Jens Martin Gurr, “‘Without Contraries Is No Progression’: Emplotted Figures of Thought in Negotiating Oppositions, Funktionsgeschichte and Literature as ‘Cultural Diagnosis’”, in Rüdiger Kunow and Stephan Mussil, eds., Text or Context: Reflections on Literary and Cultural Criticism (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), 59–77. 15.  See‚ for example‚ Stefan Glomb and Stefan Horlacher, eds., Beyond Extremes: Repräsentation und Reflexion von Modernisierungsprozessen im zeitgenössischen britischen Roman (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2004); Hörisch, Das Wissen der Literatur. 16. Felski, Uses of Literature, 84. The other functions of literature Felski programmatically refers to as “Recognition”, “Enchantment”, “Knowledge” and “Shock” can each be associated with specific literary devices in the generation of transparency (as well as intransparency), whether as transparency of the self, transparency with regard to cultural formations of knowledge, but also the preservation of intransparency by means of mystification. 17.  For this, see especially the Research Training Group (GRK) 1886 “Literary Form: History and Culture of Aesthetic Modelling” at the University of Münster. 18.  For an example, see Jens Martin Gurr, “Two ‘Romantic’ Fragments? Bürger and Shelley on Revolution”, in Christoph Bode and Sebastian Domsch, eds., British and European Romanticisms: Selected Papers from the Munich Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism (Trier: WVT, 2007), 239–256. 19. See Jens Martin Gurr, “‘Urban Complexity’ from a Literary and Cultural Studies Perspective: Key Cultural Dimensions and the Challenges of ‘Modeling’”, in Christian Walloth, Jens Martin Gurr, and J. Alexander Schmidt, eds., Understanding Complex Urban Systems: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Modeling (Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), 133–150. 20.  See‚ for instance‚ Fotis Jannidis, “Literarisches Wissen und Cultural Studies”, in Martin Huber and Gerhard Lauer, eds., Nach der Sozialgeschichte. Konzepte für eine Literaturwissenschaft zwischen Historischer Anthropologie, Kulturgeschichte und Medientheorie (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000), 335–357.

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21. This reading is developed at greater length in a number of earlier essays on which this section draws. These discussions are also much more fully referenced and contextualized than is possible in this short section. 22. Tim Harris, “Understanding Popular Politics in Restoration Britain”, in Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, eds., A Nation Transformed: England After the Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 252. 23.  For censorship‚ see‚ for instance‚ N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987), 110–120 et passim; Christopher Hill, “Milton, Bunyan and the Literature of Defeat”, Mosaic 24, no. 1 (1991), 2–3. 24. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 65. 25. See‚ for instance‚ Hill, Milton and the English Revolution; Hill, “Milton, Bunyan and the Literature of Defeat”, 2–3. 26. See especially John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alistair Fowler, 2nd edition (London: Longman, 1998), VII, 24–29, but also V, 897–907; VI, 29–32 and VI, 145–48; for these, see also Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 121–123; Nigel Smith, “Paradise Lost from Civil War to Restoration”, in N. H. Keeble, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 256–257. 27. Milton, Paradise Lost, V, 571–572. 28. Ibid., V, 574–576. 29. Ibid.‚ VI, 259, see also VI, 667–668, in the context of the war in heaven: “Infernal noise; war seemed a civil game/To this uproar”. 30. Ibid., VII, 328–329 and IX, 99. See also VII, 617: “this new-made world, another heaven”. 31. Steven Jablonski, “‘Freely We Serve’: Paradise Lost and the Paradoxes of Political Liberty”, in Kristin Pruitt McColgan and Charles W. Durham, eds., Arenas of Conflict: Milton and the Unfettered Mind (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1997), 107–119; Steven Jablonski, “‘Under Thir [sic] Head Embodied All in One’: Milton’s Reinterpretation of the Organic Analogy in Paradise Lost”, in Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan, eds., Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1994), 113–125. 32. Blair Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven”, in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Macchiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 235; see also Steven Jablonski, “Under Thir [sic] Head Embodied All in One”, 118 et passim.



90  J. M. GURR 33. Milton, Paradise Lost, I, 591–599. For censorship of this passage and a compelling subversive reading, see Horst Meller, “Der Nationalepiker als Ireniker: John Miltons Themenwahl für sein Verlorenes Paradies im Kontext der konfessionspolitischen Bürgerkriege”, in Klaus Garber, ed., Nation und Literatur im Europa der frühen Neuzeit: Akten des I. Internationalen Osnabrücker Kongresses zur Kulturgeschichte der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer Horst, 1989), 531–532; as well as Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England, 118–119 and Fowler’s note on lines 596–598 in his edition of Milton, Paradise Lost. 34. Milton, Paradise Lost, XII, 24–37; see also XII, 64–78. 35. John Milton, “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates”, in Don M. Wolfe et al., eds., Complete Prose Works of John Milton‚ Vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 204; for political readings‚ see‚ for instance‚ Barbara K. Lewalski, “Paradise Lost and Milton’s Politics”, in J. M. Evans, ed., John Milton: Twentieth-Century Perspectives, Vol. 4 (London: Routledge, 2002), 228; David Loewenstein, “The Radical Religious Politics of Paradise Lost”, in Thomas N. Corns, ed., A Companion to Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 357–359; and David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 463. 36. Milton, Paradise Lost, XII, 28. For different readings of this passage, see for instance Hill, “Milton, Bunyan and the Literature of Defeat”, 3; Nigel Smith, “Paradise Lost from Civil War to Restoration”, 262; for a survey of previous comments‚ see Alistair Fowler’s note on this passage in his edition of Paradise Lost. A number of more recent commentators have used both Milton’s prose and his oblique but striking allusions in Paradise Lost as well as Paradise Regained to argue that the poet was far more critical of Cromwell than has been generally acknowledged, especially by previous adherents to a political reading of Paradise Lost. For a representative earlier example, see Andrew Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution: A Study in the Sociology of Literature (London: Macmillan‚ 1981); for more balanced assessments, see Austin Woolrych, “Milton and Cromwell: A Short but Scandalous Night of Interruption”, in Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross, eds., Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), 185–218; Martin Dzelzainis, “Milton and the Protectorate of 1658”, in D. Armitage, A. Himy‚ and Q. Skinner, eds., Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 181–205; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and especially Blair Worden,

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Literature and Politics in Cromwell’s England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 37. See Gurr, “When Upstart Passions Catch the Government”. 38. Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England, 160. 39. Felski, Uses of Literature, 83. 40.  Lena Mattheis has drawn my attention to the Japanese genre of the “shishōsetsu” or “I-novel” of the 1910s and 1920s, a form of autobiographical fiction known for its confessional tone and its “transparency”. For this tradition and its continuing relevance, see Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishosetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Irmela HijiyaKirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishosetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 41. For literature as a medium of moralizing or psychologizing anthropological reflection, see Gurr, The Human Soul as Battleground. 42. See Michael Gassenmeier, Der Typus des ‘Man of Feeling’: Studien zum sentimentalen Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts in England (Tübingen: Narr, 1972). 43.  For comparable tendencies in German “Empfindsamkeit” (shaped not least through Johann Joachim Christoph Bode’s translation of the Sentimental Journey as Yoriks empfindsame Reise as early as 1768), see Geitner’s discussion of “Empfindsamkeit and its considerable interest in the transparency of communicative relations”. Geitner, Die Sprache der Verstellung, 250. Geitner repeatedly refers to Starobinski. 44. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick, ed. Gardner D. Stout (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 [1768]), 96 and 90; for this see also Gurr, “Such Were My Temptations”. 45. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, 225. 46. Ibid., 128. 47. Ibid., 128–129. 48. Ibid., 129. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 105. 51. Ibid., 146–147. 52. Ibid., 146. 53. Ibid., 147–148. 54. Ibid., 90. 55. For fundamental discussions on this, see Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative and the overview in Wolf, Metareference Across Media. 56. See Wolf, Metareference Across Media.

92  J. M. GURR 57. Benjamin Markovits, “Fiction—Out on a Limb” [rev. of J. M. Coetzee, Slow Man], New Statesman, 12 September 2005. 58.  J. M. Coetzee, “The First Sentence of Yvonne Burgess’ The Strike” (1976), in David Attwell, ed., Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 92 (parenthesis original). For the inescapability of narrative behind even the most obtrusive metafictional devices, see Elmar Lehmann, “‘Ha et cetera’. Oder: Von der Unmöglichkeit, nicht zu erzählen: Überlegungen zu englischen IchRomanen der 80er Jahre”, in Raimund Borgmeier, ed., Gattungsprobleme in der anglo-amerikanischen Literatur: Beiträge für Ulrich Suerbaum zu seinem 60. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986), 184–194. 59. J. M. Coetzee, “Interview [November 1990]”, in Doubling the Point, 27. One of the most sustained and most enlightening discussions of Coetzee’s literary strategies and their place in modernist, late-modernist or postmodernist traditions is to be found in Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1–31 et passim. 60. J. M. Coetzee, Slow Man (London: Secker & Warburg, 2005), 229. See also 82, 136–137, 158, 159, 203–204, 221–222, 227–228, 229 et passim. See also 117, where it is suggested that he “really” exists and that she simply takes him as a character and aims to put him into a book; or 99, where it becomes apparent that she did not invent Marijana Jokić; or 139, where Costello tells him: “I would prefer a more interesting subject but am saddled with you, the one-legged man who cannot make up his mind”. Throughout the text, there are clear indications that her powers are limited, that she cannot make him do anything she likes or can arrange everything at will (136, 138 et passim). 61. Coetzee, Slow Man, 81 (italics original). There are further instances of her reciting to him from this novel in which they both occur; see 159, where she quotes to him a sentence about the two of them which occurred earlier, on page 151: “He finds her by the riverside, sitting on a bench, clustered around by ducks that she seems to be feeding” (italics original). 62. Coetzee, Slow Man, 81. For further suggestions that he is a character she has invented and that she can largely control what happens to him or for references to things she uncannily knows‚ see 82–83, 85–89, 97–98, 101, 106, 114, 118, 122, 129, 135, 217–218, 243. 63. Ibid., 87. 64. Ibid., 238. 65. Ibid., 195. See also 85, where Costello tells him: “You occurred to me – a man with a bad leg and no future and an unsuitable passion. That was where it started. Where we go from there I have no idea”. 66. Ibid., 233.

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67. This increasing dissociation of a literary character from its author in Slow Man continues a central concern of Coetzee’s intriguing 2003 Nobel speech “He and His Man”, in which—after Foe (1986)—he engaged once more with Defoe and Robinson Crusoe and similarly explored and blurred the dependencies between a writer and his created figure. 68. Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), 138. 69. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Douglas Brooks-Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 61. It might be argued, of course, that, far from being anti-illusionist, it is precisely the admission of a lack of knowledge in so trivial a matter as this that lends credibility to the rest of the narrative. 70. Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature, 129. 71. Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 83. 72. Wolfgang Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre – Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 21, my translation. 73. Ibid., 18–21. 74. Richard Walsh, Novel Arguments. Reading Innovative American Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6. 75. This notion has been conceptualized in various ways by theorists such as Mukarovský, Adorno, Ricoeur and many others. Adorno, for instance, argues that non-mimetic works of art can more forcefully engage with the prevailing order than simplistically mimetic ones. See Theodor Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 218; see also 15, 115, 195, 335. Ricoeur, too, notes that literature comes into its own and truly fulfils its mimetic function when it breaks with the idea of verisimilitude and the mere reproduction of reality. See Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit, Vol. 3 (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 278; and for Mukarovský see below. 76. Quoted in Walsh, Novel Arguments, 8. 77. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 145. 78. Walsh, Novel Arguments, x. 79. Mukarovský even regards this as a general tendency of all fiction when he succinctly points out: “It is weakened in the sense that the work does not refer to the reality which it directly depicts, and strengthened in that the work of art as a sign acquires an indirect (figurative) tie with realities which are vitally important to the perceiver”. See Jan Mukarovský, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1979), 75. Though crucially dependent on the reader, these “ties with reality” are surely not arbitrary in the sense that

94  J. M. GURR they are randomly brought to the text by the reader, rather, each text invites specific forms of actualization and topicalization. 80.  Mark Currie, “Introduction”, in Mark Currie, ed., Metafiction (New York: Longman, 1995), 4. 81. Currie, Metafiction, 5. For the crucial role of reader participation in metafiction, see the chapter “Reader Participation” in Rüdiger Imhof, Contemporary Metafiction: A Poetological Study of Metafiction in English Since 1939 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1986), 253–267. 82.  See Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 83. Such an inquiry might begin by discussing the role of Foucault’s notion of transparency—in The Order of Things as well as Birth of the Clinic—for literary studies generally.

PART II

Transparency and the Public Sphere

CHAPTER 5

Communication Among Strangers: Concepts of the Public Sphere in American Newspapers of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries Friedrich Jaeger

The conception of the public that has been part and parcel of the semantics of modernity since the eighteenth century, is experiencing a marked upsurge in the cultural and media studies of our times.1 The public sphere is seen as a medium for communication within civil society, which, given the limitations of both particracy and representative democracy, has a vital role to play in the political self-organization of the populace. Equally, it would appear to be a value imperilled by mass media and political apathy. This simultaneity of a rise and crisis of the concept of the public calls for a renewed evaluation of its beginnings and transformation. To that end, I will draw on the example of the American press of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.2 F. Jaeger (*)  Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen (KWI), Essen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 S. Berger and D. Owetschkin (eds.), Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23949-7_5

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The Significance of Newspapers for the Development of the Public Its historic significance has long been situated within a political historical context. The contemporaries of the American Revolution were already aware of the eminently political role of the press, as stated in David Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution from 1789: “In establishing American independence the pen and the press had a merit equal to that of the sword”.3 Traditionally, historical research has tended to highlight the contribution of the press within the scope of the history of political events, interpreting newspapers as instruments for delegitimizing colonial rule, for mobilizing the population and ultimately for coordinating resistance.4 More recently, more complex interpretations have emerged that understand the rise of the press as part of an “information and communications revolution”,5 that is to say, a fundamental shift in the character and the function of the public sphere in the course of the modernization of society and the transformation of cultural knowledge.6 To put it in a phrase by Gilmore that describes the transformation of social communication within the context of the reading revolution at the time: “Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life”. This revolution was socio-historically associated with the expansion of the postal and transportation system, and was made possible by an extraordinarily high degree of literacy among the American society—particularly in New England.7 The transition from the public sphere based on physical presence of early-modern societies to the modern concept of the public based on long-distance communication was significantly influenced by the newspapers of the eighteenth century. For the first time in history, newspapers permitted an exchange of information among strangers and therefore mark a break with the face-to-face communication based on physical presence that had been common in the early-modern era.8 On the one hand, this process resulted in a de-personalization of the public sphere, but on the other hand, it drove an individualization of the conduct of living as well as a pluralization of lifestyles. As newspapers to some extent privatized the process of opinion forming, they simultaneously lessened the social pressure on communities to conform, resulting in greater autonomy in the scope for interpretation among their readers. Because of the mode of reception that is specific to newspapers, they freed their readership from concrete obligations to act in a certain way and thus created new forms of critical distance.9 Furthermore, the revolution of the

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means of communication that went along with the rise of the press created a society that was characterized by a surplus of information rather than a shortage thereof. Knowledge was transformed from a scarce and socially privileged resource to a ubiquitous and commonly accessible mass commodity. As part of a market-led revolution of public communication, an aristocratic and elitist culture for the “very few” was turned into a mass culture for the “common man”. This process of quantitative expansion and qualitative normaliza­ tion of consumable knowledge was linked to the emergence of a culture industry characterized by a division of labour: The generation and distribution of information and opinions became a business transaction; the concern of a competitive big business. While no more than 100 people were involved in the production of printed knowledge during the colonial period, their number had risen to 25,000 by 1850.10 In order to understand this communication revolution, the public sphere is an important category. With reference to a theoretical tradition stretching from Locke to Dewey to Habermas, the public sphere can be conceived of as the sum of all forms of communication and associative relationships through which individuals, social groups or entire cultures seek to find common interpretations of their diverging interests, ways of life and social issues: The constitution of disparate experiences in a world of difference. The public sphere brings the particular identities of individualizable subjects and the overarching structures of meaning of their intersubjectively diverging ways of life into a tense relationship with each other. A relationship that—in the guise of the public sphere—is characterized by a minimum of mutual recognition or, to put it in Lockean terms: toleration. As an element of the communication within civil society, it turns the experiences and opinions of a heterogeneous and pluralized public into the object of their shared interpretations. It thus documents both the commonality of difference and difference as a shared experience, and furthermore the necessity to interpret this comingling of the shared and the different by cultural means.11 To do justice to the significance of the public sphere as a communicative process in general, and the role of the press in particular, it is sensible to combine approaches from social, political and cultural historic research. In this case, the socio-historic perspective focusses on the development of the press as an institution, on its corporate structures and forms of organization, on the social class of its readership as well as on the professionalism of its contributing professions.

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From a political history perspective, the press can be reconstructed as a manifestation of the bourgeois public which, as part of the republican identity at the time, acted as a “bulwark of liberty”.12 The common phrase “only despots keep their subjects ignorant” points out the close link between knowledge and liberty that motivated the struggle for free speech and press freedom.13 Finally, cultural history considerations track the evolution of the concept of the public sphere and the communication structure within civil society. The parts that the press has played in this transition can be differentiated typologically under the headings of transparency, identity and legitimacy. Here, transparency refers to the contribution of the press in identifying phenomena and social issues that are in the public interest. It thus simultaneously delineates that which can be communicated publically from a private sphere that is protected from the gaze of others. The concept of identity refers to the part that the press plays in publically articulating and socially establishing affiliations through inclusion or exclusion. Meanwhile, it also documents the great potential of the public sphere for advancing cultural self-transformation: While the press at first was a highly exclusive phenomenon limited to the participation of white, property-owning and educated men, it was impossible to immunize the public that it represented against the criticism from initially marginalized groups. In that sense, the history of the press also reflects the history of the cultural expansion of the public sphere. Lastly, legitimacy refers to the role that the press plays in communicating political rule, ideas of social order and the determination of societal roles. In contrast to processes of identity formation, the key idea here is not a delineation of inside versus outside, but a justification of top versus bottom—not horizontal affiliations, but vertical disparities in terms of rights, income or power. These are some of the research perspectives that a history of the press can provide. The following considerations serve to empirically reconstruct their socio-historical foundations, their political significance and their communicational structure. This allows the typological distinction of three stages of development, for each of which specific models of the public sphere have become characteristic: During the colonial period, a model based on conversation or discourse had been predominant, wherein newspapers mostly functioned as impartial mediators of the general reasoning of the population. A second type came to the fore in the course

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of the American Revolution and culminated in what later became the partisan and opinion-led press. In this period, newspapers became political engines,14 that is to say, this phase was dominated by a partisan or dispositional model of the public sphere. Lastly, a third type emerged together with the penny press in the 1830s. As a consequence of a progressing professionalization, an aspiration of objectivity, variety and independence became common and helped to establish the model of the public communication based on information and later also on expertise.

The Colonial Press When Benjamin Harris published the first newspaper in America, Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick, on 25 September 1690 in Boston, the socio-economic conditions there were favourable to the establishment of newspapers: With almost 7000 inhabitants, Boston presented a market that was larger than necessary to be profitable.15 Furthermore, Boston had a reading class that was interested in a wide range of issues.16 Also, the regular ship traffic to and from England provided a steady influx of information, for which there was an eager demand among the colonialists who perceived themselves as “English frontiersmen”. Lastly, newspapers proved to be a convenient means by which to announce the arrival of ships and their cargo. Thus Harris had the ambition that his newspaper should “provide commercial intelligence and […] assist businesses and negotiations”.17 This provided the foundation for a rudimentary media landscape during the colonial period.18 By 1725, Philadelphia and New York also had weekly newspapers, often little more than short-lived and little profitable sidelines of postmasters, booksellers or small-time printers. Nevertheless, the number of papers rose to 12 by 1750 and to 48 by the time of the Revolution, and while the average circulation started out at around 300, it rose to 3600 by then.19 At first, it was the one-sided orientation of the flow of information towards the mother country as well as an insufficient postal and transport system that inhibited the circulation of newspapers among the colonies. It was Benjamin Franklin who, as Postmaster General, as of 1753 brought about a marked improvement in newspaper circulation by extending the network of postal routes and increasing the speed of communication.20

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The printers in the colonies conceived of themselves as “meer mechanics” [sic] who simply provided a skill that allowed the dissemination of information or gave other citizens the opportunity to publish their opinions.21 In general, their role was limited to compiling articles that they had taken from other publications and that they simply reprinted and passed on to other printers—without laying claim to intellectual or political originality. For his Pennsylvania Gazette established in 1729, Benjamin Franklin wrote many of the articles himself and assembled a well-balanced mixture of information, literature, entertainment and political opinions. This made his newspaper the most brilliant publication of the colonial period—and sets him apart from his contemporaries. And although these important socio-economic preconditions for the existence of newspapers had been in place since the early eighteenth century, this was not the case for the political ones, the right to free speech being a particular example. Thus Harris’ newspaper was banned after just one edition because of articles that tended to be critical of the British government. Not until 1704 a second, this time more successful, attempt was made. It took the shape of John Campbell’s Boston News-Letter, albeit with the subheading “Published by Authority”, which demonstrates the power of the British censors. The New England Courant, founded 1721 by James Franklin, elder brother of Benjamin Franklin, eventually took a more anti-government stance—made possible by the lifting of pre-publication censorship in 1720—which soon resulted in his arrest and the failure of this most ambitions newspaper up to that point.22 The dispute over free speech and press freedom in the colonies took place in front of an intellectual backdrop that was characterized by a republican discourse and the ideology of opposition in England of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.23 The self-perception of the press as an entity for controlling the government as well as an advocate of the people and their rights was an expression of a concept of the political that saw the world as characterized by the struggle between the people and the government, freedom and tyranny, virtue and corruption, the common good and private interests, the public sphere and the political parties. The concept of free speech and press freedom was given such high priority within this political culture, because it was seen as a precondition for an “informed citizenry” and thereby as a guarantor of all other liberties.24

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With their demand for freedom of the press, the men of letters of the colonies continued an English tradition that was initiated by John Milton in his polemic Areopagitica, carried forward by John Locke in his 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration and had its intellectual climax in the Cato Letters, published in 1720 by the radical Whig publicists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon.25 Within the context of this English tradition, a “marketplace-of-ideas” concept of the public sphere gradually emerged26 which tied the discourse on practical considerations to the principles of discursivity, plurality and processuality. At the heart of discursivity was the argument that truth could only come by as part of a public contest of opinions. Truth would emerge from the competition between true and false, albeit at the risk of publishing false opinions, but that would be a negligible evil compared to the overall benefits of free speech. Plurality means that there could inherently not be a monopoly on truth, but that it would be expressed as a diversity of public real-world opinions, which would have to be tolerated as legitimate forms of dissent. Lastly, processuality highlights the fundamentally unfinished nature of the search for truth, which is essentially fragmentary and would need to continue to be renewed in institutionalized processes of shaping public opinion.27 This republican concept of the public sphere was characteristic for the self-conception of the printers in the colonies. In their role as non-partisan mediators of the public discourse, newspapers served to uphold the civil liberties of the people by giving access from all sides to public life, regardless of their political views. “Open to all Parties, but influenced by None” therefore is a common phrase in the subheadings of colonial-period newspapers.28 Benjamin Franklin gave programmatic expression to this sentiment in his Apology for Printers that he published in 1731 in his Pennsylvania Gazette: “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence they cheerfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute”.29 As a communicative element of the bourgeois public sphere, the press of the colonial period reflects an ambivalent situation: In the sense of being organs for the reflection of the social reality, newspapers on the one hand enabled a discourse among people independent of face-toface communication, but on the other hand they continued to adhere

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to a concept of public discourse as a direct conversation. Because of the dominance of papers in the style of pamphlets, this conversive model was in essence aristocratic in terms of education and manifested an elitist ambition. For gentlemen to conduct an enlightened discourse above and beyond the mundane forms of communication remained a privilege for the “better sort” and thus set them apart from the “inferior orders” as a cultural elite.30 On the other hand, newspapers also drove the pluralization of processes of cultural reflection and thereby helped to act against the monopolization of the public discourse. In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin recounts with some glee the reactions to his brother James’ ambition to break the 14-year monopoly of Campbell’s Boston News-Letter by starting a second newspaper. The view among his friends was, after all, that America already had a newspaper and that would be sufficient, and so this plan would certainly fail.31 As elements for building identities and creating a sense of belonging, by gradually shifting their focus from British to colonial issues, the newspapers document the creation of national consciousness. “Domestic occurrences” became important factors in the establishment of a national identity, which in time and system terms preceded the coalescing of the nation within the context of the Revolution.32 And in terms of the role of building legitimacy, the colonial press also illustrates a transformation both of the public sphere and of communication: In the beginning, criticism of the political authorities—beyond a clearly critical subtext—was in no way an essential part of newspapers of the eighteenth century. They did not intend to cultivate dissent, but remained committed to a harmonistic social ideal, which—in normative terms—prioritized a social order in favour of the common good and above particular interests and parties. A 1720 Letter from a Gentleman from Boston states: “I wish from my heart that some Method may be found for our relief to prevent Party-making amongst us; It grieves me to see our Divisions which are daily increasing, and which tend only to our ruin”.33 The discourse within the newspapers continued to adhere to a socially integrative model of the public sphere: The role of newspapers was primarily to legitimize authority, social order and cultural norms against the backdrop of increasingly opposed interests within a pluralizing society. This role attribution would not begin to change until the rise in opposition to the mother country.

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The Politicization of the Press in the Era of the American Revolution The crisis over the Stamp Act initiated a period of transformation for the press that was chiefly characterized by two tendencies: On the one hand by a growing politicization, which turned it into a political engine; on the other hand by a tendency to become more professional, which laid the groundwork for becoming a modern mass medium.34 While the population of the US quadrupled between the onset of the American Revolution and the 1830s, from four to 16 million, the number of newspapers saw a 35-fold increase to 1200 in the same period.35 This massive growth can be explained both by the opening up in terms of communication of the hinterlands as part of the rise of village journalism36 and by increasing penetration of media into local communication structures as part of ongoing processes of urbanization. Resulting from one of the highest literacy rates in the world and accompanied by the development of a daily press, this period saw the emergence of the US’ perception of itself as a nation of newspaper readers.37 From a socio-historical perspective, the new occupational profile of the professional journalist began to appear in the late eighteenth century.38 Four tendencies are particularly significant in this regard: First, there was a trend of the “mere mechanics” giving way to “men of independent intellect and principle”.39 This development was brought about by the end of the common habit of printers to mutually exchange newspapers, and therefore information, among themselves. Reprinting articles from British newspapers had become impossible since the confrontation of the 1760s, and sharing articles between newspapers in different colonies became fraught with difficulty because of a rise in internal partisanship and diverging views.40 Since then, it became necessary to produce own articles. Increasingly, this task was taken on by correspondents and editors, which resulted in greater stylistic professionalism in the newspapers: By 1800, longwinded pamphlets had all but disappeared and given way to the concise article and opinion piece. A second professionalizing factor was the establishment of a closely regulated system of education that mandated a period of apprenticeship lasting five to seven years. Thirdly, printers and journalists developed an ethical code to safeguard the veracity of the printed materials. While during the colonial period

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articles taken from other newspapers were simply reprinted without verification, the proof of correctness of a story became a precondition for its publication. Anonymously penned articles where whose veracity and sources were in doubt and that could not be ascribed to a certain author were increasingly rejected. Furthermore, from 1786 the widespread plagiarism which was actually not frowned-upon until then, began to be kept in check with legislation that protected authors and their copyrights. After all, the printers’ self-commitment to factual restraint can be interpreted as evidence for the emergence of a specific ethical code. Fourth, the successful resistance of the printers against further taxation of newspapers shows their ability to self-organize as a profession and to safeguard their commercial interests.41 Within the political culture, newspapers have formed organizational cores of the independence movement. Following the Stamp Act crisis, printers who were (along with lawyers) most affected by stamp duties came to become the leading proponents of the Revolution. They gained strength from this crisis for two reasons: On the one hand, the press turned out to be the only practical means of creating a communicational context for all colonies; on the other hand, the fact that they were able to resist with impunity demonstrated the British government’s continuing loss of authority and inability to sanction the use of unstamped paper at any stage. How politically significant the press would be, became clear as the American Revolution progressed—particularly the Boston Gazzette as an organizational centre for the leading revolutionaries around Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty.42 The concept of newspapers as a republican tool for defending democratic civil rights against the tyranny of the British also manifested itself in a widespread fear of the few American paper mills in existence, which were there to alleviate the chronic paper shortage and ensure a basic supply of paper for propaganda purposes during the war years being burnt down. The popular call to collect rags addressed at women as republican mothers shows to what extent newspapers were put to patriotic uses during the revolutionary period: “Save your rags and save your country”.43 In terms of press freedom44 the Revolution also initiated an important period of transformation. With the rising polarization of the society, adhering to the imperative to remain impartial that was common in the colonial period was no longer possible. Anyone still allowing all sides to be able to voice their opinions was accused of representing the English

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tyranny and could even have their printing presses smashed by patriotic mobs. As a consequence of this, the anti-revolutionaries reclaimed the right to a free press against the revolutionaries, who were, in the name of press freedom, suppressing newspapers with unpopular views.45 The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights was just as bad at clearing the matter up, because it did not explicitly preclude being retroactively charged with seditious libel, in other words rebellious agitation or severe defamation as well as the possibility to take legal actions against the press for criticizing the government. This issue was not cleared up until the dispute between Federalists and Republicans over the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that the Federalists were trying to use to silence their opposition. Only the abolition of these laws by the Jefferson administration cleared the matter up and made the prosecution of the press for being critical of the government impossible and limited the protection from libel to private individuals and their dignity. From then on, the concept of the marketplace of ideas also applied to the “thought that we hate”—as the federal judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. would later put it.46 After all, from a political perspective, newspapers at the time acted as the crystallization nuclei of the earliest system of political parties in America. Even the constitutional debate between Federalists and AntiFederalists was based on the political consensus that the legitimacy of authority was closely tied to the public exchange of opinions—the “spirit of free investigation”.47 On the other hand, it became clear that access to the media that shaped public opinion was a precondition to gaining political power. Politics became the struggle for the majority within the public sphere. This was borne out by the fact that the republican disdain for factionalism gave way to an explicit affirmation of the politics of vested interests around 1800. This laid the groundwork for the formation of the partisan press that accompanied polarization between Federalist and Republicans and manifested itself in the establishment of the Federalist Gazette of the United States founded by John Fenno in 1789 and the Republican National Gazette published by Philip Freneau since 1791. They were the first newspapers that acted as a replacement for an as yet mostly lacking party apparatus and that were supported and instrumentalized by the political sphere. Regarding the concept of the public sphere, the revolutionary and early republican periods mark a key phase: There was a revolution in news which is not only attributable to the increasing impact of aspects

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of party politics, but that was also characterized by a rise in economic competition. Public life became both a setting for the struggle of opinions and also one element of a market revolution. One indicator is that the timeliness of newspapers started to become a more important factor for gaining competitive advantage. A time lag of at least two months by no means caused the cultural prestige of the press to diminish during the colonial period. However, from 1811 onward boat races became common, where journalists would race towards incoming ships for the sake of a few hours advantage over their rivals. This clearly demonstrates a fundamentally altered idea of what news meant.48 The timeliness became the make-or-break attribute of newspapers. With regard to forming group affiliations, newspapers played an important role in the reorganization of gender roles in this period. On the one hand, a male-dominated model of partisan politics established itself in the public sphere, to the exclusion of women.49 On the other hand, this time saw women gain new roles within the sphere of public debate. A system of socio-political reform organizations dominated by women and that made a conscious point in counterbalancing the male idea of possessive individualism emerged and became the medium to foster a new concept of the public sphere based on the cultural feminization of virtue and morality. This would leave its mark on the nineteenth century into the rise of the Maternal Welfare State. These were the circumstances that led to the establishment of Lady’s Magazines from the late 1880s. At first, these were intended as condensation nuclei for the women’s unions that were emerging in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and whose role was originally seen to integrate women into the gender-stereotypical separate spheres. In the long run, however, it would prove impossible to limit them to this role and they became “avenues into the public sphere”.50 Kathy Davidson used the example of contemporary novels to show that there was a subversive nature to them, in that they allowed women to culturally transcend the limitations of their real existence into alternative realms of experience, and thereby giving them the ability to actually overcome these limitations through action.51 This pattern of cultural learning can be shown by the example of magazines published at the time: Magazines have been in existence since the 1830s that can be seen as the origins of groupings aiming for political reforms, including the Female Advocate and other publications from an emerging feminist movement. In the late nineteenth century, an alternative model of the public sphere oriented towards social reform

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emerged from them, which would become the only source of reforming ideas available for addressing the modernization crises at that time in a social manner.

The Formation of Newspapers as Mass Media in the Early Republic Until the 1830s, newspapers had an average circulation of 1500–2000 and thus were unable to reach a mass audience. This was partly caused by a relatively high price of eight to 10 dollars for a daily newspaper that could generally only be had by yearly subscription.52 This only changed with the advent of the penny press, which, from a socio-historic perspective marks the emergence of newspapers as a mass medium. In the 1820s flatbed printing presses replaced by rotary presses that made it possible to print up to 4000 newspapers per hour. At the same time, making paper from cellulose rather than rags contributed to lowering its production costs. Furthermore, the transport revolution brought about by the railways allowed even deeper penetration of the country in terms of communication and significantly sped up the dissemination of information. While it had taken three weeks for all of the country’s newspapers to report the death of George Washington, now information was spread within only a few days—and within 36 hours between New York and Washington.53 Equally, the degree of social penetration of the press increased. While only half of households had regular access to newspapers around 1830, with the penny press this proportion rose markedly in only a few years by mobilizing a new readership among the middle classes who had been unable to afford the conventional six-penny papers. Circulation increased accordingly: In 1833 no papers were able to exceed 5000. Only four years after its establishment in 1833, the New York Sun had a print run of 15,000 and was true to its subheading “It shines for all”. With average circulations rising to as much as 40,000 in as little as two years, newspapers were becoming commonplace.54 These changes forced the development of new corporate structures. Newspapers became companies that were demanding in terms of capital, but also promised high returns—that is if they were able to prevail in what was increasingly becoming a competitive market. A major condition for survival was gaining financial independence by shifting their focus from unreliable funding from political parties to calculable revenues from

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advertisements. This also explains why New York took over from Boston and Philadelphia as the heart of the American press landscape at that time: Between 1830 and 1840, the population of New York doubled from 200,000 to 400,000, which expanded the customer base of a growing market for consumer goods and required a mass press as an effective marketing tool. After all, this time saw a significant push towards greater professionalism in journalism, which manifested itself in the domination of news over opinions and in the shift in emphasis from partisan to news journalism. The economic necessity of having a socially diverse readership helped to root the virtue of objectivity at the heart of journalism, because it offered the best chance of reaching and providing information for a heterogeneous readership at the same time. The belief in facts hit a nerve with a pragmatic and realistic middle class that insisted on the correctness of facts and then made decisions based on them.55 Something else that became important for economic reasons was to take the interests of the readership into account. This required to be paying attention to the everyday lives of large parts of the population and was a key to the emergence of the type of reporter that would find his stories in the way readers actually lived their social life. Since then, newspapers have been characterized by extensive sections of local news, reports on everyday occurrences and human interest stories. This also put an end to the political bias of the partisan press. However, this did not mean that the penny press was diminished as an element of the political culture. Actually, it saw itself as an essential organ of democratically egalitarian politics. James Gordon Bennett, who established the New York Herald in 1835 and by 1872 had turned it into one of the bestselling newspapers, saw the penny press as nothing short of the vox populi and a manifestation of the common good: “Equally intended for the great masses of the community”.56 This ambition of the penny press to represent the common good has been attributed to the fact that it shares its origins with the labour and trade union movement. However, this affinity will have to be limited to the early 1830s, as the later economic motivation for the penny press’ claim to objectivity made a clear identification with the concerns of the labour movement impossible.57 At least the emphatic commitment to the public good remained an integral part of its political self-image. It saw itself as the mouthpiece for

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the common man and in doing so fitted in with a climate where the falling of the last barriers to suffrage for white males seemed to point the way to an egalitarian society, but which in fact merely glossed over the emergence of new class structures and forms of social inequality. A good example for the political ambitions of the penny press is the tradition of crime news—reporting on court cases and police actions. Today this counts as sensationalist journalism, but at the time it was seen as an important form of oversight over the judicial and executive branches, in order to safeguard justice and individual rights from state despotism. Within only two decades the penny press has revolutionized the American public sphere. It reflects the emergence of a society of the masses which the representatives of the traditional elites viewed as a vulgarization of culture and an epistemological crisis. The drivers in social terms of this transformation were the urban middle classes. Under the conditions of an emerging market society, they established new forms of communication and cultural knowledge. Actions were based on prac­ tical knowledge and guided by maxims of economic utility. Gathering facts became a means for solving society’s problems and was seen as the necessary prerequisite for coping with the contemporary crisis of orientation. “Statistics” first entered the dictionaries in 1803 and this represented an intellectual environment where science, taken as a positivistic collection of facts, oriented people’s lives along objective conditions to govern their actions. The public prestige that men of science and other professions had accumulated over the nineteenth century can be traced back to turning points in everyday culture that happened during the era of the penny press and were caused by it. The boom in scientific journals and popular science magazines as well as profession-specific publications indicates the key role of the press: It provided a useful forum for these new shapers of society and served to spread a culture of science and professionalism.58 Thus the penny press represents the culmination of a long-term revolution of communication that has been fundamentally changing the bedrock on which middle-class society rests and has thereby become a driver of cultural modernization. At the same time as these developments, however, culturally critical reflections on the impending vulgarization of public life as a result of the influence of the mass media began to be voiced. As early as just after the turn of the century, Alexander Hamilton

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articulated the revolutionary elite’s growing alienation from the emerging culture of the masses by declaring: “Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me”.59 Beyond all cultural transformations of the public sphere, its state of affairs has divided opinions—as alluded to by Hamilton. And this remains true to this day and the current controversy over the repercussions of the digital revolution on forms of communication within civil society. If nothing else, the longevity of this controversy proves the need for a history of the public sphere.

Notes

1. To give even a rough overview of recent research on this topic is not feasible here. That is why what follows are purely a few examples of publications that are particularly important to this article. From a political philosophy perspective, see V. Gerhardt, Öffentlichkeit. Die politische Form des Bewusstseins (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2012). The classic study by J. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962) continues to be of great value. An expansion on his idea that was key to the concept of the public sphere in this article can also be found in J. Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), in particular 399–467. A productive discussion of Habermas’ approach from a variety of research contexts can be found in C. Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1992). Endeavouring to productively categorize the concept of the public sphere in various research contexts, see K. C. Führer et al., “Öffentlichkeit – Medien – Geschichte: Konzepte der modernen Öffentlichkeit und Zugänge ihrer Erforschung”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 41 (2001), 1–38; L. Hölscher, “Die Öffentlichkeit begegnet sich selbst. Zur Struktur öffentlichen Redens im 18. Jahrhundert zwischen Diskurs- und Sozialgeschichte”, in H.-W. Jäger, ed., Öffentlichkeit im 18: Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1997), 11–32; J. Requate, “Öffentlichkeit und Medien als Gegenstände historischer Analyse”, in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 25 (1999), 5–32; and J. Requate and J. M. Schulze Wessel, eds., Europäische Öffentlichkeit: Transnationale Kommunikation seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 2002). The academic literature on the history of the media relevant to the topic under consideration is extensive, here are just a few titles: F. Crivellari et al., eds., Die Medien der Geschichte: Historizität und Medialität in interdisziplinärer

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Perspektive (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2004); J. Hörisch, Eine Geschichte der Medien: Vom Urknall zum Internet (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004); and J. Wilke, Grundzüge der Medien- und Kommunikationsgeschichte: Von den Anfängen bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000). 2. For an instructive overview on the history of the American press and newspaper landscape, see D. A. Copeland, The Media’s Role in Defining the Nation: The Active Voice (New York: Peter Lang, 2010); M. Emery and E. Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, 6th edition (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1988); H. A. Haveman, Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. I: 1741–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1957); M. Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978); and W. D. Sloan et al., eds., The Media in America, 2nd edition (Scottsdale, AZ: Publishing Horizons, 1993). Still useful from an international or European perspective: G. Boyce et al., eds., Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London: Constable, 1978); E. L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 3. D. Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia: R. Aitken & Son, 1789), 319. On this interpretation of the press as a sword within the context of the Revolution, see also A. M. Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 208–235. 4. Relevant here is B. Bailyn and J. B. Hench, eds., Press and the American Revolution (Worcester: Northeastern University Press, 1980); from less recent research, Schlesinger’s Prelude to Independence is still relevant. 5. R. D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); A. D. Chandler and J. W. Cortada, A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 6. From the wide range of research articles, see in particular, H. Barker and S. Burrows, eds., Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); J. W. Carey, “The Press and Public Discourse”, Center Magazine 20 (1987), 4–16; J. W. Carey, “The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse”, in T. L. Glasser and C. T. Salmon, eds., Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent (New York: Guilford Communication

114  F. JAEGER Series, 1995), 373–402; and M. Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 7. W. J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). On the developments in France at the time and on the importance of the literary sphere and book culture for the development of a new form of political public life, see R. Chartier, Die kulturellen Ursprünge der Französischen Revolution (Frankfurt: Campus, 1995), especially 84–86 and 183–185 as well as R. Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?”, in K. E. Carpenter, ed., Books and Society in History (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1983), 3–26. 8. R. Schlögl, Anwesende und Abwesende. Grundriss für eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2014). Warner, who sees a “reconceptualization of the public sphere” that goes along with the “public print discourse” that developed in Boston in 1720 and shortly thereafter in other port cities, has a similar line of argument. He generates a new grade of the political caused by the structural change in how people exchange views and associate with each other in public. See Warner, The Letters of the Republic, 36. Impersonality is the constituent factor of this new form of public sphere that no longer privileges the direct exchange between people but is transmitted via a medium (ibid., 40). 9. This is pointed out by Brown, Knowledge Is Power, 279. 10. Ibid., 288–290. 11. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 399–467 is essential to this understanding of the public sphere and civil society. 12. J. A. Smith, Printers and Press Freedom: The Ideology of Early American Journalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 162–163; Emery and Emery, The Press and America, 71–72 also reconstructs the context of the creation of this document, which originated in the Virginia Bill of Rights from 1776. 13. Brown, Knowledge Is Power, 287. 14. For more, see Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence, 208–209; F. L. Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960, 3rd edition (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 63–71. 15. Emery and Emery, The Press and America, 22. 16. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, is essential here. See also Warner, The Letters of the Republic on the political and societal significance of the spread of reading as a cultural practice in eighteenth century America, who also deals with the question: “How did reading come to be so important?” (ibid., x).

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17. Quoted from Sloan et al., eds., The Media in America, 24–25. 18.  From the extensive historical research on the context of creation, on the issues covered and on the cultural identity of the colonial press, see especially C. E. Clark and E. Charles, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); D. A. Copeland, Colonial American Newspapers: Character and Content (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997); D. A. Copeland, Debating the Issues in Colonial Newspapers: Primary Documents on Events of the Period (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000); W. D. Sloan and J. H. Williams, The Early American Press, 1690–1783 (Westport, CT: ABC-Clio, 1994); and J. H. Williams, The Significance of the Printed Word in Early America: Colonists’ Thoughts on the Role of the Press (Westport, CT: ABC-Clio, 1999). 19. Specifically on these developments Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence, 51–53. 20. On the context of the development of the postal and press landscape of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see R. B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700–1860s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989). 21.  S. Botein, “Meer Mechanics and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial American Printers”, Perspectives in American History 9 (1975), 127–228. 22.  On these early developments, see Emery and Emery, The Press and America, 17–36. 23.  Still essential on this: G. Stourzh, “Die Entwicklung der Rede- und Meinungsfreiheit im englischen und amerikanischen Rechtsraum”, in J. Schwartländer and D. Willoweit, eds., Meinungsfreiheit – Grundgedanken und Geschichte in Europa und USA (Kehl am Rhein: Engel, 1986), 121– 143. See also the more recent study by A. Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 24. Brown, Knowledge Is Power, 288–289. 25.  On the historical placement and importance of this English tradition in the American context, see L. W. Levy, “Liberty of the Press from Zenger to Jefferson”, in L. W. Levy, Judgments. Essays on American Constitutional History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 115–158; L. W. Levy, Emergence of a Free Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) as well as F. Kelleter, Amerikanische Aufklärung: Sprachen der Rationalität im Zeitalter der Revolution (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), 412–417. 26. More details on this: Smith, Printers and Press Freedom, 31–42.

116  F. JAEGER 27.  Kelleter pointed out how this process-focussed self-perception of the political in the public sphere became a fundamental element of the US Constitution. See Kelleter, Amerikanische Aufklärung, 474–499. 28.  This is clearly pointed out in S. Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution”, in Bailyn and Hench, eds., Press and the American Revolution, 19. See also J. Heideking, Die Verfassung vor dem Richterstuhl: Vorgeschichte und Ratifizierung der amerikanischen Verfassung 1787–1791 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988), 222 as well as Emery and Emery, The Press and America, 59. 29. Quoted from Sloan et al., eds., The Media in America, 99. On the historical placement of Franklin’s position, see also Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution”, 20. 30.  See R. E. Shalhope, The Roots of Democracy. American Thought and Culture, 1760–1800 (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 4–5. 31. On the background, see Smith, who also quotes the relevant passage: “I remember his being dissuaded by some of his Friends from the Undertaking, as not likely to succeed, one Newspaper being in their Judgement enough for America”. Smith, Printers and Press Freedom, 12. 32. C. S. Humphrey, The Press of the Young Republic, 1783–1833. The History of American Journalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 140. 33. This model of society and the political which dominates American magazine publishing is presented very well in Warner, The Letters of the Republic, 46; the passage quoted can also be found there. 34. On the history of the press in the period of the American Revolution, see in particular Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution”, as well as R. Buel Jr., “Freedom of the Press in Revolutionary America: The Evolution of Libertarianism, 1760-1820”, in Bailyn and Hench, eds., Press and the American Revolution, 59–82; Heideking, Die Verfassung vor dem Richterstuhl; C. S. Humphrey, “This Popular Engine”: New England Newspapers During the American Revolution, 1775–1789 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992); Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence; and F. W. Scott, “Newspapers, 1775–1860”, in W. P. Trent et al., eds., Cambridge History of American Literature (New York: MacMillan, 1933), 176–195. 35. Sloan et al., eds., The Media in America, 64–65. 36. See Mott, American Journalism, 135–137. 37. Sloan et al., eds., The Media in America, 66. 38. On the history of American journalism, see Mott, American Journalism; D. Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); and M. Schudson, “The Profession of Journalism in the United

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States”, in N. O. Hatch, ed., The Professions in American History (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 145–161. On an international comparison of the German developments, see J. Requate, Journalismus als Beruf: Entstehung und Entwicklung des Journalistenberufs im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1995) as well as J. Retallack, “From Pariah to Professional? The Journalist in German Society and Politics, from the Late Enlightenment to the Rise of Hitler”, in German Studies Review 16 (1993), 175–223. 39. Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution”, 45. 40. Humphrey, The Press of the Young Republic, 133–155, outlines these developments in detail; see also Heideking, Die Verfassung vor dem Richterstuhl. 41. On the various processes of professionalization in American journalism during the revolutionary period, see Humphrey, “This Popular Engine”, 44–62, 142–150. 42. On the political significance of the American press after the Stamp Act, also see in detail Botein, “Printers and the American Revolution”; Sloan et al., eds., The Media in America, 40–70. 43. See Humphrey, “This Popular Engine”, 32–34. 44.  On the history of the free press in American history, the literature is very wide, to mention but a few: Buel, “Freedom of the Press in Revolutionary America”; D. A. Copeland, The Idea of a Free Press: The Enlightenment and Its Unruly Legacy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006); Levy, “Liberty of the Press from Zenger to Jefferson”; Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate; and Stourzh, “Die Entwicklung der Rede- und Meinungsfreiheit im englischen und amerikanischen Rechtsraum”. 45. On these events, see Humphrey, “This Popular Engine”, 87–98. 46. Stourzh mentions this, and also quotes the words of Judge Holmes: “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought – not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate”. See Stourzh, “Die Entwicklung der Rede- und Meinungsfreiheit im englischen und amerikanischen Rechtsraum”, 143. 47. On these complex processes, see in particular Heideking, “Öffentlichkeit, Presse und Korrespondenzen”, 161–178. 48. In more detail, see Mott, American Journalism, 194. 49. P. Baker, The Moral Frameworks of Public Life: Gender, Politics, and the State in Rural New York, 1870–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); P. Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and

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American Political Society, 1780–1920”, in V. L. Ruiz and E. C. DuBois, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 1994). 50. This is highlighted in M. B. Norton, “The Evolution of White Women’s Experience in Early America”, American Historical Review 89 (1984), 593–619: “Indeed, from these eighteenth-century women’s voluntary groups grew such major nineteenth-century movements as temperance and abolitionism as well as the beginnings of urban philanthropy and, later, welfare services. Therefore, disestablishment provided the impetus for one of the most important developments in American community life and in the lives of nineteenth-century American Northern and urban women” (ibid., 616). In this context, see also M. Ryan, “Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in 19th Century America”, in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, 259–288. 51.  C. N. Davidson “The Novel as Subversive Activity: Women Reading, Women Writing”, in A. F. Young, ed., Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 283–316. 52. See Schudson, Discovering the News, 14–30. 53. On these developments, see Humphrey, The Press of the Young Republic, 133–155. 54. Schiller, Objectivity and the News, 12–17. 55. Ibid., 9. 56. Ibid., 15–17. 57. Ibid., 47–55. 58. On these aspects linked to the rise of the modern mass society in the US, see in detail G. S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 347–368. 59. From Alexander Hamilton to Gouverneur Morris (29 February 1802), Founders Online, National Archives, last modified 29 June 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-25-02-0297. [Original source: Harold C. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, Vol. 25, July 1800–April 1802 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 544–546].

CHAPTER 6

Journalism and Transparency: A Mass Communications Perspective Susanne Fengler and Dominik Speck

Introduction Throughout the last decade, the news media have increasingly come under attack in many Western countries. Buzzwords such as “fake news” or “lying press” have been used to discredit the work of journalists. In an alleged “post-truth-era”, the role of the media as the fourth estate or an indispensable facilitator of public discourse has come under scrutiny. Yet, the attackers have not only been extremists, populists or “Wutbürger”.1 Quite the contrary, a variety of actors from different societal backgrounds have questioned the performance and credibility of the mass media. At the same time, journalists do not only struggle to keep up their public credibility. Traditional business models of the mass media erode, leaving uncertainty about how to fund quality journalism in the future. S. Fengler (*) · D. Speck  Erich Brost Institute for International Journalism, Dortmund, Germany e-mail: [email protected] D. Speck e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 S. Berger and D. Owetschkin (eds.), Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23949-7_6

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New actors have entered the scene. Political parties, business companies, non-governmental organizations, even ordinary citizens can use online and social media to disseminate their messages, easily bypassing traditional channels of opinion formation. Social movements and nongovernmental organizations compete with investigative journalism in terms of uncovering political or societal grievances. An at times chaotic or even opaque diversity of media services hampers the differentiation between reliable and unreliable sources. Attempts by big platforms such as Facebook or Google to create a monoculture in cyberspace may even fortify the impression of a steady, yet blurred stream of information. Media users struggle to estimate the trustworthiness of information increasingly. However, these developments do not only entail incalculable risks, but also fruitful chances for quality journalism. Highlighting credibility through open handling of errors, misconduct or editorial uncertainty is deemed a powerful means to fortify or regain trust and credibility in a societal environment increasingly questioning the value of journalism. Online and social media have enabled new forms of communications between the media and their audiences, facilitating dialogue and error correction.2 Since the early 2000s, transparency has been discussed as a strategy to counter the drop in public stature of journalism. At the same time, media organizations and the journalism profession have increasingly been forced to react on a “secular societal trend of citizen participation”.3 Following the 2011 UK News of the World phone-hacking scandal, the judicial public inquiry led by Lord Justice Leveson drew the conclusion that the press should be “as transparent as possible”4 to be both free and accountable. Recent discussions about the transparency of the news media include the connections between leading journalists and influential think tanks or lobby organizations,5 undisclosed paid cooperation between media organizations and other businesses as well as non-transparent advertising.6 In the wake of transparency as a societal “mega trend”,7 public accessibility of information has become a pivotal expectation towards institutions and organizations. Transparency has been debated as a panacea for grievances and abuse of power in almost any field of society. The desire for more transparency does not only spread to public institutions or private organizations. The cyberspace has clearly shifted boundaries between privacy and public sphere even for ordinary citizens.8 Transparency is often discussed in the light of notions such as trust in, accountability, credibility and, consequently, legitimacy of the individual,

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organization or institution committing itself to be (more) transparent. High levels of transparency are equated with high levels of democracy. Transparency is hence associated with high expectations and “often presented in public discourse as a one-way street—as though we were always destined to have more of it, and that this must always represent a good thing”.9 Moreover, transparency is closely intertwined with information.10 To make something transparent implies the provision (and verification) of information. Hence, creating transparency is a core business of the news media. News people commit themselves to the publication and visualization of otherwise undisclosed events or processes in politics, economy and society.11 Paradoxically, the journalistic business itself has often remained a black box, leading to the judgement of it being “among the most opaque of industries”.12 In other words: Those designated to create a more transparent society often fail to disclose their own work. However, in the “age of transparency”,13 the media can no longer withstand the public demand to create transparency about themselves. It is not regarded appropriate anymore for the media to shed light only on other parts of society. Keeping the abovementioned developments in mind, transparency about the media seems ever more important to uphold the media’s social mandate to create transparency through their reporting: “Transparency has consequently become a type of tactic or mechanism that news organizations deploy to show their openness in response to the challenges that they face, particularly from audiences”.14 Both media and communication studies as well as journalism practice have been debating the value of transparency. Openness towards the audiences has been praised as the new paradigm of up to date journalism: “Transparency has emerged as one of the most-discussed and evangelized aspects of practicing ethical journalism in the networked age”.15 This chapter aims to provide an overview about the status quo of the discussion on media transparency in both theory and practice. The first paragraph briefly introduces major normative foundations and practical instruments of media transparency. Following a presentation of the state of research on the matter within media and communication studies, another paragraph outlines findings on newsroom transparency from an international perspective. The connection between t­ransparency and trust requires thorough examination before we draw on economic theory as an additional explanatory model for phenomena of media

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transparency. Another paragraph highlights the professional ­ discussion about transparency as a journalistic value. Finally, we introduce a few examples from practice, before mapping a more interdisciplinary approach on media transparency.

Media Transparency: Normative Foundations and Practical Instruments The United States Congress passed the First Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1791, laying the foundation for the public’s right to know and paving the way for a de-regulated media industry.16 The same year, Bentham published his influential work Panopticon: Or the Inspection House on the transparent architecture of a “modern” prison. Bentham’s philosophy implies the transparency and veracity of governmental decisions and the accountability of government towards the public.17 Historically, transparency as a quality criterion of political decision-making has been more present in Anglo-Saxon tradition than in Continental Europe. It thus comes as no surprise that transparency seemingly has a longer history in Anglo-Saxon media systems as well. Earlier than elsewhere in the world, first instruments of media transparency have evolved especially in the United States as soon as in the early twentieth century: Professional associations adopted journalistic codes of ethics, and the famous “muckraker” journalists—part of a broader social movement against inequality—also started to investigate into questionable practices of media organizations.18 In the 1940s, the American Hutchins Commission debated on how to create an environment in which the press can be both free and responsible at the same time.19 Part of the social movements in the 1970s in the United States was the creation of a plethora of—national, but also local—alternative media, which vigorously attacked the agenda of the “mainstream media” and thus added to transparency about media.20 Another approach on media transparency is grounded in public sphere theory, which has deliberately been shaped by Habermas.21 In his concept, a well-informed public is crucial for the dialogue necessary to legitimize political decision-making. Within the public sphere, the media disseminate information, but also provide a forum for public discourse, thus contributing to the transparency constitutive for taking rational decisions. Plaisance traces journalistic transparency back to

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Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s theory of human dignity: Transparency appears as an ethical imperative of journalism and a prerequisite of rational public discourse.22 By contrast, Allen highlights Foucault’s theory of panopticism to emphasize the dark side of media transparency as a system of discipline and surveillance.23 How exactly do journalists practice transparency? Like in the concept of media accountability instruments (MAI),24 we suggest distinguishing between different media transparency instruments (MTI).25 Referring to Bertrand’s (2000) concept of media accountability, MTI can be defined as any means of making the media more transparent to the public.26 These means could be located at different levels, be it the media system in general, a specific media organization or the actions of an individual journalist, and differ regarding their degrees of institutionalization. Examples for MTI are: • Publicly accessible code of ethics or mission statement • Publicly accessible information about ownership, political or business affiliations of a certain media organization • Author’s profiles/bios and e-mail addresses published online • Disclosure in case the research for a story has been funded by third parties (e.g. in travel or automotive journalism or in case a political reporter has been invited to travel onboard a government aircraft) • Comprehensive correction policies • Live streams of editorial meetings • “Methods block”27 disclosing information about the investigation process and sources of a specific story • Newsroom or single journalist blogs • Ombudsman or public editor investigating professional misconduct and explaining editorial decisions • Disclaimers about potential biases of the author of a news story (e.g. through personal connections to sources or events mentioned within it) • Regular debates about editorial decisions between editorial staff and audience (i.e. through a specific online forum or regular face-to-face meetings) • Provision of hyperlinks to original sources of a news story • Transparency indices for media organizations • Governmental incentives to make the media more transparent

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The list of MTIs is potentially infinite and requires constant updating and close dialogue with media practitioners. Media professionals at the 2005 Aspen conference on journalism, transparency and public trust suggested virtual newsroom (methodology) tours, weekly editor’s reviews, a retooled correction process and transparency in sourcing as promising realms to improve editorial openness.28

Transparency in Media and Communication Studies Following the evolution of the transparency paradigm in society, media and communication scholars have increasingly raised the question of a more transparent journalism since the early 2000s.29 Scholarly work has focused on the ethical framework of transparency in journalism30 or on how the emergence of online media and particularly weblogs has influenced the increasing emphasis on journalistic transparency.31 Scholars have explored the use of different means of transparency within newsrooms32 or examined journalists’ and experts’ perceptions of transparency.33 Research on how the audience perceives journalistic transparency measures, by contrast, is comparatively scarce.34 In a common understanding, media transparency is regarded as “making public the traditionally private factors that influence the creation of news”.35 This definition implies a presumed paradigm shift in journalism: The tendency to explain hitherto undisclosed professional routines and methods to a more demanding and empowered audience. Consequently, transparency is a strategy “for enhancing public knowledge and engagement that demystify journalistic practices and clarify journalistic values”.36 Indeed, the discussion on media transparency mainly focusses on journalistic practices and journalistic values. The following key aspects are discussed and examined: • The weight of transparency within the professional set of values of journalists37 • Transparency about sources and material used in reporting (e.g. through clearly stating the sources of a news story, why it was considered as a source, or through clarification why an anonymous source was quoted within the story)38 • Transparency about the fallibility of news coverage (e.g. through regular, transparent and unmitigated error correction, transparency about updates within a story)39

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• Transparency about news selection and decision-making processes (e.g. through the disclosure of editorial considerations that led to cover a certain topic—or to not cover it)40 • Transparency about possible distortions through organizational or individual journalists’ affiliations (e.g. through the disclosure of potential personal biases of the author of a news story)41 So far, there are only a few contributions to a more elaborate classification of measures of journalistic transparency. Karlsson distinguishes between two different forms: disclosure and participatory transparency.42 Whereas disclosure transparency refers to measures allowing the user to see and assess factors that shaped the news production, participatory measures allow the user to contribute to the news production, e.g. by commenting or even intervening. Meier conceptualizes outside transparency and self-transparency. While the latter is developed from within a media organization, the former is introduced from the outside43 and comprises instruments such as blogs monitoring developments within the media or media journalism.44 Furthermore, Meier and Reimer split self-transparency into product transparency and process transparency. The first dimension captures the journalistic story itself and includes the disclosure of any information, e.g. about the sources, to the audience. By contrast, the second dimension refers to information about editorial decisions such as the selection of news.45 Similarly, Groenhart and Evers list source transparency, process transparency and actor transparency as different frames. While source transparency and process transparency largely refer to the model of Meier and Reimer, actor transparency includes information about the journalists and organizations themselves such as personal or organizational affiliations.46 Considering Shoemaker and Reese’s model of spheres of influence on journalism, most research on media transparency focusses on the newsroom or organizational level rather than spreading on the level of the individual journalist or the professional standards level.47 The extramedia level is rarely considered, even though pressure exerted through civil society organizations, social media or government might be powerful means to push for greater transparency. However, media practitioners and scholars alike often regard individual newsrooms as most promising to implement changes in journalistic standards.48 Most studies focus on transparency towards the audience rather than on internal transparency or openness towards the subjects of news stories. It thus comes as no

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surprise that transparency is often mentioned in the same breath with audience-related concepts such as participatory journalism49 or media accountability.50 Participatory journalism means that the audience can contribute to or even intervene into the process of news making (mostly within a specific organization)—be it through user comments, user-generated content, crowdsourcing51 or the regular participation of an audience council. It is widely agreed that the cyberspace created an environment better suited for more transparent and interactive journalism—and that both developments are linked to each other. Bloggers have often been tagged as role models for a more transparent and interactive journalism.52 Bloggers received a great deal of praise for being more discursive and transparent than journalists, as they tend to clearly state their points of view, thus challenging the journalistic value of objectivity: “Arguably, what truth is to journalists, transparency is to bloggers […]”.53 In general, bloggers started to provide deep links to sources earlier compared to journalists.54 For sure, new forms of media such as blogging have shifted journalistic standards and created pressure for journalism to adapt. Yet, we should bear in mind that during the early period of blogging, the expansion of the internet raised a lot of enthusiasm, rooting in a mindset convinced that the new technology would finally eradicate traditional communication hierarchies and invigorate democracy.55 Apparently, these dreams have not come true. As of today, bloggers have not gained the weight ascribed to them a decade ago, particularly in contrast to big networks and nowadays social media influencers.56 In general, the latter may barely serve as role models for transparent conduct, as regulatory complaints about camouflaged advertising or hidden product placement indicate.57 In other words, even though these new players challenge journalism, they also enable the news media to display their distinctness—e.g. by measures of transparency. Due to the immediacy of the internet, journalism became more of a process rather than a product.58 The “high speed of online news exposes previously hidden journalistic processes”.59 However, the debate often seems to ignore that broadcast journalism was more prompt than print journalism prior to the development of the cyberspace, and it is still possible to “hide” journalistic processes in online news. Black boxes of news production remain. Apparently, the comforts of cyberspace facilitated the development of transparency instruments. Yet, it was the societal megatrend of transparency60 that created the demand for a more transparent

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journalism. However, while issues like ecology and in past years food safety have been propagated by social movements, the quality and transparency of journalism have not spawned its own social movement yet, even though societal discontent with platforms like Facebook has risen sharply in recent years. Yet, media criticism often does not reach the degree of institutionalization inherent to many social movements. One of the reasons for the lack of a social movement for media accountability might be the diversity of news outlets, discouraging the formation of powerful groups. However, recent debates about the role and quality of public service media indicate that these issues bear mobilization potential indeed: Prior to the rejected “No Billag” referendum on abolishing public funding of the Swiss broadcaster SRG in 2018, those opposing public funding as well as their counterparts waged hard-fought campaigns. There are various “public service media challengers” advocacy groups across Europe.61 However, their purview generally remains quite limited compared to activist groups focusing on other issues, and in-depth research on how they impact changes in media routines or governance is scarce. This chapter argues that transparency does not necessarily need to embrace collaborative elements. User participation alone does not create transparency. We suggest a more differentiated approach on the connection between transparency and interactivity. Online user comments might question the credibility of a story but do not generically improve interactivity, let alone editorial transparency. This would require the editorial staff to actively participate within or react to the user debate by disclosing information. Consequently, participatory and disclosure forms of transparency are not mutually exclusive. Just as transparency, the concept of media accountability is interlinked with the ideal of social responsibility of the news media. It unites concepts of media self-regulation, ethics, responsiveness, quality and governance. Bertrand defined media accountability instruments as “any non-State means of making media responsible towards the public”.62 Media accountability comprises a potentially infinite set of instruments, including traditional means of media self-regulation such as press councils, but also “modern” measures to make media more transparent such as webcasts from an editorial meeting.63 Fox argues that transparency is necessary for accountability, yet transparency alone does not guarantee more accountability.64 De Haan states: “Being transparent does not equate to being accountable,

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but transparency can potentially form the basis for accountability”. Therefore, media transparency is both a partial aspect of media accountability, but also a concept of its own.65 Interestingly, some authors describe an almost scientific approach of editorial disclosure.66 In that sense, journalists should give as much information about their methods to enable the audience to “replicate the reporting”67—coming close to the scientific quality criteria of reliability and intersubjective verifiability. Even though media and communication scholars have taken up the societal discourse of transparency, there is no widely agreed-upon definition of how to understand transparency in journalism. There is also a tendency to regard journalistic transparency as generically positive and serving the interests of the public, whereas profound research on risks and shortcomings is comparatively seldom.68

Transparency Across Journalism Cultures: Research Results In general, journalists seem to appreciate the value of transparency instruments.69 Yet, empirical evidence reveals that news organizations are rather hesitant to introduce such instruments at large: “Newsrooms do not seem to practice what they preach in terms of transparency and audience interaction”.70 This goes for both the European countries examined within the MediaAcT study71 as well as for American journalism: In Chadha and Koliska’s study of transparency within major American news organizations, journalists stated that there is little overt discussion about transparency within the newsroom.72 Furthermore, they deemed it unlikely that information about how a story came about was particularly valuable for the audience. It needs to be noted that Chadha and Koliska examined US news organizations that serve as role models for journalism worldwide, including The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN. According to the authors, MTI in these newsrooms are widely limited to enhanced linking to original documents, more elaborate corrections online and providing reporters’ email addresses, profiles and an oversight of their stories.73 Measures requiring bigger efforts and more resources appear rare. This applies to social media as well, which seem to be employed “as a promotional tool rather than as a mechanism for enhanced transparency regarding the news production process”.74 Sourcing remains a potential black box, both in terms of explaining adequately to the

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audience why a source had been chosen and why a source has been granted anonymity. Explanation about the genesis of a story—i.e. the motivation to cover it—is only given for few rather prestigious stories. Information about individual authors often remains rather superficial.75 Similarly, German newsrooms seem to prefer “low-cost” MTI such as an introduction of the editorial staff. Instruments requiring more human or financial resources such as ombudsmen, editorial blogs or readers’ councils seem to be comparatively rare.76 The Dutch journalism experts questioned by van der Wurff and Schönbach emphasized the importance of editorial statutes, house rules and disclaimers to secure journalistic quality—“instruments that increase the transparency of the journalistic process or in other ways clarify what users may expect”.77 Like their colleagues at major US news outlets, European journalists seem to “have only moderate assumptions about the importance of explaining news decision processes”.78 Yet they emphasize the importance of publishing ownership details, codes of ethics and mission statements.79 However, the extent of usage of MTI differs from country to country, even within Europe. The same goes for the value ascribed to transparency by journalists.80 Cultures of transparency vary, as results of the MediaAcT project indicate. Journalists in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe tend to be more sceptical towards transparency compared to their colleagues in the Northern and Western parts of the continent: “the majority of Spanish and Italian journalists as well as their colleagues from Romania and Poland believe that publishing corrections or making newsrooms processes transparent online will damage the bond of trust between journalists and the audience”.81 The pilot European Media Accountability Index including the spreading of transparency measures82 reveals that Norway, Sweden, Finland, Austria and Germany are the European countries with the most diverse media accountability infrastructure. The UK media system, traditionally a role model for quality journalism, lags due to a crisis of traditional means of self-regulation. Among the Central and Eastern European postSoviet countries, Poland and Estonia represent the most diverse media systems regarding accountability. Greece, Bulgaria, Malta, Luxembourg and Cyprus score lowest on the list—countries representing considerably diverse (journalism) cultures.83 These results might be another indicator for the embedment of newsroom values and practices in the overall historical and political context of individual countries. To understand this is pivotal when comparing media

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transparency in distinct cultures: There is no “one size fits all” catalogue of MTI. Rather, one needs to consider the specific conditions of a country, media system or even single newsroom when examining transparency infrastructures or issuing policy recommendations. Context factors such as the degrees of journalistic professionalism, press freedom and media pluralism as well as the existence of media criticism from actors outside of journalism may influence the spreading and perception of MTI.84 So far, research on media transparency mainly focusses on Western countries, largely disregarding countries with a lesser extent of press freedom. At first glance, this comes as no surprise, as a transparency concept developed vis-à-vis the ideals of liberal democracy is barely applicable on authoritarian states. However, particularly social media have paved the way for a more critical discourse on (state) media performance in such countries as well. Yet, elaborate examination of actors and instruments of or discourse on media transparency in non-Western countries is still scarce.85

Transparency and Trust—A Contested Liaison Transparency is often believed to increase journalistic credibility and, ultimately, trust in the news media.86 Allen describes this rather simplistic equation as follows: The ethic of transparency is easy enough to understand. It goes something like this: the news media are facing increased examination of their daily product that leads to more and more criticism. The best way to respond to that criticism is by letting people see the process that leads to the creation of those products. Once they see the process, people will understand how journalistic decisions are made and credibility will be improved […]87

Before taking a closer look on the often-assumed connection between transparency and trust, this paragraph briefly outlines the scientific discussion on trust and the news media. Kohring and Matthes have developed an elaborate model of trust in journalism. They state that trust in media is crucial because of their role as information disseminators: “Trust in news media is therefore a necessary condition for trust in other social actors”.88 They claim that “trust in news media means trust in their specific selectivity rather than in objectivity or truth”.89 Trust in news media consequently means

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• Trust in the selectivity of topics • Trust in the selectivity of facts • Trust in the accuracy of depictions • Trust in journalistic assessment90 Blöbaum accentuates different components of trust in journalism. Following his model, trust in media may mean: • Trustworthiness of media formats (e.g. newspaper, TV, news website, social media) • Trustworthiness of a specific media organization (e.g. The Guardian, The Sun) • Trustworthiness of journalism as a profession • Trustworthiness of a single journalist • Trustworthiness of journalistic routines and processes (e.g. news selection, investigation, presentation)91 Fengler and Russ-Mohl argue that the audience barely has another choice than to trust the information provided by journalists.92 However, journalists act as both agents of their publics and principals of their sources, which often include professional communicators such as PR experts. News people therefore face a dilemma: Admitting that they are not as well-informed as they aim to appear barely comes without a loss of face. Consequently, “it remains non-transparent that journalists themselves often depend on information they can hardly judge”.93 There is no generally accepted method to measure trust in the news media, and empirical data about its degree in modern Western societies are at times conflicting. Some studies postulate a longitudinal decline in trust,94 while recent studies indicate that trust in journalism has increased at least slightly throughout the past few years, particularly vis-à-vis the trustworthiness of information shared within social media.95 According to a 2016 Eurobarometer study, a slight majority of 53 per cent of EU citizens agree that their national media provide trustworthy information, whereas 44 per cent think they do not. Yet, in nine member states including France, Greece and Spain, a majority does not believe in the trustworthiness of information provided by national media.96 The sources cited within a story and the news organizations that publish it seem to be factors decisively contributing to its perceived trustworthiness.97 According to the 2017 Reuters Institute Digital News Report,

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trust in news varies significantly across the 36 countries examined. While Finland received the highest score, trust is lowest in Greece and South Korea. Those who distrust the media often do so because they perceive the reporting as politically biased, especially in highly polarized political systems such as those of the United States, Hungary or Italy.98 Often, it is believed that transparency increases trust in the organization or individual providing it. However, Brown et al. argue that even though societal transparency has increased throughout the last 40 years, trust into governmental institutions decreased.99 O’Neill states: “Transparency certainly destroys secrecy: but it may not limit the deception and deliberate misinformation that undermine relations of trust”.100 It is even possible to trust a largely opaque organization.101 Terms such as ‘trust in god’ or ‘implicit trust’ indicate that trust does not necessarily need a reference quantity that is clearly visible or palpable. What does that mean for the assumption that transparency might be the means to overcome the perceived lack of trust in journalism and to bolster journalistic credibility? Among others, Allen warns that “providing more information does not always build more trust, but rather provides more reasons to challenge the authority of the journalistic text. Transparency can provide the raw materials to undermine trust”.102 Seen from this angle, the exposure of journalistic routines or decisions may fortify popular disenchantment with the profession rather than dismantling it. Despite the assumed connection of transparency and trust, research on the correlation between the usage of MTI and journalistic credibility is scarce. An experiment revealed that readers did not perceive transparent journalism more credible than “conventional” forms.103 The authors conclude that transparency measures cannot (yet) be deemed to enhance journalistic credibility. Conversely, they emphasize that such means (expect from negative user comments and user-written content) do not undermine credibility either.104 Applying a different concept of transparency—i.e. their own model distinguishing between product and process transparency—Meier and Reimer found some, albeit rather weak, correlations between different measures of transparency and the perceived trustworthiness of a story. They conclude that providing deep links in an online article does not generically increase trust in a story. Rather, this tool requires a combination with overall editorial openness. In print journalism, by contrast,

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source transparency had a bigger impact on the perceived trustworthiness than the provision of information about the author.105 These two exemplary studies indicate the contradictory results of studies measuring the influence of transparency on trust. The connection between trust and transparency surely needs further and, above all, longitudinal inquiry. Reimer lists context factors which influence the effect of transparency measures, such as the media format and media organization applying it as well as the single users’ attitude towards this format or organization.106

Media Transparency from an Economic Perspective Communication scholars tend to regard journalists “as guardians of the ‘fourth estate’ and servants to the ‘public interests’, implying a notion of selflessness to newsworkers”.107 This overly normative approach can be found in discussions on transparency, too. Allen criticizes that transparency often serves as an instrumental value to protect institutional legitimacy and stave off criticism rather than serving as a normative standard. He states that “transparency can be seen as an ethic that journalism has enlisted as a way to increase its power and standing within society”.108 Journalistic transparency thus would be mere tactics rather than a value in itself. Journalists would just make use of the “mega trend” of transparency to stay afloat. Since transparency is debated as a part of media ethics, it comes as no surprise that normative deliberations are inherent to the concept: Many journalism books emphasize the notion of transparency, arguing that solid ethical deliberation means having no ulterior motives and no hidden agendas. Only with this kind of straightforwardness, theorists say, can journalists cultivate trust and allow others to critically assess their decisions.109

Even though a complete lack of ulterior motives might be desirable from a normative point of view, it is rather unrealistic. Beyond doubt, journalists fulfil a crucial task within democracy and tend to be passionate about their vocation to do so. Yet, media workers are also rational actors seeking to maximize attention for their work and to minimize costs of investigation.110 Consequently, economic theory may provide an additional approach valuable to shed light on developments within the media system—such as the debate about transparency.

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As stated above, recent studies indicate that the news media are perceived as more trustworthy than social media. With all due caution, this is good news. Within an ever more competitive and sometimes hostile environment, the presentation of journalism as a superior source of information is of outstanding importance—both normatively and when considering journalists as rational actors. Amidst the heated debate about fake news after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, The New York Times saw a significant increase of digital subscriptions.111 From an economic perspective, journalism is an experience or rather credence good. As a product, journalism generally lacks quality transparency. The consumer cannot obtain information about the quality of a news product prior to its purchase.112 Moreover, the marketability of journalism suffers from the information paradox: it is hard to rate the quality of or the benefit from an information before you know it. Once you know it, however, there is no need to pay for it anymore.113 Apparently, this paradox has increasingly been taking effect since the emergence of the internet and its abundance of zero-priced information. When a public good—such as news—is offered for free and too many people attempt to get their share, it ultimately loses value—the tragedy of the commons.114 Consequently, quality media organizations make their living from their reputation,115 probably now more than in past. They need to expose their value virtually. At best, being transparent enables the consumer to check the good and confirms or strengthens the reputation of a media organization. Subsequently, transparency functions as a performance marker.116 Transparent media organizations (and individual journalists) may thus benefit—both ideationally and monetarily. Transparency may serve as a competitive advantage. Unsurprisingly, transparency has thus been discussed as a market strategy and part of the strategic communication of media organizations.117 Furthermore, exhibiting adherence to media ethics—including transparency—could be regarded as economically relevant.118 In that sense, recent initiatives trading under labels such as slow journalism or constructive journalism are ways to mark quality.119 To sum up, being transparent might not only pay off in terms of a more responsive, inclusive and empowering media landscape. It might not only be desirable from a normative point of view. Being transparent might also be a suitable strategy to stay afloat economically.

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The Journalistic Value of Transparency—And Its Limitations The triumph of transparency arguably challenges two established ­keystones of journalism ethics: objectivity and professional ­autonomy.120 Some authors even argue that transparency replaces objectivity as the core value of journalism.121 Traditionally, journalists put emphasis on their autonomy as well as the objectivity of their stories. Objectivity refers to being impartial, neutral and fair. Autonomy comprises the freedom and independence of journalists regarding their work.122 Consequently, autonomy has a clear connection to press freedom and independence of the news media from external pressure.123 Therefore, efforts to enhance transparency may meet resistance within the journalistic community: Yet journalists themselves seem ambivalent about their commitment to the ideal of transparent behavior. They have long been reluctant to expose newsroom deliberations to public scrutiny for various reasons, including a fear of undermining another central journalistic tenet: autonomy from ­outside influences.124

Transparency may conflict with objectivity, e.g. when it includes the disclosure of journalistic self-interests. It may undermine editorial autonomy, e.g. when newsrooms provide insight in current investigations or allow users to decide on which stories to cover next. Being too transparent could in fact be a disadvantage, e.g. when a competitor or subject of a news story gets too much insight into the plans of a news organization.125 Vos and Craft have examined the professional discourse on transparency in US journalism trade publications. They conclude that a paradigm shift to transparency is at least under way: Although the journalistic field has pinned a good many hopes on transparency as a way forward for the field, particularly in the face of exogenous forces that have battered journalism, not all journalistic actors appear ready to accept a shift whereby transparency takes on unquestioned normative status.126

By contrast, Allen does not regard objectivity and transparency as antagonistic values. He claims that

136  S. FENGLER AND D. SPECK Transparency works in cohort with the notion of objectivity but changes it in significant ways. While objectivity builds on the Enlightenment ideal of truth as something that can be discovered, what might be called transparent objectivity recognizes the more complex nature of truth that journalists encounter in today’s world.127

How far should journalistic transparency go? Beyond the mere disclosure of journalistic methods, it has been debated whether journalists should reveal personal biases such as economic background or upbringing. Some observers state that it is appropriate to uncover the interests, preferences and perspectives of the individual journalist.128 However, the question remains whether it is advisable to separate between a journalist as a professional and as a private individual. Cunningham claims: “To assume that we can know what someone thinks by identifying their personal traits, habits and predilections is a dangerous notion, and really has nothing to do with clarity”.129 Limits of transparency are also discussed considering straightforwardness towards subjects of news coverage: Some topics require undercover investigation. Yet, as stated for example in the code of ethics of the German Press Council,130 hidden investigation should only be used in exceptional cases and if it serves the greater good. Furthermore, in some cases it is unadvisable to reveal one’s sources as they have sound reasons to speak on the condition of anonymity. Avoiding anonymity at any rate can thus barely be a solution. Yet, journalists should make their agreements with such sources transparent and justify why anonymity has been granted.131

Media Transparency in Practice: Examples Examples of transparency instruments or initiatives are manifold, yet they often seem limited to flagship projects. This paragraph aims to introduce a few of them. Due to their public funding and organization, public service broadcasters in many countries have particularly come under pressure to provide more organizational transparency.132 Interestingly, the MediaAcT study found that journalists working for public service media put greater emphasis on the value of transparency compared to colleagues from other segments.133 Yet, due to their bureaucratic entrenchment, “transparency is certainly not a feature of public broadcasters’ DNA”.134 The German Consortium of Public Service Broadcasters has recently published the salaries of its directors. However, the licensing fees

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paid for sports transmissions or fees paid to prominent TV hosts remain undisclosed. Some observers criticize that a tradition of secrecy persists within German public broadcasting.135 In 2017, the British media regulator Ofcom obliged the BBC to publish information on audience complaints each fortnight instead of once a month, and more detailed than before.136 Editorial blogs providing insight into newsroom practices and decisions are relatively common. The BBC, as an example, offers it “About the BBC blog”. The Tagesschau, Germany’s most seen news show, uses its blog to explain its decisions why to cover a topic or not. For example, the deputy editor-in-chief commented on why the editors were hesitant at first to cover a homicide committed by a young refugee in December 2017.137 Yet, such blogs require constant updating: Zeit Online, the online section of German quality weekly Die Zeit, also has a “transparency blog” started in December 2016. However, the media watchdog platform Übermedien criticized that the team just wrote four posts during the whole year 2017—even though Zeit Online had announced to record any grave error within the blog.138 The New York Times, by contrast, offers an explicit overview on corrections within its articles. A specific web page139 bundles both corrections of online articles as well as rectifications published within the printed newspaper and explains how to file a complaint. Certain initiatives to provide more transparency have also emerged following the debate about the spreading of fake news. In 2017, The Trust Project was introduced as an initiative aiming to provide more insight into the processes and contents of the news media.140 Members of the initiative are leading international news media such as The Economist, The Washington Post, La Repubblica but also Facebook, Google (which both partially fund the project). Probably one of the most far-reaching examples of actor transparency, the tech website Recode publishes an ethics statement for each editor.141 These statements disclose quite personal details such as business or political affiliations of the editors themselves and even their partners or relatives.

Conclusion: Towards a More Interdisciplinary Model of Media Transparency As this chapter has outlined, transparency has become a relevant concept in nowadays journalism. Consequently, communication scholars have started to explore transparency regarding journalistic values and

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journalistic practices. Yet, the debate has often remained considerably cut-off from the transparency discourse in other academic fields such as political science, economics or sociology. We thus suggest to open the discourse to concepts from these or related disciplines. We propose to increasingly consult models of transparency developed within other disciplines and to combine them with existing approaches in media and communication studies.142 Whereas newsrooms implementing MTI have received much advance praise, media scholars have barely considered how to measure the quality and efficiency of these instruments. In that regard, the concept developed by the political scientists Greg Michener and Katherine Bersch might help to assess this crucial question effectively. They argue that “to label a government “transparent” just because it has a freedom of information law is a premature characterization”.143 Likewise, to label a newsroom transparent just because it employs a public editor might be premature as well. Michener and Bersch differentiate between two aspects of transparency: visibility and inferability. Visibility is necessary for transparency, but “insufficient on its own”.144 Arguing that the possibility of information manipulation poses a dilemma to transparency,145 Michener and Bersch accentuate that beyond mere visibility, high quality transparency also depends on whether the data allows accurate and verifiable inference.146 Inferable information needs to be comprehensible and intelligible. Consequently, transparency requires both visibility and inferability.147 Outlining and applying inferability parameters of media transparency would surely enrich the hitherto rather descriptive perspective of best practice examples of journalistic openness. Besides, concepts considering different addressees and directions of transparency more elaborately could add to a more precise description of the phenomenon in the news media. These should also spread beyond the newsroom level, for example by considering the media system as a whole. We suggest drawing on economist David Heald’s model. Heald distinguishes between vertical and horizontal transparency.148 While vertical transparency comprises interactions between actors from different societal levels, horizontal transparency spreads to entities of the same level.149 According to Heald, vertical transparency may either be directed upwards or downwards, implying a hierarchy or principal–agent relationship. In cases of downwards transparency, those “ruled” get the chance to observe their “rulers”, in upwards transparency it is vice versa. If both conditions are given, vertical transparency is symmetric.150

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Horizontal transparency may be directed inwards or outwards. In the former case, the environment of an organization gains insight into what is going on within it. The case of outwards hierarchy is vice versa: It refers to the capacity of an organization to observe what is happening on its outside. When both coexist, again, horizontal transparency is symmetric.151 Applying this model on the news media would add to a more detailed perspective on MTI and the various levels such measures can be directed to. To conclude, although transparency has become a buzzword both in journalism practice and media and communication research, the phenomenon still requires further examination. Areas suited for research are, e.g. the entrenchment of transparency practices within different media and political systems, the features of media transparency in transitional or authoritarian states or the suitability of MTI as a market strategy of news organizations. Certainly, the perception of journalistic transparency by the audience needs further examination. From a socio-political perspective, the interdependency of journalism and its publics in terms of transparency would be another realm yet to explore, for example considering the discourse about the accountability of public service media. Studies examining the influence of media advocacy groups and audience activists on the establishment or advancement of transparency measures in journalism would add to a less journalist-centred approach on media transparency. Scholarly elaboration of media transparency should though involve constant debate with practitioners. Despite crucial efforts to disclose or even “demystify”152 the structures, methods and values underlying journalism, those designated to create a more transparent society still often fail to explain their own work appropriately. Acknowledgments   The authors would like to thank Julia Lönnendonker and Janis Brinkmann for the preliminary research they contributed to this chapter.

Notes



1. A German neologism, loosely translated as “enraged citizens”. 2. T. Eberwein, S. Fengler and M. Karmasin, eds., The European Handbook of Media Accountability (London and New York: Routledge, 2018); K. Meier and J. Reimer, “Transparenz im Journalismus. Instrumente, Konfliktpotentiale, Wirkung”, Publizistik 56, no. 2 (2011), 133–155. 3.  R. van der Wurff and K. Schönbach, “Between Profession and Audience”, Journalism Studies 12, no. 4 (2011), 417.

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4. The Leveson Inquiry, An Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press (London: The Stationery Office, 2012), 38. 5. U. Krüger, Meinungsmacht: Der Einfluss von Eliten auf Leitmedien und Alpha-Journalisten – eine kritische Netzwerkanalyse (Cologne: Herbert von Halem Verlag, 2013). 6.  B. Kartheuser, “Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing. Fragwürdige Kooperationen mit Redaktionen und Verlagen”, in Gefallen und Gefälligkeiten. Journalismus und Korruption (Berlin: Netzwerk Recherche, 2013); Transparency International, Three Ways to Fight Corruption in the Media, http://www.transparency.org/news/feature/ three_ways_to_fight_corruption_in_the_media, accessed 22 March 2018. 7.  G. Bentele and J. Seifert, “Organisatorische Transparenz und Vertrauen”, in V. Klenk and D. J. Hanke, eds., Corporate Transparency: Wie Unternehmen im Glashaus-Zeitalter Wettbewerbsvorteile erzielen (Frankfurt: FAZ Verlag, 2009). 8.  G. Burkart, “When Privacy Goes Public: New Media and the Transformation of the Culture of Confession”, in H. Blatterer, P. Johnson, and M. R. Markus, eds., Modern Privacy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); A. Bernard, Komplizen des Erkennungsdienstes: Das Selbst in der digitalen Kultur (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 2017). 9. A. J. Brown, W. Vandekerckhove and S. Dreyfus, “The Relationship Between Transparency, Whistleblowing, and Public Trust”, in P. Ala’i and R. G. Vaughn, eds., Research Handbook on Transparency (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014), 32. 10.  J. Forssbaeck and G. Oxelheim, “The Multifaceted Concept of Transparency”, in J. Forssbaeck and G. Oxelheim, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Economic and Institutional Transparency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Chapter 1 in this volume. 11.  See H. Pöttker, “Der Beruf zur Öffentlichkeit: Über Aufgabe, Grundsätze und Perspektiven des Journalismus in der Mediengesellschaft aus der Sicht praktischer Vernunft”, Publizistik 55, no. 2 (2010), 107–128. 12. J. B. Singer, “The Political J-Blogger: ‘Normalizing’ a New Media Form to Fit Old Norms and Practices”, Journalism 6, no. 2 (2005), 179. 13.  B. I. Finel and K. M. Lord, eds., Power and Conflict in the Age of Transparency (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). 14. K. Chadha and M. Koliska, “Newsrooms and Transparency in the Digital Age”, Journalism Practice 9, no. 2 (2015), 221. 15.  J. B. Silverman, “The Best Ways for Publishers to Build Credibility Through Transparency”, American Press Institute (2014), www.

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americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/strategy-studies/transparency-credibility, accessed 24 September 2018. 16. Of course, the American founders did not institutionalize the public’s right to know as we know it today. Yet the amendment paved the way for legitimizing demands for such a right in the future. For an overview of the emergence of this right during the twentieth century, see M. Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945–1975 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 17. C. Hood, “Transparency in Historical Perspective”, in C. Hood and D. Heald, eds., Transparency: The Key to Better Governance? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3–23; S. Baume, Transparency in the Handling of Public Affairs: Origins and Meaning of a Requirement, paper presented at the First Global Conference on Transparency Research, Rutgers University, Newark, USA, 19–20 May 2011. See also Chapter 1 in this volume. 18. L. Brown, The Reluctant Reformation: On Criticizing the Press in America (New York: McKay, 1974); M. Marzolf, Civilizing Voices: American Press Criticism 1880–1950 (New York: Longman, 1991). 19. The Commission on Freedom of the Press, A Free and Responsible Press: A General Report on Mass Communications: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947). 20.  S. Fengler, “Holding the News Media Accountable: A Study of Media Reporters and Media Critics in the USA”, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2003), 818–832. 21. J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989). 22. P. L. Plaisance, “Transparency: An Assessment of the Kantian Roots of a Key Element in Media Ethics Practice”, Journal of Mass Media Ethics 22, nos. 2–3 (2007), 187–207; see also P. L. Plaisance and J. A. Deppa, Perceptions and Manifestations of Autonomy, Transparency and Harm Among U.S. Newspaper Journalists (Columbia, SC: The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, 2009). 23. D. S. Allen, “The Trouble with Transparency: The Challenge of Doing Journalism Ethics in a Surveillance Society”, Journalism Studies 9, no. 3 (2008), 335. 24. S. Fengler, T. Eberwein, G. Mazzoleni, C. Porlezza, and S. Russ-Mohl, eds., Journalists and Media Accountability: An International Study of News People in the Digital Age (New York: Peter Lang, 2014).

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25. As media accountability and media transparency are not mutually exclusive concepts, MAI and MTI might overlap. 26. C.-J. Bertrand, Media Ethics and Accountability Systems (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000). 27. R. P. Clark, “The Ethics of Attribution”, in M. Kramer and W. Call, eds., Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University (New York: Plume, 2007). 28. J. Ziomek, Journalism, Transparency and the Public Trust. A Report of the Eighth Annual Aspen Institute Conference on Journalism and Society (Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute, 2005), 24. 29. This chapter will focus on journalism studies. Yet, it needs to be noted that the concept of transparency has been discussed in other disciplines of media and communication research as well, e.g. in PR studies. See Bentele and Seifert, “Organisatorische Transparenz und Vertrauen”. 30. See Plaisance, “Transparency: An Assessment of the Kantian Roots of a Key Element in Media Ethics Practice”; Allen, “The Trouble with Transparency”. 31. See Singer, “The Political J-Blogger”; D. Domingo and A. Heinonen, “Weblogs and Journalism: A Typology to Explore the Blurring Boundaries”, Nordicom Review 29, no. 1 (2008), 3–15; M. Karlsson “The Immediacy of Online News, the Visibility of Journalistic Processes and a Restructuring of Journalistic Authority”, Journalism 12, no. 3 (2011), 279–295; T. P. Vos, S. Craft and S. Ashley, “New Media, Old Criticism: Bloggers’ Press Criticism and the Journalistic Field”, Journalism 13, no. 7 (2012), 850–868; and Fengler et al., Journalists and Media Accountability. 32.  See Y. De Haan, Between Professional Autonomy and Public Responsibility: Accountability and Responsiveness in Dutch Media and Journalism. Dissertation at the University of Amsterdam (2011); M. Karlsson, “The Immediacy of Online News”; Groenhart and Evers, “Media Accountability and Transparency – What Newsrooms (Could) Do”. 33. See Plaisance and Deppa, Perceptions and Manifestations of Autonomy, Transparency and Harm; Chadha and Koliska, “Newsrooms and Transparency in the Digital Age”; T. P. Vos and S. Craft, “The Discursive Construction of Journalistic Transparency”, Journalism Studies 18, no. 12 (2017), 1505–1522; and R. van der Wurff and K. Schönbach, “Between Profession and Audience”. 34.  Meier and Reimer, “Transparenz im Journalismus”; M. Karlsson, C. Clerwall, and L. Nord, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. Transparency’s (Lack of) Effect on Source and Message Credibility”, Journalism Studies 15, no. 5 (2014), 668–678.

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35. Allen, “The Trouble with Transparency”, 323. 36. Ziomek, Journalism, Transparency and the Public Trust, vii. 37.  See Vos and Craft, “The Discursive Construction of Journalistic Transparency”. 38.  See M. Carlson, “Whither Anonymity? Journalism and Unnamed Sources in a Changing Media Environment”, in M. Carlson and B. Franklin, eds., Journalists, Sources, and Credibility: New Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge, 2011). 39.  See Silverman, “The Best Ways for Publishers to Build Credibility Through Transparency”. 40. See Ziomek, Journalism, Transparency and the Public Trust. 41. See B. Debatin, “Herausforderungen und ethische Standards für den Multi-Plattform Journalismus im World Wide Web”, Zeitschrift für Kommunikationsökologie und Medienethik 12, no. 1 (2010), 25–29. 42. Karlsson, “The Immediacy of Online News”. 43. K. Meier, Transparency in Journalism: Credibility and Trustworthiness in the Digital Future, Paper presented at the conference “The Future of Journalism” of the Journals “Journalism Studies” and “Journalism Practice”, 9–10 September 2009, Cardiff, UK, 2. 44. Meier and Reimer, “Transparenz im Journalismus”, 138. 45. Ibid., 138–139. 46. Groenhart and Evers, “Media Accountability and Transparency—What Newsrooms (Could) Do”, 130. 47.  P. J. Shoemaker and S. D. Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influences on Mass Media Content, 2nd edition (White Plains: Longman, 1996). 48. Marzolf, Civilizing Voices, 196; see also van der Wurff and Schönbach, “Between Profession and Audience”, 414. 49. See M. Deuze, A. Bruns, and C. Neuberger, “Preparing for an Age of Participatory News”, Journalism Practice 1, no. 3 (2007), 322–338; M. Karlsson, “Rituals of Transparency: Evaluating Online News Outlets’ Uses of Transparency Rituals in the United States, United Kingdom and Sweden”, Journalism Studies 11, no. 4 (2010), 535–545; and Groenhart and Evers, “Media Accountability and Transparency”. 50.  De Haan, “Between Professional Autonomy and Public Responsibility”; Fengler et al., eds., Journalists and Media Accountability; and Eberwein, Fengler, and Karmasin, eds., The European Handbook of Media Accountability. 51. A means of investigation including contributions from the audience such as gathering information or evaluating data, sharing knowledge or opinions. See for example, T. Aitamurto, “Crowdsourcing as a KnowledgeSearch Method in Digital Journalism”, Digital Journalism 4, no. 2 (2016), 280–297.

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52. See J. D. Lassica, “Blogging as a Form of Journalism”, Online Journalism Review, 24 May 2001, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1017958873. php; Singer, “The Political J-Blogger”; J. B. Singer, “Contested Autonomy: Professional and Popular Claims on Journalistic Norms”, Journalism Studies 8, no. 1 (2007), 79–95; and Karlsson, “The Immediacy of Online News”. 53. Singer, “Contested Autonomy”, 86. 54. Meier and Reimer, “Transparenz im Journalismus”, 140. 55. For an overview on such concepts, see for example P. Dahlgren, “The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation”, Political Communication 22, no. 2 (2005), 147–162. 56. For elaborations on the end of the blogging era, see J. Heer, “What Were Blogs”, New Republic, 24 August 2016, https://newrepublic. com/article/136272/what-were-blogs-death-gawker-blogging; M. Campbell, “Should We Mourn the End of Blogs?”‚ The Guardian, 17 July 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/ jul/17/should-we-mourn-the-end-of-blogs. 57. See for example A. Gebesmair, Die wirtschaftliche und gesellschaftliche Bedeutung von YouTube-Channels in Österreich. Eine Studie im Auftrag der RTR-GmbH (St. Pölten: St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, 2017). 58. See J. Jarvis, “Product vs. Process Journalism: The Myth of Perfection vs. Beta Culture” buzzmachine.com, 7 June 2009, https://buzzmachine.com/2009/06/07/processjournalism. 59. Karlsson, “The Immediacy of Online News”, 291. 60. Bentele and Seifert, “Organisatorische Transparenz und Vertrauen”. 61.  C. Horz, “Networking Citizens—Public Service Media and Audience Activism in Europe”, in G. F. Lowe, H. Van den Bulck, and K. Donders, eds., Public Service Media in the Networked Society (Gothenburg: Nordicom, 2018). 62. Bertrand, Media Ethics and Accountability Systems, 107. 63. Bertrand, Media Ethics and Accountability Systems; C.-J. Bertrand, “M*A*S in the Present World: An Overview of Media Accountability Systems”, in T. von Krogh, ed., Media Accountability Today—and Tomorrow (Gothenburg: Nordicom, 2008); Fengler et  al., eds., Journalists and Media Accountability. 64.  J. Fox, “The Uncertain Relationship Between Transparency and Accountability”, Development in Practice 17, nos. 4–5 (2007), 664. 65. De Haan, Between Professional Autonomy and Public Responsibility, 202. 66.  See D. McQuail, Media Performance: Mass Communication and the Public Interest (London: Sage, 1992). 67. B. Kovach and T. Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism: What News People Should Know and the Public Should Expect, 2nd edition (New York: Crown, 2007), 96.

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68. See Allen, “The Trouble with Transparency”. 69. Groenhart and Evers, “Media Accountability and Transparency”; van der Wurff and Schönbach, “Between Profession and Audience”; Chadha and Koliska, “Newsrooms and Transparency in the Digital Age”. 70. Groenhart and Evers, “Media Accountability and Transparency”, 142. 71. Groenhart and Evers, “Media Accountability and Transparency”. The EU-funded research project Media Accountability and Transparency in Europe (MediaAcT) examined perceptions of media accountability and transparency among journalists of 12 European countries (Austria, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, the UK) and two Arab countries (Jordan and Tunisia). 72. Chadha and Koliska, “Newsrooms and Transparency in the Digital Age”, 219. 73. Ibid., 222. 74. Ibid., 224. 75. Ibid., 225–226. 76. T. Bettels, S. Fengler, A. Sträter, and M. Trilling, “Die Illusion von Transparenz”, Message – Internationale Zeitschrift für Journalismus 3 (2011), 82–85. 77.  van der Wurff and Schönbach, “Between Profession and Audience”, 414. 78. Groenhart and Evers, “Media Accountability and Transparency”, 142. 79. Ibid., 133. 80. Groenhart and Evers, “Media Accountability and Transparency”, 136. 81. S. Fenger et al., “How Effective Is Media Self-Regulation? Results from a Comparative Survey of European Journalists”, European Journal of Communication 30, no. 3 (2015), 257. 82. T. Eberwein, S. Fengler, K. Kaufmann, J. Brinkmann, and M. Karmasin, “Summary: Measuring Media Accountability in Europe – and beyond”, in Eberwein, Fengler, and Karmasin, eds., The European Handbook of Media Accountability, 296–298. 83. Ibid., 298. 84. Ibid., 299. 85.  See J. Pies, “Media Accountability in Transition: Results from Jordan and Tunisia”, in Fengler et al., eds., Journalists and Media Accountability, 193–209; M. Bastian, Media and Accountability in Latin America: Framework—Conditions—Instruments (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019); and D. Speck, Between Professional Autonomy, Public Responsibility and State Interference. Media Accountability in Myanmar’s Transitional Media System. Master’s thesis, TU Dortmund University, 2017.

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86. See Kovach and Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism; Plaisance and Deppa, Perceptions and Manifestations of Autonomy, Transparency and Harm. 87. Allen, “The Trouble with Transparency”, 324. 88. M. Kohring and J. Matthes, “Trust in News Media: Development and Validation of a Multidimensional Scale”, Communication Research 34, no. 2 (2007), 238. 89. Ibid., 239. 90. Ibid., 239–240. 91. B. Blöbaum, Trust and Journalism in a Digital Environment (Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2014), 48, adapted slightly. 92.  S. Fengler and S. Russ-Mohl, “Journalists and the InformationAttention Markets: Towards an Economic Theory of Journalism”, Journalism 9, no. 6 (2008), 667–690. 93. Ibid., 681. 94.  See W. Donsbach, M. Rentsch, A.-M. Schielicke, and S. Degen, Entzauberung eines Berufs: Was die Deutschen vom Journalismus erwarten und wie sie enttäuscht werden (Konstanz: UVK, 2009). 95. See C. Schemer, N. Jackob, O. Quiring, T. Schulz, M. Ziegele, and V. Granow, Medienvertrauen in Deutschland 2018. Erste Befunde der Langzeitstudie, 29 January 2018, www.uni-mainz.de/downloads_ presse/02_publizistik_medienvertrauen_grafiken.pdf; Edelman Trust Barometer, 2018 Executive Summary, http://cms.edelman.com/sites/ default/files/2018-02/2018_Edelman_TrustBarometer_Executive_ Summary_Jan.pdf. 96. European Commission, Special Eurobarometer 452: Media Pluralism and Democracy (Brussels: European Union, 2016), 26. 97.  Pew Research Center, “Americans’ Attitudes About the News Media Deeply Divided Among Partisan Lines”, 10 May 2017, 19, http://www.journalism.org/2017/05/10/americans-attitudesabout-the-news-media-deeply-divided-along-par tisan-lines/ pj_2017-05-10_media-attitudes_a-05. 98. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Digital News Report 2017 (Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2017), 8. 99.  Brown, Vandekerckhove and Dreyfus, “The Relationship Between Transparency, Whistleblowing, and Public Trust”, 32. 100. O. O’Neill, A Question of Trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 70. 101. Bentele and Seifert, “Organisatorische Transparenz und Vertrauen”. 102. Allen, “The Trouble with Transparency”, 326. 103. Karlsson, Clerwall, and Nord, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”.

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104. Ibid., 674–675. 105. Meier and Reimer, “Transparenz im Journalismus”, 151. 106.  J. Reimer, “Vertrauen durch Transparenz? Potentiale und Probleme journalistischer Selbstoffenbarung”, in M. Haller, ed., Öffentliches Vertrauen in der Mediengesellschaft (Cologne: Herbert von Halem Verlag, 2017), 114. 107.  Fengler and Russ-Mohl, “Journalists and the Information-Attention Markets”, 673. 108. Allen, “The Trouble with Transparency”, 324. 109.  Plaisance and Deppa, Perceptions and Manifestations of Autonomy, Transparency and Harm, 370. 110.  Fengler and Russ-Mohl, “Journalists and the Information-Attention Markets”, 673. 111.  N. Wojcik, “Trump Has Been ‘Rocket Fuel’ for NYT Digital Subscriptions, CEO Says”, CNBC, 3 May 2017, www.cnbc. com/2017/05/03/shares-of-new-york-times-surge-after-subscribergrowth.html. 112. B. von Rimscha and G. Siegert, Medienökonomie. Eine problemorientierte Einführung (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2015), 31. 113. J. Heinrich, Medienökonomie: Band 1: Mediensystem, Zeitung, Zeitschrift, Anzeigenblatt (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2001), 101–102. 114.  Fengler and Russ-Mohl, “Journalists and the Information-Attention Markets”, 680; see also G. Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science, 13 December 1968. 115. Von Rimscha and Siegert, Medienökonomie, 201. 116.  van der Wurff and Schönbach, “Between Profession and Audience”, 418. 117. A. Funck, Die transparente Redaktion: Ein Ansatz für die strategische Öffentlichkeitsarbeit von Zeitungsverlagen (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2016); Silverman, “The Best Ways for Publishers to Build Credibility Through Transparency”. 118.  M. Friedrichsen and M. Gertler, Medien zwischen Ökonomie und Qualität: Medienethik als Instrument der Medienwirtschaft (BadenBaden: Nomos, 2011). 119. See M. Le Masurier, “What Is Slow Journalism?”, Journalism Practice 9, no. 2 (2014), 138–152; C. Gyldensted, “Innovating News Journalism Through Positive Psychology”, University of Pennsylvania, Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) Capstone Project (2011), http:// repository.upenn.edu, accessed 26 March 2018; and U. Haagerup, Constructive News: Why Negativity Destroys the Media and Democracy— And How to Improve Journalism of Tomorrow (Rapperswil: Innovatio Publishing, 2014).

148  S. FENGLER AND D. SPECK 120.  See Allen, “The Trouble with Transparency”; Vos and Craft, “The Discursive Construction of Journalistic Transparency”. 121. D. Weinberger, “Transparency: The New Objectivity?”, kmworld.com, 28 August 2009, http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Column/DavidWeinberger/Transparency-the-new-objectivity-55785.aspx. 122. M. Deuze, “What Is Journalism? Professional Identity and Ideology of Journalists Reconsidered”, Journalism 6, no. 4 (2005), 447. 123. See A. Scholl and S. Weischenberg, “Autonomy in Journalism: How It Is Related to Attitudes and Behavior of Media Professionals”, Web Journal of Mass Communication Research 2, no. 4 (1999), www.scripps.ohio. edu/wjmcr/vol02/2-4a.htm. 124. Plaisance, “Transparency: An Assessment of the Kantian Roots of a Key Element in Media Ethics Practice”, 193. 125. Reimer, “Vertrauen durch Transparenz?”, 109. 126.  See Vos and Craft, “The Discursive Construction of Journalistic Transparency”, 1516 and 1514. 127. Allen, “The Trouble with Transparency”, 327. 128. See Debatin, “Herausforderungen und ethische Standards für den MultiPlattform Journalismus im World Wide Web”, 29. 129. B. Cunningham, “Skin Deep: When ‘Transparency’ Is a Smoke Screen”, Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2006, 10. 130. Deutscher Presserat, Der Pressekodex, www.presserat.de/pressekodex/ pressekodex/#panel-ziffer_4_grenzen_der_recherche, accessed 26 March 2018. 131. Silverman, “The Best Ways for Publishers to Build Credibility Through Transparency”. 132.  See C. Herzog, L. Novy, H. Hilker, and O. Torun, “Transparency and Funding of Public Service Media in Germany, the Western World and Beyond”, in C. Herzog, L. Novy, H. Hilker, and O. Torun, eds., Transparency and Funding of Public Service Media – Die deutsche Debatte im internationalen Kontext (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2018). 133. Groenhart and Evers, “Media Accountability and Transparency”, 139. 134. K. Donders and T. Raats, “Flanders: Increasing Transparency of Public Service Media Through Stakeholder Involvement in Policy-Making?”, in Herzog et al., eds., Transparency and Funding of Public Service Media, 43. 135. See F. Schoch, “Wider die Arkantradition. Rundfunktransparenz: Eine Entgegung auf Paul Kirchhof”, epd medien 45 (2017), 3–7. 136. G. Ruddick, “BBC to Publish Details of Viewers’ Complaints Under New Ofcom Rules”, The Guardian, 14 November 2017, www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/14/bbc-to-publish-details-ofviewers-complaints-under-new-ofcom-rules.

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137.  M. Bornheim, “Kandel – wie die tagesschau damit umgeht”, 28 December 2017, http://blog.tagesschau.de/2017/12/28/kandel-wiedie-tagesschau-damit-umgeht/. 138. F. Servatius, “Wer im „Glashaus“ bloggt, sollte mit Beiträgen werfen”, uebermedien.de, 15 February 2018, https://uebermedien.de/25425/ wer-im-glashaus-bloggt-sollte-mit-beitraegen-werfen/. 139.  www.nytimes.com/section/corrections. 140.  https://thetrustproject.org. 141. See also Silverman, “The Best Ways for Publishers to Build Credibility Through Transparency”. 142.  See also M. Bastian and S. Fengler, “Transparenz und Medien: Perspektiven der Kommunikationswissenschaft – Schnittstellen für die Politologie”, Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 26, no. 2 (2016), 211–220. 143.  G. Michener and K. Bersch, “Conceptualizing the Quality of Transparency”, Paper presented at the First Global Conference on Transparency Research, Rutgers University, Newark, USA, 19–20 May 2011, 13. 144. Ibid., 2. 145. Ibid., 11. 146. Ibid., 2. 147. Ibid., 11. 148.  D. Heald, “Varieties of Transparency”, in Hood and Heald, eds., Transparency: The Key to Better Governance?, 25–43. See also Fox, “The Uncertain Relationship Between Transparency and Accountability”; Michener and Bersch, “Conceptualizing the Quality of Transparency”. 149. Michener and Bersch, “Conceptualizing the Quality of Transparency”, 12. 150. Heald, “Varieties of Transparency”, 27. 151. Ibid., 28. 152. Ziomek, Journalism, Transparency and the Public Trust, vii.

PART III

Transparency, State and Surveillance

CHAPTER 7

Intelligence, Mistrust and Transparency: A Case Study of the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution Constantin Goschler

In a 2014 article entitled Der Transparenzwahn [Transparency Mania], Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev drew a menacing picture of a growing culture of total transparency, nurtured by the new media. This, he claimed, would reduce politics to the “management of mistrust”, and of course democracies cannot exist without trust.1 In this way, Krastev placed the conflict between trust and mistrust at the centre of his analysis of the preconditions for functioning democratic politics and institutions. The conflict is especially acute for intelligence agencies which, by their very nature, notoriously clash with the transparency expectations of liberal democracies. The history of intelligence agencies’ relations with media-consuming, civil society, as well as with the public parliamentary structures of western democracies, can to a large extent—despite undeniable national and temporal dissimilarities—be described as one of mutual mistrust. The public views intelligence agencies with mistrust C. Goschler (*)  Contemporary History, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 S. Berger and D. Owetschkin (eds.), Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23949-7_7

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and, conversely, mistrust is inscribed in the operations of the latter: It forms the basis of their data-collecting and shapes their relations with internal and external actors. In the eyes of such organizations, deception and treachery lurk around every corner. Following Ute Freverts’ definition, a distinction can be made, then, between the public’s vertical mistrust of intelligence agencies and the horizontal mistrust existing within such organizations.2 Going beyond the everyday meaning of the word ‘mistrust’, in Niklas Luhmann’s system-theoretical perspective, it does not simply denote the opposite of trust—as in Krastev’s article, for instance—but its functional equivalent. Like trust, then, mistrust serves the purpose of reducing social complexity, thus making it easier to deal with a patently uncertain future, albeit at a certain price: a diminished capacity to learn.3 In this way, then, perspectives on democracy theory and perspectives on organization sociology can be linked in an historical analysis of the relationship between mistrust and transparency in an intelligence agency context. A particularly apt example of how dimensions of vertical and horizontal mistrust are interlinked is provided by the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV)—the Federal (West) German domestic intelligence service— founded in 1950. The formative years of this organization have now been intensely researched.4 The main task of the BfV has subsequently been to collect information about potential or actual political threats to Germany’s democratic order, without holding any executive power. What part, then, did vertical and horizontal mistrust play in the constitutive tensions between liberal democracies’ expectations of transparency and the secretive nature of the BfV’s activities? And what did this mean for the Federal Republic of Germany’s specific historical situation of having to work to acquire democratic qualities in the first 25 years of its existence, especially in the field of intelligence, in constant opposition to the former Nazi regime? In view of such challenges, I would argue that public mistrust towards the BfV was less of a problem than a solution. In the following, then, I will explore how there came to be a dual institutionalization of mistrust—within the BfV and in the external public’s relationship towards the Bundesamt—before considering the dynamics of mistrust by the example of the West German government’s 1972 ‘Radicals Decree’. Lastly, I will discuss the BfV’s ways of managing mistrust.5

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The Culture of Mistrust Within the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution The German Office for the Protection of the Constitution was first set up in 1950, under the direction of the western Allies and with the cooperation of former staff members of earlier German intelligence services, adopting the internationally established, basic principles of the sector. Regardless of state differences, all modern intelligence agencies produce secret information from partly public, partly non-public sources, for communication to selected recipients in a processed form. Unlike the methods by which they are gleaned, the secrets are mostly of a transient nature, being based on a temporal advantage.6 In many respects, however, the reliability of such information is uncertain; as truth is often indistinguishable from fiction,7 trust in the information remains fragile. But mistrust, too, serves the purpose of “simplification, often drastic simplification. If someone does not trust information, they need more while at the same time narrowing the information they are prepared to go on. They become more dependent on less information. In this way, the possibility of deception becomes more calculable”.8 In view of this, then, how did mistrust shape the organization of the BfV, its forms of communication and information-gathering practices, and its evaluation of information and dissemination of intelligence? Like other intelligence agencies, the BfV gathers most of its information from public sources, namely the media. Some 80% of its intelligence comes from newspapers, flyers, or is supplied by other authorities.9 The remainder is gathered from communication monitoring, observation and via human intelligence. The latter method uses informants, more or less closely linked with the intelligence agency, from one-off messengers through stool pigeons to CHS (Confidential Human Sources). These were rated on a scale of A to F according to the degree of the presumed reliability, or unreliability, of the information they provided.10 This method holds a fundamental problem: namely, informants are by nature traitors. Although the intelligence service system needs them, it will always regard their motives sceptically, or even cynically. From our perspective, then, the informant often appears as the “personification of mistrust”.11 Gauging the credibility of information gained in this way is a constant problem for all intelligence services, and the resultant insecurity can never be completely eliminated. This is one of the first elements

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making up the culture of mistrust within the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, and it extends to all sources. The same could basically be claimed about most other intelligence agencies. Tracing the course of the information gathered through various channels, a continuation of the culture of mistrust can be observed. In the second half of the 1950s, the BfV’s departments of information acquisition and evaluation were separated, following the model of other western intelligence agencies.12 This reorganization can be seen as another element contributing to the institutionalization of mistrust: By separating acquisition from evaluation and verification, the BfV tried to neutralize the partiality of staff members working close to the sources. Like all intelligence services, in the dichotomous context of the Cold War, the BfV struggled with the fact that any information it received may have been purposeful disinformation from the opposing side. Counterplay in the context of espionage and counter-espionage is a method used to leak false information to enemy intelligence, occasionally supplemented by real information for the sake of credibility. Like all intelligence services, the BfV was both the subject and the object of such counterplay. Ultimately, then, the international community of intelligence services co-weaves a web of information and misinformation, within which all information must necessarily remain suspicious. Mistrust was therefore constitutive for the BfV as all intelligence could in principle be false or manipulated and, moreover, the danger of self-fulfilling prophecies always existed. Suspicion extends, then, from the intelligence procured, and used as the basis for delicate processes of political decision-making, to the officials dealing with its procurement and dissemination. The BfV has always had to factor in the possibility of staff members working for other intelligence services at the same time. It not only fed off traitors—so-called countermen—from the other side, then, but was also likely to be feeding traitors among its own ranks. For this reason, the BfV—like most intelligence agencies—set up an internal security service to monitor its own staff, Department ‘S’ for Security. Here, too, the various rival intelligence agencies worked on similar principles, for which reason internal surveillance focused primarily on eliminating compromising material (known as Kompromat): identifying any peculiar circumstances that may render the individual vulnerable to blackmail and promptly taking preventative countermeasures.

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However, this basically just shifted the problem to the next level. Departments supposed to defend against enemy attacks could also be infiltrated by double agents, and so the mistrust could never be neutralized. Even within an intelligence agency, not all the supervisors can be supervised. Perhaps one could paraphrase Franz-Xaver Kaufmann’s reflections on the “security paradox”13 and speak of a paradox of mistrust: The more one tries to eliminate mistrust, the more sources of mistrust emerge.14 A spectacular case hit the sister organization (and often rival) of the BfV, the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND), in 1961 when the head of the BND’s counterintelligence department at the time, Heinz Felfe, was revealed to be a Soviet spy.15 The BfV has suffered similar setbacks: its first president Otto John disappeared to East Berlin in 1954 for reasons never fully explained16 and the later head of counterintelligence, Hansjoachim Tiedge, defected to the GDR in 1985.17 As the BfV has had to be constantly prepared for enemy intrusions such as these, it evolved a need-to-know principle to contain the repercussions, which formed a traditional element of the institutionalization of mistrust in intelligence services. By this principle, only the necessary minimum of information is transmitted in internal communications.18 Recently, however, a transition towards a need-to-share principle seems to be taking place, at least within the transatlantic intelligence community, prompted by the new threat of international terrorism.19 But it is changing in relations between allied intelligence services rather than agencies’ internal handling of intelligence. In any case, the need-to-know principle formed an important component of the culture of mistrust within the BfV, which was not only directed at the outside world but also at its own staff members. In this respect, too, the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution stood as an example for intelligence services in general. The culture of mistrust was also reflected in the spatial organization of the BfV. This involved creating a firm boundary between the inner workings and the outside world by means of elaborate security measures. Up until very recently, when the German intelligence services introduced measures to intensify the impression of transparency, staff members of the BfV were required to disguise their work to the outside world by adopting biographical fig-leaves. Mistrust was cultivated right up to the closest personal relationships. To ease the psychological strain this caused, efforts were made to foster team spirit within the organization.

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As well as running an internal school for constitution protection, it periodically pursued a programme of systematically employing relatives of staff members, and there were even many marriages between staff members, presumably intended to curb the outflow of intelligence by pillow talk.20 At a New Year’s address, in view of the constant threat of alcohol-induced intelligence leakage, BfV president Hubert Schrübbers warned his employees of the correct behaviour in public bars: “Keep to the old rule: don’t mix business with pleasure. And if you feel the need to drown your sorrows, do it at home behind closed doors and windows—or here at work in the canteen”.21 Indeed, the BfV’s culture of mistrust was not only reflected in its strict separation from the outside world but also in its internal spatial arrangement: Until a short time ago, there were no door or direction signs in the vast building complex in the Chorweiler district of Cologne that the BfV first occupied in the 1980s. This was an intentional measure to prevent potential spies from finding their way around, but it was stopped by the only German organization that is even more powerful than the BfV’s Department S: the fire safety authority. In view of this, one might ask how an organization like the BfV can function at all. Luhmann argues: “A social system that needs or cannot avoid the mistrustful conduct of its participants for certain functions equally needs mechanisms of preventing mistrust from becoming rampant, of it being returned and becoming destructive by reciprocal processes of intensification”.22 Viewing the BfV in this perspective, the first thing that strikes one is that within its pronounced culture of mistrust, its suspicions extended even to its own staff members. Nevertheless, personal trust formed the main corrective to counter the destructive tendencies of mistrust. Here, membership in biographical networks played a key role. While this is a familiar lifeworld phenomenon, the peculiarity in the early years of the BfV was that shared experiences of Nazi camaraderie often formed the basis for personal trust. Previous membership of the Wehrmacht or military intelligence, or even of other parts of the Nazi regime’s security apparatus, right up to the Gestapo, SS and SD, was a frequent bonding factor between BfV officials.23 However, relying on personal trust as a means of compensating for the negative consequences of institutionalized mistrust could have disastrous consequences. One example was the above-mentioned Felfe case in 1961, the disclosure of which threw the BND into a deep identity crisis. Heinz Felfe had used the personal trust he enjoyed within his

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extensive old-comrade networks from his SD days to foster his activities as a double agent. Conversely, Otto John, the first president of the BfV, did not encounter such personal trust precisely because he had been in the resistance and, perhaps even worse, because he had assisted the Allied prosecution in the case against Field Marshall Erich von Manstein during the Nuremberg trials. His disappearance to East Berlin in 1954 was regarded by many within the Bundesamt as vindication of their personal mistrust of him. John, for his part, cited the widespread mistrust towards members of the resistance in the early years of the Federal Republic of (West) Germany and the re-instalment of former pillars of the Nazi regime in office as the main grounds for him taking his—otherwise still unexplained—step.24 From the perspective of the BfV, a professional past under Nazism only gave cause for personal mistrust if potentially scandalous elements were being concealed or if a staff member had participated in war crimes. This meant there was a danger of compromising material being leaked to enemy or rival intelligence agencies. Indeed, the BfV’s openness to staff members’ Nazi pasts served to promote personal trust within the Bundesamt. This did not even fundamentally change when news broke in the early 1960s that some BfV officials had previously had careers in the Gestapo, SS or SD, causing public scandals.25 The proverbial ‘skeletons in the closet’, then, helped build personal trust within the organization on the one hand, while also holding the potential for becoming political problems in the public sphere on the other. The above-mentioned public scandal in the early 1960s can therefore be interpreted as a consequence of attempts to manage the institutionalized culture of mistrust within the BfV, and the resultant increase in social complexity, by promoting personal trust—which, in turn, sparked, or inflamed, the public’s mistrust of the BfV from the early 1960s on.

Public Mistrust of the BfV Since its rise in the Age of Enlightenment, the concept of liberal, western democracy has been closely linked to expectations of government to be transparent and controllable.26 Intelligence agencies, however, form the core of the arcane sphere on which the sovereignty of the modern state is founded, and basically conflicts with the transparency expected of democratic systems. Literary scholar Eva Horn has proposed that a momentary state of emergency plays a role in all the activities of intelligence agencies,

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implying they are on the “irregular side of power”.27 Moreover, she sees the widespread mistrust of intelligence agencies as based on the assumption that they mark a legal vacuum looming at the very heart of liberal democracy. Meanwhile, Giorgio Agamben, in his critique of the “security state”, describes the state of emergency as the dark centre of the liberal constitutional state, thereby ultimately levelling the difference between democracy and dictatorship.28 But while the Italian philosopher provides catchwords for the public’s general suspicion of western intelligence agencies, the Berlin-based political scientist Herfried Münkler defends the need for an arcane sphere of intelligence within a liberal, constitutional state against the demand for total transparency, trusting in the constitution’s capacity to control intelligence services.29 Public mistrust of the activities of intelligence agencies differs from country to country, however, depending on national histories and political cultures. The BfV’s press officer Friedrich Ernst Berghoff alias Hendrik van Bergh portrayed this in his 1981-published inside story on the world of intelligence agencies. Here, he contrasts the severe criticism of the BfV’s involvement in Allied telephone surveillance, and its unconstitutional repercussions, culminating in the ‘telephone affair’ of 1964, with the patriotic loyalty he enviously claims is invested in the UK Secret Service, throughout all crises and scandals.30 Following the experience of Nazi dictatorship, the German public viewed the newly founded Office for the Protection of the Constitution with suspicion from the outset, although great efforts were made to show that it was no new Gestapo, concerning its fields of expertise, structure, and staff in equal measures.31 But this normative dissociation from the Gestapo provided a point of reference for the scandals that began to spark from it in the 1950s, covered by print media such as the high-circulation weeklies Der Spiegel and Die Zeit. This did not change until the 1970s, when the dual rise in significance of digitalization and ‘domestic security’ aroused public fears of a surveillance state, providing a new negative point of reference concerning the BfV. Subsequently, social mistrust of the BfV was, at least for a time, based on notions of new threats, which were more concerned with the future than with the past, although they still referred back to historical fears: The spectre of totalitarian dictatorship lent an added menace to the topos of surveillance. Here, it was precisely the combination of public fears of total monitoring and the BfV’s intransparency that fostered mistrust of the organization.

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In the long term, public mistrust of the BfV was a confluence of two mutually intensifying elements: latent mistrust of institutions exacerbated by regular cases of acute suspicion falling on individuals. The mysterious disappearance of Otto John, the first president of the BfV, in 1954 was a key occurrence in this context. Recurrent waves of media scandal reinforced the public’s mistrust of the BfV, particularly during the Cold War era. On the one hand, the BfV was criticized for breaching the rule of law, such as in the Vulkan affair of 1953 when, disregarding the constitutional presumption of innocence, dozens of civilians were wrongfully arrested as members of a supposed spy ring,32 or in the above-mentioned bugging affair eleven years later, which publicly called the BfV’s loyalty to the constitution into question.33 On the other hand, any mishaps or failures on the part of the BfV were publicly exposed as demonstrating a lack of professionalism. One example was the Hamburg Ahoi-Bar affair in 1958, when BfV officials from Cologne displayed embarrassingly inappropriate behaviour at a pre-Christmas party in the same-named pub. Another example was the Klingelpütz affair in 1971, when a prison inmate in Cologne managed to put aside a number of BfV files destined for the incinerator with the (unfulfilled) intention of selling them to the secret service of the GDR. Public mistrust focused alternately, then, on the supposed omnipotence and the impotence of the BfV. In general terms, too, the public often regards the work of intelligence agencies “either with paranoia because of its almightiness or scorn because of its ineptitude”.34 As mistrust of individuals and mistrust of institutions were mutually reinforcing elements in the public’s perception of the BfV, the history of the agency tends to appear as one long string of scandals.35 The government’s, albeit delayed, response to the recurring crises of confidence was to extend parliamentary control of the intelligence services, comprising the BND and the Military Counter Intelligence Agency (Militärischer Abschirmdienst, or MAD) as well as the BfV. This marked a further element in the institutionalization of mistrust, imposed on the German intelligence services from without. They were opposed to such measures on the grounds that greater transparency jeopardized their work and increased the risk of classified information reaching enemy services or the public. And so the conflict was and is shaped by mutual suspicion: The public and politicians mistrusted the BfV and other intelligence agencies because of their alleged lack of transparency while the BfV and the BND mistrusted parliament, fearing its careless handling of intelligence.36

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In 1956 West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer set up a Parliamentary Panel of Ombudsmen, initially to support the BND. In 1965, in the wake of the bugging affair, it was able to extend its remit to the BfV. However, the supervisory function of this committee, chaired by Adenauer and run by the Chancellor’s Office, was extremely limited, not least as it was entirely dependent on information selected and provided by the government.37 According to an official from the German Ministry of the Interior, “the main purpose of the committee is to promptly inform the chairpersons of the political groups in parliament about important developments, in order to withdraw them from party political dispute, and to inform the members of the committee before they learn about the developments from the press”.38 The committee was based, then, on the principle of personal trust. More precisely, though, in a reversal of the principle of democratic controls, it was about the trust of the head of government in parliament. In the face of increasing demands for transparency throughout the 1970s, after several abortive attempts, the Parliamentary Panel of Ombudsmen was finally replaced by a Parliamentary Control Commission in 1978. Now operating on a statutory basis for the first time, it was renamed the Parliamentary Control Panel in 1999. In 2009 this panel gained added legitimacy by being enshrined in the constitution (Art. 45d).39 The institutional evolution in the late 1970s, reflected in the various committee namechanges, marks an important point in the shift towards institutionalized parliamentary control of the intelligence services. But the controversy has continued to the very recent past, not least due to the activities of whistle-blower and activist Edward Snowden. When news broke of the German intelligence agencies’ cooperation in the field of communications surveillance with the NSA, commentators criticized the fact that the Parliamentary Control Panel still had very restricted rights and only limited insight into the activities of the German intelligence agencies. Consequently, parliamentary control of the intelligence agencies was further extended in 2017 and a ‘Permanent Representative of the Parliamentary Control Panel’ appointed, as head of an additional public authority.40 This was the result of a compromise made under the banner of “as much secrecy as necessary, as much transparency as possible”.41 We can be sure that this will not meet the expectations arising from modern societies’ “dream of transparency”42 which in general terms declare the BfV in its existing form to be obsolete. But it remains to be seen how it will affect public mistrust of the BfV and other intelligence

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agencies. For the many critics of intelligence services, there is in any case a clear connection between transparency and trust.43 Transparency critics such as Ivan Krastev, in contrast, argue that rather than promoting trust, increased control of the state executive actually does the opposite and cultivates mistrust, ultimately leading only to more sophisticated forms of concealment behind artfully constructed facades of transparency.44 Claus Leggewie, on the other hand, balances the two sides by calling for the abolishment of the BfV and checks on transparency.45 An investigation into the history of the BfV may not be able to answer the ‘ought’ question that is at the root of this debate, but at least provide some indications of the ‘is’. It can be observed, for example, that the development of public institutions and mistrust of individuals did not necessarily run parallel. The Otto John affair in 1954 had the collateral effect of causing lasting damage to the public’s perception of individuals working for the BfV. But conversely, the scandal over the BfV’s shredding of files on the neo-Nazi NSU catapulted public mistrust of the institution to an all-time high while, on a personal level, then president of the BfV, Heinz Fromm, continued to enjoy the confidence of the general public. One reason was his request for early retirement as a sign of taking responsibility for developments in which his office was implicated.46 Apparently, however, such confidence in individuals did little to change the public’s firmly established institutional mistrust of the BfV. In the final analysis, the logic of suspicion, which is inscribed in the institutional mistrust of the BfV, seems almost insurmountable as it always finds its basic premises vindicated, no matter whether efforts are made towards more or less transparency.

Radicalization Loops and Managing Mistrust Nonetheless, institutional mistrust of the BfV is not a self-evident, political constant but has a history and is subject to change. Below, I will consider a case example of the interplay of the culture of mistrust within the BfV and the public’s institutional mistrust of the BfV, asking questions such as: To what extent were radicalizing dynamics of mistrust at play? And, if appropriate, how were they stopped? The 1972 debate triggered by the German government’s resolution of “Principles on the Question of Anti-constitutional Forces in the Public Service” is a good object for investigation. These principles were resolved by the interior ministers of the West German states, together with West German Chancellor Willy

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Brandt, to tighten the existing regulations, in place since the 1950s.47 Widely known as the ‘Radicals Decree’, the resolution served to substantially extend the BfV’s remit, which now not only processed the authorities’ routine inquiries but also played a key part in defining threats. The BfV’s institutionalized mistrust of ‘enemies of the constitution’ and the public’s institutional suspicion of the BfV as being ‘thought police’ therefore reached a climax in the following years. This dynamic of mutual mistrust was connected to a shift in hostility patterns. While in the first 15 years of the BfV’s existence, its hostility focused on orthodox, Moscow-aligned communists—and therefore, on a societal level, on the workers—by 1972, the New Left, anchored in the student movement, had a broadly middle-class background with many members from the country’s educated elite.48 From the BfV’s perspective, then, the enemy might now come from the mainstream of society, a sphere that it had only gradually started to observe since the 1960s,49 having previously focused mainly on the state. In the eyes of the BfV, society was now a source of danger as well as an object of protection, and its search for the ‘enemies of the constitution’ corresponded with this mistrust of entities within society. At the same time, the BfV’s change in approach fuelled the public’s widespread institutional mistrust of it. Eva Horn suggests the term “state paranoia” for this dual-targeted suspicion. While the thus implied pathologization of historical events should be seen as strictly metaphorical, the term nevertheless aptly reflects the reciprocal radicalization of developments at the time. Because “state paranoia” points in “two directions by, on the one hand, describing the state’s mistrust of its subjects and, on the other, the citizens’ suspicions of being monitored, pursued or deceived by the state”.50 The adoption of the ‘Radicals Decree’ therefore reinforced the manifestation and reaction chains of mutual mistrust between the state and its subjects, as each vindicated and radicalized the other. Eventually, the mutual radicalization of the BfV’s institutionalized mistrust and the public’s institutional mistrust of the BfV was curbed as one West German state after the next abandoned efforts to rigidly enforce the ‘Radicals Decree’. Within the BfV, however, the possibility was discussed of widening the circle of candidates for screening beyond the public service, to include public figures.51 Two conclusions may be drawn from this: First, spiralling, radicalized societal and institutional mistrust could be stopped by politics. But the impetus had to come from without, confirming Luhmann’s supposition that mistrust reduces systems’ learning capacity.52 Second, it shows that despite de-escalation,

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the dynamic of mistrust continued to impact on the public’s mistrust of institutions in the long term. Because the BfV’s lack of transparency linked with the far-reaching extent and consequences of its information acquisition, continued to offer plenty of scope for suspicions. But to what extent does such institutional mistrust pose a problem for the BfV at all? British historian Christopher Andrew has shown that social acceptance has become increasingly important for the British domestic intelligence service, MI5—in a sense, the BfV’s counterpart— especially since the 1990s. It is essential for ensuring that threats arising from within society are detected in time.53 Andrew linked this development with the altered risks after the end of the Cold War. But the BfV had already been forced to tackle widespread institutional mistrust in the 1960s. The media scandals at that time had inflamed public mistrust to such a level, triggering repeated calls for its abolition, that it almost threatened the BfV’s existence. Consequently, from the early 1960s on, the BfV built up a public relations department to confront its negative public image and promote German society’s trust in its institutions via certain media channels. The telephone bugging affair was its first test, and the British intelligence service, enjoying the reflected glory of the internationally successful James Bond film series since 1962, was the unrivalled model (though the British government officially denied the existence of MI6, its foreign intelligence service, right up until 1986). By drawing attention to the importance of its counterespionage work, then, and painting a picture of permanent communist threat, the BfV hoped to appear not as a threat to but as a defender of the public’s freedom. As well as issuing regular press releases, it also produced films, mostly in cooperation with the Federal Press Office, which were widely received.54 While the BfV did its best with the genre of counterespionage films,55 the BND tried to directly emulate the British model by co-producing the 1967 film Spy Today – Die Tomorrow (German: Mister Dynamit – morgen küsst euch der Tod). But even though the protagonist, Bob Urban, alias Mister Dynamit, was played by popular German actor Lex Barker, this attempt at creating a German counterpart to Ian Fleming’s agent 007 also flopped.56 Meanwhile, the BfV concentrated its efforts to promote trust in the state’s institutions in a strategy of fuelling mistrust. One target, for example, was individuals who might be recruiting for foreign intelligence services. Contributing to the public portrayal of pervasive threats in a dangerous world, the BfV tried to win the competition for trust. Striking a political friend-or-foe distinction, it unearthed a boundary

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between trust and mistrust that ran right through (West) German society: Did one tend to mistrust the ‘enemies of the constitution’, against whom the BfV protected the democratic order? Or did one tend to see the BfV itself as a danger, or as the German weekly news magazine Stern asked in an article heading of 1959: “Wer schützt uns vorm Verfassunsgschutz?”57 [Who will protect us from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution?]. Over 50 years later, German journalist Heribert Prantl took this question up again in an almost unchanged wording,58 showing its continued relevance. Trust and mistrust can therefore be regarded as important political resources which are fought over in the public realm. The BfV’s position in this fight is notoriously defensive. To this day, it relies primarily on damage limitation measures of managing mistrust. It is in this spirit that it tries to demonstrate a modicum of transparency, which takes us back to the starting point of our reflections: “Transparency is not about restoring trust in institutions. Transparency is politics’ management of mistrust”.59

Conclusion Perhaps, then, mistrust of the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution is not the problem, contrary to Ivan Krastev’s view, focusing as he does on its relationship to democratically elected political leaders, but rather the solution. In the German context, permanent institutional mistrust can become a substitute for transparency of the BfV, which might only be achieved at the price of self-abandonment of this institution. Mistrust can help, if not to solve, at least to manage the basic irresolvable contradiction that Heribert Prantl describes as follows: “State protection, a ‘democratic intelligence service’, is like a round square, a contradiction in terms”.60 In other words, trust in the democratic system is perhaps dependent on mistrust in the intelligence services. However, mistrust should be contained and institutionalized, as otherwise it can lead to exponentially radicalizing loops of mistrust, especially if conspiracy theories gain the upper hand in the public’s perception. To ensure this does not occur, trust in the democratic system as a whole must exist.61 In short, trust in democracy and mistrust of intelligence services are not contradictory but concurrent, though in a constantly fluid process of negotiation.62 In the final analysis, then, the apparent permanent crisis of confidence in the BfV is perhaps revealed to be a sign of the strength of German democracy.

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Notes













1.  Ivan Krastev, “Der Transparenzwahn”, Transit. Europäische Revue 23 (2013), 24. I would like to thank my colleagues Marcel Schmeer, Christopher Kirchberg and Michael Wala at the Ruhr University Bochum for their helpful comments on this chapter. 2. Ute Frevert differentiates between the vertical trust of citizens to the government or the state and the horizontal trust of citizens among each other. See Ute Frevert, “Vertrauen. Eine historische Spurensuche”, in Ute Frevert, ed., Vertrauen. Historische Annäherungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 20–48. 3. Niklas Luhmann, Vertrauen. Ein Mechanismus der Reduktion sozialer Komplexität (Konstanz and Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius, 2009), see the chapter “Vertrauen und Misstrauen”; see also Frevert, “Vertrauen. Eine historische Spurensuche”; and Ute Frevert, Vertrauensfragen. Eine Obsession der Moderne (Munich: Beck, 2013). 4. See Constantin Goschler and Michael Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”. Das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und die NS-Vergangenheit (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2015). 5.  See also the forthcoming dissertation by Marcel Schmeer, (Un-) Sicherheitstheater? Staatliche Bedrohungskommunikation und die Inszenierung der inneren Sicherheit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1960–2001 (Ruhr University Bochum). 6.  See Niklas Luhmann, “Geheimnis, Zeit und Ewigkeit”, in Niklas Luhmann and Peter Fuchs, eds., Reden und Schweigen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 101–137; see also Robert Radu, “Einleitung: Spionage, Geheimhaltung und Öffentlichkeit – Ein Spannungsfeld der Moderne”, in Lisa Medrow, Daniel Münzner, and Robert Radu, eds., Kampf um Wissen. Spionage, Geheimhaltung und Öffentlichkeit 1870– 1940 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2015), 15–20. 7. Eva Horn, Der geheime Krieg. Verrat, Spionage und moderne Fiktion (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2007); English translation: The Secret War: Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction (Evanson, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013). 8. Luhmann, “Geheimnis, Zeit und Ewigkeit”, 93. 9. Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BArch), 443/5159, RD Jasmer/ROAR Ahrend [Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz]: Leitfaden Auswertung, Stand August 1, 1976, p. 10. 10. Ibid., 16–17, 22. 11. Frevert, “Vertrauen. Eine historische Spurensuche”, 45. 12. See in detail Goschler and Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”, 170–178.

168  C. GOSCHLER 13.  Franz Xaver Kaufmann, “Sicherheit: Das Leitbild beherrschbarer Komplexität”, in Stephan Lessenich, ed., Wohlfahrtsstaatliche Grundbegriffe. Historische und aktuelle Diskurse (Frankfurt: Campus, 2003), 93. 14. I would like to thank Marcel Schmeer for this point. 15. Sabrina Nowack, Sicherheitsrisiko NS-Belastung. Personalüberprüfungen im Bundesnachrichtendienst in den 1960er Jahren (Berlin: Metropol, 2016), 57–71. 16. Bernd Stöver, “Der Fall Otto John. Neue Dokumente zu den Aussagen des Geheimdienstchefs gegenüber KGB und MfS”, in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 47 (1999), 103–136; Goschler and Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”, 133–135; and Benjamin Carter Hett and Michael Wala, Otto John. Patriot oder Verräter: Eine deutsche Biographie (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2019). 17. Klaus Marxen and Gerhard Werle, eds., Strafjustiz und DDR-Unrecht: Dokumentation. Spionage, Vol. 4 (Berlin: de Gruyter Recht, 2004), 107– 108; see also the memoirs of Hansjoachim Tiedge, Der Überläufer. Eine Lebensbeichte (Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 1998). 18. Thomas Walde, ND-Report. Die Rolle der Geheimen Nachrichtendienste im Regierungssystem der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich: Piper, 1971), 36–37. 19. I would like to thank Christopher Kirchberg for this point. 20. See in detail Goschler and Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”. 21. BArch 443/5049, Schrübbers, Interne Neujahrsansprache. 22. Luhmann, Vertrauen, 100. 23. On the Bundesamt’s personnel policy see in detail Goschler and Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”, 52–91, 308–316. 24. Dominik Rigoll, Vom inneren Frieden zur inneren Sicherheit. Staatsschutz in Westdeutschland zwischen Entnazifizierung und Extremistenbeschluss (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 127–131; Goschler and Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”, 208–308; and Hett and Wala, Otto John. 25.  Patrick Wagner, “Ehemalige SS-Männer am ‘Schilderhäuschen der Demokratie’? Die Affäre um das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz 1963/64”, in Gerhard Fürmetz et al., eds., Nachkriegspolizei. Sicherheit und Ordnung in Ost- und Westdeutschland 1945–1969 (Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag, 2001), 169–198; Goschler and Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”, 211–238. 26.  See in particular Manfred Schneider, Transparenztraum. Literatur, Politik, Medien und das Unmögliche (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013); Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society, trans. Eric Butler (Stanford, CA: Stanford Briefs, 2015); Anita Möllering and Claus Leggewie,

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“Debatte Transparenz”, Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 4, no. 1 (2013), 59–70; and see also Christopher Hood, “Transparency in Historical Perspective”, in Christopher Hood and David Heald, eds., Transparency. The Key to Better Governance? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3–23. 27. Horn, Der geheime Krieg, 30. 28.  Giorgio Agamben, “Die Geburt des Sicherheitsstaates”, in Le Monde Diplomatique, 14 March 2014; Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and see also the critique by Cornelia Rauh and Dirk Schumann, “Ausnahmezustände und die Transformation des Politischen”, in Cornelia Rauh and Dirk Schumann, eds., Ausnahmezustände. Entgrenzungen und Regulierungen in Europa während des Kalten Krieges (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), 11–12. 29. Herfried Münkler, “Vom Nutzen des Geheimnisses”, in Der Spiegel 49, 6 December 2010, accessed 20 April 2017, www.spiegel.de/spiegel/ print/d-75476953.html. 30.  Hendrik van Bergh, Köln 4713. Geschichte und Geschichten des Bundesamtes für Verfassungsschutz (Würzburg: Naumann, 1981), 237. 31. Goschler and Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”, 19–37. 32. Ibid., 102–103. 33.  Wagner, “Ehemalige SS-Männer am ‘Schilderhäuschen der Demokratie’?”; Josef Foschepoth, Überwachtes Deutschland. Postund Telefonüberwachung in der alten Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 119–159; and Goschler and Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”, 238–271. 34. Horn, Der geheime Krieg, 507. 35. For an example of this immensely popular view, see Uwe Wesel, “Spitzel, Wanzen, Bomben”, in Die Zeit, 26 January 2012. 36. This was also the starting point for a conflict between the BfV president Hans-Georg Maaßen and the online portal netzpolitik in 2015, in which the former filed a criminal complaint on grounds of the betrayal of state secrets against two journalists. See for example “Maaßen nennt Strafanzeigen ‘notwendig’”, in Zeit online, 2 August 2015, accessed 30 April 2017, www.zeit.de/2012/05/Verfassungsschutz. 37. Walde, ND-Report, 250–251. 38. BArch B 106/101839, Memorandum BMI, undated. 39. Walde, ND-Report, 252–253; Hansjörg Geiger, “Wie viel Kontrolle ist möglich und nötig? Rechtliche Grundlagen und politische Praxis in Deutschland”, in Wolbert K. Smidt et al., eds., Geheimhaltung und Transparenz. Demokratische Kontrolle der Geheimdienste im internationalen Vergleich (Berlin: LIT-Verlag, 2007), 38.

170  C. GOSCHLER 40.  See the press release by the German Federal Parliament, “Arne Schlatmann zum Bevollmächtigten des Kontrollgremiums ernannt”, 10 January 2017, accessed 9 April 2017, www.bundestag.de/dokumente/ textarchiv/2017/kw02-schlatmann-pkgr/487768. 41.  Armin Pfahl-Traughber, “Offener Verfassungsschutz für eine offene Republik. Zur administrativen Möglichkeit und demokratietheoretischen Notwendigkeit von Transparenz”, in Hans-Jürgen Lange and Jens Lanfer, eds., Reformperspektiven zwischen administrativer Effektivität und demokratischer Transparenz (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2015), 112. 42. Schneider, Transparenztraum. 43. Heribert Prantl, “Wer schützt die Verfassung vorm Verfassungsschutz”, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1 January 2012; Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Tina Klopp, Inside WikiLeaks: Meine Zeit bei der gefährlichsten Website der Welt (Berlin: Ullstein, 2011). 44.  Krastev, “Der Transparenzwahn”; similarly, Lawrence Lessig, “Against Transparency”, in New Republic, 9 October 2009. 45. Claus Leggewie and Horst Meier, Nach dem Verfassungsschutz. Plädoyer für eine neue Sicherheitsarchitektur der Berliner Republik (Berlin: Archiv der Jugendkulturen, 2012); Möllering and Leggewie, “Debatte Transparenz”. 46.  See for example Günter Bannas, “Über Treppe, Tonfall und Tusche gestolpert”, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2 July 2012, http:// www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/der-ruecktritt-heinz-fromms-ueber-treppe-tonfall-und-tusche-gestolpert-11807444.html; Lisa Caspari, “Der oberste Agent ist gescheitert”, in Zeit Online, 2 July 2012, www. zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2012-07/fromm-verfassungschutz-nsu; and Matthias Gebauer and Veit Medick, “Endstation Rennsteig. Rücktritt von Verfassungsschutzpräsident Fromm”, in Spiegel Online, 2 July 2012, accessed 28 April 2017, www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/fromm-will-mit-ruecktritt-ansehen-des-verfassungsschutzes-retten-a-842137.html. 47.  See in particular Rigoll, Vom inneren Frieden zur inneren Sicherheit, 335–371. 48.  See in particular Alexander Gallus, ed., Meinhof, Mahler, Ensslin. Die Akten der Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016). 49. See Paul Nolte, Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft. Selbstentwurf und Selbstbeschreibung im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 2000). 50. Horn, Der geheime Krieg, 385. 51. Goschler and Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”, 300–301. 52. Luhmann, Vertrauen, 94. 53. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Lane, 2009).

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54. See Goschler and Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”, 326–337. 55.  See for example the movie Köln 4713, which was produced by the Bundesamt, probably in 1969/1970. 56. Bodo Hechelhammer, Der Bundesnachrichtendienst und das Filmprojekt Mr. Dynamit, Mitteilung der Forschungs- und Arbeitsgruppe “Geschichte des BND” (MFGBND) 7, 10 February 2014. 57.  Mainhardt Graf von Nayhauß, “Wer schützt uns vorm Verfassungsschutz?”, in Der Stern, 21 February 1959. 58. Prantl, “Wer schützt die Verfassung vorm Verfassungsschutz”. 59. Ivan Krastev, Can Democracy Exist Without Trust?, TED Talk, August 2012, accessed 11 April 2017, www.ted.com/talks/ivan_krastev_can_ democracy_exist_without_trust/transcript; see also Ivan Krastev, In Mistrust We Trust. Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders? (TED Conferences, 2013). 60. Prantl, “Wer schützt die Verfassung vorm Verfassungsschutz”. 61. Luhmann, Vertrauen, 124. 62. The close connection between mistrust and trust in the actions of representative government systems can already be found in the writings of Jeremy Bentham, one of the first theoreticians of transparency. See Sandrine Baume, “Does Transparency Engender the Confidence of the Governed? A Contribution to Political Thought”, in Roberto Baranzini and François Allisson, eds., Economics and Other Branches – In the Shade of the Oak Tree: Essays in Honour of Pascal Bridel (London: Pickering & Chattoo Publishers, 2014), 425–433; Jonathan R. Bruno, “Vigilance and Confidence: Jeremy Bentham, Publicity, and the Dialectic of Political Trust and Distrust”, American Political Science Review 111, no. 2 (2017), 295–307.

CHAPTER 8

The ‘Traube Affair’: Transparency as a Legitimation and Action Strategy Between Security, Surveillance and Privacy Christopher Kirchberg and Marcel Schmeer

Introduction In response to the numerous leaks by various websites and whistle-­blowers, western democracies have been intensively discussing the surveillance activities of intelligence services for several years now. At the centre of these debates is a conventional trade-off: In the context of global threats such as terrorism, to what extent should an individual’s freedom or the fundamental right to privacy be restricted in favour of the production of security? The public debate has revolved around the two poles— comprehensive intelligence monitoring, which invests in the ­security-political ideal of a ‘transparent’ society that must be intensively C. Kirchberg (*) · M. Schmeer  Faculty of Historical Sciences, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M. Schmeer e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 S. Berger and D. Owetschkin (eds.), Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23949-7_8

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screened for enemies of the state and the constitutional order, and defenders of civil liberties who demand the disclosure of state surveillance ­practices for the purpose of democratic control. These two logics can be interpreted as two forms of the ‘transparency dream’ of modern societies.1 This broadly outlined debate is by no means simply a phenomenon of our digitally networked present. On the contrary, the basic issues can be traced back to the 1970s in almost the same constellation and against the backdrop of a similar security-political situation in the West. Through the example of the eavesdropping attack against nuclear scientist and high-ranking manager Klaus Traube in West Germany, we want to shed light on several developments and issues which were (and in most cases still are) paradigmatic for liberal democracies: Traube came under scrutiny by the West German domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV), after his volatile contacts to left-wing radical terrorists were observed in the summer of 1975. Shortly thereafter, his apartment was bugged, and although no evidence against him was produced, Traube lost his job at Interatom, a Siemens subsidiary. When this operation was disclosed by the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel in February 1977, one of the largest surveillance scandals in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany erupted, leading to a severe government crisis. At that time, major societal changes were taking place: Processes of democratization and liberalization were shaping new threat perceptions and conceptions of enmity within the security services. The focal point moved away from the ‘classic’ communist threat in the shape of Moscow-directed agents and spies to domestic perils: student protest and civil rights movements, espousing a New Leftist ideology, were now active in the heart of society.2 Accordingly, intelligence agencies increasingly perceived society itself as a potential threat for the state, and the security services were struggling to find a solution for this ‘new obscurity’ of the enemy—represented for example by the upcoming (new) social movements.3 These protest movements engaged with German history, especially the suppressed legacy of the Nazi era, and also aimed at a societal change of values within an international framework.4 Simultaneously, the 1970s saw the emergence of left-wing domestic terrorist groups such as the Red Army Faction (RAF) and the appearance of international terrorism in the Federal Republic, for instance during the Olympic Summer Games in Munich in 1972. In this context, the ‘Traube affair’ took place only a few months before the climax of the RAF terrorism—the Deutscher Herbst (German Autumn).

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In this chapter, we want to use the scandal surrounding the Traube affair as a testing ground to investigate the debates roughly sketched above, by conceptualizing ‘transparency’ not in the sense of a critique of ideology or as an analytical instrument to verify the knowledge of the intelligence apparatus, but as a legitimation and action strategy against the backdrop of several widespread, yet interrelated security-political and societal changes within the field of tension between security, surveillance and privacy since the end of the 1960s.5 Which internal threat perception led to the eavesdropping and how was this specific intelligence knowledge generated? How was the affair negotiated within the public sphere, which dynamics of scandalization can be observed and how did the government try to cope with these? What action strategies can be identified with regard to the actors involved? And finally, what notions of security and privacy were negotiated within the highly contested field of tension between security, civil rights and transparency? To investigate the various dynamics and intertwined processes of the ‘Traube affair,’ we will analyse the practical and epistemological basis of governmental security production through the process of ‘transparentization’, as well as the inclusion of intelligence knowledge in the political process and the reciprocal amplifications of this (mode of) perception. Second, we will focus on the public sphere and the dynamics of scandalization and governmental crisis management, namely transparency aimed at the disclosure of the governmental arcane sphere and general news coverage about surveillance practices. This ‘counter-surveillance’6 raises questions about the legitimacy and legality of the bugging scandal itself. In a third step, we will investigate the individual performance of surveillance victim Klaus Traube, which can be understood as a strategy of self-transparentization as he disclosed his alleged contacts to terrorists, his ‘conspiratorial’ behaviour patterns and his alternative lifestyle in order to rehabilitate his public (and professional) reputation.

Transparency, Threat Perception and the Production of (Perceived) Security Knowledge The disclosures, as well as the internal investigations and political reports, that took place in the wake of the 1977 scandal provide a rather unusual window onto the veiled logics and dynamics of governmental intelligence and security production as well as their inclusion in the political process. By examining as of yet unexplored sources,7 it is possible to

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shed light on what literary scholar Eva Horn has called the ‘epistemology of enmity’. She understands intelligence as a specific type of knowledge, a mode of perception that ‘introduces a logic of war and enmity into the civilian sphere’.8 This logic becomes manifest in a peculiar atmosphere of fear, distrust and suspicion that under certain circumstances affects the work of intelligence agencies and thus turns them against their own society. Against this backdrop, Horn argues that even fellow citizens might come under fire by overzealous intelligence agencies, identified as individuals outside society, as ‘the domestic enemy, the traitor, the terrorist’.9 Transparency thus plays a major role in the process of tracing ‘the enemy’ within a society on two different levels. First, the process of transparentization through data collection acts as an attempt to minimize unknown variables by accumulating as much security-relevant knowledge about suspected individuals as possible. Second, and more fundamentally, transparentization also refers to the former utopian idea of intensively x-raying an entire society for security reasons which entered into the realm of the possible in the 1970s and was linked to the new opportunities afforded by the use of computers within the security agencies.10 How does this apply to the Traube case and how exactly did a manager at a nuclear facility stumble into the crosshairs of the Verfassungsschutz? On 1 March 1977, one day after Der Spiegel revealed the bugging of Klaus Traube’s home in late December 1975, the Committee on Internal Affairs (Innenausschuss) of the German Bundestag chaired by Axel Wernitz (Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD) gathered in Bonn to discuss the massive accusations against the Verfassungsschutz and the minister responsible, liberal law professor Werner Maihofer (Free Democratic Party, FDP). The minister, supported by the head of the BfV, Richard Meier, elaborately reported on the intelligence information that led to the use of so-called ‘G-10 surveillance measures’ (Lauschmittelangriff in the jargon of the files) against the high ranking nuclear scientist. In his report, Maihofer reminded the committee members of the security-political situation in the year 1975 in which the Traube case had to be embedded and that was essential for the production of threat knowledge within the security agencies. Following his remarks, the Verfassungsschutz observed ‘intensive contacts’ between Traube and ‘international terrorists and their sympathisers’ since July 1975, especially to Hans-Joachim Klein who visited Traube’s house in Overath-Marialinden nearby Cologne several times and also stayed there overnight only three weeks before he participated in the OPEC siege.11 Der Spiegel reported that Klein even ‘practiced’ with an air rifle

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in Traube’s garden.12 Klein had become part of the radical left-wing milieu in his home town Frankfurt am Main during the 1970s and was recruited by the terror group Revolutionäre Zellen (Revolutionary Cells, RZ) in 1974. In the same year he did get some media attention when he chauffeured French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to his meeting with RAF terrorist Andreas Baader in the high-security prison in StuttgartStammheim. Additionally, Traube was well acquainted with the leftist lawyer Inge Hornischer, who was accused of supporting Ernst Wilfried Böse, one of the founders of the RZ, after he was deported back to Germany from France before he went into hiding in September 1975. Böse was later killed during a hostage rescue mission carried out by special forces of the Israeli army at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in July 1976. The Verfassungsschutz even observed a joint vacation trip to the Yugoslavian island Korčula that Hornischer, Klein, Traube and several others had undertaken in the summer of 1975. Traube later asserted that he had only known Klein as an ‘appendix’ of Hornischer, that he had hardly any conversation with him and that he was not aware of his radical background.13 The OPEC attack in December 1975 then marks a dramatic caesura in the threat perception of the German security agencies. The international group of attackers took more than 60 hostages (among them several oil ministers) and killed three persons. It now had become obvious that domestic and foreign terrorists were no longer only interacting closely on an ideological level or supporting each other through ‘solidarity’ terrorist attacks, but instead were planning, working and acting together.14 At least since the critical incident in Vienna in which Klein played an important role, Traube’s more or less loose contacts constituted a powerful ‘perceived knowledge’15 within the German intelligence agencies that imagined a widespread (international) terrorist network, which the nuclear manager was now thought to be a crucial part of, or as Maihofer put it: ‘We could not explain the accumulative occurrence of surely no longer coincidental contacts other than that at least these terrorist organizations were actively seeking contact to Dr. Traube, in which he then certainly got involved with’.16 Furthermore, Maihofer argued, the secret intelligence agencies were seriously alarmed by a series of terrorist attacks that took place in Germany and other European countries even before the Vienna incident. In February 1975 Peter Lorenz, the CDU (Christian Democratic Union of Germany) regional party leader of Berlin, was kidnapped by members of the ‘2 June Movement’

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(Bewegung 2. Juni) in order to obtain the release of several RAF terrorists. On 24 April 1975, an RAF Commando carried out an attack on the West German embassy in Stockholm and held several hostages with a similar goal. The terrorists killed two hostages before accidentally detonating their TNT cache which led to the end of the siege. Only a few days later another RAF Commando (‘Puig Antich – Ulrike Meinhof’) claimed responsibility for an explosive attack on the construction site of the Fessenheim nuclear power plant in Alsace, France.17 In August, Breton separatist terrorists of the Front de libération de la Bretagne conducted an assault on the nuclear reactor Brennilis/Monts d’Arrée in Brittany in the north-west of France. Even if not all of these incidents were closely linked, this rash of unfortunate events in the turbulent year 1975 led to a meaningful shift in the analysis of the domestic as well as international security situation within the (German) intelligence agencies: a nexus of two different threat perceptions occurred that the president of the Verfassungsschutz Richard Meier described in his autobiography as ‘the nightmare of security and intelligence agencies around the world: to be blackmailed by terrorists with nuclear material’.18 Against this background, Maihofer brought forward the argument that the security agencies expected a huge attempt to liberate the imprisoned top members of the RAF and that a ‘large scale terrorist action was being prepared for that purpose, not just a usual kidnapping, but a massive strike as one fact had become obvious, at least since the Lorenz case: with the kidnapping of some politician or the like, as it turned out at the time, only people from the third and fourth string could be brought out of the detention facilities’.19 It does not come as a surprise that a top nuclear scientist like Traube who was furthermore working in a security sensitive area as managing director of the Siemens subsidiary Interatom and responsible for the development of a nuclear reactor at Kalkar in the federal state of North-Rhine Westphalia came under immediate scrutiny when his contacts to Klein were noticed. Given his peculiar expertise and access to nuclear reactors, he was soon regarded as a ‘unique’ threat to domestic security.20 Maihofer confessed, that he and the Verfassungsschutz officials ‘were really alarmed by the situation as in no other case during my entire tenure of office, and more anxious from week to week’ as it was highly uncertain whether or not Traube would support the terrorists motivated by genuine ideological convictions or as a result of a blackmail strategy.21 The real dimension of this suspected nuclear threat remained rather nebulous as the BfV apparently did not

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possess the appropriate technological and organizational knowledge about the sequences of operations within the German nuclear industry as well as the actual possibilities of influence of the suspected scientist.22 But since the famous spy case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of military espionage for the Soviet atomic bomb project by an American court in the 1950s (and later executed), the western secret services were aware of the potentially harmful nuclear knowledge of certain individuals.23 This might explain why the guardians of the state also tended to assume the worst in the Traube case. In this regard, Klaus Traube to a certain extent represented the ‘unknown variable’ within this imagined scenario that is intensively linked with the crisis of the ‘indeterminacy of the enemy’ we mentioned above. Thus, the visualization of this ‘invisible’ enemy and the transparentization of his major motives and plans became the main goal of the homeland security agents of the Verfassungsschutz. In an analytical way, this phenomenon can be grasped with what Eva Horn describes as ‘state paranoia’. Horn does not refer to the concept of ‘paranoia’ in a psychological or pathological manner. Instead, she describes it as a form of rational state action, a specific thought configuration that, in a way, tries to integrate permanent uncertainty and distrust into the modes of (threat) perception and thereby institutionalizes radical presumptions about ‘the enemy’: ‘This distrust […] has an epistemological as well as political aspect. It is the expression of a twofold crisis: a crisis of control revolving around the exclusivity of secret state knowledge [such as atomic expertise, CK/MS], and a crisis of perception triggered by the indeterminacy of the enemy’. As Horn argues, state paranoia does not merely apply to the state (and its security agencies) but functions in a mutual way as an ‘excessive distrust of both state and citizens toward each other’.24 The baleful connection of both fear of terror and ‘nuclear fear’25 was symptomatic for the investigative work of the BfV and was affecting its logics of observation as well: the perceived knowledge that had already identified Traube as a very suspicious element became influential in such a manner that all legal surveillance efforts (Traube was observed around-the-clock and his telephone and mail communication monitored for several months before the actual wiretapping), although they produced no justiciable evidence against him, only strengthened the assumption that he indeed had something to hide. The Verfassungsschutz sensed ‘conspiratorial behaviour’ in rather harmless actions or circumstances: At 4 September 1975, for instance, BfV

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agents observed and photographed a conversation between Traube and an unidentified person at Frankfurt airport. The observers reported that Traube ‘had explained the organization plan of the Interatom company in all its details’ during that ‘conspiratorial’ meeting. While this menacing information was recorded in the files, the agents had overlooked the fact that the ‘unknown person’ had been the chairman of the supervisory board of Interatom and board member of the Kraftwerk Union (KWU). Hence, Traube only had reported to his supervisor.26 Another example: The Verfassungsschutz assumed that the nuclear manager was not using a telephone connection that was registered in his name in Frankfurt because he might be afraid of phone tapping—and the telephone was indeed monitored by the BfV. Consequently, the whole situation looked fishy for the agents, but they did not consider that Traube did not reside in this apartment anymore as he and his ex-wife already lived apart at that time. Nevertheless, among others, these incidents only reinforced the perceived knowledge that had already obstructed the view of the intelligence agency. As this episode might seem rather ridiculous from hindsight, this observation logics need to be taken seriously as important factors of intelligence and security production. However, to minimize the risk that was associated with Traube, the Verfassungsschutz ultimately encouraged his dismissal from the Interatom company in February 1976— ‘for health reasons’ as Traube later remembered in an autobiographical interview.27 In reference to James Scott’s influential book Seeing Like a State, it might seem appropriate to speak about a mode of perception that can be described as ‘seeing like an intelligence service’ when thinking about the intertwined security-political dynamics in the case of Klaus Traube.28 This might as well include some connection points to the broad field of Intelligence History and the yet emerging multidisciplinary Surveillance Studies.29 At the present time, the question of the significance of (fragmented) perceived knowledge within intelligence services and its implementation into the political decision-making process still remains mostly open—also due to a lack of appropriate source material. What can be observed in the context of this surveillance campaign, however, is a complex interplay between new threat scenarios and perceptions, the ‘transparency challenge’ of a yet to be determined motive of a seemingly ‘conspiratorial’ suspect and a specific form of perceived knowledge that can be analyzed as state paranoia. Of course, the case was as well characterized by all sorts of coincidences and actual inconsistencies

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in Traube’s behaviour. These partly contradictory developments ­ultimately led to decision of Werner Maihofer to value the public safety better than the constitutionally enshrined right of the inviolability of home space when he instructed the ‘eavesdropping attack’ on Traube’s apartment near Cologne in late December 1975.30 The methods of the Verfassungsschutz as well as Maihofer’s authorization of the surveillance efforts ignited the huge scandal that was initiated by Der Spiegel more than one year after the bugging.

Counter-Surveillance, Media Scandalization and Self-transparentization On 28 February 1977, the news magazine released the title story Lauschangriff auf Bürger T. – Atomstaat oder Rechtsstaat (Eavesdropping of citizen T.—Nuclear state or constitutional state) and, based on strictly confidential internal records, reported down to the most minute detail about the surveillance operation in winter 1975–1976.31 This was possible due to a leak by the whistle-blower Karl Dirnhofer, an official of the BfV, and the journalist Hans Georg Faust who provided Der Spiegel with the volatile classified documents. This case referred to several issues: First, it allows us to focus on the twofold role of media in the production of transparency. On the one hand, the media acted as a ‘transparency institution’ by providing internal information respectively governmental arcana; on the other hand, they occur as a genuine authority of transparency claims by strongly influencing the public discourse. Second, it helps to point out the governmental crisis and security communication strategy. And third, this affair facilitates to draw conclusions on the changing interplay of security, civil rights and transparency in the late 1970s. The disclosed internal documents gave very accurate insights into Operation Müll (‘operation garbage’, the internal code name of the surveillance action) itself and, moreover, into the practices of the domestic secret service as well as the governmental arcane sphere in general. Therefore, the disclosure can be interpreted as an instructive example for the transparentization of the work of the intelligence apparatus. Specifically, they demonstrate the practices and the proceeding of the secret service. The published documents provided operational details, for instance about the exact localization of Traube’s apartment in Overath-Marialinden, the position of the safe house of the

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Verfassungsschutz agents, which functioned as base of operation, and about the strategic preparation and execution of the mission. Concealed as fishermen on their way to the close-by situated fishponds, the agents met at 5 p.m. to observe the apartment in order to detect if someone was at home. ‘At 1.20 a.m. they succeeded in opening the backdoor. Initially the windows were dimmed with black foil’, stated the official memorandum.32 During the two-hour lasting manoeuvre the agents implemented a bugging device at the back of the desk and took photos of private items like a notebook. Apparently, the agents rediscovered the legal construction of privacy after breaking into the apartment of Traube: they ‘only’ took pictures of things which were lying around. Moreover, the media also functioned as a counter-surveillance instance: it not only arranged the disclosure of the practices of the intelligence service, but overtook the task of controlling the Verfassungsschutz by contextualizing and assessing the classified documents. This disclosure not only enabled (public) counter observation, but also launched a wide-ranging outcry in the media. The core of the scandal was not only the bugging operation of the Verfassungsschutz itself, but also the public naming and shaming of deviations of the norm: the surveillance of a respectable citizen in his own apartment.33 Within this dynamics of scandalization several problems were negotiated: Among these, the reporting focused on the transparency practices of the German security authorities, the role of the liberal minister of the interior Werner Maihofer as well as the leak and its legality itself by dealing with the problem of the democratic legitimization of the surveillance mission, the meaning of civil rights and a transformation of the concept of the state at the same time. Beyond the description of the bugging operation, Der Spiegel referred to the contemporaneous context of ongoing protests against the construction of nuclear power plants in the Federal Republic and the powerful image of an emerging ‘nuclear state’ (Atomstaat), in which civil rights and liberties were restricted in favour of nuclear power and the interests of the nuclear industry. This threatening image of the state was very popular among the anti-nuclear movement at that time and linked the aspect of (nuclear) energy with the dystopian vision of the erosion of individual civil rights in an upcoming police state with ubiquitous surveillance competences. One of the most important counter experts of the new social movement was Robert Jungk, journalist and futurologist, who prognosticated at that time: ‘My concern is not only a concern of the environment, not a concern of health, but also a concern of democracy

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(itself). We are on the way to an Atomstaat. And this nuclear state means: screening of everybody, surveillance of everybody, and, if you will, an entitled surveillance of nuclear power itself because this energy and this arising power are so dangerous that everything and everyone has to be protected and surveilled’.34 Jungk elaborated this vision of a near future in his book, Der Atomstaat. Vom Fortschritt in die Unmenschlichkeit (The Nuclear State. From Technical Progress to Inhumanity) that was also published in 1977. Here, contrary to the internal perception of the security services, the threat consisted not of the linkage of the atom and terrorism but on the baleful connection of nuclear energy and the surveillance capabilities of the state. Furthermore, the story in Der Spiegel turned to the initial point of the scandalization, which had begun two days before the news magazine initiated a pre-release of the story by the German news agency DPA (Deutsche Presseagentur). By releasing internal documents about the bugging and by stating that the interior minister was informed about and responsible for the operation, Maihofer felt impelled to handle this case—and came into the focus of the media. The political dealing with this situation, we want to describe as crisis communication strategy of the state in interaction with the media. In this case, the government and Maihofer chose a strategy of vindication and justification by operating proactive. The government approved the story the day before its release and the minister declared that he had authorized the procedures of the Verfassungsschutz.35 This strategy was based on several motives: Maihofer was the responsible minister for the Verfassungsschutz and thus authorized to issue directives—in general and for the operation in the case of Traube in particular. Besides that, the president of the BfV at the time, Richard Meier, had been recruited only two years earlier as successor of Günter Nollau who had to resign after the unmasking of the GDRagent Günter Guillaume in the Federal Chancellery. An early dismissal of Meier would also have questioned the eligibility of Maihofer himself. Furthermore, this proactive, transparent handling was evoked by the fact, that the BfV officials could not know if and what other documents the unknown whistle-blowers still possessed at the time of the publishing. Beyond these practical assumptions, this strategy can be seen as (self-) transparentization of the government. Moreover, the transparentization was an attempt to demystify the prejudice of omnipotence with regard to the knowledge and the possibilities of the intelligence service, and thus also as the ‘management of public mistrust’36 against the backdrop of a public debate about an emerging ‘surveillance society’.37

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This strategy unleashed an unexpected dynamic within the following days. At first glance, this transparent offensive seemed to be successful. The first days after the disclosure almost all newspapers picked up the story—with different reactions: Most of the reports showed understanding for the surveillance measures of the Verfassungsschutz, tried to present the known facts and posed only sporadic questions of the legality of the operation. While these reports commented the upcoming affair modestly, only the Boulevard and the Süddeutsche Zeitung joined into the call for resignation of Werner Maihofer that was first expressed by conservative politician Friedrich Vogel (CDU).38 By blaming Maihofer the bugging of Traube the disclosures turned into a political affair the government had to cope with. While in other Verfassungsschutz scandals usually the president of the BfV was denounced, this time the critique focused on the minister who had authorized Operation Müll.39 However, in this stage of the reporting, the media also focused on the role of BfV president Richard Maier,40 and, more general, on the dangerous nexus of terrorism and the atom for the consistency of the constitutional state. Additionally, the question of the democratic control of the secret service(s) was raised that was also intensively discussed within the parliamentary groups.41 But when some days later Der Spiegel published a title story with hints, that the minister—contrary to his first statements—had been informed about the measures against Traube not until two weeks after the operation, the reporting turned back against Maihofer because this would also have meant that the intelligence service was able to carry out such far-reaching surveillance measures without his explicit permission. The media reporting turned from questions of the legality, respectively juristic considerations of the bugging of Traube to Maihofer’s performance in handling the scandal. One of the central problems the media stated was, that Maihofer had ignored his own principle ‘in dubio pro libertate’ by acting instead ‘in dubio pro securitate’ in this case42—and interpreted his proceeding as a liberal Sündenfall (fall of man).43 By now the media scandalization turned up to the credibility of Maihofer—and provoked a serious government crisis this time. Reasons for that were several contradictory statements and inconsistent answers of the minister when questioned whether and when he was informed about the bugging operation and if he indeed authorized the eavesdropping.44

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During these debates that lasted almost three weeks, Der Spiegel was the loudest voice—or the leading scandalizing actor—in this affair by mainly concentrating on the role of Maihofer and his contradictory statements. As Maihofer tried to regain the public prerogative of interpretation over the disclosure of internal and secret information, he triggered a personalized reporting on himself—and the focus of the scandalization shifted to the governmental crisis communication itself. While he might have been aware of this public reaction, he lost control over the public debate during the next days due to two interrelating reasons: First, the government tried to manage a political-security crisis in a transparent manner, thus reacting to contemporary public claims.45 But this strategy did not work out, because it was too extemporaneous and also way too inconsistent to cope with the increasing public distrust. Moreover, this strategy was pursued in the context of a changing role of the media since the 1960s.46 Instead of a blind belief in the authorities and their statements, the (investigative) media, which followed an idea of counter-surveillance, intensively scrutinized the official declarations of the government and minister Maihofer. In doing so, a serious governmental crisis was the result: Almost all newspapers claimed the resignation of the liberal minister. Finally, Maihofer managed to remain in office for the moment when he convinced chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD) that he indeed had authorized the bugging on 29 December 1975 via phone call.47 By now, not only the media concentrated on Maihofer anymore, but at the same time some dedicated citizens, scientists and civil rights activists published books or directly tried to call upon the minister in order to complain about the bugging of Traube, hereby mostly criticizing the authorization of the eavesdropping and the violation of the fundamental right to privacy.48 Among these Eingaben (petitions) was also one of a furious citizen who accused himself of listening to eastern radio stations and sent in his latchkey ‘in order to prevent a brake-in’ just in case that the intelligence service might feel the urge to implement a bugging device in his apartment—of course the latchkey was archived as well.49 In general, these publications and petitions dealt within the conflictual relationship between freedom and security, the question of compliance of civil rights by the liberal minister Maihofer and the almost ‘classic’ German question: ‘Who protects us and the constitution from the Verfassungsschutz?’.50 In the following days, the media performed a complete turnaround: while the first phase

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of the affair was dominated by the scandalization of the secret transparentization efforts and the question of their respective legality, now the motives and fate of the whistle-blowers ruled the public opinion. This might be seen as an attempt to repossess the interpretative authority within the public sphere by the government, which had a serious interest to plug the internal leak to restore the working base of the secret service. The whistle-blower Karl Dirnhofer and the journalist Hans Georg Faust were in fact accused of anti-constitutional sabotage but in the end not condemned due to another bugging: the evidence had been supplied by an illegal phone tapping and could not be used in court.51 The public scandalization came to an end with the public and political rehabilitation of Traube on 16 March 1977 when Maihofer gave a detailed government declaration in the Bundestag.52 Shortly after, the Minister of the Interior came under fire for a second time when it was revealed, that he had known of the illegal bugging of the incarcerated leaders of the RAF and their lawyers in Stuttgart-Stammheim—although he had always emphasized in the wake of the Traube affair that the wiretapping had been a one-time incident against the backdrop of a unique threat for domestic security. Facing massive public pressure, the minister had to retire in 1978—this was also perceived as a consequence of several slip-ups during the tracing of the kidnappers and murderers of Hanns Martin Schleyer, the president of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations during the ‘German Autumn’.53

Autobiographical Self-transparentization and the Struggle for Rehabilitation Beyond the entanglements of nuclear fear and the governmental fear of international and domestic terrorism or, antipodal, the societal fear of state surveillance, the Traube affair also saw the emergence of a new or at least exceptional media actor: Until this moment, never in the scandal-ridden history of the Verfassungsschutz54 such a strong personalization of a surveillance victim had occurred in the public debate as in the shape of the quite media-savvy former Interatom manager Klaus Traube. In similar cases, for example in the wake of the ‘Pätsch affair’ in 1963, the media mostly abstained from mentioning the names of victims of surveillance actions. Typically, these individuals merged into an amorphous mass such as the thousands affected by the Radikalenerlass

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(Anti-Radical Decree) from 1972. Contrary to that, Der Spiegel and ­others put the pugnacious Traube in the limelight right from the beginning of the scandal. However, he quickly arranged himself with the new public interest in his person and exploited the media specifically for the purpose of his own rehabilitation. Traube’s media strategy consisted of three different aspects: First, he pursued a strategy of self-transparentization as he disclosed certain aspects of his private life and family history. Second and based thereupon, he integrated the eavesdropping into a broader narrative of self-victimization. And third, he staged himself as an involuntary advocate of citizen rights. On 1 March 1977 Klaus Traube had already explained himself to journalist Wolfgang Korruhn, the host of the television show Tagesthema broadcast by the West German Broadcasting Corporation (WDR), who confronted him with some of the accusations that led to the surveillance activities. This early public appearance shortly after Der Spiegel disclosures was quite unusual, but the nuclear scientist chose to take ­ the initiative right from the beginning to act as a counterbalance to the ‘official’ government perspective. Additionally, he might have seen the chance to achieve his full rehabilitation by taking advantage of the large public attention. When questioned whether he had not acted too carelessly in the selection of his friends for a high-ranking German manager, Traube admitted a certain inattentiveness but refused to the charge of sympathizing with terrorists. He stated that he was loosely acquainted with Klein but vehemently rejected the accusations to personally know the co-founder of the RZ, Wilfried Böse. When asked by Korruhn whether the intelligence information circulated by Der Spiegel were correct that Traube had once been a member of the youth organization of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) that was banned in August 1956 by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, he answered: ‘I can now confirm this to the Federal Office of the Protection of the Constitution. I joined the youth organization of the KPD directly after the war when I was only 17 years old but soon left the party due to my rising political consciousness’.55 Traube later joined the SPD in 1972 and described himself as a ‘convinced social democrat’. In view of his youthful sympathy for the KPD, he accused the Verfassungsschutz of a sweeping condemnation without acknowledging the circumstances of his mindset at that time. From this perspective, his former KPD membership stuck to him

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as a lifelong deficit. In doing so, he criticized primarily the persisting anti-Communist attitudes within the intelligence service, which had indeed shaped its work since it was founded in 1950. At the same time, however, this also refers to the contemporary reproach that the BfV as well as other exponents of ‘militant democracy’ (wehrhafte Demokratie) were one-sidedly more rigid in the observation and prosecution of ‘enemies’ perceived as left-wing extremists in comparison to right-wing radicals.56 Furthermore, Traube also felt discredited in terms of his alternative lifestyle regarding the societal moral concepts at that time and expressed the presumption that this could also have contributed to the suspicions he had to face. As he suspected in a contribution for an anthology edited by the left-wing civil rights activist and political scientist Wolf-Dieter Narr, the BfV meticulously followed his trail because he did not fit into the expected role profile of a senior manager in the German nuclear power industry: I do not dress, I do not speak, I do not reside, I do not have friends like usual people of my position in this country. […] My habits would certainly not be out of the ordinary, given my position at that time, for example in France or England, the mother countries of modern democracy. […] But even in this country [Germany, CK/MS] my habits would not be conspicuous if I were a writer, graphic artist, director of the city theatre, editor-in-chief of a medium-sized newspaper; the Verfassungsschutz could have categorized me easily even in this orderly country.57

Traube even appeared on Der Spiegel cover in March 1977. Underlining his alternative lifestyle, he was wearing a woolen pullover and holding a cigarette in his left hand. Most recently, Traube also criticized the fact that the intelligence agency simply reproduced the unquestioned assumption that a man in his position might have uncontrolled access to nuclear power plants and thus also to potentially dangerous material. This ‘prejudice’, he stated, had its ‘roots in the lazy-minded tendency to mystification’ that in his opinion was symptomatically for the work of intelligence agencies: ‘It is this non-questioned association: nuclear manager – atomic physicist – nuclear explosion’.58 In this regard, he also reminded the readers of the absurd links in a chain of evidence that showed proof of the criminal background of his ‘conspiratorial’ behaviour, such as the meeting with his supervisor at Frankfurt airport. So, to a certain extent, Traube tried to deprive the ‘perceived knowledge’ of the guardians of the constitution of its credibility within the public

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arena. Traube also used other channels: For example, he addressed letters to the Interior Committee and even to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. In addition, he even appeared in the Federal Press Conference in Bonn on 1 March 1977 speaking directly after Maihofer and Meier to reveal his own view of things. While Maihofer during his ‘transparency offensive’ asked for public understanding in case of the threat perception of the Verfassungsschutz, Traube simply turned the tables by exposing the investigation results of the BfV to ridicule or attempted to deconstruct this intelligence information through the well-directed ‘counter-transparentization’ of his own private life. But Traube’s strategy went even further: In his publicized autobiographical narrative the intensive monitoring by the Verfassungsschutz and the subsequent loss of his job was seamlessly connected with the experience of Nazi persecution that his family had faced between 1933 and 1945. In the above-mentioned interview with Wolfgang Korruhn, this experience played a central role as the main motive for his KPD membership: ‘My father was a Jew. I have lost my family […] through suicide and the German concentration camps. And my father was a dentist. And in the Nazi era, SS guards […] stood at the door of his practice […], the only ones who still visited him were communists. […] So it might be understandable that at the age of 17 […] this led me to […] join the KPD’.59 Indeed, Traube’s father had committed suicide in 1936 facing massive repression. Strengthening this narrative of continuous persecution, he sought to strengthen the self-justification for the fight for his own rehabilitation which was ultimately successful.60 Not least, this also reflects the attempt to connect the bugging affair to David’s biblical struggle against Goliath in the shape of the powerful (Kafkaesque) state apparatus. Against this backdrop, Traube finally decided to portray himself as an involuntary but courageous defender of civil rights. In an open letter to the Federal Minister of Justice, Hans-Jochen Vogel (SPD), in 1978 Traube as a legal layman tried to defend the journalist Hans Georg Faust who together with the whistle-blower Karl Dirnhofer had unveiled the eavesdropping and was now facing charges of ‘anticonstitutional sabotage’.61 Although both were responsible for the ‘second’ invasion of his privacy, Traube was advocating for press freedom and also referred to the public debates about the ‘surveillance state’, for whose actual existence his own fate might represent the living proof: ‘I insinuate that public prosecutor’s offices can now without unfavourable consequences and

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[…] without the liberal media as an effective corrective abstain from a careful consideration of the legal basis and instead investigate, search, confiscate, monitor and infamize!’62 Within a little more than a year after the dynamics of scandalization had put Traube into public spotlight, he had grown into his second role or career, which we want to characterize as a fusion of two ‘expert cultures’. In 1978, the former nuclear manager published the influential book Müssen wir umschalten? Von den politischen Grenzen der Technik (Do we have to switch? About the political frontiers of technology) and changed sides from one of the leading scientists within the German nuclear power industry to one of the central counter-experts of the anti-nuclear movement—and thus one of the most vehement critics of the ‘nuclear state’. His role as authentic and surveillance-affected civil rights activist was equally suited to serve the state-critical tendencies which also became manifest within the anti-nuclear movement.63 Both, his technological expertise as well as his commitment to civil rights and the long-term goal of energy transition may have contributed to the fact that Traube could become one of the central figures of the anti-nuclear movement.

Conclusion When Klaus Traube died in September 2016, Europe and also Germany were facing similar challenges as the Federal Republic and its society had to deal with in the 1970s: new forms of terrorism, questions of surveillance and its technological capacities, the negotiation of the relation of freedom and security—only the topic of the atom had left the German political debate after the accident in Fukushima in 2011 and the nuclear power phaseout decreed by the German government. This refers to the permanent topicality of these conflicts within (western) democratic constitutions. In this chapter, we analyzed these conflicts by focussing on the Traube affair through the lens of transparency. In this case, transparency was not investigated as a public claim or democratic norm, but rather as an analytical concept referring to respective action and legitimation strategies in the field of tension between security, surveillance and privacy. This allowed us to connect differing developments on the levels of state, society and the individual within the nutshell of a specific case study. As a result of this analytic proceeding we can draw the following conclusions:

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First, at the level of the security authorities we focused on the questions of the production of intelligence respectively threat knowledge and expounded the problems of the intelligence practices. The bugging of Traube in winter 1975–1976 was set out due to a particular threat perception of the secret services characterized through the nexus of nuclear as well as fear of terrorism that can be described as a powerful perceived knowledge. The observation of the high-ranking nuclear manager was an attempt by the Verfassungsschutz to make sense of the ‘unknown variable’ in the shape of the unconventional scientist. The eavesdropping was the last measure of this transparentization approaches and demonstrated the ambiguity of the work of the intelligence service and of transparency itself. On the one hand, this transparentization of Traube’s private life refers to certain dynamics of suspicion that aimed at proofing that Traube indeed was part of a terrorist network. In this sense, the Verfassungsschutz operated under the logic of a permanent quest for more information. Concurrently, as complete transparency remains an unattainable goal, this led to various remaining blind spots within the observation logic of the BfV—with fatal consequences for the suspected victim of this ‘state paranoia’. Second, during this affair, the media fulfilled the role of a transparency producer by disclosing classified documents about the bugging of the nuclear manager—and by performing an important role as a speaking tube for public transparency claims. With the release of the top-­secret documents and the revelation of the methods of the secret service, the media interpreted their role as that of a counter-surveillance authority, thus triggering a certain scandalization dynamic which later on led to a serious governmental crisis. Subsequently, the responsible minister Werner Maihofer initiated a proactive campaign, which can be described as a governmental crisis communication attempt, that, to a certain extent, involved the strategy of self-transparentization of internal processes to regain the power of public interpretation. Within this interplay between public claims, the media and state representatives a highly contested debate about the relation of (individual) freedom and security was evoked. Third, during this public scandal, not only the methods of the Verfassungsschutz became publicly visible, but also large parts of the surveillance victim’s private life were revealed. Klaus Traube made use of this huge media attention with a notable approach of counter-transparentization. In this context, he followed a strategy of self-victimization and tried to gain additional public credibility as an advocate of civil rights

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and as a nuclear counter-expert which opened the gate for his second career as one of the leading scientists fighting for a nuclear phaseout. Beyond these results, the affair was intimately connected with debates about individual freedom and data-hungry security agencies starting to evolve around the implementation of computer technology within intelligence agencies. These conflicts for instance led to the Federal Data Protection Act in 1977. This simultaneity can also be seen as an initial starting point of the census debate during the 1980s, which addressed the right to privacy on the threshold of the ‘digital age’ as a fundamental right to informational self-determination. In this sense, the Traube affair acts an initial point for a ‘prehistory of current problem constellations’ (Hans Günter Hockerts) from which a line can be drawn to present discussions about the international intelligence apparatuses’ data collection mania and the challenges of combating terrorism. Acknowledgements   We would like to thank our colleagues at Ruhr University Bochum—Marcus Böick, Jan Kellershohn and Felix Vonstein—for their helpful comments on this article.

Notes





1. See Manfred Schneider, Transparenztraum: Literatur, Politik, Medien und das Unmögliche (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013). 2.  Constantin Goschler and Michael Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”: Das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und die NS-Vergangenheit (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2015), 261–264. 3. For the research on new social movements in Germany see, for example, Roland Roth and Dieter Rucht, eds., Die sozialen Bewegungen in Deutschland seit 1945: Ein Handbuch (Frankfurt: Campus, 2008); from a transnational perspective, Dieter Rucht, Modernisierung und neue soziale Bewegungen: Deutschland, Frankreich und USA im Vergleich (Frankfurt: Campus, 1994). 4. BArch N 1716/4, Hubert Schrübbers, “Links und Rechtsradikalismus in der BRD”, speech in Konstanz, 16 September 1971. 5.  See e.g. Frank Bösch, “Kampf um Normen: Skandale in historischer Perspektive”, in Kristin Bulkow and Christer Petersen, eds., Skandale: Strukturen und Strategien öffentlicher Aufmerksamkeitserzeugung (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2011), 34. 6.  Christian Fuchs et al., “Introduction: Internet and Surveillance”, in Christian Fuchs et al., eds., Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media (New York: Routledge, 2011), 13.

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7. We were able to explore these files in the Bundesarchiv with the permission of Prof. Traube himself, with whom we were able to speak shortly before his death. Here, we would like to thank his widow, who made the contact possible. 8. Eva Horn, The Secret War: Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 101. 9. Ibid., 102–103. 10.  See Hannes Mangold, Fahndung nach dem Raster: Informationsverarbeitung bei der bundesdeutschen Kriminalpolizei, 1965–1984 (Zurich: Chronos, 2017); see also Constantin Goschler, Christopher Kirchberg, and Jens Wegener, “Sicherheit, Demokratie und Transparenz. Elektronische Datenverbundsysteme in der Bundesrepublik und den USA in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren”, in Frank Bösch, ed., Wege in die digitale Gesellschaft: Computernutzung in der Bundesrepublik 1955–1990 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018), 64–85; see also Peter Brückner et al., 1984 schon heute: Oder wer hat Angst vorm Verfassungsschutz? (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1976). 11.  BArch B 106/106723, Protokoll, Innenausschuss (1 March 1977), 4, Fachaufsicht über das BfV. This and all following quotations have been translated from German by the authors. 12. “Klein-Brief”, in Der Spiegel, 9 May 1977. 13. BArch B 106/106723, Letter Traube to Wernitz, Fachaufsicht über das BfV, 7. 14. Richard Meier, Geheimdienst ohne Maske: Der ehemalige Präsident des Bundesverfassungsschutzes über Agenten, Spione und einen gewissen Herrn Wolf (Bergisch Gladbach: Lübbe-Verlag, 1992), 22. 15. In contrast to (fact based) ‘actual knowledge’ we want to define ‘perceived knowledge’ as a peculiar mode of the construction of reality within intelligence and security agencies based on specific presumptions, expectations and experiences as well as the interpretation of certain threat perceptions. These issues were discussed at the German Historikertag in 2016; see the respective conference report: “Gefühltes Wissen? Konstruktion von Realität in Geheimdiensten und Sicherheitsbehörden zwischen Weltkrieg und Mauerfall”, accessed 21 November 2017, www. hsozkult.de/index.php/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-6795. 16. BArch B 106/106723, Protokoll des Innenausschusses (1 March 1977), Fachaufsicht über das BfV, 9. 17. See directory entry in Alex P. Schmid and Albert J. Jongman, Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988), 557. 18. Meier, Geheimdienst ohne Maske, 24.

194  C. KIRCHBERG AND M. SCHMEER 19. BArch B 106/106723, Protokoll des Innenausschusses (1 March 1977), Fachaufsicht über das BfV, 10. 20. Karrin Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 166. 21. BArch B 106/106723, Protokoll des Innenausschusses (1 March 1977), Fachaufsicht über das BfV, 10; see also Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany, 166–167. 22. For the categorizing of invisible threats in general see e.g. Ulrich Beck, Riskikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986); Niklas Luhmann, Soziologie des Risikos (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1991). 23. See Horn, The Secret War, 76, who also links this case to the concept of ‘state paranoia’. For the Rosenberg spy case in general see, for example, Virginia Carmichael, Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 24. Horn, The Secret War, 278–279. 25. Although he is mainly analyzing the fear of nuclear energy in the aftermath of the Chernobyl catastrophe, we use the term in reference to Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); for the impact of nuclear fear on politics, society and culture during the 1980s also see Eckart Conze, Martin Klimke, and Jeremy Varon, eds., Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 26. Meier, Geheimdienst ohne Maske, 20. 27. Klaus Traube, Klaus Traube erzählt aus seinem Leben: “Die Vergangenheit ist etwas, was ich erinnere, aber sie hat nichts Bedrängendes mehr” (Wiesbaden: Paul Lazarus Stiftung, 2013), Track 08 – Lauschaffäre Teil 1 1975 [Audio-CD]. 28. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 29.  As an introduction to the field of Surveillance History see Sven Reichardt, “Einführung. Überwachungsgeschichte(n). Facetten eines Forschungsfeldes”, in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 42 (2016), 5–33. 30. BArch B 106/106723, Protokoll des Innenausschusses (1 March 1977), Fachaufsicht über das BfV, 12–14. In this context it is worth mentioning that Maihofer used the phrase “extreme situation” to legitimize his decision. 31. See “Der Minister und die ‘Wanze’”, in Der Spiegel, 28 February 1977. 32. See ibid., 20. 33.  Bösch, “Kampf um Normen: Skandale in historischer Perspektive”, 29–48.

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34.  Quoted in Rudolf Augstein, “Atomstaat oder Rechtsstaat?”, in Der Spiegel, 28 February 1977. 35. See BArch B 443/1256, Dokumentation zum Fall Traube, 2. 36. For the relation of transparency and mistrust see Chapter 7 in this volume. See also Ivan Krastev, In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders (TED Conferences, 2013). 37. See Brückner et al., 1984 schon heute. 38. See BArch B 443/1256, Dokumentation zum Fall Traube. 39. Goschler and Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”, 186. 40. E.g. Karl-Heinz Janßen, “Meiers ‘Feindbild’ vom Trötenberg Nr. 2”, in Die Zeit, 3 March 1977. 41.  Krep, “Wenn Terrorismus und Atom zusammengehen, entsteht Gemeingefahr”, in Die Welt, 2 March 1977; Gerlach, “Angst vor Terror – Angst vor Atom, wieweit lassen sich unter solchen Belastungen Regeln des Rechtstaates einhalten?”, KStA, 2 March 1977; and “Forderung nach verstärkter Kontrolle”, in Die Welt, 3 March 1977 (found in BArch B 443/1256 Dokumentation zum Fall Traube). 42.  He elaborated on this principle in a keynote speech for the Catholic Academy in Hamburg on 20 June 1976. See Werner Maihofer, “Grundwerte heute in Staat und Gesellschaft”, in Günter Gorschenek, ed., Grundwerte in Staat und Gesellschaft (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1977), 96. See also Gabriele Metzler, “Innere Sicherheit und Rechtsstaat bei liberalen Innenministern”, Presentation at Theodor-Heuss-Kolloquiums (2016), 6. 43.  Hans Schueler, “Ein Sturz ohne Genickbruch. Der Sündenfall des Liberalen Maihofer”, in Die Zeit, 11 March 1977. 44. See e.g. “Fall Maihofer: ‘Ohren anlegen und durch’”, in Der Spiegel, 14 March 1977; see also BArch B 443/1256, Dokumentation zum Fall Traube. 45. For contemporaneous transparency claims see e.g. Winfried Steffani, ed., Parlamentarismus ohne Transparenz (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1971). 46. See Christina von Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise: Eine Geschichte der westdeutschen Medienöffentlichkeit 1945–1973 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 293–360; Peter Hoeres, Außenpolitik und Öffentlichkeit: Massenmedien, Meinungsforschung und Arkanpolitik in den deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen von Erhard bis Brandt (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013), 57–69. 47. See “Fall Maihofer: ‘Ohren anlegen und durch’”. 48. See the different contributions in Wolf-Dieter Narr, ed., Wir Bürger als Sicherheitsrisiko (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1977). This anthology’s core message is printed on the front cover: “Im Kampf gegen Terroristen darf die Demokratie nicht zu Schaden kommen” (Democracy should not be

196  C. KIRCHBERG AND M. SCHMEER harmed in the fight against terrorists). The volume included captions such as “Staatsschutz als Verfassungsschutz” (State security as a constitutional risk) or “Sicherheit über alles: Vom äußeren zum inneren Feind” (Safety above everything: from the outer to the inner enemy); see also BArch B 106/106559 Eingaben an Maihofer. 49. BArch B 106/106559 Eingaben an Maihofer. 50. This public question accompanied the Verfassungsschutz since its foundation in 1950 until today. See e.g. Mainhardt von Nayhauß, “Wer schützt uns vorm Verfassungsschutz?”, in Stern, 21 February 1959; Heribert Prantl, “Wer schützt die Verfassung vor dem Verfassungsschutz”, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 7 January 2012. 51. OLG Köln, NJW 1979, 1216; BGH, NJW 1980, 1700. 52. Deutscher Bundestag, 8th legislative period, 16 March 1977, 961. 53. Maihofer, “Abgang gesucht”, in Der Spiegel, 5 June 1978, 21–25. 54. See Goschler and Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”, 193–272. 55. BArch B 443/1256, Dokumentation zum Fall Traube. 56. See for instance Dominik Rigoll, Staatsschutz in Westdeutschland: Von der Entnazifizierung zur Extremistenabwehr (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 8. 57.  Klaus Traube, “Lehrstück Abhöraffäre”, in Narr, ed., Wir Bürger als Sicherheitsrisiko, 63. In this regard, Traube also referred to a statement by Richard Meier at the Federal Press Conference on 1 March 1977 in which the BfV president stated that Traube’s lifestyle as a managing director “was not consistent with the standards we would normally have expected”. See Klaus Traube, “Nur mit der Feuerzange anzufassen. Zum Fall Faust”, in Freimut Duve, Heinrich Böll, and Klaus Staeck, eds., Briefe zur Verteidigung der bürgerlichen Freiheit: Nachträge 1978 (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978), 40. 58. Traube, “Lehrstück Abhöraffäre”, 63. 59. BA B 443/1256 Dokumentation zum Fall Traube; see the autobiographical narrative in Traube, Klaus Traube erzählt aus seinem Leben. 60. Traube even received a payment of compensation for his legal fees in the amount of 30.000 DM according to an internal note for the file; see BArch B 136/15201 Abhörmaßnahme im Fall Dr. Traube. 61. The charges were later dropped by the regional court in Bonn, see “Ein derartiger Verdacht hat nie bestanden”, in Der Spiegel, 4 December 1978. 62. Traube, “Lehrstück Abhöraffäre”, 35. 63. Christoph Wehner, Risikopolitik, Sicherheitsproduktion und Expertise in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und den USA 1945–1986 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017), 219.

PART IV

Transparency Conflicts and Social Movements

CHAPTER 9

Promises of Transparency, Promises of Participation: On the Ambivalent Rhetoric of the Occupy-Movement Martin Butler

Some years ago, in March 2015, the Society for East Asian Anthropology published an article on their website, which epitomized the ambivalence of the Occupy movement’s demand for transparency. Entitled “Occupy between Surveillance and Transparency”, the article deals with the Taiwanese offshoot of the Occupy movement and retells the story of the movement’s formation, in which the idea of transparency is featured as a core principle and precondition for political representation and participation. “Open and transparent was the idea that motivated young generations in Taiwan to participate in this movement”, the article argues, and continues that, “[w]hile the term ‘politics’ had long been corrupted as a political game, the power struggle, or fights among the legislators, open and transparent was believed to be capable of ‘purifying’ the politics and bringing it back to the foundation of equality and justice”.1 M. Butler (*)  Institute for English and American Studies, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 S. Berger and D. Owetschkin (eds.), Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23949-7_9

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At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically at first sight, transparency was felt to be a serious threat by the members of the movement themselves. To be precise, in 2014, the movement’s occupation of the Taiwanese Congress “was destined to be exposed to the gaze of the public”,2 and (at times highly contradictory) images of protesters stirred both public support and irritation: “Stories about drinking beer in the chamber or consuming sweets from a legislator’s office were reported by the mainstream media to show the irresponsibility and thoughtlessness of the movement while recycling and maintaining the cleanliness of the chamber became signs that the occupation was carried out by rational and responsible citizens”.3 Thus, the media spectacle both amplified the movement’s demands for transparency and, at the very same time, weakened the activists’ position, as they saw themselves subjected by a constellation of surveillance, which did not allow for all too radical actions and interventions. As a consequence, as the article concludes, “[t]he movement was both accomplished and ruined by open and transparent”.4 To be sure, while the article describes the political intervention of a movement in a non-western context, in which the claims for transparency and, accordingly, for political representation and participation are articulated in sight of what, “[f]or many Taiwanese, ... was seen as the largest threat to democracy”,5 i.e. China, the discourse of and demand for transparency is equally central to more recent protest movements in Western societies. Indeed, transparency, in a range of Occupy offshoots in the US and European countries, has been turned into both the key principle of and the basis for reviving (or radically re-designing) democratic participation in what is not seldom referred to as “post-democracies” (in the sense of Colin Crouch). Anna Szolucha also hints at this strong tie between direct democratic participation and transparency, pointing out that “for many Occupy participants, the experience of taking part in direct decision-making was ‘new’ and perceived as a radical break with most of what they had known about politics. In contrast to the inadequacies of representative democracy based on delegation, the rules of direct decision-making introduced in the movement were associated with equality, inclusion and transparency”.6 At the same time, and very much in accordance with this emphasis of open access to all information as a conditio sine qua non for direct democracy, transparency is employed as a category of self-description and -evaluation of these very movements, who have been fashioning themselves as particularly open forms of organizing ever since the voice

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of journalist and leading activist Tim Pool (“transparency is paramount”, “day one, transparency was our principle of solidarity”) had been amplified and spread as the voice of the movement through mainstream media during the protests in Zucotti Park in 2011. This claim for transparency later manifested itself, e.g. in the “Occupy Wall Street Transparency and Accountability Act” proposed to the movement’s General Assembly the same year. It argues that “[t]ransparency and accountability are key components of the principle of solidarity as espoused by O[ccupy] W[all] S[treet] and cornerstones of the foundation of democracy”. Consequently, it asks Occupy activists to regularly submit reports on their activities and, in a surprisingly rigid way, demands that “[a]n absence of one or more of the aforementioned documents will result in a mandatory notification to OWS GA and may result in a temporary suspension of GA-allocated financial disbursements and a two-week suspension of all facilities access for all group members”.7 This strong emphasis on transparency as a demand both directed at the famous infamous “one per cent” and at the members of the movement has spawned controversial discussions both within the movement and in public discourse ever since 2011: Right below the proposal of the aforementioned Transparency and Accountability Act, which was published online on the website of Occupy’s New York City General Assembly, first reactions to the Act already identify problems attached to the demand for transparency: One commentator, for instance, argues that this demand, directed at those who are accused of intransparency (i.e. “government and the 1%”, “all ye Smart People At The Top”), should not automatically include an accusation which associates intransparency with illegal activities. She argues that “it’s challenging when we don’t get answers when we want them, but for the sake of compassion let’s be kind and optimistic, even if, sceptically optimistic […] remember people are innocent till proven otherwise”. Another commentator discusses whether those who run the Occupy movement do so in a way which is ‘transparent enough’, arguing that “[a] small group – a subset of the Finance (Accounting) WG has the funds and refuses to provide so much as a single copy of a bank statement in response to many, many requests for assurance that the donations are still there and are safe”. In more general debates on transparency, there are voices who are concerned about the Occupy being made transparent through government surveillance. Others do not seem to have a problem with that, as one comment on the NYC General

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Assembly’s website puts it: “OWS isn’t a covert, undercover operation requiring high levels of secrecy. To the extent that the Government has been investigating OWS, rest assured that they know exactly who we all are by this point. Realize that the Government has unlimited funding (through tax and corporate dollars) with which to invent, purchase and use the most sophisticated surveillance equipment (including face and voice recognition machinery). In addition they have highly trained personnel. AND (sic!), they have nothing else to do but play with their new toys. Why wouldn’t they know exactly who we all are?” These randomly chosen reactions to the “OWS Transparency and Accountability Act” and, more generally, to the politics of transparency pushed forward by the movement are by no means meant to illustrate what might be wrong with transparency or Occupy in general. Rather are they supposed to hint at the normative implications and connotations of a specific rhetoric employed by the movement, in which transparency is featured as something inherently desirable and as a precondition for the (re)establishment of a participatory democracy. At the same time, and seemingly paradoxical at first sight, these reactions to the Act also show that the demand for transparency is intricately linked to the (felt) need to control and to survey in order to generate transparency in the first place. The movement’s rhetoric can thus indeed be characterized as highly ambivalent, as it promotes transparency as a conditio sine qua non for political participation—very much in line with an established discourse on transparency also promoted in scholarship.8 Yet, in so doing, as I would like to argue, this rhetoric turns out to be complicit in legitimizing practices and modes of surveillance through which transparency is generated in the first place. In other words, the one-sided and highly emphatic embrace of transparency as the key to a functioning democratic society contradicts the movement’s general critique of a trend towards what is often labelled a “surveillance society”, which, as the example of the occupation of the Taiwanese Congress has illustrated, is said to nip any form of protest and resistance in the bud. This ambivalence rooted in the discrepancy between the (contradictory) normative connotations attached to transparency and surveillance on the hand and their actual relationship on the other, becomes all the more significant in more recent social movements such as Occupy, as these movements heavily rely on digital technologies and online media.9 In these cases, one might argue, the normativity attached to notions of

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transparency meets the equally normative implications of a narrative on the deliberating potential of social media, which are, more often than not, heralded as the ultimately democratic, i.e. egalitarian, all-inclusive and participatory, forms of political engagement and organization. In other words, it is these media in particular whose potential has not seldom been outlined in narratives of transparency and democratic participation similar to those spread by the movements which employ them. In the preface to their collection of essays on Ethical Practice of Social Media in Public Relations, for instance, Marcia W. DiStaso and Denise Sevick Bortree claim that “[s]ocial media allows organizations to provide transparent communication and another outlet to take responsibility for its efforts and actions” and, with reference to Wright and Hinson, add “that effective social media acts as a watchdog for traditional news media and organizations, thereby advocating a transparent and ethical culture”.10 It is perhaps telling that DiStaso and Bortree use the metaphor of the “watchdog” here, as it captures the aforementioned tension inscribed into the process of creating transparency through surveillance. In other words: The choice of words implies that the establishment of a “transparent and ethical culture” requires surveillance by a third party, which, in turn, might well be conceived of as unethical from a different perspective. More often than not, the critical attitude towards established media channels and formats as expressed by DiStaso and Bortree is also applied to what is usually referred to as mainstream online platforms, which, it seems, are regularly considered to be all-too-compromised by commercial interests and aims, too. Jeffrey S. Juris, for example, with reference to Milan, observes that “many ‘computer-savvy activists’ from an earlier generation, including many of those involved in the movements for global justice, are wary of commercial media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook. In this sense, movement-developed media and communication platforms such as Indymedia contribute to the creation of autonomous movement infrastructures and can help protect against surveillance and repression”.11 As one may argue, however, these “movement-developed media and communication platforms”, which are, as “watchdogs”, supposed to generate transparency to secure the functioning of the movement, may not only “help protect against surveillance”, but may eventually also facilitate the implementation and institutionalization of alternative structures of surveillance, which, camouflaged by the narrative of autonomy and democratic deliberation, might turn out to be even more effective.

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Yousuf Al-Bulushi argues along similar lines, hinting at the ambivalent effects of using digital technologies with the intention of increasing transparency, no matter if they are commercial or non-commercial, professional or amateur, mainstream or grassroots. Referring to postcolonial theory in the first place (i.e. to Ed King and Eli Shapiro, who base their argument on Fanon), he outlines the “mutually constitutive dynamics of oppression and resistance” inscribed into the usage of digital media and hints at “the dual-sided nature of technologies available for both colonialism and the anticolonial struggle”. Accordingly, as Al-Bulushi continues, “[o]ne might argue that Twitter and other social media operate […] under both the directive of the surveillance state and the democratic impulses of decentralized technology”—democratic impulses, as one may add, which are due to a general perception of these media as being distinctly participatory, thus contributing to the increase of transparency of both information and information flows.12 This democratic appeal, as I have argued elsewhere,13 is grounded on the highly normative premise that social media are in and by themselves always inclusive and participatory, a premise—and promise—which neglects the intricate power structures and relations at work in the formation and use of social media. Nevertheless, the myth of the democratizing potentials of online media based on equal access to information (and, thus, transparency) is persistent both in public discourse and in scholarship14–the following results of an ethnographic study of Internet use by Occupy activists might well work as a paradigmatic example of this persistence: As the study’s author argues, “[t]he Web-based activities described by [the study’s] participants are best described as connective. These include creating dialogue, learning and seeking information, finding and sharing information and ideas, building community and connection, filming, editing and uploading, streaming and making media”.15 Seth F. Kreimer, equally enthusiastic about the democratizing potentials of the Internet, argues that “in America, the Internet has in fact developed the potential of significantly facilitating the emergence of insurgent social movements, a potential that has been seized by aspiring movements across the political spectrum”. He concludes that “the Internet is in the process of being incorporated into American social movements’ repertoires of collective action”.16 Against this backdrop, the reliance on social media in and by Occupy movements around the world, then, went hand in hand with a narrative of democratic deliberation and participation through equal access

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attached to the rise and refinement of these very media—a narrative in which the figure of the user takes centre stage and is equipped with autonomous agency; a narrative in which the claim for transparency both within the movement and within the “one per cent” could be easily embedded; and, finally, a narrative which deliberately forgets to elaborate on what Byung-Chul Han, with reference to David Brin, has called the “democratization of surveillance”, which, paradoxically as it seems, is the precondition for the fulfilment of “the promise of a ‘transparent society’”.17 Yet, as he argues, this extreme form of transparency through surveillance (and vice versa) cannot but result in an “aperspectival panopticon”18 of the digital era, in which, “[i]n contrast to the occupants of the Benthamian panopticon, who are isolated from each other, the inhabitants of today’s panopticon network and communicate with each other intensively. Not lonesomeness through isolation”, as Han concludes, “but hypercommunication guarantees transparency. Above all, the particularity of the digital panopticon is that its inhabitants actively collaborate in its construction and maintenance by putting themselves on display and baring themselves”.19 In a similar vein, Kreimer, with regard to the organization of movements through social media, identifies what he calls “the vices of visibility”,20 i.e. next to the structures of surveillance within the movement itself, the establishment of which may be fostered through an explicitly articulated demand for transparency, the activists may also be too visible to the public, i.e. to governmental institutions as well as to “nongovernmental opponents”,21 to pursue their practices of resistance—as became evident in the case of the Taiwanese Occupy movement. Kreimer thus hints at very material effects of the demand for and implementation of transparency by the movement, effects that may also run counter to the movement’s initial intention. To further describe this dilemma and possible ways out, he eventually resorts to an image that stands in stark contrast to the idea of transparency, as he proposes “[a] shield of anonymity, whether legally rooted or technically provided”, which “could benefit insurgent movements who are willing to live within its shadow”.22 Perhaps it is the felt need for such a “shield of anonymity” which, in many Occupy contexts, has contributed to make participants more hesitant towards making their own actions and discussions too visible: As Geiges observers with regard to members of German Occupy groups, for instance, “they used smartphones and laptops to inform themselves about the activities of their own group and those of others, and to

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correspond to other activists via e-mail. Yet, for them, it did not make sense to directly transmit and publish protocols of plenary discussions, internal reports on their work and recordings of conferences in the name of transparency and general accessibility”.23 Against the backdrop of these potential effects of a successful demand for transparency, Han contests the positive implications of transparency as a basis for democracy and claims that “radical transparency leads to an entirely inhuman society”.24 Arguing that “[t]ransparency and power do not get along well” and that “mutual transparency can only be achieved through permanent surveillance”,25 he cannot but conclude that “[i]nstead of affirming that ‘transparency creates trust,’ one should instead say ‘transparency dismantles trust’”.26 In a more nuanced way, but along similar lines, Frieder Vogelmann also hints at the ambivalent effects of the claim for transparency, which, once it is successful and radically put into practice, leads to what he calls “transparency’s excess”.27 This excess, then, which, as Vogelmann argues, exposes the “instability” of the concept of transparency, results in ambivalent effects: transparency eventually turns into invisibility, which, in turn, reverses the power relation between the subject of transparency and the one who claimed transparency, as a position of invisibility is considered to be a highly powerful position; moreover, radical transparency contributes to the vanishing of the autonomy of the subject, which “becomes the public’s puppet”.28 And finally, the claim for transparency put into practice results in the dissolution of the demarcation line between the public and the private, which is necessary to articulate claims of transparency in the first place.29 Featured in the narratives of political rationality in the age of postdemocracy produced and spread the Occupy movement (and, to be sure, in narratives of other movements that promote a similar political agenda),30 transparency thus turns out to be a term charged with a range of seemingly contradictory implications and connotations; a term that, once employed as a buzzword in political campaigning, might indeed unfold highly ambivalent potentials. And, as a number of scholars have argued, the Occupy narrative, featuring transparency as the basis for democratization and equality, has been corrupted by the very fact that even within the movement, the ambivalent effects of this narrative—i.e. for example its complicity in the establishment of structures that Occupy had been criticizing in the first place—became increasingly visible. As Mark Chou observes, “[t]he new democratic vitality soon had its flaws exposed. Without factoring in state intervention, Occupy’s own democratic

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commitments began to prove unsustainable. Even to the point where its procedural equality and inclusivity became extreme and counterproductive, participants refused to jettison their participatory and deliberative experiment. We know that Occupy, from its many meetings and institutional regulations, was a fundamentally taxing exercise in self-rule. What made it radical and novel also made it sluggish and alienating at times. As a democratic innovation that would not exclude, Occupy soon found itself paralyzed by the very institutions and procedures designed to give it vitality.”31 This paralyzing effect, which Chou identifies with regard to the Occupy movement, might well be due to the “excess” of the claims for transparency being put into practice in a radical way, which, as Vogelmann convincingly argues, eventually leads to an equally excessive mode of self-censorship, resulting from the attempt of modifying one’s own behaviour in a way that does justice to the rationale of radical transparency.32 This self-censorship, then, does not result in openness, but in a form of closure through the “the limitation of options of action through the subjugation under the public gaze”.33 It has perhaps been this kind of closure that the members of the Taiwanese offshoot of the Occupy movement experienced when, during their act of occupying the Taiwanese Congress, they were surveyed by cameras, which made their intervention highly transparent but equally precarious at the same time. As the article published by the Society for East Asian Anthropology put it, “[t]he movement was both accomplished and ruined by open and transparent”.34 The heyday of the Occupy movement has been declared long over. Zuccotti Park has been re-occupied by tourists and bankers, and one does not really know whether the movement has indeed been ruined by its own claims. In the recent past, though, one could still observe offshoots of the movement appear (and disappear again), which—in a range of different ways and formats—appropriated and thus continued the movement’s demand for transparency, at times with highly surprising agendas: In 2015, for example, Occupy 50 Best was founded, a movement which demands more transparency in the selection of the world’s best restaurants. As the movement states on its website, “We, the culinary connoisseurs of all countries and creeds: cooks, critics or simply lovers of Good Food, urge you to stop giving your sponsorship and support to this opaque, obsequious ranking, where nationalism trumps quality, sexism trumps diversity and the spotlight is on the Celebrity Chef instead of the health and satisfaction of the customer”.35

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One could easily take such a case as anecdotal evidence of the fact that the ideological mission of Occupy, at least in some contexts, has indeed been suspended, and that the movement (if it ever was one) is not political any longer. Yet, at the very same time, the second part of Occupy 50 Best’s agenda, somewhat prophetically, reminds us that there might be reasons enough for Occupy’s re-politicization. To be precise, one cannot avoid reading it as a hint at the current US administration, for which “nationalism trumps quality” and “sexism trumps diversity” indeed—what a disturbingly apt wording to describe the political status quo! In this part, then, Occupy 50 Best’s mission statement—unintentionally, but unavoidably at the same time—draws our attention to the fact that the discourse on transparency has been taken to a new level by exactly this administration, which proliferated terms such as “fake news” and “alternative facts” that, in turn, have stirred a heated public debate on who is able and enabled to know and tell the ‘truth’; an administration that is in favour of practices of extreme vetting as a means to ensure national security and thus demands radical transparency in some contexts, while at the same time showing tendencies of intentionally withholding information in others. An administration which, to stick to the analogy that lends itself to be drawn here, is led by a disturbing vision of a “Celebrity Chef” who indeed sees himself in the spotlight and puts the “health and satisfaction of the customer” at risk. Let us hope that the customers will have the last word on this.

Notes





1. Meichun Lee, “Occupy Between Transparency and Surveillance”, Society for East Asian Anthropology, 31 March 2015, http://seaa.american-anthro.org/2015/03/occupy-between-surveillance-and-transparency, accessed on 16 March 2016, emphasis in the original. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., emphasis in the original. 5. Ibid. 6. Anna Szolucha, Real Democracy in the Occupy Movement: No Stable Ground (New York: Routledge, 2017), 181. 7. “Occupy Wall Street Transparency and Accountability Act”, 5 January 2012, http://www.nycga.net/2012/01/15-ows-transparency-and-accountability-act, accessed on 16 March 2016. 8. See Frieder Vogelmann’s Chapter 2 in this volume.

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9.  See for example Victoria Carty, Social Movements and New Technology (Boulder: Westview Press, 2015); Bariş Çoban, “Social Media R/evolution: An Introduction”, in Bariş Çoban, ed., Social Media and Social Movements: The Transformation of Communication Patterns (London: Lexington, 2016). 10. Marcia W. DiStaso and Denise Sevick Bortree, eds., Ethical Practice of Social Media in Public Relations (New York: Routledge, 2014), xxvi. 11.  Jeffrey S. Juris, “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation”, American Ethnologist 39, no. 2 (May 2012). 12.  Yousuf Al-Bulushi, “Spaces and Times of Occupation”, Transforming Anthropology 22, no. 1 (April 2014), 4. 13.  See for example Martin Butler, “‘Partizipation’—zum Einsatz eines Begriffs”, POP. Kultur und Kritik 38, no. 2 (2015); Martin Butler, “Net-Works: Collaborative Modes of Cultural Production in Web 2.0 Contexts”, in Martin Butler, Albrecht Hausmann and Anton Kirchhofer, eds., Precarious Alliances: Cultures of Participation in Print and Other Media (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016). 14. See for example Butler, “Partizipation”. 15.  Megan Boler, Averie Macdonald, Christina Nitsou, and Anne Harris, “Connective Labor and Social Media: Women’s Roles in the ‘Leaderless’ Occupy Movement”, The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 20, no. 4 (2014), 455. 16. Seth F. Kreimer, “Technologies of Protest: Insurgent Social Movements and the First Amendment in the Era of the Internet”, Academic Law Reviews 150 (2001), 170. 17. Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 47. 18. Ibid., 45, emphasis in the original. 19. Ibid., 46. 20. Kreimer, “Technologies of Protest”, 140, 162. 21. Ibid., 166. 22. Ibid., 170. 23. Lars Geiges, Occupy in Deutschland: Die Protestbewegung und ihre Akteure (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014), 140, my translation. 24. Han, The Transparency Society, 46. 25. Ibid., 47. 26. Ibid., 48. 27. See Frieder Vogelmann’s Chapter 2 in this volume, 43–46. 28. Ibid., 44. 29. See ibid., 44–45.

210  M. BUTLER 30.  See, for example, Vogelmann’s account of the German Piratenpartei in Frieder Vogelmann, “Der Traum der Transparenz: Neue alte Betriebssysteme”, in Christoph Bieber and Claus Leggewie, eds., Unter Piraten: Erkundungen in einer neuen politischen Arena (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012). 31. Mark Chou, “From Crisis to Crisis: Democracy, Crisis and the Occupy Movement”, Political Studies Review 13, no. 1 (2015), 55. 32. See Vogelmann’s Chapter 2. 33. Leon Hempel, Susanne Krasmann, and Ulrich Bröckling, “Sichtbarkeitsregime: eine Einführung”, in Leon Hempel, Susanne Krasmann and Ulrich Bröckling, eds., Sichtbarkeitsregime: Überwachung, Sicherheit und Privatheit im 21. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011), 19. 34. Lee, “Occupy Between Transparency and Surveillance”, emphasis in the original. 35. “‘The World’s 50 Best Restaurants’: Stop Intoxicating Us!”, http://occupy50best.com, accessed 30 June 2017.

CHAPTER 10

The Dual Nature of Transparency: Corporatization and Democratization of Global Production Networks Sabrina Zajak and Christian Scheper

Introduction Transparency has become an omnipresent catch phrase both in public and scientific debates across all areas of society.1 Some postulate the ‘age of transparency’, or ‘transparency society’, where transparency demands to all institutions and actors and access to information become omnipresent. At the same time there is a growing criticism about the panoptic ‘tyranny of transparency’, which allows for an increasing surveillance and control of the people.2 Transparency is an ambiguous and contested concept with multiple normative and ideological dimensions, reflecting S. Zajak  DeZIM Institute, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] C. Scheper (*)  Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute for Development and Peace (INEF), University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 S. Berger and D. Owetschkin (eds.), Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23949-7_10

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both hopes, like for the enhancement of freedom, and dangers, such as the threat to privacy. This chapter discusses the ambivalent nature of the concept in the context of global production networks. Companies increasingly become confronted with demands for accountability and democratic control through the creation of transparency. The chapter starts with the observation that the generation and sharing of information in global production is more and more politicized: While civil society organizations continue to push both companies and governments to carry forward more pervasive forms of disclosing information about conditions of global production, states also increasingly seek to develop regulatory frameworks that force or incentivize corporate transparency in transnational supply chains, especially through obligatory forms of reporting. This growing pressure and regulatory tendency towards corporate transparency have become a key, yet contested element in the governance of global production networks. One key assumption made by advocates of corporate transparency is that disclosing available information to external stakeholders and the public is a crucial and necessary condition for companies to become sustainable, accountable and socially responsible. Corporate transparency is “promoted both as a democratic ideal and as a matter of economic efficiency”.3 We challenge such a view by discussing the dual nature of corporate transparency as a means of governing and taming corporate power, on the one hand, and as an instrument of corporate control and profit maximization, on the other. We conceptualize four levels of transparency practices in global production networks. The dual nature of transparency is inherent in each level: the level of collecting and translating information to corporate governance, the usage of information for public policy decisions and for private transnational legitimacy strategies. We argue that the consideration of these levels and their recursive interconnectedness together are necessary to understand the political nature of corporate transparency practices in global production networks. At each level, conflicts between buyers, suppliers, NGOs, trade unions, workers, auditors, state agencies, multi-stakeholder initiatives or business associations are possible. Transparency politics, therefore, are of key relevance with regard to the wider dynamics of relations of power, political conflicts and social change in global production networks. Understanding the nature and consequences of these politics is important as they link

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conflicts around corporate transparency in global production networks with the broader debate about the ‘new’ political role of transnational corporations and the changing relationship between states, markets and civil society. Our empirical evidence suggests that, while transparency is mainly discussed as a source of legitimacy through the creation of democratic, responsible and accountable companies, major technologies and practices of knowledge production, i.e. the collection, translation and usage of information about social, economic and ecological conditions in production networks, are shaped and dominated by corporations and their business rationales, leading to an increasing marketization and commodification of information as a basis for transnational governance and policy decisions. The chapter concludes by calling for a new research agenda on transnational transparency politics, which introduces a political-economic perspective on knowledge practices and links it with a political-sociological view on power and governance struggles. This agenda would require looking into the technologies and practices of information collection, translation and usage as well as inherent and subtle mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion related to them. We see a rising urgency for this research agenda in times of digitalization of supply chain management and related new technologies of knowledge production that fundamentally affect both corporate governance and civil society activism.

Transparency Conflicts and the Political Role of Corporations ‘Transparency makes democratic control possible’, argues the NGO Germanwatch.4 Germanwatch does not refer to transparency of state institutions. Instead, the organization is part of a large network in Germany, Europe and across the globe, which demands that companies collect and publish all relevant information about the social, political and environmental consequences of their business around the world. This reflects the great importance actors attribute to corporate transparency as a key tool and mechanism for governing multinational corporations (MNCs) and their transnational production networks by developing new forms of democratic control through transparency. Demands for democratizing companies by making information about their business practices publicly available are also an indication of recent

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shifts in the relation between nation states and business. Traditionally, transparency has been demanded in order to limit power and fight corruption of states. States were also addressed by activists to regulate corporate behaviour by state law.5 Corporate transparency was primarily discussed as a means to optimize management processes and investor relations. This has fundamentally changed. In the current age of global production networks, companies increasingly become confronted with (almost) the same demands for accountability and democratic control as states.6 States continue to play a crucial role in the politicization of MNCs, especially in the wake of the increasing importance of what Mayer refers to as “synergetic governance”7—the use of private corporate governance for national and transnational public policy purposes. It draws on forms of soft, incentivizing regulatory frameworks, which make corporate reporting and transparency about social and ecological conditions compulsory for companies. And states are increasingly building up such regulatory frameworks, albeit with highly varying rigor. Examples include the US Dodd-Frank Act, the new EU regulation on corporate non-financial reporting (Directive 2014/95/EU, also called ‘transparency law’), the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act and the UK Modern Slavery Act.8 Next and largely prior to state regulation, the ideal of transparency is materialized through private reporting standards, most prominently the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the ISO Norms (e.g. ISO 26000 on CSR), creating a ‘world of standards’.9 These laws and regulations require companies to disclose standards of social and ecological conduct and impacts throughout their supply chains, such as measures taken against human or labour rights violations. The key idea behind this is that such information, once publicly available, presents new opportunities for public control of companies, as they will try to avoid any association with negative practices. This can be due to business environments in which consumers increasingly become sensitive to business malpractices and sanction these by changing their buying preferences, sometimes combined with public policy incentives for disclosure of non-financial affairs in production networks. NGOs, social movements, trade unions and journalists can use this information to hold companies accountable—often through public blaming strategies but sometimes also by taking legal actions. Thus, transparency optimists hope that transparency and the public struggles resulting from them become a functioning governance mechanism of MNCs and their

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global production networks.10 Transparency pessimists argue the opposite: They see transparency as a new opportunity for existing powerful state and business actors to increase their capacities to control and surveil citizens, suppliers and consumers and fear an erosion of trust and democracy.11 We suggest looking at those two competing visions of transparency not only as philosophical debates but also as an important political and sociological issue: they are a basis of fundamental societal transparency conflicts, which are currently in the process of modifying transnational relations between civil society, business and states, both at places of production and consumption. Understanding the nature and consequences of such conflicts is important as they link conflicts around corporate transparency with the broader debate about the ‘new’ political role of MNCs and the changing relationship between states, markets and civil society in the era of global production.12 Given the high relevance and contested nature of transparency processes, it is surprising that there is little empirical research and theorizing about what we call the ‘private politics of transparency’ in global production networks.13 This chapter embarks on discussing the dual nature of corporate transparency as a means for governing and taming corporate power on the one hand and for increasing corporate control and profit maximization on the other. We suggest a framework that analyses transparency politics in different stages of knowledge production from data collection to data transformation and usage. We argue that the dual nature of transparency as a means for corporate control and democratic accountability is inherent in each level: the level of collecting, of translating, of transferring information to corporate governance and public policy decisions and the stage of private use of information for public relations purposes. We suggest that bringing these four stages and their recursive interconnectedness together is necessary to understand the political nature of transparency practices in global production networks. We use multiple examples from our previous research on global supply chains to discuss each stage of transparency politics. We conclude that, despite cases of increased control of MNCs by civil society, activist or trade unions and effective solutions to supply chain problems (e.g. labour rights violations), main contemporary elements of transparency politics are dominated by business, allowing for increasing marketization, commodification, profit maximization and corporate control under the veil of legitimacy as a transparent—i.e. democratic, responsible and accountable—company. Thus, current transnational transparency politics often

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empowers business on direct-relational and structural levels, while only occasionally empowering workers, social movements or trade unions. Overall, we are calling for a new research agenda on transnational transparency politics which introduces cultural and political-economic perspectives on knowledge and epistemic practices and links these with a political sociological view on power and governance struggles. This agenda would require looking into the techniques and practices of information collection, translation, and usage as well as inherent and subtle mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion of certain actors. In other words, without a better understanding of the conditions under which corporate transparency leads to democratic control or to increased corporate power, we are unable to validate the potentials and pitfalls of transparency as a key governance mechanism in the twenty-first century.

Corporate Transparency Between Political Contestation, Discursive Power of MNCs and Marketization In 2016, nine labour and human rights organizations formed the ‘Civil Society Coalition on Garment Industry Transparency’, a coalition to advocate for transparency in apparel supply chains. They formulated a ‘Transparency Pledge’, which defines a minimum standard for supply chain disclosure. Part of this collation are global unions like IndustriAll Global Union, International Trade Union Confederation, and UNI Global Union as well as international labour and human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Clean Clothes Campaign, Maquila Solidarity Network and the Worker Rights Consortium. They believe that transparency will ‘ensure respect for human rights in their supply chains’ and ‘improve corporate accountability in the garment industry’.14 This coalition is just the latest step of efforts by activist networks and trade unions alike to increase transparency in the global garment industry since the 1990s. Continuous waves of mobilization and politicization indeed increased the transparency of some apparel and footwear companies.15 For instance, sportswear and fashion brands that had come under civil society pressure since the early 1990s, like Nike and Adidas, have increased disclosure efforts about their supply bases from the early 2000s.

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The quest for transparency is grounded in strong normative believes in the role of transparency as a means to lift the ‘corporate veil’ that covers impacts on and responsibilities for labour conditions in global production networks, and thus contribute to a democratic control of transnational companies. This holds particularly true for contexts where trade unions as a main force of democratic corporate control are absent. Production networks are structured in a way that has enabled the brands and retailers to distance themselves from traditional labour relations and their responsibility for the work force. By externalizing the labour-intensive aspects of production, global sourcing companies no longer have to take responsibility for the majority of workers involved in the process.16 The everyday experience of activist work shows that the notorious lack of transparency in many transnational industries makes it difficult to challenge corporate misconduct and support workers’ rights. Not revealing their sourcing partners gives lead firms countless opportunities to distance themselves from misconduct in their supply chains, e.g. by arguing that they had already ended their sourcing relations prior to any specific tragedy, or to relativize the scope of instances as ‘exceptional’ cases of supplier misconduct, e.g. when the presence of their labels at the involved site is presented as a case of non-commissioned (illegal) subcontracting activities. For instance, while 14 brands have been linked to the Tazreen Fashions factory in Bangladesh, only six brands have ever confirmed their relationship after the catastrophic factory fire in 2013. The lack of transparency at sourcing locations makes it very difficult to verify many of these claims, which is one of the reasons why campaign organizations have demanded the disclosure of audit reports that document inspections prior to the fire. Thus, on the one hand, the demand for transparency is connected to the aim of holding companies accountable and making them more democratic by emphasizing their public agency and their need to publicly justify their actions.17 Furthermore, the goal is to directly improve working conditions and the environmental impact by increasing the governance capabilities of companies throughout their supply chain. This view of transparency is connected to a much more fundamental belief in the role of transparency for a functioning democracy—which has been discussed in political theory and philosophy as a key characteristic of the enlightenment and, especially, of late modernity.18 It is in this context that also many trade unions in Europe, including the European Trade

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union Federation (ETUC) as part of a broader ‘transparency coalition’ with other civil society organizations, sustainable investors or business organizations, were pushing for the introduction of the EU Directive on EU Regulatory Process of Non-Financial Reporting.19 The hope was to be able to strengthen the role of works councils and their participation and consultation rights in relation to broader topics such as diversity, environmental issues, outsourcing and supply chain management. On the other hand, transparency remains an ambiguous concept. If associated with increasing the transparency of those in power, then it is considered a means for citizens, or marginalized groups to become empowered vis-à-vis power holders. But those in power can also use techniques of ‘making something transparent’ to pursue their own governance goals. This is usually discussed in connection of increased information asymmetries, information manipulation and increased capacities to surveil in order to control from a distance.20 Companies for that matter are never just passively responding to transparency demands, but they actively shape the procedures, types of collecting, transforming and using information in processes of transparency creation. This, we claim, is a key element of the politics of MNCs—as an aspect which remains overseen in the current debate about the political role of companies. We need to also explore how their greater efforts to generate transparency provides a source for reproducing and increasing corporate power. Their control over means and technologies of generating information about their production network can allow them to increase rather than reduce their discursive power vis-à-vis activists and trade unions.21 The generation of knowledge through collecting, selecting and disseminating information about transnational business affairs is never a mere technical or managerial activity of (just) representing existing conditions in the production network. Where corporations are the prime agents of knowledge about global production, we can assume that the creation of transparency also brings about a process of marketization and commodification of knowledge. It entails a productive power of business practice.22 Given this ambiguous character of transparency, we suggest understanding it as a contested field of transnational governance and resistance in global production networks. We therefore speak of ‘private transnational transparency politics’. Empirically, we can find it on four different levels in global production networks: the level of collecting (1), of translating (2), of transferring information to corporate governance and

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public policy decisions (3) and as an object of private transnational legitimacy politics (4). 1. Collecting Information On the level of gathering and collecting information about factory conditions, we primarily find practices such as internal and external social audits, as well as forms of voluntary disclosure by supplier companies. The social audit has become the overarching approach towards collecting information about factory conditions. On the one hand, against the general backdrop of an ever-increasing importance of auditing practices as a characteristic of late modernity,23 they have been criticized with regard to their dysfunctionalities in representing labour conditions.24 On the other hand, given the fragmented and complex character of production networks, variants of social audits continue to provide a central (and sometimes the only) source of information for corporate managers, consumers, policymakers and the general public about distant factory conditions. Audits have thus become a key tool for corporations to govern—not only their relation to suppliers but also their public image and reputational risks. Furthermore, this corporate function of audits has led to the widespread commodification of ‘auditability’ as a key asset of manufacturers: not only are many social audits conducted by for-profit agencies and accordingly driven by corporate interests, but supplier factories often also use their successful passing of brand audits as a source of competitive advantage.25 Even where social audits are conducted by not-for-profit agencies, such as local civil society groups or government inspectors, the image they create about the production network is necessarily selective and limited to particular aspects of social and environmental conditions. Thus, while problems and deficits of social auditing practices are widely known, over the last decades private transparency politics has paradoxically created a massive auditing market and ever new demands for more and ‘better’ audits. Ironically, the data is often decoupled from the interpretation of the workplace situation in factories—even if they are based on worker interviews.26 Instead, data often rather follows the managerial logics of supply chain governance. With this term we refer to management-driven aspects of information and their particular collection as piecemeal data, e.g. by focusing on certain areas over which the company

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has specific leverage or which represent strategic priorities set by buying companies. These then privilege specific aspects of information about specific parts of the network, such as child labour in formal employment relations in first and second tier supplier factories, rather than laying open context-specific conflicts and priorities from workers’ perspectives. In this way, transparency is always about revealing information but also about mechanisms of separating and excluding information. This is linked to and legitimated by a vast academic management literature on measurements of social performance auditing and supply chain assessments.27 The managerial logic of measurements through specialized agencies is currently further advanced through the introduction of big data approaches to supply chain evaluation.28 One (in)famous example was the case of working conditions at Foxconn, the largest producer of electronic goods, producing about 50 per cent of the world’s electronic products, including for Apple. The tight delivery times for new products has repeatedly taken precedence over worker health and safety and rights protection. Devastating working conditions were leading to the attempted suicides of 18 young rural migrant workers, resulting in 14 deaths. That happened despite Apple’s continuous monitoring and positive evaluations in Apple Supplier Responsibility Progress Reports, by Foxconn Global Social and Environmental Responsibility Committee and, later on, the independent audits by the Fair Labour Association (FLA).29 In practice, workers and trade unions are usually not involved, at least not as equal partners in the knowledge production process. Yet, workers, trade unions and labour-oriented social movements can gather their own information. It is indeed an important yet underexplored role of activists to produce and diffuse alternative knowledge.30 They can do this in two ways: either by writing their own public reports about working conditions in a particular factory or by gathering data about labour rights problems and violations through existing complaint procedures. However, both strategies are highly conditional, as they require a rather high amount of resources, network capacities and social skills to be able to compile a report or file a complaint. In many cases local actors need the support and resources of transnational activist networks in order to be able to do so.31 Furthermore, managers, sometimes in cooperation with state actors, also apply numerous counter strategies preventing activists to gather information, e.g. by denying access to the factory or workers’ dormitories, threatening workers to talk to activists or by blocking social media communication channels to prevent the diffusion of information

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and the likelihood of collective action and broader international involvement of global unions or other labour rights organizations.32 This means while audits have become the standard managerial way of collecting social and ecological information about factory conditions, alternative ways remain marginalized and dependent on access to networks and civil society resources. This is a fundamentally different approach to knowledge creation than envisioned in ideas of industrial co-determination, where trade unions have information, consultation and participation rights in the production and usage of knowledge. 2. Translating Knowledge into the Corporate Form The second field of transparency politics is created when information about dispersed factories is brought into an appropriate form in order to make the scale and number of data accessible and intelligible in the context of wide-spread global production networks. This is the level of translating knowledge into the corporate form. Sociological and anthropological research on ‘epistemic practices’ illustrates that these processes need to be understood as productive and political in themselves. Practices such as aggregation, quantification, indexing and benchmarking of information constitute ‘technologies of truth.33 More specifically, through quantification, information about complex social conditions is made simple, accessible, countable and commensurable.34 It is through such practices of translation that information can be made marketable, such as for corporate risk assessment tools, indices, benchmarks and consumer labels. In the process of translating complex and conflictual knowledge about social contexts, highly contestable, often subjective, political and ethical interpretations and judgements, values, the distribution of wealth—e.g. over the violation or non-violation of a particular labour right—are ‘freed’ from their ambiguities and their contested nature. They are stripped-off their ethical-political contamination and are transformed into easily accessible facts. This process, thus, involves an ‘uncertainty absorption’35 from the ‘ground’, where someone gathers information, to the headquarters of corporate strategic decisions and public reports. This uncertainty absorption necessarily brings about a tendency towards depoliticization of related ethical judgements, conflicts and contradictions on the ground. Furthermore, practices of translating contextualized information into the corporate form involve processes of commensuration. That is,

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qualitatively different social phenomena and related forms of information are brought into a comparable scale or measure; they are made ‘commensurable’.36 For instance, when a company presents its ‘supply chain performance’ in terms of an integrated triple bottom line of ecological, social and economic sustainability, various conflicts related to labour processes in selected supplier factories become subject to aggregation and particular conventions of measuring social responsibility performances. The result often are absolute numbers of cases (e.g. of a number of rights violations in a certain period) or percentages indicating relative changes in company performances. While such numbers ‘firm up’37 soft laws and guidelines, they also change complex social information into the corporate, managerial form.38 The knowledge presented in this form then appears as an objective result of public transparency, but subjective decisions and conflicts over ambiguities taken in a terrain of highly unequal relations of power, information asymmetries and vested capital interests, vanish in this process of knowledge production. Thus, where normative claims for transparency tap on corporate responsibility discourses to demand for ever-increasing forms of disclosure by MNCs, the processes of corporatization, commodification of knowledge and its standardized representation become key characteristics of transparency politics—processes which are likely to be accelerated through digital technologies. In addition to these normative and epistemic political processes, we can assume more fundamental ontological effects of transparency politics: Company mechanisms for disclosure usually draw on decisions about what the actual range of the production network is and what its limits are. For instance, companies in the garment industry are usually able to report about issues in their direct supplier factories, sometimes also about the second and even the third tier of their production chain. Whereas sub-contracting, informal labour and further tiers ‘down the chain’ often constitute major parts of the production network that allow for the flexibility and distribution of costs necessary for profitable supply chain management, these are being sidelined or even made invisible, due to the dominance of the lead firm perspective and of ‘formal’ sources of information about the production network. The picture that emerges from various private and private–public disclosure practices, therefore, might look very different from the actual sum of production activities involved in a particular manufacturing country or region. Transparency politics, therefore, involves processes of boundary drawing. We can take

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the example of garment production in Bangladesh: after the Rana Plaza collapse, when various transnational actors started or renewed their efforts to address fundamental health and safety conditions, it became clear that the sector comprised a much higher number of factories than previously estimated in any of the internationally available corporate or public data. Especially, the number of subcontractors had so far flown under the trans- and international radar.39 Both this normative and epistemic managerial standardization as well as the ontological boundary drawing also affect the way knowledge gets translated in labour activist networks. Workers’ knowledge is increasingly quantified for reports in order to be comparable and thus to potentially challenge the authority of corporate reports. In order to link factory conditions to particular lead firms, activists need to draw on available corporate information, which is usually highly restricted by contractual secrecies throughout the network. Thus, even if activists try to produce alternative knowledge through their transnational ‘networks of labour activism’ (NOLAs),40 the process of translating information through standardization and quantification often looks similar, as activist groups have to compete with companies over public legitimacy in the presentation of information (see level four below). This again can feed back negatively into the activist networks and cause friction in particular between workers and local trade unions and their allies from abroad—as they no longer feel their grievances and claims being represented and gone lost during the translation process. This in turn threatens the often cited coalitional power between labour and consumer groups along global production networks. These negative consequences of transparency politics on the dynamics of NOLAs continues to be largely unexplored. 3. Transferring Knowledge into Policy Decisions Besides the collection and translation of knowledge, we can assume that private transparency politics involves a third arena: Knowledge about global production networks is constantly transferred to governance decisions, not only to the level of strategic corporate governance, but also of public policymaking. Knowledge about global production has increasingly become the ground for political decision-making, especially in the wake of what Mayer refers to as ‘synergetic governance’, that is, public policy goals that are pursued through private governance mechanisms, such as through incentives and conditions for public subsidies,

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but also public–private partnerships and multi-stakeholder settings.41 On this level, however, the political nature of knowledge production (collection and translation) has mostly vanished in the process. Patchy and fragmented elements of knowledge about conditions in the production network appear as facts and guide wider policies. Corporations also use such factual knowledge to increase their brand value or generate new sources of profit, such as niche markets for ‘fair’ or ‘organic’ trade, and the inclusion into ‘sustainability’ stock market indexes and investor schemes. Once a particular label or policy standard is developed and widely accepted, the politics of knowledge production and translation, which presuppose the label or policy standard, disappear. Through this construction of certainty, those forms of knowledge and bits of information that have been excluded from the picture in the process become highly difficult to ‘reactivate’ for civil society activists. On the level of policymaking the politics of transparency is subject to a further step of simplification, often even to a dichotomous ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision over benchmarks (which product or firm is fair/not fair; organic/not organic; sustainable/not sustainable, etc.). In this way, corporate tools and technologies of knowledge production at least co-determine economic concepts of leverage over the production network and the possible reach and scope of corporate responsibility for public policy decisions. Transparency politics then has an influence in creating the very political framework conditions that incentivize their responsibility practices, since they (co-)construct the very knowledge grounds on which policy decisions are being taken. It is particularly problematic to base decisions on such information when transparency is also a mechanism for hiding information, in particular information which is linked to non-measured negative societal impacts of core business practices. For instance, if we take the example of structural gender discrimination as a key feature of global production networks, its depth and reach will hardly be visible in individual corporate responsibility reports that draw on individualistic conceptions of responsibility and economic leverage.42 Trade unions in Europe are directly confronted with the challenge of dealing with the reports of their companies—increasingly since the European transparency regulation, but also before, in cases where non-financial reporting existed prior to this regulation. A recent study on the impacts of the EU directive 2014/957EU on labour relations in Europe found that trade unions respond very differently to non-financial reporting and in many cases and countries not at all. Even when reporting was

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already a long-term practice, very few worker representatives are involved in the consultation or preparation of these reports.43 This again makes it very difficult for them to question or challenge corporate decisions based on these reports. Thus, where policy decisions are increasingly based on such conceptions (e.g. in public procurement), they tend to reproduce the same exclusionary tendencies of corporate knowledge production. Yet, the debates about the EU transparency directive have reflected these aspects only to a very limited degree. 4. Information as an Object of Private Transnational Legitimacy Politics The fourth level of transparency politics draws on the other three levels, but it is the most indirect level and hard to make empirically visible. The notion of legitimacy politics describes the arena on which social actors negotiate and struggle over the very grounds on which legitimacy claims are being made.44 Social movements and activist groups, at least in Europe and the United States, are often engaged in public struggles where movements seek to change corporate politics to produce social change.45 Transparency should facilitate public discussion and critique, as it partly depends on the provision of information about a company’s production chain, which constitutes an elusive environment of contractual secrecy and vast geographical dispersion. In such an environment, it is often far from clear which normative grounds and criteria of legitimate corporate actions are being assumed. However, where companies can offer ‘transparent’ information, this rather reduces the likelihood that activists can win the conflict over appropriate normative grounds of legitimacy claims. This is why companies consider transparency as an important step of risk reduction, as it creates a new ground and source of legitimacy, which is difficult to question for ‘outsiders’. A provision of aggregated ‘counter-knowledge’ is hard to come by, because critique often partly depends on the very form that knowledge about the production network takes. Paradoxically, critique is sometimes disarmed simply by being confronted with a multitude of information, reports, statistics and multi-stakeholder involvements, without an actual change in the price-bound transnational competition that leads to the violation of fundamental labour rights in the first place.46 We share Vogelmann’s suggestion that the logic of transparency leads

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to paradoxical effects.47 Instead of providing more visibility, clarity and public debate, transparency can also make real problems ‘invisible’—and therefore the solution to them impossible. And instead of a public sphere with new demands for control, openness and justification from a vigilant public, which is able to embed corporate power in a democratic discourse, we see an emerging institutional framework of policy initiatives, standards, benchmarks and incentive structures (see level 3), which creates a rather corporate-led environment for legitimacy claims in global production networks.

Conclusion In this chapter we discussed the dual nature of corporate transparency as a means of governing and taming corporate power, on the one hand, and as an instrument of corporate control and profit maximization, on the other. Our conception of transnational transparency politics contributes to the debate on ‘contested transparencies’ by highlighting that the hope of increasing accountability and democratic control of companies through the creation of transparency remains wishful thinking in most parts, as the main techniques of knowledge production are mainly shaped and dominated by business under the veil of legitimacy as a transparent—i.e. allegedly democratic and accountable—company. Table 10.1 summarizes this dual nature of transparency as a means of empowerment for workers and civil society, while at the same time being a means for increasing marketization, control and profit maximization and thus further empowerment of companies vis-á-vis workers and civil society. We suggest conceptualizing transparency politics at four levels, which overlap in practice: The first level of information collection especially involves processes of selectivity. Transparency politics here constitutes struggles over ‘where to look’ and ’what counts’. The second level of knowledge translation contains processes of changing the forms of information, from the ‘ground’ towards aggregated, managerial or corporate forms. Transparency politics here constitutes struggles over translation and truth production. The level of knowledge-policy transfer can be understood as a struggle for acceptance and influence of policymaking processes. Transparency politics here represent an agenda-setting and decision-making tool. The fourth level involves the struggle over criteria for public acceptance or critique of corporate activities. Transparency politics here is also a source of legitimacy.

Collecting data on ‘real life’ conditions in the production network (esp. workers’ experience) Making workers views visible/ intelligible for a wider public

Collecting information

Collection of information within field of influence and leverage, according to corporate governance strategy Making corporate responsibility efforts and achievements visible to stakeholders

The business-empowerment vision

Key elements of transparency politics

Struggle over strategies and access to gather and select information about the production network, transparency politics as ‘selectivity’ Knowledge translation Struggle over the form of information, often adoption and dominance of managerial, corporate forms of information, in order to make networks intelligible and governable from a distance. Transparency politics as ‘truth production’ Knowledge-policy transfer Improving working conditions Steering effective transnational Struggle for policy-acceptance and using transnational networks governance under conditions transfer: civil society efforts to mobilize and policy instruments of calculable legal and reputa- through coupling of information versus tional business risks business efforts for effective governance and controllable liability. Transparency politics as agenda and decision-making tool Legitimacy politics ‘Blaming and shaming’ against ‘Knowing and showing’ Struggle over the bases of knowledge misconduct and holding com- responsible business conand interpretation of ‘real life’ conditions panies accountable duct, minimizing legal and for making legitimacy claims: corporate reputational risks, improving governance knowledge versus civil society reputation and/ or stakecritique. Transparency politics as a source holder relations of legitimacy

The civil society empowerment vision

Stages of transparency practices

Table 10.1  The dual nature of corporate transparency in global production—setting the stage for a research agenda on transnational transparency politics 10  THE DUAL NATURE OF TRANSPARENCY: CORPORATIZATION AND … 

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To further engage with transparency politics is gaining importance with an increasing digitalization of both supply chain management as well as activist networks and their strategies. Digital tools and algorithmic forms of knowledge generation could further blur political elements of contradiction and ambiguity and turn the role of labour in production and exiting capital labour power imbalances invisible.48 As Moore and Joyce state: ‘The turnaround is, apparently, complete. Where digital technology once revealed, it now obscures; workers who previously could not hide, cannot be seen at all’.49 But digital tools might as well offer new pathways of challenging alleged ‘truths’ about factory conditions. This makes it necessary to further study the dual nature of transparency through the linkages between data, activism and justice in transnational relations in times of digitization.



Notes 1. See Chapter 1 in this volume. 2. See for example Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 3. Franck Aggeri and Morgane Le Breton, “The Regulation of Transparency in the Field of CSR: The Materialization of an Ideal into Technologies of Government”, EGOS, July 2016, Naples, Italy, . 4. Accessed 24 May 2016 https://germanwatch.org/de/thema/unterneh mensverantwortung/transparenzpflicht-f%C3%BCrunternehmen. 5.  Melanie Kryst and Sabrina Zajak, “Mehr Staat durch Markt? Adressierungsstrategien der Anti-Sweatshop-Bewegung in Europas”, in Priska Daphi et al., eds., Protest in Bewegung? Zum Wandel von Bedingungen, Formen und Effekten politischen Protests. Leviathan Sonderband (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2017). 6. Michael Zürn, “Die Politisierung der Ökonomisierung? Zum gegenwärtigen Verhältnis von Politik und Ökonomie”, in Josef Wieland, ed., CSR als Netzwerkgovernance – Theoretische Herausforderungen und praktische Antworten. Über das Netzwerk von Wirtschaft, Politik und Zivilgesellschaft (Marburg: Metropolis Michael, 2007), 155–184; Andreas Georg Scherer and Guido Palazzo, “The New Political Role of Business in a Globalized World: A Review of a New Perspective on CSR and Its Implications for the Firm, Governance, and Democracy”, Journal of Management Studies 48, no. 4 (2011), 899–931; and Sabrina Zajak, “MNC’s and the Politicization from Outside”, in Christoph Dörrenbächer and Mike Geppert, eds., Multinational Corporations and Organization Theory: Post Millennium Perspectives (Emerald: Bingley 2017), 389–423.



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7.  Frederick Mayer, “Leveraging Private Governance for Public Purpose: Business, Civil Society and the State in Labour Regulation”, in Anthony Payne and Nicola Phillips, eds., Handbook of the International Political Economy of Governance (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2015), 344–360. 8. Further national policy strategies have been introduced in the wake of so-called National Action Plans to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. See OHCHR, State National Action Plans (2017), accessed 22 June 2017, www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/ Business/Pages/NationalActionPlans.aspx. 9.  Nils Brunsson and Bengt Jacobson, A World of Standards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Halina S. Brown, Martin De Jong, and Teodorina Lessidrenska, “The Rise of the Global Reporting Initiative: A Case of Institutional Entrepreneurship”, Environmental Politics 18, no. 2 (2009), 182–200. 10. See organization of the ‘know the chain’ network, https://knowthechain. org/. 11. Max-Otto Baumann, “Die schöne Transparenz-Norm und das Biest des Politischen: Paradoxe Folgen einer neuen Ideologie der Öffentlichkeit”, Leviathan 42 (2014), 398–419. 12. Frederick W. Mayer, Nicola Phillips, and Anne Posthuma, “The Political Economy of Governance in a ‘Global Value Chain World”, New Political Economy 22, no. 2 (2016), 129–133. 13. These conflicts are to a large extend carried out between private actors (companies, NGOs, unions, associations) and are therefore understood as a form of private politics. 14. https://cleanclothes.org/transparency/transparency-pledge. 15. Deniz Köksal, et al., “Social Sustainable Supply Chain Management in the Textile and Apparel Industry—A Literature Review”, Sustainability 9, no. 1 (2017), 100. 16. Niklas Egels-Zandén and Jeroen Merk, “Private Regulation and Trade Union Rights: Why Codes of Conduct Have Limited Impact on Trade Union Rights”, Journal of Business Ethics 123, no. 3 (2014), 461–473. 17. It is in this context that business scholars increasingly become interested in Habermasian discourse theory. 18. Hans Krause Hansen, Lars Thøger Christensen and Mikkel Flyverbom, “Introduction: Logics of Transparency in Late Modernity: Paradoxes, Mediation and Governance”, European Journal of Social Theory 18, no. 2 (2015), 117–131. 19.  Daniel P. Kinderman, “The Struggle Over the EU Non-financial Disclosure Directive”, WSI-Mitteilungen 8 (2015), 613–621; David Monciardini, “The ‘Coalition of the Unlikely’ Driving the

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EU Regulatory Process of Non-financial Reporting”, Social and Environmental Accountability Journal 36, no. 1 (2016), 76–89. 20.  Foucault’s famous use of Bentham’s Panopticon as the idealised representation of societal characteristics of governance under conditions of late modernity is a case in point for the critical function of transparency as a means of ‘control from a distance’. In the context of global production networks and the function of controlling distant factories through health and safety targets see Gale Raj-Reichert, “Safeguarding Labour in Distant Factories. Health and Safety Governance in an Electronics Global Production Network”, Geoforum 44 (2013), 23–31. 21.  Sabrina Zajak, “Die (Re-)Konstruktion von corporate legitimacy in öffentlichen Legitimitätskonflikten. Soziale Bewegungen und Wal-Marts Unternehmenspolitik”, Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Unternehmensethik 16, no. 2 (2015), 155–177. 22.  Christian Scheper, “From Naming and Shaming to Knowing and Showing. Human Rights and the Power of Corporate Practice”, The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 6 (2015), 737– 756; Genevieve Lebaron and Jane Lister, “Benchmarking Global Supply Chains: The Power of the ‘Ethical Audit’ Regime”, Review of International Studies 41, no. 5 (2015), 905–924. 23. Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 24.  Dara O’Rourke, “Monitoring the Monitors: A Critique of Corporate Third-Party Labour Monitoring”, in Rhys Owen Jenkins, Ruth Pearson, and Gill Seyfang, eds., Corporate Responsibility and Labour Rights. Codes of Conduct in the Global Economy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 196–208. 25. Lebaron and Lister, “Benchmarking Global Supply Chains”. 26.  Niklas Egels-Zandén and Henrik Lindholm, “Do Codes of Conduct Improve Worker Rights in Supply Chains? A Study of Fair Wear Foundation”, Journal of Cleaner Production 107 (2015), 31–40. 27.  Venkatesh Mani et al., “Social Sustainability in the Supply Chain: Construct Development and Measurement Validation”, in Ecological Indicators 71 (2016), 270–279; Debadyuti Das, “Development and Validation of a Scale for Measuring Sustainable Supply Chain Management Practices and Performance”, Journal of Cleaner Production 164 (2017), 1344–1362. 28.  Taliva Badiezadeh, Reza Farzipoor Saen, and Tahmoures Samavati, “Assessing Sustainability of Supply Chains by Double Frontier Network DEA: A Big Data Approach”, Computers & Operations Research (2017), 284–290.

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29. Ngai Pun et al., “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese Workers’ Struggles from a Global Labor Perspective”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2016), 166–185. 30. Olga Malets and Sabrina Zajak, “Moving Culture: Transnational Social Movement Organizations as Translators in a Diffusion Cycle”, in Britta Baumgarten, Priska Daphi, and Peter Ullrich, eds., Conceptualizing Culture in Social Movement Research (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 251– 274; Donatella della Porta and Elena Pavan, “Repertoires of Knowledge Practices: Social Movements in Times of Crisis”, Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal 12, no. 4 (2017), 297–314. 31.  Pun et al., “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese Workers’ Struggles from a Global Labor Perspective”. 32. Hui Xu, Sabrina Zajak, and Chris K. C. Chan, “Transformation of Labor Relations and Transnational Solidarity in China: The Case Study of Yue Yuan Strike in 2014”, Paper presented at the 10th Annual Global Labour University Conference, Washington, DC (2015). 33. Sally Engle Merry, “Firming Up Soft Law. The Impact of Indicators on Transnational Human Rights Legal Orders”, in Terence C. Halliday and Gregory Shaffer, eds., Transnational Legal Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 374–400. 34. Wendy Nelson Espeland and Mitchell L. Stevens, “Commensuration as a Social Process”, Annual Review of Sociology 24, no. 1 (1998), 313–343; Merry, “Firming Up Soft Law”; Susan Bibler Coutin, “Technologies of Truth in the Anthropology of Conflict”, American Ethnologist 41, no. 1 (2014), 1–16; and Hans Krause Hansen and Tony Porter, “What Do Numbers Do in Transnational Governance?”, International Political Sociology 6, no. 4 (2012), 409–426. 35.  Wendy Nelson Espeland and Mitchell L. Stevens, “A Sociology of Quantification”, European Journal of Sociology 49, no. 3 (2008), 401. 36. Espeland and Stevens, “Commensuration as a Social Process”. 37. Merry, “Firming Up Soft Law”. 38.  Scheper, “From Naming and Shaming to Knowing and Showing”; Christian Scheper, “The Business of Responsibility: Supply Chain Practice and the Construction of the Moral Lead Firm”, in Cornelia Ulbert, Peter Finkenbusch, Elena Sondermann and Tobias Debiel, eds., Moral Agency and the Politics of Responsibility (London: Routledge, 2017), 122–134. 39.  See Sarah Labowitz and Dorothée Baumann-Pauly, Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg: Bangladesh’s Forgotten Apparel Workers (New York: NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, 2015), accessed 22 June 2017, http://people.stern.nyu.edu/twadhwa/bangladesh/downloads/ beyond_the_tip_of_the_iceberg_report.pdf.

232  S. ZAJAK AND C. SCHEPER 40. See Sabrina Zajak, Niklas Egels-Zandén, and Nicola Piper, “Networks of Labour Activism: Collective Action across Asia and Beyond. An Introduction to the Debate”, Development and Change 48, no. 5 (2017), 899–921. 41. Mayer, “Leveraging Private Governance for Public Purpose”. 42. See Scheper, “The Business of Responsibility”. 43.  DimasoLab—Directive 2014/95/EU Impact Assessment on Labour Relations, Synthesis Report 2018. 44.  Frank Nullmeier, Anna Geis, and Christopher Daase, “Einleitung: Der Aufstieg der Legitimitätspolitik. Rechtfertigung und Kritik politisch-ökonomischer Ordnungen”, in Frank Nullmeier, Anna Geis, and Christopher Daase, eds., Der Aufstieg der Legitimitätspolitik. Rechtfertigung und Kritik politisch-ökonomischer Ordnungen. Leviathan Special Issue 27/2012 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012), 11–40; Julia Black, “Constructing and Contesting Legitimacy and Accountability in Polycentric Regulatory Regimes”, Regulation & Governance 2, no. 2 (2008), 137–164. 45.  Sarah A. Soule, “Targeting Organizations: Private and Contentious Politics”, Research in the Sociology of Organizations 34 (2012), 261–285. 46. Scheper, “From Naming and Shaming to Knowing and Showing”. 47. See Chapter  2 in this volume. 48.  See for example Lilly C. Irani and M. Six Silberman, “Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk”, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2013), 611–620. 49.  Phoebe V. Moore and Simon Joyce, “Black Box or Hidden Abode? Control and Resistance in Digitalized Management”, Paper presented at Lausanne University Workshop Digitalization and Labor Governance, 24–25 November 2017.

CHAPTER 11

The Role of Transparency in Urban Planning Processes Jan Polívka and Christa Reicher

Public interest in urban planning has increased in recent years—as has mistrust in the changes and developments brought about by planning projects and their increasingly diversified stakeholders. In particular, large-scale urban development projects engender concerns about urban (re)development, traffic or energy supply infrastructure, and are characterized by a wide range of potential conflicts.1 Reasons for protesting are Translation from the German (including all direct quotes) by Vivian Strotmann, Institute for Social Movements and University Library, Ruhr University Bochum J. Polívka (*)  Faculty of Architecture, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Department of Spatial Planning and Urban Design, ILS Research Institute for Urban and Regional Development, Dortmund, Germany C. Reicher  Faculty of Architecture, Chair of Urban Design and Institute for Urban Design and European Urbanism, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 S. Berger and D. Owetschkin (eds.), Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23949-7_11

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also diverse; they range from a fear of losing status to a general distrust of a project’s management. Frequently, fears are grounded in a widespread scepticism of institutions and politics in a more general sense,2 connected to the notion that traditional law-based planning participation processes are unable to sufficiently mirror or enforce certain interests and are therefore unable to significantly intervene in the way planning has occurred thus far. At the same time, the importance of “new” social movements as collective forms of organizing intent on profound societal change has increased.3 Frequently, planning projects that fail due to popular protest suffer from opaque planning processes—or the perception of them as such. Further, protests may be rooted in a distrust towards a range of institutions and their representatives, including particular governmental bureaucracies and financial capital, as well as other agents able to capitalize on power imbalances within government settings.4 On the one hand, researchers and practice are increasingly concerned with root cause analysis and related risk management for failed urban planning projects.5 On the other hand, the interplay between formal and increasingly diversified informal processes of planning and their agents is being addressed.6 It has furthermore become clear that urban development and planning processes designed to accommodate a greater degree of openness are growing increasingly complex in their content and more diverse in their procedures. New forms of governance and the resulting processes of participation contribute to the increasing openness of planning and its outcomes. This in turn entails a need for greater transparency in planning processes: “The need for transparency arises and ultimately fails due to complexity. Full transparency is impossible amidst high complexity”.7 Nonetheless, transparency plays an increasingly important role in the perception and acceptance of urban planning projects. A key issue in this regard seems to be a socio-discursive access to urban development projects planning processes: To what extent can these projects be examined in knowledge- or even result-oriented ways? Further, what makes projects acceptable and suitable to general consent, be it in their original form or in forms modified over the course of planning processes?

Transparency in Planning Processes and Implementation The issue of transparency in individual planning projects is multifaceted with different implications on different levels: “At the very beginning of any enquiry into transparency, a basic distinction must be established.

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Transparency may be an inherent quality of substance, as in a glass curtain wall; or it may be an inherent quality of organization. One can, for this reason, distinguish between a literal and a phenomenal transparency”.8 In the context of planning processes, the meaning of transparency is not applied to the physical architecture in physical space. Rather, what is meant here is the clarity and comprehensibility of processes. On the one hand, projects are scrutinized in terms of their necessity, alternatives, feasibility and impact, as well as investment cost. On the other hand, the issue of transparency comes to bear in connection to governance dedicated to generating and implementing processes of plans or projects, in particular the genesis, agents involved, constellation of participants and the reciprocal influence upon each other. Furthermore, it includes the negotiation settings, transmission of information, discourse and processes of participation. Finally, there is the matter of implementation in the sense of their compliance to law and proper procedures expressed by conformity to schedules and financial planning. In our opinion, transparency in these contexts is a core prerequisite for processes of governance, which stands for the interaction between the hierarchies of state authority, competitive markets and citizens’ selforganization, as a precondition for formal and informal processes of negotiation and participation.9

Transparency as a Reaction to Conflicts and Protests Against Urban Planning At a time in which detachment from citizens and a general trust in traditional politics are increasingly deplored, a decline in the power of classical intermediary organizations, such as political parties and associations, is noted,10 the ways in which planning can be implemented are also being re-interpreted.11 In this context, the critique of projects can be seen within a shift from a broad and maintained discourse equipped by distinct attitudes towards macro-social issues, and towards reactive actions, which are induced by tangible causes. Reactions to urban development projects frequently display dynamics associated with social movements; instead of a fundamental ideological standpoint, due to increasing individualization and diversification of agents, standpoints expressed in protests often concern concrete plans, are more spontaneous and temporary—that is nonrecurring and dependent on occasion. They also span the entire range of social (class) structures or political standpoints,

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focusing on concrete connections perceived within one’s own daily life.12 Interpretations of issues on the part of social movements are frequently characterized by “a sensitivity to the lived environment” and “direct concern”, and thereby, they are “more concrete for individuals and closer to their daily experiences, more flexible in the temporal dimension and in the social dimension, characterized by a specific form of involvement”.13 Such a tendency can be, besides the lack of intermediary moderation and steering, interpreted in light of changing social contexts, such as current neo-liberal developments.14 In terms of transparent planning, one of the reasons why the communication of planning has become increasingly difficult is because incrementalism is dividing particular planning steps and projects from the ostensible planning targets, and the coherence of these two is not necessarily self-explanatory for broader groups of actors involved in or responding to particular planning episodes. At the same time, due to participation, the outcomes of urban development procedures for individual projects have become relatively open15 to how they were with a technocratic top-down directive.16 On the one hand, questioning planning projects often pertains to the interrelation of particular projects and their goals within broader contexts—that is, the extent to which they correspond to an envisioned incremental perspective. On the other hand, discourse regarding macrosocial tasks and goals in post-industrial times is further being differentiated through the discourses of globalization, translocality and neo-liberalism. In this context, individual positions, be they consensual for a minority or the majority, are being communicated through various strongly diversified and differently sophisticated channels of varying reach. This happens due to individualized societal and spatial notions, leading to divergent discourse reinforcements. Besides the social media often cited in this context, one can observe the formation of new intermediaries through which topics of protest are generated or taken up and institutionalized. In this context, the past years have brought noticeable changes in the protest activities of social movements, moving away from smaller, locally anchored communities towards organizations driven by formally expressed interests: “Where protest actions often used to be poorly coordinated and of limited duration, today we are faced with well-organized and often longstanding waves of protest”.17 Often, these do not only remain connected to immediate personal involvement. They also serve as a tool to defend personal standpoints and values, albeit more seldom channelled

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and articulated through the classical intermediate platforms of political parties and movements.18

Urban Governance, Participation and Protest as Enforcers of Transparency From the perspective of planning praxis, the question arises about the degree to which these change the ways in which planning projects are developed and discussed, are put into broader spatial and social contexts, and ultimately also implemented. From the perspective of planning theory, since the definition by Albers,19 there have been multiple attempts to further develop the model of planning phases in accord with the pluralization of planning processes. The emphasis of strategic and adaptive components20 highlights the openness of planning procedures as well as their possible points of departure. Should the perspectivistic incrementalism21 (further) remain the current foundation of planning, then the act of planning in small steps divided into individual projects as well as the use of the “big picture” perspective as an overarching strategy or mission remains just one idea that incrementally shapes the generation of projects and their orientation. Projects and their orientation are a matter to be discussed alongside concrete planning steps codified in scenarios. In terms of time and argumentation, however, projects and their orientation represent different parameters in relation to individual cases. These parameters are in turn shaped by processual and argumentative contexts that are interrelated amidst increasingly strong societal dynamics. In the sense of the neo-liberal conditions underlying the scope of action of both private and public planning stakeholders as well as their increasingly cooperative planning practice, the question arises as to how transparent particular planning processes and projects are. A related factor is the proximity of citizens and administration, illustrated in notions such as “the citizen as a customer, not a petitioner” or “prosumer rather than consumer”.22 This postulates an equal role of citizen and planning institutions. Despite the fact that the governance debate has a longstanding tradition in social sciences and economics23 it acquires a new relevance in the context of urban development and planning processes, especially in relation to the terms “urban” and “local governance”. In our context, this approach entails an extended constellation of agents involved in

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planning processes, in which “societally relevant decisions are not made by the state alone, but are the result of processes of negotiation, in which state agents take part, but do not by any means pull all the strings”.24 While practical planning mostly consists of bilateral forms of cooperation between city and industry, the governance approach ideally comprises a trilateral cooperation between the city, industry and citizens. Good urban governance is seen as a new iteration of state and administrative relations, which “aims at effective, transparent and partnership-oriented collaboration of state, industry and citizens in order to find innovative solutions for societal problems and to create forward-looking and sustainable development opportunities for all involved”.25 Regarding the limits of governance vis-à-vis the redefinition of balances of power, despite open procedures of governance, the power of determining outcomes still rests with the agent(s) who set the processual frameworks and determine the allocation of resources.26 The integration of citizens into planning processes is not a new phenomenon. The active role of citizens in planning has been extensively discussed since the 1970s at the latest, leading to planning types and procedures within which citizens were involved to varying degrees.27 As such, the discussion surrounding participatory local governance including civil society has strengthened notably over the past years,28 and— against the backdrop of increasing globalization—the local level has become increasingly important as a social and political sphere.29 In this context, Wolf and Zimmer even discuss an outright “boom in the establishment of civic involvement institutions”.30 With the aim of developing solutions that are both sustainable and accepted by the public, processes of communication and transparent urban planning are set in motion to avoid conflict or protests from the start. At the same time, there is a great fear of participation and the obstacles that might be put in planners’ paths by the “over-involvement” of citizens, proprietors and other relevant agents. Against this backdrop, certain planning projects or their parts are being avoided or cancelled, even though they are a subject of ostensible public interest.31 For society’s influence on planning processes, German Planning Regulations have anchored the tool of participation in various steps and modes.32 “Participation is a logical consequence of democratic principles and of the ethical imperative of social participation”.33 Dialogueoriented procedures increasingly replace standardized procedures of planning. Linear approaches are being replaced or at least supplemented

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by participatory elements such as planning workshops and dialogue platforms. Alongside increasing participation, the dilemma of the “double legitimation” of planning decisions might arise, with that of democratically elected bodies on the one hand and that of a popular vote on the other (e.g. in the form of a referendum), which could finally lead to a lack of reciprocal acceptance. This raises the question as to how much immediate participation can be borne by representative democracy.34 According to a survey conducted by the Bertelsmann Foundation, 80% of interviewees stated that they wished for better options to participate, and 60% stated their readiness to actively take part in planning processes.35 Overall, the readiness for involvement is increasing, guided by the wish for differentiated methods, and leading to a multitude of participatory tools, such as public petitions, referendums and others.36 At the same time, planning processes and projects are becoming more complex due to legal and financial regulations and are often connected to less transparent processes of decision-making in the political realm. This contrast kindles resentment and protests against planning methods, often in spite of participation. The growing opposition of critical citizens against development and planning projects has given much momentum to a debate on a “new culture of planning”, describing a different interaction between role models, institutional frameworks and concrete processes of implementing projects. In this context, the question remains as to how the confrontationally implemented protest of decades past has affected the generation of a “new culture of planning”, and which planning consequences arise from this, as the protests, citizens’ initiatives, and social movements “add new topics to the agenda, develop alternatives and test social innovation”.37 With development projects and redevelopment measures, local administrations increasingly attach importance to public participation, frequently fearing otherwise uncontrollable protests against plans that might be regarded as crucial for urban development. The participatory practices used, from the charette procedure to internet-based methods, far transcend the stipulations of the law. Examinations of planning processes at Vienna’s main station, for example, show the central role that extensive communication measures can acquire when flanking major development projects: “Transparency, openness and comprehensive information were the guidelines through which to achieve a positive foundation for the project”.38 In turn, “the massive communication effort that preceded and accompanied the project […] ultimately

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lead to the fact that few objections or statements were made during the actual approval procedures”.39 Critics of the inflation of participatory formats, however, have highlighted the risk of “particitainment”,40 which increasingly degrades citizens’ participation to a mere show. The agents’ rules and expectations are very different in this context: Urban movements and activists are enticed by “the quiet insubordination, the adventure of realizing a fine idea together with strangers, without giving much thought to durability, safety and maintenance”.41 Planners, in their administrations, “have to abide by their guidelines, quite a few things in terms of competences, and they are aware that for everything that is being changed in a city, there are regulations and norms that have to be met”.42 Finally, in the context of their own legitimization, politics are being increasingly confronted with general claims to participation. Political decision-making processes are coupled to individual conceptual steps in planning. Even though the complete transparency of planning processes and decision making can hardly be guaranteed, the creation of plans, individual agents towards them and the planning processes themselves are nonetheless becoming more open and transparent for the aforementioned reasons. In this context, trust-building becomes a key term.

The Influence of Digitalization on the Transparency of Planning Processes New communication technology and digitalization have a varying effect on the spread of participatory processes and the transparency of planning. Overall, digitalization is perceived as a trend that improves access to information, and which changes the flow of information in urban spaces. However, with the apparently limitless potential of digitalization, risks do arise. The wish for an efficient, transparent and participatory city also puts us at risk of becoming subject to overt or covert interest-driven surveillance and commercialization. In a comprehensive overview of the different forms of internet-based civic participation, Kubicek et al. differentiate between participatory budgeting, consultations in the context of guidelines, planning projects and consultation in the context of legislative procedures, which are processes that are now being used worldwide.43 These have grown far beyond the mere gathering and analysis of urban data, and rather concern “data-smart governance”, or a call for participation that immediately addresses a city’s inhabitants as affected

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citizens.44 Trust is generated through “openness towards activities that take place outside of an institutional framework, by rendering insights and knowledge useful to actions of spatial planning in an open process. Conceptually and instrumentally, ‘open data’ and ‘open content’ processes […] are available for this”.45 “To gain trust in a knowledge-based society shaped by the internet (or, respectively, to win it back), institutions have to fulfil at least three core conditions: informational (and organizational) transparency, the protection of personal rights as well as an openness towards participation”.46 In their research project entitled “Agitation campaigns [German: Erregungskampagnen] in politics and the economy”, Bieber, Härthe and Thimm reached the conclusion that the new digital forms of participation go hand in hand with an “increasingly fragmented public, in which digital elites with often profound expert knowledge network with one another”.47 The participatory culture on the web on the one hand raises the question of whether and how far digital discourse can be steered. On the other hand, it becomes challenging to handle the increasing speed of communication and the accompanying new means of participation. It is a consequence of the “new communicative environment”, that “existing mechanisms of control are becoming less or not at all effective in terms of information distribution flows”.48 Through the possibilities of digitalization, boundaries between opacity and transparency seem to become blurred: “Opacity is created by an overly extensive and manifest transparency—for example, through mass medialization”.49 The debate on chances and limits of digitalization, however, often neglects the spatial aspect, which is indispensable for urban planning. As Leggewie puts it, “space only gains an effect when humans and social goods connect to each other through processes of perception, imagination or memory”.50 The chances created by digital platforms for participation, stronger identification with the neighbourhood and for political engagement are also to be examined are with considerations for potential dangers. The significance of enabling participation in urban development is thus threefold: First, it describes the information in the sense of an early provision of information on background conditions. Second, it stands for topics and rules for decision-making and the related consultation in the sense of active participation of affected and interested citizens. And third, it marks cooperation measures in the sense of the integration of those affected by particular planning decisions within a pre-defined framework.51

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Informality and Transparency For a long time, the discussion on informality in urban development has been limited to urban environments in the Global South, or on regions in crisis. It was equated with a lack of formal regulatory structures and makeshift infrastructures and, not seldom, with illegality.52 However, the significance of informality is also increasing in post-industrial countries, and especially in European cities. This does not pertain so much to illegal construction, but rather regards processes of planning and temporal use. Conventional top-down planning approaches are being increasingly called into question, along with their established stakeholder constellations. Informality, however, also creates opportunities for corruption both in countries of the Global South and the Global North. Koch53 compared it not only to the classical forms of corrupt behaviour, but also to informal agreements as a sign of post-democracy,54 meaning a regime in which the democratic process of distributing power is upheld but in which decisions are made behind closed doors by certain elites, who are capable of manipulating public opinion and thereby have their decisions legitimated or at least tolerated. It is for this reason that the transparency of procedures is crucial. If one posts a general claim to transparency, then informality is to be understood not so much in terms of corruption or creation of contradictions bewildered competition or unjust replacement. Rather than understanding formality as illegality, informality can assume a complementary or enabling role for formality and can therefore advantageously influence planning procedures and their subsequent results.55 Beyond long-term planning processes and instruments, informal ways of shaping cities and neighbourhoods seem to be becoming more important. A need for short-term action and demographic changes require open forms of intervention and planning of neighbourhoods, cities and regions. At the same time, the call for more citizen involvement, beyond formalized planning procedures, is receiving more attention. Current concepts of urban governance no longer see the production of spaces solely from the perspective of planning municipalities (formal sector), but rather as a result of largely informal processes, namely of its common initiative with agents from business and civil society.56 Thus, formal planning is also increasingly being demanded to incorporate non-regulative components, experimental planning procedures as well as an understanding of incremental planning procedures. Not least, at least to a certain

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point, it also needs to become tolerant of open processes and related outcomes. When new, promising ways of urban development and construction are considered in the context of transparency, planning is then no longer exclusively a matter of command. However, this also does not just mean “a bit more civic involvement”,57 but a fundamental and radical re-thinking of existing formalized planning processes. Urbanism that is not or not exclusively formal, is capable of putting things back on their feet. It raises questions that have not been formulated before and delivers the corresponding answers. Informal urbanism, however, also widens the perception to include the manifold issues that arise in the respective spatial contexts between the informal sector, the transformation of public spaces (e.g. through migratory flows) and the activities of representatives of the formal sector in select urban areas. This creates new options both in analytical approaches as well as in work on concrete planning concepts and strategies. In the context of these new approaches to space, attention is mainly focused on the procedure of planning itself. In the spatial image of European cities, the citizen has to date only been conceived of as a consumer.58 Inhabitants increasingly demand a right to have their direct say in processes of planning and decision-making, at times a pause and reconsideration of seemingly unchangeable decisions or they question the systemic and ecological pressures. Under the label of the “co-production”59 of space, concepts for integrating citizen engagement are being put to the test in many places. This does not only change priorities, it also creates innovative and more appropriate solutions. Informality is ascribed an important role as a basis for resilience in urban development.60 The concept of resilience describes two central abilities: the ability to withstand negative external influences and the ability to regenerate independently, but it above all signifies the ability to adapt a system to new conditions and continue to develop it.61 “To minimize the vulnerability of our cities, it is necessary to strengthening the ability of civil society to organize itself. In this way, the agents of informal urbanism […] can contribute to our cities’ resistance to crises”.62 In this case, the ability to self-organize transcends participation; it represents a facet of urban shaping that results in an immediate effect on the built environment and thereby becomes an aspect of transparency.

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Embedding Transparency in Planning Procedures One decisive difference between the degree of participation and informality in processes of governance vis-a-vis transparency can be discerned in the structures of planning in Germany. In this context, the various tasks of urban development and urban planning become clear: the former is sectoral and integrated with internal and external affairs, social, ecological and geographical (spatial) issues, protection of the environment and climate, economic aspects, commercial spaces, traffic or public space, as well as infrastructure and the structuring of urban space. The latter is connected with the issues of generating building land, safe and healthy living and working conditions, control of the distribution of uses in settled areas, and the legal soundness of projects.63 Both use non-binding planning (informal planning as a preliminary step) as tools to gauge the contents of plans and take on different forms, such as those of sectoral or integrated development concepts or frameworks, conceptual plans for urban development, drafts and others.64 In this case, (in)formality and a non-binding character denote— partly in contrast to the connotation within governance processes—the legally binding character of the respective planning output. Informal, or so-called non-binding plans have an administrative obligation to guidelines as foundations of planning if these are passed by the municipalities. Legal land-use planning processes, meaning the land-use plan as a preparatory urban development plan and the detailed development planning and design plans, which are also binding for citizens, are based on standardized processes grounded in law.65 The governance approach in the realm of the special urban planning law is different. Here, for instance, in the context of the now frequently used tools of the Social City and urban redevelopment, formats and programmes exist which explicitly address society and are not solely intended to implement physical construction measures. Apart from the planning consensus, an active role is presupposed for citizens. Thereby, formats of participation do not only serve to establish consensus, but more and more often also support sensitization, activation and connection to society, its social capital and social networks, micro-publics and local governance.66 Beyond the processes of development regulation, federal development regulatory procedures, such as local development regulations and building permits that relate to individual construction projects, constitute an even more constrained framework

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for participation and informality. Accordingly, opportunities for public involvement and an openness of outcomes within the respective procedures of planning vary and are clearly broader and more flexible within non-binding planning. Thus, not all formats in planning and project implementation are equally accessible to the public and informal actors. This is at least the case with preparatory studies and concepts. The shift in public interest, manifested for example in the growing environmental consciousness since the 1980s, affects the focus of planning processes. The breadth and abundance of people affected as well as that of the agents involved—especially when planning and building in historic contexts, which has increased noticeably since the 1970s—is another reason for the spread of early and complementary participation and information transfer. Here, the forms of participation anchored in the building code reach their limits. Thus, for projects that are laid out based on a zoning plan, a corresponding ex ante participation process is also important. Within areas with pertaining building regulation, in which just particular plots are being altered, due to the simplified approval process there are even fewer possibilities for co-determination. Despite all the differences in possibilities to interfere into planning procedures, the claim to transparency is retained as an indicator of the intelligibility of sovereign governmental as well as governance-based and bottom-up processes. Transparency is frequently confused with the term “absolute openness”.67 In the realm of planning and construction, however, transparent actions do not necessarily constitute “absolute openness”.68 Nonetheless, within the due course of planning, formal modes of public participation remain intended only during the course of concretized planning proposals. This relatively late involvement of formal public participation in combination with the complexity of projects creates an impression that plans are irreversible and, as a consequence, can lead to great dissatisfaction. Additionally, the concrete options to influence a planning or development project are not sufficiently clear, which either leads to an impression of “pseudo participation” without tangible consequences or to protests against the project as a whole, as well as to an insufficient use of legally provided participation options. There seems to be consensus regarding the necessity to “more systematically support the process of opinion building and decision making through transparent and inclusive citizen participation procedures”.69 Against this backdrop, individual German states and authorities have implemented a system of public accountability, which requires

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“information regarding a project to be made publicly accessible (under the political obligation of authorities to act) and for participation to be made possible for all interested parties”.70 Here, the focus is primarily on the role of the hinges, which are supposed to link formal and informal procedures.

Conclusion: Transparency as a Precondition for Openness With regard to urban development, it becomes apparent that transparency is a shared task, in which not only many participate, but which needs a communication process between as many stakeholders as possible that is based on widely accessible information. Enhancing transparency is one important factor for strengthening the acceptance of development and planning projects in the public eye. However, transparency is by no means sufficient for guaranteeing a successful implementation of these projects. The focus on participatory processes is concerned with enhancing transparency as a precondition for far-reaching and effective participation. Participation alone is not sufficient for generating the desired transparency; only through comparable degrees of information and feedback of the participatory process in the broader public will planning processes become more intelligible and therefore more transparent. Communication becomes an act of “navigating in the archipelago of publics”.71 Furthermore, participation also has to include segments of the population that are not immediately involved, because this is the only way in which the legitimation of the outcomes of planning can be strengthened in various planning fields. Thus, the shift in energy policy, for example, “assumes the participation of home owners as well as their acceptance of energy generation sites. Environmentally friendly mobility can only be achieved if attitudes and behaviours change on the whole”.72 Planning processes are increasingly characterized by alliances between top-down and bottom-up approaches. This trend poses the question of defining authority over topics and contents, as well as feedback between the different approaches to planning processes and implementation itself. If options of influence are no (more) stringently delineated from the outset, then they can—thus the claim—and they will be negotiated afresh for individual projects and their procedural steps from initiation, planning, up to implementation. The growing claim to transparency in this context is a reflection of the negotiation process which allows anyone

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to take a position that enables to influence the contents of the planned issue. The balances of power between participants are secured on the one hand through the position of sovereign rights of the administrations and the project sponsors’ investment role. On the other hand, the balance of both vis-a-vis the citizens, or groups of social agents, is based on the right to democratic control over decisions. If the latter also is institutionally secured to a certain degree by formal participatory processes, the increasing will to codetermining participation in informal and formal processes of governance is to be taken into account. Timely and sufficient access to information as a resource of power is a central condition for participation. Here, transparency does not only encompass the mere access to information, but also entitlement to openness of procedures or even outcomes of planning processes and their implementation. Transparency therefore has acquired an increasingly prominent role in the culture of planning that can hardly be overlooked. The extent to which access to information, the entitlement to openness of procedures or even outcomes of planning processes can be adequately accounted for is dependent, on the one hand, on the complexity of procedures, their external communication and, on the other hand, on the balance within the constellations of power inherent in the concrete governance settings of the respective planning procedures and projects.

Notes 1.  F. Brettschneider, “Erfolgsbedingungen für Kommunikation und Bürgerbeteiligung bei Großprojekten”, in M. Glaab, ed., Politik mit Bürgern – Politik für Bürger. Praxis und Perspektiven einer neuen Partizipationskultur (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2016), 219–238. 2. R. Roth, “Praxis und Perspektiven einer neuen Partizipationskultur”, in M. Glaab, ed., Politik mit Bürgern – Politik für Bürger, 367–388. 3.  D. Rucht, “Soziale Bewegungen als Signum demokratischer Bürgergesellschaft”, in C. Leggewie and R. Münch, eds., Politik im 21. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 321–336. 4.  See D. Sack, “Begriffe kritischer Stadtgeographie”, in B. Belina, M. Naumann, and A. Strüver, eds., Handbuch kritische Stadtgeographie (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2014), 92–99. 5. See also S. Haunss and P. Ullrich, “Viel Bewegung – wenig Forschung. Zuund Gegenstand sozialwissenschaftlicher Protest- und Bewegungsforschung in der Bundesrepublik”, Soziologie 42, no. 3 (2013), 290–304; RWE, Akzeptanz für Großprojekte: Eine Standortbestimmung für Chancen und

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Grenzen der Bürgerbeteiligung in Deutschland (Essen, 2012), accessed 18 February 2018, www.rwe.com/web/cms/mediablob/de/1716208/ data/1701408/4/rwe/ueber-rwe/akzeptanzstudie/Akzeptanzstudie-alsPDF-herunterladen.pdf. 6.  See C. Lamker, “Vom Plan zu multi-optionaler Planung – regionale Planung zwischen Akteuren, Informationen und Fragen”, in IWARU Institut für Wasser, Ressourcen, Umwelt, ed., Wasser in deiner Stadt von morgen: Wassertage Münster. Tagungsband Münster, 21. und 22. Februar 2017 (Münster: Fachhochschule, 2017), 13–19. 7.  S. A. Jansen, “Undurchsichtige Transparenz – Ein Manifest der Latenz”, in S. Jansen, E. Schröter, and N. Stehr, eds., Transparenz. Multidisziplinäre Durchsichten durch Phänomene und Theorien des Undurchsichtigen (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2010), 27. 8. C. Rowe and R. Slutzky, Transparency. With a Commentary by Bernhard Hoesli and an Introduction by Werner Oechslin (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1997), 23. 9.  See F. Koch, “Stadtplanung, Governance und Informalität: Vorschlag einer Typologie”, in O. Frey and F. Koch, eds., Die Zukunft der Europäischen Stadt (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2011), 191–207; Sack, “Begriffe kritischer Stadtgeographie”. 10.  Deutscher Bundestag, “Nachlassende Bindungskraft der Volksparteien. Ursachen und Handlungsmöglichkeiten”, Dokumentation WD 1 – 3000 – 020/16. (Berlin: Wissenschaftliche Dienste des Deutschen Bundestags, 2016); see also K. Winkler, Demokratische Praxis und Pragmatismus. Partizipation und Repräsentation auf Bundes- und Berliner Landesebene (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2017). 11. Roth, “Praxis und Perspektiven einer neuen Partizipationskultur”. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 179. 14. A. Scherr, “Randgruppen und Minderheiten”, in B. Schäfers and W. Zapf, eds., Handwörterbuch zur Gesellschaft Deutschlands (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 2001), 518–528. 15. Lamker, “Vom Plan zu multi-optionaler Planung”. 16. See A. Etzioni, Modern Organizations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1964). 17. T. Kern, Soziale Bewegungen. Ursachen, Wirkungen, Mechanismen (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), 128. 18. See for example D. Rucht and F. Neidhardt, “Soziale Bewegungen und kollektive Aktionen”, in H. Joas, ed., Lehrbuch der Soziologie (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2001), 533–556. 19. G. Albers, “Über den Wandel im Planungsverständnis”, in Raumplanung 61 (Dortmund: Dortmunder Vertrieb für Bau- und Planungsliteratur, 1993), 97–103.



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20. P. Healey, Complexity and Spatial Strategies: Towards a Relational Planning for Our Times (London: Routledge, 2007); T. Wiechmann, “Planning and Adaption—Strategising in Complex Contexts as Dealing with Social Paradoxes”, Paper presented at New Concepts and Approaches for Urban and regional Policy and Planning conference (Leuven, 2007). 21. G. Albers, “Über den Wandel im Planungsverständnis”. 22. A. Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1990). 23. See O. E. Williamson, The Mechanisms of Governance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 24.  H. Nuissl and J. Hilsberg, “‘Good Governance’ auf lokaler Ebene – Ansätze zur Konzeptualisierung und Operationalisierung”, UFZDiskussionspapiere, Department SUSOZ, 7/2009, 5. 25.  E. Löffler, “Governance – die neue Generation von Staats- und Verwaltungsmodernisierung”, Verwaltung und Management 4 (2001), 212. 26. See Sack, “Begriffe kritischer Stadtgeographie”. 27.  H. Sinning, “Urban Governance und Stadtentwicklung. Zur Rolle des Bürgers als aktiver Mitgestalter und Koproduzent”, vhw-Forum Wohneigentum, no. 1 (2006), 87–90. 28.  B. Geißel, “Zur (Un-)Möglichkeit von Local Governance mit Zivilgesellschaft: Konzepte und empirische Befunde”, in L. Schwab and H. Walk, eds., Local Governance – mehr Transparenz und Bürgernähe? (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007), 23–38. 29. See Schwalb and Walk, eds., Local Governance – mehr Transparenz und Bürgernähe? 30. A. C. Wolf and A. E. Zimmer, Lokale Engagementförderung. Kritik und Perspektiven (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2012). 31. K. Selle, Über Bürgerbeteiligung hinaus: Stadtentwicklung als Gemeinschaftsaufgabe? Analysen und Konzepte (Detmold: Rohn Verlag, 2013), 376. 32.  G. Schmidt-Eichstaedt, B. Weyrauch, and R. Zemke, Städtebaurecht. Einführung und Handbuch (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2014). 33. B. Streich, Subversive Stadtplanung (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2014), 137. 34.  See Deutscher Städtetag, Beteiligungskultur in der integrierten Stadtentwicklung. Arbeitspapier der Arbeitsgruppe Beteiligung des Deutschen Städtetages (Berlin and Cologne, 2013). 35. Bertelsmann Stiftung, Bertelsmann Change 2 (2011). 36. Bertelsmann Stiftung, Politik beleben, Bürger beteiligen, Charakteristika neuer Beteiligungsmodelle (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann-Stiftung, 2010). 37. Roth, “Praxis und Perspektiven einer neuen Partizipationskultur”, 373.

250  J. POLÍVKA AND C. REICHER 38. J. Engel, “Wien Hauptbahnhof – Wie Bürgerbeteiligung Planung und Bau eines Großprojektes begleiten kann”, in Glaab, ed., Politik mit Bürgern – Politik für Bürger, 244. 39. Ibid., 247. 40. K. Selle, “‘Particitainment’, oder: Beteiligen wir uns zu Tode? Wenn alle das Beste wollen und Bürgerbeteiligung dennoch zum Problem wird”, www.planung-neu-denken.de/content/view/213/41. 41. H. Rauterberg, Wir sind die Stadt! Urbanes Leben in der Digitalmoderne (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), 122. 42. Ibid. 43. H. Kubicek, B. Lippa, and A. Koop, Erfolgreich beteiligt? Nutzen und Erfolgskriterien internetgestützter Bürgerbeteiligung – Eine empirische Analyse von 12 Fallbeispielen (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 2011). 44.  C. Bieber and P. Bihr, Digitalisierung und die Smart City. Ressource und Barriere transformativer Urbanisierung. Expertise für das WBGUHauptgutachten “Der Umzug der Menschheit: Die transformative Kraft der Städte” (Berlin, 2016). 45. Streich, Subversive Stadtplanung, 135. 46. Ibid., 134. 47. C. Bieber and C. Thimm, Erregungskampagnen in Politik und Wirtschaft. Digitale Öffentlichkeit zwischen Candy- und Shitstorms (Bonn: Bonner Akademie für praktische Politik, 2015), accessed 11 February, 2018, www.bapp-bonn.de/forschung/er r egungskampagnen-in-politik-und-wirtschaft, 13. 48. Ibid., 14. 49. Jansen, “Undurchsichtige Transparenz – Ein Manifest der Latenz”, 38. 50. C. Leggewie, “Wie tot ist die Charta von Athen? Zur Unöffentlichkeit unserer Städte”, Informationen zur Raumentwicklung 4 (2015), 363. 51.  See Deutscher Städtetag, Beteiligungskultur in der integrierten Stadtentwicklung. 52. See S. Willinger, “Informeller Urbanismus. Einführung”, Informationen zur Raumentwicklung 2 (2014), I–VI. 53. Koch, “Stadtplanung, Governance und Informalität”. 54. C. Crouch, Post-democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). 55.  G. Helmke and S. Levitsky, “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda”, Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 4 (2004), 725–740. 56. See Koch, “Stadtplanung, Governance und Informalität”. 57. Willinger, “Informeller Urbanismus”. 58.  S. Willinger, “Bilder von Aneignung und Gebrauch – die soziale Produktion urbaner Freiräume”, Informationen zur Raumentwicklung 12 (2007).

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251

59. See Bertelsmann Stiftung, Koproduktion in Deutschland. Studie zur aktuellen Lage und den Potenzialen einer partnerschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit zwischen Kommunen und Bürgerinnen und Bürgern (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2015). 60. D. Brown, G. McGranahan, and D. Dodman, “Urban Informality and Building a More Inclusive, Resilient and Green Economy”, Working Paper, IIED London, 12 (2014). 61. F. S. Brand and K. Jax, “Focusing the Meaning(s) of Resilience: Resilience as a Descriptive Concept and a Boundary Object”, Ecology and Society 12, no. 1 (2007); B. H. Walker et al., “A Handful of Heuristics and Some Propositions for Understanding Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems”, Ecology and Society 11, no. 1 (2006). 62. Willinger, “Informeller Urbanismus”, III. 63.  I. Stoll-Haderer, “Grundbegriffe Stadtplanung und Bauleitplanung im Bild” (2011), accessed 19 March 2019, Available as power point presentation at: www.google.de/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source= web&cd=2&ved=0ahUKEwiHmoGG66_ZAhVILVAKHQwpC40 QFgg8MAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aalen.de%2Fgrundbegriffe-derstadtplanung-und-bauleitplanung.37011.25.htm&usg=AOvVaw1ZAc DoYoEXAk9ZiW-Y0mwf. 64. Ibid. 65. See Schmidt-Eichstaedt, Weyrauch and Zemke, Städtebaurecht. 66. P. Bourdieu, “Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital soziales Kapital”, in R. Kreckel, ed., Soziale Ungleichheiten (Göttingen: Schwartz, 1983) [Soziale Welt, Special issue 2], 183–198; A. Amin, “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity”, Environment and Planning 34, no. 6 (2002), 959–980; and O. Schnur, “Governance – ein neues Zauberwort für die Quartiersentwicklung?”, in M. Drilling and O. Schnur, eds., Governance der Quartiersentwicklung. Theoretische und praktische Zugänge zu neuen Steuerungsformen (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2009), 11–26. 67.  See also A. Möllering, “Politisches Handeln braucht Transparenz”, Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 4 (2013), 60. 68.  See also C. Leggewie, “Die dunklen Seiten der Transparenz und die Widersprüche der Transparenten”, Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 4 (2013), 65–70. 69. M. Glaab, “Hohe Erwartungen, ambivalente Erfahrungen? Zur Debatte um ‘mehr Bürgerbeteiligung’ in Wissenschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft”, in M. Glaab, ed., Politik mit Bürgern – Politik für Bürger, 21. 70. Staatsministerium Baden-Württemberg, Leitfaden für eine neue Planungskultur, Version 5.11.2013 (Stuttgart, 2013). 71. Selle, Über Bürgerbeteiligung hinaus, 13. 72. Ibid.

Index

A Acceptance, 3, 4, 165, 226, 227, 234, 239, 246 Access, accessibility, 2–4, 6, 9, 11, 13, 14, 48, 103, 107, 109, 120, 178, 188, 200, 201, 204, 206, 211, 220, 221, 227, 234, 240, 247 Account, 3, 43, 57, 77, 78, 80, 110, 247 Accountability, 2, 9, 19, 120 democratic, 18 of companies, 212, 214–216 of government, 122, 245 media, 126–129, 139 Achinstein, Peter, 77 Action, collective, 204 legal, 214 state, 12, 179, 220 theory, 44, 48 Activist, 127, 139, 162 civil rights, 185, 188, 190 social movement, 200, 201, 203– 206, 214–218, 220, 225, 228 urban, 240

Activism, 228 civil society, 213 Adam (biblical), 74, 76, 77, 84 Adams, Samuel, 106 Adelaide, 81 Adidas, 216 Administration, 2, 42, 46, 48, 107, 208, 237, 239, 240, 247 Adenauer, Konrad, 162 Africa, 17 Agamben, Giorgio, 160 Agent, 165, 174, 179, 180, 182, 183, 235, 237, 238, 240, 242, 245 double, 157, 159 Agitation campaign, 241 Ahoi-Bar Affair (of 1958), 161 Al-Bulushi, Yousuf, 204 Alien and Sedition Acts (of 1798), 107 Alienation, 9, 61, 112, 207 Allen, David S., 130, 132, 133, 135 Al-Qaeda, 64, 65 Alsace, 178 Ambiguity, 2, 40, 73, 191, 228 Ambivalence, 3, 5, 8, 19, 199, 202

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 S. Berger and D. Owetschkin (eds.), Contested Transparencies, Social Movements and the Public Sphere, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23949-7

253

254  Index Andrew, Christopher, 165 Antagonism, 60, 86 Anthropology, 77, 199, 207, 208 Anti-capitalism, 17 Anti-monarchical, 74, 75, 77 Anti-revolutionary, 107 Apple (Tech Company), 220 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report, 220 Apprenticeship, 105 Aquinas, Thomas, 57, 58, 60, 64, 66 Arcanum, arcane, 6 Aristocracy, aristocratic, 14, 99, 104 Aristotle, 7, 57 Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, 62 Association, 12, 76, 122, 186, 188, 212, 214 Audit, 212, 217, 219–221 Augustine, 55, 56, 69, 71, 78 Australia, Australian, 81 Austria, Austrian, 129 Authenticity, 70, 72 Authoritarian regime, 2, 130, 139 Authorities, political, 104, 155, 164, 182, 185, 191, 245, 246 Autonomy, 9, 44, 84, 85, 98, 203 professional, 135 B Baader, Andreas, 177 Bacon, Francis, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 64, 66 Bangladesh, 217, 223 Barker, Lex, 165 Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre, 60 Beauvoir, Simone de, 63 Behaviour, 11, 44, 73, 158, 161 Benevolism, 79 Benin, 17 Bennet, James Gordon, 110

Bentham, Jeremy, 10, 11, 14, 37, 38, 41, 42, 49, 122, 205 Berghoff, Friedrich Ernst (alias Bergh, Hendrik van), 160 Berlin, 177 East, 157, 159 Bersch, Katherine, 138 Bewegung 2. Juni (2nd June Movement), 178 Bible, 55 Big Bang, 63 Bill of Rights, 107 Black box, 121, 126, 128 Blackmail, 156, 178 Blog, blogging, 86, 124–126, 129, 137 Blumenberg, Hans, 36, 43, 46 Bond, James, 165 Border, 4–6, 14, 43, 45 Bortree, Denise Sevick, 203 Böse, Ernst Wilfried, 177, 187 Boston, 101, 102, 104, 110 Bourgeoisie, bourgeois, 9, 12, 14, 16, 100 Brain reading, 65 Branch, executive, judicial, 111 Brandt, Willy, 164 Brennilis/Monts d’Arrée, nuclear reactor, 178 Brin, David, 205 Brittany, Breton, separatist, terrorist, 178 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 137 Brussels, 79 Bulgaria, Bulgarian, 129, 153 Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), 154–166, 174, 176, 178– 181, 183, 184, 188, 189, 191 Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), 157, 158, 161, 162, 165 Bundestag (German Parliament), 176, 186

Index

Bureaucracy, 14 Burgundius of Pisa, 57 C Calhoun, Craig, 15 California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, 214 Camouflage, 72, 126, 203 Campbell, John, 102, 104 Capital, financial, 65, 222, 234 social, 228, 244 Capitalism, capitalist, 9, 16, 71 defeat of, 17 new spirit of, 13 Casanova, 79 Censorship, 8, 11, 46–49, 70, 73, 74, 77, 207 CERN (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire), 63 Chancellor, German, 162, 163, 185, 189 Charles I, 75 Child labour, 220 Chorweiler (district of Cologne), 158 Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), 177, 184 Church, 55, 58 City, 238, 240 Civil Society Coalition on Garment Industry Transparency, 216 Clarity, 2, 9, 136, 226, 235 Class, 37, 101 conflict, 9 lower, 14 middle, 109–111, 164 ruling, 15 social, 14, 99 war, 17 Clean Clothes Campaign, 216 Clement, Wolfgang, 45 CNN, 128 Code, 12, 181, 245

  255

Clarendon, 73 ethical, 105, 106 journalistic, 122 of ethics, 123, 129, 136 Co-determination, 221 Coetzee, John Maxwell, 80, 81, 84 Cold War, 18, 156, 161, 165 Cologne, 158, 161, 176 Colonialism, 204 Committee, 38, 162 Foxconn Global Social and Environmental Responsibility, 220 on Internal Affairs, 176, 189 parliamentary, 40 Common good, 102, 104, 110 Communication, 4–6, 9, 10, 15, 60, 61, 71, 72, 80, 97–101, 103–105, 109, 111, 112, 124, 126, 128, 133, 134, 137, 139, 155, 181, 191, 203, 220, 236, 238–241, 246, 247 mass, 121 monitoring, 155, 179 strategy, 181, 183, 185 studies, 5, 121, 138 Communism, communist, 15, 16, 164, 165, 174, 188 Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 187, 189 Community, 5, 110, 135, 156, 157, 204 Company, 2, 16, 17, 62–65, 109, 120, 180, 212–220, 222–227 Competition, competitive, 108, 109, 134, 219, 235 economic, 99 Complexity, 2, 8, 72 social, 154, 159, 221, 222 Concealment, 2, 5, 17, 163 Conditions, 9, 14, 36, 40, 42, 43, 45, 72, 73, 101, 111, 130, 138, 212, 224

256  Index environmental, 17 factory, 219, 221, 223, 228 health and safety, 220 social, 213, 214, 221 working, 16, 217, 220, 227, 244 Confederation of German Employers’ Associations, 186 Confession, 70, 86 Confidential Human Sources (CHS), 155 Conflict, 135, 153, 161, 225, 238 class, 9 context-specific, 78, 220 religious, 74 social, 14 Conformity, 7, 9, 49, 235 Congress, 64 Taiwanese, 200, 202, 207 United States, 122 Consciousness, 81, 104, 187, 245 Conspiracy, conspirational, 16, 166, 175, 179, 180, 188 Constitution, constitutional, 85, 99, 107, 122, 154–158, 160–164, 166, 174, 181, 184–190 Consumer, 110, 134, 214, 219, 221 Contat, Michel, 59 Control, 37, 77, 102, 160, 179, 182, 202, 211–218, 226, 244 corporate, 212, 215, 217, 226 democratic, 4, 162, 174, 184, 190, 212–214, 216, 226, 247 parliamentary, 161, 162 property, 62 social, 2 state, 14 Copyright, 106 Correspondent, 48, 105 Corruption, 2, 13, 65, 102, 214, 242 Costello, Elisabeth, 81–84 Countermeasure, preventative, 156 Counterplay, 156

Court, 12, 179, 186, 187 Creation, 240, 242 of autonomous movement, 203 God’s, 56 of knowledge, 221 of news, 124 of transparency, 70–73, 80, 86, 212, 218, 226 Credibility, journalistic, 119, 120, 127, 130, 132 Criminal, 38, 64, 188 Critical Transparency Studies, 7, 15 Croatia, Croatian, 81 Cromwell, Oliver, 75, 77 Crouch, Colin, 200 Cultural Studies, 5, 6 Culture, 99, 156–159 democratic, 13 of disclosure, 13 of science, 111 of the masses, 112 of transparency, 129, 153 political, 102, 106, 110, 160 Western, 1 Cyberspace. See internet Cyprus, Cyprian, 129 D David (biblical), 189 Davidson, Kathy, 108 De Haan, Yael, 127 Debate, 3, 13, 15, 17, 70, 71, 80, 107, 120, 122, 126, 127, 133, 134, 136–139, 163, 174, 218, 225, 237, 239, 241 philosophical, 215 political, 70, 190 public, 1, 47, 108, 173, 183, 185, 186, 189, 208, 226 scientific, 211 Deception, 132, 154, 155

Index

Decision, public policy, 212, 215, 219, 224 Decision-making, political, 4, 12, 15, 122, 125, 156, 180, 200, 223, 226, 227, 239–241, 243 Democracy, democratic direct, 11, 200 German, 166 liberal, 130, 153, 154, 160, 174 militant, 188 participatory, 17, 202 representative, 97, 200, 239 Western, 153, 159, 173, 190 Democratization, democratizing, 15, 17, 18, 174, 204, 205, 206, 213 Department, 156–158, 165 Dependency, 6, 19, 139 Depoliticization, 221 Deputy, 15, 137 Descartes, René, 55, 69 Despot, despotism, 100, 111 Deutscher Herbst. See German Autumn Development, 4, 7, 12, 15, 17, 98–100, 105, 109, 126, 163, 165, 178, 238, 239, 244–246 urban, 233– 237, 239, 241–244, 246 Dewey, John, 99 Diaphaneity, diaphanous, 7, 8, 57, 58 Dictatorship, 49, 73, 160 Digitalization, 160, 213, 228, 240, 241 DigitalGlobe, 62 Directive, 204, 214, 218, 224, 225, 236 Dirnhofer, Karl, 181, 186, 189 Discipline, disciplinary, 1, 3, 5–7, 49, 86, 123, 138 Disclosure, 2, 13, 14, 37, 42, 123, 125, 127, 128, 135, 136, 158, 174, 175, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187, 214, 216, 217, 219, 222

  257

Discourse, 3, 7, 9, 13, 15, 17–19, 59, 70, 100, 102–104, 128, 130, 138, 139, 200, 208, 222, 226, 235, 236, 241 public, 103, 104, 119, 121–123, 181, 201, 204 rational (enlightened, professional), 104, 135 scholastic, scientific, 1, 57, 202 Discrimination, 18, 224 Discursivity, 103 Distance, 62, 98, 217, 218, 227 DiStaso, Marcia W., 203 Distrust, 11, 132, 176, 179, 185, 234 Docherty, Thomas, 69, 70 Dodd-Frank Act (USA), 214 Dogma, 55 Donation, 41, 201 Don Juan, 79 Dual-track decision (of NATO), 17 Dysfunction, dysfunctional, 4, 7, 219 E Eco, Umberto, 84 Ecology, ecological, 127, 213, 214, 221, 222, 243, 244 Economy, economic, 2, 4, 13, 14–16, 37, 45, 60, 65, 101, 102, 108, 110, 111, 121, 133, 134, 136, 138, 212, 213, 216, 222, 224, 237, 241, 244 Écriture automatique, 61 Eden, 76 Editor, editorial, 105, 120, 123–125, 127–129, 132, 135, 137, 138, 188 Education, 2, 13, 15, 104, 105 Efficiency, efficient, 4, 8, 13, 14, 41, 138, 212, 240 Eggers, Dave, 63, 64 Elite, one per cent, 104, 164, 201, 205, 241, 242

258  Index economic, 16 ruling, 16 revolutionary, 112 traditional, 111 Emperor, German, 16 Empiricism, empirical, 55, 56, 86, 100, 128, 213, 215, 218, 225 Employer, 15, 186 England, English, 8, 43, 74, 75, 77–79, 98, 101–103, 106, 188 Enlightenment, 9, 10, 12, 14, 123, 136, 217 Entebbe (Uganda), 177 Environment, environmental, 13, 111, 120, 122, 126, 134, 139, 182, 213, 214, 218–220, 225, 226, 236, 241–243, 245, 246 protection, 13, 18, 244 Espionage, 156, 165, 179 Estate, 9, 119, 133 Estonia, 129 Ethics, ethical, 18, 47, 81, 84, 127, 133, 137, 203, 221, 238 journalism, 105, 121–124, 133, 135, 136 media, 106, 129, 133, 134 of transparency, 13, 130, 137, 203 Ethos, 70, 72 Europe, European, 12, 17, 18, 122, 127–129, 177, 190, 200, 213, 217, 224, 225, 242, 243 European Union, 214, 218, 224, 225, 131 European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), 217 Eve (biblical), 74, 77 Evers, Huub, 125 Evidence, 5, 37, 45, 70, 106, 128, 174, 179, 186, 188, 208, 213 Executive, 16, 111, 154, 163 Expansion, 13, 46, 48, 98, 99, 100, 126

Experiment, 61, 80, 132, 207, 242 Extremist, 119, 188 F Facebook, 63, 120, 127, 137, 203 Fact, 72, 84, 106, 107, 110, 111, 131, 156, 162, 178, 180, 221, 224 alternative, 208 Fair Labour Association (FLA), 220 Fake news, 119, 134, 137, 208 Fanon, Frantz, 204 Faust, Hans Georg, 181, 186, 189 Federal Constitutional Court, 187 Federal Data Protection Act (of 1977), 192 Federal Intelligence Service. See Bundesnachrichtendienst Federal Minister of Justice, 189 Federal Minister for Economic Affairs, 45 Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. See Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz Federal Press Conference, 189 Federal Press Office, 165 Federalists, 107 Felfe, Heinz, 157, 158 Felicity, 40, 41, 43, 45 Feminization, 108 Fenno, John, 107 Fessenheim nuclear power plant, 178 Fiction, fictional, 72, 73, 80–86, 155 Fielding, Henry, 84 Finland, 13, 129–132 Flaubert, Gustave, 60 Fleming, Ian, 165 Foucault, Michel, 36, 39, 41, 70, 123 Foxconn, 220 Fox, Jonathan, 127 France, French, 8, 12, 13, 59, 78, 81, 131, 177, 178, 188

Index

Frankfurt (am Main), 177, 180, 188, 192 Franklin, Benjamin, 101–104 Franklin, James, 102 Free Democratic Party (FDP), 176 Freedom, 2, 3, 49, 85, 102, 165, 173, 185, 190–192, 212 of association, 12 of expression, 12 of information, 17, 37, 42, 138 of the press, 11, 12, 17, 46, 86, 102, 103, 106, 107, 130, 135, 189 Freneau, Philip, 107 Frevert, Ute, 154, 167 Fromm, Heinz, 163 Front de libération de la Bretagne, 178 Fukushima, 190 Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI), 64, 65 Future, 12, 39, 40, 43, 60, 63, 76, 119, 154, 160, 183 G Gaarder, Jostein, 63 Galilei, Galileo, 55 Geiges, Lars, 205 Gender, 78, 108, 224 Generativity, 7 Genet, Jean, 60 Geneva, 63 Genocide, 2 Germany, German, 16, 155, 160 Autumn, 174, 186 Consortium of Public Service Broadcasters, 136 Democratic Republic (GDR), 157, 161, 183 Federal Republic of, 13, 14, 41, 46, 129, 137, 154, 159, 162–166, 174, 176–178, 188, 190, 213, 244

  259

Ministry of the Interior, 162, 163, 182, 183, 186 Office for the Protection of the Constitution. See Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz Parliament. See Bundestag Press Council, 136 German News Agency (DPA), 183 Germanwatch (NGO), 213 Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), 158–160 Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), 214 God, 6, 55–57, 59, 61–63, 74, 75, 132 Google Earth, 63, 69, 120, 137 Goliath, 189 Gordon, Thomas, 103 Governance, 4, 12, 14, 127, 216, 234, 235, 240, 245 corporate, 13, 19, 212–215, 218, 223, 227 data-smart, 240 processes of, 15, 235, 244, 247 structures, 15, 17, 18 supply chain, 219 synergetic, 10, 214 transnational, 213, 217, 227 urban, 237, 238, 242 Government, governmental, 8, 11, 13–17, 45, 62, 65, 107, 120, 125, 132, 138, 154, 159, 161– 163, 174, 175, 181, 183–187, 190, 191, 202, 205, 212, 245 accountability of, 122 British, 102, 106, 165 bureaucracy, 234 inspector, 219 parliamentary, 14 surveillance, 201 virtuous, 12 Greece, Greek, 57, 129, 131, 132, 136

260  Index Gregor the Great, 58 Grievance, 73, 223 societal, 120 Groenhart, Harmen, 125 Guillaume, Günter, 183 H Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 122 Habit, 105, 136, 188 Hamburg, 161 Hamilton, Alexander, 111, 112 Han, Byung-Chul, 205, 206 Harris Corp., 62 Harris, Benjamin, 101, 102 Hasler, Felix, 65 Haynes, Hohn-Dylan, 65 Heald, David, 138 Health, 2, 13, 180, 182, 207, 208, 220, 223, 244 Hermeticism, 71, 86 Higgs boson, 56 Hill, Christopher, 73 Hinson, Michelle Drifka, 203 Historian, 4, 75, 86 History, 13, 15, 19, 56, 63, 65, 81, 83, 86, 122, 153, 161, 163, 174, 180, 186 cultural, 4, 19, 99, 100 intelligence, 180 media, 4 of the public sphere, 4, 112 social movement, 15 Hockerts, Hans Günter, 192 Holland, Mae, 63 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr., 107 Holzner, Burkart and Leslie, 18 Horn, Eva, 159, 164, 176, 179 Hornisher, Inge, 177 Human Rights Watch, 216 Hungary, 132

Hutchins Commission (Commission on Freedom of the Press), 122 Huxley, Aldous, 64 I Ideal, 1, 10–13, 15, 35, 61, 70, 104, 127, 130, 135, 136, 173, 214 democratic, 15, 212 normative, 7, 12 Identity, 9, 63, 100, 104, 158 Ideology, 14, 19, 63–66, 102, 174, 175 Illusionism, 81 anti-, 81, 84 Improvement, 10, 11, 101 Independence, 101, 106, 109 American, 98 movement, 106 of the press, 135 Individual, 2, 3, 5, 9, 11–13, 37, 39, 42, 65, 120, 132, 156, 161, 163, 165, 173, 176, 179, 186, 190, 236 private, 107, 136 protection of the, 12 Individualism, possessive, 108 Indo-Pacific, 62–63 IndustriAll Global Union, 216 Industry, 238 arms, 17 capitalist, 16 cultural, 99 garment, 216, 222 meat-packing, 16, 72 media, 122 nuclear, 179, 182, 188, 190 Indymedia, 203 Inequality, social, 111, 122 Inferability, 138 Influencer, social media, 126

Index

Information, 8, 9, 11–14, 17, 38, 40, 42, 48, 62, 98, 99, 101, 102, 105, 121–123, 125, 127–134, 137, 138, 154–157, 161, 162, 176, 180, 181, 185, 187, 189, 191, 192, 200, 204, 208, 212– 216, 218–227, 235, 239–241, 245–247 access, 2 asymmetries, 4, 218, 222 dissemination of, 102, 109 ecological, 221 manipulation, 138, 218 paradox, 134 social, 22 stream of, 120 Informality, 242–245 Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (IFG, German Freedom of Information Act), 37 Instability, 9, 36, 43–44, 48, 49, 206 Institution, institutional, 2, 4, 5, 37–39, 132, 153, 161, 163, 165, 166, 205, 207, 211, 213, 234, 237, 238, 241 public, 120, 163 Institutionalization, 12, 123, 127, 154, 156, 157, 161, 203 Intellectual, 4, 10, 102, 103, 111 Intelligence, 101, 153–166, 173–192 agency, 153–157, 159–162, 174, 176–178, 180, 188, 192 governmental, 175 human, 155 service, 154–157, 160–163, 165, 166, 173, 180, 182–185, 188, 191 Interatom company, 180 Interests, 12, 14, 15, 37, 40, 41, 62, 63, 78, 99, 102, 104, 110, 128, 133, 135, 136, 234, 236 capital, 182, 222

  261

commercial, 106, 203, 219 International Organization of Standardization (ISO), 214 International Trade Union Confederation (UNI), 216 Internet, 17, 63, 126, 134, 204 Intransparency, 17, 70–73, 80, 85, 86, 160, 201 Invisibility, invisible, 11, 43–45, 48, 49, 59, 64, 179, 206, 222, 226, 228 Involvement, civic, 160, 221, 225, 236, 238, 239, 242, 243, 245 Iser, Wolfgang, 72, 85 Israel, Israeli, 177 Italy, Italian, 16, 129, 132, 160 J Jablonski, Steven, 75 John, Otto, 157, 159, 161, 163 Journalism, journalists, 12, 16, 17, 19, 110, 111, 119–139, 166, 181, 182, 186, 187, 189, 201, 214 broadcast, 126 constructive, 134 ethical, 121 interdependency of, 139 investigative, 16, 120, 185 news, 110 participatory, 126 partisan, 101, 107, 110 practice, 121, 139 print, 126, 132 profession, professional, 105 quality, 119, 120, 129 sensationalist, 111 slow, 134 village, 105 Joyce, Simon, 228 Jungk, Robert, 182, 183

262  Index K Kalkar, 178 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 66 Karlsson, Michael, 125 Kautsky, Karl, 15, 16 Keeble, Neil, 73 Kepler, Johannes, 55 King, Ed, 204 Kingship, 76 Klein, Hans-Joachim, 176–178, 187 Klingelpütz Affair (of 1971), 161 Knowledge, 3, 5, 6, 9–11, 41, 55, 64, 70, 72, 73, 85, 86, 98–100, 111, 124, 175–177, 179, 180, 183, 188, 191, 213, 215, 216, 218, 220–228, 234, 241 alternative, 220, 223 production, 213, 215, 220, 222, 224–226 Korčula (Island in Croatia), 177 Korea, South, 132 Korruhn, Wolfgang, 187, 189 Kraftwerk Union (power plant union, KWU), 180 Krastev, Ivan, 153, 163 Kreimer, Seth F., 204, 205 Krupp, Friedrich Alfred, 16 Kubicek, Herbert, 240 L Langleben, Daniel, 65 Language, 3, 8, 44, 60, 61, 71, 75, 85 Latour, Bruno, 72 Law, 9, 10, 12, 19, 39, 41, 46, 47, 56, 76, 107, 138, 161, 176, 177, 222, 234, 235, 239, 244 state, 214 Lawyer, 106, 177, 186 Leak (information), 156, 181, 182, 186 Leggewie, Claus, 163, 241

Legislation, 73, 106 Legitimacy, legitimization, legitimating, 8, 10, 12, 14, 39, 100, 103, 104, 107, 120, 122, 133, 162, 173, 175, 182, 190, 202, 212, 213, 215, 219, 220, 223, 225–227, 239, 240, 242, 246 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 55 Lenin, Vladimir I., 15 Leveson, Brian (Lord Justice), 120 Liberal, 12, 15, 78, 130, 153, 154, 159, 160, 174, 176, 182, 184, 185 Liberty, 59, 77, 100, 106 Literacy, rate, 98, 105 Literary Studies, 3, 19, 69, 70, 72, 86 Literature, literary, 3, 7, 18, 59, 63, 69–72, 78, 80, 85, 86, 102, 220 Lobby, 120 Locke, John, 99, 103 Lorenz, Peter, 177, 178 Luhmann, Niklas, 158 Luxembourg, Luxembourgian, 129 M Maihofer, Werner, 176–178, 181–186, 189, 191 Malefactor, 37 Malta, Maltese, 129 Manager, nuclear, 174, 176, 177, 180, 186–188, 190, 191 Manstein, Field Marshall Erich von, 159 Mapping, 62, 122 Maquila Solidarity Network, 216 Market, 13, 14, 17, 101, 108–111, 139, 213, 215, 219, 224, 235 competitive, 109, 235 financial, 13, 14 media, 17 Marketization, 213, 215, 216, 218, 226

Index

Markovitz, Benjamin, 80 Marxism, 17 Material, 57, 124, 132, 180, 188 compromising, 40, 156, 159 Materialism, 78 Media, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14–19, 59, 65, 86, 97, 101, 105, 107, 155, 160, 161, 165, 177, 181–187, 191 accountability, 123, 126–129 alternative, 122 criticism, 127, 130 digital, 17, 204 history, 4 industry, 122 mainstream, 122, 200, 201 mass, 97, 119 news, 119–121, 126, 127, 130, 131, 134, 135, 137–139, 203 online, 71, 124, 202, 204 organization, 120, 122, 123, 125, 131–134 practitioner, 124, 125 self-regulation, 127 social, 63, 120, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 134, 203–205, 220, 236 system, 122, 123, 129, 130, 133, 138 technology, 12 transparency, 17, 121–125, 128, 130, 133, 136–139 workers, 133 Mediation, mediator, 5, 7, 100, 103 Medium, 7, 57, 58, 66, 70, 72, 97, 108 mass, 105, 109 Meier, Klaus, 125, 132 Meier, Richard, 176, 178, 183, 184, 189 Meinhof, Ulrike, 178 Metafiction, 80, 81, 84–86 Michener, Greg, 138

  263

Middle Ages, 8, 56 Militarization, 63 Military Counter Intelligence (Militärischer Abschirmdienst, MAD), 161 Military Intelligence, Section 5 (MI5), Section 6 (MI6), 165 Milton, John, 73–77, 80 Minister, interior, 163, 176, 182–186 Misinformation, 132, 156 Misrule, 11 Mistrust, 153–166 culture of, 155–159, 163 institutional, 163–166 internal (horizontal), 154 public (vertical), 154, 159–163, 165, 183 Modern Slavery Act (UK law), 214 Modernity, 9, 64, 97, 217, 219 Modernization, 65, 109 cultural, 111 of society, 98 Monarchy, monarch, 74–77 Monogamy, 79 Moore, Phoebe V., 228 Morality, 10, 49, 108 bourgeois, 16 Movement, anti-nuclear, 182, 190 civil rights, 174 cooperative, 15 environmental, 18 feminist, 108 insurgent, 205 labour, 15–17, 110 Occupy. See Occupy radical, 16 2nd June, 177 social. See social movement student, 164 transparency, 18, 49, 200 urban, 18, 240 women’s, 18

264  Index Mozambique, 17 Muckraker, 16 Multinational corporation (MNC), 213–216, 218, 222 Munich, 174 Münkler, Herfried, 160 N Narrative, 60, 72, 81, 84, 187, 189, 203–206 Narr, Wolf-Dieter, 188 Nation, 77, 104, 105, 214 National Security Agency (NSA), 162 National Socialism, National Socialist, Nazi, 154, 158–160, 163, 164, 189 Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (NSU), 163 Nemesios of Emesa, 57 Neoliberalism, neoliberal, 13, 236, 237 market economy. See liberal Network, 15, 101, 121, 126, 205, 213, 216, 220, 221, 223, 241, 244 activist, 216, 220, 223, 228 biographical, 158, 159, 174 production, 211–215, 217–227 terrorist, 177, 191 transnational, 15, 223, 227 Network of labour activism (NOLA), 223 New England, 98 New Left, 18, 164, 174 New York, 101, 109, 110, 201 News, 17, 36, 97, 98, 100–105, 108–111, 119–121, 124–126, 128–139, 155, 159, 162, 166, 174, 175, 181, 183–185, 188, 203 coverage, 124, 136, 175 fake, 119, 134, 208 online, 126, 131

outlet, 127 room, 121, 123–125, 128–130, 135, 137, 138 story, 123, 125, 135 News of the World phone-hacking scandal, 120 Newspapers. See press Newsroom. See news Newton, Isaac, Newtonian, 8, 55 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 59 Nike, 216 Nimrod, 76 Nolin, Jan, 18 Nollau, Günter, 183 Non-governmental organizations (NGO), 2, 120, 205, 212–214 Norm, normative, 2–5, 7, 8, 10–14, 18, 35, 46, 71, 73, 84, 86, 99, 104, 121, 122, 133–135, 160, 182, 190, 202–204, 211, 214, 217, 222, 223, 225, 240 North-Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 17 North Rhine-Westphalia, 178 Norway, Norwegian, 129 Nuremberg, trials, 159 O Objectivity, 101, 110, 126, 130, 135, 136 Observation, 55, 62, 70, 78, 155, 179, 180, 182, 188, 191, 212 Occupy, 83 Germany, 205 movement, 199–208 New York City, 201 Taiwan, 205–207 Wall Street, 201 Wall Street Transparency and Accountability Act, 201, 202 Olympic Summer Games, Munich 1972, 174

Index

Ombudsman, 123, 129, 162 Openness, 2, 3, 9, 121, 124, 125, 132, 138, 159, 207, 226, 234, 237, 239, 241, 245, 247 Operation, 154, 174, 181, 181–184, 202 Opinion, 4, 11, 38, 46, 48, 99, 186, 188, 235, 242, 245 Opportunism, 79 Order, 2, 4, 5, 9–11, 13, 16–18, 36, 38, 39, 59, 72, 77, 84, 85, 99, 100, 104, 111, 154, 162, 166, 174, 175, 178, 182, 185, 188 Organization, organizational, 1, 2, 4, 37, 39, 71, 99, 106, 108, 120, 121, 125, 132, 133, 136, 139, 154–160, 179, 180, 187, 203, 205, 212, 213, 216–218, 235, 236, 241 lobby, 120 labour rights, 221 media, 120–123, 125, 126, 128, 131, 133–135, 139, 203 private, 120 self-, 97, 235 terrorist, 177 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 176, 177 Orwell, George, 64 Overath-Marialinden (near Cologne), 176, 181 Ownership, 123, 129 P Pain, 11, 64, 82 Pamphlet, 104, 105 Panopticon, panoptic, 11, 41, 205 Panvision, 61, 62 Paper, 42, 101, 104, 106, 109 Paradigm, 41, 78, 121, 124, 135, 174, 204

  265

Parain, Brice, 60, 61 Parliament, parliamentary, 12, 14, 15, 40, 153, 161, 162, 184 Control Commission, 162 Control Panel, 162 Panel of Ombudsmen, 162 Participation, participatory, 2, 4, 8, 19, 64, 100, 120, 126, 127, 199, 218, 221, 234–241, 243–247 political, 199, 200, 202–204 Particitainment, 240 Party, 37, 45, 104, 107, 108, 161, 203 communist, 16, 187 political, 162, 176, 177 Past, 2, 13, 19, 59, 60, 84, 127, 131, 134, 159, 160, 162, 207, 236, 238, 239 Patriarchal structures, 18 Payment system, 63 Pennsylvania, 65 Performance, 4, 7, 119, 130, 134, 175, 184, 220, 222 Period, 70, 71, 73, 101, 105, 107, 108, 126, 158, 222 colonial, 99–103, 105, 106, 108 of transformation, 105, 106 revolutionary, 106 Person, 11, 40, 45, 46, 72, 81, 82, 123, 125, 136, 137, 155, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163, 177, 180, 185, 187, 202, 236, 241 Personalization, 98, 186 Petition, public, 185, 237, 239 Phenomenon, 6, 7, 191, 100, 138, 139, 158, 174, 179, 238 Philadelphia, 101, 110 Philosophy, philosopher, 6, 10, 19, 57, 59, 60, 64, 69, 122, 123, 160, 177, 217 Plagiarism, 106 Planning, 177, 233–247

266  Index urban, 18, 19, 233–235, 238, 241, 244 Plato, 44, 78 Pleasure, 11, 158 Plurality, pluralization, 98, 103, 104, 237 Poland, 129 Polarization, 106, 107 Police, 37, 42, 111, 182 thought, 164 Politics, political, 1–3, 8–18, 37, 38, 41, 59–61, 61, 64, 66, 70, 72–78, 80, 97–103, 105–111, 120–123, 129, 132, 137, 139, 153, 154, 156, 159–166, 173–176, 178–180, 212, 213, 215–219, 221–228, 234, 235, 237–241, 246 action, 10 authorities. See authority conflict, 212 culture. See culture democratically egalitarian, 110 issue, 4, 15 private transnational transparency, 218 sciences, 4, 37, 70, 86, 138, 153, 160 system, 4, 132, 139 Politicization, 105, 208, 214, 216, 221 Pool, Tim, 201 Populist, 119 Post-democracy, 242 Postmodernism, postmodern, 80, 81, 85 Post-truth-era, 119 Power, 2, 5, 6, 9, 14, 16, 17, 36, 39, 44, 49, 58, 64, 66, 80, 83–85, 100, 102, 133, 154, 160, 191, 199, 204, 206, 212, 213, 216, 218, 222, 223, 228, 234, 235, 238, 242, 247

abuse of, 120 corporate, 212, 215, 216, 218, 226 nuclear, 178, 182, 183, 188, 190 political, 12, 14, 107 relation, 6, 39, 41, 42, 44, 49, 206 state, 10, 14, 214 Prantl, Heribert, 166 Predilection, 136 Press, 12, 98–103, 105–109, 111, 120, 122, 131, 137, 160, 162, 165, 188 American, 97, 98, 101, 104, 105, 110 boulevard, 184 colonial, 101–104 council, 127, 136 daily, 105, 109 flatbed printing, 109 freedom of the. See freedom lying, 119 mass, 110 partisan, 107, 110 penny, 101, 109–111 radical, 16 social democratic, 16 trade union, 16 Principal-agent model, 4, 138 Principles on the Question of Anticonstitutional Forces in the Public Service. See radicals Printer, 101–103, 105, 106 Prison, prisoner, 11, 41, 49, 122, 161, 171, 178 Privacy, 2–4, 7, 12, 64, 120, 173, 175, 182, 185, 189, 190, 192, 212 Private, 4, 12, 35, 44, 45, 49, 62, 100, 102, 107, 120, 124, 136, 182, 187, 191, 206, 214, 215, 218, 219, 222–225, 237 enterprise, 35 sphere, 12, 100

Index

Profession, professionalism, professional, 99, 101, 105, 106, 110, 111, 120, 122–125, 130–132, 135, 136, 139, 159, 161, 175, 204 Professionalization, professionalizing, 101, 105 Profit, maximization, 14, 16, 101, 212, 215, 219, 222, 224, 226 Progress, 10, 16, 56, 101, 106, 183, 220 Prohibition, 10, 46, 47 Propaganda, 106 Prosecution, 107, 188 allied, 159 Protest, 18, 174, 182, 200–202, 233–236, 238, 239, 245, 247 Prudentius, 78 Public agency, 35, 217 building, 11 debate, 1, 47, 108, 121, 173, 183, 185, 186, 189, 208, 226 eye, 35, 246 law, 10 office, 10, 11, 66 Public opinion tribunal, 11 Public-private partnership, 224 Publicity, 4, 6, 9–12, 14, 37 Puritan, 77–78 Q Quantum, 6, 56 QuickBird 2 (satellite), 62 R Radicalism, republican, 77 Radicals Decree (FRG, 1972), 154, 164, 187 Ramsay, David, 98 Rana Plaza, 223

  267

Raphael (biblical), 74 Rayment, Paul, 81–83 Realism, 81 Reality, 7, 59, 61, 84–86, 103 Reason, 10, 77, 100 Recognition, 78, 99 face, voice, 202 Reese, Stephen D., 125 Referendum, 127, 239 Reimer, Julian, 125, 132, 133 Relation, relationship power, 6, 39, 41, 42, 44, 49, 206 public, 165, 215 social, 13, 14 Report, political, 175 public, 220, 221 labour market, 45, 46 Reporter, 110, 123, 128 Representation, representational, 5, 38, 41, 74, 85, 86, 199, 200, 222 Representative, 37, 47, 70, 97, 111, 162, 191, 200, 225, 234, 239, 243 Republicanism, republican, republicans, 10, 13, 73, 75, 77, 100, 102, 103, 106, 107 Resistance, 40, 98, 106, 135, 159, 202, 204, 205, 218, 243 Restoration, 73, 76 Reuters Institute, 131 Revelation, 6, 72, 78, 80, 191 Book of, 56 Revolution, revolutionary, 12–17, 55, 65, 74–77, 98, 99, 101, 104– 109, 111, 112 American, 98, 101, 105, 106 Bolshevik, 15 Central European (of 1848/1849), 12 digital, 17, 107 English, 77 French (of 1789), 12

268  Index market, 108 of communication, 111 scientific, 55 transport, 109 Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionäre Zellen, RZ), 177 Right, rights, 4, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 37, 44, 47, 61, 100, 102, 106, 107, 111, 162, 173–175, 181, 182, 185, 187–192, 214–218, 220–222, 225, 241, 243, 247 civil, 106, 174, 175, 181, 182, 185, 188–191 human, 4, 10, 12, 216 labour, 214, 215, 220, 221, 225 political, 15 Robespierre, Maximilien, 49 Romania, 129 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 179 Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, RAF), 174 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 10, 11, 44, 49, 60 Royalist, 75, 76 Rule, rules, 37, 49, 66, 75, 100, 129, 138, 158, 161, 186, 200, 207, 240, 241 colonial, 98 Ruler, 9, 11, 138 S Samjatin, Yevgeny, 64 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 59–61, 63, 177 Satan, 74–76 Scandal, 160, 163, 174, 175, 182– 187, 190 media, 161, 165, 181, 184 public, 159, 186, 191 social, 16 Schleyer, Hanns Martin, 186 Schmidt, Eric (CEO of Google), 63

Schmidt, Helmut, 185, 189 Schrübber, Hubert, 158 Schutzstaffel (SS), 158, 159 Schweizerische Radio- und Fernsehgesellschaft (SRG), 127 Sciences, 55, 56, 64, 66, 111 natural, 8, 55 political, 4, 37, 70, 86, 138, 153, 160, 188 social, 4, 237 Scientist, 57, 179, 185, 190–192 neuro-, 61, 65 nuclear, 174, 176, 178, 187 Scott, James, 180 Secrecy, 2–7, 9, 132, 137, 162, 202, 225 Secret Service, 19, 62, 160, 161, 179, 181, 184, 186, 191 Sector, 155, 223, 242–244 governmental, 13 finance, 2 Secularization, 9 Security, 3, 13, 35, 46, 62, 63, 155–158, 173–183, 185, 186, 190–192, 208 domestic, 160, 178, 186 paradox, 157 Self-censorship, 8, 46–49, 207 Sentimentalism, 78 Shapiro, Eli, 204 Shoemaker, Pamela J., 120 Sicherheitsdienst (SD), 158, 159 Siemens, 174, 178 Simmel, Georg, 5, 6 Sinclair, Upton, 16, 72 Snowden, Edward, 162 Social Democracy, social democratic, 15, 16, 176, 187 Social movement, 2, 8, 12, 14, 16–19, 120, 122, 127, 202, 204, 214, 216, 220, 225 history, 15

Index

new, 17, 174, 182, 234 studies, 15 Socialism, 16, 17 Society, civil, 12, 15, 97, 99, 100, 112, 125, 153, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 221, 224, 226, 227, 238, 242, 243 egalitarian, 111 market, 111 open, 2, 18 surveillance, 183, 202 Western, 13, 17, 131, 200 Sons of Liberty (political group), 101 Source, public, 155 Sovereign, sovereignty, 76, 159, 245, 247 Soviet, 129, 157 atomic bomb, 179 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), 176 Spain, Spanish, 131 Sphere, 48, 64, 71, 125, 164, 238 arcane, 159, 160, 175, 181 civilian, 176 of influence, 160 of the Divine, 58 public, 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 13, 14, 19, 97, 104, 107, 108, 111, 112, 120, 122, 159, 175, 186, 226 private, 12, 100 Sports, 2, 137, 216 Spy, soviet, 157, 161, 165, 179 Stakeholder, 212, 224, 225, 227, 233, 237, 242, 246 Stamp Act crisis, 106 Starobinski, Jean, 44, 70 State, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12–15, 19, 37, 45, 46, 62, 111, 121, 127, 130– 133, 139, 155, 206, 212–215, 220, 238, 245 action, 12, 179, 220 agency, agent, 212, 238

  269

authority, 235 constitutional, 160, 181, 184 nuclear, 181–183, 190 paranoia, 164, 179, 180, 191 police, 182 security, 160 surveillance, 160, 189, 204 West German, 155, 164 Sterne, Laurence, 78, 79 Stockholm, 178 Strategy, 7, 49, 75, 76, 84, 120, 124, 134, 139, 165, 173, 175, 178, 184, 185, 187, 189, 191, 227, 237 communication, 15, 181, 183 legitimating, 14 Struggle, 9, 100, 102, 107, 108, 119, 120, 156, 186, 189, 199, 204, 213, 214, 216, 225–227 social, 15 Stuart (royal dynasty), 77 Subversive, 49, 73, 74, 76, 108 Suffrage, 111 Supply chain, 212–220, 222, 228 Surveillance, 2, 8, 11, 19, 69, 70, 123, 173, 203–206, 211, 240 communications, 162 counter-, 175, 181, 182, 185, 191 democratization of, 205 equipment, 202 government, 201 internal, 156 state, 174, 186 studies, 180 telephone, 160 Stammheim (district of Stuttgart), 177, 186 System, 4, 5, 8, 11, 56, 63, 65, 105, 107, 108, 155, 164, 166, 243 media, 122, 123, 129, 130, 133, 138 political, 4, 132, 139

270  Index transport, 98, 101 Szolucha, Anna, 200 T Taboo, 73–75, 77 Taiwan, Taiwanese, 199, 200, 202, 205, 207 Taxation, 106 Tazreen Fashions Factory (Bangladesh), 217 Technology, 12, 62, 64, 65, 126, 190, 192 communication, 9, 240 decentralized, 204 digital, 202, 204, 222, 228 Terrorism, international, 157, 173, 174, 183, 184, 186, 190–192 Terrorist, left-wing, 174–178, 187 Testament, Old, 76 Theology, 8 Theory, theoretical, 6, 8, 121–123, 133, 154, 204, 237 action, 44, 48 political, 59, 217 Theorization, theorizing, 18, 215 Think tank, 115 Tiedge, Hansjoachim, 157 Toleration, 99, 103 Trade, 63, 135, 173 fair, organic, 224 union, unionist, 15, 16, 110, 212, 214–218, 220, 221, 223, 224 Tradition, 9, 10, 13, 61, 69, 70, 72, 74, 78, 98, 99, 103, 111, 119, 120, 126, 127, 129, 135, 137, 157, 203, 214, 217, 234, 235, 237 Anglo-Saxon, 122 republican, revolutionary, 13 Traffic, ship, 101, 233, 244 Traitor, 155, 156, 176

Transatlantic, 18, 157 Transformation, 8, 9, 13, 97, 100, 104–106, 111, 182, 215, 243 cultural, 112 of cultural knowledge, 98 Translucidity, translucent, 7, 8, 58 Transparency Germany, 37 Transparency International, 2, 39 Transparency in Supply Chains Act (Californian Law), 214 Transparentization, self-, 175, 176, 179, 181, 183, 186, 187, 189 Traube, Klaus, 173–192 Treachery, 154 Trenchard, John, 103 Trump, Donald, 134 Trust, 2–4, 8, 11, 35, 37, 65, 66, 120, 121, 124, 129–134, 137, 153– 156, 158–160, 162, 163, 165, 166, 206, 215, 235, 240, 241 in God, implicit, 132 Trustworthy, trustworthiness, 120, 131–134 Truth, truthfulness, 9, 10, 37, 56, 65, 66, 70, 72, 84, 85, 103, 119, 126, 130, 136, 155, 208, 221, 226–228 Twitter, 203, 204 Tyranny, English, 102, 106, 107, 211 Tyrant, 38 U Uganda, 177 Undercover, 136, 202 United Kingdom (UK), 120, 129, 160, 214 United Nations (UN), 12 United States of America (USA), 122, 132, 225 Urbanism, urbanization, 105, 243 Utilitarian, utility, 10, 11, 111

Index

V Value, 2, 4, 5, 17, 35, 71, 97, 120–122, 124, 126, 128, 129, 133–137, 139, 181, 221, 224, 236 antagonistic, 135 normative, 5, 12 social, 13, 174 Vasiliu, Anca, 57 Veracity, 105, 106, 122 Verification, 106, 121, 156 Vienna, 177, 239 Visibility, visuality, 5, 7, 11, 35, 38, 40–46, 49, 56, 57, 59, 63, 132, 138, 191, 205, 206, 224–227 Vogel, Friedrich, 184 Vogel, Hans-Jochen, 189 Vogelmann, Frieder, 8, 19, 206, 207 Vote, 17, 239 Vulkan Affair, 161 W Wages, 16 War, 2, 17, 76, 176 civil, 73, 74, 76, 106 Cold, 18, 156, 161, 165 crimes, 159 First World, 15 Second World, 12, 18, 159, 187 Warren, Austin, 71 Washington (City), 109 Washington, George, 109

  271

Weber, Max, 39, 42 Weblog, 124 Wehrmacht, 158 Wellek, René, 71 Wernitz, Axel, 176 West German Broadcasting Company (WDR), 187 Whistle-blower, 162, 173, 181, 183, 186, 189 WikiLeaks, 69 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 36 Wolf, André Christian, 238 Worden, Blair, 75 Workers, 16, 133, 164, 212, 216, 217, 220, 223, 226–228 World, 5, 7, 13, 17, 56, 58, 59, 61–66, 79, 84–86, 99, 102, 103, 105, 112, 122, 128, 136, 157, 158, 160, 165, 178, 204, 207, 213, 214, 220, 240 WorldView (satellite), 62 Wright, Donald K., 203 Wutbürger, 119 Y Yugoslavia, Yugoslavian, 177 Z Zimmer, Annette E., 238 Zucotti Park, 201