Transparency and Critical Theory / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

"Just about everyone affirms the importance of transparency, but you will hesitate about unthinkingly doing so after reading this book. Jorge Valdovinos moves between fields and disciplines with remarkable fluency to illuminate the ideological implications of transparency talk. If this is what post-disciplinary communication and media theory looks like, give me more. A brilliant piece of critical scholarship"

-Sean Phelan, Massey University, NZ

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the critique of contemporary ideology, offering an innovative genealogy of one of its most fundamental discursive manoeuvres: the ideological effacement of mediation. Providing a comprehensive historical revision of media (from the Greeks to the Internet), this book identifies several critical junctures at which the tension between visibility and invisibility has overlapped with conceptions of neutrality-a tension best incarnated in today's use of the word transparency. Then, it traces this term's evolving semantic constellation through a variety of intellectual discourses, exposing it as a key operator in the revaluation of ideals, sensibilities, and modalities of perception that lie at the core of our contemporary attention-based economy.

Jorge I. Valdovinos is Adjunct Professor for Media and Communications and holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Sydney, Australia