Transparency in Triads

What if the more transparency one intends to create, the more obscure things become? What if transparency’s literal impossibility were not a conclusion but a premise for how we study political and legal relations? Would this approach shift the traces that we follow in our ethnographic investigations of transparency as a political technology? This Special Issue of PoLAR takes on these questions and brings together four articles that through exciting routes examine transparency as a phenomenon that transcends questions of the visible and the invisible. The authors focus on the instruments of transparency—the circulation of envelopes, the production of numbers about the self, the manufacturing of records, and the formalization of relations—as ways to open up the uses, and abuses, of this ubiquitous form of political sociality. They analyze the means through which transparency is supposedly produced and explore ethnographically some of the legal techniques used for this purpose in India, Costa Rica, and in Congolese Refugee Camps in Tanzania. The authors’ attention to instrumentality reveals the misappropriations and reinterpretations of transparency as a project full of ambiguities, ironies, and slippages and also brings forth questions about their intended effects. By asking what transparency projects are intending to effect beyond making the opaque visible, the articles in this collection problematize taken-for-granted ideas about who is observing and who is observed, about the materiality of documents as vessels of knowledge, and, ultimately, about the desirability of transparent arrangements. As a group, the articles turn the dyad transparency/opacity into a triad by incorporating a series of third elements that reveal expected and unexpected bureaucratic, epistemological, and affective connections.