2021, issue 2

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Transparency and its Schematism

Sjoerd van Tuinen

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Krisis 41 (2): 83-86.

10.21827/krisis.41.2.38258

832021, issue 2

Transparency and its Schematism

Sjoerd van Tuinen

“Just as the old injustice is not changed by a lavish display of light, air and hygiene,

but is in fact concealed by the gleaming transparency of rationalized big business, the

inner health of our time has been secured by blocking ight into illness without in the

slightest altering its aetiology” (§ 36). Adorno’s analogy between the administration of

social conict in monopoly capitalism and the objectication of subjectivity through

the repression of mental suering deserves to be unpacked in full. It is exemplary of

an inchoate freudomarxism, which sees psychopathology as mirroring capitalist modes

of production. It anticipates critiques of power structures and commercial interests at

work in the psycho-therapy-education industry. But it also extends to domains beyond

the corporation and the soul. It resonates with the contemporary failure of ‘leaks’ to

end tax evasion or change the operations of secret services, as well as with the impotent

appeals for more transparency made by technocrats and populists alike. In suggesting the

real and not merely metaphorical interconnectedness of heterogeneous forms of false

positivity, it performs the arch-gesture of the negative dialectic.

Today transparency still counts as a panacea. It promises accountability and

healing for romantic relations, markets, and democracies as much as for the planet

at large. Yet while transparency is celebrated both as a duty and as a right, it remains

false insofar as it triggers no new forms of responsibility or liberation. For as Adorno

would no doubt remind us, ‘seeing through’ is rst of all the fetish of an enlightenment

blinded by its own light. Transparency is the homogenizing element of the “context of

delusion” (Verblendungszusammenhang): the convergence of total mobilization with

total access in the form of a universal competition – the commodity form – of images.

At the heart of Adorno’s analogy lies the socio-cultural drama of the impov-

erishment and mutilation of experience (Erfahrung). Accordingly, the analogy marks

the beginning of an encyclopedic series of loose connections between social and indi-

vidual pathology (§ 36), bourgeois psychology and authoritarianism (§ 37), the pursuit

of happiness and mass ignorance (§ 38), or the replacement of speculative philosophy

by the scientism shared by the analytical philosophy and psychoanalysis (§ 42). In

fact we are not dealing with empirical analogies but with transcendental “schemata”.

They produce opaque but distinct kinds of evidence where the natural light of liberal

democracy fails.

Kant introduces the notion of “schematism” in the First Critique to explain

the harmony between disparate domains of experience, the intuition and the under-

standing. Whenever things appear transparent, this is because the imagination operates

under the general ‘rule’ of the concept. Nevertheless, the schematism is not the head

of subjectivity but its heart. It is hidden in the living ‘depth’ of the soul, indicating

that it does not belong to the subject but rather to a drama in which we are always

already beyond ourselves. The question that Kant fails to investigate is what makes

the schematism submit to the rigid frame of our understanding at all. How did our

capacity to synthesize get damaged this way? What remains of subjectivity when the

schemas – the outlines of identities and equivalences – are already in place? This, as well

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as the consideration of its own schematizing activity, should be the starting point of any

critique of transparency.

Because subjectivity was considered the transcendental condition of enlight-

ened transparancy, it could never appear as such. As a consequence, it will not be

missed when the conditions of transparancy are replaced by other forces. In Dialectic

of Enlightenment Adorno demonstrates that what naturalizes our experience is social

practice. The culture industry relieves us from the labor of schematization, providing

us with the framework of readymade concepts and sentimental clichés to which both

nature and subjectivity must conform. Hence, the world of the binge-watcher imme-

diately translates the humanist enthusiasm for the free use of one’s own understanding

into the objective necessities of self-preservation.

It would nonetheless be too simplistic to blame Hollywood and Netix alone

for this degeneration of subjectivity. The need for transparency is quite a bit older, and

its dialectic is not bound to the enlightenment epoch. In short, the problem is that

transparency is intrinsically polemical. While it is an important weapon in the demys-

tication of power asymmetries, the polemical never fails to turn against itself – in its

hardened dialectical fashion, the negation of the negation always precedes the initial

negation. This explains why, historically speaking, the need for transparency is more

insatiable and encompassing than the need for secrecy that was typical of traditional

dictatorships. It arises from the dream of global mastery and control.

In the panopticons, shopping malls, and boulevards of the nineteenth century,

one already sees that the truth of openness and accessibility lies in the surveillance

and governance of ubiquitous circulation rather than in the stripping of the emperor’s

clothes. By the time of the publication of Minima Moralia the schematism of human

experience was already being usurped by Cold War information technologies. Nowadays,

Silicon Valley has replaced mass mediatization with big data, probalistic logic, and auto-

mated decision-making. In surveillance capitalism, the market transparency of deregu-

lation combined with centralized planning turns us all into passive ‘users’ – laboratory

rats with or without UBI – from whom protable behavioral data is harvested.

When understood in terms of logistics, transparency means invisibility and

absence of noise. It is not a quality of information, but of the medium in which infor-

mation becomes visible or readable. Modernity bathes in the pervasive light of maritime

maps and GPS, of Vermeer’s windows and of conceptual art, of remote sensors and MRIs,

of dating-site algorithms and credit scores, of high-frequency trading and automized

weaponry. In all these cases, technology dissolves the appearance of nature and reveals

the blind workings behind it. Through the foreshortened emplotment of space and

time, it provides the expansive schema of a world that knows no negativity, only con-

stant improvement – the meta-world of whiteness (Harney and Moten 2021, 15-17).

The problem with transparency, then, is double. It is perhaps best understood as

a code of conduct in the triple sense of behavior, management, and medium for trans-

mission. It encodes and produces the circulating ows from which it extracts a surplus

value of information. Whether it is our language, our attention, our will, or our intimate

relationships, logistics renders them legible, calculable, available. At the same time, every

code is an encryption. There is no transparency without means. These are typically light,

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electricity and money – media that disappear into what they communicate and obscure

what makes communication possible. Under modern conditions, it is not nature but

technology that loves to hide. This means that no quantity of transparency can ever take

away the suspicion that is inherent in the use of all media. It is precisely our restless

desire for knowledge and information that reinforces mistrust and disorientation. What

could possibly go wrong?

Our contemporary problem, perhaps also the problem of the enlightenment as

a whole, is not a lack of transparency but of imagination. If the task of the schematism is

to establish communication across dierences without collapsing them, the understand-

ing does the opposite: It renders us indierent. Whether it is the mass murder at the

European borders or the impact of climate change, we are unable to actually experience

what we already know or feel beyond the necessities that we immediately recognize.

Here the schematism functions like the famous invisible hand of the market. It is the

lter of a hypocrisy that destroys the experience of the other, letting through only what

can nourish the thick skin of our clear conscience.

This is also implied by Adorno’s critique of psychologization as a means

of dominance that forbids any knowledge of the suering it produces. Just as fact-

checking or ethical considerations about fairness constitute a degree zero of free thought,

the exposure of hypocrisies oscillates between the emancipation of the repressed and

the apology for absolute self-alienation. The very word ‘happiness’ – today revealingly

substituted by ‘resilience’ – suces to disparage its contrary, thereby relinquishing our

capacity of imaginative schematization to the Kantian depth, or indeed the Freudian

id (§ 38). Its authoritarian schema is that of a bad conscience that seeks compensation

in herd-like ways of mobilizing the irrational and subhuman drives (§ 37, § 40). What

better condition for the emergence of fascist states than this internalization of castration,

the libidinal performance demanded of the individual who can be considered healthy

in body and soul?

Today’s return of behaviourism under the sign of the digital is well exem-

plied by Apple’s agship store in New York (Alloa 2016). The glass cube with base-

ment illustrates how it is no longer necessary to hide the extreme asymmetry between

user interface and the machinery underneath. The same goes for AI decision-making

systems or the nance sector. Although the schematizing backend of social life remains

unknown, its dierence from the frontend fails to scandalize us. Through microtargeting

and modelling, technologies for the automated distribution of privileges, we happily let

ourselves be nudged into a libertarian paternalism instead.

Yet when it comes to the logistical conditions of fascism, perhaps there is no

more adequate contemporary analogue than the distributed surveillance and total

symmetry of blockchain technology. While a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin decen-

tralizes the control over currency, it subjects everything from law-keeping, healthcare

and education to competition. Consequently, its unique transparency can only lead to

reliability, not trust. Although its source is fully open, it only communicates its own

schematization of human interaction, which is even more compelling as it immu-

nizes us to the anonymity that denes everyday life. Hence the libertarian fantasy of

self-sovereign identity: Where privacy no longer exists, demand data ownership. Yet in

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complete abstraction of the vital need to share data, property will not solve the dilemma

between privacy and security, or between well-being and convenience. Just as a sele is

unthinkable without the compulsive desire for personal transparency, commodication

will not make us freer human beings, only more calculable and calculating ones.

The critical task today, then, is the same in philosophy as it is in psychology

and technology; it is to jam the smooth functioning of schematism and turn the imag-

ination into the broken mirror of reality. How to reclaim the thickness of a subjectivity

that interrupts ows, instead of remaining a hollow switchboard for circulation? How

to restore the aesthetic element as the ground of rationalism? Nobody is dreaming

the depoliticizing dream of de-mediation, of getting rid of interference and regaining

authenticity. On the contrary, it is only in the intransparancy of means and the accom-

panying indeterminacy of ends that the instrumental reason of eective neoliberalism

opens a new, dreamlike dimension for a denaturalized politics (Brouwer, Spuybroek,

and van Tuinen 2016).

In this regard, it is precisely Adorno’s analogies that provide nuanced – some

would justiably add paranoid and far-fetched – intuitions of the falsity of the world.

Our task as readers is not to reconstruct the networks that connect the terms. As with

the essay, the aphorism, and the miniature, it is rather a matter of being incomplete and

knowing it. In particular, critical language must stray from the demands of straight talk,

that is, the total equivalence and interchangeability of language – its policed insignif-

icance. Against the ‘secularist’ defence of the freedom of speech, it upholds language’s

non-innocence. Against ‘progressive’ attempts at explicitly codifying and designing lin-

guistical behaviour, it maintains ambivalence and ambiguity. And against the ‘egalitarian’

pretension to analytical clarity, it asserts the rights of a philosophy that swims beyond

the shallow end of the pool of language. Aesthetic Theory: the free use of the imagina-

tion in experimenting with non-indierent modes of schematization.

References

Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. 2021. All

Incomplete. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions/

Autonomedia.

Alloa, Emmanuel. 2016. “Radikaler Durchblick.

Auch der Kapitalismus hat seine Tempel –

und die sind gläsern. Zum New Yorker Apple

Store.”Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 20 March 2016.

Brouwer, Joke, Lars Spuybroek, and Sjoerd van

Tuinen (eds.). 2016. The War of Appearances.

Transparency, Radiancy, Opacity. Rotterdam: V2_

Publishers.

Sjoerd van Tuinen is AssociateProfessorof

Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Biography