Byung-Chul Han's Transparency Society: From Foucault's confessions to the political implications of psychoanalysis and the end of alienating capitalism

 

I: THE TRANSPARENCY SOCIETY

 

Byung-Chul Han’s 2015 masterpiece “The Transparency Society” perfectly captures the recent tendency in the past decades of society’s move from a culture of community without communication to a hyper-communication without community. According to Han:

 

“Today the word “transparency” is haunting all spheres of life—not just politics but economics, too. Wherever information is very easy to obtain, as is the case today, the social system switches from trust to control. As total communication and total networking run their course, it proves harder than ever to be an outsider, to hold a different opinion. Transparent communication is communication that has a smoothing and leveling effect. It leads to synchronization and uniformity. It eliminates Otherness. Compulsive conformity proceeds from transparency. In this way, transparency stabilizes the dominant system. Transparency is a neoliberal dispositive. It forces everything inward in order to transform it into information. Under today’s immaterial relations of production, more information and communication mean more productivity and acceleration. In contrast, secrecy, foreignness, and otherness represent obstacles for communication without borders. They are to be dismantled in the name of transparency. Transparency makes the human being glassy. Therein lies its violence. Unrestricted freedom and communication switch into total control and surveillance.”¹

 

Indeed, Han correctly notes the same tendency I observed independently for the past few years. Even more than what Zizek ironically calls “Enlightened Western Buddhism” (life is just an illusion, don’t take it too seriously, don’t get too attached, explore multiple options => consumerism), the predominant ideology today is an ideology of transparency.

The dominant messages today, from politics to influencer culture and from mental health to dating/relationship advice trends, are messages of transparency: be yourself, don’t wear a mask, don’t be fake, communicate directly, don’t be ambiguous, don’t expect people to read your mind, be honest, be transparent about your intentions, communication is the most important thing in a relationship, don’t hold your suffering in, talk to someone (if you’re struggling with mental health), etc. It is almost as if the conglomeration of “mental health awareness”, the culture of relationship advice, the hip-hop culture of faux authenticity and the political all merged together into one huge slogan: if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. The biggest sin in transparency society is having secrets, wearing a mask or enjoying silence.

Whereas authoritarian regimes before the 90’s preserved their power by censoring information, in the era of the internet and digital communication, power sustains itself by hyper-communication. In the USSR, the sin was that you would speak too much, and the virtue was to remain silent. In our modern transparency society, the sin is to be silent or have secrets, and you have an injunction to speak. In transparency society, the message is: communicate! – it doesn’t matter what you say, just say something. Quantity over quality. In this way, power structures perpetuate themselves by adding “noise” in the signal: there is no more need to censor information as long as you can generate so much fake news for the correct information to “drown in” until people won’t be able to tell the difference.

 

Social media are also coming to resemble, more and more, digital panoptica that discipline and exploit the social. In [Foucault’s] disciplinary society, the occupants of the panopticon were isolated from each other for more thorough surveillance, and they were not permitted to speak. The inhabitants of the digital panopticon, on the other hand, engage in lively communication and bare themselves of their own free will. In this way, they actively collaborate in the digital panopticon. The digital society of control makes intensive use of freedom. It is only possible thanks to voluntary self-illumination and self-exposure. Transparency is an ideology. Like all ideologies, it has a positive core that has been mystified and made absolute. If totalized, it yields terror.²

 

Indeed, other critical theorists like Deleuze & Guattari, or even Marx in the communist manifesto, noticed this tendency of capitalism to “smooth out” contrast and differences, ending in what Han calls an “inferno of the same”. There are a few gaps in his analysis, however.

 

II: FOUCAULT’S CONFESSION

 

In Chapter II of “The History of Sexuality (Vol. 1)”, Michel Foucault argues against “the repressive hypothesis” that sex was extremely tabooed and avoided in the Victorian period (and hence simply censored, not talked about), instead arguing that one was indirectly urged to talk about it (through various forms of confession to authority figures), but in certain codes. In 18^th and 19^th century, Foucault argues that discourses surrounding sexuality multiplied: you have the medical jargon, the psychoanalytic jargon, the legal discourse, and the church’s religious one, among others. By transforming “moral vs. sinful” into “natural vs. abnormal”, law and medicine managed to uphold power structures, constantly redefining (to their needs) what is a “normal” sexuality and what is an “abnormal” or “unnatural” sexual behavior.

What is most important to notice is that Foucault precisely states that there was an injunction to speak (perhaps the seed of a future “transparency society”), but only under a certain code. That is, in the Victorian period, if you didn’t speak about sex, you were indirectly punished. But if you spoke about sex “in the wrong way”, you were also punished in some way. You must speak, but in the “proper” way – this is how discourses in society maintain power structures according to Foucault, by codifying aspects of our intimate lives.

Isn’t this exact same attitude seen in today’s culture of political correctness surrounding sexuality? Socially progressive “sex positive” left-liberals tend to stand for two seemingly contradictory things at once. On one hand, there is a message of transparency: we should be less ashamed about sex, sex is not something dirty and disgusting like conservatives say, we should be more open about sexuality, etc. On the other hand, be careful about what you say, because if you say the wrong thing, you might be accused of verbal sexual harassment, you might be a misogynist or you might offend some vulnerable minority. “We should talk about sex more, but only under my rules.” You are pressured to talk about sex, but only in the “proper”, PC way. The message of political correctness is “Don’t be so afraid to talk about sex. But be careful about what you say, because if you say the wrong thing, you are cancelled”. In other words, we should talk about it more, but we should talk about it less…

 

Psychoanalysis has a clear answer to this paradox: the notion of superego. Superego is a cruel and insatiable agency that bombards me with impossible demands and mocks my failed attempts to meet them. It is the agency in the eyes of which I am all the more guilty, the more I try to suppress my “sinful” strivings. The old cynical Stalinist motto about the accused at the show trials who professed their innocence—“The more they are innocent, the more they deserve to be shot”—is superego at its purest.³

 

Foucault’s discourse analysis applies almost equally to the right as well. “Pick-up artist” communities and “The Red Pill” sometimes tend to be meeting spots for the alt-right, and yet one is instantly bombarded with incredible amounts of abbreviations and specific terminology they invented to address their concerns, in this way separating “outsiders” (who are new to their subreddits and forums) from “insiders” who have taken the time to learn all that code. Everything is encoded in transparency society: you must constantly communicate, but “by the rules”.

One can only imagine the effect of this pressure upon our mental health. Speaking of which, don’t we treat mental health in the same way? The most popular message in the treatment of mental health today is that if we are struggling, to tell someone, to talk to someone, to not hold it inside of us. In other words, communicate! But it is always quantity over quality in transparency society; it is never taken into account to “open up” to an actually good listener, or the possibility that if we open up to the wrong person, we may do more harm than good. Han correctly said that like all ideologies, transparency has “a positive core that has been made absolute”. Just like I can argue that for many people “talking to someone” can improve their mental health, similarly enough I can argue that for just as many people, the problem is in hyper-communication and hyper-intimacy, and what they need is more privacy, distance, silence and personal space.

But what happens if you do talk to someone? Just like with sexuality, you are instantly bombarded with code. You are not allowed to remain silent; you must talk about your problems with others. But if you do, you must do it the “proper” way, using all the psychological jargon. For instance: let’s say that you are a young teenager who is suicidal and, like ideology tells you, you decide to finally “talk to someone”: you go on a mental health Discord server and vent about your issues. In the first conversation, there is a very high probability that you will be asked “What is your diagnosis?”.

If you do have an official diagnosis, the future of the conversation will be changed depending on the label that a proclaimed “expert” has put on you: bipolar, borderline, obsessive-compulsive… (because if the future of the conversation would not have been changed at all by the answer to that question, why bother asking in the first place?)

If you don’t have an official diagnosis, there are now two possibilities. You may self-diagnose, and you will be immediately faced with the often-repeated “Self-diagnosis is dangerous! Diagnosing someone else with a mental illness is unethical and you will be banned if you do it! Seek the help of a qualified expert™”. If you don’t assign any of the DSM-V labels to yourself, the future conversations might become more awkward or rigid, taking weird turns having to explain each time why you don’t have a diagnosis, or why you constantly (for example) just say “mood swings” instead of an actual ‘official’ mental illness, having to justify yourself… it ruins the organic and “natural” flow of the conversation.

In all three scenarios (you are diagnosed / you self-diagnose / you have no diagnosis), you are indirectly pressured into speaking about your problems in a certain code, in the “proper” way; and thus, ideology maintains power structures by shifting and redefining what is considered “normal” and what is considered “pathological”.

Just like with sexuality, it is bad if you don’t speak about your problems and “hold them in”, but it is also bad if you speak about them in the “incorrect” way. This dimension of the sadistic torture inherent in the super-ego structure of ideology is missing in Han’s analysis, or at least not insisted upon enough: it does not stop at transparency.

Byung-Chul Han hints towards an analysis similar to mine in Chapter 2, however:

 

“In the society of exhibition, every subject is also its own advertising object. Everything is measured by its exhibition value. The society of exhibition is a society of pornography. Everything has been turned outward, stripped, exposed, undressed, and put on show. The excess of display turns everything into a commodity; possessing “no secret,” it stands “doomed . . . to immediate devouring.” Capitalist economy subjects everything to compulsory exhibition. Hypervisibility is obscene; it lacks the negativity of what is hidden, inaccessible, and secret. Smooth streams of hypercommunication are also obscene; hypercommunication is free of the negativity of Otherness. The compulsion to hand everything over to communication and visibility is obscene.

Exhibition value above all depends on beautiful looks. In this way, compulsive display produces the compulsion to achieve beauty and fitness. "Operation Schönheit" pursues the goal of maximizing exhibition value. Today’s (role) models convey no inner values but outer measures to which one seeks to correspond, even by violent means.”⁴

 

It is almost as if Han was on the verge of saying what Foucault already said in his genealogies: you don’t have the right to remain silent, you must communicate, but “properly”. The compulsion of exhibition inherent in social media tells you “show yourself, post selfies of yourself, show us your private life!”. But, in this process, one is indirectly pressured to conform to a certain code, to a certain set of standards of beauty or of “success” indicated by society, thus one metaphorically having to “speak properly” with pictures and social media posts. This is why Han argues that Foucault’s Biopolitics mutated into something much worse today: Psycho-politics:

 

“Foucault’s disciplinary power discovered ‘population’ as a productive and reproductive mass to be administrated carefully. Reproductive cycles, birth and death rates, levels of general health, and life expectancy provide the objects of regulation. Biopolitics is the governmental technology of disciplinary power.

However, this approach proves altogether unsuited to the neoliberal regime, which exploits the psyche above all. Biopolitics, which makes use of population statistics, has no access to the psychic realm. It can deliver no material for drawing up a psychogram of the population. Demography is not the same thing as psychography. It cannot tap into or disclose the psyche. On this score, statistics and Big Data lie worlds apart. Big Data provides the means for establishing not just an individual but a collective psychogram - perhaps even the psychogram of the unconscious itself. As such, it may yet shine a light into the depths of the psyche and exploit the unconscious entirely.”⁵

 

To sum it up: Han talked a bit too much as if the message of Transparency Society is simply “be yourself”. I argue instead that its message is more akin to “be yourself… but not like that”.

 

III: ALIENATION – THE DEATH OF PRIVACY AND INTIMACY

 

Byung-Chul Han calls Transparency Society a culture of “intimacy”:

 

“Intimacy is the psychological formula of transparency. Proximity, from which all distance has been eliminated, is another form in which transparency finds expression. The tyranny of intimacy psychologizes and personalizes everything. Even politics cannot escape its grasp. Accordingly, politicians are no longer measured by their actions. Instead, general interest concerns their persons; this entails compulsive staging on their part. The loss of the public sphere leaves behind a void; intimate details and private matters pour into it. Publicizing a persona takes the place of the public sphere. In the process, the public sphere becomes an exhibition space.

“Person” (in Latin, persona) originally means “mask.” It gives the voice sounding through it character; indeed, it lends the voice shape and form. As a society of revealing and denuding, the society of transparency works against all forms of the mask, against symbolic appearance. The mounting deritualization and denarrativization of society also strip it of forms of symbolic appearance and render it naked. Objective rules, not subjective psychic states, determine play and ritual. Whenever one plays with others, one subordinates oneself to the rules of the game. The sociability of play is not based on mutual self-disclosure. Instead, human beings become sociable when they preserve distance from one another. Intimacy, in contrast, destroys distance. The society of intimacy mistrusts ["empty"] ritualized gestures, politeness and ceremonial conduct. They strike it as external and inauthentic.”⁶

 

I will be nitpicky here and say that “intimacy” is not the best word for our current state in society. As I’ve previously claimed, the primary defense mechanism of capitalism is alienation, as Lacan and Marx use it:

“We must understand the difference between alienation and separation. To separate two objects, two people or two ideas means to isolate or segregate them, removing any means of communication between them. Two nations or two people that are separated have no means of interacting with one another. Two entities that are separated do not exchange information between each other in any way. Two entities are separated if they are at a very far “distance” one from another. The closer the two entities get, the less separated they are. Separation strictly maintains the distinction between “far” and “close”.

Alienation is the dialectical reversal of this dichotomy between distance and closeness. Alienation means to be close at a distance and to be distant when you are close. Alienation is precisely that concept that blurs the line between this “close/far” distinction. Capitalism very rapidly created more forms of alienating long-distance communication: first the phone, then the mobile phone, then the internet. Slowly, capitalism’s alienating function increased: two people who are very far apart physically (at other ends of the globe) can suddenly be “close” with the aid of the internet. The reverse is also true. Two people who are right next to each other are suddenly far more apart. An anecdote: at the place where I currently work, it is a hybrid-remote tech job where, even in the cases where I go at the office, we still communicate through Microsoft Teams. Alienation is a double-edged sword because just as it connects two entities that are “far apart”, so does it “distance” two entities that are very close. It is not only ‘closeness in distance’ but also ‘distance in closeness’.”⁷

Today’s communication is marked by neither intimacy nor by privacy, but by alienation. We are so close, yet so far apart. The feeling of alienation that is inherent to the capitalist subject is the inherent feeling of being “lonely in a crowd full of people”. With the internet, you must constantly remain connected, you are always “logged on”, you must always reply to messages, justify why you left people on read, etc. At the same time, even face-to-face, communication is getting more and more superficial.

Pre-digital society was a society of a high contrast between closeness and distance. You meet with someone face to face or you don’t. The only alienating long-distance forms of communication were the letter (one-to-one) or the book (one-to-many). Today’s digital alienation marks the death of both privacy and intimacy. You are always connected, this marks the death of privacy. Yet, connection itself is becoming more and more superficial, this is the death of intimacy. The high contrast between closeness and distance is “smoothed out” in digital capitalism by alienation, just like Deleuze described capitalism’s function to smooth out striated spaces and de-territorialize and decode culture.

 

IV: ALIENATION AND THE ANALYTIC RELATIONSHIP

 

Like I argue in my article on alienation: “The more time you know someone for, and the closer you are to them, the more you can share “intimate” details about your life to them (personal problems, childhood trauma, sexual life and concerns, etc.). This is because in real-life communication, people are tied to the context in which you interact with them. Hence, the possibility of abandonment is low on both sides: if you tell something personal to your coworker and it goes wrong, you will be forced to either continue seeing them every day or quit your job. This is not the case on the internet – there, the less you know someone for, the more you can share details about your life. The internet is not tied to context but it is the creator of virtual, temporary contexts. You can find a stranger on the internet for the sole purposes of venting about your life to them, now there is no hesitation because you have nothing to lose, if something goes wrong, you can just abandon each other. On the internet, the more someone is a stranger, the more “personal” you can be with them, paradoxically.

Before the invention of the internet was the invention of psychotherapy. We usually joke about how our internet friends are our therapists, but what if we reverse this and say that the therapist was the first “internet friend”? After all, this was Jacques Lacan’s point when he said that the therapist should position themselves as what he called the “objet petit a”, that object that you only want because you can’t obtain it, and once you do obtain it, you throw it away as if it was trash. You are close to your therapist only insofar as you are “far”. In therapy, you share personal information because they are a stranger, not “in spite of” – in case something goes wrong, you can just leave them and never see them again because you won’t interact with them or any of their acquaintances in any other context.”⁸

The psychoanalytic relationship is the ultimate, most alienated human relationship there is. It goes beyond the alienation of internet friendship, of the confession to a priest or of the alienation to a friendlier type of therapist, like in humanistic therapies. Psychoanalysis is internet friendship on steroids. The relationship between analyst and analysand is closeness in distance and distance in closeness. On one hand, you share the most intimate details of your life and your most private thoughts to your analyst, which makes the two of you closer than you are with anyone else, even your spouse or best friend. This is the death of privacy in psychotherapy. Moreover, in psychoanalysis you are encouraged to free associate: to say whatever random idea comes to mind without any censorship, which makes you have even less privacy to your therapist than in other types of therapy. Moreover, the therapeutic relationship is one of distance: the analysand must not know many details about the private life of the analyst, the analyst usually abstains from emotional expressivity in order to remain a “blank screen” for the analysand to project onto, and any friendship outside the therapeutic setting is strictly prohibited. Sexual relations and excessive touching are strictly prohibited. This makes the analytic relationship one of the most distant and cold relationships. This is the death of intimacy. Your psychoanalyst is paradoxically the person who you are closest to and least close to out of your life. It is the stranger who knows everything about you. It is even more alienating than other types of therapy because it introduces the dimension of the unconscious and its interpretation: hence, the possibility that the analyst may know something about you that you don’t know about yourself, thus you having more privacy from your own ego than from the analyst.

Considering that alienation is an increasing function of time in capitalism, it is not a wild guess to suggest that all relationships in capitalism tend towards the analytic relationship. In fact, the invention of psychoanalysis is simply the discovery of the primordial “capitalist relationship”: the alienated relationship. The more capitalism advances, the more we act like analysands individually. One would imagine that towards the end of capitalism, most friendships and romantic relationships would strongly resemble the analytic relationship in some shape or form.

One can’t help but notice the similarity between free association and The Transparency Society. Sigmund Freud used to tell his analysands in their first session that they have to agree to the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis – to never hide anything from their analyst and always say whatever comes to mind, no matter how obscene or offensive it may be, with no censorship:  "Finally, never forget that you have promised to be absolutely honest, and never leave anything out because, for some reason or other, it is unpleasant to tell it."⁹

To free associate in psychoanalysis means to talk without thinking. Ideology is already one step away from telling us to talk without thinking of consequences: talk more openly about sexuality, communication is the most important thing in a relationship, be yourself, tell a friend about your suicidal thoughts, don’t have secrets. The irony of the weird times we live in is that in Han’s “society of transparency”, Freud himself has become a big Other that makes each individual citizen swear to never hide anything from anyone else, as if each individual human is the analysand of this big Other Freud in the skies.

This leads us to the final enigma of this analysis: can we get an idea of how the end of capitalism might unfold based on how the end of analysis is described by Lacan? Do we have to “traverse the fantasy” as a society, as a whole? Does capitalism end by every single subject “identifying with the symptom” of capitalism (ideology)? Lacan used to say how in psychoanalysis, the patient first talks about themselves, then they talk to you without talking about themselves, and finally when they start talking about themselves to you, you can safely terminate treatment. Can we speak of the same thing in capitalist culture? All of these questions may be answered in a future article.

 

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NOTES:

1: Byung-Chul Han, “The Transparency Society”, Preface

2: ibid.

3: Slavoj Zizek, “Wokeness is here to stay”: https://compactmag.com/article/wokeness-is-here-to-stay

4: Byung-Chul Han, “The Transparency Society”, Chapter II: The Society of Exhibition

5: Byung-Chul Han, “Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power”, Chapter IV: Biopolitics

6: Byung-Chul Han, “The Transparency Society”, Chapter VI: The Society of Intimacy

7: Ștefan “Lastrevio” Boros, “The internet and the social life under capitalism: alienation, fear of abandonment, surplus-enjoyment and "meta-objectification"”; https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-internet-and-social-life-under.html

8: ibid.

9: Freud, Sigmund (1913). On the beginning of treatment.