What might connect poetry, architecture and the concepts of power over the past two centuries? According to Marek Bieńczyk, it’s the idea of transparency. The two-hundred-year history of modernity, which the author sums up and sends on its way, owed its dynamics to a plan to make the world visible. It began with the cry of an innocent child – none other than Jean Jacques Rousseau, who in his writings very often returns to an unjust accusation that was cast at him when he was a small boy. From then on Rousseau deepens and broadens the concept of transparency as the ideal for interpersonal relations. He maintained that the human heart is pure, so if we create a world founded on the language of intention, we shall achieve the ideal society. Rousseau moved from human inner life to global organisation. Jeremy Bentham, who invented the memorable Panopticon, set off from the opposite direction, from constructing interpersonal relations. He called for creating institutions (such as prisons, hospitals or schools) where transparency would enable non-stop observation of the “resident” (the patient, prisoner, student or worker); after some time the resident, whether in the presence of his observer or not, will behave correctly of his own accord, because “being controlled” will lead to the internalisation of control. The prisoner becomes his own guard. That is why the Panopticon was called the laboratory of power – because it allowed methods of control to be tested that guaranteed the maximum effectiveness with the minimum administrative effort. The nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth opted for Bentham. Man’s heart did not become transparent, as Rousseau hoped, whereas public institutions did aim to make his life completely see-through. The school, the factory, the prison or concentration camp imposed the requisite form of full openness on interpersonal relationships. A move away from transparency as a notion that shapes relations between authority and society comes after totalitarianisms, whether lived through or considered. The experience of a fully transparent life proved murderous in its effects. But the ideology of transparency remained. This is what imposes on all companies the rule of full visibility in their principles and practices. It is in the name of transparency that non-governmental organisations require governments and major corporations to keep drawing back the curtains behind which decisions relating to society are made. Under the pressure of transparency, the European political parties vie with each other, especially before elections, in promising open principles of government or rules for distributing public money. But where is transparency – a modern concept – to come from once modernity is over? The answer to this question is one of the most interesting themes in Bieńczyk’s book as he convinces us that transparency, which has risen to the rank of the only universally accepted ideology, is the illegitimate heir to modernity. While modernisation strove to develop conditions of full control over society, and by this route to achieve perfect organisation, today’s transparency is an odd sort of shield protecting the imperfection of our institutions. Parliaments debate before television cameras, major corporations reveal the mechanisms of their own functioning, factories let us watch each stage of production, from the initial components to the finished item on sale. In none of these cases does transparency invite us to improve the rules, nor does it promise to enable any corrections to be made –in the way a government operates, for example, or in the ways animals are processed into food. On the contrary: issues that are set out in public view are simply confirmed in their imperfection. Therefore transparency proves to be a see-through shield protecting the status quo in today’s world. But Marek Bieńczyk does not just make do with an account of changes in political thinking. He covers the history of transparency within European poetry and architecture too, and also how the idea has been applied to ways of organising urban space. And one more thing: if I were tempted to categorise it, I’d say Bieńczyk’s book is an existential essay, i.e. it includes the author’s personal experience as one of the elements in the actual account and one of the lines of argument. Thus Bieńczyk weaves into his narrative memories (and fabrications) from his own life. As a poet he has always been drawn to the idea of writing a single, transparent sentence that would cover everything, while also being immaterial. However, when his tale runs to its end, the poet-narrator states in a declaration of love that the embodiment of the perfect sentence is a beloved woman. Nothing is more non-transparent than another person – especially one you love. With him or her interpersonal relations lose their stability, intentions turn out to have no depth, communication becomes a wavelength for fortunate misunderstandings. The transparent world is replaced by a world of muddled clues and transparency is replaced by uncertainty. - Przemysław Czapliński
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