Visibility

Above - Shower curtain with transparent strip - meeting room mock-up in the White Collar Factory 

Left - Photograph I took in the Natural History Museum in Berlin - Curtain partitions with transparent strip

Left - Banksy - Pretend transparencies on Israel's West Bank barrier

      

Above - Photographs I took of the parliamentary buildings in Berlin - Architecture = metaphor for political transparency  


Above - Photograph I took of the National Gallery in Berlin designed by Mies Van Der Rohe

An example of the modernist architectural utopia in which the transparency of glass would bring light, health, mental clarity, openness and nature itself into the gloomy domestic interior. Ernst Bloch, in regards to this, claimed that the vision failed because the plate glass windows of the early 19th century did not look out on anything delightful but rather on the capitalist world and fascism:

"The wide window filled with a noisy outside world needs an outside full of attractive strangers, not full of Nazis; the glass door down to the floor really presupposes sunshine that looks in and comes in, not the Gestapo."

Visibility - represented and literal space - transparency between public and private spaces. These are all vital things that I must begin to recognise in my consideration of the domestic.  

No division between public and private would lead to a totalitarian police state. A strict division could lead to a minimal night-watchman state. 
The nature of the division between realms is important. Where those divisions lie, how they work, how transparent they are intended and prove to be - these factors and how they are dealt with determine the character of a state. 

Seeing the State: Transparency as Metaphor

Mark Fenster, University of Florida

Abstract:      

When applied as a public administrative norm, the term and concept “transparency” has two intertwined meanings. First, it refers to those constitutional and legislative tools that require the government to disclose information in order to inform the public and create a more accountable, responsive state. Second, it operates as a metaphor that identifies and decries the distance between the public and the state, and that drives and shapes the desire for a more perfect democratic order. Viewed together, these two meanings both demand efforts to impose legal obligations on the state to be “open” and suggest that such efforts are necessary to allow the public to eradicate the state’s physical, organizational, and affective remove or mitigate its ill-effects. This article considers the implications of the latter meaning, and that meaning’s effect on efforts to develop and implement the technocratic tools in the former meaning. It argues that the state cannot in fact be made thoroughly visible - that the state’s organizational complexity, territorial dispersal across space, and enclosure within buildings inevitably obstruct the public’s view. Reviewing the law and culture of “transparency,” the article concludes that the metaphoric meaning’s logical end, a reversal of Bentham’s Panopticon, demonstrates the impossibility and unattractive consequences of imposing a fully visible state. Nevertheless, the article argues, the populist understanding of transparency is too embedded within our political culture to ignore or avoid entirely, demonstrating that technocratic advances in making the state appear more open must ultimately rely upon metaphoric, populist gestures.

http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=mark_fenster

Extracts of note from essay: 

• Daniel Ellsberg - illegal release of the 'Pentagon Papers' - crossed both the legal line and physical boundary that placed this binder beyond his view. 
• Transparency assumes the existence of a gap that arises naturally between the state and its public.  Government institutions operate at a distance from those they serve. In the normal course of their bureaucratic operation, public organisations - sometimes inadvertently, sometimes wilfully; sometimes with good intent sometimes with unethical or illegal intent - create institutional impediments that obstruct external observation. 
• Transparency - something that has the property of "transmitting light" - a transparent window for example - rendering visible despite separation 
• Employed in this way transparency simultaneously describes both an aspirational goal - full openness to the public - and core problem that must be overcome in order for that goal to be met - the separation between the state and the public. 
• "Democracies die behind closed doors"
• Louis Brandeis - "Sunlight" or "sunshine" when it is allowed to shine through previously darkened, secretive places, provides the best of "disinfectants"
• Transparency's symbolic pull, its ability to grab the public's imagination, leads us to fetishise means at the cost of ends
• "society has yet to discover anything that works better in coordinating complex action than public bureaucracies"
• Transparency's obsessive concern with visibility and the effort that this concern inspires to contain the state ultimately fail and disappoint because of the state's inevitable organisational and geographic distance from the public. The technocratic tools of open government cannot in fact meet the demands that transparency's force as a political and administrative symbol animates. 
• The ultimate technocratic tool that could successfully contain the state and make it visible would reverse Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, rendering the state a prisoner of the public's gaze. 
• Obama - "shine the light on Washington Lobbying"
• The image of transparency can provocatively present the government as a closed, isolated entity  with shuttered windows. 
• Some authors cast information as a substance that in a proper democracy must flow freely out of the government's clutches and into the waiting arms of the public.
• The series of paired terms upon which transparency proponents and filmmaker rely - open and closed, transparent and secret, sunshine and darkness, inside and outside, and the like - works powerfully and metaphorically to give some normative and symbolic bite to an administrative norm.
• Institutional design
• The metaphoric understanding of transparency animates deeply held beliefs about the state's legitimacy.
• The paired terms upon which transparency relies this establishes openness as a metonym for democracy - an element of a representative government that appears to stand for its entirety. An engaged, informed populace can control a transparent state, but a distant, secretive bureaucracy rules the nontransparent state. In this sense, transparency offers a deeply populist account of politics and the administrative state in which an unresponsive state can and ultimately will obstruct and oppose inquisitive individuals. Populist rhetoric - symbolic dichotomy between "the people" at one pole and "the other" at the absolute opposite.
• For progressives committed to the regulatory intervention into market activity provided by the administrative state, the government cannot rely on direct democratic rule, but must instead utilise expert, public agencies that deliberate rationally and are protected from direct political control and popular sentiment. Populist ideals can thus constitute a barrier to good, progressive governance. - A grinding of intellectual gears.
• Visibility requires simplicity because complexity creates opacity.
• If transparency abhors the distance between the state and public and requires immediacy, then efforts to make the government's operations fully visible must overcome the organisational and spatial distances that arise naturally from the size and complexity of states.
• Two of states most basic physical characteristics impede its visibility to the public. the first is state's territorial size and the political-geographic complexity. The second impediment is architectural. The thoroughly transparent state must be capable of allowing the public to view where and how government employees work: the physical spaces of the built bureaucratic environment. Government building have standard architectural elements - walls, ceilings, doors, and windows - that serve naturally to exclude  the public and obscure the state. Efforts to overcome this (if possible) could prove so intrusive and costly as to make the work of public officials difficult if not impossible.
• Access to information laws mostly confront and ultimately fail to respond coherently to the state's spatial and physical complexity.
• The modern state's sovereignty has long extended beyond its mere territory and been shaped and challenged internally not only by its citizens but by other states, nongovernmental organisations, transitional corporations, supranational institutions... the public may struggle to  identify the particular government entity from which they need to seek information.
• Public architecture aspires to more that the simple, utilitarian goal of housing offices and allowing or limiting public access, however. it also attempts to shape the affective relationship between the state and its public. It works iconically and symbolically to establish an identity for the national, state or municipal governmental unit or units that a building hosts.
• In doing so it may invite the polis to enter or initiate them and discourage their entry. The interior design and features of public buildings can also communicate openness or its opposite as they either foster or inhibit design features of public buildings can also communicate openness or its openness or its opposite as they either foster or inhibit interaction among government actors and between the state and the public. 
• Transparency laws must therefore attempt to mitigate the physical obstructions placed before the public's ability to view and access state operations. - The Americans with disabilities Act - Open government laws - "open meeting" or "sunshine" laws - open records laws.
• Sunshine Act - The only event that else laws make thoroughly visible is the official occasion of a "meeting", a term whose meaning is not self-evident.  How far along in a decision making body's consideration of a matter does a gathering of its members constitute an official meeting? Does the definition of 'meeting' extend outside the official enclosure, to other rooms in governmental buildings, or even to gatherings and encounters held in restaurants and homes?
• Most open meeting statutes reach only formal meet ins, defined as those that would adopt final actions, or at which a majority or quorum is in attendance.
• Is it right that any enclosure and any space that the official occupies must be made real or apparent of the public body?
• Understood this way the state can be everywhere  -   This view would allow no space that an official occupies to be securely private - including home - email - calls...
• To oppose this perhaps is a recognition that the state's visibility can and should be sacrificed to other interests, including the practical limits of transparency's enforcement and the private interest of public officials.
• Do freedom of information statutes cover records that are not in government offices or on government property?
• Their material scope and existence will continue to prove difficult to contain in a manner that will render them fully visible.
• If we cannot see a physical state - perhaps we can see a digital one? - internet
• Jeremy Bentham's original design for his Panopticon arrange and illuminated cells so that the inmates would be constantly visible to prison guards located securely in a central tower. Prisoners could see the tower but could not see into it, and could constantly be seen, despite being confined to a cell from which they could not escape. The prisoner's cell would illuminate them. Thus the Panopticon thus makes its subjects transparent to authority. Bentham asserted that at all times the subject should conceive himself to be so scrutinised. Constant and unending belief that one is being scrutinised would prove self-regulating as it was internalised by the prisoner. 
• "Visibility is a trap"
• The Panopticon could "carry the effects of power right to them" through "the calculation of openings, of filled and empty spaces, passages and transparencies". It offers an architecture of "continuous observation made possible by technical arrangements."
• Bentham viewed this model to have clear implications for representative democracy. He emphasised the importance of allowing the public to view its political rulers. Publicity he argued, would "constrain" the ruling assemble to perform its duty, allowing it to secure the confidence of its public and develop a more informed electorate. 
• For Bentham, democracy's foundations was built on the panoptic principle of an ever vigilant public managing a captive state and rulers. 
• The Panopticon serves as a metaphor for the modern institution, one that seeks to discipline its subjects by forcing them to internalise external authority, to develop the discipline of the self. It also represents the madness and excess of modernity. It is impossible to imagine a world in which one is perpetually under threat of observation. But it is also necessary as a metaphor to understand how the modern liberal state develops its subjects.