Transparency, Opacity and Exposure – Michel Surya, Lignes, and Intellectual Responses to Financial Crises

Through the contemporary intellectual review Lignes, this article charts the responses to neoliberalism and crisis of Michel Surya, Frédéric Lordon and Frédéric Neyrat. In the mid-1990s Surya critiques discourses of transparency which attempt to morally justify financial capitalism. The economist Lordon corroborates Surya’s account of the cynical use of ‘transparency’ within financial milieus, noting that the market’s wealth is generated by opacity. Yet Surya’s account spreads beyond the financial sector, suggesting that the demand for transparency creates a generalized atmosphere of surveillance and ostentation, implying that an opaque withdrawal from the public sphere is a mode of resistance. Also publishing in Lignes, Neyrat moves beyond the potentially sterile binary of transparency and opacity to suggest ‘exposure’ as a mediating term measuring both degrees of appearance and disappearance, and  the exposure of individuals to concrete threats such as debt, harm, surveillance and expulsion. Such conceptual texts are anchored in comparisons to UK Uncut, Occupy, le comité invisible and the black bloc.