Transparency and the Legitimation of the Incredulous Self of the Ruling Elite

‘All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts'

(Shakespeare As You Like It : act 2, scene 7, lines 138-42)

Subject under study is way the metaphor of transparency in the language of self-legitimation could emerge and the consequences it has for the way authority is exercised. The pattern of self-presentation is informed by new beliefs and conceptions of legitimate power and authority. They are new criteria for the arousal of credibility in other, but above all, I claim, for the belief in oneself. Transparency as a new convention in the presentation of the political self, I claim, signifies a lack of self-confidence in the political elite of Europe . A history of the metaphor will clarify why.

The dramatic presentation of the self in everyday, or public life has fascinated humanity throughout its history. In the ancient tradition of theatrum mundi the world is portrayed as a stage on which the drama of social interaction is played out and as the scenery against which our roles become meaningful. The metaphor of life as a stage travelled from Plato and Horace, to the early Christian writers such as Saint Paul , it found reincarnations in Pedro Calderón de la Barca's El gran teatro del mundo, in Shakespeare and Molière, but the theme can equally be found at the origin of the social sciences with Balzac's Comédie Humaine . It may strike as fairly odd therefore that the idea has only recently been rediscovered.

Maybe most prominently in academics it was Goffman who observed how the public decorum served people's self-presentation which, following certain public conventions, arouse the necessary credibility that makes social communication possible. If the full consequences of this understanding are appreciated we have to conclude that when credibility is premised on the dramaturgy of a person's self-presentation, also notions of authority become meaningful only when seen in relation to the role he is acting out. As Weber notes ‘in no instance does domination voluntary limit itself to the appeal to material; or affectual or ideal motives as a basis for its continuance. In addition every such system attempts to establish and to cultivate the belief in its legitimacy. The end to which belief is cultivated coincides perfectly with that of Goffman's self-presentation. Namely, to arouse credibility in a particular kind of identity, one with a particular kind of prestige we often call ‘legitimacy'.

Governing institutions of all kinds seem to feel the need to identify and present themselves as transparent and open, corresponding to the idea that there is a widely shared desire for participation, comprehensibility and accountability. They stage their democratic character in these terms, forging an image of comprehensibility, openness, reflexivity, accountability, self-enactment, closeness to the people, participatory democracy, and popular sovereignty. This study revolves around the question what the consequences are for the modes of governing of a self-understanding which hinges on the need for transparency and open democracy.

 

Governing institutions are confronted with an ever larger pressure to account for their presence, surveys show an increasing mistrust in relation to politicians and political institutions, and in an ever more complex society or world system it is ever harder to account for the results of ones actions. It is only natural that any power, in reaction, simulates its own absence in order to escape its accountability and citizen's distrust. As Baudrillard would have it, ‘Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy.' How did governments come so far as to deny their own existence through the language of transparency? And what does that mean for their governing practices?