Ever since the 19th century, the artistic and political avant-garde have been penetrating the denseness of the future and attempting to immobilise it. The transparency dream provides the imaginary powers to do so. Such dreams of making the world and its people transparent are equally alive in Charles Fourier's utopian Phalanstères, in the Russian avant-garde, in surrealism and in Walter Benjamin’s idea of a rebarbarised proletarian future. But the transparency dream has only now ‘come to itself’, as Hegel would put it: in the seizure of power by the big IT corporations that attempt to liquidate all traditional forms of society and policy.
