Governing Opacity: Regimes of Intention Management and Tools of Legibility

ABSTRACT The intentions of others are ultimately opaque: we can never know exactly the mind of someone else. Yet humans continually attempt to ‘read’ the mental states of others and throughout history have created institutions that attempt to do so by managing intentions and thus addressing the opacity of other minds. The contributors of this special issue argue that the form in which we meet the fundamental challenge of the opacity of mind is decisive for the kinds of government we are able to imagine. Our introduction provides the framework for the exploration of the correlations between the management of opacity and the forms of government humans create. We draw attention to different ways of creating legibility, and corresponding practices of accountability, thus linking particular forms of intention management with particular ways of doing and imagining politics.