ABSTRACT
The study of grotesque transparency leaves us with a series of theoretical and practical lessons. Grotesque transparency is a transversal and universal strategic orientation that reveals both changes and atavisms in public communication. The human body is the measure of the transparently grotesque. It is a body that readers see and feel, from which our impressions are formed and eventually translated into actions. It is precisely this centrality of the body that indicates a dialectic between the strategic and the tactical in grotesque transparency. Organizations—public, private, legitimate or not—use the visual disclosure of the esperpentic body to achieve their goals. Paradoxically, grotesque transparency embodies some of the characteristics of older propaganda: its focus on the affective driver, its ability to synthesize complex issues into an image, and its disruptive nature. Grotesque transparency conveys a rupture meant either to re-establish a lost order or to question it, hence its moral duplicity.
