bureaucracy,
transparency,
semiotics,
rhetoric,
power
Abstract
Semiotics points out that transparency is not an objective element of vision and knowledge, but a modality of that which Greimas would define as “the observing actant”. The essay seeks to demonstrate that if this transparent actant is not embodied by concrete actors, and remains evocation of an abstract instance of vision, the discourse of transparency can give rise, demagogically, to a sort of generalized voyeurism, wherein the absence of any obstacle or filter to gazes turns, on the contrary, into a rhetoric that establishes new and even more surreptitious relations of exploitation. Supposedly absolute transparency brings about systematic suspect, the paralysis of community, and the dictatorship by those who manage the mechanisms of digital bureaucracy.
