Trasparenza e trasformazione: dal paradigma visivo al paradigma informazionale

The concept of transparency is linked to vision, to the possibility that what is seen can appear as it is and exempt from opacity. This phenomenological paradigm produces, in the society of digital technologies, a form of absolute control in which various authors (Vattimo, Floridi, Byung Chul-Han) have not wrongly seen a risk of totalisation. This essay contrasts this model with an informational paradigm, based on the symbolic character of man’s relationship to the world. This makes it possible to understand the trans- and dia- of transparency and diaphanês as something that, far from being confined to phenomenological immanence, produces a mediative movement, “towards or beyond”, what appears, in such a way as to allow grasping, though not seeing, what is not present. It is only by defending this symbolic and “transductive” dimension of the technological object, beyond the visual immanence to which digital technologies condemn us, that the critical character of technology in general can be reassessed.