The Limits of Transparency

Transparency is the consensus of our time. Its presence is ubiquitous today, and there is hardly any current debate where one can’t find demands for more transparency: debates about public governance, financial markets, corporate management, political lobbyism, citizen surveillance, open space offices, big data collection, open source software, food industry, athletics and sports, pharmaceutics, supplier information, energy efficiency, ecological impact, private and public research funding, quality assessment etc. As varied as they are, in all these matters, greater transparency is generally considered to lead to a better outcome. Favoring informational openness and the accountability of all actors, transparency is held up as a miraculous panacea, as an instrument through which the citizens concerned can claim institutional justice and limit practices of obfuscation, opacity or bribery. 
 
At the same time, transparency requests do not stop at the level of political or corporate action, but extend to the private life of citizens, with surveillance technologies significantly modifying behavior and forcing individuals to permanently publicize their thoughts and deeds. In the name of neutrality, expert judgments are more and more seen as suspicious while decision-making processes are progressively handed over to algorithms. 
 
The Thinker’s Program contributes to raising a public debate about the limits of transparency. What does transparency show? What does transparency hide? How can the knowledge from the arts, and its play of visibility and invisibility, tell us something about the logics of transparency and mediation?  Is the move towards transparency a move towards a more open and critical society or is there the danger that it leads to a society closed onto itself? 

The final symposium took place December 11th and 12th 2017.