Bruno Latour, Column for Domus March 2005

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

— You cannot deny that politics has to be transparent.
— Sure I deny it. To require politics not to be opaque is as ridiculous as, I don’t know. It would be like encasing a parliament inside a glass dome, like my grandmother used to do with her clocks.
— You mean like Norman Foster did in Berlin with the Reichstag?
— Yes, I had forgotten about that. In my humble opinion it was a very weak architectural metaphor of politics.
— I thought it was a great idea actually. It showed how much transparency is valued in German politics.
— Except of course you never see members of the Reichstag at work because access to the dome is closed when they are in session. So much for the open process! In this sense, I agree with you that it’s a pretty good lesson, albeit unintended: it shows that transparency is always a sham!
— You cannot pretend to prefer obscure deals among unaccountable politicians made in smoke-filled rooms. Politics needs transparency, accountability.
— But accountability means procedures, rules, meetings, checks and balances, that is, many more complications, many more files, many more people — and thus more obscurity! I am telling you that the idea of a glass house is impossible. The more accountability there is, the more bureaucrats you get.
— So you prefer that politics be secretive, mysterious, arcane? For me this is very close to obscurantism.
— Tell me, how many times have you opened the hood of your car?
— I never do, it’s a 1997 Mercedes E420! No need to.
— So, you are confident it works and you haven’t, if I am not mistaken, the slightest idea of how the engine and its electronics work.
— I have to confess, I am not much of a mechanical engineer.
— So for you it’s a black box. And yet is this obscurantism?
— I think that’s a pretty weak example because politics, contrary to my E420, does not work. And this is why we need to be able to open the hood.
— But what I meant is that the call for transparency is not always an ultimate good. Most of the time you are pretty content with obscurity —or at least indifference.
— You are playing with words. My request was quite simple: I want to see everything that concerns me in the full light of day. That’s all.
— But what you are asking for is impossible. If you don’t like my metaphor of the car, take that of a building under construction. It never shows itself in the fully transparent way you wish to get. Never.
— Of course it does! It remains transparent throughout. I can see the plans when it is being drafted; I can peer through the scale models when they are shown to the potential investors; I can inspect the specifications when it is being built; I can visit the building sites…
— You are cheating. The many pages of sketches are hiding one another. The scale models are artists’ renditions. Any architect will tell you that they lie a lot and, besides, who inspects the building sites? Not everybody, only specialists, engineers, insurers, contractors, a couple of people with hard hats and all of that behind high fences. You never see the whole building and especially not when it is finished, because, at that stage, every wall hides the one behind. The proof that a finished building is fully opaque is that you need a lot of new technical drawings just to know where to send the firemen.
— Okay, okay, maybe I was wrong to say that it was transparent. But at least every single document, procedure and course of action is continuous with some former one, and in this sense I can inspect all the steps and detect the smallest gaps in the process.
— But what you mean is that a building is traceable not transparent.
— It’s exactly the same thing. In both cases we need more accountability.
— But traceability is obtained through complicated, bureaucratic, highly technical procedures of certification, verification, insurance —exactly the opposite of what you seem to mean by transparency!
— Maybe, but I was not talking about buildings, engines or procedures but about politics. I was asking for something that is just plain common sense: in politics more transparency is required, that’s all. You seem to prefer obscurantism.
— But what I am telling you is that the whole metaphor of “seeing through” the obscure processes of politics is an absurd request which can please nobody except fundamentalists.
— You are for obscurity and you are calling me a fundamentalist?
— Of course, because in asking politics to be transparent, you do exactly what literalists claim to do for the Bible or for the Koran: “The truth speaks plainly and openly without any interpretation.”
— In religion, it may be an absurd request because no one knows how to interpret the voice of God. But in politics it sure makes a lot of sense.
— Because the voice of the people, according to you, would be easier to hear, easier to respect, and not open to differing interpretations?
— Of course not, but the many dissenting voices should be heard and not hidden through some obscure process of translation. That’s what I call transparency.
— What would the noise be of, let’s say, sixty or eighty millions voices dissenting together all at once? I’d be curious to hear that.
— Not directly of course, it would be inaudible.
— Ah! Thus it is indirect?
— Of course it is. Everything is indirect. There is no way to represent exactly…
— See, I was right then. This is just what I had said all along: politics is obscure, by construction, because it has to pass through so many translations.
— You may be right but I still maintain a difference between secrecy and accountability.
— Fine, fine. So do I, I suppose. But this is not the same as opposing opacity and transparency.
— So you want me to stop asking politicians to be transparent?
— Right, because this would play into the hands of fundamentalists who claim to have some sort of direct access to the voice of the people.
— So for you, vox populi.
— It should be just as difficult to hear as vox dei, yes. Especially today when they are again mixed up with each other.
— Arcane of powers then? That will please our present government enormously.
— Not as much as the empty claim for a transparency no one can achieve.