upon inspection, Plato’s cave is clearly constructed as a theater. The prisoners sit like theatergoers before a stage. Between the prisoners and the fire behind them leads a path; along the path runs a low wall that resembles “a partition above which the exhibitors of puppet shows display their art.”1 All manner of implements, statues, and figures in stone or wood are carried along; they extend over the partition and cast their shadows on the wall at which the prisoners stare, enraptured. Since the prisoners cannot turn around, they think the shadows themselves are speaking. Plato’s cave presents a kind of shadow theater, then. The objects that cast shadows are not the real things of the world; they are, one and all, theatrical figures and props. After all, shadows and reflections of real things exist only outside the cave. Were one of the prisoners led up into the world of light, Plato surmises:

there would be need of habituation…to enable him to see the things higher up. At first he would most easily discern the shadows and, after that, the likeness or reflections in water of men and other things, and later, the things themselves.2

The prisoners in the cave do not see the shadow images of the real world. Rather, a theater unfolds before them. Moreover, the fire provides artificial light. In fact, the prisoners are bound by scenes—by scenic illusions. They give themselves over to a play, to narration. Plato’s allegory does not represent different modes of cognition, as his interpreters commonly claim; rather, it represents different ways of living, that is, narrative and cognitive modes of existence. Plato’s cave is a theater. In the allegory of the cave, the theater as a world of narration stands opposed to the world of insight.

The fire in the cave produces scenic illusions as artificial light. It casts appearances [Schein]. In this, it differs from natural light as the medium of truth. For Plato, light displays a strong sense of direction. It streams from the Sun as its source. All that is, is ordered toward the Sun as the idea of the Good. It forms a point of transcendence, is located even “beyond Being.” Thus, it is also called “God.” What is owes its truth to this transcendence. Platonic sunlight is hierarchizing. It establishes gradations with regard to knowledge, which extend from the world of mere likenesses, on through sensorially perceptible things, up to the intelligible world of the Ideas.

Plato’s cave is a narrative world. No causal link joins the things that are there. A kind of dramaturgy or scenography connects the things (or signs) with each other by narrative means. The light of truth denarrativizes the world. The sun annihilates mere appearance. The play of mimesis and metamorphosis yields to working at truth [Arbeit an Wahrheit]. Plato condemns any hint of change in favor of rigid identity. His critique of mimesis specifically concerns appearance and play. Plato forbids any scenic representation, and he denies the poet entrance into his city of truth:

If a man…capable by his cunning of assuming every kind of shape and imitating all things should arrive in our city, bringing with himself the poems which he wished to exhibit, we should fall down and worship him as a holy and wondrous and delightful creature, but should say to him that there is no man of that kind among us in our city, nor is it lawful for such a man to arise among us, and we should send him away to another city, after pouring myrrh down over his head and crowning him with fillets of wool.3

Likewise, the society of transparency is a society without poets, without seduction or metamorphosis. After all, it is the poet who produces scenic illusions, forms of appearance, and ritual and ceremonial signs; he sets artifacts and antifacts against hyperreal, naked evidence.

The metaphor of light, which dominates philosophical and theological discourse from antiquity over the Middle Ages up to the Enlightenment, offers strong referentiality. Light springs from a well or a source. It provides the medium for obligating, prohibiting, and promising instances such as God and Reason. Consequently, it gives rise to negativity, which has a polarizing effect and produces oppositions. Light and darkness are coeval. Light and shadow belong together. The Good has Evil as its corollary. The light of reason and the darkness of the irrational (or the merely sensory) bring each other forth.

In contrast to Plato’s world of truth, today’s society of transparency lacks divine light inhabited by metaphysical tension. Transparency has no transcendence. The society of transparency is see-through without light. It is not illuminated by light that streams from a transcendent source. Transparency does not come about through an illuminating source of light. The medium of transparency is not light, but rather lightless radiation; instead of illuminating, it suffuses everything and makes it see-through. In contrast to light, it is penetrating and intrusive. Moreover, its effect is homogenizing and leveling, whereas metaphysical light generates hierarchies and distinctions; thereby, it creates order and points of orientation.

The society of transparency is the society of information. Information is a phenomenon as such insofar as it lacks all negativity. It amounts to positivized, operationalized language. Heidegger would call it a language of “Framing” [Ge-Stell]: “speaking is challenged to correspond in every respect to Framing in which all present beings can be commandeered. Within Framing, speaking turns into information.”4 Information positions [stellt] human language. Heidegger conceives “Framing” in terms of domination. Accordingly, figures of order such as commanding [Bestellen], imagining [Vorstellen], and producing [Herstellen] signify power and rule. Commanding positions being as substance [Bestand]; imagining positions it as an object [Gegenstand]. However, Heidegger’s Framing does not encompass the forms of positioning that are characteristic of today. Exhibiting [Aus-Stellen] or putting-on-display [Zur-Schau-Stellen] do not primarily serve the acquisition of power. Power is not the aim so much as attention [Aufmerksamkeit]. The motivating factor is not polemos but porno. Power and attention are not coextensive. Holding power means holding the Other at one’s mercy; it is unnecessary to seek attention. Nor does attention automatically generate power.

Heidegger also considers the “picture” only from the perspective of domination:

“Picture” means…that which sounds in the colloquial expression to be “in the picture” about something.…“To put oneself in the picture” about something means: to place the being itself before one just as things are with it, and, as so placed, to keep it permanently before one.5

For Heidegger, the picture is the medium through which one takes over being and holds it fast. This theory of the picture does not explain today’s media images, for they are simulacra that no longer represent “beings.” They do not serve the purpose of “positioning,” being “before oneself,” and “constantly having it in this way.” As simulacra without reference, they lead an independent existence, so to speak. They also proliferate beyond power and dominion. They are, as it were, fuller with being and life than what simply “is.” Today’s multimediated mass of information and communication presents things more as an accumulation [Ge-Menge] than as a “framing.”6

The society of transparency not only lacks truth; it also lacks symbolic appearance. Neither truth nor symbolic appearance are see-through. Only emptiness is entirely transparent. To avert this emptiness, a mass of information is brought into circulation. The mass of information and imagery offers fullness in which emptiness is still noticeable. More information and communication alone do not illuminate the world. Transparency also does not entail clairvoyance. The mass of information produces no truth. The more information is set free, the more difficult it proves to survey the world. Hyperinformation and hypercommunication bring no light into darkness.

1. Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 747 [Politeia 514b]; translation modified.←

2. Ibid., 748 [516a].←

3. Ibid., 642 [398a].←

4. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 132.←

5. Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 67.←

6. The virtual world lacks the resistance of the Real and the negativity of the Other. Heidegger would invoke the “earth” against its gravity-free positivity. It stands for the hidden, the undisclosable, and the self-secluding: “Earth shatters every attempt to penetrate it.…The earth is openly illuminated as itself only where it is apprehended and preserved as the essentially undisclosable, as that which withdraws from every disclosure, in other words, keeps itself entirely closed up.…The earth is the essentially self-secluding” (Off the Beaten Track, 25). The “sky” is also inscribed with the unknown: “Thus the unknown god appears as the unknown by way of the sky’s manifestness” (Poetry, Language, Thought, 221). Likewise, Heidegger’s “truth,” as “unhiddenness/unconcealment,” remains embedded in “hiddenness/concealment.” “The unhidden must be torn away [entrissen] from a hiddenness” (Pathmarks, ed. William McNeil [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 171). Thus, the truth is traversed by a “tear” [Riss]. The negativity of the “tear,” for Heidegger, is “pain.” The society of positivity avoids “pain.” The truth as unhiddenness is neither light without negativity nor transparent radiance. It is a “clearing” [Lichtung] surrounded by dark forests. In this, it differs from evidence and transparency, which lacks all negativity.←