ABSTRACT

According to Vattimo (1992), in The Transparent Society, ‘everything’ has the potential to become an object of communication, and we are guided by an ideal of ‘self-transparency’, both for ourselves and for society. In his essay Exactitude, the novelist Calvino (1996) is concerned about the ‘loss of form’ or ‘substance’ in the ‘post-modern’ world and hankers for a ‘cult of exactitude’. Without ‘exactitude’, he suggests, ‘a well-defi ned and well-calculated plan for the work in question’, we risk ‘diluting meanings’ (56-57).