Stubborn Shadows

Author(s): Nicole Simek

Source: symplokē , Vol. 23, No. 1-2, Posthumanisms (2015), pp. 363-373
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/symploke.23.1-2.0363

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STUBBORN SHADOWS

NICOLE SIMEK

Writing in 1981, Édouard Glissant identified a difficult methodological

problem confronting him and fellow critics of the particular neocolonial situ-
ation in which his native island of Martinique found itself, namely the prob-
lem of finding a way to approach invisible modes of cultural and economic
domination whose seeming naturalness and imperceptible density rendered
them all the more pernicious. Faced with the dilemma of uncovering the
hidden, he argued, “Banging away incessantly at the main ideas will perhaps
lead to exposing the space they occupy in us. Repetition of these ideas does
not clarify their expression; on the contrary, it perhaps leads to obscurity. We
need those stubborn shadows where repetition leads to perpetual conceal-
ment, which is our form of resistance” (1989, 4).
This demand for stubborn shadows, for what Glissant also famously
termed the “right to opacity” (“nous réclamons le droit à l’opacité” [1991,
14]), frames transparency as a problem rather than the unmitigated social
or political good the term has come to evoke in an array of contemporary
discourses. Much French Caribbean writing and political activism upholds
this framework, privileging opacity and, often, the poetic as its primary mode
of expression. At the same time, calls for the right to opacity co-exist within
this writing with a perceived need for transparency, the need to uncover, to
make manifest and visible the subtle mechanisms of domination that charac-
terize Martinique and Guadeloupe’s political and cultural situation. In the
following pages I would like to take up this relationship between opacity
and transparency in order to raise some questions about the forms resistance
to neocolonial and neoliberal uses of transparency can take today. How
might we conceive of literature’s capacity or responsibility to elucidate or
to preserve shadows? Can neoliberal deployments of transparency be coun-
tered by opacity, and if so, in what forms?

Transparency and its Discontents

Transparency has become so widespread an ideal, valued and invoked

by diverse constituencies in so many sectors of contemporary life across the

© symploke Vol. 23, Nos. 1-2 (2015) ISSN 1069-0697, 363-373.

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364 Nicole Simek Stubborn Shadows

globe (from government to business to education), that its moral authority

often appears obvious. Though deploying it to different ends, neoliberal,
liberal, and leftist discourses all frequently take transparency, or disclo-
sure, to be a key principle of good governance and social relations. This
contemporary trend draws heavily on a Western Enlightenment current
shaped most prominently by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jeremy Bentham,
who theorized transparency as a tool of liberation ensuring the proper func-
tioning of representative government. On this view, transparency serves a
normative purpose first by rendering the few, the governing, visible to the
many, the governed, and thus in principle subject to judgment and repeal
by the people.1 Moreover, in associating clarity with rational thought more
precisely, the Enlightenment principle of transparent governance conceived
of responsibility, or answerability, as involving both accountability and
accounting. Transparency was not merely thought to expose the actions of
the governing, but relied on, and sought to bolster, rational modes of conduct.
As Christopher Hood puts it, transparency has become associated not only
with “governance that is intelligible and accessible to the ‘general public,’”
but also with “decisions governed by clearly established and published rules
and procedures rather than by ad hoc judgments or processes; [and] methods
of accounting or public reporting that clarify who gains from and who pays
for any public measure” (qtd. in Birchall 2011, 61). Transparency is as much
about rule-governed, predictable and reproducible modes of reasoning and
acting as it is about visibility in itself.
As a check on the arbitrary exercise of repressive power concentrated in
the hands of the few, transparent, or publically visible, rule-governed prac-
tices have obvious benefits. Transparency’s roots in egalitarian principles
have contributed to its enduring moral authority in the United States, while
its manifestation in repeatable techniques of accounting have led to its enthu-
siastic exportation by Western governments, the World Bank, and numerous
transnational agencies, as well as anti-colonial activist groups. If the 1980s
saw what Aradhana Sharma describes as “a turn toward good governance
[…among] mainstream development institutions,” who faulted developing
countries’ governmental secrecy, corruption, and inefficiency for the failures
of structural adjustment programs (2013, 309), the decades since then have
seen what Mehrpouya and Djelic term an “explosion of…visibility-based
accountability structures” (2014, 1). These include IMF-imposed liberaliza-
tion programs in debtor states, for example, programs that are a familiar
target of critique today, but also populist-backed legal reforms instituting

1
As Christopher Hood points out, transparency in itself has not historically ensured
accountability, and the absence of full transparency has not always entailed a lack of
accountability. For example, many democratic regimes apply restrictions of varying degrees
on public disclosure of civil servants’ and committees’ actions, while “bureaucratic totalitarian
states of the twentieth century (such as the USSR, Nazi Germany and the German Democratic
Republic) had some elements of transparency in the sense of rule-governed operations, accessible
statistics and various kinds of records, but were not democratically accountable” (Hood 2010,
991).

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 symplokeˉ 365

freedom of information acts, as well as non-governmental transparency-

based movements and platforms, such as WikiLeaks.
The value of transparency has not gone unchallenged, despite its wide
use. Critiques come on the one hand from liberal thinkers who view the
growing neoliberal audit culture as a threat to egalitarian principles and
balance of power, as a perverted implementation of transparency. As
Mehrpouya and Djelic have shown, while the particular forms transparency
is taking under the neoliberal “turn” today are alarming, it is also helpful
to recall that transparency has been developing along competing trajecto-
ries in the West since the eighteenth century, and that its problems are not
entirely new. If democratic thinkers emphasized the need to make “the few
visible to the many,” state actors throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries also sought to “make the many visible to the few,” to control and
shape the behavior of large masses of people through various surveillance
techniques and practices of knowing, often in the name of rational thought
and enlightened progress (Mehrpouya and Djelic 2014). Given the entangle-
ment of these various practices of visibility, and the capaciousness of liberal
thought (which has been put to the service of both democratic and authori-
tarian modes of governance), contemporary leftist critiques of neoliberalism
have taken aim at its liberal underpinnings, questioning liberalism’s and
transparency’s complicity with global capitalism and audit culture. To this
end, critics like Clare Birchall have directed attention to under-examined
assumptions about the principles frequently opposed to transparency—such
as secrecy, inefficiency, and corruption—and those thought to flow from
transparency—such as accountability, honesty, and trust. In order to rethink
and deploy more effective strategies of resistance, Birchall argues, we must
decouple these linkages, “whereby secrecy comes to be associated with all
that is nefarious…and transparency with all that is noble” (2011, 66). This
work of critique allows us to think about transparency and secrecy not as
fixed entities locked in opposition to one another, but as modes of relating
that can be either productive or repressive.2
Glissant’s demand for a “right to opacity,” his assertion that “we need
those stubborn shadows where repetition leads to perpetual concealment,
which is our form of resistance,” performs a similar type of intervention
by recoupling terms thought to be unrelated or opposed. The phrase “right
to opacity” reintroduces a concept—opacity—that rights discourses have
neglected, drawing attention to the historical processes through which some
rights becomes naturalized and others do not. If such a phrasing risks playing

2
Birchall convincingly argues in favor of situating transparency within a historical horizon
in order to evaluate its effects; transparency, on this view, is “a means to an end—good and fair
government—not an end in itself,” and as such it is neither “automatically contaminated” nor
always and everywhere productive (2011, 63). Birchall turns in this piece to psychoanalysis and
poetry as examples of domains in which secrecy has been valued as beneficial, which then leads
her to contemplate the possibility of “configuring secrecy as commons” (63), of using secrecy for
radically democratic ends.

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366 Nicole Simek Stubborn Shadows

into the logic of natural rights, suggesting that opacity is an inherent property
or identity in need of recognition, the notion of the stubborn shadow—or
“épaisseurs têtues” (1997, 17), stubborn densities or hard-headed thick-
nesses—reframes opacity as a project, as an active mode of resistance that
emerges in response to particular political problems. More specifically, opac-
ity becomes resistance when it serves to confront what Glissant terms “the
ideal of transparent universality, imposed by the West” (2). Insisting that the
West is “a project, not a place” (1989, 1), Glissant situates opacity in opposi-
tion to an Enlightenment project of knowledge that valued universal models
and categories, and one that functioned through a process of understanding
or comprehending (in the strong sense of seizing or grasping) that relied on
reducing and hierarchizing. “If we examine the process of ‘understanding’
people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought,” as he puts it in
Poetics of Relation, “we discover that its basis is this requirement for transpar-
ency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your
solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons
and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce” (1997, 190). The initial density
that difference presents evaporates as the knower drills down into it; opacity
is transmuted, falsely, into transparency, as the knower looks upon it as in a
mirror, perceiving not the opaque bottom, but the reflection of the self, of the
“world in its [Western humanity’s] own image” (1997, 111).
In the colonial period, as Patrick Crowley points out, this narcissistic proj-
ect was translated concretely into acts of “knowing” the colonized subject that
bolstered imperial control—acts of knowing carried out by all sorts of civil
servants, administrators, geographers, ethnographers, and cultural produc-
ers (2006, 107). To assert one’s right to opacity is to refuse to be known solely
on the terms of the colonizer and for the colonizer’s benefit. As Crowley
puts it, opacity appears not as an anti-rational mode of thought tout court, but
rather “as a medium that resists the light of (Western) understanding in order
to preserve diversity and advance exchanges based not upon hierarchy but
upon networks that abolish the primacy of any one centre of understanding”
(2006, 107). Opacity, then, becomes a figure for diversity, for what interrupts
the gaze and management of Western thought.

Opacity, Poetics, and Politics

Framing the demand for opacity more precisely as a demand for the
“right” to opacity still raises, of course, the question of the political struc-
tures within which this demand can be articulated and acted on. What kind
of legal, ethical, political, or aesthetic frameworks does such a claim imply
or seek to subvert? Do these frameworks shift when, in his later writing,
Glissant extends his statement “We demand the right to opacity” to: “We
clamor for the right to opacity for everyone” (1997, 194)? One of the questions
this statement raises involves the constitution of the “we” who demands,

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 symplokeˉ 367

and the “we” who is called upon to receive and read this claim, to read the
language of resistance. From what specific subject positions can the “we”
address this claim, and in what language? Under what conditions can opac-
ity, or unintelligibility, be heard as resistance and elicit a response? Should
address be thought in terms of affective call and response? In the absence
of a common language, in the absence of intelligibility, should the burden
of making oneself heard fall on the very one who is vulnerable to or reliant
on those who can act on the demand? Can this responsibility of address be
shifted, be shared, be made more equitable?
Given the difficulty of these questions, it is striking that a number of
Antillean intellectuals have strongly and repeatedly reasserted the value
of opacity to critique in their theoretical statements, in their literary prac-
tice, and, in some cases, their more direct interventions into politics. Mary
Gallagher even notes that poetics, which she defines as “writing in which liter-
ary values of expression and form, including values of semantic richness, of
infinite levels of meaning, of aesthetic resonance and ethical depth are—often
both theoretically and performatively—central and pre-eminent…” appears
to be “the dominant mode of francophone postcolonial discourse” (2010,
251). The terms “richness,” “infinite levels,” and “depth” all echo the notion
of épaisseur, that thickness or density that Glissant refers to as stubbornly
resistant.3 How exactly opacity resists, and why one would opt for this mode
of resistance over or alongside others, remains a question, however. To what
extent can poetics or the production of opacity directly or indirectly contest
either neo-imperialism or global capitalism? To what extent should opacity
be viewed as either an obstacle to political work, a “dangerous” supplement
to such contestation, or as a pre-political act that lays the groundwork for
such resistance?
Throughout his writing, Patrick Chamoiseau, a close colleague of
Glissant’s, has asserted a strong relationship between opacity and politics,
commenting in a 2012 interview that while writing in itself is not neces-
sarily a political weapon, “the poetic approach is” (Liger 2012, my trans-
lation). Lamenting the predominance of the view that the world can be
explained solely in terms of economics, that the world is, in short, calculable,
Chamoiseau claims,

Today, interpretation of the facts of the contemporary world is

drying up, due to the pervasive idea that everything is economics.

3
It is perhaps important to note here Glissant’s use of the term “depth,” which he aligns in
Poetics of Relation with transparency and Western obsessions with grasping absolute knowledge.
Western projects of knowing recognize depth, but view it as penetrable, or knowable. Such a
project, “like depth psychology,” retains “its certainty that there is a universal model, a sort
of archetype of humanity, difficult to circumscribe or define, of course, but one that would
simultaneously ensure our knowledge in the matter and be its ultimate aim” (1997, 24). Depth-
oriented poetics thus ultimately seek to raise that which is deep to the surface, to disclose, that is,
the hidden core at the bottom of another, of a culture, or of an idea. Depth is thus not equivalent
in Glissant’s usage to density, which is partially penetrable, but also irreducible.

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368 Nicole Simek Stubborn Shadows

We’re facing a rationality that has forgotten about the poetic. The
human factor has practically disappeared from political discourse,
you know. If you speak of conviviality, fraternity, love, touch,
flavor—everything that adds spice to life and to creativity— in
political discourse it makes you seem frivolous [ça ne fait pas séri-
eux]. People prefer to stay within very prosaic parameters. What
Glissant and I have tried to do in most of our work [nos interventions]
is to reinstate the forgotten, poetic dimension of the political—that
which organizes the city of men and allows peoples to come into
their own. (Liger 2012, my translation)

On this view, the poetic—that which in its thickness and creative mutabil-
ity cannot be reduced to calculable transactions—serves as a resource, as a
guarantor of vitality and creativity, and as a barrier against the homogenizing
forces of economic rationality.
Chamoiseau himself draws attention to the charge of frivolity, or naivety,
with which such a claim will be met. Such a worry might resonate with
postcolonial scholars skeptical of the broad, undefined terms Chamoiseau
uses here, such as “love” or “the human factor” (the French term is l’humain,
meaning the human or the humane), terms which smack of a universalism
and anthropocentrism so often indicted in critiques of reductive, categori-
cal thinking. It anticipates perhaps most directly, however, objections from
political theorists skeptical of the implementation of an aesthetic or ethical
approach to political problems, skeptical, that is, of the non-propositional
dimension of aesthetics, and of the open-ended temporality of the ethical,
which is frequently thought to clash with the political need for decisive,
punctual decisions and actions.4
The force Chamoiseau attributes to the poetic might seem to rely on,
or produce, a conflation of the aesthetic and the political, yet his comments
also raise the types of questions of genre and reception that are, as Nicholas
Harrison argues, both essential to assessments of the literary’s political value
but also frequently neglected in postcolonial criticism (2011, 50). Of note first
is that Chamoiseau distinguishes the “poetic approach” (l’approche poétique)
from “writing” (écriture), and asserts that such an approach is capable of

4
Over the past decades, postcolonial scholars have increasingly focused attention on this
question of poetics’ political work, and have called for new methods and lines of inquiry, in
an attempt to rectify the conflation of aesthetic and political effects judged all too frequent
in postcolonial studies. Peter Hallward brought this question to prominence in Absolutely
Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (2002); subsequent studies devoted
to the topic include Nicholas Harrison’s Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory, and the Work of
Fiction (2003), Chris Bongie’s Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature
(2008), Eli Park Sorensen’s Postcolonial Studies and the Literary: Theory, Interpretation and the Novel
(2010), and Patrick Crowley and Jane Hiddleston’s edited collection, Postcolonial Poetics: Genre
and Form (2011). In her introduction to the volume, Hiddleston explains well postcolonial critics’
predilection for texts taken to be representative of colonial experience or immediately subversive
in their political effects. The task at hand is, she argues, not to abandon the political altogether,
but rather “to articulate a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which form and genre can
engage with the political” (2011, 1).

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 symplokeˉ 369

intervening in, and affecting, political discourse (le discours politique). The
phrase political discourse implies that this discourse remains generically
bounded and distinct from other modes of address, yet it is permeable, capa-
ble of re-integrating the poetic dimension that it has allegedly lost. Writing
appears as a medium that can be deployed to this end (or not), while the
poetic approach connotes a more specific theoretical or critical orientation,
one that is defined in this interview mainly negatively, as that which exceeds
economic rationality: to approach something poetically is to approach it as
incalculable, that is, as irreducible to a formulaic analysis and resolution.
On what does this incalculability rest? One plausible explanation is to
take opacity as a fundamentally unknowable kernel of difference—in the
form, for example, of a cultural identity not fully discoverable to the other or
capable of being experienced in its full affective dimensions, or in the form of
the unconscious, an opaque structure unknowable either to the self or to the
other. On such a reading, opacity frequently comes to function as an essence
(regardless of its origins or its historical/cultural constructedness), and to be
fetishized—rendered sacred and fundamentally unreadable—in its unknow-
ability. Rendering alterity and the aesthetic absolutely inscrutable can lead
to a refusal to read, a refusal to engage that paradoxically repeats, in different
form, the refusal to enter into Relation that the gesture of respect ostensibly
seeks to resist. Yet what Chamoiseau stresses in his conversation with Liger,
and what Glissant stresses in his writings as well, is that opacity is inextri-
cable from interpretation. Chamoiseau’s allegation that political discourse
has sidelined interpretation—that interpretation is “drying up,” becoming
desiccated [il y a aujourd’hui un dessèchement de l’interprétation]—highlights
the way in which opacity, in this view, motivates reading, approach, and
entanglement, rather than respectful but distanced separation. Glissant
puts this in slightly different terms in Poetic Intention, where he asserts that
opacity and interpretation (or “unveiling”) are mutually entangled: “Opacity
encroaches on the mechanics, the technologies of unveiling: to thicken it. For
unveiling has as its mission, not so much to deliver a truth, …as to maintain
an anxiety, vertigo” (2010, 165). Opacity does not so much thwart interpreta-
tion as alter its course.
Glissant reaffirms this interrelation between opacity and unveiling, or
reading, in his later Poetics of Relation, distinguishing between a vision of
“false transparency”—a vision of the world as available for domination and
seizing com-prehension—and a countervailing willingness to “enter into the
penetrable opacity of a world in which one exists, or agrees to exist, with
and among others” (1997, 114). Absolute knowledge still remains unavail-
able (and this absence produces a sensation of vertigo), yet opacity’s dizzying
effect impels us to engage. It confronts us with “an insistent presence that we
are incapable of not experiencing” (1997, 111).
As an impetus to open-ended interpretation, opacity counters the
impulses animating both colonialist reductions of the other to transparent,
knowable object, and contemporary neoliberal, technocratic applications of

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370 Nicole Simek Stubborn Shadows

transparency. If colonialist hermeneutics at least assume there is an object to

be known (even if that object is easily interpreted), the eager turn to transpar-
ency today as a solution fit for all sorts of problems seems to stem in large
part, as a number of critics have observed, from a desire to evacuate inter-
pretation entirely. As Clare Birchall puts it, transparency “is presented as
a technical, rather than a political settlement,” a solution that promises to
restore trust by obviating the need for other modes of disclosure, notably
“narrative-interpretive forms of disclosure” tainted as less perfect and moral
(2014, 77). Transparent governance, in the eyes of many international agen-
cies operating in development, is seen, as Sharma similarly notes, “not as an
exercise in power, but as apolitical administration, which can be improved
through expert restructuring” (2013, 309). Such approaches tend to take
transparency as an end in itself, coterminous with the desired governance
results, rather than a means, a technique that can be put to different uses—in
short, such approaches fail to see transparency as a technique that becomes
intelligible and operable only within a context that must be read.
In such a climate, then—a technocratic climate hungry for data, for impos-
sible data whose evidence imposes itself, for data that interpret themselves,
in a sense—to insist on opacity is to insist on reading, on interpretation as
an inescapable and desirable feature of social life. While warnings against
fetishizing literature’s resistant powers and mistaking cultural production
as the equivalent of political action are well-founded, the case can also be
made—and this is well known but perhaps bears repeating—that since poli-
tics involves knowledge and meaning-making, the act of reading, or inter-
preting—which is the business of poetics—is always in some respects a politi-
cal act. In a context in which reading’s relevance or usefulness is routinely
challenged, “a concern with literary specificity or even literary singularity
can be oppositional per se” (Gallagher 2010, 260). It is worth restating here
that opposition or resistance is contextually bound, and thus if it is to create
effects, the specific forms opacity takes matter. This resistance must become
embodied in particular moments and places, and the theoretical conceptual-
ization of opacity expansive enough to account for its mutability.

The Work of Opacity

At times, Glissant’s and Chamoiseau’s statements seem to suggest to the

contrary that opacity imposes itself with a force that is irresistible or inevi-
table. Both authors cite examples of opaque texts that, counter to (“Western”)
expectations, strike up passion in the uninitiated reader; opacity is framed
in these examples as speaking to or impacting readers across barriers to
comprehension and clarity.5 Yet more often, both writers give attention to

5
In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant remarks, “Western thought has led us to believe that a
work must always put itself constantly at our disposal, and I know a number of our folktales, the

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 symplokeˉ 371

history and to the variability of reader’s reactions, insisting both on the

transformative capacity of opacity, but also its unpredictability and lack of
guarantees.6 Glissant points out that the opaque “alluvium deposited by
populations” that presents itself to West and the world today is “denied or
insulted more often than not” (1997, 111), while Chamoiseau frames advo-
cacy for the poetic as a political struggle, not as an already-accepted reality or
sure, self-evident outcome. Both have turned to concrete examples and made
interventions in a range of domains—from literary production to translation
practice to syndicate and community organizing to electoral politics—and
have deployed an array of genres and media.7 They thus open up paths
beyond abstract assertion for further exploration of the particular, situated
forms opacity has taken, or can take, in order to produce effects.
Much critical work thus lies ahead, if we are to give nuanced accounts of
the cognitive-affective mechanisms through which opacity becomes “opera-
tional,” to use Chamoiseau’s term, within a given network of social and insti-
tutional relations—and if we are to account for opacity’s both progressive
and regressive (or simply neutral or negligible) impacts. This is true as well
of the attempt to assess and resist neoliberalism’s values and techniques (e.g.,
technocratic data-collection in lieu of politics; economic rationality; correlate

power of whose impact on their audience has nothing to do with the clarity of their meaning”
(1989, 107). Chamoiseau gives a stirring example of the “power of reading-writing in extreme
circumstances” in Écrire en pays dominé (Writing in a Dominated Land) by recounting the story of
Loïc Léry (unnamed in the text, but referred to through the title of his book, Le gang des Antillais),
a prisoner Chamoiseau met as a social worker, and who found Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a
Return to the Native Land engaging, despite/because of his lack of familiarity with literature,
as well as the poem’s dense style (1997, 95-98; my translation). If such claims use particular
examples to poke holes in common assumptions, critics, as Nicholas Harrison points out, often
skip over or extend this move further, bypassing questions of reception altogether and basing
claims about a text’s political force “solely on close textual analysis,” a mode of reading Harrison
describes as “a legitimate exercise for other purposes, …but which provides limited evidence if
you want to assess how different readers in different contexts have actually reacted” (2011, 50).
6
As Gallagher recalls, “[Glissant] recognizes that no poetics, not even the ‘poetics of
relation,’ is necessarily politically liberatory nor even necessarily ethical: ‘la Relation n’est pas
vertueuse ni “morale” [et] une poétique de la Relation ne suppose pas immédiatement et de
manière harmonieuse la fin des dominations’ [Relation is not virtuous or ‘moral’ [and] a poetics
of Relation does not assume the immediate and harmonious end of all dominations]” (2010, 260; my
translation).
7
I have examined mainly interviews and essays here—a genre that blurs theoretical
pronouncement and literary exploration, and that functions mainly through creative exploration
and presentation of evidence that disproves or disrupts settled explanations without providing
an alternative, affirmative resolutions—but these writers’ works and activities put to use a
variety of techniques with differing functions: single-authored and collaborative pieces, novels,
poetry, graphic narrative, film, photo-essay, theater, and various public speeches, readings,
and performances, in addition to other professional activities, including Glissant’s work for
UNESCO, Chamoiseau’s career in social work, and Chamoiseau’s involvement in the political
movement MODEMAS (Mouvement des Démocrates et des Écologistes pour une Martinique
Souveraine, or Democrats and Ecologists for a Sovereign Martinique). On literary genre and
assessments of political impact, see Harrison (2011). Harrison follows Derrida and recent genre
theorists in basing distinctions between genres on readerly expectations, or function, rather than
on formal, stylistic features alone.

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372 Nicole Simek Stubborn Shadows

instrumental approaches to education and educational assessment). If the

urgency of this problem and the advances of neoliberalism understandably
prompt defensive assertions of literature’s political work, such assertions risk
playing into the terms of the debate by framing literature’s value as merely
instrumental, that is, as formulaic and calculable.
In thinking, then, about opacity’s potential resistant function, and about
what critical studies of opacity can contribute to political discourse, it seems
important to me to challenge readings of opacity that merely assume its
subversiveness always and everywhere, but also those readings that take
it to signify an absolutely impenetrable substance that reading defiles. In
interpretive practice, this sacralization of opacity flattens it, rendering it
very like a transparent, unread, non-substance or absence. Here, the idea
of a stubborn density, of something layered, something partially penetrable
but with a mind of its own, seems to me a more productive way of thinking
about opacity, a more productive way of harnessing its powers of critique, its
ability to shift assumptions and feelings so that new modes of relating, new
criteria of evaluation can be developed. This is not to claim that the other is
fully knowable to me, and to base political strategies on the assumption of
knowability; rather, it is to turn attention to the work of reading, a work that
is unavoidably political and that must go on, that must be undertaken not
in spite of, but in light of that fact that absolute transparency is unattainable
and undesirable. On such a view, the distance between different modes of
hermeneutics—the stuff of many critical debates—is comparatively short.
It certainly remains imperative to consider and weigh against one another
various modes of reading—a hermeneutics of suspicion that recognizes
depth but seeks ultimately to uncover meaning; distant and surface readings
that seek to rectify interpretive under- and over-reach; or a hermeneutics of
eating well,8 which insists on the inexhaustibility of the text, its resistance to
comprehension. But it is also urgent to address the more radical, and to my
mind, dangerous gap that transparency has come to stand in for today: that
breach that comes between reading, on the one hand, and non-reading on the
other, between engagement with conflict and ambiguity as a facet of social
interaction and a faith in the evacuation of conflict and opacity altogether
through technical means.

WHITMAN COLLEGE

8
I borrow the formulation of “eating well” from Derrida (115).

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 symplokeˉ 373

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