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The Shadows of Knowability
Reading between Opaque Narrative and
Transparent Text
Younes Saramifar
Abstract
The torch of ember and its puzzling knowability are my exemplars, serving
to open the binary of opacity and transparency in narrativity. I highlight
inadequacies in the binary of opacity and transparency by examining the
works of Peter Lamarque and Clare Birchall on matters of narrative and
secrecy. I will try to see how one can think about opacity/transparency
through the lenses of speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. I
do so by drawing examples from memories of the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1989)
and explaining how the language of remembering becomes the realm of
a tension between presence and absentia, between the unsaid within the
said. I explore how memory-as-narrative and narrative-as-memory sustain
the potentiality that eludes Orwellian newspeak.
Keywords: memory, narrative, opacity, perplexing knowability, shadow,
transparency
Standing with a torch of ember in the oubliette, I wonder whether the
ember is fire or coal. It seems like fire; it has some of its qualities,
yet it lacks a flame. The ember is alive as much as it is dying. Is it the
fire that is dying or the ember that is burning? How can it make itself
apparent to me – whatever that ‘it’ is? The torch of ember is an example
of opacity. It is a puzzling knowability that stands in-between opacity
and transparency.1 It could be about to become fire and turn into a
transparent knowable, even as it stands back and resists the flame. It
retains an opaque knowability in a state of wonder. Thus, I wonder, is it
the opaque state of the ember that appears to me as fire, imperceptible
in its appearance, lacking all signification, or …? There could be no end
to ‘or’, ‘but’ and ‘however’. The never-ending conditional clauses may
©Critical Survey
Volume 30, Number , Winter 2018: 71–84
doi:10.3167/cs.2018.300406
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Critical Survey, Volume 30, Number 4, Winter 2018
draw me to edifying meanings, or chains of signification around the
torch of ember, just as they confuse the reader about something that
may not be there at all. Am I being transparent enough in questioning
the opaque aura of an object?
The torch of ember and its puzzling knowability are my exemplars,
serving to open the question of opacity and transparency in narrativity.
I highlight inadequacies in the binary of opacity and transparency
by examining the works of Peter Lamarque and Clare Birchall.
Lamarque, from the analytical tradition of philosophy, refers to
modes of narrativity in his recent book, The Opacity of Narrative,2
and Birchall, less recently, wonders how transparent secrets can be.3
Birchall seems to be more comfortable with continental philosophy,
if her citations and bibliography are any indication. I then move on
to Agamben’s notion of ‘potentiality’4 to develop what I learn from
comparing the works of Lamarque and Birchall. However, I shall not
be content or satisfied unless I am able to complicate things further
and push puzzling knowability in a different direction. Hence, I will
try to see how one can think about opacity/transparency through the
lenses of speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. I do so
by drawing examples from memories of the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1989)
and my experience of reading the auto/biographies of former Iranian
combatants. I ‘read’5 their published memoirs and autobiographies
to detect the transparency of the opaque and the obscurity of clarity
within frameworks of remembrance forged under the influence of the
authoritarian Iranian regime. The political climate of Iran has changed
in the more than two decades since the war. Memories are becoming the
narratives of resistance against the very regime that veterans defended
during the war. They cannot be published without permission from the
board of censorship, which is administered by the Ministry of Culture
and Islamic Guidance. Authors must conceal their resistance beneath
layers of intricate syntax and plays of semiosis in order to be able talk
beyond the impositions of accepted language. Thus, the language of
remembering becomes the realm of a tension between presence and
absentia, between the unsaid within the said. I explore how memory-
as-narrative and narrative-as-memory sustain the potentiality that
eludes Orwellian newspeak. I draw from memories of the war because
violence pushes these memories under a cloak of opacity, even while
the politics of memory try to render them transparent narratives. I
examine the workings of opacity/transparency in the processes within
which memories are fixed into narratives.
The Shadows of Knowability: Reading between Opaque Narrative and Transparent Text
73
The opacity of narrative, and making sense of the
yet-to-become-sense
The example of the torch of ember and the fire reminds me how to
question the landscape of memory, narrativity and narrative modes.
Memories do not illuminate the oubliette of everyday life where we
may forget them while immersed in banal affairs and mundane
routines. At the same time, memories do not leave us alone in the
oubliette. They are the ever-present signs in our oubliette, especially if
they hail from the realm of a violent past. The burden of violence marks
them with an intensity that renders them knowable and tangible. They
become knowable in the twilight of appearing (transparency) in, and
disappearing (opacity) from, the shadows of unspoken traumas. Hence,
the memories of a violent past appear as puzzling knowability. However,
the puzzling effect fades away when it is dragged out of shadows and
forced into discourse, narrativity and narrative modes. Yet the shadows
carry themselves into the new configurations of knowable memories
of a violent past and render the narrativity, and narrative modes,
opaque. Narrativity and narrative modes force memories into a realm
of language, to exist within (rather than with) language. Becoming-a-
narrative can make the memories ‘be’, ‘become’ or even ‘signify’. But
how does that happen? And how does that appear? The question of
‘how’ brings me to the investigation of the economy of memory in
itself. One may say I am exploring narrativity, structuration, content,
appearance, or some other fancy jargon, of the memory.
The economy of memory in itself highlights its circulation and
configuration within language, rhetoric and narrative modes. Memory
travels and changes since it is its conception in language which brings
about a multifaceted economy all around it. This economy progresses
and processes in shadows, darkness and light. It makes memories
opaque/transparent, simulacra/real, said/unsaid, visible/invisible, or
perhaps archive/trace. I choose to explore opacity/transparency since
this opens up the possibility of studying narrativity more than other
options. Therefore, I will begin by entertaining the question of opacity/
transparency in the work of Lamarque, from an analytical side in order
to diverge from the dominating philosophical spectrums.
Lamarque has chosen opacity to be the starting point of a journey into
transparency. He is inspired by famous logician Willard Van Orman
Quine, who popularized the term ‘referential opacity’.6 Lamarque
makes it clear that content (text, plot and fabula) is determined by
narrative and that they are both essentially, as well as contingently,
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connected to narrativity. He highlights the ‘connection’ in order to
show that opacity is not a given fact in every emergence of narrative.
He limits his definition of narrativity in qualities of narrative to avoid
the ‘ontological trap’.7 Here, the ontological trap refers to the fact that
some, like Hayden White for example, look at narrativity as the opening
window of what is told and what is moulded into the intended closure
and conclusion.8
Furthermore, Lamarque suggests that descriptions are limitation
imposed over a narrative. He states that ‘there is no such thing as
transparent glass – only an opaque glass, painted, as it were, with
figures seen not through it but in it’.9 His suggestion serves as the
introduction to propose how impositions bring opacity into a narrative
and how opacity becomes constitutive of a narrative. According to
Lamarque, the opaque glass only retains its opacity if the characters
and constituting elements cannot be substituted with each other. He
states:
The opacity of narrative occurs when substitutions of co-existential terms
are impermissible if the content of the narrative is to be preserved. Likewise
transparency occurs when the very same content can be accessed in different
ways.10
In other words, the narrative appears opaque when change alters the
narrative’s content but transparency occurs if one is able to substitute
different identities with each other and yet leave the content of narrative
intact. The narrative (whatever it may be, i.e. memory, play or story)
is transparent as long as it is not dependent on a specific mode of
representation and structuration. Therefore, a narrative shall sustain
integrity (read transparency) as long as it is fixed and consolidated in
its meaning. The fixity must be to such an extent that even exchanging
identical elements with each other would not disrupt the narrative.
Lamarque borrows Quine’s idea of the non-substitutivity of the identical
which insists that no one can exchange ‘A’ with ‘a’ even though the only
difference is that one is a capital letter and another is a lower-case letter.
Quine believes such change is ‘disturbing [to] the truth value of the
containing sentence’.11 There is certainly a pristine and clear formula
Lamarque uses to distinguish between transparency and opacity in a
narrative. Opacity occurs, for him, with ‘non-substitutivity of identities
… or intentionality of representation’, and also, ‘opacity arises because
the content is not merely loosely or contingently connected to its mode
of presentation but is partially constituted by it’.12 In other words,
opacity is fixed into the structure of the narrative. But why I am going
The Shadows of Knowability: Reading between Opaque Narrative and Transparent Text
75
to such lengths to explain an analytical philosopher despite my strong
inclination towards continental philosophy?
I explain Lamarque in order to address the politics of his proposition
and how this affects studying memory and narrativity. He treats opacity
and transparency in a form of binary oppositions because he prefers
to ‘disregard the emotions the texts evoke’ and would have us focus on
‘the way their content is shaped by their linguistic form and the way
that attention to content can have a bearing on a reader’s own thought
process and outlook on the world’.13 The difficulty with this proposition
is not only the confinement of the method to binaries and dichotomies,
but also that its disregard for emotions unsettles application of the
method. The method’s application becomes difficult because Lamarque
simply limits the text within the narrative and it seems the text, for him,
is a linguistic craft isolated from its reader’s responses and reception.
According to Lamarque, the mandate of a transparent narrative is to
remain in a certain form in order to preserve the image implied by a
text. In other words, if the implied image is distorted, a text is lost; its
meaning is corrupted and opacity overcomes a text. He loses sight of
the transition from transparency to opacity, or the other way around
(the aesthetic response), by concentrating on the formal construct of
a text. He states: ‘transparency and opacity are not intrinsic qualities
of a text but ultimately rest on the interests brought to the text. We can
read (or interpret) a narrative transparently or opaquely relative to the
interest we bring to it’.14 He misses ‘the act of reading’15 by attempting
to find everything as it has been brought ‘[in]to the text’.16 It seems a
text is a coherent totality that engulfs readers through linguistic trickery
and they indulge it with no reaction or reception. The explanation of
Wolfgang Iser about the role of memory in the reading process is the
counter to Lamarque. Iser notes that reading is an act of constant
remembering to sustain the links and coherence in a text under
study. However, the constant remembering does not account for the
totality, or coherence, of a text because memory and perception differ.
He writes that ‘the memory evoked, however, can never reassume its
original shape, for this would mean that memory and perception were
identical, which is manifestly not so. The new background brings to
light new aspects of what we had committed to memory’.17
Diverse interests would bring about diverse interpretations of a text
but none of them can be defined as opaque or transparent. However,
transparency and opacity can be achieved if we located a text in form of
a static, unmoving, (im)mobile outhereness, an ‘it’ – whatever that ‘it’
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is – out there, according to Lamarque. A text is not an entity comprised
of linguistic configurations that are consumed and responded to. A text
is produced in interaction with the reader, the material entity known
as a book, and then finally becomes the linguistic configuration that
conveys authorial ideas. The text is ‘in between’ and, because of its
constant oscillation among these elements, remains both opaque and
transparent. It never takes on a permanent shape. Lamarque, in his
opacity of narrative, turns transparency into a consistent mode that never
changes and thus cannot offer new symbolic resonance and semiotic
emergences. Let us assume transparency as a consistent quality. What
does it stand for? Why does it need to be transparent? ‘What is the
secret of transparency?’18 What is the trajectory of its emergence? What
is the semiotic configuration of a transparent text? Yes, I raise these
questions despite the fact that Professor Lamarque states that the text
must remain consistent and ‘figurative in its textual content [which]
help[s to] give precise shape to the thoughts and beliefs that the content
brings to mind’.19 But is the text a prisoner of its content and form?
Thus, I ask, where is the text located? What are its latitude and altitude?
Where does it flow to? Maybe I can now modestly propose: one should
also pay attention to the ontology of a text.
Breaking the binary? Or maybe not quite yet
Clare Birchall provokes curiosities by asking, ‘what is the secret of
transparency?’20 She raises this question while keeping in sight that
transparency is an elusive quality that never is achieved. She stresses
that transparency cannot be achieved, even if it is enforced, because
secrecy would then be sustained in another manner. Her notion is
based on an analysis of secrecy and transparency in documentation
and texts, which she links to the realities of everyday life. I would
argue, however, that she does not dwell enough on what Iser called
the ‘unexpressed reality of the text’.21 Birchall proposes to remain with
the ‘aporia of transparency-as-secrecy and secrecy-as-transparency’22
in order to avoid forming new binaries. She does so by exploring
the histories of secrecy within the indexes of laws and government
policies (specifically in the United States). She infuses philosophical
arguments with the examples of political governance to sidestep moral
and political discourses and movements that denounce secrecy in
favour of transparency. According to her, the Left is at ‘risk of forgetting
to think through and with secret [because of] … the fear that secrecy
The Shadows of Knowability: Reading between Opaque Narrative and Transparent Text
77
is gateway to micro-fascism and a moral attachment to disclosure’.23
Birchall avoids the debate of ‘moral alignments of both secrecy and
transparency’ in order to exemplify practices, such as psychoanalysis
and poetry, which do not actively exclude secrecy.24 Although she does
not exactly explain what transparency is, she implies that information
or data are transparent as long as they are not concealed or hidden
from others (in her case people, citizens or employees versus state,
statesmen or corporations). Thus, transparency is not a thing in and of
itself; rather it is ‘merely the absence of concealment’.25
Transparency, for Birchall, is identified as an element that is
constitutive of the workings of democracy. She traces transparency
to find out how democracy forcefully and coercively tries to sustain
itself. She points at the risk of transparency and its enactment in a
democratic society, which may look ‘less like an agent of democracy and
freedom and more like a tool of totalitarianism’.26 Her point is clarified
by Derrida, who states that ‘if a right to the secret is not maintained, we
are in a totalitarian space’.27 Birchall accordingly suggests that ‘secrecy
functions as a constitutive element of transparency, while transparency
defines itself as a reaction against secrecy’.28 Transparency is defined,
for her, by its functionality as well as its appearance in the form of
the absence of concealment. The contour and textures of this ‘it’ are
dependent on secrecy. The information that is concealed or the data
that are classified acquire a mode of existence in the relationship
between secrecy and transparency. Transparency, like a good magician,
renders secrecy visible by concealing its own movement. This mode
is not a representative quality of the information and data but rather
a proof of the ‘democratic’ quality of those who encounter and handle
them. Birchall proposes to find the qualities of transparency and
secrecy in-between. In other words, by probing them and their process
of transition into each other. She especially stresses that the in-between
matters because there is nothing beyond transparency and secrecy.
There is a two-way traffic between the two and she insists on a method
that observes how information evolves and changes within that traffic
instead of placing it on one side or the other.
She highlights the opaque relationship of transparency and secrecy
by referring to Kant’s famous phrase: ‘the very transparent veil of
secrecy’.29 But I wonder, after such a lengthy epistemology of secrecy,
which made her realize that transparency is some sort of absence,
what is the ontological trajectory of secrecy and transparency? What
are the temporal components of the tension between transparency
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and secrecy? Shouldn’t we break open the opacity of secrecy and ask
what the secret of secrecy is? And if all the secrets are secret, must
we jump ahead and ask, ‘What is the secret of transparency?’30 Could
we deduce from the fact that ‘transparency might still be a kind of
veil’ that transparency is a form of non-knowledge because of its yet-
remaining tension with secrecy?31 In other words, could we deduce
that transparency is always potent with some surplus of secrecy in
itself? Or could it be a form of non-knowledge because of the temporal
dimension of secrecy? Declassified documents of secret services
are prime examples that become the interest of a select few after
becoming transparent. For instance, documents related to operation
TP-AJAX were recently declassified. The veil of secrecy was removed
from the documents, which confirmed the role of the United States in
the 1953 Iranian coup. However, their transparency does not render
transparent the politics, or what made them secrets. These documents
may imply transparency to some people, like historians, enthusiasts
and the Iranian propaganda machinery. I argue, however, that they
raise many more questions than they answer. They remain secret by
not revealing their temporal dimension, despite the documents now
bearing the ‘declassified’ stamp. Therefore, I wonder why Birchall has
not extended her idea of the ‘relativity of knowledge’32 to the secrecy
versus transparency debate. It becomes apparent that she derives
her inspiration from Agamben’s potentiality but does not dwell on
temporalities of knowledge and knowability.
Birchall uses the covenant of secrecy in psychoanalysis or WikiLeaks
to exemplify how secrecy is the framework of transparency. She
identifies the emergence of secrets as the condition of the relationship
between secrecy and transparency, as if there is access to the secret itself
or the moment of its emergence. She accuses metaphysics of taking
politics out of epistemology, but I assume otherwise. Metaphysics
calls for reading the politics of subject-object (or even object-object)
in itself instead of relating them to other vectors. Not only do secrecy
and transparency not stand side by side, they also don’t overlap. None
are in each other’s framework; they erupt and emerge with different
intensities in different temporalities. The competing intensities make
the contours and textures of secrecy and transparency visible to us.
They remain alongside each other simultaneously. Their simultaneity
leads to the opacity of their existence and consequently becomes the
condition of our perceptions, perceptions which certainly exist in-
between the speaking/spoken subjects and life. Therefore, I prefer
The Shadows of Knowability: Reading between Opaque Narrative and Transparent Text
79
to rephrase Birchall’s statement that ‘secrecy is always already at
work in transparency’33 thusly: secrecy is always already at work with
transparency. The aporia cannot be indulged by mere enforcement of
a relational existence in secrecy-as-transparency or transparency-as-
secrecy. However, we may expose its trickery by turning the language
of secrecy and transparency on its head.
The interplay of secrecy-opacity/transparency
I left Lamarque in the midst of the fact that his exploration of opacity
and transparency peels subjectivity off of a text. Text without subjectivity
becomes a linguistic craft without the interactive flows among the
materiality of a book, the fluid voice of the author and the ponderings
of its readers. Lamarque acknowledges that the intentionality of readers
or authors is causal to the production of opacity or transparency, but he
asserts that the production is a one-way traffic. It seems, if we accept
this, that either the author, or her reader, must be dead. The text, the
opacity/transparency flow, and the language, are prisoners of either
the author’s delivery or the reader’s reception, and that they occupy
different temporalities.
Wolfgang Iser proposed a different notion of the text. His approach
highlights the limitations of Lamarque’s style of reading. Iser states
that ‘the literary work [and by extension any narrative] cannot be
completely identical with the text, or with the realization of the text,
but in fact must lie half way between the two’.34 Iser sees a text in the
form of an encounter between the ‘implied reader’ and the reader’s
‘own treasure-house of experience’.35 The opacity and the transparency
(produced by whatever formula) function as a regime of signification
that impels the reader to ‘grasp the text’.36 The regime of signification
is the ‘textual structure anticipating the presence of a recipient’37 into
which opacity and transparency are embedded, awaiting the individual’s
experiences and imaginaries. Allow me to offer an example: I shared
a paragraph from the autobiography of an Iranian ex-combatant with
a colleague. My intention was to exemplify why this particular ex-
combatant preferred to remain alive and bear witness rather than pray
for martyrdom (which means attaining the state of Grace for a Shi’i
Muslim combatant). The ex-combatant exasperatedly asked the divine
power during a high casualty operation: ‘keep me alive and let me
return to the sinful city. Gift me a pen and paper in that house of sin to
write what I have witnessed’. My colleague, a Dutch man not entirely
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familiar with the dynamics of martyrdom in Iran, commented with a
questioning undertone, ‘And his prayer and intention seem to be much
nobler than just becoming a martyr?’ His reaction amused me; as an
Iranian who spent his childhood and youth exposed to those dynamics,
I was educated in the shade of a state-produced concept of martyrdom.
I read the combatant’s prayer as a form of justification of why he
remained alive, as an excuse he could use to respond to the mothers,
the fathers and the wives of his friends who were lost during the war.
His words are simultaneously transparent and opaque. (Transparent:)
A man who wants to witness and tell the story of oppression in order to
continue the battle meanwhile (Opaque:) he has to pass houses in his
neighbourhood, exchange words with remarried widows, and visit and
pay his respects to the aged mothers and fathers who see him as the
reminder of lost sons. His prayers are an excuse and an answer to their
recognition in an autobiography written twenty years after the war.
(Opaque:) Or, the prayers in his war memoir could be just survivor’s
guilt rather than born of any noble intentions.
The differences in experiences and exposures between my colleague
and I brought about different encounters, and consequently produced
two different texts. This is the simultaneous working of opacity and
transparency. They can switch sides but they cannot leave the arena.
Transparency remains at the heart of opacity, and vice versa. They are
simultaneous potentialities that maintain a messy relationship, as seen
in my example. It is messy because there is no precise way to promote
my reading over my colleague’s, or his over mine. And to add to the
mess, one should not forget Iranian readers who may desire to be a
witness in contradiction with the martyrdom doctrine of the Islamic
Republic of Iran. Hence, the narrative remains opaque in itself until
and unless the author makes the meaning of his prayer transparent
in some future interview. However, the anthropologist in me would
like to ask about the politics of such an interview and ‘the secret of
his transparency’ because, as Iser aptly mentions, ‘history is full of
situations in which the balancing powers of literature have been used
to support prevailing systems’.38
My reading of Clare Birchall should not be taken as critique or
deconstruction of her proposition. I find that we both start on the same
ground but that I prefer to continue where she has stopped. Birchall
flirts with the idea of transcending dichotomies but she finds an
escape route through the zone of contention and the tension between
transparency and secrecy. She confines herself to the choice given to
The Shadows of Knowability: Reading between Opaque Narrative and Transparent Text
81
her by chosen dichotomies instead of breaking free of them. She leaves
hints and possibilities here and there but she does not explore those
options. I prefer to develop her notion of secrecy as the framework of
the emergence of transparency by invoking Agamben’s ‘potentiality’
which Birchall is inspired by.39
The ‘aporia of transparency-as-secrecy’, and secrecy-as-transparency,
should be turned on its head by exploring the recondite corners of their
unitary existence. Transparency-as-secrecy and secrecy-as-transparency
are configured with a potentiality. A potentiality of immutable internal
oscillation created because neither secrecy nor transparency can
exhaust each other during their process of interaction. Transparency
carries itself over in the form of gaps, blanks, silences, and conceptual
and material semiosis, into secrecy. Secrecy becomes an apparent
character of transparency by suspending the semiotics that constructed
it in the first place. Transparency-as-secrecy and vice versa are ‘the
impossibility of actualization’40 in the realm of the social and the
cultural. Actualization, if any, is evolved around discursive production
of the ‘bastard child of the humanities and social sciences’.41 Hence,
opacity overwhelms the interactions between secrecy and transparency.
Secrecy and transparency never actualize into each other because there
is a surplus, left over, of one mode while it is turning into the other.
Allow me to draw an example from a war memoir in my study:
Mr X, legendary Iranian combatant, symbolizes all the meaning and
associations of martyrdom. His friends, who are veterans and alive today,
recall memories and narrate his bravery and valour at every occasion.
However, no one speaks about the details of his martyrdom. His right-
hand man, Mr B, always uses a passive verb to reference the legendary
martyrdom. Few people notice the link between the deliberate opacity of
his language and the fact that details of the military operation – which
Mr X commanded – are classified. The opacity of Mr B’s articulation
did not raise much attention because even though ‘was martyred’ (Be
shahadat resid) and ‘became a martyr’ (Shahid shod) imply the same
outcome, their semiotic configuration differs completely. The veterans
who are aware of the imposed limitations and the background of the
story play with the language against itself. Mr B is aware of the fact
that Mr X ‘was martyred’ by friendly fire. Martyrdom by friendly fire is
not deemed appropriate for the legendary brave combatant, therefore
the Iranian state has classified the details of his demise. As a result,
he was spoken about with such transparent opacity. This example is
an indicator of ‘potential potentiality’.42 It becomes a martyrdom that
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is transparent but overwhelmed by clouds of opacity through the
conjugation of a verb. It takes from itself and gives back to itself. Let’s
break it down: the demise of Mr X is martyrdom in the eyes of his friends,
and maybe God, since he was killed in action. However, it is a particular
kind of martyrdom that is not in accordance with the state’s discourse
and propaganda requirements. Thus, it is concealed inside the notion
of martyrdom according to the state but it is supposedly consumed
according to the ‘authentic’ notions of martyrdom in Shi’i Islam. In
other words, it is martyrdom that is not martyrdom but is martyrdom.
The interplay of secrecy-opacity/transparency, or the other way around,
is just enactment and performance that makes us notice the modes of
existence of potentiality within the ‘pure existence of language’.43
Tracing shadows of knowability
I began with the example of the ember to make operational the idea
of ‘puzzling knowability’. I offered my reading of two scholars from
opposing corners of the philosophical spectrum. Lamarque and
Birchall try to make opacity transparent within the borders of their
own theoretical allegiances. I critiqued Lamarque with the help of
Wolfgang Iser and tried to extend Birchall by deploying Agamben.
Birchall notes that we need to ‘modify the promise of transcendence of
any “beyond”’44 while observing the game of politics and wondering if
politics can even exist beyond the dichotomy of transparency/secrecy.
I take notice of that need and ask: could we modify our knowledge
of transparency/secrecy by distinguishing them from our experience
of them? Or in other words: could we postpone the question of how
we know transparency/secrecy for the benefit of how they actually
are? Could one attempt to identify transparency more than as a
reaction against the secrecy and avoid subordinating these concepts
to the way they are experienced? Therefore, I propose we attend to the
puzzling aspect of knowability before we decide what is known and
what qualities we seek of knowable. Tracing this puzzling aspect is not
merely wondering in awe and admiring the joy of concepts but rather
examining the shadows of knowability. Transparency and opacity are
the shadows of knowability, and any knowledge construction.
Opacity, and by extension transparency, should not be reduced to the
conditions by which they can be known, recognized or verified. Then,
the question turns towards what the alternative method of studying
them can be. First, I suggest a shift from the politics of concepts to
The Shadows of Knowability: Reading between Opaque Narrative and Transparent Text
83
the poetics of concepts in order to create space for ‘the reality of things
[and concepts which] lies outside the grasp of human knowledge’.45
For instance, I don’t need to limit narratives and memories of the
violent past only to the way Iranian readers grasp, comprehend and
interpret them. I also see the necessity of including how the very book
of memoir – in its total tangibility – charms and enchants the readers
towards itself. I must attend to the lithography of the book, for instance
by exploring the impact of an affectively charged paragraph which is
broken between two pages versus a single paragraph that makes the
narrative appear whole, on a single page. The materiality of the book
contributes to how carefully it is read and received. Consequently, the
affective gathering of the material, the reader, the author, the semiotic
constructions and the opaquely articulated transparent secrets produce
poetics that point at the puzzling knowability of memories of a violent
past among Iranians. Second, we can step backwards and try to trace
the inaccessible or puzzling existence after the shift to the poetics of
concepts. I allow my ending to remain opaque, to stand alongside
opacity, but I also offer the words of Harman, may they lend some
transparency to the shadows of opacity:
The world is filled primarily not with electrons or human praxis, but with
ghostly objects [and concepts] withdrawing from all human and inhuman
access, accessible only by allusion and sending us by means of allure. Whatever
we capture, whatever table we sit at or destroy, is not the real table.46
Younes Saramifar has been a combat zone ethnographer and
experienced resistance movements in Lebanon and recently Iraq. His
work on material culture of militancy is published in a volume titled
Living with the AK-47 by Cambridge Publishing Scholars. He is currently
a Einstein Post-doctoral fellow in Humboldt University of Berlin.
Notes
1. Taking a cue from Derrida, Lacan and others, I sometimes use italics within a word to
pique the reader’s phonemic awareness and thus inject potential additional implied
meaning within a word.
2. P. Lamarque, The Opacity of Narrative (London: Rowman & Littlefield International,
2014).
3. C. Birchall, ‘Introduction to “Secrecy and Transparency”: The Politics of Opacity and
Openness’, Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 7–8 (2011). C. Birchall, ‘Transparency,
Interrupted: Secrets of the Left’, Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 7–8 (2011).
4. G. Agamben and D. Heller-Roazen, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
84
Critical Survey, Volume 30, Number 4, Winter 2018
5. S. Felman, ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation’, Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977), 94.
6. W.V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 1960).
7. J. Ranciere, ‘Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, South Atlantic Quarterly 103,
no. 2–3 (1960), 297–310.
8. H. White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, Critical Inquiry 7,
no. 1 (1980), 5–27.
9. Lamarque, The Opacity of Narrative, 3.
10. Ibid., 6.
11. Quine, Word and Object, 96.
12. Lamarque, The Opacity of Narrative, 6, 12.
13. Ibid., 14.
14. Ibid., 12; emphasis added.
15. W. Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to
Beckett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
16. Lamarque, The Opacity of Narrative, 12.
17. Iser, The Implied Reader, 278.
18. C. Birchall, ‘Introduction to “Secrecy and Transparency”’, 7.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Iser, The Implied Reader, 279.
22. Birchall, ‘Introduction to “Secrecy and Transparency”’, 7.
23. Ibid., 8.
24. C. Birchall, ‘Transparency, Interrupted: Secrets of the Left’, 66.
25. Birchall, ‘Introduction to “Secrecy and Transparency”’, 8.
26. Ibid., 12.
27. Jacques Derrida. ‘Literature in Secret’, in Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature
in Secret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 58.
28. Birchall, ‘Introduction to “Secrecy and Transparency”’, 12.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 19.
31. Ibid.
32. Birchall, ‘Transparency, Interrupted’, 80.
33. Ibid., 71; emphasis added.
34. Iser, The Implied Reader, 275; emphasis added.
35. Ibid., 30.
36. Ibid., 34.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 77.
39. Agamben and Heller-Roazen, Potentialities.
40. Ibid., 148.
41. C. Birchall, Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 153.
42. Agamben and Heller-Roazen, Potentialities, 144.
43. Ibid., 6.
44. Birchall, ‘Introduction to “Secrecy and Transparency”’, 19.
45. G. Harman, Der dritte Tisch [The Third Table], trans. B. Hess (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz,
2012), 11.
46. Ibid., 12.
