Democracy, Secrecy and Dissidence in Contemporary Fiction in English

Juan L. Pérez-de-Luque and Paula Martín-Salván

The essays collected in this volume deal with the interrelation between democracy, secrecy and the politics of transparency in contemporary literature written in English. The opposition between secrecy and transparency, opacity and disclosure, has come to occupy center stage in contemporary debates about democracy and freedom in information societies. In the influential The Transparency Society (2015), the philosopher Byung-Chul Han claimed: “Today the word ‘transparency’ is haunting all spheres of life” (vii). While traditionally associated to democratic policies of governmental management, transparency has come to be regarded as an ideological tool for social control (vii). Thus, the idea that a government should be transparent to its citizens has been turned on its feet, rendering citizens transparent to big data companies and to the state, in a Foucaultian panoptical social environment from which the notion of privacy has been evacuated (3), and where docile bodies are voluntarily exhibited through information technologies (11). Simultaneously, though, Han calls for a recovery of areas of privacy, secrecy and opacity from big data and social media scrutiny. Interpersonal relations, he claims, are only possible in the absence of total transparency: “The other’s very lack of transparency is what keeps the relationship alive” (3).

In the equally influential Poetics of Relation (1990), Édouard Glissant made a defense of opacity that emerges from the acknowledgment that modern Western epistemologies are essentially transparency-oriented: “If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. 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” (189-190). Against the grain of this impulse toward transparency, to “grasp” the other and reduce it to sameness, Glissant advocates that consent to each other’s opacities constitutes the basis for community (194).

Both Glissant and Han gesture toward a restoration of secrecy (opacity, privacy) as constitutive of social interaction. In so doing, they signal toward Georg Simmel’s sociological work on secrets and their role in articulating interpersonal relations. In “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies” (1906), Simmel famously argued that “Every relationship between two individuals or two groups will be characterized by the ratio of secrecy that is involved in it” (462). No total transparency is possible in human interaction, Simmel claims, as it would lead to the death of relations (461). Simmel’s arguments in favor of secrecy as the “quantum” of human sociability (463) have proved fundamental to contemporary critique of transparency and “shareveillance” (Birchall 2021, 10).

Our theoretical premise emerges from the dialectics between secrecy and disclosure as “a defining feature of the contemporary Zeitgeist” (Boothroyd 2011, 42; see also Horn 2011; Broeders 2016). As Jeremy Gilbert claims, “we live in an age of endless disclosure” (2007, 22), labeled as “the transparency society” by Han. The theoretical work produced during the last two decades in the realms of sociology, political theory and cultural studies on the issue of secrecy coincides on the relevance of the tension between secrecy and transparency in contemporary capitalist societies, as information and data work as “an extension of commodification to subjective life itself” (Boothroyd 2011, 43). In this context, secrecy often emerges as defying hegemonic modes of thought: “we can refashion secrecy as that which resists ‘enclosing’ hegemonic discourses rather than as a strategy that ‘naturally’ lends itself to, and aligns with, hegemony” (Birchall 2011, 72).

In the ideological alignment of the idea of total transparency with hegemonic discourses and totalitarian practices, the echo of Derrida’s claims in A Taste for the Secret may be identified: “the demand that everything be paraded in the public square and that there be no internal forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization of democracy […] if a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space” (2001, 59). For these authors, the main social function to be attributed to the secret is that of exercising a resistance to total transparency and is therefore expressed as a form of dissent or “controversary dissidence” (Wills 2008, 28). It is also on these grounds that an ethical dimension of secrecy can begin to be articulated, as ethics comes to be thought as the realm where the individual is confronted by an irreducible otherness, which may be identified with the secret.

Our focus on contemporary literature aims at providing an in-depth account of how authors and texts from a wide range of social and aesthetic contexts have addressed such debates around secrecy and transparency. While theorists in the complementary fields of Secrecy Studies (like Clare Birchall) and Critical Transparency Studies (like Emmanuel Alloa) have gestured toward literature in their advocacy of aesthetics as the realm where resistance to demands of transparency may be best articulated, no full-length study has been devoted to the issue yet.1 Our own take on the matter takes as departing point a double theoretical intuition. On the one hand, we take cue from authors who, from the realms of sociology, political theory, or cultural studies, have hinted toward an aesthetics of secrecy. On the other hand, we build our own defense of literature as exemplary realm for secrecy from Derrida’s writings on literature and democracy. As argued by María J. López and Pilar Villar-Argáiz in Secrecy and Community in Twenty-First Century, “literature as a Western institution is inseparable from the idea of democracy” (2021, 3).

In our main aim to establish a dialogue between secrecy studies and literary studies, we are fundamentally indebted to the work of Jacques Derrida, in which the “implications” of his thoughts on the secret, as argued by Derek Attridge, “still have to be followed through with any comprehensiveness” (2010, 42).2 In their concern with the interrelation between democracy, secrets and the politics of transparency, in the context of the society of information and big data, numerous scholars have turned to Derrida. As they attempt to look for areas where productive forms of secrecy may be identified, Derrida’s theorizations on democracy and literature become an ideal textual space for readdressing the nature of secrecy (see López & Villar-Argáiz 2021, 3-4). Rather than looking at specific forms of social organization based on secrecy, Derrida writes about “the absolute inviolability of the secret” (1992a, 153) as a constituting device of human thought and interaction. We wish to join these critics, emphasizing Derrida’s “linking of the secret, literature, singularity, democracy and the event” (Attridge 2010, 47).

In search for areas in which the creative resistance to transparency may be located, authors like Clare Birchall (2021; 2011, 69-71) or Emmanuel Alloa (2022, 14) have looked at the realm of aesthetics. Alloa argues that the critical appreciation that “transparency is never given, but must be manufactured” is intrinsic to the domain of aesthetics (ibid). Eva Horn (2011) has further suggested that literature may be the best field in which to analyze and explore the implications and workings of political secrecy. Horn argues that “Since fiction does not claim, as history and journalism do, to offer the ‘ultimate truth’ of an event, it is better suited to analyse and reconstruct the minute workings of political secrecy - its mechanisms rather than its content” (2011, 118). Therefore, it “can succinctly illuminate the subtle economy of light and dark, inclusion and exclusion, suspicion and power at work in secrecy” (118). Alloa, furthermore, points to the formal properties of literary language, arguing that literature foregrounds the paradox of transparency, by “refus[ing] to sacrifice the materiality of the medium anchoring it” (2022, 24).

We aim at exploring the specific ways in which literature can be regarded as the exemplary realm where dissidence, resistance and secrecy are to be articulated. Such connection seems to work, we may tentatively argue, at two levels: On the one hand, as the realm where dissidence and resistance may be expressed, where the ideas of freedom of expression and censorship come to play most explicitly. On the other hand, as the realm where the impossibility of full disclosure in any aspect of human life is most visible, as the literary work is precisely one that never exhausts its interpretive potential in a given context, so that the singularity of the text (Attridge 2004) is made evident in each and every reading. This involves the possibility to focus on secrets as structuring devices, and on specific forms in which literary texts exert their secrecy, so that the thematic expression of secrets finds a suitable expression in narrative structure itself.

Hence, our collection aims at exploring the concept of secrecy and its connections to ideas of resistance, dissidence, democracy and transparency in contemporary literature, from two different but interrelated points of view: 1) Secrecy as a cultural, social and political dimension, and 2) the secret as a formal dimension of the literary text. The former constitutes the object of study of the twin scholarly fields of secrecy studies and critical transparency studies. The latter has been explored by literary critics like Derek Attridge, who uses the expression “the secrecy of form” (2021, 34) to refer to the opacity of literary texts to have their formal features reduced to a function of their (referential) meaning (24). Attridge argues that “The literary work is also a singular, secret other we have to trust, and this trust, as a crucial aspect of the reader’s experience, is constitutive of literature, as it is of community” (34).