4.1.4: Academic Inscrutability

While Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity is a productive counter-ethic developed within the postcolonial tradition, it is worth mentioning that opacity is often practiced as a means to protect knowledge workers from critique. In fact, as Harriet Washington has shown, the history of medical argument is so entwined with an opaque inscrutability so as to hide its malfeasance in plain sight:

As previously hidden experimental exploits come to light, some have challenged the characterization of such research as ’secret,’ noting that the reports were published in medical and scientific journals that could be read by anyone. But these critics would do well to weight Marcel Pagnol’s definition of secrecy: “A secret is not something unrevealed, but told privately in a whisper.” Until the past few decades, descriptions in medical publications of experimentation with African Americans were shielded from the eyes of the uninitiated. Generalized professional journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association and The New England Journal of Medicine are not available in bookstores or on newsstands. . . . Moreover, physical access to such journals would constitute only the first hurdle. The medical jargon in which such research papers are couched is often impenetrable even to well-educated nonmedical people.¹

Washington’s discussion of hidden-in-plain-sight medical discourses reflects how normalized obviously harmful practices can be. I describe these practices as opaque, because these scholars partake in a game of rhetorical sleight of hand. While not always a form of intentional skullduggery—because some omissions are brought by gaps in methods, discursive interest—or disciplinary bias, an academic form of opacity has been a method to cover up intentional violences perpetuated by knowledge workers. In light of medicine’s long, well documented history of malfeasance, especially perpetrated by a discipline that purports to “do no harm”, my move to enact opacity for research subjects is to create a theoretical grounding for scholars and communities who work to repatriate the bodies of those stolen for medical research.

Medical research is replete with obscuring practices—the anonymity of whose bodies were brought under the knife. The opacity of published medical argument is often at odds with the visibility, the transparency, of the specimen. The research subject’s body is what is laid out in medical museums and in published academic arguments.² Who is given the right to privacy and who is externalized under the anatomist or pathologist’s scalpel has historically run parallel with America’s classed, raced, and abled hierarchies (1.3.5; 2.1.3).³ This contrast is doubly evident in the ways the legal protocols for the return of stolen objects and remains require transparency on behalf of wronged communities. As Chip Colwel argues, using the testimony of Apache naturalist Ramon Riley to the NAGPRA Review Committee,

NAGPRA requires Native American religious leaders to expose themselves in order to get back what they believe is rightly theirs. The act of revealing—[Ramon Riley’s] own culture and personal experience—was kind of sacrilege, yet it was required by the legal process. Riley was manipulating the highly public venue of a NAGPRA Review Committee meeting—open to the public, a process of becoming part of the public record—to emphasize his very objection to how NAGPRA obliges such a public revealing. In contrast, the museum involved in the dispute did not provoke any information (secret or otherwise); it did not even send any representative to the public hearing.⁴

The implicit problem is that the creation of more knowledge may not be the answer to this ethical dilemma in medicine, even if that knowledge is produced with reparative intent, because it still always depends on the researcher’s original sin: extracting material from a research subject without their consent.

Medicine is not the only academic discipline that hides its ideological, methodological, or epistemic violence under a guise of intellectualism. Ease of access is not and cannot be only associated with technological affordances, but also with how many people can read, engage, and reflect on knowledge work (4.2.2). With this in mind, I will spend the next section negotiating and arguing for how the opaque can inform digital scholarship. Remaining in theory allows me to explain some of the more simple and rote decisions regarding legibility of the platform and the argument of this dissertation. Following this, I will touch on a single feature—image opacity—in detail (4.3.1).