Entanglement and the Politics of Occlusion
Skribent: Mary Harrington
Bildet: Fredrik Wiig Sørensen
Managerial Transparency
“Bring your whole self to work” is not a literal invitation to stop self-censoring around your professional colleagues. The purpose of official celebrations of “openness” and “transparency” is itself far from transparent: whatever its overt aim, its covert one is identifying those who mistake “transparency” for something transparent, without social subtext. These, once identified, can then be purged from roles in which they wield meaningful power, and replaced by those more skilled at calibrating for social consensus.
This is why it is directionally true that “DEI” is responsible for the now notoriously high incidence of mechanical failure in Boeing aeroplanes, even though it’s probably not the case that some mythical tranche of under-qualified “DEI hires” is directly to blame for quality control problems. The real culprit is the cultural climate that both fosters “bring your whole self to work” sentiments and makes “diversity, equity, and inclusion” proposals appear morally unassailable. For this cultural climate also forecloses, as a matter of political necessity, any attempt to notice realities that happen not to accord with socially acceptable consensus.
The kind of person who can’t resist highlighting such inconvenient truths tends also to be the kind of person who treats social statements as transparent. “Bring your whole self to work” thus operates, overtly, as a story organisations tell themselves about their own transparency; and also, tacitly, as a means of identifying (and later, perhaps, “managing out”) those who cannot or will not parse social subtext.
There is no conspiracy here. This process is more akin to an immune response, to bodies recognised as foreign and hostile to the organism overall. For as the philosopher Matthew Crawford argues, in managerial culture “success is predicated on the manipulation of language, for the sake of avoiding responsibility”. This in turn means that “reward and blame come untethered from good faith effort”,1 and that managers exist in a chronically ambiguous and desperately precarious social milieu, in which success or failure is often radically decoupled from any kind of measurable achievement.
In this state of perpetual anxiety, then, managers are preoccupied with the perceptions of their immediate superiors. To this end, they favour a style of communication that becomes more abstract, vague, and ambiguous in direct proportion to how difficult, insoluble or potentially politically dangerous the topic at hand. In this manner, should the accepted narrative change it always remains possible to reinterpret past behaviour in the light of updated moral consensus, leaving intact the manager’s overall standing in the system.
In this context, individuals whose priority is truth or objective excellence, rather than moral consensus, show up as at best obstacles and often outright enemies. Consciously or not, then, social traps such as “bring your whole self to work”, serve as effective filters for those adept at calibrating for the unsaid, and assessing the tacit moral consensus before presenting a carefully curated subset of their “whole self” as a performance of transparency. That is: for excellence in managerial social calibration.
On their own terms, ostensibly transparent social traps are an effective means of identifying high-performing navigators of occluded social subtext, all the more satisfying in that they do so ironically, via an overt celebration of transparency. But a second-order effect of this dynamic is to reduce the proportion of employees whose priority is truth, in favour of those whose priority is moral consensus. And of course the downside of such filters is that, over time, their successful operation selects against excellence in doing whatever the organisation was originally formed to do: in fact, selects against the possibility of excellence as such.
I have worked in many bureaucratic organisations, in which individuals still focused on excellence persist as a dissident minority. Such beleaguered noticers often persist for years, in struggling to re-orient the overall institution toward the truths they perceive, almost always without success. This produces a chronic state of veiled, mutinous fury at the institution’s refusal to order itself to truths such noticers perceive as transparently real, and core to the organisation’s real purpose. But most such dissidents fail to grasp that what is really at stake here is a conflict of epistemologies. The epistemology of “doing the thing well” – the one now upheld, in many organisations and arguably also the wider social fabric, only within dissident cells – both presupposes the reality of “the thing” and also that “well” has some kind of absolute value. The epistemology of “bring your whole self to work”, taken it its totality (if you will, its whole self) assumes the opposite. There is no “thing”, and no measurable “well”, except in their rhetorical construction via managerial consensus, transmitted tacitly (and thus both elliptically and, in a sense, transparently) through social subtext.
The difficulties arise, of course, where the overt purpose of that organisation is to make actual things, that are subject to the laws of Newtonian physics. For once the whole-self epistemology of the “whole self” takes root, it is only a matter of time before the dissident rump of adherents to “doing the thing well” becomes so far occluded that there really is no longer a thing, at least within the organisation’s internally transparent paradigm. Then, in turn, this becomes manifest in the wider world when windows begin falling out of planes mid-flight, and the window-seat passenger enjoys a new kind of openness and transparency.
Logocentric Ellipsis
The managerial relation to transparency and moral consensus would seem, ironically, to confirm as true (which is to say transparent) the disavowal of truth established as (transparent) moral consensus by the post-structural turn in the mid-twentieth century. More plainly: managerial hegemony rests on widespread acceptance of the social fiction that there is no truth, only power. To be a dissident today is to encounter this social fiction, to intuit the sleight of mind that enables its acceptance, and also accurately to identify the value-inversion at its heart: the change of ordering between transparency and occlusion. And it is, as we shall see, to lean quietly into that inversion.
I encountered post-structuralist though for the first time around 25 years ago, as a university undergraduate. My teachers up to that point had tacitly presented knowledge as though it could be rendered transparently intelligible with sufficient reading and reflection. Then, the first time I read Derrida’s seminal 1971 White Mythology, I experienced his notoriously anti-transparent prose as a means of showing, or perhaps rather eliciting, the consciousness shift his argument proposed. That is: that everything I’d learned about my own civilisational history was a linguistic confidence-trick that presented itself as transparent, while effacing its own rhetorical sinews.
What Derrida calls “logocentrism” is, he argues, a metaphysic of writing that centres its claims of “the truth of truth” in a logos identified with the transparency of writing. But, Derrida claims, there is no such thing as truth, in these terms. The task of criticism, as both argued and demonstrated in Derridean writing, is thus to “deconstruct” such apparently self-contained and well-polished coins of meaning, revealing and problematising what was hidden by this claim to transparency.
When we do so, Derrida suggests – and his followers have since worked tirelessly to demonstrate – what we find is a roiling, infinitely regressing snake-pit of deferred meanings, self-interested rhetorical constructions, all concealing rhetorical (and, implicitly, also more concrete) power in action. To denote this malign abyss, along with its negative moral connotations, he links it metonymically to the ultimate post-war original sin: racism. Logocentrism is, as Derrida puts it in the Exergue to Of Grammatology (1974): “the most original and powerful ethnocentrism”. To claim the truth of truth is to be a bit of a bigot.
Reading White Mythology as an undergraduate induced a kind of low-level psychosis. Suddenly, the hidden articulations of accumulated meaning and power revealed themselves to me everywhere, where previously these had been occluded by the pervasive transparency-claim that served to legitimise every argument, idea, and societal norm. The effect was disturbing, not least because of Derrida’s second claim: not only are these hidden sinews everywhere always already in operation, but – and this is crucial - they have no real referent. There is no “there” there. There is no “thing”, and certainly no “well” save as defined within an infinitely regressing chain of signification. This is the famous Derridean “différance”, in which the “thing” itself remains persistently elusive, a “supplement” whose final union with the signifier is eternally deferred.
These arguments had been propagating through the academy for some 25 years by the time I read them. Today their legacy is (like me) nearly half a century old, and has propagated considerably further. It is not difficult, for example, to see how once the assertion of truth’s existence as such is tainted with racism, this moral inversion might eventually escape the academy and affect concrete social endeavours that were premised on its possibility. Nor is it difficult to see how tainting “the truth of truth” with malign “ethnocentrism” might end up legitimising a shift within even deeply practical manufacturing organisations, away from elevating those who prioritise “doing the thing well” toward those for whom “doing”, “thing”, and “well” are instinctively morally suspect.
There exists no shortage of “anti-woke” critics today, who will get this far and then denounce the post-structuralists. The argument is usually to the effect that post-structuralism caused DEI and should therefore be discarded as obviously stupid and wrong. Some go further and point out that it serves to legitimise a toxic stratum of utopian anti-realist thinking that (in its social-justice form) pretends that re-engineering representations is the same as transforming reality itself, and (in its managerialist form) justifies asset-stripping and financialisation with a superficial gloss of identity politics.
These observations are all broadly correct. But the added implication is usually that we could fix all these noxious phenomena by going back to seeing the world as we did before Derrida knocked “transparency” off its pedestal. The difficulty with this analysis, though, is that it suffers from the same shortcoming as Derrida’s: right diagnosis, wrong prescription. Derrida was right about the “white mythology”. The “supplement” that he so compellingly revealed as effaced in the twentieth-century language of purportedly transparent objectivity is impossible to unsee once you’re attuned to it. And this is unlikely to change, no matter how loudly the “anti-woke” people demand the return of “Enlightenment values”. But just like his subsequent (and generally hopelessly metaphysically out-gunned) “anti-woke” opponents, Derrida’s prescription for how to respond to this development was way off.
Repression of the Return
This is perhaps easier to see when we read Derrida against another twentieth-century philosopher of occlusion, whose work precedes Derrida’s by around two decades but who addresses many of the same themes: Owen Barfield, particularly in his 1957 enquiry into “participation” and consciousness, Saving the Appearances. Both Derrida and Barfield take as their field of enquiry that which is excluded from the “rationalist” reality-picture that emerged in tandem with modernity, was propagated by mass literacy, and reached its peak in the late nineteenth century. Both grapple with the consequence of passing peak rationalism, and rediscovering the inescapability of human participation in whatever we perceive. But where, for Derrida, this rediscovery emerged via the arid recursivity of applying semiotics to semiosis, in the field of literary studies, for Barfield its rediscovery emerged via vast historical arc in the development of human consciousness, that had – when Barfield was writing – relatively recently culminated in the rediscovery of human participation by physicists.
But this is to read them backwards. It’s perhaps more accurate to say both Barfield and Derrida engage with the return of participation to the conceptual field, as a downstream consequence of advances in physics, because both were keen minds sharply attuned to cutting-edge thought and this was the 20th century’s most decisive intellectual shift. Tracing its propagation in detail is beyond my scope here. But we can confidently state that by the mid-20th century, when both Barfield and Derrida formulated their ideas in writing, participation already as it were pervaded the air and groundwater.
The problem they addressed was thorny, even for physicists: what are we to make of the seemingly inescapable discovery that observation plays a role in what is observed? In science this could be resolved, for everyday purposes at least, simply by setting aside interpretation and applying the discoveries in question. But the difficulties participation poses to the cultural sphere were vastly greater. Having spent some centuries leaning ever more committedly into the dualism and atomism most succinctly and notably expounded by Descartes and Newton, and matching these with a cascade of political, cultural, artistic, and theological forms predicated on these supposedly sure and objective foundations, what was the world of letters to make of the abrupt confiscation by its own master theology - science - of its own central premises? Atoms, it turns out, are not tiny orbiting balls; nor are mind and body really separable at all. We affect what we see by seeing it. Everything is a bit relational, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. And so on.
In response, the 20th century world of letters had a slow-motion collective nervous breakdown. We see early signs of this, for example, in the deliberate depiction by writers such as James Joyce and TS Eliot of the literary canon as a shattered, allusive tumult, and in subsequent decades via assorted forays into counterculture and anti-culture esoterica. Barfield and Derrida set out to address the problem directly.
They approached this, respectively, by attempting to re-order existing knowledge to the new epistemology, and to re-order the new epistemology to the existing paradigm. For Barfield, the solution to his now inescapable awareness of the return of participation was to historicise human consciousness. In Saving the Appearances he focuses on tracing the evolution over millennia of human cultural consensus on the nature and extent of our perceptual entanglement with what we perceive: a phenomenon he calls “participation”. He characterises the history of modernity in particular as a gradual falling-away of “original participation”, in favour of the empiricist fiction that world and perceiver are wholly independent of one another. And, in the light of 20th century discoveries in physics, he argues that honest intellectual enquiry must now re-admit the reality of participation, not by discarding science and rationality but developing a new capacity for entangled perception alongside the empiricist one. He calls this further development “final participation”.
For Derrida, by contrast, the solution was to reject historicity, and to swerve the metaphysical difficulties raised by the return of entanglement via scientific enquiry, through the simple expedient of relativising the possibility of truth (including science). In such a fashion the possibility of truth being both entangled and yet also true, might be carefully and methodically occluded. And as we will see, it was Derrida’s approach that prevailed. In what we might characterise as a repression of the return, he successfully indexed the emerging paradigm to the priors of the existing one, saving the overall paradigm of materialism and empiricism by reframing both as the play of language.
This response came to dominate during the latter half of the 20th century, and thence to precipitate my undergraduate psychosis at the turn of the millennium. And we must give credit where it’s due: this approach may have sent me crazy (nor do I think I’m the only one) but with all its fault and incoherences, it remains the response to participation able, as medieval scientists might have put it, to save at least some of the empiricist appearances – or at least to occlude what these leave unrepresented. But the price has been terrible: at the collective level, an abstract managerial anti-culture of anti-excellence, and at a spiritual one, gnawing nihilism. But as we will also see, there is another (dissident) way.
Unrepresentable Metaphysics
Both Derrida and Barfield grapple, in the former case implicitly and the latter explicitly, with scientists’ rediscovery of human entanglement with whatever we attempt to objectify – and thence, of a surplus of meaning or possibility that by definition cannot be rendered transparent. In the physicists’ terms, we must now account not just for the particle but also the probability wave. As Barfield puts it, these developments point to an “unrepresented” that lies behind “reality”, that is real on its own terms, and that serves as origin and source for whatever sense we are able to make of it, individually and collectively. Similarly, Derrida foregrounds an excess of meaning which he calls the “supplement”.2
Derrida, though, arrives at this “supplement” not in reference to physics but from inside a seemingly self-referential world of letters, by scraping away at literary claims to “presence”: that is, of speech or text that implicitly asserts a plenitude of meaning, in which the sign coincides transparently and completely with what is signified. As if, figuratively speaking, there were nothing between the aeroplane’s passengers and the empty sky. Against this, Derrida’s deconstructive project highlights (eventually, as it will turn out, ironically) the presence of the aeroplane window, and beyond that an infinite regress of further context and mediation.
In this acknowledgement that – as Derrida argues – that which is posited as complete, transparent, and “natural”, is also always already supplemented by “culture or cultivation”,3 he tiptoes, like Barfield, along the edge of a post-empiricist metaphysics. And both Barfield and Derrida correctly intuit the fact that this surplus and its relation to empiricism poses not just an intellectual but an ethical question. But the two thinkers resolve this in opposite directions.
For Barfield, in the context of the longer arc he postulates of evolution in human consciousness, the modernist paradigm appears not just as mistaken but pagan: he characterises as “idolatry” its objectification of a world conceived as external to the observer. In the light of twentieth-century developments in physics, he asserts, our fundamental entanglement with our world must once again be taken philosophically into account. But for Barfield, this history of perceptual entanglement does not imply a need to return to “original participation”, or even that this might be possible. Rather, he argues that the way forward lies via a further development in consciousness, such that we retain the capacity to view the world empirically but add the participatory mode of perception back in, resulting in “final participation”.
Derrida resolves the problem of historicity in the opposite direction to Barfield, opting to reject “diachrony” as accepting too many of the “symbolist” premises his argument seeks to dismantle. And in his repeated use of the term “mythology”, Derrida also adopts the stance of an orthodox cleric denouncing unbelievers and pagans. But Derrida directs his denunciatory peri-theological ire toward the opposite side of the same problem. For Derrida, it is those less-than-rational associative and emotive matrices of meaning, impossible to expunge from even the most abstract-sounding text, that figure as “mythology” – with all the connotations of superstition, ignorance and credulity that term would hold for, say, a 19th-century anthropologist. We have already seen how the entire postulate of “presence” figures, for him, as the original sin of “ethnocentrism”.
Representative Representation
Where for Derrida that entire terrain of excluded meaning is pre-emptively tainted with superstition and sin, for Barfield the idolatrous, pagan error is the effacement itself. This difference of connotation sets the philosophers’ common insight up to travel in radically different directions. In particular, these two readings have implications for what is not seen. For Derrida, the “supplement” is “dangerous”4 or else has a tragic connotation. It taunts us, as evidence of the structural failure of logocentrism. It is eternally deferred; the hunger at the heart of a metaphysic that promised fulfilment; the worm in the apple of truth. Derrida’s reading of the occluded points toward the ultimate impossibility of representation, and beyond that implicitly even of form as such. The habitual gesture of post-structuralism, in his aftermath, is a sort of epistemological defeatism, reduced to “disrupting” and “deconstructing” but chronically unable to create.
This defeatism has percolated into the culture at large, and especially into the overt (that is, represented) path followed by the politics of representation, and beyond this of representation in politics. For it is not as though empiricism had no political sequelae. It postulated as the fundamental substrate of reality a base of tiny, separate atomic particles, eternally orbiting one another, never touching, and theoretically one day available to transparent visibility and complete comprehension by the detached, objectifying mind. And though proposed as a conceptual framework for scientific understanding of the world that – it claimed – existed beyond human culture and understanding, this reality-picture also came to be adopted as central metaphor by the very culture that claimed the existence of this reality-picture as an object beyond itself: an embrace that, over time, shaped that culture’s political order as it shaped everything else. Hence the modern liberal-democratic template, which postulates human individuals as Newtonian atoms, with the mechanism of electoral politics serving as the vehicle whereby the aggregate intent of these “atoms” may be rendered perfectly transparent.
This then became the central presumed vehicle for “representation” within the age of empiricism. And it is via those post-structuralists that came after Derrida that we find fully realised the uneasy intuition first expressed in Derrida’s use of the phrase “ethnocentrism”: the discovery, that is, that the return of the repressed unrepresented is not just a metaphysical but also a political problem. It is thus that over the 20th-century period in which the return of participation was most effectively repressed, the meanings of “representation” across politics and the mass media came inexorably to converge, even as the term’s usage in the more ancient sense of metonymy all but disappeared.
For if political representation presumes a potentially transparent substrate of fully comprehensible, solid atoms, the “supplement” points perpetually beyond that comprehensibility. And yet, because we must save the empiricist appearances, there is no “beyond” beyond. There is nothing outside the text.5 From the tragic vantage-point of the Derridean différance, then, the question of political representation henceforth becomes an endlessly deferred problem, of making visible that which has been excluded, marginalised, or otherwise rendered less than transparent.
This is the positive intended outcome of “Bring your whole self to work”. The more complete the revelation, the more “representative” the regime: absolute transparency now appears not as tyrannical surveillance but as the benign extension of democratic access to all. Thus the overt trajectory of “representation” in both its perceptual and political senses has, through modernity, been toward perfect transparency; complete representation; by extension, implicitly at least, perfect democracy.
This has produced, over time, a curious situation in which whole new academic fields and corporate disciplines have emerged that ground demands for ever more complete “representation” via staffing quotas or mediation with the (usually unstated) claim that this will tend toward more perfect democracy. Meanwhile the real-world effect of popular representation via the universal franchise has grown ever more transparently attenuated. And this is where the link comes into view, between the ostensibly subversive claim put forward by the defeatists of deconstruction, and its disciplinary managerial effect. For in dismissing the possibility of truth as such, and instead politicising the domain of mediation, this line of enquiry collapsed the distinction between politicised mediation and democratic representation. In the process it enabled the effective hollowing-out of the latter and its replacement by the former: the order decried by Carl Schmitt, in an essay written just ahead of White Mythology: On The TV Democracy (1970), of entertainment as the ultimate triumph of technocratic neutralisation. Perfect atomic democracy thus implies its own extinction.
Post-Atomic Politics
In this context, we can step back from the politics that emerged to represent the atomic age and wonder: what might a post-atomic politics look like? It should be clear by now that deconstruction, which constructs itself as dissident, is in fact the implacable enemy of dissidence understood in contemporary terms. If atomic physical science produced a politics of people as voting atoms, the twentieth century post-structuralist turn opted en masse both to acknowledge the terrain but repress the implications of the metaphysics implied by a re-entangled politics of quantum participation. Instead, the pursuit of materialism even into this re-discovered realm of metaphysicshas produced a tragedy of endless deferral, while pursuing the solvent war on meaning into every corner of the purportedly neutralised domain of “entertainment”, including the exhaustion of representation in representation.
But behind this pessimistic twentieth-century arc lies a hidden counter-history, of occlusion as life-giving mystery – concealed in the relation between dissidence and the supplement, or rather the unrepresented. For in practice, whether in the context of managerial bureaucracy or in the “permanent plebiscite” of hyper-mediation lamented by Schmitt, the tyranny of perfect representation infinitely deferred is complicated by what it occludes in order to preserve its own lucidity. There is always a rump of dissident noticers, and there is always what they notice.
For Barfield this is not a bug. It’s a feature. Rather than connoting a pagan, sinful fall from lucidity as in Derrida, Barfield’s “unrepresented” is a generative thing: the mystery that enables lucidity’s return in a higher key. For Barfield, the Logos – the creative Word of God – is not as (as in Derrida) merely an anthropogenic racist fiction that works to conceal rhetorical manipulations. Rather, it works by, through, and within human consciousness, tracing a long path toward incarnation of the divine creative principle in the world. In this context, the development of “final participation” figures neither as collapse into paganism or omnium bellum contra omnes as for the post-structuralists, nor as a return to superstition, but as the retrieval of premodern cognitive modes alongside those of the contemporary era. That is, as a capacity to move between empiricist cognition and the participatory, entangled kind.
A politics from this vantage-point would necessarily presume the impossibility of perfect transparency, and the inadequacy of numerical representation. It would thus likely be unconvinced of (for example) the mode of representation offered by liberal democracy, or indeed DEI quotas. Perhaps, then, it is unsurprising to find just this scepticism among younger generations today. We might speculate further that a post-atomic politics would need to account not just for the particle but also the wave, which is to say form or potentiality. Such a politics would surely require allegory, metonymy, and living symbols to play more prominent roles than these were permitted under modernism.
We might also expect the unrepresented to operate differently. This unrepresented must be distinguished from the “silent majority”, which does not exist, and “the underrepresented”, which is a managerial bait-and-switch that tends only toward deepening the tyranny of transparency. But in figuring the “unrepresented” not as tragic but creative, Barfield opens the door for an occlusion that is not defeatist, but life-giving – and that, in the context of an order structured today by the tyranny of transparency, exists in deeply subversive dissent to the false prophets of deconstruction.
For post-atomic politics, the unrepresented figures not as that which threatens the prevailing epistemology, or even that which is failed or brutalised by it, but rather that which, in remaining hidden, nourishes and saves it from nihilism. And from this perspective, those today who are most pained by the gulf between their perception of the world’s nature and the official received view on that nature can perhaps take heart. The poisoned invitation to transparency belongs to a world that is already disappearing; in the new, “hiding one’s power level” is not merely a matter of “opsec” but a positive re-assertion of reality’s fundamentally mysterious nature. In embracing occlusion we repudiate, not in speech but in action, the false claim that the “supplement” is dangerous – or rather, the claim it is only dangerous. It is dangerous; but chiefly to the frozen ideology of managerial transparency and its dead, truthless anti-culture.
We can understand dissidence in this context as quiet dismissal of the injunction toward transparency: an attitude as it were of prayerful silence, that holds space for the return of participatory meaning. The choice is not necessarily between either pretending the aeroplane window isn’t there, or screaming in terror when it falls out mid-flight. The truly revolutionary possibility is that we may no longer need the aeroplane in order to fly.
Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft
Of Grammatology, 145
Ibid., 146
Ibid., 141
Ibid., 158