One word that I’ve been hung up on when it comes to qualitative research and reflexivity within applied linguistics is “transparency.” When I think about transparency, I seem to understand it as writing and conducting research in a way that presents a clear and open window to the research process and the entangled biases and positionalities embedded therein. However, the length requirements of journals and the confidentiality requirements of institutional review boards also give researchers the necessary counterpoint to transparency, which is opacity.
When I think about opacity, I always return to Édouard Glissant’s The Poetics of Relation. But even more specifically, I also return to Nicolas de Warren’s reading of Glissant of opacity as multilingualism. As he writes, “The right to opacity in Glissant is not synonymous nor equivalent to the command of and responsibility for another.” Rather, he recasts the right of opacity as the right to refuse forms of interpolation and overdetermined chains of signifiers. The right to opacity is ultimately a demand for multilingualism.
I find this argument compelling as contrast to what I would name an ideology of transparency within qualitative research—the idea that by rendering one’s research methods transparently, you create the necessary Francis Bacon interval to render the findings as true or authentic to some kind of natural social world.
I was reading a [insert author] piece a couple days ago. No, AI did not generate that fill-in-the-blank. I’m just respecting the author’s right to opacity. But most papers that conduct a thematic analysis can fill this gap. What the author called narrative inquiry did a disservice to what I view as storied inquiry. Chopping up all of their interview data, the short quotes, presenting them in these bins called themes. What this author is doing does an injustice to storytelling and also is something that is exceedingly common. I call it common and violent. Common in the sense that thematic analysis or grounded theory constitute the most common forms of qualitative analysis and violent in the sense that living embedded stories are dismembered, blended, sorted, and presented as if they were shared perspectives. Such an image might be provocative or melodramatic, but that’s what you have to do in this current discursive landscape that we live in.
We think that academic publishing is distinct from the discourses of social media, but I’m not so sure. A lot of the people who review academic manuscripts might also have a social media presence or, at the very least, watch the news or, at the very least, take in extracurricular media of some kind. And I think you do have to make provocative claims at some point—not because they’re necessarily extremely rigorous at that moment, but when you’re thinking imminently at the edge of your thoughts, you kind of need a little bit of backwards time to justify it. But that justification process also robs the reader of the imminence of taking in new ideas presented in new ways.
So I think that this is where Glissant gets me very excited, because I think that this call for transparency is, first of all, antithetical to storytelling. Storytelling, I think, depends on opacity to produce the suspense and the compelling rhetorical force that makes stories so good. After all, imagine a fiction writer—look, a fiction writer oftentimes explains their editorial decisions when the format is so radical that it requires at least a minimum amount of orientation, but they don’t backfill all of the context in the beginning of the piece. And even if a novel follows chronological time, that does not mean that the information flow is linear. I think this is important—fiction gets that—and I think that we can do better in academic writing. We are boring ourselves to death, and we are going to bore our field to death if we are not careful during this pivot point of the post-AI age.
Many people will not agree with this sentiment, and that is fair. I’m a language scholar, and as a language scholar, I am a storytelling scholar. And while I sincerely believe that all research, particularly research reports, constitute acts of storytelling, I also recognize that the tendrils of Sir Francis Bacon run deep—tendrils that whisper into our ears that we, as researchers, need to get out of the way, we need to erase our presence through any means necessary. At first, that erasure occurred through omission; then that erasure occurred through quarantine in the form of positionality statements. Now that erasure is no longer tolerated, and in qualitative inquiry I think that this is a move in the right direction.
Yet I believe the folks that disagree with me are not necessarily in the business of qualitative research. In fact, I think the people that disagree with me see qualitative research as antithetical to proper scientific inquiry. That’s fine, I’m not a scientist. But even the scientists out there know, consciously or not, that the work that they put out tells a story. And when you tell a story, you are ultimately trading in opacity and transparency. And one can never be fully transparent, even those who argue that AI is a great equalizer by homogenizing literary style in the name of surfacing ideas to be compared and contrasted may not understand—may not think about the fact that the style towards which we homogenize is not neutral, and the structure in which we organize those ideas are not neutral. They are not inherent; they are inherited. And because they are inherited, they can be played with, flouted, challenged. This is what de Warren talks about with the opacity of multilingualism. If we homogenize our structure and our style to the point where the human behind the research is rendered irrelevant, we also lose sight of the multilingual landscape that makes all scientific inquiry rich, engaging, exciting, compelling, and worth doing with some degree of opacity from the machines that have begun to guide us.
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