[Reader-list] First Post - IFS 2007

[Dwaipayan Banerjee]

I want to look at cryptography as a technological artefact; I want to also explore it as a metaphor to understand symbolic languages and the construction of the universal and the local in science.
   
  This will be done in three stages.
   
  The first will involve understanding mathematics as a symbolic language.  I will begin to see it as a semiotic system and understand what kind of referential relationship it shares with the material.  This will be done with specific emphasis on symbolic algebra and its development around the 16th century by cryptographers and cryptanalysts.  This development was to have profound implications for cryptography specifically, and continues to be foundational for modern science and mathematics up to today.
  Specifically here, I will look at two different styles of cryptography employed by two French mathematicians – Blaise Vigenere and Francois Viete.  The former devalued code-breaking, denied systems and structure while the latter developed symbolic algebra to provide universal and rule-bound decryption for all kinds of ciphers.  What interest me here are the different cosmologies that the two worked within.  For Vigenere, the world was not meant to be deciphered, essentially hidden by the will of God and there were no universal answers that science could base itself on.  For Viete the universal answer was the key, and the method was that of a new kind of mathematical semiotics: symbolic algebra.
  Before entering the Vigenere and Viete debate however, it is clear that one will have to review the literature on the philosophy of mathematics and understand what kind of notions of referentiality between the system of mathematics and the material world have been imagined historically.
   
  The second stage will be to follow the debate on the search of universal languages and a new understanding of the world that was inaugurated through the 16-18th centuries by scientists and thinkers such as Bacon, Lull, Wilkins, Liebniz and Descartes.  Sharing a relationship with both theology and science, the quest for universal languages and keys carries on from the previous chapter in thinking of the world of nature as an encrypted book meant to be decoded by scientists (Bacon).  The interesting and rewarding thing here would be to be able to make a correspondence between the semiotic characteristic of mathematics (its notions of referentiality) and link it to this larger thinking about science as the universal systematic answer to all questions of the world that we live in.  
  One will imagine that system-making of this kind – one that posits a unitary universal involves a break from context of some kind.  One will also ask questions of the notions of singularity and plurality and see how these debates were negotiated around the quest for universal scientific languages.  These debates are also the precursor to modern computing – and that will also be examined in this section.
   
  The third stage will take a slightly different tack and explore the literature on secrecy and secrets in science.  With its roots in religion, magic and cryptography through the centuries, one will try and examine the notion of the secret and the lie in science and see what implications this has for the first two sections (that dealt with the universal).  In Science, does this constitute a local of some kind?  Is modern day scientific thinking about chaos and disorder some kind of movement away from previous centuries of universalism?  In a sense, this will be the conclusion of thinking about cryptography – interestingly so because quantum theory is widely heralded as the new cryptographic paradigm.
   
  I do all this because I am interested in the postcolonial moment of science studies.  By this I mean that I hope to spatialise and understand scientific practice and understand how it creates its own economy of universality and locality.  Universality and locality in science have been understood in several ways, I hope to find a newer and perhaps more interesting theoretical entry into the same game.
     
   
   
   


 				
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