[Reader-list] IFS 2007 Post - Cryptography

[Dwai Banerjee]

Hi,

After reading Geert Lovink's post, I went through some of the 'first posts'
and realised that all sent from yahoo servers for some mysterious reason had
their pagination and formatting removed.  Posts sent from Gmail servers
survive this mutation.  So I'm re-sending mine from a gmail account in the
hope that it will now be readable, and urge fellow IFS posters to do the
same from now on.

Thanks,
Dwai


*Cryptography, Symbolic Languages and the Universal/Local in Science
*

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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