[Reader-list] IFS 2nd Post - Towards a genealogy of 'Code'

[Dwaipayan Banerjee]

Hi everyone,
   
  Apologies for the delayed posting, I wanted to make sure I had something concrete to say before putting something up.  
   
  To briefly recap, I have said that I am interested in understanding 'coding' as a practice, and in understanding 'cryptography' as one specific instance of such a practice.  Now it is quite clear that I am interested in a specific kind of phenonmenon - artificial languages that in some way entail a break from context and posit some notion of universal truth that it is able to access due partly to this break.  This phenomenon has had a long genealogy since medieval semi-magical European thought, to enlightenment thinking and to a new manifestation under modernity in quasi-formal mathematical and logical languages and computing languages.  I am beginning then to understand coding and cryptography then as general phenomenon that have had a long genealogy, and must be excavated archaelogically as such.
   
  What are the uses of such a project?  The relationship - in all epistemic configurations - between thought/materiality and language tells us many things.  By understanding how people represent themselves in language, we are able to access a notion of order that underlies the distribution of rules and things in that culture.  When these languages are active in their ordering function - in the sense that they are languages of enquiry (mathematics) or languages of design (code) - one is allowed direct insight into the fundamental assumptions that underlie the culture's understanding of things, representations and the relations between them.
   
  To put it less abstractly, a couple of examples will suffice.  In the medieval period, the pre-dominance of magic and incantations was by no means a throwback to previous 'darker' ages.  It was instead a relationship between thought and language that pre-dated signification, that assumed a unity between signs and their referents which allowed names to access things in themselves.  As Foucault would have it, this relationship of similitude would erode further and further into modernity - with vestiges only in literature and poetry (like that of Mallarme's) that tried to obstinately retain the strong nominalist function of language.  In the Renaissance and the classical epistemes in Europe, signification would emerge in different ways, and the relationship between language and the ordering of thought would define itself through this time.  With modernity however, the disjunction of signs and referents is pushed so far that the ability of language to order and enquire is
 pushed into an even smaller niche - quasi-formal mathematical languages.  One is suggesting that the manifestation of 'coding languages' is an interesting development in this long genealogical trajectory.  This project will attempt to find its pasts and its place.
   
  The first part (this posting) will attempt to do the former - draw out a genealogical trajectory rooting it in the search for universal languages in 16th to 18th century Europe.  The second part will continue this genealogy (foregrounding the emergence of symbolic thought in Leibniz and Vieta) and then attempt some comments on the later - the place of coding in our modern epistemic configuration.
   
  Since the first part is heavy in images, I have placed it in a blog which allows that kind of formatting.
   
  http://whateverbeing.blogspot.com/
   
  The entry to be read is entitled: 'Symbolic Thought and Artificial Languages'
   
  Thanks for your patience.
   
  Sincerely,
  Dwaipayan

 				
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