technical images and linear text

Cryptography and steganography are now used more widely in practice than at any prior moment in history, and so one might expect to find the self-evident origins of these modern practices in the work of cryptographic pioneers like John Wilkins, Francis Bacon, or Johannes Trithemius. Just as Newton’s alchemical leanings give pause to would-be historians of physics, however, so do the mystical and theological elements of early cryptography confuse the contemporary study of cryptographic history. Trithemius’ texts were for many years thought to deal exclusively with magic and the occult; only recently did we realize he was dealing with ‘occulted meaning’ of a less supernatural type. One can find polyalphabetic ciphers in Trithemius’ work, and the early origins of steganography in the Baconian ciphers. But when we ignore their mystical elements and reduce the work of these pioneers to the practical uses of their ideas, we ignore the crucial interrelation of cryptography and graphy.

Cryptography is writing whose meaning is hidden; steganography is hidden writing. Explicitly conceived cryptographic systems differ from linguistic ones in that they offer a set of formal rules for translating cryptic text into a natural language: cryptographic script, which both hides and presents a given text, is thereby subordinate to a natural language content. Yet any script not comprehended by its reader is, practically speaking, cryptographic. We might state this relativistic position more clearly by saying that a cryptographic text is one whose combinatorial logic is hidden from a given reader; conversely, a natural language is one whose combinatorial logic feels ‘natural’ to its reader. Thus hieroglyphics were cryptographic prior to the deciphering of the Rosetta stone, and the Wadi el-Hol scripts, perhaps the earliest available manifestations of truly ‘phonetic’ writing, remain so today. We might even say that all texts are cryptographic to small children and the illiterate: we are born into a world of cryptograms, which we decipher by our entrance into a symbolic order. This expansion of the term ‘cryptographic’ can extend beyond natural languages as well, into the field of formal systems, which are cryptographic to those not trained in their decipherment.

However, this leads to a further problematic of the term ‘cryptographic,’ in that it partly depends on a binary between those texts whose meaning is evident and those in which meaning is hidden. The normal graphic text aspires to convey its meaning as clearly as possible, while the cryptographic text aspires to conceal its meaning as securely as possible. The aforementioned binary is commonsensical insofar as we must recognize these two differing aspirations, and yet we must simultaneously recognize the real failures of such aspirations. Once one trains oneself in a cryptographic system, it ceases to be encrypted. Thus cryptography and graphy are, like most binaries, poles of a continuum, rather than discrete objects; it thereby also goes without saying that these poles are historically as well as perspectivally contingent.

The above examples indicate the contingency of perspective in this regard. One foundational instance of the historical contingency of encryption is the discovery of frequency analysis by al-Kindi: essentially the birth of cryptanalysis as a formal science. By modeling the combinatorial logic of a cryptographic system in the ‘universal language’ of mathematics, frequency analysis can easily translate between any simply-encrypted text and the natural language text it hides. As a result, centuries of cryptographic texts based on simple substitution are easily deciphered, their graphy no longer cryptic.

This usage of mathematics in deciphering cryptography leads to the questions of meaning raised by Aronofsky’s π: if nature is a cryptogram from the divine, then can the language of mathematics uncover the traces of that divinity (and thus — it is hoped — the divinity itself) by modelling natural processes? Or can we only follow along these traces asymptotically, locked in a ‘golden spiral’ toward the essence of things, but left unable to reach a final essence by the formal constraints of the language which structure our pursuit?

This second interpretation, like Derrida’s essay, makes recourse to the syntax of negative theology: mathematics is perhaps a formal way of presencing absences for the purposes of analysis, just as the True Name is a means of presencing the absent divine and presence itself is a presencing of différance (which itself ‘is not’). In the real world, this presentation of absence constitutes a metaphysical violence which indefinitely postpones meaning, leaving only an endless project of deconstruction. Even though the 216-letter Name, the Shem ha-Mephorash, is well known in our world, we are no closer to the divine. In the narrative context of π, however, it seems that the mechanics of presence can capture the divine absence: Max actually finds the cryptic Name through computation. His mystical cryptanalysis of nature leads to the divine Name, the ultimate ‘key’ to meaning, and yet he still finds himself thwarted. This happens three times: first, by what appears to be chance (the literal bug in Euclid); second, by the antinomy of the pharmakon: since the Name is too long for him to memorize, it has value only as textual representation; and then finally by the very structure of the pursuit, when Sol reveals that the bug in Euclid was really a ‘bug’ in computation itself. Foreign to chance and the pharmakon, in π the electronic computer can achieve what the mind cannot. Euclid reaches the ineffable Divine through formal logical procedures, but in the transcendence from electro-logical presence to divine absence, destroys itself.