An Archeology of Cryptography: Rewriting Plaintext, Encryption, and Ciphertext

This dissertation is an archeological study of cryptography. It questions the validity of thinking about cryptography in familiar, instrumentalist terms, and instead reveals the ways that cryptography can been understood as writing, media, and computation. In this dissertation, I offer a critique of the prevailing views of cryptography by tracing a number of long overlooked themes in its history, including the development of artificial languages, machine translation, media, code, notation, silence, and order. Using an archeological method, I detail historical conditions of possibility and the technical a priori of cryptography. The conditions of possibility are explored in three parts, where I rhetorically rewrite the conventional terms of art, namely, plaintext, encryption, and ciphertext. I argue that plaintext has historically been understood as kind of inscription or form of writing, and has been associated with the development of artificial languages, and used to analyze and investigate the natural world. I argue that the technical a priori of plaintext, encryption, and ciphertext is constitutive of the syntactic and semantic properties detailed in Nelson Goodman’s theory of notation, as described in his Languages of Art. I argue that encryption (and its reverse, decryption) are deterministic modes of transcription, which have historically been thought of as the medium between plaintext and ciphertext. By developing a new understanding of encryption as standing between two agents, I characterize the process in terms of media. As media, encryption technologies participate in historical desires for commodious and even “angelic” transmission, popular until the twentieth century. I identify how cryptanalysis, or “code-breaking,” is distinct from cryptography, and instead relates to language, being associated with the history of machine translation. Finally, I argue that ciphertext is the perspectival, ordered result of encryption—similar to computation—and resists attempts to be spoken. Since ciphertext resists being spoken, its application problematizes the category of language, and has, at least once in antiquity, been considered a means of creating silence. This dissertation is the first of its kind to offer a historically-rich, ontological analysis of cryptography, which therefore opens the topic to new fields of scholarship and humanistic forms of inquiry.Ph.D