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Re: VMs: postmodern cryptography: Foucault, Panopticon, and Voynich MS


On Oct 8, 2004, at 9:15 PM, Ronald Lorenzo wrote:

Hello everyone,

Well, there are a lot of things to respond to, but I
will say that postmodern as a method or theory is
definitely not intellectually bankrupt.

Only in the artificial world that is the socio-linguistic construct of postmodernists.

 Many events
fit better a postmodern explanation than a
functionalist/structuralist explanation.

When one gets to steal, er, invent new terminology and define a methodology to suit ones ends is this any surprise?

 While I
could provide some useful examples from contemporary
politics, I will refrain from doing so out of respect
for rules that may exist on the list.

Larry Laudan has commented on this quite succintly:

"The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is-second only to American political campaigns-the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time." Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism (1990)


On other matters though, postmodernism provides a new
approach to many fields, including Voynich studies.
Under modernist/positivist approaches, cryptology is
pursued as an act of construction and meaning.


And this provides what insight into any specific crypto?
This is at best a meta-analysis.

 A
Foucaultian point of view, for example, that secret
codes are the challenge to control and power by a
sovereign can serve to set new research agendas.

or the dual/mirror of the above, that secret codes are a means of exercising control by a sovereign, leading to control and direction of research agendas. One doesn't need Foucault to be able to relate cryptology, cryptography and cryptanalysis to the space time continuum that they are embedded in.

This may be interesting in its own right but it provides no new tools or methodologies to bring to bear on the issue of understanding the VMs itself.


To say that translation is not also deconstruction is
to dismiss one of the principle elements of
translation: the loss and addition of meaning outside
of the source text.  Anyone who has translated poetry
from one language to another will know (or at least
read in the two texts) that translations are simulacra
of the original (if there even is an original, the
written poem being itself a simulacrum of the poem the
author meant to create).  To say that there is one and
only one correct or true translation of a text not
demonstrates a misunderstanding of the process of
translation.

And to compare the process of decryption with the translation of poetry from one natural language to another is to completely misunderstand what coding and/or encryption does. What Lorenzo does here is a common postmodern hack of using a term with multiple meanings and deliberately clouding the issue by attempting to conflate the meanings

Additionally, the assertion that there
can only be one true translation/reading of a text is
the root of many evils: religious wars, genocide,
racism, etc.  One possibility is that the Voynich
manuscript is poetry, and that it is written in such a
way to convey double or triple meanings.

Numerous readings of the VMs have been proposed on the list, consult the archives. One can only get to the point of insisting that there is "one true translation/reading" if it is possible to read the language of the original. To the best of my knowledge nobody has made a convincing case that they are able to read the VMs.


As for Sokal's article, others have responded to the
hoax by a scientist with too much free time on his
hands.

Ad hominem attack on Alan Sokal!



--- Milo Velimirovic <milov@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Postmodernism as a discipline is intellectually
bankrupt. Those who
espouse postmodernism have repeatedly absconded with
terminology from
other fields of study usually because said
terminology represented the
theorie du jour of well established and respected
fields. The
perpetrators of such theft, having little or no
understanding of the
fields they were pilfering from, created vacuous
frameworks upon which
they have built their castles using terminology and
definitions
ascribed to others but fabricated from the cloth of
the Emperor's
clothes.

I'll cease mixing my metaphors and suggest that
anyone who's interested
take a look at just how easy it is to fabricate what
appears to be a
postmodern treatise.
e.g. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a
Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" available (look
about midpage) from:
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/

Milo

On Oct 7, 2004, at 11:18 AM, Ronald Lorenzo wrote:

If anything, the project of cryptography is an act
of
deconstruction. 

It is nothing of the sort. It is an act of
translation from one
representation to another.

Given the failure of other approaches
to de(constructing/crypting) the Voynich
Manuscript, I
see no reason for a postmodern approach.
Cryptology
was postmodern before there was postmodernism.

To say that there is "postmodern babble" is to
fail to
grasp the project of postmodernism. Perhaps there
is 
no truth, no knowledge.  Not just in the Voynich
manuscript, but in other worldly texts.  So-called
postmodern babble opens a new strategy at
decryption.

I'd agree wholeheartedly if the last word was
changed to deception.

[snip]

--
Milo VelimiroviÄ <milov@xxxxxxxxx>
University of Wisconsin - La Crosse
La Crosse, Wisconsin 54601 USA 43 48 05 N 91 14 22 W
--
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -- Charles Babbage

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