Though I am still in the midst of my current book project (now being reviewed by the editors), I’ve begun thinking about the direction of my next work. I’ve recently become interested in the issue of cryptography and its relationship to writing/rhetoric. In part this is b/c this topic has become a focus of recent sci-fi novels, including Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (both of which I’m teaching in my Cyberpunk Lit. class this summer). However, more generally speaking, it strikes me that the notion of intellectual property, information property, is hinged on the possibility of controlling access. Data encryption is likely a primary way in which access to information will be controlled and hence the marketplace value of information sustained.

The term cryptography, coming from the Greek, literally means “hidden writing.” This, of course, begs the question, what is “un-hidden” or “clear” writing? Clear writing would be that presupposed under the ideology of phallo-logocentrism, where meaning is fungible, a commodity. Of in regular discourse cryptography refers to secret codes and those who break them. Since WWII, this has been mathematicians. However, the longer tradition of Biblical hermeneutics, and indeed the tradition of interpretation as we experience it today in English Studies, is part of this practice of “code-breaking.” One might even go back further, to the Phaedrus, and Socrates’ warning us of the dangers of writing; Derrida’s now infamous pharmakon points to the cryptographia integral to writing.

And yet, writing works, as communication, as the foundation of discourse communities, and as a means of social power a la Foucault and others. Discursive, social, ethical and political codes function to regulate meaning, cybernetically: to steer us in particular directions. I am particularly interested in the “code of friendship,” a parallel, perhaps, to Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and Agamben’s Coming Community, as well as, obviously, Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. As such, the subject of friendship is significant both in the current moment and from the outset of rhetoric, as a foundation for ethical (and political) behavior.

I must admit that I am simply initiating a direction of investigation here and not speaking with the claim to authority typical of academic prose. However, I have come to trust my instincts, and my instincts suggest that there is a significant connection between friendship, rhetoric, cryptography, intellectual property, and information commerce/politics/culture. If there is not, then perhaps, to paraphrase Nietzsche, I will have to invent one.