An Archeology of Cryptography: Rewriting Plaintext, Encryption, and Ciphertext
An Archeology of Cryptography: Rewriting Plaintext, Encryption, and Ciphertext By Isaac Quinn DuPont A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Information University of Toronto © Copyright by Isaac Quinn DuPont 2017 ii An Archeology of Cryptography: Rewriting Plaintext, Encryption, and Ciphertext Isaac Quinn DuPont Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Information University of Toronto 2017 Abstract Tis 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 ofer a critique of the prevailing views of cryptography by tracing a number of long overlooked themes in its history, including the development of artifcial 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. Te 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 artifcial 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 iii 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.
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