Why do people speak in code? Censorship, encryption and euphemistic language
There is no doubt that today's political landscape is mirrored by debates that hide a debate about the philosophy of language. Roughly speaking, culture wars nowadays between the "socially progressive" liberal-left and the "socially conservative" religious right are often times simply debates about language, communication or semiotics. People are arguing about the correct definition of a word, redefining language, displacing the meaning between signifiers... Censorship is still common-place: we often hear in the west about attempts to censor speech on various topics, regardless of whether it's an official/legal censorship from the state or an "unofficial" censorship that is not done through legal means. Allusions, euphemisms, "soft language" are common place in every political discourse. People argue about political correctness, about alt-right dog-whistles, about discourses on sexuality; issues of interpretation arise in heated debates regarding consent and sexual harassment and where we draw the line on free speech lacks a consensus. The archetypal debate on diplomacy - when to say the truth even if it hurts people's feelings - is going through various transformations in discussions about "tolerance" and what is offensive or not. Clearly, it would help us to go back to the drawing board and revisit a philosophy of language. How does censorship work, exactly?
Throughout discourses we can observe various ways in which meaning can be displaced and speech
can become distorted through various forms of censorship. Would
there be a way to summarize all possible ways in which communication can become
“encrypted”, all of the reasons
why someone would speak in a “code” or in “hints” that would prompt the
receiver of the message to decipher them? Without promising that the following
list is complete, here is what I believe to be the general structure:
A simplified formula
is what I borrowed from Freud’s book “The Interpretation Of Dreams”:
between the sender and the receiver of the message, there is a censor,
some sort of obstacle blocking the communication. Hence, when the
message passes through this censor or filter, it comes out on the other
side in some form of code.
The diagram above
represents a general schema of how this censorship might happen: the line in
the middle represents the “filter” or obstacle that prevents direct
communication, the straight-line represents “direct communication” or the
uncensored version of the message, and the dotted line represents the
encrypted/coded version.
Hence, we could classify
the multiple types of encryption based on the type of censor that’s blocking
the direct communication. The censor can be:
1. A real, third entity
2. A potential version of the receiver
3. The persona
4. Expectations (the ego-ideal)
5. The master-slave dialectic
6. A “successful failure” of language (“wordplay”)
7. The Kantian sublime
8. The unconscious
Let’s explain each scenario.
SCENARIO 1: A REAL,
THIRD ENTITY
In this case, the
sender of the message thinks that there either exists, or there might exist, a
third person/group of people/entity that might interfere in the communication
between them and the receiver, and that there will be negative consequences if
this third figure understands the message. The purpose of censorship/encryption
in this case is to create a code that only the sender and the receiver have the
key to decipher, and thus, the third figure cannot understand the
message, but the receiver can. This case is the most “pragmatic” and “rational”
one out of all, so to speak: the third person must be deceived, but not the receiver
of the message.
EXAMPLE: Let’s say
that I am a child and my parents started invading my privacy and watching over
all my text conversations. Thus, I establish a code with my friends: “homework”
means “drugs”, or whatever my parents don’t allow me to do. Now, I will text my
friends about going over at their place to do homework and my friends will get
what the code means, while my parents will be deceived.
SCENARIO 2: A
POTENTIAL VERSION OF THE RECEIVER
This scenario is
similar to the previous one in the sense that there is also a person who must
be properly deceived about the meaning of the message, it is just that
it might be one and the same as the receiver. That is, I do not know yet
everything about the receiver, and I “split them in two” in my mind: the
receiver may be this kind of person, or that kind of person. I only want “that
kind of person” to understand the message, but not “this kind of person”, so I
will say it in such a way such as to have a “win-win” scenario: only a specific
type of person will react to the message in a certain way I want, and if they
are not that kind of person, they will not understand it in the same way.
EXAMPLE 1: Dog-whistles.
Let’s say that I am in an organized-crime group (like a pedophilia ring) trying
to recruit more members. I do not know yet whether the person in front of me is
also a criminal, so I will filter/censor my message such as to be able to, for
example, pass it off as a joke in the case they don’t react properly, and continue
acting seriously in the case where they might actually be interested in joining
my criminal organization. Thus, “only the ones who are supposed to get it will
get it”.
EXAMPLE 2: Let’s say
that I have a very sensitive and over-emotional relative and I have to deliver
some bad news to them. Their reaction is uncertain: I do not know whether they
will have an emotional breakdown or not. Thus, I start the conversation by “testing
the waters”, I beat around the bush a bit or deliver my message initially as
some sort of hint as to what is going on, only delivering part of the news,
etc. to see how they react. If they react properly, I can continue by giving them
the full news directly, and if they are already breaking down, I can stop or
change my strategy. This is the same structure as the dog-whistle example: my
relative may be two kinds of people in this scenario, and I do not know
yet which one it is, and therefore I will censor my words such as to accommodate
for both versions.
SCENARIO 3: THE
PERSONA
In this scenario, the
hint, allusion, euphemism or other form of indirect communication is a
compromise between my persona (how I want to appear externally) and my internal
subjective states of experience (desires, beliefs, feelings, etc.). In the case
where the two clash, directly expressing them would ruin my persona, so I will
express those states indirectly, in “encrypted form” in order to have a compromise
between the mask I wear and how I feel inside or what I believe. The purpose of
censorship is more aesthetic here: a compromise between what is true and
what “sounds good” in communication.
EXAMPLE 1: Let's say we have an individual who wants to seem helpful and nice to everyone in various contexts (who puts on a persona of a “selfless, friendly” individual) will force themselves to hide/mask all their negative attitudes towards others, because this would contradict their persona and shatter the illusion. Now, they would give an intentional hint whenever they would have a desire that would be “filtered out” through this public persona (ex: passive-aggressive comments – the individual gets “the best of both worlds”, I keep the appearance that I’m a helpful and nice individual while still getting my point across that I hate somebody, so I tell them to go to hell in a ‘nice’ way; thus, "go fuck yourself" gets transformed into "kind reminder")
EXAMPLE 2: If the direction of the relationship with a romantic affair (in my own subjective fantasy) puts me into the position of the “fuckboy/cool biker”, then anything I say about my feelings of vulnerability and weakness must be filtered in order to keep the stable appearance that I am a cool, badass guy without feelings (ex: hinted or alluded to), but my romantic feelings will be expressed more directly in the situations where I take charge and control of the situation, as that doesn’t contradict the persona. If, instead, I try to put on the mask of the shy, artistic kid in the back of the class, then the romantic feelings that put me into a position of vulnerability may be expressed in a more direct form than in the biker persona example, but the ones that put me into a position where I am supposed to take charge in a situation will now be hinted and alluded to. Thus, where the fuckboy is direct, the shy artistic kid is indirect and vice-versa. SCENARIO 4:
EXPECTATIONS/THE EGO-IDEAL
In this scenario, we
start to enter the realm of tautology and self-referentiality of signifiers.
The context of the communication (“the medium of the message”) will have a
certain set of expectations as to how people should communicate, that itself
being a function that displaces meaning from one signifier to another, thus
making everything said, essentially, a double-meaning. Expectations are circular:
people should censor their speech because it is expected of them to do so, and
it is expected of them to do so because people tend to do it, ad infinitum. Jacques Lacan had a name for expectations: the ego-ideal. "The ego-ideal is the signifier operating as ideal, an internalized plan of the law, the guide governing the subject's position in the symbolic order".
EXAMPLE 1: The example
that Slavoj Zizek often uses: in Slovenian academia, a polite way to tell your
colleague that their intervention was boring and stupid is to call it “interesting”.
Now “interesting” becomes code for “boring and stupid”: whenever I call your
intervention interesting, you know that I found it boring and stupid. So if I
were to directly call your intervention “boring and stupid”, you will think to
yourself “If they found it boring and stupid, why didn’t they just call it ‘interesting’,
like everyone else does in this context?” – and hence, “boring and stupid”
itself becomes a code/euphemism for something that is even worse than
boring and stupid. Hence, in this scenario, even the direct expression of the
message becomes coded, and everything that you can say has a double-meaning. Expectations
are circular: it is expected for you to code “boring and stupid” as “interesting”
because people tend to do it, and people tend to do it because it is expected
of them to do so, and so on…
EXAMPLE 2: In many
contexts, “How are you feeling today?” does not literally mean that, it is code
for “I do not actually care about your day, I am just trying to say hello
and expecting you to reply with ‘fine’ even if you are feeling bad that day”.
If you were to reply with “tolerable” or “acceptable”, this would be code for “I’m
doing horrible”, so if you were to actually directly say that you were doing
horrible, the person would think that it is more than horrible (“Because if he
was actually doing horrible why didn’t he just say that he was doing “acceptable”
like all people who are doing horribly say in this context?”), and thus, all
meaning becomes displaced. The justification of this displacement is,
again, circular/tautological: a signifier is code for something because that’s
how people use it in that context and that’s how people use it in that context
because that’s how people are likely to receive it and so on to infinity. Expectations
and behavior feed into each other in a positive feedback loop.
SCENARIO 5: THE
MASTER-SLAVE DIALECTIC
In this scenario, the
desire is to be desired, and thus, one cannot directly express one’s “want to
be wanted” by the receiver of the message because it would defeat the purpose,
entering into the realm of nonsense and absurdity. We want to see that the
other person cares about us, desires us more than we desire them (for instance),
so we require them to freely act on their own will without telling them
what we want them to do, testing them for authenticity. Sometimes, this does
not happen, and as a compromise, we can communicate our desire to be desired in
partial or encrypted form, to “guide them” or “help them”, to give them a “hint”,
but the other person has to do the rest of the work. In this case, the other person has to "get it", to decipher what we allude to, not because there would necessarily be some negative consequence if we were to express it openly, but because the very act of the receiver of the message deciphering the code is itself communicative of their desire towards us.
EXAMPLE 1: Let’s say
that you got a new haircut and your friend hasn’t noticed yet all day. To
communicate your desire to be recognized directly would be absurd and
solipsistic (“I want you to notice that I got a new haircut” -> “Okay,
I noticed that you got a new haircut”), and hence, as a compromise
formation, you can give your friend a hint and see if they notice after
that. You tell them: “Did you notice something different about me today?”. You must allude to it because what you want for them is to notice your haircut, but the only way for them to freely notice it is if you do not directly tell them, as then you would to the "noticing" (the recognition, as Hegel would put it) in their place... The allusion is there only to help them, you're doing part of the work but you still want an effort on their part. This is also the same as that cliché example where someone forgets your birthday and eventually you tell them "Have you forgotten something today?" or "Do you know what day it is?".
EXAMPLE 2: Let’s say that you wait for your romantic interest to make the first move, or for them to message you first after a long period of not talking. Communicating this desire directly would be absurd and solipsistic, by telling them that you want them to make the first move, you would basically make the first move, and in a weird way, but if, after waiting a lot, they still don’t say anything, you may give them only partial attention and hope that they will reciprocate.
There is MUCH more to say about the master-slave dialectic, so I would recommend the reader to (re)visit my article about it: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/03/love-desire-to-be-desired-and-master.html
SCENARIO 6: THE
SUCCESFUL FAILURES OF LANGUAGE
In this scenario, the
censorship is part of the message. What is communicated is not an idea behind the
words, but a relationship between the words/signifiers themselves. The content
is in the form, the essence is inside the appearance.
Examples: wordplay in music
and poetry, wordplay in punchline of jokes, clever references to old movies in
rap songs, clever puns and inside jokes with a friend, etc.
"There are certain peculiarities of
language in which meaning is not found in the signified behind the
signifier, but inside the signifying chain itself, for example, in wordplay.
In those situations, the purpose of language is not “clear communication and
understanding”, but more of an aesthetic goal – to produce an emotional
effect through the relationships between the signifiers themselves. I
have identified so far five main situations in which this is the case
(this list is not exhaustive and may be extended):
1.
Flirting/seductive
language
2.
Jokes
3.
“Poking”,
i.e., “making fun of people”, trying to say stuff that sounds “cool” in a
competition of insults, coming up with clever comebacks that would “burn” or
“roast” the other person (ex: think of the subreddit r/MurderedByWords)
4.
Sarcasm
5.
Lyrics
(in either poetry or music)
What do all five of these modes of
communication have in common? First off, they are self-censoring – they
create an emotional response in the other person through the logic of
implication or allusion, there is always something left unsaid, and the other
person has to “get it”, and if you later explain the meaning behind your
speech, it “loses its magic”. Second off, the emotional response is not to an idea
that is express through words, but inside the relationships between the
words/signifiers themselves. This is why I say that those five scenarios are,
paradoxically, five types of “successful failures” of language – the
failure to communicate a signified/image/idea itself becomes “not a bug, but a
feature”. For example, take the simple example of a joke. Here is a joke from
Chapter 3 of Alenka Zupancic’s book “What is sex?”:
A man comes home from an exhausting day at work, plops
down on the couch in front of the television, and tells his wife: “Get me a
beer before it starts.” The wife sighs and gets him a beer.
Fifteen minutes later, he says: “Get me another beer
before it starts.” She looks cross, but fetches another beer and slams it down
next to him. He finishes that beer and a few minutes later says: “Quick, get me
another beer, it’s going to start any minute.” The wife is furious.
She yells at him: “Is that all you’re going to do
tonight? Drink beer and sit in front of that TV? You’re nothing but a lazy,
drunken, fat slob, and furthermore …”
The man sighs, and says: “It’s started …”
The
emotional response of laugher is found not in an image or idea that is
expressed through words, it is instead found in the very wordplay (in
this case, double-meaning) inside language itself. The double-meaning of
the signifier “It’s started…” is not a “thing-representation”, to use Freud’s
language, but a collection of “word-representations”. Thus, the very thing that
seems, on the surface level, to thwart “clear communication of ideas and mutual
understanding” (double-meanings, ambiguous language, vaguely defined signifiers)
is now the goal, not the obstacle. Hence why I call them “successful failures”
of language.
Miscommunication
is also not a bug, but a feature of what I had called “poking” earlier, for
lack of a better term. It is the equivalent of flirting but with hate instead
of love, so it functions in extremely similar ways: when you get in a heated
argument with someone, and the discussion turns towards coming up with “clever”
insults and comebacks towards the other person (ex: “You are so full of
shit, the toilet’s jealous” -> “Yeah? Well too bad you can’t
Photoshop your ugly personality!”), again, there is no substantial
signified behind the signifiers, instead the emotional response is produced by
the clever displacement of meaning inside the relations between the signifiers
themselves."
SCENARIO 7: THE
KANTIAN SUBLIME
Here, the
impossibility of expressing something is what is expressed. This is what Immanuel
Kant called the sublime.
EXAMPLE 1: When Shakespeare
writes in his sonnets “I love you so much that I cannot put it into words”,
by stating the impossibility of putting it into words, he has just put it into
words.
EXAMPLE 2: A Hong-Kong
protester once held a sign that, instead of directly writing a protest message,
it read “You know very well what I want to write here”.
SCENARIO 8: THE
UNCONSCIOUS
Here, the sender of
the message is just as unaware of its hidden meaning as is the receiver. These
are all the classic Freudian examples: slips of the tongue, psychosomatic
symptoms, dreams.
We should make a few
general remarks about these eight scenarios.
First remark: In scenarios
1, 2 and 8, the purpose of the encryption is actual deception: someone
is quite literally lied to. Scenarios 3 to 7 are examples of “honest lies”: I
lie to you, you know that I am lying, I know that you know that I am lying and
yet we still pretend.
Second remark: In
scenarios 1, 2, 3, 4 and 8, it is still possible to say the uncensored or “direct”
version of the message, it would just have negative consequences if it were
communicated directly, and thus it is encrypted as a compromise, expressed
through some sort of euphemism, allusion or hint. In other words, in scenarios
1-4 and 8, the censor and the message are altogether separate. In
scenario 5, the censor/filter and the message that it censors/filters are different
but glued together. It is still technically possible to express the
direct, uncensored or “unfiltered” version of the message, but it would be
absurd and nonsensical: thus, it is a self-defeating message – the censorship
and the censored message go “hand-in-hand” quite well, as if they were made for
each other. In scenario 6, the censorship is not only “glued together” with the
censored message, it is quite literally part of the message. Thus, it is
altogether impossible to communicate the “hidden meaning” behind the
message without also communicating the censorship or the censored/filtered/encrypted
version. However, in scenario 6, it is still possible for the message to be
interpreted or deciphered – the other person has to “get it”. In
scenario 7, the censorship is not only part of the message, the
censorship is the entire message. Hence, not only is it impossible for
the message to be communicated directly, there is no interpretation, no hidden meaning
behind the message, no essence behind the appearance. The censorship is all
that there is. Thus, from 1 to 7, I arranged these scenarios from “least to
most separation” between message and censorship. In 1-4, the message and censorship
are separate, in scenario 5, they are different but not separate, in 6, they
are “two” but not “different”, in scenario 7, they are one and the same. It is
very likely that the diagram in this chapter that I drew above only accurately
represents scenarios 1 through 4.
Third remark: it is
very possible for a message to be censored in multiple ways at once, thus one
type of encryption falling into more of these categories at once. Take the
example of indirectly telling your crush that you are interested in them,
giving them a “hint” or alluding to it: this can fall into any combination of scenarios
2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, and in some limited circumstances, even the other ones (1, 2
and 8). It is very possible that it is all of them at once in a single
communicated message.
For example, it can be
scenario 2 because the person may think “I don’t know how they will react, they
may react negatively, it might ruin my friendship, so I will censor/filter the
message in order to ‘test the waters’ first and then be gradually more direct
depending on their reaction”. But it can also be scenario 3: a compromise between
how you feel inside and the mask you are wearing – remember the two examples of
the “fuckboy” persona and the “shy artistic kid” persona. But it can also be
scenario 4: simply people communicating in a certain context in a code that you
are expected to follow because people in that context follow it (“If all people
who are interested in me this much would express it in this way, why did he
express it directly and why didn’t he just say X and Y?”). But it can also
be scenario 5: in the master-slave dialectic, I already gave multiple examples of that in the article I linked. And of course, it can be scenario 6: flirting remarks can be full
of inside jokes, wordplay, self-referentiality of language and so on. Hence, a
single message can be all of them at once.
Fourth remark: scenarios
1 and 2, when repeated over time in a certain context, almost always transform
into scenario 4. This is best illustrated by the case of censorship in authoritarian
regimes: the messages of protest against the authoritarian government quickly
transform into honest lies, in which everyone understands the hidden meaning
behind the message but they still have to pretend to not understand in order to
maintain the circularity of the expectations of the ego-ideal. In Russia in this
moment, virtually everyone knows that “special military operation” means “war”,
they are deceiving basically nobody, and yet they still have to use the
euphemism. This structure is best illustrated by an anecdote of journalism in communist Yugoslavia that Slavoj Zizek gave in an interview:
A story from my youth: I remember when I was young,
I was in a student-journal and there were elections. So, we at the journal we asked
ourselves “What should we do?” [in the context where everyone knew that the
elections were rigged]. Some radical idiots proposed “Why don’t we simply
openly do a heroic gesture? Let’s publish an issue of this journal where we say
that these were fake elections and so on”. But everyone already knows this,
what would be the point? We would just appear idiots. Then, one of us had an
ingenious idea! We said: they are claiming that these are real, democratic
elections. So, let’s just treat them like that, and on the evening of
elections, we publish an extraordinary issue of the journal with big titles:
LATEST ELECTION RESULTS, IT LOOKS LIKE THE COMMUNISTS REMAIN IN POWER.
And it was such a wonderful act because they
were so furious at us at the central committee, and they called us there and said
“Boys, don’t do this. You provoke us”. Then, we just naively said “Listen,
these were free elections and we felt the duty to inform people of the result…”
– and it was so tragic because this party bureaucrat couldn’t have told us “No,
these weren’t free elections”, he just said “Boys, don’t fuck with me, you know
very well what I mean”. We asked him: “But what do you mean?”. He said “don’t
mess with me”. I almost felt sympathy for that guy…
Fifth remark: the act
of decoding a coded message can itself be a code. You speak indirectly, with
allusions, then you explain the implications behind your speech and this explanation itself can have implications and be a form of indirect communication. This is
most evident in sarcasm: in many contexts, if I am sarcastic, and right after
that I explain to you “By the way, I was just behind sarcastic right now…”,
this can be an indirect way of calling you an idiot (“You’re the kind of
person that doesn’t understand sarcasm, so it must be explained to you…”). This
is why in internet conversations, the “/s” that we add at the end of a sentence
to indicate that it was sarcastic is never just that, it’s never just an
explanation of what the previous sentence meant: in many cases, this can add an
extra layer of sarcasm and meta-irony.
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