“It’s In the Code.” But in what sense is a code something public and shared? And in what sense is a code something secret, communicated only the select few “in the know?” Dan explores these issues in this episode, arguing that secret codes that operate below the surface are dependent on public codes we all share and can understand. He also suggests that this interplay is vital in our current context defined by endless culture war.
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www.feyyaz.tv Hello and welcome to the series, It's in the Code, part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
I am your host, glad as always to be with you.
As always, I want to begin by thanking all of you who support us, those of you who listen, those of you who keep the ideas coming, the patrons.
We are self-funded and don't have any external funding for this.
We put out content three times a week.
It's a lot of work and we couldn't do it without you.
And as always, for this series, this series is driven by you.
This series is driven by the ideas and the comments and the feedback and the questions that you have, and I welcome those.
You can send them to me at danielmillerswaj.com.
Always love to hear those.
Always behind in my responses.
I closed the gap for a while.
I was doing really well about kind of Responding to more and then the new semester started and I've fallen behind again.
I do read them.
I value them.
Respond to them as I'm able.
I want to jump right in here because a couple episodes back, I reflected on the idea of code, right?
The series is called It's In The Code, talked about what that meant, and I got a lot of really cool feedback from folks about that.
Ideas and questions and comments and sort of seeking further clarifications.
And I wanted to revisit that today.
I think I said last episode that I might circle back around to this.
It's really been on my mind.
I've just been kind of chewing on it.
And so that's what I want to sort of pick back up on.
So for those who might need a refresher or maybe you didn't catch that episode or whatever, I talked about sort of different senses of the word code as I use it when we talk about, you know, a series, it's in the code.
One was the kind of source code that forms the kind of basis or structure for what something is, right?
And you used the analogy of video games and said that if we say something's in the code, it means it's written in.
It's sort of part of the structure of the game.
There's no sort of easy way to fix it or there's no workaround or whatever.
We talked about that.
We also talked about code, maybe in the conventional sense that most of us would think of this, right?
A sort of shared set of meanings, whether we're talking about language or practices or how we make sense of like our emotions or what we feel, whatever.
A shared set of meanings that shapes or reinforces our sense of who we are, our social identity, our sense of, you know, what others, which others in society are like us, which are different and so forth.
And I also suggested that all of us, as a part of being the social kinds of beings that we are, that we all use codes.
As part of the human condition is to use codes or to work through codes in these ways.
This is what I talked about.
As I say, a lot of great comments and some questions and sort of further queries from listeners.
And one of the questions that came up a lot was this, and I think this is really insightful, and it was, okay, so what's the role or the place of secrecy in the codes that people use?
That we talk about these codes, we all participate in them and so forth.
I think I also said that we're not always aware that we're doing so.
And yet people are saying, so like, we all do it and whatever, but there's also this sense of secrecy.
Like, what's the relation of that?
Like, how does that play into this idea of codes?
And it makes sense.
In this series, I talk about that, right?
When I talk about sort of decoding or cracking the code, I often make a distinction between the sort of surface meaning of a practice or a phrase or whatever we're looking at, right?
Whether it's a way of talking or it's a sort of, what, a political talking point or something you might see in a church bulletin or hear in a sermon or whatever, the sort of surface meaning, and then what I always refer to as sort of the work that's going on beneath the surface, and that's often this sense of code in this more secretive sense.
So, how does this idea of secrecy relate to the idea of codes?
And that's what I want to respond to here.
If you haven't figured this out about me, this drives my students nuts.
I often like identifying the way that words or concepts that we use can mean lots of different things, and the way that those different meanings and the slippage between them, the way we can kind of shift from one meaning to another, often lets them do the work that they do, that there's often a lot of really interesting and important stuff going on in that sort of sliding between meanings.
And the word code is the same way, right?
And here I'm thinking of code in that sense that we talked about before of like the shared set of meanings and so forth, right?
So the word code, understood in that way as the way that I think most of us would maybe commonly use it.
And I just want to throw out here, there's a field or an approach called semiotics or semiology that talks about codes and signs and meanings and messages and so forth.
And it's incredibly complex and it goes back decades.
And I am not trying to have a technical conversation about like different semiological theories of code here.
Okay?
I'm going to throw out some ideas I think will make intuitive sense to most of us, because I think it's how we actually are familiar with this idea of the code, okay?
But within that, I think there are two almost contradictory meanings that capture what I want to think about in this episode.
And the first is that a code, on one meaning, a code is public and it's shared.
It's something that is shared in common.
It is precisely not secret.
And the model, if you want an example here, it would be a legal code.
It's right there.
We call it a legal code.
Part of what makes the law the law in our system and in sort of the modern West or whatever, part of what makes it legitimate Is that it's public, that it is fixed, it has a fixed form.
Obviously, laws can be changed, but there's a process for doing that, and that process is public and so forth.
The law can be known, again, in principle.
Most of us cannot, don't have the means to sort of know the ins and outs of the law and so forth.
You have lawyers whose job is to do that, but the point is it can be made known, it can be expressed, it is supposed to be the same for everybody, and so on.
And what ensures this is that, as we say, it is codified.
If you were to study sort of history, one of the big things that happens like say in the Roman Empire and something that sort of stays as a legacy of the Roman Empire was the codification of law, the making law fixed and public and accessible so that it's not secret, so that it's not arbitrary.
That's why it's viewed as legitimate.
If you want to contrast to this, just an everyday contrast you can think of, have you ever had the person in your life who invites you to play like a new board game, right?
Or maybe it's a playground game when you're a kid or it's a sport or whatever it is.
They invite you to play a game.
You're like, "Oh, I've never played it before." Or like, "What are the rules?" "Well, I'll explain the rules as we go." And you play with that person who always seems to be modifying the rules or like, you know, something will happen and they'll explain something and you're like, cool.
So later it happens, like, cool, I think I just, I scored a point because of this.
But like, well, nope, nope.
Actually, here was this exception that makes it so that I actually get a point.
I may or may not have had siblings who would do this sometimes, who would, you know, be like, oh, we'll explain it as we go, and you'd swear that the rules were changing, right?
That they were making them up as they go to help them, right?
Like, that's the far extreme of this, the opposite of what code, in this public sense, the sense of a legal code, It's supposed to be, right?
So in this sense, a code is something that it's not for a select few.
It's universal.
I don't mean that everybody on the planet, it applies to them.
But I mean, everybody within, say, we're talking about legal codes, within a municipality or a state or a country, Or if we're talking about something like, I don't know, basic grammar and syntax and the rules of a language and so forth, everybody who uses it, everybody who is subject to the code, so to speak, can understand it, can know it, and so forth.
And lots of codes require this publicity.
Things like different kinds of social conventions and legal codes themselves and language, as I mentioned, they require this.
Okay.
So there's this one sense in which code is not something secret.
It's not something that needs to be, it does need to be, I guess, deciphered, but not because it's secret or unknown, or we don't know what it means, but you're, you know, sort of plumbing nuances, but even that deciphering and so forth is sort of public shared activity.
Okay.
So that's one sense.
But we, and obviously I in this series, we also use the concept of code to refer to something very different, to something that is not publicly shared or knowable, right?
To refer to something that is secret, that's known only to a select few, right?
It's a code, and we mean precisely code.
I mean, if you know the code, you know what's being expressed, you know what's being done, and so forth.
But if you don't know the code, you don't.
So code, understood in this sense, is used to express or communicate something that we want to reveal to some people while simultaneously concealing it for others.
And that's often what we're exploring when we talk about code in this series, right?
When I talk about cracking the code or decoding, that's often what I'm getting at.
Okay?
So I think on like a basic understanding of code, we're all pretty familiar with these two meanings that sit together with some tension.
Code is something inherently public and universal on the one hand, and code is something secret and reserved for the select few on the other.
And these two things, as I say, they might sound contradictory.
But what I think is interesting and what I want to kind of talk about for the rest of the episode here is that These two senses that can seem contradictory can actually rely on each other.
Or rather, what I would say is that the code, the sense of code as a secret or something hidden requires the sense of code as something public or shared.
It doesn't have to be that way.
There can be times when there's no overlap and you can contrast, say, a published list of rules for an organization.
It's coming out of the summertime here.
Maybe you go to the swimming pool and there's the published list of rules, right?
Like that's a code, a code of conduct.
Everybody has to follow it.
It's right there.
It's public.
It's not trying to be secret.
Depending where you live, it might even be up there in multiple languages, right?
To increase the universality of it and its public availability.
And on the far flip side would be, I don't know, a cipher that you get where you've got to have like the old school decoder ring to figure out what the secret message is, right?
There's no pretense there that there's anything publicly accessible at all, okay?
So there can be these extremes, but what I'm interested in, in this series, are things that usually combine these two senses, right?
There is usually a public or explicit or literal sense of the topic in question, and a secret or hidden meaning sort of beneath the surface.
And what I'm usually trying to do is trying to articulate what that hidden meaning beneath the surface might be.
And there, that hidden code depends upon the publicly available code.
Right?
So these two senses might seem contradictory, but there's a sense in which the secret meaning, the sense of code as a secret, is sort of parasitic on or depends upon the sense of code as something public.
And there can be lots of ways that this works, or lots of reasons why this works.
And so the first thing is this, and this is what I want to think about for a minute.
I talked about it before.
I'm not trying to get too pedantic here, but this is where you can get into some pretty complicated philosophical stuff.
But The first way that these relate is that that publicly available code becomes a kind of carrier for the code that is within or beneath it.
Some theorists refer to what's called an undercode that is carried by the publicly available code.
And this is exactly what most of us mean when we talk about sort of a coded message.
There's a kind of hidden message or a subtext Underneath or within the explicit code or message.
And we explore that in this series all the time, right?
So, for example, when we discuss the way that people on the right, religiously, politically, whatever, will express a concern to protect the children or protect women.
I did an episode a long time ago.
You can search it up.
called Christian Health and Safety, and it was about like bathroom bills and things like that and banning trans people from certain public spaces and so on.
But it didn't say anything about banning trans people or targeting trans people.
It was talking about protecting.
The rationale given is protecting women and children.
That's a publicly available code.
It's written into the law.
It's written into the stipulations, the rationale, and so forth.
It's something we can all agree on.
Great.
But beneath that affirmative or universally accepted idea is the subtext or the alternative message that we're targeting trans people.
We're going to keep them out of public space.
We are going to basically make it so they can't be present in public in a particular way and certainly not in a visible way.
So the public code carries that hidden code.
It carries the under code.
We don't come out and say, if we advance these laws, exactly what we want them to do.
But there is this subtext or subcode, which leads to the second way in which the secret code depends upon the public code.
And that is that it provides a means of denial when that secret code is brought to light.
And again, we can use this example.
Somebody says, hey, you're just targeting queer folk.
You're just targeting trans and gender non-conforming people.
This is a law based on anima.
What?
What?
No, it's not based on anima.
I'm just protecting the women and children.
This is about public safety.
I don't know what you're talking about, you crazy libs on the left, talking about targeting trans people.
I don't know what's on your mind, but hey, we're just talking about protecting vulnerable people here.
Right?
That publicly shared code, publicly accessible, explicitly stated reasoning can hide or mask the implicit or subtextual or undercoded meaning that's there.
Right?
It makes it so they can kind of deny this.
When we talk about this, Brad and I on the podcast use this illustration a lot.
But the other parallel here are people that will say racist or sexist things, then play it off as a joke.
So you call them out on it.
They're like, what?
It was just a joke.
I have a sense of humor.
Of course, I don't think that.
I'm just telling a joke.
That sort of thing.
So it allows it to be communicated In a way that also allows for a certain denial of its communication, right?
And in that sense, sort of paradoxically, it makes it more public.
You can express it publicly.
That is, you can express it using the public code and reach your audience of people who know the secret code, the private code, the code beneath the surface level, but be able to deny that you're doing that.
It's a really, really complex And so this brings to like, I think, a third dimension or way in which, or maybe it sort of just builds off of this, in which the secret code builds on the public code.
And it's this phenomenon, and this is where I think we live in culture right now, where the secret code is like right out in the open.
It's like a public secret.
It's like a secret that's not even secret anymore, right?
Everyone knows what's really being expressed.
In all of this stuff about protecting women and children in bathrooms, right?
Everybody knows what's really being expressed.
Everybody knows it's about targeting queer folk.
The people who want to target queer folk know it's about targeting queer folk.
People who oppose targeting queer folk know it's about targeting queer folk.
The people who want to target queer folk know that those who are pro-queer rights know that it's a code.
They know that we know that it's a code.
I'm sitting here saying that I know, that they know, that we know.
We could go this direction all day.
The point is that it just kind of unravels in this way where it's secret in a sense that it's disavowed But it's just sitting there right in the open, right out in the open for everyone to see, everyone to argue about.
It's a flag that is planted for opponents of queer folk to rally around.
It's a target for allies and members of the queer community and so forth.
But there is this interplay, and I would argue that this whole interaction is made possible by this interplay between these seemingly contradictory rather senses of code as something public and a code as something secret or private.
And so you get the, I guess, the open secret, the secret that's right out front But that is disavowed at the same time.
Gotta wind this up.
Always hoping that when I go and rabbit holes like this, it's not like sort of too esoteric.
Let me know.
Email me.
Daniel Miller Swedge again.
DanielMillerSwedge at gmail.com and let me know.
But again, these two contradictory senses, a code as something public, something shared, something sort of universally available on the one hand, code is something secret.
And my sense that the secret code in this sense, and that's certainly the things we explore here, depends upon the publicity of that code.
And that's what we talk about.
The last point that I'll just make here, you know, a lot of the things we talk about in the podcast or address in the podcast, things we talk about in this series are so-called culture war issues.
I would say that this interplay of the public code and the secret code, it's a necessary part of the kind of culture war, right?
We live in a society where politics on the right has become culture war.
That's all it is.
All it is is fighting wars about identity and who the real Americans are and who real Americans are not and so forth.
And I think that this culture war depends upon, requires the ability to publicly proclaim a message.
That can nonetheless be disavowed, even as everybody involved knows what's really being claimed.
It's a really, really complex interplay.
I want to thank everybody who emailed about this for getting me thinking about this, because I'm really now interested in this idea of the kind of the open secret or the, you know, openly disavowed secret that everybody knows is at work.
Don't know what I'm going to do with that, but you've all got me thinking, and I thank you for that.
As always, thank you for your support.
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Thank you for keeping the ideas coming for this series.
