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19 Overcoding, Coding, and Recoding
- “...The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. Born of decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold. They recode with all their might, with world-wide dictatorship, local dictators, and an all-powerful police, while decoding—or allowing the decoding of—the fluent quantities of their capital and their populations. They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia. They vacillate between two poles: the paranoiac despotic sign, the sign-signifier of the despot that they try to revive as a unit of code; and the sign-figure of the schizo as a unit of decoded flux, a schiz, a point-sign or flow-break. They try to hold on to the one, but they pour or flow out through the other. They are continually behind or ahead of themselves”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 260).Notions of “coding,” “recoding,” and “overcoding” refer to applications of meanings/values to bodies and practices, these meanings/values having been acquired from discursive/practical fields many of which are maintained (the meanings and the fields) by institutions such as religions, schools, corporations, hospitals (and other expert systems) and governmental organizations. The terms themselves are derived from the use of these in the work of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault, but with an added attention to semantic theory, particularly that of George Lakoff. And so, the linguistic vehicles for these practices are figures of speech that overlay and underlie the myths that claim to be figureless, i.e., that proclaim meaning as natural (as Barthes noted). These practices are at work within and between discursive/practical fields, and to a greater extent are now proving the inadequacies of attempts to limit knowledge to specific fields. This brings in a forth notion: “Decoding,” which dissolves the boundary conditions that allow the other three notions to operate as levers between knowledge and power.
“Coding” refers to the action of applying a meaning/value within a discursive field. The discursification of knowledge within a field of science results in this knowledge being coded into practices (grant applications, career opportunities, etc.). Coding is the output of discursification as this informs identity and practice.
Coding is an ongoing process, a machine that doesn’t work once and then stop. Coding is what reproduces a discourse over time. And because this must be done with some care, the institutions with an interest and position within the discourse develop strategies and procedures to ensure that the coding neither stops, nor is recoded by others. Overcoding (see below) is one strategy that maintains a code by applying this to other codes, and so reducing the potential for alternative narratives. But within the discourse itself, the code is also strengthened, say, by a consistent application of this to all practices and places, and/or through a monovocal logic that resists internal counter-narratives. The result is a singular code with universal application to a space: e.g., the national space and narrative.
In these ways, the code becomes “self-authorizing.” Institutions and persons receive it, but claim to not have authored it, and the question of authorship does not arise. “Scientific knowledge” has this “found” quality: it is discovered, not authored. Even so, scientific institutions spend time and resources to code existing knowledge in ways that resist appropriation by others (e.g., through access to funding, and by authorized texts [journals]).
“Recoding” occurs when one code is replaced with another. Recoding occurs with some regularity in discursive fields where new knowledge is highly valued. Because most of discursive fields have preexisting conditions, much of what occurs as a change within them today is the result of recoding. Recoding occurs for several reasons, such as the discovery (or the imagination) of new knowledge or the success of alternative sources of authority within the field.
“Recoding” is the central tactic that marginal groups have to break the chain of codes that marginalize them. However, recoding must take place within the discursive field, and so access to this field is central concern, and exclusion the main strategy of domination. And so, the job of recoding is a multipart operation. Recoding is also the tactic that individuals use to resist the identities that have acquired their own imaginations. The recoding of the individual by the individual is one of the primary moments of the recoding of a discursive space by a counter-discourse group.
“Overcoding” is the practice of applying meaning/values from one discursive field to others. This is where power connects with knowledge to create codes that dominate not only their own discursive field, but others as well. This may occur through active institutional programs which insist that their scope is universal. Religions, such as Christianity or Islam, may be promoted in this fashion, overcoding discourses of diseases, of sexuality, of economies, and political behaviors, etc.
But meanings/values may also spread as individuals apply these without reflexive attention to their useful limits. Overcoding happens at the reception side as well. Meanings/value judgements about sexual gender, for example, may be applied to circumstances where this notion, upon reflection, is at best an arbitrary feature. But then a history of overcoding1 configures the space within other discourses so that this imaginable arbitrariness becomes masked by everyday practices that avoid just this imagination.
When sexual gender becomes a logic that is applied to employment, to social roles (say, in public spaces), or to a role within the home, then this overcoding of these practices by the discourse of gender can acquire a history of use that obscures the fact of overcoding. In the same way, the coding of practices and spaces as “national” practices and spaces colors these practices and spaces in a way that, over time, avoids attracting attention to the fact that this meaning/value was overcoded from a more limited discursive field.
Overcoding also occurs when a discursive field acquires meanings/values from external sources, thereby enlarging its purview. Here again, “national” narratives that acquire (or reinvent) pre-historic, mythic narratives overcode these as national narratives. National narratives may acquire local myths and recode these as national narratives. Anderson’s (1983) description of nation-state formation is centrally a process of recoding and overcoding leading to a naturalized, geographically uniform narrative that is continually coded by the state.
1I once got into an argument with an economic anthropologist who insisted that women did not have the upper-body strength to handle a plow, and so could not receive the direct benefits of this agricultural innovation. Having seen women carry 50 kilo sacks of coal up steep mountain trails in India, I was not impressed with this claim. Rather, I argued that there were other reasons for the sequestering of women into domestic spaces, which then led to many women not developing the upper-body strength that they might use should they find themselves, unexpectedly, in a situation of having to control an ox and plow. But give them opportunities to strengthen their bodies as children, and nearly all women could do this task.
