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To Cypher Is A Way to Be In the World
Even the confusion of languages in the Tower of Babel, a powerful mechanism of illusion for the human race, a source of non-communication and an end to the possibility of a universal language, will have appeared, finally, not as a divine punishment but as a gift from God. Cyphering, not de-cyphering. Operating illusions. Being illusion to be event. Turning into an enigma what is clear. Making unintelligible what is far too intelligible. Rendering unreadable the event itself. Working all the events to make them unintelligible. Accentuating the fake transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion, to spread the germs or viruses of a radical illusion, that is to say operating a radical disillusion of the real. A viral and deleterious thought, which corrupts meaning, and is the accomplice of an erotic perception of reality's trouble. Erasing in oneself any remaining trace of the intellectual plot.Stealing the "reality file" to erase its conclusions. –Jean Baudrillard
TO CYPHER is a way of life, an ontos, a way to encounter the world around you. To cypher means to skew reality, to use language as it is inevitably used: to create a multiplicity of worlds rather than merely represent one. We think that words can never represent reality. Cyphered poetry is much more interesting.
TO CYPHER once referred to a method of sending secret letters in Medieval Europe. A cypher was a cryptographic algorithm that turned an intelligible text into something unruly and unintelligible.
TO CYPHER later developed as a more general metaphor (a double metaphor, because it is always already cyphered itself through language) for cryptography and letters hidden in code.
TO CYPHER means to make what is full appear empty and to make what is empty appear full.
TO CYPHER is the alpha and omega of language; language is never objective, it is only a cypher that distances us from reality through those very claims to objectivity. It is only a question of whether humanity can nut up and acknowledge the cracks and fissures that undergird our very understandings of the world.
TO CYPHER is to use language as poetry. To make the real unreal in order to make a point. To cypher is to do poetry.
TO CYPHER is to build a building without a blueprint, but with the sum total of all possible blue prints.
TO CYPHER is to graffiti language with language itself.
TO CYHER is to call out: "Lu-cy-pher...!"
TO CYPHER is to use language against itself. Any rapper worth anything is heavily invested in the cypher. They make unreal what is real to communicate to a listener. This is only possible through a cypher of language, not a video tape of their day-to-day lives.
TO CYPHER is to write, read, rap, and listen.
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