The conviction that Language expresses “truth” is a mystical position. That’s not necessarily to say it’s unjustified, just that on our side of the rupture in Language/language—the side of semiosis—it is conceptually impossible to prove or disprove that idea. Note that the most ardent supporter of Language-as-truth, Scile, must disappear from the book at precisely the moment the mystical position becomes untenable, and that he can only return in a death throe of mystical fervor, with the passage explaining his motivations (339) littered with religious language. Is it the case that prelapsarian Language directly expresses “truth”? On our side of the lapse, that’s beside the point.
The final break in which semiosis enters Language, ambivalently hailed by Avice as “transcendence or fall” (325), leads to a previously-impossible externalization of the means of communication, as the Ariekei scratch ideogrammatic signs into the dust. Avice imagines the development of durable media for the storage of this writing (330). Likewise, semiosis cannot help but spread, as all domains of life become signifying: the new Ariekene architecture proliferates spires and fashionable buttresses (340): buildings too become coded.
Which brings me to code.
I’ll suggest another way into thinking through the language-code nexus than by worrying about truth or executability: let’s think about the interdependence of physiology and language and the manner in which they co-determine what the novel calls ‘thought.’ If we extend Snow Crash’s central metaphor to Embassytown, Embassytown offers significantly more nuance
In Snow Crash, the human brain is merely a material substrate for informational processes: it’s simply the hardware to pure informational software. Software is infinitely reproducible and perfectly communicable: snow crash is the same whether afflicting computer hardware or a human body, the same whether entering the human via tainted blood or visual bitmap: the code is independent of the substrate.
If we extend the metaphor to Embassytown, a different picture obtains. An individual human is physiologically unable to speak Language, and even purpose-bred doppels, humanity’s best crack at reverse-engineering Ariekene hardware, can merely imitate Language, not speak it: their hardware is fundamentally different from that of the Hosts, and therefore the same code instantiated in an Ambassador is not the same as that code instantiated in a Host. In Embassytown, to use Chun’s phrase, code does not “obfuscate the machine” (19). The code and its substrate are mutually irreducible.
This material-informational interdepedence is handily evidenced in Embassytown in the figure of the untranslatable, an omnipresent specter in the book. Against Galloway’s assertion of the identity of different instantiations of code, the untranslatable shows that an instance of ‘thought’ is neither purely informational nor purely physiological: it is always and irreducibly both, and to think of the so-called ‘content’ of it as isolatable is an absurdity that leads to a mystification of code. That which can exist in Language but not Anglo-Ubiq (and vice versa) reminds us there’s no perfect equivalence between (instantiated) codes. These code systems have developed irreducibly with their material substrates, the body. It would be a confused question to ask whether the Arekei developed two mouths to speak a double-voiced code or whether they developed a double-voiced code because they have two mouths.
Perhaps the conceptual tool needed here would be a compound like those of Language: ‘body’ in the turn line and ‘mind’ in the cut, or ‘code’ and ‘substrate.’ But here, in WordPress, I can’t render it, and, possibly, here in my mind/body, I can’t think it.
