Resisting Biometrics/Evolving Cyberebonics
To expand this point, conventionally, within any initial encounter with ‘the other’, one of the key crises is generated at the level of the linguistic… the lack of a shared and mutually understood set of communicative codes upon which dialogue can be founded. Historical narratives, especially those which surround European colonial expansion, are littered with incidents, (and often the brutal and tragic consequences of those incidents) within which different and at times conflicting symbolic meanings were attached to behavioural codes on the part of the encountering and the encountered.
Where these encounters needed to be sustained, often within the context of trading relationships or to entrench exploitative systems such as the ‘Plantocracy’, a mutual ‘inter-language’ was evolved, often deriving terms and linguistic structures from the languages of the two or more groups involved in the encounter. These new languages are often referred to as ‘patois’ or ‘pidgin’. The artist Erika Tan explored the various codes through which the ‘inter-language’ of ‘Pidgin’ promotes the possibility of ‘slippage, invention, creative adaptation, flexibility and fluidity of communication exchanges’ within her 2002 monograph publication ‘Pidgin interrupted transmission’ (4). Tan also provides us with a succinct definition of the term ‘Pidgin’.
“The dictionary definition of 'pidgin', is a Chinese corruption of the English term 'business', used to describe a colloquial language made up of elements of two or more other languages.” (5)
This colloquial language which enables us to engage in ‘business’ with that which we may perceive as ‘Other’ provides us with a useful insight into the development of an ‘inter-language’, a colloquial tongue, a pidgin, a shared ‘lingo’ with which we can do creative business with the machine intelligence of the computer.