overcoding

29 days until the thesis is due. Had a good day of research and did a bit more ana­lysis of LJ com­munit­ies, espe­cially hapamafia and posted some­thing in queeraus­tralia asking about local edge iden­tity com­munit­ies. Going through and clear­ing up notes now. At one point I’d used the term “over­cod­ing” and my super­visor has marked it with “what does this mean?” I’d thought it was just a reg­u­lar piece of jargon but I figure, sure, I can just stick a ref­er­ence in. I wasn’t sure where it was ori­gin­ally from, it’s just one of those things I inhaled in my under­grad years…

Turns out it’s Deleuze & Guat­tari (of course) and now I’m trying to under­stand enough of what the term means so I can para­phrase enough to quickly explain what it was doing in that sen­tence of mine. 

”…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). 

Don’t you hate it when you try to be smart and you use a word you know the mean­ing of just enough to use it cor­rectly in con­text and then someone asks you to define it and you have to say “um… it’s kinda… well, it means… hang on, let me just look in the dictionary…”

this stuff is com­plic­ated. my brain hurts.