dvanhorn @ λ-calcul.us

In the introduction of perhaps the only Slavoj Žižek book I’ve ever been able to understand, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, there is a cute little anecdote—the missing ink—that should be striking to any computer scientist:

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends: ‘Let’s establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it’s true; if it’s written in red ink, it’s false.’ After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: ‘Everything is wonderful here: the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair — the only thing you can’t get is red ink.’

Žižek goes on to give an acute analysis of the message:

The structure here is more refined than it might appear: although the worker is unable to signal that what he is saying is a lie in the prearranged way, he none the less succeeds in getting his message across — how? By inscribing the very reference to the code in the encoded message, as one of its elements.

And:

The nice point is that this mention of the lack of red ink produces the effect of truth independent of its own literal truth.

You have to wonder, with the seemingly endless trumperies of cinema, psychoanalysis, and geopolitics that Žižek is able to weave together, maybe he knows a thing or two about Gödel, logic, and theoretical computer science.

• [2001,book] bibtex
  S. Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, Verso, 2001.
  @BOOK{zizek_desert,
  author = {Slavoj Zizek},
  title = {Welcome to the Desert of the Real!},
  publisher = {Verso},
  year = 2001 }