veridiction:s

There are those who find enchantment or knowledge in naming, from astrologers’ love of typology to a mathematician like the –also religious– Egorov. The mystic seems to praise and long for the unnamed, which is the reverse: Don’t name it so it, the unlimited cannot be fixed to limits.

And there is the concept of True Name. If you find the true name, you gain power over it. The mystic avoids naming that one because he wants usurpation, losing oneself in ‘the one’, instead of overpowering it. The –rather political– assignment of the mystic is to name everything else, naming all else out of euchre, competition and distraction. But also, there is a converse challenge: how are you sure that the thing you are not naming is ‘the one’ –“the sublime”, as one friend calls it, or ‘God, as another wants– and not something smaller, different (which splits any ‘one’ in pieces), or another distraction?

You can read in the poems of the Sufi’s when they speak of, or to, that which they don’t name. They mock with  priests, human weaknesses and desires for transient appearances in one place (they call them names, however subtle, in a not so accidental English language usage.) and pray to the unnamed in another. They love the undefinable and love to elaborate about it without giving away what it is, giving the impression that they do have knowledge (which however is too cerebral a word for it) of its nature, yet leaving the reader in confusion about its nature. But some like Baba Tahir are even more genuine and humble:

Happiness on the side of those who meet you every dew-fall
who speak to you and sit with you
I don’t have the feet to come and see you
I become the person who see the ones who have seen you

Baba Tahir doesn’t pretend to be “in the know” himself, but seeks ‘the one’ in those who have seen him/her. Of course, you can hear many say that the Sufi’s are speaking of ‘love’, or a human beloved. But that is just missing the point of the ‘power of naming’ and is a hasty and inattentive summary of Sufism.  It is not unlike saying that schooling is for diploma. Or seen in another , more thorough light, ‘love’ is one of those names that has the appearance of being undefinable and hence a proper name for whatever you want to speak of but not name. Then again such words are abused just too often in situations when one cannot understand completely or give oneself totally to what is taking power over him or her. That, again, is the challenge of recognizing and coming to terms with that which is the greatest, without limiting and diminishing it to a smaller something by naming it.

In case of ‘God’ size surely matters in finding the true name or the impossibility of naming that the size of which we cannot comprehend. I just wrote about “infinity”, and size (“the greatest” and “smaller something”). But a warning is place:  arriving at the true name, it is not only size that is standing in the way. Size can even be a distraction sometimes. “How large is capitalism”? It is both larger and smaller than the name. It is in your monthly retirement contribution as well as in the electronic complex of the global finance infrastructure. We are not really helped by size. Neither are we helped by the name of ‘capitalism’ that in the end cannot fix what we want to talk about. So there is a danger in thinking that we are having a hold of something through its name, while are short of the true name of that which we want to speak of.

Another capitalism-related, or modern economy-related discussion within the theme of ‘naming’ is the role of the critics of the modern economy. Critique has a definite effect on, mostly powerful, actors in the modern economy by naming what the actors do. It is no surprise that they come with new words like ‘authenticization’, ‘governmentality’, or ‘entrepreneurialism’. These namings destabilizes what the economic actors do. Mostly, the actors react with a language that is contradictory. Speakers of corporate economies speak, for instance, of “your workplace is your home”; a double contradiction because the workplace is owned by the shareholder and not the employees and because the workplace is not a place to relax, to cook, to meet with family and whatever else what one does when at home. In a metaphor, a response to true naming is putting up more smoke screens. In that same metaphor a transcendental move for critics and contrarians, a change of game, or leveling up the battle is to quenching the source of smoke, or rising above curtains, rather than walking further past another fire or keep opening endless number of curtains.

I am moving too abruptly, from Sufism to anti-capitalism. But I am doing this to make a point. That is not that naming is important. It is just as important as the number of times that we use it in our daily lives. That is, I am not making a point about Sufism or capitalism, but about a techniques of relating oneself to speaking, language and discourse, a techniques of the self. There is a technique and subtlety to the practice of naming, which otherwise goes unattended. If we make a few intervention in our speech and improve that little technique, we will experience an improvement in our pragmatics: our use of language will fit much better to what we want to express. Naming is just one of those techniques that imports on the relation between language and that which we want to talk about, name it what you want. That is, as well, the techniques of naming bear on the capability of expressing truth, a truer relationship between whatever we are speaking of and the language we deploy to speak. And of course, don’t forget about that which you cannot overpower by any name. Get closer, love it, dance around it, and if you see one day that is has a name, then you will know, this was just another proximate. Your journey is not finished.