20th-Century Rhetoric:

Why I Am Weary of Being Tagged?     

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Why I am weary of being tagged?

by Wendy Grosskopf

This is not going to be another musing about what names people give their children. I am going to write about naming as part of language use, so it is not so much about first names of people but about how people give names to people, objects, and ideas when they decide to deal with them. But why not start with the naming of a child, since everyone who read the headline has been expecting it anyway? Let’s assume a young couple just learned from the woman’s doctor that they are going to have a baby girl. Later that day, they are celebrating and contemplating names for the child. They cannot really decide, and the woman calls her mother. She tells her what they just learned from the doctor and asks what she thinks the child is going to be. “Oh, I think she’s gonna be gorgeous!” says the excited grandma to be. So Gorgeous it is. Let’s not be cruel here and assume that young Gorgeous, at age 16, really does look the way her name suggests. And let’s not think about the money she will probably spend in later years to keep it that way. At age 16, she may still be unhappy with her name because she is also good at science projects and plays tennis well. She thinks she would be more aptly named Marie as in Marie Curie, the great chemist, or Martina as in Martina Navratilova, the great tennis player.

This introduction sketches the problems involved in naming something. You get to choose one property, preferably a distinctive one, while all the rest of the characteristics become implied. They are still there, they just don’t stand out as much as the one in the name.  Of course, they may also easily be forgotten, or changed, and while you may be thinking you are talking about the same issues just because you and whoever you talk to are using the same words.

This is exactly why Judith Butler has repeatedly expressed how she mistrusts “common language” (< xml="true" ns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" prefix="st1" namespace="">Butler, 728) and the “universality” the naming process involves. Naming can amount to categorization, can mean reduction to just one defining property and thus hide or even displace all the other properties there may be. It is very much like a branding, and our sweet sixteen Gorgeous may wish to change her name when she reaches retirement age very much like people have tattoos removed of which they thought they were a good idea at the time.

And using common words can be deceptive since you do not know what set of properties you invoke in the person you talk to. When you use the word “liberal” when talking about a person, you may hope to invoke at least some of the characteristics its dictionary definition carries:

Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. b. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded (The American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition, 1992 sub “liberal”).

However, when you speak to a conservative, the properties invoked may well be “excessively permissive”, “pro-choice”, and “hostile to family values”.

There is an important second part to naming in our linguistic practice: defining the meaning behind the name, i.e. categorizing and specifying. Whenever a new concept is thought of or a new object is discovered, naming it is just the first step of bringing it into language. Defining a meaning typically involves two steps:

1.      The step of categorization, in which the named item is assigned to a known class or cover term and thus made fit into our system of concepts, and

2.      The step of specification, in which the named item is distinguished from all other items in that class or category (for if it weren’t unique, there would be no need for it)

Example: Lipizzaner: a horse that is usually white or gray, bred in the Slovenian town of Lipica, and frequently used in equestrian displays.

It is quite clear that Judith Butler would rather be in control of all these processes than having to accept and fit existing concepts into her thinking. This is why her neologisms like ‘performativity’ are so attractive to her. She unfortunately had miscalculated the strength of repair mechanisms that are at work when people are presented with unknown concepts in a communication: They go back to step 1 above and try to make them known. In Butler’s case, her coining was not received as intended but mistaken for a known word. “Performativity is neither free play nor theatrical self-presentation; nor can it be equated with performance” (Butler, 751) and a few lines down: “I was somewhat surprised that people took performativity to be nothing other than performance” (Butler, 751). She may have added to the confusion by trying to define ‘performativity’ by saying what it is not rather than what it is.

In her interview, Judith Butler talks at length about her problems with gender assignment. “There is no circumventing the categorial violence of naming ‘women’ or “men”. (Butler, 743) Well, we have already stated that the naming process involves some injustice that comes from categorization and from the fact that, in transparent or analyzable names, one property is selected as the most decisive. There is, however, another issue beyond the ‘violence of naming’ that should bother Butler here. It is the type of opposition the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’ form in most languages. It is not a contrary opposition in which the two opposites mark just the extremes of their common scale of reference while there is an area on the scale which could be described as ‘neither A nor B’ (for example, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’) but a complementary opposition where the two opposites split up the entire reference scale with nothing in between. It is either A or B. And despite much evidence to the contrary, this opposition becomes engrained in our brains when we grow up and acquire our language. This must be more than uncomfortable to anyone who is unsure about her/his assigned gender.

While I am not as uncomfortable with being named a woman, I have had my share of inaccurate labeling. For example, although I do believe that women and men should have equal rights and I don’t think that each of the genders should stick to their particular social roles, I take issue at being named a ‘feminist’. While I may share this viewpoint with feminists, there are quite a few others I don’t, and labeling me a feminist, in my view, reduces me to feminist ideology. This is probably the most troublesome aspect of labeling. It selects an allegedly dominant feature of mine and makes it even more prominent by the naming, while all other traits are pushed into the background.

Much as I am with Butler when she fears the reductionist potential of the naming process, realistically speaking, I don't think we have much choice here. The naming process is meant to provide us with concept tags, and is supposed to work in such a way that the remaining properties of the "denotatum" the object or concept that we denote are invoked without having to be enumerated. This process works quite efficiently and allows us to make well-structured meaning assignments to formal elements such as words so that we don't have to have a special form for each meaning. These efficient techniques used in our languages are the ones that enable us to communicate and think efficiently. Judith Butler focuses on the borderline cases where the language system does not seem to work properly. What alternatives does language offer to make things clearer? Up to a point, we can be more specific. One of these alternatives therefore is word formation, in particular compounding words or coining set phrases such as "darkroom" or "dark horse". A darkroom is more than just a dark room. If you are in just a dark room, and you switch on the light, it is no longer a dark room. A darkroom however will remain a darkroom even if someone switches on the light. This again is due to the naming process. The meaning element added here could roughly be called [PURPOSE]. The room is dark for a purpose, and being dark is one of its prominent features, which is why it was named for it. Thus compounding allows us to topicalize two prominent features of a denotatum and hint at their relationship with each other. However, compounding is normally restricted to up to three constituents, otherwise the construction may become a little difficult to handle. But strictly speaking, this practice could be a way out of Butler's dilemma. Theoretically, a writer could strive for including as many properties as possible. For example, this German word monster is obviously supposed to name all relevant properties of the denotatum:

Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänswitwenrente

It quite transparently denotes the pension paid to the widow of a captain who worked for the Danube Steamship Tours Corporation. While the Germans may be notorious for their compounding frenzy and its negative consequence, overspecialization, American English is doing rather well in this department, too. Time Magazine criticized then Secretary of Defense, Alexander Haig, for producing monstrous word clusters such as 'post hostage return attitude'. One would probably have to remember the incident to know what this means. It looks like "politics of discomfort" (Butler 764) in a totally different light.

Nevertheless, Judith Butler is definitely an important critical voice out there who intelligently challenges our ways of communication. I would love to hear what she has to say about the norm of political correctness. Also, I truly think that critics of something as fundamental as the way we communicate and think need to be radical to be heard.

 

 

 

Works Cited

"Haigledygook and Secretaryspeak".     Time Magazine.     Monday, Feb 23, 1981.

Lipka, Leonhard: English Lexicology.     Word Semantics, and Word Formation, narr

studienbücher, Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen.     2002.

Olson, Gary A., and Worsham, Lynn: "Changing the Subject: Judith Butler's Politics of Radical

Resignification".     in: jac, a quarterly journal, pp. 727-765.