“Hey you, weirdo!” A stranger hails me.
“My name’s Mark., and don’t call me ‘weirdo’.” I say in response, trying to reclaim my own autonomy. I choose what I am called. I am the namer of me, not this stranger. If I give him the power to name me, to hail me thus, I feel like I forfeit some power. By calling me this way, he enacts a superior position… we seem to think. But are we correct?
Even in responding it seems I am doomed to be the subject, unless I revolt against it, ignore it, or subvert it. The playground anecdotes are illustrative: “I know you are but what am I?” “Only weirdos call other people weirdos” “If you’ve got nothing nice to say don’t say anything at all.”
This is how the politics of the playground works. I name myself. All other name-calling is injurious.
This is also the suspicion against naming present in critical theorists such as Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, and Judith Butler. Both the very circumstances that allow the opportunity of someone to say “Hey you!” and that person’s saying of the words constitutes a relationship in which I am in subjection to their naming of me.
And for critical theorists, any loss of my ability to choose is evil. “Don’t let others name you. You are the namer of your own being” seems to be the working axiom. “Be yourself.”
It leaves one wanting, however. What is this “myself” that I am supposed to project onto the world? I’m reminded of the conversation between Joe and Patricia from Joe Versus the Volcano:
Patricia: I believe in myself.
Joe: What does that mean?
Patricia: I have confidence in myself.
Joe: I've done a lot of soul searching lately. I've been asking myself some tough questions. You know what I've found out?
Patricia: What?
Joe: I have no interest in myself. I think about myself, I get bored out of my mind.
Patricia: What does interest you?
Joe: I don't know. Courage. Courage interests me.
Think of how unkind and capricious we are “inside”. Are you the kind of person who has proven so good to yourself and so wise in your dealings that you trust yourself to be only self-named? No. For there is no oppressor on any street corner hailing me cruelly who could ever injure me the way I am able to injure myself in the pit of my own self-naming.
With what are we left, then? To only be named by others? To be forever open to subjection by those who name us according to their own desires?
There is another way I think. A different way of naming and being named which, in the coming weeks, I hope to explore. But which I’ll just imagine for a moment in closing:
It is captured in a scene from John 18: Cruel men clamor into the garden. The sky is dark and the hour late. They come armed with weapons and letters. They intend violence and they have the legal writ certifying their violent conduct. They approach the young rabbi, who asks them who they want. They call and hail him: “Jesus of Nazareth?” There is no clearer example of Louis Althusser’s interpellation than this.
How does Christ respond? Subversion? Sass? Cutting wit? Sticking-up-for-ones-self-ness?” No, a clear-eyed response to their appellation: “I am he.”
And the mob falls shattered to the ground, roiling in the roots of the olive trees. What has happened?
What kind of identity has been approached in this story? What kind of “naming-and-being-named” have we witnessed in which the one who was named, the one who we are told has been in the injurious position, has literally stood his ground, while the interpellators buckled?
Let us re-think naming and identity along the lines of the way God names and is himself named.