naming the powerless

If you are of any kind of evangelical persuasion, you have heard the phrase "Call on the name of Jesus" or "There's power in the Name" and other riffs on the theme. There is power to names. It might not be a power that we in our modern cultures and technopolies understand as did those before us in a different land, but names have inherent power anyway.

Matthew Paul Turner has a fantastic post on sex and anonymity that I encourage you to read. As I was reading it, my mind went in the opposite direction. Where he discusses the power of being anonymous, as a means to enact one's libtertarian "id"-like desire, I thought of the ways that names are signs of power from outside of one's self.

Chad Ochocinco (yes that is his real name now), or Prince (remember the unpronounceable symbol?) notwithstanding, names are given to us by someone else. In the Hebrew bible one is associated as a son or daughter of a parent. It is not about Drew Tatusko, it is about "Drew son of Joseph of the Tatuskos." The former focuses on me. The latter shows that I am a product of my heritage and nothing more. Individual identity among most people in history has always been tied up with the tribe. You are who you are only in relation to your tribe. Apart from your tribe you are nobody; an identity-free stranger who has no legitimacy anywhere. It's like the family is the universal ID card to get you a drink at the bar. It's all about who you know and whose blood you have pumping in your veins, not who you are as an "individual."

Names used to work kind of like little magic amulets.

In the Genesis God has no name. Yet God names things and gives human power to name things – except for God.

It is about control. You name your children and your pets, even a rock if you still have one.

It is about androcentrism. The family name is a sign of the sperm that goes from the man's testicles into the woman – literally impregnating her with his family inheritance and identity.

Naming is an activity of control because it forces you to define and categorize which is a really innocuous way of saying that you are judging things where they stand. The power of having a name, title, race, ethnicity defined for you from the social constructs in which you are forced to develop and grow during the most indelibly foundational stages of life is assumed until you can see your name as an object outside of yourself. Then you can claim your own name and make your own judgments about the world. You can even judge yourself and give yourself a new name if you wish. Of course that sometimes means simply re-branding one's self to fully mesh within the structures of corporatism and government as Max Barry imagines in the book Jennifer Government (or as Chad Ochocinco did as a symbol of his football jersey number). Such is the reinforcement of autonomy which the West so highly prizes as an ideal for happiness.

But the fetters of oppression and taboo force naming among the nameless underground. A sort of self-repression in order to feel free. As Matthew writes:

In regards to online pornography, anonymous is a rather powerful tool.

In most online situations–whether it's making comments on blogs or stalking people or checking in on old boyfriends or girlfriends or enemies, or engaging a sexual fetish of our choosing–Anonymous is a state of being that offers us the ability to "be" without the ramifications or the aftermath.

When it's over and we've had our fill of whatever it is that fancies our minds and bodies, we can simply disappear and go back to our "realities."

Here a name is both a sign of liberation and oppression. Anonymity is liberation from the oppression of one social system. It is the exercise of autonomy to give one's self a new name to escape one reality and inhabit a new construction. Why is being nameless a sign of oppression?

When one has no name in human society, one has no power at all. It is like the exact opposite of the God of the Hebrew scriptures whose lack of name is a sign of power and mystery. The nameless in our world are not vigilantes in a comic book saving people from behind the scenes that we can watch with delight. The nameless are those who have no property, are unattractive, the depressed, hungry, shy, abused, foreign, uneducated. They are those who serve you in a restaurant, clean up your spray and plunge your shit in a public restroom, pick up your trash, sew up that shirt you are now wearing. You may know them only as "Inspected by 31" yet what you wear is the product of the sweat of countless nameless people who will get up before dawn and work well into the night to do it all over again.

The power of names is paradoxical. It is a sign that someone still has or once had power over you that you have claimed for yourself or your peer group has claimed for you in a nickname. It is also a symbol of nothingness not in the sense of the almighty God whose "name" is the likeness of Voldemort, but in the sense of those who are not worthy of a name at all. In all names are signs of power. They are given, taken, refused, something even impossible to assign to others. They are not neutral. They are constructive, meaningful, and deconstructive. Names build identity and they tear it down.

If there is any Christian duty it is to seek out the nameless for they are the ignored, the abused, the used, and the oppressed. Jesus called them sons and daughters and made them well. It is the Christian duty not to give them a name, but to help them find a name for their selves as members of a community trying to find redemption as sons and daughters of Christ. God knows the nameless. Do you?

Related posts:

1. pilgrimage
2. finding my bliss
3. radical economics – a mandate for the new church?