Week 35: Who are you?
[some, more, the] trouble with naming: this is the conceptual level, also the plot of the Ugly Duckling
that’s not my name
Noticeably, glaringly, in the library catalog, we don’t name materials by the name they (or their author) have given themselves: their title.
There are some logistical reasons for this: titles do not necessarily reflect the subject of an entity. Consider poems, weird arthouse films, “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince,” and so on. Moreover, not every thing has a title, so to assume we are going to input a title for every item that comes across our desk would be inefficiently optimistic. Subject assignment is external to the object, guaranteed by the process of cataloguing, which means it’s a known data point for an item that may lack any other identifying information.
Subject assignment is, however, deeply subjective. Just because you’ve named something doesn’t mean that’s what it calls itself. This feels like a really good moment to invoke a bit of the Jewish Creation story: after God creates Adam, God instructs Adam to name things. What a presumptuous task! Dude has been kicking around Eden for half a day and suddenly gets to impose his perception of things onto all of the things, as if they hadn’t all been created before him? How annoying would it be if you called yourself Bill, then some asshat comes up to you and declares, “Right then, you’re going to be called Otter.” Seriously presumptuous.
Folklore aside,1 we see this presumptuousness deployed throughout history as a violent imperialist tactic, used to crush cultural wholeness and suppress sovereignty: In 19th-century Ireland, the British Ordnance Survey undertook a remapping (and renaming) of every feature their armies of surveyors crossed—villages, churches, landscapes, water ways—to impose British rule over Irish land and people.
Settlers in the United States misname(d) and renam(e) wherever you look, Anglicizing, Frenchifying, and Hispanizing regions’ and peoples’ names: the Haudenosaunee were misnamed by the French as “Iroquois,” a term with uncertain etymology that sometimes points to a Wyandot word. The Wyandotte Nation were themselves misnamed “Huron,” from another French word for “ruffian,” “rustic,” or “bore’s head.”
Renaming is a recent practice: until as recently as 1996, Native children were stolen away to Residential Schools by the US and Canadian governments and the Catholic Church. Among other horrors, the children were subjected to abuse for using their native languages, leading to a century of language suppression and extinction.2 Renaming and suppression of native languages in the United States has been so successful that many non-Native people do not know or fail to recognize that over half our states (Massachusetts, Alaska, Wyoming, Arkansas, Kansas, Minnesota…) have Indigenous names, and we all live in or near places—rivers, forests, valleys, hills, regions—with Native names that persisted through this attempted erasure.
These examples demonstrate that naming is not to be taken lightly, and misnaming even more so. Naming and renaming can completely obscure or destroy (or…colonize) knowledge systems. As we try to understand the arrangement of information, we have to remember that the language and framework we have at our disposal—for most of this newsletter’s readers, English and Western post-Enlightenment knowledge—cannot actually and accurately describe everything on planet Earth.
walks like a duck, talks like a duck, not a duck
With that in mind, naming and misnaming are pretty frequent problems in book history and art history. Every few years, practitioners like to unsettle their respective fields by asking, “What is a book?” or “What is art?” and then arguing that actually, this item we hadn’t previously counted as [book/art] really is [book/art] because of [new/discovered/reorganized] criteria. A lot of the time, these arguments are made in good faith, especially to expand those limited criteria to account for previously excluded entities.
But flinging around the notion of “book” and “art” doesn’t mean that the term will stick, especially when those concepts didn’t exist to the peoples academics talk about, or certainly not in the way we (Euro-American, English-speaking, print-supremacist Westerners) imagine them.
Carolyn Dean identifies this exact phenomenon in her article “The Trouble with [The Term] Art.” She writes that in art history, a lot of adjectives get slapped onto the noun “art” so that art historians can include objects that wouldn’t be considered “art” under Western standards, such as:
exotic art; traditional art; the art of pre-industrial people; folk or popular art; tribal art; ethnic or ethno-art; ethnographical art; ethnological art; native art; indigenous art; pre urban art; the art of precivilized people; non-Western art; the indigenous arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.
These alternative categories of “art” have all been suggested and critiqued, and none of them address the he[art] of the issue. Those adjectives still modify the root noun—art!!!!—which is incorrect term to apply to a lot of the things that art historians want to talk about, but are not, in fact, art.3
Dean, who studies Inca visual culture before and after the Spanish conquest, draws from her own research here: Basically, it doesn’t matter if we call the carved Sayhuite monolith “art,” it wasn’t made or understood as art at the time. “Art” as a category of visual media does not mean anything here. These monoliths often had spiritual and practical purposes of embodying different figures (rulers, territories, warriors), in which the aesthetic value of the carvings had no surmisable function. Dean sums it up better than I can:
Stretching conventional art-historical categories, such as sculpture, so as to embrace all manner of Inca rocks…reveals nothing about Inca rocks and serves to further normalize a non-Inca concept, art.
Another phenomenal point Dean makes in her article is that sometimes we name things because we want to confer value to them: a lecturer might call an object “art” because they want to invoke the social, aesthetic, political, and/or economic connotations that we associate with art to an object for which we have no other framework. How might someone who isn’t well-versed in Inca visual culture or who lacks the language talk about those carvings?
But Dean stresses that these objects do have essential value, a value that is not conferred by a name. By incorporating these objects into a Western concept—one that is not shared universally, neither geographically nor temporally—art historians invite judgement of the objects according to standards against which they were not made.
Recall what I wrote oh so many weeks ago about criteria and categories: what happens when we establish criteria and start grouping things together that fit those criteria?Then, what happens when we relax our standards a bit for the things that don’t quite fit, but also aren’t so great in any of our other categories? We get penguins as insufficient examples of birds, and carved monoliths as insufficient examples of art. Indiscriminately applying labels gets us one of two things:
At best, everyone is confused.
At worst, we risk evacuating categories of any meaning and we diminish the value of each of these things by trying to jam square pegs through circular holes and shaving off the sides in the process.
This is the plot of The Ugly Duckling! The point here is that naming is presumptuous, and we name according to what we know, and we do not know very much at all, any of us. Of course, it’s quite hard to talk about things succinctly to begin with (which is why I’m dedicating multiple issues to this naming-placing situation), and even more so if you don’t even know how to talk about the things you’re supposed to assign a subject to. That’s where we’ll head next time, finally linking naming and placing together with ~controlled vocabularies~.
Housekeeping & Birdseeking
house
New York Public Library, Queens Public Library, and Brooklyn Public Library are all going fine free. This is great (and overdue, like the materials for which they have unnecessarily penalized patrons). Fines cost more than they are worth: they comprise a mere 0.01% of the NY libraries’ budgets. In turn, late-fees discourage young people and vulnerable populations from using library services. Without fines, patrons check out more books, visit more often, use more services, and trust their libraries more. I made a powerpoint about this.
What I read this week: Magma by Thora Hjörleifsdóttir with Meg Matich (Translator)
What I’m currently reading: Upstream by Mary Oliver
bird
A group of finches were playing some game in the parking garage this morning.
More later.
In Judaism, superstition on naming abounds: sharing a newborn baby’s name too early is bad luck; Ashkenazi Jews only name children after dead relatives, lest they confuse the Angel of Death from taking a living relative too soon; one mustn’t tell their children their other potential names, or incur the spirits of lost children.
I’m glossing over the definition of “art” here because that would be another 2,000 words, but ask yourself, “what is art?” Try to come up with a criteria. What are you leaving out? What are you putting in? Why? What does that tell you about what you value?