Why does the name matter? Why not just pick some clunky, explicit phrase like
experimental_algebraic_structures, or a cute, vaguely meaningful portmanteau
like meowlgebra?
The cliched rhetorical question “What’s in a name?” is usually taken to denigrate names, but it is drawn from this famous passage in Romeo and Juliet:
Juliet:
O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name; Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet
Romeo:
[Aside] Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?
Juliet:
’Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name, And for that name which is no part of thee Take all myself.
Romeo:
I take thee at thy word: Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized; Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
This passage does not demonstrate the insignificance of names. On the contrary, it presents a scenario in which names are of decisive importance.
Romeo’s name marks him as an enemy because ’Mantague’ brands him as a foe of the Capulets. The famous line, “That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet;” clearly claims that the sense properties of objects are not affected by their names (tho I suspect in a world where roses were called “shit-blossoms”, they might smell a bit like doo doo). However, the whole exchange revolves around the fact that appellations reflect and help actualize important structures in reality.
Names work to reinforce social orders and designate belonging, which is why Juliet conjoins “Deny thy father” with “refuse they name” as if these acts where inseparable. While names are not essential properties of people (or most other things) (“that name which is no part of thee”), they nonetheless bind beings into relationships that form structures with a very real being of their own. Romeo and Juliet’s rebellion against their families’ feud presents a claim for the independent value of freely chosen, dyadic, romantic relations. It even asserts the superior value of this personal dyadic structure over the structures of familial and political affiliation into which we are thrown in being born. According to Juliet, the person can be extricated from the bondage to their inherited enmity, emancipated from the fascistic structure of their family (or nation), because the tribe is not a part of the person:
’Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man.
Yet the name is a part of those fascistic structures, which is why it seems one pays for such emancipation by forsaking one’s given name – “O, be some other name!” – and being reborn through renaming “Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized;/ Henceforth I never will be Romeo.”
Thought moves through language4 and finds its ways through systems of signs5. These systems suggest certain possibilities and foreclose others. Since the significance of names comes from their situation within networks of differentiation, naming enacts a positioning of the named thing in a space of proximate thoughts.
What is in a name? A passage from the named thing to a situation in a network of associated thoughts and recollections which bind beings into objective, intersubjective, and purely subjective structures of possibility.