Naming and Calling.

‘Naming and Calling: missing words’ by Lynette Hunter analyses the differences in Juliet’s ‘What’s in a name’ speech, found among editions printed during Shakespeare’s time, to explore the distinction between naming and calling. Naming is social, it conjures, it has power over the one who is summoned. Calling uses the ‘word’ to draw speaker and listener into a relational process. Shakespeare’s plays work at the fulcrum between earlier routes of power based on birth and blood, and different processes of selving that eventually coagulated into psychology. At the same time as words were recognised as loosened from divine and human control, they became more material as objects, and hence more elusive and unknowable, like the sentient beings who became ‘humanists’. Words are independent material objects that can never be named – they are always missing, and names that aim at them always miss. Names are anthropomorphic tools, words are materials in a person’s relational ecology. In the sixteenth century, naming transformed from an inheritable characteristic into a sociocultural identity that was tied to liberal capitalism and became known as a modern ‘subject’. Yet running alongside throughout the modern period is the echo of calling, of searching for the word that will generate the felt sense of the person, so they happen into becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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