The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

Prolegomenon 11
Provisional Response 4: Occultism and Cryptography
(the Nominalist Argument)
A final interpretation should be noted. In all our discussion thus far,
we have been assuming that the “United Nations” and the “United
States” mean specific things. But in any contemporary situation, the
issue of naming, or indeed the problem of substituting a title or name
for a larger group, has to be recognized. After all, while it is the job of
certain people to make decisions, the decisions made by “the American
administration” are not decisions made solely by a single person
or even a single entity. And yet our language shores up this assumption,
in the very way that language personifies collective entities.
This happens all the time. It becomes a sort of linguistic shorthand
to say that the United States does this, or that al - Qaeda does that.
Naming is nevertheless a tricky business; it leads to the problem of
individuation. The United States’ reaction to September 11, 2001, is
indicative of the problem of individuation. Immediately after the
attacks, two contradictory statements were insistently repeated in
the media and by the government: that there is a “new enemy” constituting
international networks of people, arms, money, information,
and ideology; and that the name of this distributed new enemy is
“terrorism” or even “al - Qaeda.” In the same breath, we see the statement
that our new enemy is networked and distributed to such a degree
that it cannot be named. And yet there continues the persistent
naming of the entity - that - cannot - be - named. What is obvious and
immediate is the same thing that is shadowy and unknown. The plain
is the obscure; the common is the cryptic.
But this is only the most explicit example of what is a much
more basic issue concerning naming, especially when thinking about
networks.
Any instance of naming always produces its shadowy double: nominalism,
that is, the notion that universal descriptors do not adequately represent
the referents they are supposed to name or demarcate.
Naming indicates its own impossibility. So perhaps the sovereign -
network debate is really only a problem of naming. Perhaps it is a