Proper names are not unique labels but components of larger classifying systems

Evidence

Yet, virtually simultaneously with the nouveau roman, we have learned from Levi-Strauss that the “proper name” was itself something of a misnomer, since individual proper names were also components of larger linguistic systems that varied according to their generic objects (dogs, race horses, people, cats): so that even this seemingly more concrete linguistic possibility — in which words reach a level of specificity denied to them as mere general nouns — vanishes in advance like a mirage: in Les corps conducteurs, however, this false lead and dead end of the promise of proper names gives rise over and over again to a linguistic proliferation in which taxonomic lists fold out aimlessly in all directions: parts of the body, tables of tropical birds, lists of the constellations. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 334

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on how language systems resist specificity — relevant to periodizing aesthetic form as economy’s appearance, since naming failure itself becomes generative in postmodern text.