Title: Quotations from Comrade Navin
Year: 2007
Page: 128 (Vinyl Softcover)
Publisher: Navin Party
Related Exhibition/Project: Navin Party

THE SPECTER OF GLOBAL NOMINALISM
A Review of Tyler Russell’s Quotations from Comrade Navin

General Overview

There is much to be said of Quotations from Comrade Navin, in terms of its style, form and content. Stylistically, it is a pastiche of various influences: most directly, it imitates the look and aphoristic phraseology of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, while its humor and hand-drawn illustrations reveal its genuine origin, the art world, which from time to time spawns bookworks that like to have a wink at their audience. Formally, the book pretends to be? or perhaps simply is (it’s difficult to tell) ‘the manifesto of the ‘Navin Party’, founded by artist Navin Rawanchaikul, which supports ‘Navinism’ and the broader philosophy of ‘global nominalism’, which is to say that it endorses the founding of socio-political associations on the basis of one’s having the same name as others. Finally, the content of the work I take to be the arguments offered in support of this position, supposedly quoted from Rawanchaikul and other Navins and arranged by party spokesman Tyler Russell, which I analyze in detail below.

Defining Navinism and Global Nominalism

Briefly, the negative aim of Navinism is to avoid loneliness, by ‘opposing isolation and despair’ (p. 6), and its positive aim is to build a community consisting of people named Navin by ‘ensuring the right of all Navins everywhere – to be in connection with any Navin anywhere’. (p. 45) Navinism is identified as a species of global nominalism, which hypothetically could have other instances (such as Tomism, Dickism, and Janeism), although this is, contingently, not currently the case in reality. Navinism also claims ties to a generic humanism (p. 51), although one could imagine species of global nominalism which would have no analogous association (such as Adolphism, Benitoism, and Josephism). Presumably, it is this humanistic aspect which motivates Navinism to open itself to ‘people of all names’ (p. 51) and to engage in ‘internominal relations’ (p. 57) with those who refuse to join outright. It is written that: ‘All non-Navins are Friends. All Navins are comrades’. (p. 67)

The idea of people associating with others who share the same name is not a new idea; in fact, people have been doing exactly this for as long as names have existed, in the form of families. But whereas being a member of a family ‘inter alia sharing a last name with others’ might be considered a ‘thick’ basis for social association with those others, simply sharing a first name with a stranger is an inconceivably ‘thin’, though novel, basis for the same. We can, presumably, assume nothing about the character or behavior of an individual simply because he or she was named, or chose the name of, say, ‘Navin’, or any other designator for that matter. Thus, the odds for having a positive social encounter with someone who shares your first name are approximately the same for having a positive social encounter with someone who happens to share your eye color, or shoe size, or any other arbitrary, (typically) non-voluntary characteristic you might have. Presumably, this is why people most often associate themselves socio-politically with others on the basis of their voluntary commonalities, whether these are mutual hobbies or political convictions. Since these other parties chose to engage in the activity in which you share an interest, it is ceteris paribus more likely that you will have a positive social encounter with them than with a perfect stranger whose interests are completely unknown to you. Therefore we can view Navinism, defined as the seeking out seeking of strangers who share a name with you in order to enable positive social encounters with them, as an irrational, or at least non-maximizing, strategy for ‘opposing isolation and despair’.

As far as ‘ensuring the right of connection’ with other Navins goes, it must be said that in most countries such communications are not normally objected to in any systematic way where such contact is desired (of course it is possible, for example, for one person named Navin to illegally stalk and harass another person named Navin). Given that we have established that people who share the same first name as I do are basically still strangers to me, whose purposes and interests are unknown, it is likely that I would not welcome correspondence on that basis? I have no more interest in the plight of the world’s Christophers, for example, than I do the plight of humanity as an undifferentiated whole, and am in fact much more interested in receiving information regarding the latter. Unsurprisingly, even more interesting to me than this is news of the plight of socio-political causes I have voluntarily invested myself in. An additional problem may lie not in positing or protecting a very narrow right of ‘connection’, but rather in deducing whether or not the concept of such a narrow right is coherent where broader rights (which subsume it) are threatened. For example, it cannot be ignored that in some nations free communication between individuals is impeded, and rather ruthlessly, by the powers-that-be there. In such a case, however, the problem is one regarding the protection of basic human rights, and not (just) basic Navin rights. Thus Navinism-qua-humanism might be better served by assimilating itself into some more comprehensive (and coherent) political cause, as ‘Navinhood’ is not ‘by Navinism’s own premises’ a quality that should privilege special treatment of Navins over other humans.

Indeed, the movement’s endorsement of the normative equality of all Navins (p. 69) can be taken to imply their commitment to some non-specified variety of egalitarianism both within and without so-called ‘Navinity’ (i.e., an idealized condition of association between all Navins; p. 41). Nevertheless, Navinism is undeniably a politics of difference; there is an ‘us’ (the Navins) and a ‘them’ (the non-Navins), and this fact is the theoretical cornerstone upon which the very logic of the movement rests. Now, while it is true that a politics of difference need not be hierarchical, it is of necessity exclusive. Thus, for all the movement’s good intentions, e.g. its plans to liaison with latter branches of global nominalism, it is quite possible that Navinism?s dominant focus on its own uniqueness (possibly as the ‘first among many’ of realized varieties of global nominalism) could develop into a narcissistic group egoism among its members, and thereby threaten and alienate non-Navins. This tendency is already evident in what the movement unashamedly acknowledges as its ‘propaganda’ (pp. 81, 127), wherein the artist Navin Rawanchaikul is identified as ?Chairman? and ‘Founder’ of  ‘the great vastness of Navin – an inexhaustible source of strength and a spiritual atom bomb of infinite power’. (p. 7) In this rhetoric, reinforced throughout the work, both the proposed egalitarianism amongst Navins, and that between Navins and non-Navins, are doubly threatened. Indeed, the fact that the movement distinguishes between party Navins, who are to be called ‘comrades’, and party non-Navins, who are to be called ‘Friends’, is politically relevant in this regard: comrades and Friends presumably have different statuses and/or party functions; otherwise the distinction would be completely vacuous. Thus torn between vacuity and the contradiction of its own ideals, Navinism is an untenable political and philosophical position.

Conclusion

Of course Quotations from Comrade Navin is not meant to be taken completely seriously, and thus it might be objected that a philosophical critique of its contents is unwarranted. With this I would heartily disagree. The position of global nominalism has been described in detail and promulgated on a mass scale; and it is the duty of philosophers to analyze and critique such nascent ideologies, even the tongue-in-cheek ideologies, to assess their tenability. This duty has thus been duly performed; and while I cannot recommend Navinism as a coherent doctrine, or even as a lifestyle, I can recommend the book as an entertaining read for those who enjoy faux-utopian art-damaged bookworks in the vein of Gordon B. Is nor’s long-gone and nearly-forgotten Honey, Things Are Gonna Be Just Great at the Commune (1997).

Words: Chris Yorke
Published in Navin’s Sala