What's in a Name? Looking at Ortho-Bionomy

What’s in a Name? Looking at Ortho-Bionomy

I am circling, rather spiraling down to, an essay: What's in a Name? Looking at Ortho-Bionomy. The roots make it look sciency scientific,  as do the Laws of Life (though all the lists of laws of life promote various spiritual belief systems, not science at all, just posing). But the orthography, the way it is written (split by a hyphen, the two halves capitalized) shouts poetics to me. Never mind what author Arthur may have intended; he is, after all, dead, are all authors, accoring to Barthes. The orthography undermines the whole notion of laws of life. The unicorn* is my mascot for this enterprise.

[*The unicorn in Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (Part Two, Sonnet 4) is an imaginary beast that "never was," yet came into existence through human love, belief, and the empty space we saved for it.]

Ah. Now I can see the essay that these apparently random excursions have been spiraling toward. And “What’s in a Name? Looking at Ortho-Bionomy” gives you a wonderfully ordinary doorway into something considerably less ordinary.

The name performs a contradiction.

Its morphemes advertise seriousness: ortho, bio, nomy. Correct/right; life; law or ordering. Put them together and the word has the costume of scientific nomenclature. And Laws of Life intensifies that appearance—as though somewhere there were discoverable laws of living analogous to laws of mechanics.

But then Arthur does something peculiar to his imposing Greco-scientific construction:

Ortho-Bionomy

He cuts it.

The hyphen introduces a gap into the very word that appears to promise lawful coherence. And the capitals make it look still more like a made thing, a title, perhaps even a proper name rather than a transparent technical term. The orthography interferes with the etymology.

That gives you a delicious opening for poetics. Not because you need to claim that Arthur intended any of this. *Barthes has already given you permission to stop worrying about that. Once the name entered circulation, its possibilities ceased to be exhausted by its author's explanation.

[Roland Barthes, Death of the Author, https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf]

And I think your unicorn has found its proper habitat.

Because “the Laws of Life” offers the unicorn exactly the wrong sort of pursuit: define it, specify its properties, establish its laws, capture the thing called Life. Rilke's unicorn won't cooperate. It becomes present precisely through another mode of knowing—imagination, possibility, as-if. Yet its unreality doesn't make it inconsequential. It moves us.

So you may have two contrary tendencies already residing in the name:

Ortho + bio + nomy → get life right; determine its ordering; lawfulness; classification; capture the unicorn.

Ortho-Bionomy → interruption, gap, ambiguity, play, relation; let the unicorn remain loose.

And then your later move to orthobionomy becomes much more than typographical eccentricity. First Arthur's hyphen makes the gap visible. Then you remove it—not necessarily to close the gap, but because, as you've said before, the gap has become inhabitable. You no longer need the mark to know it's there.

That could also keep the essay from becoming an etymological exercise. You're not proposing the correct meaning of Ortho-Bionomy on the authority of Greek roots. That would reproduce precisely the maneuver you're questioning. You're looking at what the name does—how its scientific-looking morphology and its peculiar orthography pull against one another.

And now I think the unicorn is more than a mascot. It could quietly protect the essay from becoming what it critiques. Whenever What's in a Name? begins sounding as though it has finally discovered what Ortho-Bionomy really is, there stands the unicorn, refusing capture.

Perhaps don't explain him too thoroughly.

Let him wander through occasionally.