Revenge of the Son of the Friday Conundrum

It's a commonplace of structuralism that naming something gives it meaning. Cat = not dog, not rat, not mat and not sat, amongst other things. Names exist in networks which give them meaning.

Later theory says that words, and names, don't 'mean' anything: look up 'cat' and it gives you a whole load of other words which you have to look up, ad infinitum.

Psychoanalytic theory says that without a name, you don't exist. More exactly, without language, you can't say 'I'. Therefore you aren't an autonomous individual with expressible desires. Where do you get your name from? From your parents. They impose identity upon you and you become part of the social system as an individual. Before that, you're just a lump of flesh undifferentiated from the rest of the world.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that names are important. How can you talk about something if you can't name it? It becomes unspeakable, and therefore incomprehensible.

Or does it? I have a little task for you, my children. Last night, in the pub (of course), Emma made this.

We all recognised it. None of us could name it. We couldn't remember it having a name - yet we all played with them in school, in Britain and in Ireland - we think it's global.

So - tell me what it's called. Ask your friends, or point them here. Tell us what messages you wrote on the inside, what songs you chanted as you played, but most of all - name it.

My theory is that the lack of a name is intimately linked to the game. It's a rudimentary introduction to both chance and fate. Before the final flap is listed, the players and the audience exist in a state of epistemological liminality: you don't know what's going to happen. It's like quantum physics: all the messages are possible until you choose one. In a state of knowing nothing, the lack of a name is entirely appropriate.

So fly, my pretties. Close down the radical instability by bringing me a name.