ON JARGON: AN ILLUMINATING HISTORY OF SPECIALIST SPEECH by Brian Dillon Published: October 21, 2013 Some time ago, while I was stuck in one of those art-opening conversations that devolve into show-and-tell inventories of each other’s busy-busy projects and plans, my interlocutor asked innocently: “So, is writing your practice?” To my shame, I may have winced: She couldn’t have known that this term, so common in the art world as to pass without notice, is apt to bring on the screaming fantods. It’s not even my least-favored usage: My keenest allergy has long been to the dispiriting phrase “time-based media.” (It always conjures for me that sci-fi staple, “carbon-based life-forms.”) No doubt you nurse your own horrors: those specimens of critical, curatorial, or academic verbiage that swarm out of some lexical swamp and eat works of art alive. Our examples may not overlap, but we’ll agree on one thing: Jargon — to give it its name — is spoken or written by other people. Secret or specialist modes of speech, notes Daniel Heller-Roazen in his new book, invariably “institute a division,” though as we’ll see, the split may well be in ourselves. Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers is a study in 11 essays of the history of occulting language, from criminal slang of the Middle Ages to Tristan Tzara’s positing, in the late 1950s, a secret poetic tongue unnoticed by literary historians. Heller- Roazen is an elegant and erudite scholar, author of books about the history of the senses, the way languages die, and the figure of the pirate in the era of nation-states. He has also translated Giorgio Agamben, whose 1995 essay “Languages and Peoples” is a whispering presence behind Dark Tongues. Though he’s less polemical than suggestive on the subject, Heller-Roazen follows Agamben in asserting that the concept of jargon comes freighted with political import. Consider its etymology. Jargon derives from the medieval-French gargun, denoting avian or insect chirping, thence a human tendency to babble, prattle, and chatter. Oddly, Heller-Roazen tells us, there are few references among classical writers (who certainly describe various “barbarian” tribes) to those moments when one civilization abuts another and linguistic confusion ensues. The notion of an entirely other tongue, with obscure conventions to be divined and thus translated, becomes a more insistent topic for scholars and writers of the Middle Ages, and it’s in the 15th century that the practice of a jargon, or argot, is ascribed to outsiders, notably to gypsies arriving in France at the start of the century. As Agamben puts it, “Gypsies are to a people what argot is to language.” Linguistic and political order is defined precisely against those who seem to speak a kind of dangerous (because secret) gibberish. In the same period, a vast literature arises that details the “exquisite language” of thieves and other vagabonds. These self-styled Coquillards (literally, “people of the shell”) are said to deploy secret names for each other, for the ruses by which they bilk ordinary folk, and for those hapless dupes themselves. (The word dupe, we learn, comes from the French for “hoopoe”: an especially stupid-looking bird.) As Heller-Roazen puts it, “Publications on secret tongues can only be at odds with them.” The history of such volumes is a history of scapegoating and paranoia at best. In 1527 Martin Luther composed a preface to the Book of Vagabonds and Beggars, in which he averred, “Truly, such Beggars’ Cant has come from the Jews.” Even such indigents as seemed genuinely in need, he wrote, would likely reveal themselves “outlandish and strange” once they opened their mouths. All of this may seem at some remove from contemporary anxieties regarding jargon, be it the sometimes oddly constricted style of writing about art and culture or the bizarrely metaphorical language of management and business. But there are paradoxical lessons to be learned from this history. The urge to police language in the name of some imaginary standard of clarity is an impulse of which we ought to be suspicious — as Agamben has it, all peoples are gangs, and all languages jargons. To accuse others of using jargon is to perform what Heller-Roazen calls a “systematic self-exception.” And self-exception is of course what jargon itself effects at the same time as it seeks a perfect transparency (untrammeled by the mess of ordinary speech) within the community of jargoneers. There was a perfect instance of this paradox in 2012, when Alix Rule and David Levine wrote a celebrated article for the online magazine Triple Canopy decrying “International Art English,” and the chorus of voices approving their diagnosis of a sterile and convoluted genre were rounded on by non-native speakers for whom IAE was not a rebarbative jargon at all but a practical and lucid medium. Among the other paradoxes conjured by jargon, or more accurately by the accusation of jargonism, is this: Once we think we have spotted an exclusive and occult tongue in action, we tend to find it everywhere. This was the fate of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the Dadaist Tzara, both of whom, half a century apart, thought they had spotted secret names, anagrammatically disposed, in ancient and modern poetry. The secret, once revealed, proliferated so that hardly a period, a genre, or an author seemed to lack these linguistic puzzles hiding in plain sight. And for exactly that reason, their discoverers must have been mistaken. These literary detective stories lead Heller-Roazen to a further conundrum. Tzara and Saussure may have been deluded, but isn’t the kind of obscurity they imagined they’d unearthed exactly what we look for in poetry? That’s to say, “a stratum of crafted impenetrability”? Dark Tongues turns several times to the medieval troubadours, who seeded their courtly verses with the disguised names of the women to whom they were addressed. (The pseudonyms, or “senhals,” include “My Fair Neighbor,” “Better Than Woman,” and in the case of one rather bitter troubadour, “You Are Wrong.”) The kind of indirection that we deprecate as jargon in one type of speech or writing may be just what we ask of another — and in the name also of nuance or precision, not just poetic flourish. Look again at turns of phrase and thought that we dismiss as cant, and in light of Heller-Roazen’s history of elite and hidden speech we may have to ask uncomfortable questions. Do we really wish to dispense with (let’s say in the field of writing about art) the secret and the strange, with syntax or words from elsewhere, from outside? Are we really even sure that our own language and the blather against which we have taken umbrage (academic or journalistic, philosophical or pop-cultural) are all that different — and not, as Heller-Roazen insists, “strictly simultaneous”? Can’t we find other terms to describe the failings of usage and style (thus also of thinking) in writing that seems to enclose rather than unfold works of art? We are all, it seems, jargon-mongers of a sort. I still despair of practice, and curatorial strategies, and I’m way, way tired of art writing. But I may need to find a new name to go with the wince. Blouin ArtInfo __,_._,___ Art Faul The Artist Formerly Known as Prints ------ Art for Cars: art4carz.com Stills That Move: http://www.artfaul.com Greens: http://www.inkjetprince.com Camera Works - The Washington Post . |
