Talking Shop

A seemingly recognizable little word is introduced about halfway through William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions (1955): ‘Chavenet. It really doesn’t mean anything, but it’s familiar to everybody if you say it quickly. They mention a painter’s style, you nod and say, Rather chavenet, or, He’s rather derivative of Chavenet wouldn’t you say?’ This malleable coinage is concocted by Herschel – an untrustworthy ghostwriter – as he makes his way to a party, practicing his shop talk. The Recognitions is a book of gossip and rumour; conversations are excitable and, even by the high standards of mid-century novels, frequently drunken. Herschel’s is a brief scene in this vast book of fakers, fakery and fakes. If ‘chavenet’ is a kind of jargon word, it’s a counterfeit one, set adrift within Gaddis’s counterfeit world of self-help books, plagiarist playwrights and forged Flemish paintings. Later, it seems to gain some traction, and can even be overheard circulating at several parties.

Like the best jargon, ‘chavenet’ is both persuasive and flexible – a one-size-fits-all type of terminology that, in its wide-ranging application, doesn’t really mean anything at all. It is a means of camouflaging a lack of ideas, of tactical distraction, of papering over the cracks, of allowing conversation to flow. Jargon is, though, both easy to identify and hard to track down. How might we go about defining it today?

In their widely circulated essay ‘International Art English’ (IAE), published in Triple Canopy last year, David Levine and Alix Rule made a spirited attempt, via an analysis of the art-world press release. They ran 13 years’ worth of e-flux mailings through an online concordance generator, tracking word usage and syntactical behaviour. The results often sounded a bit chavenet. As they put it, somewhat exasperatedly: ‘How did we end up writing in a way that sounds like inexpertly translated French?’ (The essay has since prompted debate as to whether or not their thesis constitutes an elitist chastising of non-native English speakers.) According to Rule and Levine, IAE – with its dutiful vocabulary of aporias and mises-en-abyme – depends on ‘more rather than fewer words’. In its spoken form, however, jargon is defined not by verbosity but by extreme brevity: it’s the most elliptical form of shorthand.

Thomas Crow, writing in 1988, called this stuff ‘patois’, a connective tissue that ‘knits together the art village on all levels’. His discursive realm is a village rather than a world, suggesting that this is a place identified not only by a language but by a common slang or accent. Crow was talking about the spoken legacy of post-structuralism and the Frankfurt School, a vocabulary – understood or not – that has ‘become part of the everyday, informal processes by which artists explain their work to others and to themselves; it is part of the dealer’s helpful explanations and the collector’s proud accounts of his acquisitions’. For Howard Singerman, in Art Subjects (1999), this kind of patois is not only Anglophone: the boundaries are ‘those of a disciplined art practice’. His book traces how, during the rapid expansion of university-based graduate education in the arts from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, language became the defining attribute of the university: ‘speech is now a requirement for the MFA’. In this model, the student’s practice is ‘always an open work’, extended by conversation – have you seen this? read that? thought about this? The art work gets talked into existence. Jargon is what occurs when some new words get talked into existence along the way.

In Keywords (1976), Raymond Williams notes that jargon ‘has become, in some modern uses, a jargon word’. By this he means that it is now uselessly general, commonly used to describe ‘unfamiliar and especially hybrid or unfavourably localized forms of speech’. It hasn’t always been this way. The word itself dates from the mid-14th century, when it referred to the warbling of birds. Jargon as chatter that is incessant and unregulated but somehow soothing – that sense may well still be there. For Williams, jargon – with its implications of unintelligibility – is a way of pointing fingers, a charge levelled at the modes of expression of an opposing ideology or position. At stake is how discursive realms become unfortunately hazy: the vocabulary of the social sciences is neither jargon nor pretentious so long as it stays safely within that given field. In Williams’s reading, jargon is ‘a confident local habit which merely assumes its own intelligibility and generality’.

A similar definition can be found in Kenneth Hudson’s classic study The Jargon of the Professions (1978): specialized language, which becomes offensive only when displaced from its proper sphere. He adds that intention is also involved: jargon can be identified as such when it is deliberately intended to bamboozle. The desire for confusion (and clubbability) is a clear motive for the creation and use of jargon, not least in the field of cultural criticism.

A couple of centuries after jargon denoted bird song, it had morphed to mean a kind of cipher; by the 19th century, it had come to mean ‘code’. Art-world jargon remains coded to a degree, the opposite of technological jargon which – as Walter Nash argues in Jargon: Its Uses and Abuses (1993) – is mostly ‘open’, in that you can understand how the words signify without always understanding what they signify. Perhaps the art world’s encrypted jargon – the patois of Crow’s imagined village – is closer to what Nash quaintly terms ‘rock jargon’. Like the criminal and sporting argot of earlier times, this is also a closed code, spoken by insiders; revealed not taught, its meanings learned in practice, not inferred in theory. In this model, words such as ‘thrash’ and ‘riff’ are like the onomatopoeic ‘pow!’ and ‘blam!’ of comic strips. If you can’t understand the ‘closed’ jargon word in connection with the event, it won’t help you to analyze it.

Franz Kafka, like many of his time, called Yiddish ‘jargon’. Oddly, though, his musings on the Ashkenazi German language might approximate a definition of contemporary jargon: ‘It is expressed curtly and rapidly,’ he wrote, ‘It has no grammars. Those who love it try to write grammars, but jargon is still spoken. It does not come to rest.’ Now, did someone say chavenet?