The Strategy of Concealment: Towards an Anarchist Critique of Communication

From Interactivist - By Roger Farr

[An earlier version of this essay appeared in Fifth Estate #375 (Spring 2007)]

"Having, then, to take account of readers who are both attentive and diversely influential, one obviously cannot speak with complete freedom. Above all, one must take care not to give too much information to just anybody."

— Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

Often when I turn to anarchist press these days, it’s certain I’ll find one comrade or another commenting on a perceived lack of “clarity” in the discourse of the movement

A recent editorial in Anarchy (#60), for example, observes that “there is an overflow of ambiguous (at best) terminology in much contemporary anarchist discourse.” Ambiguity is viewed as a problem because it “pulls the reader back into the realm of jargon; those in the in-crowd already understand the peculiar usage, further enforcing the sectarian nature of the project.”

This raises an interesting question: to what extent must the anarchist critique elaborate itself within the language of “clarity” and Standard English? Does our rejection of ideology and authority apply only to social organization, and not to linguistic systems, which, as Mikhail Bakhtin noted, are “saturated with ideology”? What does the language of our movement have in common with the language used (and enforced) by the masters of this society? Can we, to use Audre Lorde’s formulation, use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house?

No tool is neutral. Technologies render other forms of activity and value obsolete, and this extends to language. A robust anarchist critique must question the “progressive” Enlightenment values of rational debate, precisely defined terms, and other forms of communicative transparency. For when we utilize the master’s tools, we may be overlooking a set of linguistic weapons provided to us by one the most generative and subversive discourses in the anarchist tradition—the language of dangerous classes. And given the rise of surveillance technologies, the proliferation of snitches, finks, and insidious “community policing,” closer attention to the workings and implications of this robust “language of conflict,” as Alice Becker-Ho has called it, a language which must always speak “truth with falsehood,” may be a tactical necessity.

1. The Language of Those in the Know

Taking to heart the Situationist adage that “poetry is the revolutionary act par excellence”, Alice Becker-Ho has generated over the last twenty years a fascinating body of writing, including several books of poetry and translation, as well as groundbreaking studies of criminal jargon and argot.1

Argot is commonly defined as “slang used by various groups, including but not limited to thieves and other criminals, to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations,” and further, “a specialized vocabulary and terminology used between people with special skill in a field.” Often described by conservative literary types as a kind of linguistic degradation, a mutation, or even a disease within a more sophisticated national language (or, less sensationally, as merely “idiomatic”), argot was famously defined by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables as “nothing more nor less...than the ugly, restless, sly, treacherous, venomous, cruel, crooked, vile, deep, deadly language of misery...we can hardly recognize it. It is really the French tongue? The great human tongue? We distinguish questions and answers, we perceive, without understanding, a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human tones, but nearer a howling than speech. This is argot.”

The unstated assumption these definitions share is that argot poses a threat, both as a language and, more importantly, as a form of contract, a social bond that establishes “insiders” and “outsiders.” This last element of argot informs Becker-Ho’s work: argot is theorized here not simply as “a language” (or what structuralists call “la langue” – the abstract rules and patterns that govern our speech), but rather as “an independent and unified practice” that unites “a brotherhood of rogues.” As Becker-Ho writes in “The Language of Those in the Know”: “[argot] is not simply discreet and defensive. It theorizes what is about to be done: it already is a project. It never talks for the sake of talking. For those who can understand this language, every aspect of it carries the permanent confirmation of their vision of the world. Slang is not a mere specialized jargon, nor is it a language grafted on to conventional speech. It is precisely the manifestation…of an outlook exclusive to the so-called dangerous classes.”

This “outlook”, or world-view, is developed by Becker-Ho in another work, The Essence of Jargon. “You are not born dangerous-class,” she writes, “you become so the moment you cease to acknowledge the values and constraints of a world from which you have broken free: we are basically referring here to the necessity of wage-labour. This line is one that very precisely separates the working classes from the dangerous classes. […] The essence of jargon is quite simply the very attitude of mind that informs these dangerous classes’ every word and deed.”

2. Of Overhearers, Informatives, and Other Mugs

Again, argot poses a number of threats, not least of which is to challenge the very core of what we think we know about communication. Take for example the traditional model of communication, in which a speaker (S) directs an utterance at an addressee (A) along an imaginary horizontal channel:

S ----> A

This model, which dominates how we think about communication, is in fact a metaphor we use to describe how we “exchange” ideas.2 The "conduit metaphor," as linguists call it, basically reduces the complexities of communication to objects moving along a conveyor belt between immobile and passive “interlocutors.” The metaphor suggests that ideas are objects that are "put into" words, and that language is a kind of container. Messages, then, are like packages sent over a "channel of communication" to another person who takes the ideas out of the packages, and voila, "understanding." All things being equal.

But all things are not equal. For one, the model assumes that our interlocutors are standing on the same foundation, when in fact the site of the production of the message may not share the same characteristics as the site of its reception. There must be some form of agreement and mutualism between participants in a speech-act before any real "understanding" can occur, and this is difficult in a society riddled with antagonisms and competing identities.

More importantly, even if we assume the two speakers share some kind of common ground, the imaginary "channel" along which this message “passes” may be not be as secure as the diagram presents it. The conversation might be subject to interference and distortion: someone may be listening in on the conversation, someone who is hostile to the shared communicative aims of our two comrades.

Linguists use the concept of "audience design" to examine the ways in which utterances are influenced by the presence of third-party "informatives" in a given conversation. Distinguishing this approach from the traditional theory where an isolated speaker directs an utterance only at an isolated addressee, Herbert Clark provides a more inclusive model that accounts for the roles of "side-participants" and "overhearers" in the production of the utterance. Where overhearers are present, the speech act is said to be "informative", as opposed to the traditional model of “speaker ---> addressee”, which assumes that communicative transparency is both possible and desirable. Basically, Clark adds a layer of mediation, or interference, between the speaker and the addressee. The "informative" utterance, he shows, is designed with the presence of intermediary entities, or "hostile informatives" (HI), in mind:

S --- (HI) ---> A

Now, when the speaker and the addressee must take into consideration the presence of this hostile third-party "overhearer" – or, what I would prefer to call, following Becker-Ho, a cop, or a mug3 – they may adopt one or more of the following “strategies”: disguisement, indifference, disclosure, and concealment.

Disguisement is the most complex strategy of the four. Disguisement is a kind of ploy; really, it is an act of negative disclosure, what Clark calls a "disclosure of a misrepresentation," a swindle. It communicates essential information to the right people, while leading the hostile informative in the wrong direction. The second strategy, the strategy of indifference, is self-explanatory: a speaker uses the same utterance she would under more intimate conditions, thus suggesting that the third-party is so unimportant that he doesn’t even warrant attention. Disclosure, on the other hand, involves welcoming the overhearer into the conversation, and providing them with all the information and cues they need to make sense of what is being said: “facilitation.”

Finally, the strategy of concealment. Concealment, like argot, can be defined as any utterance designed in such a way that overhearers cannot interpret it. For example, the transmission of military information, such as locations of troops, movements of weapons, and strike patterns are often concealed (or "encrypted"), as is the movement of sensitive commercial information, the electronic transferring of capital from one place to another along insecure channels like the Internet. Subcultures make use of concealment in order to protect themselves from infiltration by and assimilation into a dominant culture. Lovers too: Juliet could conceal her illicit letters to Romeo by making use of a cipher which only they could decode. In short, hostile audiences — those overhearers who attempt to grasp a message without sharing the communicative aims of its producers, those who are "hostile" to the aspirations of the participants — can and should be thwarted by a strategy of concealment.

3. In Defense of Concealment

The strategy of concealment is a profoundly anarchist mode of communication, and history confirms that the anarchist movement is rich with examples of this linguistic practice. Most of Emile Pouget’s anarchist journal Pére Peinard (1889-1902), for example, was written in the argot of the Parisian underworld. According to a police report from the period, this unintelligible publication reached as many as one hundred thousand readers, a statistic which confirms Patricia Leighten’s observation that Pére Peinard “communicat[ed] an identification with the lumpenproletariat, the marginal, the starving, and the unemployed--those who inhabited the peculiar province of the anarchists.”

Thus, aside from the obvious negative benefits of helping a speaker to deceive and confuse the authorities, concealment helps to strengthen the bonds of anarchist mutualism, especially among informal, “autonomous base nucleus” formations rooted in “affinity and reciprocal knowledge.” As Clark notes, concealment, argot’s modus operadi, makes special demands on the shared knowledge of both speaker and addressee. Much more than utterances that conform to the rhetoric of decorum and transparency, concealment requires that the speaker adopt a high degree of empathy with her interlocutors; she might draw on a shared memory, for instance, in an attempt to overcome the communicative barriers imposed by the hostile overhearer. And because concealment requires that an audience conjecture in order to arrive at understanding, it relies heavily on collaboration between participants. With concealed utterances, so-called "intelligibility" — which is only superficially and strategically denied — is the result of a communal, or dialogical, process. Despite its unfamiliar surface, the concealed utterance, Clark observes, draws heavily on "communal common ground" and often depends upon shared participation in an "intelligence community."

If all of this sounds like an argument for elitism, for an anarchist aristocracy of “those in the know,” perhaps it is – after all, don’t we believe, at some level, that we are better than our enemies? At any rate, it should be stressed that the parameters of “the community” – and what constitutes its particular “intelligence” – depend entirely on the practices and world-views of those who make it up. In this respect, there is much to learn from Becker-Ho’s account of the linguistic bonds that unite the dangerous and the dispossessed: “what comprises dangerous-class nous [“we”] is the continual ability to detect who is on one side of the line or the other, and the behaviour to be adopted in either case. In order to fulfill this aim, a jargon was created whose each and every term reflects … the permanent war that this world of outlaws persecutes against the ‘normal’ world of submissiveness.”

================

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Holquist, Michael. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: Texas UP, 1981.

Becker-Ho, Alice. “from The Essence of Jargon.” Trans. John McHale. PARSER: New Poetry & Poetics. (1) Spring 2007. 4-13.

Becker-Ho, Alice. “The Language of Those in the Know.” Trans John McHale. 2001. January 12, 2007. .

Clark, Herbert H. Arenas of Language Use. Chicago: UP, 1992.

Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Malcom Imrie. London: Verso, 1996.

Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. Trans. Norman Denny. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

Jarach, Lawrence. “Of Jargon, Cant, & Gobbledygook.” Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. (60). Fall-Winter 2005-06. 2.

Reddy, Michael J. "The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in our Language about Language." Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1979.

Wier, Jean, et al. “Insurrectionary Organization.” The Batko Group. 1988. March 7, 2007. .

The best concealed

The best concealed communications these days are by using PGP/GPG and remailers such as Freenet.
I would encourage all anarchists to study crypto-anarchy and prepare for ubiquitous encryption.
Paradoxically the harder the authoritarians press for a worldwide 'prison-planet' the closer the new crypto-anarchy paradigm event-horizon seems to come.

So 'Don't throw us into that brier patch Mr Fox! '

Apparently 'Worker' is more

Apparently 'Worker' is more eclectic in his thinking than I first thought. A little Situationism with your Platformism, anyone?

A little Situationism with

A little Situationism with your Platformism, anyone?

how many times do you have to read that this site is not about a particular tendency?
from the "about us" page:
Motivation
Everything has bias. The bias of this site is to promote an anarchist culture by providing a source of news and commentary of interest to and about anarchists. The goal is not to advocate for a particular anarchist practice but to serve a general anarchist need.

you need your nose stuffed in it anymore? do you do any background search at all when you come to a new site? or is context completely irrelevant to you?

you need your nose stuffed

you need your nose stuffed in it anymore?

If you can dish it, I can take it. But, at least on the issue of "context," we don't disagree. What I disagree with you on is the idea that, because OF this context, people are some how absolved from defending the content of what they post. As I said to Professor Rat once before in an exchange about "diversity-of-tactics," diversity is not its own justification. For nearly 8 years of trying to find my way within "radical communities" (read: activist ghettoes) I have had to deal with self-styled scenesters who talk all warm and fuzzy in one moment and spew moral judgments in the next. The only thing that they ever seem to do consistently is fail to present any coherent critique of the social order in its totality. I have friends in the "activist scene" and try my best to balance my criticisms with respect for them as people. However, I have no allegiance to "the Scene" as such and do not tailor what I say to the preservation of its existence.

you're saying this site is

you're saying this site is warm and fuzzy? you're saying it spews moral judgments after it is warm and fuzzy? what are you saying that is relevant to this site?

this site is for viewing in one helpfully centralized place, everything that people can find that is of interest to anarchists. it does not cater to one brand of anarchism and it is explicitly anarchist (unlike infoshop, anarkismo, blackcat, libcom, greenanarchy.org, or any other website i've ever seen). it is for information not for convincing anyone.

no one is talking about allegiance, preserving a scene, diversity of tactics, or the acceptability of incoherent critique.
your post is a series of non sequitors.

what are you saying that is

what are you saying that is relevant to this site?

A critique of the anarchist subculture is not relevant to an anarchist website? And you're claiming that *I'm* positing non sequiturs?

it is for information not for convincing anyone.

Nonsense. First, this is exactly what CNN says to justify it's own propaganda - "FACTS. NOT FEAR." Second, you yourself have quoted the guidelines of this website which state explicitly that "everything has bias." What is the discursive function of "bias" if not to "convince" people? To "inform" them of their need to alter their beliefs, I suppose? Third, there is no such thing as purely "informative" communication. Ideology permeates our culture at every level and cannot be escaped.

escape your computer... for

escape your computer... for a while.

- anon.

That's actually some really

That's actually some really good advice.

- the Schizz

I'm sure all those sits and

I'm sure all those sits and plat hordes that want to glom onto anarchism have got the right idea. They just need to suck up to us a bit more. There is plenty of sites online to teach them how to do this.
A little rimming wouldn't go astray either please - thank you. Think with the edge of yr tongue.

Imho diversity is da shiz.

Imho diversity is da shiz. Its monoculture thats trying to kill us.

I don't even think you WANT

I don't even think you WANT anarchy. I think that, deep down, you'd prefer the State and global Capital to continue existing so that your identity as an "anarchist" can be preserved.

I want panarchy so I can fry

I want panarchy so I can fry some bacon...archy.

I want a little o' the ol'

I want a little o' the ol' moloko plus - cause it sharpens me up and makes me ready for a little o' the old ultraviolence.

Did you intentionally bring

Did you intentionally bring this off-topic spat neatly back to the actual subject of the article? (nadsat is a perfect example of an obscuring lingo) Brilliant, SHizz!

"And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines?"

Did you intentionally bring

Did you intentionally bring this off-topic spat neatly back to the actual subject of the article?

Yeah, I suppose I did; but I was also trying to use a bit of irony to connect the subject of this article to a critique of the radical subculture and its own "obscuring lingo" (think "diversity-of-tactics," "the Working Class," "anti-imperialism," etc.) For me, language, subculture, and ideology are all woven together in a network of relations that cause the recuperation of revolutionary struggle back into global capital. Because capitalism has expanded itself beyond the sphere of economics and into every aspect of culture, it does not make sense for a critique of capitalism not to include those aspects of culture which (supposedly) are opposed to it. In short, a critique of capitalism and a critique of the anarchist subculture not only go hand-in-hand, but are one and the same things. This critique, furthermore, must also include a critique of language, ideology, and (bourgeois) morality.

When you think about it, Alex and his droogs are the perfect examples of a recuperated resistance movement. While they are not consciously "political" like most anarchists, they are a disaffected youth gang with conscious contempt for "Law and Order." They are the products of an age in which "Mankind" and its striving for a "greater good" has been superceded by notions of technological and scientific "progress" (remember the "Ludivico Technique?") In such an age, a revolutionary break with the inertial of history cannot take place within the enclosed arena of "politics." The apolitical/nihilistic rage of Alex and his droogs needs to be channelled into consciously anti-political insurrection. In my opinion, this anti-political stance implies a stance against "civilization" as such; but an "anti-civilization" stance should not be treated as an ideological position. Indeed, we have seen what becomes of all of the other "anti's" on the leftist shopping list of "anti-oppression politics." Instead, an individual anarchist who considers him or herself to be anti-civilization should treat his or her critique of civilization as an unending "work in progress"; and, in doing so, treat civilization itself not as a single "thing," but a network of interlocking processes and structures that are always changing.

Anyway, as you no doubt have figured out by now, I am pretty much fed up with certain elements within the contemporary "anarchist movement." My frustration gets the better of me sometimes but I am not going to apologize for it. Instead, I will try to adopt a more productive tone so that these sorts of discussions can go in a more positive direction.

Cheers,
the Schizz (unlogged)

Are you saying that this

Are you saying that this piece is platformist? I don't see that...could you explain?

No no, I was pointing out

No no, I was pointing out the irony involved in the original poster ("worker") going from posting a bunch of articles lauding Platformism to one with clear situationist leanings. After the shit he took from a number of post-left/insurrectionary types over the Karl Blythe articles he posted, it just struck me that he was trying to gain sympathy from us. In any case, I've moved past that now.

the Schizz

you are an idiot. This site

you are an idiot. This site posts from all parts of the @ spectrum. 'worker' is a name, maybe a description, not an ideology.

you are an

you are an idiot.

Correction: I am the Cosmic FoOoOl! But my foolishness is none other than the genius of pure Madness. I am the transvaluation of Jesus Christ. Satan is my master; but *I* am none other than Satan himself. Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moon-light? :P

This site posts from all parts of the @ spectrum.

Agreed; and, unless we wish to be good little Postmodern relativists, this is precisely why each post should be equally subject to penetrating critique. A catchy slogan for this website might be "What's Your Anarchy?"

'worker' is a name, maybe a description, not an ideology.

It may be too late for this one. He is not yet among the Children of Dionysus. ;)

"You must be careful who you pretend to be, because in the end you are who you pretend to be." -- Frederich Wilhelm Nietzsche

And your "critique" is that

And your "critique" is that it is ironic that a user (who happens to be user #1) posts -both- an article on platformism and situation(ism)? Have you checked out a listing of all the articles that 'worker' has posted to the site? Critique does actually require some work on your part, every flip wave of your hand is not critique. Every fart that comes out of your mouth does not smell of roses.

And your "critique" is that

And your "critique" is that it is ironic that a user (who happens to be user #1) posts -both- an article on platformism and situation(ism)?

Sort of. My critique is that plurality for its own sake does not in itself help to clarify potential radical theories. All it does is create a list of questions for which answers are neither expected nor found. At the same time, the questions that you ask yourself already contain your assumptions about their answers. That being the case, your seemingly 'random' choices of articles to post do in fact contain - to some degree - a map of your own ideological assumptions and preoccupations. If nothing else, it doesn't make sense to say that the articles you choose to post do not reflect the direction(s) in which you think radical discussion should be going at any given time.

By which you mean...

By which you mean... anarchist?

Who is to say what it means

Who is to say what it means to be an anarchist is universally agreed upon/understood even within the anarchist milieu itself?

gotchya.

gotchya.

Hey it might help the

Hey it might help the 'workers' street credibility if we all knew a little more about them and their efforts to enlighten us post-leftist insurrectionist savages. So how about it 'worker'?
Who the heck are you really and where are you at (wo)man? ( I'm pr btw. Downunder in the land of Oz )
Obviously the NSA have enough on you now from text analysis to build a substantial profile - so shouldn't we humble crass lumpen elements also be let in on the big secrets?

Inquiring minds and all that. Fuck I'd hate to be caught out like Lenin once was, with one of his main nodes being run by a cop eh! So humiliating!

I don't know how much you

I don't know how much you have read on this site, but neither 'worker' nor anyone else needs street cred. First of all, 'worker' mostly just posts relevant/interesting articles and others comment on them. If you don't like them, don't read them. Or post your viewpoint and get it off your chest. It is fairly obvious that many anarchists disagree with how to bring about an anarchist society, so I for one am glad that 'worker' posts a wide range of possible alternatives that we can study, discuss and accept/reject/modify to our liking. Street cred is for establishing trust, and if 'worker' wanted you to fellow him/her/them into battle then I can see wanting more info to base your decision on. Instead he/she/they seem to be saying "hey check this out, what to YOU think?" Have some self respect and stop hating for the sake of hating.

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