anti-society in Dockray 2010

formal or faddish usages of nearly anyone in the speech commu­nity.
However, slang, while subject to rapid change, is widespread and
familiar to a large number of speakers, unlike Polari. The terms jargon
and argot perhaps signify more what Polari stands for. as they are asso­
ciated with group membership and are used to serve as affirmation or
solidarity with other members. Both terms refer to "obscure or secret
language’or language of a particular occupational group ...
While jargon tends to refer to an occupational sociolect,
or a vocabulary particular to a field, argot is more concerned with language
varieties where speakers wish to conceal either themselves or aspects of
their communication from non-members. Although argot is perhaps the
most useful term considered so far in relation to Polari. there exists a
more developed theory that concentrates on stigmatised groups, and could
have been created with Polari specifically in mind: anti-language.
For ..., anti-language was to anti-society what language
was to society. An anti-society is a counter-culture, a society within a
society, a conscious alternative to society, existing by resisting either
pas-sively or by more hostile, destructive means. Anti-languages are
gen­erated by anti-societies and in their simplest forms arc partially relexicalised
languages, consisting of the same grammar but a different vocabulary
... in areas central to the activities ot subcultures.
Therefore a subculture based around illegal drug use would have words tor
drugs, the psychological effects of drugs, the police, money and so on. In
anti-languages the social values of words and phrases tend to be more
emphasised than in mainstream languages.

... found that 41 per cent of the criminals he
interviewed cave "the need for secrecy" as an important reason lor using
an anti-language, while 38 per cent listed 'verbal art'. However ...
in his account of the anti-language or grypserka of Polish
pris­oners. describes how, for the prisoners, their identity was threatened and
the creation of an anti-society provided a means by wtnclt an alternative
social structure (or reality) could be constructed, becoming the source of
a second identity tor the prisoners.

107

Streetwalker theorists cul­tivate the ability to sustain and create hangouts by hanging
out. Hangouts are highly fluid, worldly, nonsanctioned,
communicative, occupations of space, contestatory retreats for the
passing on of knowledge, for the tactical-strategic fashioning
of multivocal sense, of enigm atic vocabularies and gestures,
for the development of keen commentaries on structural
pres­sures and gaps, spaces of complex and open-ended recognition.
Hangouts are spaces that cannot be kept captive by the
private / public split. They are worldly, contestatory concrete
spaces within geographies sieged by and in defiance of logics
and structures of domination.20 The streetwalker theorist
walks in illegitim ate refusal to legitimate oppressive
arrange­ments and logics.

Common

108

As we apprehend it, the process of instit

 

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