Philip Trotter 33327830Sensing the Commons Word Count: 2183

Nishta Measures, Just Polari

How does a group of people find common ground so as to find common

action? Their ideals? Their situation? Their location? Or at its very root,
their communication. When Morrissey released Bona Drag in 1990, the
first track, Piccadilly Palare, brought back into the ears of a popular
audience the sound of an almost dead slag that had aliened communities
across Englands urban settings for centuries. Polari1 was an ever-
changing collection of slang that grew out of various trades and time
periods. Associated by writer Rictor Norton as being an unself-conscious
use of obscenity and slang [that] is characteristic of working-class men
and prostitutes, polari slang was at one stage the communicative of the
English gay male community. As a form of dialect it could allow
homosexuals to communicate with one another without being understood
or recognized by straights though this is arguable for writers such as
Norton, stating that polari was never designed to escape notice, but was
often confrontative2. Nevertheless, for a gay male community spread
amongst maritime vessels, West End theatres, prostitution and various
other trades, the languages unique expression as a linguistic self
ownership and communication allowed them to foot a collective, just as its
90s reappearance by Morrissey expresses how it was just silly slang
between me and the boys in my gang3. Polari being a slag that operated
primarily within queer culture and functioned to cement the relations
within queer culture4, I intend to explore to what extent this use of slang
between the gay male community could be the bases for the existence of
a commons at the time. In identifying the qualities of alliance through

1 The term has multiple other municipal spellings including Parlary, Palare,
Palarie and Palari; thought to have derived from Parlare, the Italian for to
talk.
2 Rictor Norton. "Queer Language," A Critique of Social Constructionism
and Postmodern Queer Theory. Last updated 2 July 2011. Accessed 31
March 2016.
3 Morrissey. Piccadilly Palare on Bona Drag. MP3 (Parlophone Records
Ltd, 1990)
4 Rictor Norton. A Critique of Social Constructionism and Postmodern
Queer Theory.
Philip Trotter 33327830

language, I will also be looking at the forward feasibility of reintroducing a

field of slag and language as a space for present day applications of
commoning and common action.
Ross Higgins on his writing of linguistic importance in Canadian gay
liberation movements expressed that: language practices lie at the heart
of the symbolic processes by which individual gay men signal gay
community affiliation to themselves and others. In learning and using the
linguistic and discursive conventions of the group, an individual proclaims
attachment to it publicly5. What we see here is the singular, the
individual, becoming plural in the creation of alliance through language as
the key link. This combination of singular and plural is a concept very
much embodied by the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, making it clear that from
faces to voices, gestures, attitudes, dress and conduct, whatever the
typical traits are, everyone distinguishes himself by a sort of sudden and
headlong precipitation where the strangeness of a singularity is
concentrated6. By expressing that the singular always accumulates a
plural through its outward perceptions, the alliance is somewhat already
available in the action of language, a self-authorized element of the
individual that conducts itself most effectively in a state of collective
being. What Nancy brings about is the concept of singular plural as a form
of alliance, or more accurately a form of being, that produces
commonalities consistently in interaction. He goes on to explain that
being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the
with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence7. If we consider
the communicative ability of language to be that of with, such language
as polari slang becomes inbuilt into the needs of collective action,
identification and the community collective. Polari if thought about with
the thinking of Higgin therefore creates a strong basis to be considered

5 Ross Higgins. French, English, and the Idea of Gay Language in

Montreal in Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language
edited by William L. Leap and Tom Boellstorff. (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2004) 73
6 Jean-Luc Nancy. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richards
and Anne E. OByrne. (California: Stanford University Press, 2000) 8
7 Jean-Luc Nancy. Being Singular Plural. 3
Philip Trotter 33327830

under the term being as constructed between the singular and plural, a
term which has become often escribed for common performativity
discussions by queer theorists.
One such theorist is Judith Butler who identifies a concept of being-with
within the needs of collective political movement surrounding the body
and domesticity. Using the work of Hannah Arendt, Butler develops that
political space then lies between the people which means that as much
as any action takes place somewhere located, it also establishes a space
which belongs in alliance itself8. If we consider the located aspect of this
between space as an anyplace, the alliance for Butler is based on two
points and a presence connecting those points. For the collective aspect of
language, this is exactly how it functions, either working as part of the
physical between of two people, a person and their plural or even the
person and the non-human. What Butler reveals in Arendts writing is that
action and speech create a space between the participants which can
find its proper location almost anywhere at anytime9 but, Butler
continues on to critic that Arendt misses an acknowledgement of the body
as support to collective action allowing presence in the public realm.
Because speech becomes the paradigmatic form of action, physically cut
off from the private domicile10, something such as Polari as a public and
confrontational form of communication further Butlers thinking towards
bodily presence for political action. The key here is the difference in the
location of polari from the thinking of Higgin who believed gay language
comes from the kitchen, the living room, and the dining room as well as
from the bedroom. The private sphere was the first site where collective
goals were formulated and the idea of community was conceived for gay
men11. Polari, though a largely private language to outsiders, was located
within working and cultural specific environments which required the

8 Judith Butler. Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street. European
Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. Published September 2011.
Accessed 30 March 2016.
9 Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998) 198
10 Judith Butler. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies.
11 Ross Higgins. Speaking in Queer. 79
Philip Trotter 33327830

bodily support of Butlers case. However, the language already allows

political commonality to be produced collectively without public bodily
presence, as these capitalist private spaces the slang can be converted
into political space as Arendts idea of proper location through polari
slags dissociation with the work at hand12. Though Butler evades
language, that it is not that bodily action and gesture have to be
translated into language, but that both action and gesture signify and
speak, as action and claim13, her thinking is reversed by the gay male
communities construction of slang in the private, that their slang makes
possible collective alliance before action, a commonality already present
without the action of the body politically for a community to build common
movement much in the spirit of the Marxist factory worker.
The idea of alliance in language forming commonality is also the
thinking behind another conception of queer being. Jose Esteban Munoz
considers queerness as a mode of being-with that defies social
conventions and conformism14 by looking through the frame of punk rock
to identify a commons. In doing so, he opens with the poetry of Jack
Spicer, seeing it as an animating force for the queer punk scene that
formed the music of Darby Crash. Munoz explains their iconography and
music, allowed a kind of punk rock commons, a being-with, in which
various disaffected, antisocial actants found networks of affiliation and
belonging that allowed them to think and act otherwise15 Munoz is
responding to a queer being-with associated to Spicers and Crashs
language that engage the individual to arrive at venues and stages
where they could realize their plurality16. Polari didnt exist in bringing
people to a space but rather that gay men already present in areas of
work created dialect, often in conjunction with non-gay workers in

12 From what polari is on record, very little of it had to do with the

profession at hand (excluding prostitution) normally referring to another
bodies appearance, personality, sexual desire or avoidance of the law.
13 Judith Butler. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies.
14 Jose Esteban Munoz. Gimme Gimme This... Gimme Gimme That:
Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons. Social Text 31
(3). (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013) 96
15 Jose Esteban Munoz. Social Text 31 (3). 99
16 Jose Esteban Munoz. Social Text 31 (3). 97
Philip Trotter 33327830

particular contexts. By the gay male community further adapting to a use

of slag outside capitalist spaces, the use of language as communication
has the potential to work just as punk music in producing collectivity and
commonality without the post-construction of physical space. Quite
literally Munozs statement of hear that whisper and know it is good, that
a certain acting crazy together is possible17 which originates from queer
punk space can be the engagement of any space, much like Arendts
political, for the use of polari as the bases for commoning. The queer idea
of being-with for Munoz, not a queer of identity but a queer of possibility,
is altered by gay slang not producing a specific stage of common politics
but having the potential to produce commonality across a community
geography, making for a rendering of a being-with that forms a
provisional and temporary commons through the encounter18 without
defined location.
Nevertheless, slags ability to produce the being-with condition that
surrounds common action can also appear to challenge the capitalist
assimilation of commons. William Leap explains that linguistic practices
reflect, reproduce and validate the heteronormative order; and by doing
so, they expose the regulatory processes lending authority and
privilege19. The heteronormative position of standard pronunciation and
language therefore stands at the center of systems such as capital and
those that help support it such as the family model, division between
productive and reproductive labor and assimilative practices. Keeping to
fixed terms, even as simple as gay and lesbian, allows easy transfer of
knowledges and attachment of value to common systems and common
action. For communities this has lead to situations such as gay
commodification culture seen in the corporatization of gay pride displays
across the globe, now not sights of activism but of assimilated identity
fetishization. Jason Lim identifies in the work of Elizabeth Grosz how
language can begin to counter this, that: a relative shortage of language

17 Jose Esteban Munoz. Social Text 31 (3). 102

18 Jose Esteban Munoz. Social Text 31 (3). 102
19 William L. Leap. Commentary II: Queering Language and Normativity
Discourse Society. vol. 24 no. 5 (London: SAGE Publications, 2013) 643
Philip Trotter 33327830

to describe female and especially lesbian sexual practice in medical,

sexological and even popular discourse [leads to a relation of sexual
pleasures prevented from] fixing them with (often male and heterosexual
dominated) forms of knowledge, making them functional20. Polari, much
like the lack of lesbian identity language was not fixed with a
heteronormative capitalist function so as to be included in a gay
commodity. Only having had 20 known core words and otherwise
expanded by specific sections of the community, polari was an unfixed
queer slang except in relation to its users. Much as Butler saw the way in
which language worked not to incite an action, but to restrain one21 in the
chanting of phrases in Cairo, polari worked to restrict the actions of
normative structures that, because of standardized language, undermines
commonalities. This is further thought of by Deleuze who makes it clear
that to produce a real and not a capitalist pseudo-desire entails producing
new utterances. It is a matter of undermining the order-word of a
hegemony in an ongoing movement of becoming22. Therefore, polari can
take to the Deleuzian idea of producing new non-fixed utterances and
most importantly keep producing them in engagement with its community.
By doing this, the importance of being-with seen by Butler and Munoz in
producing a commonality becomes even harder to pin down and
depoliticize, making a constantly happening engagement that doesnt rely
on the importance of physicality to push towards a common action that
stays common. It is what Jason Lim saw in being, that this kind of politics
does not aim for specific goals, but rather attempts to embrace an
unpredictable future23. The none fixed nature of the slangs use means it
is consistently forming a collective not of being-with but becoming-with, a
process that searches not for a gay identity or for being-gay but for

20 Jason Lim. Queer Critique and the Politics of Affect in Geographies of

Sexualities. Edited by Kath Browne, Jason Lim and Gavin Brown. (Farnham,
UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2009) 64
21 Judith Butler. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies.
22 Verena Andermatt Conley. Thirty-six Thousand Forms of Love: The
Queering of Deleuze and Guattari in Deleuze and Queer Theory. Edited
by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr. (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh
University Press, 2009) 25
23 Jason Lim. Geographies of Sexualities. 64
Philip Trotter 33327830

becoming gay24. By doing this there is not an origin century for polari to
come from which importantly means, as Norton explains, these are not
words of hegemonic social control: these are words indigenous to an
ethnic culture25 that can work outside capitalist (and any other)
normativity.
Polari slang was the collective resource of the community of its time that
had the potential of a becoming-with as common. Through the fault or
benefit of such contexts as 1970s liberation movement, polari died out on
the bases of correctly placed sexisms. Nevertheless, what we can take
from polari is a possibility. Its unique production of alliance carries with it a
potential direction not seen in other forms of common action, a commons
proposal that does not have a final fulfillment any more than it has a
point of origin26. In current times, nostalgically trying to use polari again
would be counter-productive, it is partly translated and though culturally
forgotten, if too heavily mobilized beyond the occasional album track,
would be assimilated and commodified. Yet the use of language within a
community to produce a common action in todays highly commodified,
heteronormative world could be beneficial. To not sit a political
commoning action within dominant social language moves it to the
margins, beyond normativity, important as in order to be able to say
something and to produce change, gays have to be part of a minority or,
even more so, of a becoming minoritarian. Only in that capacity can they
escape a hypocritical, normativising majority27. A becoming minoritarian,
that through language actions such as polari showed, can produce a
possibility for common.

24 Verena Andermatt Conley. Deleuze and Queer Theory. 25

25 Rictor Norton. A Critique of Social Constructionism and Postmodern
Queer Theory
26 Jean-Luc Nancy. Being Singular Plural. 5
27 Verena Andermatt Conley. Deleuze and Queer Theory. 27
Philip Trotter 33327830

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