Grew up on a council estate? Check. Raised by a single mum on benefits? Check. Yes, I come from exactly the kind of working class background that would - in contemporary parlance - typically be described as ‘chav’.
The main difference is that when I was growing up, boys only ever wore sportswear when they were actually doing sports, and that was an activity I consciously avoided whenever possible.
But until this week, I have never thought twice about using the new C word in speech. Indeed, I have even applied it to myself. Only with the postmodern irony that befits a well-paid journalist, of course.
The point is that this is a neologism that has entered everyday British English in recent years, and seems to describe an identifiable social type. And if I don't have a problem with it, why should anyone else?
Well, Tom Hampson - editorial director of the Labour-affiliated Fabian Society – does. Writing in the think tank’s quarterly magazine, he opines:
Some uses of some words fall below the threshold of acceptability and some are definitely above it.
'Chav' is way above that threshold. It is deeply offensive to a largely voiceless group and - especially when used in normal middle-class conversation or on national TV - it betrays a deep and revealing level of class hatred …
It is sneering and patronising and - perhaps most dangerous - it is distancing, turning the 'chav' into the kind of feral beast that exists only in tabloid headlines.
In many cases, Hampson’s points are beyond dispute. Take midmarket tabloids, for instance. Daily Mail subeditors are much like Humpty Dumpty, in that when they use a word, it means exactly what they choose it to mean.
And in Dacrespeak, the designation ‘chav’ is always and exclusively one of triple-distilled petit bourgeois contempt, deliberately deploying a stereotype to display savage distain for the working class as a whole.
That’s why Stephen Glover’s contention that the word is essentially free of class connotation – printed in that very newspaper this morning – is particularly disingenuous.
Glover weakly attempts to argue that Prince Harry has ‘more than a touch of chav about him’ or that Chelsy Davy is ‘authentically chav’. But Hooray Henry behaviour is hardly the imagery the word conjures up. Readers are expressly expected to think of Vicky Pollard - pictured - and then praise the Lord for their social superiority.
Mind you, I do have more time for his suggestion that the left should devote its efforts not towards inculcating new linguistic taboos but instead take up the real issues raised by the persistence of ingrained poverty in places like Glasgow East, even if he formulates it in a reactionary way.
As a general rule, socialists should use language carefully and always bear its intended audience in mind. Pieces of a journalistic nature will inevitably require a vocabulary different from an article in a heavyweight theoretical magazine. Alas, some far left groups often don’t get this fairly basic point.
Sometimes things can get a little bit too precious for my liking. Some blogs debar commenters for using mental health-related terminology as insults. But can it really be offensive to brand this or that government policy ‘mad’, for instance? Not by the standards of quotidian banter where I work, that’s for sure.
Everything depends on context. Take ‘nigger’, for example. Today considered an open and shut case of racist abuse, it was still commonly heard as recently as the 1970s.
Thankfully, it isn’t any more, although it may still legitimately crop up in ironic usages, especially when parodying the attitudes of the right. John Lennon wrote lyrics like ‘woman is the nigger of the world’ to make a forcible political point, and it would be difficult not to get the message.
Interestingly, I absorbed enough 1970s feminism to find ‘cunt’ unacceptable as an insult to this day. But it seems to have been widely rehabilitated.
To my mind, Hampson’s point should be noted in as far as it is valid. Yet I don’t feel he has established the case for a blanket ban. As a father, I do tick off Daddy’s Little Princesses when I hear them using rude words. But shouldn’t the left treat each other as grown ups?
Posted at 14:36, 17 July 2008
Comments (16)
I'm not sure if all this is right. Chave is not used very often round here. When it is said it refers to a specific type of young working class estate person, a kind of track-suit and trainer-wearer who's dresssed up a bit for the weekend and still looks naff. Certainly *not* working class in general (since most of the peeple who say it are working class in the first place). It's more a tribe word, like Goth, Skate-border, and not like, say, Pikey, which is bordering on the racist. That's my take anyway.
Still it's not a common word. Unlike 'cunt' which is everywhere.
Then there's another one to look at, which is very widespread: dippy. Unpleasant way of describing those who are mentally differently abled?
I was reading an Upton Sinclair novel yesterday, and was taken aback when this American Socialist novellist casually dropped the word darky into his text (written in 1920).
I agree with Tom Hampson: at this point in time "chav" is part of a distancing, exclusionary discourse which marginalises and stigmatises a broad section of working class youth, often based on external appearance alone. It isn't particularly useful except to tabloid editors and middle class journos, I'd have thought. Not that I'm particularly bothered, but I'm reluctant to use the term myself.
This is a useful post, Dave. For both of us, it seems, the central point is that “the left should devote its efforts not towards inculcating new linguistic taboos but instead take up the real issues raised by the persistence of ingrained poverty in places like Glasgow East…”
Absolutely…... we should not lose sight of the fact that the primary struggle of the left is to counter material inequality. That is not to say that language is unimportant – discourse is a vital part of the hegemonic process of the right; one of our own, Stuart Hall (1988), showed us that clearly a long while ago in his analysis of the way ‘Thatcherism’ was built on a discourse that articulated “a number of disparate ideological element [which] included rational Tory values about law and order, ‘Englishness, the family tradition and patriotism, on the one hand, and classic liberal ideas about the free market and homo economics on the other” (Howarth et al. 2000, p4).
Equally, Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) classic analysis of how discourse creates political boundaries and ‘othernesses’ as a hegemonic system of control rings true when we look at how ‘chav’ is used.
But, as you suggest, it’s dangerous to take this too far, in the way that Tom Hampson seems to indicate we should; banning/tabooing the word chav will not in itself undo the material conditions that create the need/opportunity for chav-haters to hate chavs. Discourse is only one strategy, albeit an important one, for neo-liberal societal control. To suggest that banning its use will resolve inequalities is not only to hand a tactical advantage to the right, who can then bang on about ‘political correctness’ and how the left seeks to control society through language – while actually the reverse is true, it also skirts quite close to the post-modern fallacies of Foucault, Lyotard and Baudrillard, whose ‘all is discourse’/’language is a game’/’nothing is real anyway’ anti-foundationalism actually mask a deep conservatism (for a clear setting out of this argument, I really like Colin Hay’s should-be-seminal-but-isn’t Political Analysis (2002).
I’m sure Tom Hampson doesn’t intend to this by pushing toward a recommendation for ‘tabooing’ the term chav, but that’s the logical consequence for me.
Instead, what socialists should be doing (and like you often do) is to critique how lots of words are used as a controlling device by the right, not just as an end in itself, but as a means to the end of retaining material inequalities.
There’s actually a really good, but I suspect overlooked, blogging example of this at http://communityconfusions.blogspot.com/ where Andy Gregg critiques how the term community has been appropriated by the right to create a discourse of ‘otherness’ and ultimately to reinforce material inequalities (or at the very least to create a smokescreen for failure to tackle material inequality).
Refs:
Stuart Hall (1988) The Hard road to Renewal (London: Verso)
Colin Hay (2002) Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave)
David Howarth et al (eds) (2000) Discourse Theory and Political analysis: Identities, hegemony and social change (Manchester University Press)
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) Hegemony and Social Strategy: towards a radical democratic politics (London: Verso)
Paul - I like a lot of what you say here, but the rather flippant way you dismiss Foucault, Lyotard and Baudrillard on this question of discourse lets you down.
I am reminded of something Baudrillard says in The Intelligence of Evil:
"At bottom, we are faced with an alternative: either we suppose a real that is entirely permeable to history (to meaning, to the idea, to interpretation, to decision) and we ideologize or, by contrast, we suppose a real that is ultimately impenetrable and irreducible and in that case we poetize." (p. 63)
But we must not mistake "poetize" here with the stance of the Beautiful Soul - even Laclau admits that Baudrillard's abandoning of the terms of classical political theory is itself a politically-inspired project. Far from advocating some sort of vulagr relativism in which 'nothing is real anayway', what is at stake for Baudrillard is how the relationship between what is Real and what is Imaginary is itself, in our era, politically-suspect.
I mean, on this point Baudrillard and co agree with Dave and yourself - who the hell other than hand-wringing leftist liberals really genuinely worries about the uses and abuses of the term 'chav'?
Dear Toodle (or do you prefer Dear Toodle Noodle?)
I appreciate that input - and of course your earlier comments on Baudrillard should have made me more cautious about bandying his name about with proper aforethought. At the very least what you have succeeded in doing is going back to the Baudrillard original, so thanks. Baudrillard has moved on towards a more 'ethical' stance, perhaps (but you'd have a better feel for this than me, I suspect) in response to Habermas's stuff, perhaps just 'cos he thought through the implications of postmodernism a bit/lot more.
I am not of course alone in my flippant merging of the 'French postmodernists', but I suppose in some ways that is my point (at least in a grasping guiltil at hindsight manner).
Is it not the political practice (or disdain for politics as morality-in-action) that emerges from an unsound/half-baked reading of postmodernism, mostly starting and ending with Foucaultian 'relativism' (forgetting his own leftist practice of course), and blends with a whole raft of other postmodernist ways of being, these themselves rooted largely in post-war neo-liberal ideologies taking root in the 70/s/80's (e.g. see Colin Hay's later 'Why we Hate Politics) which have created such a fertile ground for neoconservative nhilism by default, and which makes the challenge for socilaists all the greater (but all the more intriguing as well).
Thanks for putting me straight on JB.
I've usually found the term 'chav' used by working-class people when complaining about lumpen types; the sort of people who have no concept of class-consciousness, care little for their fellow man or woman, and spend a lot of their time making life a misery for the rest of humanity, which usually means the working-class people around where they live.
As for their being 'a largely voiceless group', they're usually the noisiest people in town, especially after a few pints on a Saturday night.
"find ‘cunt’ unacceptable as an insult to this day. But it seems to have been widely rehabilitated."
Its been bought back to describe people like the man in your previous post.
Nice short word that fully demonstrates one persons loathing for another.
Paul - Yes, I agree that the vulgar readings of the French postmodernists (although Foucault is more of a poststructuralist rather than a postmodernist) has made it more difficult to get their ideas across to socialists. But I think it is part of a failure of the British Left in general to devote more time to understanding modern French political theory.
As for the convergence of Leftist postmodernist thought with postmodernist, neo-liberal ideology, it's my belief that we need to push neo-liberal ideology beyond its own limits by radicalising its own assumptions. But I gather from your website that you believe something different!
Oh, and Toodle is fine!
Lefties: Your party is in the shit, you have comprehensively failed to build an alternative, and you're arguing about whether people should be able to call a chav a chav and a cunt a cunt.
I read this post. You deserve it. All of it.
Of course the admonishion that "the left" should not worry about creating new linguistic taboos but concentrate on real problems, like poverty in East Glasgow or whatever is sheer bollocks. Every rightwinger will try that tactic on at one point or another when called on their bad behaviour. First there's the denial that it's a real problem, then comes the argument that it's not a big problem, and shouldn't you worry about more pressing issues? Numbnuts like Stephen Glover count on ingrained liberal guilt to distract you, but have no intention of worrying about either problem much themselves.
The use of c**t as a general swear word in English seems to me to ape the use of the Frencgh word 'con' where it is not considered a very rude word, just a mild expletive. Personally my objection to c**t is not on feminist grounds but because it is the language of the lowest of the low. This is a class based objection I realise, but surely, the idea is to raise standards not lower them? Fix reality and the language will take care of itself.
"Raised by a single mum on benefits? Check. Yes, I come from exactly the kind of working class background"
Dave, if you are describing a home where no adult worked, why do you call that Working Class?
This is a serious question, rather than a opo at you. That has been the experience of a significant proportion of children for the past 30 years.
Interestingly, I absorbed enough 1970s feminism to find ‘cunt’ unacceptable as an insult to this day. But it seems to have been widely rehabilitated.
Dave me old china, I'm far too polite to even suggest what the obvious reply to this would be! ;)
Alan
Essentially it's a 'reserve army of labour' analysis. My mum - ex-nurse before marriage, did work part time in OAP home before she became too ill - was a worker and could potentially have been so again.
``Pieces of a journalistic nature will inevitably require a vocabulary different from an article in a heavyweight theoretical magazine. Alas, some far left groups often don’t get this fairly basic point.''
Yup. And they wonder why ``you're not going to make it with anyone anyhow''. (Maybe I just don't like Chairman Mao...) There is a way to talk socialism to the workers without condescension but without jargon. Nye Bevan knew how, and so did Eugene Debs. So, for that matter, did E. P. Thompson. Why not learn from them? (You can start by (re)reading In Place of Fear.:-)