Revista Internacional de Educación y Análisis Social Crítico Mañé, Ferrer & Swartz.

ISSN: 2990-0476

Vol. 3 Núm. 2 (2025)

 

A Brief Essay on Two Files for Counter-Histories: An Investigation into the History of Anarchism and an Activist Editorial Project in the Present, from Prison

Pequeño ensayo sobre dos archivos para las contra-historias: una investigación sobre la historia del anarquismo y un proyecto editorial activista en el presente, desde la cárcel

Um Pequeno Ensaio sobre Dois Arquivos para as Contrahistórias: Uma Investigação sobre a História do Anarquismo e um Projeto Editorial Ativista no Presente, desde a Prisão

 

Federico Fabián Ternavasio

Becario Doctoral del Instituto en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales del Litoral (Conicet-UNL) / Asociación Civil Contraversiones, Argentina

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7190-9719

ffternavasio@riseup.net

 

 

Abstract

 

In this work, I am interested in relating two cases of thought and action that center on the relationship between politics and language, based on a conceptual framework in development situated within the tradition of “glottopolitics”, while also addressing some tensions regarding those aspects of the political that the term encompasses. It is important to connect two cases of thought and action regarding the political relationship and language, based on a conceptual framework in construction that is situated within the tradition of “glottopolitics”, while also raising some tensions about those aspects of the political that the term involves, focusing on the discursive practices of the anarchist movement in Santa Fe (Province of Santa Fe, Argentina) and Paraná (Province of Entre Ríos, Argentina) in the early decades of the 20th century. These two cities are geographically close, separated by the Paraná River, but connected through the circulation of activists and support among groups. The other case stems from an activist experience in which, along with colleagues with whom I form the collective Contraversiones, we have been conducting workshops and productive projects in contexts of incarceration since 2018, while also supporting individuals who are released from prison in the city of Santa Fe. Specifically, I am part of the team that runs reading and writing workshops and coordinates the Barrett Editorial Community project. While these involve different forms of action and temporalities, a series of commonalities emerge in both cases. Social actors who are often ignored, a “speaking out” [prise de parole], and the question of how to intervene publicly in cases where, due to the nature of the actions, there is either no possibility or desire to conquer positions of governmental power. In both cases, editing and circulating printed materials appear as a political and linguistic praxis; they also contribute to the formation of a dispersed and fragmented archive, resulting from activisms that converge in policies and poetics constructed from a practice -always somewhat unpredictable- that is difficult to translate institutionally. These are archives that are built and simultaneously opened up to think counter-histories: of the political and cultural life of medium-sized cities in the Argentine interior; of prison life and the lives affected by incarceration.

Keywords:  Activism, anarchism, Argentina, counter-history, critical history, prison, critical thinking, critical sociology.

 

Resumen

 

En este trabajo interesa poner en relación dos casos de pensamiento y acción que tienen un eje en el vínculo entre política y lenguaje, desde una trama conceptual en construcción que se ubica en la tradición de la “glotopolítica”, aunque plantea algunas tensiones sobre aquellos aspectos de lo político que involucra el término. Un caso proviene de las prácticas discursivas del movimiento anarquista en Santa Fe (Provincia de Santa Fe, Argentina) y Paraná (Provincia de Entre Ríos, Argentina) en las primeras décadas del siglo XX. Dos ciudades cercanas geográficamente, separadas por el río Paraná, pero vinculadas en cuanto a circulación de militantes y apoyo entre grupos. El otro caso proviene de una experiencia activista donde, junto a compañeros y compañeras con quienes conformamos el colectivo Contraversiones, desde 2018, llevamos adelante talleres y proyectos productivos en contextos de encierro carcelario y acompañando a las personas que salen de la cárcel en la ciudad de Santa Fe. Puntualmente, formo parte del equipo que lleva adelante talleres de lectura y escritura y que coordina el proyecto Barrett Comunidad Editorial. Si bien se trata de formas de acción y temporalidades diferentes, en ambos casos emergen una serie de coincidencias. Actores sociales a los que no se quiere escuchar, una “toma de la palabra” [prise de parole] y la pregunta por los modos de intervenir públicamente en casos donde por la propia naturaleza de las acciones, no se puede o no se desea la conquista de lugares de poder gubernamental. En ambos casos aparece la edición y la puesta en circulación de impresos como una praxis política y lingüística; y también la formación de un archivo disperso y fragmentario, producto de activismos que convergen en políticas y poéticas que se construyen desde un hacer -siempre un poco imprevisible-, difícil de traducir institucionalmente. Se trata de archivos que se construyen y a la vez se abren para pensar contra-historias: de la vida política y cultural de las ciudades medias del interior argentino; de la cárcel y de las vidas atravesadas por el encierro.

Palabras clave: Activismo, anarquismo, Argentina, contra-historia, historia crítica, prisión, pensamiento crítico, sociología crítica.

 

Resumo

 

Neste trabalho, tenho interesse em relacionar dois casos de pensamento e ação que têm um eixo na ligação entre política e linguagem, a partir de uma trama conceitual em construção que se situa na tradição da “glotopolítica”, embora também levante algumas tensões sobre aqueles aspectos do político que o termo envolve. Um caso provém da minha pesquisa doctoral em andamento, e é o das práticas discursivas do movimento anarquista em Santa Fe (Província de Santa Fe, Argentina) e Paraná (Província de Entre Ríos, Argentina) nas primeiras décadas do século XX. Duas cidades geograficamente próximas, separadas pelo rio Paraná, mas conectadas na circulação de militantes e apoio entre grupos. O outro caso vem de uma experiência ativista onde, junto a companheiros e companheiras com quem formamos o coletivo Contraversiones, desde 2018 estamos realizando oficinas e projetos produtivos em contextos de encarceramento e apoiando as pessoas que saem da prisão na cidade de Santa Fe. Especificamente, faço parte da equipe que conduz oficinas de leitura e escrita e que coordena o projeto Barrett Comunidade Editorial. Embora se trate de formas de ação e temporalidades diferentes, em ambos os casos emergem uma série de coincidências. Atores sociais que não são ouvidos, uma tomada da palavra [prise de parole] e a questão sobre como intervir publicamente em casos onde, pela própria natureza das ações, não se pode ou não se deseja conquistar lugares de poder governamental. Em ambos os casos, a edição e a circulação de impressos aparecem como uma praxis política e linguística; e também a formação de um arquivo disperso e fragmentário, produto de ativismos que convergem em políticas e poéticas construídas a partir de uma prática – sempre um pouco imprevisível – difícil de traduzir institucionalmente. Trata-se de arquivos que são construídos e ao mesmo tempo se abrem para pensar contra-histórias: da vida política e cultural das cidades médias do interior argentino; da prisão e das vidas atravessadas pelo encarceramento.

Palavras-chave: Ativismo, anarquismo, Argentina, contra-história, história crítica, prisão, pensamento crítico, sociologia crítica.

 

Introduction

Academic life is largely structured and institutionalized. Teaching, research, and outreach are activities for which projects must be submitted if one wishes to secure funding (in Argentina, always -and increasingly- scarce), or if one wants them to be recognized as part of formal academic labor, accumulating points for some curriculum vitae. From a benevolent perspective, these are ways of making work visible and of verifying that we have done what we claim to do. From a more critical, even malicious, perspective, they are highly bureaucratized procedures that already require a specific kind of expertise: the “know-how of applying for funding calls” as a form of activity in itself.

Regardless of how one views it, this triad of actions that defines academic life is deeply interconnected. It is often the case that outreach activities are developed around the same topics that are researched, and that research is conducted within the disciplinary frameworks in which teaching takes place.

Outside the institutional orders of academic life, anyone who has engaged concretely in any of these practices knows that there are gaps, lines of flight, and cross-contaminations that no checkbox can capture and no administrative procedure can make transparent. I therefore turn to essayistic writing, situated between experience and research, insofar as this is allowed by an academic journal that defines itself through its pursuit of critical science, emancipatory forms of writing, and transformative knowledge[1].

Of the barriers and divisions imposed by the organization of working life within the university are dismantled, there is no longer any need to speak of contaminations or applications, nor of linkages, outreach, or knowledge transfer. It is enough to say that we have an intellectual project -one that is, of course, part of a life project- and that we build it as we come to understand how, when, with whom, and why we do what we do.

The cases I wish to bring into dialogue are those of an activist experience[2] and those of an ongoing research project. The first is an editorial project currently grounded in a “reading and writing workshop” (the quotation marks signal a deliberate distance from the label) carried out in a “context of confinement”; the second is an attempt to write a doctoral dissertation on the linguistic ideologies of the anarchist movement in the early twentieth century, as expressed in Argentina’s littoral region. Both are collective projects, although in the latter the question of authorship comes into play in a differentiated way.

I am interested in focusing on two points of contact between the conceptualization of these two experiences and the way in which, as I understand it, they mutually nourish one another: I learn to think about my research object at a workshop table inside the prison; I learn to think about the political praxis we carry out with my comrades by researching language, discourse, and anarchism.

In the pages that follow, I aim to weave together the activist experience and my doctoral research experience, seeking to combine narration and reflection. I will begin with the experience of the Collective and the editorial project; I will then turn to the anarchist movement and the notion of “taking the floor” (or “seizing the word”). In the following two sections, I raise some tensions concerning the framework of “glottopolitics” and the issue of representation in the activist actions we carry out. In the final remarks, I outline several concerns related to academic practice itself.

“Tumbergencia”[3]

Together with a group of comrades, we have carried out a series of activist projects involving the prison system. Each person will have different ways of defining what we do and of explaining why we do it, as well as the immediate and long-term political horizons that guide us. The very nature of our activity means that what I can write about this experience is traversed by both convergences and conflicts developed over nearly a decade of assemblies, meetings, and projects.

One way of defining the type of intervention we carry out inside prisons is that we seek to reduce the effects of confinement… effects that, needless to say, are harmful to those who are incarcerated. At the same time, “outside” the prison, we develop projects with people who have already regained their freedom of movement, as well as with their loved ones (family members, partners, friends). Another way of defining what we do is to think of it as an attempt to collectively build life projects together with people affected by the prison system.

All of this takes concrete form in the sustained work of running workshops inside prisons, as well as workshops and productive projects outside them, addressing different areas: technologies, computer repair, and textile work (garment production or repair). This also includes the reading and writing group in the Coronda prison, which goes hand in hand with the Barrett Comunidad Editorial project[4].

It is a meeting table where we talk about politics, read a wide range of books, write and share our texts, and try to bring all of that into a printed production that looks good, is done well, and comes out quickly. A more or less “improvised,” artisanal form of publishing that seeks to be beautiful within financial precarity, to circulate widely within the discretion that characterizes our practice.

The experience began in 2016 at Penal Unit No. 2, known as Las Flores prison (located on the outskirts of the city), and today continues at the Model Correctional Institute Unit No. 1 “Dr. César Tabares” in Coronda (about forty minutes from the city of Santa Fe).

In the specific case of the reading and writing workshops, they were always possible thanks to the existence of university classrooms inside the prison. The University Education in Prisons Program of the Universidad Nacional del Litoral maintains a classroom in each of the prisons in Santa Fe and in Coronda. There, the initiative to “do something” with incarcerated comrades was always well received. Generally, in the form of volunteer work, entry into the prison and the meetings with comrades take place with the backing of the public university.

To avoid an account overloaded with program names, detours, and complications, it is enough to highlight a few key moments. Our first production was the Antidictionary of Words in Prison, in 2018. Within the framework of the provincial program Nueva Oportunidad, between 2018 and 2019 we printed our only industrially produced book, titled Counterversions of Life in Prison. We later realized that the artisanal and self-managed mode, printing short runs sufficient for sale at the fairs in which we participate, was a much more sustainable model than its alternative mediated by commercial printers and more expensive materials. Sales were always made at a minimal price that would allow us to recover funds to continue producing copies.

From the outset, we worked with free licenses and without ISBNs, because among us there were activists from free software and free culture movements. We chose Barrett as the name through a vote—it was one of the last meetings in Las Flores before the pandemic—in reference to Rafael Barrett (Bravo, 2020; Chica, 2018; Lissorgues, 2025; Martínez, 2020), an author we had read at the beginning of the workshop. We later published some of his texts as well. Currently, and with several titles in between, we publish from Coronda the magazine Tumbergencia (2025), a neologism invented by our comrade Fénix by combining tumba (tomb) and divergence, which defines itself as a “pasquin of free writing.” As anarchist publications once warned, Tumbergencia notes that it “comes out when it can,” something that also applies to life in prison: when one can, one gets out.

The project did not move to Coronda; rather, it re-emerged there. Within the framework of a volunteer initiative to accompany students entering the university, as always, I shared the news that the Collective and the editorial project existed, and that if there was interest, something could be done. There was interest, so the news became the possibility of creating something together.

The comrades built their own authorial voices. Fénix with his poetic flight, Nano with his political positioning, the comrade who signs as “an Argentine” discovered his powerful narrative voice; Erudito with his transparency, Gabriel with his stories marked by faith, among many others. Prison imposes its own rhythm: some comrades are released every two weeks, others return when they finally manage to make it to the classroom.

Fénix expresses that rhythm in a poem titled “sub poena,” which, because it is brief and forceful, we often read at our public interventions:

Prison is the genesis of routine and controllable behaviors: searches from time to time, buses from time to time, visits from time to time, a freedom from time to time, sports from time to time, from time to time so much happens, that we fall silent so much, we row so much, so much is lost, that we take so long, that I feel so foolish, that I lack so much, that my time is so foolish, that I wait so much, such clumsy consolation, it got so late (Tumbergencia, 07/28/2023, Year I, No. I).

“It got late,” says Fénix, because, like the workers whom Rancière listens to in The Nights of Labor (2017), night is the time stolen from prison for literature, beyond those two weekly hours when the group meets.

“Nights,” says the one who signs as an Argentine, “were my inspiration. With no television or anything to distract me, I clung to reading. Without realizing it, I already had a few short texts that could fit.” In a text written after the first year of Tumbergencia, he recounts the first scenes he experienced when he joined the workshop. The first time he took part in the moment of sharing some printed copies on the table -the moment when his texts appeared for the first time- he felt that we had built a place of belonging there, where one could be part “of something beyond being a prisoner” (Tumbergencia, 07/04/2024, Year II, No. 8).

He also identifies a projection that constantly reappears at the table. Everything we do builds an archive. A key emerges toward a form of “eternity,” because “the day our physical existence disappears from this world, someone will bring us back to life by reading Tumbergencia, the pasquin of free writing” (Tumbergencia, 07/04/2024, Year II, No. 8).

These two dimensions identified by an Argentine can be translated into two concepts that become central for us. On the one hand, our group—our work table—as a space that founds or amplifies the possibility of subjectivation. On the other hand, it also constitutes a space for the construction of a living archive. Both dimensions converge in Rancière’s idea of the “taking of the word.”

Taking the word

In this idea of constructing an archive -where the archive is understood as a praxis rather than as an object of study- I hear the echoes of another sensation: the echo of names and pseudonyms that emerge from the magazines and newspapers of early twentieth-century anarchists in cities such as Santa Fe or Paraná.

With two or three exceptions, these are not names that appear in the lists of illustrious militants remembered by historiography. Rather, they are militants who, even when they produced a substantial body of doctrinal texts or essayistic elaborations, can only be sketched biographically.

At the outset, my research set out to examine the language policies of the anarchist movement in the Argentine littoral from 1890 to 1920. I later discovered that, at this doctoral stage, I could only account for anarchism in Santa Fe and Paraná, from the first reports of militant presence around 1900, extending the time frame to 1930, since the 1920s were the most prolific decade for anarchist editorial production in Santa Fe.

Unlike other studies that work with a consolidated archive, I quickly found that the anarchist archive is dispersed and fragmented, as a result of the persecutions its militants endured both under dictatorship and under democracy. The Emilio Zolá Library, with more than one hundred years of existence, preserves little to nothing of its own past, having been the target of arson attempts on more than one occasion, in addition to repeated closures.

Most of the anarchist archive is located in Buenos Aires, in microfilm copies, or in Europe. It is an archive that, by the very nature of anarchism, does not interest the State, except insofar as its actors are considered “dangerous.” In many cases, when information about militants does exist, it comes from criminal records and arrest documents, as well as from the work of intelligence services that persecuted them.

At the same time, it is not clear that contemporary anarchist activists wish to enter official archives. What they do seek, instead, are spaces such as the Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas[5] (CeDInCI) or the Centro de Estudios Históricos de los Trabajadores y las Izquierdas (CEHTI), whose work of preservation and open-access dissemination is of immeasurable value.

Something similar occurs with the archive of writings produced in prison. It is an institution extensively documented by the State itself, just as the legal lives of incarcerated people fill pages -if not entire folders- in police archives. Yet the literature they write, even when it takes the form of a book and achieves some degree of public circulation, tends to become dispersed or lost, except for the various initiatives developed through prison extension programs[6] except for the various initiatives developed through prison extension programs at the University of Buenos Aires, or the more recent exhibition Prisons: Narratives of Confinement (1878–2025) held at the Mariano Moreno National Library[7].

Both the anarchist archive and the archive of prison writing constitute archives of a counter-history (Gallagher & Greenblatt, 2000, p. 17). A counter-history of a people, of its institutions, of resistance to the State and the Market. A counter-history of a significant number of lives that are narrated in a one-directional manner, without the participation of those who are themselves being referred to.

Anarchist production, together with writings such as those of Tumbergencia and other similar projects, document an attempt to twist the pre-established social distribution of speech. They document, and at the same time seek to create, a forced redistribution of speech as a public good. Subjects who have no place in the distribution take the floor by force, and suddenly the rest of the social actors must recognize that there was someone there who could speak for them.

It is no coincidence, in the anarchist case, that some groups present themselves under names such as El Perseguido (The Persecuted), subtitled La voz de los explotados (The Voice of the Exploited); or publications whose titles are directly La voz de la mujer (1896) (The Voice of Woman), La Libera Parola (1900) (The Free Word) or La voz del esclavo (1901) (Voice of the Slave). These names point to what they were constructing on the political stage, just as others named their actions with titles such as Demoliamo (1893) or La Protesta (1897), and others named their subjects El descamisado (1879), El oprimido (1894), or El Rebelde (1898).

Language, or more colloquially “the word”, is a common good that shares the fate of so many other commons which, with the advance of modernity, are subjected to enclosure and privatization. This privatization, in this case, takes the form of a loss of agency. Those who are excluded or dominated, if they have any place on the scene at all, are usually spoken for by those who occupy positions of domination. Even when this is done with the best intentions, the other does not decide. Does not speak. Does not make decisions. Has no place to create the representation of the self that they wish to create.

Rancière offers a set of notions that allow these problems to be conceptualized. As he argues in Disagreement (1996), politics occurs when groups that initially had no place in the social distribution of speech take it by force. This means interrupting the already established circulation of the parts that count (those that are taken into account and that can count, that can tell their versions of the world).

This interrupts the distribution of legitimized, authorized, publicly visible voices in order to open a new space of subjectivation, of the creation of subjectivities. When this happens, “there is politics.” Everything else is, in Rancière’s terminology, “police”: a form of control and pacification of the parts of a community (Rancière, 1996, p. 44). A “taking of the word” disrupts that harmony and forces a transformation:

Political activity is that which displaces a body from the place assigned to it or changes the destination of a place; it makes visible what had no reason to be seen, makes heard a discourse where there was only noise, makes heard as discourse what was previously heard only as noise. (Rancière, 1996, p. 45).

When there is a taking of the word, a political community is superimposed upon the community structured by the police order, a community that exists “by and for conflict, a community that is the conflict over the very existence of what is common between those who have a part and those who have none” (Rancière, 1996, p. 52).

Both at the Tumbergencia table and in the anarchist taking of the word, a scene is traced in which it becomes possible to produce “a capacity for enunciation” that was previously not identifiable “within a given field of experience.”

This comes to “produce a multiplicity” that contradicts the police logic of a community. It does not correspond, for example, to the proletariat or to prisoners as a collective ethos that unifies a single voice, but rather reveals a “multiplicity of fractures” that separate each individual “from their ethos and from the voice that is supposed to express their soul.”

There is no possible mediation or representation because what is at stake is a “multiplicity of verbal events (…) of singular experiences of the dispute over word and voice, over the partition of the sensible” (Rancière, 1996, p. 53).

In other words, the fact that there have been those who speak “for workers” -voices that claim to express the soul of the worker- does not mean that working-class groups acquire a voice and inaugurate their own spaces of subjectivation, which will necessarily be plural, because “the worker” is not a stable entity but rather agents who begin to dispute their own representation.

In the same way, Tumbergencia, insofar as it seeks to account for a “divergence,” for a community of diverse and even opposing voices, often makes it impossible to account for what we collectively produce except by inviting others to read the broadsheets themselves.

The Glottopolitical and the Glottopolicing

I located my doctoral research within the coordinates of what is known as glottopolitics (Arnoux & Del Valle, 2010). Most of the work in this field examines texts that explicitly address languages. In many of these studies, tools from discourse analysis are used to reveal the textual operations at work. This is the case even when the central category of the field is that of “linguistic ideologies” (Woolard, 2012), which aims to reveal what underlies discourse and, therefore, should be observable even in texts that deal with other topics.

As a result, although there is a politicizing intention, the relationship between language and politics ends up being framed primarily as a relationship between languages and government. This undoubtedly constitutes one part of the initial pairing, but it does not fully cover the territory that the term itself seems to promise.

Anarchism, even at an a priori level, suggests that its political project poses a challenge to this type of approach. As is well known, the anarchist movement opposes all forms of domination. “Neither god, nor boss, nor husband”, an old anarchist slogan, continues to be reproduced on T-shirts and walls in many parts of the world. They were libertarians -let us reclaim the term from its current right-wing uses- insofar as they upheld a sense of individual and collective freedom that was anti-statist, anti-religious, and anti-capitalist.

Only one academic body of work has addressed anarchism in Argentina from the perspective of the language sciences. This consists of a series of articles and the doctoral dissertation of Mariana Di Stefano, later reworked into two books: Anarchism in Argentina: A Discursive Community (2015) and The Libertarian Reader: Reading Practices and Ideologies of Argentine Anarchism, 1898-1915 (2013).

However, several issues emerged there that I understood I could contribute to. First, under the label Argentine anarchism, what was actually being delimited was anarchism in Buenos Aires. Moreover, the central material for that work consisted of only a few issues of La Protesta Humana (The Human Protest), the newspaper later renamed The Protest. While this newspaper is undoubtedly central to the anarchist movement, and includes texts by militants from different parts of the country—circulating as well across the continent and Europe—the mediating role played by the editorial group in relation to the rest of the militants was not problematized in that research.

In response to Di Stefano’s work, my interest was to open up a range of nuances, because the fundamental feature of any decentralized activist movement, past or present, is precisely its plurality of voices.

If one examines only the front pages of a short series of periodical publications from Santa Fe, it quickly becomes evident that there are internal disputes, competing styles, and militants who call each other out and argue even within the same printed initiative.

In the early issues of the anarchist cultural magazine La Campana (1919), voices are constructed that establish a clear asymmetry with respect to the addressed audience (the intellectual circles of Santa Fe, the anarchist intelligentsia of the region). From an aesthetic that is still modernist and allusive, the working class and students appear as passive, secondary actors, never as the intended recipients of the word being circulated by the magazine. If the worker had been the subject of enunciation in the initial moments of anarchism, here the worker becomes merely a topic about which one writes, and it is not even clear that they are considered interlocutors. At the same time, the city of Santa Fe is represented as a backward town in which the magazine’s promoters must create everything from scratch (La Campana, 06/29/1919, Year I, No. 1).

Even in its early issues, the magazine does not explicitly state its ties to anarchism, perhaps to evade censorship and political persecution. But, when repression strikes, and the militant López Arango, one of its editors, receives an ultimatum from the police to leave the city, things change. In the opening manifesto of the sixth issue, the magazine calls for abandoning abstractions and summons “words of struggle, words that appeal to the heart rather than the intellect” (La Campana, 09/07/1919, Year I, No. 6).

By contrast, the newspaper La Revuelta (The Revolt), which appears that same year, is explicitly anarchist from the outset. It is a workers’ newspaper whose format and spirit resemble those of the earliest anarchist newspapers in Argentina, with El Perseguido (The Persecuted) as its exemplary model. In its pages, as in La Campana (The Bell), there are dense doctrinal texts. But there is also labor news, reports on police attempts to seize bundles sent to other towns such as San Cristóbal, summaries of railway workers’ union assemblies, and accusations against union leaders aligned with the government.

This alone already demonstrates the plurality characteristic of anarchism, at least in its printed initiatives. There is more: Teófilo Dúctil, director of La Revuelta, who writes against intellectuals in his own newspaper, also reproduces that anti-intellectual stance in La Campana. He writes for both publications, even though the latter maintains a clearly intellectualist style. This plurality within anarchism is conflictual; it is a movement in which the word circulates in unstable ways and constantly seeks polemic. It is an effectively political movement, if we follow Rancière.

Activist experience -whether lived or researched- brings into dialogue the level of language and discourse with another dimension of the social and the political that exceeds the management of languages. If one examines not legislation but rather “takings of the word,” the prior scenes that make them possible, or the subsequent scenes and their trajectories over time, a glottopolitics of conflict emerges. In Rancière’s terms, this notion would be redundant, because within his framework one might instead distinguish between a glottopolicing (the linguistic policies of governments, norms, and institutions) and glottopolitics proper (that of actors who erupt onto the political scene, whose politics of the word disrupt the circulation of already legitimized voices).

Representation

Every time we intervene publicly with the Contraversiones collective or the editorial project, we make a move that is, at its core, glottopolitical. We challenge a progressive common sense that defines militant practices of communication, publishing, or whatever else as “giving a voice to those who have no voice.” We say no: everyone has a voice. What is needed, rather, is to make ears grow on those who do not want to listen. Eyes on those who do not want to see. That is, one must take the floor: interrupt and force others to listen.

At this point, those of us who go in and out of prison are also affected by it. Years of friendship are lost in the legal labyrinths surrounding an incarcerated comrade. Dialogues and forms of accompaniment are interrupted due to prison-related issues or, on the outside, when one of the many ministries involved shifts its perspective. But those who must take the floor are the incarcerated comrades themselves. Those of us who go in and out, at most, create together a scene that makes this possible.

All of this leads, from the standpoint of research, to two related questions: who can have the floor? And how is it expressed? The first question concerns the social distribution of speech. Looking at the signatures in anarchist publications shows that, over the years, part of the movement became institutionalized, while another part remained in rebellion.

The second part of the question refers to styles and forms. The anarchist archive shows how circulating culture is reused, copying with variation. For example, the scientific spirit is omnipresent, but it does not lead to a survival-of-the-fittest evolutionism; instead, it points to Kropotkin and his idea of the survival of those who cooperate best. Similarly, there is a moralizing discourse against vices: not drunkenness as an offense to bourgeois morality, but drunkenness as something that clouds the judgment of the exploited, weakening and distracting them.

The same happens in current forms of activism. Quite literally, we reuse old illustrations that are in the public domain for our designs. Concepts from Foucault and quotations from a range of authors are mobilized in the service of making visible a humanity that seeks emancipation at the very center of state control.

This is an infra-politics that weaves and unweaves its emancipatory projects at the heart of an institution that denies freedom and dignity to its inhabitants. Infra-political actors periodically attempt to take public speech, somewhat below certain radars, in order to speak themselves and say something. A step from the “hidden transcripts” of survival in prison for the comrades -and of the very possibility of the workshop and our projects for the collective- toward “public transcripts” and strategies for dialoguing with institutions, the state, party politics, and governance.

All of this keeps us in constant tension with the problem of representation: someone speaking in the place of others. As now, when the person writing speaks in the place of others. The comrades point out that there is trust, a pact tied to the fact that we share a common horizon. One holds onto that code of friendship that we have built, insofar as I may bear a certain responsibility, but no domination (because the existence of power does not necessarily imply domination).

Thus, Tumbergencia is printed with the texts that the table -the group- decides should be printed. The table: eight people who meet inside the prison and want to say things, some among themselves, others publicly. Hidden transcript, public transcript.

The anarchist movement resonates at our table partly because of me: I read anarchists and bring anarchist readings. In everyday practice -in the complaints and deliberations through which we decide what to do and how, together with the comrades- I find loose threads that allow me to think about past activisms, to give density to each fragmented biography I encounter in texts and documents, to look skeptically at the distribution of speech when the signer is also a journalist in bourgeois newspapers, or when the signer is a worker; when the signer was arrested and immediately released, or arrested and detained, or expelled from the city.

Prisoners of the past published their manifestos in Santa Fe anarchist journals such as Palotes (1929-1930) or Orientación (1924-1933). They denounced inhumane living conditions. One sees again there, in the 1920s, what one sees in the morning upon entering prison a hundred years later. One sees again in prison what was happening in prisons even before the walls that now enclose us in the workshop were built.

Politics of words. Should we name prison as prison, as a context of confinement, as a center of torture? Should we name our comrades as prisoners, as people deprived of their liberty, as survivors (if they manage to get out)?

Final comments

Every taking of the floor involves a risk; to enunciate it has a cost. The Santa Fe anarchist Leónidas Acosta was arrested during the 1930 coup and sent to Devoto prison. His printing press shared the same address as his home, which was also the address of the El Porvenir Library, the Libertarian Graphic Association, and the anarchist newspaper Orientación. In prison, he was tortured until half of his body was left paralyzed. In the courtyard of what was his house, the adapted linotype he used in later years still waits. With his broken body, all of those militant initiatives came to an end. Behind him, many other comrades were arrested, like Francisco Rivolta, who questioned the circulation of words in the anarchism of small towns, and so many others. Sara Dubovsky was also arrested in the coup; she wrote in Palotes and assisted prisoners, the daughter of a mother and father who were both prominent anarchists and immigrants to Santa Fe.

Their printed productions constitute part of that archive for a counter-history of the city and of many other scales and framings: a counter-history of politics, of publishing, of speech, of language.

Every time we print an issue of Tumbergencia or another project with the comrades, that sense of satisfaction appears. We keep going. The moment will come when the space we have founded will come to an end. It is ephemeral, mutable. Many times it is concealed within the grind of prison life; at other times it stands out inside the prison and becomes a problem. When opportunities for visibility on the outside appear, they are always celebrated.

Loose threads of a fabric that also speak to the University: activist experience, past and present, can not only enter into dialogue with academia as an object of research, or as outreach and engagement. It can also generate concepts, think itself, contribute theories… even if they are wild or feral theories and concepts, coming from the pastures of what for some is “empiria,” and for others is pain, deprivation, struggle, or the table of a workshop.

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