Such a counterpublic, while maintaining a vigilant and at times painful consciousness of its subordinate or subaltern relationship to the larger (and hostile) public within which it is embedded, would appear to have a number of advantages over the grand public. Its smaller scope—perhaps especially important for anarchists caught up in movements of displacement and migration, whether fleeing from Russian shtetls to the Argentine pampas or from rural Catalonia to seek factory work in Barcelona—could retain something of the intimacy of village life (even the intimacy of personal bickering), as against the anonymity and impersonality of the great urban centers. Like other counterpublics, as Warner notes, it permits “discussion … understood to contravene the rules obtaining in the world at large, being structured by alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying.”241 Anarchist counterpublic discourse, thus, can unfold partially outside the range of locally tolerated opinion and expression, the little space between official orthodoxy and the outer limits of heterodoxy—the invisible boundaries of “free” public discourse.
It is when outsiders peer into the counterpublic conversations taking place in an anarchist newspaper like Golos Truda (The Voice of Labor, 1911–1918) or Khleb i Volia (Bread and Freedom, 1917–1918) that these conversations, constituted by a universe of references not shared by outsiders, appear to be, as Karen Rosenberg says, “arcane,” “a body of esoteric knowledge,” reserved for the “initiated,” etc.242 The apparent mysteriousness of anarchist counterpublic discourse is accentuated when it unfolds under intense surveillance, censorship, and repression (e.g., under the Czarist and Communist regimes in Russia). In such conditions, when the only “safe” public discourse is that which mirrors “the flattering self-image of elites,” anarchist discourse might be expected to take on the kinds of cryptic, inaccessible forms—carefully coded exchanges of subversive signs—so evocatively described by James C. Scott in his studies of peasants’ resistance culture. Sometimes, anarchists did resort to encrypted speech: Bakunin, for instance, was an avid user of ciphers, foreshadowing today’s cryptoanarchists.243 However, the police were all too often capable of countering such evasive maneuvers, as in 1892, when a group of French anarchists using a fairly sophisticated code were arrested, their messages intercepted and deciphered.244 At other times, anarchists experimented with class-specific dialects that facilitated easy communication among equals while eluding the comprehension of “hostile informatives”: such was the case with the use of French argot in Émile Pouget’s (1860–1931) fin-de-siècle newspaper, the Père Peinard (1889–1902).245
But even in Russia, where anarchism was an illegal, underground movement, as Michaël Confino observes, the anarchists’ vocabulary is no argot; it is “not a clandestine language, the utility of which consists in not being understood by those not privy to the ‘secret.’”246 More often, especially under regimes with even limited freedom of speech and assembly, anarchists chose to openly defy bans and constraints, to make these into the occasion for struggle—the “free speech fights” of Emma Goldman and the IWW, for instance, holding meetings in public and challenging the laws. Anarchist movement poetry, by and large, pursues just this strategy, pushing the boundaries of acceptable public discourse rather than surrendering the field.
159 Mallarmé qtd. in Richard Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin De Siècle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 225, 332n28, 255; Ibid., 22; Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 207, 212. See also Mallarmé’s response to Jules Huret’s political questions in his Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (Paris: n.p., 1891), 61–62; and Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 10, 12, 24–25, etc.
160 Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 4.
161 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
162 Lucía Sánchez Saornil qtd. in Poetas del Novecientos: entre el Modernismo y la Vanguardia, Tomo I: De Fernando Fortún a Rafael Porlán, ed. José Luis García Martín (Madrid: Fundación BSCH, Fundación Santander Central Hispano, 2001), 159.
163 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 19.
164 For an extended argument on this point, see Hubert van den Berg, “Anarchismus, Ästhetik und Avantgarde,” in Anarchismus und Utopie in der Literatur um 1900, ed. Jaap Grave et al. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 22–45, and “Anarchismus für oder gegen Moderne und Avant-garde?,” Avant-Garde 3 (1989): 86–97.
165 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 195; Catherine Coquio, “Le soir et l’aube: Décadence et anarchisme,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 99.3 (mai–juin 1999): 454; Uri Eisenzweig, “Poétique de l’attentat: anarchisme et littérature fin-de-siècle,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 99.3 (1999): 443; Ball, Flight Out of Time, 19.
166 E.g., Lazare, L’Écrivain et l’art social, 23–25; Fernand Pelloutier, “L’Art et la révolte,” in Fernand Pelloutier et les origines du syndicalisme d’action directe, ed. Jacques Julliard (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971), 507; Luigi Fabbri, Bourgeois Influences on Anarchism, trans. Chaz Bufe (Tuscon, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2001), 8.
167 Georges Poinsot and Mafféo-Charles Normandy, Les Poètes Sociaux (Paris: Louis Michaud, 1909), xxv. This judgment might have to be considerably complicated by a consideration of the Korean case. During the period of anti-Japanese resistance, poets such as Hwang Seok-Woo (1895–1959) and Kwon Ku-hyeon (1898–1938), while concretely engaged with anarchist projects and organizations like the Heukdo Hoe (Black Wave Society), sometimes drew on Symbolist resources to articulate a utopian vision. Moreover, Symbolist coterie poetry journals like Jangmichon (Rose Village) often blurred the lines between poetry and political militancy. However, in the 1920s and 1930s, Korean anarchist poets were increasingly pulled in the direction of proletarian literature. See Cho Doo-Sub, “1920nyeondae hangug sangjingjuuisiui anakijeumgwa yeonsogseong yeongu [A Study on the Relationship Between 1920s Korean Symbolist Poems and Anarchism],” Ulimalgeul tong-gwon 26 (2002): 331–385; and Cho Young-Bok, 1920-yeondae ch’ogi si eui inyeom kwa mihak (The Ideology and Aesthetics of Korean Poems in the Early 1920s) (Seoul: Somyeong Ch’ulp’an, 2004).
168 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 125.
169 Alain Pessin, “Anarchisme et littérature au XXe siècle,” Proudhon, anarchisme, art et société: Actes du Colloque de la Société P.-J. Proudhon, Paris, 2 décembre 2000 (Paris: Société P.-J.