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Title: Anarchist Counterpublics
Author: Kathy E. Ferguson
Date: 2010
Language: en
Topics: politics, history
Source: *New Political Science*, Volume 32, 2010 — Issue 2, Pages 193–214. DOI: 10.1080/07393141003722040

Kathy E. Ferguson

Anarchist Counterpublics

Abstract

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were key figures in the creation of

anarchist counterpublics in the US at the turn of the last century.

Their work drew together immigrant subcultures, labor activists,

progressive liberals, radical women, and international supporters to

create a counterpublic within which anarchist ideals could achieve

intelligibility. Their public words illuminate the dynamic relationship

between the realm of ideas, the social imaginary, and the bodily habitus

within which anarchism came to be in the United States. Viewing

anarchism as a counterpublic highlights the significance of its

temporalities, social locations, and textual practices. At the same

time, reconsidering counterpublics in light of anarchist world-making

practices suggests a more hybrid, fluid, non-linear conceptualization of

radical counterpublics.

Introduction

From their arrival in the US in the 1880s until their exile in 1919,

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were instrumental in creating vibrant

anarchist counterpublics. Goldman was the best-known anarchist in

America. Berkman, while less known outside of anarchist circles, was a

stalwart figure in radical labor activism. But what does it mean to

create and address a radical counterpublic? Who participated in these

publics and what modes of constitution and address did they facilitate

or require?

This essay looks to the political agitation of Goldman and Berkman to

develop an account of anarchist counterpublics in the US at the turn of

the last century. Focusing primarily on their journals, with some

consideration of lectures, books, and other textual practices, I find an

energetic triangle of political ideologies, symbolic communities, and

embodied practices out of which anarchist counterpublics took shape.[1]

Goldman established, edited, and wrote for the monthly journal Mother

Earth, a pocket-sized publication with a sizeable circulation that ran

from 1906 to 1918. Berkman also edited and wrote for Mother Earth;

subsequently, he put out his own weekly journal The Blast (1916–1917)

and the remarkable, poignant Prison Blossoms during his

incarceration.[2] While no doubt some readers were merely curious or

even hostile—the government, after all, was a reliable collector of

anarchist materials—the readership of the journals also regularly

attended and helped organize lectures, participated in protests, and

hosted the editors on their cross-country speaking tours. While

anarchism is often dismissed with the bromide, “it’s great in theory,

but it would never work in practice,” I suggest, on the contrary, that

it is in the intense and energetic world of political practice that

anarchism’s extraordinary but neglected presence in US politics can best

be charted. Of course, there is no hard-and-fast distinction to be drawn

between anarchist theory and anarchist practice, since each takes its

shape from and helps create the other; yet it is still useful to shift

focus away from the arguments anarchists made in order to examine what

their anarchism allowed them to accomplish. Accordingly, I am pushing

Goldman’s and Berkman’s theories temporarily to the background in order

to illuminate the dynamic relationship between the realm of ideas, the

social imaginary, and the bodily habitus within which anarchism came to

be in the United States.[3]

Why Counterpublics?

Nancy Fraser’s influential critique of Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural

Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) emphasized “a host of

competing counterpublics,” rather than a single unified bourgeois public

sphere, and sketched the contestatory relations among these “parallel

discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and

circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate

oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and

needs.”[4] Building on Habermas and Fraser, scholars have analyzed a

variety of counterpublics, including those organized by women,[5]

African Americans,[6] queers,[7] the proletariat,[8] and artists.[9]

While Mark Morrison has written a fascinating analysis of Dora Marsden’s

anarchist journal The Freewoman (later called The Egoist) as a

counterpublic textual space, to my knowledge no one else has applied the

fertile concept of counterpublics to anarchism.[10]

In his useful overview of counterpublic literature, Robert Asen asks,

“What is counter about counter publics?”[11] Asen identifies

“participants’ recognition of exclusion from wider public spheres” and

“articulation through alternative discourse practices and norms” as

constitutive of their emancipatory potential.[12] Taking Goldman’s and

Berkman’s activism as an example, we can both explore and expand Asen’s

response. The anarchists certainly understood themselves as largely

excluded from hegemonic public spaces, and they developed vigorous

discursive arenas to create their own counterpublic spheres.

Additionally, they allow us to see the intensely embodied material

context within which anarchist ideas emerged and through which they were

put into circulation. Both our understandings of anarchism and of

counterpublics benefit from their encounter. Bringing the concept of

counterpublics to bear on anarchism helps us to see the concrete

practices through which this social movement did its work, and to chart

the relations it sustained to various audiences and subcultures.

Similarly, bringing anarchism into the discussion of counterpublics

explores the political potential of activism based more on shared

political vision than on prior sexual or racial identities, and

highlights the often vicious repressions faced by radical critics. Going

beyond the idea of “parallel” publics (Fraser) or “nested” publics

(Taylor), anarchist counterpublics embody both directly antagonistic

clashes with dominant authorities as well as considerable influence upon

those dominant spheres. Anarchist political practices, I argue, both

created effective counterpublics and at the same time reinvented the

contours that alternative publics can usefully achieve. By foregrounding

the temporal and spatial practices of anarchism, I suggest a more hybrid

account of the work of radical counterpublics.

Articulating Publics and Counterpublics

Michael Warner provides a useful analysis of the circularity and

layering of publics: “Publics exist,” he explains, “only by virtue of

their imagining.”[13] A speaker or writer needs a preexisting public in

order to have someone to address, yet it is the act of addressing that

creates the needed public. From, roughly, the Haymarket Riots in 1886 to

the post World War I Red Scare, anarchism was an emergent site for this

ironic process, shaping a vigorous counterpublic within the US.[14]

Grounded largely in the radical immigrant communities on the coasts,

while spreading to some “native” (that is, non-immigrant)[15] labor and

liberal circles, anarchism exemplified the relationship Warner describes

between counterpublics and subcultures:

A counterpublic, against the background of the public sphere, enables a

horizon of opinion and exchange; its exchanges remain distinct from

authority and can have a critical relation to power; its extent is in

principle indefinite, because it is not based on a precise demography

but mediated by print, theater, diffuse networks of talk, commerce, and

the like. … [T]his subordinate status does not simply reflect identities

formed elsewhere; participation in such a public is one of the ways by

which its members’ identities are formed and transformed.[16]

The constitutive relation between immigrant subcultures and anarchist

counterpublics is intensified because these communities are largely

subaltern, organized by racial/ethnic, religious/cultural, and above

all, class stratification to produce, as Dilip Gaonkar suggests,

“form[s] of social solidarity” embracing radical social change through

“imaginative act[s] of world-making.”[17]

Warner sketches three levels of public-ness, each of which is at work in

anarchist social imaginaries. First, the public can refer to people in

general, gathered up into a collective noun that must be imagined into

reality, such as humanity, Christianity, or all residents of a nation.

Secondly, “public” can mean a more concrete and located audience, one

that can “witness itself in visible space,” as in the audience for a

theater production, sporting event, or concert.[18] Charles Taylor calls

this the “topical common space” because particular people are assembled

in a specific place for an identifiable purpose.[19] Warner, however, is

primarily concerned with a third sense of public: “the kind of public

that comes into being only in relation to texts and their

circulation.”[20] These publics are text-based, either oral or written,

and they are “autotelic…[they] exist by virtue of being addressed.”[21]

Not just a group of people, but a collectivity organized by discourse,

textual publics are “capable of being addressed and capable of

action.”[22] Textual publics cohere with Taylor’s metatopical space, one

that “knits a plurality of spaces into one larger space of

nonassembly.”[23] Text-based publics extend beyond friends to include

strangers, combine both personal and impersonal modes of address, work

on a temporal rhythm of publication, and help constitute a life world by

circulating among readers/listeners whose attention is constitutive of

“the social space created by the reflexive circulation of

discourse.”[24]

Goldman’s and Berkman’s publics illustrate the intertwining of these

three levels of publicity. At the grandest level, they imagined “the

People,” “the masses,” “the workers,” or “the oppressed” as their

audience and their potential comrades. Struggle over the meaning of the

multitude occupied them throughout their lives, yet they never ceased to

negotiate some relationship with humanity itself. Yet, as a practical

matter, there must be mailing lists, lecture halls, bookstores, and

other locations for distribution of texts so that this imaginary

audience, the People, can be addressed. So the most general level of

public within which anarchists circulated their words still bore a de

facto relation to identifiable geographic areas and social groupings.

At Warner’s second level, Goldman’s extensive audiences for her lectures

and speeches constituted something like a theatrical public, a crowd

that could know itself by shared attendance at a public event. By my

estimate, Goldman gave over 10,000 speeches during her political career.

Like William Jennings Bryant and other successful turn-of-the-century

orators, her lectures drew thousands of listeners, combining political

education, organizing, and entertainment. Goldman estimated that, during

the years of touring in the first two decades of the 20^(th) century,

she spoke to 50,000–75,000 people annually.[25] Her lectures were often

sites where the emergent anarchist counterpublic rubbed shoulders with

other political dispositions, inciting conversations among radicals and

liberals over shared agendas such as freedom of speech or access to

birth control. Also a respected lecturer, Berkman’s public-creating

skills were strongest in militant labor circles, while Goldman’s topical

publics brought radical and liberal audiences together to experience the

possibilities of coalition.

At the third level, the one that most concerns Warner, the anarchists

spoke into existence the counterpublic to which they addressed

themselves. Their addressees were to some extent projections, “always

yet to be realized.”[26] Their anarchist counterpublic included friends,

acquaintances, and identifiable groups (such as militant unions,

alternative theatre companies, anarchist colonies, radical educators,

and civil libertarians) while extending further into the realm of

strangers and operating under the surveillance of the authorities.

Goldman and Berkman maintained offices (which were periodically raided

by the police), kept subscriber lists (sometimes confiscated),

corresponded with readers who invited the anarchists to lecture in their

communities (frequently prohibited by local authorities), and set up

talks at which copies of Mother Earth, The Blast, and other anarchist

publications would be available for purchase (when not seized and

destroyed). Always there was an excess of possible readers, a

combination of known individuals and groups along with a yet-to-be

tapped reservoir of potential members and an alert constituency of

enemies.

Taking Goldman and Berkman as the lens through which to examine the

workings of counterpublics, the distinctions that Warner draws recede in

significance while the interactions among the levels stand out. Goldman

and Berkman addressed the broadest possible public, which they imagined

as The People, even as they came to doubt the masses’ capacity to “wake

up.” The anarchists directly addressed the third level, the textual

counterpublic, in their indefatigable production and circulation of

written words. Candace Falk notes that there was “a strong written and

oral tradition among anarchists.”[27] These traditions included a well

developed material circuitry by which texts were produced and

distributed, social conditions of access were facilitated, terms of

intelligibility were made available, and practices of “genre, idiolect,

style, address, and so on” were articulated and contested.[28] Both

writers flourished in part because a vigorous “culture of circulation”

already existed, yet they also helped to materialize that culture by the

act of addressing it. They used the second level of public, the physical

assembling of an audience for a public event, as a vehicle to draw more

of the masses into the circle of comrades: that is, the second kind of

public constituted their opportunity to recruit from the first level,

the broader public, into the third, the focused textual counterpublic.

Goldman’s unique epistolary writing style exemplified a mixing of

personal with impersonal forms of address. She wrote over 200,000

letters during her lifetime, and her letters were often the basis for

her speeches, essays, books, and subsequent letters.[29] A letter, of

course, is addressed to someone in particular, a known

correspondent-in-the-flesh. Sometimes she sent carbon copies of her

letters, which could be pamphlet-sized epistles (especially those to

Berkman) to other correspondents, then built on the themes of letters

addressed to a particular person to create an impersonal document

addressed to strangers. Berkman’s prison letters similarly, albeit on a

much smaller scale, segued into the journal Prison Blossoms, invoking a

radical prison micropublic. While Warner insists on a distinction

between “an implied addressee of rhetoric and a targeted public of

circulation,” the anarchists’ mixed genres suggest more intimate

linkages among these relations.[30] Warner maintains “that publics are

different from persons, that the address of public rhetoric is never

going to be the same as address to actual persons.”[31] Yet, the

epistolary style bleeds between personal and impersonal and in the

process knits together modes of address to particular others with those

to a generalized public.

For purposes of my explorations of anarchist counterpublics, the

following aspects are particularly relevant: publics are multiple,

temporal sites of struggle, anchored in concrete material spaces, and

capable of enhancing the lives of their participants through the

world-making practices of political struggle. In the next sections, I

chart some of the key ingredients of anarchist political worlds to show

how they worked as counterpublics. Bringing the analytic energy of

counterpublics to anarchism does more than describe the same phenomena

in different language; it forces fresh aspects of anarchism to the fore,

compelling new insights. In the final section, I use these insights to

put pressure on Warner’s and Taylor’s analyses, expanding them to be

more capacious with regard to anarchist worlds.

1. Publics are multiple and fluid

They are “potentially infinite in number” and composed of multiple,

interactive layers.[32] Gerard Hauser offers the image of a reticulate

structure of discursive sites, a network of emergent processes.[33]

Warner elaborates:

No single text can create a public. Nor can a single voice, a single

genre, even a single medium. All are insufficient to create the kind of

reflexivity that we call a public, since a public is understood to be an

ongoing space of encounter for discourse. Not texts themselves create

publics, but the concatenation of texts through time.[34]

A “concatenation of texts” is a good description of the radical émigré

communities of New York City. Goldman has often been heralded as “ahead

of her time,” but in fact she was very much of her time, an active node

in networks of textual reflexivity by which anarchism constituted itself

in discourse and institutions. In 1919 Attorney General A. Mitchell

Palmer, making his case to the Senate for even more stringent anti-red

laws, helpfully cataloged the available radical publications into 222 in

foreign languages, 105 in English, 144 published in foreign countries

and distributed in the US, and “hundreds of books, pamphlets, and other

publications which also receive wide circulation.”[35] Well-known

journals included the Italian-language Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive

Chronicle) edited by Luigi Galleani; Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty;

Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, edited by two of the Haymarket martyrs;

Regeneración, a Spanish-language paper edited by Mexican revolutionary

Ricardo Flores Magón; Johann Most’s Freiheit; and the long-running

Yiddish-language paper Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Free Voice of Labor).

Texts circulated in nearly every European and many Asian languages and,

eventually, in English.

Texts always happen in spaces. Popular theater productions and weekly

lectures were robust sites for the circulation of texts: not only were

spoken texts produced in these spaces, and specific self-recognizing

publics constituted by attendance, but books, pamphlets, and journals

were often sold there as well. Salons, homes, cafés, editorial offices,

community centers, pubs, union halls, free schools, court rooms, and art

exhibits were sites for the “concatenation of texts” through time. The

hundreds of radical publications that so worried Attorney General

Palmer, while concentrated in the New York area, were not limited to the

east coast: Robert Reitzel edited the successful German-language

literary weekly Der arme Teufel (The Poor Devil) in Detroit; Paris,

Illinois, was the home of The Truth Seeker, the oldest freethinker

publication in the world; Moses and Lillian Harman edited the weekly sex

radical publication Lucifer, the Lightbearer in Valley Falls, Kansas.

Goldman and Berkman raised money for anarchist journals like Free

Society and The Firebrand as well as their own publications. Their dense

network of citational references and social encounters took place within

a horizon of intelligibility whose modes of articulation, address, and

consumption made anarchism thinkable.

2. Publics are located in relation to material life spaces

While counterpublics are not the same as subcultures, the former must

have a constitutive link to the latter. A subculture both makes and is

made by its counterpublics. Life spaces have certain characteristic

elements that are formative for publics. Warner explains:

To address a public or to think of oneself as belonging to a public is

to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social

world, to have at one’s disposal certain media and genres, to be

motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a certain

language ideology.[36]

This “kind of person” taps the prevailing construction of subject

positions and identity practices within a particular counterpublic. The

“social world” flags the habitus, “the conventions by which we

experience, as though naturally, our own bodies and movement in the

space of the world.”[37] The last three characteristics in Warner’s list

constitute the anarchist social imaginary: “media and genres” indicate

the salient forms of articulation and communication constituting the

available interpretive practices. “Normative horizon” taps the cultural,

religious, and political values formative within communities, and

“language ideology” gets at the discursive universe of intelligibility

by which ideas can be enunciated and solutions to problems formulated.

On one level, the life space within which Goldman participated in

anarchist counterpublics was her own immigrant Jewish female body, a

physical site so improbable for public discourse that it was heavily

scrutinized by incredulous observers. Newspaper accounts of Goldman’s

speeches frequently began with the observation that she was “clean.”

Nelly Bly’s sympathetic interview with Goldman on the front page of the

New York World noted that Goldman “loves her bath.”[38] The press was

obsessed with the details of her physical appearance, commenting

extensively on her wardrobe, and in her youth continuously surprised at

her “good looks.”[39] Later representations of Goldman portrayed her as

big, rawboned, loud, crude, and mannish. Yet Goldman was less than five

feet tall, with a slender build in her youth, becoming matronly as she

aged. She dressed stylishly; in one memorable letter to her niece Stella

Cominsky, she carefully specified the hat, gloves and collars she needed

in order to properly dress for her release from prison.[40] While no

doubt personal vanity was one consideration, Goldman was well aware of

the anxieties her public presence evoked. She spoke in public; she

smoked cigars; she declined to participate in the conjugal domestic

family; she talked authoritatively about politics, religion, and sex.

She negotiated a thicket of heteronormative expectations about bodies

and publics, upsetting persistent stereotypes about unwashed immigrants,

dirty Jews, and mannish unwomen.

Berkman’s embodied presence in public life was less remarked upon than

Goldman’s, both because he was a man and because he was not a celebrity

as Goldman became. Yet his personal demeanor and presentation, like hers

always punctiliously respectable, took their significance from the

larger space of embodied danger in which the two anarchists lived.

Anarchist spaces were filled with violence. Everywhere that Goldman and

Berkman traveled, they spoke and worked with people who were shot,

clubbed, and trampled by public and private security forces during

strikes and other protests. Between 1877 and 1903, state and federal

troops were sent 500 times to put down strikes.[41] Equally violent were

the private security forces. Corporations raised “powerful private

armies that often operated outside the law” while detective agencies

provided strikebreakers, armed guards, and labor spies.[42] Politically

active radicals in the US during this volatile time could not take for

granted that they would be physically safe; their bodies were not

secure. Additionally, routine arrests, constant official harassment,

ever-present and potentially fatal danger of spies and provocateurs—such

conditions created a painfully disruptive personal and symbolic space

while putting a high premium on friendship and loyalty. This level of

violence strains yet also intensifies the social imaginary: it fractures

and at the same time binds the implicit understandings that enable

common practices.

Beyond the immediate space of their own embodiment, Berkman and Goldman

participated in multiple loosely affiliated, overlapping groupings,

including the following:

Eastern European, Italian, and Jewish immigrantsUntil 1893, Goldman

spoke and wrote mostly in German, Russian, and Yiddish to “the

formidable immigrant non-English-speaking subculture,” and in many

cities she gave two sets of lectures, one “English,” the other “Jewish.”

While Goldman became a household name in America, the immigrant Left

remained “her loyal audience and refuge.”[43] Although Berkman’s

formative 14 years in prison severed him from the Lower East Side, he

nonetheless wrote his prison letters and journal first in German, later

switching to English to broaden circulation. Both anarchists developed

ties to the militant Italian anarchist communities and worked in exile

for the release of Sacco and Vanzetti. They worked with immigrant

organizations sponsoring speeches, organizing demonstrations,

establishing schools, publishing pamphlets, papers and newsletters, and

in myriad other ways put texts into circulation among immigrant workers.

Progressive labor organizations and individualsIn 1894, while Berkman

was in prison, Goldman began to criticize the “flamboyant insularity” of

the radical immigrant subpublics and began lecturing in English to wider

audiences.[44] She found support for her campaign to reduce Berkman’s

prison sentence in the United Mine Workers of America. She made common

cause with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), who fought for

free speech because it was an organizing issue for labor. Even more so

than Goldman, Berkman remained focused on labor: he participated in

radical labor actions in California, organized the unemployed in New

York, and supported striking miners in Ludlow, Colorado.[45] Both

Goldman and Berkman moved toward syndicalism as the economic

underpinning of anarchism, looking to labor and the general strike as

agents and vehicles of social change.

Radical women. (including many from the other four categories in this

list)Candace Falk observes that Goldman addressed “a growing movement of

women drawn to but often not completely satisfied with suffrage

solutions.”[46] Goldman spoke to The Women’s National Liberal Union; The

Ladies Liberal League in Philadelphia, organized by anarchists

Voltairine de Cleyre and Natasha Notkin; and women’s clubs and

congresses in the US and Europe. Both The Blast and Mother Earth

supported the movement to wrest information about birth control from the

forbidden category of “obscenity” and make it widely available to women,

stressing the constituent connections between women’s reproductive

unfreedom, on the one hand, and the interests of the capitalists in

producing docile workers and the state in growing cannon fodder for

future wars, on the other. The anarchist movement, like the IWW, was

generally hospitable to women, many of whom were successful orators,

organizers, and writers. While Goldman and a few others are often

portrayed as the archetypal activists of the first wave of feminism, an

extensive, diffuse web of radical women helped to form, and were in turn

formed by, anarchist and related radical publics.

“Native” liberalsIt was a source of much contention in the anarchist

movement, particularly with Berkman, when Goldman began participating in

non-immigrant, English-speaking liberal political circles, the groups

Falk characterizes as “the lively edge of the liberal reform

mainstream.”[47] While Berkman and others feared that Goldman was

diluting anarchism’s radical edge, she was also expanding its public

presence. Goldman spoke to the Liberal Clubs, which “adhered to free

thought principles and focused especially on protesting the role of

organized religion in state affairs.”[48] She forged a friendship with

young Roger Baldwin and contributed to the organization of the Free

Speech League and the American Civil Liberties Union.[49] She addressed

Single Tax clubs, Freethinkers, Social Science Clubs, philosophical

societies, church congregations, and literary societies.

While Berkman was less enthusiastic than Goldman about allying with

liberals, he nonetheless worked closely, as did Goldman, with the Ferrer

Association and the Modern School movement, one of the key opportunities

for linking anti-authoritarian middle class liberals with immigrant,

working-class radicals.[50] Goldman looked for pregnant intersections,

where partial interests converged, and built on them. She “crossed over”

to speak with groups who often viewed anarchists as the lunatic fringe,

yet entertained some partial convergence with anarchist ideas,

especially ideas about free speech, birth control, and other

individualistic causes which did not necessarily require a critique of

capitalism. By 1906, when Mother Earth made its début, this successful

anarchist journal reached a broad left/liberal audience of as many as

10,000 readers.[51] By pushing these audiences to consider a more fully

radical critique of existing institutions, and to embrace anarchism’s

vision of social transformation, Goldman’s coalition politics connected

anarchist counterpublics with more conventional life spaces.

Progressive international audiencesGoldman assumed the role of

“anarchist emissary,” contributing to the creation of international

counterpublics by reporting back to America about European activism, and

vice versa.[52] She brought foreign anarchists to visit the US, setting

up speaking tours for British anarchist John Turner and Russian

anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Her labor helped create “an informal

pan-national exchange.”[53] In her campaign to reduce Berkman’s prison

sentence, she internationalized the protests, drawing support from

England, Scotland, France, Germany, Russia, and Austria. Both The Blast

and Mother Earth carried news of rebellious politics around the world,

linking radical labor, education, and anti-colonial struggles. The

global anarchist counterpublic also tapped the single tax movement in

Scotland, England, and Germany; anarchist individuals and groups in Asia

and South America (who often translated Goldman’s essays); and anti-war

activism around the world.

Unique anarchist spacesIronically, given the common equation of

anarchism with chaos, anarchists have an impressive record of creating

separate institutions run on libertarian principles. This form of direct

action creates an example of the new, free society within the belly of

the old. Berkman, Goldman, and other anarchists were the main force

behind the Modern School movement, an international effort to create

non-authoritarian and joyous learning environments based on the

educational philosophy of martyred Spanish educator Francisco

Ferrer.[54] The schools also served as evening schools for adults and as

community centers; the most famous, the Ferrer Center in New York City,

was a vibrant source of anarchist art, drama, and literature until

forced to close in 1918.[55] Several anarchist “colonies”—intentional

anarchist communities—flourished in the US, notably at Stelton, NJ,

Mohegan, NY, and Home, WA. Mother Earth and The Blast carried regular

announcements of meetings of radical libraries, current events circles,

dances, concerts, dinners, and other events at which audiences were

assembled, anarchist texts were put into circulation, and unflagging

efforts were made to constitute and sustain anarchist public spaces.

3. Publics have their own temporality

Warner calls our attention to “a temporality of circulation,” “a regular

flow of discourse” that organizes time, as time organizes it: “Public

discourse is contemporary, and it is oriented to the future; the

contemporaneity and the futurity in question are those of its own

circulation.”[56] He emphasizes the importance of “newsletters and other

temporally structured forms oriented to their own circulation” in

forming textual publics.[57] Usually, in studying anarchist

publications, the controversial content of the material stands out; but

Warner calls our attention to the temporal regularity and common

calendar of publications—not so much what was said, but the pace and

timing with which discourse was put into circulation. Anarchists

cultivated a remarkable proclivity toward regular, clearly dated

publications. In the case of Mother Earth, Goldman’s annual lecture

tours were part of the regularity of the cycle of monthly publication.

Goldman reported back from the field, informing readers about anarchist

activities in other regions. Her animated field reports served as

radical travelogues for readers unable to visit other regions, building

geographic familiarity that helped people imagine themselves as part of

a larger anarchist landscape.[58]

Mother Earth regularly marked the anarchist counterpublic by producing

it in discourse. No wonder, then, that Goldman and Berkman struggled so

hard to maintain the journal despite scarce resources and government

harassment: it was not simply that anarchism happened elsewhere and

Mother Earth reported it, but that the acts of writing, soliciting,

editing, producing, and circulating Mother Earth were a happening of

anarchism. The reliable punctuality of circulation was crucial to the

shared sense of participating in discussion “unfolding in a sphere of

activity.”[59] The temporality of a textual public is “not timeless,”

Warner explains, and “not without issue”—“the more punctual and

abbreviated the circulation, and the more discourse indexes the

punctuality of its own circulation, the closer a public stands to

politics.”[60] In this light, it is understandable that the creators of

struggling anarchist publications would insist on frequent and regular

appearance. Anarchism is often understood primarily in psychological

terms, as the offspring of well-meaning dreamers or driven fanatics;

shifting attention to the temporal rhythms of publications calls on us

to ask less about anarchists’ motivations and more about what they were

able to accomplish. The circulation itself is an active part of the

process, not the “inert opposite” of the writing.[61] Of the 60

anarchist and other progressive publications documented by the editors

of the Emma Goldman Papers and by historian Paul Avrich, 28 were

weeklies, 19 were monthlies, six were semi-monthly, three were dailies,

two were biweekly, and only two were variable.[62] Journals’ frequency

and regularity are not simply traits of instrumental delivery vehicles

for a politics that happens elsewhere—they are the politics, part of the

ongoing production of public temporality. As Gaonkar and Povinelli

explain, the “flows and forms are integrally related” so that the form

of circulation both conveys and conducts social life.[63]

The flow and the form came together in the person and the machine of the

anarchist printer. The materiality of the printers’ skilled laboring

bodies and the presses’ irreplaceable mechanical productions held pride

of place in anarchist communities. Along with garment work, printing was

one of the most common trades of anarchists, especially among the Jews.

Joseph Ishill, widely known as “the anarchist printer,” operated the

Berkeley Heights Press for more than 40 years, producing approximately

250 books and pamphlets “whose publication through the usual commercial

channels was unfeasible.”[64] Ishill was a crucial link in the political

economy of circulation, selecting texts by major anarchist thinkers,

lovingly printing them with the greatest artistry, and adorning them

with woodcuts and engravings by well-known artists.[65] Joseph Labadie,

founder of the Labadie Collection of radical literature at the

University of Michigan, was a well-known anarchist printer, as was his

son Laurance, who inherited his father’s small hand press and his

passion for anarchism.[66] Berkman himself was a printer. Pedro Esteve,

a leader among the Spanish anarchists in the US, was a printer in Tampa

and set type for La Questione Sociale in Paterson.[67]

The role of the printer was respected, even revered, within anarchist

publics. Regardless of their professed atheism, anarchists were people

of the book. The printers’ labors sometimes resembled a guerrilla war on

hegemony; outnumbered and on the run, they fired back their volleys of

words and evaded capture in order to carry on again tomorrow. Recalling

her days printing Frayhayt illegally and distributing it clandestinely,

Sonya Deanin remembered, “It was holy work, you know, to distribute our

literature, to spread the word.”[68] Others used similar spiritual

language to speak of the struggle to produce the printed word: Bronka

Greenberg, one of four young people who ran an underground press in

Warsaw in the 1930s, remembered, “The press was our most treasured

possession. It must be kept safe at all costs.” Working in isolation and

secrecy, they printed a few hundred copies, distributed them

immediately, and then returned to their disguised print shop to do it

again. Greenberg recalled, “It was sacred work.”[69]

Anarchist schools taught printing, passing the crucial skills of

circulation to subsequent generations. Anarchist cultures of circulation

were further enhanced by vigorous grassroots commitments to translation.

There were several anarchist bookstores and numerous booksellers.

Multilingual anarchist communities made each others’ writings available

through creative labors of circulation, which are also labors of

production. The interlocking networks of printers, translators, and

booksellers helped sustain the “ongoing life” of anarchist publics.

Warner explains,

It’s the way texts circulate, and become the basis for further

representations, that convinces us that publics have activity and

duration. A text, to have a public, must continue to circulate through

time, and because this can only be confirmed through an intertextual

environment of citation and implication, all publics are intertextual,

even intergeneric.[70]

Mother Earth relied on certain practices of reflexivity to generate the

needed ongoing feedback loops. Short, punchy articles were accompanied

by activist reports and scornful (but carefully calibrated) defiance of

Comstock laws and other vehicles of censorship. Readers’ relations to

other readers were coordinated through ongoing debates, letters and

responses, and appeals for funds and support. A regular feature called

“Comments and Observations” offered “brief, occasionally humorous news

items, miniature editorials, and follow-ups relating to previous issues

of the magazine—a kind of anarchist ‘Talk of the Town.’”[71] Ongoing

attention to subsequent journal issues was cultivated by serial

publication of some of the longer works. Cover art by Robert Minor,

Jules-Félix Granjouan, Adolf Wolff, Man Ray, and Manuel Komroff

cultivated readers’ attention.[72] Chatty announcements and

advertisements notified readers of anarchist activities and events, such

as the opening of anarchist bookstores; upcoming masquerade balls,

dances, and parties (usually fundraisers); lectures, mass meetings, and

commemorations of landmark anarchist events; and other anarchist

publications made available through the Mother Earth Publishing

Association. The journal’s temporal rhythms and self-reflexive circuits

were constitutive of anarchism’s intelligibility.

Another temporal source of meaning for anarchist counterpublics was the

ritual recognition of key historical events. The executions of the

Haymarket martyrs in 1887, Spanish educator Francisco Ferrer in 1909,

and Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 were fertile moments of international

protest and collective anger; the annual remembrance of these deaths

produced a regular periodicity shaping the social imaginary. Similarly,

the anniversaries of outrages against labor—Homestead, Ludlow, and

Hazelton—were occasions to organize time in ways that made “we”

possible. Goldman was a master at anarchist time: she regularly

identified the opportunities and worked to produce the memorial

services, annual dinners, commemorative marches, and other “discursive

forms, practices, and artifacts” that, as Gaonkar and Povinelli explain,

“carry out their routine ideological labor of constituting subjects who

could be summoned in the name of a public or a people.”[73] These

events, repeated through dogged insistence and the continuous re-telling

of anarchist counter-histories, produced a lively literature of protest,

which in turn was the vehicle for reinforcing the countermemories, in a

continuous chain of circulations. Additionally, each node in the

temporal chain was a fund-raising opportunity. For example, it was

Goldman’s idea to organize annual commemorations of Ferrer’s death

across the US to remind people of the outrage against a man widely seen

as “a martyr of free thought, done to death by a vindictive clericalism

in league with a reactionary state.”[74] Anarchists were joined by

liberals, socialists, and people of many progressive strains to condemn

the execution of another Socrates. Jack London recalled, “It were as if

New England had, in the twentieth century, resumed her ancient practice

of burning witches.”[75] By 1910, 25 cities had memorial gatherings for

Ferrer; the largest, in New City, brought 5000 people to Cooper Union

“to pay tribute to the Spanish martyr.”[76] At these events, organizers

raised funds to support what eventually became a network of 22 Modern

Schools across the US, a fitting commemoration for a teacher whose last

words, when facing the firing squad, were “Long live the Modern

School.”[77] These temporal practices cemented a cadence of ritual

memory sustaining public affect.

4. Publics are both sites and products of struggle

Publics always have histories in which the “preconditions of [their]

intelligibility” are produced and contested; at the same time, publics

exceed and confound their own enabling circumstances and maintain an

ambiguous relation to conscious political action.[78] Warner notes that

“when people address publics, they engage in struggles—at varying levels

of salience to consciousness, from calculated tactic to mute cognitive

noise—over the conditions that bring them together as a public.”[79] Yet

the conditions of struggle are not fully within the domain of conscious

reflection. They also operate metapragmatically, within “the very notion

of a public or by the medium through which a public comes into

being.”[80]

In Goldman’s and Berkman’s worlds, the conditions of struggle were

frequently overt and continuous. One of anarchism’s many ironies is that

this fiercely independent counterpublic could not help but be formed, in

Craig Calhoun’s words, “by struggle against the dominant organization of

others.”[81] State and capitalist authorities identified Goldman and

Berkman as public enemies. They were viewed as the terrorists of their

time, minor participants in a series of assassinations and attempted

assassinations that by World War I had targeted 15 heads of state.

While government harassment probably contributed to the mystique

surrounding the journal, it also hampered its public-making endeavors.

The police seized radical literature when they arrested radicals. The

Post Office frequently delayed circulation or confiscated issues

altogether. The US Post Office confiscated the June and August 1917,

issues of Mother Earth because the journal’s opposition to conscription

was defined as espionage under the era’s anti-anarchist laws. When

Goldman and Berkman were arrested on June 15, 1917, the day the

Espionage Act passed, The Blast ceased publication. Mother Earth, in the

hands of Stella Cominsky and Fitzi Fitzgerald, struggled on until August

1917, publishing vivid accounts of Goldman’s and Berkman’s trial; after

closure, it was resurrected for six months as the smaller Mother Earth

Bulletin, again confiscated by authorities (this time for publishing an

account of the lynching of 13 black soldiers at an army base in Texas),

and followed yet again by a brief underground newsletter, Instead of a

Magazine. In July 1918, with Goldman and Berkman in prison, federal

agents raided Fitzgerald’s apartment in Greenwich Village, closed down

the newsletter and the Mother Earth Book Shop, and circulated the names

of 8,000 subscribers to federal intelligence agencies. A series of

nationwide arrests followed: thousands of people were seized, often held

incommunicado for weeks, and charged with vague crimes; few were

convicted, but about 800 “undesirable aliens” were eventually deported,

Berkman and Goldman among them. Until the end, official persecution by

the authorities immediately became grist for subsequent publications:

trial transcripts and letters from prison, along with accounts of

arrests and confiscations, were featured in subsequent issues, in a

persistent ballet of circulations, seizures, and counter circulations of

words.

5. The absence of a public or counterpublic is damaging to human

potential

Publics, Warner insists, are world-making. To address a public is to be

motivated by the relationships such address enables, to participate in

the constitution of a formative social imaginary. The poetics of public

discourse is performative. Its speeches and performances “try to specify

in advance, in countless highly condensed ways, the lifeworld of its

circulation.”[82]

While a common way to imagine public speech is the metaphor of

conversation, Warner points out that public words involve much more than

the back-and-forth of dialogue: the utterances and responses of public

address are located in “potentially infinite axes of citation and

characterization.”[83] The metaphor of conversation suggests that first

you have two speakers, then they talk to one another. The analogy is too

tame and stable for the open-endedness and multi-layeredness of publics,

too much about persuasion and argument, not enough about the

world-making expressivity of calling worlds into being through

imaginative speech.

The utter tenacity and indefatigability of Goldman’s and Berkman’s

struggles can be understood as an unflagging commitment to anarchist

world-making. Berkman lovingly characterized the circulation of prison

letters as “a fresh mountain streamlet joyfully rippling through a

stagnant swamp.”[84] The anarchists wrote and spoke themselves into

collective life, and when they could not imagine addressing a public

capable of comprehending them, they despaired. Berkman committed suicide

in 1936 when the toll of imprisonment and exile, compounded by illness

and the withering of anarchist counterpublics, produced what Warner

aptly characterizes as “political depressiveness, a blockage in activity

and optimism, a disintegration of politics toward isolation,

frustration, anomie, forgetfulness.”[85] Goldman believed that, had

Berkman comprehended the robust anarchist possibilities of the Spanish

revolution, “he would have made an effort to continue living … the

chance to serve our Spanish comrades in their gallant fight would have

strengthened his hold on life.”[86] While Goldman also suffered in

exile, her prodigious letter-writing maintained her contact with

comrades and sustained her participation in making anarchist worlds.

Prison as Public Space

While prison, as Gramsci observed, is a poor place to write, Berkman’s

prison writings offer a condensed site for analyzing the complex

struggle to create a counterpublic by addressing it. When Berkman first

entered prison, he found the People sorely lacking. The young anarchist

expressed near comic disappointment in his fellow inmates for their lack

of class nobility or revolutionary consciousness: “they do not belong to

the People, to whose service my life is consecrated.”[87] Yet over time

he moves from pity and condescension to intimacy and love: “Daily

association dispels the myth of the ‘species’ and reveals the

individual. Growing intimacy discovers the humanity beneath the fibers

coarsened by lack of opportunity, and brutalized by misery and

fear.”[88] His apocalyptic revolutionary expectations were mediated by

the daunting circumstances of long imprisonment. In a December 1901

letter to Goldman he reflected on their former thinking, when “wisdom

[was] dear at the price of enthusiasm” and “our eyes were riveted upon

the Dawn.”[89] Yet it was not his revolutionary commitments that

changed. At the end of his prison term, he still believed: “On the wings

of an all-absorbing love I hastened to join the struggle of the

oppressed people.”[90] Rather, it was his understanding of the complex

human beings who might come to participate in anarchist publics that

underwent thoughtful, painful rethinking.

Berkman’s prison writing began with letters. When fellow anarchists Carl

Nold and Henry Bauer joined Berkman in prison, they began a vigorous

correspondence. Berkman writes: “The presence of my comrades is

investing existence with interest and meaning. It has brought to me a

breeze from the atmosphere of my former environment; it is stirring the

graves, where lie my soul’s dead, into renewed life and hope.”[91] The

prisoners exchanged views on aspects of anarchism, at first separated by

old disputes, including their loyalty to or bitterness at their

anarchist mentor, Johann Most, Berkman’s “shattered idol.”[92] Yet the

act of exchanging ideas soon progressed beyond rehashing old arguments.

Their surreptitious correspondence was world-making:

The evening hours have ceased to drag: there is pleasure and diversion

in the correspondence. The notes have grown into bulky letters, daily

cementing our friendship. We compare views, exchange impressions, and

discuss prison gossip…. The personal tenor of our correspondence is

gradually broadening into the larger scope of socio-political theories,

methods of agitation and applied tactics. The discussions, prolonged and

often heated, absorb our interest.[93]

The problematic materiality of their communication required extensive

attention:

The bulky notes necessitate greater circumspection; the difficulty of

procuring writing materials assumes a serious aspect. Every available

scrap of paper is exhausted; margins of stray newspapers and magazines

have been penciled on, the contents repeatedly erased, and the frayed

tatters microscopically covered with ink. Even an occasional fly-leaf

from library books has been sacrilegiously forced to leave its covers,

and every evidence of its previous association dexterously removed. The

problem threatens to terminate our correspondence, and fills us with

dismay.[94]

When a sympathetic inmate secured a large supply of paper, the three

comrades expanded their correspondence into a magazine, initially in

German and subsequently in English, entitled Prison Blossoms. They

recruited other writers: an inmate whom they name Meistersinger

contributed “a rather creditable poem.”[95] As they invented their

publication, they imagined their counterpublic.

In contrast to the persistent regularity of other anarchist

publications, the clandestine collective writing of Prison Blossoms

struggled forward according to the irregular opportunities of prison

time. Within the unforgiving circumstances of incarceration, the

anarchists created a clandestine round-robin system of production and

circulation in which the readers were also writers:

Soon we plan more pretentious issues: the outward size of the

publication is to remain the same, three by five inches, but the number

of pages is to be enlarged; each issue to have a different editor, to

ensure equality of opportunity; the readers to serve as contributing

editors. The appearance of the Blüthen [Blossoms] is to be regulated by

the time required to complete the circle of readers, whose identity is

to be masked with certain initials, to protect them against discovery…

[They] are to act, in turn, as editor-in-chief, whose province is to

start the Blüthen on its way, each reader contributing to the issue till

it is returned to the original editor, to enable him to read and comment

upon his fellow-contributors. The publication, its contents growing in

transit, is finally to reach the second contributor, upon whom will

devolve the editorial management of the following issue.[96]

He described the contents with pride:

The unique arrangement proves a source of much pleasure and recreation.

The little magazine is rich in contents and varied in style. The

diversity of handwriting heightens the interest, and stimulates

speculation on the personality of our increasing readers-contributors.

In the arena of the diminutive publication, there rages the conflict of

contending social philosophies; here a political essay rubs elbows with

a witty anecdote, and a dissertation on ‘The Nature of Things’ is

interspersed with prison small-talk and personal reminiscence. Flashes

of unstudied humor and unconscious rivalry of orthography lend peculiar

charm to the unconventional editorials, and waft a breath of Josh

Billings[97] into the manuscript pages.[98]

Ironically, Berkman worried about their success—Zuchthasblüthen “soon

discovers itself a veritable Frankenstein,” as “the popularity of joint

editorship is growing at the cost of unity and tendency.”[99] Things

were getting out of hand: the little journal was overwhelmed with

poetry, lacked sufficient paper, was becoming ideologically dispersed

within the counterpulls of multiple micropublics. Berkman, Nold, and

Bauer brought in other inmates, including two “Homestead men,” Hugh F.

Dempsey and Robert J. Beatty, union activists from the Knights of Labor

who were accused of attempting to poison the food of strike-breakers.

For Berkman, their arrival “offers opportunity for propaganda among

workers representing the more radical element of American labor.”[100]

The contours of the counterpublic shifted again.

The little magazine was eventually discontinued because of constant

harassment by the warden. But the writers renewed their correspondence

when possible and eventually revived Prison Blossoms; by that time, the

Knights of Labor men had been pardoned, the poet also released, but they

recruited others, including more imprisoned strikers from the Duquesne

confrontation. Readers, generally drawn from “the more intelligent and

trustworthy element,” renewed their “subscriptions” by contributing

material, creating an active feedback loop within their public.[101] The

public they were creating in prison also contained enemies—the “stools”

and “trusties” who worked for the officers and could not be trusted. The

process occasionally worked the other way, producing a friendly guard

who became an ally. Berkman’s analysis of the authority structure of the

prison is part of the hazardous process by which he recruits and

produces his public. Berkman writes:

The editorials are short, pithy comments on local events, interspersed

with humorous sketches and caricatures of the officials; the balance of

the Blossoms consists of articles and essays of a more serious

character, embracing religion and philosophy, labor and politics, with

now and then a personal reminiscence by the “second-story man,” or some

sex experience by “Magazine Alvin.” One of the associate editors

lampoons “Billy-goat Benny,” the Deputy Warden; “K” sketches the “shop

Screw” and “the Trusted Prisoner”; and “G” relates the story of the

recent strike in his shop, the men’s demand for clear pump water instead

of the liquid mud tapped from the river, and the breaking of the strike

by the exile of a score of “rioters” to the dungeon. In the next issue

the incident is paralleled with the Pullman Car Strike, and the punished

prisoners eulogized for their courageous stand, someone dedicating an

ultra-original poem to the “Noble Sons of Eugene Debs.”[102]

More troubles beset their fragile relations: some readers were moved to

inaccessible parts of the prison; two contributors died; the route of

writing and circulating was in disarray. In the face of persistent

obstacles to journal circulation, they decided to write a book. Their

public shifted again; confident that a resourceful friend could smuggle

the manuscript out of prison, they spoke more to the hypothetical public

outside prison gates.[103] Throughout this process, Berkman worked on

the materials of confinement to create a counterpublic by, as Warner

eloquently explains, “elaborating common worlds, making the

transposition from shame to honor, from hiddenness to the exchange of

viewpoints with generalized others, in such a way that the disclosure of

self partakes of freedom.”[104] Like other prisoners of conscience

described by Hauser, Berkman’s prison writings are “an example of the

resistance he advocates.”[105] Within the harsh and degrading space of

prison, these writings made worlds.

Concluding Thoughts

The vicissitudes of anarchist activism can provide insights for refining

our understanding of counterpublics. For example, Warner dwells

persistently on what he takes to be a troubling circularity of publics,

the “chicken and egg” problem—the public has to exist in order for us to

address it, but it can’t exist until we address it. Yet Warner’s own

insights into the temporality, multiplicity, and porosity of publics

suggests that he is too rigid in some of his categories, too anxious

about an original moment, when his own arguments suggest a focus on

connections and processes rather than stable cause and effect relations.

Warner rightly points out that publics and counterpublics sustain

tensions not attributable to the workings of domination on the

oppressed. The search for a better public or counterpublic, while

worthwhile, will not resolve these enduring tensions. Our problem isn’t

only that some authorities are manipulative (although they are) or use

public culture to dominate (although they do); even if we succeed in

replacing an oppressive public culture with a more liberated one, Warner

insists that there are tensions inherent in any publics, including

counterpublics, that exceed containments and defy resolutions.

Yet when Warner sorts his way through different kinds of public speech

and writing, he sometimes insists on hard and fast distinctions among

registers of address that are better understood as porous and

interactive. For example, he contrasts public address with sermons,

finding that the latter lack the needed temporality and reflexivity of

circulation. A sermon, he insists, may be a kind of public eloquence and

may be political, but it is a message delivered from god to sinner and

lacks the circulation that constitutes and is constituted by public

address. Yet the example of Goldman’s public speaking blurs the

distinctions upon which Warner insists. Like the preachers whom Warner

describes, Goldman could often “speak with something other than [her]

individual voice, and… address the intimate hearer, creating a scene of

hearing markedly different from the speech of one person to others in

ordinary time.”[106] Goldman was often credited with exceptionally

moving address, as though she were speaking directly to the listener and

not to the crowd. Yet of course it is precisely the capacity to touch

and be touched by anarchism that she was putting into circulation.

Warner recognizes hybrid forms, such as the speech of itinerant

preachers addressing revivals, but rather than pursuing hybridity he

insists on a fundamental difference of the two categories of speech,

arguing that public speech is essentially circulating while sermons

address the private sinner.[107]

Warner’s analysis in this instance is too rigid to fully capture the

shifting practices of anarchist publics. Berkman’s and Goldman’s writing

blurred distinctions between letters addressed to a specific individual

and public speech addressed to the generalized other. Their practices

undo clear distinctions between words meant for circulation and those

meant only for exchange, as well as between the rhetorical practices of

sermons and those of public address. Examining the practices of

anarchist counterpublics suggests that hybridity of forms is the rule

rather than the exception. Were Warner to focus more on hybridity and

process, less on distinctions among categories, he could avoid some of

his anxieties about “which came first.” For example, after many pages of

insistence that publics are formed “merely” by address, he admits to a

“reality” that undermines this appearance: “A public seems to be

self-organized by discourse but in fact requires preexisting forms and

channels of circulation. It appears to be open to indefinite strangers

but in fact selects participants.”[108] Yet this abrupt distinction

between how things appear and how they really are would be unneeded,

were Warner to give up the search for a founding moment. Why not instead

embrace the relations among moments of a dynamic, non-linear, mutually

constitutive process? Goldman’s and Berkman’s public careers presumed

the publics they helped articulate. They took the risk of addressing

participants outside their immediate circle, engaging the “fruitful

perversity” of inviting strangers into a circulatory field that the

strangers might well destroy.[109] The unpredictability inherent in

public world-making marked both its risks and its possibilities.

Similarly, Taylor’s analysis of publics is usefully taxed by the

pressure of anarchist examples. Taylor’s image of publics is too smooth,

its exchanges too conversational, to fully grasp the abiding frictions

both within and between contending publics. Taylor emphasizes the

commonness of publics, the way people fit together with others, “how

things go on between them and their fellows,” while in anarchist

political spaces the “way things go on” is fraught with danger.[110]

Attention to anarchist counterpublics puts pressure on the serenity of

Taylor’s account, bringing more turbulence into the triangular relation

of social imaginaries, political ideologies, and bodily practices. While

Warner recognizes the centrality of struggle to the workings of publics,

he too sometimes lets the language of commonness dull his attention to

the violence that struggle may entail. The instability and risk that

Warner appears to regret are the flip side of the possibilities that the

anarchists embraced. Warner states:

Publicness is just this space of coming together that discloses itself

in interaction. The world of strangers that public discourse makes must

be made of further circulation and recharacterization over time; it

cannot simply be aggregated from units that I can expect to be similar

to mine. I risk its fate.[111]

For Goldman and Berkman, their ability to draw upon anarchist social

imaginaries to locate “the expectations that are normally met” in

collective practices was both sustained and compromised by their

subaltern position.[112] Their position was compromised because

anarchists served as the constitutive Other of proper social order; it

was sustained because it was exactly that fracture which anarchists

utilized to articulate their critique and to draw suffering or visionary

individuals into their circulations of words. Anarchist public-making

was dangerous business, and Goldman and Berkman did indeed risk its

fate.

[1] Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries: An

Introduction,” Public Culture 14:1 (2002), p. 11.

[2] In 1892 Berkman attempted to kill Henry Clay Frick for ordering

assaults on striking steel workers at Carnegie’s mills in Homestead,

Pennsylvania. He served 14 years in prison.

[3] I do not have space in this essay to develop their ideas; for a

fuller consideration, see my forthcoming book Goldman: Political

Thinking in the Streets (Rowman and Littlefield).

[4] Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the

Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25:26 (1990), pp.

61, 67.

[5] Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and

Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989);

Mariangela Maguire and Laila Farah Mohtar, “Performance and the

Celebration of a Subaltern Counterpublic,” Text and Performance

Quarterly 14:3 (1994), pp. 238–252.

[6] The Black Public Sphere Collective (eds), The Black Public Sphere

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Melissa Harris-Lacewell,

Barbershops, Bibles, and BET (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2004); Michael Jeffries, “Do Barbershops Matter? Disaggregating and

Demystifying the Black Counterpublic,” paper presented at American

Sociological Association annual meeting, Boston, MA (July 31, 2008).

[7] Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2002).

[8] Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, trans.

Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis, MN:

University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

[9] Gregory Sholette, “Dark Matter—Activist Art and the Counter-Public

Sphere,” InterActivist Info Exchange <

http://info.interactivist.net/node/1946> (accessed July 20, 2009).

[10] Mark Morrisson, “Marketing British Modernism: ‘The Egoist’ and

Counter-Public Spheres,” Twentieth Century Literature 43:4 (1997), pp.

439–469.

[11] Robert Asen, “Seeking the ‘Counter’ in Counterpublics,”

Communication Theory 10 (November 2000), p. 426.

[12] Robert Asen, “Seeking the ‘Counter’ in Counterpublics,”

Communication Theory 10 (November 2000), p. 427.

[13] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, pp. 56–57.

[14] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 8.

[15] I am focusing on Goldman’s and Berkman’s work in the United States.

For an account of Goldman after 1919, see Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in

Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War (Boston, MA:

Beacon Press, 1989).

[16] “Native” commonly meant non-immigrant for the anarchists,

suggesting both their distance from indigenous people and their

absorption in a political world framed by immigration.

[17] Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries,” p. 16.

[18] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 66.

[19] Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14:1

(2002), p. 113.

[20] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 66.

[21] Ibid., p. 67.

[22] Ibid., p. 69.

[23] Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” p. 113.

[24] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 90.

[25] Peter Glassgold (ed.), Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s

Mother Earth (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), p. xxvi.

[26] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 73.

[27] Candace Falk, “Forging Her Place: An Introduction,” in Falk, Barry

Pateman, and Jessica Moran (eds), Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of

the American Years, vol. I, Made for America, 1890–1901 (Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 2003), p. 2.

[28] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 73.

[29] Richard Drinnon and Anna Maria Drinnon (eds), Nowhere at Home:

Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (New York:

Schocken Books, 1975), p. xiv.

[30] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 72.

[31] Warner, op. cit., p. 78.

[32] Gerard Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and

Public Spheres (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999),

p. 90.

[33] Warner, op. cit., p. 9.

[34] Gerard Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and

Public Spheres (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999).

[35] Investigation Activities of the Department of Justice, Letter from

the Attorney General (November 17, 1919) 66^(th) Congress, 1^(st)

Session, Senate Doc No. 153 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,

1919), p. 11.

[36] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p.10.

[37] Ibid., p. 23.

[38] Falk, “Forging Her Place,” p. 29.

[39] Falk, op. cit., p. 35.

[40] Drinnon and Drinnon, Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma

Goldman and Alexander Berkman, p. 8.

[41] Falk, “Forging Her Place,” pp. 19–20.

[42] Stephen H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries

and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC:

University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 4.

[43] Falk “Forging Her Place”, p. 21.

[44] Falk op. cit., p. 48.

[45] Barry Pateman, “Introduction,” in Alexander Berkman, What Is

Anarchism? (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), pp. iv–v.

[46] Falk, “Forging Her Place”, p. 29.

[47] Falk, op. cit., p. 29.

[48] “Directory of Organizations,” in Falk, Pateman, and Moran, Emma

Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, p. 572.

[49] See “Directory of Organizations,” in Candace Falk, Barry Pateman,

and Jessica Moran (eds), Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the

American Years, vol. II, Making Speech Free, 1902–1909 (Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 2005), pp. 557–558.

[50] Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in

the United States (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), pp. 42–52.

[51] Glassgold, Anarchy!, p. xxii.

[52] Falk, “Forging Her Place,” p. 39.

[53] Falk, op. cit.

[54] While the movement had its greatest success in the US, numerous

Modern Schools were created in Spain before state suppression closed

them down; schools were also founded in Brazil, Argentina, China, Japan,

and Europe. Nearly all of the former students of the Modern Schools

interviewed by Paul Avrich in Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of

Anarchism in America (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005) had strong positive

memories of their early anarchist educations.

[55] Avrich, The Modern School Movement, p. 272.

[56] Warner, Public and Counterpublics, p. 94.

[57] Warner, op. cit., p. 95.

[58] Falk, “Raising Her Voices: An Introduction,” in Falk, Pateman, and

Moran, vol. II, pp. 48–49.

[59] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 96.

[60] Warner, op. cit., pp. 96–97.

[61] Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, “Cultures of Circulation: The

Imaginations of Modernity,” Public Culture 14:1 (2002), p. 192.

[62] See the “Directory of Periodicals” in Falk, Pateman, and Moran, op.

cit., vol. I, pp. 563–569; vol. II, pp. 549–554; and vol. III,

forthcoming. My thanks to the editors for generously sharing the

Directory for volume III. See also “List of Periodicals” in Avrich,

Anarchist Voices, pp. 529–534.

[63] Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Technologies

of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition,” Public

Culture 15:3 (2003), p. 387.

[64] Avrich, The Modern School Movement, (2006), p. 257.

[65] Ishill became the printer in residence for the University of

Florida in 1964. Avrich, The Modern School Movement, op. cit., p. 259.

[66] Avrich, Anarchist Voices, p. 15.

[67] Avrich, Anarchist Voices, op. cit., p. 398.

[68] Avrich, Anarchist Voices, op. cit., p. 336.

[69] Avrich, Anarchist Voices, op. cit., p. 465.

[70] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 97.

[71] Glassgold, Publics and Counterpublics, p. xvii.

[72] Glassgold, op. cit.,, p. xvii.

[73] Gaonkar and Povinelli, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 389.

[74] Avrich, The Modern School Movement, p. 30.

[75] Quoted in Avrich, The Modern School Movement, op. cit., p. 37.

[76] Avrich, The Modern School Movement, op. cit., p. 47.

[77] Avrich, The Modern School Movement, op. cit.

[78] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 9.

[79] Warner, op. cit., p. 12.

[80] Warner, op. cit., p. 14.

[81] Craig Calhoun, “Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism,

Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Sphere,” Public Culture 14:1

(2002), p. 162.

[82] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 114.

[83] Ibid., p. 91.

[84] Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (New York: New

York Review of Books, 1999), p. 179.

[85] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 70.

[86] Goldman’s 1937 introduction in Alexander Berkman, What Is

Anarchism? (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), p. xi.

[87] Berkman, Prison Memoirs, p. 140.

[88] Berkman, Prison Memoirs, op. cit., p. 242.

[89] Berkman, Prison Memoirs, op. cit., p. 421.

[90] Berkman, Prison Memoirs, op. cit., p. 482.

[91] Berkman, Prison Memoirs, op. cit., p. 180.

[92] Berkman, Prison Memoirs, op. cit., pp. 180–182.

[93] Berkman, Prison Memoirs, op. cit., p. 179.

[94] Berkman, Prison Memoirs, op. cit.

[95] Berkman, Prison Memoirs, op. cit., p. 182.

[96] Berkman, Prison Memoirs, op. cit., pp. 182–183.

[97] Josh Billings was a well-known American humorist of the time.

[98] Josh Billings was a well-known American humorist of the time, p.

183.

[99] Josh Billings was a well-known American humorist of the time, p.

183.

[100] Josh Billings was a well-known American humorist of the time, p.

184.

[101] Josh Billings was a well-known American humorist of the time, pp.

283–284.

[102] Josh Billings was a well-known American humorist of the time, p.

283.

[103] Josh Billings was a well-known American humorist of the time, p.

335.

[104] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 61.

[105] Gerard Hauser, “Prisoners of Conscience and the Counterpublic

Sphere of Prison Writing,” in Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (eds),

Counterpublics and the State (Albany, NY; State University of New York

Press, 2001), p. 51.

[106] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 83.

[107] Warner, op. cit., p. 85.

[108] Warner, op. cit., p.106.

[109] Warner, op. cit., p.113.

[110] Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 122.

[111] Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” p. 106.

[112] Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” p. 106.