In account of those who don't count: writing in school and critique of consensus

In this article we discuss the problem of text production in the classroom, investigating how educational policies of recent decades may be favoring the fragmentation of students' enunciative stance. We analyze 28 essays produced by 8th graders in response to an exercise inspired by ENEM. We peer into those texts with Larrosa's notion of politics as a background; for him, politics consists of "communicating disagreements". We thereon discuss how students take position about a topic when writing. Concepts drawn fromDiscourse Analysis (in particular, conditions of production, enunciation scene, ethos, simulacrum) are used in order to analyze discursive regularities found in the data. We describe two movements made by the students: on the one hand, they emulate the "militant discourse" taken as a model of enunciation from the exercise itself; on the other, there is a series of "slips" through which divergent positions appear on the textual surface. We interpret the latter as occurrences that can rescue the political dimension of writing in the classroom, insofar as they are vanishing points in which a subject has not yet surrendered to the repetition of school doxa.