Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848-2011

315 Pages·2015·7.7 MB·English

by  Jesse Cohn

Part I: Resistance and Culture
The adverse decision of the Board of Pardons terminates all hope of release by legal
means.… The authorities are determined that I should remain in the prison, confident
that it will prove my tomb. Realizing this fires my defiance, and all the stubborn
resistance of my being. There is no hope of surviving my term. At best, even with the
full benefit of the commutation time—which will hardly be granted me, in view of the
attitude of the prison management—I still have over nine years to serve. But existence
is becoming increasingly more unbearable; long confinement and the solitary have
drained my vitality. To endure the nine years is almost a physical impossibility. I must
therefore concentrate all my energy and efforts upon escape.
—Alexander Berkman, “Chapter XXXIII: The Tunnel,” Prison Memoirs of an
Anarchist.
What strikes me …. is how after ten years in a maximum-security prison, as soon as
there was a tiny possibility of escape, the spirit and prose style of Alexander Berkman
sprang alive as if he had not been dehumanized at all.
—Paul Goodman, New Reformation.
Introduction: Of Tunnels and Theaters It
is true: there is a tony mall there now. In
Montevideo, Uruguay, the very walls that
once formed El Penal de Punta Carretas,
where, for decades, political prisoners
were held without trial and executed, now
harbor Punta Carretas Shopping, featuring
a Nike Shop, a Swarovski, an Adidas, a
Burger King, and, apparently, a women’s
clothing shop called “Tits.” Eighty years
ago, across the street at 2529 Calle
Solano García, there stood a zinc-roofed
warehouse that a small family of Italian
immigrants—Gino Gatti, Primina Romano,
and their child—had turned into a coal-
dealer’s shop in the spring of 1929,
hanging up a sign: “Carbonería El Buen
Trato” (fig. 1). It is from the back of this
shop that a fifty-meter-long tunnel was
dug, over the course of a year and a half,
into the prison bathroom, enabling a
number of anarchist prisoners to escape
from Punta Carretas in August 1931 (fig.
2). The policemen who discovered the
tunnel later on could not help but admire
its construction: no crude crawlway, it
had a vaulted ceiling that could
accommodate a standing adult of average
height. It was well ventilated, electrically
lit, and rigged with a system of alarm
bells.
Fig. 1: The “Buen Trato” charcoal shop.
Fig. 2: Gino Gatti’s tunnel.
At a certain point along the route of this tunnel, it intersects with another tunnel
that also runs under the floors of Punta Carretas, this one dating from 1971, when
over one hundred Tupamaro guerrillas made their prison break. When they broke
through into the old tunnel, they recognized it for what it was—they had read the
accounts. “My eyes will never forget,” one of the escapees later wrote, “the clearly
visible traces of their tools crossed with ours at the summit of the vault.” In a small
ceremony, they planted a sign there: “AQUÍ SE CRUZAN DOS GENERACIONES,
DOS IDEOLOGÍAS Y UN MISMO DESTINO: LA LIBERTAD [At this place
there was a crossing of two generations, two ideologies, and one destiny: freedom].”1
This crossing of ways and destinos does indeed invite contrasts as well as
comparisons, and not only contrasts of generation and ideology. Whereas the first
prison break was accomplished from the outside, the second was dug from within.2
The Tupamaros, who called their movement one of “national liberation,” were
overwhelmingly Uruguayan in origin, while the anarchists were of diverse national
origins—Italian, Catalan, Argentinean, German. Their movement, a “vast rhizomal
network,” was in no small part the byproduct of an age of expansion, a creature of the
telegraph line, the railway, and the steamship, carried by flows of immigration.3
Arriving always before (or after) its time, in the words of Sandra Jeppesen, it had “no
real permanent space of its own”; it subsisted in a state of perpetual motion. The Gatti
family participated in this circulation on many different levels: not only were they
multiple immigrants (Gino, for instance, first emigrated to Argentina in 1923 before
making his way to Uruguay), they also seem to have been engaged in illegal border-
crossing almost as a kind of profession. Archival records testify to governments’ ever-
frustrated, ever-renewed attempts to locate and fix the address of this family, tracking
it from one address to another, from one name to another. The Italian embassy in
Buenos Aires reported to Rome that Gino, later dubbed “El Ingeniero [The
Engineer]” for his tunneling prowess, had “a small motor boat that … provides for the
transfer of their fellow anarchists as well as for smuggling operations.”4
Tunnels belong to this theme of mobility. A tunnel is a means of escape to la
libertad—transitory, not a home, not a destino. But El Ingeniero built his tunnel as if it
were meant to last. Was this not a little more than merely practical? Gatti may have
been a logistical genius, but he seems to have had a lyrical streak; he described his
friend’s very life as “a true epic poem.” What kind of space, then, was his tunnel:
logistical or lyrical?
The very being of a tunnel, to a sufficiently lyrical eye, could seem to be a paradox, a
contradiction in terms: a subterranean structure erected by destruction, built by sheer
subtraction, the negation of solidity itself. Mikhail Bakunin used the figure of the
tunnel to evoke the manner in which radical “spirit” survives underneath the world’s
crushing weight: “the spirit of revolution is not subdued, it has only sunk into itself in
order soon to reveal itself again as an affirmative, creative principle, and right now it is
burrowing—if I may avail myself of this expression of Hegel’s—like a mole under the
earth.” Well said, old Bakunin.5 To live mole-wise, to live tunneling, is to make the
very means of escape one’s home.
If you can imagine living this way, then you can imagine what this book is about:
anarchist resistance culture. My intention, in this book, is to examine the ways in
which anarchist politics have historically found aesthetic expression in the form of a
“culture of resistance,” is to some extent unique. It is hardly unheard of, in my corner
of the academic world, to utter the word “resistance” in such close connection with
the word “culture”; for some, the two terms have become synonymous, so that
instances of “culture” as innocuous as playing a video game or wearing a T-shirt can be
taken to be instances of “resistant” behavior, making the phrase “resistance culture”
almost redundant. Furthermore, what if the word resistance, modifying culture, implies
that only some forms of culture, and not others, are authentically subversive or
threatening to the established order of things, i.e., “resistant”? This is what I mean; I
am interested in what makes the difference between innocuous or conservative
moments in culture and those that potentially or actually defy, disturb, and challenge
the given.
Though I am not the first to speak of a “culture of resistance” or “resistance culture,”
the currency of these terms hasn’t fixed their meanings. Some of the ambiguity
probably derives from the ambiguity of the word “culture” itself, which, as Raymond
Williams points out, has come to mean both the special kinds of “works and
practices,” supposedly distinct and separate from everyday life, that we call “art and
learning,” and the more amorphous notion of “a particular way of life.”6 Thus, for
instance, Vivian Schelling speaks of “cultures of resistance” in the plural, defining these
as “more subtle and everyday practices of opposition to domination” by contrast with
“systematic and confrontational forms of struggle.”7 James C. Scott, similarly,
describes a “culture of resistance” as the sharing of the “risk” entailed in individual acts
of resistance by an entire community aligned against an external source of oppression.8
For Robert M. Press, a “culture of resistance” is “greater than the sum of the acts of
resistance”: it “involves a change of thinking … a decision to no longer accept
authoritarian rule in daily life, not just at the top … but at all levels.”9 Writers from
Stanley Aronowitz to Dinesh D’Souza use the term “culture of resistance” or
“resistance culture” to refer to an informal climate of recalcitrance and opposition
created by marginalized people unable to revolt openly—slaves in the fields, working-
class students in the classroom, workers in fast-food restaurants.10 In odd cases, it
serves to describe the behavior of rather privileged subjects, e.g., doctors or
businessmen, defending their group interests against external imperatives; usually,
however, it is used to characterize the behavior of poor, especially black people, either
to appreciate their creativity and agency in the face of overwhelming institutional
forces or to decry their stubborn refusal to respond to the well-meant interventions of
teachers, social workers, and other supposed agents of change.11
In all of these formulations, the word “culture” serves to qualify the concept of
“resistance,” to indicate forms of resistance that are, on the one hand, relatively
atmospheric, even vaporous—not formalized or embodied in any visible institutions,
perhaps not even conscious or coherent—and on the other hand, not merely sporadic
or fleeting but generalized, communal, habitual, and entrenched. In any case, the sense
of the word “culture” that is evoked is that of “a way of life” rather than specific
“works and practices.” Occasionally, however, one encounters references to “resistance
culture” in something more like the artifactual sense: American hip-hop, a particularly
subversive film, “an alternative news network” are given as instances. The last of these
is specifically described as “a tool for changing attitudes, raising public awareness and
relaying the views of the movement to a wider public … to mobilize concerned citizens
not normally involved in action protests.”12 During South Africa’s transition to
postapartheid, the term “resistance culture” is used synonymously with “écriture
engagée” or “protest” theater, the kind of cultural artifact produced specifically and
consciously as the expression of an organized resistance movement (in the words of
Albie Sachs, “art … seen as an instrument of struggle”).13 This is far closer to the sense I
intend, with two crucial differences.
First, the anarchist conception of “resistance” is—with all due respect to the
astounding trials undergone by the South African anti-apartheid movement—
something different and broader, aimed not only at one particular oppressive regime
but at all forms of domination and hierarchy, whether these are constituted through
the formal institutions of violence and property or the infinity of informal power
relations through which we form our sense of ourselves and our world. Anarchist
“resistance,” declares Georges Yvetot (1868–1942), encompasses
all the popular movements, all the ambitions of the people to revolt against
tyrannies, whatever their source, against all the tyrannies and all the entities in the
names of which they are exercised: God, Truth, Homeland, Honor, Universal
Suffrage, Labor, Property, Church, State, Law, Dictatorship, Justice, General
Interest, Peace, Law, Culture, Humanity, Progress, etc.… Resistance must be a
way of understanding our role in an entire society based on social inequality.14
To be an anarchist, in a place and time that is like any part of the world in the
twentieth century, is to deny the legitimacy of almost every feature of that world: its
nation-states, its religions, its pretense of representational government, its
organization of production and consumption, its patriarchal customs, its warped
ideals—etc., etc.: there is almost no end to the things one is “against,” to the point that
one continually risks slipping into an entirely negative and reactive self-definition
(anti-capitalist, anti-statist, anti-clerical, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-
authoritarian, anti-sexist…).15 When an “entire society,” i.e., almost everything around
you, seemingly to the smallest detail, reflects assumptions contrary to your most deeply
held convictions about what the world is and can be—namely, the assumption that
hierarchy, domination, violence, and injustice are the natural, necessary, and
permanent characters of existence—then merely to persevere in imagining and acting
on the assumption of the possibility of another kind of world is in itself a monumental
and continual effort of resistance.
At one end of the tunnel is a prison (or a mall). At the other end is a little theater in
which a humble spectacle is staged for the benefit of the public: a simulation of law-
abiding commerce (El Buen Trato—literally, “The Good Deal”!) and normal family
life (the “Gatti Family”). A farce, perhaps? In light of such theatricality, it might come
as no surprise to learn from certain websites dedicated to anarchist history that the
famed playwright, Armand Gatti, was the child of this couple.16 It makes a further
kind of perverse sense that Gatti fils should become known, decades later, for his
experimental work with prisoners. An ex-prisoner himself—having been arrested and
thrown into a Nazi labor camp as a young French Resistance fighter—he, like Gatti
père, had learned to escape. Like his father before him, Armand Gatti became an
anarchist.17
The themes of imprisonment and escape are, indeed, of fundamental importance in
Armand Gatti’s works, including his screenplay for the film L’Enclos (1961) and the
plays L’Enfant-Rat (1960), Le deuxième existence du camp de Tatenberg (1962), Chant
public devant deux chaises éléctriques (1964), Chroniques d’une planète provisoire
(1967), Le labyrinthe (1981), Ulrike Meinhof (1986), Les 7 possibilités du train 713 en
partance d’Auschwitz (1987), Le Combat du jour et de la nuit dans la maison d’arrêt de
Fleury-Mérogis (1989), and Le chant d’amour des alphabets d’Auschwitz (1989). One of
the experiences that first marked out this thematic trajectory took place in the
courtyard of the labor camp in which the young Gatti was interned. There, one day, he
saw another prisoner, who had been subjected to three months solitary confinement,
emerge into the courtyard for the first time, dancing strangely and singing the
alphabet. Gatti immediately understood this “danse alphabétique,” later written into
one of his theatrical pieces, as a means of mental survival and escape: “That day … the
war had been won.”18 Gatti resisted his jailers and torturers by writing poems in his
head and reciting in lieu of answering questions—“buil[ding] up a defensive linguistic
barrier around himself,” as his biographer Dorothy Knowles observes.19
In dramaturgical workshops with prisoners, Gatti puts this hard-earned knowledge
to use, leading them through exercises designed to trace the histories that have
imprisoned them and to allow them to reimagine themselves as something other than
prisoners.20 The aim of Armand Gatti’s theater, “becoming conscious of what one is,