Jesse Cohn - Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848-2011

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 timewhich will hardly be granted me, in view of the attitude of the prison managementI 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 womens clothing shop called Tits. Eighty years ago, across the street at 2529 Calle Solano Garca, there stood a zinc-roofed warehouse that a small family of Italian immigrantsGino Gatti, Primina Romano, and their childhad turned into a coal-dealers shop in the spring of 1929, hanging up a sign: Carbonera 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 Gattis 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 wasthey 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: AQU SE CRUZAN DOS GENERACIONES, DOS IDEOLOGAS Y UN MISMO DESTINO: LA LIBERTAD [At this place there was a crossing of two generations, two ideologies, and one destiny: freedom].

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.

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 friends 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 worlds 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 burrowingif I may avail myself of this expression of Hegelslike a mole under the earth. Well said, old Bakunin. To live mole-wise, to live tunneling, is to make the very means of escape ones 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 hasnt 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.

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 vaporousnot formalized or embodied in any visible institutions, perhaps not even conscious or coherentand 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. This is far closer to the sense I intend, with two crucial differences.