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,