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, of one’s own possibilities, to the profoundest measure,” is quite continuous with the aim of Gino Gatti’s engineering.
There is only one problem with this analogy-via-genealogy between the two Gattis: if the analogy is true, the genealogy is false. The father of the playwright born Dante Sauveur Armand Gatti in 1924 was indeed an Italian immigrant anarchist, but in 1929–1931, he was not in Montevideo but in Monaco, having previously sought work in Chicago; named Auguste Gatti, he was a street sweeper, not an engineer, and his wife, Letizia Luzana, gave birth to her son, the future playwright, in Monaco,21 half the world away from Gino Gatti, Primina Romano, and their daughter. In fact, “Gino Gatti” was merely the nom de guerre of a man identified by Argentine police as “José Baldi”—in Italian, Giuseppe.22
Given the spurious nature of the paternity claim in re Gatti, we might ask: what is the meaning of this misidentification? It seems a particularly odd mistake, after all, given the general indifference toward questions of pedigree in the anarchist tradition.23 If it has any occult or unconscious significance, perhaps it is in the fact of the peculiar affinity between these two persons, falsely linked by a name, truly linked by the analogy between their actions.24 There is, in short, a strange kind of family resemblance, an affinity or analogy.
What makes the tunnel of Punta Carretas such an apt analogue for this culture is the nature of the fundamental problem to which the culture constitutes a strategic response. Let me explain this by way of another brief anecdote. In his memoirs, Abraham Frumkin (1872–1946) recounts how a fellow Yiddish-speaking anarchist, Moshe, once asked the Russian gentile anarchist Kropotkin the rather rabbinical question: “Tsi meg an anarkhist hobn a bank-bikhl [Can one be an anarchist and save money in the bank at the same time]?”).
There is one easy way to interpret this anecdote. For Karen Rosenberg, it merely serves as one more demonstration that “anarchism is a sect,” i.e., “a religious … cult of self-sacrifice.”25 Here is one of the most tediously repeated commonplaces about anarchism: i.e., that the counter-cultures or “counter-communities” formed by anarchists bear a strong resemblance to religious communities, e.g., the sixteenth-century Anabaptists or the medieval Cathars (the more exotic, the better; few think to compare them to the church down the block from us).26 While this claim is regularly made by writers hostile