UK Britain, Anarchist Federation ORGANISE! #85 - Book REVIEW - Underground Passages anarchist resistance culture 1848-2011 Jesse Cohn

Jesse Cohn is extremely widely read. An academic and author of Anarchism and the Crisis of 
Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics he now in this book tackles anarchist 
influences on and in art, whether it be fiction, poetry, songs, plays, 
illustrations,painting and cinema. He has read everything from Vallès to Ursula Le Guin, 
Stéphane Mallarmé to Kenneth Rexroth, listened to everything from John Cage to punk music. 
---- This present work is staggeringly encyclopaedic and comprehensive. Not only does he 
range across the vast territory of culture in most of its forms but he breaks out of 
Eurocentric preoccupations and includes China, Japan, Argentina, Brazil and Cuba. ---- As 
the blurb on the back cover states: "What anarchists demand from art is what they demand
from all aspects of their political lives: that it should, as much as possible, embody the 
principle in the practice, the end in the means.

While prefiguring a post-revolutionary world, anarchists
simultaneously created a vividly textured "resistance
culture" to sustain their ideals and identities amid everyday
lives defined by capital and state, allowing an escape from
domination even while enmeshed in it."

As Cohn told an interviewer[1]: "When I was in grad school
studying for my Ph.D. in literature, I was struck by the fact
that we were being introduced to a huge spectrum of literary
theory, much of it derived from radical political traditions,
but that anarchism was conspicuously absent from any
discussion, as if it had never existed, much less contributed
any insights into literature and culture."

Cohn certainly succeeds in producing the most complete
study of anarchist culture so far with sections of the book
dealing with different aspects of culture with poetry, songs
and music, fiction, drama, art and illustration and cinema
dealt with in order.

Now, art and politics have often been uneasy bedfellows
as the individual artist wrestles with the need for artistic
expression versus what can be a straitjacket of adhering
to the right political line. The avant garde by its nature was
not something that could be readily adapted to political and
social movements. Cohn accepts that and draws attention
to the "deliberately obscure" poetry of Mallarmé and the
"entirely undecipherable" sound poetry of Hugo Ball (both
identified as having anarchist influences and sympathies).
As Cohn notes:"...the anarchist movement, which refused to
nullify social commitments in the name of the autonomous
individual, was not, on the whole, welcoming towards these
experimenters, whose work, they often saw as wilfully
obscure at best, more suited to the narcissistic enjoyment
of a self-appointed elite than to the needs of working-class
people in struggle". He states that there is little trace of the
avant gardes- be they Dada, Imagism, Futurism, Surrealismin
anarchist literature at the time of the flourishing of these
movements and that anarchists developed their own art forms
in their journals, with widespread use of poetry, but admits
that the poetic forms were very often traditional. For example
the anarchist Voltarine de Cleyre was producing political
poetry in a "genteel" Victorian form at a time when modernist
movements were in revolt against such gentility. Cohn does
acknowledge the contribution of the French Surrealists to the
anarchist weekly Le Libertaire, though he notes that some
militants were concerned about the "hermeticism" (read
closed-off world) and "originality for originality's sake" that
they thought was intrinsic in modern art. He signally fails
to mention the German example of Franz Pfemfert and his
political-artistic journal Die Aktion which had close links with
Expressionist artists whilst pushing revolutionary anarchist
and left socialist views, and ignores Expressionism and
anarchist influences on it completely. He also ignores the
quite close relation between the bohemians of Greenwich
Village and leading members of the Industrial Workers of the
World and the resulting artistic contribution to such struggles
as the Paterson strike (see American Moderns: Bohemian
New York and the Creation of a New Century by Christine
Stansell).

This problem of avant garde versus accessibility is tackled
full on in Cohn's concluding chapter. He addresses the period
of 1945-1973 when the working classes of the wealthier
nations were effectively co-opted into the apparent economic
success and consumerism of that period. In response
"anarchist resistance culture increasingly began to borrow
from the styles that had developed in the bohemian countercultures
of the late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth
centuries, which had themselves grown up in the shadow of
the anarchist movements".

He rather harshly describes the main tenets of the merging of
modernist movements and anarchism as Noncommunication,
Nonsense, Nonutility, Noncollectivity and Nonpopularity where
there is a deliberate turning away from accessibility and the
popular to the dramatic gesture, absurdity, abstraction, and
aesthetic individualism. He seems to associate the period
of what he incorrectly identifies with that of "propaganda by
the deed", that is the period when some anarchists used
assassinations against members of the ruling class, as one
when the connection between "aesthetes" and anarchists
was strongest and that this waned once mass anarchist
movements emerged. As a look at the lives of many anarchist
artists shows, this was not strictly true as they maintained
their allegiance through the rise of syndicalism and beyond.

Similarly, just to take poetry as an aspect of culture. Some
Poets in the period of 1945-1973 (which he describes as
"valley times" as opposed to the periods of mass anarchist
organisation before and the period of a turn towards huge
attacks on the working class) like Kenneth Rexroth and Phillip
Levine DID produce accessible poetry, alongside perhaps
less accessible work.

He feels that once these mass movements had been destroyed
then "anarchist poets like Robert Duncan and anarchist
dramaturges like Judith Malina recovered the tradition of
the aesthetes...In so doing, they constructed a more selfcontained,
hermetic, opaque counterculture." And here is
the problem, he feels. Can such countercultures now evolve
again to "provide the symbolic framework for a new anarchist
movement that would stand in the public square, that would
have broad popular appeal and institutional staying power."
He points to the inwardness of the punk music scene as an
example, as well as the punk zines and concludes that the
political message is often lost because lyrics cannot be heard,
articles are spoilt by "teeny-tiny handwriting...deliberately
crude photocopying, words crossed out, corrupted, blurred,
misspelled."

However he comes to no fully worked out conclusion as
to break out of the subcultural ghettoes that he feels are
self-imposed, other than posing "mutual aid, direct action ,
participatory democracy, cooperation etc" to a movement that
he feels appears to be "ridiculous, inconceivable, unintelligible,
nonsensical". All he can fall back on as an alternative is citing
groups like the British Reclaim the Streets of the 1990s where
collective action is coupled with individual enjoyment and to
the hackneyed concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone,
designed to avoid confrontation with the State "And to remain
only as a shared memory." Now as we know, RTS actions
DID come into confrontation with the State. Other examples
he points to are long established infoshops, bookshops,
social centres, though he acknowledges that these too do not
always successfully open to a wider and more varied public.

Unfortunately at times Cohn lapses in academic and
"hermetic" ways of expressing himself which he criticises
some of the avant garde movements for. But all in all, the
book is a massive compendium of an enormous number
of contributors to anarchist culture in all its forms and has
certainly inspired this reviewer to look at some artists and
writers I had not heard of before and certainly asks the right
questions about breaking out of the anarchist ghetto.
[1] See: 
http://www.panthernewsnetwork.com/topstories/2014/09/19/underground-passages-anarchistresistance-culture/#sthash.aC5Rc6bu.dpuf