UK Britain BOOK REVIEW Underground passages: anarchist resistance culture 1848-2011. Jesse Cohn. AK Press.

(en) UK Britain, afed: BOOK REVIEW: Underground passages:
anarchist resistance culture 1848-2011. Jesse Cohn. AK Press.

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: “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, Surrealism- in 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 counter-cultures 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 self-contained, 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.

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