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

Author:Jesse Cohn
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: AK Press

The breathless lyricism of this “ideal voyage” could make us miss the poetics of horror that initiate it: diabolical, vertiginous, monstrous, infernal. Why should this Dantesque language be the vehicle for a journey to the Free Land? Perhaps before we are ready to leap into utopia, we need to experience the present as something other than concretely, mundanely, incontestably real. Otherwise, fear bars the way.

If utopia is, by definition, the vision of our desires fulfilled, then it would seem to be the least frightening thing in the world: can we want not to get what we want? The reception-history of utopias after the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848 (and even more so after the Russian Revolution of 1917) can be read as a series of attempts to answer that question “yes.” In a humor magazine from 1893, thus, we find an image of anarchy as a state of misery—indeed, something very like Hobbes’s notion of the State of Nature as a war of all against all, if the crows picking at the bones of the dead lying in the street are any indication. Crippled, ragged, and above all friendless, the “limited member of the Future Society” is precisely a member of nothing; the caricaturist takes it as self-evident that anarchy is the opposite of “society,” that an anarchist “civilization” is a contradiction in terms (fig. 1). This figure of the miserable tramp is the scarecrow posted at the gates of our civilization, now as then. We are scared away from thinking of a better world by the production of images of our fears: fear of poverty, of violence, and above all (for this is what they amount to), fear of one another.

Utopia has been successfully transformed into an object not only of ridicule, but of terror, by the evocation of a series of such scarecrows:

• The demon within: Utopias ignore the greed and violence inherent in human nature.

• The demon without: Utopias, as perfect societies, cannot stand contamination from “the outside”; they crumble at the least contact.

• The ignorant masses: Utopian ideals—including sexual freedom, internationalism, and atheism as well as the abolition of money and government—are hatched by eggheads, bohemians, rootless intellectuals; they will never be popular among ordinary, uneducated people, who are by nature conservative, nationalistic, and backwards-­looking, fearful of change.

• The impossibility of rupture: Utopias require violent beginnings; there is no possible transition from the status quo to another system except through unthinkable disruption and cruelty.492

What is needed, to resist these appeals to fear of the unknown, is encouragement. “If you walk straight toward the [door] frame without fear,” the mysterious stranger in Félix Martí-Ibáñez’s “The Threshold of the Door” tells the narrator, “I promise you that you shall enter the poetic world whole and safe.”493 So Vicente Carreras ends his utopian sketch, “Acraciápolis,” published in La Revista Blanca (1902):

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