the anarchist content of anarchist literature, producing a depoliticized text—or worse, a politically co-opted text.135
This danger, the ineliminable possibility that what you’ve written or painted or sung can take on a life of its own or be turned against itself, is the condition of all art. Nonetheless, it is a special risk for anarchists just because the Idea is almost universally perceived as so terrifically threatening that it is all but literally unthinkable. “Someone whose legs had been bound from birth but had managed nevertheless to walk as best he could,” Malatesta wrote, “might attribute his ability to move to those very bonds.… That man would ferociously defend his bonds and consider as his enemy anyone who tried to remove them.”136 Thus with anarchists’ proposals to remove the bonds of Capital, State, and Church. Readers can resist, and the popular audience for anarchist messages resists “ferociously.” And anarchists are all too familiar with popular distortions of the Idea—the notion that anarchy means “chaos,” that anyone who is destructive or disregarding of others is an anarchist, and so on. In effect, these symbolic uses of “anarchy” are co-optations of anarchist themes for capitalist uses, promoting the kind of hedonistic individualism that moves product (and providing the police and the priests with a handy folk-devil). An anarchist writer can expect to be misread in many directions at once.
At the same time, there is also the danger of making anarchism into—again, in the words of Malatesta (apropos of his Russian colleagues’ attempt to formalize anarchist beliefs and methods into a “Platform”)—“a government and a church”:137 that is, anarchist militants could attempt to so tightly control meanings as to choke off any alternative readings, reintroducing authoritarianism into the heart of anti-authoritarian thought and practice. Here, I think of Roland Barthes’s speculation that a certain authoritarian element would always inhere in “the very fact” of speaking: “All speech is on the side of the Law,” he gloomily surmised, suggesting that to teach as an anti-authoritarian, the best one could do would be to somehow soften one’s speech, “‘presenting’ a discourse without imposing it.”138 This might indeed be taken as a model of anarchist pedagogy: the teacher presents but does not impose. “Teaching,” Ricardo Mella insists, “neither can nor must be propaganda.”139 And yet it is not the model of pedagogy most widely adopted by actual anarchists; that would be Francisco Ferrer y Guardia’s (1859–1909) Escuela Moderna, which dispensed with most of the disciplinary apparatus of conventional schools but retained for the teacher a considerable role as an active propagator of values:
This does not mean that we will leave the child, at the very outset of its education, to form its own ideas.… The very constitution of the mind, at the commencement of its development, demands that at this stage the child shall be receptive. The teacher must implant the germs of ideas.140
To merely leave the pupil to think alone, for Ferrer, is to surrender to capitalist ideology, popular prejudices, Church hegemony, and a thousand other authoritarian influences already in place. Accordingly, many anarchists have accepted the notion of anarchist culture as a form of propaganda, in the root sense of seed-sowing (“implant[ing] the germs of ideas”): Peter Lamborn Wilson suggests that fiction should function as “propaganda for life,” while Derrick Jensen (b. 1960) flatly declares that “all writing is propaganda.”141
How can an anarchist text make propaganda without treating its readers as a passive mass to be led? How can it overcome the resistance of its readers without thereby exercising a tyrannical power over them? Here we might turn Socrates’s problem around: rather than seeing the text as a helpless victim of mischievous readers, unable to defend or “speak for” itself, we could see it as a little dictator, a voice that can’t and won’t “shut up.” If texts are inherently incapable of listening to their readers’ responses, how can they ever be anything but monologues, forms of “speech” more unilateral than any participant in ordinary dialogue could ever claim? On the other hand, how can anarchist readers defend themselves against the author’s authority without simply squeezing the life out of the texts they read, “reading into them” the pre-formed contents of their prejudices, closing off possible interpretations?
For a long time, the Revista Blanca bore on its cover a peculiar message, written in a cursive font: “Lector: cuanto veas en ésta revista contrario a tus opiniones en ella misma puedes refutarlo [Reader, if you see anything in this journal contrary to your own opinions, you may refute it].” If this sounds like a kind of haughty challenge in English, it does not appear to have the same connotative force in Spanish; Antonio Elorza parses this as a kind of editorial policy, a way of signaling “total acceptance of the principle of dissent regarding their positions.”142 And as we have seen, the solicitation of dissent was evidently successful, as La Revista Blanca regularly drew vigorous, contestatory correspondence from readers.
Inviting reply, questioning, participation, and engagement, anarchist periodicals turn readers into writers, recipients into senders, consumers into producers. Thus, readers of Rosa Graul’s utopian novel, Hilda’s Home: A Story of Woman’s Emancipation, first published by installments in Lucifer in 1897, turned the pages of the journal into a months-long forum on “Where to Practicalize Hilda’s Home”: i.e., what would be the best site on which to found a real colony on the principles proposed by the novel.143 Rather than distinguishing the fictional from the factual, the distant, cognitive sphere of utopian dreaming from the immediate, embodied realm of “practical” action, these readers freely appropriated Graul’s story for their own purposes. This, too, demonstrates a convergence of the roles of writer and reader within anarchist literary discourse, as both claim and exercise the right to create.
Fig. 5: From the Brazilian anarchist journal A Guerra Social 1.2 (July 16, 1911): the “Libertarian Ideal” is restrained by the clergy, the bourgeoisie, etc.: “All strive to stifle him, but he is developing, preparing … the day will come when, breaking all bonds, he will triumph, driving away all tyrants.”
This constitution of the reader as active agent is mirrored by an emphasis on what the Mujeres Libres called capacitación (at once “training,” “preparation,” and, more literally, “empowerment”) as distinct from captación (“capture” or successful proselytization).144 In this spirit of capacitación, Errico Malatesta recommended that propagandists working among depoliticized people “[make] an effort not to appear to be expounding and forcing on them a well-known and universally accepted truth,” favoring a problem-posing method that would “stimulate them to think, to take the initiative and gain confidence in themselves.” Such propaganda would aim, in fact, not so much at teaching “unconscious” masses what to believe as at “making people who are accustomed to obedience and passivity consciously aware of their real power and capabilities.”145 This is, indeed, one of the themes we will see running throughout anarchist culture—in imaginations and performances of rebellion (Part III), as well as in lyrical (Part II) and visual (Part IV) images of powerful bodies breaking their bonds (fig. 5). Resistance culture, for anarchists, meant nothing less than the cultivation of resistant bodies and souls.
Another way in which anarchists conceived of readers’ empowerment entailed learning “the habit of reading twice, or at least with a double intent” recommended by Voltairine de Cleyre: i.e., an empathetic or recollective reading that allows the reader “to feel what the writer felt” and a skeptical reading that places the text at a distance from the reader.146 This weaving back and forth between what one might identify as a Romantic hermeneutics of recollection (aimed at reconstructing a perspective that is historically or culturally distant from one’s own) and a hermeneutics of suspicion with roots in the Enlightenment tradition (looking at the text as an instrument of power, as called into being by certain “interests” that might be distinct from or antagonistic to one’s own), we can both resist the force of “Dominant Ideas” transmitted by texts and, at the same time, allow texts to educate us out of the dogmas, prejudices, and fixed ideas we’ve already absorbed.147 Gustav Landauer, Rudolf Rocker, B. Rivkin, Ethel Mannin, Herbert Read, George Woodcock, Paul Goodman, and a host of other anarchist literary critics offer demonstrations
