Let’s Talk About Attack

The State has a clear interest in making the information about facts which mark the refusal of domination the least public possible. The police control the flux of information in order to prevent the spreading through its channels (the media) of hostilities and attacks which are a consequence of it. However if we want to seriously subvert this world, or if we simply cannot accept it nor be accomplices to its miseries – the ones of domination, of the State – it is necessary for us to talk about attack.

I.

Attacks target the manifestations of this world of domination. Against fixed structures, such as administration offices, institutions, buildings, infrastructures, churches, government offices, courts, prisons, police, the deportation machine and that of exploitation. However the wheels of this world of domination do not operate without the people who, whether they like it or not, put themselves at the service of this ideology and play their role in the upkeep of our oppression and in the management of this social organization, thus domination does not only consist in the physical structures to be destroyed. Power is not an executioner who sits above us, observing the crimes we commit against the rules of domination. Power is a relationship, it is embedded in the social fabric which composes and determines our relationships. An attack therefore has to address itself to the relationships between us and the roles that we choose, by asserting the existence of autonomous individuals and their will. It also has to head up against all the ideas that make up the functioning of this world of domination, such as morality, religion, property, the notions and judgments about good and evil and the abstractions which present themselves as external values to ourselves.

Even though many of these ideas need an actual physical structure to impose their existence upon us, by gaining their importance through social acceptance,[1] if one were to refuse them (even if we had to accept their consequences), attacks need to be prepared on different levels. Some targets are easier to recognize and the means to be used are evident, while for others, it is perhaps necessary to beforehand spread more texts and reflections about the proposed method and the place.

II.

An attack interrupts the normal course of an aspect of the world or touches the surroundings of the structure which depends on it. An attack creates a rupture and opens a moment, a temporary space or a terrain for something new. It can open the possibility of having suddenly the time and the energy to confront oneself with something else, when for the most part of the uninterrupted daily routine only work and being exhausted was on the agenda. A large scale attack, such as an insurrection can also free the air of the obligations and requirements of domination and thus make possible, even temporarily, the experimentation of new relationships. An attack can also just be a simple tear in the tissue of normality and of routine in which our everyday life is caught up and cause little tension, and just be a sort of hopeful signal, or to correspond to the necessity of surviving without resorting to the offers of reintegration promoted by this world. This world plays a hypocrite game. While it is busy oppressing us by all means, at the same time it covers us with propositions of compensation to console us. The road to affirm one’s dignity and individuality passes through the fact of rejecting the offers of reconciliation and of attacking all its forces.

III.

Attacks leave traces in everyday life. It leaves traces by showing to those who also feel this refusal but have not yet found the courage to express their rage, that the world is filled with anonymous accomplices in struggle, that no one is alone. And even more importantly, these traces and stories of attack show that this world is not the only horizon possible, that it can be changed, that this possibility is always there, even if the situation appears quite dire. An attack is always the beginning of a communication on the ways to attack and the objectives that exist. An attack is an invitation to anyone to pull up their sleeves and to rebel in their own way. In this sense an attack never remains an isolated incident, even though its existence is not recognized in the media. It belongs to a conflict in which the cops and the media clearly find themselves on enemy ground. Therefore we cannot have as a goal to see ourselves be represented and put under the spotlight by the distorted and conformist mediation of the press. Because this would do nothing but losing the potential in which each act of revolt finds itself in.

[1] ed. – For historically how this process played out in the creation of early States, see the supplement to this chapter of Return Fire; ‘The Temple was Built Before the City’