Be careful.
With what relief do we fall back
on the tale, so often told in revolutions
that now we must
organize, obey the rules, so that later
we can be free. It is the point
at which the revolution stops. To be carried forward
later & in another country, this is
the pattern, but we can
break the pattern
//
learn now we see
with all our skin, smell with our eyes too
sense & sex are boundless & the call
is to be boundless in them, make the joy
now, that we want, no shape
for space & time now but the shapes we will

– Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter #48“

breaking patterns is a personal anarchist project. it is not contained within this website.

breaking patterns means identifying the mechanisms through which systems of control and domination self-perpetuate and interrupting them on every level by any means necessary.

here are some things this is about: rupture. a redistribution of violence. revenge apart from punishment, transformation amid the impossibility of justice. uncompromising resistance to the intimate authoritarianism of abuse as well as those authoritarianisms enforced at the level of states and borders, cops and prisons. total abolition. insurrectionary memory. a wrench in the gears and a cut through the wires. shattering the narratives of counterinsurgency. when to destroy and when to hack, repurpose, reverse the feedback loop into itself. precision not restraint. a reckoning with my own relationship to violence. choosing this fight, again and again. weaving new patterns into the world.

here are some things this could be: a discomfort, a provocation, a threat. the search for new weapons, or fractures, escape routes (*) and angles of attack. an appeal to sharpen your destructive desires into powerful weapons for undoing this hell world, rather than managing them into strictly constructive work. an experiment in contagious concepts for breaking through logics of domination and coercion. an inventory of tools. a collection of words that have built up in my head, arranged in secret codes and summoning circles for the possibility that someone else might find them useful. an echo of a grounded embodied practice, defiantly emotional and spiritual as much as it’s lived out in tangible acts of resistance, around which i can draw spirals of pretty or unsettling phrases but which i can never fully articulate, only experience. (this is not a political ideology, a well-reasoned academic thesis, a blueprint for a better world, or a singular plan of action.)

notes:

“An insurrectionary queer anti-politics functions to interrupt the closed circuitry of emptiness-politics-emptiness…our project centers itself on immediate fulfillment, joy, conflict, vengeance, conspiracy, and pleasure. Rather than politics, we engage in social war. Without demands, we expropriate what we desire. Instead of representation, we rely on autonomous self-organization. We do not protest, we attack.”
– baedan

“The redistribution of violence is a practical demand when we are dying alone and without any kind of reparation, be it from the state or from organized society. The redistribution of violence is a social justice project in a full state of emergency, and it should be performed by those for whom peace has never been an option…
“The basic premise of this proposal is that violence is socially distributed, there being nothing anomalous about the way it intervenes in society. It is all part of a world-making project, of a policy of termination and normalization, guided by racist, sexist, classist, and cis-supremacist principles of differentiation, among others. To redistribute violence within this context is a confrontational gesture, but also one of self-care. It has nothing to do with declaring war. It is, rather, a matter of sharpening the blade so as to better inhabit a war was declared behind our backs, a war which is structural for the supposed peace of this world, and which is waged against us.”
– Jota Mombaça, “Towards a Gender-Disobedient & Anti-Colonial Redistribution of Violence”

“…what happens when revenge is aimed in the direction of revolt? In the direction of insurrection? What happens when revenge is itself not a complete project, or a bad infinity, but a break, an opening onto something else, be it terrifying or wonderful or both?”
– Bedour Alagraa, “And the Last Shall Be First: On the (Im)possibility of Revenge”

re-invent body-as-weapon against the powers that designated it so

“Our goal is to interrupt structures of power, and interrupt the ability of those who enact domination to do further harm, by whatever means are available or necessary. Anti-rape politics are anti-fascist politics, no more, no less.”
– Judith’s Dagger, “Thirty-One Theses: A Manifesto”

responding with violence to the violent removal of my bodily autonomy is not ‘carceral’ for the simple fucking reason that i am not a state.

(*) on a larger scale, there’s no outside to systems of domination, no secession from structures of oppression – but that shouldn’t be extrapolated to close off escape routes from a harmful relationship or exploitative circumstances. for some it’s a process of prefiguration; i conceptualize it as rupture, breaking patterns of coercion and finding in the chaos new ways of being and relating.

“The distinction is not about what side one is playing, but on what level. For every pretty theory that presents itself, study it only in the way that a cat studies its prey: for the enjoyment of the hunt, to be sure, but also so as to seize upon whatever unique revolutionary chance may appear as in a flash of lightning. So that when that narrow gate opens, you pounce without a moment’s hesitation.”
– baedan