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\title{Kill the Couple in Your Head}
\date{May 2021}
\author{Anonymous}
\subtitle{}






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We want to talk about how those who attack the state recreate and
reinforce its power through their participation in its intimate
institutions, specifically the Couple via gender, the Family, and Sex.


Any transgression of normality  —  any threat to the order of things  —
must be pacified and incorporated; subversive currents are quickly
channeled into, and claimed by, movements demanding equality or
recognition from authority. We see both anarchists and queers reacting
against one another in this sense  —  queers reacting against the cult of
the patriarchal militant that anarchism so often embodies by devaluing
attack and valorizing ‘emotional labor’ and identity. On the other hand,
anarchists react to this reaction by valorizing normative social
relations and devaluing the (feminized) terrain of the emotional, the
intimate, the “private”.


We propose a transversal approach that rejects this useless deadlock and
intends to attack authority on all levels  —  from the intimate to the
structural —  understanding that it is in the interest of power to
maintain the idea that how we are controlled and how we control one
another are separate concerns. We want to address these phenomena  —
gender, Family, Couple, Sex  —  as forms or institutions that capture our
desires and energies. Our desire for companionship and commitment is
sucked into the institution of the Couple and the Family. Our erotic
energies are captured by the institution of Sex. Gender is reproduced
through the violence of these institutions. We want to understand how
the prison functions so that we can stage a breakout, without creating
new subcultural moral standards for a superior anarchist subject. We
have all been caught in the snares of these social forms and it’s not a
question of purity.


We’ll start with the self, how we see ourselves and how this relates to
our friends. Within society, we are created as atomized subjects in a
network of other atomized subjects. From this point of departure, we
\emph{are} subjects of society who \emph{do} relationships, friendship, Anarchy.
These are acceptable as hobbies or pastimes but can not put into
question or threaten the walls around our sense of self which is
restricted to the atomized sense of “I” permitted within the network of
atomized “I”s that is dominant society. We are made to believe that our
infinite desires and potential can be reduced to shaping and maintaining
our unique brand of subjecthood, by changing the decorations on the
walls of the cubicle-coffin that we are locked into from birth.


This sense of self is the foundation of the rationalist cosmology that
is the official religion of the secular state. Rationalism is
uncritically inherited and espoused by a large part of the anarchist
tradition. This european legacy splits the world into binaries  —
subject\Slash{}object, mind\Slash{} body, civilization\Slash{}nature, self\Slash{}other  —  and only
acknowledges as real what can be measured with instruments in a
laboratory. We say cosmology because we believe that domination starts
with how we conceptualize ourselves and our place within the universe.
This totalizing cosmology does not allow for the existence of any other
worlds, and so both requires and facilitates colonialism, genocide,
slavery, and the general deadening of existence.


Experiencing subversive cosmologies threatens the foundations of this
civilized order. This requires finding ways of seeing ourselves and one
another as part of a spider web of relations, of potential complicity.
Instead of the fundamental truth of our reality being our unchanging,
atomized Self, our reality is characterized by its constant change, our
borders destabilized and our ‘self ’ expanded by the accomplices we
welcome into our web  —  a world without objects. We want to wrench
ourselves free from the economy in which we see one another through the
lens of exchange value, in which the Couple and the Family are
productive units, and dive fearlessly into a vital ecology of living
beings based on reciprocity and gift-giving. A subversive cosmology is a
practice, not an alienated ideology or ‘belief system’.


We are not interested in critiquing individual decisions for how to move
within society, or saying that to call someone a comrade is better
than calling them your girlfriend, or that we should all live in a big
house without walls or anything like that. We are bored of being limited
to the moral framework of judging one another’s choices in relation to
love and sex. Rather we are interested in understanding the
institutions, forms, and affects that structure our world and ensure
that we constantly reinvent our own domination, so that we can destroy
them. A shared language around what this looks like is only valuable
insofar as it reflects a genuine shared commitment to attack these forms
with our friends, ancestors, and ourselves. Language aimed at achieving
recognition or creating meaning within society’s forms and institutions
is also our enemy.


We want to abandon the structures that mediate intimate life in the
present. We see this not as adopting a new form or ideology, but as a
constant tension, a way of life that is in conflict with these
institutions and the infinite ways that they impose themselves, without
a utopian endpoint. We focus on the psychic dimension of the Couple –
how our fears and insecurities are manipulated by the world around us on
both a societal and intimate scale to drive us to seek refuge in this
cage. However, the psychic dimension is inseparable from the material –
our fears of abandonment tied to the constant threats of real scarcity,
poverty, and violence that push us into and prevent us from leaving
coercive bonds of codependency. At the same time, poor people have
experimented with creative forms of material interdependence since the
advent of poverty, from intergenerational households to land
reclamation, and anarchists have created networks of solidarity and
mutual aid to confront material scarcity for two centuries. Being
embedded in these networks gives us more possibilities for sharing our
lives and resources beyond the Couple, and more places to go when
Couples fail us. If we want to banish the Couple from our lives, we must
nurture and sustain these ways of life. Yet these networks are more
meaningful and transformative when they arise from expansive affinity
and complicity instead of hierarchies that are structured around Couple
units or cults of personality. The struggle to break free from the bonds
of the Couple that entrap our imaginations goes hand in hand with the
struggle to destroy the material structures that trap us in lives that
are not our own. We change our lives in order to act, we act in order to
change our lives.


So first off, we’ll speak to why we want to destroy gender, rather than
expand it, reappropriate it, or affirm it.


Faced with the homogenizing force of civilization that flattens us all
into its gendered subjects, difference is our strongest weapon. Between
us there is an infinite diversity. To reduce all of this difference to
the categories of men and women \Slash{} males and females requires a great
violence from the time of our births. To say that the sexual difference
is an objective biological reality is one of the great lies that founds
this nightmare that we live in. We know that each of our bodies is
unique, and we each, to name just one example, have different
proportions of estrogen and testosterone. To maintain the great lie,
they operate on babies without their consent, mutilating their bodies
because their very existence exposes the lie and, so, must be erased.


For this reason, to say that those with vaginas are women and those with
penises are men is an imposition from above that requires constant
violence to be maintained. It also requires that we discipline our own
bodies so that they fit within this binary, so that women reproduce
themselves as sexual objects for men.


To maintain the category of man also requires constant discipline. Those
determined to be men are trained to be a social police force that
upholds this patriarchal order through violence. They rape us, kill us,
beat us  —  to remind us that we are women and to remind themselves that
they are men. And in the rare circumstance that they get thrown in jail
for what they do to us, it’s other rapists and murderers who hold the
key. They have to keep us in this binary of man\Slash{}woman to reproduce all
of the institutions that make this colonial world function  —  work, the
family, the couple  —  to keep us working and reproducing their workforce,
producing and disciplining more bodies for them to exploit and rape. The
other great lie of race as a biological reality is connected with the
lie of gender at its root: the historical construction of racialized and
gendered subjects through slavery and colonialism map bodies into
binaries to facilitate control.


They have to reduce us to categories that they create, because to
continue controlling us they must understand us. Even if we create new
identities of recognition, they are neutralized and converted into new
categories of control, incorporating them as new commercial markets.
This is why there are now queer and trans police, bosses, and landlords.


While seeking recognition from above is a trap, we must support one
another in the different strategies and tools we each use to survive
this nightmare, such as changing our pronouns or our bodies. We must
feel seen by one another to build the trust necessary to attack
together. And by truly seeing our comrades, being seen by our comrades,
we can create a kind of interpersonal freedom, a fuel for our collective
fire.


There have always been those who have rejected this nightmare and
refused to live within its boundaries. Active solidarity and
relationships of affinity with anti-authoritarian indigenous struggles
can teach us ways of understanding ourselves that are not imposed from
those in power, like the many peoples who don’t divide themselves
according to the man\Slash{}woman binary. These dissidents have been met with
all the organized violence of the state, like in the concentration
camps, reservations, and residential schools where they were
incarcerated and killed for transcending their order. And in the entire
colonial world where all other worlds struggle against attempted
annihilation and assimilation.


Gender is constituted through the institutions of the Family and the
Couple. Society forces us to put our intimacy within these productive
containers to prevent the formation of more extensive complicity. The
Family has been critiqued widely within anarchist discourse, as has
marriage, but the Couple has largely evaded criticism and continues to
shape the way we relate to one another and limit potential affinity.


The Couple splits us off from ourselves and the living web of relations,
restricting care, material and emotional support, affection, and
intimacy to this codependent unit. What we are calling ‘The Couple’ is
\emph{only} mutual control, management, and governance. It is the extension
of the colonial logic of land privatization, the objectification of our
inter-subjective relationality. Of course, the love we share or have
shared within couples cannot be reduced to this form, but the form
itself serves to capture free love and desire and contort it into
something that is productive for society  —  an intelligible unit that is
easily controlled. The Couple fulfills the same purpose as marriage,
although not legally codified  —  permitted flexibility in the cybernetic
age. The Couple takes the atomized subject and merges it with another
into a single atomized unit with two faces. Our self worth, inseparable
from our success at gender, depends on our desirability  —  our value
determined by how well we mold ourselves into a unit.


The story of the Couple tells us that another being can complete us,
make what is incomplete whole. It is fixed within the feminized
‘private’ sphere of the home, painting as shameful betrayal the seeking
of support or intimacy outside of the unit. As soon as a Couple contract
is established, the Relationship becomes a private affair, surgically
removed from the friendships it was once embedded within and exempt from
the critiques we otherwise apply to our shared lives.


\emph{A Relationship litmus test: Can you kill a harmful dynamic or pattern
without killing your friendship? Can you break up with a certain way of
being or relating that does not serve you and remain friends, changed
and new? If these two things are indivisible, if killing one means the
other dies with it, you might just be in a Couple.}


Many of us have lost friends to Couples, been cast aside the moment the
default order of things becomes possible. This betrayal is generally not
seen as significant, if it is acknowledged at all. How many of us have
been shunted into a supporting role to the romantic leads  —  felt like a
weird intrusion into the script, an embarrassing and desperate ploy for
relevance? We are expected to accept that the bonds of friendship are to
be put down and taken back up according to the whims of the Couple –
their fights, breakups, and reconciliations. As I resist against my
recasting from confidante and companion to occasional coffee date, it
becomes clear that my feelings about how the Partners are treating one
another, the choices they are making within their Couple, are unwelcome.
None of my business. We’ve seen so much abuse play out in Couples,
culminating in traumatic breakups that divide entire crews and wider
scenes because of an inability to critically approach the dynamics and
behavior that happen within the unit of the Couple in a collective way.


We’ve been fed the story of Romantic Love from our earliest years with
Disney, folk tales about fairies wreaking havoc distorted into stories
of heroes saving princesses, always ending in a wedding or at least a
big heterosexual kiss. We think it’s revealing to look at the etymology
of Romance: “a story, written or recited, of the adventures of a knight,
hero, etc., often one designed principally for entertainment,” from Old
French \emph{romanz}.


The social role of Romantic Love is similar to that of the spectacle,
insofar as it provides an addictive technology that serves power between
a network of body-screens. It can be seen as the intimate manifestation
of the spectacle, the flattening of another singular being into an image
of projections. When you see someone as your other half, you’re not
actually seeing them.


We find the following passage from Attakattak, translated in The Local
Kids issue 1 makes a beautiful distinction between free love and the
enclosure of Romantic Love:



\begin{quote}


I will not always be here, I will maybe not always love you exactly like
you wish, you will not be everything for me and I will not be everything
for you. But I have enough confidence in what you are to know that your
being will always be dear to me because it is wonderfully unique and
irreplaceable. Life without you would not be impossible, it would be
terribly more empty and grey. As a life always and only with you would
be cruel to me. But there is an unstable equilibrium between our
promise, that sense of eternity, and our desires for somewhere else and
for freedom, that equilibrium is our desire to love each other.



\end{quote}


Oftentimes, anarchists like to fool themselves into thinking they have
escaped the clutches of the Couple by proliferating its logic –
polyamory is taken for free love. We disagree. This framework leaves the
form of the Couple intact and creates an entire economy of energy and
affection to manage it. Polyamory is neoliberal monogamy. Countless
rebranded models have emerged, desperate to adapt the logic of intimate
control to the queer free market by suggesting that we can find
liberation by \emph{expanding} our spheres of control and domination. The
“primary partner”, with their “secondaries” is an easy hierarchy to
critique, but the fundamental logic of polyamory is that we each have a
finite quantity of energy (i.e. love) that is to be meted out according
to negotiations within the respective couple units. We are all managers
in the worker co-op of love! The idea that another’s jealousy can be
addressed by managing my relation with someone else is a convenient way
to avoid facing the fear of death and abandonment we all struggle with
due to the artificial scarcity and very real isolation of society.


Another reactionary position  —  that of the empowered slut, a
self-sufficient unit of one, who engages in dating or cruising, also
fails to put into question the organization of dominant society. In the
dating paradigm, it is seen as acceptable to only fuck people you don’t
truly care about, trust or respect. Distinguishing the underlying
impulse is key here  —  a desire to connect and share intimacy with people
outside of your circles to expand and transform your world, or a desire
to keep your friends separate from your lovers to be able to skirt
responsibility for your actions. The practice of ‘not dating or hooking
up within the scene’ can be particularly ugly if it serves to separate
the people you fuck from the people whose opinion you care about,
preventing them from sharing critiques of your actions. Proposed as a
way to avoid the disastrous social consequences of breakups that
sabotage shared potential, this practice can play out as a ‘don’t shit
where you eat’ approach  —  meaning you can treat intimate partners and
lovers however you want as long as they’re not part of your world.


We propose starting by collectively denaturalizing all Couple dynamics.
It is seen as normal for an intimate partner to have influence over who
you share intimacy with. This is seen as a matter that should be
negotiated within the Couple, as it is our job as Partners to manage one
another’s affections. What would happen if we threw that whole framework
in the trash and were forced to look at what was underlying this
dynamic?


Simply saying “I don’t care who you fuck, do whatever you want” is not a
solution. We are part of a web, a crew. The people that our friends
bring into their worlds impact our shared world. But it is much more
difficult, messy, and generative to approach these dynamics from a place
of care for our friend, our ecology, and our shared potential than from
a place of control via management and bureaucracy within a Couple. If
someone I love starts giving her love to someone who is treating her
badly, this is absolutely my business, as it is the business of the rest
of our friends. And it is her responsibility to consider the impacts of
bringing this person into her life, our world. Likewise, when one of our
friends or accomplices treats their intimate partners like shit, this is
our concern. When we accept this shared commitment, we are forced to
face the underlying dynamics that inform our decisions  —  the fear
of being undesirable, of change, of aging, of loneliness, and gendered
expectations.


We are not proposing the repression of emotions like jealousy that can
move through us, but rather to recognize that these emotions are not
located within the Couple, but within ourselves, and can only be truly
resolved within our network of trust.


Of course, this should not be confused with suggesting that our love and
affections should be submitted to an informal board of review for
approval. Communist and liberal ideas of community accountability that
attempt to apply the frameworks of justice and equality to our loving
friendships do not make us more free, but rather add yet another layer
of control and management to our already suffocated lives. We are not
suggesting putting more aspects of our lives under a microscope, saying
that everyone must get along and collaborate for the sake of the
Revolution. Each of our relationships is different, not all have the
same intensity or hold the same place in our heart and that’s okay –
flattening our relations into a false homogeneity only leads us to
deceive ourselves.


Faced with the social impetus to understand our relations within an
economy of scarcity and negotiate austerity measures, we can instead
extend an anarchist idea of social expansiveness. Giving love freely
actually expands our heart and our capacity for loving others. If we are
always in relation with everything around us, what is a Couple? It is a
container that takes something alive that is fluid and in constant
change and objectifies, freezes it. This is relevant to how we think
about anarchy as well  —  as soon as our relations, our love, our
struggle, becomes quantified, we’re walking dead. Releasing our love,
our intimate affect, from the bounds of the Couple makes possible the
subversive cosmology based on an expansive sense of self.


The Couple form can occupy and take over any of our relationships, even
ones that we see as ‘platonic’ friendships. This often springs from the
bonding that comes with shared trauma, giving rise to codependent
isolation. Some of my most Coupley relationships have been platonic
anarchy “power couples” that formed through the shared trauma of the
betrayal of a snitch, the death of a friend, comrades being locked up.
And each of these has led to rupture, where the relational patterns
became too toxic to heal. By critiquing the form in its entirety we hope
to avoid the easy false solutions of scapegoating certain exceptionally
toxic relationships and exempting others. Developing understandings of
all the ways this form controls our lives can allow us to constantly
recognize and release the elements of The Couple as they creep into our
relations and nourish elements of free love and interdependency.


When first coming into contact and experimenting with an anti-Couple
ethic, the natural impulse is to map it onto one’s current romantic
partnerships. This impulse makes a lot of sense, as anyone who shares
the values explored here will likely already have put great effort into
freeing their love from the bonds of hierarchy and control. We have all
sensed and experienced how wrong things are, if only on an intuitive
level that we have yet to discover how to confront in practice. However,
if these ideas are taken as simply an alternative map for romantic
partnerships, we miss the point and risk covering up the encroachment of
the Couple into our loving relationships, facilitating denial with new
jargon. For this to work, it must be a commitment not only to our
intimate partners, but to all of our friends and to our selves. Refusing
to allow the Couple to wrap its wires around your life means refusing to
extricate your relationships with those you fuck or fall in love with
from your spiderweb of friends and accomplices; it means making a
commitment to honor and prioritize the unique feelings and trust in each
and all of your relations.


Inversely, we should also be critical of automatically integrating new
loves into a scene or crew. The forms of trust shared with physical
intimacy and those of anarchic complicity are unique and must be
cultivated and valued on their own terms.


I have been experimenting with these frameworks for several years. In a
certain sense, nothing changed  —  I was sucked into a deeply codependent,
and in some moments abusive, relationship wherein a dear friend
distorted their love for me into a fixation they could use to avoid
confronting their past. My love for them was in turn twisted with bitter
resentment for the trap they spoke so vehemently against and then
continued to step right into. I had been through this before, it was an
old, painful story. In another sense, everything changed  —  I had a clear
vision of what I wanted in our friendship that made none of the
exceptions to our shared values of individual and collective freedom and
non-domination that are usually made in the context of Couples. When our
friendship strayed from these values I was able to recognize that and
intervene, even if only by refusing to engage, something that is often
unheard of within the Couple. When my own hurt turned into resentment, I
was able to be self-aware and critical of my actions in their own right,
apologize when I felt I had acted wrongly and change behaviors that did
not reflect my principles, instead of justifying my behavior based on
how they were treating me. I was able to recognize harm without
normalizing it as a part of being in love. And when, tragically, I felt
that their fear of me leaving them ultimately eclipsed their love for
me, I was able to walk away. Instead of living under the weight of an
ultimatum  —  being either together or apart; instead of internalizing
their terror of being abandoned and making their healing my
responsibility, blaming myself for their suffering, I was able to trust
them and our friends enough to leave. I was able to see my own needs and
desires autonomously from theirs and act on them.


\emph{Instead of a breakup, a ritual: With a beloved friend, light some kind
of fire, a candle will do. Together, think of all the elements of your
relationship that are formal, hierarchical, bureaucratic. Name out loud
to each other the parts of your friendship that don’t serve you:
control, jealousy, competition. Write them down and burn them in the
fire. Now think of the elements of your love that you want to nourish
and grow: wildness, vulnerability, bravery. Visualize them as oxygen
that feeds your flame, allowing it to burn brighter. Revisit this ritual
however often you need, not only in crisis but as a way of maintaining
indomitable intentions.}


The Couple is often established, through explicit contract or implied
through restriction of intimacies, by Sex. Sex is the institution that
recuperates our erotic energies and corporality and codifies them into a
symbolic order, a language that is scripted and transactional. Play is
transformed into work. The compartmentalization of our sensuality into a
specific act  —  separate from our other sensory exchanges and all the
ways we share ourselves with our friends  —  creates Sex as the inverse,
the negative space, of Work.


In 1975, Silvia Fedirici wrote, in “Why Sexuality is Work”:



\begin{quote}


In reality, every genuine communication has a sexual component, for our
bodies and emotions are indivisible and we communicate at all levels all
the time. This has meant the imposition of a schizophrenic condition on
us, as early in our lives we must learn to draw a line between the
people we can love and the people we just talk to, those to whom we can
open our body and those to whom we can only open our ‘souls,’ our
friends and our lovers. The result is that we are bodiless souls for our
friends and soulless flesh for our lovers.



\end{quote}


We must destroy this boundary between body and soul, the foundational
lie of rationality, to free our sensuality from this order. By rejecting
Sex, we can explore what becomes possible when we see our erotic
energies as other forms of sensation and communication that we use to
share\Slash{}expand ourselves. This avoids the fetishization of Sex as integral
to liberation that can lead to radical sex cults, like elements of the
Weather Underground in the ‘70s. Our experiences with sex work reveal
with startling clarity the capture of erotic gestures into a
transaction. These gestures, in this explicitly transactional context,
serve to reify our atomization, pouring concrete into the separation
between us. While sharing my body with a friend, I do what to an outside
observer would look like the exact same thing with my body that I did
with a john. But this gesture is nothing like the other, here it is a
corporeal venture into trust, a step in our dance that dissolves our
stable sense of self.


We want to quote from “To Destroy Sexuality”, anonymously submitted to
the publication 3 million perverts in the 1970s:



\begin{quote}


We want to rediscover sensations as basic as the pleasure in breathing
that has been smothered by the forces of oppression and pollution; or
the pleasure in eating and digesting that has been interrupted by the
rhythm of profitability and the ersatz food it produces; or the pleasure
in shitting and sodomy that has been systematically assaulted by the
capitalist establishment’s opinion of the sphincter. It inscribes
directly upon the flesh its fundamental principles: the power lines of
exploitation, the neurosis of accumulation, the mystique of property and
propriety, etc. We want to rediscover the pleasure in shaking ourselves
joyously, without shame, not because of need or compensation, but just
for the sheer pleasure of shaking ourselves. We want to rediscover the
pleasures of vibrating, humming, speaking, walking, moving, expressing
ourselves, raving, singing  —  finding pleasure in our body in all ways
possible. We want to rediscover the pleasure in producing pleasure and
in creating pleasure that has been ruthlessly straightjacketed by the
educational system in charge of producing obedient worker-consumers.


We want to be rid of sexual segregation. We want to be rid of the
categories of man and woman, gay and straight, possessor and possessed,
greater and lesser, master and slave. We want instead to be transsexual,
autonomous, mobile, and multiple human beings with varying differences
who can interchange desires, gratifications, ecstasies, and tender
emotions without referring back to tables of surplus value or power
structures that aren’t already in the rules of the game.



\end{quote}


We want to turn now to how gender and sexual norms impact and alienate
anarchy. The insurrectionary tradition warns us to reject specialization
in favor of social contagion and expansiveness. The role of the militant
is that of the soldier  —  a specialist in war. The anarchist tendency to
fetishize militancy and create cultures of macho stoicism requires that
we devalue its inverse  —  the home and its terrain of feminized
emotionality. To upend this binary, we propose adopting a warrior ethic.
A warrior ethic integrates the spiritual dimension of conflict, valuing
shared ritual for how to prepare to risk death, and for being welcomed
back into the arms of our friends. It allows for a holistic vision of
struggle among healers, hearth keepers, storytellers, and fighters  —  we
can circulate fluidly among these roles of struggle as circumstance and
desire change, all of which are necessary for creating worlds in the
ruins of this one. We don’t want to act like soldiers under the black
flag.


Our nervous systems shut down to sensation when they are permanently
activated to threat, giving rise to the symptoms we identify as
responses to trauma  —  hyperarousal, numbness, insomnia, dissociation,
depression. Stoicism, or being ‘hard’, is how men are socialized to
engage in conflict, but is just a valorization of the ‘freezing’ trauma
reaction. In order to hone our techniques of war making we need to
develop healing


modalities to reappropriate our senses. We need to be able to take our
armor off when we aren’t in immediate harm’s way, learn how to release
trauma rather than endlessly accumulate it. We need to be emotionally
aware and open ourselves to connection as a life force in our struggle.


Affinity groups or crews can also turn into a sort of nuclear Family, or
a grouping of Couples. Although some projects are only possible with the
few that we trust completely, not all projects require these standards.
This affords us space to develop complicity outside of the usual
channels, to experiment with trusting new people over time. If our crew
is all we have, like the Couple or Family, it must meet all of our
needs. Since our potential for action depends entirely on the survival
of the crew, we live under the shadow of its impending rupture. This
puts our shared life into a sort of pressure cooker, fertile ground for
the formation of norms, discipline through control, and informal
hierarchy. Conflict and the space necessary to work through it in a
healthy way comes to be seen as a threat to our collective survival or
an interruption of our ability to act together instead of a necessary
and desirable source of growth and change. Fearing the dissolution of
the crew, we turn further to Couples so that we are not left all alone
when the inevitable rupture hits.


I’ve been trying to navigate this pattern by approaching crew-formation
more informally, something fluid and context-specific rather than
permanent and formal like a cell. We can form an affinity group for a
specific project, and upon its completion we can allow this group to
die, allowing for the birth of new constellations of affinity that grow
from these experiences. Having different possibilities of action within
many unique relations that can change according to the needs of
projects, without stable boundaries of inside and outside, allows us to
act within a web rather than a unit.


We also don’t want to reproduce the familial model of the patriarch and
his progeny by elevating influential male theorists and strong
personalities to a place close to worship, as we see in many contexts,
from Bonanno to less public dynamics within each milieu.


It can be scarier to face our own demons than to confront riot police –
conflict with who we were made to be, the poison that we have ingested
of this society, requires courage. For instance, if I feel jealous of
the person I’m sharing intimacy with desiring someone else, and I refuse
to locate that feeling within my relationship with that person, I can
recognize it as something that comes from my lived experiences. Then I
can see what I’m identifying as jealousy as a mask of my own fear of
loss. I can reflect on where that fear comes from, my friend getting
killed or my deepest love leaving me, and I can mourn those losses with
my friends. Only then can I avoid using that feeling to create a dynamic
of control and deepened exclusivity with the person I’m sharing intimacy
with. Without this framework, this opportunity, my fear and grief would
stay stuck and festering within me, and I would continue to project it
onto my loved ones.


Turning to face my trauma, rejecting the addictions that allow me to
avoid it such as the Couple, is just a first step to healing, but it is
a massive, terrifying step that most people spend their entire life
fleeing. Only by engaging this trauma, which is a life-long journey, can
I step through the fear that leads me to need a Couple or a child,
someone to control. Of course, living in this world is a constant
trauma, always compounding and reinforcing what we fight so hard to
resolve and change. And so we will continue to plunge our friendships,
our love, into the cage of the Couple. We will continue to project our
fear onto those closest to us. The struggle to free our relations from
this cage can only nourish the anarchist tension.


A friend put it beautifully in their response to this talk,



\begin{quote}


“Lately I’ve been thinking about intimacy like a bandit. Like a hacker
or a scavenger. I know I need reciprocal forms of care to keep fighting.
These days I’ll take it wherever I can find it. Clutching at these
fugitive intimacies even as they slip through my fingers. Cobbling
together something workable, something livable, something that’s enough
to keep going. Learning to live in these spaces of ambivalence and
imperfection. I don’t think you have to heal yourself to heal the world,
or whatever. You just need to keep yourself going enough to keep burning
things down. Who know what kinds of strange and wonderful relational
forms might emerge from this mess\dots{}”



\end{quote}


We try to outrun our fear of disappearing, fear of irrelevance,
disposability, aging, death, by encasing ourselves in institutions that
are immortal  —  that exist to halt the cycle of death and rebirth. Old
women were criminalized in the witch hunts because they were no longer
productive of children or sexual desire, a.k.a. no longer women. So we
also fear what happens when we are no longer productive for society:
what repression will we face when we are no longer young and sexy enough
to be seen as relevant within anarchist cults of personality? What
happens if we die as nobody’s lover, nobody’s mother, nobody’s child?
What happens when we don’t allow ourselves to be claimed by anyone?


This fear is based on the reality that some of our friends, our comrades
will eventually abandon and betray us, leave our shared struggle behind,
or be stolen from us by prison or death. This is not untrue, and we must
learn to grieve this loss instead of attempting to outrun it.


We are driven into Families and Couples by a desire to belong to
something. It is this desire that nationalism, religions, gangs, mass
society, and other authoritarian cults prey on. Told that without
membership we do not exist, we encase our free relations within
institutions that, like capital, prisons, the commodity, transcend
death. Against civilization’s cult of immortality, we propose bonds of
kinship, a vital ecology full of life, death and rebirth  —  a shared
belonging that is in constant formation based on our shared antagonism
to domination and commitment to attacking it, as outsiders.


From Sexxxual Luddites: Amatory Ethic of Liberatory Desire for a Free
and Joyful Affect:



\begin{quote}


In the kennel next to the house, the dogs howl all night and all
morning. It is this idea of protection, of wellbeing, of care that we
oppose. Running through the street exposed is preferable to sleeping in
a cage of good intentions.



\end{quote}


We invite you to close your eyes for a visualization to close:


\emph{You are a wolf, lying down in a cage about twice the size of your body,
under the harsh glow of fluorescent lamps that turn on and off, a
funhouse mirror of night and day. You are never hungry, never fearing
for your survival, numb in a haze of sedation as the clock on the wall ticks through
the days. You hear a noise, not sure where it comes from, not sure if
it’s within you or outside. Is it distant thunder? The contours of a
memory as it flashes up at a moment of anger? You stand, but instead of
pacing back and forth, you hurl all of your weight against the door, and
tumble out onto the sterile floor. Was it ever locked? You break into a
gallop, and run out of the building, through the streets, past the
limits of the city, and the desert opens before you. The moon is full.
You howl.}


\emph{Silence.}


\emph{You howl again, louder, not even considering slowing your straining
limbs, reveling in the feeling of the cold air on your fur. You hear a
call in response, and your lone howl becomes a complex weaving of
voices, a song. You run to the other wolves and melt together in a dance
of bodies, play, fight, rest. The ticking of the clock eventually leaves
your nightmares, your heart beats along with the rise and fall of the
moon. You howl together for others to hear, to let them know there is
somewhere to run.}


\emph{Our pack lays siege to the city that seeks to recapture us, smashing
cages, tearing out the throats of the lab technicians, trying and
failing to tear that cursed clock from the wall. Some of your kin die by
the guns of hunters. Others join, some return to the safety of their
cages. Those who will never return lick one another’s wounds. One night,
you decide to leave and wander alone. The solitude you now choose is
nothing like the isolation of the cage, you left that behind worlds ago.
You know that you can always come home to your kin, changed, different.
You climb a dune and absorb the expanse of the starry sky  —  your heart
floods with the immense beauty of the desert and your smallness within
it. You fill your lungs, release a howl alive with all the grief and joy
of your wandering. Others answer.}









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The Anarchist Library



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Anti-Copyright



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Anonymous

Kill the Couple in Your Head



May 2021


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Retrieved on 2022-02-12 from \href{https://ungratefulhyenas.noblogs.org/post/2021/04/29/kill-the-couple-in-your-head/}{ungratefulhyenas.noblogs.org\Slash{}post\Slash{}2021\Slash{}04\Slash{}29\Slash{}kill-the-couple-in-your-head}
   

       

       
         Published by Ungrateful Hyenas Editions. \emph{What follows are the notes of a talk given in Berlin, Athens, and Marseille in 2020.}
       

       

       

       

       

   



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