REVOLT AND CRISIS IN GREECE
political formation—a formation that would most certainly be threatening to it. In this sense it forced these riots to situate themselves in the irrational maelstrom of the natural condition. The city-jungle, then, especially in those days hosted a double condemnation: first it strengthened and largely contributed to the desperate enterprise of consolidating the misleading shape of the “wild society” as a non-political society, attaching to it one more pre-political event. Second, it situated the metropolitan-political unrest in a vast area of wild (re-)representations and therefore in a forced, eternal, natural condition. It makes sense to pause at this double conviction and reflect upon the value of those days. This was a pure reflex outburst of the youth which, after its first two or three days in the public eye, was attributed the typical characteristics of urban “thuggish behaviour” and indiscriminate violence; an apolitical outburst with angry shopkeepers as its victims. This outbreak did not escape a ton of always-at-the-ready bourgeois ink which wrapped these unprecedented events up in a veil of mystery, making sure to treat them as yet another violation of some supposed universal contract. Such a move revealed a U-turn of the media which had initially come close to recognising political elements in a social phenomenon that has constituted to date an historical scourge of such dialectical thinking—that is, violence per se. Yet fortunately, once repented, they viewed things clearly and confessed: all against all, irrational violence against reputable merchants—i.e. a state of nature, or at least nothing that would resemble any political process. A brilliant social war was therefore within a matter of days transformed through a media delirium into some supposed “natural condition,” that is, into a pre-modern drama containing absolutely no political content. No relation-commodity, no relation-state was able to magnetise the interpretations to guide the understanding, to declare war. It was therefore clear that the duty of the agents of communication was to highlight the absurdity of the extremely violent reaction next to the extreme reason of everyday legal violence. The only thing that could guarantee this was the bombardment of public opinion with images of damaged and looted “innocent” commercial functions. An image of “all against all”; the law of the jungle. FROM THE INTERMEDIATE COMMENTARY ON THE CONCEPT THE POLITICAL… 62
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Paradoxically, the concept of the “asymmetrical threat”—which conceptually refers to an uncontrolled war condition—was unexpectedly