Whatever we may learn about suspect Tyler Robinson in the days to come, his deed demands to be understood within a longer history of modern political violence.
Violence of this sort rarely comes to us as a complete surprise, even when it is shrouded in mystery. It’s not shocking because it is incomprehensible, but because it is already too familiar.
For centuries, acts of political violence have oscillated between the solitary fanatic and the organised faction. One can find, in every era, the lone zealot driven by visions of redemption or apocalypse, who takes up the knife or pistol against some symbolic figure. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a distinct pattern emerged: assassination and terror became not merely personal obsessions but organisational projects.
Cells, societies, even semi-public associations transformed murder into a technique. They saw in violence not simply catharsis or vengeance, but the deliberate reordering of the social landscape.
Revolutionary Russia, for instance, was a carnival of plots: social revolutionaries hurling bombs into carriages, reactionary leagues countering with their own bloody spectacles. In Germany, underground tribunals and mystical clubs alike found in the bullet and the garrote the means of policing ideological boundaries. Later decades brought their own catalogue of small armies—red brigades, black orders, a proliferation of initials and slogans whose members saw themselves less as criminals than as executors of history’s mandate.
This phase of violence by group initiative has, however, receded. The forms remain in memory, in celluloid, in ageing manifestos yellowing in basements. But the present appears to belong, once again, to the solitary individual.
The murder of figures like United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson and Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband, the near killing of Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump: each was presented as the deed of a single hand, perhaps unstable, perhaps fanatical, but above all, isolated.
And now there is Tyler Robinson, who initially escaped capture only—we are now being told—to confess to his father and be turned in by clergy.
There is rarely a credible organisation to be dismantled in such cases.
All we have are the glowing embers of obscure websites, fragmentary chat logs, or notebooks scrawled with symbols comprehensible only to their author.
Robinson’s scrawling of “Bella Ciao”, the title of the WWII Italian partisan anthem, on a spent bullet casing, is the only institutional signifier found by police. In this instance, referring to a Communist left largely absent from Italian politics for three decades, and its American equivalent, even longer.
Violence appears to have “molecularised,” returning to the scale of the individual, yet not in the same form as the fanaticisms of old. It is as if each solitary act now plugs into a network not of fellow conspirators but of images, memes, and floating signifiers, circulating ceaselessly through the ether.
The political field in which such deeds unfold is no longer coherent in the manner once imagined by liberal democracy.
That field was supposed to be governed by institutions, parties, deliberations, compromises, the prosaic machinery of representation. In place of that coherence, one increasingly encounters a peculiar disaggregation today. Individuals exist less as citizens of a shared republic than as particles, tumbling and colliding in fields of information and resentment.
Yet, paradoxically, within the shattered field, some individuals achieve a new kind of coherence. They congeal around a symbolic image in which violence is no longer an aberration but legitimacy itself. In such a configuration, the act of murder is not meant to persuade, nor even to terrify, but to demonstrate: a flash of decisive action meant to force the spectacle of politics into a different register.
We used to see politics as the realm of rational persuasion, where convictions are gradually shifted. But here, violence works differently. Its purpose is not to change minds but to alter the scene itself. Violence now exists within a world of images and spectacles, where what matters is not the argument but the act. The bullet or bomb appears not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself: a moment of eruption that gains meaning only through its circulation, its replay on screens, its transformation into legend or meme.
In this framework, the act of violence is closer to performance than propaganda. It is a gesture, a scene, a play in which both the assassin and the victim are characters. Asking whether anyone is persuaded misses the point; the aim is to shift the collective gaze, to show that decisive action is possible in a world otherwise filled with hesitation and chatter.
This logic arises in an era where information flows continuously. The public sphere, if it can still be called that, is no longer a structured space for debate but a turbulent swarm of voices, fragments, and images. In this chaos, violence enters not as a disturbance but as an intensification. A single act can dominate the flows for a day, a week, or occasionally a season. The act becomes an attractor around which commentary, outrage, and imitation revolve.
Even as official institutions condemn and mourn, the flows beneath begin to twist and eddy, forming new channels of resonance. The assassin often seems to know this perfectly well: their action is not only against the body of the victim but aimed at the circulation of the image, the storm of discourse that will follow. They murder not to eliminate an opponent but to create a new configuration of flows.
The liberal democratic order is notably vulnerable to this approach. Its institutions are intended to handle arguments, to settle competing claims, and to deliberate. They are not meant to manage images of blood. A deliberative assembly cannot process a live-streamed gunshot. Courts, laws, procedures—all falter in the face of the spectacle’s immediacy. What they produce, in reply, is delayed, awkward, and rife with clichés.
Those institutions appear increasingly irrelevant; as a consequence, their discourse is a weak echo of the far more compelling immediacy of the violent image. It is not that parliaments or courts cease to function, but that they function in another register altogether, one which no longer sets the rhythm of social meaning.
Meanwhile, beneath the surface, political values spread not through reasoned discourse but through subterranean connections. They move rhizomatically, forming networks that are invisible to official structures. Friendships, ephemeral gatherings, online communities like Discord: these are the sites where political intensities congeal.
The state and its institutions find themselves confronted not with organised parties or declared movements, but with nebulous swarms, constantly shifting, never quite present enough to be outlawed. It is in such swarms that individuals may come to experience violence as meaningful, as legitimate. The act of murder is less the conclusion of a coherent ideology than the eruption of a subterranean flow into visibility.
This is how the spiral deepens. As these flows circulate, they reshape the very concept of the political body. Once envisioned as a collective entity governed by institutions, it increasingly resembles a formless organism, pulsating with intensities and spasms. Here, violence appears not as an anomaly but as a symptom: the convulsion of a body whose organs no longer quite cohere.
The assassin, in this perspective, is not an outsider but an involuntary gesture of the body itself. The shot fired into the crowd or the stage is at once the assertion of an individual and the twitch of the whole. To call it deranged is to comfort oneself with categories; to understand it as part of the convulsion is to admit how fragile the entire structure has become.
It is tempting to conclude that political violence today is both deeply individual and profoundly social.
Individual in its execution—there is usually only one finger on the trigger—but social in its resonance, in the flows it disrupts and reorders. Each act is a lonely one, and yet immediately it is reabsorbed into networks of meaning. It is atomised and molecular at once.
The assassin is solitary, but not alone: they are always already part of a wider circulation of signs and images that precede and exceed them. Their act is less an expression of autonomy than a condensation of circulating intensities, as if the swarm momentarily found a point of focus.
The irony in all this is that such acts rarely achieve the grand transformations their perpetrators imagine.
The spectacle burns brightly but fades quickly. The world rarely shifts into a new configuration; the old institutions, battered and awkward, continue to grind on. The particles do not cohere into a new body; they drift as before.
Yet in the very repetition of such failures lies a deeper danger. Each new act reinforces the pattern, accustoms the social field to the idea that violence is part of the political repertoire. What was once exceptional begins to feel inevitable, and inevitability has a way of producing its own supply.
In the United States, this inevitability is compounded by how easily would-be assassins can secure the tools of their depraved trade. In a country where weapons are as accessible as fast food, the barrier to action is minimal. What elsewhere might require networks of procurement, careful planning, or institutional complicity, here requires little more than a drive to the store.
The democratisation of violence has reached its apogee. Anyone can be an executioner of history for a few hundred dollars. The great armies of the past required recruitment and ideology; today’s assassin requires only a grievance, a fantasy, and a steady hand.
And yet it would be mistaken to imagine that this is simply the result of policy or legal framework. The accessibility of weapons is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient explanation. The deeper issue lies in the transformation of meaning itself. In a society where images circulate without rest, where attention is currency and spectacle the supreme value, violence takes on a peculiar aura.
Assassination and mass murder are the ultimate attention-grabbers. A world accustomed to constant stimulation requires ever greater shocks. Against the background noise of outrage and scandal, only the gunshot breaks through.
It is the one act that still commands silence, if only for a moment. And within that silence, the assassin imagines, a new order might be glimpsed. Of course, what actually arrives is only another wave of commentary, another rotation of the spiral. But the illusion remains powerful enough to inspire the next hand.
This brings us back to the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Right now, we know very little about the perpetrator other than that he was a college-age white male who engraved messages on the aforementioned bullet casings, like Brian Thompson’s killer—unless you believe conspiracy theorists—Luigi Mangione.
Although the MAGA outrage machine has been vigorously selling the idea that Kirk’s killer is another example of violence inspired by the “radical left”, reports indicate he only recently became politicised.
Yet we also know too much, because we have seen all this before.
Kirk’s murder is part of a pattern, a molecular violence that emerges from the disaggregated field of our present politics. It is neither wholly deranged nor entirely rational, neither purely individual nor genuinely collective. It belongs to a world where the body politic spasms in unpredictable gestures, where institutions respond with tired rituals, and where images circulate with unceasing hunger.
To seek a final explanation is futile; what matters is recognising that the act is both utterly meaningless and completely overdetermined. It means nothing by itself and everything in its circulation.
What, then, is to be done?
Nothing, perhaps, beyond the acknowledgement that we live in a field where violence has become one of the available idioms of political speech. It will not persuade, it will not transform, but it will resonate.
The liberal dream of rational discourse limps on, but in its shadow, the bullet continues to speak in its own language. To ignore this is to indulge in fantasy; to accept it is to recognise the strange irony of our political moment.
We are governed less by institutions than by spasms, less by arguments than by images, less by coherence than by convulsion. And in that convulsion, from time to time, someone will take up the role of executioner, imagining themselves a creator of history, only to find they are merely another performer in the endless play of spectacle.
That is the peculiar fate of political violence in our time: it believes itself decisive, yet it is always already absorbed. It imagines itself transformative, yet it is only another ripple in the flow. Its perpetrators dream of remaking the world, but succeed only in demonstrating the fragility of meaning.
The irony is complete: violence, which once sought to end history, has become merely one of its ordinary gestures. And so the spiral continues, endlessly circling, a dance without resolution, in which every convulsion feels final but none ever is.
Photograph courtesy of Gage Skidmore. Published under a Creative Commons license.
