REPRESENTATION OF A CONFLICT: Camera! Action!
In the epoch of the realization of separation, of the
complete separation of the human being from life and of the consequent loss of
the sense of existence itself, the image functions as a protective screen with
respect to a paralyzing reality.
Photos, films and visual documents fill the head and hands
no longer just of cops and magistrates but also, if not more so, of the actors
in the scene-painting of demonstrations of false dissent.
Already, it has
been said and repeated, however uselessly, that the use of cameras and their
technologically more advanced relatives at marches is a dangerous boomerang
weapon useful for repression; we are sick of having to go over this again.
There is no understanding why one should collaborate in gathering material
useable for embroiling oneself in the strangling web of the network of
judiciary proceedings. A photo works as evidence and nothing else is needed.
The irresponsible practice of the obsessive collection of images becomes
collaboration, and that from the side of those who claim to demonstrate
dissent.
Now aren’t we told that turn-abouts
are carried out in order to firmly rein in the cops when they go too far in the
fulfillment of their wicked duty; does one really think that an image could be
enough to put a police officer in jail? And then, above all, is our
revolutionary task that of taking the place of a magistrate or the spokesperson
of those who have arranged judiciary justice? What step forward will we have
made once we have entrusted our freedom to the hands of a magistrate, a
politician or a new law that doesn’t feel any need for it?
In the rivalry for the collection and spread of images one
ends up later competing with the other fine category, that of the journalist.
The frenzy to communicate the event takes upper hand over
the event itself, so much so that it is no longer even necessary that it
happens; it is enough that it is simulated for those few moments requested and
dictated by television times. This craze for the day after in the newspapers,
or better for the same day on TV has gotten so out of
hand as to cause the loss of being ourselves and acting in the moment, since
one is already projected toward the image to project.
One thinks to escape from this tiresome whirlpool through
self-production by going around in the supposedly antagonistic circuits of the
social centers. What simpler way to give breadth and resonance to a movement
born dead than that of making it live by placing it under the restraints of the
neo-modern media prison?
Foolish imitators, whose schemes break down, what leads to
this shattering if not their self-celebrative representation?
“Against the war of the powerful now and always disobedient!”
Ah… bah!
With objectives
that intertwine themselves in an exultation of interlaced leaps, like building
the set of a hall of mirrors in which the images, to be narcissistically
enjoyed, rebound off of each other. In a game of infinite return, the situation
is amplified at pleasure until alluding to a spectacle for strong emotions. On
stage there is the tension of an urban guerrilla war that always seems to be on
the point of exploding… But that moment will never come.
The sign is enough: a helmet on the head, the face covered, whatever smoke-producer and the pre-arranged space
for the sham retreat. All the actors on the field know the script well but the
unaware nonentities remain there with their rage in their throats, ignorant of
what has really happened, besieged, closed in on both sides by cops and
bullies.
The action is fake and impotence increases.
The hands morbidly seize the recording tools; there is no
way now to use them for other purposes. The mind is occupied by the anxiety of
capturing the instant the best expresses the spectacle. The eyes fix on the
objective and this is how the separation from living and from concentrating on
that which one is doing is concretized in the being absent in the moment in
which being present would be needed.
With this body
weighed down in all its parts by technological prostheses what does one want to
demonstrate? Against who does one want to go? How can
one claim to chase police masked as humans and journalistic vultures from the
march when one cannot see the difference between them and the others?
It is a conflict between video cameras that infects the
consciousness and the blockheads.
Then repression does not just come from the simpletons in
uniforms or the evidence collected unwarily for them, but also from that which
is produced from the inside. The instinct brought back to reason, restrained
and annihilated by the ideology of the image, prevents the realization of the
authentic act of revolt.
The image empties the action while the fetish sucks the
blood of the human being.
Some comrades with free hands