REPRESENTATION OF A CONFLICT: ACTION! CAMERA!

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, the extent to which 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 isn’t it said to us 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, indeed does one 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 of 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 placing it under the restraints of the neo-modern media prison?

Foolish imitators, whose schemes break down, what leads to the 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, they 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 is that infects the consciousnesses 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