``...People do have an instinct for freedom, just as they have an instinct for survival, but the two get screwed up when one is being brought up in a class society.... so that a child learns to attain power by giving it away to the people who are seen as the legitimate authorities...
...As for the BIG existential turns, these occur BECAUSE people start to move history for themselves. No individual can do this alone. It's a class act brought about by a combination of a legimation crisis of the system and an ever growing number of individuals talking, acting and organizing to change...'' Michael Ballard
--------
Yes. I absolutely agree. And I don't understand it.
It is as if you have to pretend to have already accomplished an act of revolt...exactly in order to carry it out.
The petty personal example is I had to pretend to be a union rep in order to become one..
But much more important and difficult is to act as if you are no longer a person at all, but a class in order to become a class. In other words you do attain power by giving it away, but in a different way than you are taught, which is in submission---under the oppressive authority of the father (or mother) or state. But this new or revolutionary form of giving away power is a different kind of act all together.
Related to all this is the transformation itself as a moment. Do these really exist or are they just enhanced memories that you creat for yourself or for the sake of historical explanation? I certainly don't know the answer to that question. Of course they are retro-actively enhanced, but they also exist.
Henri Cartier-Bresson died today, and his short obituaries on tv news reminded me of HCB's tremendous impact on me. His photography did attempt to capture the transformative moment when the human condition is trapped into revealing itself in an instant. I could never have written about that in this way, when I first saw his work, but some how I understood something like was there.
Who, what, how and even why we exist at all, is almost always the subject. HCB's artistic origin in surrealism was critical to developing a formal understanding---in some very practiced, and endlessly rehearsed way that foregrounds improvisation---about the direction toward seeing the `magic' or surreal reality of the documentary photograph. So, that, if anyone ever wonders do such moments exist, you can always pull out an HCB photograph and point. The answer is yes. Here is one.
And yet all of this is also the tool of oppression. At this particular moment, both Bush and Kerry (and the entire sweep of US media) pretend the US state is doing just fine. It has only become a little lighter weight on its moorings. It is as if gravity is beginning to pull in the opposite direction, toward the sky rather than the ground.
We are cut free. Yet it is only the enormous momentum of the delusional mass that is keeping this state in place. It is as if it would take only the slight motion of one photograph waved about in the still air. The butterfly effect.
Of course at least one butterfly was here for a few weeks in April. Abu Ghraib. It has gone. Forgotten.
On the other side of the world, the Iraqis live in this contradictory moment everyday.
Somewhere in the wine soaked thoughts of evening (and reminded by something Dennis Redmond wrote), I dream about all the Arab photographers who must have seen HCB or know him without ever seeing him, and are trying their best to catch those moments as they evaporate. There will be a day, a moment, a sequence of faces and bodies in motion, caught in the act of their own universal revolt.
Of course we know where HCB would be if he were not dead, had not been old, and still had his cameras, his shoulder bag, his hotel room developer kit.
And yet, I also understand that all of this has been trivialized beyond recognition, turned into the very reified core of selling capital as if it were life--in an endless cycle of diminishing representations. Never mind. That commodification only makes the need to supersede it in a metanarrative all the more pressing. And you actually can penetrate the morass of replicas with those momentary glimpses of something else, something better.
CG