Politics, Equality, and Freedom in Revolution

Abstract

Walter Benjamin observes that “just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by nature but by history” (“Work of Art,” 255). In twentieth-century Mexico the historical spectacle of the revolution—the convergence between the advent of technological reproducibility and the forcible entry of the masses into the domain of sovereignty—moved the image out of the realm of aesthetic distinction into that of social function and ushered in a fundamental shift in collective perception. The vast photographic and filmic production of the revolutionary decade is an inventory of human action, an imagistic arrest of the concrete conditions of life in its (often cruel) immediacy, and the exposure of a new political optic that revolutionized the social function of art in Mexico and beyond.¹

It was perhaps Zapatismo that exercised the greatest influence in the readjustment of the historical optic. The mere presence of Zapatistas in Mexico City in 1914 was an immediate corrective to the Porfirian idea of Mexico as a Greek or Egyptian necropolis.

—Enrique Krauze