Patrick Barbanes

Start Annoying Yourself

As a child, you probably annoyed your parents when you began to test the boundaries of what was allowed, how far you could go, what you could get away with. Adults do the same thing. The Occupy movements are testing boundaries. While the movements have various goals, I see a great deal of protesting for the sake of protesting, to test the rules of free speech and free assembly – even if there’s nothing particularly specific behind the assembly or the speech. They’ll form a crowd and cause a ruckus in a train station where you just might be trying to catch the 5:45 to get home, or they’ll make it difficult for you to get into your office building in the morning to do your job. It’s pretty annoying. A videographer that I know sees one of his foremost roles as that of boundary tester: he’ll begin videotaping in a situation you might not really expect, like in the security line at an airport. It’s legal, and he knows it, even though the authorities often don’t know it themselves. The photographer is creating a crisis and often a confrontation – Hey, you can’t videotape here! I’ve seen footage, and you can hear the annoyance of people in line behind him who are perhaps late for their flight. Needless to say, it’s more than annoying to the authorities. But in each case, whether it’s a child testing the limits of parental authority, a group of citizens testing their country’s constitution, or a videographer testing the right to take pictures, there are two significant effects. First, they put the legality of the rules to the test: do the authorities know the limits, and how do they enforce them? Second, they show other people that the limits they may have expected – you can’t videotape here! you can’t assemble here! – were not limits at all. As a child, the limits to how far you could go naturally seemed narrow. Until you tested them and realized that in many cases, the limits weren’t there at all – they were in your childish mind. You annoyed your parents, but were discovering yourself. There’s great value in being annoying. Unless you’re testing your own boundaries, you’ll never know where your limits are – and chances are, they don’t even exist.

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