ILLUSTRATIVE OPPOSITION
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association, creativity and meaning, self and community development, and
social and political opposition. Such yearnings stand in sharp contrast to the
vernacular understandings of desire that are framed in terms of individualized
accumulation of status, power, or pleasure. To understand the socio-erotic is to
locate moments of individual desire within a distinctly social and political
context, appreciating the potential of our individual desires to be accountable
to, and enhancing of, a greater social collectivity.
Our illustrations must speak to our socio-erotic desires. Within the bland
culture of global capitalism, people crave authentic integral sensual stimulation.
The appeal of theater groups such as Bread and Puppet attests to the sensual
power of creative media. The display of towering and colorful puppets
parading down barren city streets during demonstrations summons up the
sensual awe and desire for our own creativity in a world of commodified
alienation, allowing us in turn to remember our own creative potential. We
need to appeal to as many media as possible to illustrate our analysis and
vision, utilizing art, theater, dance, electronic media, print media, speak-outs,
and street demonstrations, illustrating the sensual presence and resistance of
our physical bodies as well. In this way, illustrative opposition must be sensual:
it should constitute the ultimate body politic in which we literally throw our
bodies into social contestation, taking illustrative and expressive direct action.
However, such actions must not only ‘show5 but they must also ‘tell’ a
narrative, moving from the particular to the general or from the personal to the
social and political. People join social movements for a variety of reasons. In
addition to wishing to transform the world, activists often yearn to transform
themselves. They come to movements out of associative desire: out of the
desire to find friendship, lovership, community, and meaning. Seeking a sense
of connection and purpose, people are drawn to particular social movements
because the people within the movements embody the intelligence, passion,
and communality they wish to develop within themselves. Hence,
our
illustrations must convey both the values of the world we want to create as
well as the values of the people we want to draw into our movements. While
our work must be collective and non-hierarchical, our forms of contestation
must put forth a display of communality as well. We must clearly articulate the
ways in which others may join our struggle, continually illustrating points of
entry into our social movements.
Further, we must address our creative or differentiative desire as we
illustrate our opposition. In this age of incoherence, we each have an
underlying desire to differentiate, or to ‘make sense’ of the chaos which
surrounds us. As we are overwhelmed by social, political, and ecological crises,
we yearn for illustrations that render our world more legible and intelligible.
Our illustrations must draw what is coherent and clear out of what is confusing