ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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and opaque. The goal of illustrative opposition, then, is to help others to
literally ‘sort out* the different spheres of social and political injustice, bringing
others to a state of increased confidence and desire for ever greater levels of
understanding. Hence, our illustrations must be educational as well as sensual
and associative; they must represent ongoing teach-ins in which we assist
ourselves and each other to recover lost radical history and a rational and
coherent analysis of injustice.
In turn, we must consider our developmental desire as we create new
expressions of social opposition, Developmental desire represents the yearning
of the self to become more of itself, to uncover ever wider horizons of
competence,
joy,
and
community.
Our
illustrations
must
represent
opportunities for self-development in general that offer more opportunities for
participation than spectacle-gazing. Through social contestation, we may
develop abilities for public speaking, writing, teaching, and art-making; we
may become lecturers, poets, and painters, speaking at coffee houses, concerts,
universities, street corners, community health centers, libraries, cable stations,
and city halls, creating a counter-spectacle of coherent disruption.
Finally, our illustrations must inspire oppositional desire. Far from the
individualistic and acquisitive desires that constitute our everyday lives under
global capitalism, we need to publicly articulate and express a new vision of
desire: a social desire, a desire informed. Engendering a new oppositional
desire is a potent antidote to an age of authority-induced passivity. Corporate
CEO’s and state agents dismiss our rants about ‘desire’—as long as we keep
our desire bound within the social sphere. Once we draw out the political
implications of desire, informing our desire with a rational demand for direct
participation in determining the conditions of our everyday lives, then we will
see real opposition and fertile conflict.
ILlusTRATivELy OpposiNq Bioioqio\l Patent^
We may begin to think through a potential illustrative opposition by addressing
a particular form of social injustice: the patenting of human and biological life.
Beginning with an ecological problem that touches upon realms of the social
and the State, we may transform this problem into a point of departure, a seed
out of which we may draw a wider analytics of revolutionary political
reconstruction. We may begin by taking a brief look at the issue at hand, then
explore a series of questions that may lay the ground for a deeper
understanding of the sufficient condition for a ‘patent free’ society.
PRobiEM BAckqRouNd; WIhat Are BiobqicAl Patents?
Within the world of biotechnology, a new vocabulary emerges that equates the
genetic modification of cells to an act of ‘creation’.4 Just as Columbus