Comic characters tend to posses such qualities where one discovers, at a certain point in their lives, extraordinary powers that exceeds those of mere mortals. Hidden within, such discoveries cannot be shared with the general public that will, as the norm presupposes, turn one into a freak show. Their overreaching superpowers becomes the source of social inadequacy that renders them incapable social beings. Only with time, when one has assumed the carriage as the self other, the pseudo, does he feel compelled to reach out and express these powers.

The expression itself is meant to be an affection for others, the broader community, his ‘radiance 1‘. Such affection tends to come with a baggage, from the other that is the real. Since the powers are beyond human reach, the function of the baggage is meant to humanise and tone down the power to get the audience to feel for and be affectionate towards the superhero, our ‘radiance 2‘.

Think Clark Kent, and Bruce Wayne, two white males with troubled past trying to find love. Despite their immediate comfortable backgrounds, their alter ego’s seems the only attraction to the love of their lives. Here it seems, without the jeopardy of unmasking, love cannot be expressed. As we see, expression demands one to adopt an other within. But there is a disjunction between the two; Bruce Wayne, a billionaire weapons manufacturer assumes some sort of a military industrial complex crime fighting hero. Now as an enabling device, this could also be said about Iphone’s cobalt relationship in the Congo. Here, Bruce Wayne transforms into batman as the self other. On the other hand, Bill’s monologue on Superman analogy assumes the inverse. Superman is the real steel who assumes the neutralised role of journalist Clarke Kent as a socialising strategy. Bruce Wayne is born into power whilst Clark Kent’s power genetic. The paradox here is whether one is born into or with makes little difference where structural domination is concerned. This position tends to occupy the notion of whether one becomes or born an artist. Such a disjunction compels us to rephrase SaySay’s question ‘what are you‘?

This question of being and artist occupies a position similar to what Jaques Ranciere, discussing the relationship between inside and outside, as a politic of how social space is distributed. He notions that art is politics in the way it ‘configures a spatiotemporal sensorium through determining the different ways of being together or apart, inside and outside…of dividing up a certain space’. Self directed, one reads the ‘gift of water’ as that which quenches the being. Here, art seems to be the love, the quench, the temporality that must be constantly revived. It revives. It is the resource, the code giving meaning to the being. The aesthetic is self directed. A reinvention.